Thursday, 05 November 2009

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with an impure mind
And trouble will follow you
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you
As your shadow, unshakable.



“Look how he abused me and beat me,
How he threw me down and robbed me.”
Live with such thoughts and you live in hate.

“Look how he abused me and beat me,
How he threw me down and robbed me.”
Abandon such thoughts and live in love.

In this world
Hate never yet dispelled hate.
Only love dispels hate.
This is the law,
Ancient and inexhaustible.

Gotama Shakyamuni
from the Dhammapada

Re: Thursday, 05 November 2009

Only love dispels hate… yes

Re: Thursday, 05 November 2009

Kind of a fearful symmetry to it…no?

But where the love is a strong attraction and the hate is a strong aversion, I'm going to try to cultivate an equanimity which has both the lovable and the hateful in full view.
Acceptance holds both values loosely, and hate of course rejects and  annihilates it's object.  However, there is a love, which like Blake's worm, makes for the heart of the rose, and in it's affection, devours and destroys.

The same love stirs in the heart of an addict.

Re: Thursday, 05 November 2009

The poets have a wide range of emotions/experiences, all these emotions exist at some level within humanity.  
I was having an interesting discussion on the subject of love with a friend - she was recalling that there were 40 different types of love - I'm a little unsure of where this information came from and just how accurate it is….I feel that we love each person we meet/connect with in a slightly different way so I may say that there unnumerable types of love - each love is unique to the person we connect with.  Thinking along these lines and taking the ideas to other areas…I love woodlands, sunsets, sunrises, the ocean, but the love of each feels different and unique…
Our thoughts if dwelt upon in a negative/hateful way hurt not only ourselves but others too - we have to continually accept, acknowledge and love.  If we encounter disruption, it is there to strengthen us and it teaches us to acknowledge the “disruptive” energy within ourselves so that we may thoroughly know it and love it/shed light on it.  When we “love” someone it induces a feeling which feels good inside - if we feel anger/hate or any such negative emotions it registers with our physical self and we feel discomfort within - so we can choose either way, this is free will…either way it is just perfect for the time/stage we are living in - only we can choose the experience we would like to engage with.
Hope this makes sense!
Love Tai

thank you for your posting sherab

Re: Thursday, 05 November 2009

40 sounds a little high - I googled and found

Eight Types of Love


The Four Loves


Tai, you always make sense! Hugs,


Nicole

Re: Thursday, 05 November 2009

Thanks for the links Nicole, just been over to read them
Glad you thought I made sense - it was something I needed to make sense of myself to obtain clarity…

Love Tai

Re: Thursday, 05 November 2009

Lewis' Four Types resonates well for me. I'll have to check out that book, but I must have been introduced to these ideas early on. I could only remember three, (phila, eros, agape,).
I've been working with a 2+1 Duality/Triad, where Attraction and Aversion are the dyad and Equanimity (or acceptance,)  balances  those.
I tend to reduce things even more and group love into Feeling and Action. Basically I recognize  the things that I like and need as stuff i feel attracted to, and its a feeling that i like eggplant and lentils, or that I like my friends and family.
What I actually do can also be an expression of love. It could be smiling, or hugging someone, but it could also be watering the tomato plants, washing the dishes or giving a really deep massage.
I grew up in a family where loving could also mean yelling and hitting, more often than listening. I got lots of hugs and kisses, but they seemed to come as compensation for being thrown to the ground and kicked. I was told that the real love was the education and the care and feeding, but I have felt rather wildly un-mothered, and fatherless most of my life. I know foster kids who are far better adjusted that I.

The 40 types of love, sounds very reasonable considering the Kokoshastra, Kama sutra and other Classical Indian tracts on sexual love, which catalog every small detail.
I've read some texts on music which draw analogies between feelings and different notes and melodies; and there are some incredible subtleties.

I do find a lot of Value in Lewis' view because it allows  that different  loves , and lovers  might have a combination of  the  four important types. But we are individuals, and as such we are more than a some of our parts. The Romantic in me has to assert that each persons love for another is in fact a different love. If we could reduce it to four or eight, there'd be no need for poetry.
.s-



 

Re: Thursday, 05 November 2009

I cannot imagine a world without poetry or romance sherab - poetry speaks with so many tones, and musical notes and colours, some subtle, some not so subtle, some inbetween! - poetry delves deep into the soul and pulls out every emotion possible - it heals, it soothes, it tells a story of each persons life just the way it is.  It brings about new possibilities through story telling, wisdom teachings, and through experiencing the writer's emotions.  Poetry can be like a massage or a brisk cycle ride - it can be soothing, stirring, evoking emotions of love or pain or just a gentle harmony…  Poetry is like life itself - we experience and enjoy, empower and learn from its inclusion in our lives..
Love seems to take many forms and sometimes it is hard to understand the type of love we receive at some points in our lives….we are givers and receivers and I think we learn that each type of love has its function… sometimes we learn that what we have received from others just isn't our way, so we give in a more honest and truthful way that fits with our “pattern of being”…We evolve/grow/deepen our understanding of what love means to us and how we can offer our “love” to others…it can have so many forms, subbleties or levels and it rises and falls like the waves on an ocean - there are highs and there are lows and parts where there is “no charge” or balance points.
Love Tai

Re: Thursday, 05 November 2009

I like what you say; “Poetry is like life itself.”
Some where, I read Diane DiPrima Talking about reading Keats' letters and she said that the “light was pouring through the pages.” He didn't really stop writing poetry when he wrote to his friends, in a way it was more poetic because he was just being honest about his thoughts and what was going on in peoples lives.

DiPrima was also saying that good poetry was magical and that it transports you to a new place. She felt that most of the poems that she reads just take you there and stop. She felt that it wasn't enough. She wanted to go there and live in that new land.

I think that is what happens in the really great classical poems like the Odyssey, and the great Indian epics like the love of Rhadha and Krishna, Or the Ramayana.

I was in a workshop once where a woman wrote a nasty little poem that mocked some of the writers in the group. She had some religious motivation for this, but it really inspired me to try to reverse what she did, so i wrote a poem for each person in the group and then used lines from each to compose a sonnet which brought everyone into a healing space.  Nick Samaras read it aloud, and he seemed deeply moved, which was a profound compliment to me, as he is a spiritual poet of some stature.

I do think that the Buddha must have been a poet. As a prince, his education would have included poetry and  philosophy as well as military strategy and statecraft. Many of the Pali sutras have a sort of dry, analytical quality, which probably comes from the scholarly monks who wrote them down a few centuries later. The Dhamapada, however has many strong metaphors and allegories, like the imagery of the swans which runs through the entire poem.

I do agree, also, about the many forms that love can take, which is why I can relate to Lewis' four types, which seem like a lucid distillation of what the poets have been saying all along. But Lewis was somewhat unlucky in love was he not?  Perhaps I can relate because of that too. It seems that the quest for a pure love, or a true love must always fail; we are after all, imperfect vessels. Our love is most often clouded by other concerns. Acceptance and affirmation are two of the most important watchwords to me. I have trouble seeing where the violence and rejection fit into the scheme of love, but I guess we are after all, savage creatures, however much we may wish to embrace the vision of angelic light and goodness, there is always an unwanted part of us which it turns out, needs love on its own terms.

I know that I dwell on the the abuses of the past. It was late in life that I came to realize what had happened. I had all but forgotten many parts of my childhood, and in doing so, banished the good along with the bad. The point of recollection for me is not so much to say: “Look how he abused me and beat me,
How he threw me down and robbed me,” it is my attempt to bring into the light a part of my life which I had hidden from.
I don't want to “live in hate” as the sutra says. By hiding those  experiences, I was in a way rejecting them, and they were continuing to cause me damage. So I don't want to blame my parents and show them up as monsters, I want to accept the past and integrate the experience.
I hope this is becoming a little more clear,
Thanks for reading me.
peace
-s-

Re: Thursday, 05 November 2009

Since joining Gaia my love for poetry has grown - I have read so much but never come across some of the classical poems or indian epics you mention.  I have so much more to experience and to enjoy!   I have several poetry books including a beautiful 3 book set of the english poets - some of the poems resonate with how I write, some are in language that I find a little difficult to understand.  I hope that people will always write poems and songs, they are an amazing outlet for our feelings/emotions …
I can understand what DiPrima said about wanting to be in that magical place, it is like an expanded state of consciousness which is hard to hold in place for any length of time while living in a state of physicality.
Poems can leave the emotions so bare and I understand that they can be healing too - it was an amazing opportunity for you to “write” the balance in your workshop. 
We seem to each live to balance one another and to put right the wrong, to evolve and reach higher and higher levels of understanding and depth of feeling.  The heart drives us on to feel and experience, to live and to love, to motivate and inspire one another to our original state of perfect perfection and to resurrect us to “original” and the ultimate state of love.
As we accept and acknowledge the past our feelings come to the surface and are set free - they are released and changed - through the release we are made “lighter” and free to use this energy in ways that elevate and inspire not only ourselves but others too….
I am still learning that sometimes the type of love we have to give is not always acceptable to another, even so our love is so precious that if we don't let this love flow we injure and block ourselves…. so the channelling of love into the activities that we enjoy is a wonderful outlet when we cannot flow directly with a love of our choosing…  Our perfect partner is ourselves, we must all learn to love ourselves in a deep way, to acknowledge and accept every part of our “original” blueprint.  We cannot be totally dependent upon another to love us, or maybe another cannot love us totally until we can love ourselves totally…
Love and blessings
Tai

Re: Thursday, 05 November 2009

fascinating discussion.

The four loves according to Lewis are

1 Affection - storge, often between family members2 Friendship - philia3 Eros 4 Charity - agape or unconditional love

Re: Thursday, 05 November 2009

Tai,
I appreciate what you say about the love one offers not being appreciated by another. For me, feelings of affection come easily. and I was always over brimming with a certain kind of eros. I could fall in love at the drop of a shoe, and that is not always a good thing for a young person. In fact it made me incredibly vulnerable. I often found out too late that I was in a relationship that was not reciprocal.

The Love of the Worm for the Rose, is a metaphor for obsessive desires where one person tries to fill up a gap in his or her self, by focusing on another as the object of that desire. The rose is beautiful, so the worm hides himself inside. I'm sure Blake has other meanings.

the Odyssey, has been one of the most influential 'poems' in western literature. it tells of Ullysses who simply wants to return to his home in Ithica after ten years of war with Troy. The Illiad, a poem with broader scope, describes the war itself and the events which lead up to it.
There are many translations, some of which are very accessible and 'modern' without loosing some of the poetry of the originals.
It may be useful to read the poem in an academic situation because of the ancient Greek cultural references, but equally fascinating (and bewildering) are the references to the epic.
Ezra Pound's Cantos which he worked on most of his life and James Joyce's Ullysses, are extremely dense modern, (early twencen) works, and O' Brother Where Art Thou, is a fun, contemporary retelling which is worth watching for the American roots music alone.

On first looking into Chapman’s Homer:

Re: Thursday, 05 November 2009

Think I will be having a little more adventure into the classics - thank you sherab for your references - will search out more poetry - it's something I really enjoy
many blessings
Tai