mysterium fascinas
[mysterium fascinas - the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel. (Rudolf Otto). [mysterium - transcending human boundaries. [fascinas - unknowable, unable to drag oneself away. [the sense of fascination and curiosity evoked by the experience of the numinous, of mystery and wonder.]
"But aesthetics is not religion, and the origins of religion lie somewhere completely different. They lie anyway, these roses smell too sweet and the deep roar of the breaking waves is too splendid, to do justice to such weighty matters now."
- Rudolf Otto
"The time allotted to you is so short that if you lose one second you have already lost your whole life, for it is no longer, it is always just as long as the time you lose. So if you have started out on a walk, continue it whatever happens; you can only gain, you run no risk, in the end you may fall over a precipice perhaps, but had you turned back after the first steps and run downstairs you would have fallen at once – and not perhaps, but for certain. So if you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, and if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don't worry, just leap up another flight of stairs. As long as you don't stop climbing, the stairs won't end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards."
- Franz Kafka
"I think the entire discussion of Zen was warped in the very beginning when some said that Zen was about being irrational and transcending the rational mind. So after that everybody thought, "Oh, look, they're just trying to get us to transcend our rational mind with all these riddles and tricks." But it's just another kind of logic. It's perfectly intelligible. It's just a different style of logic."
- Norman Fischer
"Enlightenment is only the beginning, is only a step of the journey. You can't cling to that as a new identity or you're in immediate trouble. You have to get back down into the messy business of life, to engage with life for years afterward. Only then can you integrate what you have learned. Only then can you learn perfect trust."
quoted by Jack Kornfield in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
"I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it."
- Joan Didion
"We live in this mysterious world as if we understand it and so wonder becomes lost. We live as if we know more than we don't know and that isn't true. Each moment of our lives we stand at a crossroads: we can reduce the profound to the mundane or we can intuit the continuous and vital mystery through which we move."
- G. Bluestone
This life is a test - it is only a test.
If it had been an actual life, you would have received further
instructions on where to go and what to do.
- Jack Kornfield
"No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it."
- Annie Dillard
"We must allow ourselves to be infinitely insecure in order to know the truth, recognize the groundlessness of the constantly changing mind, its continual change in point of view. Or the idea of enlightenment becomes just another fantasy in the mind. The ego wishes to be present at its own funeral. It imagines, at last, that it has met a worthy opponent - itself. Thereby reinforcing its imagined existence."
- Stephen and Ondrea Levine
Who Dies?
God: I own you like I own the caves.
The Ocean: Not a chance. No comparison.
God: I made you. I could tame you.
The Ocean: At one time, maybe. But not now.
God: I will come to you, freeze you, break you.
The Ocean: I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what's happened to me.
- Dave Eggers
How We Are Hungry
"It was almost dark on an early summer eve, and the forest was never more enchanting than now, at dusk. At dusk the mountain begins to withdraw its force back into itself and become quiescent. If you too can become quiescent, so still that you can't think of your name, you can feel this as a palpable fact. Just become so still that your mind won't be bothered to remember the mundane, and then you'll feel it like you feel the shifting of the winds. Then you'll know when the mountain changes from exhaling to inhaling. That's not so important in itself, but the mind that is quiet enough to notice is. The mind that is not always caught up in detail is your only treasure. Stop chasing details and become still to feel it. The mind that sees details clearly but is not caught by them is like a vast borderless mirror. That mind does not oppose itself."
- G. Bluestone
"The truths we have come to understand need to find their visible expression in our lives. It is not enough to be a possessor of wisdom. To believe ourselves to be custodians of truth is to become its opposite, is a direct path to becoming stale, self-righteous, or rigid. Ideas and memories do not hold liberating or healing power. There is no such state as enlightened retirement, where we can live on the bounty of past attainments. Wisdom is alive only as long as it is lived, understanding is liberating only as long as it is applied. A bulging portfolio of spiritual experiences matters little if it does not have the power to sustain us through the inevitable moments of grief, loss, and change. Knowledge and achievements matter little if we do not yet know how to touch the heart of another and be touched."
- Jack Kornfield
"Everything in life is a question of drawing a line, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You can't draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn't work. People obeying rules laid down by somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line."
- John Berger
"We use the word "love" but we have no more understanding of love than we do of anger or fear or jealousy or even joy, because we have seldom investigated what that state of mind is. What are the feelings we so quickly label as love? For many what is called love is not lovely at all but is a tangle of needs and desires, of momentary ecstasies and bewilderment - moments of unity, of intense feelings of closeness, occur in a mind so fragile that the least squint or sideways glance shatters its oneness into a dozen ghostly paranoias. When we say love we usually mean some emotion, some deep feeling for an object or a person, that momentarily allows us to open to another. But in such emotional love, self-protection is never far away. Still there is "business" to the relationship: clouds of jealousy, possessiveness, guilt, intentional and unintentional manipulation, separateness and the shadow of all previous "loves" darken the light of oneness. But what I mean by love is not an emotion, it is a state of being. True love has no object."
- Stephen and Ondrea Levine
What is Poetry?
" . . . that which cannot be paraphrased?"
Well, so is a rock. Scissors. Paper.
Rock. Scissors. Paper. Mind.
Put your hands behind your back.
Just cup your palm for mind.
Choose one of the four. Be sly.
One. Two. Three. Go.
Paper beats rock. Wraps it up,
as history's lines wrap lies. We're stoned.
One. Two. Three. Show.
Scissors cuts mind into paper dolls.
(Descartes throws up before multiplied I's).
One. Two. Three. Whoa.
Mind beats rock, beats against rock
until world relents, and the matter settles
grit on the tongue. Two. Three. So.
Paper slices mind in tissue samples,
soul's salami, soul's Salamis of utter
defeat to a Kleenex-thinness of thinking,
how can a tornado drive a piece of straw
through a roof beam? But deep down
you know, you really know how,
if you've ever played the game before.
If you ever saw a page behead someone,
yet leave the heart furiously beating.
This is the praying mantis, death-in-life,
which leaps from leaf to leaf, life to life
and the dead all turn their heads
360 degrees when they are inside it.
And lovers are the only ones will ride it.
- W. B. Keckler
"My philosophy is fundamentally sad, but I'm not a sad man, and I don't believe I sadden anyone else. In other words, the fact that I don't put my philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell, or, rather, my faith in the human race is stronger then my intellectual analysis of it; there lies the fountain of youth in which my heart is continually bathing."
- Antonio Machado
"It is this admirable, this immortal, instinctive sense of beauty that leads us to look upon the spectacle of this world as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven. Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is both by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul dimly descries the splendors beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not a proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still on this earth, of a revealed paradise."
- Charles Baudelaire
"What is wrong with us human beings, and has been wrong since time immemorial, is that without ever stating it in so many words, we believe that we have entered the realm of immortality. We behave as if we are never going to die - an infantile arrogance. But even more injurious than this sense of immortality is what comes with it : the sense that we can engulf this inconceivable universe with our minds."
- Carlos Castaneda
"One moment it was there, another moment it is gone. One moment we are here, and another moment we have gone. And for this simple moment, how much fuss we make! How much violence, ambition, struggle, conflict, anger, hatred, just for this small moment! Just waiting for the train in a waiting room in a station, and creating so much fuss: fighting, hurting each other, trying to possess, trying to boss, trying to dominate - all the politics. And then the train comes and you are gone forever."
- Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Falling
Long before daybreak
none of the birds awake
rain comes down with the sound
of a huge wind rushing
through the valley trees
it comes down around us
all at the same time
and beyond it there is nothing
it falls without hearing itself
without knowing
there is anyone here
without seeing where it is
or where it is going
like a moment of great
happiness of our own
that we cannot remember
coasting with the lights off.
- W. S. Merwin
"Vulnerability is built into our hearts, which can be sliced open at any moment by some sudden shift in the arrangements, some pain, some horror, some hurt. We know and instinctively fear this, so we protect our hearts by covering them against exposure. But this doesn't work. Covering the heart binds and suffocates it until, like a wound that has been kept dressed for too long, the heart starts to fester and becomes fetid. Eventually, without air, the heart is all but killed off, and there's no feeling, no experiencing at all."
- Norman Fischer
"The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into new heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"
- Milan Kundera
"The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."
- Ted Hughes
Moonrise
And who has seen the moon, who has not seen
Her rise from out the chamber of the deep,
Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber
Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw
Confession of delight upon the wave,
Littering the waves with her own superscription
Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes toward us
Spread out and known at last, and we are sure
That beauty is a thing beyond the grave,
That perfect, bright experience never falls
To nothingness, and time will dim the moon
Sooner than our full consummation here
In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.
- D. H. Lawrence
"You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To have running water you must let go of it and let it run."
- Alan Watts
"Once, in ancient Japan, a young man was studying martial arts under a famous teacher. Every day the young man would practice in a courtyard along with the other students. One day, as the master watched, he could see that the other students were consistently interfering with the young man's technique. Sensing the student's frustration, the master approached the student and tapped him on the shoulder. "What is wrong?" inquired the teacher. "I cannot execute my technique and I do not understand why," replied the student. "This is because you do not understand harmony. Please follow me," said the master. Leaving the practice hall, the master and student walked a short distance into the woods until they came upon a stream. After standing silently beside the stream bed for a few minutes, the master said, "Look at the water. It does not slam into the rocks and stop out of frustration, but instead flows around them and continues down the stream. Become like the water and you will understand harmony."
- Timothy H. Warneka
"Philosophy is speculation, Zen is participation. Participate in the night leaving, participate in the evening coming, participate in the stars and participate in the clouds; make participation your lifestyle and the whole of existence becomes such a joy, such an ecstasy. You could not have dreamed of a better universe."
- Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
"I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling."
- Robert M. Pirsig
"There are seconds, they only come five or six at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, fully achieved. It is nothing earthly; not that it's heavenly, but man cannot endure it in his earthly state. One must change physically or die. The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: yes, this is true. This is not tenderheartedness, but simply joy."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I'm not trying to counsel any of you
to do anything really special
except to dare to think,
and to dare to go with the truth,
and to dare to really love completely.
- R. Buckminster Fuller
"Somewhere, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?"
- Annie Dillard
"Zen's greatest contribution is to give you an alternative to the serious man. The serious man has made the world, the serious man has made all the religions. He has created all the philosophies, all the cultures, all the moralities; everything that exists around you is a creation of the serious man. Zen has dropped out of the serious world. It has created a world of its own which is very playful, full of laughter, where even great masters behave like children."
- Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
"If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next - if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions - you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to."
- Margaret Atwood
"We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events, and things of the day - to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color."
- Annie Dillard
"There is the deeper mystery:
the gate and doorway all hidden essences issued from:
all such subtleties.
And the subtle, mysterial opening homewards.
Call it the door mystery or golden secret of all life."
- Tao Te Ching
"The key to the hidden lands beyond those veils lies in the letting go of all hope, fear and expectation. The portal opens when one realizes that one no longer needs to seek it and must simply open to that which is already fully present. In that vastness in which nothing is hidden and nothing needs to be revealed, all is transparent, clear, and the doors, in response, open everywhere."
- Ian Baker
The Heart of the World
"I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball."
- Annie Dillard
Need not end. Indeed, nothing. Step
out. Grist for wits. Shadow of your
shell. Stand there.
No other ground. No
other. And the world concerns you every-
where, but do not identify with it.
Let light onto us. Flowers through the
gate, flowers skimming
the wall. A carpet of petal.
Treasures below the earth. Neither in
this world nor another, guarding.
Nothing but fade and flourish.
- Keith Waldrop
Born Thirty Years Ago
Thirty years ago I was born into the world.
A thousand, ten thousand miles I've roamed.
By rivers where the green grass grows thick,
beyond the border where the red sands fly.
I brewed potions in a vain search for life everlasting,
I read books, I sang songs of history,
and today I've come home to Cold Mountain
to pillow my head on the stream and wash my ears.
- Han-shan
aka Cold Mountain
"I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.
If the old imbeciles hadn't discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn't have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up, the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!"
- Arthur Rimbaud
"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference."
- Joan Didion
My Hand
See how the past is not finished
here in the present
it is awake the whole time
never waiting
it is my hand now but not what I held
it is not my hand but what I held
it is what I remember
but it never seems quite the same
no one else remembers it
a house long gone into air
the flutter of tires over a brick road
cool light in a vanished bedroom
the flash of the oriole
between one life and another
the river a child watched
- W. S. Merwin
The Shadow of Sirius
"The word "compassion" generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
In languages that form the word "compassion" not from the root "suffering" but from the root word "feeling," the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the others misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion - joy, anxiety, happiness, pain.
This kind of compassion therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme."
- Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
"This building we're in has doors and windows. If we close the doors and windows, we can't get out. People lock themselves inside a house of delusions. But they're only delusions. They can leave anytime. Actually there is no house to leave. There's not even any leaving."
- Yi-ch'ao
"The first Oxherding picture is called "Seeking the Ox." The ox represents the seeker's true nature, that is, Buddha nature or Buddha-mind, the Self. It is probably because of the ox's sacred nature in ancient India that it came to symbolize man's primal nature or Buddha-mind. The oxherder, however, knows himself only as small mind, as an ego. He sets out in search of enlightenment, but in fact, his original nature has never gone astray - he just can't see it. What blocks enlightenment are the defilements of the ego - its desires, fears, and delusions of duality. As the Hindu sage Meher Baba said, "The ego sees what is not there, and does not see what is there." But herein lies the paradox: If the oxherder doesn't see the ox, how does he know it even exists? How does he even know to seek it? It is the Self from the very beginning that seeks itself, that inspires the urge to realization. The whole process occurs under the auspices of the Self."
- Michael Gellert
"And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast."
- Saul Bellow
"We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on "good" rather than "time" and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes."
- Robert M. Pirsig
"It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
"I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?"
- Margaret Atwood
We live among ideas much more than we live in nature."
- Saul Bellow
"That it doesn't strike us at all when we look around us, move about in space, feel our own bodies, shows how natural these things are to us. We do not notice that we see space perspectively or that our visual field is in some sense blurred towards the edges. It doesn't strike us and never can strike us because it is the way we perceive. We never give it a thought and it's impossible we should, since there is nothing that contrasts with the form of our world. What I wanted to say is it's strange that those who ascribe reality only to things and not to our ideas move about so unquestioningly in the world as idea and never long to escape from it."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
I
Don't trace out your profile -
forget your side view -
all that is outer stuff.
II
Look for your other half
who walks always next to you
and tends to be who you aren't.
- Antonio Machado
Moral Proverbs and Folk Songs
"What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity - only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn't. I swear it."
- Saul Bellow
"Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us."
- Annie Dillard
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write
- W. S. Merwin
"A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men: the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed - and the supreme scientist. For he attains the unknown. Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone. He attains the unknown, and, if demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them. So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen."
- Arthur Rimbaud
Illuminations, and Other Prose Poems
"Although we have no actual written communications from the world of emptiness, we have some hints or suggestions about what is going on in that world, and that is, you might say, enlightenment."
- Shunryu Suzuki
not always so
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