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#2547 - Monday, August 7, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Silence
As when from the depth of music,
A note vibrates grows and wanes
Until in another music blends
In this way, pours from silence
Another silence, a steeple, a sword
That soars and grows and lifts us
And while it soars, it lets go
Of memories, and hopes,
Of lies big and small
And we want to cry and in our throat
Dies the scream:
And we disembogue in the silent
That all silences mute.
~ Octavio Paz
[disembogue:To flow out or empty, as water
from a channel: “the river whose dirty waters disembogue
into the harbor” ]
posted to Advaita to Zen
Tibet launches Internet television for world to
see Dalai Lama
One will be able to find a vast collection of feature and
documentary films
about Tibet and Dalai Lama in the Tibetonline.tv archive. There
are also
videos of his lectures at various conferences and forums.
Tibetonline.tv
viewers will be able to watch a documentary about the life of
Buddhist
religious leader "Compassion in Expulsion", Dalai
Lama's speech at the Nobel
Award ceremony, a big public prayer in Sakyamuni's enlightenment
place -
Bodh Gaya- and a lot more. The news volumes will be gradually
increasing
from weekly to everyday.
http://www.tibetonline.tv/
In response to yesterday's quote on Buddha's flower, yosy contributes his own poem.
the flower
presenting buddha
to ten thousand
devotees
kissed by a smile
called ananda
said to itself
in buddha's voice
"you have the marrow
of
my
bones"
~ yosy
John Keat's "Negative Capabilty"
In a letter to his brothers, in 1817, Keats wrote:
"...It struck me what quality went to form a Man of
Achievement, especially in Literature, and which
Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative
Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being
in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason".
Keats knew! Keats knew! Even though his life was brief
he deeply understood that life cannot be understood because
it is the immensity that cannot be grasped, measured, defined
or controlled. Life is the flowing and living energy which
cannot be frozen into concepts and formulas. Life cannot be
understand, only lived. Therefore the philosophers who see
life as a problem of philosophy are wrong; life is the
solution and philosophy is the problem.
Keats recognised that seeking after certainty was the seed of
insecurity, and that paradoxically security could only be
found in insecurity through a recognition of what is. To quote
Keats again, the genuine truth seeker is a man "capable of
being
in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact & reason." Keats called this
Zen-like
quality "Negative Capability." "Negative
Capability" involves
the loss of self-identity and the disappearance of the illusion
of separateness.
Keats appreciated that whenever people are facing two
conflicting arguments, they naturally seek a rapid closure,
a conclusion. They try to figure out which argument is right
and which is wrong, which is stronger and which is weaker.
And Keats wrote admiringly of how William Shakespeare could
resist the impulse for closure; how he could "luxuriate in
uncertainties and doubts, entertaining two opposing ideas
without irritable reaching after fact and reason."
Shakespeare,
to Keats, was a master exponent of Negativity Capability.
Like a Zen artist fully exploited the creative emptiness of
the mind of Negative Capability.
In Zen the seeker dwells in a kind of Negative Capability in
which there is a state of uncertainty, doubt and mystery without
being uncomfortable with this or being irritated by facts and
logic. After this there may a come a stage of explosive insight
known as "satori".
Keats had a similar concept to Zen satori. He recognised that
there was a state beyond Negative Capability which he called
the Chief Intensity, a state of "fellowship with
essence", a
state of oneness in which the relative terms of certainty and
uncertainty have been transcended through the realization of
no-self. In the life of the Chief Intensity nothing is sought
behind phenomena and the meaning of life is seen as life
itself. Spiritual problems are simply dissolved in the
brilliance of the Chief Intensity, the no-mind state of Zen.
Your brother in Tao,
beatnik
posted to Allspirit
photo by Alan Larus http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/islands/mother_and_child.htm
Music Master
You that love lovers,
this is your home. Welcome!
In the midst of making form, love
made this form that melts form,
with love for the door,
soul the vestibule.
Watch the dust grains moving
in the light near the window.
Their dance is our dance.
We rarely hear the inward music,
but we're all dancing to it nevertheless,
directed by the one who teaches us,
the pure joy of the sun,
our music master.
~ Rumi
-- Version by Coleman Barks, "The Essential
Rumi",
HarperSanFrancisco, 1995