you are that which has the infinite potential to love, yet, you cling to your imagined personality

 

whale breath

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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

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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

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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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