"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."

Anais Nin

"My cosmic schmuck principle holds that, if you occasionally notice that you've been thinking or acting like a cosmic schmuck, you''ll become less of a cosmic schmuck. And the more often you notice that you're thinking and acting like a cosmic schmuck, the less of a cosmic schmuck you become. On the other hand if you never, never, never suspect that you might be thinking or acting like a cosmic schmuck, you will remain a cosmic schmuck for the rest of your life."

-Robert Anton Wilson

"Writing poetry consists in letting the word be heard behind words"

-Gerhart Hauptmann

"But the cult of the self, which is really at the engine of consumer society and which now dominates our culture...is very differnt...it is about a kind of breakage of community...and of course this is what consumer society is about - it's about creating anxieties and fears quite consciously...this cult at its core has many of the traits of psychopaths. It's about superficial charm, it's about grandiosity, self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and an incapacity for remorse or guilt. It's about presentation, not about integrity. It's about image. And this is exceedingly dangerous."

-Chris Hedges

"The blind was down; but outside the moon rose up out of the sea, and laid the silver path across the waters that is the way to places at the edge of the world and beyond, for those that can walk on it."

-Tolkien

"...when we begin to practice and to learn more, we may think we should be adding tricks or embellishments of all kinds to our practice. This is the approach of spiritual materialism. It seems fascinating and efficient to use more gadgets to run our domestic scene, office scene, spiritual scene or whatever scenes we may have. American society already has enough gadgets, but we want more.

In the long run, that approach is wasteful and creates further chaos. Spiritual discipline is not about advancement, but it is a question of undoing what we have created already. We are not talking about extending ourselves to become greater or more professional meditators, we are talking about meditation as unlearning.

We should be aware that spiritual materialism creates garbage. Some of the mental tricks associated with spirituality are so fantastic and outlandish that one wonders who dreamed up such things. One might feel dwarfed by such seemingly impressive wisdom. We purchase this stuff. We pile up one cardboard box of spiritual stuff after another. We bring it home and take it out of the cardboard box it came in, and then we find that our garage is completely filled with boxes after boxes with labels on them. A lot of these complicated techniques are just garbage that is being imposed on us. They have nothing to do with unlearning, undoing, or simplifying at all.

We have all made these kinds of collections. In fact, without them, we couldn’t come to the spiritual path. Some people like to collect junk, some like to collect antiques, some like to collect stamps. You have your own style of collecting. Some of these collections may be worthwhile. In the practice of meditation, you are surrendering the collections you have made, and that process could be genuine and beautiful. On the other hand, sometimes we are aggressive about holding onto our collections-we want to get something out of them."

-Chogyam Trungpa

"Those who are enlightened never stop forging themselves. The realizations of such masters cannot be expressed well in words or by theories. The most perfect actions echo the patterns found in nature."

-Morihei Ueshiba

"All that glisters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgement old
Your answer had not been inscroll'd
Fare you well, your suit is cold."

-Shakespeare

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

-Tolkien

it is summer, and the city tears at me
I breathe in dirt and suffocate
I think of a time years ago
of candy eyes
red lips and silver words
and there are no words I can remember now
among the slogans and empty phrases
the hollow eyes and snakeskin smiles
that seem real to me

I reach out to you
a hollow drum in a dusty basement
beating, muffled under dirty stone
as my memory fades
into dead wood along darkened streets

-------------------

in my eyes a hundred screens of static
blue with a silent terror
as my voice turns, grinds, chews
endless
over and over
silent to deafened ears

I give in
forget the past
forget my mind
and with my body clenched
my mind as water
I fall away to unknown places

I cannot do this
this is not me
I do not understand

it's SUMMERTIME

WHERE IS IT

alcoholic red
those wide eyes in black branches
that silent laughter in a silent mind
it brings me closer
towards your door

and I stay behind
I feel the silence
like slow flowers in tightened skin

and still
I came through the window looking for you
I came in dreams
and in dreams I am with you
with easy smiles
with shifting eyes
to riddle you with jeweled tongues

dripping, shining in a black mirror

According to the silence, winter has arrived-
a special kind of winter. I, its inventor,
watch it freeze in calendars and stare
out of clocks. I do not feel its cold.

Across a certain farm evening crows go flying,
intervals of sky that I have seen before,
the bearing of a river: I advance, a wanderer
out of thought country, that serious, quiet place,

Till according to the silence all the light is gone
and according to the dark all wanderers are home

-William Stafford, "Shepherd"


Across the round field under the dark male tower
drift the two horses, the chestnut and the black,
aloof and quiet as two similar clouds -

alike and distant, heads towards the wind,
and the grass a green pool under moving clouds
under the sickle gulls, the screaming grey eyed girls

Only by night around the standing tower
the stallion's white teeth in the brown mare's shoulder
those eight hooves fly like thunder in the wind,
like water falling under the night's drum

-Alex Comfort, "The Lovers"

"Unite yourself to the cosmos, and the thought of transcendence will disappear. Transcendence belongs to the profane world. When all trace of transcendence vanishes, the true person - the Divine Being - is manifest. Empty yourself and let the Divine function."

"You cannot see or touch the Divine with your gross senses. The Divine is within you, not somewhere else. Unite yourself to the Divine, and you will be able to perceive gods wherever you are, but do not try to grasp or cling to them."

"When you bow deeply to the universe, it bows back; when you call out the name of God, it echoes inside you."

-Morihei Ueshiba

shining under stars
the room wraps us up tightly
in finely textured silken waves
of bubble fuzzy carpet laughter

I catch your eyes, your smile
blue with the darkening sky
I have come from the dusk to sit with you in the night
as we shake off the day
as the world fades away
and what game will we play

you flash your eyes once more
jeweled as flowers, bloomed
like a note, a melody
of a glimmering heart in a crystal cage

and later
when we walk towards the roots and the stones
will you give yourself to the sea
will you toast the deep blue and beckoning symphony
outside of time
near the roots, and the stones

Your morning smile of torture
Holds me in its grip
You trace the taste of yesterday
The bruise upon my lip
You touch my eyes and hypnotize
And slip inside my heart
I wait for this forever
But we always fall apart

You want to hold me closer
And secretly entice
You take the size of shadowed men
And punish me with kisses every night

This espionage is sweeter now
Now that we're alone
But I meet your eyes and then despise
All we call our own
I write my name in lipstick
On the mirror as I leave
To stay would be too dangerous
To break the make-believe

You want to hold me closer
And secretly entice
You take the size of shadowed men
And punish me with kisses every night


-The Glove, "Punish me with kisses"

"The whole point is that we have grown up with a very strange relationship with society. Sometimes we like society and are trying to get into it and become a replica of everyone else. You do exactly the same thing as everyone else, and it feels good. You have a social standard to relate to and you have your M.A. or Ph.D. You are a professional person and you have a car of your own. You know how to cook food, entertain friends, you are humorous and engaging. You are even eloquent and interesting. You are a good host, a good driver, an acceptable person, a nice guy.
But at the same time, you don't want to be like that at all. Your complex about society takes all kinds of forms. Sometimes you want to be above society and bring society up to your level. You are part of an exclusive lodge or club. Only highly evolved people can work with you, deal with you. You are not like the rest of the world, not like the others. You are special, very special. You eat different food. You even drive differently, maybe. You break the law in a different way- with conscious effort. You cook meals specially, and you talk a special way; you articulate differently. You put the accent on the metaphysical or mystical, or on being zany. Society pushes people into this kind of attitude because there are so many repetitions taking place.

On the other hand, sometimes people have the feeling that they can't even make it up to the repetitious level. They feel belittled, uneducated. But then, once you've gotten to that level and you feel you are just like everybody else, you want to rise above this and do special things. You acquire special art treasures, which you show. You develop a special handicraft or a talent that you have that is out of the ordinary. The selling point in all this is that it is every special, unlike anything else, that you are a very special person, which is another kind of neurosis that goes on in society. First you try very hard to be ordinary, and then, when you achieve that, you try to rise above the ordinariness.
There are all kinds of different levels and different approaches to trying to ignore the loneliness."

-Chogyam Trungpa

"The streets were the ones that they walked along each morning and afternoon and yet quite different, for they had their own separate, breathing life that the country always has, but that towns do not by day. Even her footsteps did not seem to belong to her. The night seized and transformed them, just as it transformed the greenhouses they passed from useful places for growing things into cold night palaces."

-Penelope Farmer

white spires on foggy shores
distant as the moon
call with whispers, loud as lions

turn round and breathe deep, the heavy scent
the porcelain caress
dripping like honey in the silver gateway
of all smiles and serpents

and I dance sideways,
toward the silent and slow
the white, cracked walls
a stage upon a stage

I dance with slow knives in my heart
a mask on my face
sliding and swaying through the fog on the stage

"The practice of meditation is a way of unmasking ourselves, our deceptions of all kinds, and also the practice of meditation is a way of bringing out the subtleties of intelligence that exist within us. The experience of meditation sometimes plays the role of playmate: sometimes it plays the role of devil's advocate, fundamental depression. Sometimes it acts as an encouragement for birth, sometimes as an encouragement for death."

"We constantly produce a display, a theatrical scene. For each situation we create the appropriate backdrop and the appropriate lighting. We also have the appropriate actors, mainly ourselves, who appear on the stage. We carry on this kind of play, this theatrical game, all the time, and we are constantly using our antennae, so to speak, to feel out the total effect our stage set is having."

-Chogyam Trungpa