turtles all the way down
A woman once came up to William James, after he had delivered a lecture on cosmology, and assured him that the world rested on the back of a giant turtle. "But what does the turtle rest on?" James asked. "Another turtle," she replied. James paused, and the lady anticipated his question: "I know what you're going to ask, Professor James, and it's turtles all the way down."
"Thought pushes experience further, opens up new dimensions for it, and refines what comes to experience. Experience pushes thought further, opens up new dimensions for thinking, and sets limits to its excursions. The brilliance of Zen thinking is its tentative and provisional character, the 'non-abiding', 'non-grasping' mind. Knowing through thought that all thought is empty, Zen masters have explored worlds of reflection unavailable to other traditions - playfully 'thinking' what lies beneath commonsense.
The Zen master is one who no longer seeks solid ground, who realizes that all things and situations are supported, not by firm ground and solid self-nature, but rather by shifting and contingent relations. He no longer needs to hold his ground in dialogue, and therefore does not falter when all grounds give way. His role in dialogue is to reflect in a selfless way whatever is manifest or can become manifest in the moment"
- Dale S. Wright
Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism
"Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be. You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death, and religion), you must have mirth or you will have madness."
- G.K. Chesterton
"Something happens when we face the truth about ourselves. For one thing, there is no room for pomposity, arrogance, or self-absorption. More than one person has pointed out how closely conjoined "humility" is with "humor." A sense of humor, like a true sense of humility, involves ruthless honesty about who we are, without disguise or pretense. The temptation, of course, is to become weighted with gravity, and to take ourselves very seriously indeed. The point is that the opposite route is the direct one.
The truth of the matter is that we are singularly gifted in avoiding self-discovery, even though we pay lip service to it. Impressed with our self-importance and weighted with the seriousness of the adventure of self-discovery, we are sitting ducks for missing the meaning of what is going on."
- Doris Donnelly
"Something marvelous has happened to me. I was caught up into the seventh heaven. There sat all the gods in assembly. As a special grace, there was accorded to me the privilege of making a wish. "Wilt thou," said Mercury, "wilt thou have youth, or beauty, or power, or long life, or the most beautiful maiden, or any other glorious thing among the many we have here in the treasure chest? Then choose but one thing."
For an instant, I was irresolute, then I addressed the gods as follows: "Highly esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side." There was not a god that answered a word, but they all burst out laughing. Thereupon, I concluded that my wish was granted, and I found that the gods knew how to express themselves with good taste."
- Soren Kierkegaard
Someday, if we live long enough
we will tell our love stories to a stranger from
down the hall,
inventing what we must
to explain the rule of time and the
uncertainty of our place in this world.
- Don Snyder
So you'll know me
The one thing I will tell you
So you'll know me
Precisely
When you look for me in the
Crowd of all those faces
Those many, many faces
Which always move back and forth like
The Sea,
Is that I will look nothing like
What you expect me to
Look like.
Do not doubt it, it will work
You will find me, just as surely
As you always find that right turn
Onto your street, when you are coming
Home from work.
Right there, at the intersection between
This avenue and that avenue
As you take that turn
Effortlessly
That's how you will know me.
I will look like none of those faces,
And I will feel precisely like
That right turn.
- Corina Bardasuc
"How is it that we need all this prodding, all these warnings and earnest invitations and promises of infinite rewards, to persuade us to take a really close look at ourselves? Why don't all intelligent and serious people make it their chief business in life to find out whose life it is?"
- Douglas Harding
"To be or not to be" is not really a question. It's indecision."
- R. L. Wing
The I Ching Workbook
"The most expedient method for dislodging the id-entity is to confront it directly and ask tough questions. This is self-inquiry, self-interrogation. Don't be distracted by the flurry of decoys and red herrings it throws out - the personality quirks and tantalizing memories of past imperfections. This is where it wants to play, in the muck and mire of personal history. Here it has home field advantage. It will do everything in its power to keep you looking under those rocks for the duration. There's no end to it. Rather, look straight at it, at the heart of the matter, at the myth of personhood itself. Is there a self to study? If so, then by all means have at it. If not, why study something that doesn't exist? First things first.
A certain amount of persona-study is necessary to demystify the workings of one's particular vehicle. Beyond that it risks becoming a narcissistic indulgence. We need only be concerned with those aspects of persona that block truth. In actuality, very few of one's traits fall into this category. Focus on those and leave the rest to wither. How can we know which ones stand in the way? Move along a narrow path in the direction of your longest view and see what you hit. The direction of your movement will determine what stands in the way. Deal only with those things that block the path and keep moving. Do not look right or left at extraneous quirks that appear to need fixing - Sirens conjured by the identity to distract and delay you. Don't get sidetracked trying to become a better robot. Don't waste time polishing the turd. It doesn't hold truth and it won't take a shine.
The path is subtractive here as elsewhere. We love what we believe to be unique personal aspects of our individuality - memories, character traits, opinions . . . We like to think of ourselves as extremely complex, with burdens and challenges and destinies of mythic proportion. That's a lot to carry. Weed out as much of this as possible and focus available energy on actual obstacles, not seductive cul-de-sacs and dead ends. The danger is that psychological self-study becomes an ego game, a goal in itself - an endless tail-chasing device that locks one into the idea that the person can be fixed, that it needs to be fixed before moving forward. It becomes a reason for procrastination, a reason to refuse freedom, a reason to hold grace at bay. "I am not yet worthy," we protest, and fend off God with all our might.
Move in any direction, and the way you live and act will quite naturally come into alignment with that direction. This does not need to be taken on as a separate task. The key is direction. Choose wisely, set your sights on the furthest point in current view and move out smartly."
- Bart Marshall
Nothing Is Necessary
"How do you go about finding anything? By keeping your mind and heart in it. Interest, there must be, and steady remembrance. To remember what needs to be remembered, is the secret of success. You come to it through earnestness.
When you are in dead earnest, you bend every incident, every second of your life to your purpose. You do not waste time and energy on other things. You are totally dedicated.
To know that you are a prisoner of your mind, that you live in an imaginary world of your own creation, is the dawn of wisdom. To want nothing of it, to be ready to abandon it entirely, is earnestness."
- Sri Nisargadatta
"I'm frequently overwhelmed by the monotony of a typical day. Like most people, I pretend not to be excited by catastrophes. I prefer a life that won't cohere, that scrutiny might destroy, to a life the populace might approve of. To my fellow prisoners I say, Just because the escape tunnel goes on forever is no reason to stop digging. Because I've often felt what I've said, I know that nobody's problem was ever solved by feeling deeply about it. I've said the opposite of this, and stand by what I said. I am a pagan and enjoy a pagan's tragic optimism. I'll dance to almost anything, however awful, if the beat is good. I know several consolations for the letdowns and sorrows of experience, but intend to keep them to myself. Every secret I've ever told concealed another secret. I prefer relationships in which so little is asked of me I feel free enough to be generous."
- Stephen Dunn
Personal
Riffs & Reciprocities
"At day's end, what honest effort do you look back upon? Did you express one thought that was not in defense? Did you look at your self from another person's perspective? Did you understand the why behind another person's actions? Did you laugh at your self? Did you remember you will die? How long till you experience one night utterly alone, where silence absorbs every hope, and boils you down to zero? How long till you remember these questions every day, then end them?"
- Shawn Nevins
- Tao-chi
"Each man's life represents a road towards himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimidation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that - one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best as he can."
- Hermann Hesse
Demian
We are the echo of the future
On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live
- W.S. Merwin
from his poem The River of Bees
Sad twilight cricket
Yes, I have wasted
Once again
Those daylight hours.
- Rikei
Looking for a Rest Area
I've been driving for hours,
it seems like all my life.
The wheel has become familiar,
I turn it
every so often to avoid the end
of my life, but I'm never sure
it doesn't turn me
by its roundness, as women have
by the space inside them.
What I'm looking for
is a rest area, some place where
the old valentine inside my shirt
can stop contriving romances,
where I can climb out of the thing
that has taken me this far
and stretch myself.
It is dusk, Nebraska,
the only bright lights in this entire state
put their fists in my eyes
as they pass me.
Oh, how easily I can be dazzled -
where is the sign
that will free me, if only for moments,
I keep asking.
- Stephen Dunn
Looking for Holes in the Ceiling
I think of the past twenty years,
When I used to walk home quietly from the Kuo-ch'ing;
All the people in the Kuo-ch'ing monastery-
They say, "Han-shan is an idiot."
"Am I really an idiot:" I reflect.
But my reflections fail to solve the question:
for I myself do not know who the self is,
And how can others know who I am?
- Han Shan
"Simplicity in conduct, in beliefs, and in environment brings an individual very close to the truth of reality. Individuals who practice simplicity cannot be used because they already have everything they need; they cannot be lied to because a lie merely reveals to them another aspect of reality. An attraction to simplicity is essentially an attraction to freedom - the highest expression of personal power. We are taught to think of freedom as something one has, but it is really the absence of things that brings freedom to the individual and meaning into life. To let go of things - unnecessary desires, superfluous possessions - is to have them. Lao Tzu believed that an individual life contains the whole universe, but when individuals develop fixations about certain parts of life they become narrow and shallow and uncentered. Fixations and desires create a crisis within the mind. As individuals let go of desires, feelings of freedom, security, independence, and power increase accordingly."
- R.L. Wing
The Tao of Power
"As incredible as it sounds, an unhappy man does not realize that happiness is better than unhappiness. Knowing only his own concealed anguish, he worships it, which is the same as self-worship."
- Vernon Howard
"If we fall into hell, we go through hell; this is the most important attitude to have. Just sit in the Reality of Life seeing hell and paradise, misery and joy, life and death, all with the same eye. No matter what the situation, we live the life of the Self. We must sit immovably on that foundation. This is essential; this is what "becoming one with the universe" means.
If we divide this universe into two, striving to attain satori and to escape delusion, we are not the whole universe. Happiness and unhappiness, satori and delusion, life and death; see them with the same eye. In every situation the Self lives the life of the Self - such a self must do itself by itself."
- Uchiyama Kosho
"We say you cannot divert the river from the river bed. We say that everything is moving, and we are a part of this motion. That the soil is moving. That the water is moving. We say that the earth draws water to her from the clouds. We say the rainfall parts on each side of the mountain, like the parting of our hair, and that the shape of the mountain tells where the water has passed. We say this water washes the soil from the hillsides, that the rivers carry sediment, that rain when it splashes carries small particles, that the soil itself flows with water in streams underground. We say that water is taken up into roots of plants, into stems, that it washes down hills into rivers, that these rivers flow to the sea, that from the sea, in the sunlight, this water rises to the sky, that this water is carried in clouds, and comes back as rain, comes back as fog, back as dew, as wetness in the air.
We say everything comes back."
- Susan Griffin
"Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev was a Hasidic master, and when his only son died, the funeral bier was taken through the village and the congregation followed behind in deep silence. Of course, the Rabbi himself was walking behind his son's bier. And then to the great astonishment of his people, he began to dance. He began a slow, grave dance with his coattails flying out like great black wings. The people began to look at each other and they at last had to say something, and they said, "What are you doing? What are you doing!"
And he said to them, "A pure soul was rendered to me, and a pure soul I render back."
- Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen
It Was Like This: You Were Happy
It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.
It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.
At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent - what could you say?
Now it is almost over.
Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.
It does this not in forgiveness -
between you, there is nothing to forgive -
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.
Eating, too, is now a thing only for others.
It doesn't matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.
Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.
- Jane Hirshfield
"We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience - even of silence - by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles."
- Annie Dillard
"Just live that life. It doesn't matter whether it is life or hell, life of the hungry ghost, life of the animal, it's okay; just live that life, see. And as a matter of fact there is no other way. Where you stand, where you are, that's what your life is right there, regardless of how painful it is or how enjoyable it is. That's what it is."
- Taizan Maezumi
As the plump squirrel scampers
Across the roof of the corncrib,
The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,
And I see that it is impossible to die.
Each moment of time is a mountain.
An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,
Crying
This is what I wanted.
- James Wright
"Though I do not expect that I shall be reborn directly as a crocus, I know that one day my atoms will inhabit a bacterium here, a diatom there, a nematode or a flagellate - even a crayfish or a sea cucumber. I will be here, in myriad forms, for as long as there are forms of life on Earth. I have always been here, and with a certain effort of will, I can sometimes remember."
- John A. Livingston
One Cosmic Instant, A Natural History of Human Arrogance
"You become sense and the Whole becomes object. Sense and object mingle and unite, then each returns to its place, and the object rent from sense is a perception, and you rent from the object are for yourselves, a feeling. It is this earlier moment I mean, which you always experience yet never experience. The phenomenon of your life is just the result of its constant departure and return. It is scarcely in time at all, so swiftly it passes; it can scarcely be described, so little does it properly exist. It is immediate, raised above all error and misunderstanding. You lie directly on the bosom of the infinite world."
- Friedrich Schleiermacher
On Religion
"The real distinguishing factor between the little self and the higher Self is that the little self is acutely aware of itself as a distinct separate individual, and a sense of solitude or of separation sometimes comes in the existential experience. In contrast, the experience of the spiritual Self is a sense of freedom, of expansion, of communication with other Selves and with reality, and there is the sense of Universality. It feels itself at the same time individual and universal."
- Roberto Assagioli
"You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate you to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained - though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is."
- Alan Watts
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Living
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.
A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily
moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.
Each minute the last minute.
- Denise Levertov
"The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire since the word go."
- Annie Dillard
"In considering what is possible for the future one must be careful not to slide into denial. Imagination can so easily be trapped by the wish to escape painful facts and unbearable conclusions. The New Age idea that one can wish oneself out of any circumstance, disease, or bad fortune is not only sadly disrespectful toward suffering, it is also, in the end, dangerous if escape replaces awareness.
At the same time, the act of seeing changes those who see. This is perhaps most clear with self-perception. By my perceptions of who I am or what I feel, not only do I re-create my idea of who I am but I also change myself. Perception is not simply a reflection of reality but a powerful element of reality. Anyone who meditates has had this experience: Observing the activities of the mind changes the mind until, bit by bit, observation creates great changes in the soul. And the effect is the same when the act of perception is collective. A change in public perception will change the public. This is why acts of imagination are so important.
Like artistic and literary movements, social movements are driven by imagination. I am not speaking here only of the songs and poems and paintings that have always been part of movements for political and social change, but of the movements themselves, their political ideas and forms of protest. Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope for the future emerges."
- Susan Griffin
"Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water.
What a thing to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen."
- Thomas Merton
Rain and the Rhinoceros
"This is not your week to run the Universe. Next week is not looking so good either."
- Susan J. Elliott
Chairman: "Item six on the agenda: the meaning of life. Now, Harry, you've had some thoughts on this?"
Harry: "That's right. Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: people are not wearing enough hats. Two: matter is energy. In the universe, there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this soul does not exist ab initio. It has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved, owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia."
[pause]
Chairman: "What was that about hats, again?"
- Monty Python's Meaning of Life
"At the height of laughter the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities. Laughter is the loaded latency given us by nature as part of our native equipment to break up the stalemates of our lives and urge us on to deeper and more complex forms of knowing."
- Jean Houston
"I have not always had this certainty, this pessimism which reassures the best among us. There was a time when my friends laughed at me. I was not the master of my words. A certain indifference, I have not always known well what I wanted to say, but most often it was because I had nothing to say. The necessity of speaking and the desire not to be heard. My life hanging only by a thread.
There was a time when I seemed to understand nothing. My chains floated on the water.
All my desires are born of my dreams. And I have proven my love with words. To what fantastic creatures have I entrusted myself, in what dolorous and ravishing world has my imagination enclosed me? I am sure of having been loved in the most mysterious of domains, my own. The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love. My amorous imagination has always been constant and high enough so that nothing could attempt to convince me of error."
- Paul Éluard
"The false self consists of all of the efforts we make to nurture a reputation for ourselves in the mind of others. In our culture, we have a compulsive need to be validated by external sources. But the true self is one that is wholly separate from this fragile image that we try to construct in the imagination of others. The true self is like a very shy wild animal that never appears at all whenever an alien presence is at hand, and comes out only when all is peaceful, when he is untroubled and alone. He cannot be lured by anyone or anything, because he responds to no lure except that of the divine freedom."
- Thomas Merton
New Seeds of Contemplation
Air
Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.
This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.
I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.
Young as I am, old as I am,
I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.
This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.
- W. S. Merwin
"Part of my intensely deep practice in Germany was walking for several hours a day in the woods that surrounded the town. It was an integral part of the meditation. I began to think that meditation or contemplative practice that is divorced from the world is a little bit crazy. These practices in fact tend to have been developed in the natural world. Buddha sat under a bodhi tree. Jesus wandered and fasted in the desert. All of these practices are very deep in their origin, with a very deep connection with the Earth. You open so much that the Earth then teaches - the wisdom encoded in nature simply speaks. It's wonderful to meditate in a hall or to pray in a church - it's fabulous. But if that's the only place we do it, we're actually missing what the practices originally gave people when they were founded."
- James Thornton
Radical Confidence: A Field Guide to the Soul
Every day priests minutely
examine the Dharma
and endlessly chant
complicated sutras.
They should learn
how to read the love letters
sent by the wind and rain,
the snow and moon.
- Ikkyu
"On one of his rare trips outside of the monastery, Thomas Merton traveled to Columbia University in New York to meet Daisetz T. Suzuki, the famous Japanese interpreter of Zen to the West. They had corresponded and even published a dialogue together, but this was their first meeting. Immediately, they found in each other much of the sensitivity and ability to delight in simplicity that they had valued most in each of their own traditions. Merton said he had the feeling that in this ninety-four year old man he had met the "True Man of No Title" of which Zen masters sometimes speak. Suzuki said that he had found no one in the West who understood Zen better than Thomas Merton. They celebrated tea ceremony in Butler Hall before departing, and Merton was deeply moved by the simple experience of listening to water boil, stirring green tea, and drinking it together in the three and a half sips required by Zen rubric. Watching Suzuki in this moment of ritualized silence, he later said:
"It was at once as if nothing at all had happened and as if the roof had flown off the building. But in reality nothing had happened. A very old deaf Zen man with bushy eyebrows had drunk a cup of tea, as though with the complete wakefulness of a child and yet as though at the same time declaring with utter finality: this is not important!"
- Thomas Merton
Learning to Live
Thomas Merton's Collected Essays
"Truth does not become more valid because it is seen by the light of a Chinese lantern or wrapped in a Japanese kimono. The Masters may have been distinguishable because they wore Mongolian masks, but the real souls of Absolutism were universal and cosmopolitan. Take them out of the Oriental environment and they are still great Masters. Many of the greatest are probably unknown, preached but little, did not seek disciples and were never entangled in monastic life. They lived like leaves blown by the wind. If realization does not give real freedom, then it is not realization. Liberation has no entanglements and involvements and those who permit them are not liberated."
- Dadaji
"There is no teaching about, and also no Buddhistic teaching, about Zen. Meister Yuansou correctly maintained, "There is no teaching for you to chew on or upon which you can squat. If you do not believe in yourself, take your bundle and make the rounds to other people's houses in the search for Zen and the Tao. You are looking for mysteries, for wonders, for Buddhas, for Zen masters and teachers. You believe that is the search for the highest truth and you make that your religion, but that is like running eastwards in order to find something that lies in the West."
- Thomas Cleary
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