Ram Dass

 

We are alone, but to die alone is not to die in loneliness               Don Juan

 

 

 

The great way has no gates.

There are a thousand paths.

Once you pass the barrier.

You walk the universe alone.

     Zen Koan

 

It is not the ‘mind’ (memories, ideas, knowledge), but the soul that transmigrates thru successive lives. The soul is the repository of one’s ‘virtue’; one’s good and bad karma, and it is one’s ‘strength’ of awareness, the ability to witness without attachment or aversion. It’s one’s wisdom. The soul equals one’s Karmic Virtue plus Unattached Wisdom. The witnessing position, the soul position, begins to partake of eternity, of infinity. It has a timeless nature. It becomes certain that it does not die with the body and mind. It is absolute Spirit– Buddha– Mind– the One and Only.

     Ken Wilbur

 

The student learns by daily gain. The Way is acquired by daily loss.     Lao-tzu

     

Today is the day when we work at being what we will be like tomorrow.

     Ram Dass              

 

If we can’t stand being with ourselves, we are chancy company for anybody else.

     Ram Dass              

 

The movement of the Tao is exactly the same thing as the present moment – that which we call now is the same thing as the Tao. The Tao, the course of things, the eternal now, the presence of God, anything you want to call it – that is now! And you cannot get out of it. There is no need to get with it because you cannot get away from it! That is beautiful. You just relax, and you are there.         

Alan Watts

 

Old battlefield, fresh with spring flowers again—

All that is left of the dreams of twice ten thousand warriors slain.

     Basho

 

To die into the next moment consciously is to be always ready for death of the body.

Each moment is our moment of birth and our moment of death.

In death you have nothing to lose, because there never was a separate ‘you’ to begin with; you ‘are’ the process – just choice-less awareness, watching the passing show.

     Ram Dass

 

True men of old were not afraid when they stood alone in their views. No great exploits. No plans. If they failed, no sorrow; no self congratulation in success…The true men of old slept without dreams, woke without worries. Their food was plain, they breathed deep… The true men of old knew no lust for life, no dread of death. Their entrance was without gladness, their exit yonder, without resistance; Easy come, easy go. They did not forget where from, nor ask where to. Nor drive grimly forward fighting their way through life. They took life as it came, gladly; took death as it came, without care; and went away, yonder. They had no mind to fight Tao. They did not try, by their own contriving, to help Tao along. These are the ones we call true men. Minds free, thoughts gone, brows clear, faces serene.

     Chuang-tzu

 

In reality nothing happens. Onto the screen of the mind destiny forever projects its pictures and memories of former projections and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go – light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the picture.

     Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

The absence of the desire for things produces emptiness and liberty of soul, even when there is an abundance of possessions.

     St. John of the Cross

 

All forms of Buddhism have as their basis the idea that: If you have the nerve, and that’s really all it amounts to, you can live the liberated life because all terrors are empty. All existence is in a way, just so much to-do about nothing. Not said in a joyless way. But the universe is a performance. Look here: Words have meaning. You sit around here and listen and understand what I’m saying – but what does the whole situation mean? It doesn’t mean anything! It’s just a form of life – like an elephant, a tree, a mountain, - it’s a human game. We’re doing this jazz. It’s not threatening – it’s just jazz.

     Alan Watts

 

It isn’t pain that awakens us. Pain is pain and it’s a drag! Pain gets our attention. And attention awakens us.

     Steven Levine

 

What is there to life if one cannot hear the lovely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frog around the pond at night?

     Chief Seattle

 

There’s anger and hate; love and wisdom, but there’s no one who has these. Only mindfulness purifies these factors of consciousness, but mindfulness also is a factor. There’s no one being mindful. Mindfulness is being mindful. The idea of ‘Self’ that people have, is created by wrong view which identifies with either the object or the knower.

     Joseph Goldstein

 

In Gods wilderness lies the hope of the world, the great, fresh, un-blighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off and the wounds heal….

     John Muir

 

I have been as a child playing on the seashore, every now and then finding a bright pebble, while all around me the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered.

     Sir Issic Newton

 

Without the awareness of death everything is ordinary, trivial. It is only because death is stalking us that the world is an unfathomable mystery.

     Don Juan

 

Every existence is a flashing into the vast phenomenal world. Each existence is another expression of the quality of being itself.

     Dogen

 

A basic way of affirming uniqueness is to gain attention of others. In this sense, the game of being alive is the game of ‘look at me.’ It is the sacrifice of uniqueness that leads to awakening.

     Albert Low

 

Lives based on having are less free than lives based on either doing or on being.     William James

 

In order to leave no traces when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely.

     Shunryu Suzuki

 

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality

is just to peal the potatoes.

     Alan Watts

 

When we sit, we are nothing; we just sit. But when we stand up, we are there! When you are there, everything else is there; everything is created all at once.

     Shunryu Suzuki

 

When the intensity of concentration allows you to see the space between two thoughts, you see eternity. You realize that thoughts exist against the backdrop of no thought. Against the backdrop of emptiness, of nothing, we exist. And there you are at the edge of perceiving who you are. Then you face one of the greatest fears you will ever confront: the fear of your own extinction. The fear of ceasing to exist not just as a body, but even as a soul... But as you’re ready for the ultimate mystic doorway, you say, ‘I am not this thought.’ You let go of even the great fear of non-existence. The senses are just doing their thing but there’s nobody home. Thoughts are going by like a river and awareness simply is. By letting go of even the thought ‘I’, there is nowhere to stand and no one to stand there. No separateness anywhere. Just clarity and being.

     Ram Dass

 

To run after desires is to run after a mirage. It is a journey from one death to another. In the illusion that is life man dies this way time and time again. But those willing to die to their desires discover that death itself dies for them.

     Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh    

 

Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness….

No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question….At any rate, they forbid our premature closing of accounts with reality.

     William James

 

Hallucinations are taboo in Western technological society….But, as LSD attains, when one glimpses the world from the liberated states of mind of the mystics, the notion of being born (i.e. being a separate person doomed to die) is perceived as the ultimate hallucination…. A paradox: From the so-call normal state of mind, the liberated state that has been achieved by some mystics is seen as a hallucination; and from the so-called liberated state of mind, the ego is seen as a hallucination – a fictional identity that’s held together by concepts such as ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’. When you glimpse that place within, you ask the big questions of liberation: Who am I? Where did I come from? And where am I going? These are central to solving the mysteries and meaning of life.         

Robert Leverant

 

When it is dark enough you can see the stars.                    Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Think of the moment of death as a strange border zone of the mind, a no-man’s land in which, on the one hand, if we do not understand the illusory nature of our body, we might suffer vast emotional trauma as we lose it, and on the other we are presented with the possibility of limitless freedom, a freedom that springs precisely from the absence of that very same body. When we are at last freed from the body that has defined and dominated our understanding of ourselves for so long, the karmic vision of one life is completely exhausted, but any karma that might be created in the future has not yet begun to crystallize. So what happens in death is that there is a “gap,” or space, that is fertile with vast possibility; it is a moment of tremendous, pregnant power where the only thing that matters, or could matter, is how exactly the mind is. Stripped of a physical body, the mind stands naked, revealed startlingly for what it has always been: the architect of our reality

     Sogyal Rinpoche

          

Meditate on death because there is no way to know life unless you stand face to face with death – and it is everywhere; wherever life is death is also; they are really two aspects of one and the same phenomenon, and when one comes to know this, he transcends both.

Only in that transcendence is the total flowering of consciousness and the ecstasy of being.

     Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

 

In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.     Robert Green Ingersoll

 

Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that ‘I’ cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life.

     Alan Watts

 

Recognizing this moment-to-moment birth and death of the mind allows us to penetrate the illusion of solidity which potentiates the fear of death

     Steven Levine

 

To completely awaken to the Now, to awaken from the nightmare of history, is to suffer the death of the future-less Present….This dying to the future by seeing Now-only, is not ‘sudden death’ at the end of one’s life, but ‘instant death’ all through it….in this moment we are always already suffering ‘instant death’ and thus we are always already awakening to that which has no future: To that which has no future and therefore to that which has no past; to that which has no beginning in time, and therefore to that which has no end in time; and hence to that which is Unborn, and therefore to that which is Undying.

Always already suffering death Now, we are always already living eternally. The search is always already over.      Ken Wilbur

 

The Bodhisattva, in seeing fully into his own empty momentariness, knows a despair beyond suicide, the absolute despair that is the literal meaning of nirvana. It is complete disillusion form every hope of safety or rest or gain; suicide itself being no escape since ‘I’ would awaken once more in every being that is form. He is the same emptiness from which blazes the sun, moon, and stars.         

Alan Watts

 

There is neither creation nor destruction, neither destiny nor free-will; Neither path nor achievement; This is the final truth.

     Ramana Maharshi

 

There have been many would be saviors in the world,

No one has succeeded,

Save yourself.

     Sujata

 

There is a reality even prior to heaven and earth; Indeed, it has no form, much less a name; Eyes fail to see it; it has no voice for ears to detect. To call it Mind or Buddha violates its nature.

     Master Daio

 

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses. And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.     Walt Whitman

 

It is virtually certain now that Enlightenment is not for me in this life – the hindrance of sloth being too great due to my evil Karma in this and many former lives. I do not despair. May all sentient beings be happy. May I assist them to liberation. It’s not form lack of belief in the realities awaiting realization, but my laziness – A pilgrim may ardently long to reach the golden city and yet loiter on the way, making unnecessary night stops, because he is tired of plodding thru clinging mud or lingering at village fairs because, although their tawdry attractions fall far short of the jeweled splendors awaiting him, they are to be had now, whereas the golden city lies scores of leagues away.

     John Blofield

 

The wind blows hard among the pines

Towards the beginning

Of an endless past.

Listen: you’ve heard everything.

     Shinkichi Takahashi

 

I look out, and snow is falling with a moon still in the sky,

A new day begins. And the dream called yesterday  --     no trace.

     Sozen

 

Light from the moon of clear mind drinks up everything in the world. When mind and light disappear, what … is … this …?

     Kyong Ho. A moment before his death.

 

The knocking on the walls of all space and consciousness is my own heart beating.

     Alan Watts

 

Flesh is merely a lesson. We learn it and pass on.                    Erica Jony

 

To succeed is always to fail. Arrival is death and traveling is eternal…     J. Kristnamurti.

 

He who knows enough is enough will always have enough.               Lao-tzu

 

Deep among ten thousand peaks I sit alone cross-legged, a solitary thought fills my empty mind.

My body is the moon that lights the winter sky. In rivers and in lakes are only its reflections.

     Han-shan

 

 

When we are grounded in the nature of Reality and we know that this same reality is our own nature, then we realize that we can create anything; because all of material creation has the same origin, and Nature goes to the same place to create a cluster of nebula, or a galaxy of stares, or a rain forest, or a human body, as it goes to create a single thought.

     Deepak Chopra

 

Empty handed I entered the world,

Barefooted I leave it.

My coming, my going –

Two simple happenings

That got entangled.

     Kozan Ichikyo death poem

 

I asked the boy beneath the pines,

He said, ‘The master’s gone alone

Herb-picking somewhere on the mount,

Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.’

     Chia Tao

 

I pack no provisions for my long journey – entering emptiness under the midnight moon.    

A Chinese Sage

 

The river moves, moon travels rock,

Streams unreal, clouds there among the flowers.

Sails go: They can’t know where.

     Tu Fu

 

When Zen Master Fa-ch’ang was dying, a squirrel screeched on the roof, ‘It’s just this,’ he said, ‘and nothing else.’

     Alan Watts

 

To what may this world be likened?

Moonlight in a dewdrop

Falling from a ducks beak.

     Dogens’ last verse

          

 

 

 

May all sentient being share with me this offering

And by the power of my merit

May all beings be healthy, happy, and liberated from suffering

In Love,   Ron