
Keep practicing even when
there seems no hope
of success.

Keep practicing even when
there seems no hope
of success.

Anyone
can say anything.
Eyes look without obstruction,
And the nose, it sniffs everything.
Legs go where they want to. Hands reach.
The mind respects nothing. Even the heart
Is unsure where to stand. This is how
Things are. Is something missing?
A human being can walk in different ways,
Deliberately, as though going somewhere,
Or strolling with no purpose, or marching,
Or limping, or pretending to be a gorilla
With arms hanging down.
He or she can curse you or trust you, comfort you,
Or act without considering anything or anyone.
Truth and lies, both glitter in the eyes.
He or she can hear and enjoy and embrace
The language coming in, but to understand everything
With divine wisdom is hard.
There is one clear truth, the pure loving.
When people do not have that, they are
Disconnected. Words are just words,
And good actions are done for wrong reasons.
Paint on a red dot like the dancing Shiva,
But if you don’t know how to open your heart
With modesty, dignity, and respect for others,
It’s just collecting more honors and robes.
It’s easy to explain the condition of being human,
What’s missing and what’s here, but if
You don’t know God exists,
It’s foolishness.
To know this and act accordingly is difficult.
Saying the words is easy.


Revise the story
you tell yourself about failure.
Consider yourself an apprentice in the world.
Learn all you can. Gain experience.
Keep moving.
Don’t
seek a Buddha,
don’t seek a teaching,
don’t seek a community.
Don’t seek virtue, knowledge,
intellectual understanding, and
so on. When feelings of defilement
and purity are ended, still don’t hold
to this non-seeking and consider it right.
Don’t dwell at the point of ending, and
don’t long for heavens or fear hells.
When you are unhindered by
bondage or freedom, then
this is called liberation
of mind and body in
all places.
“What would be really interesting for people to see is how beautiful things grow out of shit, because nobody ever believes that, you know. Everybody thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head, they somehow appeared there and formed in his head, and all he had to do was write them down and they would be kind of manifest to the world.
“But what I think what’s so interesting, and what should be a lesson everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed, in the wrong situation, turns into nothing.
“And I think that this would be important for people to understand because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that that’s how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted, they have these wonderful things in their head, but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that, then you live a different kind of life, you know.
“You could have another kind of life where you can say, where you say, ‘Well, I know that things comes from nothing very much and start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.'”