Three mid-winter haiku.
xxxv
winter in my hut
drafts shivering the rainbows
I sit with my tea
xxxvi
thoughts and thinker? wrong
thoughts-thinker-thinking: all one!
pop goes the poseur
xxxvii
zafu guru says
two thoughts cannot co-exist
I dive in the gap
Painting by Rengetsu – Uji River Teapot Scroll
Source – The Rengetsu Circle
311
My eyes pop open in the pre-dawn half-light and I see two huge hares, just outside the window. Their heads are so huge! Their long antennae-ears are tipped with black, creating the appearance of eyes on the tips of rotating arms. Sitting on the dew-drenched grass, they move their ears constantly, turning this way and that, bringing one forward or back, or both. They seem keenly interested in the raucous morning dialogue of nearby kookaburras.
Everything is shouting this morning – the whooping mountain whip birds, the rooster, the parrots; even the guinea fowl are making their clicking contribution.
It’s a dawn of clear and gentle loveliness; the sanctity of the earth is like a long, slow exhalation. Resting in its embrace is bliss.
“The thinker is the thought,” said Krishnamurti
opening a whole chapter of self-inquiry for this scribbler.
But no thinker can be found
and no thought can be caught.
Thinking’s happening; thoughts arise
and one of them likes to think it’s a thinker.
~
Hare from here.
250
Problems?
Of course there are problems; isn’t that the nature of dreams?
If you wake up from a sleeping-dream which was problem-filled you say, “Oh it was only a dream, whew!”
When you wake up within the big Dream the response is the same: “Whew!”
As they say in the big Down Under: “No worries, mate!”
~
The first time I sat with Krishnamurti he asked us whether it was possible to live without problems. Just to entertain the possibility. What exactly is a “problem?” he asked.
Twenty years and much deliberation later, spaciousness scribbles: A problem is a thought believed to be real by another thought – the ‘me’ thought. It’s only by inquiring into the nature of thought that one gets a grip on problems. Or, rather, they lose their grip on the tail-chasing thinker.
Problems are as ephemeral as the ‘me’ thought. When the dreamer wakes up to the Dream, problems are seen as Life’s creative unfolding. There is nothing outside of this utterly mind-boggling miracle of Creation.
~
226
Do you exist apart from the stories you believe about yourself?
I found I cannot claim existence apart from the beliefs I buy into. I found that just as the thinker is the thought, the believer is the belief.
The evidence for solid, separate existence is compelling – and true, relatively-speaking. It’s just that we forget we aren’t separate from our beliefs; we believe we ‘own them.’ But the owner-thing turns out to be … another belief!
Unless we’ve acknowledged and questioned our beliefs – including the ‘real me’ one – we tend to think they are non-negotiable and rock-solid. However, we cannot unstitch a belief without simultaneously disappearing the believer.
Perhaps that’s why it’s such a touchy business to enter into dialogue or self-inquiry about our non-negotiable beliefs and assumptions. Yet on the other side of the terror of self-extinction lies the peace that we seek – the peace that passeth all understanding.
~
echoes from emptiness 