progress?

• Questioner:

How am I to know if there is any progress in my spiritual search?
How am I to know if I am progressing?

 
• Maharaj: 

You don't really listen. If you did, such a question should not arise.
 And, if at all it did, you could have easily dealt with it yourself,
 in case if you had listened to me attentively and understood 
what I had been saying. Instead, I find that this question does disturb
 many of you. The problem apparently is about 'progress'. 

Now, who is to make the progress, and progress towards what?

 I have said this repeatedly and untiringly that you are the Conscious Presence,
 the animating consciousness which gives sentience to phenomenal objects; 
that you are not a phenomenal object, which is merely an appearance
 in the consciousness of those who perceive it. How can an 'appearance' 
make any 'progress' towards any objective? 

Now, instead of letting this basic perception impregnate your very being, 
what you do is to accept it merely as an ideological thesis and ask the question. 
How can a conceptual appearance know whether it is making any 
conceptual progress towards its conceptual liberation? 

Perception is not a matter of gradual practice. It can only happen by itself 
instantaneously, there are no stages in which deliberate progress is made. 
There is no 'one' to make any progress.

 Perhaps, one wonders, could it be that the surest sign of 'progress',
 if one cannot give up the concept, is a total lack of concern about 'progress'
 and an utter absence of anxiety about anything like 'liberation', 
a sort of' 'hollowness' in one's being, a kind of looseness, 
an unvolitional surrender to whatever might happen? 



 ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
with thanks to No Mind's Land

it belonged to no one

You playmates of mine in the scattered parks of the city,

small friends from childhood of long ago:

how we found and liked one another, hesitantly,

and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,

spoke with our silence. When we were filled with joy

it belonged to no one: it was simply there.

And how it dissolved among all the adults who passed by

and in the fears of the endless year.

Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the carriages;

horses surrounded us, solid but untrue--and none 

of them ever knew us. What in the world was real?

Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.

Not even the children . . . But sometimes one,

oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

 In memorial: Egon von Rilke
(beloved cousin of Rilke who died young) 

comparison and struggle

One is everlastingly comparing oneself with another, with what one is, 
with what one should be, with someone who is more fortunate.
 This comparison really kills. Comparison is degrading, it perverts one's outlook.
 And on comparison one is brought up. All our education is based on it 
and so is our culture. So there is everlasting struggle to be something other than
 what one is. The understanding of what one is uncovers creativeness, 
but comparison breeds competitiveness, ruthlessness, ambition, 
which we think brings about progress. Progress has only led so far 
to more ruthless wars and misery than the world has ever known.
 To bring up children without comparison
 is true education.

~ J. Krishnamurti

with thanks to j krishnamurti online

art by van gogh

see another?

Where there is a duality, as it were, there one sees another; 

there one smells another; there one tastes another; there one speaks to another ...

But where everything has become just one's own self,

 Then whereby and whom would one see? 

Then whereby and whom would one smell? 

Then whereby and to whom would one speak? 

Then whereby and whom would one hear? 

Then whereby and of whom would one think? 

Then whereby and whom would one touch?

 Then whereby and whom would one understand?

~  Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

I am nobody

I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away

 

 

 

by Richard Wright

from  Haiku Enlightenment: New Expanded Edition

 by Gabriel Rosenstock

with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

 

 

 

attached to the known

Now if you see how it is still the action of thought and is therefore based on fear,
 on imagination, on the past, that is the field of the known.  That is,
 I am attached to the field of the known, with all its varieties, changes,
 its activities, and what I demand is comfort.  Because I have found comfort
 in the past,  I have lived within the field of the known; that is my territory, 
 I know its borders, the frontiers.  

So I ask myself: my life has been the past; I live in the past; I act in the past;
 that is my life.  Listen to this!  My life, living in the past is a dead life. 
 You understand?  My mind, which lives in the past , is a dead mind.  

  I see this as something enormously real.  Therefore the mind, realizing that,
 actually dies to the past; it will use the past, but it has lost its grip;  
the past has lost its values, grip, its, vitality.  So the mind has its own energy,
 which is not derived from the past.  
Therefore living is dying - you understand? 

Therefore living is love, which is dying.  Because if there is no attachment, 
then there is love.  If there is no attachment to the past - the past has its value,
 which can be used, which must be used as knowledge - then my living
 is a constant renewal, is a constant movement in the field of the unknown
 in which there is learning, moving





J. Krishnamurti
from a talk in Saanen, July 27th, 1972
art by Van Gogh

you are sitting in a wagon

You are sitting in a wagon being

drawn by a horse whose

reins you

hold.

There are two inside of you

who can steer.

Though most never hand the reins to Me

so they go from place to place the

best they can, though

rarely happy.

And rarely does their whole body laugh

feeling God's poke

in the

ribs.

If you feel tired, dear,

my shoulder is soft,

I'd be glad to

steer a

while.

~ Kibir

art by Van Gogh

earth and fire

In this woman the earth speaks

Her words open in me, cells of light

flashing in my body, and make a song

that I follow toward her out of my need.

The pain I have given her I wear

like another skin, tender, the air

around me flashing with thorns.

And yet such joy as I have given her

sings in me and is part of her song.

The winds of her knees shake me

like a flame.  I have risen up from her,

time and again, a new man.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming

welcomers of that ancient joy

In a crease of the hill

under the light,

out of the wind,

as warmth, bloom, and song

return, lady, I think of you,

and myself with you.

What are we but forms

of self-acknowledging

light that brings us

warmth and song from time

to time? Lip and flower,

hand and leaf, tongue

and song, what are we but welcomers

of that ancient joy, always

coming, always passing?

Mayapples rising

out of old time, leaves

folded down around

the stems, as if for flight,

flower bud folded in 

unfolding leaves, what

are we but hosts

of times, of all

the Sabbath morning shows,

the light that finds it good.

~ Wendell Berry

from This Day - Collected and New Sabbath Poems

Interview with Pir Zia Inayat-Khan

 ~ Pir Zia Inayat-Khan

forbearance

The Chinese ideograph for forbearance is a heart 
with a sword dangling over it, another instance of language's
 brilliant way of showing us something surprising and important
 fossilized inside the meaning of a word.

Vulnerability is built into our hearts, which can be sliced open at any moment

 by some sudden shift in the arrangements, some pain, some horror, some hurt.

 We know and instinctively fear this, so we protect our hearts by covering them 

against exposure. But this doesn't work. Covering the heart binds and suffocates it

 until, like a wound that has been kept dressed for too long, the heart starts to fester

 and becomes fetid. Eventually, without air, the heart is all but killed off,

 and there's no feeling, no experiencing at all.

To practice forbearance is to appreciate and celebrate the heart's vulnerability,

 and to see that the slicing or piercing of the heart does not require defense; 

that the heart's vulnerability is a good thing, because wounds can make us more 

peaceful and more real - if, that is, we are willing to hang on to the leopard 

of our fear, the serpent of our grief, the boar of our shame, without running away

 or being hurled off. Forbearance is simply holding on steadfastly with whatever

 it is that unexpectedly arises: not doing anything; not fixing anything 

(because doing and fixing can be a way to cover up the heart, 

to leap over the hurt and pain by occupying ourselves with schemes

 and plans to get rid of it).

 Just holding on for dear life. 

Holding on with what comes is what makes life dear. 

~ Norman Fischer 


Norman Fischer is a poet, author, and Zen Buddhist teacher and priest. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he has been publishing poetry since 1979. He is the author of seventeen books of poetry, six books of prose on Zen and religion, as well as numerous articles and essays. His most recent publication, Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion, is a long-awaited collection of his essays about experimental writing as spiritual practice.

Norman has been a Zen Buddhist priest for nearly 30 years. He served as abbot for the San Francisco Zen Center from 1995 to 2000. He is the spiritual director of the Everyday Zen Foundation, an organization dedicated to adapting Zen Buddhist teachings to Western culture, which he founded in 2001. One of the most highly respected contemporary Zen teachers in America, his Zen teaching is known for its eclecticism, openness, warmth, and common sense, and for his willingness to let go of everything, including Zen.

without the shadow of a reason

The more I write the less substance do I see in my work, ... It is tolerably awful. 
And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken 
by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself 
— and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep.

Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; 
words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy 
as the hope of to-morrow....

In this world – as I have known it – we are made to suffer without the shadow
 of a reason, of a cause or of guilt....

There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness 
of ourselves which drives us about a world that... is always but a vain
 and fleeting appearance....A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains
 – but a clod of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space,
 rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing.
 Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.

~ Joseph Conrad

born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski  was a Polish-born English novelist who today is most famous for Heart of Darkness, his fictionalized account of Colonial Africa.

Conrad left his native Poland in his middle teens to avoid conscription into the Russian Army. He joined the French Merchant Marine and briefly employed himself as a wartime gunrunner. He then began to work aboard British ships, learning English from his shipmates. He was made a Master Mariner, and served more than sixteen years before an event inspired him to try his hand at writing.

He was hired to take a steamship into Africa, and according to Conrad, the experience of seeing firsthand the horrors of colonial rule left him a changed man. His introspective need to come to terms with his experience lead to Heart of Darkness, which was followed by other fictionalized explorations of his life.

He has been lauded as one of the most powerful, insightful, and disturbing novelists in the English canon despite coming to English later in life, which allowed him to combine it with the sensibilities of French, Russian, and Polish literature.

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