Poem by Rumi "the wolf is my shepherd,"

This is a lovely poem by Rumi I got from a dear friend:

"the wolf is my shepherd,"

The Sea boils with passion for you
The clouds pour pearls at your feet
A lightning from your love has pierced the earth
This smoke curling to heaven is its child.

We were green: we ripened and grew golden.
The Sea terrified us: we learned how to drown.
Squat and earthbound, we unfolded huge wings.
We started sober: are love’s startled drunkards.

You hide me in your cloak of nothingness
Reflect my ghost in your glass of being
I am nothing, yet appear: transparent dream
Where your eternity briefly trembles.

This love sacrifices all souls, however wise, however “awakened”
Cuts off their heads without a sword,
hangs them without a scaffold.

We are the guests of the one who devours his guests
The friends of the one who slaughters his friends....
Although by his gaze he brings death to so many lovers
Let yourself be killed by him: is he not the water of life?

Never, ever, grow bitter: he is the friend and kills gently.
Keep your heart noble, for this most noble love
Kills only kings near God and men free from passion.
We are like the night, earth’s shadow.
He is the Sun: He splits open the night
with a sword soaked in dawn....

The man to whom is unveiled the mystery of Love
Exists no longer, but vanishes into love.
Place before the Sun a burning candle
And watch its brilliance disappear before that blaze,
The candle exists no longer, it is transformed into Light,
There are no more signs of it, it itself becomes sign....

You are my soul, my universe:
what do I have to do with the soul and the universe?

For me you are ever-flowing treasure:
what do I have to do with profit and loss?
One minute, I am the friend of the wine,
another the friend of him who burns me.
I have come to this age of ruins,
so what do I have to do with time’s melodrama?

I am terrified by the whole world,
I am sprung free of the whole world,
I am neither “hidden” no “apparent.”
What do I have to do with existence or space?
I am drunk on union with you,
I need and want and care about no one else.

Since I am your prey, what do I care
about fate’s bow and its arrows?
I live at the bottom of the stream,
why would I go looking for water?
What could or would I say about this stream that flows and flows?
I have given up existence,
why go on staggering under the burden of this mountain?

Since the wolf is my shepherd,
why put up with the pretensions of the shepherd?
What abandon! What drunkenness!
You hold the cup in you hand
Blessed is the place you are,
and glorious to the eye of the heart.
Each atom, by your grace, is a universe,
each drop of water a soul.

No one who has ever had a sign from you
need worry again about “name” or “sign.”
To find the place of splendor,
at the bottom of the Sea of truths
You have to dive, dive head first:
what do I have to do with feet that scurry?

With the sword of the One God you have hacked a Path for us:
You have stolen all my clothes:
What will I give to the toll-man?
From your beauty ablaze like the sun,
from the curls of your hair,
My heart has become ecstatic:
O my soul, hand me this brimming cup,
Do not weigh pain and misery,
contemplate love, contemplate friendship:
Do not mull over tyranny and neglect:
think of all those who have their eyes fixed on you.
Surname all grief ‘grace’:
transmute pain and anguish into joy
And ask from joy all happiness, all security, all peace.
Demand that security, that peace, demand them,
Choose the company of those withdrawn in love

Rumi

Namaste

Roshi

Adyashanti - Simple Awareness

Here Adyashanti is talking about simple Awareness and the sense of the "nothing", I love it....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohVRK3nlsgQ

Some inspiring words from John Sherman;

You are here, if you look at that, everything else is taken care of. This is the only thing you can do by yourself, nobody can do that for you, and its easy, you are here. What could be easier. It's to look at the fundamental thing that you know.You are here. Just that! Looka at it. It looks like you. Already you are exactly as you are. You don't have to change anything to see this.

John Sherman


Namaste

Roshi

Quotes

-The thought of knowing it keeps you from being it.

-Arrogans is to claim that you know what anything is.

So, is it to not to try to 'Know' it ?....can we avoid arrogans?

Maybe it is not either....

Now where do we stand?

Do we have a choise?

Namaste

Roshi

Zen

"If you understand, things are just as they are...
If you do not understand, things are just as they are."

- Zen Saying

Namaste

Roshi

Bernie Prior

Bernie says something nice about when a 'knowing' appears of something that is impossible to explain or touching nothingness;

When we begin to touch this nothing and we have a knowing about it, for a while we feel contained in something but we do not know what it is. If you have ever watched somebody die, they are in the same place – almost. When someone dies they become less interested in the sensible forms and more interested in something that they cannot explain.

Their attention gets drawn into this place inside them rather than drawn outside - that is exactly the mystical way. The mystical way is when an individual begins to awaken to the pull inside that has nothing to do with the forms as they presently are, but has everything to do with what is animating and changing them constantly from a place of the true will. So when this begins to happen - we begin to touch this unknown place because we’re giving ourselves and you begin to awaken to knowing - it is a question of whether you continue to be nurtured by the knowing and your response to the knowing; then the knowing starts to move as an action in life.

As it moves in an action in life the knowing is being integrated into the life of a human being; you have living knowingness. Now you have a living Being beginning to take place. You as a Being, appearing human, have access to that place. There is an expansion inside and outside; you are no longer contained, you are beginning to be uncontainable. The containment that you may feel is the holding on to a personal life that is being threatened by this uncontainable place you are opening up to.

Bernie Prior

http://www.bernieprior.org/

Namaste

Roshi

Dr. Shankar

Shankar talks about the ultimate understanding;

The moment you understand or the understanding happens to man, that he neither talks nor speaks nor does - and all three happen to him as an optical and auditory illusion of light and sound - he will be relaxed in life, he will be alive in life, he will not have to worry about what will happen in life, because life happens to him whether he likes it or not. He simply enjoys the life as a witnesser - witnesser means “he who witnesses life happening”, “he who witnesses and understands that life makes life happen and it is not man who makes life happen, least of all through his mind.

Whatever man believes happens in life, he beliefs it, it is just a belief to him, but not an understanding. If he understands life, he will realize, nothing happens in life. Life is just a movement of color, light and sound, forms and shapes. An action is an optical illusion, and an auditory illusion in the mind. But man is convinced of an action as a reality. Man needs to understand, that in life neither is time existent nor is anything physically real. There is not anything such as substance in life. Everything, which is known, is not of any substance or reality in life. It is just existent as a thought in his mind. Such is the intelligence of life.

Dr. Shankar

Namaste

Roshi

!

“Life makes the mind happen”

V.S.Shankar

Namaste