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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Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years could pass in a moment.

Time is not a straight line but rather a labyrinth, and if you press yourself against the wall in the right place you can hear the hurried steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walk past on the other side.


—Tomas Tranströmer

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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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all shapes speak

 

Nils Udo

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The beautiful illusion of the dream worlds, in the creation of which every man is a consulate artist, is the precondition of all visual art, and indeed, as we shall see, of an important amount of poetry. We take pleasure in the immediate apprehension of form, all shapes speak to us, and nothing is indifferent or unnecessary. But even when this dream reality is presented to us with the greatest intensity, we know it is just an illusion. 

Men of philosophy even have a sense that beneath the reality in which we live there is hidden a second, quite different world, and that our own world therefore is an illusion; and Schopenhauer actually says that the gift of being at times able to see men and objects as mere phantoms or dream images is the mark of the philosophical capacity. 

Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.

—Nietzche
The Birth of Tragedy

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Give up all.

The correct understanding will be when you realize that whatever you have understood so far, is invalid.

Give up all and you gain all. Then life becomes what it was meant to be: pure radiation from an inexhaustible source.

In that light the world appears dimly, like a dream.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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As stars, a lamp, a fault of vision,

As dewdrops or a bubble,

A dream, a lightning flash, a cloud,

So one should see conditioned things.

—Diamond Sutra

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