telling time

   

.

.

Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. 

It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. 

And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. 

This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind.


—Joseph Campbell
Myths of Light

.

We are the creators and creatures of each other, causing and bearing each other’s burden. 

Love is not selective, desire is selective.

In Love there are no strangers.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

For the birds there is not a time that they tell,
but the point vierge between darkness and light,
between being and non-being.

You can tell yourself the time by their waking,
if you are experienced. 

But that is your folly, not theirs.


—Thomas Merton 
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

.

one's not half two

.

one's not half two.  It's two are halves of one:

which halves reintegrating,shall occur

no death and any quantity;but than

all numerable mosts the actual more

minds ignorant of stern miraculous

this everytruth-beware of heartless them

(given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss;

or,sold the reason,they  undream a dream)

one is the song which friends and angels sing:

all murdering lies by mortals told make two.

Let liars wilt,repaying life they're loaned;

we(by a gift called dying born)must grow

deep in dark least ourselves remembering

love only rides his year.

                                    All lose, whole find

—e. e. cummings

 

.

But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. 

These are the eyes of the earth. 

And this is the voice of the earth.

―Joseph Campbell

The Power of Myth
wait - what ?

.

Although the evening is cold and starless
And the rain is raging,
I'm still singing my song during this period,
Don't know who's listening.

Though the world is drowned in war and fear,
At some point
Burning secretly, if no one sees them,
The love continues.


—Hermann Hesse

.

Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. —Taisen Deshimaru

   

Night Sea, 1963, Agnes Martin
oil, gold, canvas

.

In my best moments I think "Life has passed me by” and I am content.

—Agnes Martin

.

.

Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. 

It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. 

And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. 

This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind.


—Joseph Campbell
Myths of Light

.

For the birds there is not a time that they tell,
but the point vierge between darkness and light,
between being and non-being.

You can tell yourself the time by their waking,
if you are experienced. 

But that is your folly, not theirs.


—Thomas Merton 
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

.

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

.

First thing you do before you write a decent song, before you pick up the guitar, before you play your first gig, you lay in bed at night and you dream yourself up. 

Everything you were in the day, as we stand united, all rock musicians, in the great faith of self-loathing and self-hatred. I hate my nose... I hate my hair… 

So the first thing you do is, you dream yourself to life.

—Bruce Springsteen, April 8, 2014

.

we are the consciousness of the earth

  

.

I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked.

If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us, the labyrinth is fully known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. 

And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the centre of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

If we will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. 

We see with the eyes of the earth. 

We speak with the voice of the earth.


―Joseph Campbell

.

knowing with an(other

  

.

One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. 

People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another—but it’s predictable. 

And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness, rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment.

—Joseph Campbell

.

According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. 

The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don’t bother you anymore. You become light-hearted and full of joy. The second symptom is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous. 

―Deepak Chopra

Synchro Destiny

.

I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

—Walt Whitman

.

listen

  

.

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. 


—Joseph Campbell

The Power of Myth

.

Understand the secret unseen ways of 
heart to heart contact like this:

When two lamps are being lit 

The lamps will remain separate 

But their light will become intermixed.


—Rumi 

.

Spirit, rehearse the journeys of the body
that are to come, the motions of the matter that held you.

Rise up in the smoke of palo santo.
Fall to the earth in the falling rain.
Sink in, sink down to the farthest roots.

Mount slowly in the rising sap
to the branches, the crown, the leaf-tips.
Come down to earth as leaves in autumn
to lie in the patient rot of winter.

Rise again in spring’s green fountains.
Drift in sunlight with the sacred pollen
to fall in blessing.
All earth’s dust
has been life, held soul, is holy.


—Ursula K. Le Guin

. 

you are that

  

.

Life has no meaning. 
Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. 

It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.


—Joseph Campbell

.

I sometimes forget that I was created for Joy.
My mind is too busy.
My Heart is too heavy
for me to remember
that I have been
called to dance
the Sacred dance of life.

I was created to smile
To Love
To be lifted up
And to lift others up.

O’ Sacred One
Untangle my feet
from all that ensnares.
Free my soul.
That we might
Dance
and that our dancing
might be contagious.


Hafiz

.

two tanka

Nordin Seruyan, central Borneo

.

The goal of life is to match your heartbeat to the beat of the universe, 

to match your nature with Nature.

—Joseph Campbell 

.

From outside my house,

only the faint distant sound

of gentle breezes

wandering through bamboo leaves

in the long evening silence.

Late evening finally

comes: I unlatch the door

and quietly

await the one

who greets me in my dreams.


–Otomo No Yakamochi

.

we are that

        

.

We are the children of this beautiful planet that we have lately seen photographed from the moon.  

We are not delivered into it by some god, but have come forth from it.

We are its eyes and mind, its seeing and its thinking. 

And the earth, together with its sun, this light around which it flies like a moth, came forth, we are told, from a nebula; and that nebula, in turn, from space.

So that we are the mind, ultimately, of space …


—Joseph Campbell
Myths to Live By

.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart 

whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. 

At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

—Plato

.

As long as nothing can be known for sure

(no signals have been picked up yet),

as long as Earth is still unlike

the nearer and more distant planets,

as long as there’s neither hide nor hair

of other grasses graced by other winds,

of other treetops bearing other crowns,

other animals as well-grounded as our own,

as long as only the local echo

has been known to speak in syllables,

as long as we still haven’t heard the word

of better or worse mozarts,

platos, edisons, elsewhere,

as long as our inhuman crimes

are still committed only between humans,

as long as our kindness

is still incomparable,

peerless even in its imperfection,

as long as our heads packed with illusions

still pass for the only heads so packed,

as long as the roofs of our mouths alone

still raise voices to high heavens  

– let’s act like very special guests of honour

at the district firemen’s ball,

dance to the beat of the local oompah band

and pretend that it’s the ball

to end all balls.

I can’t speak for other –
for me this is misery and happiness enough:

just this sleepy backwater
where even the stars have time to burn
while winking at us
unintentionally.


—Wislawa Szymborska
the ball

.

If you are falling …. dive. —Joseph Campbell

  

.

You feel you are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything. God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance. 

Vanity runs, love digs. If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you and will close in because of the wind of your flight; if you go deep down into yourself it will disappear in paradise.


—Gustave Thibon

.

We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast and anxiety comes along. All you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. 

It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is, joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.


—Joseph Campbell

.

The way of love is not a subtle argument.
The door there is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.
How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling, they're given wings.


—Rumi

(notes to self

sway in the rift between beats

  

.

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

.

Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. 

This is it. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.


—Joseph Campbell

.

In our consciousness of time
we are doomed to the past.
The future we may dream of
but can know it only after
it has come and gone.
The present too we know
only as the past. When
we say, "This now is
present, the heat, the breeze,
the rippling water," it is past.
Before we knew it, before
we said "now." it was gone.

If the only time we live
is the present, and if the present
is immeasurably short (or
long), then by the measure
of the measurers we don't
exist at all, which seems
improbable, or we are
immortals, living always
in eternity, as from time to time
we hear, but rarely know.

You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river
or the swallows flying, you see
a beloved face, mortal
and beloved, causing the heart
to sway in the rift between beats
where we live without counting,
where we have forgotten time
and have forgotten ourselves,
where eternity has seized us
as its own. This breaks
open the little circles
of the humanly known and believed,
of the world no longer existing,
letting us live where we are,
as in the deepest sleep also
we are entirely present,
entirely trusting, eternal.

Is it concentration of the mind,
our unresting counting
that leaves us standing
blind in our dust?
In time we are present only
by forgetting time.


—Wendell Berry

.

return with the bliss

  

.

The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature as opposites (as, e.g., ‘warm and cold’) where there are, not opposites, but differences of degree. 

This bad habit has led us into wanting to comprehend and analyse the inner world, too, the spiritual-moral world, in terms of such opposites. 

An unspeakable amount of painfulness, arrogance, harshness, estrangement, frigidity has entered into human feelings because we think we see opposites instead of transitions. 


—Friedrich Nietzsche
The Wanderer and his Shadow

.

The divine manifestation is ubiquitous, only our eyes are not open to it. Awe is what moves us forward. 

Live from your own center. The divine lives within you.
The separateness apparent in the world is secondary. 

Beyond the world of opposites is an unseen, but experienced, unity and identity in us all.

You must return with the bliss and integrate it.
The return is seeing that the radiance is everywhere.

The world is a match for us. We are a match for the world.
The spirit is the bouquet of nature.

Sanctify the place you are in.


—Joseph Campbell

.

'The world,’ said the Buddha, 'is an ever-burning fire.’

Raymond Pettibon

Only the Fine, 1991

largerloves

.

if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. 

These are the eyes of the earth. 
And this is the voice of the earth. 


―Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth

.

[...] to enjoy the world requires something more than mere good health and good spirits; for this world, as we all now surely know, is horrendous. ‘All life,’ said the Buddha, 'is sorrowful’; and so, indeed, it is. Life consuming life: that is the essence of its being, which is forever a becoming. 

'The world,’ said the Buddha, 'is an ever-burning fire.’ 

And so it is. 

And that is what one has to affirm, with a yea! a dance! a knowing, solemn, stately dance of the mystic bliss beyond pain that is at the heart of every mythic rite.


—Joseph Campbell
Myths to Live By

.

Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea! 

—Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoch

.

 

everything is alright forever and forever and forever

  

.

Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. 

So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. 

The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.


—Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth

.

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. 

Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind it is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. 

Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. 

It is all one vast awakened thing. 

I call it the golden eternity. 

It is perfect.

We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. 

That which passes through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. 

Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.


—Jack Kerouac

.

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

—Julian of Norwich, 14th century

.

hold everything dear

.

The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. 

It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, — or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.

We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.


—William James
The Principles of Psychology

.

A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different time-scales, ranging from solar energy to insects that live for a day. 

A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible. 

It is not only visitors who feel this attendant something; hunters and foresters who can read unwritten signs are even more keenly aware of it.


—John Berger
Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

.

The goal of life is to match your heartbeat to the beat of the universe, 

to match your nature with Nature.

—Joseph Campbell 

.

the energy of the blood

    

.

The foundation of the body is the heart, which is the residence of essence... By assembling essence in its residence, it will by and by enter into the blood ... 


—Dong Zhongshu
董仲舒 Han Dynasty Chinese scholar, 179 BC - 104 BC

.

This description of essence as being first assembled in the heart and then passed on into the body allows the concrete understanding of the blood as energy and of the mind as energy in ancient Chinese thought. 

The mind is consequently thought of as fluid residing in one or the other organ and circulating freely around the body—carried, perhaps, by the energy of the blood.


—Hidemi Ishida
Body and Mind: The Chinese Perspective

.

The goal of life is to match your heartbeat to the beat of the universe, 

to match your nature with Nature.

—Joseph Campbell 

.