romanesque arches

Inside the huge Romanesque church the tourists jostled in the half darkness.

vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.

A few candle flames flickered.

An angel with no face embraced me

and whispered through my whole body:

"Don't be ashamed of being human, be proud!

Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.

You will never be complete, that's how it's meant to be."

Blind with tears

I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza

together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Mr Tanaka, and Signora Sabatini,

and inside each of them vault opened behind vault endlessly.

~ Tomas Tranströmer

from The Half Finished Heaven

translated by Robert Bly

behind all my behaviors

Please always know that behind all of my human behaviors - 

behind the best of me and the worst of me, 

behind the ego struggling to survive - 

is my soul, longing to mingle with yours.

~ Elizabeth Lesser

as spoken by Ram Dass

from Broken Open

empty yourself

.

As a river empties into the ocean,
empty yourself into Reality.

When you are emptied into Reality
you are filled with compassion,

desiring only justice.

When you desire only justice,
the will of Reality becomes your will.

When you are filled with compassion,
there is no self to oppose another

and no other to stand against oneself.



~ Pirke Avot 2:4 —
a compilation of ancient Jewish teachings and maxims.

empty and awake

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: Self is only an idea, 

a mortal idea. That which passes into 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 vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, 

will never crumble away because it was never born.

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks don't see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you're already
in heaven now.
That's the story.
That's the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they're
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s'why I'll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.

 

 

 

  ~ Jack Kerouac

from  The Portable Jack Kerouac

with thanks to whiskey river

 

 

 

radical discontinuity

I have been talking, of course, about a dualism that manifests itself in several ways:
 as a cleavage, a radical discontinuity, between Creator and creature,
 spirit and matter, religion and nature, religion and economy, 
worship and work, and so on. This dualism, I think, is the most destructive disease
 that afflicts us. In it’s best-known, it’s most dangerous, and perhaps its fundamental version,
 it is the dualism of body and soul. This is an issue as difficult as it is important,
 and so to deal with it we should start at the beginning…

~ Wendell Berry

from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

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