december 2006
active self-knowledge
without self-knowledge, experience breeds illusion; with self-knowledge, experience, which is the response to challenge, does not leave a cumulative residue as memory. Self-knowledge is the discovery from moment to moment of the ways of the self, its intentions and pursuit, its thoughts and appetites. There can never be “your experience” and “my experience”; the very term “my experience” indicates ignorance and the acceptance of illusion.
january 25, the book of life: daily meditations with krishnamurti, © 1955 by krishnamurti foundation of america, pub. harper collins
gratitude
what if the world we live in is a reflection of what we focus our attention on, of what we honor, celebrate, and think about most? is it really so farfetched an idea? we are a culture obsessed with evil, danger, and materialism and our world is becoming more plagued by these things with each passing day. we tend to believe that we’re obsessed with them because they’re growing, but what if it’s the other way ’round: they’re growing because we’re obsessed with them, because we keep feeding them our energy?
i was thinking about this and imagining how different the world might be if we fed the things we love rather than the things we fear. i envisioned a culture in which goodness, connectedness, and life are celebrated in meaningful and tangible ways, in which the energy of our lives is expended in living deeply rather than in endless war.
here’s my prayer:
dear god,
today, make my breathing and the beating of my heart a thank-you. help me remember to be glad i’m here. remind me throughout the day to say thank you as I meet you in all your disguises, to know that you always come bearing gifts if i’m willing to look inside the many packages i think of as “other.” today, give me the eyes of a child.
sincerely, your forgetful friend
troy chapman
© copyright 2006 the lifeful way
gandhi - violence the choice
... where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence - i would advise violence... I would rather have india resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should - in a cowardly manner - become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor
... to run away from danger - instead of facing it - is to deny one's faith in man and god - even one's own self - it were better for one to drown oneself than live to declare such bankruptcy of faith
i have been repeating over and over again that he who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honour by non-violently facing death may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor - he who can do neither of the two is a burden - he has no business to be the head of a family - he must either hide himself - or must rest content to live forever in helplessness and be prepared to crawl like a worm at the bidding of a bully
... when... violence... is offered in self-defence or for the defence of the defenceless - it is an act of bravery far better than cowardly submission - the latter befits neither man nor woman - under violence - there are many stages and varieties of bravery - every man must judge this for himself - no other person can or has the right
source - the mind of mahatma gandhi
accepting life as it is
the first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory - the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. those who think they know -- and their name is legion -- how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time - without death - are unfit for illumination
so if you really want to help this world - what you will have to teach is how to live in it - and that no one can do who has not themselves learned how to live in the joyful sorrow and the sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is
joseph campbell
quote courtesy of troy chapman
perfection
Wholeness lies beyond perfection. Perfection is only an idea. For most experts and many of the rest of us it has become a life goal. The pursuit of perfection may actually be dangerous to your health. The Type A personality for whom perfectionism is a way of life is associated with heart disease. Perfectionism can break your heart and all the hearts around you.
A perfectionist sees life as if it were one of those little pictures that used to appear in the newspapers over the caption "What's wrong with this picture?" If you looked at the picture carefully you would see that the table only had three legs or the house had no door. I remember the "Aha!" that these pictures evoked in me as a child. I wonder now why anyone would want to take such satisfaction in seeing what is missing, what is wrong, what is "broken."
The pursuit of perfection has become a major addiction of our time. Fortunately, perfectionism is learned. No one is born a perfectionist, which is why it is possible to recover. I am a recovering perfectionist. Before I began recovering, I experienced that I and everyone else was always falling short, that who we were and what we did was never quite good enough. I sat in judgment on life itself. Perfectionism is the belief that life is broken.
Sometimes perfectionists have had a parent who is a perfectionist, someone who awarded approval on the basis of performance and achievement. Children can learn early that they are loved for what they do and not simply for who they are. To a perfectionistic parent, what you do never seems as good as what you might do if you tried just a little harder. The life of such children can become a constant striving to earn love. Of course love is never earned. It is a grace we give one another. Anything we need to earn is only approval.
Few perfectionists can tell the difference between love and approval. Perfectionism is so widespread in this culture that we actually have had to invent another word for love. "Unconditional love," we say. Yet, all love is unconditional. Anything else is just approval.
The pursuit of perfection is built into every professional training. But long before I went to medical school, I was trained as a perfectionist by my father. As a child, when I brought home a ninety-eight on an exam, he invariably responded, "What happened to the other two points?" I adored my dad, and my whole childhood was focused on the pursuit of the other two points. By the time I was in my twenties, I had become as much a perfectionist as he. It was no longer necessary for him to ask me about those two points: I had taken that over for myself. It was many years before I found out that those points don't matter. That they are not the secret to living a life worth remembering. That they don't make you lovable. Or whole.
Life offers us many teachers and many teachings. One of mine was David, who was an artist and my first love. The living proof that opposites attract. While we were together, my driver's license came up for renewal. And I needed to take a written test of the traffic laws.
The DMV had sent a little booklet. I studied it for days. All the while I was memorizing the meaning of the white curb and the yellow curb, David would try to persuade me to join him for a walk or go to a party or out to dinner or dancing or even just talk. I told him I couldn't take the time. Of course I got 100% on the test. Triumphant, I rushed into his studio shouting that I had gotten 100% on my driving test. David looked up from his painting with an expression of great tenderness. "My love," he said, "why would you want to do that?"
It was not the response I had expected. Suddenly I understood that I had sacrificed a great deal to get a hundred on a test that I had only needed to pass in order to drive. I had spent days studying for it that I could have spent in much wiser ways. I had learned many things that I did not even want to know. It had felt as if I had no choice. If my father could not approve of me with anything less than 100, I could not approve of myself with less than 100 either. Even on a written driving test. Like most addicts, I was out of control.
It was clearly not about driving. It was not even about grades. It was about needing to deserve love. Fortunately, David did not play by these rules. He didn't even know the game.
from Kitchen Table Wisdom, by Rachel Remen, M.D., ©1996, Riverhead Books
enthusiasm
There is another way of creative manifestation that may come to those who remain true to their inner purpose of awakening. Suddenly one day they know what their outer purpose is. They have a great vision, a goal, and from then on they work toward implementing that goal. Their goal or vision is usually connected in some way to something that on a smaller scale they are doing and enjoy doing already ...
Enthusiasm means there is deep enjoyment in what you do plus the added element of a ... vision that you work toward. When you add a goal to the enjoyment of what you do, the energy-field ... changes. A certain degree of what we might call structural tension is now added to enjoyment, and so it turns into enthusiasm ...
... it may appear that you are under stress, but the intensity of enthusiasm has nothing to do with stress. [With stress] the balance between enjoyment and structural tension is lost, and the latter has won... it is usually a sign that the ego has returned, and you are cutting yourself off from the creative power of the universe. Instead, there is only the force and strain of egoic wanting, and so you have to struggle and "work hard" to make it ...
Enthusiasm brings an enormous empowerment into what you do, so that all those who have not accessed that power would look upon "your" achievements in awe and may equate them with who you are ... Unlike egoic wanting, which creates opposition ... enthusiasm ... is nonconfrontational ... [no] winners and losers. It is based on inclusion, not exclusion, of others. It ... does not need to take energy from ... something or someone ... it never attacks [obstacles] but walks around them or by yielding or embracing turns the opposing energy into a helpful one, the foe into a friend.
Through enthusiasm you enter into full alignment with the ... creative principle of the universe, but without identifying [yourself] with its creations ...
Enjoyment of what you are doing, combined with a ... vision that you work toward, becomes enthusiasm. Even though you have a goal, what you are doing in the present moment needs to remain the focal point of your attention ... Make sure your vision ... is not an inflated image of yourself ... a concealed form of ego, such as wanting to become a movie star [etc., or] on having [material things] ... Instead, make sure your goals are dynamic ... point toward an activity that you are engaged in and through which you are connected to other human beings as well as to the whole ... see yourself inspiring countless people with your work and enriching their lives. Feel how that activity enriches or deepens not only your life but that of countless others. Feel yourself being an opening through which energy flows from the ... Source of all life through you for the benefit of all.
Enthusiasm ... is the creative use of mind ... the way of the new earth.
from: A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle, © 2005, Dutton
love
Love is patient and kind;
love is not jealous or boastful;
it is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.
1 Corinthians 13:4-8
that thing which you fight
you becomeSurely that thing which you fight you become.... If I am angry and you meet me with anger what is the result? More anger. You have become that which I am. If I am evil and you fight me with evil means then you also become evil, however righteous you may feel. If I am brutal and you use brutal methods to overcome me, then you become brutal like me. And this we have done for thousands of years. Surely there is a different approach than to meet hate by hate? If I use violent methods to quell anger in myself then I am using wrong means for a right end, and thereby the right end ceases to be. In this there is no understanding; there is no transcending anger. Anger is to be studied tolerantly and understood; it is not to be overcome through violent means. Anger may be the result of many causes, and without comprehending them there is no escape from anger.
We have created the enemy, the bandit, and becoming ourselves the enemy in no way brings about an end to enmity. We have to understand the cause of enmity and cease to feed it by our thought, feeling, and action. This is an arduous task demanding constant self-awareness and intelligent pliability, for what we are the society, the state, is. The enemy and the friend are the outcome of our thought and action. We are responsible for creating enmity and so it is more important to be aware of our own thought and action than to be concerned with the foe and the friend, for right thinking puts an end to division. Love transcends the friend and the enemy.
Krishnamurti
"the underlying song"
In so many instances, the poem is muddied by too much explanation, too much exposure. What one is aiming for is the indication of an energy, or a spirit, below the surface, in the secret vaults of the self, that somehow withers under too much exposition or explanation. That's why I've always believed that so much of the energy of the poem comes from the secrets it folds into what we would call, in a flower, its crown. The height of the beauty of a bloom is its folded state, rather than when it's fully opened. The rose when it is just about ready to unfold is at its most beautiful.
In a poem, the secrets of the poem give it its tension and gift of emerging sense and form, so that it's not always the flowering in the poem and the specific images that make it memorable, but the tensions and physicality, the rhythms, the underlying song.
The high spots of a poem could be said to correspond with the bloom in the garden. But you need the compositional entity in order to convey the weight and force of the poem's motion, of its emerging meaning.
And you need the silence. So much of the power of a poem is in what it doesn't say as much as in what it does say. As when a flower is preparing to bloom, or after it has bloomed, when it is suspending its strengths and its potency and is at rest-or seems to be, its mission to flower and to produce seed having been fulfilled.
There's that sense that unless something's in bloom, nothing is going on; it's dead in the garden. People talk about a plant being "done" - "the salvia's done for the season" - as if blooming is all a plant has to do. That's a complete fallacy and limitation.
In a poem, the danger is obvious; there is natural idiom and then there is domesticated language. The difference is apparent immediately when you sense everything has been subjugated, that the poet has tamed the language and the thought process that flows into a poem until it maintains a principle of order but nothing remains to give the poem its tang, its liberty, its force. Once the poem starts flowing, the poet must not try to dictate every syllable.
One of my principles is never to try to explain what a poem is about. That's a straight line to me. The path to the understanding of the poem is for me always circuitous, it's a winding path... The poem holds its secrets and keeps its tensions by closing out the opportunity to explain. The fact that it is so secret is what makes it so immediately touching and searching. It is not like explanatory prose ...
Art conceals and reveals at the same time. Part of the concept of the garden is that you never see it all at once. ...the way to see a garden is by circling it, by walking through it.
You don't see the garden as a whole from any point, but you begin to know it by making a tour around it. Then it becomes a garden in the mind, and you become the instrument that defines it, just as you have to create the wholeness of the poem in your mind. Though you learn the meaning of a poem, the sense of a poem, word by word, in the end what you have is a fusion.
In the poem, there is an impulse that moves from line to line, from image to image, but complete revelation is not achieved until the poem arrives at its terminal point, at which time what has been secret before the poem, begins to reveal itself, and you have to really meditate on the poem. It's like someone removing a garment slowly, slowly. What bothers me about so much contemporary poetry is that there is none of that secrecy; it is all exposition, all revelation. I find that to be a diminishing factor.
Poetry is a secret language. It is not the language of the day. It is not the domestic language. It contains within it the secret sources of one's own life energy and life convictions. And it is not immediately translatable. ...but there is a life there and it is embodied in that language.
from "The Wild Braid" by Stanley Kunitz, ©2005, pub W W Norton & Co.
Stanley died on May 16th, 2006. He would have reached his 101st birthday on July 29th.
our endangered values - what is a superpower?
Americans have always been justifiably proud of our country, beginning with our forefathers' bold Declaration of Independence and their pronouncement "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Since then, our people have utilized America's great natural resources, access to warm oceans, relatively friendly neighbors, a heterogeneous population, and a pioneering spirit to form a "more perfect union."
Now, more than at any time in history, the United States of America has become the preeminent military power on earth. While there has been a sharp downward trend in worldwide expenditures for weapons during the past twenty years, the United States has continued to increase its military budget every year. It now exceeds $400 billion annually, equal to the total in all other nations combined. The next largest military budget is Russia's, which is one-sixth as large. The only arms race is one that we are having with ourselves. One reason for this enormous expenditure is that twenty thousand sailors and marines are deployed in ships afloat and almost three hundred thousand additional troops are stationed in more than 120 countries, with military bases in 63 of them. Since I left office, American presidents have intervened about fifty times in foreign countries. In addition to supplying our own military forces, America's arms manufacturers and those of our NATO allies provide 80 percent of weapon sales on the international market.
It is good to know that our nation's defenses against a conventional attack are impregnable, and imperative that America remain vigilant against threats from terrorists. But as is the case with a human being, admirable characteristics of a nation are not defined by size and physical prowess.
What are some of the other attributes of a superpower? Once again, they might very well mirror those of a person. These would include a demonstrable commitment to truth, justice, peace, freedom, humility, human rights, generosity, and the upholding of other moral values.There is no inherent reason that our nation cannot be the international example of these virtues. Our government should be known, without question, as opposed to war, dedicated to the resolution of disputes by peaceful means, and, whenever possible, eager to exert our tremendous capability and influence to accomplish this goal. We should be seen as the unswerving champion of freedom and human rights, both among our own citizens and within the global community. America should be the focal point around which other nations of all kinds could marshal to combat threats to security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing humane assistance to people in need, willing to lead other industrialized nations in sharing some of our great wealth with those who are destitute.
In achieving all these goals, our great country should strive in every practical way to cooperate with other nations, most of which share these same fundamental ideals. There is an unprecedented opportunity as we enter this new millennium to use our unequaled influence wisely and with a generous spirit.
There would be no real sacrifice in exemplifying these traits. Instead, our own well-being would be enhanced by restoring the trust, admiration, and friendship that our nation formerly enjoyed among other peoples. At the same time, all Americans could be united at home in a common commitment to revive and nourish the religious faith and historic political and moral values that we have espoused and for which we have struggled during the past 230 years.
from Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, by Jimmy Carter, pub 2005, Simon and Schuster
on genius
Mozart wrote: "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together make genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."
The love Mozart refers to is agape not eros. A blissful connection with God, a higher power or a universal field of spiritual energy. It includes but is not limited to sensual love. It depends on innocence rather than pride. The genius knows he or she is only a connection to this higher power. Pride is only that of having been of service.
Einstein, often thought of as a genius because of his extremely high IQ, was actually aware of the real source of his creativity as this connection. He wrote of "the music of the spheres ... a pre-established harmony" that revealed itself to him through his beautiful and elegant theories. He was also deeply affected by music, particularly Mozart's, throughout his life and played his violin for help whenever his thinking reached an impasse. TK
on innocence in abstract painting
Cezanne was most innocent in the Last Water Colors... Matisse... in the Paper Collages. Mozart... in the Requiem...
Innocence is a truce, an equilibrium, between the mind, the emotions and the senses when the movement between them is effortless and they in their interplay are uncontaminated one with the other... It is most delicate and sickeningly subject to withering corruption. Yet, it can smile, for a second, on its own corruption and beautifully incorporate it into its work...
If innocence is the appetite of the soul, the Koan turned clear... in painting it is the dissolving of the barriers between the perceived and the executed. It is the split-second that makes "it" a painting. It is what the painter most admires about his own action. Who wouldn't want to cultivate it? But the advent of innocence to the artist, is... a moment of hesitancy and bewilderment - not calculation. Calculate it, make it a gimmick and you have a bar fly that buzzes in vacant ears, a newly interesting ambiguity... an idea for a symposium on "the creative attitude", a way of the 'artistic' life which implies ignorance as a status-quo.
Of course, we are all corrupt and yet, we are very, very innocent. Living is a great innocence. Painting, as an activity... is... hardly innocent. Innocence is in the margin which the artist carries about himself. It can make Grace (the painter's grace) which can invade the natural impurities... of painting.
A thirst for the absolute may be mad but it gave the early abstractionists a pioneer courage. The thirst for innocence is sympathetic but sentimental. A wide eyed, childish gaze will not solve a plastic problem or a moral one. Abstract painting is, by its favorite definition, a thing unto itself, non-"square"... in its associations. Sentimentality cannot produce it. For 'it' is... cross-references, frustrations, accidents, calculations, self-hypnosis, knowledge, experience, culture, skill and sweat which is run by a current wired to Heaven, Hell and all in between but which, on very rare occasions is controlled by a gentle, arms down, big blue innocence... and, for five minutes, leads (the painter) into the sin of thinking that he is God...
John Ferren
excerpted from "It Is". Autumn 1958, A magazine for Abstract Art
Copyright 1958, Second Half Publishing Company, Inc, NY, NY
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