How can you be bored with being?

Thoroughly thought-provoking .....

"Finally, the game of life as Western man has been 'playing' it for the past century needs less emphasis on practicality, results, progress, and aggression. This is why I am discussing vision, and keeping off the subject of justifying the vision in terms of its practical applications and consequences. Whatever may be true for the Chinese and the Hindus, it is timely for us to recognize that the future is an ever-retreating mirage, and to switch our immense energy and technical skill to contemplation instead of action. However much we may now disagree with Aristotle's logic and his metaphors, he must still be respected for reminding us that the goal of action is always contemplation—knowing and being rather than seeking and becoming.

As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, 'It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what's happening now.' How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies — how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?" 

~ Alan Watts.
Excerpt from the book - The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

There is Buddha

in the still space

between each thought

the Buddha waits

~~~

For Carpe Diem's Santoka Taneda's 'There is Buddha' prompt

in the ceaseless sound
of the water
there is Buddha

© Santoka Taneda

Insight of the day

It matters little what others think
it matters not at all what you think,

the real you is not thinking
the real you is just being.

The incredible lightness of being a poet

Nothing repulses the poet-weaver like 'facts' or the cultural compulsion she feels to place her feet firmly on the 'ground' - for the poet is an offspring of chaos, consciousness dissatisfied, Maya playing in an orchard of mirrors. Reality is too small for her...too stifling. She knows there is no ground. There are no facts. She believes this - in a way that defeats the very idea of belief. Leave her to glide gracefully in mid-air - her feet brushing the dancing grass, disrupting the pollination songs of the fields, disturbing the smooth surfaces of the river; leave her to build sandcastles near the ocean; leave her to stand embarrassed by a falling leaf; leave her to mock your certainty, your assured creeds, your arms-akimbo-ed heroes and their moral games. Leave her to her fatal insignificance - away from your intricate schemes and grandiose plots; leave her to her confusing ambiguity. Leave her - and in time, or out of it, she will paint you stories that shake you, songs that undo you, and myths that strip life of its cocksureness. And you will see, as if for the first time, that your feet weren't and never were on the ground either. And you are flying.

~ Adebayo Akomolafe (Keynote Speech for EU-DEEEP Global Summit, 2013)

The bleating sheep

the river flows placid
clattering over the pebbles
as cicadas tone down
their fervid cadences
and quieten for the night

on a tiny patch of farm
across the road
a sheep bleats into the night
I worry about it,
is it thirsty? is it hurt?

it strikes me as odd
that I worry about a sheep
while in parts of the world
people die of hunger
and children get robbed
of their souls
bit by bit day after day
by abuse

I keel over with helplessness
by the enormity of it all

“answer me, you answer me”
I beseech an unseen God
“surely there must be a reason”

‘you tell me’ he retorts right back
“why human beings are so intent
on hurting one another.
why do they lock up the love
that is their real nature
and embrace fear, you tell me”

I keel over in defeat
silenced into submission
by the stark truth of it

“maybe your creation is flawed
maybe you wired us all wrong”
I use a rallying point

“maybe you prefer to be blind
else why would you court darkness
when you are in reality
nothing but pure beings of light”

“so how do we begin to see?”

“stop thinking and just be
realise who you are really”

I am floored by the simplicity of it

The sheep has stopped bleating
the cicadas are quiet
a resplendent full moon
admires its shimmering image
on the singing rippling water

Just being

There is great happiness in not wanting, in not being something, in not going somewhere.
The mind is not tranquil as long as it is traveling in order to arrive.

 ~Jiddu Krishnamurti

All lit up : a photo-haiku

Infancy and childhood

by Jean Houston

I am beginning to write a new online course on the recovery of the capacities that we lose at each stage of our development. Here is what I have to say about infancy and childhood:

We are given as our birthright a Stradivarius, and we come to play it like a plastic fiddle. Consider the Stradivarius. Consider the child—the star brighter than any star man's mind can create conception of, this Godstuff rendered freely as spillover of an abundance of which we are largely unaware. This nuclear divinity, which radiates an unnameable glory when it comes, is in fact a creation of such inestimable worth that, were a cosmic scales to be employed, the infant child placed on one tray and all the precious jewels on the other, there would be no possibility of outweighing the child.

Talents to last a million years are the mother lode of its molecules. Its body is celled of mysteries that are incomprehensible, yet existent and responsive to all that is, and therefore is the container and active channeler of all that is. There is no need here to speak of Evolution to come. All the future tunings and turnings are already here, latent givens in the once and future child.

Its arms and legs enter into conversation with the bright of mornings. In perfect diaphany it knows the shapes of nature for its own. Sunbeams shaping grasses, trees parting skies, waters rushing over rock, these are the mirrors and progenitors of all its movings, the visible likeness of its earth-partnered life.

Comes then society's teaching time. The child is ushered into the presence of the Guidepost to the relevant life. And this post, assigned the teaching task, begins the process of informing the child of its smallness in relation to the far larger, its ignorance measured against great intelligences, its ineptitudes contrasted to vast skills, its lacks opposed to fullnesses, its basic inconsequentiality within the context of "things that matter."

Knowledge of its own divine origins begins to be quite systematically removed from its consciousness. First, the fullness of nature is removed. The trees are taken out of its arms, the rushing waters out of its blood. Body and brain are hunched; gates are built in its muscles; its brain becomes a fortress against all vastness, guarding against the remembrance of who it is and where it came from. This done, the child is deemed acceptable.

But it is not yet over. The internal world must be put to rout. At one point, a serious point, the child will be taught that what is imagined is unreal, and an arterial siphon will draw from near its heart that much strength of impulse which was necessary to keep up its commitment to the inner realms. What is imagined, what has a reality of ponderables that simply doesn't lend itself to physically calibrated scales, this is said to be not real, and the child is halved, so to speak.

If the heart siphon is not wholly effective, another siphon is put into the veins of the inner elbow and all that society thinks impractical is drawn from the elbow's crook. Put the various other siphons into alcoved places, the armpits, the groin, the bend of the knee, the arched chamber of the eye-socket.

Tell the little child that the world out there is only this, or only that, or perhaps phrase it merely, make less than worthy the notice of it. Only a tree, and all the trees are cut down; merely a small lake, and the deeps have lost their mystery; only this and merely that, and the magnificences of nature are made into shoddy stage sets. The siphon has drawn nerves of vision from under the roofed brain, taken the full life of seeing from the eyes.

Belittle another human being, categorize him with a label having to do with his color, his race, his lack or surfeit of academic training, his societal affiliations, pin him like a butterfly specimen for the child to inspect minus all his full lifeness, his essential human-divineness, his proper dimensionality; and you've siphoned out generative power that reaches deep into the groin that could have meant the reseeding of the world.

~~~ taken from her FB page

What to remember when waking

A mind-blowing poem by David Whyte

WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
to which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love?  What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?

~ David Whyte ~
(The House of Belonging)

Ego

Ego is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing, and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.

In Tibetan, ego is called dakdzin , which means “grasping to a self.”

Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of “I” and “mine,” self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activities that will sustain that false construction.

Such grasping is futile from the start and condemned to frustration, for there is no basis or truth in it, and what we are grasping at is by its very nature ungraspable.
The fact that we need to grasp at all and to go on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self doesn’t inherently exist.
From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fears.

~ Sogyal Rinpoche, from Glimpse of the day

Nature loves courage

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed. 

Source : Internet

 

The teacher

A teacher cannot give you the truth
The truth is already in you
You only need to open yourself –
body, mind and heart,
so that his or her teachings
will penetrate your own seeds
of understanding and enlightenment
If you let the words enter you,
the soil and the seeds
will do the rest of the work.

Source : Internet

Yes, when? And why?

"In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?"

—Gabrielle Roth, dancer, musician and author

SOULMATE

“The feeling of connection that people are looking for, the exhilaration of being with someone with their hearts soaring, really is not a function of the person you are with, but instead it is a function of your own Connection with You.

We would prefer to think of Soul Mate as you mating, or consciously connecting, with your own Soul or Source or Inner Being or Self. When you in your physical moment and time, are offering a similar vibration to your Inner Being, you have indeed found your Soul Mate. And if you consistently do that, the people who will gravitate to you will be enormously satisfying in nature.”

~ Abraham

Surrender

We humans during the course of our lives build so many barriers between our innermost, vulnerable core and the outer world that for us to open up fully and surrender completely to another human being becomes virtually impossible. So terrified are we that the other will hurt us in some way that for all our adult lives we go about clad in armour and fortified with shields and swords.

I am one such person. However, fortunately for me, surrendering to God, or to my Higher Self is much more easier. It could be because I experience my Higher Self as being loving, benevolent and compassionate.When I surrender to this Higher Self, a lot of things happen. I not only lose the barriers that are imprisoning me, I am also able to shed my ego and face my Self egoless. This happens effortlessly, like as if I rise to a place where the ego is no longer needed, since I am now out of the survival mode and in my natural state.

The other thing I have noticed is that I become desire-less. This could be because desires arise in, and are created by the mind, and when we are able to rise above the mind, the desires also disappear. The only desire that can be said to exist is to remain in this state of surrender. But it cannot be called a desire as such, because it is spontaneously and simultaneously being fulfilled. Only when I drop back into the mind does the desire arise again, to regain or return to that state of grace.

Journey

In those elusive, far-apart moments of silence
I hear a drummer beat a different tune,
soft at first, then increasingly urgent,
Peter Pan-like, it leads me on.

Follow I must,
intrigued, tanatalised, mesmerised
as it most surely pulls me in,
away from the garish lights of the world,
and discordant sounds of humdrum,
into spectral spaces, full of mystery,
where truths lie sleeping at every turn
waiting to be discovered by me.

There among the shadowy mists of wonder
heartbeat quickening, eyes moistening,
I listen, as silence, so profound, speaks.
that things are not as they appear to be.

~~~

love story

God writes only love stories,
in it you are the lover and the beloved,
if you realise this,
there are only happy endings.