immaculate perception
"You're the only one who knows when you're using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you're opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is - working with it rather than struggling against it. You're the only one who knows."
- Pema Chodron
They say
do not try to unlock this door
without a teacher.
Who locked this door?
- John Ezra Fowler
What I teach people just
Requires you not to take
On the confusion of others.
Act when necessary,
Without further hesitation or doubt.
When students today do not attain this,
Wherein lies their sickness?
The sickness is in not
Trusting yourself.
If your inner trust is insufficient,
Then you will frantically go along
With changes in situations,
And will be influenced and
Affected by myriad objects,
Unable to be independent.
If you can stop the mentality
Of constant frantic seeking,
Then you are no different
From Zen masters and Buddhas.
- Linji
you may call the rose an open heart or a broken heart."
- Dard
" . . . consider that virtually everything we do is easily recognizable as being our own - the way we walk down a street, the way we write our signature, the way we pick up the telephone. For example, there is in Buddhism a teaching which intimates that you can learn a lot about someone from the way they go about sweeping a room. Do they do it in a wild fashion, dust flying everywhere? Or do they go about it more calmly and methodically?
Sweeping a room may seem far removed from what is usually thought of as the spiritual life, but it is shrewd to make this connection. Every act is built upon all that has gone before, and even the way we approach a simple task is likely to reflect our deepest and most subjective patterns, all the hopes and fears that go to make us what we are."
- Manjusvara
Writing Your Way
"And this do I call immaculate perception of all things: to want nothing else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a hundred facets."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Things I Saw With My Own Eyes
I saw a stout man turn into a bird, then shed
his feathers, one by one, and become a woman.
I saw a hippocentaur preserved in honey, wheeled
through town by a bellowing entrepreneur.
On a feast day, a man lay down upon the banquet
and spewed forth sweet wine from his genitals.
It soaked everyones clothes and stained our skin
hilarity ensued, until the wine turned to blood.
When we were soaked with his blood, the man died.
There was chaos in the hall, and much howling.
Tribes in India howl when they are happy. I saw
a woman give birth to a hundred children,
like drops from a dripping faucet or luggage on
a luggage carousel. If you are perfectly still
and you lie down in a field, soon your body
will be covered by sparrows, but move an inch
and they fly away all at once, leaving you naked,
and scatter everywhere above you in the sky.
- Dan Chiasson
Natural History
In the very earliest time,
when people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen -
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody can explain this:
That's the way it was.
- Eskimo
The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart
Robert Bly, James Hillman and Michael Meade
"We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don't know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home."
- Sogyal Rinpoche
"Mindfulness works like an electron microscope. That is, it operates on so fine a level that one can actually see directly those realities which are at best theoretical constructs to the conscious thought process. Mindfulness actually sees the impermanent character of every perception. It sees the transitory and passing nature of everything that is perceived. It also sees the inherently unsatisfactory nature of all conditioned things. It sees that there is no sense grabbing onto any of these passing shows. Peace and happiness just cannot be found that way. And finally, Mindfulness sees the inherent selflessness of all phenomena. It sees the way we have arbitrarily selected a certain bundle of perceptions, chopped them off from the rest of the surging flow of experience and then conceptualized them as separate, enduring, entities. Mindfulness actually sees these things. It does not think about them, it sees them directly."
- Venerable Henepola Gunaratana
Mindfulness in Plain English
"What is common to all human beings in all history is problems, problems, problems. We are here for problem-solving and, if you are any good at problem-solving, you don't come to utopia, you come to more difficult problems to solve. That apparently is what we're here for, so I therefore conclude that we humans are here for local information-gathering and local problem-solving with our minds having access to the design principles of the Universe. We are here for local information gathering and local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. That is a very extraordinary and important kind of a function we have."
- R. Buckmister Fuller
"You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here . . . I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me."
- Richard Feynman
I go through my body and out onto the paper
She wraps my head in white
My eyes burn to read
I can't forget anything
No word or face or silence
They go through my body
Into its streams released
From openings into air
Upon the page
How the world is gone
every moment we are awake in it.
- David Meltzer
"Your whole past is like a long sleep which would have been forgotten had there been no memory, but remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which everything is washed away but that which is new and more substantial even than life - reality."
- Henry Miller
Tropic of Capricorn
"I didn't make the universe. I just live in it.
Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.
Fravashi saying (from the formularies of Osho the Fool)
The power of ahimsa is not just the readiness to die. It is the willingness to live. To live utterly without fear - this is a fearsome thing.
All living things are afraid to die.
No, you're exactly wrong, the only truly alive beings are those unafraid to die.
Well, it's a cruel universe, isn't it? Sometimes I think it all just falls worse and worse.
No, it is just the opposite. It is the way creation must always be.
But how is it possible? How could it be possible that everything is really all right?
How could it not be possible?"
- David Zindell
resourceful in its form
untrackable in its reach
unlinkable to my
mouth
- Marc Weber
Saying of the Warrior-Poets
"Since the business of living has so many barbs in it, and since so many of our friends are liars or fools or inarticulate or emotionally blunt or are sucking on us for what they imagine we can give though we can't, it is pure joy to read the poems of the truth-sayers, the simple singers, the masters of prayer and devotion, and the crazed, wise, babblers of Ecstasy, the High-Mind Singers to no end."
- Lew Welch
Language Is Speech
Lew Welch: How I Work As a Poet & Other Essays
In Those Years
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
- Adrienne Rich
"Sometimes the path you are on is not as important as the direction you are heading. For, no matter if you take the Holland Tunnel or the George Washington Bridge you get to New Jersey, so long as you are heading west. The procedure involved in your path to Nirvana may meander, but a road worth traveling will have its twists and turns."
- Kevin Smith
there is a whole different world."
- C. S. Lewis
I am the joy of the desiring flesh
The days of my living
are summer days
The nights of my glory
outshine the blazing wavecaps of the heavens
at their floodtide
Mine is the confident hand shaping this world.
- Kenneth Patchen
"And now, advice for beginning mystics. Be sober, be intelligent, be educated, rely on the tangible reality as long as you can. Remember that the act of writing is a tiny part of a bigger something. Defend the value of the spiritual experience and if somebody tells you it's an old fashioned notion, laugh loudly and serenely."
- Adam Zagajewski
I reach deep inside myself I rip out
a handful of bleeding crackling
wires I squeeze the juice out
I burn them out I want to see where
the truth lies I want to see where
it all breaks down I walk down the
mouth of every beast I can find So
I can see what's at the end That's
the only part that interests me
The end The rest is all getting there
- Henry Rollins
One From None
"The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself. Yet the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no meaning, they are meaning; the mountains are. I ring with life and the mountains ring and when I can hear it, it is a ringing we share. I understand all this in my heart knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that only words will remain when I read it again another day."
- Peter Matthaissen
The Snow Leopard
illumination
right now,
i stand, my feet firmly
placed in the present.
right now,
my words feel profound,
and my writing
could guide the ones who come later
maybe, even, myself.
right now,
my life is entwined
with so many others,
and history seems
like a meaningful path
defining humanity's striving.
tomorrow,
all bets are off . . .
- Jon Bohrn
"We don't really have any mind at all. We think we have a mind; we think we have this thing called my mind, that it's a particular mind. Then we lock ourselves into this structure of our own creation. It's a little prison we put ourselves in. But actually, we aren't anything in particular at all. Once we realize this, then we have complete freedom - whether we're exploring the mind through writing, or through just sitting there quietly, observing the thoughts as they come up. It's all the same; it's the same free-flowing mind that's taking place. It can be found and expressed in any activity."
- Steve Hagen
some nights
Some nights, stay up till dawn.
As the moon sometimes does for the sun.
Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
of a well, then lifted out into light.
Something opens our wings. Something
makes boredom and hurt disappear.
Someone fills the cup in front of us.
We taste only sacredness.
- Rumi
translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks
Lightenings viii
The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.
The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'
The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvelous as he had known it.
- Seamus Heaney
Seeing Things
"We write to understand. Thus we should write. But we can never fully understand. The world is shifting, and we are shifting under it. Thus we should keep writing."
- Andy Couturier
Writing Open the Mind
"Only to a magician is the world forever fluid,
infinitely mutable and eternally new.
Only he knows the secret of change.
Only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness
to become something else
and it is from this universal tension
that he draws his power."
- Peter Beagle
"Zen has an expression, "nothing special." When you understand "nothing special," you realize that everything is special. Everything's special and nothing's special. Everything's spiritual and nothing's spiritual. It's how you see, it's what eyes you're looking through, that matters."
- Jon Kabat-Zinn
The unspoiled colors of a late summer night,
The wind howling through the lofty pines
The feel of the autumn approaching;
The swaying bamboos keep resonating,
And shedding tears of dew at dawn;
Only those who exert themselves fully
Will attain the Way,
But even if you abandon all for the ancient path of meditation,
You can never forget the meaning of sadness.
- Dogen
August
August rushes by like desert rainfall,
A flood of frenzied upheaval,
Expected,
But still catching me unprepared.
Like a matchflame
Bursting on the scene,
Heat and haze of crimson sunsets.
Like a dream
Of moon and dark barely recalled,
A moment,
Shadows caught in a blink.
Like a quick kiss;
One wishes for more
But it suddenly turns to leave,
Dragging summer away.
- Elizabeth Maua Taylor
I
Wrapped in silence,
the scent of white blossom
is carried from the earth,
the season slowly taking back
what was given.
- Anne Fraser
. . . . . . this, that,
and the day goes.
- Kobayashi Issa
The moon and the flowers,
forty-nine years,
. . . . . . walking around, wasting time.
- Issa
I WAS HERE
We all begin
as unmarked trees
And we spend our lives
Desperately
carving our initials
in one another.
- Linda Delayen
"Why fret away your life? See the willow tree by the river;
there it is, watching the water flow by."
- Shibayama
- Paul Watzlawick
It's Ours
there is always that space there
just before they get to us
that space
that fine relaxer
the breather
while say
flopping on a bed
thinking of nothing
or say
pouring a glass of water from the
spigot
while entranced by
nothing
that
gentle pure
space
it's worth
centuries of
existence
say
just to scratch your neck
while looking out the window at
a bare branch
that space
there
before they get to us
ensures
that
when they do
they won't
get it all
ever.
- Charles Bukowski
"It has been said that if you could become another person for even a few moments you would probably become Enlightened. So strong is our attachment to the idea of who we are that even the smallest jolt out of it can have an immense effect."
- Manjusvara
"So much of what we do is habitual. Through repetition it becomes hard-wired into the very circuitry of our being. Eventually we have already anticipated most aspects of our life and we increasingly stop being surprised by ourselves."
- Manjusvara
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