the theatre of thought
"True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness."
- Francesco Petrarch
"Love is much more fundamental than any kind of thinking or believing. It is the root and basis of who you are, at the most fundamental level. This means that anything other than love as an expression of your being is artificial and unnatural and is a result of not knowing who you are."
- Bill Harris
if you have time to chatter
read books
if you have time to read
walk into mountain, desert and ocean
if you have time to walk
sing songs and dance
if you have time to dance
sit quietly, you happy lucky idiot
- Nanao Sakai
What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop
In our idleness, cinnamon blossoms fall.
In night quiet, spring mountains stand
empty. Moonrise startles mountain birds:
here and there, cries in a spring gorge.
- Wang Wei
- Yasunari Kawabata
In the past, when I began to study Zen,
it was all a mistake.
Wandering through numberless
mountains and rivers,
I wanted to find
something to know.
It's all clear in hindsight.
Having learned this,
what do I have?
Release a crow into the night
and it flies
flecked with snow.
- Dayang Jingxuan
"Discovering the selfless nature doesn't have a monumental "Eureka!" quality. It is more like being continually perplexed, the way we feel when we're looking for the car keys we're so sure are in our pocket, or when the supermarket's being renovated and what we need has moved to a different aisle each time we go shopping. That experience of being somewhat dumbfounded is the beginning of wisdom . . . . We're beginning to see through our ignorance - the everyday vigil we sustain to confirm that we exist in some permanent way. We look at our mind and see that it is a fluid situation, and we look at the world and see that it is a fluid situation. Our expectation of permanence is confounded."
- Sakyong Mipham
Ruling Your World
The Laughing Thrush
O nameless joy of the morning
tumbling upward note by note out of the night
and the hush of the dark valley
and out of whatever has not been there
song unquestioning and unbounded
yes this is the place and the one time
in the whole of before and after
with all of memory waking into it
and the lost visages that hover
around the edge of sleep
constant and clear
and the words that lately have fallen silent
to surface among the phrases of some future
if there is a future
here is where they all sing the first daylight
whether or not there is anyone listening
- W.S. Merwin
The Shadow of Sirius
"Beware of gnawing the ideogram of nothingness:
Your teeth will crack. Swallow it whole, and you have a treasure."
- Karasumaru Mitsuhiro
Searching for spring all day, I never saw it,
straw sandals treading everywhere
among the clouds, along the banks.
Coming home, I laughed, catching
the plum blossom's scent:
spring at each branch tip, already perfect.
- unknown zen nun from the Song Dynasty
Sam Hamill and J.P. Seaton
The Poetry of Zen
"We have no where to go (really) but down - eventually we must all let go and jump - it is supposedly that act which propels us to meet the next level - to enlightenment. What would bring us to this point - where we are willing to give up the self? Does the fall into the abyss always result in enlightenment? How would we know? What do we have to give up to make such a leap?"
- Hakuin Ekaku
Hakuin's famous koan is What is the sound of one hand clapping?
The wind blows hard among the pines
Toward the beginning
Of an endless past
Listen: you've heard everything.
- Shinkichi Takahashi
"Proclamation of the actual mind, manifesting your mind, writing the mind, which goes back to Kerouac but also goes back to Milarepa, goes back to his original instructions: Don't you trust your own mind? Why do you need a piece of paper?
So writing could be seen as "writing your mind", observing your own mind, or observe what's vivid coming to mind. For the purpose of relieving your own paranoia, and others', revealing yourself and communicating to others. It is a blessing for other people if you can communicate and relieve their sense of isolation, confusion, bewilderment, and suffering by offering your own mind as a sample of what's palpable, visible, and whatever little you've learned.
In other words, if you can show your mind it reminds people that they have got a mind. If you can catch yourself thinking, it reminds people that they can catch themselves thinking. If you have a vivid moment that's more open and compassionate, it reminds people that they have those vivid moments.
By showing your mind as a mirror, you can make a mirror for other people to recognize their own minds and see familiarity and not feel that their minds are unworthy of affection or appreciation. It is appreciation of consciousness, appreciation of our own consciousness."
- Allen Ginsberg
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician -
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and
school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination" - above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
- Marianne Moore
The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore
I am looking for a poem that says Everything
so I don't have to write
anymore.
- Tukaram
Face of the spring moon -
about twelve years old,
I'd say.
- Kobayashi Issa
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"If you've never been thrilled to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom."
- Audra Foveo
"And notwithstanding the scene is so impressively spiritual, and you seem dissolved in it yet everything about you is beating with warm, terrestrial human love, delightfully substantial and familiar."
- John Muir
"The wing scars the sky, making a path inevitably as the deer in snow, and the winds all know it and tell it though we hear it not."
- John Muir
"How much of the day are you aware - just basically aware of what life is presenting - rather than being lost in waking sleep, in being identified with whatever you're doing, almost as if you didn't exist?
To what extent do you blindly drift from one form of comfort to another, from one daydream or fantasy to another, from one secure place to another, in order to avoid the anxious quiver of discomfort or insecurity? How much of your energy is used to fortify a particular self-image, or to simply please others in order to gain approval, instead of devoting your energy to living a genuine life?"
- Ezra Bayda
At Home in the Muddy Water: A Guide to Finding Peace within Everyday Chaos
"In any given moment, we are either practicing mindfulness or, de facto, we are practicing mindlessness. When framed in this way, we might want to take more responsibility for how we meet the world, inwardly and outwardly in any and every moment - especially given that there just aren't any in-between moments in our lives."
- Jon Kabat-Zinn
Coming to Our Senses
"It has to be felt deeper, below the surface, at the very point where all senses merge. Merge with them right there like a fleck of foam falling into a stream. Just by listening with your eyes you can fold back on yourself and merge into that primal stream of awareness like a river is swallowed by the immensity of the ocean. Only then will you know what point to live from. Only then will you be sure."
- G. Bluestone
Journeys on Mind Mountain
"Breathing is the work of the universe; it's not the work of your individual self. Thinking, too, is the work of the universe. And as it is written in the Genjokoan, delusion and realization are one - both a part of the same scenery.
That this thing becomes this thing is the form of the universe. If you want to become something else, you are making a mistake. You need to be satisfied with who you are."
- Joko Shibata
Individuality
Individuality?
is not of the substance of elements.
It is an organism, indivisibly
occupied
by elementary objects of a divergent character:
if you
were to attempt division, these parts
would die.
Myself,
for instance: an entire dramatic company.
Enter an ancestor, prophetic;
enter a hero, brutal
a rake, alcoholic, to argue
with a learned professor.
A lyrical beauty, rolling her eyes
heavenward, a case
of chronic infatuation -
enter a heavy father,
to take care of that.
enter a liberal uncle - to arbitrate . . .
Aunt Chatterbox gossiping in a corner.
Chambermaid Lewdie, giggling.
And I, watching it all,
astonishment in my eyes.
Poised, in my left hand
a sharpened pencil.
A pregnant woman!, a mother
is planning
her entrance -
Shushhh! you
don't belong here
you
are divisible!
She fades.
- Paul Klee
"Self is a myriad. We can use the word to cover both our sense of extension over time – the feeling that somehow I'm the same person I was as a child – and for the constantly changing ungraspable flow of consciousness. Which is the true self? That question, the basis for so many Zen koans, immediately leads us astray.
Instead of fully experiencing ourselves in the very act of asking the question, we imagine there's another more real, truer, more essential self hiding somewhere out of sight that we have to go search for. Not surprisingly, we can never find it. But when a problem remains intractable for so long and so many answers that are proposed are so unsatisfying, one must begin to suspect that the question is either being asked in a way that makes it inherently unanswerable or that we are looking for the wrong kind of answer."
- Barry Magid
Ending the Pursuit of Happiness
At first a yogi feels his mind
Is tumbling like a waterfall;
In midcourse, like the Ganges,
It flows on slow and gentle;
In the end, it is a great
Vast ocean, where the lights
Of child and mother merge in one.
- The song of Tilopa
"The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else - we are the busiest people in the world."
- Eric Hoffer
"The key to happiness is in allowing whatever arises to be as spontaneous and joyful as possible, recognizing that whatever occurs is impermanent and nothing, no matter how painful or pleasurable, is going to last."
- Fred Alan Wolf
"We are taught not to take ourselves too seriously, and we are taught to believe that there is little ultimate truth in grief or misery. The real wisdom is joy. The real wisdom is happiness. It takes great courage when you are suffering to see beyond your suffering to the clear relations between things, to the laws that cause and govern your suffering; it takes great courage to be ruthless with one's grief."
- Andrew Harvey
(as told to him by a Tibetan monk)
"Well, what do you want?" Sotan's voice had such power that the monk's voice was reduced to a whisper.
"I want to understand the Great Matter please."
"Whose Great Matter?" was the teacher's brusque response.
"Um, mine . . . "
"What? Yours? If it's just you alone, what does it matter?" Sotan responded with a laugh.
- Arthur Braverman
Living and Dying in Zazen
"The mind may be a "cleaver" of the passage of reality, but in the final analysis the "cleaver" does not or cannot "cleave" itself, nor does it leave its marks on reality by the "cleaving" process: that is, reality is not divided by the mind, nor is it manipulated and transformed into new realities. Paradoxically, but inextricably, the mind is part and parcel of the very reality that it attempts to understand."
- Kenneth K. Inada
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.
- D.H. Lawrence
The Enkindled Spring
You breathe,
Frosting mountains white,
Exciting trees to verdant flame,
Dancing sparrows on your wing,
Swirling waves into long sighs,
You breathe,
And all things live.
- Deng Ming-Dao
365 Tao
"As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm.
Jump. It is not as wide as you think."
- Native American Indian saying
"There is an underbelly of terror to all life. It is suffering, it is hurt. Deep within all of us are intense fears that have left few of us whole. Life's terrors haunt us, attack us, leave ugly cuts. To buffer ourselves, we dwell on beauty, we collect things, we fall in love, we desperately try to make something lasting in our lives. We take beauty as the only worthwhile thing in this existence, but it cannot veil cursing, violence, randomness, and injustice.
That is why spiritual progress is slow: not because no one will tell us the secrets, but because we ourselves must overcome sentiment and fear before we can grasp it."
- Deng Ming-Dao
365 Tao
"In his lectures, Masao Abe has a memorable way of showing the difficulty with understanding and expressing the mind emptied of self and of the self's need for perspective. Pointing to the floor at his feet, Abe says that if asked to show the ground on which he is standing, he could reveal it by stepping back and pointing to it. But that would not be the ground on which he is presently standing. "To show the ground on which I am standing now," Abe remarks, "I may again step back and point to it. Again, however, it is only the ground where I was standing before. How can I show the ground on which I am standing now?"
- John G. Rudy
Wordsworth and the Zen Mind
You are demons.
You are darkness.
Your soul is at stake.. . . . . . . . Your soul is light.
Dissipation is the threat.
Don’t surrender the key.. . . . . . . . Just dissolve.
- Deng Ming-Dao
365 Tao
Humans are indeed frightful beings.
A single moon
Bright and clear
In an unclouded sky;
Yet still we stumble
In the world's darkness.
- Ikkyu
"We're here to feast our eyes and hug loved ones, with our joy perhaps analogous to photosynthesis in plants - an energizing process of oxygenation that I like to imagine helps keep the Big Bang's spin to life's origins going on and on."
- Edward Hoagland
Curtain Calls
"A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire."
- Thomas Merton
"And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the 'real' world - rock, bone, wood, ice - and elements of the real - not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself - inside stories and tales and dreams."
- Rick Bass
"Of all the ridiculous expressions people use - and people use a great many ridiculous expressions - one of the most ridiculous is "No news is good news." "No news is good news" simply means that if you don't hear from someone, everything is probably fine, and you can see at once why this expression makes such little sense, because everything being fine is only one of many, many reasons why someone may not contact you. Perhaps they are tied up. Maybe they are surrounded by fierce weasels, or perhaps they are wedged tightly between two refrigerators and cannot get themselves out. The expression might as well be changed to "no news is bad news," except that people may not be able to contact you because they have just been crowned king or are competing in a gymnastics tournament. The point is that there is no way to know why someone has not contacted you, until they contact you and explain themselves. For this reason, the sensible expression would be "no news is no news," except that it is so obvious that it is hardly an expression at all."
- Lemony Snicket
A Series of Unfortunate Events
"On those occasions when one's serenity seems about to collapse, I recommend that one step out into the backyard and vigorously spit."
- David Huddle
"Breathe with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens."
- Wendell Berry
"Where gods appear in flashes of blinding light, where hell yawns open with flames and sparks, how is it that Tao, supreme above all, is strangely colorless?"
- Deng Ming-Dao
"There is no such thing as objective reality. You color everything."
- Deng Ming-Dao
One day, a pilgrim arrived at the front door of a hermitage, wishing to see the holy man who lived on the mountain. He was greeted by a monk who asked how he could be of service.
"I want to see the holy man," the pilgrim replied.
"Follow me please." the monk said.
He followed the monk through the house. There were doorways opening on various rooms into which he looked hastily, but the monk ahead was moving so quickly through the house, he couldn't linger and literally had to rush after him. In no time they had passed through the entire first floor of the house and were at a large door similar to the one through which he had arrived. It was the back door. The monk opened it wide and said, "Good-bye."
"But I have come to see the holy man!" he said plaintively.
"You have seen me," the monk replied. And the next thing he knew, he was outside, and the door closed behind him.
Sometimes the holy man would add, "If you look on everyone you meet as holy, you will be happy."
What She Wanted
What she wanted was to return
to the original rainforest
hear water pushing
through the sapwood
and leaves eating light
as she wanted to eat light.
She knew her nature
was to be water, not wood.
She knew there was a grove
of vertical rivers
of roaring waterfall-trees,
and a grove of whirlpool-trees
with vortices she could dive through,
past the hollow years of her life
right back to the roots.
- Pascale Petit
"If you remember nothing else, always remember this one great secret of spiritual practice: we don't have to feel any particular way. We don't have to have special experiences, nor do we have to be any particular way. With whatever arises, whether it's pleasing or not, try to remember that all we can do is experience and work with whatever our life is right now. No matter what life is and no matter how we feel about it, all that matters in practice is whether we can honestly acknowledge what is going on, and then stay present with the physical experience of that moment."
- Ezra Bayda
Zen Heart
Though the years may creep ahead
Mind itself can never age
This mind that's
Always just the same
- Bankei
Song of Original Mind
"Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
"We have to understand everything in our whole life. So accept that life is just a continuation of learning. Day after day, life after life, we just have to learn constantly. That's enough.
- Dainin Katagiri
Each Moment is the Universe
"What are you doing right now? You weren't reading. You are reading now, but you weren't at that moment. Try it again. What are you doing now? By the time you finished that sentence, you had stopped reading and were busy thinking about the question. Maybe you were tapping your foot; maybe you were looking up at the ceiling. Breathing. Digesting. Wondering what the noise is in the next room. Thinking about something that happened earlier? Wondering what is coming next? Wondering where we are going with this line of thought? What are you doing now? What about now?"
- Za Rinpoche and Ashley Nebelsieck
The Backdoor to Enlightenment
"If you cannot be a poet, be the poem."
- David Carradine
"The states of mind or feelings that art can excite have been helpfully distinguished in Sanskrit aesthetics, where they are called rasas, from a word meaning 'juice' or 'essence'. A fully achieved work of art should flow with all nine of them: their names might be transposed into English as wonder, joy, sexual pleasure, pity, anguish, anger, terror, disgust and laughter."
- Marina Warner
Monsters of Our Own Making
"The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions."
- Paul Klee
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