Why not wake up?

You have slept for millions and millions of years.
Why not wake up this morning?

- Kabir (1440–1518)

Kabir is possibly the first Indian saint to have harmonised Hinduism and Islam by preaching a universal path which both Hindus and Muslims could tread together. He was a major influence on Sikhism.

Kabir lived in Varanasi, the sacred city on the Ganges.

Image used with kind permission of Azli Jamil
See more of his work here

An Ancient Take on the Gun Control Issue

The Tao Te Ching
... 31. A Weapon is a Tool of Death

A weapon is a tool of death.
A tool of death is anti-Tao.
A man of the Way, leading,
will reject tools of death
if he has a choice.

There is a formal attitude
the left of which is life
the right of which is death.

To the left is peace & creation;
violence & destruction
occupy the right.

There is no beauty in death,
this the wise man understands.

If a man finds beauty in death
his self is compromised to its core.
He has lost the Way.

Should a wise man be compelled to violence
he will not rejoice.  Victory is not
a time for joy. Victory is a funeral
wherein a multitude is mourned.
.

from The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu
An Adaptation by R. Bob

via 3quarksdaily

The Unforseen

Whoever cannot seek
the unforeseen sees nothing,
for the known way
is an impasse.

-Heraclitus

Anish Kapoor

Today I saw the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, by the Harbour in Sydney.
Kapoor was born in India but has been based in London since the early 1970s.
I was familiar with his installations featuring piles of powdered red and yellow pigment (resembling the cone-shaped heaps of sacred kumkum and turmeric displayed in shops near Hindu temples in India) but I was unprepared for his amazing mirror and optical illusion pieces.
Several of the works appear to be flat planes flush with the walls they are hanging on, but when you stand in front of them, your eyes cannot determine where the surface is. It was hard not to try to touch the works to check; however, there were lots of museum staff to prevent people doing this. (understandable - removing fingerprints from all those polished objects would not be easy)
It's an incredible experience but unfortunately there is no way of conveying the depth perception effect through photos, and you simply have to see the exhibition. But here are some images of his mirror pieces, which are photographable.
Even someone with no interest in contemporary art would find this show amazing.

Happy Christmas

The Strangeness of Self

"…if you think you know yourself, you haven’t looked far enough —- into that distance where your strangeness is. You hold more than you know, and that is how knowing opens."
-Heather McHugh

Heather McHugh, ia an American poet, translator, and educator

The Self can seem strange to the artist because the artist seeks originality, to say something that has never been said before. When the Self speaks through the poet, it is as if the poet is hearing his own language for the first time. j.

Saul Williams

You will sit in darkness,
Swallowed by silence,
Until the angel of solitude
Ignites your spine.

-Saul Williams

Saul Stacey Williams (born February 29, 1972) is an American singer, musician, poet, writer, and actor.

Inner Noise

The problem with listening, of course, is that we don’t. There’s too much noise going on in our heads, so we never hear anything. The inner conversation simply never stops. It can be our voice or whatever voices we want to supply, but it’s a constant racket. In the same way we don’t see, and in the same way we don’t feel, we don’t touch, we don’t taste.

Philip Glass, Listening to Philip Glass

Why Does the World Exist?

In his book Why Does the World Exist?, Jim Holt explores the ideas of the great 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. 
“Of all the possible resolutions to the mystery of existence,” Holt writes, “perhaps the most exhilarating would be the discovery that, contrary to all appearances, the world is causa sui: the cause of itself.” For Spinoza, all mental and physical existents were temporally modified expressions of a single substance, an infinite substance that he called God or Nature. Albert Einstein embraced Spinoza’s idea that the world was divine and self-causing, as more recently have other “metaphysically inclined physicists” like Sir Roger Penrose and the late John Archibald Wheeler.

read more: the american scholar
According to Advaita (Non-dual) philosophy, the Self and the world are one. The Self is uncreated, ever existing, and the cause of itself. 

Because the world is inseparable from the Self, it too is uncreated, ever existing and the cause of itself.

There is nothing else but the Self

The beginning, the end, the manifest and the hidden.
The seer and the listener, all is Him,
He is in everything yet He is beyond,
there is nothing else, everything is Him;
abandon the duality of me and you,
see one, there aren't two at all,
understand this and disappear in it;
when you are not, then truly He is.

- Hazarat Ali

Hazarat Ali was the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. Sufis identify him as the founder of their strain of Islam. For his courage, wisdom and compassion he is revered by Muslims (the Alawis even consider him to be an incarnation of the Divine), and he has also been greatly praised by Western scholars since the 18th century. The poet Kahlil Gibran wrote of Ali:

"In my view, ʿAlī was the first Arab to have contact with and converse with the universal soul. He died a martyr of his greatness, he died while prayer was between his two lips. The Arabs did not realise his value until appeared among their Persian neighbors some who knew the difference between gems and gravels."

The Prophet, Ali, Husayn and Hasan in Paradise, public domain image from wikimedia commons.

Changadeva Pasashti

To become one with the Self,

surrender all impulses of the mind.

Then you will know the sleep beyond sleeping, 

the wakefulness beyond waking.

-Shri Jnaneshwara, Chângadeva Pâsashtî

This statue, garlanded with marigolds, depicts the Hindu deity Shri Vishnu with half opened eyes, awakening from, or entering, cosmic sleep. Budhanilkantha Temple, Nepal.

Mysore

Several years ago I visited the spectacular Royal Palace in Mysore, South India.

The city's name is derived from that of Mahisha, the asura (demon) king who ruled there thousands of years ago, according to legend. 

One would think that, because of this, the area might not be very auspicious, but the goddess Shri Durga  is said to have trodden that ground also, when she defeated Mahisha, gaining Her the name Mahishasuramardini (destroyer of the asura Mahisha). On a hill near the city there is a famous temple to Her in the form of Shri Chamundeshwari, the destroyer of the demons Chanda and Munda.

This mural in the palace depicts a puja (ceremony of propitiation) to the Goddess Durga/Mahishasuramardini being performed by the Maharajas of Mysore, for whom the fiercely protective Mother Goddess is the traditional family deity.

Throne Room, Mysore Palace.

Imagination

“Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.”

- Anna Funder, All That I Am.

I've just finished reading Anna Funder's brilliantly researched novel: All That I Am, which traces the lives of a group of anti-Hitler activists in exile who gradually become aware that they are not beyond the reach of Nazi cruelty. The book suggests that the sufferings imposed by Hitler's regime were due to a vast and tragic failure of the human imagination. The watercolours Hitler produced whilst attempting an art career are evidence of this.

The line I've quoted from Funder's novel led me to contemplate the art of imagining, and the act of putting oneself in the shoes of another person. 

With that in the back of my mind, I began searching for another book to read, I randomly picked up an autobiography of the poet William B Yeats, The Unicorn, W. B. Yeats' Search for Reality, by Virginia Moore. I dipped into the book, also at random, and by strange coincidence, on the page I opened, the word 'imagination' appeared several times. Moore was exploring William Blake's influence on the philosophy and work of Yeats, specifically Blake's championing of the quality of Imagination (he was fond of capitalising abstract nouns, probably to lend importance to, or to personify, the qualities they signify).

Blake saw Imagination not as a silly realm of fictive irrelevance, but as something vital to the very existence of human beings, a divine gift awakened by Jesus in particular. He saw the growing rationalism of the European mind as a force smothering the capacity for imagination.

From the perspective of yoga, with its system of chakras, as elucidated by Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, imagination is a quality of the Agnya Chakra (or brow centre), opened on a cosmic level by Jesus. This is not to say that only Christians are capable of empathy; in fact Europe, the seat of Christendom, has seen some of the worst persecutions of the 'other' in the history of the world.

At the Sahasrara Chakra (or crown centre), which is the next step in the evolution of consciousness, the universal Self is realised. After Self-realisation, a person not only can imagine themselves in the situation of another person; they actually share Selfhood with that person, transcending the duality of 'me' and 'other' in a single cosmic Self. Imagination becomes Reality.

"The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself."
-William Blake

Reincarnation and Judaism

I was surprised to discover recently that belief in reincarnation has been a part of Judaism for centuries, particularly within the Hasidic community. The Hasidic tzadiks (righteous teachers) were believed to know the past lives of people.

The first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus states that the Pharisees, the founders of rabbinic Judaism, believed in reincarnation.

All pure and holy spirits live on in heavenly places, and in course of time they are again sent down to inhabit righteous bodies.

- Josephus

One wonders why there is so much resistance to the idea of transmigration in Christianity, especially when there are hints at it in the New Testament: eg Christ's reference to John the Baptist as the prophet Elijah returned. Also, when asked why  a man was born blind, Jesus explained that it was not a consequence of sins the man committed in his present life, nor  of any sins of his parents; instead the suggestion is that his condition was due to acts committed in a previous life.

Certainly there were prominent theologians in the early Christian Church, such as Origen, who considered the transmigration of souls as an integral part of dogma.

From the viewpoint of the Self, belief in reincarnation is of little consequence, since for the Self there is no incarnation, or reincarnation, as individual, discrete, transmigrating 'souls'. Self is all-pervading, co-extensive with time and space, and therefore concepts of incarnation and reincarnation are meaningless.

From the human perspective, however, the idea that we have only one life to live has consequences for the way we live life. On the positive side, people in Western societies, that have developed under the influence of the Christian churches, can be motivated to live life to the fullest; while the drawback can be an attitude of impatience and even desperation to get the most out of life, also a lack of acceptance of what life throws in our way, possibly as a result of karma.
If you look at the history of spirituality, belief in reincarnation is almost universal, except within Christianity. Even in Islam, the Sufis and Ismailis have often accepted it.

It (the Self) is not born, and It does not die; nor is it ever that this One having been nonexistent becomes existent again. This One is birthless, eternal, undecaying, ancient; It is not killed when the body is killed.

-Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavd Gita is a core text of Hinduism. It does not refute reincarnation as such, but merely points out that the Self, the ultimate reality, is not subjected to rebirth and karma.

As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is 
our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God.

- Leo Tolstoy

There is no death. How can there be death if everything is part of the Godhead?
The soul never dies and the body is never really alive.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer, Stories from Behind the Stove

To disregard what appears to be the self

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.

First, to let go of life.
In the end, to take a step without feet;
to regard this world as invisible,
and to disregard what appears to be the self.

Heart, I said, what a gift it has been
to enter this circle of lovers,
to see beyond seeing itself,
to reach and feel within the breast.

- Rumi,
The Divani Shamsi Tabriz, XIII

Indian miniature painting, Bhairavi Rangini

A poem by Vaclav Havel

It is I Who Must Begin

It is I who must begin.
Once I begin, once I try --
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
-- to live in harmony
with the "voice of Being," as I
understand it within myself
-- as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.

Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.


by Vaclav Havel
from Teaching With Fire