I, the Beloved, and Love

We lay in the dark, breathing together. The deepest intimacy ...

—L. Gluck



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In those days before a trace of the two worlds,
no "other" yet imprinted on the Tablet of Existence,

I, the Beloved, and Love lived together
in the corner of an uninhabited cell.


—Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
Divine Flashes

...

For this is the truth about our soul…our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.


—Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway

...

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another.


—Thomas Merton

...



If a thing loves, it is infinite.


—William Blake

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give love in secret by praying for one another

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Never get involved with God, and above all never in any really intimate way. 

Get involved with people and imagine that together with them you are involving yourselves with God. 

—Søren Kierkegaard
Works of Love (1847)

...

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction not a state of the soul. 

If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

—Simone Weil

The Love of God and Affliction, Waiting for God

...

let all go

let it go - the

smashed word broken 

open vow or

the oath cracked length

wise - let it go it

was sworn to

go

let them go - the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers - you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go - the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things - let all go
dear

so comes love


—E. E. Cummings

...

I saw you dancing last night
on the roof of your house
all alone.

I felt your heart longing for the Friend.

I saw you whirling

beneath the soft bright rose

that hung from an invisible stem in the sky.

So I began to change into my best clothes

in hopes of joining you,

even though I live a thousand miles away.

And if you had spun like an immaculate sphere

just two more times,

then bowed again so sweetly to the east,

you would have found God and me

standing so near

and lifting you into our arms.

I saw you dancing last night

near the roof of this world.

—Hafiz

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wait - what ?

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To love is to undress our names. —Octavio Paz

Love in its essence is spiritual fire.  

—Seneca



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In the end these things matter most: 

How well did you love?

How fully did you love?

How deeply did you learn to let go?

—Buddha

 
...

Let your love flow outward through the universe,

To its height, its depth, its broad extent,

A limitless love, without hatred or enmity.

Then as you stand or walk,

Sit or lie down,

As long as you are awake,

Strive for this with a one-pointed mind;

Your life will bring heaven to earth.

—The Sutta-Nipāta

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soul of the whole

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We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.

Meantime within man is the soul of the whole;
the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.

And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.


—Ralph Waldo Emerson

 ...

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest —- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. 

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.


—Albert Einstein

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whale eye
Christopher Swann
.

the way in

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Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding, and beauty.

To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.

To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.


—Linda Hogan

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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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there is no division between love and sorrow and death

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Here it is that we approach that attitude of the self, that point of view, which is loosely and generally called mystical.

Here, instead of those broad blind alleys which philosophy showed us, a certain type of mind has always discerned three straight and narrow ways going out towards the Absolute.

In religion, in pain, and in beauty—and not only in these, but in many other apparently useless peculiarities of the empirical world and of the perceiving consciousness—these persons insist that they recognize at least the fringe of the real.


—Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism

...

Now I think there are three things that we have to understand very deeply if we are to comprehend the whole movement of life. They are time, sorrow, and death. To understand time, to comprehend the full significance of sorrow, and to abide with death—all this demands the clarity of love. Love is not a theory, nor is it an ideal. Either you love, or you do not love. It cannot be taught. You cannot take lessons in how to love, nor is there a method by the daily practice of which you can come to know what love is. But I think one comes to love naturally, easily, spontaneously, when one really understands the meaning of time, the extraordinary depth of sorrow, and the purity that comes with death.


... 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

...

Brother stand the pain;
Escape the poison of your impulses.
The sky will bow to your beauty, if you do.

Learn to light the candle. Rise with the sun. Turn away from the cave of your sleeping. That way a thorn expands to a rose. A particular glows with the universal.

—Rum

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markings

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Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of inference —Karl Friston | Aeon Essays

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There is no such thing as a person. 

There are only restrictions and limitations. 

The sum total of these defines the person. 

You think you know yourself when you know what you are. 

But you never know who you are. The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot. 

See that you are not what you believe yourself to be. 

Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. 

You are not. 

Refuse to think of yourself in terms of this or that.

There is no other way out of misery, which you have created for yourself through blind acceptance without investigation. 

Suffering is a call for enquiry, all pain needs investigation. 

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

...

You cannot fight pain and pleasure on the level of consciousness.  

To go beyond them you must go beyond consciousness, which is possible only when you look at consciousness as something that happens to you and not in you, as something external, alien, superimposed. 

Then, suddenly you are free of consciousness, really alone, with nothing to intrude. 

And that is your true state.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

...

The best time is late afternoon

when the sun strobes through

the columns of trees as you are hiking up,

and when you find an agreeable rock

to sit on, you will be able to see

the light pouring down into the woods

and breaking into the shapes and tones

of things and you will hear nothing

but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy

falling of a cone or nut through the trees,

and if this is your day you might even

spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese

driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things

how the voices of light enter the body

and begin to recite their stories

how the earth holds us painfully against

its breast made of humus and brambles

how we who will soon be gone regard

the entities that continue to return

greener than ever, spring water flowing

through a meadow and the shadows of clouds

passing over the hills and the ground

where we stand in the tremble of thought

taking the vast outside into ourselves.

—Billy Collins
Directions (excerpt), The Art of Drowning

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Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra

 


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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.

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wonder(ful

with spoken introduction

.

It is I who must begin.
Once I begin, once I try --
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
-- to live in harmony
with the "voice of Being," as I
understand it within myself
-- as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.

Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.


—Vaclav Havel

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An ant hurries along a threshing floor
with its wheat grain, moving between huge stacks
of wheat, not knowing the abundance
all around. It thinks its one grain
is all there is to love.

So we choose a tiny seed to be devoted to.
This body, one path, one teacher.
Look wider and farther.

The essence of every human being can see,
and what that essence-eye takes in,
the being becomes. Saturn. Solomon!
 

The ocean pours through a jar,
and you might say it swims inside
the fish! This mystery gives peace to
your longing and makes the road home home.

—Rumi
Coleman Barks version

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largerloves
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what speaks in the blood

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Without stirring abroad,
one can know the whole world; 

Without looking out of the window
one can see the way of heaven. 

The further one goes the less one knows.

—Lao Tzu

...

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark. It is winter and there is smoke from the fires. 

It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. 

Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.


—Linda Hogan

...

Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

...

I am a fountain, You are my water.

I flow from You to You.

I am an eye, You are my light,

I look from You to You.

You are neither my right nor my left.

You are my foot and my arm as well.

I am a traveler, You are my road.

I go from You to You.


—Zeynep Hatun, 15th Century,
Murat Yagan translation

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wherever you go, there you are

. 

Just turn away from all that occupies the mind;

do whatever work you have to complete,
avoid new obligations;

keep empty, keep available, but resist not what comes uninvited.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

...
 

wherever you are is the entry point

—Kabir

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