Saturday, September 7, 2019

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

 



few are willing






To deliver oneself up,
to hand oneself over,
entrust oneself completely to the silence
of a wide landscape of woods and hills,
or sea and desert; to sit still while
the sun comes up over the land
and fills its silences with light.

...few are willing to belong completely
to such silence, to let it soak into their bones,
to breathe nothing but silence, to feed
on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life
into a living and vigilant silence.





~ Thomas Merton
from Thoughts in Solitude





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

the soft animal

.






You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.



~ Mary Oliver


every breath taken



Every breath taken in by the man
who loves, and the woman who loves,
goes to fill the water tank
where the spirit horses drink.


~ Robert Bly

.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

our group identities







When you seek to affirm your unity by denying that you have anything to do with anyone else, by negating everyone else in the universe until you come down to you: what is there left to affirm? 

 The true way is just the opposite: the more I am able to affirm others, to say “yes” to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says “yes” to everyone.

 I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. . If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.





~ Thomas Merton
from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander


somehow




I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, 
I become the very thing I look at, 
and experience the kind of consciousness it has; 

I become the inner witness of the thing. 
I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness,

love; 

you may give it any name you like. 

Love says "I am everything". 
Wisdom says "I am nothing". 
Between the two, my life flows. 

Since at any point of time and space 
I can be both the subject and the object of experience, 
I express it by saying that 
I am both, and neither, and beyond both.



~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

the secret





.
Since I am
Somebody's dream, 
I have a good life.

Sometimes I go away in my sailboat on a cloud
and take a quiet little trip.

I have a secret
which I have learned how to read inside myself;
if I told it to you, 
it would make you laugh.

My heart is naked
and no one can put clothes on it,
and nothing can be put on
that will not immediately fall off.

My secret is ignorant,
it doesn't sing songs,
no lie,
it has nothing to tell you.

My two eyes 
are maps of the planet -
I see everything
and nothing upsets me.

Just now
I was in China
and saw there a great piece of happiness
that belonged to one man.

And I have been to the center of the earth,
where there is no suffering.

If on your loneliest nights,
I visit other planets
and the most secret stars of all,

besides being no one,
know that I am you
and everybody.

But if I go away
without giving you a name to remember me with,
haw will I find
the right dream to return to?

You won't have to mark down
on your calendar that I am coming back;
don't bother to write me into your notebooks.
I will be around
when you aren't thinking about me,

without hair or a neck,
without a nose and cheeks
no reputation -
there won't be anything.

I am a bird
which God made.



~ Thomas Merton
from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton