the intellectual landscape
I've torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.
If you're not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you,
and sleep."
- Rumi
If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
- Leonard Cohen
"What you don't feel, you will not grasp by art,
Unless it wells out of your soul
And with sheer pleasure takes control,
Compelling every listener's heart.
But sit - and sit, and patch and knead,
Cook a ragout, reheat your hashes,
Blow at the sparks and try to breed
A fire out of piles of ashes!
Children and apes may think it great,
If that should titillate your gum,
But from heart to heart you will never create.
If from your heart it does not come."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust I
"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."
- T.S. Eliot
"When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before,
like the tambourine sound of the snow cricket
whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.
Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,
shaking the water sparks from its wings.
Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
like the diligent leaves.
A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.
Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good natured and untidy in your exuberance.
In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling."
- Mary Oliver
the bang splat poem:
<>!*''#
^@`$$-
!*'$_
%*<>#4
&)../
|{~~SYSTEM HALTED
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.
- Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese
Finally, to forgo love is to kiss a leaf,
is to let rain fall nakedly upon your head,
is to respect fire,
is to study man's eyes and his gestures
as he talks,
is to set bread upon the table
and a knife discreetly by,
is to pass through crowds
like a crowd of oneself.
Not to love is to live.
To love is to be led away
into a forest where the secret grave
is dug, singing, praising darkness
under the trees.
To live is to sign your name,
is to ignore the dead,
is to carry a wallet
and shake hands.
To love is to be a fish.
My boat wallows in the sea.
You who are free,
rescue the dead.
- David Ignatow
"Poets utter great and wise things which they themselves do not understand."
- Plato
A time comes when we no longer can say:
my God.
A time of total cleaning up.
A time when we no longer can say: my love.
Because love proved useless.
And the eyes don't cry.
And the hands do only rough work.
And the heart is dry.
They knock at our door in vain, we won't open.
We remain alone, the light turned off,
and our enormous eyes shine in the dark.
It is obvious we no longer know how to suffer.
And we want nothing from our friends.
Who cares if old age comes, what is old age?
Our shoulders are holding up the world
and it's lighter than a child's hand.
Wars, famine, family fights inside buildings
prove only that life goes on
and not everybody has freed themselves yet.
Some (the delicate ones) judging the spectacle cruel
will prefer to die.
A time comes when death doesn't help.
A time comes when life is an order.
Just life, without any escapes.
- Carlos Drummond de Andrade
"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."
- T. S. Eliot
I am intoxicated. I don't know what I am doing.
This is love - to fly upward
toward the endless heavens.
To rend a hundred veils at every moment.
At the first breath, to give up life;
At the final step, to go without feet.
To see the world as a dream
and not as it appears.
- Jalaluddin Rumi
"Listen to the mustnt's child,
listen to the dont's,
the shouldnt's, the impossibles,
listen to the wont's.
Listen to the never haves,
then listen close to me . . .
Anything can happen child,
anything can be."
- Shel Silverstein
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
- Mark Strand
Eating Poetry
"One of the conditions of being human is, even if we're surrounded by others, we essentially live our lives alone.
Real life takes place inside us."
- Paul Auster
"The real wilderness of the hermit is the wilderness of the human spirit which is at once his and everyone else's. What he seeks in that wilderness is not himself, not human company, and consolation, but God.
Man's loneliness is, in fact, the loneliness of God. This is why it is such a great thing for a man to discover his solitude and learn to live in it. For there he finds that he and God are one: that God is aloneness as he himself is alone. That God wills to be alone in man."
"You will never find interior solitude unless you make some conscious effort to deliver yourself from the desires and the cares and the attachments of an existence in time and in the world."
- Thomas Merton
"In this hut where I live as a hermit, as a passing traveler, there is no need to accumulate household possessions. ... But I should not have it thought, from what I have said, that I am devoted to solitude and seek only to hide my traces in the wilderness. Rather, I am like a sick man weary of people, or someone who is tired of the world. What is there to say? ... I labor without results, am worn of spirit and wrinkled of brow. Now, when autumn is half over, and every morning and each evening brings changes to the scene, I wonder if that is not what is meant by dwelling in unreality. And here too I end my words."
- Basho
My daughter: "I hope there's an animal
somewhere that nobody has ever seen.
And I hope nobody ever sees it."
Being, whose flesh dissolves
at our glance, knower
of the secret sums and measures,
you are always here,
dwelling in the oldest sycamores,
visiting the faithful springs
when they are dark and the foxes
have crept to their edges.
I have come upon pools
in streams, places overgrown
with the woods' shadow,
where I knew you had rested,
watching the little fish
hang still in the flow;
as I approached they seemed
particles of your clear mind
disappearing among the rocks.
I have walked deep in the woods
in the early morning, sure
that while I slept
your gaze passed over me.
That we do not know you
is your perfection
and our hope. The darkness
keeps us near you.
- Wendell Berry
Farming: A Handbook
"Since we were apparently not ready, we did not pass via the clear light into nirvana - which, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is a possibility. You and I missed the boat, and there was no alternative but to gather up our skandhas again and descend for the umpteenth time to the place where, by using the resources of our own mind, heart, and will, we can take control of the game again."
- Jules van Bergen
The bartender asks him, "Would you like another?"
Descartes pauses and says, "I think not," and promptly disappears.
The bartender is enlightened.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"Beloved Pan, and all you other gods who dwell in this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry. Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me."
- Socrates
"To take refuge in the Buddha is to take refuge in someone who has let go of holding back just as you can do. To take refuge in the dharma is to take refuge in all the teachings that encourage you and nurture your inherent ability to let go of holding back. And to take refuge in the sangha is to take refuge in the community of people who share this longing to let go and open rather than shield themselves. The support we give each other as practitioners is not the usual samsaric support in which we all join the same team and complain about someone else. It's more that you're on your own, completely alone, but it's helpful to know that there are forty other people who are also going through this all by themselves. That's very supportive and encouraging. Fundamentally, even though other people can give you support, you do it yourself, and that's how you grow up in this process, rather than becoming more dependent."
- Pema Chodron
Start Where You Are
"If we follow the reasoning of the ancients, this evolutionary course extends over many incarnations and is sometimes spoken of as the Path. On this Path there are innumerable awakenings or births of new awareness. At times understanding will flood our nature and so alter our outlook that we are never again the same. At other times insight glows for an interval, but fades in the confused welter of daily events. The old saying has it that "the Self can only be grasped in each moment as it passes." When we go out under the stars and gaze into the immensity of space, something marvelous stirs in us - to which we cannot give labels and which cannot be confined in a human mind. The deep without us calls forth the deep within us - indeed what is outside and what is inside? Our human consciousness cannot contain it, so no matter how many times we bring ourselves back to the scene, the magic moment, though evoked time and again, cannot be sustained."
- John P. Van Mater
"A large part of the pleasure that I have experienced in the study of Buddhism has arisen from what I may call the strangeness of the intellectual landscape. All the ideas, the modes of argument, even the postulates assumed and not argued about, have always seemed so strange, so different from anything to which I have been accustomed, that I felt all the time as though walking in Fairyland. Much of the charm that the Oriental thoughts and ideas have for me appears to be because they so seldom fit into Western categories."
- Henry Clarke Warren
Buddhism In Translations
"Many people tell us that the Buddha taught two different types of meditation - mindfulness meditation and concentration meditation. Mindfulness meditation, they say, is the direct path, while concentration practice is the scenic route that you take at your own risk because it's very easy to get caught there and you may never get out. But when you actually look at what the Buddha taught, he never separates these two practices. They are both parts of a single whole. Every time he explains mindfulness and its place in the path, he makes it clear that the purpose of mindfulness practice is to lead the mind into a state of Right Concentration - to get the mind to settle down and to find a place where it can really feel stable, at home, where it can look at things steadily and see them for what they are.
In the typical unbalanced state of the mind, things are appearing and disappearing too fast for you to notice them clearly. But as the Buddha notes, when you get really skilled at Right Concentration, you can step back a bit and really see what you've got. You can see, say, where there's an element of attachment, where there's an element of stress, or even where there's inconstancy within your balanced state. This is where you begin to gain insight, as you see the natural cleavage lines among the different factors of the mind, and in particular, the cleavage line between awareness and the objects of awareness.
Still another reason why solid concentration is necessary for insight is that when discernment comes to the mind, the basic lesson it will teach you is that you've been stupid. You've held onto things even though deep down inside you should have known better. Without aiming at Right Concentration, you can't develop the skills needed for understanding the mind - for it's in the process of mastering the skill of mindful concentration that true insight arises. Just as you don't really understand a herd of cattle until you've successfully herded them - learning from all your failures along the way - you can't get a sense of all the cause-and-effect currents running through the mind until you've learned from your failures and successes in getting them to gather in a state of concentrated mindfulness and mindful concentration."
- Thanissaro Bhikkhu
"Each person is a great mystery, to himself and to others. We see the ever-changing play of light and shadow upon the superficial aspects of ourselves, but of the endless depths that lie beneath we are for the most part ignorant or unconscious. At any time, however, currents flowing from these depths may sweep us unexpectedly into thoughts, actions, or even lifestyles we would now find inconceivable. We may then rise to heights of achievement or fall far below what we would have believed possible in others. Yet how easy it is to pass judgment based on what people manifest of themselves outwardly at any given time, as if this could approach the totality of who they really are."
- Sarah Belle Dougherty
"The human soul, even unconsciously, reaches out to become more like its inner self. There have always been ways of knowing through a more direct experience of eternal realities, and these, if shared, can benefit others. Science, religion, and the arts are pathways of seeing and awakening, each essential to the growth of our being. Each has its own language to record inner experience. It doesn't matter whether this is conveyed through the artist's brush, poetry, a symphony, or the camera lens. All these ways and more are involved in the greatest art - the art of living and becoming. The intuitive process of creativity is essential to life, and in its highest expression, every language of consciousness is active in the eternal moment."
- John Van Mater, Jr.
"The Buddha, well before Aquinas or Heisenberg, stressed the primacy of the mind in the perception and even creation of reality. A central concept of Buddhism is the idea that everything is made from the mind. Any distinction between subject and object is false, imagined, at best an expedient nod to the demands of conventional language. In the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Buddha uses metaphor to elucidate:
It can paint an entire world
If a person knows the workings of the mind
As it universally creates the world
This person then sees the Buddha
And understands the Buddha's true and actual nature."
We think we are observing nature, but what we are observing is our own mind at work. We are the subject and object of our own methodology. Moreover, this mind encompasses the entirety of the universe; there is nothing outside of it, nothing it does not contain."
- Martin J. Verhoeven
"Enlightenment does not annihilate the ego. Why would someone want to annihilate something so useful and extraordinary? It has not been by chance that we have mentioned many times how important the mind and ego are as the creative force of our intelligence. We need to dissolve this dangerous spiritual conditioning that has taken deep root in our habitual way of thinking. Irresponsible psychological language has caused a lot of harm to those on the Path. The ego concept needs to be defined in a way that relates to our everyday experience, and to all those complicated processes in meditation and on the spiritual Path.
In the case of people without insight into the nature of consciousness, the mental activity is in the center of consciousness. Every thought creates a new center, a new identification which is the ego - there is nothing else there. We cannot talk about “one” ego but rather about a flow of conscious or semi-conscious events, being capable of operating in a relatively integrated way. This is the function of the ego.
When Enlightenment takes place, the Presence becomes the center, and there is the feeling that all the thoughts are only witnessed objects-events on the periphery of consciousness; they are guests coming and going, having nothing to do with the stillness of our being. For that reason, it is easy to conclude that there is only Witnessing, and the rest is irrelevant, impersonal and objective. But this popular conclusion is one-dimensional and is not able to grasp the dynamics of human consciousness. Thoughts are being witnessed and observed. The center is empty and uninvolved. Is that all? Not fully. Although the thoughts are witnessed, the intelligence which is using them represents also a parallel center of relative consciousness - it is also the "Me."
We can speak about two centers within us, as manifested beings: one is the Witnessing Consciousness - a constant flow of presence, and the second is the moving self-conscious center of our personality. When we see this clearly, there is no doubt that the thoughts, which are being witnessed, are simultaneously an indivisible part of Me, and it is Me who is thinking them! In the case of an Enlightened being, although thoughts have a different quality, still they remain as a function of consciousness and as a functional self-relating center, which we interpret as "me." The absolute Me and the relative me are one. Being and self-conscious expression are one."
- Aziz Kristof
"Conventional thought is, in brief, the confusion of the concrete universe of nature with the conceptual things, events, and values of linguistic and cultural symbolism. For in Taoism and Zen the world is seen as an inseparably interrelated field or continuum, no part of which can actually be separated from the rest or valued above or below the rest. It was in this sense that Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch, meant that "fundamentally not one thing exists," for he realized that things are terms, not entities. They exist in the abstract world of thought, but not in the concrete world of nature. Thus one who actually perceives or feels this to be so no longer feels that he is an ego, except by definition. He sees that his ego is his persona or social role, a somewhat arbitrary selection of experiences with which he has been taught to identify himself. (Why, for example, do we say "I think" but not "I am beating my heart"?) Having seen this, he continues to play his social role without being taken by it. He does not precipitately adopt a new role or play the role of having no role at all. He plays it cool."
- Alan Watts
"If you have a beautiful voice, don't think that you have created that beautiful voice for yourself. It has been transmitted by your ancestors, your parents. If you have the talent of a painter, don't think that you have invented that talent. It has been transmitted to you as a seed. So everything you have thought that you are has come from the cosmos, from your ancestors. The water in you, the heat in you, the air in you, the soil in you, belong to the water outside, the soil outside.
Without the forest how could you be? Without your father and mother how could you be there this moment? Therefore you say, in wisdom, that you are nothing. Everything that you think, you thought that you are, you have received from the cosmos, from parents - including your body. Suddenly non-self arises as an insight. You belong to the stream of life. If you bear hatred toward your father, you think that your life has been ruined by your father, that you don't want to have anything to do with your father. It is out of ignorance that you have thought so. Because if you touch the reality of no-self, you see very clearly that you are your father. You are just a continuation of your father, and your father is a continuation of your grandfather.
We are one in a stream of life. To think that you are a separate entity, that you are a self that can be independent from your father, is a very funny thing. Because your father is inside you, you can never get rid of him. There is no alternative except to reconcile with your father. To reconcile with him means to reconcile with yourself. The other person, it might not be your father, he may be your brother or your spouse or anyone. You think that he or she has made you suffer so much, has made your life miserable. There is a tendency in you never to see him again, to hear from him again or from her again. That kind of willingness, that kind of feeling is born from your ignorance of the reality of no-self. Because we are all together. Not only are we together, we are inside each other, we inter-are. So if you surrender your idea of self, suddenly you release a lot of suffering, a lot of anger. You give yourself a chance for compassion and understanding to be born in your heart."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Who left me a few words,
Usually a pointless joke or a silly question
A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin
of a quick splashed picture - bug, leaf,
caricature of a Teacher -
On paper held together now by little more than ink
& their own strength brushed momentarily over it
Their world and several others since
Gone to hell and a handbasket, they knew it -
Cheered as it whizzed by -
& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars
Happy to have saved us all.
- Philip Whalen
When something is right, something else is wrong.
Knowledge and ignorance depend on each other.
It has been like this since the beginning.
How could it be otherwise now?
Wanting to toss out one and hold onto the other
makes for a ridiculous comedy.
You must still deal with everything ever-changing,
even when you say its wonderful.
- Ryokan
"The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself - and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results."
- Agatha Christie
Rebus
You work with what you are given
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottom of rivers or dust.
Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.
This rebus—slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life—
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.
As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.
The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.
How will I enter this question the clay has asked?
- Jane Hirshfield
<< Home