Be a lamp,
a lifeboat, a ladder.
Help someone’s soul heal.
Walk out of your house
like a shepherd.
Posts Tagged → sufism
they see the divine in all forms
In the East,
when we speak of saints
or sages, it is not because of their
miracles, it is because of their presence
and their countenance which radiate vibrations
of love. How does this love express itself? In tolerance,
in forgiveness, in respect, in overlooking the faults of others.
Their sympathy covers the defects of others as if they were
their own; they forget their own interest in the interest
of others. They do not mind what conditions they are
in; be they high or humble, their foreheads are
smiling. To their eyes everyone is the
expression of the Beloved, whose
name they repeat. They see the
divine in all forms and
in all beings.
begin all over again
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Before the awakening, man with his little knowledge thinks he knows so much, but now his pride is broken. He finds that all he has known hitherto is useless, that he has to begin all over again. But this is the very time when inspiration and power come. The power of concentration is the means by which to acquire not only the power of telepathy, but will power, moral power, inspirational power, moral courage, mental strength, physical strength, and all the different kinds of development in life. It is the first stage, and maybe it is the last stage, when a person’s eyes open to real light.
There are three different steps in concentration: observation, concentration, and vision. Observation is developed by singleness of glance. For instance, if I look at a person I can see that one person much better than if I look at many people and it is thus with everything in life. The first step in learning mysticism is just this: to develop our observation. We are always looking at a hundred things around us, and hardly ever study one thing properly at all. To understand and know a thing better we must keep looking at it; if we keep looking at everything we look at nothing. Such is the law of observation.
The next step, concentration, implies steadiness of mind. We cannot concentrate until we have made the external part steady. Just think: can we keep our eye fixed on one spot for some time without moving it? Can we sit in one posture without fidgeting? Why, many people cannot sit still even for a photographer! This shows us that the vehicle given us to control and utilize is not completely in our power, and if the lowest vehicle we have is not in our power, though this is the simplest thing to control, how then can our mind be in our control? How can we acquire more pure and more powerful thoughts?
Various postures have been recommended to enable us to acquire control. The body has to be made our obedient servant first, and when the body has been subdued the mind will learn obedience from it, for order teaches order. The inner self cannot be in order if the external self is not in order, for our mind is always affected by the body. In order to learn to control the mind we must therefore first learn to control the body.
The third step is vision. When concentration has been mastered the vision becomes clear, and when the vision is clear we can aim clearly, like one who has learned to aim a ball at a certain spot and hit it. If he does not throw the ball properly how can it reach the goal? To hold the ball in our hand and aim it at and hit the desired goal we must master three things: observation, concentration, and vision.
when tao is talked about
Stay
centered in the Tao
and the world comes to you:
comes, and isn’t harmed;
comes, and finds
contentment.
Most
travelers are drawn
to music and good food.
When Tao is talked about, the words
can seem bland and flavorless. Looked at,
it may not catch the eye. Listened to,
it might not seduce the ear.
Used, it can never be
exhausted.
from The Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu,
ebooks & apps of the Tao the Ching, I Ching,
Hua hu Ching, and Art of War for
You
can now buy
Tao te Ching as part of a
five-app bundle of Taoist classics
for iPhone or iPad for less than
the cost of one hardcover
book.
the immortal sinead o’connor
8 December 1966 – 26 July 2023
Someone went to a Sufi
with a question. He said, ‘I have been
puzzling for many, many years and reading books,
and I have not been able to find a definite answer.
Tell me what happens after death?’ The Sufi
replied, ‘Please ask this question of
someone who will die. I am
going to live.’
I came home from running errands two afternoons ago and picked my iPhone up off the counter where I’d left it, face down. As it was turning toward me, I saw among the notifications on the lock screen one from the New York Times that began with the words, “Sinead O’Connor…”. I put the phone straight back because I knew I needed to go talk to the contractor working on my lanai, and I knew that would be hard — and strange — to do through a river of tears. Notifications that begin like that are usually just one kind.
Since her death was announced, I have read tens or hundreds of thousands of words written about this lion of a woman, and mostly I’m struck by the river of quiet condescension which runs through them. “Struggled with her mental health for years”, they all say, often in the headline. They talk about how her career was never the same after she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. They jabber a bit about her dance with suicidal ideation and she is dismissed, by nearly every critic’s tone, to some pantheon in their minds of lesser, failed artists.
Sinead O’Connor was abused, sexually and physically and otherwise, in her early childhood by her mom. Not a little, a lot. People who’ve gone through something like that suffer things you and I don’t: borderline personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder, so on. They are colossal fragmentations of the mind and self which arise as a natural response to being savaged by a person of trust in a time of indescribable vulnerability. These have next to nothing to do with our fiercest moods, yours or mine, however full of darkness, struggle, and desperate grasping our troubles may be, however long they might go on.
Many people who’ve endured such things are permanently or regularly crippled by them at a level and in ways we cannot imagine or understand. Sinead O’Connor recorded ten albums, many of them outstanding, endured epic fame, which is no treat, collected Grammys and other awards by the wheelbarrow full, birthed and raised four children with tremendous love, fought off the hands and minds of record executives who imagined her a sexy bunny of a pop star when she understood herself to be a revolutionary and a protest singer, and carried on a lively, funny, occasionally heartbreaking, always substantive and intelligent and meaningful conversation with the world for nearly six decades. It included a very fine memoir, Rememberings (in which she refers to Prince as “Ol’ Fluffy Cuffs”, which gives you some measure of her wit). Her conversation with her creator, every bit as public as the rest of her life, was one of the most profound and wide-ranging I have ever witnessed.
Talking about how John Steinbeck was disrespected by critics after his death, the poet and novelist Jim Harrison said, “The Grapes of Wrath is a monstrously underrated novel, and Steinbeck has been neglected. But that’s okay, because he’s Steinbeck and they’re not. Where’s their Grapes of Wrath? They didn’t even write The Grapes of Goofy.”
Sinead O’Connor was as large as they come. She fenced and cleared the wilderness of her soul and her furiously difficult life, she toiled there with the dedication of an artist of the very first water, and she brought forth sweet grapes like few ever have or will. I trust that she is bringing them forth still, and I bow to this magnificent being for all eternity.