rag-and-bone shop
"What do people want? What are any of us actually, fundamentally, looking for in all the various things we are looking for? We all are, and yet we remain unconvinced that we are, or that we are enough. Regardless of how much we augment our being with our immense doing, in an effort to construct an abiding and secure identity, we remain unsure. Even the greatest of us know, in the middle of the night, when the moment is most tender, that we are all like clouds, like grass, springing up and dying back when winter comes. Somehow, despite all the various accomplishments, both inner and outer, of a lifetime, none of us can escape the fact that we are less and less day by day, as time runs on. Whether or not we think about this we all know it. The most basic fact of our lives - our very existence, our very sense of identity - is elusive, constantly sliding away.
It was the genius of the Buddha to pinpoint this abiding human problem and to apply gentle acupressure right at the heart of it. The Buddha felt that since what we hold to as identity, our fixed sense of being a person, is so unreliable (as we always knew, always feared), we should stop insisting on it with such shrillness. Rather than trying to avoid the reality of not being someone, Buddha thought that we should observe and embrace this fact. There is no real identity outside of flux, he taught. If we practice and train in this existential fact, which we verify with meditation experience, then we have nothing to fear. As we begin to warm up to life in this way, with openness to the endless change within and outside us, we come to see the effort to maintain a brittle sense of identity as cold, even frozen. We come to appreciate that the whole point of spiritual practice is to warm up, to become flexible with what we think we are and begin to release ourselves to our experience as it really is. This warmth melts the ice of identity and lets the waters of our lifetime flow."
- Zoketsu Norman Fischer
After I was born
They locked me up inside me
But I left.
My soul seeks me,
Through hills and valley,
I hope my soul
Never finds me.
- Fernando Pessoa
"As often as not our whole self engages itself in the most trivial of things, the shape of a particular hill, a road in the town in which we lived as children, the movement of wind in grass. The things we shall take with us when we die will nearly all be small things."
- Storm Jameson
"However smart we may be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, it doesn't help us at all. The real power comes in to us from the beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand.
And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honor and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty. We may have length of days. But an empty tin can lasts longer than Alexander lived."
- D.H. Lawrence
"I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea."
- Henry David Thoreau
My mind is intact, but the shapes
of the world change, the peach
has released the bough and at last
makes full confession, its pudeur
had departed like peach-fuzz wiped off, and
We now know how the hot sweet -
ness of flesh and the juice-dark hug
the rough peach-pit, we know its most
suicidal yearnings, it wants
to suffer extremely, it
Loves God, and I warn you, do not
touch that plum, it will burn you, a blister
will be on your finger, and you will
put the finger to your lips for relief - oh, do
be careful not to break that soft
Gray bulge of blister like fruit-skin, for
exposing that inwardness will
increase your pain, for you
are part of this world. You think
I am speaking in riddles. But I am not, for
The world means only itself.
- Robert Penn Warren
"Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles, and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?"
- Lao-tzu
"You see this goblet?" asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. "For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious."
- Mark Epstein
Thoughts Without a Thinker
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart."
- William Butler Yeats
"Let me stop here. Let me, too, look at nature awhile.
The brilliant blue of the morning sea, of the cloudless sky,
the yellow shore; all lovely,
all bathed in light.
Let me stand here. And let me pretend I see all this
(I really did see it for a minute when I first stopped)
and not my usual day-dreams here too,
my memories, those images of sensual pleasure."
- C.P.Cavafy
Sunday Morning
2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.
- Wallace Stevens
"According to the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, spirituality is not for people who are trying to avoid hell; it is for people who have been through hell. In many ways, spirituality is about what we do with our pain. And the truth is, if we don't transform it, we will transmit it."
- Al Gustafson
"And now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth.
Let's not speak in any language, let's stop for one second, and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines, we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.
Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire, victory with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their
brothers in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused with total inactivity.
( Life is what it is about, I want no truck with death. )
If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this
sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems
dead and later proves to be alive.
Now I'll count up to twelve, and you keep quiet and I will go."
- Pablo Neruda
amazing
day; for the leaping greenly
spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;
and for everything
which is natural, which is
infinite, which is yes."
- e. e. cummings
are we here yet?
"What is nirvana?" asked the young monk.
"Nothing happens next. This is it." said the old monk.
Note to Self
"When I was a child, all was mysterious. The line between fantasy and reality was not always clear. I was inquisitive about the ways of the world and full of questions. As I got older, I began to realize that not every question has an answer, or at least that I wasn't capable, yet, of finding all the answers. Maybe I got tired of waiting for wisdom, or distracted by more mundane matters. These days, I'm asking all sorts of questions again, but wondering where to start. Perhaps the way to begin is to simply pay more attention - to what can be read in the eyes of a loved one, for example, but also to the meaning I find in a tree, the sky, a piece of wood, a stone. In art. Until I learn to be attentive to these things, to live in the present and really see what's before me, I'll never know what lies behind them."
- Michael Gates
Twists & Turns
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Krishnamurti: "Think for yourself. What does that mean? All your thinking is superficial."
Krishnamurti: "That's it. Can you think for yourself? What does that mean, "think for yourself", when all your mechanism of thinking is in the field of the known? I am not saying it is right or wrong. But all thinking is in that field, whether you call it thinking for yourself or thinking according to some other pattern, isn't it?
My problem, my question then would be, how can a mind that has been trained, almost destroyed, by this rotten education, by society with its demands, how can that mind delve into something that is not mere knowledge, mere information, mere conclusion or concept? How? By what process, by what catalyst, whatever it is, how will you set about it? Come on sirs. What will you do?
Wait a minute. There you are. You are all very well educated. You have a degree. You all have the capacity to remember, recollect, quote, and so on, and I am asking you a question - out of the ordinary - and you are stumped, aren't you? You can't proceed further. Right? How will you proceed further? You can't go back to books, Shankara and so on; they can't reply.
Now, what will you do? Here is a fact, being shallow - I am not being insulting - what will you do to break through this shallowness?"
Krishnamurti: "How will you wipe it out? Don't say things that have no meaning. Do you follow? Don't say things that you cannot put into action. Otherwise you'll be impractical, contradictory. What will you do?
Here is a problem. Right? How do you respond to it? A challenge is given to you, what is your reaction, how do you answer it?
If you are really aware, honest, clear, you would answer it from the field of the known, wouldn't you? Stick to that. I wish you would go slowly, logically. You will see in a minute. The question is new to you. Right? And you respond from the old, obviously. And when you respond from the old and that isn't satisfactory, you try to find other answers, still within that field. Right? Look, this question is put to me and I haven't an immediate answer. If it were a familiar question, my answer would be immediate. But I don't know the answer. I don't know what to do. So, what is my mind doing? What's your mind doing?"
Krishnamurti: "Still working in the field of memory, still within the field of the known. Right? I wish you would push it. Don't wait for me to tell you. Push it. You are still within the field of your memories, of what you have read. Do you follow? Your mind is still looking, looking, looking, searching, to find out the answer. Right? You have an examination paper - all your memories are in operation to answer it. You are doing the same thing here, aren't you? How you are responding is important, not the answer. Right? Here is a question put to you. How do you respond?
May I go into it? You are all so lazy. Not being familiar with the question, your mind is looking for the answer in all the books you have read, in all the memories you have gathered. No? It is looking and you don't stop looking. You have said, now what did Shankara say? What did this person say? What did that person say? What is my own memory? Do you follow? You are looking. You are asking. You are demanding. You are searching. And your search is within what you know. Have you found the answer? You haven't, have you? No? Right? Then, why don't you stop? I say, I don't know. You don't know. So, why don't you stop? Instead of looking, looking, looking, asking … say, I really don't know. Can you honestly say you don't know?
Now go the next step further. Come on. When you say you don't know, what do you mean by that? What is the state of mind that says, 'I don't know'? What is your state?"
Krishnamurti: "No, it's not blank."
Krishnamurti: "It is not empty. It is still waiting. It is waiting to find the answer. But, it is waiting. It has sought here, there, there, there, there, and hasn't found an answer and says, "I don't know", but I am still in a state of expectation. Obviously, right? What are you expecting?"
Krishnamurti: "That is, you are waiting for an answer from me?"
Krishnamurti: "Wait. No. I am saying to you, what is the state of the mind? You have to find it out, not I tell you about it. If I tell you what it is, then you repeat it and you are back again where you started. Right? Now, go step by step. You will see it for yourself - shallow mind, how it has been made shallow and when a question is put to it, a challenge - then you respond according to your conditioning, according to everything you know.
But, the challenge is a new thing, and you respond according to your memories; so you are not answering or responding totally to the challenge; you are still searching - Eh? - and you don't say, "Now wait a minute, I really don't know what to do." And when I ask you what is the state of the mind that says, "I don't know" you don't answer me. You are still waiting for somebody to tell you, which means you, yourself, haven't found out what it means when you say, "I don't know".
Right?
Now, go into it. What do you mean, "I don't know"? What is the state of your mind when you say, "I don't know"? You understand what I mean by "state"? What is taking place in the mind?
Do you want me to explain it to you? Eh? And then you'll agree; or will my explanation be the exact description of what your mind is, and therefore non acceptance, though you can't put it into words. Which is it?
When you have stopped searching and researching and trying to answer from the field of the known, and you face the fact - please follow this - you face the fact that you really don't know, what is the state of the mind which says, "I don't know"? You are still expecting, right? You are still expecting an answer, no?
Let's proceed. You see, I am watching the mind. I see what happens. I've searched in the known and I can't find an answer and I say, like a school boy, "I don't know, Sir!" Now, if I wait for an answer from you, my mind will accept the answer according to my judgment, evaluation, and that becomes another memory to be added. Do you follow? And again I move from that which I have known. So I say to myself, what is the state of my mind when it says, "I don't know"? It's very important for me to find out. What is the state of my mind? Am I waiting, expecting an answer, or do I say, "I really don't know"? Do you see the difference, not because I point it out, but do you actually see the difference?
Now look what you have done - started with a superficial mind and now you have come to a state when you actually say, "I don't know", which means you are not expecting. Right? Now, next thing, what is the state of the mind that says, "I really don't know", not expecting, not seeking, not wanting, not hoping somebody will tell you? Do you follow? You don't know."
Krishnamurti: "Ah! It has moved far away. It has moved away because now it's concerned. It has seen that every response it has had so far has been from the shallow, from the little, from the known, from the experienced. If you haven't seen that, you can't go to the next. Right? You are following?
So, either you say, "I don't know" and are waiting for an answer, or you actually don't know. Now, if you actually don't know, then what is the state of the mind?"
Krishnamurti: "What do you mean by being still?"
Krishnamurti: "There is no frantic search. Now be careful. Because you have stopped seeking, is it still? If you find the answer, it will become active again, so it is not still. Do you follow? Do you see this?
I'll put it differently. If the mind is made still, then it is not still. If I force you to do something, it's not your action. If the mind is forced to be still because it cannot find an answer, then it's made to be still. You understand? So you are still in the field of waiting for an answer.
So when you say, "I don't know" and you really mean "I don't know", what is the state of that mind?"
Krishnamurti: "And yet you want to know."
Krishnamurti: "All right, sir. But it's still not a mind that says, "I really don't know"."
Krishnamurti: "Yes, that's all. So I am asking, what if you go a bit further away from the knowledge that I know that I don't know? Then you must inevitably come, if you pursue seriously and persistently, you must come to a point "I don't know", not as knowledge, but actually "I don't know". I say, I'm asking, when you say, "I really don't know", then what is the state of that mind?"
Krishnamurti: "Wait. What do you mean by empty? Empty of what?"
Krishnamurti: "Therefore you are still waiting for an answer."
Krishnamurti: "Empty of expectation. Now wait. Please go slowly, because I can't think fast. I want to see everything step by step you understand? - logically, sanely. Otherwise we'll go off the deep end and get stupid.
Empty. When you say empty, what do you mean by empty? Still a result?"
Krishnamurti: "You are sure it is not a result?"
Krishnamurti: "Ah. Go slowly. It is not a result, which means what?"
Krishnamurti: "Which means you actually experience a state when you say, "I really don't know.""
Krishnamurti: "That's it. You are aware. You are choicelessly, negatively, aware that you really don't know."
Krishnamurti: "Right. Do you follow? For the first time you have touched something original."
Krishnamurti: "Do you follow? For the first time, when you say, "I don't know", you have touched something original. From there proceed. Before, everything you have said has been second hand. See what has happened to your mind. You have completely put aside the known. It becomes secondary. Right?
So, from the moment you said, "I don't know", you have begun something entirely new, not second-hand. Now, from there proceed.
When you put away the second-hand, it means putting away Jesus, Buddhas, Shankaras, Einstein, do you follow? Put them under the carpet as you put dirt, you know; leave it there. You can remove it later or use it for whatever purpose, put it in a compost. Do you follow? Leave it there.
Now, can you proceed from there, which means you are really learning. The moment you accumulate and reply from what you have accumulated, you are back into the old field. Do you understand what I am talking about?
So we see a mind becomes shallow when it is caught within the fence of the known. And the moment the mind is free from the known it has touched something which - I won't use too many philosophical terms - is out into a different dimension. From there can you function?"
- David E. S. Young
Krishnamurti: Who Am I
"Weariness may also begin to set in - this is actually a healthy sign - at the enormous burden of working for the ego. Most of us, before we see this, don't realize why we're so tired, or even how tired we are. But we spend our whole day nourishing the ego, being told by it what to do, maintaining and protecting it, being wounded in it. It's exhausting."
- Larry Rosenberg
Lessen the doldrums
of fellow bipeds
Coax their spirits
to busk and bounce
Squeeze their chakras
Ungum their works
Use any trick you know
to redeem humanity
from impotent glum
Inject with joy
Inseminate with light
the wombs of mankind
- James Broughton
Little Sermons of the Big Joy
"A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living. He is born with divine sparks in his head. His favorite of all games is the play of words. He expects to be dismissed as a fool, a black sheep, or a threat to society. But he can't help writing memorable lines. Glorious oddballs: Hopkins, Rimbaud, Rumi, Lear, Lao-Tsu, to say nothing of Blake, Whitman and Jesus. None of these took a course in creative writing, but they can make shivers go down your spine.
The literary establishment fears originality, oddity and outrage.
An excellent poet wrote a book
And an excellent book it was.
But nobody gave it a second look
as nobody often does.
But as Noel Coward said, "We must try not to be bitter."
Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness. However there is lingering regret that limitations of daring and energy prevented the completion of the masterpieces one imagined for years. Advice: Be true to your madness throughout your life.
Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing."
What matters
matters
but it doesn't
Some of the time
everything
matters
Much of the time
nothing
matters
In the long run
both everything
and nothing
matter a lot
° ° °
Advice to Poets
Simplify. Clarify. Vivify.
Surprise your eyes. Break your heart open.
Look out! Here comes the Imperishable Light!
Accept no substitutes.
A cucumber shouldn't try to be a tomato.
Don't argue or mock. Unfurl like a rose.
Dose all your ills with laughter.
Collapse categories.
Go beyond! Go beyond!
We are all participants in the marvelous.
- James Broughton
and you would see the way you've grown, see the way you shine,
and see all the love that's in your eyes."
- Ellen Stapenhorst
"You must have noticed that I have got an extremely bad memory for what one may call physical realities. When you arrived this morning I could not remember whether we had met two, three or ten years ago. Neither can I remember where and how we met. People used to call me a dreamer and they accused me, quite rightly, of being desperately vague. I was hopeless at school in India. Teachers or friends would talk to me, I would listen to them, and yet I wouldn’t have the faintest notion of what they were talking about. I don’t recollect whether I used to think about anything in particular at such moments, and if so, what about. I must have been dreaming, since facts failed to impress themselves upon my memory. I remember vaguely having written something when I was a boy educated by Bishop Leadbeater, but I haven’t the slightest recollection whether I wrote a whole book or only a few pages. I don’t know what Leadbeater did with the pages I wrote, whether he corrected them or not, whether they were kept or destroyed. I don’t know whether I wrote of my own accord or whether I was influenced by some power outside myself. I wish I knew. I don’t claim to be a writer, but it seems to me that no one can ever tell whether a writer is directed by a power outside or just by his own brain and his own emotions. I would very much like to know the hidden subtleties of that complex process which is called writing. I, too, would like to know the facts about the writing of the book At the Feet of the Master. I can still see myself sitting at a table and writing something that did not come at all easily to me."
As the flower contains the scent,
So I hold Thee,
O world
In my heart.
Keep me within the heart,
For I am liberation
And happiness.
As the precious stone,
Lies deep in the earth,
So I am hidden
Deep in thy heart.
° ° °
"People have asked me about it before, and I always feel that they expect to hear the dramatic account of some sudden miracle through which I suddenly became one with the universe. My inner awareness was always there; though it took me time to feel it more and more clearly; and equally it took time to find words that would at all describe it. It was not a sudden flash, but a slow yet constant clarification of something that was always there. It did not grow, as people often think. Nothing can grow in us that is of spiritual importance. It has to be there in all its fullness, and the only thing that happens is that we become more and more aware of it. It is our intellectual reaction and nothing else that needs time to become more articulate, more definite."
- J. Krishnamurti
"We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self."
- Cyril Connoly
- David Richo
"While the rational man will at once accept the need for self-education, he may have difficulty in accepting that his own self is as corrupt as the self which he observes operating in others. This is because, of his own self, he has created a glossy, glamorous, bright image. He may at times become conscious of the darker side when the shocks of life make cracks in his self-gratifying image. But soon the cracks are repaired by beautiful explanations and he becomes blind and deaf to the cunning activities of self-centeredness."
- J. Krishnamurti
"The death of self is needed here, not rhetoric.
Be nothing, then, and walk upon the waves."
- Rumi
"The spiritual blindness of every man is placed on the largest cosmological scale - it is inherent in the very laws by which one becomes a creature. In that sense, the blindness to truth and reality, turning away from the Light, is something in which everyone participates by the mere fact of being human. Yet by the very fact of being born human, each one inherits the specifically human potentiality of being able to turn to the Light, and to live in the presence of truth. Thus we are faced with not only the terror of our human situation, our general sleep and proclivity for living in illusion, but also with the wonder of it all and with the possibility of waking up. We are in the midst of this play of forces taking place not only in the cosmos as an outer whole but also in the interior cosmos of our soul."
- Ravi Ravinda
"See with your eyes, hear
with your ears.
Nothing is hidden."
- Tenkei
"Behead yourself! Dissolve your whole body into
Vision; become seeing, seeing, seeing!"
- Rumi
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