Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Timeless Truth

Truth is never belief. Identifying with a set of thoughts is not the truth. Truth is only and always experiential, but experiential in this certain nonconceptual indefinable way.

Truth is not experiential in an ordinary way. This is a common misunderstanding and a great occlusion to the truth.

This experience is sudden, previously unknown, and non-abiding in the common way of memory, but abiding in the way of truth. Some call this kensho, or satori, and enlightenment.

As a conceptual experience, the moments before and after will define it. As a nonconceptual experience, it still is and always was, but was forgotten in the process of identifying with the memory.

Awakening is like losing one's virginity to the unborn. Awakening is like experiencing the non-experiential. Insert next paradox here.

One practice emphasizes no thought. Another practice emphasizes being. Other practices emphasize the shock and awe of ego in the world. Any good practice is time well-spent waiting for the timeless.











"Have you ever been experienced?

Well, I have.

Ah, let me prove it to you.

~Jimi"


the first law of self-awareness. awareness is not what you think it is.

let me say this in another way. i was looking at my face reflecting in the bathroom mirror when i suddenly was realizing i didn't have a head.

footnote douglas harding

footnote zen

meditation after satori. deconstruction before kensho.

footnote the divine imagination of koan and sutra

paradoxify, paradoxify, paradoxify



My Rumi 6 (A-218)

There is a fire in my voice for you but my mouth is sealed ten thousand times.

These flames rising from my heart would make one portal for both worlds.

And when this world shall pass away, there’s still this one of ten thousand others.

There are sweet caravans now in motion from that Egypt of the absolute.

Being drunk with love, I know not what profit or what loss is in this exchange.

An eye is radiating pearls of love. The eye of the eye is radiating pearls of being.

I am not imprisoned in this world. Like Jesus, my home is in the turning of the sun.

Thank God That makes this spirit manifest. As this spirit is unmanifest, I am the spirit of the spirit.

Seek that which Shams Tabriz the sage presented me. For that is what we are.




~transcreated from an Arberry translation (A-218) of a Rumi ghazal (F-1754)












Tuesday, August 11, 2020

My Rumi 5 (A-102)

One by one the drunks are coming. One by one wine-tasters arrive.

Lovers are flirting along the way. The innocent emerge from the garden.

One by one from the field of being and the absolute, potentiality is leaving and becoming is arriving.

Those with robes of gold unearthed from an infinite mine spring forth for the sake of the needy.

The starving and sick, after passing through pastures of love, are showing up nourished and healthy.

The spirit of the true like sunshine from on high is spilling down upon the false.

Hallowed be that place where ripe fruit falls for our blessed mothers even in the middle of the winter.

Our source is grace and our return is grace. From pure awareness to self-awareness, we are transpiring.




~transcreated from an Arberry translation (A-102) of a Rumi ghazal (F-819)






Monday, August 10, 2020

My Rumi 4 (A-7)

The sovereign is here and the sovereign is now. Grace the palace hall. Mark your hands in wonder at the angel from Canaan.

As the heart of the heart of the heart is here, there's no need to name the heart. For in its own presence, what value is the heart except surrender.

Without love I am one who's lost the way. But suddenly the way of love has entered me. I was the mountain and now I'm the hay for the horse of the sovereign.

Whether Turk or Tajik, this captive is as near to either as the heart is to the mind. But the mind never knows the heart.

My friends, good fortune is here. The time has come for letting go our burden. Wisdom is sitting at the helm, ready to unseat all demons.

Get out of your rut. Procrastinate no more. Why are you being helpless? If you don't know the way, ask the hoopoe bird how to get to Solomon's palace.

And when you’ve arrived, make your petitions, tell your secrets, confess your desires. The story goes that Solomon knows the speech of every bird.

Words are the fervent winds dividing the heart. But wisdom is the sun that gathers together the scattered ones.






Saturday, August 8, 2020

Enlightenment Road

There are seven stages in the process of enlightenment: absolute awareness, being, myth, scientific materialism, deconstruction, love, sudden self-awareness.

Being is the raw material. Self-awareness is the finished good. Scientific materialism is the basest point, like a myth not knowing it's a dream. Wake up, it's the twenty-first century!

Between materialism and deconstruction is nihilism like the wasteland of the mind. Love is to being as self-awareness is to absolute awareness. Enlightenment is not a dirty word.

To the mind, enlightenment is a process. To the heart, enlightenment is the heart. I shall be telling this ad infinitum: mind is a quality hand tool but love is the hand of the heart of the noumenon.


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Friday, August 7, 2020

My Rumi 3 (A-5)

O lovers, lovers, the presence of oneness and enlightenment is here. That manifesto from eternity is always here: “Original-faced beauty, welcome here.”

Blissful hearts, blissful hearts, joy is joining in our whirling dervish. We have caught its train and it has caught our shroud.

The burning spirit is being served. Hell cowers in the corner and mortal terror gives up the ghost. Our steady wine steward reappears!

The seven stages of heaven are drunk with intensity for you. We are counted as mere points in your work. And my being is your universal being whenever resting at ease.

The sweet voice of the singer, the bells that keep the beat, joy is riding on wild horses. Its whirlwind is swirling our vital essence!

O sound of the sweet-responding flute, your note is like the taste of honey. Your music brings to me the fragrance of devotion night and day.

Begin the beginning again. Play the music of the manifest once more. O sun of lovely being, glory over this beautiful creation.

Now be silent. Do not tear the veil. Drain the vessel of contemplation. Be unknown, be unknown. And acclimate yourself to the absolute compassion of an undivided God.



~transcreated from an Arberry translation (A-5) of a Rumi ghazal (F-34)















Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Tripping the Noumenal Fantastic

Simmer summer august wind gust, monster maple, ogre oak, trees are scary after living with the mushroom desert folk.

The mind hallucinates while being watches; disidentifying with the mind is called job one.

It’s not the dream that’s waking up but it’s the dreamer returning from its trip of self-awareness.

Like an ouroboric fractal universe, the mind is made to endlessly divide if left to its own device.

Mind may be a tool but love is the hand that holds the tool. And love is the hand of the heart of the noumenon.



footnotes

1. leaving santa fe, we were somewhere on the edge of the catskills when the trees began to stranglehold

2. the mind divides, therefore the mind is dreaming. i am, therefore the mind is deconstructing.

3. self-awareness is the evolutionary thread. the needle is enlightening intent.

4. consciousness gets lost in the mind. getting lost in the mind hurts. no one wants to hurt.

5. in other words, mind is a tool, love is non-doing, being is ouroboros, self-awareness is the sacrifice.















My Rumi 2 (A-3)

Now I know the true beloved, this beauty adorning all experience. It rises into heaven like the spirit of the prophet.

The sun is blotted out by its presence; the universe is chaos in its heart. And by its brightest power, the sea and earth catch fire.

So I ask where is the ladder that I may join with you in heaven. And it answers that the mind is the ladder; place it underneath oneself and rise.

As the mind is placed beneath you, you will step into the stars. And when you know you are the air that climbs the air, already you are there.

Ten thousand ways to realization open suddenly to you. One is waking into heaven every morning like a prayer.




Arberry 3

Today I beheld the beloved, that ornament of every affair; he went off departing to heaven like the spirit of Mustafā. 

The sun is put to shame by his countenance, heaven's sphere is as confused as the heart; through his glow, water and clay are more resplendent than fire.

I said, "Show me the ladder, that I may mount up to heaven." He said, "Your head is the ladder, bring your hcad down under your feet."

When you place your feet on your head, you will place your feet on the head of the stars; when you cleave through the air, set your foot on the air, so, and come!

A hundred ways to heaven's air become manifest to you; you go flying up to heaven every dawning like a prayer.






Monday, August 3, 2020

Transcreating Rumi

For lovers of Coleman Barks' versions of Rumi, this book, 'Mystical Poems of Rumi' by A.J. Arberry, should be a place of pilgrimage. This is the source of most of his transcreations. The way the story goes is that Robert Bly introduced this book to Barks in 1976 saying, these poems need to be released from their cages.


Here is Arberry on his book in the introduction (it is one paragraph which I have divided into five for blog readability): 

"These versions, being in the vast majority the first renderings into a western language (and the modern Turkish translation has been fully consulted), and intended primarily for non-specialists, have been made as literal as possible, with a minimal concession to readability. Short notes have been appended, to clarify obscurities and to explain unfamiliar allusions. 

For the rest, the reader is earnestly advised to make himself familiar with the Mathnawi in Nicholson's translation, and with the Fihi mā fihi in my own Discourses of Rumi. The poet is always consistent in his thought, and often repetitive in his expression, so that all his writings shed an abundance of mutually clarifying light. 

When all is said and done, however, it must be admitted that a number of passages in these poems still baffle the understanding, which is hardly surprising, considering the occasional nature of some of the references (for these poems were the spontaneous utterances of an ecstatic, unpremeditated and unrevised). 

There is also the further difficulty, that the language of the poems, though of course greatly influenced by literary style, is basically colloquial. It incorporates many Khorasanian idioms, affected by long residence in Arabic-speaking and Turkish-speaking lands, all from seven hundred years ago, so that the colloquial usages of the present day are not always a reliable guide.

Rūmī himself appears to have been conscious of the elusive, evanescent nature of his utterances, as when he says (in poem 125 of this selection), "My verse resembles the bread of Egypt—night passes over it, and you cannot eat it any more.”"


And here is Franklin Lewis on Barks and Bly and Rumi (one para divided into 3 here): 

"On the other hand, Bly and Barks tend to present Rumi as a guru rather calmly dispensing words of wisdom capable of resolving, panacea-like, all our ontological ailments. This effect is created in their writing not only by simple diction and plain sentences, but by the tendency to resolve paradoxes, and in the breathy knowing pauses and placid demeanors of their recitation style.

In reality, Rumi, especially in the Divân, is a poet of overpowering longing, trying to grope through his acute and shattering sense of loss – loss of Shams and alienation in the material world from the spiritual source - to achieve catharsis, usually in some kind of silent, sagacious suffering.

Rumi's Persian ghazals, spontaneous, excited, full of sonorous, urgent sound play and rhythm, constantly toy with unresolved paradoxes, and do not impress the reader with a sense of serene wisdom calmly dispensed, but with frenetic search and longing to understand. Bly and Barks's view of Rumi corresponds more closely to the tenor of the narrator of the Masnavi than to the poet of the ghazals."


And of course there is the backlash to Barks: The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi.



So I decided to try my hand at one of Arberry's translations which Kabir Hemninski also translated. 


Here is the Arberry:

282 

Sit with your comrades, do not go to sleep; do not go to the bottom of the sea like a fish. 

Be surging all night like the sea; no, do not go scattered like a torrent. 

Is not the water of life in darkness? Seek in darkness, and do not hurry away. 

The nightfarers of heaven are full of light; you too, go not away from the company of your companions. 

Is not the wakeful candle in a golden dish? Go not into earth like quicksilver.

The moon shows its face to the night-travelers; be watchful, on the night of moonshine do not go.


And here's Helminski's translation:

Search the Darkness

Sit with your friends; don't go back to sleep.
Don't sink like a fish to the bottom of the sea.

Surge like an ocean,
don't scatter yourself like a storm.

Life's waters flow from darkness.
Search the darkness, don't run from it.

Night travelers are full of light,
and you are, too; don't leave this companionship.

Be a wakeful candle in a golden dish,
don’t slip in the dirt like quicksilver.

The moon appears for night travelers,
be watchful when the moon is full.


I just found the Coleman Barks version:

The Ocean Moving All Night

Stay with us. Don't sink to the bottom
like a fish going to sleep.
Be with the ocean moving steadily all night,
not scattered like a rainstorm.

The spring we're looking for
is somewhere in this murkiness.
See the night-lights up there traveling together,
the candle awake in its gold dish.

Don't slide into the cracks of ground like spilled mercury.
When the full moon comes out, look around.


And finally here's my transcreation of the Arberry translation:

My Rumi A-282

Stay with the ship and do not fall asleep. Do not sail away to the bottom of the sea. 

Gather yourself as the ocean surges. Do not disperse into the tempest. 

Night travelers are bathed in heaven’s light. Do not fade away from their circle. 

The water of life is rising from the darkness. Stand in the dark and do not light away. 

The midnight candle sits in a golden dish. Do not bury yourself in quicksilver. 

The moon guides all travelers at night. Stay in focus and do not let your full face go. 



It's obvious to me that Heminski also used Arberry as his template, although it's said he did go to the Persion or Farsi as well. Mine is a transcreation and so wanders from the original but in a direction which I feel is closer to the intent of the original. Also, in my transcreation, I tried to stay with the parallelism, paradox, nonduality, and form (the couplet is in each line although I am reconsidering this strategy and dividing the lines into an actual couplet). At the least, the process was enjoyable, and I look forward to a second.












Saturday, August 1, 2020

Let There Be Lightning

The Big Bang is like the knowledge that I am. Everything following the Big Bang is forgetting that I am. Let there be lightning and the echoing of thunder.

Before the Big Bang am I—the absolute unknown, the reality of true potentiality, and the sacred ground of material silence.

Lucid dreaming is remembering forgetting. Spontaneous enlightenment is the full potentiality of the noumenon.

The mind divides. Self-awareness is the trinity of reality. The mind identifies with the process. This hurts.

Consciousness knows the mind as a tool by first identifying with it. The meaning of a paradox is always left unsaid.

One doesn’t solve the paradox. Paradox dissolves the logic. Paradox is always unresolved.

Resolution is the latest meta-paradigm. This is called religion when it’s not the latest. The latest meta-paradigm is scientific materialism.

There are many conspiracy theories based on something missing. The mind will always try to prove it is or isn’t. Faith is knowing that I am.