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#2484 - Monday, May 28, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee  

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.   -Meister Eckhart    

              I spent my days idly as a vine
            growing slowly in some holy place.

            Then compassion came,
            and I saw the Absolute.

            All the names are true,
            but I kept repeating that
            of my teacher, and OM.

            And sometimes I sang Om
            Namah Shivaya, the greeting
            that gives peace to the world
            as well as to the spirit.

                                 - Lalla
                                   14th Century North Indian mystic   posted to Along the Way
 

Imagine yourself as a child lying on your back, gazing up into a cloudless sky, and
blowing soap bubbles through a plastic ring. As a bubble drifts up into the sky, you
watch it rise, and this brings your attention to the sky. While you are looking at the
bubble, it pops, and you keep your attention right where the bubble had been. Your
awareness now lies in empty space.

--B. Alan Wallace, "Tibetan Buddhism From the Ground Up"

Experiencing the Ground of Consciousness  

People often confuse meditation with prayer, devotion, or vision. They are not the
same. Meditation as a practice does not address itself to a deity or present itself
as an opportunity for revelation. This is not to say that people who are meditating
do not occasionally think they have received a revelation or experienced visions.
They do. But to those for whom meditation is their central practice, a vision or a
revelation is seen as just another phenomenon of consciousness and as such is not
to be taken as exceptional.  

The meditator simply experiences the ground of consciousness, and in doing so
avoids excluding or excessively elevating any thought or feeling. To do this one
must release all sense of the "I" as experiencer, even the "I" that might think it is
privileged to communicate with the divine.  

--Gary Snyder, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Vol.I, #1
 

  The world is still full of divinity and strangeness, Mr. Shawnessy said. The
scientist stops, where all men do, at the doors of birth and death. He knows no
more than you and I why a seed remembers the oak of 20 million years ago, why
dust acquires the form of a woman, why we behold the earth in space and time. He
hasn’t yet solved the secret of a single name upon the earth. We may pluck the
nymph from the river, but we won’t pluck the river from ourselves: this coiled
divinity is still all murmurous and strange. There are sacred places everywhere.
The world is still man’s druid grove, where he wanders hunting for the Tree of
Life.
--Ross Lockridge  

Here's your Daily Poem from the Poetry Chaikhana --

Just Done By Yuan Mei (1716 - 1798) English version by J. P. Seaton A month alone behind closed doors forgotten books, remembered, clear again. Poems come, like water to the pool Welling,                               up and out, from perfect silence -- from A Drifting Boat: Chinese Zen Poetry, Edited by J. P. Seaton / Edited by Dennis Maloney

============ Thought for the Day: It is not the path that makes the person holy. The person makes the path holy. ============

Here's your Daily Music selection -- Yurdal Tokcan Passion Listen - Purchase More Music Selections

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