I wished for death often
but now that I am at its door
I have changed my mind about the world.
It should go on; it is beautiful,
even as a dream, filled with water and seed,
plants and animals, others like myself,
ships and buildings and messages
filling the air -- a beauty,
if ever I have seen one.
In the next world, should I remember
this one, I will praise it
above everything.

~David Ignatow~

Toward dawn I dozed off, and in my dream I found myself surrounded by a group of skeletons . . . . One skeleton came over to me and said:

Memories
Flee and
Are no more.
All are empty dreams
Devoid of meaning.

Violate the reality of things
And babble about
"God" and "the Buddha"
And you will never find
the true Way.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I liked this skeleton . . . . He saw things clearly, just as they are. I lay there with the wind in the pines whispering in my ears and the autumn moonlight dancing across my face.

What is not a dream? Who will not end up as a skeleton? We appear as skeletons covered with skin -- male and female -- and lust after each other. When the breath expires, though, the skin ruptures, sex disappears, and there is no more high or low. Underneath the skin of the person we fondle and caress right now is nothing more than a set of bare bones. Think about it -- high and low, young and old, male and female, all are the same. Awaken to this one great matter and you will immediately comprehend the meaning of "unborn and undying."

-Ikkyu

That night in Harrisburg I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the station masters threw me out. Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wrteched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life. I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control. All I could see of the morning was a whiteness like the whiteness of the tomb. I was starving to death. All I had left in the form of calories were the last of the cough drops I'd bought in Shelton, Nebraska, months ago; these I sucked for their sugar. I didn't know how to panhandle. I stumbled out of town with barely enough strength to reach the city limits. I knew I'd be arrested if I spent another night in Harrisburg. Cursed city! The ride I proceeded to get was with a skinny, haggard man who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health. When I told him I was starving to death as we rolled east he said, "Fine, fine, there's nothing better for you. I myself haven't eaten for three days. I'm going to live to be a hundred and fifty years old." He was a bag of bones, a floppy doll, a broken stick, a maniac. I might have gotten a ride with an affluent fat man who'd say, "Let's stop at this restaurant and have some pork chops and beans." No, I had to get a ride that morning with a maniac who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health. After a hundred miles he grew lenient and too out bean-and-butter sandwiches from the back of the car. They were hidden among his salesman samples. He was selling plumbing fixtures around Pennsylvania. I devoured the bread and butter. Suddenly I began to laugh. I was all alone in the car, wating for him as he made business calls in Allentown, and I laughed and laughted. Gad, I was sick and tired of life. But the madman drove me home to New York.

On The Road, Jack Kerouac

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U.G. Krishnamurti. The full interview is available at the link listed above.

"Look, I tried everything to find an answer to my burning obsession: "Is there such a thing as enlightenment at all, or have we all been fooled by abstractions?" That utter frustration and complete failure to answer that question created an intensity. The first third of my life was spent in India around Theosophists, J. Krishnamurti, yogins, holy men, sages, Ramana Maharshi, the Ramakrishna Order -- in short, all the associations that could benefit a person interested in spiritual matters. I found out for myself that it was all bogus, there was nothing to it at all. Totally disillusioned with the whole religious tradition of both the East and the West, I plunged myself into modern psychology, science and, whatever the material world could give me. I found out for myself that the whole idea of spirit or psyche was false. When I experimented with and studied the material world, I was surprised to find that there was no such thing as matter at all. Denying the spiritual and material basis of things, I was left with nowhere to turn. I began drifting on my own, unable to find an answer from any source. Then one day the futility of what I was doing dawned upon me, and the question which had obsessed me for almost my entire life got burnt, then disappeared. After that there were no more questions. The thirst burned itself out without ever satisfying itself. Not answers, but the ending of questions, is the important thing. Even though everything got burnt there, still embers remain to express themselves in a natural rhythm. What impacts this expression may have on the society around me is not my concern."


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A Woman's Sex:

It has the original mouth but remains wordless;
It is surrounded by a magnificent mound of hair.
Sentient beings can get completely lost in it
But it is also the birthplace of all the Buddhas of the ten thousand worlds.
- Ikkyu, from Wild Ways

Do you think that you can clear your mind by sitting constantly in silent meditation? This makes your mind narrow, not clear. Integral awareness is fluid and adaptable, present in all places and at all times. That is true meditation... The Tao is clear and simple, and it doesn't avoid the world.

- excerpt from The Hua Hu Ching

"There should be a law: If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood."

- Tim O'Brien

When Shirai was dying, Shiri burst into his room and exclaimed,
"How wonderful! What is this that is happening to you? Would you
become the liver of a rat, or the elbow of a worm?"
Shirai reply, " I'm like a small child, I have no choice but to go
wherever my mother takes me."

Shosi

Sweet Darkness
David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~from Risking Everything edited by Roger Housden c.2003

Language is a jewelled scabbard that conceals our species' most potent weapon,
the two-edged sword of mysticism. However wonderful that sword has been in the right hands,
in the hands of the 'moral' mystics of East and West that wield it now, the blade
of human mysticism seems certain to cut us to ribbons.

In the Legend of King Arthur it was the scabbard that sharpened Excalibur
and made it invincible. Sharpened by language, mysticism may yet prove to be
the most potent GAS component of all.

-Reg Morrison

When Ralph McGehee was being interviewed on Australian Radio regarding the CIA's role in the elimination of Australian Prime Minister Whitlam, he explained part of it, based on how people are selected for the agency. He explains what's called the ERA personality scale:

They were looking for the total personality picture. They can pick up one element of your personality or another or another and come up with the individual's total picture. And what they are looking for is the E.R.A. type of personality. In the E mode they are looking for the extrovert who likes to be active, who doesn't particularly like to sit and think, who doesn't like to plan in advance but works by trial and error. In the R mode they are looking for the Regulated Individual, or the rigid I call it, a person who sees the world in black and white certainties, there are no shades of gray, a person who has trouble feeling sensitivity towards others. Then in the Social Mode they are looking for the A or adaptable individual, a person who will not protest, who adjusts his personality to the milieu he finds himself in at the time.
So you get this total E.R.A. type of personality which they are looking for, and you recruit this man, knowing this person, knowing his ideological position, always to the right-wing of course. And then you take this sort of personality, put him into the system, indoctrinate him in the tenets that the world is threatened by an international communist conspiracy and you feed him all the so-called intelligence the Agency collects and you have a sort of hermetically sealed lifestyle that reality can never penetrate. ...

I well suited the E.R.A. personality type, I guess, and I tried to hold off reality for several years but I was living in the belly of the beast and my defenses sort of crumbled slowly and it was a very -- at first you know, 'I can't believe this is true', 'I don't want to believe', and ultimately I had no other recourse but to accept the reality that I was involved in and this was, as you can imagine, extremely painful. Not only was the Agency that I had so given my life to but my country was deceiving and killing and all the things that I sort of pondered my personality and like all in the world shown to be deceit so it was extremely painful and, of course, one thought of the various solutions to one's dilemmas such as suicide which I ultimately rejected in the hope that I could bring my story out.

One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain

- Bob Marley

“We cannot think of ourselves as we ought to think without utterly despising everything that may be supposed as excellence in us. This humility is unfeigned submission of a mind overwhelmed with a weighty sense of its own misery and poverty; for such is the uniform description of it in the word of God.”

- Johannes Calvin