Waves crash into each other.
Sharing their salinity, oxygenation, clouded sand
and silver flashing fish.
How can we demarcate them?
Usain Bolt ran exactly 100 metres.
To be there before the others.
Josef Klein ran exactly 100 metres.
To catch the bus.
Usain Bolt won
and is engulfed by cameramen
in Beijing.
Josef Klein missed the bus
and is slumped on a bench by a bus stop
in Clapham.
Usain is recognised by everyone world-wide
and lives in luxury everywhere.
Josef is unrecognised by neighbours
in a block of Council Flats in Clapham.
Usain Bolt is an entertainer.
Josef Klein is a retired refuse collector.
Exactly 100 metres is exactly 100 metres.
Papa Francis says
He
and
his cohorts of priests
can forgive abortion.
Abortion is a label for killing.
Papa is wrong.
The only killer Papa can forgive
is the man who assassinates
Papa himself.
This is true
for all his cohorts of priests.
Only God can forgive all killing.
If He chooses to.
Es audiendo, Papa?
-GNOME
NEW PROJECT: AS WE SOW, SO ARE WE REAPED
The less I name, the less I impede communications from the Centre. M.
ReplyDeleteA thinker's question to ignore
ReplyDeleteIs 'Don't you miss before?'
An invitation to name and bore
Or see with vision from the Centre's core.
Labels can be useful when used for the storing or passing on of information. However they are often used as a means of creating separatism, and can become a platform for negative states of mind. A situation becomes 'good' (for me) or 'bad' (for me). I am 'right', so therefore he is 'wrong'. Flora and fauna are catalogued using labels and sub-labels and this affects the way they are viewed and therefore treated. One can't see the wood for the trees. And as a thing is viewed, then of course so it appears.
ReplyDeleteThis type of obsessive and compulsive labelling is the product of unconsciousness. It encourages further unconsciousness. If one isn't careful, labels can take one out of the Present and off to the past or the future. Only in the present moment, without this habitual judging and labelling, can one see things as they really are.
There is labelling which is practical and useful in everyday life. This is not a problem.
ReplyDeleteThere is labelling which is intended to be useful (e.g. “Priest”), but which can be completely misleading if one simply accepts the label without further examination. One needs to put the label on hold, as it were, and look carefully at the being in question. (Red Riding saw the label “Grandmother” – with unfortunate results.)
The serious problems arise when one identifies with a label. That’s when the Ego takes over, creating an image which is projected onto every situation, thereby obscuring reality. I/Me/Mine becomes paramount, distorting what “is”.
The project has been invaluable in reminding one that a label is just a mental concept which one has to go beyond in order to see. Labels belong to the world of thinking and knowledge; they are of the past and so, however briefly, distract attention from the present moment.
Like being, seeing is only in the Now.
Sometimes labels can have practical functions. Hot. Poisonous. High voltage. Etc. However, this project is about the unnecessary and largely unconscious automatic labelling done by the mind which serves no other purpose than to strengthen the ego's sense of separateness by seemingly creating 'others'. The mind compulsively attaches labels (which are purely mental concepts) to objects perceived because it believes that by labelling something it therefore 'understands' it. By 'understanding' what something is, the mind feels that it is somehow in control of the perceived object, person or situation. By feeling 'in control' the mind/ego thereby strengthens its sense of separateness
ReplyDeleteas an independent entity.
The irony is that by being separate and attaching labels (which are mental concepts based upon a very narrow point of view - the mind's) to seemingly perceived separate objects and beings, the mind actually sees less, as it has already blinkered itself by the mental labels. Therefore, in the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant, different blind men 'saw' the elephant from very limited point of view - in this case, what they could feel. They attached labels according to what they felt - it is like a plough, it is like a pot, it is like a granary etc. They started arguing over what an elephant really was and in the end came to blows over the matter.
Labelling, like cancer and technology addiction, is a modern disease. The more (so-called) developed we as a society become, the more we know and the more we label. But the development is more like processing - and we all know that the more processed food is, the worse it tastes and the less good it does you. So therefore, the more we know and label, the less we actually see.
ReplyDeleteOnly those who are not developed in this modern sense are free from this disease. Children, primitive people, animals.
And the ill can join them, if they don't resist their illness and seek for labels to put on it. When one is ill, and accepts it, one doesn't label. One doesn't follow trains of thought. One doesn't see a brown bird and think - 'A dunnock' - and then go off on a train of thought about dunnocks and other birds and robins and the sparrow hawk that might, or might not, be around and the food that one gave to the birds in the morning. One sees it and then lets it go. And so one is very much in the present and therefore one actually sees, rather than giving labels that come from the past.
If I'm a labeller,
ReplyDeleteCalling every flower by its correct Latin name,
Branding every action a success or failure,
Instead of realising they're all intrinsically the same,
Then I'm firmly stuck, labelling the Present
With names I've learnt in the past,
Never seeing things in their truest sense,
My reality and the true Present always in direct contrast.
The modern world is fond of labels.
ReplyDeleteSo much so that it wraps its things in them.
Binds them up until they are turned inside out
and the label swamps the thing, becomes the thing.
The human mind is fond of labels, wraps its world
in them. Dividing this from that, creating subjects
from objects. Them from us, mine from ours.
Rainbows from illumination. And sets one against
the other.
A sunrise, without label, without price, costs no-one,
accosts no-one. Is of itself. Thoughts and words,
have their place (as echoes, on paper, in sounds), they
cannot add to the Moment, cannot take from it, should
not obscure it.
Shining, the present Moment reveals itself, complete.
Those who have eyes seeing, knowing.
In the words of Eckhart Tolle:
"Don't get attached to any words.
They are only stepping stones..."
"Consciousness does not need thought."
"...free of the involuntary internal dialogue
...there is inner stillness."
"The mind then gives form to the creative
impulse or insight."
WHAT'S THAT?
ReplyDeleteWhat’s that?
“An insect.”
An insect? That!
Dragging a fly
along a stalk
with a buzz and crackle that fills a world
down there. That?
Your “insect” is in a glass case
on the table,
dried out to illustrate its label.
Between insect and word
another insect.
Between word and insect
another word.
To label something is to put a name onto that thing according to your idea or point of view about it. You can also accept or use the existing label that other people have made. Once you have labelled something, you separate it from the whole. You think you know it.
ReplyDeleteTo see something is to open your eyes and look at that thing in the moment totally with full awareness. No mental concept. No idea about it. For example, a sheep or a fish. If you label them as food or a source of income, you will treat them accordingly. But if you see them as living beings just like you, you leave them alone; you feel friendly towards them.
Another example is a friend. The less you label him as a friend, the more you see him as he really is.
So you know what’s what. You see the Truth. The less you label or not label, the more you see. When you see, you have a choice: to act or not.
As I sit on this lump of wood, I see flowers nodding in the breeze, I hear birds chirping happily in the trees. I see grasshoppers hopping from plant to grass, hind legs rasping...
ReplyDeleteThe sun shines down, so warm & comforting, butterflies and bees flit from flower to flower, I find myself smiling and feeling content. I hear a high pitched call from above, and see a buzzard circling overhead...
So much movement and vibration....and stillness.