Posted on: February 1, 2012
Van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows. 1890
Forty Illusions Before Midnight
Birds never fly away
Fish never swim away
The sun never sets
We are idiots of ego
The only revolutions
That matter are the violent ones
The ones that force us to cast off
Me mine me mine
The only revolutions that matter
Are those that reveal
All is relative
All is contingent and evanescent
Like the leaf that falls because
She says so
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Posted on: January 12, 2012
Ishizuri Jakucho. 1770
Have decided to take the plunge. Jump in. No longer just an observer. I will practice. I will breathe zazen. I will contain all opposites and not look back. Will do Mu and find emptiness in all forms and form in all emptiness. Will do what is necessary to eliminate I.
The wheel. The great karmic wheel. How to get off it. Why wait? Why wait a thousand lifetimes? Why not now? Total immediacy, total naturalness, complete such-ness. Now. Within this one lifetime, which is all that there is, the nothing and the everything, the nowhere and the everywhere, the center and the circumference, I will get off the wheel. Why wait? Why postpone it? There is only now. There is only here, now.…
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Posted on: December 31, 2011
Golden Pavilion, Kyoto, Japan. Photo by Keith Pomakis
Nothing to learn
Sitting still and awesome like a mountain
No-I thought of nothing
Half-way home
Master Hsueng asked No-I
“Why do you think of nothing
With great intent?”
And No-I said
“Through concentration on nothing
I am liberated.”
Thwack came the bamboo stick
Gong gong gong rang the bell
Birds cawed as they fled into the blue sky
Their sky their home
“Master, why did you strike me!“
No-I asked in great pain
No longer still or awesome like a mountain
And Master Hsueng answered:
“When you grasp after nothing
You make it an object
Outside Mind-Body
You break the flow between void
And form
Form and void
You categorize nothing!”
Thwack came the bamboo stick
Back down on No-I’s shoulders
No-I did not Awaken
For two more years
by Douglas Pinson
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