Put aside the
crazy and false mind that
has been concocting your knowledge
and understanding, and make it so that
nothing whatsoever is weighing
on your mind.
🪷
Posts Tagged → death
love, faithfulness, and correctness
joan radcliffe walker embodied all these
as did her partner in all bud walker
A healthy family,
a healthy country, a healthy
world — all grow outward from
a single superior
person.
The hexagram Chia Jen concerns the proper foundation of human communities. The I Ching teaches that all clans must have a superior person at their center if they are to prosper and succeed. Therefore, in order to improve our family, company, nation, or world community, we must begin by improving ourselves.
If you will observe healthy families you will always see present in them three qualities: love, faithfulness, and correctness. When we truly love others, we are naturally kind, gentle, and patient with them. When we are faithful to others, we place proper principles and conduct above temporary influences like anger, desire, or greed. And when we practice correctness, we spiritually nourish ourselves and all those around us. When all three qualities are cultivated, a healthy clan springs naturally into being.
The difference between paying lip service to these ideals and practicing them is profound. If you advocate high ideals and actions to others but do not embody them yourself, your influence will disintegrate for lack of a proper foundation. Therefore, in order to inspire superior qualities in others, you must first instill them in yourself.
Concentrate not upon influencing others or external events but upon strengthening your inner devotion to proper principles. When modesty, acceptance, equanimity, and gentleness become deeply ingrained in your character, they will flow steadily out from from you.
Soon you will find yourself enmeshed in a web of healthy relationships, and in this there is great good fortune.
from The I Ching, or Book of Changes
Hexagram 37, Chia Jén / The Family (The Clan)
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the work now is to become pure light
Darkness
has been given as
a nightshirt to sleep in.
Remember how human beings
were composed from water and dust
for blood and flesh with oily resins heated
in fire to make a skeleton. Then the soul, the divine
light, was breathed into human shapes. The work now is
to help our bodies become pure light. It may look like
this is not happening. But in a cocoon every bit
of worm-dissolving slime becomes silk.
As we take in light, each part
of us turns to
silk.
We
made the night
a darkness, but we bring
shining dawnlight out of that.
In the same way the mound of your
grave will bloom with resurrection. Sufis
and those on the path of the heart use darkness
to go within. During the night vigil the universe
is theirs. With all the kings and sultans and
their learned counselors asleep, everyone
is unemployed, except those wakeful
few and the divine
presence.
sing in the dark and try to forgive
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
—Bertolt Brecht
There will be prayer, too,
but to a different god,
and dread will lurk
in the songs we sing.
Doom in the timpani
no matter what the tune,
the tune a variation
on the theme of doom.
We will sing in the dark
and try to forgive
and try not to dwell
on the lives we lived.
The music we play
will be a funeral song,
the poetry we speak,
that ancient tool
we used to believe
was the vital spark,
or if not the spark,
will be the match we strike
again and again
in the darkest dark.
you must realize what is at stake here
You must realize
that what is at stake here
does not reside in words and phrases:
it is like sparks from struck flint, like the brilliance
of flashing lightning. However you mange to deal
with this, you cannot get around losing
your body and life.