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

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute
of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet, cold water and the jar that pours.
~ Jelaluddin Rumi

Toys 'n Things

"Mind is interested in what happens, while awareness is interested in the mind itself. The child is after the toy, but the mother watches the child, not the toy."
~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford,
New Jersey, in 1883. He was a practicing doctor, and a
principal poet of the Imagist movement, which stressed
precision of imagery, and clear, sharp language.

When I was searching about,

(not too long ago) looking for something, didn't know
what it was at the time, I went down to London on
the train to listen to Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee giving a
talk on Rumi, Llewellyn is the present Shaykh in the
lineage, (inherited from Mrs Irina Tweedie,) of
The Golden Sufi Order, as he was speaking, questions
built up one by one in my mind which I intended to
ask him after the talk. . .

He was sitting on the edge of the stage, I went to
him and sat down beside him and said, "Llewellyn,
I had a hundred things to ask of you, but I can't
now think of one single question. He was eating
dates at the time, he answered, "forget the
questions, Tom, have a date."

Tom McFerran

Wei Wu Wei

A myriad bubbles were floating on the surface of a stream.
'What are you?' I cried to them as they drifted by. 'I am a
bubble, of course' nearly a myriad bubbles answered, and
there was surprise and indignation in their voices as they
passed.

But, here and there, a lonely little bubble answered, 'We are this stream', and there was neither surprise nor indignation in their voices, but just a quiet certitude."

Wei Wu Wei

Ask the Awakened

Infinite Potential

It's very important to understand that everything that exists—the whole universe, including each and every one of us, is a manifest or material expression of that which does not exist. From nothing came something. The unmanifest became the manifest. From emptiness, from the void, this whole material universe, which eventually gave rise to life, emerged. So everything that exists came from nothing. Nothing is the source of everything that is. That which became everything is that nonmaterial spiritual essence. That's what you can experience in a deep state of meditation. The fundamental mystical insight throughout the ages is basically this: that the ultimate essence of everything that exists is this no-thing-ness. But when seen from this evolutionary perspective, what you become aware of is that the nothingness is not nothing. Why? Because in the absolute emptiness prior to the big bang there was still the infinite potential for everything that would be created. Everything was possible but nothing had happened yet. So even in complete emptiness, there is some kind of positive creative tension that is experienced in meditation as a suspended state of absolute awakeness. This quiet tension exists in consciousness because everything is possible but nothing has yet occurred. There is a vibration of empty fullness that is enthralling. And what we're very interested in, in the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment, is locating that same vibration within our very own self—the same energy, the same intelligence that initiated the entire creative process at the very beginning.

Andrew Cohen

AhhhhAuden

"You,"

Really, must you,
Over-familiar
Dense companion,
Be there always?
The bond between us
Is chimerical surely:
Yet I cannot break it.

Must I, born for
Sacred play,
Turn base mechanic
So you may worship
Your secular bread,
With no thought
Of the value of time?

Thus far I have known your
Character only
From its pleasanter side,
But you know I know
A day will come
When you grow savage
And hurt me badly.

Totally stupid?
Would that you were:
But, no, you plague me
With tastes I was fool enough
Once to believe in.
Bah!, blockhead:
I know where you learned them.

Can I trust you even
On creaturely fact?
I suspect strongly
You hold some dogma
Or positive truth,
And feed me fictions:
I shall never prove it.

Oh, I know how you came by
A sinner's cranium,
How between two glaciers
The master-chronometer
Of an innocent primate
Altered its tempi:
That explains nothing.

Who tinkered and why?
Why am I certain,
Whatever your faults are,
The fault is mine,
Why is loneliness not
A chemical discomfort,
Nor Being a smell?

WH Auden (1960)

Those who wish to embody the Tao

should embrace all things. To embrace
all things means first that one holds
no anger or resistance toward any
idea or thing, living or dead, formed
or formless. Acceptance is the very
essence of the Tao. To embrace all
things means also that one rids oneself
of any concept of separation; male
and female, self and other, life and
death. Division is contrary to the
nature of the Tao. Foregoing
antagonism and separation, one
enters in the harmonious oneness
of all things.

Lao Tzu, from Hua Hu Ching,
translated by Brian Walker

Click to enlarge.





















The important thing is not to think much,
but to love much;
and so, do that which best stirs you to love.

Saint Teresa of Avila

You stop to point to the moon in the sky,

but the finger's blind unless the moon is shining.

One moon, one careless finger pointing --
are these two things or one?

The question is a pointer guiding
a novice from ignorance thick as fog.

Look deeper. The mystery calls and calls:
No moon, no finger -- nothing there at all.

By Ryokan
(1758 - 1831)

The Self

"Being the source of both, the self is beyond both knowledge and power. The observable is in the mind. The nature of the self is pure awareness, pure witnessing, unaffected by the presence or absence of knowledge or liking. Have your being outside this body of birth and death and all your problems will be solved. They exist because you believe yourself born to die. Undeceive yourself and be free. You are not a person."

~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Watching a Documentary

Watching a Documentary about Polar Bears

Trying to Survive on the Melting Ice Floes

That God had a plan, I do not doubt.

But what if His plan was, that we would do better?
~Mary Oliver

John Donne

BATTER my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,	5
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:	10
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

The Secret of Freedom

Under the right circumstances, it is not difficult to have a powerful experience of meditation, to taste the indescribable peace, bliss, rapture, and stillness of the Ground of Being-like a still forest pool, in which you sink ever more deeply, where your mind is not moving at all. It is very important to taste the inherent liberation of your own infinite depth, but that kind of experience in and of itself will not necessarily teach you how to have a liberated relationship to the chaos of your own mind and emotions. Sinking to the depths of your own self is always profoundly inspiring, but it's not enough. It is equally important to know how to stay on the surface when a storm is raging and have no relationship to the chaos. And that is what the deliberate practice of meditation is all about. For most of us, learning to do that is ultimately a source of greater confidence and soul strength than the spontaneous experience of infinite depth. And in fact, from an absolute or nondual perspective, being at the surface is no different from being at the very bottom of the pool. Even if it doesn't necessarily feel that way, in time you will come to understand that it is the same. That is the secret of freedom.

Andrew Cohen

Reality

Any reality that can be conceived by an individual entity is based on a belief or personal absoluteness in temporality which is a complete misapprehension in itself. The individual human just cannot accept the fact that his individuality and, more importantly, his individual volition or free-will is nothing more than an illusion.

There is a single, immanent Reality which is at once the source, the substratum and the true nature of everything that is manifested as the universe. This indivisible Reality is directly experienced by every sentient being as the subjective awareness of self, the consciousness of existing and being present.
Ramesh S. Balsekar

Just for sheer delight . . .

From . . .
Faustus, M.D. The Search for Love in Manhattan

March 29, 2008

From a conversation E.S. and I had earlier today in the kitchen.

E.S.: Hey, those cookies are mine.
FAUSTUS: Yes, but your love for me makes them mine too.
E.S.: ...
FAUSTUS: It's the transitive property of love.
E.S.: Give them to me right now.

" I Am An Illusion"

Lyrics

by Rob Thomas . . .

Take this confusion
Runnin' round my head
Take back my unkind words
Lay that weight on me instead
I'm the place where everything turns sour
Where you gonna run to now

Wrong step
We got off track
We need someone to help us get back now
Worn thin
Awful state I was in
I believe I was losing me now I'm found
I am found

But I'm not real anymore
I am an illusion

I am the damage
I am the relief
Sometimes I'm people
I never hoped that I would be
If I take in whatever they turn out
What's that gonna make me now
Don't you understand

I'm not real anymore
I am an illusion

Wrong step
We got off track
We need someone to help us get back now
Worn thin
Awful state I was in
I believe they were fooling me
Now I'm down
I am down

But I'm not real anymore
I am an illusion

Hear it here . . . .

chinese

One of my chinese students in China give me a Christmas card at Christmas past. On one side she had written these words presumably copied from some text. I just wondered if you had heard these words before or thought they might be of interest/relevance. (Strange christmas card verse I thought )

"Happiness is accompanied by sorrow and it would turn sunny after rain as well. If rain remains after rain and sorrow remains after sorrow, please take these farewells easy and turn to smilingly look for yourself who is never to appear."
~Anonymous
From "Non-Duality Highlights" Jerry Katz, Editor