The world is created every moment

The world exists only when we think about it; creation stories are for children. In reality the world is created every moment.

— Dr. Jean Klein – I Am – p. 9

My burning Heart

My heart is burning with love
All can see this flame
My heart is pulsing with passion
like waves on an ocean

my friends have become strangers
and I’m surrounded by enemies
But I’m free as the wind
no longer hurt by those who reproach me

I’m at home wherever I am
And in the room of lovers
I can see with closed eyes
the beauty that dances

Behind the veils
intoxicated with love
I too dance the rhythm
of this moving world

I have lost my senses
in my world of lovers

— Jalalud’din Rumi – The Love Poems of Rumi (transl. by Fereydoun Kia, edited by Deepak Chopra)

What is perception, what is seeing?

What is perception, what is seeing? How do you see that tree? Look at it for the moment. With what sight do you see it? Is it solely an optical observation, just looking at the tree with the optical reaction, observing the form, the pattern, the light on the leaf? Or do you, when you observe a tree, name it, saying. “That is an oak” and walk by? By naming it you are no longer seeing the tree—the word denies the thing. Can you look at it without the word?

So, are you aware how you approach, how you look at, the tree? Do you observe it partially, with only one sense, the optical sense; or do you see it, hear it, smell it, feel it, see the design of it, take the whole of it in? Or, do you look at it as though you are different from it—of course, when you look at it you are not the tree. But can you look at it without a word, with all your senses responding to the totality of its beauty?

— Jiddu Krishnamurti – The Flame of Attention (p. 34)

Handling the moment

The present moment
contains past and future.
The secret of transformation,
is in the way we handle this very moment.

— Thich Nhat Hanh – Understanding Our Mind

Life

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, — you’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

— Emily Dickinson – Complete Poems – Part One – IX

Dualism, the chasm between “me” and the world

So how does the observer come into being? When you look at this flower, at the moment you observe it closely, there is no observer, there is only a looking. Then you begin to name that flower. Then you say, “I wish I had it in my garden or in my house.” Then you have already begun to build an image about that flower. So the image-maker is the observer. Right? Are you following all this? Watch it in yourself, please. So the image and the image-maker are the observer, and the observer is the past. The “me” as the observer is the past, the “me” is the knowledge which I have accumulated: knowledge of pain, sorrow, suffering, agony, despair, loneliness, jealousy, and the tremendous anxiety that one goes through. That’s all the “me”, which is the accumulated knowledge of the observer, which is the past. Right? So when you observe, the observer looks at that flower with the eyes of the past. And you don’t know how to look without the observer and, therefore, you bring about conflict.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti – Mind in Meditation – Pages 8 and 9

The Last Curtain

Like a dream,
Whatever I enjoy
Will become a memory;
The past is not revisited.

— Shantideva – Verse 36 / Chapter 2 of the Bodhicharyavatara

I know that the day will come
when my sight of this earth shall be lost,
and life will take its leave in silence,
drawing the last curtain over my eyes.

Yet stars will watch at night,
and morning rise as before,
and hours heave like sea waves casting up pleasures and pains.

When I think of this end of my moments,
the barrier of the moments breaks
and I see by the light of death
thy world with its careless treasures.
Rare is its lowliest seat,
rare is its meanest of lives.

Things that I longed for in vain
and things that I got
—let them pass.
Let me but truly possess
the things that I ever spurned
and overlooked.

— Rabindranath Tagore – Gitanjali – Poem N° 92

Truth Is A Pathless Land

Whatever counts is the present moment!

“When there is neither ‘is-ness’ nor ‘non-is-ness’ existing before the mind, there being no other course, the mind, without a support, will become tranquil.”
— Shantideva – Verse 35 / Chapter 9 of the Bodhicharyavatara

A thing or concept either exists or does not exist. When there is neither a thing or a nothing the mind will have no concept to deliberate upon. Hence, when there is neither is-ness nor non-isness before the mind, there being no alternative, the mind will attain a state of perfect equanimity as it will be deprived of its props of is-ness and non-isness. Like fire bereft of all fuel, the mind will get stilled in absolute tranquillity. All concepts, all alternatives will evaporate and a state of complete ‘nivritti’ or detachment will result. The alternatives that act as disturbing concepts, for example, are to believe that something is both a thing and a nothing and that it is neither a thing nor a nothing. To rise above such concepts is to attain absolute ‘prasanti’, absolute peace.

(Text from Parmanada Sharma – Bodhicharyavatra of Santideva: Orginal Sanskrit Text with an English Translation)