From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, July 12
CBS News — read the full story
A fax machine buzzed through the stack just after lunch, spitting out a C.B.S. alert on fuel. Gas prices are ticking back up as fighting near the Strait of Hormuz chokes tanker flows and lifts crude again. Markets are pricing in not just oil risk... but the slow creep of inflation pressure into everyday budgets. J. Krishnamurti has the first word today, then HIL-de-gard of Bingen.
Look , the news speaks of oil flowing through a narrow strait, of prices rising when passage is threatened. We see only the symptom: the gallon at the pump, the barrel on the exchange. But what moves beneath?
It is not merely geopolitics or supply chains. It is the mind that has made itself dependent on a flow it cannot control, then trembles when that flow falters. We have built a life on the assumption that oil will always move, that energy will always be there , and now we panic at the thought of interruption.
Why do we accept this fragility as natural? Why do we not question the very structure of a society that stakes its breath on a single channel? The real crisis is not in Hormuz; it is in our refusal to imagine another way.
Let us look at this together: what would happen if we stopped treating oil as a right and began seeing it as a gift , one that demands attention, not entitlement? Where would our energy go then?
Krishnamurti: You know, one must put the right question to get the right answer. If one puts a wrong question, it will bring about a wrong answer. Now, is this the right question? If I have no conflict at all, I will have an astonishing amount of energy. That is a fact, is it…
A.P.: Modern society developed during the last two hundred years. It has certain clear postulates - that the problems that affect human society arise from a lack of material resources, from poverty, disease, squalor; and that these can be remedied by control over the material env…
Krishnamurti: Obviously the present crisis throughout the world is exceptional, without precedent. There have been crises of varying types at different periods throughout history, social, national, political. Crises come and go; economic recessions, depressions, come, get modif…
S: Why do you say that greed would come in the way of energy operating? Man may be ambitious but he is also good. These are the elements which structure his self. Krishnamurti: We are asking why, when man has that energy, that energy does not bring about a radical change? P: …
So, that is what we are going to do this morning. Naturally I have to talk, but the words do not act as an enquiry. Words have little meaning unless you use the words and go beyond the words - then the enquiry becomes extraordinarily interesting and alive. One sees within ones…
The trembling reveals a mind that has mistaken continuity for security, sir. When the strait threatens to close, it is not merely the market that shudders,it is the inner architecture we have built: a life arranged around the belief that energy must arrive, uninterrupted, as a right. That tremor is fear made visible,fear not of scarcity alone, but of the collapse of a world we have come to take for granted, a world where we do not have to attend, to wait, to wonder. It exposes how deeply we have outsourced our vitality to a system we do not understand, and then blame the system when it falters. Look at your own dependence, sir,what would you feel if the light did not turn on? What would you feel without.
A small shift begins with attention to what is already given: the warmth of morning light, the breath drawn without cost, the water from the tap. When you pause to consider that even the oil enabling your journey was once ancient sunlight held in earth, a gift of time and pressure, you meet it not as a due but as something lent. That pause — just a breath before turning the key — can loosen the habit of taking. Try it tomorrow, sir, and see what arises in the space between expectation and gratitude. The shift is not in the act but in the quality of attention you bring to it.
I recall a farmer in Rajasthan, many years ago, who tilled his small plot with a wooden plow and two oxen. He had no tractor, no diesel pump, no connection to the grid. When the rains failed, he did not curse the sky or demand a subsidy,he observed the soil, saved seeds from the hardiest plants, and shared water with his neighbors in silence. His life was not marked by protest... but by a quiet adjustment to what was actually given. He did not imagine abundance as a right; he met scarcity with attention. That is one modest way: to live as if the next gallon, the next meal, the next day, is not guaranteed,and to act accordingly, without fear or expectation. The refusal to imagine another way ends when we stop waiting for the system to change and begin changing our own hands.
I hear of the strait narrowing, where the waters that carry the lifeblood of commerce grow tight with fear. It is as though the earth itself holds its breath, and the flow that once greened the markets now meets resistance, like a river dammed by stone. I recall the visions in my SKEE-vee-ahs, where I saw the winds restrained in their courses, and knew that when the breath of the world is choked, the body politic grows feverish.
This is not merely of markets, but of the soul's dryness made visible,when trust in peace frays, and the routes of sustenance become perilous, the greening power withdraws. I, who fought emperors for the freedom of my nuns to sing, know well how interdicts silence not just voices... but the very pulse of life; so too does fear in the strait still the song of trade.
Tell me, what have you seen in the waters since the light returned? Do the tankers move again, or does the strait yet hold its breath? Let the image linger: a single sail, white against the dusk, straining toward the open sea.
These things, being separated from themselves, and the breaths of their blasts emit up to those places in which they arise, in which also the breaths of them encounter themselves. Whence, just as the preceding chapters, they emit their blasts into the same wheel and into the same…
It is, because the sun has already declined to the lower regions. Therefore, the qualities of it are shown in the hands of man, which accomplish many works and have the power of the whole body in themselves, since they attract and treasure all things that they can, so that man is…
of the firmament under the earth coagulates, and through its heat it is dissolved. For the heat of the sun and the moisture from the waters in the clouds thus join and mix together, so that through these all fruit on earth is ruled and strengthened, because the heat of the sun an…
and the rising humors it flees with its fortitude and those fevers which are born in the stomach and are not daily or tertian or quartan, but rather that which a man yawns and is slow and has a loathing of foods, let him take pure copper to the weight of five coins and put it in …
it stretches, whence falling it does not rise again. Which, just as the blackness of the brain, coagulated by heat and moisture, diffuses phlegm or livor into the body of man, so also the black fire, which is in the second circle, brings forth tempests and lightnings into the wor…
In the stillness of the strait, I saw not only the idle hulls but the faces of those who wait,hands resting on railings, eyes fixed on the horizon not for profit... but for the return of the tide that brings not just oil... but the quiet assurance that the world still turns. Their longing was not for gain... but for the resumption of rhythm, the greening flow that once carried bread and light to distant shores, as the Psalmist said, 'the rivers have lifted up their voice',a voice now hushed, yet yearning to rise again. I remembered YOO-tah, in our hermitage cell, how she would press her ear to the stone wall, listening for the distant bell that meant the nuns were safe,so too do these watchers listen for the hum of engines, the sign that life's current has not been severed. The soul does not hunger only for sustenance... but for the knowing that the ways remain open, that the Spirit's breath still moves through the waters, and that exile from flow is not the final word. Let the strait remember its vocation: to be a passage, not a prison.
I sensed a tremolo, not yet the full song,the wind still holding its breath as it did when Abbot Kuno barred our move to ROO-perts-berg, and the nuns' feet itched for the road. Only when the interdict lifted and we sang again in the chapel did I know the wind had truly returned, not as a gust but as a steady breath in the lyre of the Spirit. Let the strait remember: even the fiercest storm yields to the tide that greens the reedbeds and steadies the keel.
In my SKEE-vee-ahs, I saw the rivers flowing in their fullness, their waters clear and swift, bearing fish and reed alike,a sign that the breath of the earth was unchained. When the waters run without hindrance, I knew the greening power had returned, and the fields would blush with green again. Thus I watched for the unrestrained current, for it is in the free flow that the Spirit's song is heard. Let the waters rise and carry their burden without fear, for in their movement lies the health of the world.
The story ran in C.B.S. News. Oil moves through chokepoints; fear tightens the flow. That's Old News for today.