20 Apr Haiku 65
In the zoo are beautiful tigers and elephants. Strolling in their cages, we see their nature and ours....
19 Apr Koan 48
"Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one." -- Voltaire...
18 Apr God Plays Hide and Seek
Alan Watts in The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are: "God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear. Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever. Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as 'he' and not 'she,' God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive. "God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding. You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world." Everything is a manifestation of God. When we perceive God as something different than ourselves, we can never be one with God....
17 Apr William Shakespeare
"The play's the thing." Hamlet says "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." The king's guilty conscience will be revealed by the king's obvious embarrassment as he is watching the play. It's odd that an expression that's ambiguous to the point of meaningless is well-recognized. It must speak to certain truths. In the play of life, our intentions, actions and their consequences are revealed. So while the play is a fiction, it reveals the reality of who we are. The play's the thing; that is, something that cannot be described beyond "thing." It is what it is whatever it is. It can be anything we want it to be....
16 Apr Eckhart Tolle 1
“Don't Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness.”...
31 Mar T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land
"I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison" When we focus on our earliest memories, we imprison ourselves and can only wait for the prison door to open to allow us return to who we were before we were born. This keeps us from making the most of our present circumstances....
28 Mar Albert Camus
"Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth." The play of life is a story, a facade beneath which lies the truth; clear to the audience of gods watching the play but not to most of the actors playing their respective roles....
16 Mar Charles Swindoll
"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than success, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill. It will make or break a company...
05 Mar Jim Morrison
“A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.”...