a peculiar notion
Inner feelings are subtle and hidden, and they often contradict the ego and the intellect, and over the centuries we have suppressed them. Eventually, inner feelings and messages were drowned out so completely we came to think that emotions and sensations were feelings. Emotions have been raised up by the ego to become very important. Wielding emotion is a tool in the promotion of ideas and the manipulation of life. We eliminate reasoning and respond to emotion. People think their feelings are so special - but it's not their feelings you're dealing with, it's their emotions. By making emotions so terribly important, inviolable and so uncontradictable, people try to subjugate you to their opinion. You are not allowed to upset them by contradicting their emotions.
Emotions are external manifestations of personal opinions presented on a grand scale, often to elicit your reaction. It's theatrics and merchandising of opinion. There is nothing special or holy about emotions, any more than there is anything special or holy about opinions.
The intellect can't feel, it can only know. The emotions think they feel but they are limited to information courtesy of the intellect. It is reaction based on opinion. It offers no reliable source of information.
The intellectual world has its moments, but generally it's dry and boring. At the deepest levels of our spiritual identity, the inner you is pure feelings. Everything emits celestial light to some degree, so everything emits feelings. People come to believe that it's their ideas that are important, but behind every idea is a deep inner feeling."
- Stuart Wilde
"If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.
The Way is perfect like vast space, where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess. Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject that we do not see the true nature of things.
Live neither in the entanglements of outer things, nor in inner feelings of emptiness. Be serene in the oneness of things and such erroneous views will disappear by themselves. When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity your very effort fills you with activity. As long as you remain in one extreme or the other you will never know Oneness."
The Third Great Ancestor of Zen in China
Verses on Faith in the Mind
"Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each one of us is part of her heart, and therefore endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. You are sharing in the totality of that pain.
You are called upon to meet it in joy instead of self-pity."
- Pir Vilayat Khan
- D. H. Lawrence
"The Morning of Manifestation sighed, the breeze of Grace breathed gently, ripples stirred upon the sea of Generosity. . . . The lover, then, satiated with the water of life, awoke from the slumber of non-existence, put on the cloak of being and tied round his brow the turban of contemplation; he cinched the belt of desire about his waist and set forth with the foot of sincerity upon the path of the Search."
But how can You be seen?
Are you not the soul as well?
Yet how can You be hidden?
How can You be manifest?
For You are occult always.
Yet how can You be hidden
When You are eternally seen?
Hidden, manifest,
Both at once. . . .
You are not this, not that –
Yet both at once.
If You are Everything
Then who are all these people?
And if I am nothing
What's all this noise about?
- 'Iraqi
Lama 'at
"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there."
- Henry Miller
"Plato taught me not to be ashamed of using my imagination as well as my intellect. He taught me, when, in a mental voyage, I found myself at the upper limit of the atmosphere accessible to the Reason, not to hesitate to let my imagination carry me on up into the stratosphere on the wings of a myth."
- Arnold Toynbee
A Study of History
"Each and every one of us has one obligation, during the bewildered days of our pilgrimage here: the saving of his own soul, and secondarily and incidentally thereby affecting for good such other souls as come under our influence."
- Kathleen Norris
"Just before the full moon day of the month of Vesakha in about the year 528 BCE, a young ascetic of noble birth, worn out by years of self denial, arrived on the outskirts of the small village of Uruvela nestled on the banks of the sandy Neranjara River. Many years later he described the scene that unfolded before him. "There I saw a beautiful stretch of countryside, a beautiful grove, a clear flowing river, a lovely ford and a village nearby for support. And I thought to myself; 'Indeed, this is a good place for a young man set on striving' ". He settled himself under the spreading branches of a nearby tree and prepared to begin his meditation. All night he sat there as the leaves of the tree quivered in the gentle breeze and the moon shone bright in the velvety black sky. Eventually the clouds of ignorance dissolved and he saw the Truth in all its glory and splendour. He was no longer Prince Siddhattha or the ascetic Gotama. He had become the Awakened One."
- S. Dhammika
for the monks in the monasteries of China and Japan
is to doubt the existence of the Buddha.
It is one of the doubts that must be imposed on one's self
in order to arrive at the truth.
"Although one might wish otherwise, in dreams what is important is not the images. What matters is the impression produced by the dream. The images are minor; they are effects."
- Jorge Luis Borges
"The soul, without the body, plays."
- Petronius
"There are those who depend on us, watch us, learn from us, take from us. And we never know. Don't sell yourself short. You may never have proof of your importance, but you are more important than you think."
- Robert Fulghum
discernment
decency
and hard work
there is also groundedness.
"Groundedness comes in many forms: resolute common sense, daily prayer or meditation, a regular job that keeps us engaged with material realities, physical exercise, or something as simple as family life. One needs a sufficient engagement with the requirements of the so-called real world so that one is less likely to fall prey to flights of fancy or become engulfed by archetypes, repressed complexes, or manias that will make one lose one's wits. The specter of madness haunts the spiritual search.
A recurring motif of the esoteric traditions is the realm of the unseen - other dimensions, invisible entities, inner planes, etheric bodies, energy centers, planetary forces, hidden masters, the list goes on and on. Some people with a tendency toward paranoia are strongly attracted to the esoteric precisely because it mirrors their secret fears: unseen forces affect our lives, consensus reality is a sham, the universe is somehow converging on our personal slice of life. The spiritual landscape is littered with addled mystics who jumped into esoteric belief systems that were more than their sanity could bear.
Which leads us to a skill that it would be wise to cultivate: the ability to maintain a simultaneous belief and disbelief in all matters esoteric until you have undeniably experienced them for yourself. Let us call this faithful skepticism.
The kind of knowing that one finds in gnosis is personally verified. It isn't based on the hearsay of another's experience. And even when you have experienced something that seems real, it is well to keep room in your worldview for the possibility that it is all in your imagination. Keep things in perspective."
- Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney
Hidden Wisdom
"There are, scattered throughout the world, a handful of thoughtful and solitary students, who pass their lives in obscurity, far from the rumors of the world, studying the great problems of the physical and spiritual universes. They have their secret records in which are preserved the fruits of the scholastic labors of the long line of recluses whose successors they are. The knowledge of their early ancestors, the sages of India, Babylonia, Nineveh, and the imperial Thebes; the legends and traditions commented upon by the masters of Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato, in the marble halls of Heliopolis and Sais; traditions which, in their days, already seemed to hardly glimmer from behind the foggy curtain of the past; all this, and much more, is recorded on indestructible parchment, and passed with jealous care from one adept to another."
- H. P. Blavatsky
Isis Unveiled
To live without listening is not to live at all; it is simply to drift in my own backwater."
- Joan Chittister
"What I wonder is whether life is better or richer or cooler if you go around believing in coincidence and signs and auguries, seeing meaning in every billboard and opportunity in every meeting. There's something about that kind of life that seems young and hopeful."
- Paul Tough
a billion to one
"Provided one has the slightest remnant of superstition left, one can hardly reject completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, or mouthpiece, or medium of some almighty power. The notion of revelation describes the condition quite simply; by which I mean that something profoundly convulsive and disturbing suddenly becomes visible and audible with indescribable definiteness and exactness. One hears - one does not seek; one takes - one does not ask who gives: a thought flashes out like lightning, inevitably without hesitation - I have never had any choice about it. There is an ecstasy whose terrific tension is sometimes released by a flood of tears, during which one's progress varies from involuntary impetuosity to involuntary slowness. There is the feeling that one is utterly out of hand, with the most distinct consciousness of an infinitude of shuddering thrills that pass through one from head to foot; there is a profound happiness in which the most painful and gloomy feelings are not discordant in effect, but are required as necessary colors in this overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces an entire world of forms. Everything occurs quite without volition, as if in an eruption of freedom, independence, power and divinity. The spontaneity of the images and similes is most remarkable; one loses all perception of what is imagery and simile; everything offers itself as the most immediate, exact, and simple means ofexpression. This is my experience of inspiration."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
You think there is something outside to attack or fight or win over. In most cases hatred is like that. You are angry with something and try to destroy it, but the process is self-destructive, it turns inward and you would like to run away from it; but then it seems too late, you are the anger itself, so there is no where to run away. You are haunting yourself constantly, and that is hell.
Each intense torture is a psychological portrait of oneself. In hell, you are not exactly punished, but overwhelmed by the environment of terror. This all stems from your aggression. This is your anger, manifested as hell.
In the hungry ghost realm there is a tremendous feeling of abundance, of gathering possessions; whatever you want, you find yourself possessing. But this makes you hungry, this makes you feel deprived, because you get satisfaction not from possessing alone but from searching, from your desire itself. Since you have everything already, you can't go out and look for something and possess it. It is very frustrating, a fundamental insatiable hunger. There are different stages of this experience, depending on the intensity of hunger. There are all sorts of levels of hunger which constantly happen in everyday life.
The joy of possessing does not bring us pleasure anymore once we already possess something, and we are constantly trying to look for more possessions, but it turns out to be the same process all over again; so there is constant intense hunger which is based not on a sense of poverty but on the realization that we already have everything yet we cannot enjoy it. It is the energy, the desire, that is more exciting; collecting it, holding it, putting it on, eating it - that kind of energy is a stimulus, but the grasping quality makes it very awkward. Once you hold something you want to possess it, you no longer have the enjoyment of holding it, but you do not want to let go. This is the environment of your greed.
What is lacking is that if any unknown, unpredictable situation occurs, there is a feeling of being threatened. If anything becomes different or irregular, you are threatened. Anything unpredictable fundamentally threatens the basic pattern, which is ignorance, which is without a sense of humor.
When you are separated from the luminosity, you have the feeling of bewilderment, as though someone had dropped you in the middle of a wilderness; you have a tendency to look back and suspect your own shadow, whether it is a real shadow or someone's strategy. Paranoia is a kind of radar system, the most efficient radar system the ego could have. It picks up all sorts of faint and tiny objects, suspecting each of them, and every experience in life is regarded as something threatening.
This is known as the realm of jealousy or envy - but jealousy and envy in an extremely fundamental sense, based on survival and winning. Unlike the human or animal realm, this is purely functioning within the realm of intrigue; that is all there is, it is occupation and entertainment. Intrigue and relationship are your whole livelihood, whether the intrigue is based on an emotional relationship, the relationship between friends, parents, teachers, students - any kind of relationship which creates, for you, intrigue.
You begin to feel thankful to have confirmation that you are something after all, instead of the luminosity which is no man's land. And because you are something, you have to maintain yourself, which brings a natural state of comfort and pleasure - complete absorption into oneself.
The Tibetan Book of The Dead
by Guru Rinpoche according to Karma-Lingpa
translated by Francesca Fremantle and Chogyam Trungpa
"We must learn that an essential characteristic of observing is acceptance. As we practice and watch, we begin to see that the mind can accommodate everything and that there is no need to struggle against ourselves.
There are times when we don't know where we are, when we feel like ships that have left the shoreline, out in the middle of the ocean with no discernible reference point.
In Calcutta there is an old teacher, Dipa Ma, with whom I have had a chance to study. She is a great yogi and an embodiment of loving-kindness. She often gives blessings to people while they are practicing. She will come over and put her hand on your head and say, "Shhh", very softly and comfortingly. She has a tremendous power of heart, and there is a great field of kindness and love around her that's strong and quite tangible. Whatever you're going through, whatever difficulty you present her with, she greets you with, "Shhh, it's okay." You don't have to struggle to get rid of it, or hate yourself for experiencing it, she teaches. It, too, is all right."
- Jack Kornfield
"We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold fast to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
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
"Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that when - in a decade, a century or a millennium - we grasp it, we will all say to each other, how could it be otherwise? How could we have been so stupid for so long?"
- John Archibald Wheeler
"Man is so unlikely that if he did not exist, the possibility would not be worth discussing."
- Damon Knight
around corners, through doorways and windows, along sidewalks,
up stairs, over carpets, down drainpipes, in the sky,
with friends, lovers, children and heroes; perceived,
remembered, imagined, distorted, and clarified."
- Tom Robbins
Another Roadside Attraction
(a peculiar notion)
There is an alternate, parallel reality that exists simultaneously with this reality, and in that one, everything is as it should be.
Consider this:
A little child is playing and throws a rock at a tree. The rock ricochets and hits his little brother in the head who begins to scream. Mother is frightened by the screams and rushes out of the house, demanding to know what has happened. Little child senses this is not a good situation. He knows the right explanation could save him, doesn't know what that is, and goes mute.
Younger brother yells, "He hit me with a rock!" Mother yells, "What is the matter with you? Why did you hit your brother with a rock?"
Little child whimpers, "I didn't mean to. I was aiming at a tree. It bounced off."
Does this work? Is the child off the hook?
No way. The response from mother is
the all-time award-winning crazy-maker:
"You shouldn't have done that.
You should know better."
At first the child is bewildered. He tries to figure out how he could have known something he didn't know. He concludes others must be able to do it, and there must be something wrong with him for not being able to. Finally, he just accepts, "That's right, I should know better."
This is the birth of the parallel reality myth in which:
I know what I should know
I do what I should do
I feel what I should feel
I look how I should look
I never forget to remember
I always make the right decision
I always say the right thing
and on and on and on...
Here, in this reality, I should know better but don't; there, somehow, I do.
It would serve us well to see that the little child who threw the rock could not have known better, that we never know better, that this is an illusion, an imaginary world perpetuated by looking at a moment that has passed and saying, "It should have been different."
- Cheri Huber
"We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard - of, must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"We are not onlookers peering into the unified field of separate, objective reality - we are the unified field. We can reach beyond the physical body and extend the influence of intelligence. Every thought you are thinking creates a wave in the unified field. It ripples through all the layers of intellect, mind, senses, and matter, spreading out in wider and wider circles. You are like a light radiating not photons but consciousness. As they radiate, your thoughts have an effect on everything. Your relationship to life is the same as that of one cell to your whole body. One cell can talk to your whole body. One cell can influence your whole body. You can talk to the whole of life - influence the whole of life. The whole of life is as alive as we are. The distinction between 'in here' and 'out there' is a false one - as if the heart disregarded the skin because it was not on the inside."
- Deepak Chopra
"Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason - you and all other conscious beings as such - are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.
Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon mother earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you."
- Erwin Schroedinger
- Anna Akhmatova
Of course, the idea that you can't learn the lesson of humanity quickly and simply comes from organized religion, which has a bit of a vested interest in saying so. I think the Buddhist teachings are neat and have a lot to offer, but I have never bought the view that it takes a thousand incarnations to go beyond the earth plane. When Buddha said (if he did say it at all) that sitting under the Bodhi tree was the only game in town, it's natural Buddhist writers thought it would take ages and ages to understand ourselves and our environment. But nowadays, we pretty much know all there is to know; there aren't many mysteries left. What you don't know, you probably don't need. And what you do need, you can take it on at high speed. The whole world and all of its possible experiences are theoretically available to you at the flick of a switch. Psychology and our knowledge of human ways have become so sophisticated that there really aren't any human ideas or behavioral patterns which haven't been studied and explained a hundred times over.
The various religions teach that our goal is to seek to emulate the perfection of the masters, but deep within us we know that the masters were probably not quite as perfect as the writers made them out to be. It is not perfection we seek - just peace, understanding, and the sweet embrace of a personal reconciliation.
I'm convinced that the lessons of humanity aren't so complex. If they really were beyond us, no one would be here on the planet learning them. Meaning that, as an eternal spirit, you wouldn't put yourself into an evolution on the physical plane if the lessons offered were impossible to comprehend. So it follows that there must be a way to eventually get the message."
- Stuart Wilde
- Henry David Thoreau
"Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real.
Perhaps they are."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Whenever we finish talking to ourselves the world is always as it should be.
We renew it, rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk.
Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves.
Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die,
because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die."
- Carlos Castaneda
A Separate Reality
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