the more wakeful glimpse
- J. Krishnamurti
image and man
is the eye of the image in which the person is hidden
You are the eye of the image, and
the light of the eye.
Who has ever seen the eye
through which all things are seen?
The world has become a man
and man a world.
There is no clearer explanation than this
When you look well into the root of the
matter
He is at once seen both seeing eye
and thing seen.
- Mahmud Shabistari
a continual extinction of personality.
- T. S. Eliot
Tradition and the Individual Talent
"Everybody has seen an image of enfoldment: You fold up a sheet of paper, turn it into a small packet, make cuts in it, and then unfold it into a pattern. The parts that were close in the cuts unfold to be far away. This is like what happens in a hologram. Enfoldment is really very common in our experience. All the light in this room comes in so that the entire room is in effect folded into each part. If your eye looks, the light will be then unfolded by your eye and brain. As you look through a telescope or a camera, the whole universe of space and time is enfolded into each part, and that is unfolded to the eye. With an old-fashioned television set that's not adjusted properly, the image enfolds into the screen and then can be unfolded by adjustment.
When you are talking to somebody, your whole intention to speak enfolds a large number of words. You don't choose them one by one. There are any number of examples of the implicate order in our experience of consciousness. Any one word has behind it a whole range of meaning enfolded in thought.
Consciousness is unfolded in each individual. Clearly, it's shared between people as they look at one object and verify that it's the same. So any high level of consciousness is a social process. There may be some level of sensorimotor perception that is purely individual, but any abstract level depends on language, which is social. The word, which is outside, evokes the meaning, which is inside each person.
Meaning is the bridge between consciousness and matter. Any given array of matter has for any particular mind a significance. The other side of this is the relationship in which meaning is immediately effective in matter. Suppose you see a shadow on a dark night. If it means "assailant," your adrenaline flows, your heart beats faster, blood pressure rises, and muscles tense. The body and all your thoughts are affected; everything about you has changed. If you see that it's only a shadow, there's an abrupt change again.
Meaning enfolds the whole world into me, and vice versa - that enfolded meaning is unfolded as action, through my body and then through the world."
- David Bohm
"My foot slips on a narrow ledge: in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us, what one lama refers to as "the precision and openess and intelligence of the present." The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life."
- Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard
and now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
- Li Po
"Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession ... Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-Reliance
"Women will love her, that she is a woman
More worth than any man; men that she is
The rarest of all women."
- William Shakespeare
The Winter's Tale V, 1
"Woman is the promise that cannot be kept," said the poet Paul Claudel.
But does she know that? She - her sexuality, her voice and eyes and skin and hair - is the promise that we men make to ourselves hour after hour every day, every day of our lives. If she is not the secret of the universe, then there is none. To us she appears in the clandestine and burning center of the mind as the form we most deeply desire and must create or die. There she is - dressed, or half-dressed, in her mysterious clothes, hair a little mussed, lips just moist enough; and from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it - the real earth, and not just the enchanted fragment of it that blazes in the longing mind to furnish her setting - she becomes a hidden archetype to the beholder rendered godlike by her presence: his possession and promise, soulless and soulful at the same time, receding, flashing up with terrible certainty at the most inopportune times that she then makes opportune. Behind her are real women, giving to the ideal the substance it requires from the lived world, and serving to make more powerful and imperious those all-powerful creatures of the depths of our being, the slaves of our needs who enslave us. We have seen her in actual beds, and seen her satisfactions taking place hiddenly, deep in the body, from outward signs so powerful and intimate that we know, with awe and gratitude, that we could never attain anything of like consequence, or even approach it. We leave her sleeping, and retire to the center of the mind, where she has taken a new dimension, another hairdo, another set of magic lingerie. We love her there in another one of her endless changes, and wonder when she will come true again, taking on the mortal and identifying flesh without which all ideals die, as a real woman, perhaps not yet encountered, unhooks her bra with the strange motion that only women have ever mastered, smiling with infinite complicity."
- James Dickey
"Women never have young minds.
They are born three thousand years old."
- Shelagh Delaney
- J. Krishnamurti
The way it forces you to look
watching your step
so as not to turn your ankle
on a rock
or step into water nearby
The way it turns the torso
this way and that
view after view
spaces between spaces
and spaces between
The way it slows you down
step after step
no skipping between
there is no short cut
to the edge of this garden
The way it swirls the vision
into brown and black
and green and light with
sound in the air until
only a blanket remains
The way it stops the mind.
- Harry Palmer
"Truth is perfect and complete in itself. It is not something newly discovered; it has always existed. Truth is not far away; it is ever present. It is not something to be attained since not one of your steps leads away from it.
Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things.
Your search among books, word upon word, may lead you to the depths of knowledge, but it is not the way to receive the reflection of your true self. When you have thrown off your ideas as to mind and body, the original truth will fully appear. Zen is simply the expression of truth; therefore longing and striving are not the true attitudes of Zen.
Life is short and no one knows what the next moment will bring. Open your mind while you have the opportunity, thereby gaining the treasures of wisdom, which in turn you can share abundantly with others, bringing them happiness."
- Dogen
"I don't use the word enlightenment because the term itself is very loaded. To many people it implies a kind of Big Bang after which you are eternally in a steady state called enlightenment. While in fact the actual experience is a kind of opening in spaciousness, here and now, which allows anything to come and go, with no resistance. It is not a state, it is just relaxing into a natural ease of being. It's already here. When people use the word enlightenment, it implies some point in time that you hop into or it happens to you and then you are there for ever more ...
I don't think this is a good way of thinking about it.
It is only in this profound relaxation into your simplest being - just being, just having tea, just talking, just seeing and hearing - is the treasure we've been searching for.
What I teach is realization, not meditation. In realization, you live in what is so-called meditation. You live in this sense of beingness, in wakeful, present awareness, which any good meditation practice worth its salt is trying to get to.
I'm suggesting that you recognize that that's really all that's going on anyway, and just hang out there. From that perspective, you don't have to call it meditation, and we certainly don't call it practice, because the very word 'practice' implies a goal, a future.
We're speaking about that which is not in the future, there is no future. It is fully present right now and is always just here, just now. It's a way of being - living as meditation, living as presence."
- Catherine Ingram
"Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
And this our life, exempt from human haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I would not change it."
- William Shakespeare
As You Like It
Let us rise up and be thankful,
for if we didn't learn a lot today,
at least we learned a little,
and if we didn't learn a little,
at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick,
at least we didn't die;
so let us all be thankful.
- Buddha
"The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when you find out that something is not what you thought. Nothing is what we thought. Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion. Love. Courage. These are code words for things we don't know in our minds, but any of us could experience. These words point to what life really is when we let things fall apart and let ourselves be nailed to the present moment."
- Pema Chodron
because I wasn't in charge of my own life.
Self-Knowledge
And a man said, Speak to us of Self- Knowledge.
And he answered, saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.
And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'
Say not, 'I have found the path of the soul.' Say rather, 'I have met the soul walking upon my path.'
For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.
- Khalil Gibran
The Prophet
"Celebration . . . is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder - the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this."
- Martin Heidegger
"Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
- Marianne Williamson
- J. Krishnamurti
"The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them."
- Jean Cocteau
"Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable."
"This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people."
The Case for Christianity
"Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment."
The Problem of Pain
"We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness..."
Transposition and Other addresses
"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..."
Mere Christianity
"Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect."
Mere Christianity
"We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge - the last thing we know before things become too swift for us."
- C. S. Lewis
Out of the Silent Planet
you will find me in the tiniest house of time."
- Kabir
shadow
So the dead are among us again
even here where Halloween is not celebrated
and the moon flies through the skeletons of trees
and men in rowboats fish for souls on the river
There is a woman with spidery hair swinging a lantern
disappearing down the colonnade
a row of buildings tilted like gravestones
in which a single window is lit
a wall from whose depths shadows emerge
assuming the contours of bodies they will follow
all night and abandon at dawn:
a revelation to you
that each day we take on a new shadow
- Nicholas Christopher
"This," she whispered in my ear, "is the House of the Past. Come with me and we will go through some of its rooms and passages; but quickly, for I have not the key for long, and the night is very nearly over. Yet, perchance, you shall remember!"
The key made a dreadful noise as she turned it in the lock, and when the great door swung open into an empty hall and we went in, I heard sounds of whispering and weeping, and the rustling of clothes, as of people moving in their sleep and about to wake. Then, instantly, a spirit of intense sadness came over me, drenching me to the soul; my eyes began to burn and smart, and in my heart I became aware of a strange sensation as of the uncoiling of something that had been asleep for ages. My whole being, unable to resist, at once surrendered itself to the spirit of deepest melancholy, and the pain of my heart, as the Things moved and woke, became in a moment of time too strong for words...
As we advanced, the faint voices and sobbings fled away before us into the interior of the House, and I became conscious that the air was full of hands held aloft, of swaying garments, of drooping tresses, and of eyes so sad and wistful that the tears, which were already brimming in my own, held back for wonder at the sight of such intolerable yearning.
"Do not allow this sadness to overwhelm you," whispered the Dream at my side. "It is not often They wake. They sleep for years and years and years. The chambers are all full, and unless visitors such as we come to disturb them, they will never wake of their own accord. But, when one stirs, the sleep of the others is troubled, and they too awake, till the motion is communicated from one room to another and thus finally throughout the whole House.... Then, sometimes, the sadness is too great to be borne, and the mind weakens. For this reason Memory gives to them the sweetest and deepest sleep she has and she keeps this old key rusty from little use. But, listen now," she added, holding up her hand: "do you not hear all through the House that trembling of the air like the distant murmur of falling water? And do you not now... perhaps... remember?"
Even before she spoke, I had already caught faintly the beginning of a new sound; and, now, deep in the cellars beneath our feet, and from the upper regions of the great House as well, I heard the whispering, and the rustling and the inward stirring of the sleeping Shadows. It rose like a chord swept softly from the huge unseen strings stretched somewhere among the foundations of the House, and its tremblings ran gently through its walls and ceilings. And I knew that I heard the slow awakening of the Ghosts of the Past.
Ah, me, with what terrible inrushing of sadness I stood with brimming eyes and listened to the faint dead voices of the long ago.... For, indeed, the whole House was awakening; and there presently rose to my nostrils the subtle, penetrating perfume of age: of letters, long preserved, with ink faded and ribbons pale; of scented tresses, golden and brown, laid away, ah, how tenderly! among pressed flowers that still held the inmost delicacy of their forgotten fragrance; the scented presence of lost memories -- the intoxicating incense of the past. My eyes overflowed, my heart tightened and expanded, as I yielded myself up without reserve to these old, old influences of sound and smell. These Ghosts of the Past -- forgotten in the tumult of more recent memories -- thronged round me, took my hands in theirs, and, ever whispering of what I had so long forgot, ever sighing, shaking from their hair and garments the ineffable odors of the dead ages, led me through the vast House, from room to room, from floor to floor.
And the Ghosts -- were not all equally clear to me. Some had indeed but the faintest life, and stirred me so little that they left only an indistinct, blurred impression in the air; while others gazed half reproachfully at me out of faded, colorless eyes, as if longing to recall themselves to my recollection; and then, seeing they were not recognized, floated back gently into the shadows of their room, to sleep again undisturbed till the Final Day, when I should not fail to know them.
"Many of these have slept so long," said the Dream beside me, "that they wake only with the greatest difficulty. Once awake, however, they know and remember you even though you fail to remember them. For it is the rule in this House of the Past that, unless you recall them distinctly, remember precisely when you knew them and with what particular causes in your past evolution they were associated, they cannot stay awake. Unless you remember them when your eyes meet, unless their look of recognition is returned by you, they are obliged to go back to their sleep, silent and sorrowful, their hands unpressed, their voices unheard, to sleep and dream, deathless and patient, till...."
At this moment, her words died away suddenly into the distance and I became conscious of an overpowering sensation of delight and happiness. Something had touched me on the lips, and a strong, sweet fire flashed down into my heart and sent the blood rushing tumultuously through my veins. My pulses beat wildly, my skin glowed, my eyes grew tender, and the terrible sadness of the place was instantly dispelled as if by magic. Turning with a cry of joy, that was at once swallowed up in the chorus of weeping and sighing round me, I looked... and instinctively stretched forth my arms in a rapture of happiness towards... towards a vision of a Face... hair, lips, eyes; a cloth of gold lay about the fair neck, and the old, old perfume of the East - ye stars, how long ago - was in her breath. Her lips were again on mine; her hair over my eyes; her arms about my neck, and the love of her ancient soul pouring into mine out of eyes still starry and undimmed. Oh, the fierce tumult, the untold wonder, if I could only remember! .... That subtle, mist-dispelling odor of many ages ago, once so familiar... before the Hills of Atlantis were above the blue sea, or the sands had begun to form the bed of the Sphinx. Yet wait; it comes back; I begin to remember. Curtain upon curtain rises in my soul, and I can almost see beyond. But that hideous stretch of the years, awful and sinister, thousands upon thousands .... My heart shakes, and I am afraid. Another curtain rises and a new vista, farther than the others, comes into view, interminable, running to a point among thick mists. Lo, they too are moving, rising, lightening. At last, I shall see... already I begin to recall... the dusky skin... the Eastern grace, the wondrous eyes that held the knowledge of Buddha and the wisdom of Christ before these had even dreamed of attainment. As a dream within a dream, it steals over me again, taking compelling possession of my whole being... the slender form... the stars in that magical Eastern sky... the whispering winds among the palm trees... the murmur of the river's waves and the music of the reeds where they bend and sigh in the shallows on the golden sand. Thousands of years ago in some aeonian distance. It fades a little and begins to pass; then seems again to rise. Ah me, that smile of the shining teeth... those lace-veined lids. Oh, who will help me to recall, for it is too far away, too dim, and I cannot wholly remember; though my lips are still tingling, and my arms still outstretched, it again begins to fade. Already there is a look of sadness too deep for words, as she realizes that she is unrecognized... she, whose mere presence could once extinguish for me the entire universe... and she goes back slowly, mournfully, silently to her dim, tremendous sleep, to dream and dream of the day when I must remember her and she must come where she belongs...
She peers at me from the end of the room where the Shadows already cover her and win her back with outstretched arms to her age-long sleep in the House of the Past.
Trembling all over, with the strange odor still in my nostrils and the fire in my heart, I turned away and followed my Dream up a broad staircase into another part of the House.
As we entered the upper corridors I heard the wind pass singing over the roof. Its music took possession of me until I felt as though my whole body were a single heart, aching, straining, throbbing as if it would break; and all because I heard the wind singing round the House of the Past.
"But, remember," whispered the Dream, answering my unspoken wonder, "that you are listening to the song it has sung for untold ages into untold myriad ears. It carries back so appallingly far; and in that simple dirge, profound in its terrible monotony, are the associations and recollections of the joys, grieves, and struggles of all your previous existence. The wind, like the sea, speaks to the inmost memory," she added, "and that is why its voice is one of such deep spiritual sadness. It is the song of things for ever incomplete, unfinished, unsatisfying."
As we passed through the vaulted rooms, I noticed that no one stirred. There was no actual sound, only a general impression of deep, collective breathing, like the heave of a muffled ocean. But the rooms, I knew at once, were full to the walls, crowded, rows upon rows .... And, from the floors below, rose ever the murmur of the weeping Shadows as they returned to their sleep, and settled down again in the silence, the darkness, and the dust. The dust .... Ah, the dust that floated in this House of the Past, so thick, so penetrating; so fine, it filled the throat and eyes without pain; so fragrant, it soothed the senses and stilled the heart; so soft, it parched the tongue, without offense; yet so silently falling, gathering, settling over everything, that the air held it like a fine mist and the sleeping Shadows wore it for their shrouds.
"And these are the oldest," said my Dream, "the longest asleep," pointing to the crowded rows of silent sleepers. "None here have wakened for ages too many to count; and even if they woke you would not know them. They are, like the others, all your own, but they are the memories of your earliest stages along the great Path of Evolution. Some day, though, they will awake, and you must know them, and answer their questions, for they cannot die till they have exhausted themselves again through you who gave them birth."
"Ah me," I thought, only half listening to or understanding these last words, "what mothers, fathers, brothers may then be asleep in this room; what faithful lovers, what true friends, what ancient enemies! And to think that some day they will step forth and confront me, and I shall meet their eyes again, claim them, know them, forgive, and be forgiven... the memories of all my Past...."
I turned to speak to the Dream at my side, but she was already fading into dimness, and, as I looked again, the whole House melted away into the flush of the eastern sky, and I heard the birds singing and saw the clouds overhead veiling the stars in the light of coming day.
- Algernon Blackwood
The House of the Past
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