it's all right

.

There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can't remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and people
Who love God but can't remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It's
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he's lonely, and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul
And greatness has a defender, and even in death
you're safe.


—Robert Bly
people like us

.

don't move

 

 

 

. 

 

Don't move.

Just die over and over. 

Don't anticipate.  

Nothing can save you now, 
because this is your last moment. 

Not even enlightenment will help you now, 
because you have no other moments. 

With no future, be true to yourself
—and don't move.


—Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

.
your moment of zen
hengki koentjoro 
.
 

flow like Tao

.

Yoga systematically teaches man to search for the divinity within himself with thoroughness and efficiency. He unravels himself from the external body to the self within. He proceeds from the body to the nerves, and from the nerves to the senses. 

From the senses he enters into the mind, which controls the emotions. From the mind he penetrates into the intellect, which guides reason. From the intellect, his path leads to the will and thence to consciousness (chitta). 

The last stage is from consciousness to his Self, his very being (Atma).

—B.K.S. Iyengar
Light on Pranayama

. . .

Who can free himself from achievement
And from fame, descend and be lost
Amid the masses of men? 

He will flow like Tao, unseen.
He will go about like Life itself
With no name and no home. 

Simple is he, without distinction.
To all appearances he is a fool.
His steps leave no trace. He has no power. 

He achieves nothing, has no reputation.
Since he judges no one
No one judges him. 

Such is the perfect man:
His boat is empty.


—Chuang Tzu
Thomas Merton version

.

painting, Nancy Poucher

wait - what ?

.

note to self

.

All human beings should try to learn before they die
what they are running from, and to, and why.


—James Thurber

.

The Egg

 

 

.

 

You were on your way home when you died. 
 
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me. 
 
And that’s when you met me. 
 
“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”
 
“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words. 
 
“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”
 
“Yup,” I said.
 
“I… I died?”
 
“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.


You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”
 
“More or less,” I said. 
 
“Are you god?” You asked.
 
“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”
 
“My kids… my wife,” you said. 
 
“What about them?”
 
“Will they be all right?” 
 
“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”
 
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty. 
 
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”
 
“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”
 
“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”
 
“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”
 
“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”
 
You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”
 
“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”
 
“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”
 
“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”
 
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.
 
“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”
 
“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”
 
“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”
 
“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”
 
“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”
 
“Where you come from?” You said.
 
“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”
 
“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”
 
“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”
 
“So what’s the point of it all?”
 
“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”
 
“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.
 
I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”
 
“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”
 
“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”
 
“Just me? What about everyone else?”
 
“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.” 
 
You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”
 
“All you. Different incarnations of you.”
 
“Wait. I’m everyone!?”
 
“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back. 
 
“I’m every human being who ever lived?”
 
“Or who will ever live, yes.”
 
“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”
 
“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.
 
“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.
 
“And you’re the millions he killed.”
 
“I’m Jesus?”
 
“And you’re everyone who followed him.”
 
You fell silent. 
 
“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”
 
You thought for a long time. 
 
“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”
 
“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”
 
“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”
 
“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”
 
“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”
 
“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”
 
And I sent you on your way.


—Andy Weir

 

 

.

 

 

 

 

Falling: The Code

 

.

1.

Through the night
the apples
outside my window
one by one let go
their branches and
drop to the lawn.
I can’t see, but hear
the stem-snap, the plummet
through leaves, then
the final thump against the ground.

Sometimes two
at once, or one
right after another.

During long moments of silence
I wait
and wonder about the bruised bodies,
the terror of diving through air, and
think I’ll go tomorrow
to find the newly fallen, but they
all look alike lying there
dewsoaked, disappearing before me.


 
2.

I lie beneath my window listening
to the sound of apples dropping in
the yard, a syncopated code I long to know,
which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know
the meaning of what I hear, each dull
thud of unseen apple-
body, the earth
falling to earth
once and forever, over
and over.


–Li-Young Lee

.

rotatio

.

Tending to grief is the essence of....providing a sanctuary and
safe passage for its unfolding - in the body, the psyche, and the
nervous system - which requires that we fall to the ground,
at times, and weep.

Weep for our shattering [collective and personal], for the dying
of a dream, for the entirety of the unlived life. For it is these tears
that form the substance of the portal of joy. [Rebirth].

Grief is not something we "get over", but a partner we spin
with, honor at times, argue with at others, and lament with as
the cycles of our lives unfold.

We live in a world that has lost contact with the holy waters of
reorganization. But to marginalize the experience of grief is
to work against nature. Out in the natural world, the earth grieves
by way of her seasons. We can feel that grief in a rain drop, if
we allow ourselves to be taken apart and put back together.

There is no endpoint to this restructuring, no final state of
resolution where we land in some untouchable place, free from
our embodied vulnerability, our somatic aliveness, and from
more burning.

Rather, we find ourselves in what the alchemists call the rotatio,
the holy rotation of vast cycles of rupture and repair that touch
and open the human soul.

The soul is endless and the visitors of grief may companion us
for a lifetime. But the grieving, orphaned ones of the psyche
and soma come not to harm, but to reveal. And to open a
doorway into wholeness, mercy, and light.

Grief is not so much a process that we "make it through" and
come out the other side fully intact, but a non-linear transforming
midwife of the unknown. It moves not by way of straight line,
but by that of circle and spiral.

—Matt Licata

.

mysticmeandering

.

Journal of an Ordinary Grief, excerpt

.

And if happiness should surprise you again,
do not mention its previous betrayal.

Enter into the happiness, and burst.


—Mahmoud Darwish

 

.

A Ring of Endless Light

    

.

The earth will never be the same again 
Rock, water, tree, iron, share this grief 
As distant stars participate in the pain. 
A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf, 
A dolphin death, O this particular loss 
A Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried 
If this small one was tossed away as dross, 
The very galaxies would have lied. 

How shall we sing our love’s song now 
In this strange land where all are born to die? 
Each tree and leaf and star show how 
The universe is part of this one cry, 
Every life is noted and is cherished, 
and nothing loved is ever lost or perished.

 
―Madeleine L’Engle 

.

on youth and old age, on life and death, on breathing

 

.

To be born and to die are common to all animals, but there are specifically diverse ways in which these phenomena occur; of destruction there are different types, though yet something is common to them all. 

There is violent death and again natural death, and the former occurs when the cause of death is external, the latter when it is internal, and involved from the beginning in the constitution of the organ, and not an affection derived from a foreign source. In the case of plants the name given to this is withering, in animals senility. 

Death and decay pertain to all things that are not imperfectly developed; to the imperfect also they may be ascribed in nearly the same but not an identical sense. Under the imperfect I class eggs and seeds of plants as they are before the root appears.

It is always to some lack of heat that death is due, and in perfect creatures the cause is its failure in the organ containing the source of the creature’s essential nature. This member is situate, as has been said, at the junction of the upper and lower parts; in plants it is intermediate between the root and the stem, in sanguineous animals it is the heart, and in those that are bloodless the corresponding part of their body. 

But some of these animals have potentially many sources of life, though in actuality they possess only one. This is why some insects live when divided, and why, even among sanguineous animals, all whose vitality is not intense live for a long time after the heart has been removed. Tortoises, for example, do so and make movements with their feet, so long as the shell is left, a fact to be explained by the natural inferiority of their constitution, as it is in insects also.

The source of life is lost to its possessors when the heat with which it is bound up is no longer tempered by cooling, for, as I have often remarked, it is consumed by itself. Hence when, owing to lapse of time, the lung in the one class and the gills in the other get dried up, these organs become hard and earthy and incapable of movement, and cannot be expanded or contracted. 
Finally things come to a climax, and the fire goes out from exhaustion.

Hence a small disturbance will speedily cause death in old age. Little heat remains, for the most of it has been breathed away in the long period of life preceding, and hence any increase of strain on the organ quickly causes extinction. 

It is just as though the heart contained a tiny feeble flame which the slightest movement puts out. Hence in old age death is painless, for no violent disturbance is required to cause death, and there is an entire absence of feeling when the soul’s connexion is severed. 

All diseases which harden the lung by forming tumours or waste residues, or by excess of morbid heat, as happens in fevers, accelerate the breathing owing to the inability of the lung to move far either upwards or downwards. 

Finally, when motion is no longer possible, the breath is given out and death ensues.


—Arostotle
G. R. T. Ross translation

  

.

more here

.

the lesson you forgot

.

It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.

Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for three seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all.

It is all one vast awakened thing. 
I call it the golden eternity.
It is perfect. 

We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about.


—Jack Kerouac

.

there is always the light

 

.

The first thing you should realize is that there will never be a time when you disappear or die, because there never was a time when you were born. You have always existed as Consciousness, and you will always exist as Consciousness.


—Robert Adams
Silence of the Heart

. . .

Is there death for you? For whom is death? The body which dies, were you aware of it, did you have it, during sleep? The body was not, when you slept, but you existed even then. When you awoke, you got the body and even in the waking state you exist. You existed both in sleep and waking. But the body did not exist in sleep and exists only in waking. That which does not exist always, but exists at one time and not at another, cannot be real. You exist always and you alone are therefore real.

... We are so engrossed with the objects or appearances revealed by the light, that we pay no attention to the light. In the waking or dream state in which things appear, and in the sleep state in which we see nothing, there is always the light of Consciousness or Self, like the hall lamp which is always burning. The thing to do is to concentrate on the seer and not on the seen, not on the objects, but on the Light which reveals them.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

stardust and comets and whale tooth

.

At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again.

—Caitlin Moran

.

In the Microscope

 

.

Here too are the dreaming landscapes,
 lunar, derelict.
 Here too are the masses,
 tillers of the soil.
 And cells, fighters
 who lay down their lives for a song.
Here too are cemeteries,
 fame and snow.
 And I hear the murmuring,
 the revolt of immense estates.

—Miroslav Holub

.
stem cells 
.

is this dying?

.

Is this dying? Is this all?

Is this what I feared when I prayed against a hard death?

Oh, I can bear this! I can bear this!


—Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

.

Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains. —Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

The Life-Energy and
Awareness arrive.
In due course,
The instrument’s purpose is fulfilled
The Life-Energy and
Awareness depart.
The cycle is completed.
Understand this thoroughly and
There is nothing else to do.

—Wu Hsin

.

sleep

 

.

Do you give yourself to me utterly,

Body and no-body, flesh and no-flesh

Not as a fugitive, blindly or bitterly, 

But as a child might, with no other wish?

Yes, utterly.

Then I shall bear you down my estuary,

Carry you and ferry you to burial mysteriously,

Take you and receive you,

Consume you, engulf you,

In the huge cave, my belly, love you

With huge waves continually.

And you shall cling and clamber there

And slumber there, in that dumb chamber,

Beat with my blood's beat, hear my heart move

Blindly in bones that ride above you,

Delve in my flesh, dissolved and bedded,

Through viewless valves embodied so –

Till daylight, the expulsion and awakening,

The riving and the driving forth,

Life with remorseless forceps beckoning –

Pangs and betrayal of harsh birth.


—Kenneth Slessor

.

from '640'

.

I could not die — with You —
For One must wait
To shut the Other’s Gaze down —
You — could not —

—Emily Dickinson

. 

if there are any heavens

 

.

 

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be(deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

swaying over her
(silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

                                   (suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

&the whole garden will bow)

 —E. E. Cummings 

.

on living

 

.

I 

Living is no laughing matter:
 you must live with great seriousness
  like a squirrel, for example–
   I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
  I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
 you must take it seriously,
 so much so and to such a degree
   that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                            your back to the wall,
   or else in a laboratory
 in your white coat and safety glasses,
 you can die for people–
   even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
   even though you know living
 is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
   that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees–
   and not for your children, either,
   but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
   because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
 
 

II 

Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery–
which is to say we might not get up
   from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
   about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
  for the latest newscast... 
Let’s say we’re at the front–
 for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
 we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
        but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
        about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
                        before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind–
                                I  mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
        we must live as if we will never die.
 
 

III
 
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
               and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet–
   I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even 
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
   in pitch-black space... 
You must grieve for this right now
--you have to feel this sorrow now–
for the world must be loved this much
                               if you’re going to say “I lived”... 
 
 
—Nâzım Hikmet Ran 
1902 - 1963 

.

in(formation

.

There is no universe without perception. Consciousness and the cosmos are correlative. They are one and the same.

Reality is a swirl of information in the mind. This means that absolutely everything, from the trees “out there” to our sense of time and perception of distance, is all being continually constructed and perceived by lightning-quick life-based information systems.

[...]

If all is an eternal existence of life and nature—the true “self”—what can die?

Birth and death are apprehended as illusions, and this perception is accompanied by conviction, a sense of certainty. It is cognized as a recognition of reality rather than as an acquisition of a new idea.

—Robert Lanza
Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness and the Illusion of Death

. 

stubborn persistence

 

.

Many of us fear death. We believe in death because we have been told we will die. We associate ourselves with the body, and we know that bodies die. But a new scientific theory suggests that death is not the terminal event we think.

One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely. Instead, there is a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation, the “many-worlds” interpretation, states that each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the ‘multiverse’). A new scientific theory – called biocentrism – refines these ideas. There are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios.

All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling – the ‘Who am I?’- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn’t go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?

Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists could retroactively change something that had happened in the past. Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a beam splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle did in the past.

Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it is you who will experience the outcomes that will result. The linkages between these various histories and universes transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time. Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting either this or that result onto a screen. Whether you turn the second beam splitter on or off, it’s still the same battery or agent responsible for the projection.

According to Biocentrism, space and time are not the hard objects we think. Wave your hand through the air – if you take everything away, what’s left? Nothing. The same thing applies for time. You can’t see anything through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything you see and experience right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything together.

Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now Besso” (an old friend) “has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us…know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Immortality doesn’t mean a perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether.

This was clear with the death of my sister Christine. After viewing her body at the hospital, I went out to speak with family members. Christine’s husband – Ed – started to sob uncontrollably. For a few moments I felt like I was transcending the provincialism of time. I thought about the 20-watts of energy, and about experiments that show a single particle can pass through two holes at the same time. I could not dismiss the conclusion: Christine was both alive and dead, outside of time.

Christine had had a hard life. She had finally found a man that she loved very much. My younger sister couldn’t make it to her wedding because she had a card game that had been scheduled for several weeks. My mother also couldn’t make the wedding due to an important engagement she had at the Elks Club. The wedding was one of the most important days in Christine’s life. Since no one else from our side of the family showed, Christine asked me to walk her down the aisle to give her away.

Soon after the wedding, Christine and Ed were driving to the dream house they had just bought when their car hit a patch of black ice. She was thrown from the car and landed in a banking of snow.
“Ed,” she said “I can’t feel my leg.”

She never knew that her liver had been ripped in half and blood was rushing into her peritoneum.
After the death of his son, Emerson wrote “Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.”

Whether it’s flipping the switch for the Science experiment, or turning the driving wheel ever so slightly this way or that way on black-ice, it’s the 20-watts of energy that will experience the result. In some cases the car will swerve off the road, but in other cases the car will continue on its way to my sister’s dream house.

Christine had recently lost 100 pounds, and Ed had bought her a surprise pair of diamond earrings. It’s going to be hard to wait, but I know Christine is going to look fabulous in them the next time I see her.


—Robert Lanza  
The Hufffington Post, December 8, 2009 

.

always the light

.

Is there death for you? For whom is death? The body which dies, were you aware of it, did you have it, during sleep? The body was not, when you slept, but you existed even then. When you awoke, you got the body and even in the waking state you exist. You existed both in sleep and waking. But the body did not exist in sleep and exists only in waking. That which does not exist always, but exists at one time and not at another, cannot be real. You exist always and you alone are therefore real.

... We are so engrossed with the objects or appearances revealed by the light, that we pay no attention to the light. In the waking or dream state in which things appear, and in the sleep state in which we see nothing, there is always the light of Consciousness or Self, like the hall lamp which is always burning. The thing to do is to concentrate on the seer and not on the seen, not on the objects, but on the Light which reveals them.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.