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#2394 - Thursday, February 16, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
photo by Alan Larus http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/river/page_1.htm
Soul, Heart, and Body One Morning
"There's a morning where presence comes over you,
and you sing like a rooster in your earth-colored shape.
Your heart hears and, no longer frantic, begins
to dance. At that moment soul
reaches total emptiness. Your heart becomes Mary,
miraculously pregnant, and body, like a two-day old
Jesus says wisdom words. Now the heart
turns to light, and the body picks up the tempo.
Where Shamsi Tabriz walks, the footprints
are musical notes and holes you fall through into space."
~ Rumi, "Book of Love" - transliterated by Coleman
Barks
posted by Mazie Lane to Allspirit
Under a vast blue sky this
wondrous presence is here, replacing
habitual worrisome thoughts and feelings. They can't survive the
deep
silence of open being. It is not brought about by anything or
anyone -
it is here without effort, without time.
- Toni Packer
posted by Ben Hassine
Here's your Daily Poem from the Poetry Chaikhana --
 |
Oceans By Juan Ramon Jimenez English version by Robert Bly
I have a feeling that my boat
|
Ajahn Sumedho:
http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/intuitive-awareness.pdf
"Trust in your own intuitive awakened
sense. Don't
trust in your views and opinions about anything: about
yourself, about Buddhism or the world, for these views
are often times very biased. We get very biased views
about each other: we have racial prejudices, class identities,
ethnic biases and feelings of social superiority. These are
not to be trusted.
We can look at things in different ways. We don't have
to look at something always from the conditioning that
we have acquired. So when the Buddha talks about
the Buddha-mind, it's very flexible and malleable; it's
universal. We can see things in so many different ways.
The mind has a radiant quality to it. Consciousness
has a radiance; it has a light itself. So when we begin
to let go of always limiting ourselves through the
distortions of our conditioned mental states, then we
begin to understand, see things as they really are,
know the Dhamma - enlightenment."
posted by Gill Eardley to Allspirit
"In Louisville,
at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center
of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the
realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine
and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even
though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream
of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world,
the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole
illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.
Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic
life:
but the conception of "separation from the world" that
we have in
the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion,
we are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the
bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the
world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest,
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a
relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud ....
To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking
seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our
monastic thinking .... I have the immense joy of being man,
a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.
As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could
overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only
everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained.
There is no way of telling people that they are all walking
around shining like the sun."
~ Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
posted by ts to Allspirit
