• The Self-Taught man - my love for whom runs as deep as my condescension does - woke me up this morning with the sound of prayer bells. (yes, he finished his last book yesterday) It induced in my head a frenzy of laughter, but when I realized my mockery was too much for him, I felt a pang of compassion, which quickly turned into anger. I thought about banging against the wall to express my disapproval, but something something about letting the fool persist in his misery.

Call upon Allah or call upon the All-merciful; whichever you call upon, to Him belong the most beautiful names. (Koran 17:110)

• Since there’s a request for an update:
  • My progress heretofore: being able to name the three palliatives - distraction, imagination, and intoxicants. This newfound skillfulness goes one step further - I’ve learned to feign disinterest in palliatives altogether while keeping each up my sleeve.

Everything in the world can be endured, except a succession of fine days. (Goethe)

• The Question, after having imposed Itself on the victim (its own creation), enchants a spell so powerful the victim is compelled to seek for answers. The victim, in spellbound ignorance, even deludes himself with the title of a “truth-seeker”. Soon the poor victim discovers in his truth-seeking voyage that he has arrived in the remotest of the lands, completely overstepping the domain of what he calls “ordinary reality”. He discovers that he has chartered the wrong flight to the wrong destination and as such must have taken off from the airport of untruth. Disappointed but doubly determined, he backtracks into an imaginary ground zero, and with a dash of extra prudence, finds himself a new airport that promises him the right destination. Rinse and repeat. This is how the Question entertains Itself.

• Philosophy which is wielded as a means to earn bread becomes decadent. Such undertakings always converge on stagnant half-truths, and are only bound to putrefy themselves into a filthy soup of repugnant political and personal aims, all the while dancing to the song of whose bread one eats.
• The “truth institution” has an agenda, it cannot not have one. That’s what gives it an apparent sense of cohesiveness, without which it would have no words for advertisement and without which it would dig its own grave. But that sense of cohesiveness is inevitably bound to be exclusionary. A true seeker therefore disowns his allegiance to all institutions. He revels in being an outsider because the moment he belongs, Inquiry stops.

the ambrosial screaming of night jasmines -
pays no heed to my fathers and uncles, brothers and friends,
who fumbling and hustling, ready water for Ashtami.
a pending murder -
but an impersonal sacrifice where this story unfolds ▫

Jail gates ajar,
but prisoners oblivious ▫

• Friendship: I’ll approve of you in your terms, if you’ll approve of me in my terms.
• When one has forgotten the right view (samma ditthi), one engages in the rather comical debate between free will and determinism. With samma ditthi however, both determinism and free will are true. The Sage “wills” what is and what must be.
• Last time You lifted your Veil. Time: eternity. Location: Bodhimandala.
• We remember, we forget. Ad infinitum. No birth, no death. Many births, many deaths. Eternal bliss. Eternal suffering. Such is the predicament.
• Welcome! In this gathering, nouns are forbidden.

Stay, for love. (Doug)
The things we do for love. (GoT, Jaime)

• There are those who the bards do not care to sing for. Do you have space for me in Your choir?
• Delirious Descartes should’ve stopped at “Am”, instead he stooped to “I Am”. “Am” - that which is incessantly gushing forth from the inexhaustible fountain of God. All else is speculation.
• Fearing the consequences of our own ideas is the first rung of the holy ladder. We’re parrots until then. पट्टु, कृष्ण कहो!

• You who loved me when I deserved it the least, you who made space for me in the biggest chambers of your heart, how will you let me love you back at this hour of separation? With an aching heart I say goodbye, but there is no such thing as distance when love is the glue.
• Teach me that philosophy which cries and laughs and dances, something I could whisper into a dying man’s ears.
• So long as man can imagine another heaven and another hell, the strife will continue. What is my next heaven? What bait have I dropped and what bait awaits for me in the wooded valleys of the East?
• What a funny play we get to spectate, all the sentrymen have disguised themselves in the clothes of the burglars they’re so keen on catching.
• Buddha and Mara, what a suspicious pair! Which one is Tom and which one is Jerry?

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
(Love, Herbert)

• Three prayers for today:
  • I pray that I’m graced with intermittent bouts of insanity lest I forget how long-term exposure to sanity ripens the seed of ignorance.
  • I pray that I do not grow aversive to my suffering for suffering is what carves the gorge where joy may flow.
  • I pray that I remain incapable of fabricating too-orderly sob stories to render courtesy to the multitude.
• How distasteful that we ensnare each other into the podium of narration, and lo, how fondly the sheep like to bleat.
• I shall like to remain in my turbulent and tranquil solitude than pay heed to their unsolicited sageliness.
• The Faustian predicament, which I very much relate to, is one of vaguely remembering the divine nectar. The sweetness is ever fading but never completely gone. I’d love to be cured of it but I’m lying when I say that.

You only know one driving force,
and may you never seek to know the other!
Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
and each is eager for a separation:
in throes of coarse desire, one grips
the earth with all its senses;
the other struggles from the dust
to rise to high ancestral spheres.
(Faust, Goethe)

Give me words so that I may sing a song for you,
do you not want to dance?
A memory stirs, of a distant full-moon night,
when you came to me as a gentle breeze
and tickled me into tears.
A consummation,
a celebration,
of you and me,
like we’ve done a thousand times before.
But where are you today?
The breeze doesn’t tickle ▫

• Love requires granting subjectivity to the beloved so that we may see them. Seeing in this context also subsumes capacity for discerning when to stop seeing. Very difficult.
• Love also requires we let others see us. Sometimes it may demand a reification of the self. This is the only true ground where we may do so. Ability to do this skillfully is equally difficult.

• Humility is the supreme of all virtues. Humility to accept what is given. This is the real cultivation. As opposed to “to be content with what is”. The latter implies more was desired and couldn’t be had.
• Suffering is what I feel deep in my bones. I suffer therefore I am. I am therefore I suffer. Both arise together. Having forgotten the right view is why I am.
• We can only defeat Mara by loving Mara. Every Saturday we should arrange teatime with the Evil One. Mara is our own creation and it’s by running away from him that we give him shape.
• We keep sanity by exchanging consolations. The tendency is to one-up the Job inside the other such that my afflictions are more salient. I’m guilty of doing it in my thoughts if not in my speech. This only takes me farther from You.

“Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation — no apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down.”
(Gravity and Grace, Weil)

• A self-injunction to write. How strange. I neither have a subject to write about nor an audience who cares what gets written. How to solve this impasse?
• To explicate a distant memory is always the first urge, but that is bound to reify something false. What can be written that is true but does not reify what is false? I could praise God but that requires God make himself seen. It’s perhaps the case that I’m on an elevated ground and need to descend to the void to see God. It’s always been that way, I don’t know why I’m affecting a feeling of surprise.
• We could also laugh at the absurdity of these ten strange tentacles typing these words. What makes them move?
• Deciding to get up early is the best gift you can give to yourself, but if that early is somebody else’s early too, might as well sleep until ten.
• Three bows. One for the the Tathagata, one for the Dhamma, one for the Sangha. But have you seen those who after bowing secretly scan their periphery ranking others’ bows thereby validating their own? Last time I bowed I couldn’t help but bow. It was a welling up of a reverence of Being and for Being, an exclamation.
• The Buddha asked his disciples to either talk about the Dhamma or to keep noble silence. I’d take it one step further. Noble exclamation or noble silence. All noble exclamations are Dhamma talks.

Some sweet strange longing
makes me rove through the woods and the meadows,
and to an ardent flood of tears
I’d feel a world rising inside me
(Faust, Goethe)