The ending of thought is the beginning of love

Since the past few months I’d been nurturing a desire to spend some time at Krishnamurti’s retreat at Brockwood Park, but somehow it wasn’t quite working out. Then this weekend, circumstances so developed that on a rainy Saturday morning I finally found myself driving down from London to the place that had been calling me all this while. I really didn’t know what to expect, wasn’t even clear why exactly I wanted to go…but there was this inner calling that said ‘go and be’.

What a day – I think it was one of the most transformational twenty four hours of my life. Come to think of it, didn’t attend any talk or class or lesson or programme – all I did was spend time with myself, read a few books from the library, watch a few thought provoking videos, observe the mind, listen to the silence, go for long nature walks, have conversations with the lovely fellow guests at the retreat…and something shifted inside me.

Walking in the forest watching the deer run away from me, listening to the calling of the birds, breathing the fresh and divine air, observing the heavenly shades of white, yellow, purple, pink and red dotting the various tints of green, my heart is filled with a feeling of joy and eternal peace that I’ve never know before. My eyes are filled with tears of happinees. Suddenly I realise I am free from fear, free from thought and filled with love, only love.

I come back still overwhelmed by my experience and am looking for the right words to describe what I went through. I open a book on the coffee table, and the page I open to contains just those words:

“If you pass on through the meadows with their thousand flowers of every colour imaginable, from bright red to yellow and purple, and their bright green grass washed clean by last night’s rain, rich and verdant – again without a single movement of the machinery of thought – then you will know what love is – J. Krishnamurti”

I got what love is.