Krishnamurti tea

Hope is a belief that something will improve in the future. Despair is a belief that nothing will improve in the future. Hope contains a belief that the past and present are no good. Despair contains a belief that the past was the best possibility and the present is no good. We swing between both, ropes creaking, gripping tightly, burning our palms.

The mind adores routine, worships the known. It will perform all kinds of gymnastics to cling to certainty. Routines of life are built and polished, decorated and painted brightly to evoke permanence. Predictability is comforting because it supports the mind's story of what life is. Patterns of thought and reaction build, until the expectations created from the foundational beliefs the mind has carefully organized from its limited experience are perceived as needs, causing desire to become grasping and attachment.

Desire can only be tamed by that which cannot be named by the mind, but what might be known as love. Otherwise, desire is a wild power, and from what the mind narrowly perceives and has already experienced in the past desire creates an idol, a story. The image inflates into a mirage of epic proportions until all possibility of seeing truth is lost. Until it ends.

"There is always an ending to that which is incomplete."

And so I travel. Then I stay. Here I am silent. There I participate. I am inside and out, sometimes at the same time.

Some of us have trouble seeing clearly.
Some of us want truth so much (and also, clearly, do not) that will we again and again try to leave our certainty behind. And then we notice that we've brought our certainty-seeking along. The judging deciding organizing mind. We still use the mind with the will to discipline, define, illuminate, understand, control... and we still hope to understand truth with insight the mind can grasp.
Again and again we tear down the false walls we keep building so beautifully, and we dive forward past what we know to be illusions, seeking truth. While building a new structure each time.

But eventually we see that seeking is the problem. Hoping for truth means we believe it is not with us right now. Right here.

So some of us keep changing our here. Keep changing our now. Then staying here. Staying now. Then changing again. Inviting contrast, swinging from hope to despair, from certainty to fear, from illusion to devastation...

And in the space, in the brief moment where the pendulum is centered, clarity dawns.
And the mind overtakes and swings again!

But there is a space now open for truth.
In case at some point I want it more than the gratification of the search.