The Contemplative Wasabi Bandit

[wasabibandit]

Can I touch the center of my pain? Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine, without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache of loss or disgrace — disappointment in all its many forms — and let it open me? This is the trick.

Pema Chodron

[wasabibandit]

The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward.

Joseph Campbell

[wasabibandit]

This dewdrop world-

Is but a dewdrop world

And yet

Issa

[wasabibandit]

This body is inert like the earth,

This body is selfless like the water,

This body is impersonal like the wind,

This body is non-substantial like space,

This body is unreal, being a collocation of four elements,

It is void, indefinable, mysterious

Happy Birthday Wasabi!

[wasabibandit]

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body         love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

[wasabibandit]

I Want Both Of Us

I want both of us

To start talking about this great love

As if you, I, and the Sun were all married

And living in a tiny room,

Helping each other to cook,

Do the wash,

Weave and sew,

Care for our beautiful

Animals.

We all leave each morning

To labor on the earth's field.

No one does not lift a great pack.

I want both of us to start singing like two

Travelling minstrels

About this extraordinary existence

We share,

As if

You, I, and God were all married

And living in

A tiny

Room.

Hafiz

[wasabibandit]

Love after love

The time will come  when, with elation  you will greet yourself arriving  at your own door, in your own mirror  and each will smile at the other's welcome,  and say, sit here. Eat.  You will love again the stranger who was your self.  Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart  to itself, to the stranger who has loved you  all your life, whom you ignored  for another, who knows you by heart.  Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,  the photographs, the desperate notes,  peel your own image from the mirror.  Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

[wasabibandit]

Well-being is the state of having arrived at the full development of reason: reason not in the sense of merely intellectual judgement, but in that of grasping truth by "letting things be" (to use Heidegger's term) as they are. Well-being is possible only to the degree to which one has overcome one's narcissism; to the degree to which one is open, responsive, sensitive, awake, empty (in the Zen sense). Well-being means to be fully related to wo/man and nature affectively, to overcome separateness and alienation, to arrive at the experience of oneness with all that exists- and yet to experience myself at the same time as the separate entity I am, as the in-dividual. Well-being means to be fully born, to become what one potentials; it means to have full capacity for joy and for sadness or, to put it still differently, to awake from the half-slumber the average man lives in, and to be fully awake. If it is all that, it means also to be creative; that is, to react and to respond to myself, to others, to everything that exists- to react and to respond as the real, total wo/man I am to the reality of everybody and everything as s/he or it is. In this act of true response lies the area of creativity, of seeing in the world as it is and experiencing it as my world, the world created and transformed by my creative grasp of it, so that the world ceases to be a strange world "over there" and becomes my world. Well-being means, finally to drop one's and the aggrandisement of the Ego, to be and the experience one's self in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using.

from Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis

Erich Fromm

[wasabibandit]

You will find that it is extraordinarily difficult to watch yourself in the mirror of relationship without any sense of condemning what you see, and if you condemn what you see, you do not understand it. To understand a thing as it is, condemnation, judgment, evaluation, must go which is extremely difficult because at present we are trained, educated to condemn, to reject, to approve, to deny.And that is only the beginning of it, a very shallow beginning. But one must go through that, one must understand the whole process of the mind, not merely intellectually, verbally, but as one lives from day to day, watching oneself in this mirror of relationship. One must actually experience what is taking place in the mind-examine it, be aware of the whole content of it, without denying, suppressing, or putting it away. Then, if you go so far, and if you are at all serious, you will find that the mind is no longer projecting any image, no longer creating any myth, any illusion; it is beginning to understand the totality of itself, and therefore it becomes very clear, simple, quiet.

J. Krishnamurti

[wasabibandit]

The Eight Verses of Thought Transformation

by Geshe Langri Tangpa

With the thought of attaining enlightenment  For the welfare of all beings,  Who are more precious than a wish-fulfilling jewel,  I will constantly practice holding them dear.

Whenever I am with others  I will practice seeing myself as the lowest of all,  And from the very depth of my heart I will respectfully hold others as supreme.

In all actions I will examine my mind  And the moment a disturbing attitude arises,  Endangering myself and others,  I will firmly confront and avert it.

Whenever I meet a person of bad nature  Who is overwhelmed by negative energy and intense suffering, I will hold such a rare one dear,  As if I had found a precious treasure.

When others, out of jealousy,  Mistreat me with abuse, slander and so on,  I will practice accepting defeat  And offering the victory to them.

When someone I have benefited  And in whom I have placed great trust  Hurts me very badly,  I will practice seeing that person as my supreme teacher.

In short, I will offer directly and indirectly  Every benefit and happiness to all beings, my mothers.  I will practice in secret taking upon myself  All their harmful actions and sufferings.

Without these practices being defiled by the stains of the eight worldly concerns,  By perceiving all phenomena as illusory,  I will practice without grasping to release all beings  From the bondage of the disturbing unsubdued mind and karma.

[wasabibandit]

One of my most intense epiphanies happened while I was stoned and meditating and I saw myself- really saw myself- and realized that I was the exact sort of guy I try to avoid. At first it's dismaying to realize this but then it becomes a real tool. It's wild when you digest that you're being attacked by mirrors!

Duncan Trussell

[wasabibandit]

Keeping Quiet Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still for once on the face of the earth, let's not speak in any language; let's stop for a second, and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines; we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales and the man gathering salt would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire, victories with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.

Now I'll count up to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go. Pablo Neruda

[wasabibandit]

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill. going far ahead of the road I have begun. So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; it has inner light, even from a distance- and charges us, even if we do not reach it, into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are; a gesture waves us on answering our own wave... but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Rainer Maria Rilke

[wasabibandit]

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

Henry David Thoreau 

[wasabibandit]

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[wasabibandit]

being in the moment might be a bit like surfing. i can't surf, but i know you have to be patient and wait for waves. some waves don't last so long but when they're good and long i bet you forget what waiting was even like. b.bays

[wasabibandit]

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness. Herman Hesse