"Be realistic- plan for a miracle." - Osho

Looking for a monk and not finding him

I took a small path leading
up a hill valley, finding there
a temple, its gate covered
with moss, and in front of
the door but tracks of birds;
in the room of the old monk
no one was living, and I
staring through the window
saw but a hair duster hanging
on the wall, itself covered
with dust; emptily I sighed
thinking to go, but then
turning back several times,
seeing how the mist on
the hills was flying, and then
a light rain fell as if it
were flowers falling from
the sky, making a music of
its own; away in the distance
came the cry of a monkey, and
for me the cares of the world
slipped away, and I was filled
with the beauty around me.

- Li Po

Translated by: Rewi Allen

Alone and drinking under the moon

Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,

and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon

accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are

friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.

- Li Po

The vision of Alex Grey

THE VAST EXPANSE

I acknowledge the privilege of being alive in a human body at this moment, endowed with senses, memories, emotions, thoughts, and the space of mind in its wisdom aspect.

It is the prayer of my innermost being to realize my supreme identity in the liberated play of consciousness, the Vast Expanse. Now is the moment, Here is the place of Liberation.

Witness the contents of mind, the visions and sounds, the thoughts, as clouds passing through the vast expanse - the sky-like nature of mind. The rootedness of Being is in emptiness, clarity and awareness: unborn, unspoilt, stainlessly pure.

The infinite vibratory levels, the dimensions of interconnectedness are without end. There is nothing independent. All beings and things are residents in your awareness.

I subject my awareness to the perfection of being, the perfection of wisdom and perfection of love, all of these being co-present in the Vast Expanse. I share this panorama of Being and appreciate all I can share it with...the seamless interweaving of consciousness with each moment.

Create perfection wherever you go with your awareness. That is why this teaching is admired by artists--they sense the correctness of the response to life as creative. Life is infinite creative play. Enjoyment and participation in this creative play is the artists profound joy. We co-author every moment with universal creativity.

To bare our souls is all we ask, to give all we have to life and the beings surrounding us. Here the nature spirits are intense and we appreciate them, make offerings to them--these nature spirits who call us here--sealing our fate with each other, celebrating our love.

I am an intersecting kaleidoscope of Being in a rainbow refractive wave pattern: a corpuscle of light on the ocean...the transparency of my body with the rocks...sometimes the only way to summarize my feelings is to draw--to collapse the frenzy in my limbs enough to make a mark out of profound appreciation for my existence.

Share your presence with others, no boundaries, completely openly lovingly. Love is what makes us alive, that is why we feel so alive when we love. Service is being available to love. Life is the combustion of love. That we love ourselves here, that is the true magnificence in the mountains of being. We are constantly drawing the line between love and not love--enter into the Non-duality Zone, and all judgements dissolve in the Vast Expanse.

It's as though we are co-conspirators of consciousness--everyone, everywhere, everywhen, mixing up our openable minds. It's as though we could gather clouds in the sky and people into our lives. Like an eruption of consciousness, we discover the most important force is love. Experience yourself as the Source and appreciate every moment as perfection. Sunrise--Sunset. Thank you, Thank you, Creator, profound unstoppable connectedness of all beings, pattern to everything, most radical no-thing, the Vast Expanse.

Alex Grey

Wounded healer

Oil painting "The Journey of a Wounded Healer" by Alex Grey

~One of the deeper, underlying archetypal patterns which is being constellated in the human psyche that is playing itself out collectively on the world stage is the archetype of the “wounded healer.” To quote Kerenyi, a colleague of Jung who elucidated this archetype, the wounded healer refers psychologically to the capacity “to be at home in the darkness of suffering and there to find germs of light and recovery with which, as though by enchantment, to bring forth Asclepius, the sunlike healer.” The archetype of the wounded healer reveals to us that it is only by being willing to face, consciously experience and go through our wound do we receive its blessing. To go through our wound is to embrace, assent, and say “yes” to the mysteriously painful new place in ourselves where the wound is leading us. Going through our wound, we can allow ourselves to be re-created by the wound. Our wound is not a static entity, but rather a continually unfolding dynamic process that manifests, reveals and incarnates itself through us, which is to say that our wound is teaching us something about ourselves. Going through our wound means realizing we will never again be the same when we get to the other side of this initiatory process. Going through our wound is a genuine death experience, as our old self “dies” in the process, while a new, more expansive and empowered part of ourselves is potentially born.

Going through and embracing our wound as a part of ourselves is radically different than circumnavigating and going around (avoiding), or getting stuck in and endlessly, obsessively recreating (being taken over by) our wound. The event of our wounding is simultaneously catalyzing a deeper (potential) healing process which requires our active engagement, thus “wedding” us to a deeper level of our being. Jung’s closest colleague, Marie Louise Von Franz, said “the wounded healer is the archetype of the Self [our wholeness, the God within]…and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures.”~

This excellent article by Paul Levy in full here

YouTube - u2 beautiful day live slane castle dublin

YouTube - U2 - One

Rebel- Osho

I find it wonderful that every time when I feel I am in need of advice, the advice will come. Sometimes it comes from within and this is of course the best advice of all- the only one I know I am capable of following. At other times it comes out of nature, be it the weather, the movement of birds or trees- the signs really can come from anything at all if you watch with a quiet mind. And then of course the advice can come from the mouths of fellow travellers.
Yesterday I was struggling to keep my heart open, cause once again I was forced to see the cruelty and inhumanity of the society we live in. It is easy to close one's heart at those times, even though it is the very thing that we do not want to do. Yet in a few instances the anguish from witnessing all that is vile and painful in the world can be so great that you can miss the chance of getting a grip of yourself before you have already run away into a self-protective mode of a closed heart.
How to come out of it, how to keep on the path of love...
How to reconcile yourself with a society that sometimes seems impossible to love, a world filled with hate, violence, killing, utter mindlessness, utter lack of responsibility, of love... How to remain sensitive when your senses come close to being destroyed by the pain that they feel... How to stay adament in hope while seeing a society so corrupt from top to bottom, that there seems not a single way to improve it... A revolution? A rebellion? Renunciation?
The answers lie within, always, but sometimes we are so shocked by an experience that we momentarily loose the path to them. Sometimes we are in a state of doubt, which is necessary I feel, cause it can help us reinforce that which for us is sacred.
It was Osho this time who held up the mirror.

"WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A REBEL AND A REVOLUTIONARY?

There is not only a quantitative difference between a rebel and a revolutionary, there is also a qualitative difference. The revolutionary is part of the political world. His approach is through politics. His understanding is that changing the social structure is enough to change the man.
The rebel is a spiritual phenomenon. His approach is absolutely individual. His vision is that if we want to change the society, we have to change the individual. Society in itself does not exist; it is only a word, like ‘crowd’, but if you go to find it, you will not find it anywhere. Wherever you will encounter someone, you will encounter an individual. Society is only a collective name, just a name, not a reality – with no substance. The individual has a soul, has a possibility of evolution, of change, of transformation. Hence the difference is tremendous.
The rebel is the very essence of religion. He brings into the world a change of consciousness – and if the consciousness changes, then the structure of the society is bound to follow it. But vice versa is not right – and it has been proved by all the revolutions, because they have all failed.
No revolution has yet succeeded in changing man; but it seems man is not aware of the fact. He still goes on thinking in terms of revolution, of changing society, of changing the government, of changing the bureaucracy, of changing laws, political systems. Feudalism, capitalism, communism,socialism, fascism – they are all in their own way revolutionary. They all have failed, and failed utterly, because man has remained the same.
All the revolutionaries who have succeeded in capturing power have been corrupted by the power.
They could not change the power and its institutions; the power changed them and their minds and corrupted them. Only names became different, but the society continued to remain the same.

The world has known only very few rebels.
But now is the time: if humanity proves incapable of producing a large number of rebels – a rebellious spirit – then our days on the earth are numbered. Then this century may become our graveyard. We are coming very close to that point.
We have to change our consciousness, create more meditative energy in the world, create more lovingness. We have to destroy the old man and his ugliness, his rotten ideologies, his stupid discriminations, idiotic superstitions, and create a new man, with fresh eyes, with new values; a discontinuity with the past – that’s the meaning of rebelliousness.

The revolutionary tries to change the old; the rebel simply comes out of the old, just as the snake slips out of the old skin, and never looks back. Unless we create such rebellious people around the earth, man has no future. The old man has brought man to his ultimate death. It is the old mind, the old ideologies, the old religions – they have all combined together to bring about this situation of global suicide. Only a new man can save humanity and this planet, and the beautiful life of this planet.

WHAT ARE THE QUALITIES OF A REBEL?

The qualities of a rebel are multidimensional. The first thing: the rebel does not believe in anything except his own experience. His truth is his only truth; no prophet, no messiah, no savior, no holy scripture, no ancient tradition can give him his truth. They can talk about truth, they can make much ado about truth, but to know about truth is not to know truth. The word ‘about’ means around – to know about truth means to go around and around it. But by going around and around you never reach to the center.
The rebel has no belief system – theist or atheist, Hindu or Christian; he is an inquirer, a seeker. But a very subtle thing has to be understood: that is, he is not an egoist. The egoist also does not want to belong to any church, to any ideology, to any belief system, but his reason for not belonging is totally different from the rebel. He does not want to belong because he thinks too much of himself. He is too much of an egoist; he can only stand alone.
The rebel is not an egoist, he is utterly innocent. His nonbelieving is not an arrogant attitude but a humble approach. He is simply saying, ”Unless I find my own truth, all borrowed truths are only burdening me, they are not going to unburden me. I can become knowledgeable, but I will not be knowing anything with my own being. I will not be an eyewitness of any experience.”
A rebel respects his own independence and also respects the independence of everybody else. He respects his own divineness and he respects the divineness of the whole universe. The whole universe is his temple – that’s why he has left the small temples made by man. The whole universe is his holy scripture – that’s why he has left all holy scriptures written by man. But it is not out of arrogance, it is out of a humble search. The rebel is as innocent as a child.

His second dimension will be not to live in the past, which is no more, and not to live in the future, which is not yet, but to live in the present with as much alertness and consciousness as he can manage. In other words, to live consciously in the moment. Ordinarily we live like somnambulists, sleepwalkers. The rebel tries to live a life of awareness. Awareness is his religion, awareness is his philosophy, awareness is his way of life.

His third dimension is that he is not interested in domination over others. He has no lust for power, because that is the ugliest thing in the world. The lust for power has destroyed humanity and has not allowed it to be more creative, to be more beautiful, to be more healthy, to be more wholesome. And it is this lust for power that ultimately leads to conflicts, competitions, jealousies and finally to wars.

His religion is not superstitious – it is scientific. His religion is not a search for God, because to begin with God means you have already accepted a belief, and if you have accepted a belief your search is contaminated from the very beginning.
The rebel goes into his inner world with open eyes, with no idea of what he is looking for. He goes on polishing his intelligence. He goes on making his silences deeper, his meditation more profound, so that whatever is hidden in him is revealed to him; but he has no preconceived idea of what he is looking for.
He is basically an agnostic. That word has to be remembered because it describes one of his basic qualities. There are theists who believe in God, there are atheists who do not believe in God and there are agnostics who simply say, ”We do not know yet. We will search, we will see. We cannot say anything before we have looked into every nook and corner of our being.” He begins with, ”I do not know.” That’s why I say he is just like a small child – innocent.

Only a rebellious person is truly revolutionary and is truly religious. He does not create an organization, he does not create a following, he does not create churches.
But it is possible that rebels can be fellow travelers: they may enjoy to be together, to dance together, to sing together, to cry and weep together, to feel the immensity of existence and the eternity of life together. They can merge into a kind of communion without any surrender of anybody’s individuality; on the contrary, the communion of rebels refreshes everybody’s individuality, nourishes everybody’s individuality, gives dignity and respect to everybody’s individuality.

IS RENOUNCING THE WORLD AND SOCIETY PART OF A REBELLIOUS SPIRIT?

The rebel is renouncing the past. He is not going to repeat the past; he is bringing something new into the world. Those who have escaped from the world and society are escapists. They have really renounced responsibilities, but without understanding that the moment you renounce responsibilities you also renounce freedom. These are the complexities of life: freedom and responsibilities go away together or remain together.
The more you are a lover of freedom, the more you will be ready to accept responsibilities. But outside the world, outside the society, there is no possibility of any responsibility. And it has to be remembered that all that we learn, we learn through being responsible.
Escapists are cowards, they are not rebels – although that’s what has been thought up to now, that they are rebellious spirits. They are not, they are simply cowards. They could not cope with life. They knew their weaknesses, their frailties, and they thought it was better to escape; because then you will never have to face your weakness, your frailty, you will never come to know any challenge.
But without challenges how are you going to grow?
No, the rebel cannot renounce the world and the society, but he certainly renounces many other things. He renounces the so-called morality imposed upon him by the society; he renounces the so-called values imposed by the society; he renounces the knowledge given by the society. He does not renounce the society as such, but he renounces everything that the society has given to him.
This is true renunciation.
The rebel lives in the society, fighting, struggling. To remain in the crowd and not to be obedient to the crowd but to be obedient to one’s own conscience, is a tremendous opportunity for growth. It makes you bring out your best; it gives you a dignity.

As far as the world is concerned... and the world and the society are not the same thing. In the past, the so-called religious people have renounced the society and the world, both. The rebel will fight against the society, renounce its ideals, and he will love the world – because the world, the existence, is our very source of life. To renounce it is to be anti-life. But all religions have been anti-life, life-negative.
The rebel should be life-affirmative. He will bring in all those values which make the world more beautiful, more lovable, which make the world more rich. It is our world – we are part of it, it is part of us – how can we renounce it? Where can we go to renounce it? The world is in the Himalayan cave as much as it is here in the marketplace.
The world has to be nourished because it is nourishing you. The world has to be respected because it is your very source of life. All the juice that flows in you, all the joys and celebrations that happen to you, come from existence itself. Rather than running away from it, you should dive deeper into it; you should send your roots to deeper sources of life and love and laughter. You should dance and celebrate.
Your celebration will bring you closer to existence, because existence is in constant celebration.
Your joy, your blissfulness, your silence, will bring the silences of the stars and the sky; your peace with existence will open the doors of all the mysteries it contains. There is no other way to become enlightened.
The world has not to be condemned, it has to be respected. The rebel will honor existence, he will have immense reverence for life in whatsoever form it exists – for men, for women, for trees, for mountains, for stars. In whatever form life exists, the rebel will have a deep reverence. That will be his gratitude, that will be his prayer, that will be his religion, that will be his revolution.

To be a rebel is the beginning of a totally new kind of life, a totally new style of life; it is the beginning of a new humanity, of a new man.
I would like the whole world to be rebellious, because only in that rebelliousness will we blossom to our full potential, will we release our fragrances. We will not be repressed individuals, as man has remained for centuries... the most repressed animal. Even birds are far more free, far more natural, far more in tune with nature.
When the sun rises, it does not knock on every tree, ”Wake up, the night is over.” It does not go to every nest of birds, ”Start singing, it is time for song.” No, just as the sun rises, the flowers start opening on their own accord. And the birds start singing – not by an order from above, but from an intrinsic inevitability, from a joy, from a blissfulness.

WHAT GUIDES THE REBEL?

That’s the beauty of the rebel – that he does not need a guide. He is his own guide, he is his own path, he is his own philosophy, he is his own future. It is a declaration that ”I am all that I need and existence is my home. I am not a stranger here.”"

Snippets from Osho's discourse series "Rebel"

Zen Master Seung Sahn: "Wake up!"

Zen Master Seung Sahn's teaching documentary "Wake up! On the Road with a Zen Master". A professional and entertaining documentary that captures Zen Master Seung Sahn's energy while presenting the core of his teaching. Wake Up! is not only a rare portrait of an unusual and provocative teacher, but also an introduction to Zen Buddhism today. Wake Up! was shot on location during a teaching trip in Europe by award-winning independent filmmaker Brad Anderson from Boston.

Truth as a mystery

Tao mystics never talk about God, reincarnation, heaven, hell. No, they don't talk about these things. These are all creations of human mind: explanations for something which can never be explained, explanations for the mystery. In fact, all explanations are against God because explanation de-mystifies existence. Existence is a mystery, and one should accept it as a mystery and not pretend to have any explanation. No, explanation is not needed – only exclamation, a wondering heart, awakened, surprised, feeling the mystery of life each moment. Then, and only then, you know what truth is. And truth liberates.

    Osho ~ "Never Born, Never Died" (2002)

Lessons from nature

I am very lucky to be living in an area where I have millions of lovers. I try to pay a visit to as many as I can as often as I am able to. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are strong and some are delicate. Some you have to kneel down to in order to greet. With some you have to reach up your hands above your head in order to shake theirs. They come in all colours, they talk in different languages. Some are old lovers that I met years ago, with them I have a special relationship, I always stop and stay underneath their loving arms for a while. Most are new-comers, who come and go each year, though their essence feels as prevailing as if there had been no pause and no change of shape. Many have just been born, and with them I always share an inner dialogue. “Hello! Hi there! Wow, look at YOU! Welcome! Aren‘t YOU amazing!”
I live in a little green village in the outskirts of a grey, polluted, bustling capital city. Every house has a garden with a variety of exotic trees and flowers. I enjoy nothing more than to go plant-gazing near my house. The tiny white-brick houses are softened with roses and vines crawling up the walls. Nature lives in peace with the houses here. People are always busy in their gardens, weeding the plants and planting new ones.  The smell of freshly mowed lawn.. The curving green Dublin mountains in the background..  And the hour suddenly becomes an hour in paradise.
I greeted all my favourite trees today and paid homage to many amazing flowers.
Looking for the Divine, it smiles back in a breathtaking way.
And all you can feel is- Thank you, you tree! Thank you- you flower. Thank you for existing.  Thank you for being so beautiful. Thank you for sharing your love.  If I could bow down to each of you for the rest of my life, I still wouldn’t be able to express my gratitude.
I feel the same instant falling in love feeling whenever I meet a dog or cat, fox or any other animal that lives in my neighbourhood or anywhere else I find myself. It comes so natural to at once share a smile with them, and greet them with an open heart.
On the way back home, being wonderfully energised, I came across several people. For some reason every face that I saw looked familiar, yet I don’t think that I had ever met them before. All of them looked like old friends. I smiled. Some smiled back. And some didn’t.
So this made me think today- why is it that there seems to be an obstacle to greeting every single human being in the same way as when we greet nature while in communion with it. I never meet a single tree, flower, or animal, who I don’t feel absolute love towards. I never meet a plant that I don’t like, or a puppy that I feel I don’t want to hold and embrace. So why do I feel this when I meet certain types of people? Are they not the same as all the other creations of nature, are they all not born from the Divine, are they not all beautiful. Yes they dance in their own unique way, they move in all sorts of crazy manners at times, they act in ways that seem to be removed from love and the divine essence at times as well. But in reality- is it not merely a simple dance that they do, just like a tree can bend down and take away the sun-light from a flower, who could in fact too feel violated and feel the tree is not very loving in its actions. The flower however bends up in unison with the tree and still beams out beauty.
Yet if a person was walking down the street greeting every human being with eyes filled with love, with recognition, would their response more often than not be- why is she looking at me like that, my god she seems a bit weird? It seems we are not used to being loved, perhaps because we don’t love ourselves and therefore do not understand strangers loving us for no reason. If we ourselves were greeted with awe and wonder and a recognition of deep beauty, would we not feel uncomfortable, would we not resist and disagree with such an attitude?
Which tree, plant, or animal shies away and is ungrateful for being loved? On the contrary- they always answer back in love and fill you with beautiful, wonderfully tingling energy. We have much to learn from nature I feel.

We are all free, nonexistent, without beginning and end. Bubbles of air, drops of water, grains of sand. Who am I? Who are you? Take a microscope and still you won’t find the answer. But in that ocean, cloud, in that desert of sand, nobody stands alone, separate. There are no quarrels or misunderstandings. This if we step out of our tiny little shell for a moment and look around. Or turn inward and take a look at our hearts. We will discover that someone has tried to pull our leg- nothing is as it seems, nowhere is the person we call “I”.

Too much information

"To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day."- Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching.

Very often when I am busy gathering important and for me interesting information, I forget that I am actually quite devoted to the path of emptying my mind from information, the Taoists way. There are always so many new and interesting pieces of information out there, the mind is like a little child reaching out a hand and saying, "Gimme!". There will never be enough for your hungry brain, once it values information above wisdom. 
In my experience the mind is very much at peace when it is in a no-thought state. So today, going through another pile of essays and words online- I said to myself ENOUGH! You already have and know everything that you need to know.

Chuang-tzu (Master Chuang), who followed the teachings of Lao-tzu, describes the empty mind in his monumental work that bears his name by stating:

"The still mind of the sage is the mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of all things. Vacancy, stillness, placidity, tastelessness, quietude, silence, and non-action - this is the Level of heaven and earth, and the perfection of the Tao and its characteristics." (Legge version)

The still mind is a mind that is not moving, or put another way it is the mirror of the universe. This is the pure mind of ancient Taoist masters.

Chuang-tzu illustrates the empty mind in several stories:

~

Consciousness wandered North to the land of Dark Waters and climbed the Unnoticeable Slope, where he met the Speechless Non-Doer. "I have three questions for you," Consciousness said, "First, what thoughts and efforts will lead us to understanding the Tao? Second, where must we go and what must we do to find peace in the Tao? Third, from what point must we start and which road must we follow in order to reach the Tao? Speechless Non-Doer gave him no answer.

Consciousness traveled South to the land of the Bright Ocean and climbed the mountain of Certainty, where he met the Impulsive Speech-Maker. He asked him the same three questions. "Here are the answers," Impulsive Speech-Maker replied. But as soon as he started to speak, he became confused and forgot what he was talking about.

Consciousness returned to the palace and asked the Yellow Emperor, who told him, "To have no thought and put forth no effort is the first step towards understanding the Tao. To go nowhere and do nothing is the first step towards finding peace in the Tao. To start from no point and follow no road is the first step towards reaching the Tao."

~

On his way back from the K'un-lun Mountains, the Yellow Emperor lost the dark pearl of Tao. He sent Knowledge to find it, but Knowledge was unable to understand it. He sent Distant Vision, but Distant Vision was unable to see it. He sent Eloquence, but Eloquence was unable to describe it.

Finally, he sent Empty Mind, and Empty Mind came back with the pearl.

~

"I am learning," Yen Hui said.
"How?" the master asked.
"I forgot the rules of Righteousness and the levels of Benevolence," he replied.
"Good, but could be better," the Master said.
A few days later, Yen Hui remarked, "I am making progress."
"How?" the Master asked.
"I forgot the Rituals and the Music," he answered.
"Better, but not perfect," the Master said.
Some time later, Yen Hui told the Master, "Now I sit down and forget everything."
The Master looked up, startled. "What do you mean, you forget everything?" he quickly asked.
"I forget my body and senses, and leave all appearance and information behind," answered Yen Hui. "In the middle of Nothing, I join the Source of All Things."
The Master bowed. "You have transcended the limitations of time and knowledge. I am far behind you. You have found the Way!"

~

Stories from Bejamin Hoff's wonderful book "The Tao of Pooh". If you love Pooh- go here. :)

Falling in love with everything that is

I find more and more that the only suffering that exists is only our resistance to suffering. We prefer some experiences to other experiences and go into the duality of yes/no, unpleasant/pleasant. We resist Darkness with our minds, hearts and bodies and only want the Light.

In Buddhism there are said to be 4 types of people:

-those running from darkness to darkness
-those running from darkness to light
-those running from light to darkness
-and those running from light to light.

When I heard this I made a promise to myself to be running from darkness to light. But I have realised now that this is not completely the true way of seeing. In truth there is no darkness, but only our dislike of darkness. What is the Light that we aspire towards?- Love. It is not a love for only the "good" and the "wholesome", it is a love for everything, without exception. It is a love for darkness as well.

Living in Ireland rain is ones almost constant companion. I used to like the rain until I moved here, here rain became an obstacle to seeing the sun, it became ever-so-tedious in its persistence. It's not only the rain itself, but the people around who only talk about the rain. You talk about the rain with your shop-keeper, neighbour, boss, taxi-driver, friends. In Ireland you end up greeting random strangers with a remark about the rain. Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain. In the end it wasn't only raining in the outside, it was raining in the inside of myself and all the other people in this little green island. Why- because I was resisting the rain. But as the Borg so wisely say in Star-Trek, "Resistance is futile." True words indeed.

The simple way to stop resisting is to start loving. There is much one can love about the rain. You can love the feeling of purification that it gives you. You can let it nourish you as if you were a flower. You can love the beauty of the sunbeams reflecting in the rain in colours of the rainbow (yes the sun also shines in Ireland but its common for it to still rain at the same time :)). You can love the funny squeaky sound your shoes make when they're filled with water. You can love jumping over puddles and you can play in the rain like a child. And once you have fallen in love with rain, you will never mind anymore when it happens.

It is exactly the same with emotions. Yesterday my heart was going on a roller-coaster. I had some wonderful news, and was overflowing with happiness. And then I had some difficulty, which made me suffer. So I decided to embrace my suffering. At first my heart was beating wildly and it caused me hurt. But when I was in the state of love for this hurt the pain disappeared. My breath was still very rapid and my heart was pounding. But there was no polarity or quality to the breath and heart-beat, they simply were as they were. And I found it so miraculous that my heart could pound so fast- what a wonder your own heart is. And then I wasn’t just listening to the wonder of it, I was enjoying it. The pace hadn’t changed all this while, but everything had changed. I had fallen in love with my heart, whatever it felt and did. This is the alchemy of emotions, of negativity. If you love yourself fully, with everything, in every single state, then there is no such thing as negativity or suffering. Suffering is merely the lack of love that you have for yourself.

Take the time to get to know your suffering. Dive into it, with no reservations. Look at it, accept it, embrace it, and love it. At the end of the day its all you, it is all the Universe. Everything that you are, everything that you feel, in every moment, deserves to be loved by you. It may be anger, it may be hurt, it may be desire, disappointment. Whatever it is, everything is worth love- why? Because it is life, because it is divine, because it is a miracle.
We often tend to forget that life is a wonder, it is always, always a gift. Yes- life is suffering, but even suffering is a gift. Everything is a miracle to be fallen in love with.


Here is an excellent talk by Eckhart Tolle on the power of Yes to life


  

Grace

"Isn’t what we call beauty in fact essentially grace? Grace – so different in a tiger or gazelle – is born through precisely perceiving one’s own self and the surrounding world, through correctly evaluating one’s chances and using them to the full. Grace can only increase by way of precision, unlike strength, which can increase endlessly. Grace is strength with intelligence, the skill of managing with very little, the capacity to recognise the necessary, and the courage to give up the excessive. Grace is born from trust – and there are many possibilities there too. A child trusts naturally, because he has not experienced disappointment. A pilot trusts, on the other hand, because of experience, being in control. A lover trusts – believes, hopes and loves – despite everything, risking all. Love blinds fear, as fear can blind love – these two exclude each other. The trust of a lover - opening up in all one’s vulnerability - is the greatest expression of humanity; this is what constitutes the supreme grace - the perception of one’s place in the world, one’s fragility and fortuity - and readiness to act despite that, the ultimate devotion and creativity."



This is my small tribute to my home-country. I realised today that I haven't been able to post so many of my favourites here, mainly cause there is almost nothing translated to English. The excerpt is from the poet Doris Kareva's article in Estonian Literary Magazine called "A Lesson of Harmony" and the music is "Spiegel im Spiegel" by Arvo Pärt, an Estonian modern classical composer. And even though I have always been a great fan of poetry and literature today I also realised that it is music which allows for true unity of all nationalities. Languages always separate us but music always brings us back together. Music is indeed humanity's greatest creative wealth. May it be a source of Grace and Love between us all!

Two poems of Federico Garcia Lorca

The Prisoner

 Through the indecisive
branches
went a girl
who was life.
Through the indecisive
branches.
She reflected daylight,
with a tiny mirror,
which was the splendour,
of her unclouded  forehead.
Through the indecisive
branches.
In the dark of night,
lost, she wandered,
weeping the dew,
of this imprisoned time.
Through the indecisive
branches.

Song

The girl with the lovely face,
goes, gathering olives.
The wind, that towering lover,
takes her by the waist.
Four riders go by
on Andalusian ponies,
in azure and emerald suits,
in long cloaks of shadow.
‘Come to Cordoba, sweetheart!’
The girl does not listen.
Three young bullfighters go by,
slim-waisted in suits of orange,
with swords of antique silver.
‘Come to Sevilla, sweetheart!’
The girl does not listen.
When the twilight purples,
with the daylight’s dying,
a young man goes by, holding
roses, and myrtle of moonlight.
‘Come to Granada, my sweetheart!’
But the girl does not listen.
The girl, with the lovely face,
goes on gathering olives,
while the wind’s grey arms
go circling her waist.
 

Joy of life in art and in Zen- Matisse & Ikkyu

Three Poems on Love and Longing

Day and night I cannot keep you out of my thoughts;
In the darkness, on an empty bed, the longing deepens.
I dream of us joining hands, exchanging words of love,
But then the dawn bell shatters my reverie and rends my heart.
Women, lovely flowers that bloom and quickly fade;
Flowery faces, in full flush, lovely as dreams.
When flowers burst open they grow heavy with passion
But once they fall, no one speaks of them again.
Even if I were a god or a Buddha you’d be on my mind.
I sit beneath the lamp, a skinny monk chanting love songs.
The fierce autumn wind nearly bowls me over
And my heart is choked with thick clouds.
The wise heathens have no knowledge;
They just keep their mind continually set on the Way.
There are no big–shot Buddhas in nature
And ten thousand sutras are distilled in a single song.
I’d like to
Offer something
To help you
But in the Zen School
We don’t have a single thing!
A sex-loving monk, you object!
Hot-blooded and passionate, totally aroused.
Remember, though, that lust can consume all passion,
Transmuting base metal into pure gold.
Coming alone,
Departing alone,
Both are delusion:
Let me teach you how
Not to come, not to go!
Of all things
There is nothing
More congratulatory
Than a weather-beaten
Old skull!
Typhoons and floods make everyone suffer,
And tonight there will be no singing and dancing.
The Dharma flourishes and decays, ages come and go:
So right yet so sad—the bright moon sets behind the Western Pavilion.
Bliss and sorrow, love and hate, light and shadow, hot and cold, joy and anger, self and other.
The enjoyment of poetic beauty may well lead to hell.
But look what we find strewn all along our Path:
Plum blossoms and peach flowers!

From “Love Letters Sent by the Wind,” the poetry of Ikkyu translated and introduced by John Stevens. Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly, Winter 2004.

Painting "Joy of Life" by Henri Matisse

Travel as a meditation

There are many who love to travel and many who don’t. As for myself I love nothing more and I find that travel can be very akin to meditation. Meditation of mindfulness, of impermanence and much more.

To be on the road… A village rises to pass away, a city rises to pass away.  Wonderful scenery passes before your eyes. You sit back and watch quietly, let the wonder of it fill your mind, but never try to hold on to anything, you know that it will pass away soon, but you don’t think about that. You are always in the present moment, always in appreciation of the vistas that have opened for you now, this very moment. It is easiest to find an anchor to the Here and Now, when you are travelling I find, that’s why every time I travel, I feel I am actually more at home, than I was while at home. It is a paradox- travel looks like you are moving all the time, like you’re distancing yourself from what you consider part of yourself- your familiar environment; but actually it is quite the opposite. Because you are free at that time to be the real you constantly, you are actually quite stable and always at home- in the here and now, in the truth of impermanence, in the wonder of being.

I have fallen in love with many places and sometimes it has been hard to leave a certain place. Yet it is  a very good chance to realise that travel is like life itself, we are always on the road to a new place, new experience, new state of being. When you feel melancholy and are short of mourning a loss of an important place where you have grown a lot, which you have loved so much, it is a perfect time to realise the impermanence of everything. Then no disappointment will arise, no thought even will arise to hang the keys to your heart on a specific wall, only to find that wall in ruins years after.

Travel can also be a teacher of equanimity. When we travel we are free of goals. We don’t know what to expect from new places because we have never been there. We approach each new place with an open mind and heart. And sometimes we may not like what we see. Many a times I have stumbled into a third world city that is a wreck, filled with poverty, unsanitary conditions,  and at first glance feels like not the kind of place I wanted to find. Yet this is the gift of the open mind state that travel presents to you. You came for the journey and not for the destination. You wanted to see and experience new places, no matter what you found. Some places are beautiful, some lack in beauty. But even in the latter- there is always something there, an experience, an encounter, a lesson, which in the end makes you glad to have ventured there. It might be the people you meet on the street, it might be your own compassion that you meet, it might be a lesson to let go of preferring beauty to no-beauty.

I once met an old mountain guide in a little mountain village in Morocco, who I still remember as the greatest teacher in my life. He hadn’t gone to school, he hadn’t read books. Yet he was wiser than anybody I had ever met before. Regardless of not being educated intelligence shot out of his eyes with a piercing force. What else shone out of his eyes was happiness. An incredible true peaceful happiness. It shocked me to see someone so poor, be so clearly happy. He simply wondered to our table in a little café along the road-side. And me and my friends sat talking to him and listening to him for a long time. He told us he didn’t own much anything, apart from what he had in his bag, he struggled to support his family at times. He had experienced the loss of several family members and his son to illness. Yet he told us he was the luckiest man in the world to be blessed to have the love of his wife and remaining children. He told us he was the luckiest man in the world to live on that mountain. He said he didn’t need anything else in the world, how he’d seen tourists come and go and always talk about things they wanted to buy and to gain. He said that all that he ever wanted to have was already his, completely free. It was the mountain he lived on, it was the sky and the clouds in the sky, the little mountain roads, the trees, the rivers and streams, the little animals on the paths. He felt he had so much- the whole world! He was grateful to have so much! He said he was greatful to have learned that god was everywhere. And we knew here was a man truly rich. He was the richest man I have ever met.

On the whole it is a great freedom that you enjoy when you’re on the road. During this time you are free to just be. You have no deadlines, nothing that you have to do, nowhere that you have to go. You let intuition be your guide, you are free to be spontaneous. I don’t like to make many plans when I go travelling. Like Lao-Tzu says, "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving." I research a bit as to important sites I don’t want to miss. But the best part of travel is just to wake up in the morning, go out and just walk in strange new places. Follow some signs, something people you meet randomly recommend to you, or sometimes just some roads that seem interesting, there might be a beautiful old tree that draws you near, it might be a lovely little puppy that begs you to see where its going. Wondering around aimlessly can in the end lead you to places that astound you and change you, but you went not knowing this, you went cause you enjoyed the path itself.
You are on the journey and that’s your only aim, your only goal is to keep going and enjoy everything that you find. You are a silent witness that passes through places like the wind, loving everything on the way. Just like when you meditate, and in fact when you live, the only difference being one is done in the “outer” and other in the “inner” world, but of course at the end of the day both of these worlds blend in to each other and dissolve such differences.

AFOOT and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Walt Whitman, excerpt from the poem Song of the Open Road, from the collection "Leaves of Grass"

And finally I would like to share some fantastic and inspiring quotes on the subject of travel:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”- Mark Twain

“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” - Samuel Johnson

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” - St. Augustine

“Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” - Aldous Huxley

“All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” - Samuel Johnson

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” - Cesare Pavese

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” - Henry Miller

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” - Miriam Beard

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” - Bill Bryson

“Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” - Freva Stark

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” - G. K. Chesterton

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure - self-determined, self-motivated, often risky - forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind - and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” - Mark Jenkins

Travel has been such a learning and growing experience for me, the most effective type of meditation, and I feel I have gained more from it than from any school.

Yes, I love to travel.

I would like to write when the experience of peace is strong within. I would like to. I would. I. Nope. There is nothing to say. There is no me to say it. There is no vocabulary. There is. There. No. Here!

YouTube - Ram Dass interviews Thicht Nhat Hanh

Love is a parallax- Sylvia Plath

Love Is A Paralax

'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
where wave pretends to drench real sky.'

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of shaded grays; suspense
on the quicksands of ambivalence
is our life's whole nemesis.

So we could rave on, darling, you and I,
until the stars tick out a lullaby
about each cosmic pro and con;
nothing changes, for all the blazing of
our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move
implacably from twelve to one.

We raise our arguments like sitting ducks
to knock them down with logic or with luck
and contradict ourselves for fun;
the waitress holds our coats and we put on
the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun
who insists his playmates run.

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun,
would have me swallow the entire sun
like an enormous oyster, down
the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark
of comet hara-kiri through the dark
should inflame the sleeping town.

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames
in dubious doorways forget their monday names,
caper with candles in their heads;
the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in
scattering candy from a zeppelin,
playing his prodigal charades.

The moon leans down to took; the tilting fish
in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish
blessings right and left and cry
hello, and then hello again in deaf
churchyard ears until the starlit stiff
graves all carol in reply.

Now kiss again: till our strict father leans
to call for curtain on our thousand scenes;
brazen actors mock at him,
multiply pink harlequins and sing
in gay ventriloquy from wing to wing
while footlights flare and houselights dim.

Tell now, we taunq where black or white begins
and separate the flutes from violins:
the algebra of absolutes
explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes
that jar, while each polemic jackanapes
joins his enemies' recruits.

The paradox is that 'the play's the thing':
though prima donna pouts and critic stings,
there burns throughout the line of words,
the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion
which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion:
an insight like the flight of birds:

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing
the secret of their ecstasy's in going;
some day, moving, one will drop,
and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals
only to reopen as flesh congeals:
cycling phoenix never stops.

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells
of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells
and heavens till the spirits squeak
surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's
bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks
away our rationed days and weeks.

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
in our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
the simple sum of heart plus heart.

Sylvia Plath

A Life- Sylvia Plath

A Life

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.

The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.

Sylvia Plath

YouTube - ZEN, Teaching of zen, Shodo Harada Roshi in America 4/7

Shodo Harada Roshi talking about the state of enlightenment.

Mind and matter, eternally pushing and pulling, turning into eachother. With no reason other than change, no creator other than time.

Spiritual warrior in Buddhism and Shamanism

"Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors- people who have a certain hunger to know what is true- feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we are holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, its with us wherever we are."

- Pema Chodron "When things fall apart" full chapter online

The concept of a spiritual warrior has connotations in almost all religions and nowadays the new-age movements. Yet I find in shamanism a close link to the Shambhala warriors.


The only person who can survive the transformative path of the shaman is the Spiritual Warrior. The average human seeks comfort, safety, wealth, and a “healthy distance” from the true realities of life. The spiritual warrior actively seeks change, the facing of his fears and demons, and truth in all its starkness. A large proportion of a shaman’s training is learning to take full responsibility for his incarnation on Earth, and acquiring the qualities of a Spiritual Warrior.
The student learns the way awareness works and is taught to make a strategy for his life. By applying himself to these principles on a constant, everyday basis and by developing the profound qualities of impeccability, the student will activate the qualities of the Spiritual Warrior within. Once the Spiritual Warrior has been birthed, the student will then have the tools to enable him to walk the path towards total freedom.  source

Here are some of my favourite shamanic meditations from Kenneth Meadows wonderful book "Where eagles fly"

*
Adversity is not a punishment of an anrgy deity, but an interplay of energies that provides an opportunity for growth in a new direction.

*
Celebrate each day as it comes to you as if it is the only one in your entire existence. Compassion comes through a recognition that all living creatures are our "relatives".

*
Detachment does not mean retreating from the world to escape its responsibilities. It is being in the world but not of it.

*
Follow your heart, for what you feel is nearer to the truth than what you think.

*
Innocence is not that which is separate from moral wrong, for innocence is not divisive. An innocent child lives for the moment. The past is forgotten and the future does not exist. Only the moment has importance. That is innocence.

*
Look to a way, that is not a route to a destination but rather a journey itself, for you cannot become what it is you aspire to unless you can be it where you are now.

*
Rainbows are a demonstration of all colours combining together into a wholeness, and illustrate that separateness is an illusion. A rainbow indicates that all paths that are harmonious are ways to wholeness, all races are part of a greater unity, and all paths that create beauty are deserving of respect.

*
Take anything to its extreme and you lead it to its destruction.

*
The most joyful sounds are heard not with the ears but with the Spirit. Only by finding the solitude of our personal Quiet Place can we experience the sound of silence.

*
To love Nature is to love your Real Self, for Nature itself is an expression of the essence of what you are.

*
Truth wears many masks in order to teach us not to mistake appearances for the reality.

*
Zero is the Nothing that precedes creation, out of which an infinity of numbers and combinations is possible, and to which everything returns, for it shares itself with all that can be numbered and contains within it everything in existence. An apt symbol for Great Mystery.

*
You alone have the power to make something of yourself simply by choosing to do so.

Sounds of silence

     the
          soft Hiss
of a blanket sliding to the  floor...     
     the
          Shuffle
of footsteps...       
          Banging
of a door                                 
     the
          Gurgle           
of a boiling kettle... quickly followed by a Click...
     the
          Clacking
of metallic spoon against ceramic cup...
        a
          S l u r p...
     and a
          C r e a k i n g
of leather taking on a weight
                                     
                                                        and             
                                                         all
                                                        the  
                                                       while…
      the
                Sighs            of                  outward               breaths,

and slow                          r            m            i             g
                              D              u             m           n
                                                                                             of a heart.
     

How full of Sound
                         these mornings
                                               of Silence!
                     
How loud with Music
                              this embrace
                                                 of the Void!