If you are not coming to put into question everything you do, I don’t see why you’re here.
Love must come to the mind
Question: I am full of hate. Will you please teach me how to love?
K: No one can teach you how to love. If people could be taught how to love, the world problem would be very simple, would it not? If we could learn how to love from a book as we learn mathematics, this would be a marvelous world; there would be no hate, no exploitation, no wars, no division of rich and poor, and we would all be really friendly with each other. But love is not so easily come by. It is easy to hate, and hate brings people together after a fashion; it creates all kinds of fantasies, it brings about various types of co-operation, as in war. But love is much more difficult. You cannot learn how to love, but what you can do is to observe hate and put it gently aside. Don’t battle against hate, don’t say how terrible it is to hate people, but see hate for what it is and let it drop away; brush it aside, it is not important. What is important is not to let hate take root in your mind. Do you understand? Your mind is like rich soil, and if given sufficient time any problem that comes along takes root like a weed, and then you have the trouble of pulling it out; but if you do not give the problem sufficient time to take root, then it has no place to grow and it will wither away. If you encourage hate, give it time to take root, to grow, to mature, it becomes an enormous problem. But if each time hate arises you let it go by, then you will find that your mind becomes very sensitive without being sentimental; therefore it will know love.
The mind can pursue sensations, desires, but it cannot pursue love. Love must come to the mind. And, when once love is there, it has no division as sensuous and divine: it is love. That is the extraordinary thing about love: it is the only quality that brings a total comprehension of the whole of existence.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, “Think on these things,” 1964, pp 62-63
Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.
Don DeLillo, Underworld (via liquidnight)
Allenova Varola from avanishedtime.
(Source: avanishedtime)
The Procession of the Worlds. From ‘The Children’s Encyclopedia’ published by Arthur Mee. Courtesy of blueruins.
Transparent
When all thoughts
Are exhausted
I slip into the woods
And gather
A pile of shepherd’s purse.
Like the little stream
Making its way
Through the mossy crevices
I, too, quietly
Turn clear and transparent.
~ Ryokan
Courtesy of The Beauty We Love.
“Masao Yamamoto is a famous Japanese photographer who successfully interprets his knowledge of existence through his photography. Yamamoto’s images are simple, nostalgic, and elegant. They are suggestive and original, and can be perceived in many ways. He tells us, without explanation, about the human experience. Yamamoto exposes us to one of his influences: a Japanese calligrapher-poet named Ryokan. Yamamoto describes his respect for Ryokan’s work by admiring his ability to “describe simply the movement of a leaf trembling as it falls” in one of his haikus. This poem can be interpreted in several ways. The falling leaf could be a metaphor for life, the right side up, the bad, or the reverse side, the good.
Yamamoto’s work emphasizes that some things are beyond our knowlege of physical reality. Not everything can be explained using empirical investigations, and perhaps some things are better left undiscovered and unexplained. Perhaps by analyzing every insignificant detail, one may lose sight of the broader landscape. By not labeling and categorizing, one can discover the mysteries of the unknown, one can think autonomously, and maybe that is more honest than any proven fact. If you are curious, read some excerpts from Being and Time by Heidegger. Or read some Derrida. For photography lovers, new discoveries can be found in Camera Lucida. There are connections in the thoughts of great philosophers, Yamamoto included. Yamamoto is of a different breed, but he too has ways of explaining that life is worth living, even though at times it is shit.”
Courtesy of Illiterate Magazine
Thomas Merton on becoming the poet that you were meant to become (note to self)
Many poets are not poets
for the same reason that
many religious men are not saints:
they never succeed in being themselves.
They never get around to being the particular poet
or the particular monk they are intended to be by God.
They never become the man or the artist who is called
for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.
They waste their years in vain efforts
to be some other poet, some other saint…
They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor
to have somebody else’s experiences or write somebody else’s poems.
There is intense egoism in following everybody else.
People are in a hurry to magnify themselves
by imitating what is popular—
too lazy to think of anything better.
~ Thomas Merton
Courtesy of The Beauty We Love & Behind the Lines: Poetry, War, & Peace.
Essence is emptiness. Everything else, accidental. In this world of trickery, emptiness is what your soul wants.
Rumi, 13th century Persian poet-philospher. From Fernwood Zendo.
Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) “Iris,” from yama-bato
