The water of the mind,
How clear it is!
Gazing at it,
The boundaries are invisible.
But as soon as even
A slight thought arises,
Ten thousand images crowd it.
Attach to them,
And they become real.
Be carried by them,
And it will be difficult to return.
How painful to see a person
Trapped in the ten-fold
delusions.
Severing entanglements
means detachmeht from entanglements
in contrived mundane concerns. Relinquish concerns
and your body will not be under a strain,
contrive nothing and your mind will
naturally be calm.
As serenity and simplicity
develop day by day, worldly defilement
lessens day by day. As your behavior departs further
and further from the mundane, your mind
becomes closer and closer
to the Way.
…As long as we do not
initiate anything, others will naturally
not get involved; even if others initiate something,
we do not get involved. As past entangelments gradually
stop, do not form new involvements. Ritual socializing
and opportunistic intercourse naturally become
remote, and you become unburdened
and at peace. Only then can you
practice the Way.
Treatise on Sitting Forgetting
When you are not
afraid to forget who you are,
life in the kitchen, or life in the office,
might contain huge and overwhelming happiness.
Everything you look at, the door, the walls meeting in the
corner of the room, the light shining on the cell phone, might be
so alive that it looks back. Other people might not be who you
thought they were. Family members might be as fresh
and surprising as strangers. And you, whom you
have only apparently known all your life,
might be fresh and surprising
to yourself too.
Can what happened to you
stop you from being fair, high-minded,
moderate, conscientious, unhasty, honest, moral,
self-reliant, and so on — from possessing all the qualities that,
when present, enable a man’s nature to be fulfilled? So then,
whenever something happens that might cause you
distress, remember to rely on this principle:
this is not bad luck, but bearing it
valiantly is good luck.
One learns to understand
that there is a world in one’s self,
that in one’s mind there is a source of
happiness and unhappiness, the source of
health and illness, the source of light and darkness,
and that it can be awakened, either mechanically or at will,
if only one knew how to do it. Then one does not blame his
ill fortune nor complain of his fellow man. He becomes
more tolerant, more joyful, and more loving toward
his neighbor, because he knows the cause of
every thought and action, and he sees
it all as the effect of a
certain cause.
…Therefore, the work
of the mystic is to be able to read
the language of the mind. As the clerk
in the telegraph office reads letters from the
ticks, so the Sufi gets behind every word spoken to
him and discovers what has prompted the word to come out.
He therefore reads the lines which are behind man’s thought,
speech, and action. He also understands that every kind of
longing and craving in life, good or bad, has its source
in deep impression. By knowing this root of the
disease he is easily able to find out its cure.
No impression is such that it
cannot be erased.