OM (aum) Our Buddha-nature is there from the very beginning. It is like the sun emerging from behind clouds. It is like a mirror that reflects perfectly when it is wiped clean and returned to its original clarity. HO-SHAN
What brings understanding is love. When your heart is full, then you will listen to the teacher, to the beggar, to the laughter of children, to the rainbow, and to the sorrow of man. Under every stone and leaf, that which is eternal exists. But we do not know how to look for it. Our minds and hearts are filled with other things than understanding of "what is". Love and mercy, kindliness and generosity do not cause enmity. When you love, you are very near truth. For, love makes for sensitivity, for vulnerability. That which is sensitive is capable of renewal. Then truth will come into being. It cannot come if your mind and heart are burdened, heavy with ignorance and animosity. Can the mind that is small, petty, be transformed into something which is not bound by its own limitations?
It is attention that allows silence to come upon the mind, which is the opening of the door to creation. if you have observed and learnt what it means to communicate, the non-verbalization of the mind — that communicates and receives communication— , then, as life is a movement, you will, in your action, move on naturally, freely, easily, without any effort, to that state of communion. And in that state of communion, if you enquire more deeply, you will find that you are not only in communion with nature, with the world, with everything about you, but also in communion with yourself.
When the mind itself becomes sacred then it opens the door to something that is immeasurably sacred. And that affects the daily living, the way I talk, the way I treat people, the conduct, behaviour- all that - J Krishnamurti in Conversation with Prof Allan Anderson on Meditation
Salutations to that sacred sound present in the earth, the heavens, and that which is beyond. May the glorious splendour of that Divine life illuminate our meditation. Gayatri Mantra — Rig Veda 3.62.10
In man, his highest nature most readily cognizes good because the good external to him in the world is in harmonic ratio with the good present in his soul. In the Mysteries the lyre was regarded as the secret symbol of the human constitution, the body of the instrument representing the physical form, the strings the nerves, and the musician the spirit. Playing upon the nerves, the spirit thus created the harmonies of normal functioning, which, however, became discords if the nature of man were defiled. Theory of Music and Color
The root meaning of our word beauty means fairness; beauty is a condition of fairness; of what is good, well, and fitting. It’s possible that by placing ourselves on the path of beauty, we prepare ourselves for justice, not just tending one’s own garden but to bring more beauty into the world; it can convey a heightened sense of aliveness to ourselves and access to what’s alive and striving in others. Steven Epperson and Joe Cherry
Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance. Vaclav Havel
Vaclav Havel defined God as a horizon that gives everything meaning, the possible perimeter of his life and that death permeates our consciousness as destiny.
The original and most important sphere of activity, one that predetermines all the others, is simply an attempt to create and support the independent life of society as an articulated expression of living within the truth. In other words, serving truth consistently, purposefully, and articulately, and organizing this service. This is only natural, after all: if living within the truth is an elementary starting point for every attempt made by people to oppose the alienating pressure of the system, if it is the only meaningful basis of any independent act of political import, and if, ultimately, it is also the most intrinsic existential source of the "dissident" attitude, then it is difficult to imagine that even manifest "dissent" could have any other basis than the service of truth, the truthful life, and the attempt to make room for the genuine aims of life. "The Power of the Powerless"
Why we have exiled ourselves from that realm of permanence from which we came? The purpose of life that will satisfy both sense and reason, is this: that each one of us will be progressively conscious in ever higher degrees in being conscious; that is, conscious of nature, and in and through and beyond nature. By nature is meant all that one can be made conscious of through the senses. Thinking and Destiny, Harold Waldwin Percival
If we don’t live and speak our truth we will manifests a dis-ease of some type in the body, "suppressed identity and dignity," for we lie to ourselves and create a separation within our being.
Havel's dramatic works are dominated by themes of alienation, malcommunication, betrayal, bureaucratic dehumanization, domestic nightmares, and the search for identity and truth. "Disturbing the Peace" is a portray of modern humanity in a state of crisis where a compromised self-identity becomes a pawn of the nonsensical system. "The Memorandum" examines the alienating effect of bureaucratic discourse and an official document written in scientific language designed to banish emotion from human communication. "The Increased Difficulty of Concentration" involves a social scientist who attempts to balance conflicting obligations to his wife and mistresses while participating in a farcical computer experiment and composing a lecture on the complexity of modern life. "The Vanek trilogy" (“Audience,” “A Private View” and “Protest”) is a portray of a dissident writer who witnesses the degrading forces of corruption, false ideology, and socioeconomic coercion. His visit with a superficial couple who have sacrificed moral consciousness for material advantage and social respectability. In the plays, Vanek is variously debased and demeaned, in effect, made to become an alien in his own country. "Largo Desolato" centers upon the existential crisis of a persecuted intellectual who must renounce a controversial passage that he has written by denying its authorship. Confined to his apartment—a symbolic prison cell—to contemplate authority and subjectivity, he becomes consumed with self-doubt regarding his identity and the possibility of truth. "The Garden Party" also deal with distorted language, moral abdication, and lost self-identity.
Ab Ke Hum Bichhde - Mehdi Hassan Seek the spoiled pearl of fidelity strewn among people and you may find this treasure among the wretched. Neither are you God, nor is my love like that of the angels. Human both of us, why then so many obstacles? Make the pain of life part of the pain of separation, headier will the mix of the two wines be. Today, neither am I, nor are you, nor is the time the same as that of the days before. We are like two shadows who meet in a mirage built of unfulfilled wishes.
For people who have been forced to become foreigners in their own land, who have been driven from their properties and who have been pushed around by the powerful like the mighty wind blows the dust around, ashes, as a moment of the continuum of the pilgrimage of life become most powerful. They mark the radical acceptance of the moment - actually there is no choice. But this acceptance does not indicate approval in any way whatsoever. It is the acceptance of an unjust situation without the acceptance of its disastrous consequences: The very fact that we are here in growing numbers and walking up to receive the ashes is an act of public and collective defiance of the destructive situation that has been forced upon us. We will not be eliminated from this earth, we might be dust today, but dust settles down and can take roots when it receives moisture. Ethical Issues in the Struggles for Justice
"Forgiveness doesn't mean forget what happened. … If something is serious and it is necessary to take counter-measures, you have to take counter-measures," Dalai Lama
My work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.
What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Hoag's Object, known as a ring galaxy. Serendipitously, from the perspective of our solar system what appears to be an even more distant ring galaxy is plainly visible within the gap between this galaxy's central body of mostly yellow stars and the outer ring of blue stars.
The wanderer above the sea of fog - Caspar David Friedrich
Absurdism, Albert Camus, the Myth of Sisyphu: Damned to eternity because of a misguided love, Sisyphus spends his time with a rock, a hill, and an eternal struggle.
Can we step beyond time and all its unnecessary cultural limitations? Time that doesn't move like an arrow from the past to the present and then onto the future. It's time as a process which isn't necessarily finished when it ends. It's a recognition that while the past may be discarded because it's no longer serves us, that doesn't mean it's worthless. In the right hands, it can be recycled and turned into something new and valuable. Kevin Griffin
Mother Earth & Dreams that time weaves and unravels
My entire soul is a murky verse, reiterating you within itself. Carrying you to the dawn of eternal burstings and blossomings. In this verse, I sighed you, AH! In this verse, I grafted you to trees, water and fire. Perhaps life is a long street along which a woman with a basket passes every day. Perhaps life is a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch. Perhaps life is a child returning home from school. Perhaps life is the lighting of a cigarette between the lethargic intervals of two lovemakings. Or the puzzled passage of a passerby tipping his hat saying good morning to another passerby with a vacant smile...Born Again by Forough Farokhzad
I never learned to count my blessings, I choose instead to dwell in my disasters... and still its hard somehow to let go of my pain... If through my cracked and dusted dime-store lips I spoke these words out loud would no one hear me? Well I looked my demons in the eyes, laid bare my chest, said "Do your best, destroy me. You see, I've been to hell and back so many times, I must admit you kind of bore me.".. There's a lot of things I don't understand, why so many people lie. Its the hurt I hide that fuels the fire inside me. Will I always feel this way? So empty, so estranged. Ray LaMontagne
Cusco, Peru Colorful Taki Festival in La Plaza de Armas
The major gradations of energy and substance between elemental earth and absolute unconditioned force. Note that the ascending pyramid of substance touches but does not pierce the fifteenth sphere--that of Limitless and Eternal Life. Likewise, the descending pyramid of energy touches but does not pierce the first sphere--the grossest condition of substance.
In the realm of quantum physics, observing something actually influences the physical processes taking place. Light waves act like particles and particles act like waves (called wave particle duality). Matter can go from one spot to another without moving through the intervening space (called quantum tunnelling). Information moves instantly across vast distances.
What is matter? Marbles or waves? And waves of what? And what does an observer does have to do with any of this? The observer collapsed the wave function by simply observing! Double Slit Experiment
George Ohsawa's Order Of The Universe. 1.Everything is a differentiation of One Infinity. 2.Everything changes. 3.All antagonisms are complementary. 4.There is nothing identical. 5.What has a front has a back. 6.The bigger the front, the bigger the back. 7.What has a beginning has an end
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you ’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!” If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that ’s in it, And—which is more—you ’ll be a Man, my son! Rudyard Kipling’s poem If
The act of deep listening to any natural sound connects me with the inner Silence, that doorway to my personal heaven. Whether it may be a concert by a master musician or sitting by a river, the act of fully showing up and turning my whole being into an ear seems to connect me to that energy that some call God. The more I “touch base” with that internal experience of heaven the more it translates into an increasingly calm, accepting, conscious and loving way to live daily life… maybe what the First Nations people call: “Walking in Beauty”. THE WAY OF SOUND Pepe Danza
the process of letting go is ultimately the process of becoming more whole: the more I let go of the stories, illusions and thoughts that were a creation of my ego mind, the more I let my real Self in. Saskia Schreiber
From each, Love demands a mystic silence. What do all seek so earnestly? It is Love. Love is the subject of their inmost thoughts. In Love no longer "Thou" and "I" exist, For self has passed away in the Beloved. Now will I draw aside the veil from Love, And in the temple of my innermost soul Behold the Friend, Incomparable Love. He who would know the secret of both worlds will find that the secret of them both is Love. Attar
Malidoma Some - Voices of the Earth It is possible that we have been brought together at this time because we have profound truths to teach each other. From an indigenous perspective, the individual psyche can be healed only by addressing one's relationships with the visible worlds of nature and community and one's relationships with the invisible forces of the ancestors and Spirit allies.
Candide: or, The Optimist by Voltaire begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life and then an abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by a slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Always questioning the purpose of life and it's meaning,he asks a dervish and the dervish asks him "Why are you concerned with that?. . . Is it any of your business?" He is saying that each and every person must care only about what he is placed on earth to do, and not what the entire world is up to. Candide says "...we must cultivate our garden." because he has finally realized that the entire world is not his to worry about.
Vivaldi - The Four Seasons
In the cool shade of granite I take in the whole of Machu Picchu. Panoramic terraced walls sweep up at every turn deep in the Peruvian Andes, I find comfort in the simple fact that love, is the key. Each time we pour forth loving intention we heal ourselves and we heal one another.
It is the harmonious flow of information, cooperation, and order among the subsystems of a larger system that allows for the emergence of more complex functions. This higher-order cooperation among the physical subsystems such as the heart, brain, glands, and organs as well as between the cognitive, emotional, and physical systems is an important aspect for coherence.
Gayatri Mantra Om Bhur Bhuvah Svaha Thath Savithur Varenyam Bhargo Devasya Dheemahi Dhiyo Yonah Prachodayath We contemplate the glory of Light illuminating the three worlds: gross, subtle, and causal. I am that vivifying power, love, radiant illumination, and divine grace of universal intelligence. We pray for the divine light to illumine our minds.
Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra Om Thryambhakam Yajamahe Sugandhim Pushtivardhanam Urvarukamiva Bandhanaan Mrithyor Mukshiya Mamrithaath OM. We worship and adore you, O three-eyed one, o Shiva. You are sweet gladness, the fragrance of life, who nourishes us, restores our health, and causes us to thrive. As, in due time, the ripe cucumber is freed from the vine, so free us from attachment and death, and grant us liberation and immortality
The power of storytelling as a profound and unique art form combining spoken literature, spirituality, and direct oral tradition akin to ancient ritual. The book is shaped with stories and poems and a remarkable fairytale that weaves in and out of a life of experiences. This is a unique combination of personal story, myth, memoir, and fairytales that will interest anyone involved in storytelling; those using narrative in healing, or education; peacemakers and humanitarians; anyone seeking a deeper spiritual practice; and, those hoping to understand the psychology of personal memoir, myth and symbol, the importance of anthropology . Our Secret Territory by Laura Simms
Within the realm of mindfulness practice, Right Action, the fourth step of the Eight-fold Path in Buddhist tradition, informs us at these critical choice points: that every single act we do has the potential of causing pain; and if we are not alert our naturally arising impulses of greed and anger might lead us to do something exploitative or abusive; and every single thing we do has consequences that echo beyond what we imagine. It means we should act carefully. Everything matters. Sylvia Boorstein
If we define altruism, this highest of human ideals, as one's readiness to sacrifice self for another, for a greater cultural good, how could individuals with 'large helpings of selflessness' continue to survive? Jonah Lehrer
But what drives us to make responsible choices? Do we all have the same moral (or human) potential? In the presence of free-riders, cooperation collapses. Defining 'free riders' as those who cheat, lie, steal, kill, etc. for their own benefit, thereby taking advantage of everyone else's cooperation, without paying the price of cooperating themselves. Why we have such a pervasive pattern of disregard for, or violation of the rights of others...characterized by the lack of empathy or remorse, false emotions, selfishness, and deception?
Having endured his own tragedies, Richard Wagamese believes fundamentally the acknowledgment of personal history that allowed him to preserve some of the dignity and innocence that marginalization and racism systematically stripped away. I can be grateful for all of my hardships, and not carry forward any residual wounds or pain or trauma, and live free and express myself through the saving power of stories.
