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#2431 - Monday, March 27, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee

And the day came
when the risk
it took to remain
tight inside the bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took to
blossom.

-Anais Nin

 Your mind will vacillate. Mind is vacillation, mind is either/or, mind is always in that space of "to be or not to be." If you really want to grow, mature, if you really want to know what this life is all about, don't vacillate. Commit, involve! Involve yourself with life, get committed to life, don't remain a spectator. Don't go on thinking whether to do or not - "Should I do this or that?" You can go on vacillating your whole life, and the more you vacillate, the more trained you become in vacillation.

Life is for those who know how to commit - how to say yes to something, how to say no to something decisively, categorically. Once you have categorically said yes or no to something, then you can take a jump, then you can dive deep into the ocean.

People are just sitting on the fence. Millions of people are fence-sitters - this way or that, just waiting for the opportunity to come. And the opportunity will never come, because it has already come, it is there!

My own suggestion is that even if sometimes it happens that you commit to the wrong thing, even then it is good to commit, because the day you will know it is wrong you can get out of it. At least you would have learned one thing: that it is wrong, and never to get into anything like that again. It is a great experience; it brings you closer to truth.

Why do people vacillate so much? - because from the very childhood you have been told not to commit any mistakes. That is one of the greatest teachings of all the societies all over the world - and very dangerous, very harmful. Teach children to commit as many mistakes as possible, with only one condition: don't commit the same mistake again, that's all. And they will grow, and they will experience more and more, and they will not vacillate. Otherwise a trembling... and time is passing by, out of your hands, and you are vacillating.

I see many people standing on the shore vacillating, whether to take the jump or not. Here it happens every day.

Just a few days ago, one young man came to me. For three years he has been vacillating whether to take sannyas or not. I said, "Decide either yes or no, and be finished with it! And I am not saying decide yes, I am only saying decide. No is as good as yes. But wasting three years? If you had taken sannyas three years ago," I told him, "by this time you would have known whether it is worth it or not; at least one thing would have been decided. Vacillating three years, nothing has been decided. You are in the same space, and three years have gone by."

From The Book of Wisdom : Discourses on Atisha`s Seven Points of Mind Training, by Osho

Because we all share this planet earth, we have to learn to live in harmony and peace with each other and with nature. That is not just a dream, but a necessity. We are dependent on each other in so many ways that we can no longer live in isolated communities and ignore what is happening outside those communities.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

From "The Pocket Dalai Lama," edited by Mary Craig, 2002.

from Beliefnet

  "If the generally accepted concept was to obtain what we really need
and then be content, society would be completely different."

              ~ His Holiness the Dalai Lama


From the book, "Imagine All the People: A conversation with the Dalai
Lama on Money, Politics, and Life As It Could Be," published by Wisdom.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0861711505/angelinc
posted to Daily Dharma  

  ”The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.”

Paul Valery. 1895   posted to Alpha World  

  Siesta

     While the fish of fire traces its curve,
near the cypress beneath the supreme blue,
and the blind child flies in the white stone,
and in the elm the ivory couplet
of the green cicada beats and returns,
let's honor the Lord
-- the black stamp of his good hand --
who has dictated the silence in the clamor.

     To the god of the distance and the absence,
of the anchor in the sea, the open sea...
He frees us from the world -- omnipresence --
opening for us a path to walk on.

     With the hidden cup well-filled,
with this ever-filling heart,
let's honor the Lord who has made the Void
and has sculpted in faith our reason.

- Antonio Machado (1875 - 1939)
Translated by Ivan M. Granger  

    god loves in simple words

god loves in simple words simple and small i am and you are that and it is the all
god words reach for silence where words are the same the silence in each word is god's true name
god says god has a lower case g says nothing is finished, so how could god be
god is the space at the heart of god's name
and two other letters each moving outward near mirror alternate not quite the same  

--hannah   (a reader's contribution, thank you!)  

Terra Incognita
D.H. Lawrence


There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of
vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps,
we know nothing of, within us.
Oh when man has escaped from the barbed-wire entanglement
of his own ideas and his own mechanical devices
there is a marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty
and fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked life
and me, and you, and other men and women
and grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlight
and ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo
of the unknown air, and eyes so soft
softer than the space between the stars,
and all things, and nothing, and being and not-being
alternately palpitant,
when at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosure
of Know Thyself, knowing we can never know,
we can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our effort
and dangle in a last fastidious fine delight
as the fuchsia does, dangling her reckless drop
of purple after so much putting forth
and slow mounting marvel of a little tree.
.
Gill Eardley posted to Allspirit  

Beneath the mountain
Magpie flying by,
Ever changing sky

Beneath the mountain
If again I do,
Question where are you

Beneath the mountain
Now who is moving this,
Avalanche of bliss

Homage to you whose face is like
The gathering of a hundred full moons in autumn,
Shining resplendent light
In the perfect, spacious constellation of a thousand stars.