Nothing To Be Gained From Enlightenment

Where can I find a man who has forgotten words?
He is the one I would like to talk to.

~ Chuang Tzu

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Wanting to reform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.

~ Ramana Maharshi

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"Popularity among the soundly asleep may not be the best criterion by which to judge a method for waking up."

~ Jed McKenna

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"Speaking of Self-realization is a delusion. It is only because people have been under the delusion that the non-Self is the Self and the unreal the Real that they have to be weaned out of it by the other delusion called Self-realization; because actually the Self always is the Self and there is no such thing as realizing it."

~ Ramana Maharshi

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Nothing is Gained with Enlightenment

I once lived in an apartment so small I had to step outside into the adjacent hallway to open my oven door. There was room only for a bed, a radio, and a cardboard carton of books. I kept my clothes in a closet down the hall. Even in this confined space, there was housework to be done. Indeed, the demands of maintenance follow us wherever we find ourselves, from palaces to prison cells.

The Italian poet Cesare Pavese wrote in his journal that we never remember days, we remember only moments. And Zen teachers tell us that this moment is the only one we’ll ever have. Perhaps this is a better way of looking at enlightenment. It’s not achieving or gathering something. Nor is it losing or overcoming something else. It’s simply stepping outside of the room you’re in and allowing the oven door to open. It’s checking the ceiling overhead and cleaning up the spills beneath your feet.

~ Gary Thorp, "The Dust Beyond the Cushion"

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"In Kisagata,
The flowering cherry trees
Vanish under waves ---
Until an old fisherman
Rows out across blossoms.

Whatever it is,
I cannot understand it,
Although gratitude
Stubbornly overcomes me
Until I'm reduced to tears.

My final desire ---
That I be allowed to die
Under flowering cherries,
On the fifteenth evening
Of the second month."

~ Saigyo, "The Poetry of Zen"

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So really what it comes down to, it's God. Wherever you look, it's God appearing as this, that, and what you really love and appreciate in each form is the divine formless out of which each form comes. But to be able to sense that you have to sense it in yourself first. And that is seeing the beauty in everything, that's really what it means.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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A Message from Space

Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna -- a dish
aimed at stars -- and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear -- suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath --

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."

~ William Stafford