"It has seemed to me that each year one should pause to take stock of
himself, to ask: Where am I going? What am I becoming? What do I wish to
do and become?"
~ Louis L'Amour, The Walking Drum
"Now this is what they really mean in this Zen literature about no-mind.
They mean the point where the head stops. And they talk occasionally
about killing the Buddha, or killing the mind. But you can't kill your
mind. These were terms that were either lost or had something wrong with
the translation, or misinterpreted. The mind is killed for you. You
can't set out to kill your own mind. The only thing you can do is set
out to find the truth. But in the process of finding the truth, you have
to somehow put a stop to this relative hassle that goes back and forth:
'It could be this but it also could be the opposite. Or let's look at
it from two sides.' No, you have to go right down the middle. Look at it
directly. Become one with it. You can't reason it out, back and forth."
~ Richard Rose, Definition of Zen talk at Kent State U, circa 1973
"Knowledge is awareness, and to it there are many paths, not all of them
paved with logic. But sometimes one is guided through the maze by
intuition. One is led to something felt on the wind, something seen in
the stars, something that calls from the wastelands of the spirit. To
receive the message, the mental pores must be open…."
~ Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods
"It goes back, perhaps, to the fairy tales of childhood, to Hansel and
Gretel, to Babes in the Wood, to Alice and Wonderland, to all
half-luminous places that pleased the imagination as a child. It may go
back still farther, to racial Druid memories, to an atavistic sense of
safety and delight in an open forest. And after long years of spiritual
homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood
again. Here is home. An old thread, long tangled, comes straight again."
~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek,
writing about the effect of walking through her orange grove
"I don't believe in the 'evolution of consciousness' line of thinking
that is increasingly manifest in thinking about spiritual work. If
anything, I see a devolution – as the manifestations of the least common
denominators of human nature – albeit well-dressed – are recast
en-masse as spiritual growth. The Perennial Way has become one of
self-magnification and the self-delusion of 'knowing' things in esoteric
literature simply because it is so widely available and widely read.
Everyone 'knows' these days – and seeks affirmation from others – of
course they know nothing as their preconceptions of spirituality blind
them from seeing clearly. Real going within is experienced as a
loss of self – and it takes a rare and unique seeker motivated at a very
deep level to weather that." ~ Bob Cergol
"When any mother animal raises her babies to survive in the world, she
isn't thinking consciously about what it will take to teach them how to
find food or how to spot a danger or how to follow the rules of behavior
for being that particular animal. The babies learn from her what it
takes to be a successful animal in that particular environment without a
lot of extra effort on her part, much less bribes or punishment.
Surviving, fitting in, and functioning in the world around them is their
most fundamental motivation." Cesar Millan, Cesar's Rules
"The point is, 99 percent of what you do in life I classify as laundry.
It's stuff that has to be done, but you don't do it better than anybody
else, and it's not worth much…. Once in a while, though, you do
something that changes your life dramatically." ~ Ralph Wanger
Don't Wait for Inspiration
"We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing.
Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates
action."
~ Frank Tibolt
Sticking to It Is Key
"Sticking to it is key. Richard J. Daley's one ambition was to become
mayor of Chicago. Not President, not ambassador to the U.N., just mayor
of Chicago. And since he already was mayor of Chicago, his life was much
simpler. I thought that was worth emulating."
~ Ralph Wanger
Why Men Don't Know the Law of Life
"The reason men don't know the law of life is because they're afraid to look Eternity in the face."
~ Erle Stanley Gardner, The Law of Drifting Sand
I Didn't Ask
"I took space and time for granted. I did not ask where I had been
before my birth or after my death. I did not even recognize the problem
of my own death; it was something I left to be explained later."
~ Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites
Clinging to Beliefs
"Charles Darwin used to say that whenever he ran into something that
contradicted a conclusion he cherished, he was obliged to write the new
finding down within 30 minutes. Otherwise his mind would work to reject
the discordant information, much as the body rejects transplants. Man's
natural inclination is to cling to his beliefs, particularly if they are
reinforced by recent experience…."
~ Warren Buffett, Dec. 10, 2001 Fortune magazine
Every Day
"Every day, therefore, should be regulated as if it were the one that
brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives."
~ Seneca (Roman philosopher and statesman)
Not Spiritual Olympians
"The point is to find a practice and do it. Find a teacher that
resonates with you and plunge in, do the work until you run into a wall,
then try again. Work the system until you are at a dead end, then try
again, only moving on when you've truly beaten your head against the
wall and broken your tools. Then find a new system and begin again.
Again and again, falling and rising is how we make progress.
"The teachers we read about are not spiritual Olympians. The search is
accomplished through ordinary commitment applied to an extraordinary
idea."
~ Shawn Nevins, editorial comment in the December 2008 TAT Forum
You Don't Exist?
"… The one thing neuroscience cannot find is the loom of cells that
creates the self. If neuroscience knows anything, it is that there is no
ghost in the machine: there is only the vibration of the machinery.
Your head contains a hundred billion electric cells, but not one of them
is you or knows or cares about you. In fact, you don't even exist. The
brain is nothing but an infinite regress of matter, reducible to the
callous laws of physics."
~ Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist
Doubt Transports You
"Doubt transports you to the truth. Who does not doubt fails to inquire.
Who does not inquire fails to gain insight. Without insight, you remain
blind and perplexed."
Al-Ghazali, Sufi master (1058-1111)
The Appeal of Love
"The idealism of youthful love with its whisper of immortality fades,
but the fortunate person finds a new direction for pursuit of the best
that life has to offer. The appeal of love is the loss of the boundary
that traps us in our conviction of individuality, of being a thing
apart. This seeming separation also leaves us feeling threatened with
being overwhelmed and subject to annihilation. It is the cocoon or egg
of the undefined self."
See The Language of Love in the articles section of this site.
Watching
"Sometimes you can observe a lot by watching."
Yogi Berra
Comfort
"Comfort is the enemy of achievement."
Farrah Gray, who grew up in a single-parent family in the Chicago projects and became a millionaire at 14.
You Can Overcome It
"I've worn glasses since I was six years old," he said, "and of course, they called me four-eyes
and a lot of other things, too. That's hard on a boy. It makes him
lonely, and it gives him an inferiority complex, and he has a hard time
overcoming it."
He paused a moment, still smiling, then said, "Of course, we didn't know
what an inferiority complex was in those days. But you can overcome it.
You've got to fight for everything you do. You've got to be above those
calling you names, and you've got to do more work than they do, but it
usually comes out all right in the end."
Harry Truman, in Merle Miller's Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman
See Los Niños Héroes in the articles section of this site.
One Quality of Greatness
"There is one quality of greatness that a soldier appreciates perhaps
more than any other, that is, the selfless willingness to be of service
to others without thought of personal reward or danger."
George Marshall, in an address to the 80th anniversary of the Salvation
Army, whose men and women Marshall admired for "their standards of
loyalty and discipline and their simplicity and selfless devotion to
duty."
George Catlett Marshall, Jr. (1880-1959) was an American military
leader, Secretary of State, and the third Secretary of Defense. Once
noted as the "organizer of victory" by Winston Churchill for his
leadership of the Allied victory in World War II, Marshall supervised
the U.S. Army during the war and was the chief military advisor to
President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As Secretary of State he gave his name
to the Marshall Plan, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in
1953.
~ Wikipedia
See A Self-Effacing Man in the articles section of this site.
The Time Has Come to Stop Fooling Around
"Who am I; who are you? Why are we here? What is the
purpose of life? Who or what is God? What is absolute reality?
"The time has come to stop fooling around. It's time to get the answer –
not from someone else, not someone else's version of the answer – your
own answer, arrived at yourself from the depth of your very own being.
"Here and now, you can begin this personal effort to determine just what
Fact, Principle, Reality, Truth ITSELF is. In spite of all that mankind
has been told for centuries, this is not an impossible task! It is not
hard to do. It is not even an uphill struggle. It is the happiest thing
you will ever undertake! As one divests himself of former beliefs and
opinions and begins to arrive at his own concept of God, through his own
effort, from out the wisdom of his own heart, then God, Reality, Truth
reveals Itself to that one – just as it has been said, 'Seek and ye
shall find.'
"Let the beliefs go. Let what 'they say' go. Drop all the old personal
opinions no matter how near and dear they seem. You start anew, turning
within to the heart. Then when you arrive at your own meaning of God,
you happily find you are also discovering your own real Identity and its
childlike simplicity."
William Samuel, 2 + 2 = Reality
Awake to the Life-Puzzle?
-
Are you a lonely puzzle-piece looking for your spot in the puzzle?
-
Or maybe a puzzle with an aching emptiness at the middle?
-
Is there a way to complete the puzzle with full satisfaction?
Jigsaw alarm clock: The puzzle pieces fire out from the clock at the
set time. Wanna shut that dreaded noise off? Sorry, gotta complete the
puzzle first.
True excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort.
Rafe Esquith, Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire
Silent prayer or any other kind of meditation and contemplation without action in the world is like asking God to end our thirst without our drinking water.
William Samuel
It ain't the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so.
Artemus Ward
The lamps are different, but the Light is the same. So many garish lamps in the dying brain's lamp-shop. Forget about them.
Rumi
One must undergo all the anguish of mind that the flesh is heir to, in order to see the wants of others.
Joseph Sadony, from A Second Book of Crumbs from the Table
All lives are a struggle against selfishness.
John McCain, from Worth the Fighting For
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Rumi
Leave it to Him. Surrender unreservedly. One of two things must be done.
Either surrender because you admit your inability and also require a
Higher Power to help you; or investigate into the cause of misery, go
into the Source and merge into the Self. Either way you will be free
from misery. God never forsakes one who has surrendered. Mamekam saranam
vraja. [Take refuge in Me.]
Talks with Ramana Maharshi (no. 363)
I spent over thirty years journeying; you people were not even born when
I found the way. If younger folk believe what I am talking about, you
will step back each day, look at yourselves, and see all the way
through.
Foyan (1067-1120), from Instant Zen: Waking Up in the Present, translated by Thomas Cleary
There are men of strange taste who seem to like the resultant gambler's
world of complete uncertainty wherein nothing may be trusted and only
illusions are left to feed the yearning for belief. But for all those of
deeper religious need, the death of hope for certainty is the ultimate
tragedy of absolute pessimism -- not the relative pessimism of a Buddha,
a Christ, or a Schopenhauer, who each saw the hopeless darkness of this
dark world as well as a Door leading to the undying Light, but rather a
pessimism so deep that there is no hope for Light anywhere. Somewhere
there must be certainty if the end of life is to be more than eternal
despair. And to find this certainty something other than criticism is
required.
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, from Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object
I went on to discover that in its deepest sense, the will is not
primarily the faculty of desire for anything known, but rather, the
desire for something unknown, animate desire for something that lies
beyond ourselves, a longing for something we know is missing in us....
Bernadette Roberts, from Contemplative: Autobiography of the Early Years
The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state,
while you are bemused.... We discover it by being earnest, by searching,
enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this
discovery.
Nisargadatta
Let me remind you
That the perceived
Cannot perceive.
Huang Po
The only meditation is what you devise for yourself. The best meditation
is just to look at yourself: "Why did I think this?" or "What should I
do more dynamically tomorrow?"
Richard Rose, from Peace of Mind Despite Success talk (Akron, 1984)
I tell people to get to know themselves. Some people think this means
what beginners observe, and consider it easy to understand. Reflect more
carefully, in a more leisurely manner, what do you call your self?
Foyan (1067-1120) from Instant Zen: Waking Up in the Present, translated by Thomas Cleary
Part of the system I advise in The Albigen Papers is that we make
milk from thorns. These very things which are negatives can be turned,
the energy taken from them, and this energy can be used in progression
-- in finding goals faster.
Richard Rose, from the Boston College lecture in The Direct-Mind Experience
If the consciousness is getting restless to know the Self, it will throw away everything and run to the goal.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
The practice of Zen has no secret, except standing on the verge of life and death.
Takeda Shingen, 16th Century Japanese warlord
John said: "Master, is there any material universe?"
Jesus answered: "No."
John asked: "Is there a material body?"
Jesus hesitated a long time and finally said: "Saints believed that
their bodies were fashioned of clay and this believing brought them
death."
Jesus said: "Let not him who seeketh cease from seeking until he hath found:
"... and when he hath found, he shall be amazed.
"... and when he hath been amazed, he shall reign.
"... and when he shall reign, he shall have rest.
"... the Kingdom of Heaven is within you and whoever shall know himself shall find it.
"... strive, therefore, to know yourselves and ye shall know that ye are in the City of God, and ye are the City."
This dialogue was said to have come from a manuscript found in
Oxyrynchus in Egypt on the back side of a land-surveyor list of
measurements. It appeared in the TAT Journal Vol. 2, No. 1 (issue 6) --
see the TAT Journal archive
-- and was believed to reside in the British Museum, which apparently
wasn't true. There were three papyrus fragments in Greek found during
archeological excavations on the site of an ancient library at
Oxyrhynchus in 1897-1903. The Nag Hammadi discovery in 1945 of a
complete version of the lost "Gospel of Thomas" in Coptic made it
possible to identify the fragments as coming from a Greek edition of
Thomas. You can see the twenty sayings from those Oxyrynchus fragments
on the gnosis.org site.
You have to steal your spirituality [from the appetites].
Richard Rose, Introduction to the Albigen System
Where the thinking path is exhausted
and the roots of life cease,
there the self becomes tranquil
and the time of life's fulfillment arrives.
Bassui
"How is it that we need all this prodding, all these warnings and
earnest invitations and promises of infinite rewards, to persuade us to
take a really close look at ourselves? Why don't all intelligent and
serious people make it their chief business in life to find out whose
life it is?" - Douglas Harding, "Self-Enquiry: Some Objections
Answered," from Look for Yourself: The Science and Art of Self-Realization
Ramana Maharshi explained to Paul Brunton the advantage of self-enquiry,
'Mental quiet is easier to attain and earlier, but the goal is mental
destruction. Most paths lead to the first, whereas self-enquiry leads to
it quickly and then to the second.' In other words, other means may
also lead to the subsidence of the mind, but it would rise again. For,
they imply the retention of the mind as the instrument of practice,
which would lead to its perpetuation. The ego [Note: RM used the terms ego, mind, and small-s self synonymously] may take different and subtler forms at different stages of one's practice but it is itself never destroyed."
Ramana Gita: Dialogues with Sri Ramana Maharshi
Wisdom tells me I'm Nothing.
Love tells me I'm Everything.
Between the two my life flows.
Nisargadatta
"I recommend for those not otherwise addicted, to embark upon a
threefold path.... I would explain the mechanism as a sort of troika,
the vehicle being the individual, and the three powers that are pulling
the vehicle with proportionate pace are the Truth, the Law of the
Contractor (brotherhood), and the Life of Search....
"I feel that a sincere seeker who possessed the determination to find
the Truth at any cost, suffering, or expenditure of energy, would most
certainly find the Truth, if he followed the threefold path with an open
mind. The part of the path which is hardest to realize is that dealing
with the brotherhood or school.... This latter requires compatibility
with a group of people and requires that we find a group that is doing
something worthwhile."
From The Albigen Papers by Richard Rose.
Click here for the Threefold Path by Richard Rose.
Ouspensky: "Very well," I said, "tell me what you think of recurrence.
Is there any truth in this, or none at all. What I mean is: Do we live
only this once and then disappear, or does everything repeat and repeat
itself, perhaps an endless number of times, only we do not remember it?"
Gurdjieff: "This idea of repetition," said G., "is not the full and
absolute truth, but it is the nearest possible approximation of the
truth. In this case truth cannot be expressed in words. But what you say
is very near to it. And if you understand why I do not speak of this,
you will be still nearer to it. What is the use of a man knowing about
recurrence if he is not conscious of it and if he himself does not
change?"
From In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky.
Clever
Life is Short film clip. Requires Windows Media Player or equivalent software. Takes 5 - 10 minutes to download at modem speeds.
"Our mind has an amazing ability to split itself. The effect of this on
the seeker of self-knowledge is to lead him about in endless circles of
egos, never getting a true look at himself. 'The world is divided into
people who think they are right' also applies to the world inside our
heads."
~ Bob Fergeson's Mystic Missal Newsletter for February 2002.
NOW IS THE ACCEPTED TIME
From Towards Democracy by Edward Carpenter (1844-1929)
"Amid all the turmoil and the care - the worry, the fever, the anxiety,
The gloomy outlook, fears, forebodings,
The effort to keep up with the rush of supposed necessities, supposed duties,
The effort to catch the flying point of light, to reach the haven of Peace - always in the future -
Amid all, glides in the little word Now.
"As when the winds of March with their long brooms sweep the dead leaves
from the surface of the ground, and the Earth in virgin beauty with the
growing grass once more appears;
So when all this debris of thought from the Past, of anxiety about the Morrow, is at last swept away,
Does the vast ever-Present beneath reveal its perfect rondure."
"Consciousness, descending from above the field of subject-object
knowledge, is distorted just as soon as it is forced into the relative
form of expression. In the latter field, discursive formulation has
finished its task when it has finally shown what non-relative Knowledge
is not. It clears the ground so that no obstruction remains for entering
the Darkness and Silence. But when the 'Voice of Silence' speaks into
the relative world, the meaning lies between the words, as it were,
rather than in the direct content of the words themselves.... We may say
that the sequence of words is like the obverse side of an embroidered
design. One must turn to the other side of the cloth to see the real
figure...."
~ Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy
"Only a fool proclaims he is a spirit and a body. What we are is a body attempting to discover if it has a spirit."
~ Finding Balance by Shawn Nevins, in the November TAT Forum.
"I looked, as it were, over the world, asking: 'What is there of
interest here? What is there worth doing?' I found but one interest: the
desire that other souls should also realize this that I had realized,
for in it lay the one effective key for the solving of their problems.
The little tragedies of men left me indifferent. I saw one great
Tragedy, the cause of all the rest, the failure of man to realize his
own Divinity. I saw but one solution, the Realization of that Divinity."
~ Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy
"These tales of love are what moves me. The deaths do not impress me. It
is the ever present theme of Love manifesting in human relationship and
all life that I find overwhelmingly poignant."
~ The Recent Tragedy by Bob Cergol, in the October TAT Forum.
"All men are noble ... they just have to take the role that allows them to learn about love."
~ Adam, from "Tales of Love" by Richard Rose, in the September 2001 TAT Forum.
"These forms are like peep-holes, through which the Absolute gazes -- back into Itself."
~ Acceptance and Letting Go by Bob Cergol, in the August 2001 TAT Forum.
"Enlightenment: The stunning realization that you are eternal, and are no longer alive."
~ Definitions by Shawn Nevins, in the July 2001 TAT Forum.
[The Cathars of medieval France, who were exterminated as heretics by
Crusaders and Inquisition, had the idea that] "the soul is 'not-created'
and being a particle of divine substance, is exiled into a wicked
world,
prisoner of Matter and Time which have forced it to forget its true
essence." - Michel Roquebert, The Cathar Religion (Editions Loubatieres).
See The Voice of the Cathars in the June 2001 TAT Forum for a fascinating look at their story.
*
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