Pema Chödrön / Comfortable with Uncertainty

There was once a lady who was arrogant and proud. Determined to attain enlightenment, she asked all the authorities how to go about it. She was told, "Well, if you climb to the top of this very high mountain, you'll find a cave there. Sitting inside that cave is a wise old woman. She will tell you."

Having endured great hardships, the lady finally found this cave. Sure enough, sitting there was a gentle spiritual-looking old woman in white clothing, who smiled beatifically. Overcome with awe and respect, the lady prostrated at the feet of this woman and said, "I want to attain enlightenment. Show me how."

The wise woman looked at her and asked sweetly, "Are you sure you want to attain enlightenment?" And the lady said, "Of course I'm sure." Whereupon the smiling woman turned into a demon, stood up brandishing a great big stick, and started chasing her, saying, "Now! Now! Now!"
For the rest of her life, that lady could never get away from the demon who was always saying, "Now!"

Now - that's the key. Mindfulness trains us to be awake and alive, fully curious, about now. The out breath is now, the in breath is now, waking up from our fantasies is now, and even the fantasies are now. The more you can be completely now, the more you realize that you're always standing in the middle of a sacred circle.

Whatever you're doing, you're doing it now.

Edward Abbey

One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast, a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.

zen story

A monk asked Seng ts'an, "Master, show me the way to liberation."

Seng ts'an replied, "Who binds you?"

The monk responded, "No one binds me."

Seng ts'an said, "Then why do you seek liberation?"

timothy speed levitch

i am cruising currently right now
i am cruising because i have dedicated myself
to all that is creative and destructive in my life right now
and i'm equally in love
with every aspect of my life
and all the ingredients that have caused me turmoil
and all the ingredients that have caused me glory

in that active verb 'fleeting' there i live
there i reside in this moment
i have dedicated myself to the idiom 'i don't know'
i am in love with the frantic chaos of this limitless universe

J. Krishnamurti

So, when living, be with death, so that you are a guest in this world, so that you have no roots anywhere, so that you have a brain that is amazingly alive. Because if you carry all the burdens of yesterday, your brain becomes mechanical, dull. If you leave all the psychological memories, hurts, pains, behind, every day, then it means dying and living are together. In that there is no fear.

Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not Be A Christian

"Nothing, absolutely nothing, remains just what it is. For Buddhists, the most basic fact or quality of the world is not being, as it is for most Western philosophers and theologians: it’s becoming. To be is to become, one can “be” only if one is in motion. (We can note an immediate difference here from what we heard about the Christian God: for Western, Christian theologians, to call God perfect means he doesn’t change; for Buddhists, if we call God perfect, it means that God is the most changeable reality we could imagine!)

But just why is everything impermanent and in constant change? The answer has to do with what might be called the flip-side of anicca: pratityasamutpada, or, technically, “interdependent origination.” More simply: everything changes because everything is interrelated. Everything comes into being and continues in being through and with something else. Nothing, Buddha came to see, has its own existence. In fact, when he wanted to describe the human self, or the self/identity of anything, the term he used was anatta, which means literally no-self… We are not “selves” in the sense of individual, separate, independent “things.” Rather, we are constantly changing because we are constantly interrelating (or being interrelated)."

hagakure quotes

If by setting one's heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way.


But there is one transcending level, and this is the most excellent of all. This person is aware of the endlessness of entering deeply into a certain Way and never thinks of himself as having finished. He truly knows his own insufficiencies and never in his whole life thinks that he has succeeded. He has no thoughts of pride but with self-abasement knows the Way to the end. It is said that Master Yagyu once remarked, "I do not know the way to defeat others, but the way to defeat myself."


When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning. Above all, the Way of the Samurai should be in being aware that you do not know what is going to happen next, and in querying every item day or night.


If one does not get it into his head from the very beginning that the world is full of unseemly situations, for the most part his demeanor will be poor and he will not be believed by others.


It is not good to settle into a set of opinions. it is a mistake to put forth effort and obtain some understanding and then stop at that. At first putting forth great effort to be sure that you have grasped the basics, then practicing so that they may come to fruition is something that will never stop for your whole lifetime. Do not rely on following the degree of understanding that you have discovered, but simply think, "this is not enough."


"As a human being, what is essential in terms of purpose and discipline?"
"It is to become of the mind that is right now pure and lacking complications."


There is nothing outside the thought of the immediate moment.


There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.

HAND, HAND, FINGERS, THUMB / Al Perkins

Hand Hand Fingers Thumb
One thumb One thumb Drumming on a drum.
One hand Two hands Drumming on a drum.
Dum ditty Dum ditty Dum dum dum.
Rings on fingers.
Rings on thumb. Drum drum Drum drum Drum drum drum.
Monkeys drum…
…and monkeys hum. Hum drum Hum drum Hum drum hum.
Hand picks an apple.
Hand picks a plum. Dum ditty Dum ditty Dum dum dum.
Monkeys come And monkeys go.
Hands with handkerchiefs. Blow! Blow! Blow!
“Hello Jack.” “Hello Jake.”
Shake hands Shake hands Shake! Shake! Shake!
“Bye-bye Jake.”
“Bye-bye Jack.” Dum ditty Dum ditty Whack! Whack! Whack!
Hands play banjos Strum strum strum.
Hands play fiddles Zum zum zum.
Dum ditty Dum ditty Dum dum dum,
Hand in hand More monkeys come.
Many more fingers. Many more thumb. Many more monkeys. Many more drums.
Millions of fingers! Millions of thumbs! Millions of monkeys Drumming on drums!
Dum ditty Dum ditty Dum dum dum.

Joseph Campbell / The Power of Myth

"Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature."

Henry David Thoreau

I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be a success if I shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what I will do when I get there. Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?

Rumi

Be crumbled.
So wild flowers will come up
Where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different. Surrender.

Inscription for a Gravestone - Robinson Jeffers

I am not dead, I have only become inhuman:
That is to say,
Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities,
But not as a man
Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete
Stripping for the race.
The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer
Of certain fictions
Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain
And expand with pleasure;
Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope:
That's gone, it is true;
(I never miss it; if the universe does,
How easily replaced!)
But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free.
I admired the beauty
While I was human, now I am part of the beauty.
I wander in the air,
Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean;
Touch you and Asia
At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises
And the glow of this grass.
I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth
For a love-token.

J. Krishnamurti

Why is there this urge to identify, to be attached? Why is one human being attached to another? Does not attachment breed fear, fear of losing what one is attached to? Being attached, you may become jealous, frightened, anxious, which are obvious phenomena. You are attached because of your own insufficiency, loneliness. And so out of your own insufficiency, loneliness, a sense of lacking, you cling to another. So is attachment love? Where there is attachment there must be exploitation. And we use that word love to cover up all this. And is love jealousy? None of these things exist as attachment when you have understood that that emptiness in yourself can never be filled by something else. You have to look at it. You have to not escape from it, observe it totally. […] In attachment there is fear, there is anxiety, there is hate, all the conflicts in relationship; and where there is conflict can there be love?

Walker Percy

"Consider the alternatives. Suppose you elect suicide? Very well. You exit. Then what? What happens after you exit? Nothing much. Very little, indeed. After a ripple or two, the water closes over your head as if you had never existed. You are not indispensable after all. You are not even a black hole in the Cosmos. All that stress and anxiety was for nothing. Your fellow townsmen will have something to talk about for a few days. Your neighbors will profess shock and enjoy it. One or two might miss you, perhaps your family, who will also resent the disgrace. Your creditors will resent the inconvenience. Your lawyers will be pleased. Your psychiatrist will be displeased. The priest or minister or rabbi will say a few words over you and you will go on the green tapes and that's the end of you. In a surprisingly short time, everyone is back in the rut of his own self as if you had never existed.

Now, in the light of this alternative, consider the other alternative. You can elect suicide, but you decide not to. What happens? All at once, you are dispensed. Why not live, instead of dying? You are free to do so. You are like a prisoner released from the cell of his life. You notice that the door to the cell is ajar and that the sun is shining outside. Why not take a walk down the street? Where you might have been dead, you are alive. The sun is shining.

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he knows he doesn't have to."

.

Jean Klein

The idea of being a person, an ego, is nothing other than an image held together by memory.

The Earth by N. Scott Momaday

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon
the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up
to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from
as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon
it.

He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at
every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon
it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest
motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and
all the colors of the dawn and dusk.
For we are held by more than the force of gravity to the earth.
It is the entity from which we are sprung, and that into which
we are dissolved in time. The blood of the whole human race
is invested in it. We are moored there, rooted as surely, as
deeply as are the ancient redwoods and bristlecones.

BROTHERHOOD by Octavio Paz

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

a koan

Bassui wrote the following letter to one of his disciples who was about to die:

"The essence of your mind is not born, so it will never die. It is not an existence, which is perishable. It is not an emptiness, which is a mere void. It has neither color nor form. It enjoys no pleasures and suffers no pains.

"I know you are very ill. Like a good Zen student, you are facing that sickness squarely. You may not know exactly who is suffering, but question yourself: What is the essence of this mind? Think only of this. You will need no more. Covet nothing. Your end which is endless is as a snowflake dissolving in the pure air."

The Eye-witness by the The Habibiyya

Forms of action and being do not multiply the actor in any way.

Joko Shibata

Breathing is the work of the universe; it’s not the work of your individual self. Thinking, too, is the work of the universe. And as it is written in the Genjokoan, delusion and realization are one - both a part of the same scenery. That this thing becomes this thing is the form of the universe. If you want to become something else, you are making a mistake. You need to be satisfied with who you are.

Tilopa

The mind that desperately desires to reach another realm or level of experience inadvertently ignores the basic light that constitutes all experience.

Ryokan

Even if people know that names aren’t reality,
They don’t see that reality itself has no root.
Name … reality … both are beside the point.
Find joy in the ever-shifting flow.

Does this path have a heart? - Carlos Castaneda

All paths are the same: they lead nowhere.
They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush.
In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere.

Does this path have a heart?

If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use.
Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't.

One makes for a joyful journey;
as long as you follow it, you are one with it.
The other will make you curse your life.

One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart?
If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path.

The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path.

A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it.
On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.

fragment of a Shin Buddhist poem in Taitetsu Unno's book, River of Fire, River of Water

You, as you are, you're just right.
Your parents, your children, your daughter-in-law, your grandchildren,
they are, all for you, just right.

Happiness, unhappiness, joy and even sorrow,
for you, they are just right.

The life that you tread is neither good nor bad.
For you, it is just right.
Whether you go to hell or to the Pure Land,
wherever you go is just right.

Nothing to boast about, nothing to feel bad about,
nothing above, nothing below.

Even the day and month that you die,
even they are just right.

Hakuin

At this very moment, what can be sought?
Nirvana is immediate.
This place is the lotus land.
This body is the Buddha body.

Charles Baudelaire translated by Louis Simpson

Be Drunk

You have to be always drunk.  That's all there is to it—it's the only way.  So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what?  Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish.  But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking... ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk!  So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk!  On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

Hsuan-sha (Jap., Gensha)

Things are such as they are. For who does not understand this, things are just as they are. Nevertheless, things remain such as they are.

Ilchi Lee

Observe your own body. It breathes. You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity. Who, then, is breathing? The collection of information that you mistakenly think is you is not the protagonist in this drama called the breath. In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you. You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going. The expression, ‘my life’ is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption. You don’t possess life; life expresses itself through you. Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life.

steven norquist

what sages from every era have come to understand is this simple truth:  all that happens in this universe does so spontaneously, perfectly, and of its own accord.  yet simultaneously and equally true in this spontaneous manifestation that is the universe, is the knowledge that nothing is random, everything emerges exactly as it has to.

unknown (comment if you know)

when you realize at a very deep level that the winter of your death is inevitable, that nothing that you identify now as yourself will survive, at that moment the spring of your awakening will begin.

Advice to Myself - Louise Erdrich - Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic - decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

Louise Erdrich

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after - lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.

Louise Erdrich

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.

Jalal ad-Din Rumi

“Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly. Let the lover be.”

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.”

Ovid, The Metamorphoses

”Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form. The phrase “being born” is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while “dying” means ceasing to be the same. Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged.”

scott adams

how can one part be more important if each part is completely necessary?

Seneca

Life’s like a play; it’s not the length but the excellence of the acting that matters

Cid Corman

There are things to be said. No doubt.
And in one way or another
they will be said. But to whom tell

the silences? With whom share them
now? For a moment the sky is
empty and then there was a bird.

Ajahn Chah

“The Buddha wanted us to practice Dhamma. But what is practicing Dhamma? Dhamma means all things. The forms that the eyes see, sounds heard by the ears, these are all Dhamma, because Dhamma means conditions that are maintained in existence. Having come into being, they pass away. We don’t need to expect too much from them, because that is the way they are. We should internalize this truth and see it in our minds and bodies; it is not something far away. The components of body and mind are not stable or permanent. They have no inherent reality. Why would you want to see something that has no inherent reality as real? Appearing and disappearing, constantly in a state of change—where is the reality in that? The only reality is the insubstantiality itself. The Buddha wanted us to see this truth, the truth that things are impermanent, unsatisfactory in nature, and without self-essence. Not seeing this and grasping at things, the only result is suffering; seeing and letting go leads to freedom.”

Louise Erdrich

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

J. Krishnamurti

“…it is important to understand, not intellectually but actually in your daily life, how you have built images about your wife, your husband, your neighbor, your child, your country, your leaders, your politicians, your gods–you have nothing but images.

The images create the space between you and what you observe and in that space there is conflict, so what we are going to find out now together is whether it is possible to be free of the space we create, not only outside ourselves but in ourselves, the space which divides people in all their relationships.

Now the very attention you give to a problem is the energy that solves that problem. When you give your complete attention–I mean with everything in you–there is no observer at all. There is only the state of attention which is total energy, and that total energy is the highest form of intelligence. Naturally that state of mind must be completely silent and that silence, that stillness, comes when there is total attention, not disciplined stillness. That total silence in which there is neither the observer nor the thing observed is the highest form of a religious mind. But what takes place in that state cannot be put into words because what is said in words is not the fact. To find out for yourself you have to go through it.”

~  excerpt from Freedom from the Known

michael mallon

outwhere

the vanishing

k. c. cole

the energy you use to read this sentence is powered, ultimately, by sunlight - perhaps first soaked up by some grass that got digested by a cow before it turned into the milk that made the cheese that topped the pizza - but sunlight, just the same.

carlos castaneda

"Death is the only wise advisor that we have.  Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so.  Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch.  Your death will tell you, 'I haven't touched you yet."

"In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts.  There is only time for decisions."

"The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today.  The wind will be soft and mellow and your hilltop will tremble.  As you reach the end of your dance you will look at the sun, for you will never see it again in waking or in dreaming, and then your death will point to the south.  To the vastness."

"Malicious acts are performed by people for personal gain …  Sorcerers, though, have an ulterior purpose for their acts, which has nothing to do with personal gain.  The fact that they enjoy their acts does not count as gain.  Rather, it is a condition of their character.  The average man acts only if there is a chance for profit.  Warriors say they act not for profit but for the spirit."

"Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge.  A warrior cannot complain or regret anything.  His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad.  Challenges are simply challenges."

"The trick is in what one emphasizes.  We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong.  The amount of work is the same."

peter matthiessen

In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.

tennessee williams

once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation

tao teh ching

The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it,
you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it,
you will lose it.

henry miller

life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly

tilopa's song of mahamudra

do naught with the body but relax;
shut firm the mouth and silent remain;
empty your mind and think of naught.
like a hollow bamboo, rest at ease your body.