Memory Ends

 "For the being of love, the process of memory must come to an end. Memory comes into being only when experience is not completely, fully understood. Memory is only the residue of experience; it is the result of a challenge which is not fully comprehended. Life is a process of challenge and response. Challenge is always new but the response is ever old. This response, which is conditioning, which is the result of the past, must be understood and not disciplined or condemned away. It means living each day anew, fully and completely. This complete living is possible only when there is love, when your heart is full, not with the words nor with the things made by the mind. Only where there is love, memory ceases; then every movement is a rebirth."

- J Krishnamurti

Water

 "We should realize that, although they are liberated, without any bonds, all things are abiding in their own state. However, when humans look at water, they have the one way that sees it only as flowing without rest. This "flow" takes many forms, of which the human view is but one. Water flows over the earth; it flows across the sky; it flows up; it flows down. Water flows around bends and into deep abysses. It mounts up to form clouds; it descends to form pools.

The Wen Tzu says, 'The tao of water, ascending to heaven, becomes rain and dew, descending to earth, becomes rivers and streams.'

This passage says that, although the way of water is unknown to water, water actually functions as water; although the way of water is not unknown to water, water actually functions as water.

'Ascending to heaven, it becomes rain and dew.'

We should realize that water climbs to the very highest heavens in the highest quarters and becomes rain and dew. Rain and dew is of various kinds, in accordance with the various worlds. Water extends into flames; it extends into thought, reasoning and discrimination; it extends into awareness and the buddha nature.

It is not the case simply that there is water in the world; within the world of water there is a world. And this is true not only within water: within clouds as well there is world of sentient beings; within wind there is world of sentient beings; within fire there is world of sentient beings; within earth there is world of sentient beings. Within the dharma realm there is a world of sentient beings; within a single blade of grass there is world of sentient beings; within a single staff there is a world of sentient beings. And wherever there is a world of sentient beings, there, inevitably, is the world of buddhas and ancestors.

The reason this so, we should study very carefully."

- Dogen Kigen, excerpt from The Mountains and Waters Sutra, 1240 AD.

How do you say Goodbye?

How do you say Goodbye?

We say it almost every day. Sometimes it's just a word in passing to someone you'll see tomorrow, sometimes it's the last time we'll ever tell a person that without knowing it is. It's the latter I'm concerned with here. 

Many of us have already faced this at some point in our lives. For those who have not, it's only a matter of time. But what is time, really? Can it really be measured? Can it really be felt, time? How long did it take to emerge from your mother's womb? How long did it take to journey across the room, or across the country, to be with someone important to you? How long does a true conversation last with someone you love? I say truly, these things are timeless! They all are.

One day we are born, one day we grow, one day who we were is gone, the molecules in our bodies that were there before are completely recycled, rebuilt, and restructured. Days are just time, one time the Earth spins and returns to a place it never was before.

I'll never forget the last time I was at the Lake in Wisconsin, right around the time my son was size of a lentil in his mother's womb, and I happened upon my grandfather, Dave, sitting in his office, who had just put down a book, I forget what it was. He told me Alex, I've come to a conclusion about spirituality and religion, and there is nothing else, there is only Love. The Universe is made of Love, and that's it. And I nodded, because I knew he was right.

Nothing special, nothing extra. Nothing outside of us. We are it. Love is what surrounds us everywhere and always, whether we accept it or not, it's just there. Love is what makes life, and life is all we are in an otherwise lifeless and chaotic existence of stars exploding in far-off spaces, dust collecting and merging together to form new planets that none of us will ever see except through a telescope, when the vibrations that reach our eyes have traveled for thousands of years at the speed of light across unknown galaxies. How else are these things in our world here, except as things to be seen, heard, felt as living, conscious beings?

So we have to ask, if these things arise together, phenomena and being, and only exist for each other's sake, are they actually separate at all? Is there really an experience and an experiencer? We all were born out of an act of love, we all grew up because of acts of love from others greater than ourselves, and thus we are here now, alive and breathing, nourished, sheltered, with clothing on our backs and most importantly, the capacity to love one another.

To see an end as a beginning, we simply need to take a step back from our immediate selves. Does a drop of water worry about when it will evaporate? Ask a wave on the ocean, what will it tell you? Whooooosh.... CRASH.... again, and again, but never the same twice.

In the same way, events in this life seem to repeat or have patterns, but in the big picture, it's all one big beautiful, chaotic wave, made up of a collection of smaller waves, with even smaller waves inside them, all composed of drops of water, where even one drop is great number of water molecules making it what it is, as it crashes again and again into rock, over eons and eons, gently crushing them into pristine sandy beaches, creating tiny bubbles floating on the surface of the deep ocean, being formed by the chaos and popping so quickly no one could ever keep up, but can only listen to the subtle and unique sound it all makes, vibrating through the air as it reaches your inner ear, becoming sound waves, shimmering across your neural cortex that dissipate as soon as they arrived, just like those bubbles.

Love is what makes our sense of time and self disappear, it's what makes us do things that make no sense, it's what makes us forget about living and dying, it's what keeps us grounded in what's happening now. It's a bedtime story, it's an embrace that seems to last forever but never long enough, it's a lullaby, it's teaching someone how to play, it's holding someone's hand when they are sick, it's making dinner, it's saying a prayer, it's the Sun rising with loon calls echoing across the water. These events are not random!

Those of us who have ever lost all sense of Love, find ourselves trapped in our own loneliness, isolation and sadness, a prisoner of our own minds, belittling ourselves and others by thinking we are just separate things that will live forever, and never change.

My grandmother Bea was someone who seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of this Love. She gave it to everyone around her incessantly, this intangible, inexpressible, infinite thing that you can never quite put your finger on, but you know it's there, because you feel it, because it's literally what is maintaining your and my entire existence, it's the same force that holds the atoms in our bodies together, what helps us through illness, old age, tragedy, loss, and death itself.

My mother tells me that when I was a boy, I once said "There are too many goodbyes, and not enough hellos." 

We have all lost someone and had to say goodbye, whether we knew it was goodbye or not. But if we step back from our immediate selves, death of one person is not a finality, not a goodbye, it's an opportunity to discover a new version of ourselves, not as one person, but all of us who are alive now, remembering and cherishing, as one gigantic crashing wave of vibrations: flesh, blood, synapses, emotions, voices, beating hearts ignited by the fire of Love itself. All of us will never be who we are forever, we are changing all the time, we are change itself.

So, the best way to say goodbye, is to say "Hello". Meet yourself and this world exactly as it is, because there is no other time, no other person, no other way it could be. No inside, no outside, no beginning, no end.

Goodbye Gomma, Goodbye AhAh, Hello us. Let us not sleep in sorrow, let us wake up and meet things as they are with our eyes open, our hearts ready to carry this Love on as long as we can. We need to love ourselves, and we need to love each other. We ARE it. So say Hello. That's how you say good bye.

Say Hello!

Ten year path (re-post)

I posted this quote exactly 10 years ago (May 2011), images added this time:

"Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary.

"This question is one that only a very old man asks: Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you."

- Don Juan

Visiting

Unknown, Hsiang-chi Temple—

Miles and miles into cloud-draped peaks.

Among the old trees, a path no one travels,

A bell deep in the mountains but where from?

A brook gulps among protruding boulders,

And though the sun glows, it’s cool beneath the pines.

At dusk, by a bend in an empty pool,

Meditating quietly I rout the deadly dragon.

-Wang Wei (699 - 761 AD)

The Outside Goes With The Inside

"There are—in nature, in the actual physical universe—no such things as things, and no such happenings as events. They’re all invented by us in the same way as we invent lines of latitude and longitude, inches, meters, minutes and hours. They’re all measures: they don’t really exist out there. But we choose certain lines. For example, we choose the boundary of the human skin and we say this divides me from everything else. Inside this bag of skin is “me,” inside those bags of skin is “you.” And outside that is a foreign world that isn’t me, that isn’t you. But that’s not true!

Alex Grey, Praying

"The skin, from one point of view, can be said to divide us from the external world, but from another point of view it is exactly what joins us to the external world. The skin is full of pores through which we breathe the air. The skin is full of nerve ends through which we become sensitive to what goes on around us. And if, as a matter of fact, the air pressure outside the skin was not exactly fifteen pounds per square inch—if it was anything less than that—we’d blow up. The pressure inside would be too much for the outside. See? What we don’t—we are carefully educated not to notice certain things, because once you start noticing it—in other words, using your spotlight to concentrate on certain areas—at the same time as you notice, you also ignore, you also don’t notice.

"Often I take a blackboard and I draw a circle on it. And I say to people, “What have I drawn?” And they’ll say, “A circle,” “a ball,” “a sphere.” Very few people ever say, “A hole in the wall.” A few smart ones do. In other words, do you notice what’s inside the circle, or do you notice what’s outside? Because what’s outside is just as important as what’s inside. You know, the fundamental secret of life—I’m going to tell you this, and this is worth all your price of admission; it’s the ultimate secret! The ultimate secret is: for every inside, there is an outside. And they go together, and you can’t have one without the other. And that’s the whole problem of metaphysics, of religion, of life and death, so be of good cheer. But normally, you see, the way we are trained to attend our attention is captured by the area inside, just as it’s captured by an object that moves rather than one that’s still. In other words, if a mouse were suddenly to go skitty-skit across the floor here, everybody would notice the mouse. And I keep moving a little instead of standing still, like this, while I talk to you so that you will notice me a little, see?

So by that I mean, the inside always goes with the outside.

"Now then, the whole use of consciousness—this is the point I’m making—the whole use of consciousness is the isolation of certain areas which we pay attention to. And we pay as the price for that kind of attention ignoring what stands outside them. For example, most people think that space is nothing. Space is just emptiness through which we all move. Interstellar space—the space between planets, the space between galaxies—is nothing. But every painter and every architect knows that space isn’t nothing at all. Architects sometimes talk about the influence of space upon behavior. And to the uninitiated this sounds  like nonsense. And if you paint, you realize that you have to paint the space as well as the things in the space. In other words, if you work in oils on canvas, you have to work on the background. You have to paint the background in. And you realize, therefore, that it’s something that’s there.

Ma Lin, "Landscape With Great Pine"

"Can you imagine a solid without a space ’round it? Why, you can’t possibly do so! Can you imagine a space without a solid in it? You can’t possibly, because you have to constitute the solid to imagine yourself in the middle of an empty space. There is no way of having a space without a solid just as there is no way of having a front without a back. They go together.

"But we are trained by our education and by our language—by the patterns of thought which our culture instills in us—to notice the solid and ignore the space. So, in the same way, we notice ourselves as we exist inside our skins and ignore ourselves as we exist outside our skins. And that gives us our peculiar feeling of insularity, of being skin-encapsulated egos who feel ourselves to be different from, to confront, to meet an alien, external, and largely hostile physical universe. And this is the supremely difficult price that we pay for our ingenious ability to use symbols, and to divide the world into the symbolic and the real, the significant and the insignificant, the important and the unimportant.

"We have lost the fundamental physical elemental sense that every single one of us is the entire works, focused here and now. That is to say, every human being—every beetle, every mosquito, every living cell—is something that the entire cosmos, the whole universe, is doing in a particular way. Just as when you hold a magnifying glass to the sun, and you focus the sun as a vivid little point of light at that particular spot on that particular leaf, so every creature that exists is a focus, a special case of what the entire works of existence is doing. Only: we have been taught to forget that. By being concentrated on the here and now—who I am, what circumstances I’m in, what I’m doing, what’s important for me—we get absorbed in it.

"My fingers—all of them move separately and independently, but only because they are part of the hand, and only because the hand is part of the arm, and so on. So underneath our marvelous ability to analyze the world through concentrated attention and through symbols—words which suggest that a tree is a tree. The word “tree” is different from the word “ground,” and therefore it seems that the tree is different from the ground. But it isn’t. The tree is the ground reaching up to grab at the sky and, you know… enjoy. It’s the ground, swinging. So, in the same way, each one of us is the whole cosmos waving and saying,

'Yoo-hoo! I’m here!'

Tianzi Mountains (China)

"So that knowledge is necessary. That knowledge of being one with the totality is necessary to underpin and support the knowledge of being different, and unique, and individual. Without it, the individual goes mad."

- Alan Watts, from "The Symbolic and the Real"