listen to the answer
It sees again what has been seen; it hears
Again what has been heard, enjoys again
What has been enjoyed in many places.
Seen and unseen, heard and unheard, enjoyed
And unenjoyed, the real and the unreal,
The mind sees all; the mind sees all."
- Prashna Upanishad
"My close-walled soul has never known
That innermost darkness, dazzling sight,
Like the blind point, whence the visions spring
In the core of the gazer's chrysolite…
The mystic darkness that laps God's throne
In a splendour beyond imagining,
So passing bright.
But the many twisted darknesses
That range the city to and fro,
In aimless subtlety pass and part
And ebb and glutinously flow;
Darkness of lust and avarice,
Of the crippled body and the crooked heart . . .
These darknesses I know."
- Aldous Huxley
"And if we found you, standing transfixed, would that be the beginning of the poem? Would you begin to write right then?"
- Mary Oliver
"A writer's inner life matters: it is hard to imagine that anything matters more. Nor is this inner life something that anyone else is privy to, unless and until the writer wants to share it. It is a private, secret hotbed of activity, an unruly, unquiet, unholy cauldron bubbling with the best and the worst thoughts a person can think."
- Eric Maisel
"What is this thing that has us chewing at our own selves, grating ourselves against our own sharp sieve? It is the act of stepping back. It is the act of separating, and judging. It takes only one because the one becomes two. The self separates from the self. It points a finger and declares, "You are good" or "You are bad." Either one, it doesn't matter. The first statement usually flips over to become the second. And vice versa. Either way, the separated self is not doing the writing. Envious, the self is thinking about the writing, thinking about the self, rocking in its dark corner."
- Bonnie Friedman
Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.
- Octavio Paz
"Some people fear seeing or feeling anything about which there is no general agreement. For others, it is thrilling to be aware of innuendo, shading, complexity. For those who do not wish to step away from consensus, the creative is useless at best; at worst, it is dangerous. But for those who are intrigued by the multiplicity of reality and the unique possibilities of their own vision, the creative is the path they must pursue."
- Deena Metzger
"What we want art to do for us is to say what is fleeting, and to enlighten what is incomprehensible, to incorporate the things that have no measure, and immortalize the things that have no duration."
- John Ruskin
"I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow."
- Ernest Becker
It is what we are."
- Georgia O'Keeffe
"We do not inspire and expire fully and entirely enough, so that the wave, the comber, of each inspiration shall break upon our extremist shores, rolling till it meets the sand which bounds us, and the sound of the surf comes back to us."
- Henry David Thoreau
"I see now that my turbulent mind needs activity, that it must break out and try a hundred different ways before reaching the goal towards which I am always straining. There is an old leaven working in me, some black depth that must be appeased. Unless I am writhing like a serpent in the coils of a pythoness I am cold. I must recognize this and accept it, and to do so is the greatest happiness. Everything good that I have ever done has come about in this way."
- Eugene Delacroix
"We all sat in silence.
This guy walks onto the stage and up to the microphone.
He adjusts his glasses.
He reaches out and taps the mike.
A hollow ping sounds though the hall.
He says: "Zen Buddhism, Very hard to understand. Thank you."
Then he walked off the stage."
- Jonathan Greenlee
The mind like a clear mirror stand;
Time and again wipe it diligently,
Don't let it gather dust."
- Shenxiu
"Enlightenment is basically not a tree,
And the clear mirror is not a stand.
Fundamentally there is not a single thing -
Where can dust collect?"
- Huineng
Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.
From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.
Think of how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, "The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheatfields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.
At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding."
You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.
Listen to the answer.
There is no "other world,"
I only know what I've experienced.
You must be hallucinating."
- Jalaluddin Rumi
° ° ° ° °
No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its eyes wide open
far off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.
- Antonio Machado
This place is a dream.
Only a sleeper considers it real.
Then death comes like dawn,
and you wake up laughing
at what you thought was your grief.
But there's a difference with this dream.
Everything cruel and unconscious
done in the illusion of the present world,
all that does not fade away at the death-waking.
It stays,
and it must be interpreted.
All the mean laughing,
all the quick, sexual wanting,
those torn coats of Joseph,
they change into powerful wolves
that you must face.
The retaliation that sometimes comes now,
the swift, payback hit,
is just a boy's game
to what the other will be.
You know about circumcision here.
It's full castration there!
And this groggy time we live,
this is what it's like:
A man goes to sleep in the town
where he has always lived, and he dreams he's living
in another town.
In the dream, he doesn't remember
the town he's sleeping in his bed in. He believes
the reality of the dream town.
The world is that kind of sleep.
The dust of many crumbled cities
settles over us like a forgetful doze,
but we are older than those cities.
We began
as a mineral. We emerged into plant life
and into the animal state, and then into being human,
and always we have forgotten our former states,
except in early spring when we slightly recall
being green again.
That's how a young person turns
toward a teacher. That's how a baby leans
toward the breast, without knowing the secret
of its desire, yet turning instinctively.
Humankind is being led along an evolving course,
through this migration of intelligences,
and though we seem to be sleeping,
there is an inner wakefulness
that directs the dream,
and that will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are.
- Jalaluddin Rumi
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it's writing,
or a ball can guess where it's going next."
- Rumi
"I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my breathing, when I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance. Being a physicist, I knew that the sand, rocks, water and air around me were made of vibrating molecules and atoms, and that these consisted of particles which interacted with one another by creating and destroying other particles. I also knew that the Earth's atmosphere was continually bombarded by showers of cosmic rays . . . but until that moment I had only experienced it through graphs, diagrams and mathematical theories. As I sat on the beach my former experience came to life; I saw cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I saw the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I heard its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshipped by the Hindus."
- Fritjof Capra
The Tao of Physics
and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end,
you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.
For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions
(one has emotions early enough)
- they are experiences.
For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people
and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly,
and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning.
You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods,
to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming;
to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained,
to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up
(it was a joy meant for someone else);
to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations,
to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea,
to the sea itself, to seas,
to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars
- and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.
You must have memories of many nights of love,
each one different from all the others,
memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls
who have just given birth and are closing again.
But you must also have been beside the dying,
must have sat beside the bedside of the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises.
And it is not yet enough to have memories.
You must be able to forget them when they are many,
and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return.
For the memories themselves are not important.
Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture,
and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves
the first word of a poem
arises in their midst
and goes forth from them."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"When you are truly writing, there's no writer, no paper, no pen, no thoughts. Only writing does writing - everything else is gone.
In writing you can know everything. You can have other people live in you. You can go anywhere.
The problem is we think we exist. We think our words are permanent and solid. But that's not true.
We write in the moment. These words are not me. They were my thoughts and my hand and the space and my emotions at that time that I wrote them, but everything about me has since changed.
Writing is ninety percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you - and you write and it pours out of you. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write."
- John Welwood
"It's a surprise to many that the Writer does not do the writing - other than mechanically recording words. The primary impulse to write comes from somewhere else, somewhere energetic, passionate, forceful, idiosyncratic, immensely wise, immensely impulsive. Somewhere close to strong emotions, somewhere the Writer may have an inkling about, and maybe not much more."
- Clive Matson
1. Writers write.
2. Writing is a process.
3. You don't know what your writing
will be until the end of the process.
4. If writing is your practice,
the only way to fail is to not write.
write about what you know
about what you know
what you know
you know
"Still, 'write what you know' commanded such influence that I couldn't ignore it completely. I made my peace with it by turning it backwards: not write what you know, but know what you write.
If you write about a world before, after, or other than this one, enter that world completely. Search it to find your deepest longings and most terrible fears. Let imagination carry you as far as it may, as long as you recount the voyage with excitement and wonder.
But this is the most important rule: write the book you most long to read. Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labor of love bordering on madness."
- Steven Saylor
at the dawn of their lives,
men seek a noble vision of
man's nature and of life's potential."
- Ayn Rand
but until you realize it, you cannot manifest it.
The limitations that each of us has are defined in
The ways we use our minds."
- John Daido Loori
without it the world still appears, but it appears dormant.
Imagination wakes the world up so that it can be played with,
experienced as alive."
"First
we need it as persons, to give us a path into the content of our lives. Of course I don't need art to know what I think and feel. But without art what I think and feel will become quickly circular, self centered, and limited. Making art gives me a way to start with what I think and feel, and to plunge deeply enough into it until it becomes not only what I think and feel but what anyone thinks and feels, and even, beyond this, what isn't thought or felt at all. In other words, writing poems I reach beyond my own sensibilities to that which I cannot directly know but very much need to know. When I write poems I am met, through my own thought and feeling, by what's outside my thought and feeling. In this sense art promotes a profound empathy, a widening of my sphere of awareness and appreciation of my own life.
Second
we need art specifically as spiritual practitioners to help us overcome our weakness for religious doctrine, dogma, and identity. Which we all have, no matter how resistant to it we think we are, for we are all looking for the security of a fixed truth. Not knowing the truth, but having to discover it for ourselves anew through the imagination, is a much more difficult proposition, one that we are all reluctant, at bottom, to undertake."
- Norman Fischer
filling it with sublimity and exaltation.
And those who come together in the night and are
entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetness,
gather depth and strength for the song of some coming poet,
who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"Although deep mystical experiences do not, in general, occur without long preparation, direct intuitive insights are experienced by all of us in our everyday lives. We are all familiar with the situation where we have forgotten the name of a person or place, or some other word, and cannot produce it in spite of the utmost concentration. We have it 'on the tip of our tongue' but it just will not come out, until we give up and shift our attention to something else when suddenly, in a flash, we remember the forgotten name. No thinking is involved in this process. It is a sudden, immediate insight. This example of suddenly remembering something is particularly relevant to Buddhism which holds that our original nature is that of the enlightened Buddha and that we have just forgotten it.
Another well known example of spontaneous intuitive insights are jokes. In the split second where you understand a joke you experience a moment of 'enlightenment'. It is well known that this moment must come spontaneously, that it cannot be achieved by 'explaining' the joke, i.e. by intellectual analysis. Only with a sudden intuitive insight into the nature of the joke do we experience the liberating laughter the joke was meant to produce. The similarity between a spiritual insight and the understanding of a joke must be well known to enlightened men and women, since they almost invariably show a great sense of humor. Zen, especially, is full of funny stories and anecdotes, and in the Tao Te Ching we read, "If it were not laughed at, it would not be sufficient to be Tao."
- Fritjof Capra
- Shi Su Goong
"In trying to understand the mystery of Life, men and women have followed many different approaches. Among them, there are the ways of the scientist and mystic, but there are many more; the ways of poets, children, clowns, shamans, to name but a few. These ways have resulted in different descriptions of the world, both verbal and non-verbal, which emphasize different aspects. All are valid and useful in the context in which they arose. All of them, however, are only descriptions, or representations, of reality and are therefore limited. None can give a complete picture of the world."
- Fritjof Capra
The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.
Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves,
the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves."
- Terry Tempest Williams
"Mindful observation is based on the principle of non-duality: our feeling is not separate from us or caused merely by something outside us; our feeling is us, and from the moment we are that feeling."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"The Buddhist does not believe in an independent or separately existing external world, into whose dynamic forces he could insert himself. The external world and his inner world are for him only two sides of the same fabric, in which the threads of all forces and of all events, of all forms of consciousness and of their objects, are woven into an inseparable net of endless mutually conditioned relations."
- Lama Anagarika Govinda
A world of dew,
and within every dewdrop
a world of struggle
- Issa
Deep within the stream
the huge fish lie motionless
facing the current
- J.W. Hackett
Covered with the flowers,
Instantly I'd like to die
In this dream of ours!
- Etsujin
First autumn morning:
the mirror I stare into
shows my father's face.
- Kijo Murakami
Behold the ego
Set in glowing emptiness
On the edge of time
- Noel Kaufmann
Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.
- Francis Heaney
Faceless, just numbered.
Lone pixel in the bitmap-
I, anonymous.
- Chris Spruck
Watching white moon face
The stars never feel anger
Blah, blah, blah, the end.
- Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club
° ° °
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