question

empty only of a separate existence

.

 

Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara,

Sitting in the depth of knowledge,

Lit the glow of his wisdom five elements

And saw that all of them are empty.

After this enlightenment he overcame the pain.

Listen, Shariputra,

Form - a void, emptiness - is the form

Form - is nothing but emptiness,

Void - it is nothing but a form.

The same is true for the senses,

Perceptions of mental activity and consciousness.

Listen, Shariputra,

All dharmas are empty properties.

They do not create and are not exterminable,

Are not dirty and are not cleaned,

Do not grow or shrink.

Hence, in the void

There is no form, no feelings, no perceptions,

No mental activity or consciousness.

There is no dependent origination

No eyes, no ears, no nose,

No tongue, no body, no mind.

There is no form, no sound, no smell,

No taste, no touch, no object of mind.

No sphere of elements, ranging from eye

And the ending of consciousness.

And it is not fading, from ignorance

And ending with death and decay.

There is no source of suffering and misery,

No Cessation of Suffering

And there is no way to end suffering.

There is no wisdom and no progress.

Since there is no progress, all the Bodhisattvas,

Relying on perfect wisdom,

No obstacles are in your mind.

With no obstacles, they overcome fear,

Forever exempt from error

And reach true nirvana.

Thanks to this perfect wisdom,

All the Buddhas of the past, present and future

Enter into a full, true and total enlightenment.

Therefore, to know that perfect wisdom

Expressed unsurpassed mantra,

The highest mantra, devastating suffering

Perfect and true.

Hence, the mantra Prajnaparamita

Must be declared.

Here is the mantra:

Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.

Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.

Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.

.

this is how you become everything that lives

  

.

You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.

Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like a formula for clay.

Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
This is how you become everything that lives.

And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push back the shadows so that you can rest--
vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.


—Pablo Neruda
love sonnet, XXXIV

.

love and love and nothing else

 

.

The holiest of all holidays are those 

 Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; 

The secret anniversaries of the heart …

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Holidays, excerpt

.

atom of the universe

 

.

The 1930s had seen monumental advances in atomic science and radiation research and the spectacular discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 was overshadowed by the outbreak of war just a year later. But physicists were quick to realize the devastating potential of their new discovery.

Albert Einstein co-signed a letter to then president Roosevelt with a warning: "It is conceivable that extremely powerful bombs of a new type... may thus be constructed." So the US developed their own bomb before any other nation could. The test was considered a great success and just 21 days later the United States dropped a similar atomic bomb, the so-called Fat Man, on the city of Nagasaki, Japan.

If it had not been for the deadly pressures of war nuclear science may have followed a very different and likely slower path. The exploration of the atom, one of the tiniest particles of matter, had until then been little more than a curiosity, the domain of at first philosophers and then gentlemen scholars.

Small improvements in experimental methods and equipment brought small breakthroughs until the fateful revelation that atoms and their nuclei were indeed not the end of the Russian doll. A discovery that led directly to New Mexico and then Japan.

As the glow from that first nuclear explosion faded it left behind a new thirst to understand what our universe was actually made of and how it came to be. That journey, the quest to discover what makes up everything, would see scientists delve ever deeper down a rabbit hole of matter and mass of fields and particles and even further back in time in a century-long quest to answer the immortal question: 

What is at its most fundamental level everything, and perhaps even more importantly is any of it really real at all?

—Leila Battison

.

the less i seek my source

 

.

I'm trying to tell you something about my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
And the best thing you've ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously
It's only life after all

Well, darkness has a hunger that's insatiable
And lightness has a call that's hard to hear
And I wrap my fear around me like a blanket
I sailed my ship of safety 'til I sank it
I'm crawling on your shores

And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine
Closer I am to fine

And I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind
Got my paper and I was free

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine
Closer I am to fine

I stopped by the bar at 3 A.M
To seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friend
And I woke up with a headache like my head against a board
Twice as cloudy as I'd been the night before
And I went in seeking clarity

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain

We go to the doctor, we go to the mountains
We look to the children, we drink from the fountain

We go to the Bible, we go through the workout
We read up on revival, we stand up for the lookout
There's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine
Closer I am to fine
Closer I am to fine

—Indigo Girls
Closer To Fine

.

 

hey!

 

.

I am yours.

Don’t give myself back to me.


—Rumi

:)

bless

. 

this is how love catches up and wants to be our friend, as we hold 

each other, and the good secret inside slides forth continuous

—Rumi

.

We offer gratitude to and for all friends

Who create, remake and refine one another;

Who point to stars and keep us from the dark;

Who help us hear the music in the silent places ...

Who hold us and will not let us go.


—Marge Ackley

.

the cold before the moonrise

 

.

Instantaneous architectures
hanging over a pause,
apparitions neither named
nor thought, wind-forms,
insubstantial as time
and, like time, dissolved.

Made of time, they are not time;
they are the cleft, the interstice,
the brief vertigo of between
where the diaphanous flower opens:
high on its stalk of a reflection
it vanishes as it turns.

Never touched, the clarities
seen with the eyes closed:
transparent birth
and the crystalline fall
in the instant of this instant
that forever is still here.

Outside the window, the desolate
rooftops and the hurrying clouds.
The day goes out, the city
lights up, remote and near.
Weightless hour. I breathe
the moment, empty and eternal.


—Octavio Paz

interval
Eliot Weinberger version

.

It is too simple to turn to the sound
Of frost stirring among its
Stars like an animal asleep
In the winter night
And say I was born far from home 

If there is a place where this is the language may
It be my country 

—W.S. Merwin

.

wolf water image

  

time is a child

 

.

In 1950, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, Jung set up a stone cube on the lakeshore, just west of the Bollingen Tower, inscribing it on three sides. One side contains a quote taken from the Rosarium philosophorum: Hic lapis exilis extat, pretio quoque vilis, spernitur a stultis, amatur plus ab edoctis. 

Here stands the mean, uncomely stone, ‘Tis very cheap in price! The more it is despised by fools, The more loved by the wise. 

A dedication is also inscribed on this side of the stone: IN MEMORIAM NAT[ivitatis] S[uae] DIEI LXXV C G JUNG EX GRAT[itudine] FEC[it] ET POS[uit] A[nn]O MCML. 

In memory of his 75th birthday, C.G. Jung out of gratitude made and set it up in the year 1950.

The second side of the cube depicts Jung’s Telesphoros figure, bearing a lantern and wearing a hooded cape. It is surrounded by a Greek inscription: «Ὁ Αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεττεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη» · Τελεσφόρος διελαύνων τοὺς σκοτεινοὺς τοῦ κόσμου τόπους, καὶ ὡς ἀστὴρ ἀναλάμπων ἐκ τοῦ βάθους, ὁδηγεῖ «παρ’ Ἠελίοιο πύλας καὶ δῆμον ὀνείρων». 

Time is a child — playing like a child — playing a board game — the kingdom of the child. This is Telesphoros, who roams through the dark regions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams.

"Time is a child at play, gambling; a child’s is the kingship” is a fragment attributed to Heraclitus. 

“He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams” is a quote from the Odyssey (Book 24, Verse 12). It refers to Hermes the psychopomp, who leads away the spirits of the slain suitors. 

The second side also contains a four-part mandala of alchemical significance. The top quarter of the mandala is dedicated to Saturn, the bottom quarter to Mars, the left quarter to Sol-Jupiter [male], and the right quarter to Luna-Venus [female]. 

The third side of the cube is the side that faces the lake. It bears a Latin inscription of sayings which, Jung says, “are more or less quotations from alchemy.” 

The inscription reads: 

I am an orphan, alone; yet, I am found everywhere. I am one, but contrary to myself. I am youth and old man at the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I must be lifted up from the depth like a fish, or i fall from the sky like a white stone. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of time.

From the one comes two,

from two, three,

and from the third comes the one as the fourth.

.

true be(longings

.

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

.

question

 

.

Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles

and the water is clear?


—Lao Tzu

.

the root of happiness

 .

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 

.

no(thing

Richard Cartwright, The Messenger

.

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

.

 

I am what is around me.

.

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

.

glimpsey

 

.

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

.

no(thing not nothing

.

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.

Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.


―Ingmar Bergman

.

[...] I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.


—Pablo Neruda

.

bird sing image

 

.

years and distances, stars and candles

   

.

Researchers have captured the first image of what dolphins see using echolocation.

"When a dolphin scans an object with its high frequency sound beam, each short click captures a still image, similar to a camera taking photographs,” Reid said. “Each dolphin click is a pulse of pure sound that becomes modulated by the shape of the object."


—John Stuart Reid

.

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together.

My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.


― Ursula K. Le Guin
A Wizard of Earthsea

.

 

 

 

i give you the end of a golden string, just wind it into a ball ... William Blake

.

When you discover
your new work travels the ground you had traversed
decades ago, you wonder, panicked,
‘Have I outlived my vocation ? Said already
all that was mine too say ?’

There’s a remedy –
only one – for the paralysis seizing your throat to mute you,
numbing your hands: Remember the great ones, remember
Cezanne
doggedly sur le motif, his mountain
a tireless noonday angel he grappled like Jacob,
demanding reluctant blessing. Remember James rehearsing
over and over his theme, the loss
of innocence and the attainment
(not by separate note sounding its tone
until by accretion a chord resounds) of somber
understanding. Each life in art
goes forth to meet dragons that rise from their bloody scales
in cyclic rhythm: Know and forget, know and forget.
It’s not only
the passion for getting it right (though it’s that , too)
it’s the way
radiant epiphanies recur, recur,
consuming, pristine, unrecognized –
and remembrance dismays you. And then, look,
some reflection of light, some wing of shadow
is other, unvoiced. You can, you must
proceed.


—Denise Levertov
For Those Whom the Gods Love Less

.

window over enchanted seas

.

You cannot be frightened of the unknown because you do not know what the unknown is and so there is nothing to be afraid of. Death is a word, and it is the word, the image, that creates fear. So can you look at death without the image of death? As long as the image exists from which springs thought, thought must always create fear. Then you either rationalize your fear of death and build a resistance against the inevitable or you invent innumerable beliefs to protect you from the fear of death. Hence there is a gap between you and the thing of which you are afraid. In this time-space interval there must be conflict which is fear, anxiety and self-pity.

Thought, which breeds the fear of death, says, 'Let's postpone it, let's avoid it, keep it as far away as possible, let's not think about it'- but you are thinking about it. When you say, 'I won't think about it', you have already thought out how to avoid it. You are frightened of death because you have postponed it.

We have separated living from dying, and the interval between the living and the dying is fear. That interval, that time, is created by fear. Living is our daily torture, daily insult, sorrow and confusion, with occasional opening of a window over enchanted seas. That is what we call living, and we are afraid to die, which is to end this misery. We would rather cling to the known than face the unknown - the known being our house, our furniture, our family, our character, our work, our knowledge, our fame, our loneliness, our gods - that little thing that moves around incessantly within itself with its own limited pattern of embittered existence.

We think that living is always in the present and that dying is something that awaits us at a distant time. But we have never questioned whether this battle of everyday life is living at all. We want to know the truth about reincarnation, we want proof of the survival of the soul, we listen to the assertion of clairvoyants and to the conclusions of psychical research, but we never ask, never, how to live - to live with delight, with enchantment, with beauty every day. 

We have accepted life as it is with all its agony and despair and have got used to it, and think of death as something to be carefully avoided. But death is extraordinarily like the life we know how to live. You cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.

Most of us are frightened of dying because we don't know what it means to live. We don't know how to live, therefore we don't know how to die. As long as we are frightened of life we shall be frightened of death. The man who is not frightened of life is not frightened of being completely insecure for he understands that inwardly, psychologically, there is no security. When there is no security there is an endless movement and then life and death are the same. The man who lives without conflict, who lives with beauty and love, is not frightened of death because to love is to die.


—Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986)
Freedom from the Known, p. 75-77
from Kevin, who walks the walk  

💗

.

listen

 

  

   

   

.

Listen, my child, to the silence.
An undulating silence,
a silence
that turns valleys and echoes slippery,
that bends foreheads
toward the ground.


—Federico García Lorca

.

 

 

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

.

 

You are me, and I am you.

Isn’t it obvious that we “inter-are”?

You cultivate the flower in yourself,

so that I will be beautiful.

I transform the garbage in myself,

so that you will not have to suffer. 

I support you;

you support me.

I am in this world to offer you peace;

you are in this world to bring me joy.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

.

In fact, my soul and yours are the same. 

You appear in me, I appear in you. 

We hide in each other.

—Rumi

.

  

I am neither young nor old, existent nor nonexistent ... —Thich Nhat Hanh

 

.

[...] When a grasshopper sits on a blade of grass, he has no thought of separation, resistance, or blame… The green grasshopper blends completely with the green grass… It neither retreats nor beckons. It knows nothing of philosophy or ideals. It is simply grateful for its ordinary life. 

Dash across the meadow, my dear friend, and greet yesterday’s child. When you can’t see me, you yourself will return. Even when your heart is filled with despair, you will find the same grasshopper on the same blade of grass… 

Some life dilemmas cannot be solved by study or rational thought. We just live with them, struggle with them, and become one with them… To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

.

from another lovely posting by

Maria Popova at The Marginalian

here

.

dear ones

. 

put some honey and sea water by your bed.

acknowledge that your being needs 

sweetness and cleansing.

that it is sore.

that you are soft.


—Nayyirah Waheed

.

per(spective

.

In this classic masterwork of perspective, Abbott examines the science of multiple spatial dimensions while satirizing the absurdity of truth by consensus and extending a subtle invitation to consider how what we take as our givens limits our grasp of reality, presenting us with a false view of the world warped by our way of looking at it.

The story is narrated by a protagonist named A. Square, a native of Flatland — a world whose geometric denizens only live and see in two dimensions. But the square has a transformative experience that renders him “the sole possessor of the truths of Space.” On the eve of a new year, he has a hallucinatory vision of journeying to a faraway place called Lineland, populated by “lustrous points” who see him not as a shape but merely as a scattering of points along a line. Frustrated, he tries to demonstrate his squareness to their king by moving from left to right. The king, ignorant of directions, fails to perceive the motion and clings to his view of the square as points on a line.

But then the square himself is visited by a creature from another world — a sphere from the three-dimensional Spaceland. The very notion of three dimensions is at first utterly unimaginable to our hero — he sees the visitor merely as a circle. And yet when the sphere floats up and down, thus contracting and expanding the radius of the perceived circle based on its distance from our grounded observer, the square begins to suspect that he, like the inhabitants of Lineland, might be congenitally blind to the existence of another dimension.

When he returns to Flatland and tries to awaken his compatriots to the revelatory existence of a third dimension, he is met only with obtuse denial and declared mad. Decrees are passed to make illegal any suggestion of a third dimension and all who make such claims are to be imprisoned or executed.

The square himself is eventually thrown in jail, where he spends seven years and composes Flatland as a cautionary memoir he hopes will inspire posterity to see beyond the limit of two dimensions.


—Maria Popova
Edwin Abbott Abbott, 1884
Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimension

.

full article at

brainpickings

.

you must have a place

.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell was asked by an interviewer how a regular person could preserve his sense of the mythic when so many feel too besieged by the claims of every day living.

He said, "You must have a place to which you can go, in your heart, in your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not know what you owe anyone or what anyone owes you.

You must have a place you can go to where you do not know what your work is or who you work for, where you do not know who you are married to or who your children are."


—Joseph Campbell

.