WHY LIVE?

Coming out of a talk by Krishnamurti in Switzerland once, I caught a glimpse of the “fuse that drives the flower”. Walking back to camp along the rushing river, my mind empty and calm, I suddenly realized I was seeing and hearing a world of astoundingly vibrant technicolor hyper-reality. Every bird singing, every gust of wind in the leaves was a shockingly sudden and astounding miracle.

I was floored. Suddenly the mask came off the ecstatic and astoundingly powerful dance of life that goes on under the surface of manifest existence. I was the astonished witness only, that in itself a miracle. I seemed to exist as a witnessing mind without an identity or name or history. A thrill, a flash of ecstatic perception of the dance of existence passed through me, and just as quickly was gone, leaving a knowing about the foundations of everything. At the sub-rasa level just below my preoccupied consciousness was a pulsating dance of gleeful ecstatics that astonished my naive mind — and put the fear of God into me, you might say.

The veil was lifted for a brief moment. It changed my life.

That experience touched the root of my real search. I suddenly lost interest in the whole question of “enlightenment.” It’s true there was an awe-inspiring power there, and there was also a long term knock-on effect. Pursuing an altered state based on a received idea of “spirituality” seemed infantile…