The true path

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Just before Ninakawa passed away the Zen master Ikkyu visited him.  "Shall I lead you on?"  Ikkyu asked.

Ninakawa replied:  "I came here alone and I go alone.  What help could you be to me?"

Ikkyu answered:  "If you think you really come and go, that is your delusion.

Let me show you the path on which there is no coming and no going."

With his words, Ikkyu had revealed the path so clearly that Ninakawa smiled and passed away.

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~ from Zen Flesh Zen Bones compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki

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Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room

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Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. Loneliness is small, solitude is large. Loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. Loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nobody answers; solitude has its roots in the great silence of eternity. 
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~ Kent Nerburn

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what is sorrow for?

What is sorrow for? It is a storehouse
Where we store wheat, barley, corn and tears.
We step to the door on a round stone,
And the storehouse feeds all the birds of sorrow.
And I say to myself: Will you have
Sorrow at last? Go on, be cheerful in autumn,
Be stoic, yes, be tranquil, calm;
Or in the valley of sorrows spread your wings.

~Robert Bly

what time is it?

what time is it?it is by every star

a different time,and each most falsely true;

or so subhuman superminds declare

- nor all their times encompass me and you:

when are we never,but forever now

(hosts of eternity;not guests of seem)

believe me,dear,clocks have enough to do

without confusing timelessness and time.

Time cannot children,poets,lovers tell -

measure imagine,mystery,a kiss

- not through mankind would rather know than feel;

mistrusting utterly that timelessness

whose absence would make you whole life and my

(and infinite our)merely to undie

~e.e.  cummings

silently if

silently if,out of not knowable

night's utmost nothing,wanders a little guess

(only which is this world)more my life does

not leap than with the mystery your smile

sings or if(spiralling as luminous

they climb oblivion)voices who are dreams,

less into heaven certainly earth swims

than each my deeper death becomes your kiss

losing through you what seemed myself,i find

selves unimaginably mine;beyond

sorrow's own joys and hoping's very fears

yours is the light by which my spirit's born:

yours is the darkness of my soul's return

- you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars

~ e.e. cummings

Loneliness

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Her son had recently died, and she said she did not know what to do now.  She had so much time on her hands, she was so bored and weary and sorrowful, that she was ready to die.  She had brought him up with loving care and intelligence, and he had gone to one of the best schools and to colleges.  She had not spoiled him, though he had had everything that was necessary.  She had put her faith and hope in him, and had given him all her love; for there was no one else to share it with, she and her husband having separated long ago.  Her son had died through some wrong diagnosis and operation - though, she added smilingly, the doctors said that the operation was 'successful'.  Now, she was left alone, and life seemed so vain and pointless.  She had wept when he died, until there were no more tears, but only a dull and weary emptiness.  She had had such plans for both of them, but now, she was utterly lost.
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The breeze was blowing from the sea, cool and fresh, and under the tree it was quiet.  The colours on the mountains were vivid, and the blue jays were very talkative.  A cow wandered by, followed by her calf, and a squirrel dashed up a tree, wildly chattering.  It sat on a branch and began to scold, and the scolding went on for a long time, its tail bobbing up and down.  It had such sparkling bright eyes and sharp claws.  A lizard came out to warm itself, and caught a fly.  The tree tops were gently swaying, and a dead tree against the sky was straight and splendid.  It was being bleached by the sun.  There was another dead tree beside it, dark and curving, more recent in its decay.  A few clouds rested on the distant mountains.
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What a strange thing is loneliness, and how frightening it is!  We never allow ourselves to get too close to it; and if by chance we do, we quickly run away from it.  We will do anything to escape from loneliness, to cover it up.  Our conscious and unconscious preoccupation seems to be to avoid it or to overcome it.  Avoiding and overcoming loneliness are equally futile; though suppressed or neglected, the pain, the problem, is still there.  You may lose yourself in a crowd, and yet be utterly lonely; you may be intensely active, but loneliness silently creeps upon you; put the book down, and it is there.  Amusements and drinks cannot drown loneliness; you may temporarily evade it, but when the laughter and the effects of alcohol are over, the fear of loneliness returns.  You  may be ambitious and successful, you may have vast power over others, you may be rich in knowledge, you may worship and forget yourself in the rigmarole of rituals; but do what you will, the ache of loneliness continues.  You may exist only for your son, for the Master, for the expression of your talent; but like the darkness, loneliness covers you.  You may love or hate, escape from it according to your temperament and psychological demands; but loneliness is there, waiting and watching, withdrawing only to approach again.
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Loneliness is the awareness of complete isolation; and are not our activities self-enclosing?  Though our thoughts and emotions are expansive, are they not exclusive and dividing?  Are we not seeking dominance in our relationships, in our rights and possessions, thereby creating resistance?  Do we not regard work as 'yours' and 'mine'?  Are we not identified with the collective, with the country, or with the few?  Is not our whole tendency to isolate ourselves, to divide and separate?  The very activity of the self, at whatever level, is the way of isolation; and loneliness is the consciousness of the self without activity.  Activity, whether physical or psychological, becomes a means of self-expansion; and when there is no activity of any kind, there is an awareness of the emptiness of the self.  It is this emptiness that we seek to fill, and in filling it we spend our life, whether at a noble or ignoble level.  There may seem to be no sociological harm in filling this emptiness at a noble level; but illusion breeds untold misery and destruction, which may not be immediate.  The craving to fill this emptiness - to run away from it, which is the same thing - cannot be sublimated or suppressed; for who is the entity that is to suppress or sublimate?  Is not that very entity another form of craving?  The objects of craving may vary, but is not all craving similar?  You may change the object of your craving from drink to ideation; but without understanding the process of craving, illusion is inevitable.
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There is no entity separate from craving; there is only craving, there is no one who craves.  Craving takes on different masks at different times, depending on its interests.  The memory of these varying interests meets the new, which brings about conflict, and so the chooser is born, establishing himself as an entity separate and distinct from craving.  But the entity is not different from its qualities.  The entity who tries to fill or run away from emptiness, incompleteness, loneliness, is not different from that which he is avoiding; he is it.  He cannot run away from himself; all that he can do is to understand himself.  He is his loneliness, his emptiness; and as long as he regards it as something separate from himself, he will be in illusion and endless conflict.  When he directly experiences that he is his own loneliness, then only can there be freedom from fear.  Fear exists only in relationship to an idea, and idea is the response of memory as thought.  Thought is the result of experience; and though it can ponder over emptiness, have sensations with regard to it, it cannot know emptiness directly.  The word loneliness, with its memories of pain and fear, prevents the experiencing of it afresh.  The word is memory, and when the word is no longer significant, then the relationship between the experiencer and the experienced is wholly different; then that relationship is direct and not through a word, through memory; then the experiencer is the experience, which alone brings freedom from fear.
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Love and emptiness cannot abide together; when there is the feeling of loneliness, love is not.  You may hide emptiness under the word love, but when the object of your love is no longer there or does not respond, then you are aware of emptiness, you are frustrated.  We use the word love as a means of escaping from ourselves, from our own insufficiency.  We cling to the one we love, we are jealous, we miss him when he is not there and are utterly lost when he dies;  and then we seek comfort in some other form, in some belief, in some substitute.  Is all this love?  Love is not an idea, the result of association; love is not something to be used as an escape from our own wretchedness,  and when we do so use it, we make problems which have no solutions.  Love is not an abstraction, but it's reality can be experienced only when idea, mind is no longer the supreme factor.
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~ J. Krishnamurti - from 'Commentaries on Living First Series'

When the ocean finally comes to you

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When the ocean finally comes to you as a lover,
Marry, at once, quickly,
For God's sake!
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Don't postpone it!
Existence has no better gift.
No amount of searching
Will find this.
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A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder,
And become yours.
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~ Rumi
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You stay home too

I will wait here in the fields

to see how well the rain

brings on the grass.

In the labor of the fields

longer than a man's life

I am at home. Don't come with me.

You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods

where the old trees

move only with the wind

and then with gravity.

In the stillness of the trees

I am at home. Don't come with me.

You stay home too.

~ Wendell Berry

to go in the dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

~ Wendell Berry

other creatures

All other creatures look into the Open
with their whole eyes. But our eyes,
turned inward, are set all around it like snares,
trapping its way out to freedom.

We know what’s out there only from the animal’s
Face; for we take even the youngest child,
Turn him around and force him to look
At the past as formation, not that openness
so deep within an animal’s face.

Free from death,
we only see it; the free animal
always has its destruction behind
and god ahead, and when it moves,
it moves toward eternity like running springs.

Not for a single day, no, never have we had
That pure space ahead of us, in which flowers
endlessly open.

It is always World
and never Nowhere without No:
that pure, unguarded space we breathe,
always know, and never crave.

As a child,
one may lose himself in silence and be
shaken out of it. Or one dies and is it.

Once near death, one can’t see death anymore
And stares out, maybe with the wide eyes of animals.

If the other weren’t there blocking the view,
Lovers come close to it and are amazed…
It opens up behind the other, almost
an oversight…but no one gets past
the other, and the world returns again.

Always facing creation, all we see
is the reflection of the free and open
that we’ve darkened, or some mute animal
raising its calm eyes and seeing through us,
and through us.

This is destiny: to be opposites,
always, and nothing else but opposites.

If this sure animal approaching us
from a different direction had our kind
of consciousness, he’d drag us around
in his wake. But to the animal, his being
is infinite, incomprehensible, and blind
to his condition, pure, like his outward gaze.
And where we see the future, he sees
all, himself in all, and whole forever.

And yet the weight and care of one great sadness
lies on this warm and watching creature.
Because what often overwhelms us
Also clings to him — the memory
that what we so strive for now may have been
nearer, truer, and its attachment to us
infinitely tender, once.

Here all is distance, there it was breath.
After that first home,
the second seems drafty and a hybrid.

Oh, blessed are the tiny creatures
who stay in the womb that bore them forever;
oh the joy of the gnat that can still leap within,
even on its wedding day; for the womb is all!

And look at the half-certainty of the bird
almost aware of both from birth,
like one of the Etruscan souls rising
from the dead man enclosed inside the space
for which his reclining figure forms a lid.

And how confused is anything that comes
from a womb and has to fly. As if afraid
of itself, it darts through the air
like a crack through a cup, the way a wing
of a bat crazes the porcelain of night.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,
Looking at everything and never from!
It floods us. We arrange it. It decays.
We arrange it again, and we decay.

Who’s turned us around like this,
so that whatever we do, we always have
the look of someone going away? Just as a man
on the last hill showing him his whole valley
one last time, turns, and stops, and lingers –
so we live, and are forever leaving.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

the woman I love lives inside of you

Because the Woman I love lives

Inside of you,

I lean as close to your body with my words

As I can -

And I think of you all the time, dear pilgrim.

Because the One I love goes with you

Wherever you go,

Hafiz will always be near.

If you sat before me, wayfarer,

With your aura bright from your many

Charms,

My lips could resist rushing to you and needing

to befriend your blushed cheek,

But my eyes can no longer hide

The wondrous fact of who

You Really are.

The Beautiful One whom I adore

Has pitched His royal tent inside of you,

So I will always lean my heart

As close to your soul

As I can.

~ Hafiz

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Two Bears

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Once,
After a hard day's forage
Two bears sat together in silence
On a beautiful vista
Watching the sun go down
And feeling deeply grateful
For life.
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Though, after a while
A thought -provoking conversation began
Which turned to the topic of
Fame.
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The one bear said,
"Did you hear about Rustam?
He has become famous
And travels from city to city
In a golden cage;
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He performs to hundreds of people
Who laugh and applaud
His carnival
Stunts."
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The other bear thought for
A few seconds
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Then started
Weeping.
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~ Hafiz

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Don't surrender your loneliness

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Don't surrender your loneliness

So quickly.

Let it cut more deep.

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Let it ferment and season you

As few human

Or even divine ingredients can.

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Something missing in my heart tonight

Has made my eyes so soft,

My voice

So tender,

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My need of God

Absolutely

Clear.

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~ Hafiz

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"There is nothing of value in here."

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I was

looking for that shop

where the shopkeeper would say,

"There is nothing of value in here."

I found it and did

not leave.

The richness of not wanting

wrote these

poems.

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~ Kibir

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self-centeredness?

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Question: Does not this process of constant self-awareness lead to self-centeredness?

Krishnamurti: It does, does it not?  The more you are concerned about yourself,
 watching, improving, thinking about yourself, the more self-centered you are,
 are you not?  That is an obvious act.  If I am concerned with changing myself, 
then I must observe, I must build a technique which will help me to break up
 that centre.  There is self-centeredness as long as I am consciously or unconsciously
 concerned with a result, with success, as long as I am gaining and putting aside
 – which is what most of us are doing.  The incentive is the goal I am pursuing; 
 because I want to gain that end, I watch myself.  I am unhappy, I am miserable,
 frustrated, and I feel there is a state in which I can be happy, fulfilled, complete, 
 so I become aware in order to gain that state.   I use awareness to get what I want, 
 so I am self-centered.  Through awareness, through self-analysis through reading,
 studying, I hope to dissolve the ‘me’, and then I shall be happy, enlightened, 
liberated, I shall be one of the elite – and that is what I want.   So, the more I am 
concerned with gaining an end, the greater is the self-centredness of thought.
  But thought is ever self-enclosing anyhow, is it not?

So – what?  To break down the self-centeredness, I must understand why the mind
 seeks an end,  a goal, a particular result.  Why does my mind go after a reward? 
  Why?  Can it function in any other way?  Is not the movement of the mind
 from memory to memory, from result to result?  I have acquired this, 
 I don’t like it, and I am going to get something else.  I don’t like this thought,
 but that thought will be better, nobler, more comforting. more satisfying. 
 As long as I am thinking,  I can think in no other terms;  for the mind moves
 from knowledge to knowledge, from memory to memory.  Is not thinking
 self-centered in its very nature?  I know there are exceptions, but we are not 
discussing the exceptions.  In our everyday life,  are we not consciously or
 unconsciously pursuing an end,  gaining and avoiding,  seeking to continue, 
  putting aside anything that is disturbing,  that is insecure, uncertain? 
 In seeking its own certainty, the mind creates self-centeredness; 
 and is not that self-centeredness the  ’me’, which then watches over and analyses itself?
   So, as long as we seek a result, self-centeredness must exist, whether in an individual,
 in a group, in a nation or a race.  But if we can understand why the mind seeks a result,
 a satisfying end,  why it wants to be certain – if we understand that, then 
there is a possibility of breaking sown the walls that enclose thought as the  ’me’. 
 But that requires an astonishing awareness of the total process, not only the conscious,
 but also of the unconscious levels, an awareness from moment to moment in which
 there is no gathering, no accumulation, no saying,  ’Yes, I have understood this,
 and I am going to use it for tomorrow’,  a spontaneity which is not of the mind. 
 Only then is there a possibility of going beyond 
the self-enclosing activities of thought.

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~ J. Krishnamurti

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