city of the blind
the depths where neither sin nor desire can reach,
the person that each one is in Gods eyes.
If only they could see themselves as they really are.
If only we could see each other that way
there would be no reason for war, for hatred, for cruelty…
we would fall down and worship each other."
- Thomas Merton
"Thus is it ever so: we oppose, when we misunderstand, what, if we understood, we would love with all our hearts. The skeptic of today is so much like Criminino in Bruno's day, who refused to look through Bruno's instrument, his telescope, at the mountains on the moon, because Criminino said, "There can be no mountains on the moon."
- Rudolf Steiner
- Kabir
"The state of mind that most needs enlightenment is the one that sees human beings as needing to be guided or enlightened. The sin that most needs to be loved and forgiven is the state of mind that sees human beings as sinners."
- Thaddeus Golas
The far-off murmur of some dreamland sea
Lifting throughout the night,
Up to the moon's mild light,
Waves silver-lustrous, silvery-white,
That beat in rhythm on the shadowy shore,
And burst in music, and are seen no more."
- George Sidney Hellman
"Intrinsic enlightenment refers to the idea that all living beings are Buddhas. It does not mean that beings possess a Buddha nature, or that beings are containers in which a seed form of Buddha can be found, as if there were two realities, beings and Buddha. It means that beings are Buddhas, but they are blind, stupid Buddhas who are ignorant of their true nature."
- Francis Cook
There is nothing that you need to achieve.
Just open your eyes."
- Siddhartha Gautama
"There is no secret Truth, only Truths we refuse to acknowledge.
Truth undermines the self to which we so desperately cling.
The Truth is not hidden from us. We are hiding from it."
- Rebbe Yerachmeil Ben Yisrael
"Truth is like vast space without entrance or exit. There is nothing more nor nothing less. Foolish people limit themselves covering their eyes but truth is never hidden. Some attend lectures trying to grasp truth in the words of others. Some accumulate books and try to dig truth from them. They are all wrong. A few of the wiser ones may learn meditation in their effort to reach an inner void. They choose the void rather than outer entanglements, but it is still the same old dualistic trick. Just think non-thinking if you are a true Zen student. There you do not know anything, but you are with everything. There is no choice nor preference, and dualism will vanish by itself. When you forget your liking and disliking, you will get a glimpse of oneness. The serenity of this middle way is quite different from the inner void."
- Shin-jin-mei
Unless the right person takes it at the right time, the elixir turns to poison.
Please be careful."
- Torei Enji
"Do not hastily let teachers give you a stamp of approval, claiming, "I understand Zen, I understand Tao." They may talk glibly, but they are making a strange karma."
- Lin-chi
"A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire."
- Thomas Merton
"All men should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why."
- James Thurber
"We read of spiritual efforts, and our imagination makes us believe that, because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them.
I am appalled to see how much of the change I thought I had undergone lately was only imaginary.
The real work seems still to be done.
It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself - to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed & then to find yourself still in bed."
- C.S. Lewis
"If we think about it, we find that our life consists of achieving a pure relationship between ourselves and the living universe about us.
This is how I save my soul - by accomplishing a pure relationship between me and another person, me and a nation, me and a race of people, me and animals, me and the trees or flowers, me and the earth, me and the skies and sun and stars, me and the moon; an infinity of pure relationships, big and little … this, if we know it, is our life and our eternity; the subtle, perfected relation between me and the circumambient universe."
- D.H. Lawrence
the path is clearest
when there is no place to go,
for through clouds and cliffs,
one goes nowhere
when there is no place to go,
and one can go nowhere
till he knows the path, too,
is a place.
- Shih-te
If you come to a break in your path, leap across."
- Han Shan
"To accuse others for ones misfortunes
is a sign of want of education.
To accuse oneself
shows that ones education has begun.
To accuse neither oneself nor others
shows ones education is complete."
- Epictetus
"When the mind is scattered and filled with thoughts, mostly all you see is your ordinary reality. Ordinary reality is real too, but part of what helps free us is to see that it's relative, that there are some other perspectives in life. And concentration is the vehicle to discover those other perspectives. It's also the way to learn to live in the present moment, so then you can see what is true."
- Jack Kornfield
Householder Series
"One suggestion is to regard your personality as a pet. It follows you around anyway, so give it a name and make friends with it. Keep it on a leash when you need to, and let it run free when you feel that is appropriate. Train it as well as you can, and then accept its idiosyncrasies, but always remember that your pet is not you. Your pet has its own life, and just happens to be in an intimate relationship with you, whoever you may be, hiding there behind your personality."
- Wes Nisker
"Enlightenment in Zen does not mean withdrawal from the world but means, on the contrary, active participation in everyday affairs. Their emphasis was on awakening in the midst of everyday affairs and they make it clear that they saw everyday life not only as the way to enlightenment, but as enlightenment itself.
In Zen, satori means the immediate experience of the Buddha nature of all things. First and foremost among these things are the objects, affairs and people involved in everyday life, so that while it emphasizes life's practicalities, Zen is nevertheless profoundly mystical. Living entirely in the present and giving full attention to everyday affairs, one who has attained satori experiences the wonder and mystery of life in every single act. The perfection of Zen is thus to live one's everyday life naturally and spontaneously. It is the belief in the perfection of our original nature, the realization that the process of enlightenment consists merely in becoming what we already are from the beginning.
- Fritjof Capra
You have no formal merit.
In the multiplicity of the relative world,
You cannot find such freedom.
Self-centered merit brings the joy of heaven itself,
But it is like shooting an arrow at the sky;
When the force is exhausted, it falls to the earth,
And then everything goes wrong."
- Cheng Tao-Ko
The arts liberated
Lament, the end of your dreams shows in your eyes.
Webbed, The window's shattered
Trapped, Yet inside your true dreams lie
Fettered, You lie shivering chanting 'nothing matters'
Hopeless, Until the day your fire dies
Chasmed, The cuts press and increase in length
Creaking, Nearing the breaking
Awakened, The spirits gather strength
Shattered, Phantasms flee, the Earth is shaking
Blinding, Light shines with the strength of the core
Illuminating, Show the path paved with the soul
Spreading, Sweet desires thaumaturgy pours
Freeing, Banality's bondage shrugged off like days of ol'
Hope, The future continues, the arts liberated.
- Thairone Medina
[thaumaturgy - the working of miracles or magic feats,
the act or art of performing something wonderful.]
"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."
- Bertrand Russell
"Don't fool yourself by saying "What can I do? What can I, an individual, living a shoddy little life, with all its confusion and ignorance, what can I do?" Ignorance exists only when you don't know yourself. Self-knowing is wisdom. You may be ignorant of all the books in the world (and I hope you are), of all the latest theories, but that is not ignorance. Not knowing oneself deeply, profoundly, is ignorance; and you cannot know yourself if you cannot look at yourself, see yourself actually as you are, without any distortion, without any wish to change."
- J. Krishnamurti
"Whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it." The meaning is very clear; it is the meaning of all religious practice. The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity."
- Joseph Campbell
"Differences exist because thought develops like a stream that happens to go one way here and another way there. Once it develops it produces real physical results that people are looking at, but they don't see where these results are coming from - that's one of the basic features of fragmentation. When they have produced these divisions they see that real things have happened, so they'll start with these real things as if they just suddenly got there by themselves, or evolved in nature by themselves. That's a mistake that thought makes. It produces a result, and then it says, I didn't do it; it's there by itself, and I must correct it. But if thought is constantly making this result and then saying, I've got to stop it, this is absurd. Because thought is caught up in this absurdity, it is producing all sorts of negative consequences, then treating them as independent and saying, I must stop them."
- David Bohm & Mark Edwards
Changing Consciousness
"Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are all there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question - for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitude though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality."
- William James
"A warrior chooses a path with heart, any path with heart, and follows it; and then he rejoices and laughs. He knows because he sees that his life will be over altogether too soon. He sees that nothing is more important than anything else."
"Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge," he said. "Because the art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man."
- Carlos Castaneda
"But it is in the nature of truth or love, cosmic consciousness, whatever you want to call it, to express itself, to affirm itself, to overcome difficulties. Once you've understood that the world is love in action, consciousness is love in action, you will look at it quite differently. But first your attitude to suffering must change. Suffering is primarily a call for attention, which itself is a movement of love. More than happiness, love wants growth, the widening and deepening of awareness and consciousness and being. Whatever prevents that becomes a cause of pain, and love does not shirk from pain."
- Nisargadatta Maharaj
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
- Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
"Whenever I am composing a new piece, it is the same. I have to go through the agony of not being able to do it. I keep trying to cut out the stage of incompetence and misery, but it can't be done, and I'm not sure that I would want to do it. The blackness is the door of the creative process."
- John Tarrant
The Light inside the Dark
Fear not the uncertainty you feel; the future must enter you long before it happens."
- Ranier Marie Rilke
Set in glowing emptiness
On the edge of time
- Noel Kaufmann
"Now, as far as the notion of two different worlds is concerned, my view is that there is only one world - this awesome and mysterious world, as Carlos Castaneda calls it - but this one reality has multiple aspects, dimensions, and levels.
Physicists and mystics deal with different aspects of reality. Physicists explore levels of matter, mystics, levels of mind. What their explorations have in common is that these levels, in both cases, lie beyond ordinary sensory perception. And, as Heisenberg has taught us, if the perception is nonordinary, then the reality is not ordinary."
- Fritjof Capra
Invariably the internal answer will be autobiographical - an identity based on the past. It will be a description of a continuity from childhood through adolescence to adulthood which is all past memories and no longer exists. Memory is the mirror and we live on the wrong side. Seldom will anyone answer the question of "Who am I?" with: "I appear to be the process of reading this page."
"You live in past programs, past events.
You are a memory.
You only feel comfortable in the non-existential, in that which does not yet exist, in the past and the future.
In the present, in the actual existential moment of now, you are ill-at-ease.
You feel powerless, for of course anything might happen.
You fear you might not be adequate in dealing with the unexpected situation.
You sleep while thinking you are awake, even though you manage to be highly efficient at maintaining your life even while being asleep to your true surroundings.
You dream twenty-four hours a day regardless of what the real world is relaying to your senses.
Your thoughts are in perpetual motion but any openness to receive new experiences has been replaced by the closed mechanism of the mind which edits and re-edits the same past programs.
Your activities are pre-programmed by society, the nation, the parent and the priest.
Rituals of politeness mask whoever might have once been inside.
Spontaneity is lost.
There is a constant rehearsal in a mind which is perpetually in a state of preparation of what to do, of what to say and to whom it is to be said.
You can never be in the present because your thoughts have rushed on to the next place and the next time.
You live for other's opinions, acting out your assigned roles efficiently and properly."
- Yatri
[paraphrased from Humanoid, Chapter 2, Paradise Lost]
Unknown Man
- Ezra Pound
"As my prayer became more attentive and inward I had less and less to say. I finally became completely silent. I started to listen - which is even further removed from speaking. I first thought that praying entailed speaking. I then learnt that praying is hearing, not merely being silent. This is how it is, to pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking. Prayer involves becoming silent, and being silent, and waiting until God is heard."
- Soren Kierkegaard
Your answers will be given in koans, zen riddles or cryptic sayings that challenge your conventional thought process and force you to look deeper. In the process, redefining your perspective of life.
- Fernando Pessoa
The slippery cold heights,
After the blinding misery,
The climbing,
the endless turning,
strikes like a fire,
A terrible violence
of creation,
A flash into
the burning heart
of the abominable;
Yet if we wait,
unafraid,
beyond the fearful instant,
The burning lake
turns into a forest pool,
The fire subsides
into rings of water,
A sunlit silence.
- Theodore Roethke
Many Lives, Many Masters
"The imagination places the world of the future either far above us, or far below, or in a relation of metempsychosis to ourselves. We dream of traveling through the universe - but is not the universe within ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us - the mysterious way leads inwards. Eternity with its worlds - the past and future - is in ourselves or nowhere. The external world is the world of shadows - it throws its shadow into the realm of light. At present this realm certainly seems to us so dark inside, lonely. shapeless. But how entirely different it will seem to us - when this gloom is past, and the body of shadows has moved away. We will experience greater enjoyment than ever, for our spirit has been deprived."
- Novalis
Miscellaneous Observations
"Constantly remind yourself, I am a member of the whole body of conscious things. If you think of yourself as a mere part, then love for mankind will not well up in your heart; you will look for some reward in every act of kindness and miss the boon which the act itself is offering. Then all your work will be seen as a mere duty and not as the very portal connecting you with the Universe itself."
- Marcus Aurelius
"This ego is hell, and hell is a dragon not diminished by oceans of water. It drinks down the seven seas, yet the heat of that manburner does not become less. It makes a morsel out of a world and gulps it down. Its belly keeps shouting: Is there any more?"
- Rumi
"Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think … and think … while you are alive.
What you call salvation belongs to the time before death.
If you don't break your ropes while you are alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire."
- Kabir
"You know that our breathing is the inhaling and exhaling of air. The organ that serves for this is the lungs that lie round the heart, so that the air passing through them thereby envelops the heart. Thus breathing is a natural way to the heart. And so, having collected your mind within you, lead it into the channel of breathing through which air reaches the heart and, together with this inhaled air, force your mind to descend into the heart and to remain there."
- Nicephorus the Solitary
The Rock Exercise:
Hold a rock in the palm of your hand.
Grasp it as tightly as you can.
Explore the physical sensations in your body - pain, discomfort, tension.
Then open your hand.
Notice the rock - it's not crushed; it hasn't gone away.
Notice that it is gently resting in your palm; just being held gently. Notice the sensation: the hardness, the lightness or heaviness; the differences in the sensations, sharp or smooth edges. Notice its temperature.
These are it's true characteristics. It is only the earth element (hardness); the water element (cohesion); and the fire element (temperature) and air (motion and pressure due to gravity) - nothing more.
This is what it brings to you. You need not add anything to it.
Open, spacious, tensionless effort.
A non-doing effort.
Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness
Session Six
"We all have a story. It's the pain and dysfunction of our lives, the rip offs and the abuse, the disappointments and setbacks, the memory of past experiences. It's our illusions and the ego's need to be right all the time. But the story is just that, a story, and it's got to go or you will never become free."
- Stuart Wilde
"One of the biggest factors in stress is cognitive distortion - we make an absurd situation into a catastrophe. We create our own reality out of it. Like, "You make me crazy!" Well, nobody makes you crazy; you make your self crazy. There is a tremendous amount of humor in that . If we could just take a breath and step away and be witnesses to our own absurdity, we'd be cracking up most of the time. What humor can do is make your life less of a problem. A laugh is a break. It removes the dark lens that you see your life through and gives you a lighter lens that gives you clarity. As you step away and get less involved in getting pissed off, you achieve a certain level of enlightenment. In other words, humor takes you to a higher place."
- Loretta Laroche
"You have registered for the human race. You have donned a flesh-and-blood T-shirt, the matching garb that makes the incredibly diverse range of all of you look so very similar. You choose thus for the sheer excitement and challenge of the endeavor itself and for what you have to gain, which is as yet unknowable and vast. YOU - exhausted, worried, terrified, resentful and rageful though you may be - would not have missed this for the world."
- Penumbral Domains, an unseen Guide
"The basic condition for all healing is to be able to rest, but we don't have the capacity to rest. We have the habit of running, of doing things. That is why to meditate is first of all to learn how to rest, to give your body and your mind a chance to rest and to heal themselves. It seems to be a very simple thing, but we need training to be able to do that.
When an animal living in the forest is wounded, it always tries to look for a quiet place to lay down for many days and allow the wound to heal. During these days the animal does not think about eating or anything else. That is the practice of all animals in the forest every time they get wounded by another animal or by other kinds of things, including disease. That wisdom we have to learn. There are wounds within our body. We may have diseases, we may have difficulties that we think to be incurable. We may have blocks of suffering in our consciousness. We may have despair, fear, and confusion, but we know that our body has the capacity of healing itself if we allow it a chance to rest. This is not only true for our body but also for our soul.
Our consciousness knows and has the capacity of healing itself - only if we allow it the chance, that is, to allow it to rest, to authorize it to rest. When we cut our finger we are not so afraid, we know that our body can heal itself. So we just clean the wound, protect it from the dirt, and the battle is from inside, and in just twenty-four hours we can heal it. Our body knows how to create antibodies to protect itself. We have to believe in our body. We have to allow our body a chance to rest. Many difficult diseases may be healed just by our capacity of resting. This we have to learn.
You have had the experience of utmost suffering - something happened to you and you did not believe that you could survive that. How could you survive such bad news, pain? And yet, you have survived. You have gone through that period and you've proved to be able to survive that kind of suffering. It means your consciousness knows the way to survive. You say, “Time heals.” But time alone cannot heal your suffering. It is not because you are acquainted with the suffering that you are healed. No. It is because of the fact that your consciousness knows the way to heal itself. You have to trust it because in your consciousness there is the Buddha, there is a seat of love, of understanding. If you allow them to manifest, then your consciousness will be able to heal itself.
The heart of the Buddhist practice is to stop - to stop running, to stop preventing our body and our soul from resting. You breathe in and out in such a way that you can stop completely running in your mind and in your body. Meditation is made of stopping, calming and looking deeply. Stopping helps you to rest, to calm, to have peace, to provide the basic condition for healing."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
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