 |
| Giant Buddha, Kamakura, Japan, cast 1252 C.E., November 2010 |
"Discriminating wisdom recognizes the folly of chasing impermanent things in search of permanence. Whether it is in money, food, lovers, or great spiritual states, it is foolish to search for something permanent in something that is inherently impermanent...recognition of impermanence is like a thunderclap opening the mind. Not a belief, not a hope, not a theory -- but a realization that all of your grasping has been in vain. All of your rejecting has been in vain. All mind activity of attempting to hold, to keep, or to deny has been in vain. If you link up realization with particular experience, then in your mind, realization is a thing. No thing is permanent" (p. 51).
"Self-inquiry is vigilance. If in any moment you feel pulled towards identification with suffering, ask yourself the question, "who is suffering?" The belief, I am not THAT, and the resulting suffering must be faced. Direct experience is self-inquiry. Who is not That? Who is suffering? In self-inquiry, one uncovers self-denial through fabrication of thought. Belief in fabricated thought as reality leads to suffering. In the moment of directly experiencing the fabrication, the lie is exposed and annihilated" (pp. 160-61).
"Attention gets its attentiveness from pure awareness, which is who you are. Self-definition only keeps you fixated on waves while yearning to find the deep. The ocean has no problems with waves. Never for a moment does the ocean imagine the waves as separate from itself. Never for a moment does the ocean imagine its depths as separate from itself. Never for a moment does the ocean imagine there is any separation between wave and depth. Be the ocean. This is vigilance" (p. 166).
"All is true self. There is no separation anywhere. Suffering comes while imagining separation from self. Fear arises around whatever it is you imagine you are separate from" (p. 170).
Anyone watching you? Good. This is a double-secret exercise.
Pretend you just received a phone call with wonderful, mind-blowing, life-changing news! As you put down the receiver, your arms fly up over your head with joy. Pumping fists, then waving palms, like you just crossed a finish line before throngs of adoring fans. You cover your face with your hands, trying to contain the euphoria, but it doesn't work, so you reach for the sky again while shaking your head in disbelief. You're grinning, crying, and just so happy! Yes! Life is awesome, and you feel so grateful!!!!!!! Got it? Now if someone catches you doing this, just tell 'em it was your pet psychic who called, and they'll forget everything they just saw.
The Universe xxoo
PS -- Show me what you want to feel, create the feeling within yourself, and I'll then orchestrate the circumstances, however outlandish, that will help you feel it again, and again, and again.
It's not real! Don't go there!
The things and events of time and space are like Play-doh; fictional, make-believe.
What matter are what you feel in your heart and the dreams that flit through your head. This is the ultimate test, to discover what's real in a sea of illusions.
You can do it or you wouldn't be here. Don't look to the world for clues, not even to your family, friends, or career. Look within. You decide what's right. You decide what's possible. You write the script and lay down the laws. You are the door, the path, and the light.
Whosoever may torment you, harass you, confound you, or upset you is a teacher. Not because they're wise, but because you seek to become so.
"These additional bubbled not only do not exist in just one universe, they exist in parallel universes--universes that can be reached from our universe via a process called quantum tunneling. In this process an electron is able to suddenly vanish in one universe and appear in another. Indeed, if this idea is correct, much of what we now call psychic phenomena, altered states of awareness, channeling of conscious beings, spirits, ghostly apparitions, flying saucers, and other unexplainable phenomena could be explained as information tunneling---coming from parallel universes" (pp. 176-77).
"I thought of another Eskimo shaman story: "When the bear of the glacier comes out he will devour you and make you a skeleton and you will die. But you will awaken and your clothes will come rushing to you" (p. 149).
"In the Bardo Thodol, known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, bar means "between"; and do "a landmark that stands between two things"; joined together, bardo means "gap ." It refers to the wandering state between life and death, confusion and enlightenment, neurosis and sanity. The past has just occurred, and the future has not yet happened. In the bardo of the human realms we experience the body as illusory. Our relationship to our own existence and nonexistence is lukewarm. The whole world is a hiatus; the gap is not a widening in the road before the next bend, it is where the road falls off the cliff.
"The bardo has also been described as a vast and desolate plain littered with corpses and bleached bones and feral animals feeding on remnant flesh, a plain that is crowded and empty at the same time where animals copulate wildly, fall away from each other, and move on. Then it's a gray ocean again with no surface and no bottom, no reference points, no lighthouse, no breakwater guarding the harbor, no guiding light to lead me home. The bardo state occurs not only at the moment of death or the moment before death, but all during our lives; the bardo is the uncertainty and groundlessness we often feel" (pp. 39-40).
"I felt like a river moving inside a river: I was moving but something else was rushing over top of me. There was too much to take in: the deep familiarity with a place where I had lived for so long and the detachment a year away brings. The rivers were layers of grief sliding, the love of open spaces being nudged under fallen logs, pressed flat against cutbanks and point bars. I felt as if I'd never left, and at the same time as if I could never come home" (p. 140).
"Legends have attempted to describe this. For example, the Australian Aboriginal people believe that a Great Spirit dreamed all of reality, the whole universe of it, into existence. They say that the land they walk is a reflection of this Great Spirit's dream, and then they walk this land, they become aware of the songs of their legends, which resonate with the land itself. These songs resonate as song lines in the earth and give them directions. There are stories of runners moving across the land at great speeds in the dark, seeing the glow of the song as vividly as if they were running along a great lighted highway. They can find out where to go, where the sacred grounds are, as if this spirit were still speaking to them and lighting the way" (p. 345).
"When we dream, we return to that reality in order to gain information about how to survive in this reality. But survival may not be as it seems from a single perspective" (p. 346).***
"We become afraid because people tell us what is real and what is not real. But we sense an inner conflict with what people tell us. We feel fear because we know that the viewpoint of, say, a political system is not consistent with our own view. The Communist Party is not the answer to the world. The capitalist system is not the answer for the world's problems. Going to war is not the answer to the world. We know these things from some deeper voice inside ourselves. What happens is that fearful images enter our minds, and we don't realize this. But if you have fearful images, they tend to come into reality: whatever you can imagine begins to appear as if we called it into existence.
"We are creating these images as realities because the universe is ambivalent and paradoxical. It doesn't care what you produce. It doesn't say to you that you can't do this and you can do that. It is like a mother who loves all of her children: the ugly ones, the beautiful ones, the starving ones, and the rich fatted ones--it doesn't care. It says whatever you create as imagery, so will it be. Why? Because at the core of the universe, at its most fundamental level, it is not solid stuff. It is not hard reality. It is capable of forming reality into whatever our images produce" (p. 348).
"In the native American cosmology, insofar as it can be regarded as the same from tribe to tribe, the universe was perceived in six directions: the space above; that below; and the four cardinal divisions of the world horizon. Frequently on the plans the bear represented the west, the mountain lion the north, the wolf the east, and the wildcat the south. They were regarded as the creatures with the greatest power and influence in the spirit world.
"The Pawnee of present-day Nebraska and Kansas differed from most other tribes in that they divided their world horizon into four semi cardinal points, assigning the wolf to the southeast. In the Pawnee cosmogony the wolf was also set in the sky as a star, along with the bear and the two cats, to guard the primal female presence, the Evening Star. The Wolf Star was read -- the color associated with the wolf by virtually every tribe (red did not signify blood; it was simply an esteemed color.)
(p. 102)***
"The Pawnee conceptualization of the wolf was that he was an animal who moved like liquid across the plains: silent, without effort, but with purpose. He was alert to the smallest changes in his world. He could see very far--"two looks away," they said. His hearing was so sharp he could even hear a cloud as it passed overhead. When a man went into the enemy's territory he wished to move exactly like this, to sense things like the wolf, to be Wolf.
"The sense of being Wolf that came over a Pawnee scout was not the automatic result of putting on a wolf skin. The wolf skin was an accoutrement, an outward sign to the man himself and others who might see him that he was calling on his wolf power. It is hard for the Western mind to grasp this and to take seriously the notion that an Indian at times could be Wolf, could actually participate in the animal's spirit, but this is what happened. It wasn't being like a wolf; it was having the mind set: Wolf." (pp. 112)
