Wednesday, August 10, 2011

the seer, though unseen









.
...the Imperishable.  It is neither big nor small, neither long nor short,
 neither hot nor cold, neither bright nor dark, neither air nor space. 
 It is without attachment, without taste, smell, or touch, without eyes, ears, 
tongue, mouth, breath, or mind, without movement, without limitation,
without inside or outside.  It consumes nothing, and nothing consumes it.

In perfect accord with the will of the Imperishable, sun and moon make their orbits;
 heaven and earth remain in place; moments, hours, days, nights, fortnights, 
months, and seasons become years; river starting from the snow-clad mountains 
flow east and west, north and south, to the sea.

Without knowing the Imperishable, whoever performs rites and ceremonies
 and undergoes austerities, even for many years, reaps little benefit,
 because rites, ceremonies, and austerities are all perishable.  Whosoever dies 
without knowing the Imperishable dies in a pitiable state; but those who know 
the Imperishable attain immortality when the body is shed at death.

The Imperishable is the seer, though unseen; the hearer, though unheard;
 the thinker, though unthought; the knower, though unknown. Nothing 
other than the Imperishable can see, hear, think, or know.  It is in
 the Imperishable that space is woven, warp and woof.






~  from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
translated by Eknath Easwaran



Monday, August 8, 2011

Some Further Words




Let me be plain with you, dear reader.
I am an old-fashioned man. I like
the world of nature despite its mortal
dangers. I like the domestic world
of humans, so long as it pays its debts
to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.
I like the promise of Heaven. My purpose
is a language that can repay just thanks
and honor for those gifts, a tongue
set free from fashionable lies.


Neither this world nor any of its places
is an "environment." And a house
for sale is not a "home." Economics
is not "science," nor "information" knowledge.
A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool
in a public office is not a "leader."
A rich thief is a thief. And the ghost
of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer,
returns in the night to say again:
"Let me tell you something, boy.
An intellectual whore is a whore."


The world is babbled to pieces after
the divorce of things from their names.
Ceaseless preparation for war
is not peace. Health is not procured
by sale of medication, or purity
by the addition of poison. Science
at the bidding of the corporations
is knowledge reduced to merchandise;
it is a whoredom of the mind,
and so is the art that calls this "progress."
So is the cowardice that calls it "inevitable."


I think the issues of "identity" mostly
are poppycock. We are what we have done,
which includes our promises, includes
our hopes, but promises first. I know
a "fetus" is a human child.
I loved my children from the time
they were conceived, having loved
their mother, who loved them
from the time they were conceived
and before. Who are we to say
the world did not begin in love?


I would like to die in love as I was born,
and as myself of life impoverished go
into the love all flesh begins
and ends in. I don't like machines,
which are neither mortal nor immortal,
though I am constrained to use them.
(Thus the age perfects its clench.)
Some day they will be gone, and that
will be a glad and a holy day.
I mean the dire machines that run
by burning the world's body and
its breath. When I see an airplane
fuming through the once-pure sky
or a vehicle of the outer space
with its little inner space
imitating a star at night, I say,
"Get out of there!" as I would speak
to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.
When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, "Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!" I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.


My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing.
The body's life is its own, untouched
by the little clockwork of explanation.
I approve of death, when it comes in time
to the old. I don't want to five
on mortal terms forever, or survive
an hour as a cooling stew of pieces
of other people. I don't believe that life
or knowledge can be given by machines.
The machine economy has set afire
the household of the human soul,
and all the creatures are burning within it


"Intellectual property" names
the deed by which the mind is bought
and sold, the world enslaved. We
who do not own ourselves, being free,
own by theft what belongs to God,
to the living world, and equally
to us all. Or how can we own a part
of what we only can possess
entirely? Life is a gift we have
only by giving it back again.
Let us agree: "the laborer is worthy
of his hire," but he cannot own what he knows,
which must be freely told, or labor
dies with the laborer. The farmer
is worthy of the harvest made
in time, but he must leave the light
by which he planted, grew, and reaped,
the seed immortal in mortality,
freely to the time to come. The land
too he keeps by giving it up,
as the thinker receives and gives a thought,
as the singer sings in the common air.


I don't believe that "scientific genius"
in its naive assertions of power
is equal either to nature or
to human culture. Its thoughtless invasions
of the nuclei of atoms and cells
and this world's every habitation
have not brought us to the light
but sent us wandering farther through
the dark. Nor do I believe
.artistic genius" is the possession
of any artist. No one has made
the art by which one makes the works
of art. Each one who speaks speaks
as a convocation. We live as councils
of ghosts. It is not "human genius"
that makes us human, but an old love,
an old intelligence of the heart
we gather to us from the world,
from the creatures, from the angels
of inspiration, from the dead--
an intelligence merely nonexistent
to those who do not have it, but --
to those who have it more dear than life.


And just as tenderly to be known
are the affections that make a woman and a man
their household and their homeland one.
These too, though known, cannot be told
to those who do not know them, and fewer
of us learn them, year by year.
These affections are leaving the world
like the colors of extinct birds,
like the songs of a dead language.


Think of the genius of the animals,
every one truly what it is:
gnat, fox, minnow, swallow, each made
of light and luminous within itself.
They know (better than we do) how
to live in the places where they live.
And so I would like to be a true
human being, dear reader-a choice
not altogether possible now.
But this is what I'm for, the side
I'm on. And this is what you should
expect of me, as I expect it of
myself, though for realization we
may wait a thousand or a million years.






~ Wendell Berry
from the American Poetry Review (May/June 2002)



Saturday, August 6, 2011

putting aside the things of the mind









.

Truth is not for those who are respectable, nor for those who desire self-extension, self-fulfillment. Truth is not for those who are seeking security, permanency; for the permanency they seek is merely the opposite of impermanency. Being caught in the net of time, they seek that which is permanent, but the permanent they seek is not the real because what they seek is the product of their thought. Therefore, a man who would discover reality must cease to seek -which does not mean that he must be contented with what is. On the contrary, a man who is intent upon the discovery of truth must be inwardly a complete revolutionary. He cannot belong to any class, to any nation, to any group or ideology, to any organized religion; for truth is not in the temple or the church, truth is not to be found in the things made by the hand or by the mind. Truth comes into being only when the things of the mind and of the hand are put aside, and that putting aside of the things of the mind and of the hand is not a matter of time. Truth comes to him who is free of time, who is not using time as a means of self-extension. Time means memory of yesterday, memory of your family, of your race, of your particular character, of the accumulation of your experience which makes up the 'me' and the 'mine'.




~ J. Krishnamurti
from The Book of Life
art by Dali



seek the unforeseen






Whoever cannot seek
the unforeseen sees nothing,
for the known way
is an impasse.


~ Heraclitus


Friday, August 5, 2011

Naomi Shihab Nye






.


.


Thursday, August 4, 2011

exclude nothing







.

We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; 
everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. 
That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us:
to have courage for the most strange, 
the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. 

That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; 
the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," 
death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, 
have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life 
that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. 

 But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; 
the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, 
as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities 
and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. 

For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves 
from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: 
it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience 
with which one does not think oneself able to cope. 

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, 
not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive 
and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. 
For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room,
 it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, 
a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. 
Thus they have a certain security. 

And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human 
which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons 
and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. 
We, however, are not prisoners. 
No traps or snares are set about us, 
and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. 

We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, 
and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation 
become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, 
scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. 

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. 
Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us; 
are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. 

And if only we arrange our life according to that principle 
which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, 
then that which now still seems to us the most alien 
will become what we most trust and find most faithful. 

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons 
that at the last moment turn into princesses; 
perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting 
to see us once beautiful and brave. 
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being 
something helpless that wants help from us. 





~ Rainer Maria Rilke


the hawk in his nest









.

It's all right if this suffering goes on for years. 
It's all right if the hawk never finds his own nest.
It's all right if we never receive the love we want. 

It's all right if we listen to the sitar for hours.
It doesn't matter how softly the musician plays.
Sooner or later the melody will say it all. 

It doesn't matter if we regret our crimes or not.
The mice will carry all our defeats into Asia,
And the Tuva throat-singers will tell the whole story. 

It's all right if we can't remain cheerful all day.
The task we have accepted is to go down
To renew our friendship with the ruined things. 

It's all right if people think we are idiots.
It's all right if we lie face down on the earth.
It's all right if we open the coffin and climb in. 

It's not our fault that things have gone wrong.
Let's agree it was Saturn and the other old men
Who have arranged these series of defeats for us.




~ Robert Bly
from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey


Thursday, July 28, 2011

the darkness that comes with every infinite fall







.

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces
that so work and feel thirst…

You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke



Wednesday, July 27, 2011

maturity








.

A level of mental maturity is reached 
when nothing external is of any value 
and the heart is ready to relinquish all. 

Then the real has a chance and it grasps it. 
Delays, if any, are caused by the mind unwilling to see or to discard.


~ Nisargadatta Maharaj



Tuesday, July 26, 2011

silence and solitude








.

Trusting this more penumbral dimension brings us to new places in the human adventure. 
 But we have to let go in order to be; 
we have to stop forcing ourselves, 
or we will never enter our own belonging. 

 There is something ancient at work in us creating novelty. 
 In fact, you need very little in order to develop a real sense of your own spiritual individuality. 
 One of the things that is absolutely essential is silence, the other is solitude.




~ John O'Donohue
from Anam Cara



Monday, July 25, 2011

it depends on you







If in your heart you make
a manger for his birth,
then God will once again
become a child on earth.



~ Angelus Silesius



abundant heart




.
Because the pelicans circle and dive, the fish
Because the cows are fat, the rains
Because the tree is heavy with pears, the earth
Because the woman grows thin, the heart




~ Jane Hirshfield
from The Lives of the Heart



Sunday, July 24, 2011

heaven is only present






.
Hell is timely, for Hell is the thought
that Hell will go on, on and on, without end.
Heaven is only present, instantaneous and eternal,
a mayfly, a blue dayflower, a life entirely given,
complete forever in its hour.


~ Wendell Berry
from Leavings



silent in the moonlight





.
Silent in the moonlight, no beginning or end.
Alone, and not alone.  A man and a woman lie
On open ground, under an antelope robe.
They sleep under animal skin, looking up
At the old, clear stars.  How many years?
The robe thrown over them, rough
Where they sleep.  Outside, the moon, the plains
Silent in the moonlight, no beginning or end.




~ Robert Bly
from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey



Saturday, July 23, 2011

a sybil





.
Long before our time they called her old,
But she'd walk down the same road every day.
Her age became too much to say
In years — and, like a forest's, would be told 

In centuries. She comes to stand at dusk — 
Her spot each time the same — and to foretell.
She is a hollow, wrinkled husk,
Dark as a fire-gutted citadel. 

She has to turn her flock of talking loose
Or it will grow too crowded to relieve.
Flapping and screaming, words are flying all 

Around her. Then, returning home to roost,
They find a perch beneath her eyebrows' eaves,
And in that shadow wait for night to fall.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
art by picasso