on the contrary
"Around you is a subtle electromagnetic body of energy that is sometimes called the subtle body and is normally unseen by the naked eye. The ancient Greeks called it the etheric body. This is where the real you resides. It's also where your real feelings reside.
Imagine it to be a faint energy field, like a colorless mist. But, unlike a slow, wafting mist, the etheric is moving very, very quickly. Flashing through it are mini-lightning bolts of energy, and fingers of flamelike etheric sunbursts that shoot out from you in all directions. Underlying the flashes are great waves of rolling energy that move up and down and sometimes outward, tumbling and turning in response to emotion. You walk inside an amazing glowing bubble of light that sometimes projects three or four feet away from you in every direction.
The etheric is fascinating and beautiful to watch. I find it very humbling - the secret human is all there to see, spiritually naked in his or her identity. In the etheric, you see how the human condition is complicated by the ego/personality, but you can have a deep compassion for it. For a human is not just a mind, a body, or an emotion - it is light. The brilliance of that human light overshadows the personality traits and weaknesses that come from human frailty."
- Stuart Wilde
Silent Power
"See the world as energy, and become responsible for your energy. Realize that everything you do, say, and touch, everything you pass - even for a fleeting second - is affected and changed by you. You impact the animals and plants; the air, water, and buildings; and people - the energy of each drops or rises to reflect the subtle etheric pressure you place on it.
When you are angry, fearful, mean and vindictive, the energy of the room you are in starts to wobble and act chaotically. It metaphysically starts to implode. Anyone standing nearby will be robbed of energy and pulled down. Everything gets sucked into the vortex of your negative implosion.
With perception comes responsibility. Understand that if you are infinite you are everywhere, and you can be anywhere, and you are inside all things, and you affect them.
Remember that the solidity of the world is an illusion created by the speed at which atoms oscillate. If they slowed down just a little, you'd be able to walk through walls. In an out-of-body experience, you have consciousness inside a subtle body that we believe weighs four grams. You can pass right through the wall.
In effect, physical reality is both opaque and ethereal - just a collective feeling. It's only by habit that you consider yourself solid. In a sense, you are a collection of particles, transmuted from being in the solid-particle state of physical existence to the more ethereal wave-state.
In the wave-state, you are an amorphous oscillation, existing at no particular place in space or time, with no particular human definition. That wave state contains your consciousness and can be driven by your force of will. Through it, you have an immense potential to exert yourself on the etheric reality. The wave can move, so you move. It's everywhere, so you can be everywhere."
- Stuart Wilde
Silent Power
out of nothingness
scattering stars
like dust
the stars made a circle
and in the middle
we dance
the wheel of heaven
circles God
like a mill
if you grab a spoke
it will tear your hand off
turning and turning
it sunders
all attachment
were that wheel not in love
it would cry
"enough! how long is this turning"
every atom
turns bewildered
beggars circle tables
dogs circle carrion
the lover circles
his own, heart
ashamed,
I circle shame
a ruined water wheel
whichever way I turn,
is the river
if that rusty old sky
creaks to a stop
still, still I turn
and it is only God
circling Himself
- Jalaluddin Rumi
"Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externalized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is Instinct."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say it has great gifts to lay before us, but it wishes a greater gift for us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky."
- Ayn Rand
Anthem
But The substance of our mind, our ego,
Is exactly like the moon's reflection on the water.
So if we do not dwell upon our thoughts,
If we let them go by, the substance of
Our mind is fudo, motionless.
And that substance of our ego,
Of our mind, is God or Buddha, is the
Zen mind, is satori, hishiryo.
- Taisen Deshimaru
82. Nothing Exists
Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen, visited one master after another.
He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku.
Desiring to show his attainment, he said: "The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist.
The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity.
There is no giving and nothing to be received."
Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing.
Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.
"If nothing exists," inquired Dokuon, "where did this anger come from?"
101 zen koans
"The external world is really there around us.
That its existence is normally veiled is due not to existence but to our eyes.
The habitual way of consciousness makes us look at things mechanically and think them dead.
If only this mechanical view is abandoned, then existence is exposed in its nakedness.
Zen is not, in my view, philosophy or mysticism.
It is simply a practice of readjustment of nervous activity.
That is, it restores the distorted nervous system to its normal functioning."
- Katsuki Sekida
Zen Training
"It is said that one may attain enlightenment at any moment if the mind is kept in a state of meditative readiness. The tiniest, most ordinary perception can be the stimulus: a view of the moon, the cry of a bird, the sound of the wind in the trees. It's not so important what is perceived as the way in which you attend to that perception. The state of open readiness is essential. It could happen to you right now if you are ready. The tactile sensation of this book in your fingers could be the cue. The sound of these words in your head might be enough. You could attain enlightenment right now, if you are ready."
"You awaken to the unceasing changes of your own life. You look around and see everything in flux, everything, everything, everything. It is all rising and falling, intensifying and diminishing, coming into existence and passing away. All of life, every bit of it from the infinitesimal to the Indian Ocean, is in motion constantly. You perceive the universe as a great flowing river of experience. Your most cherished possessions are slipping away, and so is your very life. Yet this impermanence is no reason for grief. You stand there transfixed, staring at this incessant activity, and your response is wondrous joy. It's all moving, dancing and full of life."
"Out of this living laboratory itself comes an inner and unassailable conclusion. You see that your life is marked by disappointment and frustration, and you clearly see the source. These reactions arise out of your own inability to get what you want, your fear of losing what you have already gained and your habit of never being satisfied with what you have. These are no longer theoretical concepts - you have seen these things for yourself and you know that they are real. You perceive your own fear, your own basic insecurity in the face of life and death. It is a profound tension that goes all the way down to the root of thought and makes all of life a struggle. You watch yourself anxiously groping about, fearfully grasping for something, anything, to hold onto in the midst of all these shifting sands, and you see that there is nothing to hold onto, nothing that doesn't change."
"You see the pain of loss and grief, you watch yourself being forced to adjust to painful developments day after day in your own ordinary existence. You witness the tensions and conflicts inherent in the very process of everyday living, and you see how superficial most of your concerns really are. You watch the progress of pain, sickness, old age and death. You learn to marvel that all these horrible things are not fearful at all. They are simply reality."
"In the midst of every pleasant experience, you watch your own craving and clinging take place. In the midst of unpleasant experiences, you watch a very powerful resistance take hold. You do not block these phenomena, you just watch them, you see them as the very stuff of human thought. You search for that thing you call 'me', but what you find is a physical body and how you have identified your sense of yourself with that bag of skin and bones. You search further and you find all manner of mental phenomena, such as emotions, thought patterns and opinions, and see how you identify the sense of yourself with each of them. You watch yourself becoming possessive, protective and defensive over these pitiful things and you see how crazy that is. You rummage furiously among these various items, constantly searching for yourself - physical matter, bodily sensations, feelings and emotions - it all keeps whirling round and round as you root through it, peering into every nook and cranny, endlessly hunting for 'me'."
- the Venerable Henepola Gunaratana Mahathera
Mindfulness in Plain English
but most people live as though they don't know they're enlightened.
While you're waiting to realize you're enlightened,
live as though you already know it.
"But remember, meditation will not give you enlightenment. No technique will ever give you enlightenment; enlightenment is not technical. Meditation can only prepare the ground. Meditation can only do something negatively; the positive - enlightenment - will come on its own. Once you are ready, it always comes."
- Osho
When he walked and found that his shadow was close behind him,
he began to walk faster and faster.
But the faster he moved, the closer his shadow came.
So he ran like a madman ... and in the end, he dropped dead.
Those who do not understand the Dao are just like the man
who hated his shadow. It is actually very easy to be rid
of one's shadow - just rest under a tree. Just rest."
- Zhuangzi
1. See yourself to be the Ground or Bottom Line for the pros and cons of the problem to arise from - as many of them and in as much detail as may be. Encourage them to arrange themselves in all sorts of ways. Live with that display, brood on it, sleep on it, but don't go hankering after a decision. As entertaining the problem in all its aspects, as the Screen for them to come and go on, as their Mirror, you remain neutral. Among the exhibits, however, you may well find, prominently featured, a dateline for the problem's solution. Brood on that, too.
2. One morning on waking, or during the day when you are preoccupied with some chore, the completed pattern of things to come arrives, spontaneously and unannounced, from the Bottom Line. So inevitable it seems, so conclusively does it resolve your problem, that you are left in no doubt that here is the right decision, arrived at in the right way at the right time. It has been immaculately conceived in you and for you but not by you. Certainly not by you the human being. Accordingly, it arrives carrying the authority of its parentage, which is the real You, the Source, the World's Beginning and the World's End.
3. Now it is the turn of that decision itself, of that seemingly so right design, to go on display above your Bottom Line: and to reveal its limitations and weak spots. All manner of doubts and difficulties, and dilemmas about how to give effect to the decision, are now likely to appear. Again, you don't solve them by choosing between possible alternatives. You stay with them till they, in turn, are ripe and ready to resolve themselves.
4. Finally, the plan is implemented. With interest, perhaps with awe, you watch it take shape. At no time do you feel that you are moulding or forging that shape. It forms in you as cloud-shapes form in the sky, or intricate patterns in a kaleidoscope.
Such, then, is the technique of No-choice, resulting in no stress of the superfluous and toxic sort. It works. It works creatively, coming up with unforced and unpredictable and truly inspired solutions that you couldn't possibly take personal credit for. And it works like that because, to tell the truth, it is not a technique at all, not a useful dodge for relieving you of the pains of indecision, and certainly not a recipe for a quiet life at all costs. No: it works because it's the way you are built, the way you function in any case, whether you realize it or not. All this choosing one thing in preference to another is illusory, a great cover-up. Separate individuals, as such, are powerless to make the slightest difference in a universe where every one of them is tightly controlled by the rest. Pretending otherwise, pretending that, as our sole selves, we exercise free will, is as absurd and dishonest as it is vainglorious - and stressful. Only the Source of all, under the sway of none, has free will; and only deeds which are seen to proceed from it, which are referred back to it, which are felt to be its own deeds - only these carry its marvellous smell, the smell of an originality and rightness which belongs solely to that Origin. To live the choiceless life that we have been describing is not fatalism. It is not giving up the struggle and accepting that one is a machine within a Machine. It is to identify with the Machine's Inventor, to take one's stand in Freedom itself. It is to be one's Source, to choose what flows from it, and to perceive it as very good."
- Douglas Harding
Head Off Stress
The Zen Master replies, "I get them to the point where they can't ask anymore questions."
came to the banks of a wide river.
Staring hopelessly at the great obstacle in front of him,
he pondered for hours on just how to cross such a wide barrier.
Just as he was about to give up his pursuit to continue his journey
he saw a great teacher on the other side of the river.
The young Buddhist yells over to the teacher
"Oh wise one, can you tell me how to get to the other side of this river?"
The teacher ponders for a moment, looks up and down the river,
and yells back, "My son, you are on the other side."
for good karma
With all your heart
Stop the stream.
When the world dissolves
Everything becomes clear.
Go beyond
This way or that way,
To the farther shore
Where the world dissolves
And everything becomes clear.
Beyond this shore
And the farther shore,
Beyond the beyond,
Where there is no beginning,
No end.
Without fear, go.
Meditate,
Live purely.
Be quiet.
Do your work, with mastery.
By day the sun shines,
And the warrior in his armor shines.
By night the moon shines,
And the master shines in meditation.
But day and night
The man who is awake
Shines in the radiance of the spirit.
A master gives up mischief.
He is serene.
He leaves everything behind him.
He does not take offense
And he does not give it.
- Buddha
The Dhammapada
i say you don't need help
you may think you do,
but as soon as you remember you're fine as you are
all the help you need will come to you
now if you find that confusing
or you think
i'm in some way abusing your mind,
i'll just keep it simple and say that you'll find,
from this very day...
nothing will ever be the same again.
but that doesn't matter
it never was the same before -
there are no ends, no starts,
just continuum.
sure there are doors,
but it's theatre, it's art,
and all you do is play your part.
all you do is play your part."
- anonymous
rudimentary online healing [no longer online]
Oh my friends, then you also said yes to all pain.
All things are linked, entwined, in love with one another."
not because we are used to living,
but because we are used to loving.
There is always some madness in love,
but there is also always some reason in madness."
On the contrary,
I find it truer,
more desirable and mysterious every year
– ever since the day when the great liberator came to me:
the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge
- and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
How many make the hour full complete,
How many hours bring about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live."
- William Shakespeare
Heaven and Earth and Man
Chinese Myths and Fantasies
"This . . . is worth quoting at length. It contains a truth eminently suitable for our age:
That the end of life is not action but contemplation - being as distinct from doing - a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality. In poetry, in art, if you enter into their true spirit at all, you touch this principle in a measure; these, by their sterility, are a type of beholding for the mere joy of beholding.
To treat life in the spirit of art is to make life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to encourage such treatment, the true moral significance of art and poetry.
Wordsworth, and other poets who have been like him in ancient or more recent times, are the masters, the experts, in this art of impassioned contemplation.
Their work is not to teach lessons, or enforce rules, or even to stimulate us to noble ends, but to withdraw the thoughts for a while from the mere machinery of life, to fix them, with appropriate emotions, on the spectacle of those great facts in man's existence which no machinery affects, 'on the great and universal passions of men, the most general and interesting of their occupations, and the entire world of nature' - on 'the operations of the elements and the appearances of the visible universe, on storm and sunshine, on the revolutions of the seasons, on cold and heat, on loss of friends and kindred, on injuries and resentments, on gratitude and hope, on fear and sorrow.'
To witness this spectacle with appropriate emotions is the aim of all culture; and of these emotions poetry like Wordsworth's is a great nourisher and stimulant. He sees nature full of sentiment and excitement; he sees men and women as parts of nature, passionate, excited, in strange grouping and connection with the grandeur and beauty of the natural world: - images, in his own words, 'of men suffering, amid awful forms and powers."
- Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde's commonplace book
Where lies the truth? has Man, in wisdom's creed,
A pitiable doom; for respite brief
A care more anxious, or a heavier grief?
Is he ungrateful, and doth little heed
God's bounty, soon forgotten; or indeed,
Must Man, with labour born, awake to sorrow
When Flowers rejoice and Larks with rival speed
Spring from their nests to bid the Sun good morrow?
They mount for rapture as their songs proclaim
Warbled in hearing both of earth and sky;
But o'er the contrast wherefore heave a sigh?
Like those aspirants let us soar - our aim,
Through life's worst trials, whether shocks or snares,
A happier, brighter, purer Heaven than theirs.
- William Wordsworth
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