the creations of sound

If the poetry of X was music,

So that it came to him of its own,

Without understanding, out of the wall

Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen,

Or chosen quickly, in a freedom

That was their element, we should not know

That X is an obstruction, a man

Too exactly himself, and that there are words

Better without an author, without a poet,

Or having a separate author, a different poet,

An accretion from ourselves, intelligent

Beyond intelligence, an artificial man

At a distance, a secondary expositor,

A being of sound, whom one does not approach

Through any exaggeration.  From him, we collect.

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence

Clarified.  It is silence made still dirtier.

It is more than an imitation for the ear.

.

He lacks this venerable complication.

His poems are not of the second part of life.

They do not make the visible a little hard

To see nor, reverberating, eked out the mind

On peculiar horns, themselves eked out

By the spontaneous particulars of sound.

We do not say ourselves like that in poems.

We say ourselves in syllables that rise

From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.

~ Wallace Stevens

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You have wakened not out of sleep

.

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You have wakened not out of sleep,

 but into a prior dream, 

and that dream lies within another, 

and so on, to infinity, 

which is the number of the grains of sand. 

The path that you are about to take is endless, 

and you will die before you have truly awakened.

.

~ Jorge Luis Borges, from 'The Writing of the God'

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When a person dies, there arises this doubt:

.

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When a person dies, there arises this doubt:

"He still exists," say some; "he does not,"

Say others...

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The joy of the spirit ever abides, 

But not what seems pleasant to the senses.

Both these, differing in their purpose, prompt

Us to action.  All is well for those who choose

The joy of the spirit, but they miss

The goal of life who prefer the pleasant.

Perennial joy or passing pleasure?

This is the choice one is to make always.

.

The first leads one to Self-realization;

The second makes one more and more 

Estranged from one's real Self...

Ignorant of their ignorance, yet wise 

In their own esteem, those deluded men

Proud of their vain learning go round and round

Like the blind led by the blind.

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It is but few who hear about the Self.

Fewer still dedicate their lives to its

Realization.   Wonderful is the one

Who speaks about the Self.  Rare are they

Who make it the supreme goal of their lives.

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~ Katha Upanishad

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a place to which you can go

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The mythologist Joseph Campbell was asked by an interviewer how a regular person could preserve his sense of the mythic when so many feel too besieged by the claims of every day living. He said,

 You must have a place to which you can go, in your heart, in your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not know what you owe anyone or what anyone owes you. You must have a place you can go to where you do not know what your work is or who you work for, where you do not know who you are married to or who your children are.

~ Joseph Campbell

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I am not I

.

I am not I.

I am this one

walking beside me whom I do not see,

whom at times I manage to visit,

and whom at other times I forget;

who remains calm and silent while I talk,

and forgives gently, when I hate,

who walks where I am not,

who will remain standing when I die.

~ Juan Ramón Jiménez

translated by Robert Bly

photo by Frantisek Drtikol

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the boy and the lion (via elizabeth sarah)

look at a flower

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If you would look at a flower, any thought about that flower prevents you from looking at it. The words the rose, the violet, it is this flower, that flower, it is that species keep you from observing. To look there must be no interference of the word, which is the objectifying of thought. There must be freedom from the word, and to look there must be silence; otherwise you can’t look. If you look at your wife or husband, all the memories that you have had, either of pleasure or pain, interfere with looking. It is only when you look without the image that there is a relationship. Your verbal image and the verbal image of the other have no relationship at all. They are nonexistent.

~  J. Krishnamurti

from New York, Fifth Public Talk, October 5, 1966

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We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.

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~ Kenji Miyazawa

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a pathless land

The core of Krishnamurti’s teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when he said: “Truth is a pathless land.”

Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a fence of security — religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man’s thinking, his relationships and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind. The content of his consciousness is his entire existence. This content is common to all humanity. The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all mankind. So he is not an individual.

Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not choice. It is man’s pretence that because he has choice, he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity.

Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever-limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts he will see the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical mutation in the mind.

Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence.

~ A statement written by Krishnamurti himself on October 21, 1980
 in which he summarizes his teachings

inner silence

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Once inner silence is attained, everything is possible. 

The way to stop talking to ourselves is 

to use exactly the same method used to teach us to talk to ourselves;

 we were taught compulsively and unwaveringly, 

and this is the way we must stop it: 

compulsively and unwaveringly.
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~ Don Juan Matus
Carlos Castaneda, from 'The Fire From Within'

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returning

You can live for years next door

to a big pine tree, honored to have

so venerable a neighbor, even

when it sheds needles all over your flowers

or wakes you, dropping big cones

onto your deck at still of night.

Only when, before dawn one year

at the vernal equinox, the wind

rises and rises, raising images

of cockleshell boats tossed among huge

advancing walls of waves,

do you become aware that always,

under respect, under your faith

in the pine tree’s beauty, there lies

the fear it will crash someday

down on your house, on you in your bed,

on the fragility of the safe

dailiness you have almost

grown used to.

~ Denise Levertov

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in timelessness and nowhere

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Home again. But what was home? 

The fish has vast ocean for home. 

And man has timelessness and nowhere. 

"I won't delude myself with the fallacy of home," he said to himself.

 The four walls are a blanket I wrap around in,

 in timelessness and nowhere, to go to sleep.
.

~ D.H. Lawrence

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My prayer is to die underneath the

Blossoming cherry,

In that spring month of flowers,

When the moon is full.

~ Saigyo

The wooden statue of Miroku Bosatsu, one of the treasures of Koryu-ji Temple, is regarded as an outstanding example of beauty and purity in Japanese art.

from: Heritage of Japan
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Loveliest of what I leave behind is the sunlight,

And loveliest after that, the shining stars and the moon’s face,

but also cucumbers that are ripe, and pears, and apples

— Praxilla of Sicyon, 5th century B.C.

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The snowfall is so silent

The snowfall is so silent,

bit by bit, with delicacy

it settles down on the earth

and covers over the fields.

The silent snow comes down

white and weightless;

snowfall makes no noise,

falls as forgetting falls,

flake after flake.

It covers the fields gently

while frost attacks them

with its sudden flashes of white;

covers everything with its pure

and silent covering;

not one thing on the ground

anywhere escapes it.

And wherever it falls it stays,

content and gay,

for snow does not slip off

as rain does,

but it stays and sinks in.

The flakes are skyflowers,

pale lilies from the clouds,

that wither on earth.

They come down blossoming

but then so quickly

they are gone;

they bloom only on the peak,

above the mountains,

and make the earth feel heavier

when they die inside.

Snow, delicate snow,

that falls with such lightness

on the head,

on the feelings,

come and cover over the sadness

that lies always in my reason.

~ Miguel de Unamuno
translated by Robert Bly