true be(longings

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The Buddha recommends that we recite the “Five Remembrances” every day:


1. I am of the nature to grow old. 

There is no way to escape growing old.

2. I am of the nature to have ill-health. 

There is no way to escape having ill-health.

3. I am of the nature to die. 

There is no way to escape death.

4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.


—Thich Nhat Hanh

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question

 

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Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles
and the water is clear?


—Lao Tzu

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the root of happiness

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In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond - and his response is magnificent:

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow. 

God bless you all!

—Kurt Vonnegut 

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the narrow gate

  

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Fall in love.

There is no salvation for the soul 
But to fall in Love.

It has to creep and crawl 
Among the Lovers first.

Only Lovers can escape 
From these two worlds. 
This was written in creation.

Only from the Heart 
Can you reach the sky.

The rose of Glory 
Can only be raised in the Heart.


—Rumi

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note to self

 

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life is a garden,
not a road

we enter and exit
through the same gate

wandering,
where we go matters less
than what we notice


—Bokonon

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no(thing

Richard Cartwright, The Messenger

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In an old Eastern story, God wants to reward a man for his exceptional kindness and purity of intentions. He calls an angel and tells him to go to the man and ask him what he wants. 

He will have whatever his heart desires.

The angel appears before the kind man and gives him the good news. The man replies, “Oh, but I am already happy. I have all that I want.”

The angel explains that, with God, you just have to be tactful. If He wants to give us a gift, it is best to accept. The kind man then replies, “In this case, I would like all who come in contact with me to feel well. But I want to know nothing about it."

From that moment, wherever the kind man happens to be, wilted plants bloom again, sickly animals grow strong, ill people are healed, the unhappy are relieved of their burdens, those who fight make peace, and those beset by problems resolve them. And all this happens without the kind man’s knowing — always in his wake, but never in front of his eyes. There is never any pride, nor any expectation. Unknowing and content, the kindly man walks the roads of the world, spreading happiness to everybody.


—Robert Ferrucci
The Power of Kindness
Teaching Story

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I am what is around me.

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I am what is around me.

Women understand this.
One is not duchess
A hundred yards from a carriage.

These, then are portraits:
A black vestibule;
A high bed sheltered by curtains.

These are merely instances.


—Wallace Stevens
theory

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glimpsey

 

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Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face — there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. 

Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

—Fernando Passoa

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speech pouring down

  

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Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.

The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.

I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield […]. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the place where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!

—Thomas Merton 

Raids on the Unspeakable (1960)

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arrivals

  

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The great corn arrives. 

The child-rain arrives. 

In a way of beauty arrives. 

Grasshopper arrives. 

From the west arrives. 

Vegetation arrives. 

Pollen arrives. 

In a way of beauty arrives. 


—Diné

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i am not what i am aware of

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Give your attention to the experience of seeing rather than to the object seen 

and you will find yourself everywhere.

—Rupert Spira

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aspects of open space

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And strangely enough, these experiences of the six realms - gods, jealous gods, human beings, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell - are ‘space’, different versions of space. It seems intense and solid, but in actual fact it isn’t at all. They are different aspects of space - that’s the exciting or interesting part.

In fact, it is complete open space, without any colors or any particularly solid way of relating. That is why they have been described as six types of consciousness. It is pure consciousness rather than a solid situation - it almost could be called unconsciousness rather than even consciousness.

The development of ego operates completely at the unconscious level, from one unconscious level to another unconscious level. That is why these levels are referred to as loka, which means ‘realm’ or 'world’. They are six types of 'world’. Each is a complete unit of its own.

In order to have a world, you have to have an atmosphere; you have to have space to formulate things. So the six realms are the fundamental space through which any bardo experience operates.

Because of that, it is possible to transmute these spaces into six types of awakened state, or freedom.


—Chögyam Trungpa

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