Shut Down

I was moved to meditation by this exhibition and essay at the Leopold museum in Vienna.

In a few years many of these structures will have disappeared – torn down, carted away or simply collapsed. What will be left then? A few walls, some rubble and iron skeletons – an elegiac memento mori. They compel us to reflect on the essence of things, on our own mortality. “My occupation: ruins builder. My mission: ruins architect. My sin: ruins voyeur. Don’t ask me about forgotten places”, wrote the Romanian poet Mircea Cărtărescu. “Gather around me, open my skull and look at my brain: before your very eyes it will crumble like plaster. And its dust will be mixed indistinguishably with the dust of the ruins among which I have lived my entire life, as a lover of a harem of ruins.”

Shut the door...

…close the curtains, then groove your ass off to this:

What do you think?

if you pass your night
and merge it with dawn
for the sake of heart
what do you think will happen?

if the entire world
is covered with the blossoms
you have labored to plant
what do you think will happen?

if the elixir of life
that has been hidden in the dark
fills the desert and towns
what do you think will happen?

if because of
your generosity and love
a few humans find their lives
what do you think will happen?

if you pour an entire jar
filled with joyous wine
on the head of those already drunk
what do you think will happen?

go my friend
bestow your love
even on your enemies
if you touch their hearts
what do you think will happen?

- Rumi

Kick ass moves

I was always fascinated by these shows when they were on, this one is pretty amazing, then it turns surreal.



My heart goes out to the presenter.

Tears

Just read…

Secrets – One foot in front of the other.

Nyungne fasting retreat

Its been more than twenty fours hours since I last drank or ate anything. I can't sleep at the moment because my energy is sky high. I am waiting for sunrise to eat breakfast and a drink a cup of tea. These things seem golden to me. I know what Primo Levi mean't when he talked about wanting to get back to the normal suffering of the everyday. (Please don't think I equate a self-enforced fast with life in Berkenau) Such a strange experience all the same.

I understand better how quickly one becomes weak through hunger and thirst, you get shooting pains through your joints, aching limbs and dizzy spells. Many people in this world are surviving on will-power alone.

More on disappearing...

'There are quiet places also in the mind', he said meditatively. 'But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately — to put a stop to the quietness. …All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head – round and round, continually What's it for? What's it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn't there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night – not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep – the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits …we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows — a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying …For one's alone in the crystal, and there's no support from the outside, there is nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to
pull oneself up by or stand on …There is nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiast about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize you and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die …one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard of manner.

- Antic Hay (1923)

The Dharma of Dancing

"From the Buddhist point of view, basic human nature is beautiful, profound and clear. This is how you exist; it’s simply a matter of recognizing your own profound qualities and seeing that you have the potential for limitless development. Meditation on the four immeasurables--limitless love, limitless compassion, limitless joy, and limitless equilibrium--indicate this.

The reason that these four attitudes are called limitless is that fundamentally, we do have love, compassion, joy and equilibrium, but they are limited. We have love but it is limited love; we have compassion, but it is limited compassion; we have joyful appreciation of each other’s lives, but that joy is limited; we have a certain degree of equilibrium, but it too is limited. What prevents us from realizing the four immeasurables is our ego; the ego mind. The view the ego mind perceives is wrong, partial. Therefore, our loving kindness is very narrow. First, we have to recognize this in order to expand it.

Look how we limit our enjoyment. Intellectually, our minds create the fabrication, “This object is my object of joy; I cannot enjoy the rest.” Such preconceptions cement our minds into fixed positions and are the result of our ego mind making mistaken judgments and placing limitations on our thought-- “Only this object can bring me joy.”

The Dharma of Dancing – Lama Yeshe

You?

What would it mean if you could forget yourself?
I don't mean amnesia.
Your mind still working
but you are gone.

Maybe you've had a taste of this?

Everything falls into place.
And you take your rest
in the middle of action.

No longer needing attention
To assert who you are.

Happy being ignored,
comfortable alone.

Lifted from this constraint
perceptions become startling
the slightest movement poetic

Centred finally because you've stopped holding on

We chase normal food
everyday
You are fortunate if you understand
So please I urge you
Do everything 'you' can.

Talking to myself

"Are you thinking what I’m thinking?"

"I’m always thinking what you’re thinking!"

I wish it was different...

(This post contains extremely distressing material)

Keep your eyes open to this reality. What is the nature of this world in which we find ourselves?

Update
…now wonderful things are happening…

Update #2
Google have take down the video, here is a YouTube version.

Richard Dawkins touches emptiness

Whenever I've come across Richard Dawkins, I've felt he was rather arrogant. However, I found some time to watch his lecture "The Universe is Queerer Than We Can Suppose" and its inspiring, not least because I could listen to his voice for hours, he reminds me of children's stories on casette tape. Its really when he gets to this part:

‘In a desert plane in Tanzania in the shadow of the volcano Ol Doinyo Lengai there is a dune made of volcanic ash. The beautiful thing is that it moves, bodily. Its what's technically known as a Barcarn and the entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17 metres per year. It retains its cresent shape and moves in the directions of the horns; what happens is that the wind blows the sand up the shallow slope on the other side and then as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge it cascades down on the inside of the cresent and so the whole horn-shaped dune moves. Steve Grande points out that you and I are ourselves more like a wave than a permanent thing. He invites us the reader to think of an experience from your childhood, something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell – as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell, you weren't there, not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are therefore you are not the stuff of which you are made – if that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does! Because it is important.’

The hair stood up on the back of my neck…