nothing

Self-consciousness

Gill Washington Buddhist Writings, I Am, Meditation , , , , 0 Comment

From: Buddhism without Beliefs

by Stephen Batchelor

Self-consciousness is at once the most obvious and central fact of my life and the most elusive. If I search for my self in meditation, I find it is like trying to catch my own shadow. I reach for it, but there’s nothing there. Then it reappears elsewhere. I glimpse it from the corner of my mind’s eye, turn to face it, and it’s gone. Each time I think I’ve pinned it down, it turns out to be something else: a bodily sensation, a mood, a perception, an impulse, or simply awareness itself.

I cannot find the self by pointing my finger at any physical or mental trait and saying: “Yes, that’s me.” For such traits come and go, whereas the sense of “I” remains constant. But neither can I put my finger on something other than these traits that-however ephemeral and contingent they may be-nonetheless define me.

The self may not be something, but neither is it nothing. It is simply ungraspable, unfindable. I am who I am not because of an essential self hidden away in the core of my being but because of the unprecedented and unrepeatable matrix of conditions that have formed me. The more I delve into this mystery of who I am (or what anything is), the more I just keep going. There is no end to it, only an infinite trajectory that avoids falling into the extremes of being and nonbeing. This trajectory is not only the center, which is free from this duality, but the central path itself.

More Buddhist writings on Allspirit

 

The Snow Man

Gill Washington Poems, Spirituality, Wallace Stevens , , , 0 Comment

By Wallace Stevens

 

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Read more poems from Wallace Stevens

Index of poets on Allspirit

 

The Transcendental Realisation

Gill Washington Barry Long, Love, Poems, Spirituality , , 0 Comment

By Barry Long

Nothing.
Nothing but I.
Origin
Black, undistinguished, indistinguishable
Being Outside the world
Static
Forever aware
Forever
Forever present
Forever unformed
Forever unable to tell the secret of My being.
Yet, not from withholding
For I am Origin
Source
Beginning
Everness
Now
It.

Nothing.
I am producing Nothing.
And you, My Love,
Are producing Everything.
As Nothing
I am Supreme Being
Origin indescribable
No-suchness
A mystery
Of non-stirring, knowledge, ceaseless undetectable
presence.

I am Origin of all action and sound
And My agency, the lesser being, the creator
Is Love.

Love is all.
Life is the action of Love
Love’s business
The never-ending tireless endeavour to enact My Being
To describe with creation what I am
And lovingly creating what I am not.
Love fails.
Love always fails, yet never tires of failing
(Even now, Love groans at its own inadequacy to
express in words the Truth I am.)

This the impossible, hopeless task of love
The reason why love lives to serve
Yet must forever remain sufficient only to itself, that task.
Love is the only means I have
And the only means to Me
Nothing.

I am producing Nothing.
An unimaginable substantive endingness
More real than even Love.
I am the space, the pause, the perimeter of sound and
form.
I enable Love’s beauty to be seen.
Where All and the Nothing meet is Man.

Read more poems from Barry Long

Index of poets on Allspirit

Brahman

Gill Washington Poems, Robert Goslin, Spirituality , , , 0 Comment

Brahman

by Robert Goslin

I sought Thee in the timeless halls of space
I sought Thee in the spaceless halls of time
But found that time and space do not exist.
I wondered ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Who art Thou?’
And then I found Thee. Thou in me and I in Thee.
‘Twas then I knew that I do not exist.
For I am nothing; yet am everything
For evermore … and so we cannot die.

Read more poems from Robert Goslin

Index of poets on Allspirit

Stillness

Gill Washington Poems, Robert Goslin , , , , 0 Comment

Stillness

by Robert Goslin

Tormented friend, why do you still enquire
And thirst to know the sum of things entire?
The more you strive, the less you will succeed;
The mind cannot fulfil the spirit’s need.
Striving too hard begets a troubled mind
And those who strive will always stay confined.
For you are not the body, not the mind
But LIGHT IMMORTAL , mortally enshrined.

So live in bliss – enjoy the simple task;
Seek not to know, and do not dare to ask
Why you are here, or what your fate will be.
Be still and listen to the symphony
Which your surroundings play in unity.
The part cannot exist without the whole;
The whole cannot exist without the part;
And reason has no place in cosmic art.

When stillness reigns, you are the sum of things;
The Nothing and the All that Oneness brings.
When stillness reigns, you are Infinity
And sense the nearness of Divinity.
Just as the pigeon navigates in flight
And homeward speeds before a hint of night;
So too, the soul, will homeward soar one day
Without a mind to guide it on its way.

Read more poems from Robert Goslin

Index of poets on Allspirit