All things are conditions of mind.

That which knows the mind is the
unconditional SELF of everything.
~Ramesh S. Balsekar

Searching for the Dharma

xLes>en Googlec

You've traveled up ten
thousand steps in search of
the Dharma.

So many long days in the archives, copying, copying.

The gravity of the Tang and the profundity of the Sung
make heavy baggage.

Here! I've picked you a bunch of wildflowers.
Their meaning is the same
but they're much easier to carry.

~ Xu Yun ~

Cosmogenesis

"By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers . . . This palpable world, which we are used to treating with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association, is a holy place."

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, *The Divine Milieu*

birthday 2008

"In reality only the Ultimate is. The rest is a
matter of name and form. And as long as we
cling to the idea that only what has name and
shape exists, the Supreme will appear to us
non-existing. When we understand that names
and shapes are hollow shells without any
content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless
and formless, pure energy of life and light of
consciousness, we will be at peace - immersed
in the deep silence of reality."
~Nisargadatta

Ladybug

inch by inch
exploring the universe.

G.Rosenstock

That this entire phenomenal show of the universe has no purpose indicates the obvious futility of seeking a goal in life. No sooner is a goal conceived than spontaneity is at once destroyed and the self
conscious ego takes over in destructive competition against everything that comes, thus missing all that is worthwhile in life. It is, indeed, the
"purposeful" life which entirely misses out on the purpose
of life! The true purposeless vision misses nothing and enjoys
everything without inhibition.
~Ramesh S. Balsekar

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
~ David Wagoner ~

Cellular

At a certain level of magnification the various cells of an organism appear to be engaged in a fierce and ruthless battle for individual survival. Yet if the organism as a whole is observed at a different level of magnification, it is clearly seen that what appears as conflict at the lower level is indeed harmony at the higher level. And so it is with the ceaseless flow of energy passing through infinitely diverse patterns, expressing the rhythm and unity of Life throughout the changing myriad's of forms in the manifest universe, for which the illusory individual ego has unnecessarily and mistakenly assumed the burden of concern.
~ Ramesh S. Balsekar

Nature does not know or care about the world or man-made opposites. Nature is perfectly
satisfied and happy to produce a world of infinite, rapturous variety that knows nothing
about pretty or ugly, ethical or unethical. Nature never apologizes for anything, nor does it see or acknowledge anything of man's
misconceived errors of opposition.
~Ramesh S. Balsekar

Thanatopsis

Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mold.

~ William Cullen Bryant

Happy Birthday Siddhartha Gautama

c. 563–479 BC

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
-W. B. Yeats

The Bat Poet

... A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale.
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
And catches him.
He clings to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting --
Her baby hangs on underneath.

... The mother eats the moths and gnats she catches
In full flight; in full flight
The mother drinks the water of the pond
She skims across.
~Randall Jerrell

WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT THAT MOON?

A wine bottle fell from a wagon and
broke open in a field.

That night one hundred beetles and all their cousins
Gathered

and did some serious binge drinking.

They even found some seed husks nearby
and began to play them like drums and whirl.
This made God very happy.

Then the "night candle" rose into the sky
and one drunk creature, laying down his instrument,
said to his friend ~ for no apparent
Reason,

"What should we do about that moon?"

Seems to Hafiz
Most everyone has laid aside the music

Tackling such profoundly useless
Questions.

Nature as Mind

"There is a great insight which our culture is
deliberately designed to suppress, distort,
and ignore: that Nature is a minded entity;
that Nature is not simply the random flight
of atoms through electromagnetic fields;
that Nature is not the empty, despiritualized
lumpen matter that we inherit from modern
physics. But it is instead a kind of intelligence,
a kind of mind."
- Terence McKenna