Time waits for no-One

Our existence is defined by perpetual motion. We can find stillness in our Selves, stillness in the present; but if we don’t tend to our inescapable propulsion across our time, if we neglect either the time that slips from our birth to the moment we’re reading this, or the time hurtling towards us from the Doors of our Death, we’ll find ourselves floating in our bubbles of recycled time. Reliving our past or the dreams that come and pass without any invested grain of action. How do we do that? Well, the past informs how we navigate the present. Our bright and gentle memories form who we are just as much as the painful ones. We’re not mechanistically bound to recreate the past, we’re capable of interacting, learning and growing from our past. There’s strength in accepting the entirety of who we’ve been and the responsibility of choosing who we want to be. The future is the perpetual state of the present, always in motion. It unfolds on the horizon and for the idealists of conviction and trust in one’s Self, the future is a space we can reach into and inhabit; that is, if we accept the responsibility of actualizing and believing in it. What we choose to reach for matters, the transitivity or the permanence of the events and goals we place before Death can determine the satisfaction we have with our perpetual motion. If you fill your time chasing after the falling seconds, after temporary pleasures and impersonal, objectifying or commodifying objectives, you’ll end up swimming in circles instead of falling off the edge of the Horizon. Stand, instead, at the gates of the present with Love, a determination to be Happy and act on a clear and fulfilling goal.

Everything is Buddha

"Everything is Buddha

As is Nirvāna so is Samsara.

Do not think there is any distinction.

Yet it possesses no single nature,

For I know it as quite pure.

Do not sit at home, do not go to the forest,

But recognzie mind wherever you are.

When one abides in complete and perfect enlightenment,

Where is Samsāra and where is Nirvāna?

Oh know this truth,

That neither at home nor in the forest does enlightenment dwell.

Be free from prevarication

In the self-nature of immaculate thought!

“This is my self and this is another.”

Be free of this bond which encompasses you about,

And your own self is thereby released.

Do not err in this matter of Self and other. Everything is Buddha without exception.

Here is that immaculate and final stage.

Where thought is pure in its true nature.

The fair tree of thought that knows no duality,

Spreads through the triple world.

It bears the flower and fruit of compassion,

And its name is service of others.

The fair tree of the Void abounds with flowers,

Acts of compassion of many kinds,

And fruit for others appearing spontaneously,

For this joy has no actual thought of another.

So the fair tree of the Void also lacks compassion,

Without shoots or flowers or foliage,

And whoever imagines them there, falls down,

For branches there are none!

The Two trees spring from one seed,

And for that reason there is but one fruit,

He who thinks of them thus indistinguishable,

Is released from Nirvāna and Samsāra.

If a man in need approaches and goes away hopes unfulfilled

It is better he should abandon that house

Than take the bowl that has been thrown from the door.

Not to be helpful to others,

Not to give to those in need,

This is the fruit of Samsāra

Better than this is to renounce the idea of a self.

He who clings to the Void

And neglects compassion,

Does not reach the highest stage.

But he who practices only compassion,

Does not gain release from toils of existence.

He, however, who is strong in the practice of both,

Remains neither in Samsāra nor in Nirvāna. “

From Saraha, Dohākośa, v. 102-end; as translated by D.S. Snellgrove in Conze, Buddhist Texts, pp.238-39

"Love is supposed to be fun!"

“Love is supposed to be Fun” - Yasmin Al-Salman

Nothing has eluded my understanding more than Love. Maybe that’s because love isn’t something that can be dissected by the analytic mind, it can’t be delayed to a time and place where we can safely explain it from a distance, and it sure can’t be performed or constructed by our minds. Love demands to be felt, experienced, it demands surrender to a living and changing world. The moment we try to hold, capture or contain love with our attachment, we fragment the unity of its experience, we separate ourselves from its reality by taking refuge in the imagined copy of love we live vicariously through in fear of feeling the real thing. Isn’t it bizarre how easy it can be to love an imagined relation we have with the constructed image we preserve of someone rather than loving the real person. Maybe because in our imagined world we can hold their avatar still, we can preserve their ‘love’ or ‘validation’ like Han Solo in a carbon print, in our world we’re in control of this appearance of ‘love’.

In our real experience of love, with our hearts on the line, we’re bare, vulnerable, open to being wounded and cared for by the living and ever-changing fabric of love we surrender to. The real thing means loving and allowing ourselves to be loved by a person whose Heart we have no control over, a Heart just as volatile as our own; it means leaving ourselves bare to a living breathing world of hearts that can reject, abandon, threaten and even die out on us. Whoever said love doesnt take courage is yet to understand the real value of Love. Over time Hearts may learn to be self-sufficient, to find themselves swimming in Divine Love, to love themselves so that they don’t shatter or drown in the currents; but nevertheless, every once in a while I meet some gentle hearts who have thrown themselves in the flame only to come out with peace, Hearts who have flown through the Sun only to come out yawping their outcries of Love’s rebelion. Hearts who have suffered so much only to split themselves open as a big fuck you to a world that forces it shut.

People with open hearts are remarkably courageous. To be so bare and vulnerable, to sit in their being until their sensibility becomes strength, is deceivingly simple. Open hearts have to commit themselves to remain open and loving when facing storms and fearful hearts alike. To walk around in generous spirit despite their encounters with closed door after closed door?? You know how brave you must be to love based solely on your own independent nature to love? To love because it’s who we are, whether we’re loving in the presence of similar hearts or hearts that have grown cold, distant, spiteful in their resistance against the spin of their hearts.

From Avatar the Last Airbender, a Lion Turtle to Ang