Primordial Is-ness

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The daily enhancement practice system of the Completion stage teachings of the Yuthok Nyingthig (called) the ‘Spontaneous Arising of the Three Kayas’:

“Having ascertained that all the phenomena, all the appearances and arisings of Samsara-Nirvana exist within your own mind, recognize the essence of one’s mind as primordial - it does not arise, cease, or abide, it is free of either center or periphery, of the stain of (spatial) elaboration.

Devoid of any basic characteristics whatsoever, it appears as a manifold display of radiance (of light and colour), and yet even in appearing it is devoid of any fundamental basis of an ‘appear-er’.

Beyond expression and thought, inconceivable, ineffable, the naked primordial awareness is clear and bright, totally relaxed and open. It is all external appearances without exception, it is all internal awareness without exception. It is wholly unobstructed wisdom. It is beyond the need for rejecting afflictive emotions and bad actions, and is free of any ‘rejecter’.

Perceive, without perceiving any ‘thing’, the natural state of this primordial is-ness. With this changeless wisdom of experiential awareness appearing in the depths of one’s mind, relax into the freshness of this suchness, the immediacy (that pervades) the four activities of walking, moving, lying down and sitting, of body, speech and mind, every activity.

Let go into relaxed and uncontrived presence, relax into your own uncontrived spontaneously manifesting self-radiance. Maintaining this awareness in its bare and open state without any distraction whatsoever, your own mind will undoubtedly be transformed into that of Samantabhadra within this very life.”


—Nida Chenagtsang
Mirror of Light: A Commentary on Yuthok’s Ati Yoga, Volume 1

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Today I celebrate with all of you,
The miracle of sunlight,
The humble joy of being and breath
And the mystery and grace of each new day.

—Vincent Van Gogh

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photo Laura Rowe

wait

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stay deep

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Stay deep within yourself and stay alone there – that is where your poems come from, and that has nothing to do with audience. You are the audience.


—Stanley Plumly

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Contemporary trends of thought have imagined art to be a fountain, whereas it is a sponge. They have decided that art ought to gush forth, whereas it should absorb and become saturated. They think it can be broken down into means of depiction, whereas it is composed of organs of perception.

Its proper task is to be always among the spectators and to look more purely, receptively and faithfully than all others.


―Boris Pasternak

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Every perception of colour is an illusion, we do not see colours as they really are. In our perception they alter one another.


—Joseph Albers (1888 - 1976)

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photo AndyIlachinski

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merrily, merrily

  

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We should not for a moment consider even our best-established knowledge of existence as true. 

It is awareness only of the colors that our own vision paints on the film of one bubble in one strand of foam on the ocean of being.

—Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)

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The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. 
And it is entirely private.  

Take it to be a dream and be done with it.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead

 

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1. The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead. In that core are the dimensions of time and space. What surrounds the core is timelessness.

2. Between the core and its surroundings there are exchanges, which are not usually clear. All religions have been concerned with making them clearer. The credibility of religion depends on the clarity of certain unusual exchanges. The mystifications of religion are the result of trying to systematically produce such exchanges.

3. The rarity of clear exchange is due to the rarity of what can cross intact the frontier between timelessness and time.

4. To see the dead as the individuals they once were tends to obscure their nature. Try to consider the living as we might assume the dead to do collectively. The collective would accrue not only across space but also throughout time. It would include all those who have ever lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.

5.The dead inhabited a timeless moment of construction continuously rebegun. The construction is the state of the universe at any instant.

6. According to their memory of life, the dead know the moment of construction as, also, a moment of collapse. Having lived, the dead can never be inert.

7. If the dead live in a timeless moment, how can they have a memory? They remember no more than being thrown into time, as does everything which existed or exists.

8. The difference between the dead and the unborn is that the dead have this memory. As the number of dead increases, the memory enlarges.

9. The memory of the dead existing in timelessness may be thought of as a form of imagination concerning the possible. This imagination is close to (resides in) God; but I do not know how.

10. In the world of the living there is an equivalent but contrary phenomenon. The living sometimes experience timelessness, as revealed in sleep, ecstasy, instants of extreme danger, orgasm, and perhaps in the experience of dying itself. During these instants the living imagination covers the entire field of experience and overruns the contours of the individual life or death. It touches the waiting imagination of the dead.

11. What is the relation of the dead to what has not yet happened, to the future? All the future is the construction in which their "imagination" is engaged.

12. How do the living live with the dead? Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus, living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egoism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as the eliminated.


—John Berger
Hold Everything Dear

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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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the lotus of the heart

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All reality is consciousness.

And the same consciousness is the life of all: thus we have the explanation for both the sanctity and the unity of life.

As far, verily, as this world-space extends, so far extends the space within the heart. 

Within it, indeed, are contained both heaven and earth, both fire and wind, both sun and moon, lightning and the stars, both what one possesses here and what one does not possess; everything here is contained within it.


—Chhandogya Upanishad 8.1.3

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As by knowing one tool of iron, 
We come to know all things made out of iron - 

That they differ only in name and form,
While the stuff of which all are made is iron - 

So through spiritual wisdom, dear one,
We come to know that all of life is one.

The Self is hidden in the lotus of the heart.

Those who see themselves in all creatures go day by day into the world of Brahman hidden in the heart.


—Eknath Easwaran
The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit

 

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if we lose our way

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I hope that in the future they invent a small golden light that follows you everywhere and when something is about to end, it shines brightly so you know it’s about to end.

And if you’re never going to see someone again, it’ll shine brightly and both of you can be polite and say, “It was nice to have you in my life while I did, good luck with everything that happens after now.”

And maybe if you’re never going to eat at the same restaurant again, it’ll shine and you can order everything off the menu you’ve never tried. Maybe, if someone’s about to buy your car, the light will shine and you can take it for one last spin. 

Maybe, if you’re with a group of friends who’ll never be together again, all your lights will shine at the same time and you’ll know, and then you can hold each other and whisper, “This was so good. Oh my God, this was so good.”

—Iain Thomas

The Light That Shines When Things End

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ways to live

  

 

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1. India

In India in their lives they happen
again and again, being people or
animals. And if you live well
your next time could be even better.

That's why they often look into your eyes
and you know some far-off story
with them and you in it, and some
animal waiting over at the side.

Who would want to happen just once?
It's too abrupt that way, and
when you're wrong, it's too late
to go back - you've done it forever.

And you can't have that soft look when you
pass, the way they do it in India.

2. Having It Be Tomorrow

Day, holding its lantern before it,
moves over the whole earth slowly
to brighten that edge and push it westward.
Shepherds on upland pastures begin fires
for breakfast, beads of light that extend
miles of horizon. Then it's noon and
coasting toward a new tomorrow.

If you're in on that secret, a new land
will come every time the sun goes
climbing over it, and the welcome of children
will remain every day new in your heart.
Those around you don't have it new,
and they shake their heads turning grey every
morning when the sun comes up. And you laugh.

3. Being Nice And Old

After their jobs are done old people
cackle together. They look back and shiver,
all of that was so dizzying when it happened;
and now if there is any light at all it
knows how to rest on the faces of friends.
And any people you don't like, you just turn
the page a little more and wait while they
find out what time is and begin to bend
lower; or you can turn away
and let them drop off the edge of the world.

4. Good Ways To Live

At night outside it all moves or
almost moves - trees, grass,
touches of wind. The room you have
in the world is ready to change.
Clouds parade by, and stars in their
configurations. Birds from far
touch the fabric around them - you can
feel their wings move. Somewhere under
the earth it waits, that emanation
of all things. It breathes. It pulls you
slowly out through doors or windows
and you spread in the thin halo of night mist.

—William Stafford
The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems
written just over a month before William Stafford's death in August, 1993

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travelling together

  

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If we are separated I will 
try to wait for you 
on your side of things 

your side of the wall and the water 
and of the light moving at its own speed 
even on leaves that we have seen 
I will wait on one side 

while a side is there 


—W.S. Merwin

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My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing. —Rilke

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Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet. 

This explains many things, and among them the fact that everyone measures us with his own standard—generally about as long as a tailor’s tape, and we have to put up with it: as also that no one will allow us to be taller than himself—a supposition which is once for all taken for granted.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things and they come
toward me, to meet and be met.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, I-I

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questions

 

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What is Real? 

We could define ‘real’ as something which never changes. In order to change, a thing has to cease to be what it is and become something else; i.e. it would have to become what it is not.

Therefore, anything that changes cannot be real, since the act of changing involves non-existence

What is Unreal? 

Unreal is the appearance of something in the place/location of its non-existence. Example the snake appears where it does not exist, ie the rope. The snake appears in the location of its own absence. This is the very definition of falsity or unreality. 

Where something is not, there it appears. Then it is false. 

Blue color appears in the sky where it does not exist. The blue color appears where there is no blue color. The sky IS NOT blue. 

Similarly, the entire universe of experience (waking world, dream world, deep sleep blankness) continuously appears and disappears in the sky of Awareness. 

Awareness is the locus or location of the absence of the mind. Awareness is where the mind appears, plays it games and dissapears. Hence, The mind is unreal. 

The locus in which something appears and disappears, then in that locus, that thing is an appearance and unreal. The locus only is real.

You are that locus - Awareness.

—Swami Sarvapriyananda
Lectures on Mandukya Karika

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Neti Neti

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The path of the Vedāntic discipline is the path of negation, "Neti", in which, by stern determination, all that is unreal is both negated and renounced. It is the path of jnāna, knowledge, the direct method of realizing the Absolute.


—Sri Ramakrishna

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The Vedantins do not say that the world is unreal.

That is a misunderstanding. If they did, what would be the meaning of the Vedantic text: ‘All this is Brahman’?

They only mean that the world is unreal as world but real as Self. If you regard the world as non-self, it is not real.

Everything, whether you call it illusion (Maya) or Divine Play (Lila) or Energy (Shakti) must be within the Self and not apart from it.


—Ramana Maharshi

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space is not empty

  

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We see the the universe as a solid fact,

God sees it as liquid law. 

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Space is not empty — nor is it an ‘ether’. The space which surrounds every particle of matter in every wave field is the negative half of the wave field. The solid nucleus is the positive half. Both halves are equal in potential but vastly unequal in volume. 

Science thinks of space either as a void or as an ether through which solids of matter travel. The fact is that space travels with its solids, for each solid is surrounded by a minus zero equal-and-opposite vacuity of the plus zero which we call matter. Matter floats in these insulating spatial counterparts.

Positive electricity is accountable for the solids and negative electricity is accountable for the space. All matter comes out of space by the action of positive electricity and is returned to space by the action of negative electricity. White-hot suns come from the blackness of cold space and cold space radiates from hot suns.

The matter of space consists of holes surrounded by corpuscular solids, while the matter of solids consists of small dense cores surrounded by vast tenuous holes of space. All unfolding and refolding patterns are gyroscopically manipulated, electrically motivated and magnetically measured and controlled.

In the chemical elements, the sharps and flats are isotopes. These can be produced by man in greater numbers than Nature has produced them, for Nature does not begin to split her tones until she has passed two octaves beyond carbon, malleability and conductivity await division in vast quantities from carbon and silicon. These will be found when science discards its concept of matter as being substance, and becomes aware of the gyroscopic control of motion which will split the carbon tone into isotopes as a musical tone is split into sharps and flats.

The elements of matter are not different substances, or different things. They are pressure conditions of light waves. The light units of the elements are all alike but are differently conditioned by the electric pressures exerted upon them during the inward or outward spiral journey from zero to zero.

The unanswered mystery of how the elements become mathematically precise octave tones, just as musical tones or color tones of the spectrum are mathematically precise in vibration orderliness, lies in the wave field gyroscopic principle.
 

—Walter Russell

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Whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself, also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence ... are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things eternally separated?
 

—Friedrich Nietzsche

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The mystic and the physicist arrive at the same conclusion; one starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that Brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to Atman, the reality within.

—Fritjof Capra

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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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question

  

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I cannot sit still with my countrymen in chains.
I cannot act mute
Hearing the world's loneliness
Crying near the Beloved's heart.

My love for God is such
That I could dance with Him tonight without you,
But I would rather have you there.

Is your caravan lost?

It is,
If you no longer weep from gratitude or happiness,
Or weep
From being cut deep with the awareness
Of the extraordinary beauty
That emanates from the most simple act
And common object.

My dear, is your caravan lost?

It is if you can no longer be kind to yourself
And loving to those who must live
With the sometimes difficult task of loving you.

At least come to know
That someone untied your camel last night
For I hear its gentle voice
Calling for God in the desert.

At least come to know
That Hafiz will always hold a lantern
With the galaxies blooming inside
And that

I will always guide your soul to 
The divine warmth and exhilaration
Of our Beloved's 
Tent.

—Hafiz

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the pearl of great price

  

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I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.


—RS Thomas

the bright field
[Brooklyn State Hospital]

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In a mist of light 
falling with the rain
I walk this ground
of which dead men
and women I have loved
are part, as they
are part of me. In earth,
in blood, in mind,
the dead and living
into each other pass,
as the living pass
in and out of loves
as stepping to a song.

The way I go is
marriage to this place,
grace beyond chance,
love’s braided dance
covering the world.


—Wendell Berry

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futurity - questions

    

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A memory may feel abstract or immaterial, but it is actually a biochemical process taking place in the brain. It involves neurons communicating with each other via the “wires” or synapses connecting them. The pathway an electrochemical signal follows as it continually travels from neuron to synapse to neuron constitutes a memory.  

Whenever you have that memory, the same pathway gets activated. And the more it’s activated, the more it becomes hardwired into the brain’s circuitry. Eventually, it becomes a long-term memory. 

Activation also requires enzymes, molecules that set off chemical reactions. The problem is that these enzymes don’t exist for longer than a week. If a memory is to endure, it would seem that the enzymes would have to remain functioning for years or even decades. 

Once the enzymes turn off, one would expect the memories to go with them. “This became a holy grail in neuroscience,” Lisman says. “How can a molecule in your brain serve as a memory? How does nature accomplish this?”

—John Lisman 

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What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then.

—T.S. Eliot

The Cocktail Party

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cosmic dancers

 

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As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. Nothing seems to me better adapted than this magnificent cosmological perspective to give us the proper standard and the broad outlook which we need in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us. 

It not only clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance, and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element... 

Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and taken up the correct cosmological perspective, can we hope to reach the solution of the riddles of the universe.

—Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919) 

The Riddle of the Universe

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The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. 

Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance. 

—Thomas Merton
New Seeds of Contemplation

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When the blood of your veins returns to the sea and the dust of your bones returns to the ground, maybe then will you remember that this earth does not belong to you, you belong to this earth.

—Sweetgrass

Native American Prophet

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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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unit(ed

  

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The brief span of an individual life is misleading. 

Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. 

The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. 


—J.G Ballard
The Drowned World

 

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i am that

 

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Among animals I am the lion; among birds, the eagle Garuda. I am Prahlada, born among the demons, and of all that measures, I am time.

I am death, which overcomes all, and the source of all beings still to be born. Just remember that I am, and that I support the entire cosmos with only a fragment of my being.

Behold, Arjuna, a million divine forms, with an infinite variety of color and shape. Behold the gods of the natural world, and many more wonders never revealed before. Behold the entire cosmos turning within my body, and the other things you desire to see.

I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world.

—Lord Krishna

The Bhagavad Gita

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The flowers, the incense, 

Grain, spices, and honey 

Offered in worship 

Are made out of the same divine stuff as you. 

Who then is worshiped?

—Vijnana Bhairava Tantra

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