no places to go to

For some it a terrifying prospect. It would be better, think they, 
if Heaven were above and Hell below—anywhere outside, but not within.
 But that comfort has been knocked from under us. There are no places
 to go to, either for reward or punishment. The place is always here and now,
 in your own person and according to your own fancy. The world is exactly 
what you picture it to be, always, every instant. It is impossible to shift
 the scenery about and pretend that you will enjoy another, a different act. 
The setting is permanent, changing with the mind and heart, 
not according to the dictates of an invisible stage director. 
You are the author, director and actor all in one: the drama is always going
 to be your own life, not some one else’s. A beautiful, terrible, ineluctable drama,
 like a suit made of your own skin. Would you want it otherwise? 
Could you invent a better drama?

~ Henry Miller

from Sexus

photo by Christine de Grancy

insider / outsider ambivalence

Czechoslovakia's velvet revolution evolved under the leadership

of Vaclav Havel, who refused to live in the palace.  After

becoming president he continued to reside in his working

class digs in downtown Prague.  Although to his constituents

he was a hero, Havel did not define himself as superior to the

common man; he preferred to be the common man.  Havel

lives out a relationship to authority that seems to include respect

for the hermetic as well as the heroic.

Resisting the seductive delusion of the Big-Man in the Big-House in keeping

with the "under-the worldly point of view," which is at the root of 'wisdom.' 

Like the shaman, the hunter mediates wilderness to civilization.  As in

history and throughout the world: in the hunt, the vision quest, the initiatory

vigil, the hunter goes alone - beyond civilization, into the primeval forest,

into the dark, into the under-world.  And yet the family, the whole village, is 

carried along in the heart.  Perhaps it is only in such solitude that on comes

to understand what human beings really are,...

The insider / outsider ambivalence of the hunter plays across the categorical

and normative boundaries. With the hunter, as with the Trickster, the 

impenetrable boundary becomes a permeable membrane: "membranes act

in a selective permeable way, allowing nourishment in, keeping poisons out."

The hunter, to be successful in the hunt, must abandon the ordinary,

structural categories of perception and descend from the rider into the

mind of the "horse" and "dragon." This descent, delineates "a 

fundamental distinction between two types of perception: 

discernment and designation."  

Distinction, 'designation' may be placed

 on the side of dogmatic structure's endless classifications; 

whereas 'discernment' is nameless, pre- and para- lingual,

 before-and-beyond designation - beyond our linguisticlly 

constructed world - 

discernment is "the music of the pattern."   

Discerning outside of the limitation

of designation - as Rilke implores:

If only we would let ourselves be dominated

as things do by some immense storm,

we would become strong too, and not need names.

Dropping the reins, our tight-fisted rationality must come to trust the shaggy

 little horse of limbic discernment.

~ Daniel Deardorff

from the other within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, & Psyche

 

just be aware - here and now

.

Just live your life as it comes. 

Keep quietly alert, inquiring into the real nature of yourself. 

Perception is based on memory and is only imagination. 

The world can be said to appear but not to be. 

Only that which makes perception possible is real.

You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown. 

Give up all names and forms, and the Real is with you. 

Know yourself as you are. Distrust your mind and go beyond. 

Do not think of the Real in terms of consciousness and unconsciousness. 

It is utterly beyond both. 

It gives birth to consciousness. 

All else is in consciousness.

Nothing you can see, feel or think is so. 

Go beyond the personal and see. 

Stop imagining that you were born. 

You are utterly beyond all existence and non-existence, 

utterly beyond all that the mind conceives. 

Question yourself: Who am I? 

What is behind and beyond all this? 

Soon you will see that thinking yourself to be a person is mere habit built on memory. 

Inquire ceaselessly.

 Just be aware of your being here and now. 

There is nothing more to it. 

In reality you are not a thing nor separate.

You are the infinite potentiality, the inexhaustible possibility. 

Because you are, all can be. 

The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become. 

You are neither consciousness nor its content. 

You are the timeless Source. 

Disassociate yourself from mind and consciousness. 

Find a foothold beyond and all will be clear and easy.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

from I am That

steep yourself in the sea of matter

.

Sons and daughters of the earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter, 

bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life and your youthfulness.

You thought you could do without it because the power of thought has been kindled in you?   

You hoped that the more thoroughly you rejected the tangible, 

the closer you would be to spirit: that you would be more divine 

if you lived in the world of pure thought or at least more angelic 

if you fled the corporeal? 

Well, you were like to have perished of hunger.

You must have oil for your limbs, blood for your veins, water for your soul, 

the world of reality for your intellect: 

do you not see that the very law of your own nature 

makes these a necessity for you?

~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

art by picasso

no need

At least a flash of sanity: the momentary realization that there is no need
 to come to certain conclusions about persons, events, conflicts, trends, 
even trends toward evil and disaster, as if from day to day and even
 from moment to moment I had to know and declare (at least to myself):
 This is so and so, this is good, this is bad; we are heading for a “new era” 
or we are heading for destruction. What do such judgments mean?
 Little or nothing. Things are as they are, in an immense whole of which
 I am a part, and which I cannot pretend to grasp. To say I grasp it
 is immediately to put myself in a false position, as if I were “outside” it.
 Whereas to be in it is to seek truth in my own life and action, 
by moving where movement is possible and keeping still when 
movement is unnecessary, realizing that things will continue
 to define themselves ... - and will be more clear to me if I am silent
 and attentive,... rather than constantly formulating statements
 in this age which is smothered in language, in meaningless and inconclusive
 debate, and in which, in the last analysis, 
nobody listens to anything except what 
agrees with his own prejudices.



~ Thomas Merton

from Learning to Love

sketch by the author

thief of hearts

Thief of hearts,
you have ransacked
this beggar's hut,
left me
nothing.

All I see
now
is the print
of your pilfering hand
everywhere.

 

 

 

 

Ivan Granger 

from Real Thirst

art by Van Gogh

the greek ships

When the water holes go, and the fish flop about

In the mud, they can moisten each other faintly,

But it's best if they lose themselves in the river.

You know how many Greek ships went down

With their cargoes of wine.  If we can't get

To port, perhaps it's best to head for the bottom.

I've heard that the mourning dove never says

What she means.  Those of us who make up poems

Have agreed not to say what the pain is.

Eliot wrote his poems for years standing under

A bare light-bulb.  He knew he was a murderer,

And he accepted his punishment at birth.

The sitar player is searching: now in the back yard,

Now in the old dishes left behind on the table,

Now for the suffering on the underside of a leaf.

Go ahead, throw your good name into the water.

All those who have ruined their lives for love

Are calling to us from a hundred sunken ships.

~ Robert Bly

from My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy

why we tell stories

I 

Because we used to have leaves 

and on damp days 

our muscles feel a tug, 

painful now, from when roots 

pulled us into the ground 

and because our children believe 

they can fly, an instinct retained 

from when the bones in our arms 

were shaped like zithers and broke 

neatly under their feathers 

and because before we had lungs 

we knew how far it was to the bottom 

as we floated open-eyed 

like painted scarves through the scenery 

of dreams, and because we awakened 

and learned to speak 

2 

We sat by the fire in our caves, 

and because we were poor, we made up a tale 

about a treasure mountain 

that would open only for us 

and because we were always defeated, 

we invented impossible riddles 

only we could solve, 

monsters only we could kill, 

women who could love no one else 

and because we had survived 

sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, 

we discovered bones that rose 

from the dark earth and sang 

as white birds in the trees 

3 

Because the story of our life 

becomes our life 

Because each of us tells 

the same story 

but tells it differently 

and none of us tells it 

the same way twice 

Because grandmothers looking like spiders 

want to enchant the children 

and grandfathers need to convince us 

what happened happened because of them 

and though we listen only 

haphazardly, with one ear, 

we will begin our story 

with the word and

~ Lisel Mueller

from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

still playing

Mind and body dropped off; 

dropped off mind and body!

This state should be experienced by everyone;

it is like piling fruit into a basket without a bottom,

like pouring water into a bowl With a pierced hole;

However much you may pile or pour you cannot fill it up.

When this is realized the pail bottom is broken through.

But while there is still a trace of conceptualizations

which makes you say ‘I have this understanding’

or ‘I have that realization’,

you are still playing with unrealities.

~ Dogen Zenji
.

Dogen was born about 1200 in Kyoto, Japan,

 he was drawn to the teachings of silent meditation. 

He established his own school of zen. 

.

the direct path - the progressive path

~ Rupert Spira

grounded values - open arms

~ Jean Vanier

longing

~ Rupert Spira

 

beyond the reach

I lost whatever ability I still had to distinguish subject from object, 
tell apart what remained of me and what was Bach’s music.
 Instead of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, egoless and one with all it beheld,
 I became a transparent ear, indistinguishable from the stream of sound
 that flooded my consciousness until there was nothing else in it,
 not even a dry tiny corner in which to plant an I and observe. Opened to the music,
 I became first the strings, could feel on my skin the exquisite friction
of the horsehair rubbing over me, and then the breeze of sound flowing past
 as it crossed the lips of the instrument and went out to meet the world,
 beginning its lonely transit of the universe. Then I passed down into the resonant
 black well of space inside the cello, the vibrating envelope of air formed 
by the curves of its spruce roof and maple walls. The instrument’s wooden 
interior formed a mouth capable of unparalleled eloquence —
 indeed, of articulating everything a human could conceive.
 But the cello’s interior also formed a room to write in and a skull in which to think
 and I was now it, with no remainder.

So I became the cello and mourned with it for the twenty or so minutes it took
 for that piece to, well, change everything. Or so it seemed; now, its vibrations subsiding,
 I’m less certain. But for the duration of those exquisite moments, Bach’s cello
 suite had had the unmistakable effect of reconciling me to death… Having let go
 of the rope of self and slipped into the warm waters of this worldly beauty —
 Bach’s sublime music, I mean, and Yo-Yo Ma’s bow caressing those four strings 
suspended over that envelope of air — I felt as though I’d passed 
beyond the reach of suffering and regret.

~ Michael Pollan 

from How to Change Your Mind: 
What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness,
 Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

 with thanks to brainpickings

 

compassion

.

.

The Grail Hero - particularly in the person of Parzival, the 'Great Fool' - is the forthright, simple, uncorrupted, noble son of nature, without guile, strong in the purity of the yearning of his heart.  ... His widowed, noble mother, in their forest retreat had told him of God and Satan, "distinguished for him dark and light."  However, in his own deeds light and dark were mixed.  He was not an angel or a saint, but a living, questing man of deeds, gifted with paired virtues of courage and compassion, to which was added loyalty.  And it was through his steadfastness in these - not supernatural grace - that he won, at last, the Grail.

Parzival makes two visits to the Grail Castle.  The first is a failure. 
 The Grail King is a wounded man, whose nature has been broken by castration in a battle. 
 Parzival spontaneously wishes to ask him, "What is wrong?"  But then, he has been told
 that a knight does not ask questions, and so, in order to preserve the image of himself 
as a noble knight, he restrains his natural impulse of compassion,
 and the Grail quest fails.

... in the end, as in the case of Parzival, the guide within will be his own noble heart alone, and the guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in his heart amor: the deepest, inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial with the process of the All, "thus come" And in this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be ... the courage to let go the past , with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of "meaning," and its gifts: to die to the world and come to birth from within.

What the Holy grail symbolizes is the highest spiritual fulfillment of a human life.  
Each life has some kind of high fulfillment, and each has its own gift from the grail.
  The theme of compassion is part of the clue about how to get there and where it is. 
 It has to do with overcoming the same temptations that the Buddha overcame: 
of attachment to this, that, of the other life detail that has pulled you off course.

~ Joseph Campbell
 from: A Joseph Campbell Companion
 edited by Diane Osbon

.

humility

When humility delivers a man 

from attachment to his own words 

and his own reputation, 

he discovers that true joy is only possible 

when we have completely forgotten ourselves,

and it is only when we pay no more attention to our life 

and our own reputation and our own excellence 

that we are at last completely free to serve God for His sake alone.

~ Thomas Merton