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.