The Ship:  A Parable of Immortality

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.  She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch until at last she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.

Then someone at my side says, 'There she goes!'

Gone where?

Gone from my sight ... that is all.

She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination.  Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone at my side says, 'There she goes!' there are other eyes watching her coming and their voices ready to take up the glad shouts 'Here she comes!'

This is how I see and understand death.

For one minute every hour, stop and focus on your intention.  It works miracles.

Greatness is a natural state - A state of wholeness, a state of balance between mind, body and soul connection. In this state everything that you are is available to respond to whatever the moment calls for. You are free, you are boldly self-expressed. Greatness is not based on accomplishment - it is available to anyone right now.

My notion about service is actually that kind of relationship in which you have a commitment to the other person.  Now, I don't mean to the person's body or to the person's personality, or to the person's stomach, or the person's almost anything.  What I mean in fact is that for me what service is about is being committed to the other being.  To other person spiritually.  To who the other person is.  Now the problem with that is that, to the degree that you are in fact committed to the other person, you are only as valuable as the degree to which you can deal with the other person's stuff, their evidence, their manifestation, and that's what service is about.  Service is knowing who the other person is and being able to tolerate giving space to their garbage.  What most people do is to give to people's quality and deal with their garbage.  Actually, you should do it the other way around.  Deal with who they are and give space to their garbage.  Keep interacting with them as if they are God.  And every time you get garbage from them, give space to the garbage and go back and interact with them as if they were God.

Life is a game.
In order to have a game something has to be more importantthan something else.
If what already is, is more important than what isn't the game is over.
So, life is a game in which what isn't is more important than what is.
Let the good times roll.

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

Please Call Me By My True Names
Don't say that I will depart tomorrow-
even today I am still arriving.
Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive,
in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart
is the birth and death of all that is alive.
I am a mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.
I am a frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his "debt of blood" to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.
My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up
and the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.

Meditation hasn't got a damn thing to do with anything, 'cause all it has to do with is nothing. Nothingness. Okay? It doesn't develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? Forget it, baby. It erases the self. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass. What good is it? Good for nothing. Excellent for nothing. Yes, Lord, but when you get down to nothing, you get down to ultimate reality. It's then and exactly then that you're sensing the true nature of the universe, you're linked up with the absolute Absolute, son, and unless you're content with blowing smoke up your butt all your life, that there's the only place to be.

Meditation hasn't got a damn thing to do with anything, 'cause all it has to do with is nothing. Nothingness. Okay? It doesn't develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? Forget it, baby. It erases the self. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass. What good is it? Good for nothing. Excellent for nothing. Yes, Lord, but when you get down to nothing, you get down to ultimate reality. It's then and exactly then that you're sensing the true nature of the universe, you're linked up with the absolute Absolute, son, and unless you're content with blowing smoke up your butt all your life, that there's the only place to be.

To the as-yet unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. 

I have caught life. I have come down with life.   I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Christopher Webster, and that was that. They said the year was 1968, and that was that. They said I was in Leeds, England, and that was that. 

They never shut up. Year after year they piled detail upon detail. They do it still. You know what they say now? They say the year is 1982, and that I am fifty years old.

Blah blah blah.