Sunday, September 26, 2010

Loreena McKennitt The Stolen Child

Enthusiasm

People spend their days
Grudgingly doing tasks,
Enslaved
By the mind that tells them
They can only do this or that.

Day after day,
They hope for the lottery
To be free to fulfill their dreams—

Dreaming, praying,
While their eyes become more sunken
And their bones more protruding,
And gravity becomes more relentless
To pull their bodies back into the soil.

O Adventurer of the Cosmos,
Take up your banner of joy,
And go out into the jungle
And roar with the tigers,
And charge with the rhinos,
And live each day with a light
Shining in your eyes.

Janaka has,
And the toy chest of heaven
Lies open for him to pick and choose,
With angels anxiously waiting to bear such gifts.

When your body drops
A rerun of your life you’ll see.

Make it a good one,
When no yawns will drown out the words.

Make it a show
At which you can smile, laugh,
Say ooh and aah,
which finishes in a crescendo of a Wow!

The Infinite Self needs nothing to add to ItSelf,
So it does not tell you
To go grab something outside yourself,
Which will give you happiness
That they tell you is to be found
Only upon a Hollywood screen.

That Self,
which you are,
And share with All That Is,
Is happiness complete,
Wanting to express in this wonderland of delight.

If you feel anger at a desire thwarted,
Happiness did not send you that way—
But only the shadow of unfulfillment.

Let every moment be your desire,
Free of the whips of ‘shoulds,’
That you may be donned in creation’s garment—
A glorious garment removed by angelic hands
From the toy chest of God.

Janaka wears this garment,
Is given everything he needs,
And each moment

His heart utters: Wow!
 
--Janaka Stagnaro
from "Footprints along the Shore of an Incoming Tide"

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Focusing on the True

Once you recognize the power of that true self, there won’t be any remnants of Mind for Restraining. For a Saint, a mind may work or it may not, but according to him there is only one thing that is the true self. The Mind, The world and the Body are not different and separate from that true self. All of them are arising in that true self and disappearing in that. They can’t stay separate and survive on their Own.

They are not different from the true self. So always remain with the awareness of that power of true self. Don’t worry and think about the shadows, they can’t do anything to the true self.

The Mind, the world and the body are just reflections of that light of true self.

-- Sri Ramana Maharshi.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Art and Soul

A secular society devoid of spiritual vision will not produce art but entertainment and will soon succumb to selling the artist's soul. Einstein saw that when he declared that "The purpose of both art and science is to keep alive the cosmic religious feeling."
--Matthew Fox, Original Blessing

A friend of mine, a jazz musician, plays mostly in Europe because Americans he feels lack the musical education and patience to go into his music. Most Americans, conditioned on entertainment, will approach an art piece with an immediate reaction of attraction or repulsion. If they like it it is "good." Most movies cater to this emotional centerness of viewers who need emotional excitement instead of contemplation. I remember when I was in a gallery in Palm Springs and I started to listen to the owner's advice on subject matter to cater to client's likes. After a few attempts my wife said, "That's not your work." And it wasn't. My focus was on selling, not creating. The artist, the poet, the writer, the director, must go to the Center to truly create what Spirit wants to bring into the world for revelation and transformation, as well as to that place of being a Cosmic Child of creating for creation's sake.  Now, is entertainment bad? I don't think so. It can lighten one's burden. But when all art comes out of that arena it becomes empty; it is just more of the same, over and over again.

The Rainbow Warriors