Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living. Guns us down… We’re caught in a universe of collision and drift, the long slow ripples of the first Big Bang as the universe breaks apart; the closest galaxies smash together, then those that are left…
Master Yu and Master Sang were friends. Once when it rained continuously for ten days, Master Yu said, “Perhaps Master Sang is unwell.” He wrapped some rice and took it to his friend. When he arrived at Sang’s gate, he heard sounds of singing or wailing accompanied by a lute. “Father? mother? Heaven? Man?”…
“When we say to one another,‘I am this’, how do we knowthat the ‘I’ isthe real ‘I’? You dream that you are a birdsoaring into the sky; you dream that you are a fishdiving into the deep.We do not know whether wewho are now speakingare awake or dreaming. It is not seeing what is…
Having transcended all life, he was clear as the morning.Having become as clear as the morning, he was able to see the One.Having seen the One, he was able to set aside past and present.Having set aside past and present, he was able to enter where there is neither life…
There is the great mass of nature –it supports my body. I struggle with my life; old age brings relief and death rest. What makes my life good also makes my death good. A boat may be hidden in a ravine, or a fishing net in a lake, and you…
“What do you mean by virtue not being manifested?” “Nothing is so level than still waters –this can be a paradigm. There is inner preservation and no outer movement. Virtue is the perfect cultivation of harmony. Even though this is not manifested in the person, things cannot be without it.“ Zhuangzi by Zhuang Zhou,…
Moira was the name given by the Greeks to this realm of the incalculable and of sublime and eternal limitedness; and they set it round their gods like a horizon beyond which they could neither see nor act, —with that secret defiance of the gods which…
This conversation takes place between Confucius and Yan Hui, a court official. Can you imagine a more precarious professional role, than a job in the administration of an autocrat? The topic revolves around how a “fasting-of-the-mind” is advantageous to someone such as Hui. Confucius describes a concentration, a quieting of the will, as one…
The lyric penned by Chrissie Hynde is more true now than ever. Resist temptation, irrational faith in “the system,” that’s going to take care of us. The system is an abstraction, a collection of imagined, dream-like benefits, (democracy protects everyone’s rights, captalism-gets-us-all-ahead, etc.) quite divorced from the way things actually work, the sharp-edged reality….
Monday, a mild day with 45 degrees F at 6:30AM. The poet James Dickey suggests in his poem To Rise To Walk Again that non-human mammals live in a perpetual paradise. That is, they live in a state of perpetual renewal. A consciousness that is filled with each successive moment would be one that…
