Robert Wolfe - Freeing your thoughts

 

photo H.kopp delaney

 

 

You want to know what is meant when you see the phrase “thought-free”.

If you concern yourself with whether you are thought-free or not thought-free, would it be possible to be “thought free”, in that circumstance?

As the Dzochen Rinpoche Tulku Orgyen has commented:

“Checking, ‘Is there a thought now; or (am I) free of thought?’— isn’t that just another thought?”
These teachers speak of a “natural” mind. During your day, all sorts of thoughts come and go, spontaneously arising and dissolving, like surf washing up on a beach. Isn’t this what is natural to all of us?

Tulku Rinpoche has said, “ it is not beneficial to continuously pursue a special, thought-free mental state. Rather, simply allow yourself to be in naturalness, free of any fabrication”; that is, conceiving of, and attempting to engineer, some special state of mind or condition for thought. “Thought-free means free of conceptual thinking,” he states.

Tulku’s eldest son, Chokyi Nyima also speaks of the dualistic distinction between “thought” as compared to “thought-free”.

“What is to be practiced has nothing to do with thoughts and conceptual mind…The main practice is to simply rest vividly awake in this nondual awareness. Relax loosely, and remain naturally. Totally relax and do not check or question; remain totally free from accepting or rejecting—that is the conducive situation for meeting the natural face of awareness. Apart from this, you don’t need anything else to meditate upon.

“Whenever something is denied, something is affirmed at the same time. Whenever something is rejected, another thing is automatically accepted. This dualism is the very nature of conceptual judgment.

“When not involved in any kind of conceptual judging, that itself is innate suchness, thought-free wakefulness, and genuine ordinary mind.”

He has further stated:

“When leaving this fresh ordinary mind as it is, without correcting or modifying it, without altering it in any way, without accepting and rejecting, there is no fixating on anything.
“In the guidance manuals for meditation, it is often phrased like this: do not alter your present fresh wakefulness. Do not rearrange even as much as a hair tip. Just leave it exactly as it is. This is very profound, and there is a lot to understand here…

In the present moment, do not correct,
Do not modify,
Do not accept or reject.
Don’t try to rearrange your present wakefulness.
Instead, leave it as it naturally is
Without any attempt to alter it in any way.
That is called sustaining your natural face.”

Another son of Tulku Rinpoche, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, speaks in detail about the innate naturalness of the mind free of such dualistic concepts as thought versus no thought:
“Like many of the people I now meet on teaching tours, I thought that natural mind had to be something else, something different from, or better than, what I was already experiencing. Like most people, I brought so much judgment to my experience. I believed that thoughts of anger, fear, and so on (that came and went throughout the day) were bad or counterproductive—or at the very least inconsistent with natural peace! The teachings of the Buddha—and the lesson inherent in this exercise in non-meditation—is that if we allow ourselves to relax and take a mental step back, we can begin to recognize that all these different thoughts are simply coming and going within the context of an unlimited mind, which, like space, remains fundamentally unperturbed by whatever occurs within it.
​
“All you have to do is rest your mind in its natural openness. No special focus, no special effort, is required. And if for some reason you cannot rest your mind, you can simply observe whatever thoughts, feelings, or sensations come up (hang out for a couple of seconds and then dissolve) and acknowledge, ‘Oh, that’s what’s going on in my mind right now.’ Wherever you are, whatever you do, it’s essential to acknowledge your experience as something ordinary, the natural expression of your true mind. If you don’t try to stop whatever is going on in your mind, but merely observe it, eventually you’ll begin to feel a tremendous sense of relaxation, a vast sense of openness within your mind—which is in fact your natural mind, the natural unperturbed background against which various thoughts come and go.”

 

 

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http://www.livingnonduality.org/ 

 

 

Come, come, you are the life and salvation of man.
Come, come, you are the eye and light of Joseph.
Touch my head
for your touch removes
the darkness of the body.
Come, come, for you bestow beauty and grace.
Come, come, for you are the cure of a thousand ills.
Come, come, even though you have never left—
come and hear some poetry.
Sit in the place of my soul,
for you are a thousand souls of mine.
Begone with your cares and your ancient longings—
you are the Beloved!
If the King did not sit
on the throne of this world
There would be darkness and confusion.
You are joyous and alive by His breath.
You move by the power of His love.
Now, like an artist, you create.
Now, like a servant, you sweep the floor.
Everything you touch
will reach its goal
and fly with the wings of an angel....
But wings cannot carry you to God.
Like the mule that carried the Prophet,
Only love can carry you there.

 

Rumi ♡ The Drunkards And The Tavern

 

 

 I’m drunk and you’re insane,
who’s going to take us home?
How many times did they say,
“Drink just a little, only two or three at most?”
 
In this city no one I see is conscious;
one is worse off than the next,
frenzied and insane.

 
Dear one, come to the tavern of ruin
and experience the pleasures of the soul.
What happiness can there be apart
from this intimate conversation
with the Beloved, the soul of souls?
 
In every corner there are drunkards, arm in arm,
while the Server pours the wine
from a royal decanter to every particle of being.
 
You belong to the tavern: your income is wine,
and wine is all you ever buy.
Don’t give even a second away
to the concerns of the merely sober.
 
O lute player, are you more drunk, or am I?
In the presence of one as drunk as you, my magic is a myth.
 
When I went outside the house,
some drunk approached me,
and in his eyes I saw
hundreds of hidden gardens and sanctuaries.
 
Like a ship without an anchor,
he rocked this way and that.
Hundreds of intellectuals and wise men
could die from a taste of his yearning.
 
I asked, “Where are you from?”
He laughed and said, “O soul,
half of me is from Turkestan
and half from Farghana.
 
Half of me is water and mud, half heart and soul;
half of me is the ocean’s shore, half is all pearl.”
 
“Be my friend,” I pleaded,
“I’m one of your family.”
“I know the difference between family and outsiders.”
 
I’ve neither a heart nor a turban,
and here in this house of hangovers
my breast is filled with unspoken words.
Shall I try to explain or not?
 
Have I lived among the lame for so long
that I’ve begun to limp myself?
And yet no slap of pain could disturb
a drunkenness like this.
 
Listen, can you hear a wail
arising from the pillar of grief?
Shams al-Haqq of Tabriz, where are you now,
after all the mischief you’ve stirred in our hearts?

 

 

Lisel Mueller - The World in Different Light

 

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller
1924-2020

 

 

Lisel Mueller
 

Original title - "Monet Refuses Operation"

"Her poems are 'a testament to the miraculous power
of language to interpret and transform our world'
and 'a testament that invites readers to share her vision
of experiences we all have in common: sorrow,
tenderness, desire, the revelations of art, and
mortality - 'the hard dry smack of death against the glass'"
(Washington Post)

Lisel Mueller was a German born American Poet.
Her family fled the Nazi regime in 1939 when she was 15.
She worked as a translator and academic teacher.  She
began writing poetry in the 1950's, publishing her first
collection in 1965.

~

Main photo and post - Mystic Meandering

 street light through ice on window...

Jean Klein - Living in the unknown

 

Many of us have heard the Zen story of the Renowned Quantum Physicist who came to the tea pouring Zen Master for further knowledge of the Theory of Everything. But that’s only part 1, there is a part 2. For the sake of those who have not heard part 1 here it is:

So there was this renown physicist in the field of quantum physics, totally fascinated with getting to the bottom of grasping an intellectual understanding of the mystery of life, determined to discover the ‘Theory of Everything’ but after decades of researching has come to a head. So he decided to visit a unknown tea pouring Zen master for advise???

After the introductions and paying due respect, the Physicist began, “Here is what we know: We have conducted double-slit experiments, quantum entanglement experiments, ‘ … the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter … the creator and governor of the realm of matter… the observer creates the reality …’

As the Physicist continues to speak of what he knows, the Master began pouring tea for his guest. The tea cup became full and yet the Master continues to pour and tea was now overflowing from the already full cup. Seeing this and seeing that apparently the Master is not stopping, the Physicist couldn’t help it and exclaimed, “Stop already, the cup is full!” To this the Zen Master says, “Sir, your cup is full, how can knowledge be revealed in a cup that is already full? Please come back when you have emptied your cup.”

So the Physicist left with his cup full of tea but now realise that he has a cup full of tea. That’s part 1.

Part 2

So the Physicist went back realizing that he had to dismantle the whole mental structure that he had built up over the years. Finally, after what seems like a long time, he felt that his cup was now empty, it’s time to revisit the Zen Master.

Master, ever since our last meeting when you highlighted to me that I had a cup full of knowledge and couldn’t be receptive to the real knowledge, I have worked on myself to remove one by one all of my accumulated knowledge, until finally I am now empty of knowledge, look, this tea cup that you gave me before is now empty; I am now ready for knowledge. The Zen master, took the empty tea cup from the Physicist, had a look at its emptiness and threw it over his head breaking it to pieces on the ground. “Good, keep it empty!”

“There is nothing eventually knowable ... living in non-concluding from moment to moment … Living in non-concluding does not mean being passive. Let us be clear about this. Non-concluding means you don’t conclude through personal interference. Things, situations, conclude by themselves when you leave them alone. Is there a choice for the girl on the tight-rope? You can be sure she does not think of left or right, but is established unthinkingly in the centre. She is spontaneously in non-conclusion. When you are established in globality, it is normal to live in choiceless awareness like the ballerina in the circus … When you are beyond choosing, like the dancer on the rope, when the mind does not plot, the conclusion comes instantaneously when the facts are ‘ripe.’ Live open to all perceived, open to the openness … In non-conclusion the world is rich and intelligent. One must come to the state where there is a complete shift in energy. 

 

 from living in the known, to living in the unknown. ” ~ Jean Klein, The Book Of Listening 

 

source text 

 

 

Maghrebi - Mirror (narrated)

 

Your beautiful face needs a clear mirror
That can truly reflect You and Your beauty to you.

When I glance at Your lovely visage
I behold the beauty of the entire world.

Nothing but my eyes are the beautician of Your visage,
It is the sight that presents the splendour of Your face.

The eye will have no regard for the beautiful ones of this world
If it ever caught a glance of Your beauty.

I feel You become lovelier all the time,
Since my love for you increases with every moment.

The attraction of Your beauty intensifies every instant,
Snatching me from myself, from this world and the hereafter.

Our eyes are unfit to behold You,
Only Your eyes are worthy of witnessing you.

Maghrebi! As long as the dark night of your self-existence remains

You will not see the day of my sun rising from the eastern horizon of the soul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jami - You are my goal!

 

Who can be seen in the appearance of water and earth except You?
Who is concealed inside the heart and soul except You?
You said: ‘Purify your heart from all others except Me’.
O Soul of the world, who is there in both worlds except You?

O you who’ve turned into the direction of loyalty
Why have you turned the shell into the veil of the kernel?
It’s not wise that your heart runs after this and that:
With a single heart, one Friend is enough for you!

O you whose heart experiences thousands of difficulties from everything!
Your heart will find it difficult finding peace from everything.
The result for your heart is nothing but dispersion from everything,
So submit your heart to the One and free yourself from everything!

I went out to enjoy the roses, but that Beauty of Taraz
Saw me in the rose garden and playfully said:
‘I am the Root and the roses of the world are My branches.
You stop at the branches; why not proceed to the Root?’

If a rose enters your heart, a rose you are.
If it is a restless nightingale, a nightingale you are.
You are a part and Reality is the Whole. If for some time
You concentrate on the Whole, the Whole you are.

In the relationship between body and soul, You are my goal!
In living and dying, You are my goal!
You live forever, and I am departing in the midst.
When I say “I” about me, then You are my goal!

Being manifests Itself in everything.
If you want to discover Its state in everything,
Go and see how the bubbles are on top of the wine:
Wine in the bubbles is bubbles; they are wine in the wine!

When will it be, when will the garment of my being get torn in pieces?
When will the unlimited beauty of His Face become luminous?
When will my heart get consumed in the majesty of His Light?
When will my soul get drowned in the strength of my longing for Him?