Thursday, September 12, 2019

moses and the shepherd







Moses heard a shepherd on the road praying,

“God,
where are you? I want to help you, to fix your shoes
and comb your hair. I want to wash your clothes
and pick the lice off. I want to bring you milk
to kiss your little hands and feet when it’s time
for you to go to bed. I want to sweep your room
and keep it neat. God, my sheep and goats
are yours. All I can say, remembering you,
is ayyyy and ahhhhhhhhh.”

Moses could stand it no longer.

“Who are you talking to?”

“The one who made us,
and made the earth and made the sky.”

“Don’t talk about shoes
and socks with God! And what’s this with your little hands
and feet? Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like
you’re chatting with your uncles.

Only something that grows
needs milk. Only someone with feet needs shoes. Not God!
Even if you meant God’s human representatives,
as when God said, ‘I was sick, and you did not visit me,’
even then this tone would be foolish and irreverent.

Use appropriate terms. Fatima is a fine name
for a woman, but if you call a man Fatima,
it’s an insult. Body-and-birth language
are right for us on this side of the river,
but not for addressing the origin,
not for Allah.”

The shepherd repented and tore his clothes and sighed
and wandered out into the desert.
A sudden revelation
came then to Moses. God’s voice:

You have separated me
from one of my own. Did you come as a Prophet to unite,
or to sever?


I have given each being a separate and unique way
of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.


What seems wrong to you is right for him.
What is poison to one is honey to someone else.


Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
these mean nothing to me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshiping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It’s all praise, and it’s all right.
It’s not me that’s glorified in acts of worship.
It’s the worshipers! I don’t hear the words
they say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, burning.
Be friends
with your burning. Burn up your thinking
and your forms of expression!
Moses,
those who pay attention to ways of behaving
and speaking are one sort.
Lovers who burn
are another.




Don’t impose a property tax
on a burned-out village. Don’t scold the Lover.
The “wrong” way he talks is better than a hundred
“right” ways of others.

Inside the Kaaba
it doesn't matter which direction you point
your prayer rug!

The ocean diver doesn't need snowshoes!
The love-religion has no code or doctrine.
Only God.

So the ruby has nothing engraved on it!
It doesn't need markings.

God began speaking
deeper mysteries to Moses. Vision and words,
which cannot be recorded here, poured into
and through him. He left himself and came back.
He went to eternity and came back here.
Many times this happened.

It’s foolish of me
to try and say this. If I did say it,
it would uproot our human intelligences.
It would shatter all writing pens.

Moses ran after the shepherd.
He followed the bewildered footprints,
in one place moving straight like a castle
across a chessboard. In another, sideways,
like a bishop.

Now surging like a wave cresting,
now sliding down like a fish,
with always his feet
making geomancy symbols in the sand,
recording
his wandering state.

Moses finally caught up
with him.

“I was wrong. God has revealed to me
that there are no rules for worship.

Say whatever
and however your loving tells you to. Your sweet blasphemy
is the truest devotion. Through you a whole world
is freed.

Loosen your tongue and don’t worry what comes out.
It’s all the light of the spirit.”

The shepherd replied,

“Moses, Moses,
I’ve gone beyond even that.

You applied the whip and my horse shied and jumped
out of itself. The divine nature and my human nature
came together.

Bless your scolding hand and your arm.
I can’t say what has happened.

What I’m saying now
is not my real condition. It can’t be said.”

The shepherd grew quiet.

When you look in a mirror,
you see yourself, not the state of the mirror.
The flute player puts breath into a flute,
and who makes the music? Not the flute.
The flute player!

Whenever you speak praise
or thanksgiving to God, it’s always like
this dear shepherd’s simplicity.

When you eventually see
through the veils to how things really are,
you will keep saying again
and again,

“This is certainly not like
we thought it was!”



~ Rumi
translation by Coleman Barks





into your heart






You must descend from
your head into your heart.
At present your thoughts of God
are in your head.  And God Himself is,
as it were, outside you, and 
so your prayer and other spiritual
exercises
remain exterior.  Whilst you are still
in your head,
thoughts will not easily be subdued but
will always be whirling about, like snow
in winter or
clouds of mosquitoes in summer.





~ Saint Theophan the Recluse
(an orthodox monk from 19th century Russia)


three mornings






In Istanbul, my ears
three mornings heard the early call to prayer.
At fuller light, heard birds then,
water birds and tree birds, birds of migration.
Like three knowledges,
I heard them: incomprehension,
sweetened distance, longing.
When the body dies, where will they go,
those migrant birds and prayer calls,
as heat from sheets when taken from a dryer?
With voices of the ones I loved,
great loves and small loves, train wheels,
crickets, clock-ticks, thunder—where will they,
when in fragrant, tumbled heat they also leave?




~ Jane Hirshfield



Tuesday, September 10, 2019

how to continue





Oh there once was a woman
and she kept a shop
selling trinkets to tourists
not far from a dock
who came to see what life could be
far back on the island.

And it was always a party there
always different but very nice
New friends to give you advice
or fall in love with you which is nice
and each grew so perfectly from the other
it was a marvel of poetry
and irony

And in this unsafe quarter
much was scary and dirty
but no one seemed to mind
very much
the parties went on from house to house
There were friends and lovers galore
all around the store
There was moonshine in winter
and starshine in summer
and everybody was happy to have discovered
what they discovered

And then one day the ship sailed away
There were no more dreamers just sleepers
in heavy attitudes on the dock
moving as if they knew how
among the trinkets and the souvenirs
the random shops of modern furniture
and a gale came and said
it is time to take all of you away
from the tops of the trees to the little houses
on little paths so startled

And when it became time to go
they none of them would leave without the other
for they said we are all one here
and if one of us goes the other will not go
and the wind whispered it to the stars
the people all got up to go
and looked back on love




~ John Ashbery
from Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems




the cocktail party








Unidentified Guest:

Ah, but we die to each other daily. 
What we know of other people is only our memory 
of the moments during which we knew them. 
And they have changed since then. 
To pretend that they and we are the same is a 
useful and convenient social convention 
which must sometimes be broken. 
We must also remember that at every meeting 
we are meeting a stranger. 

Edward:

So you want me to greet my wife as a stranger?
That will not be easy.

Unidentified Guest:

It is very difficult.
But it is perhaps still more difficult
To keep up the pretense that you are not strangers.
The affectionate ghosts: the grandmother,
The lively bachelor uncle at the Christmas party,
The beloved nursemaid - those who enfold
Your childhood years in comfort, mirth, security-
If they returned, would it not be embarrassing?
What would you say to them, or they to you
After the first ten minutes? You would find it difficult
To treat them as strangers, but still more difficult
To pretend that you are not strange to each other.


Edward:

You can hardly expect me to obliterate the last five years.


Unidentified Guest:

I ask you to forget nothing.  To try to forget
is to try to conceal.

Edward:

There are certainly things I should like to forget.


Unidentified Guest:

And persons also, but you must not forget them. You must
face them all, but meet them as strangers.  

Edward:

Then I myself must also be a stranger.


Unidentified Guest:

And to you as well, but remember
When you see your wife, you must ask no questions 
and give no explanations. I have said the same to her.
Do not strangle each other with knotted memories.
Now I shall go.




~ T. S. Eliot
excerpt from The Cocktail Party,
The Complete Poem and Plays
1909-1950
art by Teresa Bingham



Saturday, September 7, 2019

Don’t squeeze the way of Buddha into any frame.






To you who can’t stop worrying about how others see you


You can’t even trade a single fart with the next guy. 
Each and every one of us has to live out his own life.
 Don’t waste time thinking about who’s most talented.

The eyes don’t say, “Sure we’re lower, but we see more.”
The eyebrows don’t reply, “Sure we don’t see anything, but we are higher up.”
Living out the buddha-dharma means fulfilling your function completely
 without knowing that you’re doing it. A mountain doesn’t know it’s tall.
 The sea doesn’t know it’s wide and deep. Each and every thing
 in the universe is active without knowing it.
The bird’s singing and the flower’s laughter appear naturally,
completely independent from the person sitting in zazen at the foot of the cliff.
The bird doesn’t sing in honor of the person in zazen.
 The flower doesn’t blossom to amaze the person with her beauty. 
In exactly the same way, the person doesn’t sit in zazen
 in order to get satori. Every single being simply realizes the self,
 through the self, for the self.

Religion means living your own life, 
completely fresh and new, without being taken in by anyone.

Hey! What are you looking at? Don’t you see that it’s about you?

The asshole doesn’t need to be ashamed of being the asshole. 
The feet don’t have any reason to go on strike just because they’re only feet.
 The head isn’t the most important of all, and the navel doesn’t need to imagine
 he’s the father of all things. 
It’s strange though that people look at the prime minister
 as an especially important person. The nose can’t replace the eyes,
 and the mouth can’t replace the ears.
Everything has its own identity,
 which is unsurpassable in the whole universe.

Some children have caught a mouse and now it’s writhing in the trap. 
They’re having fun watching how it scrapes its nose till it bleeds
 and how it rips up its tail . . . In the end they’ll throw it to the cat for food.
If I was sitting in the mouse’s place, I’d say to myself,
 “You damn humans won’t have any fun with me!” 
And I’d simply sit zazen..



To you who wish you could lead a happier life

“Rest awhile and everything will be fine.”
We simply need to take a short break. Being buddha means taking a short break
 from being a human. Being buddha doesn’t mean working your way up as a human.

What makes Ryōkan so refreshing is that he doesn’t fondle things.

In everything, people follow their feelings of joy, anger, sadness and comfort.
 But that’s something different from everyday mind. 
Everyday mind means cease-fire. Without preferences, without animosity,
 without winner and loser, without good and evil, without joy and pain
 – that’s everyday mind.

“What sort of person stands on the ground where there’s neither coming nor going?”
Kyūhō answered, “The stone sheep versus the stone tiger: 
sooner or later they’ll get tired of staring each other in the eyes.” 
The stone sheep won’t flinch. The stone tiger won’t jump out of hunger. 
That’s the point – encountering things beyond thinking.

What do we have when we truly have a grip on things as they are? 
Beyond-thinking [hishiryō]. Beyond-thinking doesn’t allow itself to be thought.
 No matter if you think so or not: things are simply as they are.

“All things are empty” means there’s nothing we can run into,
 because nothing is really happening. We only think something’s happening
 because we are intoxicated by something.

Nothing is ever happening, no matter what seems to be going on 
– that’s the natural condition. Illusion means losing this natural condition.
 Normally we don’t recognize this natural condition.
 Normally we cover it with something else, so it’s not natural anymore.

The buddha-dharma means the normal condition. 
Yet in the world everything is unnatural.
 Domineering, succumbing and discussing everything to death are unnatural.

Each place fills heaven and earth, every instant is eternal.

To practice the way of Buddha means to completely live out this present moment 
– which is our whole life – here and now.

Don’t squeeze the way of Buddha into any frame.




~ Kodo Sawaki
excerpts from To you
Translated from Japanese by Jesse Haasch and Muhô 




pastures of possibility


.




More often than not, we have picked up the habits of thinking of those around us.
  These thought-habits are not yours; they can damage the way you see the world 
and make you doubt your own instinct and sense of life. 
 When you become aware that your thinking has a life of its own,
 you will never make a prison of your own perception. 
 Your vision is your home.  A closed vision always wants to make a small room
 out of whatever it sees.  Thinking that limits you denies you life. 

 In order to deconstruct the inner prison, the first step is learning to see that it is a prison.
  You can move in the direction of this discovery by reflecting on the places
 where your life feels limited and tight.  To recognize the crippling feeling
 of being limited is already to have begun moving beyond it.  
Heidegger said, "To recognize a frontier is already to have gone beyond it." 
 Life continues to remain faithful to us.  If we move even the smallest step
 out of our limitation, life comes to embrace us and lead us out into
 the pastures of possibility.



~ John O'Donohue
 from 'Eternal Echoes'


seeing and thinking






However, in the seeing of a tree for instance,
 there is no seer and there is no seen. There is no inside
 ‘I’ that sees and there is no outside ‘tree’ that is seen.

The ‘I’ and the ‘tree’ are concepts superimposed by thinking
 onto the reality of the experience, which in this case could simply be called
 ‘seeing’.

It is thinking alone that divides the seamless intimacy of experiencing 
into a subject and an object, into an ‘I’ that sees and a ‘tree’
 that is seen. However, awareness, or ‘I’ and the reality of the tree
 are not two separate experiences.
 They are one.

…The experience of beauty is the dissolution of the apparent ‘objectness’
 of the object and the ‘subjectness’ of our self,
 leaving only the seamless intimacy of experiencing.




~ Rupert Spira
from Presence - Volume II






Wednesday, September 4, 2019

a longing that burns







There is a longing that burns at the root of spiritual practice. 

This is the fire that fuels your journey. The romantic suffering 
you pretend to have grown out of, that remains coiled like a serpent 
beneath the veneer of maturity. You have studied the sacred texts.
 You know that separation from your divine source is an illusion. 
You subscribe to the philosophy that there is nowhere to go 
and nothing to attain, because you are already there
 and you already possess it.

But what about this yearning? What about the way a poem by Rilke

 or Rumi breaks open your heart and triggers a sorrow
 that could consume you if you gave in to it? You’re pretty sure 
this is not a matter of mere psychology. It has little to do with unresolved
 issues of childhood abandonment, or codependent tendencies
 to falsely place the source of your wholeness outside yourself.

 The longing is your recognition of the deepest truth
 that God is love and that this is all you want.
 Every lesser desire melts when it comes near that flame.



—Mirabai Starr
from Parabola  July 2017
art by Fra Angelico, c.1437–1446




find all the barriers







Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers
within yourself that you have built against it.

Then when you see what is around you as
not other-than-you, and all and everything as
the existence of the One;

when you do not see anything else
with Him or in him;

but see Him in everything as yourself and
at the same time as the nonexistence
of yourself;
then what you see is the truth.



~ Ibn Al-Arabi

to find himself in another











No, the great business of our time is this: 
for one man to find himself in another one who is on the other side of the world. 
Only by such contacts can there be peace, 
can the sacredness of life be preserved and developed 
and the image of God manifest itself in the world.


It is as if we met on a deeper level of life 
on which individuals are not separate beings...
it is as if we were known to one another in God.
...

Although we are separated by great distances and even greater barriers 
it gives me pleasure to speak to you as to one whom I feel to be a kindred mind....
...
It is true that a person always remains a person and utterly separate and apart from every other person. 
But it is equally true that each person is destined to reach with others an understanding and a unity which transcend individuality, and Russian tradition describes this with a concept we do not fully possess in the West- "sobornost."


from his letters to Boris Pasternak


~ Thomas Merton
from  A Life in Letters
art by Tony Karp




lifting of the burden






To me it seems that at those moments, which are characterized 
by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear 
which presses upon our daily lives so steadily 
that we are unaware of it, 
what happens is something negative: that is to say, not ‘inspiration’ 
as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers
—which tend to reform very quickly. 

Some obstruction is momentarily whisked away. 
The accompanying feeling is less like what we know as positive pleasure,
 than like a sudden relief from an intolerable burden.




~ T.S. Eliot
 describing moments of clarity and inspiration
art by Emil Nolde





Monday, September 2, 2019

a walk





Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, 
and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, 
by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think,
 and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace,
 a salutary emptiness within… By wandering aimlessly, 
all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. 
On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. 
And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.




~ Paul Auster
from A Piece of Monologue

 



Sunday, September 1, 2019

by whom






The Student
.
Who makes the mind think?
Who fills my body with vitality?
Who causes my tongue to speak?  Who is that
Invisible one who sees through my eyes
and hears through my ears?

The Teacher

The Self is the ear of the ear,
The eye of the eye, the mind of the mind,
The word of the word, and the life of life.
Rising above the senses and the mind
And renouncing separate existence,
The wise realize the deathless Self.

Him our eyes cannot see, nor words express;
He cannot be grasped even by the mind.
We do not know, we cannot understand,
Because he is different from the known
And he is different from the unknown.
Thus have we heard from the illumined ones.

That which makes the tongue speak but cannot be 
Spoken by the tongue, know that as the Self.
This Self is not someone other than you.

That which makes the mind think but cannot be
Thought by the mind, that is the Self indeed.
This Self is not someone other than you.

That which makes the eye see but cannot be 
Seen by the eye, that is the Self indeed.
This Self is not someone other than you.

That which makes the ear hear but cannot be 
Heard by the ear, that is the Self indeed.
This Self is not someone other than you.

That which makes you draw breath but cannot be
Drawn by your breath, that is the Self indeed.
This Self is not someone other than you.



~ The Kena Upanishad
translated and introduced by Eknath Easwaran

There is a Sufi story about a seeker who calls on Allah day in and day out for years and finally throws himself down and sobs,  "How long have I been calling and you do not answer!"  Then he hears a voice:  "Who do you think has been making you call me?"

Kena, in the title means "by whom?" - that is, impelled by whom do all the motions stir?  Or in Shankara's brilliant paraphrase, "By whose mere presence does that desire arise which moves the universe?"



The Heart of Herakles




Lying under the stars,
In the summer night,
Late while the autumn
Constellations climb the sky,
As the Cluster of Hercules
Falls down the west
I put the telescope by
And watch Deneb
Move towards the zenith
My body is asleep. Only
My eyes and brain are awake.
The stars stand around me
Like gold eyes. I can no longer
Tell where I begin and leave off.
The faint breeze in the dark pines,
And the invisible grass,
The tipping earth, the swarming stars
Have an eye that sees itself.





~ Kenneth Rexroth

from News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness
chosen and introduced by Robert Bly