Arthur Osborne - Arunachala

I sought to devour Thee:
Come now and devour me,
Then there will be peace, Arunachala.

You bade me give all for you --
Take now the giver too,
Survive alone, Arunachala!

Let now the deception end.
There was no lover or friend
Apart from Thyself, Arunachala!

Now that at last I know
All this a magic show,
Let it dissolve in Thee, Arunachala!

 

Tiruvalluvar - Love

Can love be latched and hidden? A trickling tear
Will proclaim it loud.

The loveless grasp all; while the loving
With their very bones help others.

The soul, it is said, is enclosed in bones
That human love may be.

From love, devotion comes; and from that unsought
Priceless enlightenment.

Bliss hereafter is the fruit, they say,
Of a loving life here.

"Love helps only virtue," say the fools:
But it also cures vice.

As boneless worms wither in the sun, so too
The loveless in a just world.

A loveless life is a withered tree that would fain
Sprout in a desert.

What good are outward features if they lack
Love, the inward sense?

Love's way is life; without it humans are
But bones skin-clad.

English version by P. S. Sundaram
Original Language Tamil

poetry chaikhana 

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj - Truth

If you expect any benefits from your search, 
material, mental, or spiritual, you have missed the point.

Truth gives no advantage. 
It gives no higher status, no power over others. 
All you get is truth and the freedom from the false.

Where is the dwelling place of truth 
where you could go in search of it? 
And how will you know that you have found it?

What touchstone do you bring with you to test it?

You imagine that truth is a thing 
which carries the name ‘truth’, 
and that it is advantageous to have it, 
provided it is genuine.

You are shopping for truth but you do not trust the merchants. 
You are afraid of forgeries and imitations. 
You are asking for truth, but in fact you merely seek comfort, 
which you want to last forever.

Now, nothing, no state of mind, can last forever.

In time and space there is always a limit, 
because time and space themselves are limited. 
And in the timeless the words ‘for ever’ have no meaning.
 The same with the proof of truth.

In the realm of non-duality everything is complete, 
its own proof, meaning and purpose. 
Where all is one, no supports are needed. 
You imagine that permanence is the proof of truth, 
that what lasts longer is somehow more true.

Time becomes the measure of truth. 
And since time is in the mind, 
the mind becomes the arbiter 
and searches within itself the proof of truth.....

a task altogether impossible and hopeless!

Farid ud-Din Attar - A slave's freedom

Loghman of Sarrakhs cried: "Dear God, behold
Your faithful servant, poor, bewildered, old
An old slave is permitted to go free;
I've spent my life in patient loyalty,
I'm bent with grief, my black hair's turned to snow;
Grant manumission, Lord, and let me go."
A voice replied: "When you have gained release
from mind and thought, your slavery will cease;
You will be free when these two disappear."
He said: "Lord, it is You whom I revere;
What are the mind and all its ways to me?"
And left them there and then -- in ecstasy
He danced and clapped his hands and boldly cried:
"Who am I now? The slave I was has died;
What's freedom, servitude, and where are they?
Both happiness and grief have fled away;
I neither own nor lack all qualities;
My blindness looks on secret mysteries
I know not whether You are I, I You;
I lose myself in You, there is no two."

 

Kuan Han-Ch'ing - Idle Wandering

go where my mind will
sit when my heart's still
drink when I'm thirsty
and sing when I'm drunk
when hard times come
I find a pile of grass and sleep
the days and months are long
the world is vast
and idleness is happiness

toss off the vintage wine
use up the raw
laugh beside the earthen pot
ha, ha, ha,
hum harmonies together with this rude old mountain bonz
he has a pair of chickens
I've brought along a duck
and idleness is happiness

I've reined mind's horses
locked up my monkey heart
leapt up from red dust and evil-mannered wind
who woke me from my shady dreams of Empire?
I've left the field of honor
and wormed into a nest of joys
where idleness is happiness

he's ploughed the southern field
and slept among the eastern hills
I've been the way the world goes, often
vainly measured bygones in my mind
he's the saint
and I'm the fool
who'd argue that?

 

Paramahansa Yogananda - What Is Love?

Love is the scent with the lotus born.
It is the silent choirs of petals
Singing the winter's harmony of uniform beauty.
Love is the song of the soul, singing to God.
It is the balanced rhythmic dance of planets -
sun and moon lit
In the skyey hall festooned with fleecy clouds -
Around the sovereign Silent Will.
It is the thirst of the rose to drink the sunrays
And blush red with life.
'Tis the promptings of the mother earth
To feed her milk to the tender, thirsty roots,
And to nurse all life.
It is the urge of the sun
To keep all things alive.

Love is the unseen craving of the Mother Divine
That took the protecting father-form,
And that feeds helpless mouths
With milk of mother's tenderness.
It is the babies' sweetness,
Coaxing the rain of parental sympathy
To shower upon them.
It is the lover's unenslaved surrender to the beloved
To serve and solace.
It is the elixir of friendship,
Reviving broken and bruised souls.
It is the martyr's zeal to shed his blood
For the well-beloved fatherland.
It is the ineffable, silent call of the heart to another
heart.
It is the God-drunk poet's heartaches
For every creature's groans.

Love is to enjoy the family rose of petal-beings,
And thence to move to spacious fields -
Passing by portals of social, national, international
sympathy,
On to the limitless Cosmic Home -
To gaze with looks of wonderment,
And to serve all that lives, still or moving.
This is to know what love is.
He knows who lives it.

Love is evolution's ameliorative call
To the far-strayed sons
To return to Perfection's home.
It is the call of the beauty - robed ones
To worship the great Beauty.
It is the call of God
Through silent intelligences
And starburst of feelings.

Love is the Heaven
Toward which the flowers, rivers, nations, atoms,
creatures - you and I
Are rushing by the straight path of action right,
Or winding laboriously on error's path,
All to reach haven there at last.
[From: Songs of the Soul]
Paramahansa Yogananda

Self realization fellowship

 

Thomas Merton - Natura naturans

There is in all visible things
an invisible fecundity,
a dimmed light,
a meek namelessness,
a hidden wholeness.
This mysterious Unity and Integrity
is Wisdom, Mother of all,
"Natura naturans."

Mooji - Clear seeing

"For the ego, self-inquiry is like being soak in sulphuric acid.
When you persistently and genuinely analyse the ‘I’ sense in the light of self-inquiry, 

things cannot continue living in the dark.
As truth reveals itself, untruth will simply dissolve.
The common mistake that is made, even by so-called mature spiritual seekers, is to become involved with and identified with what keeps arising in one’s consciousness.
But it is not about what keeps arising.
What matters is who you are, the one experiencing it.
In whatever form trouble comes, identity must be looked at first,
for it is here, in the realm of personhood, that the apparent 'becomes’ the actual.
By inquiring into the nature of the one in whom all of life appears as a play of contrasts, and recognising that the 'person’ is only the most intimately assumed thought arising from consciousness—you sieve yourself out of confusion by discarding the false self-image.
Whatever you perceive phenomenally and whatever you perceive yourself to be will now be seen in the great space of clear seeing.
See and verify: this space, the Self, cannot be stained or injured.
It cannot be troubled or acquire any type of sin or merit or demerit,
for it is formless, infinite and impersonal.
This twist or shift of perception from person to presence to Unborn Awareness, will be recognised as the work and beatitude of the Supreme grace; the great gesture of the Self to Itself."

 

Ted Loder - Silence

Eternal God, since silence seems to be
the voice of holiness, the only language
you speak directly,
then I pray to be steeped in it
until I fear it less and welcome it
as an usher to grace,
a narrator of sacred mysteries;
until silence cease the fretful conversations
of my mind with too little else than itself;
until silence calm my heart to an ease,
convene my senses to an anchored focus,
hush my tongue to a chastened hold;
until I discern in the silence
an answer to that necessary question
which, for the very life of me,
it has not yet occurred to me to ask;
until I am stretched alive and deep
to its dimensions, and catch,
at last and ready,
your assuring wink at me. Amen.

~ from MY HEART IN MY MOUTH by Ted Loder

 

 

 http://tedloder.blogspot.gr/

Albert Einstein - Optical delusion

A human being is part of the whole, called by us the "universe," 

a part limited in time and space. 

One experiences oneself, one's thoughts and feelings, 

as something separated from the rest, 

a kind of optical delusion of one's consciousness. 

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires 

and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. 

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison 

by widening our circle of compassion 

to embrace all living creatures

 and the Oneness of nature in its beauty.

May Sarton - Now I become myself

art source unknown

 Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
'Hurry, you will be dead before-'
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

about May Sarton