Deepest Teaching

Where Can I Go

"Where can I go. I am here"

    ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

Woodstock

Woodstock

Well, I came upon a child of God

He was walking along the road

And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going

This he told me

Said, I'm going down to Yasgur's Farm

Gonna join in a rock and roll band

Got to get back to the land and set my soul free

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

Well, then can I roam beside you?

I have come to lose the smog,

And I feel myself a cog in somethin' turning

And maybe it's the time of year

Yes and maybe it's the time of man

And I don't know who I am

But life is for learning

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock

We were half a million strong

And everywhere was a song and a celebration

And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes

Riding shotgun in the sky,

Turning into butterflies

Above our nation

We are stardust, we are golden

We are caught in the devil's bargain

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

Songwriters: Joni Mitchell Woodstock lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Backgammon

Backgammon is perhaps 5000 years old, originating in what is now Iraq - previously known as Mesopotamia. Backgammon balances randomness and order. Your dice throws "determine" possible moves. This reflects a random, somewhat arbitrary aspect of life. Every day, every hour, the unexpected shows up - regardless of how well our day is planned. As the game continues, past decisions "determine" the present. Reflecting everyday life. The sum of our past decisions and nondecisions "determines" the present. Backgammon allows you to talk while playing - providing for deeper interpersonal contact.  Playing backgammon (just for fun and without gambling for money) will improve your life. And even if you have no one to play with there are excellent computer programs who can tirelessly play with you.

Life Is Uncertain

We really don't know much
life is uncertain, to assume anything else
is the epitome of stupidity

  

Love Is All We Need

Love is all we need
many songs and poems say this
love is all we need
be love now

Spontaneous

Noise

12 Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening

Perfection of Meditation Practice

Let It Be

When the broken hearted people living in the world agree
There will be an answer, let it be
For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see
There will be an answer, let it be

Faith, trust, and surrender. Practice that today

Tilopa's Mahamudra Teaching to Naropa

Is space anywhere supported? Upon what does it rest? 

Like space, Mahamudra is dependant upon nothing; 

Relax and settle in the continuum of unalloyed purity, 

And, your bonds loosening, release is certain. 

Gazing intently into the empty sky, vision ceases; 

Likewise, when mind gazes into mind itself, 

The train of discursive and conceptual thought ends 

And supreme enlightenment is gained. 

Like the morning mist that dissolves into thin air, 

Going nowhere but ceasing to be, 

Waves of conceptualization, all the mind's creation, dissolve, 

When you behold your mind's true nature. 

Pure space has neither colour nor shape 

And it cannot be stained either black or white; 

So also, mind's essence is beyond both colour and shape 

And it cannot be sullied by black or white deeds. 

The darkness of a thousand aeons is powerless 

To dim the crystal clarity of the sun's heart; 

And likewise, aeons of samsara have no power 

To veil the clear light of the mind's essence. 

_________________________________________

Complete translation: http://keithdowman.net/mahamudra/tilopas-mahamudra-teaching.html

For context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilopa

Woman - John Lennon

Wild Card

While it can take time to realize that it is never too late; you always have time to change your own fate.

Work of the Heart

Driving

Blindnesss

Businessman or Employee

In the 1970's enlightenment was in the air. India, Tibet, and Japan exported many spiritual teachers to the U.S.A. Demand was high for insights from the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. I attended a workshop with one such a teacher fresh from India. He said: "You are either a businessman or employee!" It was an unforgettable comment. A businessperson does not assume there will be a "next" paycheck. To succeed, businesspersons must generate "confidence" (a word based in Latin, meaning "with faith"). A business' source of supply depends on the ebb and flow of clients, the cycles of the seasons, and the economic climate. Nothing is taken for granted. An employee believes that paychecks will keep coming -- hardly thinking the businessperson, the employer, is mortgaging their house to finance the next month's paychecks. The spiritual teacher from India, was a businessman. He scheduled talks, got the word out, collected money and planned for future workshops. He was not an employee. When I saw him, I did not appreciate that businesslike quality. Now, I see it as spiritual, and close to the Buddhist ideal of living with knowledge of impermanence. Employees pay a price for security -- akin to surrender of the ego. Come to think of it: that's Buddhist, too.

Choruses from The Rock – T.S. Eliot

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

{First stanza}

THE INTERNET IS MY omnipresent conduit to infinite distraction

THE INTERNET IS MY omnipresent conduit to infinite distraction. It is the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night. In between, my smartphone ensures that I am never very far from my next Google-Facebook-YouTube-Craigslist-Amazon fix. I have been in rooms full of people, each glued to a hand-held device and completely oblivious to the others.

What began for me as a thing of wonder is now merely my drug of choice. I miss my friends — the very ones whose hourly Facebook posts keep me up to date on their every move. I miss sitting on the front porch of my row house on a warm summer evening and talking to the neighbors who walk by. My nervous system spent the past two hundred thousand years evolving in an environment of human interaction, and now that’s disappeared almost overnight.      -- Rick Silberman   Grass Valley, California

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/440/the-internet

Merits of Hard Work

Hermann Hesse - quote

We must become alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome and we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for in our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.

~ Hermann Hesse

Light of Life

The light of life

    opened the day

    I sat waiting

    for the sun

    to rise from

    my horizon

    of darkness

    and dreams

Human Life

Vincent Van Gogh - The Cafe at Night

La Soupe, by Picasso in 1902

W.H. Auden, Under Which Lyre (A Reactionary Tract)

In a witty 1946 poem, W.H. Auden contrasted the way of "experts" with the Hermetic path of the trickster.
Harvard Magazine (November-December 2007)

Someday I’ll get caught up

I KEEP IMAGINING THAT SOMEDAY I’ll get caught up: write those letters, read those books. What a great imagination! My plans smile at me from tomorrow, always tomorrow. And here it is, always today.
                                     --  SY SAFRANSKY
                                               The Sun, December 1995

Time and Eternity

Bob Dylan 1963

Current state of affairs: 

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'

Stand up now or forever hold your peace

Tilopa's Mahamudra Teaching to Naropa

Gazing intently into the empty sky, vision ceases; 
Likewise, when mind gazes into mind itself, 
The train of discursive and conceptual thought ends 
And supreme enlightenment is gained. 

Like the morning mist that dissolves into thin air, 
Going nowhere but ceasing to be, 
Waves of conceptualization, all the mind's creation, dissolve, 
When you behold your mind's true nature. 

Pure space has neither colour nor shape 
And it cannot be stained either black or white; 
So also, mind's essence is beyond both colour and shape 
And it cannot be sullied by black or white deeds. 

Link to All twenty eight verses.

Let's Get Together - Kate Wolf (Live in Austin, TX)

The Real You - Alan Watts

Krishna talks to Prince Arjuna

Enactment of the dialogue between
Krishna and Arjuna

The Mahabharata (1989 film) - Wikipedia

Hsin Hsin Ming (Verses on the Faith Mind)

Xinxin Ming, Faith in mind, is a poem attributed to the Third Chinese Chán Patriarch Jianzhi Sengcan 鑑智僧璨 and one of the earliest Chinese Chan expressions of the Buddhist mind training practice. Wikipedia

Grandpa on Judaism

“In our religion we are not confined to many rituals.  That’s the basic part of our belief – that every man should have the freedom to face God in  his own way.”

                                    -Samuel Shavelson

Become comfortable with being lost

Become comfortable with being lost. Knowing that you don't know where you are is honest freedom. Breathe long deep breaths. Feel the life within you. pic.twitter.com/Op6U3b1Zki

— Meditation101 (@meditation101) June 17, 2018

Sunday Song of Love’s Longing Found

A Sunday Song of Love’s Longing Found

I was awakened this morning
By the music of a bird
Singing his heart out
For his love.

Recalling in me
The pinging sound
Of water meeting stone,
As the stream sparkles
Countless twinkling little sunbursts,
Reflecting the one sun.

Recalling then
The sky’s stars
Flickering in the bright night;
Suns for other planets’ days,
Shine,
Form a line
In our sight—
“Orion’s Belt,”
“Little Dipper,”
We say
With delight.

Then,
The joining of my heart
With my love;
Two shining as one,
Bursting with light
Equal to
The sun.
             *   *   *  
The miracles of life
Abound
In the Love that is expressed
All around,
And so are more
Abiding
And profound
Than the entire
Grief
Of all the human-folly driven
Dying
Of this planet we call
“Earth”;
The place of our singing
And our crying,
Our loving
And our shining.

For Love is absolute.
It permeates the Universe,
Saturates all existence's manifestations,
Is what we all are.
                      (Diane 2/10/13)

Global Brain

Everything is related to everything else. We know this by intuition, by listening and feeling deeply. We also intuit this via cyclic revolutions of electronic communications such as the internet, radio, television, etc. The world's "growing" a collective global brain to augment our biological heritage. 

Where is all this going? We don't know. We are "cells" of human life plunging into a great mystery. 

Image from The Social Superorganism and its Global Brain: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/suporgli.html.