Last Post: 2007

Wake up. Day calls you
to your life: your duty.
And to live, nothing more.
Root it out of the glum
night and the darkness
that covered your body
for which light waited
on tiptoe in the dawn.
Stand up, affirm the straight
simple will to be
a pure slender virgin.
Test your body's metal.
Cold, heat? Your blood
will tell against the snow,
or behind the window.
The colour
in your cheeks will tell.
And look at people. Rest
doing no more than adding
your perfection to another
day. Your task
is to carry your life high,
and play with it, hurl it
like a voice to the clouds
so it may retrieve the light
already gone from us.
That is your fate: to live.
Do nothing.
Your work is you, nothing more.

~ Pedro Salinas ~

Love

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.

~ Czeslaw Milosz ~

Whatever we need is what is given.

~Adyashanti

Existence

or Consciousness is the only reality.
Consciousness plus waking we call waking.
Consciousness plus sleep we call sleep.
Consciousness plus dream, we call dream.
Consciousness is the screen on which all the
pictures come and go. The screen is real,
the pictures are mere shadows on it.
~Ramana Maharishi

Excerpt from A Thousand Names for Joy

What's not okay about dying? You close your eyes every night, and you go to sleep. People look forward to it; some people actually prefer that part. And that's as bad as it gets, except for your belief that says there's something else. Before a thought, there's no one, nothing-only peace that doesn't even recognize itself as peace.

What I know about dying is that when there's no escape, when you know that no one is coming to save you, there's no fear. You just don't bother. The worst thing that can happen on your deathbed is a belief. Nothing worse than that has ever happened. So if you are lying on your deathbed and the doctor says it's all over for you and you believe him, all the confusion stops. You no longer have anything to lose. And in that peace, there is only you.

People who know that there's no hope are free; decisions are out of their hands. It has always been that way, but some people have to die bodily to find out. No wonder they smile on their deathbeds. Dying is everything they were looking for in life: they've given up the delusion of being in charge. When there's no choice, there's no fear. They begin to realize that nothing was ever born but a dream and nothing ever dies but a dream.

When you're clear about death, you can be totally present with someone who's dying, and no matter what kind of pain she appears to be experiencing, it doesn't affect your happiness. You're free to just love her, to hold her and care for her, because it's your nature to do that. To go to that person in fear is to teach fear: she looks into your eyes and gets the message that she is in deep trouble. But if you come in peace, fearlessly, she looks into your eyes and sees that whatever is happening is good.

Dying is just like living. It has its own way, and you can't control it. People think, "I want to be conscious when I die." That's hopeless. Even wanting to be conscious ten minutes from now is hopeless. You can only be conscious now. Everything you want is here in this moment.

~ Byron Katie

"Perfection is realized only in the moment.

The past tugs, the future holds.
In the moment, no resistance"
- Anonymous

American Advaita: Winter Solstice, 2007

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
-Wallace Stevens

With us, one needs to be a waking sleeper,
that in the state of wakefulness,
you may dream dreams.
The thought of created things
is an enemy to this sweet waking sleep;
until your thought is asleep, your throat is shut,
no mysteries can enter.
Mystical bewilderment must sweep thought away;
bewilderment devours thought
and recollection of anything other than God.
- Rumi, Mathnawi III: 1114-1116, version by Camille
and Kabir Helminski, Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance

Whenever you notice that some form of negativity has arisen within you, look on it not as a failure, but as a helpful signal that is telling you: "Wake up. Get out of your mind. Be present."

- Eckhart Tolle, from The Power of Now,

Self-enquiry,

is a passive rather than an active process.
Mind is allowed to subside into its source even while
engaged in normal activity, which then becomes an
undercurrent of witnessing that gradually extends
throughout all waking hours and begins to pervade
all one's activities without intruding on them or
interfering with them.
~Ramesh Balsekar

All questions and problems go POOF! right now in this present, spontaneous moment of being, in which there is nothing at all but awareness watching. Every moment is brand-new, free of all content. Right now, the whole world is brand-new. Nothing ever existed before this very second. An independent "you" seems to exist, as a few disconnected thoughts float in - an image here, a memory there - and they glom together and you start believing a story that there is a whole person. And then in the next moment, a different image, a different memory, and they glom together, and a wholly different "you" is thought of. You think they are all the same "you," but they are obviously not. "You" changes every moment, as different thoughts of "This is me" arise, and form different patterns. So who are you? In every moment there are different thoughts arising and forming your idea of who you are. You might insist that you have a lifetime history, but as you recall it right now, you'll only be recalling tiny glimpses of it, flashes, distorted memories. The stored "history of you," even if it did exist as a whole somewhere in the brain (and it does not - those memories go through changes as they recede in time), you can only be recalling any tiny portion of it at a time, a few brushstrokes, like an impressionist painting. So where is this solid story of you? Is it really real? So what is being pointed to is this - that you do not exist as a solid, discrete entity as you believe, and ALL your questioning and suffering and problems refer to this NON-EXISTENT entity. You ask: What am I not getting? Why are you getting it and I'm not? There is no difference between what's going on for you and what's going on for me, what I "get" and what you "get," because neither of us has ever "got" anything. Both of us are in the same boat. That boat is: right now, there is awareness going on. - Annette Nibley

Shoveling Snow With Buddha

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.

Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.

Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.

We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.

And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.

After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?

Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck.
and our boots stand dripping by the door.

Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.

~ Billy Collins ~

(Picnic, Lightning)

Thanks to Joe Riley @ Panhala@yahoogroups.com

An Improvisation For Angular Momentum

Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out,
motions profound,
alive, musical!

Perhaps the death mother like the birth mother
does not desert us but comes to tend
and produce us, to make room for us
and bear us tenderly, considerately,
through the gates, to see us through,
to ease our pains, quell our cries,
to hover over and nestle us, to deliver
us into the greatest, most enduring
peace, all the way past the bother of
recollection,
beyond the finework of frailty,
the mishmash house of the coming & going,
creation's fringes,

~ A.R. Ammons ~
(Poetry, 1994)

Thanks to Panhala

 

The Seperation

True worship is effortless, supreme meditation in the continuous, unbroken awareness of the within, the indwelling presence. It requires no effort because there is nothing in it to be attained which one does not already possess.

What is generally understood to be prayer is nothing more than one fictitious entity called 'me' begging for something from another fictitious entity called 'God'.
~ Ramesh S. Balsekar

What is the difference
Between your experience of Existence
And that of a saint?

The saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God

And that the Beloved
Has just made such a Fantastic Move

That the saint is now continually
Tripping over Joy
And bursting out in Laughter
And saying, "I surrender!"

Whereas, my dear,
I am afraid you still think
You have a thousand serious moves.
~ Hafiz about 1320-1389

Kali

Ever-blissful Kali,
Bewitcher of the Destructive Lord,
Mother --
for Your own amusement
You dance,
clapping Your hands.

You with the moon on Your forehead,
really You are primordial, eternal, void.
When there was no world, Mother,
where did You get that garland of skulls?

You alone are the operator,
we Your instruments, moving as You direct.
Where You place us, we stand;
the words You give us, we speak.

Restless Kamalakanta says, rebukingly:
You grabbed Your sword, All-Destroyer,
and now You've cut down evil and good.

By Kamalakanta
(1769? - 1821?)

English version by Rachel Fell McDermott