OCEAN

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing...Silence...Waves...

--Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

Juan Ramon Jimenez
English version by Robert Bly

"Most people ignore most poetry / because / most poetry ignores most people."

- Adrian Mitchell

GERMAN TRUCK ART

The Beer Bottle

The Pepsi Cartons Stacked Upside Down on the
Ceiling

The Canvas Tote Bag

A Truck Backing Up

The Aquarium

Post-it Note with Advertisement on Books

Pringles Hot & Spicy

The path of forgiveness is the Path of Freedom.

Forgiveness is a rebellion
against the ego’s self-importance.

After many births the wise seek refuge in me, seeing me everywhere and in everything. Such great souls are very rare. There are others whose discrimination is misled by many desires. Following their own nature, they worship lower gods, practicing various rites.

-Bhagavad Gita 7:19-20

LOVE

Those who don't feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don't drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don't want to change,

Let them sleep.

This Love is beyond the study of theology,
that old trickery and hypocrisy,


If you want to improve your mind that way,

sleep on.

I've given up on my brain,
Ive torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.

If you're not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you,

and sleep.

--Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi



Be the captive of Love in order that you may be truly
free--free from coldness and the worship of self.
Thousands have passed who were wise and learned but
who were strangers to Love.
No name is left to them, nothing to proclaim their fame and
dignity or to relate their history in the march of time.
Although you may attempt to do a hundred things in this
world, only Love will give you release from the bondage
of yourself.
~JAMI~


Leave everything and cleave to love! Turn your heart from all else;
feel love in your whole being! Take love as your guide to the land of
being so that you may reach the True Beloved, enter the Paradise of
God's essence, behold the beauty of the Friend, gather roses of the
garden of Union. In the way of love, the lover sacrifices himself but
finds the dear one. All the saints who have drunk of the wine of love
have sacrificed thenselves thus in the way of love.
--Sheikh Muzaffer


There is no salvation for the soul
But to fall in Love.
It has to creep and crawl
Among the Lovers first.

Only Lovers can escape
From these two worlds.
This was written in creation.

Only from the Heart
Can you reach the sky.
The rose of Glory
Can only be raised in the Heart.

--Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi

Master Yourself

Love yourself and watch -
Today, tomorrow, always.

First establish yourself in the way,
Then teach,
And so defeat sorrow.

To straighten the crooked
You must first do a harder thing -
Straighten yourself.

You are your only master.
Who else ?
Subdue yourself,
And discover your master.

Willfully you have fed
Your own mischief.
Soon it will crush you
As the diamond crushes stone.

By your own folly
You will be brought as low
As your worst enemy wishes.
So the creeper chokes the tree.

How hard it is to serve yourself,
How easy to lose yourself
In mischief and folly.

The kashta reed dies when it bears fruit.
So the fool,
Scorning the teachings of the awakened ,
Spurning those who follow the law,
Perishes when his folly flowers.

Mischief is yours.
Sorrow is yours.
But virtue also is yours,
And purity.

You are the source
Of all purity and all impurity.

No one purifies another.

Never neglect your work
For another's,
However great his need.

Your work is to discover your work
And then with all your heart
To give yourself to it.

Lord Buddha

Adapted from the Dhammapada
Translated by Thomas Byrom

In one salutation to thee, my God (from Gitanjali)

In one salutation to thee, my God, let all my senses spread out and touch this world at thy feet.
Like a rain-cloud of July hung low with its burden of unshed showers let all my mind bend down at thy door in one salutation to thee.
Let all my songs gather together their diverse strains into a single current and flow to a sea of silence in one salutation to thee.
Like a flock of homesick cranes flying night and day back to their mountain nests let all my life take its voyage to its eternal home in one salutation to thee.

By Rabindranath Tagore
(1861 - 1941)

Mindfulness is not just a word or a discourse by the Buddha, but a meaningful state of mind. It means we have to be here now, in this very moment, and we have to know what is happening internally and externally. It means being alert to our motives and learning to change unwholesome thoughts and emotions into wholesome ones. Mindfulness is a mental activity that in due course eliminates all suffering.


-Ayya Khema, "Be an Island"

"Everything in the universe is made of one element which is a note, a single Note. Atoms are really vibrations which are extentions of the Big Note. Everything is one Note, everything. Even the ponies. The Note, however, is the Ultimate Power. But, see, the pigs don't know that; the ponies don't know that."
"You mean just we know that?"
"Right"
--Frank Zappa, Lumpy Gravy

SPIRITUAL MATURITY

It is a sign of spiritual maturity when the individual experiences for him- or herself a powerful urgency to evolve. As you begin to transcend the ego and awaken to the authentic self, which is the first cause or creative impulse becoming conscious of itself in the human heart and mind, you will have the often shocking recognition that there is literally no time to waste—not because some external authority has told you so but because the internal God-principle awakening within you makes it apparent as an intuitive recognition or absolute knowing. In that recognition, you become aware of the absolute dimension of life and death, and you also realize the precariousness of your presence on this planet as a vulnerable biological organism supported by a delicate balance of countless factors.
So a sign of maturity, in a spiritual context, is knowing how precious every moment actually is—on one hand because of your human frailty, and on the other hand because you appreciate the miraculous nature of the self-reflective capacity that has taken billions of years to emerge in this evolving organism and recognize its profound implications for our particular moment in history. You begin to see that this extraordinary human form that is you makes all things possible, and at the same time you become painfully aware of its inherent limitations. This dual recognition creates a sense of urgency, purpose, and meaning that is overwhelming. And the degree to which you awaken to this is the degree to which you will feel compelled to drop your identification with the endless fears and desires of the ego. Why? Because there is no time to waste. In light of the overwhelming significance and precariousness of our presence here, the ego's concerns become absolutely irrelevant. You will find the willingness to nobly struggle in whatever way is needed, so your own ego will never be an obstacle to the evolution of consciousness itself. Indeed, if you are authentically engaged with the evolution of consciousness, there is literally no difference between your own effort and intention to participate in the process and the actual development of that process itself. What could be more exciting than that? Then God's thrill becomes your thrill, and the ecstatic urgency of the evolutionary impulse becomes your very own reason to be.


Andrew Cohen
January 29, 2006

There is a community of the spirit.

Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.

Drink all your passion
and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,
if you want to be held.

Sit down in this circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd's love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.
Don't accept consolations.

Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover's mouth in yours.

You moan, "She left me." "He left me."
Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.
Think who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.
~ Rumi ~

If God Invited You to a Party

And said,

Everyone
In the ballroom tonight
Will be my special
Guest,

How would you then treat them
When you
Arrived?

Indeed, indeed!

And Hafiz knows
There is no one in this world

Who
Is not upon
His Jeweled Dance
Floor.

( The Gift versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)

What will happen?

What happens when your soul
Begins to awaken
Your eyes
And your heart
And the cells of your body
To the great Journey of Love?

First there is wonderful laughter
And probably precious tears

And a hundred sweet promises
And those heroic vows
No one can ever keep.

But still God is delighted and amused
You once tried to be a saint.

What happens when your soul
Begins to awake in this world

To our deep need to love
And serve the Friend?

O the Beloved
Will send you
One of His wonderful,
wild companions like Hafiz.


(I Heard God Laughing versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)

There is a candle in your heart,

ready to be kindled.
There is a void in your soul,
ready to be filled.
You feel it, don't you?
You feel the separation
from the Beloved.
Invite Him to fill you up,
embrace the fire.
Remind those who tell you otherwise that
Love
comes to you of its own accord,
and the yearning for it
cannot be learned in any school.

From: 'Hush Don't Say Anything to God:
Passionate Poems of Rumi'
Translated by Sharam Shiva

First He pampered me with a hundred favors,

Then He melted me with the fires of sorrows.
After He sealed me with the seal of Love,
I became Him.
Then, He threw my self out of me.

--Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi

At the Leading Edge

God is no longer “up there” waiting to save us. Until very recently, that creative principle was something that we were asking for help from. But I believe we've reached a time in history when God, which I would describe as the energy and intelligence that created the universe, is now completely dependent upon us—upon those sentient beings who have reached a level of development where we're actually capable of beginning to appreciate who we are and why we are here in nothing less than a cosmic context.
God, or the creative principle, is who we are. From an absolute perspective, who we are is not only that formless, unmanifest dimension from which the universe emerged, but also, and simultaneously, the creative, manifest dimension—the evolutionary impulse, the spark that initiated the big bang, which is our own Authentic Self. The mysterious compulsion to evolve that we experience at the level of consciousness is nothing less than God becoming aware of himself, herself, or itself, as us. And the creation of the future, at the leading edge of evolution, is dependent upon each one of us waking up to this Authentic Self and making whatever effort is necessary to begin to identify with that thrilling creative passion and to transcend our attachment to the fears and desires of the ego or separate self-sense, which go on forever. In this awakening, we directly know that the future depends upon us. It's no longer just an idea; it's an emotionally felt absolute fact.

Andrew Cohen
September 2005

Sonnet XIV from Sonnets to Orpheus

Look at the flowers, so faithful to what is earthly,
to whom we lend fate from the very border of fate.
And if they are sad about how they must wither and die,
perhaps it is our vocation to be their regret.

All Things want to fly. Only *we* are weighed down by desire,
caught in ourselves and enthralled with our heaviness.
Oh what consuming, negative teachers we are
for them, while eternal childhood fills them with grace.

If someone were to fall into intimate slumber, and slept
deeply with Things - : how easily he would come
to a different day, out of the mutual depth.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

Or perhaps he would stay there; and they would blossom and praise
their newest convert, who is now like one of them,
all those silent companions in the wind of the meadows.

...he not busy being born

Is busy dying.

excerpt from the song
Its Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
~Bob Dylan

*What I See In Your Eyes*

Out of myself,
but wanting to go beyond that,

wanting what I see in your eyes,

not power,

but to kiss the ground
with the dawn breeze for company,

wearing white pilgrim cloth.

I have a certain knowing.

Now I want sight.

from "The Glance"
Rumi/Barks

Do with me what You will.

If you were to place before me hellfire,
with all it contains of torment, I would
think lightly of it in comparison with my
state when You are hidden from me. Forgive
the people and do not forgive me.
Have mercy upon them and do not have
mercy upon me. I do not intercede
for myself or beseech You for what is due to me.
Do with me what You will.

--Hallaj

Ego: An Anti-Evolutionary Force

What is ego? In an enlightenment context, the word ego refers to a deeply ingrained, unconscious, compulsive, and mechanical need to remain separate and superior at all times, in all places, under all circumstances. Ego is expressed as an irrational refusal to say yes to life, to love, and to God—to an unconditionally positive relationship to the human experience.
The true face of ego is rarely seen for what it is except at those brief moments when you have recognized something as being absolutely positive, wholesome, and good, and are compelled to respond, to say a wholehearted yes to that which you have recognized. It is only in those moments that you come face to face with the force of a powerful inertia within you that blindly resists, defies, and denies that which is radically positive. This is what ego is: that immovable stance, deep in the human heart and mind, that irrationally resists any call from within or without to embrace the greatest goodness. When we aspire to evolve at the level of consciousness, to live a spiritual life, to become an enlightened person, we open our hearts to the thrilling possibility of something so inconceivably glorious that it's just too positive for most of us to bear. And it is only when we dare to even consider saying yes to this highest good that we will experience this kind of profound confrontation with our own self—both with the anti-evolutionary force that exists in all of us, and with our normally untapped potential for extraordinary developmental leaps.

Andrew Cohen

Tilling the Soil

Seeing a man who was tilling the earth, a fool, unable to control himself, cried out, "Why are you ruining this soil?" "Fool," said the man, "leave me alone: try to recognize the difference between tending the soil and wasting it. How will this soil become a rose garden until it is disturbed and overturned?"




~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

n yeki âmad zamin-râ mi shekâft ablahi feryâd kard va bar na-tâft "Kin zamin-râ az cheh virân mi koni mi shekafi va parishân mi koni" Goft "Ay ablah be-raw bar man ma-rân to `emârat az kharâbi bâz dân Kay shavad golzâr o gandom-zâr in tâ na-gardad zesht o virân n zamin Kay shavad bostân o kesht o barg o bar tâ na-gardad nazm-e u zir o zabar

-- Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi Mathnawi
IV: 2341-2345 Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski
"Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance" Threshold Books, 1996
(Persian transliteration courtesy of Yahyá Monastra)

Hafiz on Brokeback Mountain

It happens all the time in heaven,
And some day

It will begin to happen
Again on earth -

That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are
Lovers,

And women and women
Who give each other
Light,

Often will get down on their knees

And while so tenderly
Holding their lover's hand,

With tears in their eyes,
Will sincerely speak, saying,

"My dear,
How can I be more loving to you;

How can I be more
Kind?"

~ Hafiz ~

Long seeking it through others,

I was far from reaching it.
Now I go by myself;
I meet it everywhere.
It is just I myself,
And I am not itself.
Understanding this way,
I can be as I am.

~ Tung-shan ~
(806 - 869)

Out of the Mouths of a Thousand Birds

Listen -
Listen more carefully to what is around you
Right now. In my world
There are the bells from the clanks
Of the morning milk drums, And a wagon wheel outside my window
Just hit a bump Which turned into an ecstatic chorus
Of the Beloved's Name. There is the Prayer Call
Rising up like the sun
Out of the mouths of a thousand birds. There is an astonishing vastness
Of movement and Life Emanating sound and light
From my folded hands And my even quieter simple being and heart. My dear,
Is it true that your mind
Is sometimes like a battering
Ram Running all through the city,
Shouting so madly inside and out About the ten thousand things
That do not matter? Hafiz, too,
For many years beat his head in youth And thought himself at a great distance,
Far from an armistice
With God. But that is why this scarred old pilgrim
Has now become such a sweet rare vintage
Who weeps and sings for you. O listen -
Listen more carefully
To what is inside of you right now. In my world
All that remains is the wondrous call to
Dance and prayer Rising up like a thousand suns
Out of the mouth of a
Single bird.

~ Hafiz ~

It is not those who lack energy or refrain from action, but those who work without expectation of reward who attain the goal of meditation. Theirs is true renunciation. Therefore, Arjuna, you should understand that renunciation and the performance of selfless service are the same. Those who cannot renounce attachment to the results of their work are far from the path.

-Bhagavad Gita 6:1-2

Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth,

a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything
is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.

Natalie Goldberg

COMPARING RUMI WITH RAMBAUD

I've come again
like a new year
to crash the gate
of this old prison.

I've come again
to break the teeth and claws
of this man-eating
monster we call life.

I've come again
to puncture the
glory of the cosmos
who mercilessly
destroys humans.

I am the falcon
hunting down the birds
of black omen
before their flights.

I gave my word
at the outset to
give my life
with no qualms
I pray to the Lord
to break my back
before I break my word.

How do you dare to
let someone like me
intoxicated with love
enter your house.

You must know better
if I enter
I'll break all this and
destroy all that.

If the sheriff arrives
I'll throw the wine
in his face.
If your gatekeeper
pulls my hand
I'll break his arm

If the heavens don't go round
to my heart's desire
I'll crush its wheels and
pull out its roots.

You have set up
a colorful table
calling it life and
asked me to your feast,
but punish me if
I enjoy myself

What tyranny is this?

-- Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi
Translation by Nader Khalili
"Rumi, Fountain of Fire"
Cal-Earth Press, 1994

Compared with

The Drunken Boat

AND I HAVE NO FEAR

I sit in my own radiance,
And I have no fear.

Walking,
Dreaming,
Sleeping,
What are they to me?

What is far or near,
Outside or inside,
Gross or subtle?

I sit in my own splendor.

-Ashtavakra Gita 19:5-6