Heart Cave
In the full light of day there are caves.
In full sunlight caverns.
Its not always a bad thing to enter them,
to think oneself over in there, and emerge then
charged with something else,
to hallow the day.
excerpt from Repose, by Guillevic Selected Poems
Excerpt Tagore's Invitation, image H.C.Love
"Seeds of Contemplation EVERY moment and every event of every mans life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love."
- Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
Still Life, H.C. Love
A voice from the dark called out, "The poets must give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster, peace, not only the absence of war."
But peace, like a poem, is not there ahead of itself, can't be imagined before it is made, can't be known except in the words of its making, grammar of justice, syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it, dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have until we begin to utter its metaphors, learning them as we speak.
A line of peace might appear if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, questioned our needs, allowed long pauses...
A cadence of peace might balance its weight on that different fulcrum; peace a presence, an energy field more intense than war, might pulse then, stanza by stanza into the world, each act of living one of its words, each word a vibration of light - facets of the forming crystal.
Denise Levertov, Making Peace
Has the light done you any injury?
Does the light ever take you away?
Is it always the same light?
- Guillevic/ Levertov, excerpt Enquetes
"The outer being is a means of expression only, not one's self. One must not identify with it, for what it expresses is a personality formed by the old ignorant nature. If not identified one can change it so as to express the true inner personality of the light." - Sri Aurobindo, The Integral Yoga
Light Breaks through... a dawning of awareness of this inner self - not what you expect... so easy to go back to the old ways... so hard to stay with what moves you into the unknown the unexplored aspects of true light of self. The roles you have played no longer apply here, as you grapple with this you become more of who you were meant to be and yes this can be painful to the ego
that cherishes the false self, and has a fear of whats unfamiliar.
Does the light ever take you away?
"Lost in the light supernal am I and on that light I turn my back ... " December's seed thought
The sadhana of this yoga does not proceed through any set mental teaching or prescribed forms of meditation... but by aspiration, by a self-concentration inwards or upwards, by self-opening to an influence, to the Divine power above us and its workings, to the Divine presence in the heart...It is only by faith, aspiration and surrender that this self -opening can come. - Sri Aurobindo
Is it always the same light?
"A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic--or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can."
When one enters the true (yogic) consciousness then you see that everything can be done, even if at present only a slight beginning has been made; but a beginning is enough, since the force, the power are there. It is not really on the capacity of the outer nature that success depends, (for the outer nature all self-exceeding seems impossibly difficult,) but on the inner being and to the inner being all is possible. One has only to get into contact with the inner being and change the outer view and consciousness from the inner; that is the work of the sadhana and is sure to come with sincerity, aspiration and patience. - Sri Aurobindo, The Integral Yoga
As the sun illuminates the moon and the stars, so let us illumine one another... Anonymous
"Praise be to Nero's Neptune the Titanic sails at dawn And everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on?" And Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them and fisherman hold flowers" - Bob Dylan
"His work has also veered purposefully into poetry. in 1966, he wrote a book of poems and prose called Tarantula. Many of the liner notes from his 1960's albums were written as epitaphs. And his songwriting is peppered with literary references. Consider, for example, these lyrics from "Desolation Row", released on 1965's Highway 61 revisited.
Professor Ricks is not the only scholar who considers Dylan a great American poet. Dylan has been nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature every year since 1996, and the lyrics to his song "Mr. Tambourine Man" appeared in the Norton Introduction to Literature."
The Poetry of Rock: A Reflection of Human Values, The Center for Humanities Inc. N.Y.
"With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as god gives us to see the right, let us... achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."
-Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address
"The night, scent -heavy, lies on the park and, quiet, her stars look out and see how already the moon's white bark wants to land in the top of the linden tree. I hear in the distant fountain's babble a long forgotten fairy-tale, and in the high, motionless grass the faint sound of an apple fall. From the nearby hill, the night-wind floats past old oaks planted in a line and carries on his blue butterfly wing the heavy scent of young wine." - Rainer Maria Rilke, Dream Crowned
“We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
night bloom
As I drew nearer to the end of all desire,
I brought my longings ardor to a final height,
Just as I ought. My vision becoming pure,
Entered more and more the beam of that high light
that shines on its own truth. from then, my seeing
Became too large for speech, which fails at a sight
Beyond all boundaries, at memories undoing -
As when the dreamer sees and after the dream
the passion endures, imprinted on his being
Though he can't recall the rest. I am the same:
Inside my heart, although my vision is almost entirely faded,
droplets of its sweetness come
The way the sun dissolves the snow's crust -
The way, in the wind that stirred the light leaves,
The oracle that the Sibyl wrote was lost.
from the Last Canto of Paradiso, Dante Alighieri
"Or as Sahajo says: "In a dream, in one moment fifty years can pass. When the eyes open it is all false; such is living in the body." Don't immediately agree because one who agrees to it immediately will not have an experience of his own. When it is your experience, only then will it lead you towards the truth. Nothing can happen with borrowed experience.
The world is like the last morning star. Sahajo says: it is fast disappearing like a pearl of dew. it looks like a pearl, but only in appearance; actually it is a dewdrop. How long can it survive? A little passing breeze and the dewdrop will vanish in the dust. Just a ray of sun and the dewdrop will evaporate... like a pearl of dew, like water held in the hollow of your hands. Or it is like when you are trying to hold water in your hands: the hands are filled but soon the water starts falling through your fingers. Not even a moment passes and your hands are empty. When you feel that everything is achieved, your hands are already beginning to empty.
Look deeply at the transitory - that is the first step towards looking at the eternal. One who has not recognized the momentary will never be able to recognize the eternal... Look deeply at all that comes and goes, that exists and disappears, that manifests and vanishes. A Flower blooms in the morning and fades away in the evening. Look carefully at the momentary: now there is beauty, tomorrow it will not be there. Youth was just there and it is gone. Slowly, slowly one thing will become clear to those who look at the momentary - that it is madness to search there for truth. How can there be truth in that which does not endure? The definition of truth is that which is always there... that which is a constant unbroken stream. Nothing can happen to it... there can be no break in its constancy. But to know this, you have first to deeply see the momentary. Recognizing the momentary, slowly, slowly the recognition of the eternal will start to arise. Seeing the futile, slowly, slowly you will start to have a glimpse of the significant. seeing the wrong, you will recognize the right..."
from Showering without Clouds, Osho
