Dear Reader,
This Citation Nation segment of Free Range Egos offers perennial wisdom insights gained from decades of study by the author, ransacking some of the best philosophy and spiritual literature bookstores in the world: San Francisco's Shambala Books, London's Compendium Books, Oxford's Blackwell's Bookshop and, most especially, Vancouver's Banyen Books -- plus online resources as extensive as television dramas about lawyers with dubious ethics.  

Not all entries here are full of sweetness and light, but then, neither is the world. All are noteworthy in terms of poignancy, revelation and radical insight into the human condition. May you find these pages useful in the process of your own heartfelt inquiries into what it means to be sharing this human adventure.

New posts usually appear at the bottom of the page.  Click the floating blue 'top' button on the left to be returned to the Free Range Egos navigation menu.

Let's start with a brief selection of what Charles Olson calls 'the contraries that dispose of argument'...

"What can be forgotten is not the eternal."
-- Nisargadatta Maharaj

"What does not change is the will to change."
--  Charles Olson

"On the one hand the 'I' is Nothing and, on the other hand, complete-being. In non-duality, these co-exist without the contradictions that occur in the thought process. This non-dual coincidence of Not-being and the complete spontaneous morality of All-being is the highest wisdom.

It's always new and miraculous,
the emergence of things and the waves of events.
while nothing happens
in the quiet simplicity."

             -- Douwe Tiemersma

... and forge on with some of the best current insights concerning  consciousness [yours, mine and beyond]...

'Dialectical epistemology is phenomenological epistemology but not ‘phenomenalism’, ‘solipsism’ or ‘subjectivism’. For it includes a dialectical understanding of the intrinsically relational dimension of subjectivity or awareness, and the inter-subjective character of awareness fields. The world is indeed the world as we are ‘subjectively’ aware of it. But that does not mean that awareness is the property of a solipsistic ‘subject’ or ‘ego’, for whom the existence of ‘other minds’ or other ‘subjects’ is doubtable.' --  Peter Wilberg


'The transparency of nondual consciousness is more subtle than our ordinary attention. It pervades the objects it perceives, rendering all of experience both transparent and substantial at the same time.' - Judith Blackstone, Ph.D.


 ... Judith Blackstone, here pointing out something subtle, yet essential, about the Buddhist dictum, 'Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.'   -- ed.



Waves of Experience

'Just like waves are the inseparable and natural characteristics of the ocean itself, appearances and experiences are the natural and inseparable characteristics of awareness.

You can't put the waves on one side and put the ocean on the other. Likewise you can't put experiences on one side and awareness on the other.

Experiences are the contours and textures of awareness itself.'  -- Jackson Peterson


the background that makes the picture possible....

"I used to believe
that this inner moan
in my chest
was a longing for a lover
out there
Could only be satisfied
by a lover out there
Now I realise
that this inner moan in my chest
was always my entry point
into being ravished
by silence"

                  -- Hélène Demetriades

On being yourself

“I feel sorry for anyone who feels that they must take such a huge responsibility upon their poor shoulders. Your responsibility, in your terms, lies in recognizing the joy of your being, and expressing its many aspects. When you express your being, you automatically fulfill your responsibilities. When you think of responsibilities in those terms, however, you think of taking something alien upon yourself and holding it up and bearing the weight. And then you think of being serious and long-faced and dignified and adult and saintly and of making sure that you fulfill yourself. But when you let yourself go, you automatically fulfill yourself....

Trust yourselves, and do not treat yourselves with a heavy hand; and do not over-criticize yourself, or step apart from yourself so you can examine yourself better. You are the self who examines and the self who is examined, and they are together and not apart, and let them be friendly with one another.”  -- Seth (Jane Roberts)

He Who Gets Slapped --  by Wei Wu Wei

When I was a child I was taken to the circus. There I saw a long series of entrancing performances that caused men and animals to execute every kind of astonishing  and unexpected maneuver. And throughout, but particularly when the scenario and its appurtenances were being changed , there appeared a grotesque personage , vaguely resembling a human being , who interfered with everything but effected nothing.  He fell over the carpets, bumped himself against every object, was slapped and kicked, and then took all the applause as though he were responsible for everything. We thought him very funny and laughed at him like anything.


Now that I am no longer a child he seems to me to be the perfect image of the I-concept, whose function is apparently his, and whose performance corresponds in all respects with that of the clown, in the circus which is our life. In all respects but one:  we laughed at the clown in the circus, but we take seriously the clown in the circus of life, although the one is as ineffectual as the other. We even believe that he is responsible for the performance, whereas, as children we could see that he was responsible for nothing that happened, that his "will" was totally ignored by the circumstances to which he was subjected, and that in every event he was an unnecessary nuisance.

In one respect, however, our attitude is unchanged: in both the circuses we love the clown dearly and consider him more important than anything else in the show.

"To tease the chimpanzee is to mistake
which side of the cage you're on."
--- Wan Dring Inzhu

                                                    *                                                               *                                                                  *


A prolonged ecstasy will burn out your brain, unless it is extremely pure and subtle.  -- Nisargadatta


                                               
Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody Poor,
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we. 
-- William Blake


"The treasures of Heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory. "                  
 -- William Blake

"Reason for Blake means the most mechanical operations of thought, where intellect refers to a grasp of the whole...." -- Ralph Dumain

                              *                                               *                                                 *
   
“When you feel depressed and you wanta go here, wanta go there, remember Mind Essence; the world, like dreams, will never come true. Operate on Intuition, Rest and Be Happy. It's all in your head what happens so you might as well think happiness.” 
-- Jack Kerouac, Some of The Dharma



'Words are the burden of a poem.' -- Robert Creeley

'Man, sometime it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.'
-- Miles Davis
                                    *                                                   *                                                 *

poets, always messing up philosophy with too much beauty...

“Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.” 
-- e.e. cummings

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." -- Dorothy Parker

'Waiting is not a function of the intellect.' - Reshad Field

"The veil is in the mind, not the heart. Only the heart will lift the veil." -- E.J. Gold

"Pure consciousness without content is something all those who meditate regularly and seriously have experienced - it is not just some sort of Buddhist theory. "
-- Matthieu Ricard

... more on the overlooked obvious, thanks to Michael Jeffreys...  


Awareness notices thoughts. Thoughts themselves are not aware.


To cite Peter Francis Dziuban, 'Thoughts and feelings are belief territory.'  When you notice that, you notice something liberating about noticing itself.

"It's not about being above it all, it's about being with it all."
    -- Chad Foreman

"The primal spirit loves stillness, and the conscious spirit loves movement."          
    --  The Secret of the Golden Flower, Richard Wilhelm, ed. & translator.

How can a shadow eliminate itself?    
-- Wei Wu Wei on ego's attempts to transcend ego - ed.

“ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN 
BUT IT TAKES A GODDESS 
TO GET OUT OF ONE.” 
― Jack Spicer

Editor:  What Blake called "the sea of time and space."...  now there's an ocean.

“to know how tall a tree is
I must fall from the top;
that is,
desire burns.”
― Robin Blaser

'The uncertain egotist is not good for himself.'  -Robert Creeley

“Objectivism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside of himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man’s problems, the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. This is not easy.” 


-- Charles Olson, Collected Prose

... the journey happens in the mind
the discovery happens in the heart.
-- Mooji

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.                             -- Jane Austen

“Judge not, lest you be so fearful of judgment that you can hardly breathe.”                                               --  Paul Williams

Epitaph

So I may say,
“I died of living,
having lived one hour;”

so they may say,
“she died soliciting
illicit fervour;”

so you may say,
“Greek flower; Greek ecstasy
reclaims forever

one who died
following
intricate song’s lost measure.”

—H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

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.
                                   -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If the only prayer you say in your life is
‘thank you,’ it would be enough.”
~ Meister Eckhart

“Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.” 


--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"Anyone who attempts to relate his life
loses himself in the immediate." 

                              -- Augusto Roa Bastos

'The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and to believe in it willingly.' - - Wallace Stevens

Editor: Scholar and poetic prose writer, Roberts Avens, posits imagination AS reality, in the sense that it is the imaginative/fictive which functions to infuse life and meaning into objects colliding about and to give to the aery nothingness of abstraction a local habitation and a name, i.e., form. Imagination transports human vision beyond the conceptualizing mind's battles with oppositions, dualities and dichotomies.  


Imagination soars, belief plods. Belief freezes life's spontaneous metamorphoses with black and white snapshots that capture nothing truly alive, archiving and institutionalizing artifacts of hope and fear.

It is not sufficiently observed that logos, and the reason necessary to it, are only a stage which a man must master and not what they are taken to be, final discipline. Beyond them is direct perception and the contraries which dispose of argument. The harmony of the universe, and I include man, is not logical, or better, is post-logical, as is the order of any created thing. --  Charles Olson

                                   It's not a matter of right or wrong.  
                      It's a matter of singing a deeper song. 
                                                                           - Robert Augustus Masters

“I've often lost myself,
in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake” 
― Federico Garcia Lorca

“You can have the other words - chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it. ” 
― Mary Oliver

Bill Hicks, from one of his epic standup routines, playing a TV news anchor...

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the Weather.” 

'Poets are the lovers, not the masters, of the real.'
  -- Robin Blaser  (in conversation, years ago - ed.)

“You have carried a branch of tomorrow into the room - its fragrance awakened me." 
      -- Robert Duncan 

'In silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves."                     -- Rumi 

Editor's note:  Only the last three words above, bracketed by quotation marks, are from the 16th Karmapa,  everything preceding is the editor's summary of his limited understanding of what the Karmapa saw so clearly.

Chip Hartranft on Pantajali's notion that most human suffering is produced by the confusion of consciousness with awareness...

'Consciousness itself is an object' he [Patanjali] asserts, incapable of self-regard.
Once its recognition as such can be steadily maintained, reality can finally be seen as it actually is -- a torrent of microphenomena utterly devoid of substantiality or permanence. The true nature of pure awareness itself is now visible, omnipresently observing the world but separate from it and not imbued with its qualities. This, Patanjali explains, fulfills the true purpose for which nature created consciousness, and marks the end of suffering.'  

Editor's note:  Here it must be pointed out that the 'pure awareness' Hartranft describes cannot be observed as an object.  When we look in a mirror, we see a reflection of our face. We do not see that which is looking at the reflection... and we don't see it, the sages tell us, because we ARE it.

“Just as it is known
That an image of one's face is seen
Depending on a mirror
But does not really exist as a face,
So the conception of "I" exists
Dependent on mind and body,
But like the image of a face
The "I" does not at all exist as its own reality.”

-- Nagarjuna (circa 200 AD)

"Being is no longer the essential matter to be thought."  -- Martin Heidegger

"The Being of all things that are recognized in Awareness in turn depends on Awareness." --  Abhinavagupta

ed. -- thanks to http://heideggerindianthought.blogspot.ca/  for the above two citations from Heidegger and the Shaivite sage, Abhinavagupta.

"As soon as there is a Being, there is an object of which Awareness is aware.  Awareness is that which make both being and perception  possible, while itself  limited to neither."   
--  Sri Ganoosh ji

We do not possess an 'ego'.
We are possessed by the idea of one.
-- Wei Wu Wei

'Dad, my mind seems to be in two parts. There's a part that sees and a part that knows. The part that sees doesn't know and the part that knows is blind.'                     -- Michon Yardley, 10 years old.

"The thinking mind is not in touch with the real. The Self is, but it doesn't think." 
                 -- Hannah Arendt, paraphrasing Aristotle.

"The secret! The secret!  It's hid
In its showing forth!" 

-- Robert Duncan, At The Loom Passage 2

Editor's note:  The above half dozen citations get us into abstruse territory regarding discrimination between what is real and true vs what is illusory. Confusion seems inevitable as long as we persist in assuming that the subject-object dichotomy lies at the root of the problem.  A deeper, more profound, radical take on the issue, as proposed by, among others, Nagarjuna, Nisargadatta, the Buddha, Patanjali, Peter Francis Dziuban, Robert Adams, Wei Wu Wei and the Ch'an Zen adepts of 15-16th century China, clears the confusion by pointing out that the classical subject-object polarity belongs entirely to the realm of phenomena. The standard conscious self that we all take for granted is a pseudo-subject. Our true nature as pure awareness lies beyond the subject-object polarity.  It is unfathomable and cannot be reduced to any position in subject-object interaction. More, without that true nature, not a single thing in the subject-object field could be demonstrated to exist.  True nature is the foundation of the subject-object dichotomy and is completely beyond it. Says The Prajnaparamita Sutra, "It utterly transcends all things while embracing each thing lovingly in its womb."

The tiniest, intuitive apperception of True Nature confers genuine humility; not the acquired humility of an ego seeking escape from the clutches of apparent mortality, but a spontaneous, natural humility that occurs when, as J. Krishnamurti put it, "one sees the futility of arrogance."


The Truth of who we are is indescribably beyond who we think we are.

   Let me remind you
  That the perceived
Cannot perceive.
-- Huang Po

Here, Huang Po points to the fact that while you can perceive other apparent perceivers, only you can have the immediate, first hand experience of perception.  You can easily infer that others are capable of perception, but you never have the direct experience of that fact. Thoughts, feelings and intuitions that occur to you are objects, as well. They just feel so close to home that it's hard not to identify with them AS you. 

Of course, another perceives me, one might argue. Another can spot me half a mile away and wave hello. But, strictly speaking, only I am having the direct experience of someone waving and my apparent body responding (and MY body is every bit as much an object as the guy half a mile away). Paradoxically, there is not another perceiver anywhere. The experience of direct perception occurs only for YOU, ever. All else is inference. The difference between inference and direct perception is the difference between mental formulations about what is happening and awakened, spontaneous participation in what IS happening. Sooner or later, the liberating realization dawns that, to cite Jiddu Krishnamurti, "There is neither perceiver nor perceived. There is only perceiving."  The one who notices THAT is not personal and cannot ever be perceived, for it is who you Are. That one is the 'who' of all sentient beings. It has no locatable center, most certainly not a personal one.  It essentiates (Heidegger's term) as the appearance of everything altogether. It is a non-local radiant awareness in which all subjects and objects spontaneously arise; too obvious to notice, too present to identify, too alive to measure .  

"When you become identified you cannot observe." -- P. D. Ouspensky

a simple sentence that has a much deeper meaning than meets the 'I'.

Novelist, Han Suyin, writes of her morning walks in the Himalayas, accompanied by a British Colonel "who kept destroying the beauty of things by pointing them out."

    *                                                                                      *                                                                                              *

“I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.” 
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

"There are two kinds of darkness and one is caused by an excess of light." 
  -- Dionysius the Areopagite,  6th Century AD

*                                                           *                                                             *

"....Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative..."

― Ezra Pound

nanobot in revolt   


     

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” 
                                   -- Simone Weil

On the phenomenal plane we seek pleasure and the avoidance of pain. On the noumenal plane we know the absence of both - which is Bliss.
                -- Wei Wu Wei

“The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny - it is the light that guides your way.” 
                  -- Heraclitus, Fragments

If Tony Soprano wuz a Sage

Spirit wants wings.
Soul needs roots.
Whaddaya gonna do?

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.” 
-- William Blake

Right here and now you are in the realized state. But you try to judge it through desires and mind-concepts, hence your inability to apperceive it and abide in it. In the [awakened] state, there is no need for anything, not even to know oneself. You are attached to the body-senses; therefore even though you may attain an age of hundred years, you still would crave for more years. -- Nisargadatta Maharaj

The Four Part Cure...

Don't fear God,
Don't  worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure.
          --  Philodemus, Herculaneum Papyrus

Break This Code, a.k.a. Encryption also means encased in a crypt

I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.
-- G.W.F. Hegel, Letter to Niethammer, 13 Oct.1806

Hans Schicht in 2003 noted that David Rockefeller, the "master spider," was then 88 years old.
-- Ellen Hodgson Brown,  Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System And How We Can Break Free


“In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.”
 --Ezra Pound

Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.
-- William S. Burroughs

“Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.” 
-- e.e. cummings

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.
-- Eugene Ionesco 

It would be more interesting to learn from children, than try to teach them how to behave, how to live and how to function.
-- U.G. Krishnamurti

'Things can appear only because they are empty." 
-- Matthieu Ricard

Wei Wu Wei's elaboration on the Buddha's 'Form is emptiness, emptiness form.'
"Both manifestation and non-manifestation are conceptual, neither is nor is not except as the absence of non-manifestation".

We throw clay to shape a pot,
but the utility of the clay pot is a function
of the nothingness inside it.
-- Tao Te Ching, chapter 11

See also:   Khan Academy -- Why multiplying two negatives gives a positive

"There is a void outside of existence, which if entered into englobes itself and becomes a womb." -- William Blake 

Ch'an Zen adepts refer to awakening as "passing through the Gateless Gate."   Awakening is indescribable, unfathomable and absolutely Real. The paradox hidden in plain view in the emptiness and nothingness referenced above is just this -- the Real abides there, so to speak. In Nisargadatta's words, "Relative absence is Absolute presence."
-- Editor

'Form is the only evidence of unenlightenment.' -- Da Free John

''Your interpretation of the meaning of the mandala is concise, penetrating, logically astute and seems in all ways to be correct,' said the Rinpoche, 'Now consider the possibility that it may also mean something entirely different." 
-- inspired by a passage in Andrew Harvey's 'Journey in Ladakh: Encounters With Buddhism.'

... there is also, for example, the language of love...

"Facts are okay, but just okay; they don’t make life a rejoicing, they don’t create celebration. They can give you a better standard of life but they cannot give you a new passion for life, they cannot give you intensity of life. They cannot give you quality; they can only give you quantity. Only the language of love starts penetrating you through a different dimension, through the vertical dimension."

-- Osho

“here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart). ” 

-- e.e. cummings

"To merit the madness of love, one must abound in sanity." --  Sufi saying

the language of love demystified...

During a television interview with the renowned Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, Oprah Winfrey got around to asking him if he believed in the efficacy of reciting a mantra, which he did. She asked him if he had a personal favorite. Hanh smiled broadly, and said 'Yes. It is... "Darling, I am here for you."  Not exactly what Oprah and her audience were expecting. -- Ed. 

---

"The greatest gift you can give someone is your attention, your energy, your presence." 
-- Ram Dass

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”  
― Simone Weil,  trans. from French

" ... loving kindness is the automatic function of Awareness.” 

-- Keith Dowman, The Flight of the Garuda: The Dzogchen Tradition
of Tibetan Buddhism

an anecdote about Picasso...

A couple stood before a painting at a Picasso exhibit. The man said to his partner, "I think this painting here is a fake."  Picasso, who happened to be listening, leaned in and said, "Be assured, they're all fakes." It's an anecdote that sheds additional humorous light on Picasso's declaration that "painting is a lie through which the truth is revealed." .

and one about Dali...

At an exhibition of his surrealist paintings, two women regarded one of his works with expressions of disdain. One said to the other, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like."  Dali overheard, leaned in and said, "So, madam, does a cow."

'Surrealism is not my cup of fur." -- Phil Savath

'The life of a Zen master is one continuous mistake.' ~ Zen master Dogen.

“One minute of sitting, one inch of Buddha. Like lightning, all thoughts come and pass. Just once look into your mind-depths: Nothing else has ever been.” - Manzan

Sister Maria lights a candle for  postmodernism

'The practice of art is prayer.' -- William Blake

"...creation being the highest, most exact form of confession." -- Nikolas Kazantzakis

“You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do, and that
sight becomes this art.” 
-- Rumi

Seems the hardest thing in the world to get, the thing that people most resist acknowledging is that awareness is no thing, while being the only aspect of us that is truly alive...

The sense 'I am' is the first born, but awareness is the unborn. It is not an object, but objects manifest in it, in the realm of consciousness and mind. Nothing affects awareness and awareness is not a belief. You cannot 'believe' in awareness. You can only be awareness. Not to be as an action taken, but as Truth revealed. It's the most obvious thing! -- Mooji

Mind is the space for the 'person'.
Timelessness is the space of the Self. -- Mooji

Spirituality is a personal relationship with the Divine.

Religion is crowd control.

                                -- Heather Schulze

'The divine awareness field, as the 'oceanic' source of all beings, can no more be conceived of as one single and 'supreme' being  than can the ocean be conceived of as one single and supreme fish.'
                                   -- Peter Wilberg,  The Awareness Principle

'The Truth is not going to be anything that you can perceive in front of yourself and at some distance away. 
It is always the subject, never an object. 
Take subject and Source to be one.
Therefore, don’t keep looking at what is seen but instead, bring your attention to That from where the seeing emerges. Note that the seeing position is not trapped inside the bubble of the objects perceived.
To whom is all this occurring? 
Is it to a person or some tangible entity which can be recognised?
Can that in whose presence even the functioning of perception is being perceived, can it Itself be recognised phenomenally?
And if so, by whom or what?
Do you follow?'
       -- Mooji

"There is no higher learning without Eros.” – Plato.

“Let's start with the obvious. If that doesn't work, we’re going to need some religion real fast.”  
         - Monsignor Coleman Brell-Peuneux,   Vaticana Organa vol. XVII

‘It is only hell when you are in denial of it”            -
            - S. Vanier

portraits are mists;
descriptions are just a shot in the air;
biographies have a fictional duration.


Even the notion of a portrait of someone:
an inner contradiction, impossible.
The frame itself is already too much.


-- Douwe Tiemermsa

Facts are only a part of any situation. Many facts are facts only in terms of projecting a future.

A wall is a barrier to someone who wants to be on the other side, and a protection to someone who wants defense. -- Eugene Gendlin

Knowings of the veil
cannot bear what happens
when the veil is torn.

                                      -- Niffari, Sufi, 10th Century

'Wisdom is knowing I am nothing. Love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life moves.' -- Nisargadatta

meditation as revolution --   slamming quotes together

"Hell is other people." -- Jean Paul Sartre

"Other people wrote the language you think in." -- Bastart

Roberts Avens on Heidegger's poetic, salvational thinking

"I have identified gnosis with "salvational knowledge" which, [Heidegger notes] "results in nothing" and "has no effect." .... Salvation results in nothing for the simple reason that it is not something to be acquired and held as one's possession. It is not a thing...  but an event, an occurrence that takes place in the soul. To say "in the soul," however, does not mean that we escape from the world into soul.... soul, in addition to being "my" soul, is also the soul of the world. "Salvational knowledge", therefore, is concerned with resouling the world as well. It is a recollection, a remembering of a worldly soul and of an ensouled world. So - what are we to do? Nothing. We have to let the soul be. We have to let the world be. We have to let Being - be."
     -- Roberts Avens, The New Gnosis 

'Imagine how much serious time is spent proving the reality of the external world. Imagine having to prove what every animal knows.'
                                -- James Hillman

“No amount of prayer or meditation can do what helping others can do.” ―Meher Baba

A nice exchange between Sri Ramana Maharshi and a well educated North Indian visitor (circa 1946):

Visitor: What is the cause and origin of the universe?
Maharshi: Have you no worries of your own?

Sweet Sane Seeing


Awakened awareness, as Avens envisions it, is... "a state of betweenness which is indifferent to all abstractly established opposites, a state of holiness.... One may characterize it also as a condition in which my emotions, thoughts, etc. cease to be 'mine' and are experienced as something 'outer' or 'other'. At the same time, however, things in the co-called outer world are interiorized. In the last resort, therefore, it hardly matters where we turn in our efforts at self-actualization, to things (the world) or to the psyche." -- Roberts Avens, 'The New Gnosis', pp. 92-93

Is this not the very inverse of our usual way of seeing?  i.e., My thoughts and emotions are indeed very much 'mine' and the outer world is some separate thing that appears indifferent towards me or, at worst, hostile and threatening - ed.

"It is possible to... kill a person by inversion" -- Charles Olson.

"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder.
Help someone's soul heal.
Walk out of your house like a shepherd."
   -- Rumi

"Don't try to change the world.
First, change yourself or rather, your self-perception, and you find the world automatically corresponding to the level of your understanding.
You will find that it has always been you who set the pace and depth of your experience by recognizing and honoring your true nature."
~ Mooji

A Tibetan Kagyu recitation, corresponding to the meaning of the above:
"Knowing that experience and awareness are not two, I take refuge in the Dharma."

If experience and awareness are not two, not separate, then what we experience is a function or correlate of our level of awareness. This is the context in which the platitude 'you create your own reality' makes sense, with this caveat:  Thoughts that we think are not all there is to our 'level of awareness', not even close.       -- ed.

On the far side of high achieving...

"The one who has fully investigated himself, the one who has come to understand, will never try to interfere in the play of consciousness. There is no creator with a vast intellect as such; all this play is going on spontaneously. There's no intellect behind it, so don't try to impose yours to bring about any change; leave it alone. Your intellect is a subsequent product of this process, so how can your intellect take charge of or even evaluate the whole creation? Investigate your self; this is the purpose of your being."   --  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

"Rather than describe enlightened thought as mystical, we would say that it is the product of a non-dual, intimate union with the nature of the mind which is clear, luminous and concept-free." -- Matthieu Ricard

".... there is no ultimate identity but only a self-reflexive transitivity of mutual relation, it is this very selfness of mutuality that constitutes what we call, for short, the self. "  -- Michael Kosok

"A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five. "
-- Groucho Marx



"If the odds are against me then I will go with the evens." -- Richard Bartlett


" It is often said that before you die your whole life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living." -- Terry Pratchett

"Between the last mental event that just ended and before the next mental event begins to arise: that empty space which is naked of mind and absent of self, but not empty of aware sentience is exactly nirvana. Recognizing that pure space from within that pure space is called rigpa.

Samsara only exists in the moment of a thought event, but not between thought events.

The self only exists as a thought event but not between thought events.

When the mind sees this clearly, nirvana is known but not as a mental event. When the whirling whirlpool of the mind and mental events cease, only nirvana remains. In the meantime rest in the gap where thoughts are absent but not wisdom; where nothing needs correction nor modification, but all is seen as perfection itself."  

--  Jackson Peterson

If you become enlightened, all delusions are eliminated. There is not even a trace of the act of having rid oneself of those delusions. 

This state is what we call "No Mind." But this is not a state of suspended animation. It is the recovery of the state of the Great Light.

Its the principle of coming out of darkness into Light, but Light which is beyond light and darkness.

It's the same as a dust-covered mirror being cleaned and recovering its function to reflect light.

When you open the Eye, everything is the Great Light, everything is Buddha, and every place is a Buddha-field. And when this happens and you have the purity of the heart of a child, you see that mountains are floating on water. This is the world of enlightenment.

- Zen master Song Chol

The Unbinding -- by Jackson Peterson

When all thoughts and concepts are no longer subjectified or held tight as "important" reference points that help define the central core of a "me-ness", but simply float loose like momentary light wisps of clouds in a summer sky; there is revealed a completely free openness that is beyond any dimension defined through thought and concepts.

The central contracted core of "me" unravels revealing a hollow center. Bound up in thoughts, the one bound is found to be no more than the conceptual bindings.

The complete serenity of that empty, thought-free, self-free space seems primordially unchanged as though having been always ever-present, but too subtle to have ever been seen.

No "me" nor any topic is present, nor even noticed to be absent in that undefined space.

Our energizing attention is either bound up and enlivening our mental universe constructed purely of fictional concepts and reified beliefs or it collapses back into its primordial emptiness in a moment of complete release,vivid clarity and sheer delight.

Observing closely the mental events that arise and fall from moment to moment and the thoughts that talk about an unfindable self; will lead to this unravelling insight that leaves samsara stripped naked in the space of its own absence.

"Access occurs on the basis of the principle of effortlessness. The view is disclosed without needing to meditate. The commitment is kept without out needing to observe it. The capacity for spiritual action is acquired without striving. The path is not something to tread gradually. There is no level to achieve through training. Wisdom is a non-conceptual state that cannot at all be produced in any way. The ultimate nature is the authentic condition that cannot be altered. Listen, great being! If this is taught to followers of the vehicles based on cause and effect, they would deem it impossible. In fact, they believe that as the world is founded on cause and effect, everything must be tied to this principle." -- Kunje Gyalpo, cited by Jackson Peterson, Transparent Being Facebook  site.

Feels like the kind of truth that pulls all the carpets out from under one's feet. There is, at one and the same time, a terror of letting go of the known and a relief filled ecstasy in seeing that one's whole life has been a purgatory of carpet mediated aggravation. -- ed.

“As I began to love myself I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth. Today, I know, this is authenticity." - Charlie Chaplin


"While phenomena are in flux from their arising to their passing, there is awareness of them. Thus, awareness is not these phenomena, as it is not a thing, nor is it separate from these objects, as there would be no experience if this were so."  ~ from a Buddhist site. Perhaps appropriately, the author did not give his/her name.

What Impact Does the Dropping Away of Self Have on Life Situations?

"When the illusion of self as a "me" ceases, along with that cessation all that was built upon that false foundation will also fall apart, break up and cease. A neurotic marriage may cease or become sane. We may walk away from a stressful job that never made sense, or suddenly it will make sense. We may abandon friends and relationships that were always difficult or we might now see only ease and enjoyment in such engagements.

But any former "ego-driven" purposes, goals and lifestyles will surely cease. Life will become purposeless, goal-less and completely spontaneous according perfectly with present circumstances and the felt needs of others. All concern for oneself will cease and desist; for what "self" could there be to be concerned with and who would now have that concern?

With no self to do any grasping or resisting, the body/mind can finally relax; freed from the ceaseless torments of hope and fear.

With one's selfless natural wisdom and compassion unfurled, there is no end to the benefit and release of suffering that one can now bring. With no self as a "me" filling the space of your attention, there is always a place for the one you're with to be treasured and nurtured in a most beneficial way." -- Jackson Peterson

​
Full Court Express

An extraordinary statement about higher order awareness in action, taken from the book, "Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man" written by basketball legend, Bill Russell:

“Every so often a Celtics game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even mental game, and would be magical. That feeling is difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level. It came rarely, and would last anywhere from five minutes to a whole quarter, or more. Three or four plays were not enough to get it going. It would surround not only me and the other Celtics, but also the players on the other team, and even the referees.

At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened: The game would be in the white heat of competition, and yet somehow I wouldn’t feel competitive, which is a miracle in itself. I’d be putting out the maximum effort, straining, coughing up parts of my lungs as we ran, and yet I never felt the pain. The game would move so quickly that every fake, cut, and pass would be surprising, and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion.

During those spells, I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball inbounds, I could feel it so keenly that I’d want to shout to my teammates, ‘it’s coming there!’— except that I knew everything would change if I did. My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt then that I not only knew all the Celtics by heart, but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine. “... On the five or ten occasions when the game ended at that special level, I literally did not care who had won. If we lost, I’d still be as free and high as a sky hawk.”

Sourced from... Childre, Doc; Martin, Howard; Rozman, Deborah; McCraty, Rollin (2016-02-14). Heart Intelligence: Connecting with the Intuitive Guidance of the Heart (pp. 9-11). Waterfront Press. Kindle Edition.


"The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think not what they see." - - Huang Po
​

"In my reality tunnel, none of the teachings are true in any way, shape or form. At best, they are helpful lies. Buddhas have never had any interest in teaching anyone the Absolute Truth of Ultimate Reality; they're interested in waking people up. Every teaching, pointer and practice human ingenuity has ever come up with is nothing other than an attempt to "trick" the human organism out of its unhealthy relationship with thought, and into a healthy relationship with its actual experience. A true guru will tell you that the sky is purple and Barack Obama is a bunch of leprechauns in a human suit if that's what it takes to snap you into a healthy relationship with life. He might even tell you that everything is God, or that your true nature is awareness. Whatever lie it takes to help you.
If you had a lazy child who wouldn't get up in the morning no matter what you tried, if you were a real rascal you might try telling him the house is on fire. Once the kid jumps out of bed and scrambles downstairs there's no need for him to keep believing that the house is on fire, though."

-- Tim Foley

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