our invisible prisons

…. We do have a deadening desire to reduce the mystery, the uncertainty of our lives…. 

We bind our lives in solid chains of forced connections that block and fixate us. …. 

Our sense of uncertainty and our need for security nail our world down. …. 

 

Each time we go out, the world is open and free;

 it offers itself so graciously to our hearts, to create something new and wholesome

 from it each day. It is a travesty of possibility and freedom to think

 we have no choice, that things are the way they are and that the one street,

 the one right way is all that is allotted to us. 

Certainty is a subtle destroyer.

We confine our mystery within the prison of routine and repetition. 

One of the most deadening forces of all is repetition. 

Your response to the invitation and edge of your life becomes reduced 

to a series of automatic reflexes. For example, you are so used to getting up

 in the morning and observing the morning rituals of washing and dressing.

 You are still somewhat sleepy, your mind is thinking of things you have to do

 in the day that lies ahead. You go through these first gestures of the morning

 often without even noticing that you are doing them. This is a disturbing

 little image, because it suggests that you live so much of your one life

with the same automatic blindness of adaptation.

… Habit is a strong invisible prison.

 Habits are styles of feeling, perception, 

or action that have now become second nature to us.

 A habit is a sure cell of predictability; it can close you off from the unknown,

 the new, and the unexpected. You were sent to the earth to become a receiver

 of the unknown. From ancient times, these gifts were prepared for you; 

now they come towards you across eternal distances. 

Their destination is the altar of your heart. 

~ John O’Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

.

on meeting

 

With respect

And reverence

That the unknown

Between us

Might flower

Into discovery

And lead us

Beyond

The familiar field

Blind with the weed

Of weariness

And the old walls

Of habit.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

 

As long as we imagine ourselves to be separate personalities,

one quite apart from another, we cannot grasp reality

which is essentially impersonal.

First, we must know ourselves as witnesses only,

dimensionless and timeless centers of observation,

and then realize that immense ocean of pure awareness,

which is both mind and matter and beyond both.

What do you know about yourself?

You can only be what you are in reality;

you can only appear what you are not.

You have never moved away from perfection.

All idea of self-improvement is conventional and verbal.

Yet the mind is nothing else but the self.

Just as a cloud obscures the sun without in any way affecting it,

so does assumption obscure reality without destroying it.

All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false.

All is one -- this is the ultimate solution of every

conflict.

How does personality, come into being?

By memory.

By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future.

Think of yourself as momentary,

without past and future and your

personality dissolves.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

from I am That

the public bath

 

Imagine the phenomenal world as a furnace

heating water for the public bath.

Some people carry baskets of dung

to keep the furnace going,  Call them

materialists, energetic, fire-stoking citizens.

One of those brags how he's collected

and carried twenty dung baskets today,

while his friend has brought six!

They think the counting up at nightfall

is where truth lies. They love the smoke smell

of dried dung, and how it blazes up like gold!

If you give them musk or any fragrance

of soul intelligence, they find it unpleasant

and turn away. Others sit in the hot bathwater

and get clean. They use the world differently.

They love the feel of purity, and they have

dust marks on their foreheads from bowing down.

They are separated by a wall from those

who feed the fires, busy in the boiler room

belittling each other. Sometimes, though,

one of those leaves the furnace,

takes off the burnt smelling rags,

and sits in the cleansing water.

The mystery is how the obsessions

of the furnace stokers keep the bathwater

of the others simmering perfectly.

They seem opposed, but they're necessary

to each other's work: the proud piling up

of fire worship, the humble disrobing

and emptying out of purification.

As the sun dries wet dung to make it

ready to heat water, so dazzling

sparks fly from the burning filth.

~ Rumi

from The Book of Love

translations by Coleman Barks

angels grumble

 

Every time a man upon the path

Does not keep his

Word.

Some angels grumble

And have to remove a few of

The bets

They had placed upon

His heart

To win.

~ Hafiz

from The Subject Tonight is Love

translations by Daniel Ladinsky

the kind of friend you are

.

This is the kind of Friend

You are -

Without making me realize

My soul's anguished history,

You slip into my house at night,

And while I am sleeping,

You silently carry off

All my suffering and sordid past 

In Your beautiful 

Hands.

.

~ Hafiz

from The Subject Tonight is Love

translation by Daniel Ladinsky

the false dissolves when it is discovered

 

Contemplate life as infinite, undivided, ever present, ever active,

 until you realise yourself as one with it.

 It is not even very difficult, for you will be returning

 only to your own natural condition.

Once you realise that all comes from within, 

that the world in which you live has not been projected onto you but by you,

 your fear comes to an end. 

Without this realisation you identify yourself with the externals,

 like the body, mind, society, nation, humanity, even God or the Absolute.

 But these are all escapes from fear. 

It is only when you fully accept your responsibility

 for the little world in which you live and watch the process of its creation,

 preservation and destruction, that you may be free from your imaginary bondage.

 You are in bondage by inadvertence. Attention liberates. 

You are taking so many things for granted. Begin to question. 

The most obvious things are the most doubtful.

 Askyourself such questions as:

  'Am I really so-and-so?’

 ‘Who am I, anyhow?

  the false dissolves when it is discovered. 

All hangs on the idea 'I am'.

 Examine it very thoroughly. It lies at the root of every trouble.

 

It is a sort of skin that separates you from the reality.

 The real is both within and without the skin, but the skin itself is not real.

 This 'I am' idea was not born with you. 

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

from I am That

with thanks to love is a place

ready-made knowledge

 

The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention

 rather than provide ready-made knowledge.

 ~ Papert

Ready-made knowledge can only be memorized;

 knowledge is not truly our own until we are capable of reproducing

 the given content in a form of our own making. 

Memorizing is but a negative condition; true,

 organic assimilation is impossible without 

inner transformation of what we learn.

All rules for study are summed up in this one: 

learn only in order to create.

~ Schelling

from On University Studies 

with thanks to love is a place

(Seymour Papert, an MIT professor, believed that teachers

 should create conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.

 He argued that students should be allowed to learn through

 exploration and discovery, rather than being told what to think.

 Papert's ideas have been influential

 in the development of constructivist learning theory, 

which emphasizes the importance of active learning

 and the construction of knowledge by the learner.)

~ AI generated

express in action what you are

 

Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road,

not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom,

life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple,

in itself an ecstasy.

After all, what do you really want?

Not perfection; you are already perfect.

What you seek is to express in action what you are.

For this you have a body and a mind.

Take them in hand and make them serve you.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

excerpts from I am That

beyond our senses

 

Many claim to have found God in the mountains. 

I don’t know what God is, but I admit to having sought her there too.

 Whatever my search, I have found that the pursuit of scientific inquiry —

 its own, necessarily limited kind of truth-seeking — 

can be as much an act of devotion as it is scholarly meditation.

 For to pay attention to the world, to seek its stories, 

to run your fingers along some crack of rock or furrow of tree bark,

 to admire a raptor in flight, to look, closely, at the construction

 of a previously unencountered wildflower —

 to wonder and to seek answers to how these things 

might have come to be in the world — 

are themselves acts of devotion,

 ways of knowing, 

ways of longing for communion.

The world around us is not what we see. 

It holds a life-giving, gift-giving,

 invisible order everywhere and always. 

It is an order of musical and exultant beauty. 

It has a mysterious and radiant splendor. 

Everywhere we look, if we would look,

 the natural world is making beauty, 

without fanfare, and the work is so plain,

 intelligent, playful, and devoted, 

that there is only one word for it: 

cosmic.

There is something numinous and joyful in these encounters, 

a way in which the boundary between the world we sense

 and the world that is beyond our senses becomes, 

for the briefest of moments, thin —

 almost transparent.

Up too early again.

 Listening to the patter of rain dripping from the tree limbs

 onto the tent and the hush of the creek in the darkness.

 Breathing in the scent of earth and rain. 

I can’t believe we are here, 

surrounded by these old trees and mountains, 

with days ahead of us. I’m a little boy all over again, 

incredulous that this place actually exists, 

and I am here in it. 

I want to get up and wander 

down to the creek and feel its black,

 wet, cold aliveness on my skin.

~ Richard J. Nevle and Steven Nightingale

excerpts from The Paradise Notebooks:

 90 Miles across the Sierra Nevada

with thanks to 

The Marginalian by Maria Popova

art by Chiura Obata

making it our own

 

The question is asked, if life’s journey be endless where is its goal? 

The answer is, it is everywhere. 

We are in a palace which has no end, 

but which we have reached. 

By exploring it and extending 

our relationship with it

 we are ever making it more

 and more our own. 

The infant is born in the same universe where lives the adult of ripe mind.

 But its position is not like a schoolboy who has yet to learn his alphabet,

 finding himself in a college class. 

The infant has its own joy of life

 because the world is not a mere road, but a home,

of which it will have more and more as it grows up in wisdom. 

With our road the gain is at the end, 

but with this world of ours the gain is at every step;

 for it is the road and the home in one; 

it leads us on yet gives us shelter.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

 from The Essential Tagore

photo: termite mounds in Australia

by Brian W. Schaller

well done or

For a man regards some deeds as well done and some as evil,

and our Lord does not regard them so,

for everything which exists in nature is of God’s creation,

so that everything which is done has the property of being God’s doing

~ Julian of Norwich

art: Sendan Kendatsuba, banishing evil

from the Nara national museum or Japan

in a handful of God

 

Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.

When your truth forsakes its shyness,

When your fears surrender to your strengths,

You will begin to experience

That all existence

Is a teeming sea of infinite life.

In a handful of ocean water

You could not count all the finely tuned

Musicians

Who are acting stoned

For very intelligent and sane reasons

And of course are becoming extremely sweet

And wild!

In a handful of the sky and earth,

In a handful of God,

We cannot count

All the ecstatic lovers who are dancing there

Behind the mysterious veil.

True art reveals there is no void

Or darkness.

There is no loneliness to the clear-eyed mystic

In this luminous, brimming

Playful world.

~ Hafiz

from The Subject Tonight is Love:

 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz 

translated by Daniel Ladinsky

photo: Artists from Tjanpi Desert Weavers let their sisters fly,

 Papulankutja, Western Australia, 2015. 

Photograph: Annieka Skinner

our separatedness and our grief

 

 

What gets you is the knowledge, and it sometimes can fall on you in a clap,

that the dead are gone absolutely from this world. As has been said around here

over and over again, you are not going to see them here anymore, ever.

Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. Any questions

you think of that you ought to've asked while you had a chance are never

going to be answered. The dead know, and you don't.

 

And yet their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before.

You even maybe know them better than you did before. They stay with you,

and in a way you go with them. They don't live on in your heart, but your

 heart knows them. As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets

bigger on the outside. If the dead had been alive only in this world, you

would forget them, looks like, as soon as they die. But you remember them, 

because they always were living in the other, bigger world while they lived 

in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same. You

can't see this with your eyes looking straight ahead. It's with your side vision, 

so to speak, that you see it. The longer I live, and the better acquainted

I am among the dead, the better I see it. I am telling what I know.

It's our separatedness and our grief that break the world in two.

~ Wendell Berry

from Stand by Me

art by Luke Marston

Coast Salish Artist

what is loved

 

I said to God,

"What are you?"

"I am what is loved.  I am not what should be loved.

for how cruel that would then

be for my

bride."

~ Saint John of the Cross