sey090

The desire to be secure in things and in relationship only brings about conflict and sorrow, dependence and fear; the search for happiness in relationship without understanding the cause of conflict leads to misery. When thought lays emphasis on sensate value and is dominated by it there can be only strife and pain. Without self-knowledge relationship becomes a source of struggle and antagonism, a device for covering up inward insufficiency, inward poverty. Does not craving for security in any form indicate inward insufficiency? Does not this inner poverty make us seek, accept and cling to formulations, hopes, dogmas, beliefs, possessions; is not our action then merely imitative and compulsive? So anchored to ideology, belief, our thinking becomes merely a process of enchainment. Our thought is conditioned by the past; the I, the me and the mine, is the result of stored up experience, ever incomplete. The memory of the past is always absorbing the present; the self which is memory of p...

The story goes that in certain Native American tribes, when a person became psychologically unstable, she or he was placed in the middle of a circle of tribal members – men and women, children and old people – and required to spin around and around until collapsing to the ground. The tribal member toward whom her body faced now became her special charge. She was obligated to care for that person, see to their needs, and be their companion and friend. The understanding was that caring for someone else is what stirs personal healing. When we ache from the pain of loss or rejection, the pain of depression or loneliness, the pain of feeling unloved, from bodily pain or even the pain of impending death, the ache can feel agonizingly private to us. We feel alone in our pain: it encloses us in an isolation that feels terribly unfair. How is it possible then to offer care for others? When Robert Kennedy lay dying from an assassin’s bullet, his blood spreading across a kitchen floor, he op...

. Each of us carries in our hearts the wound of mortality. We are particularly adept at covering our inner wounds, but no wound is ever silent.  Behind the play of your image and the style you cut in the world, your wounds continue to call out for healing.  These cuts at the core of your identity cannot be healed by the world or medicine, nor by the externals of religion or psychology.  It is only by letting in the divine light to bathe these wounds that healing will come...  Every inner wound has its own particular voice.  It holds the memory of that breakage as pristine as its moment of occurrence.  Deep inner wounds evade time.  Their soreness is utterly pure.  These wounds lose little of their acid with the natural transience of chronological time.   Only the voice of deep prayer can carry the gently poultice inwards to these severe crevices and draw out the toxins of hurt.  To learn what went on at the time of such wounding can help...

Now I am being buried in the earth. Every one leaves me and I am alone, quite alone. I do not stir… I lay there and — strange to say — I expected nothing, accepting without question that a dead man has nothing to expect. But it was damp. I do not know how long passed — an hour, a few days, or many days. Suddenly, on my left eye which was closed, a drop of water fell, which had leaked through the top of the grave. In a minute fell another, then a third, and so on, every minute. Suddenly, deep indignation kindled in my heart and suddenly in my heart I felt physical pain. ‘It’s my wound,’ I thought. ‘It’s where I shot myself. The bullet is there.’ And all the while the water dripped straight on to my closed eye. Suddenly, I cried out, not with a voice, for I was motionless, but with all my being, to the arbiter of all that was being done to me. “Whosoever thou art, if thou art, and if there exists a purpose more intelligent than the things which are now taking place, let it be present her...

It is a whisper. You turn somewhere, hall, street, some great even: the stars or the lights hold; your next step waits you and the firm world waits - but there is a whisper. You always live so, a being that receives, or partly receives, or fails to receive each moment's touch. You see the people around you - the honors they bear - a crutch, a cane, eye patch, or the subtler ones, that fixed look, a turn aside, or even the brave bearing: all declare our kind, who serve on the human front and earn whatever disguise will take them home. (I saw Frank last week with his crutch de guerre.) When the world is like this - and it is - whispers, honors or penalties disguised - no wonder art thrives like a pulse wherever civilized people, or any people, live long enough in a place to build, and remember, and anticipate; for we are such beings as interact elaborately with what surrounds us. The limited actual world we successively overcome by fictions and by the mind's ...

See then  what the heart wants, that pliable iron sprung to the poppy's redness, the honey's gold, winged as the heron-lit water is: by reflecting. As an aged elephant answers the slightest, first gesture of hand, it puts itself at the mercy - utterly docile, the forces that brought it there vanished, fold into fold. And the old-ice ivory, the unstartlable black of the eye that has traveled so far  with the fringed, peripheral howdah swaying behind, look mildly back as it swings the whole bulk of the body close to the ground.  Over and over it does this, bends to what asks. Whatever asks, heart kneels and offers to bear. ~ Jane Hirshfield from The October Palace

. . Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have.  I walk out to the pond and all the way  God has given us such beautiful lessons.  Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell;  grant me, in your mercy, a little more time.  Love for the earth and love for you  are having such a long conversation in my heart.  Who knows what will finally happen  or where I will be sent, yet already  I have given a great many things away,  expecting to be told to pack nothing,  except the prayers which,  with this thirst, I am slowly learning. ~ Mary Oliver

. Late have I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved thee! For behold, thou wert within me and I outside; and I sought thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon these lovely things that thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with thee. I was kept from thee by those things, yet had they not been in thee, they would not have been at all. Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness. . . . I tasted thee, and now hunger and thirst for thee; thou didst touch me, and now I burn for thy peace. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo from Confessions Augustine concludes the text by exploring an allegorical interpretation of Genesis, through which he discovers the Trinity and the significance of God's creation of man. Based on his interpretation, he espouses the significance of rest as well as the divinity of Creation: "For, then shalt Thou rest in us, in the same way that Thou workest in us now [...] So, we see these things which Thou hast made...

Before this longing, I lived serene as a fish At one with the plants in the pond, The mare's tail, the floating frogbite, Among my eight-legged friends, Open like a pool, a lesser parsnip, Like a leech, looping myself along, A bug-eyed edible one, A mouth like a stickleback,- A thing quiescent! But now- The wild stream, the sea itself cannot contain me: I dive with the black hag, the cormorant, Or walk the pebbly shore with the humpbacked heron, Shaking out my catch in the morning sunlight, Or rise with the gar-eagle, the great-winged condor, Floating over the mountains, Pitting my breast against the rushing air, A phoenix, sure of my body, Perpetually rising out of myself, My wings hovering over the shorebirds, Or beating against the black clouds of the storm, Protecting the sea-cliffs. ~ Theodore Roethke from News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness edited by Robert Bly    

When they plow their fields and sow seeds in the earth, when they care for their wives and children,  young brahmans find riches. But I've done everything right and followed the rule of my teacher. I'm not lazy or proud. Why haven't I found peace? Bathing my feet  I watched the bathwater spill down the slope. I concentrated my mind the way you train a good horse. The I took the lamp and went into my cell, checked the bed, and sat down on it. I took a needle and pushed the wick down. When the lamp went out my mind was freed. ~ Patacara, (6th B.C.E.) from Women in Praise of the Sacred edited by Jane Hirshfield .

If one reaches the point where understanding fails, this is not a tragedy: it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking.  Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all: perhaps we only need to wake up. A monk said: "I have been with you (Master), for a long time, and yet I am unable to understand your way.  How is this?" The Master said: "Where you do not understand, there is the point for your understanding." In the first two chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul distinguishes between two kinds of wisdom: one which consists in the knowledge of words and statements, a rational, dialectical wisdom, and another which is at once a matter of paradox and of experience, and goes beyond the reach of reason.  To attain to this spiritual wisdom, one must first be liberated from servile dependence on the "wisdom, of speech." St. Paul compares this knowledge of God, in the Spirit, to the subjective knowledge that a man has of hims...

And the deepest level of communication  is not communication,  but communion.  It is wordless.  It is beyond words,  and it is beyond speech,  and it is beyond  concept.  Not that we discover a new unity.  We discover an older unity.  My dear  brothers, we are already one.  But we imagine that we are not.  And what we have  to recover is our original unity.  What we have to be is what we are. ~ Thomas Merton from his Asian journal art by Van Gogh  

In the great circle, dancing in and out of time, you move now toward your partners, answering the music suddenly audible to you that only carried you before and will carry you again. When you meet the destined ones now dancing toward you, out of your awareness for the time, we whom you know, others we remember whom you do not remember, others  forgotten by us all. When you meet, and hold love  in your arms, regardless of all, the unknown will dance away from you  toward the horizon of light. Our names will flutter on these hills like little fires. ~ Wendell Berry .

Some thoughts from Thich Nhat Hanh If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform. When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness. Sometimes we feel empty; we feel a vacuum, a great lack of something. We don’t know the cause; it’s very vague, but that feeling of being empty ins...

. …. We do have a deadening desire to reduce the mystery, the uncertainty of our lives…. We bind our lives in solid chains of forced connections that block and fixate us. …. Our sense of uncertainty and our need for security nail our world down. …. Each time we go out, the world is open and free; it offers itself so graciously to our hearts, to create something new and wholesome from it each day. It is a travesty of possibility and freedom to think we have no choice, that things are the way they are and that the one street, the one right way is all that is allotted to us. Certainty is a subtle destroyer. We confine our mystery within the prison of routine and repetition. One of the most deadening forces of all is repetition. Your response to the invitation and edge of your life becomes reduced to a series of automatic reflexes. For example, you are so used to getting up in the morning and observing the morning rituals of washing and dressing. You are still somewhat sleepy, your mind is...

There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse.  The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man, standing alongside the road, shouts, 'Where are you going?" and the first man replies, I don't know! Ask the horse!" This is also our story. We are riding a horse, we don't know where we are going, and we can't stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless.  We are always running, and it has become a habit.  We struggle all the time, even during our sleep.  We are at war within ourselves, and we can easily start a war with others. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh from "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching"

The shoes put on each time left first, then right. The morning potion’s teaspoon of sweetness stirred always for seven circlings—no fewer, no more— into the cracked blue cup. Touching the pocket for wallet, for keys, before closing the door. How did we come to believe these small rituals’ promise, that we are today the selves we yesterday knew, tomorrow will be? How intimate and unthinking, the way the toothbrush is shaken dry after use, the part we wash first in the bath. Which habits we learned from others and which are ours alone we may never know. Unbearable to acknowledge how much they are themselves our fated life. Open the traveling suitcase— There the beloved red sweater, bright tangle of necklace, earrings of amber. Each confirming: I chose these, I. But habit is different: it chooses. And we, its good horse, opening our mouths at even the sight of the bit. ~ Jane Hirshfield from Given Sugar, Given Salt

. The Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbors as one living a pure life. A beautiful Japanese girl whose parent owned a food store lived near him.  Suddenly,  without any warning,  her parents discovered she was with child. This mad her parents angry.  She would not confess who the man was,  but after much harassment at last named Hakuin. In great anger the parents went to the master.   "Is that so?"  was all he would say. After the child was born it was brought to Hakuin.  By this time he had lost his reputation,  which did not trouble him,  but he took very good care of the child.  He obtained milk from his neighbors and everything else the little one needed. A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer.   She told her parents the truth - that the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fishmarket. The mother and father of the girl at once went to Hakuin to ask his forgiveness, ...

. It's very important to experience the complete negation of yourself which brings you to the other side of nothing. You go to the other side of nothing and you are held by the hand of the absolute. You see yourself as the absolute so you have no more insistence of self. You can speak of the self as no self when you sit in the absolute. Your sitting still is like a person who just shot an arrow. A moment later the result is there. What you know, the only thing you know is the sense that the arrow is moving all right. It has left your realm but you sense it is running well. The stillness in sitting is like that. You flip to the other side of nothing, where you discover everyone is waiting for you already . ~ Kobun Chino

Time says “Let there be” every moment and instantly there is space and the radiance of each bright galaxy. And eyes beholding radiance. And the gnats’ flickering dance. And the seas’ expanse. And death, and chance. Time makes room for going and coming home and in time’s womb begins all ending. Time is being and being time, it is all one thing, the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding. ~   Ursula K. Le Guin

  Harlan and Anna Hubbard The Kentucky shore of the Ohio at evening.  Some time in the future, perhaps a saner time than now.  It is the season when the toads mate and sing from the stones along the water’s edge at night.  Here the river has curved in close to the foot of a steep hillside.  The slope is wooded with tall trees.  A fringe of willows along the shoreline opens to give a view up among the larger trunks.  During the play, the light slowly changes from twilight to dusk.           Two boatmen, a man past middle age and a boy of about fifteen, come ashore.  They may be small-time traders who row of drift from one river town to another.  Their johnboat, the bow of which is visible to our right, is of the traditional make, built of wood.  A rope is attached to a ring in the bow.           The boy carries the end of the rope up the shore and ma...