No personal, individual effort can possibly
lead to enlightenment. On the contrary, what
is necessary is to rest helpless in beingness,
knowing that we are nothing - to be in the
nothingness of the no-mind state in which
all conceptualizing has subsided into passive
witnessing. In this state whatever happens
will be not our doing but the pure universal
functioning to which we have relinquished
all control.

~ Ramesh S. Balsekar

The Place Where We Are Right

From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.

~ Yehuda Amichai

The lover of nature is the true worshipper of God.

Bowl of Saki, by Hazrat Inayat Khan

Commentary by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan:

A true worshipper of God sees His presence in all
forms, and thus in respecting others he respects God.
It may even develop to such an extent that the true
worshipper of God, the Omnipresent, walks gently
on the earth, bowing in his heart even to every tree
and plant, and it is then that the worshipper forms
a communion with the Divine Beloved at all times,
when he is awake and when he is asleep.

Anyone who has some knowledge of mysticism and
of the lives of the mystics knows that what always
attracts the mystic most is nature. Nature is his bread
and wine. Nature is his soul's nourishment.
Nature inspires him, uplifts him and gives him the
solitude for which his soul continually longs. Every
soul born with a mystical tendency is constantly
drawn towards nature; in nature that soul finds its
life's demand, as it is said in the Vadan, 'Art is dear
to my heart, but nature is near to my soul'. ... Nature
does not teach the glory of God; it need not teach
this as nature itself is the glory of God. People wish
to study astrology and other subjects in order to
understand better, but if we study astrology then we
are sure to arrive at an interpretation which is given
by a man, whereas what we should read from nature
is what nature gives us and not what any book teaches
us.

There comes a time with the maturity of the soul when
every thing and every being begins to reveal its nature
to us. We do not need to read their lives. We do not
need to read their theories. We know then that this wide
nature in its four aspects is ever-revealing and that one
can always communicate with it, but that in spite of this
it is not the privilege of every soul to read it. Many souls
remain blind with open eyes. They are in heaven, but not
allowed to look at heaven; they are in paradise, but not
allowed to enjoy the beauties of paradise. It is just like
a person sleeping on a pile of gems and jewels. From the
moment man's eyes open and he begins to read the
book of nature he begins to live; and he continues to live
forever.

'There is One Holy Book, the sacred manuscript of nature,
the only scripture which can enlighten the reader.' Most
people consider as sacred scriptures only certain books
or scrolls written by the hand of man, and carefully
preserved as holy, to be handed down to posterity as
divinerevelation. Men have fought and disputed over the
authenticity of these books, have refused to accept any
other book of similar character, and, clinging thus to the
book and losing the sense of it have formed diverse sects.
The Sufi has in all ages respected all such books, and has
traced in the Vedanta, Zend-Avesta, Kabbala, Bible, Quran,
and all other sacred scriptures, the same truth which he
reads in the incorruptible manuscript of nature, the only
Holy Book, the perfect and living model that teaches the
inner law of life: all scriptures before nature's manuscript
are as little pools of water before the ocean.

To the eye of the seer every leaf of the tree is a page of
the holy book that contains divine revelation, and he is
inspired every moment of his life by constantly reading
and understanding the holy script of nature

so what else are my senses not picking up?

As you sleep your 8 hrs. a night, you, your bed, and the Earth go 536,000 miles around the sun. During that same time you, and the solar system traveled, 166 million miles around the galaxy. That is fast! 1/1000 of the speed of light. At a slighter more leisurely pace, you, and the galaxy drifted toward Andromeda at 80 miles per second, or roughly five millions miles in eight hours. All these, as space itself expands at 14 miles per second. Who says you're not going places! And yet, you don't feel a thing, only the serenity of an immobility which isn't there.

Pete S.

Narrowness is primitiveness; it is the breadth of heart that proves

One person will do something and consider that there is great
wisdom in his sacrifice, while another who is not evolved
enough to understand it will say, 'How very foolish!' Remember
therefore that not only to the wise person the man of little
sense seems foolish, but even to the foolish person the wise
one seems foolish. The points of view of both are different:
one looks from the top of the tower, the other standing on
the ground. So there is a vast difference in the range of their
sight.

It is a man's outlook on life which makes him broad or narrow,
and it is the grade of his evolution which gives man the
illumination of sacrifice. What a man was not inclined to do
last year, he may be inclined to do this year; the sacrifice
one could not make yesterday, one can make today, for the
rate of speed of man's evolution cannot be limited to a
particular standard. A broad outlook enriches man and a high
point of view ennobles the soul.

Once you have linked yourself with love, a flood of inspiration
is revealed to you, whatever the subject, whatever the problem
in life may be. Whatever it be that your eye casts its glance
upon, it will disclose itself. Then you are on the real road, and
what a joy this is!

Breadth of heart is what is needed for all this. ... It is the
breadth of heart that makes a man great, whereas it is
narrowness of heart that makes him small. The great heart
does not think about how troublesome a person is, and why
he should be bothered like this. It is only the narrow of
heart that thinks, 'I will cause him some trouble.' It may
be justified, but still it is a narrow thought. The one with
a broad heart thinks,' This is a small thing, I can put up
with it; not much harm will come from it.'

The Nizam wrote this verse, 'The width of the land and the
water cannot be compared with the width of man's heart.
If man's heart is wide enough there is nothing greater than
that.' The heart becomes wide by forgetting the self, and
narrow by thinking of the self and by pitying one's self.
To gain a wide and broad heart you must have something
before you to look upon and to rest your intelligence upon,
and that something is the God ideal. This is the prescription
for killing the self, and to kill the self is the basis of every
religion.

Bowl of Saki, by Hazrat Inayat Khan

Commentary by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Joel Guzman Accordion Jam

There is something so light about this man and his accordion.

72 Virgins

As long as there is a 'you'

doing or not-doing, thinking or
not-thinking, meditating
or not-meditating you are
no closer to home than the
day you were born.
"The Tenth Man" by Wei Wu Wei

One night while the Buddha was
meditating, a brilliant and beautiful
devata named Rohitassa appeared
in front of him. He told the Buddha,
"When I was a human being, I was
a spiritual seeker of great psychic
power, a sky walker. Even though I
journeyed for 100 years to reach
the end of the world, with great
determination amd resolution, I could
not come to the end ofthe world. I died on the joruney
before I found it. So can you tell me, is it possible to journey
to the end of the world?" And the Buddha replied, "It is not
possible to reach the end of the world by walking, but I tell
you unless you reach the end of the world,you will not reach
the end of suffering. "Rohitassa was puzzled and said, "Please explain
this to me, Venerable Sir." The Buddha replied, "In this very fathom-long
body is the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the way leading to the cessation of the world."
(A 4.45, S 2.26)

In this instance, the Buddha used the exact formulation as
in the Four Noble Truths. The world, "loka", in this respect means the
world of our experience. And this is how the Buddha almost always
uses the term "the world". He's referring to the world as we experience it.
This includes

Sight
Sound
Smell
Taste
Touch
Thought
Emotion
Feeling
That's it. That's what "the world" is - my world, your
world. It's not the abstracted, geographical planet,
universe-type world, it's the direct experience of the
planet, the people, the cosmos. Here is the origin
of the world, the cessation of the world, and the
way leading to the cessation of the world. He said that
as long as we created "me and my experience" -"me in
here" and "the world out there" - then there is dukkha,
we're stuck in the world of subject and object. Geographically,
it's impossible to journey to the end of the world. It's only
when we come to the cessation of the world, which literally
means the cessation of its otherness, its thingness, will
we reach the end of dukkha, unsatisfactoriness. When we
stop creating sense objects as absolute realities and stop
seeing thoughts and feelings as solid things, there is
cessation. To see that the world is within our minds is one
way of working with these principles. The whole universe
is embraced when we realized that it's happening within
our minds. And that moment when we recognize that it all
happens HERE, it ceases. Its thingness ceases. Its
substantiality ceases. Its insubstantiality is known. We're not
imputing soidity to it, a reality it doesn't possess. We're just
looking directly at the world, knowing it fully and completely.
It all happens internally. When we stop creating the world
we stop creating each other. We stop imputing the sense of
solidity that creates a sense of separation. Yet we do not
cut off our senses in any way. Actually,we shed the veneer,
the films of confusion, of opinion, of judgment and conditioning
so that we can see the way things really are. At that moment
dukkha ceases.

There is knowing.
There is liberation.
There is freedom.
There is no dukkha.

-Amaro Bhikkhu

Evil wins when it scares us into killing evildoers.
In doing that, we think we're fighting evil, when in
reality, we're only dancing by its drum.

Evil can only be defeated by denying it the publicity,
the notoriety it seeks. The battle is over people's
minds, and must be won with ideas, not bullets.
Killing evildoers is transforming them into martyrs
and heroes. That always adds glamour to their
cause.

Evildoers are always a miniscule minority. The
number of victims they cause is always insignificant,
when compared to such accepted killers as car accidents.

Fear magnifies the danger they represent. We seldom
see any national campaign in favor of reducing car
accidents, or preventable deaths caused by lack
of hygiene in our hospitals. Yearly, those numbers are
consistently higher than deaths caused by evildoers
of all sorts.

Fight evil with ideas, not bullets. Evil becomes
contagious when blood is spilled in the name of Good.

Pete S.