I have now, a great yearning to write all my anxiety entirely out of me. I stare rigidly ahead lest my eyes lose the imaginary peepholes of the imaginary kaleidoscope into which I am looking. I invite heaven and earth to take part in my scheme. And what is my scheme? To observe myself. This inescapable duty to observe oneself. But most of these observations are no more than lies, we often ask who has been telling lies about us? Who could have said such things? Franz Kafka
Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual. Vladimir Nabokov
Mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding. Lao-tzu
What grows in this darkness? So many things: spring's roots, deep dreams, depth to ponder, quiet meditations, the renewing, deep pond of silence and stillness. Art, imagination, vision, all arise from the place of no light. Poem: Denise Benitez
Objects do not exist for me, except that there is a harmonious relationship among them, and also between them and myself. When one reaches this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual void - what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry. Georges Braque
Sister Marie Keyrouz - the Ensemble de la Paix (performing a hymn in the Melkite tradition.)
Novels certainly can’t save us, but they can provide spaces where true introspection happens. One of the reasons I write fiction is that fiction is a great space for equivocation. Questions breed questions; answers are elusive. Fiction needs to strike a balance between strangeness and familiarity in order to transport us and say something about how we live. “My job is just to reveal this magic to you, to illustrate what in your hearts you already know, what you already believe. My work is only to remove the fog that obscures the truth.” Pasha Malla's People Park
Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are. Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
Waking the Green Tiger: The Rise of a Green Movement in China - Betsy Carson and Gary Marcuse (include history of Mao’s campaigns to conquer nature in the name of progress)
The Four Absolutes:absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love
Alan Watts - A conversation with myself: The drama of human existence, the sense of alienation between man and nature and unlearning of wrong habits, beliefs, preconceptions and opinions which block the unreserved opening of mind, and heart to reality.
Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit... Alan Watts
"The nations must re-arm morally. Moral recovery is essentially the forerunner of economic recovery. Moral recovery creates not crisis but confidence and unity in every phase of life." Frank Buchman, Remaking the World
Vedas means knowledge. There are four Vedas and they claim to teach men the highest aspects of truths. Vedas state Self Ralization is the goal of human life. Shiva is scripturally represented as having worked out the infinite modes of rhythm in his cosmic dance of universal creation, preservation, and dissolution. Brahma is the consciousness and Vishnu is the vibratory sound called Aum. Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu, with his flute plays the enrapturing song that recalls our true home the human souls. Origin of Music Sama Veda
My lord, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. Thomas Merton
When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to Bhagavad-gita and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow. Those who meditate on the Gita will derive fresh joy and new meanings from it every day. Gandhi The text is not concerned with actual warfare so much as with the war within or battle that goes on within each individual..."an allegory in which the battlefield is the soul and Arjuna, man's higher impulses struggling against evil."
Forgiveness transforms violence into non-violence, anger into calm, hatred into love.
"We the Elders don't think about ourselves, we think about the young ones and the future generations" Alejandro Cirilo Perez Oxlaj - The Shift of Ages
Buddha - A Documentary About Buddhism
Zal Idrissa Sissokho was predestined to sing and play the kora. In Senegal, the Sissokho family are among the greatest representatives of the griots, who have conveyed the history of the Mandinka people orally for centuries.
Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented. Georges Braque
To cross paths gogol discovers an old house or is it love, an impossible love or dancing and he immersed himself in a happy and sweet madness?
If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One. From Chapter 11 of the Bhagavad Gita
I reincarnate again and again to protect the righteous and punish the evil doers. Vishnu. The Story of India
Splendor, forgiveness, fortitude, cleanliness, absence of malice, and absence of pride; these are the qualities of those endowed with divine virtues.
Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,) Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me? For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have heard you, Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake, And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours, A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die. O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me, O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you, Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations, Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me, Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night, By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon, The messenger there arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within, The unknown want, the destiny of me. Walt Whitman - Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvellous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. Dogmas and Rituals of High Magic - Eliphas Levi
I live to love, I love to live with you beside me. This role so new, I’ll muddle through with you to guide me. In this world where many, many play at love and hardly any stay in love I’m glad there is you. Natalie Cole
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fiber your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you. Walt Whitman
We can’t ever go back to old things or try and get the 'old kick' out of something or find things the way we remembered them. We have them as we remember them and they are fine and wonderful and we have to go on and have other things because the old things are nowhere except in our minds now. Ernest Hemingway
And love was as new and as bright and as true when I loved you and you loved me...And walked for hours arm in arm through the rain, to the glassed-in cafe...Love is the greatest deceiver it hollows you out like a drum. And suddenly nothing is certain as if all the clouds closed the curtains and blocked the sun and friends now are strangers in this city of dangers. As cold and as cruel as they come. Sometimes I look at old pictures and smile at how happy we were. How easy it was to be hungry. It wasn't for fame or for money. It was for love. Now my copper hair's gray as the stones on the quay in the city where magic was...Mary Chapin Carpenter - Mrs. Hemingway
The banal worldview has the tendency to foster ignorance and prejudice against anyone different than oneself. Whatever else we might do in this age of interconnectedness...we should aim to transcend the limitations imposed by neglecting or... obliterating the other. Only by dint of the other’s benevolent care, as embodied beings, do human beings become independent and autonomous. Hwa Yol Jung
Just as Anna fixates on how we cannot escape ourselves, affirming darkly that we are always our own worst enemies, Levin also asserts here the central place of the self in existence. The difference is that Levin finds the self to be not a punisher, as Anna does, but a nurturer that puts value into life, as a farmer puts seeds into the ground.
In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself. You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life - J. Krishnamurti
Kabir says: "Friend, listen, this is what I have to say: The Guest I love is inside me!" Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive. Jump into experience while you are alive. Think and think while you are alive. What you call 'salvation' belongs to the time before death.
"My life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!". Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Follow and practice the teaching without prejudice. If it brings happiness to you and others and does not encourage self harm or harm to others then follow it.
Kabir says: "Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath."
"To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day." Lao Tzu
When you remove just the right thing in just the right way, something good happens. Improve the world by waging "war on more" through subtracting anything obviously excessive, wasteful, complicated, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly. Or better yet, refraining from adding those things in the first place! Matthew E. May
