compassion

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The Grail Hero - particularly in the person of Parzival, the 'Great Fool' - is the forthright, simple, uncorrupted, noble son of nature, without guile, strong in the purity of the yearning of his heart.  ... His widowed, noble mother, in their forest retreat had told him of God and Satan, "distinguished for him dark and light."  However, in his own deeds light and dark were mixed.  He was not an angel or a saint, but a living, questing man of deeds, gifted with paired virtues of courage and compassion, to which was added loyalty.  And it was through his steadfastness in these - not supernatural grace - that he won, at last, the Grail.

Parzival makes two visits to the Grail Castle.  The first is a failure. 
 The Grail King is a wounded man, whose nature has been broken by castration in a battle. 
 Parzival spontaneously wishes to ask him, "What is wrong?"  But then, he has been told
 that a knight does not ask questions, and so, in order to preserve the image of himself 
as a noble knight, he restrains his natural impulse of compassion,
 and the Grail quest fails.

... in the end, as in the case of Parzival, the guide within will be his own noble heart alone, and the guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in his heart amor: the deepest, inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial with the process of the All, "thus come" And in this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be ... the courage to let go the past , with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of "meaning," and its gifts: to die to the world and come to birth from within.

What the Holy grail symbolizes is the highest spiritual fulfillment of a human life.  
Each life has some kind of high fulfillment, and each has its own gift from the grail.
  The theme of compassion is part of the clue about how to get there and where it is. 
 It has to do with overcoming the same temptations that the Buddha overcame: 
of attachment to this, that, of the other life detail that has pulled you off course.

~ Joseph Campbell
 from: A Joseph Campbell Companion
 edited by Diane Osbon

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humility

When humility delivers a man 

from attachment to his own words 

and his own reputation, 

he discovers that true joy is only possible 

when we have completely forgotten ourselves,

and it is only when we pay no more attention to our life 

and our own reputation and our own excellence 

that we are at last completely free to serve God for His sake alone.

~ Thomas Merton

on passion

In a state of passion without a cause, there is intensity free of all attachment;
but when passion has a cause, there is attachment , and attachment
 is the beginning of sorrow.  Most of us are attached; we cling to a person,
 to a country , to a belief, to an idea, and when the object of our attachment 
is taken away or otherwise loses its significance, we find ourselves empty,
 insufficient.  This emptiness we try to fill by clinging to something else, 
which again becomes the object of our passion.

When passion has a cause, it becomes lust.  When there is a passion for something
 - for a person, for an idea, for some kind of fulfillment - then out of the passion
 there comes contradiction, conflict, effort.  You strive to achieve or maintain
 a particular state, or to recapture one that has been and is gone. 
 But the passion of which I am speaking goes not give rise to contradiction, conflict. 
 It is totally unrelated to a cause, and therefore it is not an effect.

There can be passion only when there is total self-abandonment.  
One is never passionate unless there is a complete absence of what we call thought. 
 What we call thought is the response of the various patterns and experiences of memory, 
and where this conditioned response exists, there is no passion, there is no intensity. 
 There can be intensity only when there is a complete absence of the 'me'.

You will find out what love is, and what sorrow is, only when your mind
 has rejected all explanations and is no longer imagining, no longer seeking 
the cause, no longer indulging in words or going back in memory 
to its own pleasures and pains.  Your mind must be completely quiet, 
without a word, without a symbol, without an idea.  And then you will discover
 - or there will come into being - that state in which what we have called love, 
and what we have called sorrow and what we have called death are the same.  
 There is no longer any division between love and sorrow and death;  
and there being no division, there is beauty.  But to comprehend, to be in this state
 of ecstasy, there must be that passion which comes with the
 total abandonment of oneself.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from a talk in Saanen, Aug. 5th 1962

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inside the fog that encloses trees

Inside the fog that encloses trees, they undergo the robbing of their leaves... 
Thrown into confusion by a slow oxidation, and humiliated by the sap's withdrawal
 for the sake of the flowers and fruits, the leaves, following the hot spells of August,
 cling less anyway. 

The up-and-down tunnels inside the bark deepen, and guide the moisture down to earth
 so as to break off with the animated parts of the tree. 

The flowers are scattered, the fruits taken away. 
This giving up of their more animated parts, 
and even of parts of their body, has become, since their earliest days, 
a familiar practice for trees. 

~ Francis Ponge

translation by Robert Bly
from News of the Universe 
- poems of the twofold world

the silence inside the illusion

Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds.
 But in our true blissful essence of mind it is known that everything is alright 
forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop,
 stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world,
 and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense 
milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all.
 It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.
 We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do
 with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere,
 or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes
 through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing
 to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains
 months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. 
Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? 
Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal
 essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, 
will never crumble away because it was never born.

~ Jack Kerouac

the guest is inside

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The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;

you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.

We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.

Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,

the daily sense of failure goes away,

the damage I have done to myself fades,

a million suns come forward with light,

when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken,

inside "love" there is more joy than we know of,

rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,

there are whole rivers of light.

The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.

How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.

The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.

With the word "reason" you already feel miles away.

How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy

he sings inside his own little boat.

His poems amount to one soul meeting another.

These songs are about forgetting dying and loss.

They rise above both coming in and going out.

~ Kabir

version by Robert Bly

let it shine

Take off your traveling clothes and 

lay down your luggage, 

Pilgrim, shed your nakedness. 

Only the fire is absorbed by the Holy of Holies.

Let it shine.

~ Charles Wright

from Chickamauga

close with us

For too long, we have believed that the divine is outside us. 

This belief has strained our longing disastrously. 

 This is so lonely since it is human longing that makes us holy. 

 The most beautiful thing about us is our longing; 

 this longing is spiritual and has great depth and wisdom. 

 If you focus your longing on a faraway divinity, you put an unfair strain on your longing. 

 Thus it often happens that the longing reaches out towards the distant divine, 

but, because it over-strains itself, it bends back to become cynicism, emptiness or negativity. 

 This can destroy your sensibility. Yet we do not need to put any strain on our longing. 

 If we believe that the body is in the soul and the soul is divine ground, 
then the presence of the divine is completely here, close with us.

~ John O'Donohue

art by Odilon Redon

my fulfillment

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In the ancient days, when the first quiver of speech came to my lips,
 I ascended the holy mountain and spoke unto God, saying,
 "Master, I am thy slave,  Thy hidden will is my law and 
I shall obey thee for ever more."  

But God made no answer, and like a mighty tempest passed away.

And after a thousand years I ascended the holy mountain 
and again spoke unto God, saying, "Creator, I am thy creation. 

 Out of clay hast thou fashioned me and to thee I owe mine all."

And God made no answer, but like a thousand swift wings passed away.

And after a thousand years I climbed the holy mountain 
and spoke unto God again, saying, "Father, I am thy son. 
 In pity and love thou hast given me birth, and through love 
and worship I shall inherit thy kingdom."

And God made no answer, and like the mist that veils the distant hills he passed away.

And after a thousand years I climbed the sacred mountain
 and again spoke to God, saying, " my God, my aim and my fulfillment;
 I am thy yesterday and thou art my tomorrow,  I am thy root in the earth
 and thou art my flower in the sky, and together we grow before the face of the sun."

Then God leaned over me, and in my ears whispered words of sweetness,
 and even as the sea that enfoldeth a brook that runneth down to her,
 he enfolded me.

And when I descended to the valleys and the plains God was there also.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from Poems, Parables and Drawings

finding the father

My friend, this body offers to carry us for nothing - as the ocean carries logs.

So on some days the body wails with its great energy;

it smashes up the boulders,

lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides.

Someone knocks on the door.

We do not have time to dress.

He wants us to go with him through the blowing and rainy streets,

to the dark house.

We will go there, the body says,

and there find the father whom we have never met,

who wandered out in a snowstorm the night we were born,

and who then lost his memory,

and has lived since longing for his child,

whom he saw only once...

while he worked as a shoemaker,

as a cattle herder in Australia,

as a restaurant cook who painted at night.

When you light the lamp you will see him.

he sits there behind the door....

the eyebrows so heavy,

the forehead so light....

lonely in his whole body,

waiting for you.

~ Robert Bly

from Reaching Out to the World

finding belonging

~ Jean Vanier

why am I so lonely

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So I am interested in understanding why I am lonely, for I see it is that which makes me attached. That loneliness has forced me to escape through attachment to this or to that and I see that as long as I am lonely the sequence will always be this. What does it mean to be lonely? How does it come about? Is it instinctual, inherited, or is it brought about by my daily activity? If it is an instinct, if it is inherited, it is part of my lot; I am not to blame. But as I do not accept this, I question it and remain with the question. I am watching and I am not trying to find an intellectual answer. I am not trying to tell the loneliness what it should do, or what it is; I am watching for it to tell me. There is a watchfulness for the loneliness to reveal itself. It will not reveal itself if I run away; if I am frightened; if I resist it. So I watch it. I watch it so that no thought interferes. Watching is much more important than thought coming in. And because my whole energy is concerned with the observation of that loneliness thought does not come in at all. The mind is being challenged and it must answer. Being challenged it is in a crisis. In a crisis you have great energy and that energy remains without being interfered with by thought. This is a challenge which must be answered.

So there is this tremendous energy to answer the question: why is there this loneliness? I have rejected ideas, suppositions and theories that it is inherited, that it is instinctual. All that means nothing to me. Loneliness is `what is'. Why is there this loneliness which every human being, if he is at all aware, goes through, superficially or most profoundly? Why does it come into being? Is it that the mind is doing something which is bringing it about? I have rejected theories as to instinct and inheritance and I am asking: is the mind, the brain itself, bringing about this loneliness, this total isolation? Is the movement of thought doing this? Is the thought in my daily life creating this sense of isolation? In the office I am isolating myself because I want to become the top executive, therefore thought is working all the time isolating itself. I see that thought is all the time operating to make itself superior, the mind is working itself towards this isolation.

So the problem then is: why does thought do this? Is it the nature of thought to work for itself? Is it the nature of thought to create this isolation? Education brings about this isolation; it gives me a certain career, a certain specialization and so, isolation. Thought, being fragmentary, being limited and time binding, is creating this isolation. In that limitation, it has found security saying: "I have a special career in my life; I am a professor; I am perfectly safe." So my concern is then: why does thought do it? Is it in its very nature to do this? Whatever thought does must be limited.

Now the problem is: can thought realize that whatever it does is limited, fragmented and therefore isolating and that whatever it does will be thus? This is a very important point: can thought itself realize its own limitations? Or am I telling it that it is limited? This, I see, is very important to understand; this is the real essence of the matter. If thought realizes itself that it is limited then there is no resistance, no conflict; it says, "I am that". But if I am telling it that it is limited then I become separate from the limitation. Then I struggle to overcome the limitation, therefore there is conflict and violence, not love.

Thought has created this sense of loneliness, this emptiness, because it is limited, fragmentary, divided and when it realizes this, loneliness is not, therefore there is freedom from attachment. I have done nothing; I have watched the attachment, what is implied in it, greed, fear, loneliness, all that and by tracing it, observing it, not analyzing it, but just looking, looking and looking, there is the discovery that thought has done all this. Thought, because it is fragmentary, has created this attachment. When it realizes this, attachment ceases. There is no effort made at all. For the moment there is effort conflict is back again.

In love there is no attachment; if there is attachment there is no love. There has been the removal of the major factor through negation of what it is not, through the negation of attachment. I know what it means in my daily life: no remembrance of anything my wife, my girl friend, or my neighbor did to hurt me; no attachment to any image thought has created about her; how she has bullied me, how she has given me comfort, how I have had pleasure sexually, all the different things of which the movement of thought has created images; attachments to those images has gone.

And there are other factors: must I go through all those step by step, one by one? Or is it all over? Must I go through, must I investigate--as I have investigated attachment--fear, pleasure and the desire for comfort? I see that I do not have to go through all the investigation of all these various factors; I see it at one glance, I have captured it.

So, through negation of what is not love, love is. I do not have to ask what love is? I do not have to run after it. If I run after it, it is not love, it is a reward. So I have negated, I have ended, in that enquiry, slowly, carefully, without distortion, without illusion, everything that it is not--the other is.

~ J. Krishnamurti

taken from A dialogue with oneself

a discussion meeting on August 30, 1977
photo by Shreve Stockton

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self-isolation

We know loneliness, don’t we?, the fear, the misery, the antagonism, the real fright of a mind that is aware of its own loneliness. We all know that. Don’t we? That state of loneliness is not foreign to any one of us. You may have all the riches, all the pleasures, you may have great capacity and bliss; but within there is always the lurking shadow of loneliness.

The rich man, the poor man who is struggling, the man who is writing, creating, the worshiper – they all know this loneliness. When it is in that state, what does the mind do? The mind turns on the radio, picks up a book, runs away from `what is’ into something which is not. Sirs, do follow what I am saying – not the words but the application, the observation of your own loneliness.

When the mind is aware of its loneliness, it runs away, escapes. The escape, whether into religious contemplation or going to a cinema, is exactly the same; it is still an escape from `what is’. The man who escapes through drinking is no more immoral than the one who escapes by the worship of God; they are both the same, both are escaping.

When you observe the fact that you are lonely, if there is no escape and therefore no struggle into the opposite, then, generally, the mind tends to condemn it according to the frame of its knowledge; but if there is no condemnation, then the whole attitude of the mind towards the thing it has called lonely, has undergone a complete change, has it not?

After all, loneliness is a state of self-isolation, because the mind encloses itself and cuts itself away from every relationship, from everything. In that state, the mind knows loneliness; and if, without condemning it, the mind be aware and not create the escape, then surely that loneliness undergoes a transformation. The transformation might then be called `aloneness’ – it does not matter what word you use. In that aloneness, there is no fear.

The mind that feels lonely because it has isolated itself through various activities, is afraid of that loneliness. But if there is awareness in which there is no choice – which means no condemnation – then the mind is no longer lonely but it is in a state of aloneness in which there is no corruption, in which there is no process of self-enclosure. One must be alone, there must be that aloneness, in that sense. Loneliness is a state of frustration, aloneness is not; and aloneness is not the opposite of loneliness.

Surely, Sirs, we must be alone, alone from all influences, from all compulsions, from all demands, longings, hopes, so that the mind is no longer in the action of frustration. That aloneness is essential, it is a religious thing. But the mind cannot come to it without understanding the whole problem of loneliness. Most of us are lonely, all our activities are the activities of frustration. The happy man is not a lonely man. Happiness is alone, and the action of aloneness is entirely different from the activities of loneliness.

All this requires, does it not?, awareness, a total awareness of one’s whole being, conscious as well as the unconscious. As most of us only live on the superficial consciousness, on the surface level of our mind, the deep underground forces, loneliness, desperations and hopes are always frustrating the superficial activity. So it is important to understand the total being of the mind; and that understanding is denied when there is awareness in which there is choice, condemnation.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from On Love and Loneliness

an absence of separateness

One says of him that he is "interested" in what he's doing, that he's "involved" in his work. What produces this involvement is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an absence of any sense of separateness of subject and object. "Being with it," "being a natural," "taking hold"-- there are a lot of idiomatic expressions for what I mean by this absence of subject-object duality, because what I mean is so well understood as folklore, common sense, the everyday understanding of the shop...Zen Buddhists talk about "just sitting," a meditative practice in which the idea of a duality of self and object does not dominate one's consciousness. What I'm talking about here in motorcycle maintenance is "just fixing," in which the idea of a duality of self and object doesn't dominate one's consciousness. When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing. When one has this feeling then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself.

~ Robert Pirsig

from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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without ambition?

Is it not possible to live in this world without ambition, just being what you are?

 If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, 

then what you are undergoes a transformation. 

I think one can live in this world anonymously, 

completely unknown, 

without being famous, ambitious, cruel. 

One can live very happily when no importance is given to the self; 

and this also is part of right education.

The whole world is worshiping success. 

You hear stories of how the poor boy studied at night and eventually became a judge, 

or how he began by selling newspapers and ended up a multi-millionaire. 

You are fed on the glorification of success. 

J. Krishnamurti

from The Book of Life

thanks to j. krishnamurti online