seeing the waterfall
1. Fall and rise a thousand times if need be.
2. Become a habitual seeker.
3. Give up, then try again.
4. Realize that you want to help others.
5. Be thankful.
6. Become a decent human animal.
7. Look for the source of thoughts.
8. Look in whatever way keeps your attention.
9. Will to do one thing -- one iron in the fire.
10. Find a teacher(s).
11. Always desire more, never be content.
12. Surround yourself with fellow seekers.
13. Spend time alone.
14. Know that the Hound of Heaven is real.
- Shawn Nevins
"Over and over again, as people describe how it feels when they thoroughly enjoy themselves, they mention eight distinct dimensions of experience. These same aspects are reported by Hindu yogis and Japanese teenagers who race motorcycles, by American surgeons and basketball players, by Australian sailors and Navajo shepherds, by champion figure skaters and by chess masters. These are the characteristic dimensions of the flow experience."
1. Clear goals: an objective is distinctly defined; immediate feedback: one knows instantly how well one is doing.
2. The opportunities for acting decisively are relatively high, and they are matched by one's perceived ability to act. In other words, personal skills are well suited to given challenges.
3. Action and awareness merge; one-pointedness of mind.
4. Concentration on the task at hand; irrelevant stimuli disappear from consciousness, worries and concerns are temporarily suspended.
5. A sense of potential control.
6. Loss of self-consciousness, transcendence of ego boundaries, a sense of growth and of being part of some greater entity.
7. Altered sense of time, which usually seems to pass faster.
8. Experience becomes autotelic: If several of the previous conditions are present, what one does becomes autotelic, or worth doing for its own sake."
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The Evolving Self
[autotelic - denoting those traits closely associated with the central purposes of an individual.
Origin: auto-+ G. Telos, end, completeness, purpose]
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
- Douglas Adams
"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls."
- Carl Jung
"I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore. After all, what is reality anyway? Nothin' but a collective hunch . . . I made some studies, and reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it."
- Jane Wagner
you have made the classic spiritual mistake."
- Gary Harmon
love or emptiness. I only know what's
not here: resentment seeds, back-
scratching greed, worrying about out-
come, fear of people. When a bird gets
free, it doesn't go back for remnants
left on the bottom of the cage! Close
by, I'm rain. Far off, a cloud of fire.
I seem restless, but I am deeply at ease.
Branches tremble; the roots are still.
I am a universe in a handful of dirt,
whole when totally demolished. Talk
about choices does not apply to me.
While intelligence considers options,
I am somewhere lost in the wind.
- Jelaluddin Rumi
In the mystic, the poet, the musician, the artist, powers lying below the threshold, and hardly controllable by their owner's conscious will, clearly have a major role in the business of perception and conception. In all creative acts, the larger share of the work always owes its inception to some sudden uprush of intuitions or ideas for which the superficial self cannot account. The superficial self must become the humble servant of a more profound and vital consciousness.
Few people pass through life without knowing what it is to be at least touched by mystical feeling. Now and again something stirs mystical feeling into consciousness, and man is caught up to the spiritual level, and catches a glimpse of the hint of a marvelous truth, a shine in created things which awakens in the self a feeling of love, adoration, awe. The barrier of personality is broken, man escapes the sense world and ascends to the apex of his spirit, entering for a brief period, a transcendental universe.
As artists stand in peculiar relation to the phenomenal world, receiving rhythms and discovering truths and beauties which are hidden from other men - so the mystic stands in a peculiar relation to the transcendental world - he lives at different levels of experience from other people - he sees a different world (since the world as we know it is the product of certain aspects of reality acting upon our consciousness).
The artist, because perception brings with it the imperative longing for expression, tries to give us a hint of his ecstasy, his glimpse of truth. Only those who have tried know how small a fraction of his vision he can, under the most favorable circumstances, contrive to represent.
Sometimes the emergence of the mystical consciousness is gradual, unmarked by any definite crisis - the self slides gently, almost imperceptibly, from the old universe to the new. Sometimes there is a gradual and increasing lucidity, of which the beginning has hardly been noticed by the self. Sometimes transcendence is a single and abrupt experience, involving a sudden and acute realization of something never before perceived; consciousness suddenly changes its rhythm and a new aspect of the universe rushes in, but this is usually the result of a long period of restlessness, uncertainty, and mental stress. The deeper mind stirs uneasily in its prison, and its emergence is but the last of many efforts to escape.
The Mysteries of the antique world appear to have been attempts to "open the immortal eyes of man inwards - exalt his powers of perception until they could receive the messages of a higher degree of reality." This clarity of vision is enjoyed in regard to the phenomenal world - in that actual physical perceptions seem to be strangely heightened, so that the self perceives an added significance and reality in all natural things. In Blake's words "the doors of perception are cleansed" so that "everything appears to man as it is , infinite." It is as if the attainment of new levels of consciousness bring the power of perceiving a splendor always there, but beyond the narrow range of our poor sense of sight. "I know," says Blake, "that this world is a world of imagination and vision. To the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. You certainly mistake, when you say that the visions of fancy are not to be found in this world. To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination."
Visions and voices may stand in the same relation to the mystic as pictures, poems, and musical compositions stand to the painter, poet, musician. They are the artistic expressions and creative results of thoughts, intuition, and direct perception. In both types there is a constant and involuntary work of translation going on, by which reality is interpreted in terms of appearance. In artistic subjects, the state of reverie tends easily to a visionary character: thought becomes pictorial, auditory or rhythmic. Concrete images, balanced harmonies, elusive yet recognizable, surge up mysteriously and place themselves before the mind. Thus the painter really sees his unpainted picture, the novelist hears the conversation of his characters, the poet receives his cadences ready-made, the musician listens to a veritable music. Hence, those "interior voices" and "imaginary visions" are indistinguishable from the ordinary accompaniments of intense artistic activity.
Visions are the spontaneous and automatic activity of a power which all artists, all imaginative people, possess. So far as the machinery employed in it is concerned, there is little real difference except in degree. "The vision passes as quickly as a flash of lightning, yet this most glorious picture makes an impression on the imagination that can never be effaced."
- Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism
"This is an example of the diverse responses that an object may elicit. The object is a book. To an animal, it appears as an oddly shaped black and white object. A primitive human being would see a rectangular flexible object with curious markings. To a Western child it is a book, while to an adult it may be a particular type of book, say, that of a book that makes incomprehensible, even ridiculous claims about reality. Finally, to a physicist, it may be a profound text on quantum physics.
This example illustrates that all the observers are partly correct in what they see, but all except the trained physicist are unaware of how much more meaningful and significant the object is than they can recognize. To the non physicist adult it is a book that seems incomprehensible - even ridiculous. What this example demonstrates is that when we cannot comprehend higher levels of significance, we can blithely believe that we have fully understood something whose true significance we have completely missed. The more subtle, profound depths tend to be overlooked - and what is crucial to understand is that we will not even recognize that we are overlooking these more profound depths of meaning.
This occurs because the higher levels of significance are lost. Facts do not carry labels indicating the appropriate level at which they ought to be considered. Nor does the choice of an inadequate level lead the intelligence into factual error or logical contradiction. All levels of significance - up to the adequate level [i.e., up to the level of meaning in the example of the book] are equally factual, equally logical, equally objective, but not equally real. When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious - an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.
This raises the question - what higher levels of significance - what profound meanings and messages - does the world give us that we are overlooking?"
- Helen Palmer
Inner Knowing
Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long."
- Walker Evans
"Abandon all authority, including that of [your] own experience, when observing oneself, others, and life. . . . Truth is a pathless land. ... [one] cannot arrive at truth through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest, or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique.
[You have] to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the content of [your] own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection."
- J. Krishnamurti
- Lily Tomlin
Well, I was praying, and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself."
- Peter O'Toole
The first step is in leaning that you have little or no control over the mental flow, in seeing it not as something that I am doing but something that is simply happening. Without this realization no progress can be made, for one must first know one is in prison in order to work intelligently to escape. Ordinary mental processes are foreign to the deepest reality of one's being. The more regularly this is seen, the clearer it becomes that one is not one's thoughts, and the more one understands the distinction between consciousness and the contents of consciousness."
"While we usually think of it as our mind, when we look honestly, we see that the mind follows its own nature, conditions, and laws. Your mind is like a puppy. You put the puppy down and say "Stay." Does the puppy listen? It gets up and it runs away. You sit the puppy back down again. "Stay." And the puppy runs away over and over again. Sometimes the puppy runs over and pees in the corner or makes some other mess. This is how our minds behave, only they create even bigger messes. In training the mind, like training a puppy, we have to start over and over again. Frustration comes with the territory. Nothing in our culture or our schooling has taught us how to transcend ordinary consciousness and reach for the dizzying heights of cosmic truths. You simply pick up the puppy again and return to reconnect with the here and now."
- Helen Palmer
Inner Knowing
"Ecstasy is what everyone craves - not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy and a thrill. That enravishment doesn't give meaning to life, and yet without it life seems meaningless."
- Diane Ackerman
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
- T.S. Eliot
What is the last thing that a fish would ever discover?
answer:
water
"Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them."
- Alan Watts
at fifty I approach myself,
eighteen years of age,
seated despondently on the concrete steps
of my father's house,
wishing to be gone from there
into my own life,
and I tell my young self,
Nothing will turn out right,
you'll want to avenge yourself,
on those close to you especially,
and they will want to die
of shock and grief. You will fall
to pleading and tears of self-pity,
filled with yourself, a passionate stranger.
My eighteen-year-old self stands up
from the concrete steps and says,
Go to hell,
and I walk off.
- David Ignatow
- Ellen Wood
just want to know, anyway, now
where do those who are not pure enough
for heaven, but not bad enough
for hell, and unbaptized babies
and all those who we were once
taught stopped over in purgatory,
where do they go? And, further,
what happens to a place, say a family, a marriage,
or purgatory when no one believes in it any longer?"
- Susan Firer
All Souls Day
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many
I had not thought death had undone so many."
- T.S. Eliot
"The supreme vision comes not at the end of the Bardo, but right at the beginning, at the moment of death; what happens afterward is an ever-deepening descent into illusion and obscuration, down to the ultimate degradation of new physical birth. The spiritual climax is reached at the moment when life ends."
- Carl Jung
As everybody knows, you can't think of even two or three things at once without being thrown into confusion, and so, to introduce some measure of coherence and order, the thought process, with the help of memory, strings out all the separate bits of attention along a line which it creates for that very purpose. This line of successive bits of narrowed attention is nothing other than time. In other words, time is nothing more than thought's successive way of viewing the world. But by habitually viewing everything in this linear, successive fashion, we arrive at the conclusion that everything proceeds in a line. Everything, however, does not proceed in a line - it happens simultaneously - every-where-at-once. The sun is shining, your heart is beating, birds are singing, the kids are playing, your lungs are breathing, the dog is barking, the wind is blowing, crickets are chirping - these phenomena do not proceed one after another nor follow one another in time - they are all happening everywhere at once, no before, no after. Reality does not proceed in a line, it does not proceed in time, it has the whole of its existence simultaneously.
The whole notion of succession, of one thing succeeding another thing in time, depends directly upon our process of memory. Memory creates an illusion of the past, and we generate a vivid sense of time and that we are somehow moving through it towards the future. The whole idea of time depends upon the notion that, through memory, we know the actual past. But, strictly speaking, we are never directly aware of a real past at all, we are only aware of a memory-picture of the past, and memory exists only in and as the present.
You are not looking at the real past at all. You are looking at a present trace of the past. From memories you infer that there have been past events, but you know the past only in the present and as part of the present.
In remembering any past event, you are never aware of any actual past at all, but only dim pictures of the past, and those pictures exist only as a present experience.
The same holds true for the future as well, because any thought of the future is nevertheless a present thought. We know the past and the future only in the present and as part of the present. Thus, the only time we are ever aware of is Now. There is only a Now that includes memories and expectations. It is out of this that we conjure up, out of this present moment, the vast illusion called Time.
When memory is no longer imagined to be a real knowledge of the past, but is instead understood to be a present experience, it can been seen that this present moment contains all time and is therefore itself timeless, and that this timeless present is Eternity itself. Eternity exists in its entirety right now. The universe and all things in it are being created Now. God is always creating the world now, this instant, and it is only to creatures of time that the creation presents itself as a series of events, or evolution.
Think of the past - that is a present act; anticipate the future - that is also a present act. Any evidence of a past exists only in the present, and any reason to believe in a future also exists only in the present. When the real past happened, it wasn't past but present, and when the real future arrives, it won't be the future, it will be the present. Thus, the only time of which we are ever aware is the present moment, this moment, which contains all time, is itself timeless, which is Eternity. All time is now. Time is a vast illusion. Eternity is not everlasting time but the real, indestructible, timeless present. The present is the only thing that has no end."
- Ken Wilber
The Spectrum of Consciousness
- Jack Kornfield
"According to the Buddha's teachings there are six realms or planes of existence: the four lower realms of suffering, the human realm, and the higher planes of the various heaven worlds.
The human realm is the first of the happy planes of existence. It is said to be the most conducive for developing wisdom and compassion because of its particular mixture of pain and pleasure. In the lower realms the intensity and degree of suffering is too great for most beings to develop wholesome qualities of mind, while in the higher planes of existence, everything is so blissful that there is little inspiration to practice. It is precisely the combination of pain and pleasure in the human realm that provides the best circumstances for deep understanding and realization.
The Buddha spoke often of the rarity and preciousness of human birth. There is a traditional metaphor illustrating how difficult it is to take birth as a human being. Imagine a blind turtle living at the bottom of a huge ocean; floating on the surface of the ocean is a wooden yoke. Once every hundred years the turtle comes to the surface. It is said that the likelihood of the turtle surfacing at just the place where it can stick its head through the yoke is greater than the opportunity for a being in a lower realm to take a human birth."
- Joseph Goldstein
It is ever-present. It is a central experience of our lives, like water to a fish. As we come to see the pervasive nature of dissatisfaction in our lives, we also see our consuming preoccupation with avoiding it. We create elaborate dramas around our routines, desires, and relationships, just so we can lose ourselves in them and not face the underlying hunger - hunger for contact, for love, for food, for happiness, for comfort - from which they all arise.
We are part of a waterfall. Through thought and ego-sense, through habit and conditioning, we have grasped the body, the feelings, the perceptions, the reactions, the consciousness itself, for many years as our self, yet none of these processes can be held, and the very identification with them is false, the cause of our suffering. It is all a phenomenal show of light and color, gone as soon as it arises. Everything comes out of the amazing void, each day and each moment, coming out of nothing and returning to nothing.
We continually look and hope for a new, special thing that is going to last or make us happy, fulfill our needs, answer all our questions. In actuality, what are we going to get? We will get more seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking. That's it. That's what life is."
- Jack Kornfield
Had this been an actual life, you would have received further instructions
as to what to do and where to go."
- anonymous
"What most consider their inner world, that is experiencing and viewing their emotions, impulses and instincts, is, in fact, also an outward view. Emotions and impulses are only a different manifestation of the mind's opinion. The subconscious mind is inner compared to your external conscious world, but it's still all part of the mind - your personal memory - so all of its world, symbols, pictures, and memories are external in relation to the real inner celestial worlds.
You can go to a psychologist and pick through the things you believe motivate and drive your personality. You may discover how you react to thoughts and beliefs. But in looking at the contents of the mind, you never leave it to establish observation of it. All you can do is know it. You can't get external to it in order to observe it. A psychoanalyst may take an individual into their deeper subconscious mind, but the journey is an intellectual one, based on opinion.
The problem is that it's an intellectual opinion. Although it's the opinion of a very eminent body of learning and your very eminent therapist, it's speculation, not observation. You can't know if it's really the answer or not. You might think it is and give the theory weight - after all you paid for it - but there may be a hundred and one inner aspects of your total memory that contribute to your overall emotional and behavioral issues. Most of your subconscious is invisible, silent, and hidden from the conscious mind, and although your therapist might be very clever at eking it out and giving you interpretations of the bits he or she finds, it will always be an interpretation - not necessarily fact. Further, the therapist will only be able to discuss the aspects that surface at the very moment of therapy, so those features will seem to have more weight than the bits that don't surface. Trillions of quanta of memory lay hidden; we can only discover a small percentage of it all, and we have no way of really knowing if the bits we discover are more important than the parts that remain a mystery.
So, psychoanalysis is a slow, hit-or-miss affair. It certainly helps people of an intellectual bent go through the process of understanding the mind, but in the end, no one can say categorically what your symbols mean to you. They can't see inside your mind to know how the language of your symbols and images is held together.
Picking through the mind may help you to understand yourself and it may assist you in going beyond your reactions. It may help you to become a more settled being. But the only way to establish inner observation is to turn your attention from the intellect and the ego, and all the distractions of the outside world, and look inwardly."
- Stuart Wilde
and reading the morning paper at his center in Providence, Rhode Island.
This upset a student who had many times heard him instruct in Zen,
"When you walk, just walk" and "When you eat, just eat."
How could the master say that and then go ahead and eat and read?
So the student asked him about it.
Soen-sa-nim looked up, smiled, and replied,
"When you eat and read, just eat and read!"
In much the same way the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, we all know, kills off brain cells, but naturally it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, constantly making the brain a faster and more efficient machine."
humour thyself
dharma the cat
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