the pursuit of fantasy
The cloud that leaves the valley does not think that it leaves the valley.
A philosopher asked the Buddha to neither speak nor be silent.
It is known how difficult it is to shut the prison door? Words and speech disappear.
If mind is not - mind, who can we ask for advice?
The old monk who thinks he can calm the mind of another is
just mocking everyone around him, and he doesn't even know it.
The sea is calm when the wind stops blowing.
Still, we search outside of ourselves.
One burst of laughter dissipates a thousand doubts.
I yearn for the soul
of marvelous truth.
Coming back to myself,
I walk beneath the shining moon.
Stars move with silent sounds.
The universe is calm, nothing
brings trouble.
Perfect tranquility: nothing
whatsoever is happening.
Everyday thought is the way.
Without walking for days,
one is suddenly at home.
When confronted by people, you can say yes or no.
Words are never perfect.
Even if people stop speculating,
we still have to use things
to point out the truth.
Wake up! Wake up! Don't let anyone despise you for another moment.
I have a touching story to tell you. But please wait until this cloud passes.
Otherwise, even if I tell you the story perfectly, the distance between us will still be ten thousand miles.
Those who are enlightened
who see through
the eyes of great wisdom,
can see noon at midnight.
The deepest truths disclose themselves naturally,
don't even ask the hermit on the hill.
Space is one, without a crack:
By what road does the scent of the cinnamon flowers
come to us at the end of the day?
This is Buddha's examination.
Those who pass the test of emptiness
will be declared winners.
For your name to be on the list of winners, don't leave blank pages.
- Tran Thai Tong
Koans from the Khoa Hu - Lessons in Emptiness
what little chance you have in trying to change others."
- Jacob M. Braude
"Consumed with anger,
The world is an ugly place.
Bathed in happiness,
The world is a wonderful place.
But, aha! the same world."
- Taitetsu Unno
Shin Buddhism: Bits of Rubble Turn to Gold
"However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned."
- Henry David Thoreau
- Rumi
"Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being, between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality."
- Thomas Merton
"Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us."
- Thoreau
How do you find out who you are? Dive into silence and see."
- Satguru Siva Yogaswami
"NOTE: An evening at the theatre. It occurred to me that there is something weird about someone wanting to be someone else. And even more so about someone sitting down for a couple of hours to look at someone they don't know, pretending to be someone else, talking to someone who is also pretending to be someone else. A dialogue, furthermore, invented by somebody who imagined they were pretending to be each of these in turn."
- Alan Fletcher
"Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable."
- Italo Calvino
Enlightenment is a Gamble
Time to cash in your chips
put your ideas and beliefs on the table.
See who has the bigger hand
you or the Mystery that pervades you.
Time to scrape the mind's shit
off your shoes
undo the laces
that hold your prison together
and dangle your toes into emptiness.
Once you've put everything
on the table
once all of your currency is gone
and your pockets are full of air
all you've got left to gamble with
is yourself.
Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top
of the highest stakes table.
Place yourself as the bet.
Look God in the eyes
and finally
for once in your life
lose.
- Adyashanti
Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean."
- Aldous Huxley
"Someone once asked Aldous Huxley as he was dying if he could say what he had learned in all of his experience with many spiritual teachers and gurus and much of his own spiritual life, and he said, "It's embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder."
- Jack Kornfield
"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct. Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual."
- Viktor Frankl
Man's Search for Meaning
Some ask the world
and are diminished
in the receiving
of it. You gave me
only this small pool
that the more I drink
from, the more overflows
me with sourceless light.
- R. S. Thomas
"It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course, for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusion that veils his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him."
- Carl Jung
"You are not required to act in any way that sacrifices your wish to grow in spiritual strength. For example, you are not required to support the weakness of another person. Also, you are not required to relieve the anxiety of anyone whose anxiety is caused by his preference for delusion over reality."
- Vernon Howard
Writing in the Dark
It's not difficult.
Anyway, it's necessary.
Wait till morning, and you'll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.
Fumble for the light, and you'll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.
You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen, ballpoints don't always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There's nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are our tools.
Never mind about crossing your t's, dotting your i's--
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.
Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices,
or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:
words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.
- Denise Levertov
"Were it not a fact of experience that supreme values reside in the soul, psychology would not interest me in the least, for the soul would then be nothing but a miserable vapor. I know, however, from hundredfold experience that it is nothing of the sort, but on the contrary contains the equivalents of everything that has been formulated in dogma and a good deal more, which is just what enables it to be an eye destined to behold the light. This requires limitless range and unfathomable depth of vision. I have been accused of deifying the soul. Not I but God Himself deified it."
- C.G. Jung
Psychology and Alchemy
High I.Qs like haikus. Low
I.Qs - no haikus.
- Willard R. Espy
"Sometimes there would be a rush of noisy visitors and the Silence of the monastery would be shattered. This would upset the disciples; not the Master, who seemed just as content with the noise as with the Silence. To his protesting disciples he said one day, "Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self."
- Anthony de Mello
"What then is the creative state of mind, which so few have been able to be in? It is first of all, one whose interest in what is being done is wholehearted and total, like that of a young child. With this spirit, it is always open to learning what is new, to perceiving new differences and new similarities, leading to new orders and structures rather than always tending to impose familiar orders and structure in the field of what is seen."
- David Bohm
"Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them."
- Thoreau
Surely you remember
After they all leave,
I remain alone with the poems,
some poems of mine, some of others.
I prefer poems that others have written.
I remain quiet, and slowly
the knot in my throat dissolves.
I remain.
Sometimes I wish everyone would go away.
Maybe it's nice, after all, to write poems.
You sit in your room and the walls grow taller.
Colors deepen.
A blue kerchief becomes a deep well.
You wish everyone would go away.
You don't know what's the matter with you.
Perhaps you'll think of something.
Then it all passes, and you are pure crystal.
After that, love.
Narcissus was so much in love with himself.
Only a fool doesn't understand
he loved the river, too.
You sit alone.
Your heart aches, but
won't break.
The faded images wash away one by one.
Then the defects.
A sun sets at midnight. You remember
the dark flowers too.
You wish you were dead or alive or
somebody else.
Isn't there a country you love? A word?
Surely you remember.
Only a fool lets the sun set when it likes.
It always drifts off too early
westward to the islands.
Sun and moon, winter and summer
will come to you,
infinite treasures.
- Dahlia Ravikovitch
translated by Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch
Our feelings are hostages -
We exchange them
With each other
Mine for yours
Yours for mine
We give and take
What for what
Two hostages
For your love
Two hostages
For a kiss
Ten hostages
For your honesty
A plot of land
For your last thought
A jet plane
For silence
Release from follow-up
For your laughter
A bundle of money
For understanding
- Yona Wollach
"However young, the seeker who sets out upon the way
shines bright over the world.
In him there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today.
Possessing nothing, wanting nothing,
he is full of power."
- Buddha
A Buddhist comic
The first of the three kinds of delusion that plague us most often is the pursuit of fantasy. Actually, there is a question of who is pursuing whom. The fantasy pursues us, or at least it often seems that way.
When caught up in this delusion, you plan, scheme, tell yourself stories, or recall something in full detail from the past. The ordinary self is always at the heart of these mental activities. They have their appropriate place in our daily life.
It is not an easy task to break this delusion. You will not be successful if you just try to block your thoughts. You are trying to block yourself, you will end by tiring yourself out, and the fantasy will be as feisty as ever.
When you are caught up by the delusion, at that moment the delusion will occupy you completely.
2. Random Thoughts
The second kind of delusion is random thoughts. You drift and dream, carried along by the flow of images, music, memories, and fantasies. You may not be putting energy into these fragments of mental activity and they may have no particular coherence. These thoughts chatter idly in the background.
This can't be helped. Thinking is the function of your brain, and you are not trying to shut that function down.
As Yasutani Roshi used to point out, there are people who have done zazen for several years who think that their object is to quiet all thoughts. It is possible to achieve this condition, but hardly desirable. Our creativity would also be quieted, and where would realization come from?
3. Makyo
The third class of delusion is makyo, "mysterious vision". This is a deep- dream experience that may involve a dramatic vision, a feeling of bodily distortion, or less commonly a sensation of hearing or smelling something that is not there in objective fact.
Yasutani Roshi points out that certain religions place great importance upon makyo. Visions and heavenly voices are seriously considered to be signs of enlightenment and salvation. Speaking in tongues is a kind of makyo. Astral walking, with all its variants, is elaborate makyo. These phenomena may be of general interest, for they reveal the rich potential of human experience, but they reveal little of the true nature of the one who experiences them.
In Zen, makyo are a sign that you are making progress with your practice. You have passed beyond the superficial stage of thinking this or that. You are no longer in the world of everyday delusion, and you may be encouraged to feel that if you press on earnestly in your practice, you will realize your true nature before long. The Buddha himself had visions of beautiful women, angels, and devils while he was seated under the Bodhi tree. On the other hand, some completely mature students have never had makyo, so it is not a prerequisite to realization. If you do experience it, however, you can recognize that you are walking near your true home and that it is then important to press on with particular diligence.
I have heard some Zen students, who really should know better, describe makyo as something ultimate. In one sense this is true, but please be careful. "God's voice" is the voice of your own psyche in its present place. It may show you that you are near, but that is all.
When they do occur, let them go as you would any other delusion. No matter how interesting and encouraging thoughts or makyo may be, they are self-limited."
- Robert Aitken
Taking the Path of Zen
"Once, with closed eyes made radiant from brooding, I meditated on the eternal question, "Who Am I?" and felt myself gradually dissolve into a shoreless sea of vibrant light, imagination passing beyond all fear of death. In this state nothing existed but myself, a boundless ocean of liquid light. Never have I felt more intimate with Being. How long this experience lasted I do not know, but my return to earth was accompanied by a distinct feeling of crystallizing again into human shape.
If I brood over the alternative that my psychic experiences were self-begotten fantasy, no less am I moved to wonder at this mightier self who flashes on my mind a drama as real as those I experience when I am fully awake."
- Neville
The Search
"It is wonderful to explore and continue turning the question of "who am I?" or "what is this life?" so that we are simply open to what it means to be alive - to be in a body. And if we really don't know, which we don't, then the searching, the wandering, the questioning, the never-arriving, is a wonderfully liberating way to live."
- Katherine Thanas
another tree
inhabits the same body;
within this stone
another stone rests,
its many shades of gray
the same, its identical
surface and weight.
And within my body,
another body,
whose history, waiting,
sings: there is no other body,
it sings,
there is no other world.
- Jane Hirshfield
"A story about a Taoist hermit in the mountains conveys the truth of our oneness with divine humor. A formal delegation from the Confucian temple below decided to visit and seek his advice. When they arrived at his hut unannounced, they were scandalized to find him completely naked. "What are you doing meditating in your hut with no pants on?" they demanded. "The whole world is my hut," he replied. "This small room is my pants. What I want to know is, what are you doing in my pants?"
- Jack Kornfield
"No one ever told us we had to study our lives, make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history or music, that we should begin with the simple exercises first and slowly go on trying the hard ones, practicing till the strength and accuracy becomes one with the daring to leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggio or faulting the full sentence of a fugue . . . And in fact, we can't live like that: we take on everything at once before we've even begun to read or mark time; we're forced to begin in the midst of the hardest movement, the one already sounding as we are born."
- Adrienne Rich
There are many detours, washed-out,
interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
and the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning."
- Theodore Roethke
"The trouble with the world " said the Master with a sigh, "is that human beings refuse to grow up."
"When can a person be said to have grown up?" asked a disciple.
"On the day he does not need to be lied to about anything."
- Anthony de Mello
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding!"
- Immanuel Kant
People who do not discern what is being asked
give replies depending on what comes up.
to whom would you answer?
When people do not understand an answer,
they produce views based on words.
what truth have you found, and where does it lead?
Therefore it is said,
'It's all you.' Look! Look!
- Foyan
<< Home