For the moment
we were only playing rough
as two animals might play
in a kind of necessary relief
of something that was beyond us.
And in our enthusiasm
we overdid it
and one of us got injured or hurt.
But the other did not rejoice
in victory
or feel superior
or walk away in a flight of fancy
or egotism.
He felt that in hurting someone else,
he might be hurting himself.
So he made apology
and asked forgiveness.
Young men on way to political rally in Rajastan, India.
Let the news increasingly be the arm of the people,
and let it belong to the people—and not to sanctify
the ambitions and limitations of a few.
Let it furnish the people with unending information.
Let it be an educational means toward healthier,
happier, and more well-balanced goals.
Let it help man to formulate more comprehensively,
in the most wholesome sense, his mode of life.
Out of suffering, shock, and defeat
may come an extraordinary renewal.
Almost every loss offers some hope of compensation.
Pain, in its many forms, may be measured
by the force it generates against itself.
Shock can be a warning.
Defeat can be a cleansing and a rebirth
that may be long overdue.
The insanity of excessive industrialism is that it creates
problems it cannot solve and then asks society to expend
itself on its behalf.
Prevailing governments must then, through taxation of the
common man or creation of fictitious money, subsidize all
major industrial production units and guarantee their profits
and their existence.
To be arrested in some trauma
or neurosis of the present:
to be encased, enclosed, cloaked in,
to carry a veil over oneself,
to allow one’s will
to be subdued, restrained, immobilized, imprisoned,
is to waste time
and one’s life
and to be buried
before one has died.
With excessive commercialism man limits and constrains
himself to a few things for which he labors endlessly.
By giving an unending array of commercial products an
inordinate value, he places himself at their altar and subordinates
his whole being to their use and care.
In the face of his avid inventiveness and industriousness, he
inherits more problems than he does happiness.
Knowledge in and for itself has little value.
Fuel without a spark ignites no fire.
Knowledge without action and vital intention
changes nothing. The most valuable wisdom
or knowledge is that which at some point is put
into action.
Wisdom then becomes incarnate.
Education that does not teach
redemption from individual and mass tyranny,
economic or otherwise,
but that silently and snugly
accepts its gratuity
and confirms its reign
is worse than no education at all.
Truth has no prescribed means of approach.
It grows out of the realities with which it co-exists.
In the midst of some dereliction,
some defeat, some vast contradiction,
a tangible truth can be in the making.
In the midst of some vast turmoil,
there is always the seed of some great awakening.
The life of man is consummated physically.
His spirit, however, goes beyond life.
It challenges any destiny that it cannot penetrate.
It seeks to transport the body with it.
It does not accept death as final.
They hire a devil to make things work out.
When the system stops working,
when the plant is losing money,
when people stop buying junk,
They hire a devil.
And the devil does the trick.
He cuts corners.
He fires people.
He makes people work harder.
He makes everyone cringe at his presence.
For the devil gets results,
no matter whom he hurts
or what he destroys.
But he always saves the system.
Men can communicate best
if they feel a consciousness
of each other’s
infinite nature
and know
that access to the other
will always be incomplete.
The life of the spirit
must always appear unreal.
When it becomes too real
it becomes
ridiculous.
Semana Santa (Holy Week) procession in Seville, Spain.
Belief should not be the sum-total of an attitude
or stance. It should not be a thing in itself,
that freezes its believer and neutralizes his will.
Believing is not just an answer, but an asking.
It is a temporary commitment to an unknown quantity
that holds as long as it serves a vital purpose
and does not stifle the generation of other things
that are also necessary and good.
Because of the unknown factor in life,
the unknowingness of what we experience together,
the unknowingness of so much of ourselves,
our affiliations with each other
must to a large extent be religious.
The spirit and the heart
can fill in that portion of ourselves
where knowledge and wisdom
are of little value, or of no avail.
Our attitudes and our commitments
then become religious
in the most acute sense.
One has to take the part of a god or be god-like
at times, or one cannot fulfill one’s self.
One cannot be fully coordinated mentally
or physically without this concept in mind.
Nature seems to have intended
that even the most minute part of its structure
should have an authority of its own,
even as it is part of the universal structure.
LISTEN TO OTHERS!
Generate the exposition of
the other person’s self,
that he might pour himself out,
and confirm himself;
that he might let his needs
and wants and wisdom
flow out, and that in
revealing himself he may
help himself.
Power grid. Old Delhi, India.
What about reason? It can be many things, some that are
good. It can also be an accessory, not of action, but of
withdrawal.
Reason deals in known factors but too little in the
unknown. In the unknown its logic is only a presumption.
It attempts to project the future through past experience. It
too often puts a cloak around the creation of life.
The tragedy of human life is that so often one has to be
surrounded by and involved with those who reason.
Let there be untold numbers of services,
rendered by all who need or wish to render,
for the purposes of survival, need, duty, honor, responsibility;
services out of self-expression and love;
performed with diligence, efficiency, conscientiousness,
integrity, and enthusiasm.
But let not services be performed
for a master by a slave,
for an owner by a serf,
for a profiteer or parasite
by some naïve, ambitious performer.
Love has its final confirmation in the flesh, whether it be in
the bond between children and parents, husbands and
wives, or strangers.
Even religious love reaches its most natural verification in
the physical. No one could love a God who was not also
manifested as man.
The final union of each being is in the pulsing heart.
The living body seeks constant extension and bestowal. It
expresses itself out of an abundance of itself. When this
abundance is not expressed, it becomes a liability.
Sex is an excess of self. It must be ever given. This is the
story of creation.
Life in every expression of itself, in all living things,
generates itself to a point of excess. This excess must then
be relinquished. By every law of commitment, it unites
with that to which it is attracted or with which it has
an affinity and which also is in excess.
A sin of life is to withhold that which one has in excess.
Why do people think?
They often think so that they might justify
passivity and ineptitude rather than action.
Eventually they justify everything that is wrong.
They do not bear a burden for long.
They run away.
They think their way out of things.
Because people may be small in some things doesn’t mean
that they will be small in others. Even people living in the
smallest of realities may bring forth a breadth of vision that
is far beyond words.
This works also in reverse: Many people who have the
appearance of living in big realities are sometimes so small
and petty that they appear ridiculous when found out.
Many believe that they cannot be creators of things, creators of life;
that they cannot set new patterns, be different.
They assume that any new things that come into existence must be by
someone else’s hand.
They take the creation of another person, embellish it, and give it
authority.
They then kneel before it, learn to fear it, retain it as a dogma, and
perhaps for a whole lifetime follow it, instead of calling forth a creation
of their own.
Nature allows
the greatest return
to the physical body
that respects its own
sanctity.
We must attempt to rout any deep-seated distortions in
ourselves: the accumulated debris, the elusive and craven
fears, the inhibitions, the stultifying inertia; that which has
crowded in on us, clogged us up, corroded us, and clouded
our vision and consciousness.
Most of the time we are ordained to be our own judge and executioner.
This is at once a difficult but potentially thrilling task, for it is like
shedding an old skin. In this procedure a cleansing and purifying
process goes on.
If one cannot purify oneself, one cannot be of much help in purifying
society.
No matter how well-developed the mind
or how intelligent it is,
it still needs to live
by symbols, impressions, images,
since it knows too little
of the mystery
of its own existence.
Thinking, acting, going
beyond our power
may be a form of self-displacement
in which we put ourselves at the mercy
of those things to which we over-commit ourselves,
and by which we literally hang ourselves.
In the sense of our spirit and creative mind,
there is very little if anything
beyond our power,
but it must be enlisted at any time
in the amount that it is possible to absorb.
Cut down a tree to keep warm.
Cut down a forest to make paper
for extraneous advertising
to sell extraneous gadgets.
The gadgets are a transformation
of something from a natural
to an unnatural state.
They cannot create new life.
They become images lost in time.
The people find this out.
They tire of them.
The earth is a potential paradise, but man is turning it
into a noisy, smelly, poisonous sump hole.
And even as he is told what is happening, or sees
what is happening, he does little else than make
excuses and show a niggardly helplessness.
He sees his degenerate way of life as something
progressive and necessary. He sees it also as
inevitable.
He devises every means of tolerating it and
conditions his thinking to its acceptance.
A precious type of reality
is a simple, detached consciousness
when one is at rest:
where there is no imposition from without,
where there is no needless mental generation from within,
where there is a generous and wholesome awareness,
and where one’s nature is in full of harmony
with its surroundings.
I let that particular moment pass,
but I can recall it.
I can bring it back
for a spell.
I wish that I
could live it over
again,
in the full—
with what I know now.
I wish that I could grace it
with more love,
contribute more to it,
milk it for all of its beauty,
its setting,
its circumstance.
Let’s dance.
Let’s recover
some sense of rhythm
that we had in past times
and past ages
and let’s dance.
Let’s dance,
beautifully, artfully, creatively,
in any manner or style
that comes to us,
at any time
and in any place,
on any pretext,
with fire, passion, vigor, and love.
Let’s dance
by ourselves, with others,
for ourselves, for others,
to our own rhythm,
to the rhythm of others.
Let’s dance!
Dia de los Muertos, Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Invite a kind of death, rebirth, renewal,
change. In much of our dying we live.
In much of death we renew ourselves.
Are we not a part
of something else, that also needs to
live, to die, to change?
Statue of Shiva at the Ganga Aarti ceremony in Haridwar, Uttarakhand.
God is a humanly created symbol
of life.
He has been known in many images,
and ardently worshiped as a
creator of life.
Many philosophies of living
have been formed
in his name.
There have been many interpretations
of this universal image–
some wild and distorted,
but the symbol of God
is valid.
It is born out of necessity
and is representative
of many extraordinary
experiences and desires.
We must have the courage
not to overly distort it
for we are very much a part
of this God…
A high peak of being is to be able to
rediscover and to return to one’s
inviolate self: removed from all
that one has absorbed or inhibited,
cleansed, so to speak, and purified;
all things set off.
There need be no denial
or renunciation of anything vital,
beautiful, true or rewarding; only
a return to a full possession of
one’s self, completely free of
all things.
Each man’s life is an edifice
of realities to which he
adds or subtracts from.
All of these
realities exist in the
framework of many values:
imaginary and real, definite
and indefinite, that he has
bestowed on them according
to his experiences, training,
environment, discipline,
education or need.
First you learn from yourself
and then you learn from
others… if necessary.
In human life it
is usually the other way
around. First you learn
from others and then,
hopefully, through the
whole maze of mislearning,
you try to finally learn
from yourself… if it is
still possible.
When a way of
life you have been schooled
in, or a state you have
lived in, falls apart, you
are on your own–very much
on your own.
And your lifetime
could almost be over
by the time you realize
how it should have been
in the first place.
Far Beyond Words 