MEDITATE

STILLNESS is
the space between movements
the crack in the universe
the gloved hand
with the art
to pull apart
two thin life stitches
and let a stab of nothing in.



New Project: VIPĀKHA KAMMA

"MY BODY", "MY MIND"

Commonsense dictates that in the short term (i.e. from birth to death), this is clearly the case.  They certainly don't belong to anyone else.  While they are mine, this is both opportunity and responsibility.  Because of freewill I can, within their limits, use them as I wish.  

This is opportunity.  

My responsibility is to take sensible care them and use them without allowing myself to be used by them.  The human state is very hard to attain. It should be used to attain the highest goal that a human being is capable of: Total Freedom from Suffering.

"O! dreadful is the check - intense the agony -
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain."

                                                                     -Emily Brontë

NEW PROJECT: MEDITATE

SILENCE

Where there are listeners
there is no silence.
Either the sounds
of the listeners’ minds
rebound
from the boundlessness of space,
or the universe itself pounds
out a multivociferous chatter;
the sound of reaching out,
selecting
rejecting
and pain;
coming together
and falling apart again.



THERE ARE SILENCES

There are silences
born of stillness
others that are discovered
when something snaps:
a cloud,
a stick,
a thought.
(A life).



New Project: "MY MIND", "MY BODY"

SPEECH

COMMENT: SPEECH

Speech
reaches out
to whisper and shout,
praise and curse,
across a silent universe;
making of molecular vibration
a means of human communication.

It wasn’t always quite like this;
the groans
and moans,
the hiss
and howls
in the warm pre-Cambrian mud
were eloquent enough avowals
of love and hatred, fear and blood.

Even now,
it isn’t always quite the same;
the grunts and lowing
of pig and cow
in farmyard barn and shed
make no poetic claim
but express the cosmic suffering
of the living and the dead.

When fragile humankind
comes here to peer,
through spiralling downwards mind,
into thorny jungles of raw sensation,
it loses its clear articulation;
the fine distinction
of the human word
is dislocated and blurred
into jabbering of animal and bird.


 
New Project: SILENCE

THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

The universe is everything that exists and everything that does not exist.  It includes the Past, Present and Future.  The project refers to everything that exists because no communication is possible in the realm where nothing exists.  Everything that exists is vibrating.  The vibrations accurately express a thing's present time condition.  The vibrations flow out from a thing's location in space and impinge upon other things.  If this impingement vibrates at a frequency within the range of any sense organs other "things" have developed, it can be consciously perceived and interpreted.  This is communication.

The English word "language" emphasises communication with the tongue; "lingua" = "tongue".  However, the vibrations which flow out from beings cover a wide spectrum and are perceived by different sense organs in different ways.  Slower vibrations are perceived as sound; faster ones as light. 

There are many gradations in between and outside of these. Different beings have developed different sense organs in order to perceive these vibrations and interpret them for survival.  It is always a mistake if a human being assumes that, because he cannot perceive something with his five senses, it doesn't exist.

Even human beings do not limit communication to what can be heard or transmuted into symbols and written down.  We have sign language, body language, intuitive perception, body contact (kisses, pats, punches, caresses). Unintentional perception enters through the nose and communicates stinks and aromas.

So this vast network of vibrations from every existing thing is eternally communicating its all and everything.  Is anyone listening?  In a nutshell, what does it all add up to?

Looking with dispassion,
with equanimity,
doesn’t it shine brighter than a thousand suns?
The broken wing
the severed finger
the uncompleted life
‘the smyler with the knife’
the smell of fear
spirochaetes, viruses and germs
and the ever-chewing sepulchral worms?

And don’t we see a thousand times and more
that what we build and try to hold in place
disintegrates, vanishes without trace?
And what we hoard up
and try to store
provides a breeding ground for rats?

And this, which is the Past,is also Evermore?

What we cannot preserve here
when we have felt the betrayal of the breath
we save for heaven,
taking our joys and pains
across the no-man’s land of death
and there, in finer, subtler, intellectual realms
plant our standards.
And still the Eternal, empty wind
blows them down.



LISTENERS

Where there are listeners
there is no silence.
Either the sounds
of the listeners’ minds
rebound
from the boundlessness of space,
or the universe itself pounds
out a multivociferous chatter;
the sound of reaching out,
selecting
rejecting
and pain;
coming together
and falling apart again.

Every plant, every stone, every sun
has its tongue,
its subtle and interminable vibration.
Every whirling planet
and spinning electron
screams (or whispers) its history.
Reaching out
selecting
rejecting
coming together
falling apart again.
Pain.

Where there are listeners
there is no silence.

The universal music thunders discordant tones
the unintended harmony
in its unintended composition;
the sound of creation
and of decomposition.




PUBLIC NOTICE

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING SILOM ROAD
THE POLLUTION LEVEL IS VERY HIGH

The terracotta pavement is lined
with pradhu trees,
the symbol of the Navy,
hung with orchids (wooden bananas).

Outside a shop called “Modern Optical”
with its reflecting rows
of à la mode spectacles
is a line of large Chinese fish bowls
in which live (and will die)
three-foot high pudtan trees.

On these pots, sit five of the very poor,
hunching together as penguins do,
to keep the outside out.
One is grey with age,
two play old wooden instruments discordantly,
a girl sings;
the harmony is in the poverty.
Each has a tin labelled “Donations”.
No eyes are visible in half open sockets.
For they are blind.

They touch to make a living human chain
so that the fragile world they share
does not disintegrate.
A sharp-eyed woman,
with eyes for all five,
assists (or exploits)
their helplessness.

When the owner of Modern Optical
comes out to speak
and wave his hands,
she leads them away
to the market to find a new pitch.
Each holds onto the one in front
like a medieval European dance
of Dies Irae.

“What were they playing?”
The music of human misery.



New Project: "My Body, My Mind"

LISTEN

LISTEN

What is that sound?
Like the trailing of a fan
through a silent anteroom?

It is the murmur of air
ruffling leaves.

It is the herald of the whirlwind
which will strip those leaves from their trees
and wrench the trees from the hillside
and blast the soil from the rocks beneath,
leaving the skeleton of the earth
to bleach and crumble.

And what is that sound?
Like a cascade of pearls
on a silver salver?

It is the rushing of the waterfall
in the Italian garden.
It presages the tempest and the raging ocean
which smashes earth’s boundaries
and drives the rivers back up to their sources,
drowning and destroying everything that lives on air.

And what is that sound?
Like the crackle of dry twigs
under the heavy boots of soldiers?
It is the fire in the hearth,
logs spitting, blue and yellow flame dancing
under the granite lintel.

It is the messenger of the Sun
which will rage and burn the planet
to a cloud of incandescent interstellar dust
for the winds of space to disperse forever.

And what is that sound?
High and plaintive
behind the polished nursery door?

It is the crying of a two-day-old baby.
It tells of the heavy tramp of armies
across the continents of the world
marching to the rhythms
of dark gods
bringing the destruction of cities
and the extinguishing of civilisations.

It is the sound of an empty skull
there in the desert,
abandoned by dog and raven,
dry and bleached and splitting along its seams,
home to gusts of wind
and the occasional locust.

These are the sounds of the end of human
endeavour,
the end pages of books,
the silence which silences the symphony.

When the gums shrivel and decay,
the teeth are cracked and broken
and there is to be found no place where the smile
or its shadow has ever been;
no echo of long ago laughter.

This is the sound of eternity.


 
New Project: THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

SAME SOIL, DIFFERENT SEEDS

The soil is always the same; made up entirely of the corpses of uncountable bodies. These have lived and fed upon each other and died and rotted down and been digested into soil.

Each body is a life in which the experiences of becoming, the sangsara, are tested and its sweet and bitter fruit digested. All is recorded on a timetrack which has neither beginning nor ending.  Each body is the fruit of its past.  Each fruit spills out its seed (murmuring "please some more!") into the soil (which is always the same).

Same soil.  Different seeds.

The splendour of a hundred kings
fades like the bloom on a butterfly’s wings.
The meanest flower that blows
goes the same way the forest goes.
All is consumed by worm or fire;
nothing needs building any higher.
The rattling of teeth within the jaw
mocks the tongue murmuring:
“Please, some more!”



NEW PROJECT: LISTEN

INSIDE OUT OR OUTSIDE IN?

INSIDE OUT indicates the direction of flow: from the Centre outwards into the Universe of Becoming. Obviously, everything "out there" has come from the Centre, the Point of Origin.  Our Point of Origin is in the centre of our physical bodies but is unnoticed and forgotten by most beings that have physical forms.  If we don't overlook or lose sight of it, then all of our behaviour (thought, word and deed) is grounded in the Centre, flows from it and is in harmony with everything else "out there" which has the same origin as ourselves.  We are therefore able to sustain contact with our Point of Origin.  We do not go astray and, in the end, we return to it.

OUTSIDE IN indicates a flow in the opposite direction: from the Universe of Becoming "out there" into our minds.  Everything "out there" seems separate and competing with everything else for survival and happiness.  Points of views and knowledge arise based upon this separateness, self and other, me and you.  A cloud of thinking founded on multiplicity obscures our ability to see clearly.  We do things which cause suffering to ourselves and others.

INSIDE OUT OR OUTSIDE IN.  We have to chose.  Worldly values (the World) or ethical values (the Centre)?

Ethics shows us that it is wrong to kill (Who cuts off his own hand?).  Worldly wisdom says that we need the protein from meat and explains that if, for example, a country like Denmark gave up exporting meat and dairy products, it would be a very poor country indeed.

Indeed.  But it would also be richer spiritually and happier.  Because the more you tune into the Centre, the happier you are.  And the more you adjust to the wisdom of the world (compromise), the more you cause suffering (and suffer).

Ethics is the highest science,
concerned with surviving,
not merely knowing.

A man without Ethics

is already drowning;

ever sinking

ever lower

in a sea of being.

New Project: SAME SOIL, DIFFERENT SEEDS