out of nowhere, the mind comes forth —The Diamond Sutra

   

 

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If dreaming really were a kind of truce
(as people claim), a sheer repose of mind,
why then if you should waken up abruptly,
do you feel that something has been stolen from you?
Why should it be so sad, the early morning?
It robs us of an inconceivable gift,
so intimate it is only knowable
in a trance which the nightwatch gilds with dreams,
dreams that might very well be reflections,
fragments from the treasure-house of darkness,
from the timeless sphere that does not have a name,
and that the day distorts in its mirrors. 

Who will you be tonight in your dreamfall
into the dark, on the other side of the wall?


—Jorge Luis Borges
Dream
Alastair Reid version

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Usually people work hard to make things happen. Yet it might be that things happen by themselves, coming out of nowhere.

When you forget your carefully assembled fiction of who you are, you can find a natural delight in people, in the planet, the stones, and the trees. There is no observable limit to this beauty, and no one is excluded from it. Then, if you are fighting an enemy, you may be fighting them as well as you can, but you won’t be a true believer. You will know that an enemy is not truly other and that the fighting is some kind of misunderstanding. The worries that lead to quarrels may still be present, but they are not the main thing. 

Your problems could be a kind of dream, very powerful when you are in it, and yet a dream. You might notice that, even deep in dreaming, you are near to waking up. And the more you are awake, the kinder the world might seem.


—John Tarrant
Working With the Koan
from Bring Me The Rhinoceros
and other Zen Koans that will save your life

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