20th Century Psalms: The Impersonal (February 2016)

From the out-of-print book, 20th Century Psalms, excerpted and reprinted with permission from Good Karma Publishing.

~ If you hate anything, you cannot love.

~ The Zen Master, Chao Chou, being asked what one should say to a traveler carrying nothing, answered: “Tell him to throw it out!” When the asker protested that, carrying nothing, he could throw nothing out, he received the reply: “Then let him carry it out!”

~ We see matters through a veil of self-interest.

~ So who’s doing the playing? The performer is just a listener. “Did I do that?” he wonders. Can we be so guided in everything?

~ Indian Philosophy traces everything back to an Uncaused Cause, but Buddhism says nothing happens without a prior cause. And then we have the Chinese Uncarved Block. In most cases we believe what we want to believe.

~ Why the urge to personalize and worship this great Life Force in the form of a man?

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~ In a drop of salt water we can sense the ocean; in one action we can feel a person’s character.

~ Envy of others keeps us from realizing our own true value.

~ There is tremendous energy in clouds – even more so when they hang over mountains. We can absorb this energy.

~ Nature is without sentiment. That must be realized.

~ People rush to grasp the ersatz while ignoring the real.

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~ To be devious is to lose your own respect. Better to try to see things from the overall view.

~ The leaves that fall in Autumn will be back next Spring. They will not be the same leaves, you say? Why identify with the leaves; why not identify with the tree?

~ A man who speaks Truth is often thought to be humorous. Otherwise, he might be crucified.

~ To shut out echoes from the past, to attenuate the pleasure principle, these are the hardest tasks.

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~ Some men hear music as noise, some do not see colors. Most do not feel the Essence that pulses through them.

~ If we have constant clamor, the tiny voice inside is drowned out.

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~ The great wisdom is to trust the voice within. “Did I say that?” one wonders, knowing the hand at the throttle is Wisdom. The good jazz musician hears, in wonder, the music he is spontaneously playing.

~ What good to relieve a child of stresses and then send it back to the same environment that caused those stresses?

~ Rhythm is the essence of Being (hence the cyclical nature of things). Without time there can be no rhythm.

~ The Self is realized by forgetting the self. “I, John Jones, am trying hard to achieve Enlightenment” makes it impossible. Enlightenment is always there, but it cannot be the reward of an individual ego.

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~ The pleasure-seekers (and finders) are often the suicides. Living the “good life” can be boring.

~ To write with erudition about painting and music makes me smile. Better one performer than one thousand critics. The critic, seeing a man standing on his head on a bicycle balanced on a tightrope – with a violin held upside down – playing Zigeunerweisen says caustically, “Heifetz he’s not.” I heard this story a long time ago.

~ The ego does not die. It grows to embrace all.

~ If you dislike people, how can you love God?