Cafe

Adventure
When you start on the road to Ithaca,
Then pray that the road is long, full of knowledge, full of adventure.
Do not fear Lestygonians or the Cyclops or the fierce Poseidon.
For you will never meet such as these on your path if your thoughts remain lofty,
if a fine emotion touches your spirit.

No, you need not fear the Lestygonians, the Cyclops, or the angry Poseidon.
You will not meet such as these on your path if you do not carry them
within your soul, if you do not call them up before you.

Then pray that the road is long, and summer mornings many,
that you enter ports seen for the first time, with great pleasure and joy.
Stop at Phoenician markets and purchase exquisite merchandise, mother-of-pearl
and coral, amber and ebony, as much pleasurable perfume as you can.
Visit hosts of Egyptian cities to learn from those who possess knowledge.

Do not hurry the voyage at all,
for it is better that it last long years,
even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all you have
Gained along the way,
but never expecting Ithaca to offer you riches.

For she has already given you the beautiful voyage,
and without her, you would never have taken the road,
but she has nothing more to give.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not betrayed you.
With all the experiences you have had and all the wisdom you have gained,
You must surely understand by then what Ithaca means.

trans. by Dr. Jeffrey Collins

Goethe

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making
sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and, finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven't experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

Herman Hesse

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nauseau, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew..I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace, to hear Om again..

Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone...

Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can harm me...
- from Siddhartha

Julian of Norwich

All is Well Done
And after this I saw God in a Point, that is to say, in mine understanding,-by which sight I saw that He is in all things.

I beheld and considered, seeing and knowing in sight, with a soft dread, and thought: What is sin?

For I saw truly that God doeth all-thing, be it never so little. And I saw truly that nothing is done by hap nor by adventure, but all things by the foreseeing wisdom of God: if it be hap or adventure in the sight of man, our blindness and our unforesight is the cause...
- from Revelations of Divine Love

Kabir

Student, do the simple purification.
You know that the seed is inside the horse-chestnut tree;
and inside the seed there are the blossoms of the tree, and the chestnuts, and the shade.
So inside the human body there is the seed, and inside the seed there is the human body again.

Fire, air, earth, water and space- if you don't want the secret,
one,
you can't have these either.

Thinkers, listen, tell me what you know of that is not inside the soul?
Take a pitcher full of water and set it down on the water-
now it has water inside and water outside.
We mustn't give it a name,
lest silly people start talking again about the body and the soul.

If you want the truth, I'll tell you the truth:
Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you.
The one no one talks of speaks the secret sound to himself,
and he is the one who has made it all.

Quatrain 28
There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming in them.
All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can't say a word,
I know, I have been crying out to them.
The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but words.
I looked through their covers one day sideways.
What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived through.
If you have not lived through something, it is not true.

Quatrain 8
I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.

You don't grasp the fact what that what is most alive of all is inside your own house;
and so you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look!

Kabir will tell you the truth: go wherever you like, to Calcutta or Tibet;
if you can't find where your soul is hidden,
for you the world will never be real!

Lalla, Hindu Bhakti Poet

Ascetics wander from shrine to shrine,
looking for what can only come
from visiting the soul.

Study the mystery that you embody.
When you look up from that,
the dub grass looks fresher
a little ways off, and even more
green farther on. Stay here.

H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama

In Tibetan, the word for blessing means "transformation through majesty or power." In short, the meaning of blessing is to bring about, as a result of the experience, a transformation in one's mind for the better.

Peter Quiller, Merlin the Immortal

Consider how Will, Love, Wisdom and Intelligence unify and sustain all things, from the dance of the smallest electron to the majestic procession of the galaxies. How could it be otherwise?

Layman P'Ang

My daily affairs are quite ordinary;
but I'm in total harmony with them.
I don't hold on to anything, don't reject anything;
nowhere an obstacle or conflict.
Who cares about wealth and honor?
Even the poorest thing shines.
My miraculous power and spiritual activity:
drawing water and carrying wood.

Philo

...If someone has experienced the wisdom that can only be heard from oneself, learned from oneself and created from oneself, he does not merely participate in laughter: he becomes laughter itself.

Rainer Maria Rilke

To Praise Is The Whole Thing
To praise is the whole thing! A man who can praise
comes toward us like ore out of silences
of rock. His heart, that dies, presses out
for others a wine that is fresh forever.

When the god’s energy takes hold of him,
his voice never collapses in the dust.
Everything turns to vineyards, everything turns to grapes,
made ready for harvest by his powerful south.

The mold in the catacomb of the king
does not suggest that his praising is lies, nor
the fact that the gods cast shadows.

He is one of the servants who does not go away,
who still holds through the doors
of the tomb trays of shining fruit.

The Man Watching
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes,
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the angel, who appeared
to the wrestler of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel,
(who often simply declined the fight),
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Jellaludin Rumi

Quatrains

82
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

1616
Inside the Great Mystery that is,
we don't really own anything.
What is this competition we feel then,
Before we go, one at a time, through the same gate?

Those You Are With
What is a real connection between people? When the same
knowledge
opens a door between them. When the same inner sight exists
in you as in another, you are drawn to be companions.
When a man feels in himself the inmost nature of a woman,
he is drawn to her sexually. When a woman
feels the masculine self of a man within her,
she wants him physically in her.

When you feel the qualities of Gabriel in you, you fly up quickly
like a fledgling not thinking of the ground.
When you feel asinine qualities in you, no matter how you try
to do otherwise, you will head toward the stable.

The mouse is not despicable for its form, which is a helpless victim
to birds of prey, the mouse who loves dark places and cheese
and pistachio nuts and syrup. When the white falcon, though,
has the inner nature of a mouse, it is a disgrace
to all animals. Angelic figures and criminals
shackled head-down in a pit are similar-looking,
same arms, same head. Moses is a bright spirit,
Pharaoh disgusting with his sorcery.

Always search for your innermost nature in those you are with.
As rose-oil imbibes from roses.
Even on the grave of a holy man, a holy man lays his face
and hands and takes in light.
- from Open Secret: Versions of Rumi by John Moyne and Coleman Barks

Forget your life. Say God is Great. Get up.
You think you know what time it is. It's time to pray.
You've carved so many little figurines, too many.
Don't knock on any random door like a beggar.
Reach your long hand out to another door, beyond where
you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, "How are you?"
and no one says How aren't you?

Tomorrow you'll see what you've broken and torn tonight,
thrashing in the dark. Inside you
there's an artist you don't know about.
He's not interested in how things look different in the moonlight.

If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you're causing terrible damage.
If you've opened your loving to God's love,
you're helping people you don't know
and have never seen.

Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,
if you know, if you you've known it
from the beginning of the universe.
- from The Enlightened Heart, edited Stephen Mitchell, trans. by A.J. Arberry and Coleman Barks

Sun Szu

It does not take sharp eyes to see the sun and the moon, nor does it take sharp ears to hear the thunderclap. Wisdom is not obvious. You must see the subtle and notice the hidden to be victorious.

Chief Tecumseh, Shawnee Nation

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, whenin a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled wiht fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

Henry David Thoreau

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty, poverty, nor weakness, weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

H.S. Tigner

The capacity to believe is the most significant and fundamental human faculty, and the most important thing about a man is what he believes in the depth of his being. That is the thing that makes him what he is; the thing that organizes him and feeds him; the thing that keeps him going in the face of untoward circumstances; the thing that gives him resistance and drive. Let neutrality, confusion, indifference or skepticism enter this inner place, and the very springs of life will cease to flow.

John Vaughan

A Proclamation of Invisibles
there is now a stretch of fecund earth lying between us
i can see strong tendrils growing up, curling powerfully into the sky
green stalks that reek of the power and terror that are in our God
there is great terror in His promises when you look into them deeply
there is great terror because you can feel His power in them like you
can see His power in a deep blackish and blue sky where you see the winds occluding the sun
like you feel in a mountain of sea
He is our terror and our very great love
it is all One, we are caught in that precious field between the poles
sparkling and deadly to me somewhere in some secret cavern in my heart
it was not there, this fecund wondrous earth, not there in my mind's eye
all that i could see was a blinding white sky, hard like diamonds, hard like stretched brass
i had tasted deep of petty cruelties and wondered
is it me? did i do a bad thing? certainly i deserve what i am getting,
certainly i do
but now all of that seems insipid, its power slipping away,
i cannot grasp it any longer
i want to scream up into sky
i want to knock on wood
i want to kneel down in a holy, dirty bathtub under the shower head
and thank Him that i am alive, just for the sheer joy of it
thank you
- John Vaughan 1997

Nancy Wood

Solitude
Do not be afraid to embrace the arms
of loneliness.
Do not be concerned with the thorns
of solitude.
Why worry that you will miss something?

Learn to be at home with yourself
without a hand to hold.
Learn to endure isolation
with only the stars for friends.

Happiness
comes from understanding unity.
Love
arrives on the footprints of your fear.
Beauty
arises from the ashes of despair.
Solitude
brings the clarity of still waters.
Wisdom
completes the circle of your dreams.
- Nancy Wood, from Spirit Walker

Resources for further thought

Mysticism

Mystics