Lao Tsu rides an Ox like a Dragon

Ting rides an Ox to the bleeding
edge of emptiness.

Reason fly's on borrowed wings.
Stars practice stillness.

The time has passed when nations
should be allowed to do as they individually
wish with regard to global matters,
each striving solely in its own interests,
with the more powerful now
able to destroy all humanity and more.

For the common good,
we need to frame and abide
by a higher system of law and justice,
designed with less national,
more godlike, perspectives for the preservation
and welfare of the biosphere as a whole.

The problems of setting up
and administering an effective,
international force of this kind
can hardly be more grave,
formidable or insoluble
than those we encounter
on any alternative course.

Toward a Higher System of World Law and Justice (1986)
Roger wolcott Sperry

We
(the indivisible divinity that works in us)
have dreamed the world.
We have dreamed it resistant,
mysterious, visible, ubiquitous
in space and firm in time,
but we have allowed slight,
and eternal, bits of the irrational
to form part of its architecture
so as to know that it is false.

"Avatars of the Tortoise" ["Avatares de la tortuga"]

Jorge Luis Borges

Super Conductor

Refugees in Sri Lanka

It has been just over a month
since the last time the Sri Lankan
conflict was featured here.
In that time, government forces
have put further pressure
on the rebel
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE),
and hundreds of thousands of civilians
in the north of the country
have been trapped in a war zone.
Press coverage is still very limited,
and conflicting stories are the norm,
with LTTE representatives claiming
the ethnic Tamil civilians are staying willingly,
fearful of government forces,
and the Sri Lankan government claiming
the civilians are being held against their will by the LTTE.
According to the UN, over 6,500 civilians have been killed,
thousands more injured,
and a stream of over 100,000 refugees
has recently left the LTTE stronghold,
and the Sri Lankan government
has halted the use of heavy-caliber weaponry.

The Big Picture
Refugees in Sri Lanka

Opal

O Opal, your ear
in my heart
both hear
the glorious void,
preferring the birds.

Saving Daylight (Jim Harrison)

Ed alleyne-Johnson

Ed
went
to study
Fine Art at
Oxford University,
where he quickly became
established as a bass player
and violinist in the Oxford music scene.
After finishing college, he took to the streets
of Europe with a home-made electric violin,
battery-powered amp and effects pedals,
and started to develop the unique style
of multi-layered playing which became
his trademark. On this subject,
Ed says, "It's continuing
a tradition really.

I've always thought
people like Vivaldi and Bach,
if digital delays had been
around in their
day, they'd have
used them ...

(click here)
Sweet child of mine.

(and here)

(and here)

Once upon a time in ancient Japan, a young man was studying martial arts under a famous teacher. Every day the young man would practice in a courtyard along with the other students. One day, as the master watched, he could see that the other students were consistently interfering with the young man’s technique. Sensing the student’s frustration, the master approached the student and tapped him on the shoulder. “What is wrong?” inquired the teacher. “I cannot execute my technique and I do not understand why,” replied the student. “This is because you do not understand harmony. Please follow me,” said the master. Leaving the practice hall, the master and student walked a short distance into the woods until they came upon a stream. After standing silently beside the streambed for a few minutes, the master spoke. “Look at the water,” he instructed. “It does not slam into the rocks and stop out of frustration, but instead flows around them and continues down the stream. Become like the water and you will understand harmony.” Soon, the student learned to move and flow like the stream, and none of the other students could keep him from executing his techniques.

Timothy H. (2006).
Leading People the Black Belt Way:
Conquering the Five Core Problems Facing Leaders Today.

Ed Alleyne-Johnson Busking Electric Violin in Chester UK

If you have seven minutes,
this is amazingly beautiful
violin music.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

By Robert frost

Learning to Be Evolution

If we wish to consciously evolve as a civilization
evolution has some lessons
we need to start learning, taking seriously, and applying

First of all, I want to be clear that this is not about Darwin or genetic engineering. It is bigger than that, much bigger. Those pursuing this inquiry see Darwin as a genius who opened new realms of understanding, while at the same time provoking profoundly deeper questions about what's really happening in evolutionary processes. Furthermore, we are exploring not only the evolution of living species, but the evolution of the cosmos, the planet, society -- everything from natural laws to the shape of our everyday lives.

Evolution is the process of change -- ongoing transformational change. It is the cumulative development of life, unfolding slowly and incrementally, with occasional sudden bursts of creativity, with evolutionary opportunities sprouting in climates of crisis. We are living through one of these disorienting bursts of creativity and crisis right now.

Through evolution new forms appear -- new organisms, new partnerships, new conditions, new systems. Some of them last and some don't. Evolution tests things out. Evolutionary testing goes on at every level, all the time. The universe does it. Life does it. Human societies do it. You and I are doing it every day -- sometimes in our lives, sometimes in our minds, sometimes in our conversations. New patterns rise and fall.

Billions of years of creative trial and error have added up to the world we live in. Some of that world is profoundly exciting and enjoyable. Some of it is increasingly scary. Things are getting better and better and worse and worse, faster and faster. Much of it is changing faster than we can follow, its novelty and complexity racing ahead of our individual capacity to understand and respond.

We face daunting choices about how to respond to changes that seem forced on us. We also face compelling choices about creating a better world from the depths of our hearts and our dreams.

How did we end up in this place? Individually and collectively, we are products of evolution. Evolution produced us through 13.7 billion years of trial and error and a few thousand years of more or less conscious choices by thousands of people we call our parents, leaders, elders, ancestors. Little did they know what would happen.

And now WE are the ones making choices that are shaping the evolution of the future -- not only future generations of humanity but future generations of all life on earth.

(Read the rest of the article here)

by Tom Atlee

Happy Earth Day !

Happy Earth day!
I hope things are well
where you are.

We take so much,
today is a day to give something back.
Or not use something that you don't need.

Feed the birds.
Watch the Sunset.
Plant a tree.
It may live longer than you.

The world is a better place
because you are in it.

A fully achieved person is like a spirit!
The great marshes could be set on fire,
but she wouldn't feel hot.
The rivers in China could all freeze over,
but she wouldn't feel cold.
Thunder could suddenly echo through the mountains,
wind could cause a tsunami in the ocean,
but she wouldn't be startled.
A person like that could ride through the sky
on the floating clouds, straddle the sun and moon,
and travel beyond the four seas.
Neither death nor life can cause changes within her,
and there's little reason for her
to even consider benefit
or harm.

Zhuangzi (Nina Correa)

Where the Sidewalk Ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends

Shel Silverstein

It is in this way that we must train ourselves: by liberation of the self through love. We will develop love, we will practice it, we will make it both a way and a basis, take our stand upon it, store it up, and thoroughly set it going.

The Buddha, Samyutta Nikaya

Environmental and social breakdown is now vast and global in scale. Technological advances have provided the basis for a new kind of social evolution, beyond cultural, religious or spiritual boundaries. Technology, however, is not ultimately directed by reason, but by internal forces of sociobiology and psychology. Human instincts have destructive as well as benign aspects. As much as we may celebrate our art, scientific knowledge or altruism, we can no longer ignore the truth that we are also ‘the most dangerous animal’. [1]

Humans are opportunistic, as are all higher animals, and characteristically greedy. Our high intelligence confers the capacity to manipulate others to accumulate power or resources. We are quite easily trained into violent forms of aggression. Now that we have ‘accidentally’ acquired the capacity to destroy the climate of this planet, what will we call upon to restrain ourselves in time?

Technological prowess alone cannot confer contentment or happiness on us: in ‘advanced’ societies, the rates of anxiety, stress and mental illness are greater than ever previously recorded. [2] On a physical level too, cancer, cardiovascular disease, inflammatory and auto-immune disease as well as diverse ‘functional illnesses’ have become epidemic. [3] What will our governments, corporations and politicians now do with the power of life or death over the biosphere from which our species evolved?

Do politicians even understand the scientific facts? Are they as attentive to their citizens and future human generations as they are to the most profitable corporate special interest in commercial history, the fossil fuel industry? The answer to these questions will determine the course of the sixth great extinction in Earth history, which is now unfolding. It could even provoke the end of an era of geological time [4]—or as Buddhists would say, the end of an aeon:

Empty Your Cup

A university professor went to visit a famous Zen master.

While the master quietly served tea,

the professor talked about Zen.

The master poured the visitor's cup to the brim, and then kept pouring.

The professor watched the overflowing cup

until he could no longer restrain himself.

"It's overfull! No more will go in!"

the professor blurted.

"You are like this cup,"

the master replied,

"How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup."

So to begin, we must all empty our cups of all the preconceived ideas, concepts, techniques and methods that prevent us from receiving the new. This seems like a simple thing to do, but can be quite difficult in practice. At first we think we are emptying our cups but as we drink from the new knowledge we detect residual tastes of the "old". Sometimes this new mixture can be sweet, like adding honey to tea, but sometimes even a little residue can curdle the whole mix, like adding lemon juice to milk. We must not only empty our cups, but make sure we have a "clean receptacle" so we may taste the "true essence" of the new knowledge.

Do The Evolution

(click picture to play)

Woo..
I'm ahead, I'm a man
I'm the first mammal to wear pants, yeah
I'm at peace with my lust
I can kill cause in God I trust, yeah
Its evolution, baby

I'm at piece, I'm the man
Buying stocks on the day of the crash
On the loose, I'm a truck
All the rolling hills, Ill flatten em out, yeah
Its herd behavior, uh huh
Its evolution, baby

Admire me, admire my home
Admire my song, here's my coat
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
This land is mine, this land is free
Ill do what I want but irresponsibly
Its evolution, baby

I'm a thief, I'm a liar
There's my church, I sing in the choir:
(hallelujah hallelujah)

Admire me, admire my home
Admire my song, admire my clothes
cause we know, appetite for a nightly feast
Those ignorant indians got nothin' on me
Nothin', why?
Because, its evolution, baby!

I am ahead, I am advanced
I am the first mammal to make plans, yeah
I crawled the earth, but now I'm higher
Twenty-ten, watch it go to fire
Its evolution, baby (2x)
Do the evolution
Come on, come on, come on

no more lies/no more war

This is a nickel I was given; for change.
Maybe it is the new nickel.
I could only hope.
I thought that I would share it with you.
It seems to have been stamped onto it.
click picture to see the stamp
more clearly.

Stand by Me

Playing for change:
Song around the world.
"stand by me".
Great concept!
A friend of mine E-mailed it to me.
Thank you.

For love of you,

my soul soars in the sky

As your kindness plucks music on its strings.

The smallest favor that you grant your slave

Is greater than a thousand years of prayer brings.

#939, from Rumi's Kolliyaat-e Shams-e Tabrizi
Edited by Badiozzaman Forouzanfar (Tehran, Amir Kabir, 1988).

Maurice Sendak

Where the wind things are (The movie)

Eco friendly oven

Bohmer with the oven he has made out of a cardboard box.

The ingeniously simple design uses two cardboard boxes, one inside the other, and an acrylic cover that lets in the sun's rays and traps them.Black paint on the inner box, and silver foil on the outer one, help concentrate the heat. The trapped rays make the inside hot enough to cook casseroles, bake bread and boil water.

What the box also does is eliminate the need in developing countries for rural residents to cut down trees for firewood. About 3 billion people around the world do so, adding to deforestation and, in turn, global warming.

By allowing users to boil water, the simple device could also potentially save the millions of children who die from drinking unclean water.

full article here

If Sufism is an adventure, a goal of human perfection attained by reviewing and awakening within humanity a higher organ of fulfillment, completion, destiny, why is it so difficult to assess, to locate in time, to pin down? It is precisely because Sufism is carried out in every community and at every time that it has such diversity -- and this is one of its secrets.

Sufis believe that, expressed in one way, humanity is evolving to a certain destiny. We are all taking part in that evolution. Organs come into being as a result of the need for specific organs (Rumi). The human being's organism is producing a new complex of organs in response to such a need. In this age of the transcending of time and space, the complex of organs is concerned with the transcending of time and space. What ordinary people regard as sporadic and occasional bursts of telepathic or prophetic power are seen by the Sufi as nothing less than the first stirrings of these same organs. The difference between all evolution up to date and the present need for evolution is that for the past ten thousand years or so we have been given the possibility of a conscious evolution. So essential is this more rarefied evolution that our future depends upon it.
--From The Sufis © 1964, 1977 by The Estate of Idries Shah

The Core of the Teachings

The core of Krishnamurti’s teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when he said, “Truth is a pathless land”. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.

Man has built in himself images as a fence of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man’s thinking, his relationships, and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind. The content of his consciousness is his entire existence. The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all humanity. So he is not an individual.

Written by Krishnamurti in 1980 at the request of his biographer Mary Lutyens.

(Click here to read the complete version)

"I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before,
Or else I am awake for the first time,
and all before has been a mean sleep."
Walt Whitman.

The body is the tree of enlightenment,
The mind like a clear mirror stand;
Time and gain wipe it diligently,
Don't let it gather dust.

- Shenxiu

Enlightenment is basically not a tree,
And the clear mirror is not a stand.
Fundamentally there is not a single thing -
Where can dust collect.

- Huineng, Sixth Zen Patriarch in China, 638-713
Transmission of Light, Thomas Cleary, p. 140

Brian Walker (Hua Hu Ching)
This is a amazingly insightful book.
Also check out his translation of (Tao Te Ching)

NIN HURT LYRICS

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of shit
Upon my liar's chair
full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here

What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end

You can have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

Trent Reznor

Non-Duality

The bell tolls at four in the morning.
I stand by the window,
barefoot on the cool floor.
The garden is still dark.
I wait for the mountains and rivers to reclaim their shapes.
There is no light in the deepest hours of the night.
Yet, I know you are there
in the depth of the night,
the immeasurable world of the mind.
You, the known, have been there
ever since the knower has been.

The dawn will come soon,
and you will see
that you and the rosy horizon
are within my two eyes.
It is for me that the horizon is rosy
and the sky blue.
Looking at your image in the clear stream,
you answer the question by your very presence.
Life is humming the song of the non-dual marvel.
I suddenly find myself smiling
in the presence of this immaculate night.
I know because I am here that you are there,
and your being has returned to show itself
in the wonder of tonight's smile.
In the quiet stream,
I swim gently.
The murmur of the water lulls my heart.
A wave serves as a pillow
I look up and see
a white cloud against the blue sky,
the sound of Autumn leaves,
the fragrance of hay-
each one a sign of eternity.
A bright star helps me find my way back to myself.

I know because you are there that I am here.
The stretching arm of cognition
in a lightning flash,
joining together a million eons of distance,
joining together birth and death,
joining together the known and the knower.

In the depth of the night,
as in the immeasurable realm of consciousness,
the garden of life and I
remain each other's objects.
The flower of being is singing the song of emptiness.

The night is still immaculate,
but sounds and images from you
have returned and fill the pure night.
I feel their presence.
By the window, with my bare feet on the cool floor,
I know I am here
for you to be.

 Thich Nhat Hanh  

Spilled Speech

As everyone drifts off to sleep,
I am still staring at the stars.

Separation from you does have a cure.
There is a way inside the sealed room.

If you will not pour wine,
at least allow me half a mouthful
of leftover dregs.

Secretly I fill my sleeve with pearls.
When the love-police detain me,
let your moon come down
and hold me in its arms.

Officer, I know this man.
I will take him home.

Let my wandering end as the story does
of the Kurd who loses his camel.
Then the full moon comes out,
and he finds what he lost.

These rocks and earth-forms
were originally sun-warmed water,
were they not?

Then the planet cooled
and settled to what we are now.

The blood in our bodies carries
a living luminous flow,
but watch when it spills out
and soaks into the ground.

That is how speech does,
overflowing from silence.

Silk on one side,

cheap, striped canvas on the other.

Colman Barks(Rumi poems)
and interview

One New Orleans solution?

Click picture to see video