the silence of words
"Something arises which pleases the mind, which fits in with our notion of what is profitable for us - and we love it. Something arises which thwarts us, which conflicts with our wants, and we hate it. So long as we possess this individual mind, enlightenment and delusion, pain and pleasure, accepting and rejecting, good and bad toss us up and down on the waves of existence, never moving onwards, always the same restlessness and wobbling, the same fear of woe and insecurity of joy."
"Our state of mind is not to be fatalistic, saying of bad things, "It can't be helped," and of good things, "What difference does it make?" It must be to want what the universe wants, in the way it wants it, in that place, at that time. This wanting is the Way, this wanting is the suchness of things; there is no Way, no suchness apart from it.
The suchness of things is what the poet is looking for, listening to, smelling, and tasting. And in so far as he and we listen and touch and see, the suchness has an existence, a meaning, a value. Unless we taste the world, it is tasteless; it is void of suchness. But this tasting is not to be a choosing, tasting some and not tasting others."
- R. H. Blyth
"Thought has nowhere to go but its own isolated, endless fragmented repetition.
Without the obsession of thought we are the recognition and the expression of the energy of consciousness and space in which we and others coexist in such profound contact that there is nothing that definitively divides us."
- Steven Harrison
Whatever anyone does,
anyone says, in the
past, now, everything, let
it bounce off the rock
. . . . . of yr gladness (yr mirror)
- Jack Kerouac
To drive out Angry Thoughts
Book of Sketches
In the transcendence
of convalescence
the translation
of Basho
I lay down
. . . . . with brilliance
I saw a star whistle
. . . . . across the sky
before dropping off
- Lorine Niedecker
I called Han Shan in the fog - there was no answer -
The sound of silence
. . . - is all the instruction you'll get.
- Jack Kerouac
Desolation Angels
The Dharma is like an Avocado!
Some parts so ripe you can't believe it,
But it's good.
And other places hard and green
Without much flavor,
Pleasing those who like their eggs well-cooked.
And the skin is thin,
The great big round seed
In the middle,
Is your own Original Nature -
Pure and smooth,
Almost nobody ever splits it open
Or ever tries to see
If it will grow.
Hard and slippery,
It looks like
You should plant it – but then
It shoots out thru the
. . . . . fingers -
gets away.
- Gary Snyder
Turtle Island
If one is not even a type of what one is, one
Must be the sign and wonder of the absence of
Something.
- Brother Tom
blank in it
p l a i n e r
"How can there be such a thing as pointing without a finger? How can art subsist without a medium? What is this silence that speaks so loudly?"
- R. H. Blyth
Zen and Zen Classics
"First be quiet. By the way, notice that I said be quiet, I did not say think quiet."
- Donald Neale Walsch
"Practice mental silence: Instead of trying to activate cosmic powers within, we should remain silent in order to see them already at work. Make it your task for today not to try to achieve anything, but to quietly watch yourself being moved about by inner forces."
- Vernon Howard
"Once inner silence is attained, everything is possible. The way to stop talking to ourselves is to use exactly the same method used to teach us to talk to ourselves; we were taught compulsively and unwaveringly, and this is the way we must stop it: compulsively and unwaveringly."
- Don Juan Matus
Carlos Castaneda
The Fire From Within
"Everything in life is speaking in spite of it's apparent silence."
- Hazrat Inayat Khan
"We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all."
- William James
A Pluralistic Universe
"You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation . . . and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else."
- Hermann Hesse
"Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed."
- Corita Kent
"Of course there can be desire without love. Desire isn't passion. Desire is the natural consequence of the sexual instinct and it isn't of any more importance than any other function of the human animal.
Unless love is passion, it's not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction, but on impediment. What d'you suppose Keats meant when he told the lover on his Grecian urn not to grieve? "Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!" Why? Because she was unattainable, and however madly the lover pursued she still eluded him. For they were both imprisoned in the marble of what I suspect was an indifferent work of art.
Passion doesn't count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love."
- W. Somerset Maugham
The Razor's Edge
"Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit."
- Peter Ustinov
"Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile is the source of your joy."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"The aim of life, its only aim, is to be free. Free of what? Free to do what? Only to be free, that is all. Free through ourselves, free to be sad, to be in pain; free to grow old and die. This is what our soul desires, and this freedom it must have; and shall have."
- Norman A. Waddell
"The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing."
- John Muir
"According to some ancient Indian poets the essential quality of Beauty is that it remains from moment to moment ever new. Since every new experience compels a fresh modification of character it might be possible to describe Beauty not only as that which is always new, but also as that which, far from allowing us the luxury of remaining satisfied with ourselves as we are, demands from moment to moment a fresh transformation of our lives."
- Bhante
The Religion of Art
"Beauty is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive."
- Nikos Kazantzakis
Sunlight streams on the river stones.
From high above, the river steadily plunges -
three thousand feet of sparkling water -
the Milky Way pouring down from heaven.
- Li Po
"They arise spontaneously, the principles of all things. Water need not think to offer itself as a home for clear moonlight."
- Sogi
"Sometimes I look at something and I think it's so wonderful.
And then I realize I was pointing out a fact
That was as obvious as the moon."
- Hsu Yun
"If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us."
- Kafka
"In the reading room of the New York Public Library, that mausoleum, designed by some schoolmaster with memories of hard oak, dust and gloom, there are men who sit day after day, bulwarked by stacks of books, scribbling, scribbling in the little pools of light from the green-shaded lamps on the long oak tables, and you look at them and wonder what will-o'-the-wisps they are pursuing day after day, year after year. One of them may be writing a history of dentistry in America, another studying explosives in order to blow up the world, a third gathering evidence that Shakespeare wrote the Bible. Their faces are pale and grim. The only cheerful people in that place are those who do not read the books, but only handle them as they come from the dumbwaiter, and set them on the counter like mouldy slabs of beef. Those who sit at the long tables day after day are dedicated men; some of them are brave men. There is death in old books from the stacks of a great library; the dust that impregnates their pages is death and darkness; the dust says, "These are books that no one has opened for twenty years, fifty years, eighty years; and when you have written your book, it too will gather dust." White book dust, bone dust: garden dirt and axle grease are clean in comparison; they are living and unctuous; rubbed into the skin, they do good. The dust of books causes blains and hangnails; ingested, it provokes dyspepsia, flatulence, and heartburn; in the lungs it is cancerous."
- Damon Knight
"Is it possible that nothing real or important has yet been seen or known or said? Is it possible that mankind has had thousands of years in which to observe, reflect, and record, and has allowed these millenia to slip past, like a recess interval at school in which one eats one's sandwich and an apple? Yes, it is possible."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
The Journal of My Other Self
"Seventh heaven may be the whole truth of a sixth sense come to pass."
- Seamus Heaney
"What is essential is not the answer but the questions; the answers indeed are the death of the life that is in the questions."
- R. H. Blyth
Witness
Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.
- Denise Levertov
sometimes my body fills up with light
until the walls of the container burst
- Robert Epstein
"Just as some people work because they're bored, I sometimes write because I have nothing to say. Daydreaming, which occurs naturally to people when they're not thinking, in me takes written form, for I know how to dream in prose."
- Fernando Pessoa
"The aim of Zen is to open the eye of the "supreme reason", that is, to awaken the inmost sense which has remained altogether dormant since the beginning of the human consciousness. When this is accomplished, one sees directly into the truth of Reality and confronts a world which is new and yet not at all new.
Hindu philosophers call this eye of the supreme reason "Mahendra's third eye." It is said to open vertically between our two horizontal ones. What the third eye sees is paradoxical, contradictory. It sees a world of non-duality - things not expressible in terms of relativity, intellection, and mere verbalism."
- Daisetz T. Suzuki
"What is Zen? Zen is looking at things with the eye of God, that is, becoming the thing's eyes so that it looks at itself with our eyes."
- R. H. Blyth
"We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows."
- C.S. Lewis
"And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say it has great gifts to lay before us, but it wishes a greater gift for us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky."
- Ayn Rand
Anthem
"Admire the world for never ending on you as you would admire an opponent, without taking your eyes off him, or walking away."
- Annie Dillard
My Dead Friends
I have begun,
when I'm weary and can't decide an answer to a bewildering question
to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.
Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?
They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling -
. . . . .whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,
to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where
Billy's ashes were -
it's green in there, a green vase,
and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call,
. . . . .and
. . . . .he says, yes.
Billy's already gone through the frightening door,
whatever he says I'll do.
- Marie Howe
"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."
- D.H. Lawrence
"Wear Donald Duck Underpants.
Choose a few childlike accoutrements to remind you of the irreverent, uninhibited, joyous side of life."
- Alan Fletcher
The art of looking sideways
What's in My Journal?
Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean
things, fishooks, barbs in your hand.
But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.
Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous
discards. Space for knicknacks, and for
Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.
Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected
anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind
that takes genius. Chasms in character.
Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above
a new grave. Pages you know exist
but you can't find them. Someone's terribly
inevitable life story, maybe mine.
– William Stafford
Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further views on the writer's vocation
"There's a belief
that thoughts are bad.
But thoughts are just
fish in the river.
You think a river
minds having fish?"
- Pamela Wilson
Thus spring begins: old
stupidities repeated,
new errs invented
- Issa
"The use of blows (being struck by the masters' staff) are not a means of enlightenment, not merely a mode of the teachers sadism and the learners masochism. The teacher wishes to teach that the universe wishes to teach us. Both teach by striking us. What does the universe wish to teach us? It wishes to teach us that it wishes to teach us."
- R. H. Blyth
"Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul."
- Simone Weil
Dark Pines Under Water
This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.
Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.
But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.
- Gwendolyn MacEwen
"Remember that self is illusive at best; not all parts of the self can be reflected in a single moment but rather over time in flowing movement. The more fragmented or fractured our experience in the world the more disjointed our reflections."
- Dr Ellen K. Rudolph
"But everything human is fragmented.
Not even Plato himself was dressed for the music he spoke of."
- Vilhelm Ekelund
"One way of spinning this is to say that my daily experience is often spontaneous and exciting. Not fragmented and intimidating, but unpredictable, continuously new. I may lose track of things, or of myself in space, my line of thought, but instead of getting frustrated I try to see this as the perfect time to stop and figure out what I want or where I am. I accept my role in the harlequinade. It's not so much a matter of making lemonade out of life's lemons, but rather of learning to savor the shock, taste, texture, and aftereffects of a mouthful of unadulterated citrus."
- Floyd Skloot
In the Shadow of Memory
Filling the void:
Spring sun
Snow whiteness
Bright clouds
Clear wind.
- Daido Ichi'i
"Judge not" means, "Do not judge your own actions or those of others good or bad, approve or disapprove of them." We must have no principles, no standards, no values. It is true that everything thus becomes wildly subjective, but it can't be helped. You must believe that your real nature is no different from the nature of things, and must somehow try to get at it."
- R. H. Blyth
"A poet is a poet for such a very tiny bit of his life; for the rest he is a human being, one of whose responsibilities is to know and feel, as much as he can, all that is moving around and within him."
- Dylan Thomas
What is it that upsets the volcanoes
that spit fire, cold and rage?
Why wasn't Christopher Columbus
able to discover Spain?
How many questions does a cat have?
Do tears not yet spilled
wait in small lakes?
Or are they invisible rivers
that run toward sadness?
- Pablo Neruda
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