Rumi

- Deschooling Society - Ivan Illich/ Thanks to N.F. – ‘A Clean Glass‘ blog

The Korean poet Ko Eun describes the trait as universal to the Korean experience: “We Koreans were born from the womb of Han and brought up in the womb of Han.” Han connotes both despair at recognition of past injustice and acceptance of such matters as part of the Korean experience.

“As I have already said, Han is an expression of the complex feeling which embraces both sadness and hope. The sadness stems from the effort by which we accept the original contradiction facing all living things, and hope comes from the will to overcome the contradiction. In the present, we accept it; in the future, we will overcome it. Life for all living things is full of contradictions. Where there is centrifugal force, there is also centripetal force. Where there is a beginning, there is also an end. Where space lasts for ever, time passes. And all who are born must die. Thus we become aware of existence, time, space and life itself. Finally, we have to admit the contradictory duality of life. It is very easy to resign ourselves to this contradiction, but we can think of it in another way. We can think of ourselves as actively conforming to the laws of the universe. This is the way in which Koreans strive to overcome the contradictions of life. When we are poor, we think of Han. We therefore work hard in order to buy lots of land. When we are ignorant, we are mindful of Han. We educate our children in order to deliver them from Han, that is why the passion for educating the young is so ardent in Korea. We cannot however completely deliver ourselves from Han in this world, because Han is also a hope for the future…”(Park Kyong-ni) Read more

The ego is, empirically, a dream in which we ourselves dream ourselves; the contents of this dream, drawn from our surroundings, are at bottom only pretexts, for the ego desires only its own life: whatever we may dream, our dream is always only a symbol for the ego which wishes to affirm itself, a mirror that we hold before the ‘I’ and which reverberates its life in multiple fashions.

This dream has become our second nature; it is woven of images and of tendencies, static and dynamic elements in innumerable combinations: the images come from outside and are integrated into our substance; the tendencies are our responses to the world around us; as we exteriorise ourselves, we create a world in the image of our dream, and the dream thus objectivised flows back upon us, and so on and on, until we are enclosed in a tissue, sometimes inextricable, of dreams exteriorised or materialised and of materialisations interiorised.

The ego is like a watermill whose wheel, under the drive of a current — the world and life — turns and repeats itself untiringly, in a series of images always different and always similar. The world: it is as if the ‘conscious Substance’ which is the Self had fallen into a state which would split it up in many different ways and would inflict on it endless accidents and infirmities; and in fact, the ego is ignorance floundering in objective modes of ignorance, such as time and space.

What is time, if not ignorance of what will be ‘after’, and what is space, if not ignorance of what escapes our sense? If we were ‘pure consciousness’ like the Self, we would be ‘always’ and ‘everywhere’; that is to say we would not be ‘I’, for that, in its empirical actuality, is entirely a creation of space and time. The ego is ignorance of what is ‘the other’; our whole existence is woven of ignorances; we are like the Self frozen, then hurled to earth and split into a thousand fragments; we observe the limits which surround us, and we conclude that we are fragments of consciousness and of being.

Matter grips us like a kind of paralysis, it imposes on us the heaviness of a mineral, and exposes us to the miseries of impurity and of mortality; form shapes us according to such and such a model, it imposes on us such and such a mask and cuts us off from a whole to which we are none the less tied, though at death it lets us fall as a tree lets fall its fruit; finally, number is what repeats us — inside ourselves as also around us — and what, in repeating us, diversifies us, for two things can never be absolutely identical; number repeats form as if by magic, and form diversifies number and must thus create itself ever anew, because the All-Possibility is infinite and must manifest its infinitude.

But the ego is not only multiple externally, in the diversity of souls, it is also divided within itself, in the diversity of tendencies and of thoughts, which is not the least of our miseries; for ‘strait is the gate’ and ‘a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven’. And since we are ‘not other’ than the Self, we are condemned to eternity.

Eternity lies in wait for us, and that is why we must find again the Centre, that place where eternity is bliss. Hell is the reply to the periphery which makes itself the Centre, or to the multitude that usurps the glory of Unity; it is the reply of Reality to the ego wanting to be absolute, and condemned to be so without being able to be so… The Centre is the Self ‘freed’, or rather that which has never ceased to be free—eternally free.

Thus, Shariputra, all dharmas are emptiness. There are no characteristics. There is no birth and no cessation. There is no impurity and no purity. There is no decrease and no increase.

Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no appearance, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no dharmas, no eye dhatu up to no mind dhatu, no dhatu of dharmas, no mind consciousness dhatu; no ignorance, no end of ignorance up to no old age and death, no end of old age and death; no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom, no attainment, and no non-attainment”

The Heart Sutra is a well-known Mahāyāna Buddhist sutra that is very popular among Mahayana Buddhists both for its brevity and depth of meaning.

Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton

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“It was not Napoleon
Who founded the Ashmolean
He hardly had a chance
living mostly in France”

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“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”

“Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.”
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Read more on Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936)
Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton full text

The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158