Who am i

 

I am neither of the West nor the East

Not of the ocean, nor an earthly beast

I am neither a natural wonder

Nor from the stars yonder

Neither flesh of dust, nor wind inspire

Nor water in veins, nor made of fire

I am neither an earthly carpet, nor gems terrestrial

Nor am I confined to Creation, nor the Throne Celestial

Not of ancient promises, nor of future prophecy

Not of hellish anguish, nor of paradisic ecstasy

Neither the progeny of Adam, nor Eve

Nor of the world of heavenly make-believe

My place is the no-place

My image is without face

Neither of body nor the soul

I am of the Divine Whole.

I eliminated duality with joyous laughter

Saw the unity of here and the hereafter

Unity is what I sing, unity is what I speak

Unity is what I know, unity is what I seek

Intoxicated from the chalice of Love

I have lost both worlds below and above

Sole destiny that comes to me

Licentious mendicity

In my whole life, even if once

Forgot His name even per chance

For that hour spent, for such moment

I’d give my life, and thus repent

Beloved Master, Shams-e Tabrizi

In this world with Love I’m so drunk

The path of Love isn’t easy

I am shipwrecked and must be sunk.

-RUMI

 With their whole gaze animals behold the open. 

Only our eyes are as though reversed, 

and set like traps around us, keeping us inside. 

That there is something out there we know only from a creature’s countenance. 

Never, not for a single day do we let the space before us

be so unbounded that the blooming of one flower is forever. 

We are always making it into a world,

and never letting it be nothing. 

The pure and unconstructed,

which we breathe and endlessly know, 

and do not crave. 

Sometimes a child loses himself in this stillness, and gets shaken out of it. 

Or a person dies and becomes it. 

For when death draws near,

we see death no more;

we stare beyond it with an animal’s wild gaze. 

Lovers also look with astonishment into the open, 

when the beloved doesn’t block the view. 

It surges up unburdened in the background. 

Sometimes neither can get past the other, 

and so the world closes again. 

Ever turn toward what we create,

we see it as only reflections of the open, darkened by us.

This is our fate: to stand in our own way, forever in the way. 

We, always and everywhere spectators, 

turn not toward the open, 

but towards the stuff of our lives. It drowns us. 

We set it in order, and it falls apart. 

We order it again, and fall apart ourselves. 

Who has turned us around like this? 

Whatever we do, 

we are in the presence of one 

who’s about to depart.

— RAINER MARIA —

This human a guest house

 This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

Tao

 The universe is deathless; Is deathless because, having no finite self , it stays infinite. A sound man by not advancing himself stays the further ahead of himself, By not confining himself to himself sustains himself outside himself:

By never being an end in himself 

He endlessly becomes himself. 

And here, of action rooted in essence or being

There is no need to run outside 

For better seeing,

Nor to peer from a window.

Rather abide 

At the center of your being;

For the more you leave it,

the less you learn.

Search your heart and see 

If he is wise who takes each turn:

The way to do is to be.

 As once the wingéd energy of delight

carried you over childhood's dark abysses,

now beyond your own life build the great 

arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed 

in passing through the harshest danger; 

but only in a bright and purely granted

achievement can we realize the wonder. 

To work with Things in the indescribable 

relationship is not too hard for us;

the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,

and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between two contradictions. . . . 

For the god

wants to know himself in you.

— RAINER MARIA RILKE

Amid the vastness of the things among which we live, the existence of nothingness holds the first place; its function extends over all things that have no existence, and its essence, as regards time, lies precisely between the past and the future, and has nothing in the present. This nothingness has the part equal to the whole, and the whole to the part, the divisible to the indivisible; and the product of the sum is the same whether we divide or multiply, and in addition as in subtraction; as is proved by arithmeticians by their tenth figure which represents zero; and its power has not extension among the things of Nature.”

Leonardo da Vinci

Non-existence is called the antecedent of heaven and earth; Existence is the mother of all things. From eternal non-existence, therefore, we serenely observe the mysterious beginning of the Universe; From eternal existence we clearly see the apparent distinctions. These two are the same in source and become different when manifested.”

”Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name;

this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery.”

”The Tao is like a well: used but never used up. It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities. It is hidden but always present.”

-tao

wheel of life

 OVERVIEW of the WHEEL of LIFE

There's a thread you follow. It goes among 

things that change. But it doesn't change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can't get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt 

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.

You don't ever let go of the thread.

— WILLIAM STAFFORD, “THE WAY IT IS”

 But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For Heaven and the future's sake.

- Robert frost 

You walking, your footprints are 

the road, and nothing else

there is no road, walker,

you make the road by walking.

By walking you make the road,

and when you look backward,

you see the path that you

never will step on again.

Walker, there is no road,

only wind-trails in the sea

-antanio machado

Adyashanti poem

 If you prefer smoke over fire

then get up now and leave.
For I do not intend to perfume
your mind's clothing
with more sooty knowledge.

No, I have something else in mind.
Today I hold a flame in my left hand
and a sword in my right.
There will be no damage control today.

For God is in a mood
to plunder your riches and
fling you nakedly
into such breathtaking poverty
that all that will be left of you
will be a tendency to shine.

So don't just sit around this flame
choking on your mind.
For this is no campfire song
to mindlessly mantra yourself to sleep with.

Jump now into the space
between thoughts
and exit this dream
before I burn the damn place down.



---------------------------------


Time to cash in your chips
put your ideas and beliefs on the table.
See who has the bigger hand
you or the Mystery that pervades you.

Time to scrape the mind's shit
off your shoes
undo the laces
that hold your prison together
and dangle your toes into emptiness.

Once you've put everything
on the table
once all of your currency is gone
and your pockets are full of air
all you've got left to gamble with
is yourself.

Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top
of the highest stakes table.
Place yourself as the bet.
Look God in the eyes
and finally
for once in your life
lose.

No single thing abides

No single thing abides; but all things flow.

Fragment to fragment clings--the things thus grow

Until we know and name them. By degrees

They melt, and are no more the things we know.

Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift

I see the suns, I see the systems lift

Their forms; and even the systems and the suns

Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.

Thou soo, oh earth--thine empires, lands, and seas--

Least, with thy stars, of all the galaxies,

Globed from the drift like these, like these thou too

Shalt go. Thou art going, hour by hour, like these.

Nothing abides. The seas in delicate haze

Go off; those moonéd sands forsake their place;

And where they are, shall other seas in turn

Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.

Lo, how the terraced towers, and monstrous round

Of league-long ramparts rise from out the ground,

With gardens in the clouds. Then all is gone,

And Babylon is a memory and a mound.

Observe this dew-drenched rose of Tyrian grain--

A rose today. But you will ask in vain

Tomorrow what it is; and yesterday

It was the dust, the sunshine and the rain.

This bowl of milk, the pitch on yonder jar,

Are strange and far-bound travelers come from far

THis is a snow-flake that was once a flame--

The flame was once the fragment of a star.

Round, angular, soft, brittle, dry, cold, warm,

Things are their qualities: things are their form--

And these in combination, even as bees,

Not singly but combined, make up the swarm:

And when the qualities like bees on wing,

Having a moment clustered, cease to cling,

As the thing dies without its qualities,

So die the qualities without the thing.

Where is the coolness when no cool winds blow?

Where is the music when the lute lies low?

Are not the redness and the red rose one,

And the snow's whiteness one thing with the snow?

Even so, now mark me, here we reach the goal

Of Science, and in little have the whole--

Even as the redness and the rose are one,

So with the body one thing is the soul.

For, as our limbs and organs all unite

to make our sum of suffering and delight,

And without eyes and ears and touch and tongue,

Were no such things as taste and sound and sight.

So without these we all in vain shall try

To find the things that gives them unity--

The thing to which each whispers, "Thou art thou"--

The soul which answers each, "And I am I."

What! shall the dateless worlds in dust be blown

Back to the unremembered and unknown,

And this frail Thou--this flame of yesterday--

Burn on, forlorn, immortal, and alone?

Did Nature, in the nurseries of the night

Tend it for this--Nature whose heedless might,

Casts, like some shipwrecked sailor, the poor babe,

Naked and bleating on the shores of light?

What is it there? A cry is all it is.

It knows not if its limbs be yours or his.

Less than that cry the babe was yesterday.

The man tomorrow shall be less than this.

Tissue by tissue to a soul he grows,

As leaf by leaf the rose becomes the rose.

Tissue from tissue rots; and, as the Sun

Goes from the bubbles when they burst, he goes.

Ah, mark those pearls of Sunrise! Fast and free

Upon the waves they are dancing. Souls shall be

Things that outlast their bodies, when each spark

Outlasts its wave, each wave outlasts the sea.

The seeds that once were we take flight and fly,

Winnowed to earth, or whirled along the sky,

Not lost but disunited. Life lives on.

It is the lives, the lives, the lives, that die.

They go beyond recapture and recall,

Lost in the all-indissoluble All:--

Gone like the rainbow from the fountain's foam,

Gone like the spindrift shuddering down the squall.

Flakes of the water, on the waters cease!

Soul of the body, melt and sleep like these.

Atoms to atoms--weariness to rest--

Ashes to ashes--hopes and fears to peace!

Oh Science, lift aloud thy voice that stills

The pulse of fear, and through the conscience thrills--

Thrills through the conscience the news of peace--

How beautiful thy feet are on the hills!

Poem by: Lucretius (c. 99-55 B.C.)

 translated by W. H. Mallock