Livin Your Best Life

First topic message reminder :

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”

—Robert Frost - “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

You cannot have the crest of the wave without the trough or trough without the crest.

We are not meant to be perfect, we are meant to be whole.

That Watts and Bukowski combo is lethal!

Perfect videos for the Livin Your Best Life thread.

Indeed, that such people lived this and spoke so clearly, gives me courage.

They are true Genius to me.

“When I see a man in a state of anxiety, I say, 'What can this man want? If he did not want something which is not in his power, how could he still be anxious?”

—Epictetus

http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/dep/dep045.htm

Robert Graves and the Goddess

All saints revile her, and all sober men
Ruled by the God Apollo’s golden mean—
In scorn of which I sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom I desired above all things to know,
Sister of the mirage and echo...

ROBERT GRAVES STATED THAT ‘the test of a poet’s vision ... is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess and the island over which she rules and must address only the Muse... and tell her the truth about himself and her.’

‘Symptoms of the trance in which poetic composition occurs differ greatly from those in an induced mediumistic trance; though both seem directed by an external power. In a poetic trance, which happens no more predictably than an epileptic fit, this power is traditionally identified with the ancient Muse-goddess.’

A friend of his who was a poet of note, quit poetry and 20 years later explained why. I think this profound. I’ll have to pick up some of her books.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/03/17/the-telling-laura-riding-jackson/

“There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait. In our unwilling ignorance we hurry to listen to stories of old human life, new human life, fancied human life, avid of something to while away the time of unanswered curiosity. Many of the lesser things concerning us have been told, but the greater things have not been told; and nothing can fill their place. Whatever we learn of what is not ourselves, but ours to know, being of our universal world, will likewise leave the emptiness an emptiness. Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.”

Hmmm, this is the way to the next level.

Haha.

Good job cw. Good inquiries.

“Everywhere can be seen a waiting for words that phrase the primary sense of human-being, and with a human finality, so that the words themselves are witness to what they tell… In the eyes of all (in the opaque depths in them of unacknowledged presentness to one another) are mirrored (but scarcely discerned) concourses where our souls ever secretly assemble, in expectation of events of common understanding that continually fail to occur. We wait, all, for a story of us that shall reach to where we are. We listen for our own speaking; and we hear much that seems our speaking, yet makes us strange to ourselves.”

She describes the yearning that burns brightest in me.

Shape shifiting Celtic tales.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07FK7T66F/ref=tmm_aud_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=

I’m hunting the Welsh Bards.

Pretty fucking good shit...

Dan, we are all our own prison warden.

The Quids

The little quids, the million quids,
The everywhere, everything, always quids,
The atoms of the Monoton—
Each turned three essences where it stood
And ground a gisty dust from its neighbors' edges
Until a powdery thoughtfall stormed in and out,
The cerebration of a slippery quid enterprise.
Each quid stirred.
The united quids
Waved through a sinuous decision.

The quids, that had never done anything before
But be, be, be, be, be,
The quids resolved to predicate
And dissipate in a little grammar.
Oh, the Monoton didn't care,
For whatever they did—
The Monoton's contributing quids—
The Monoton would always remain the same.

A quid here and there gyrated in place-position,
While many essential quids turned inside-out
For the fun of it
And a few refused to be anything but
Simple, unpredicated copulatives.
Little by little, this commotion of quids,
By threes, by tens, by casual millions,
Squirming within the state of things—
The metaphysical acrobats,
The naked, immaterial quids—
Turned inside on themselves
And came out dressed,
Each similar quid of the inward same,
Each similar quid dressed in a different way—
The quid's idea of a holiday.

The quids could never tell what was happening.
But the Monoton felt itself differently the same
In its different parts.
The silly quids upon their rambling exercise
Never knew, could never tell
What their pleasure was about,
What their carnival was like,
Being in, being in, being always in
Where they never could get out
Of the everywhere, everything, always in,
To derive themselves from the Monoton.

But I know, with a quid inside of me,
But I know what a quid's disguise is like,
Being one myself,
The gymnastic device
That a quid puts on for exercise.

And so should the trees,
And so should the worms,
And so should you,
And all the other predicates,
And all the other accessories
Of the quid's masquerade.

by Laura Riding

smelly wrote:I found all the poetry first with Rumi and Lao Tzu, TS Eliot, Kabir, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waites and several Zen Masters, Yeats as well.

Parmenides and Gilgamesh are favs.

See what resonates with you.

I am just a layman.

Perfect, thank you

The Female God

We curl into your eyes-
They drink our files and have never drained :
In the fierce forest of your hair
Our desires beat blindly for their treasure.

In your eyes' subtle pit,
Far down, glimmer our souls ;
And your hair like massive forest trees
Shadows our pulses, overtired and dumb.

Like a candle lost in an electric glare
Our spirits tread your eyes' infinities :
In the wrecking waves of your tumultuous locks
Do you not hear the moaning of our pulses ?

Queen ! Goddess! Animal!
In sleep do your dreams battle with our souls ?
When your hair is spread like a lover on the pillow
Do not our jealous pulses wake between ?

You have dethroned the ancient God,
You have usurped his Sabbath, his common days;
Yea, every moment is delivered to you,
Our Temple, our Eternal, our one God !

Our souls have passed into your eyes,
Our days into your hair;
And you, our rose-deaf prison, are very pleased with the world,
Your world.

by Isaac Rosenberg

Aleister Crowley has written some of the most amazing poetry as well.

Yeah... I remember some Crowley stuff you posted a while back that donkey punched me in the soul. So much content... not enough time.

All the words speak of the same hunger we all have.

Hiding in the shadows of a spider web of thought
I look side to side as if anxiety could be caught

ANGEL… ANGEL… ANGEL of death!!
How am I screaming without any breath

Go inward and deeper and straight to the core
And mount your defense to ready for more

The goal becomes clear as your will shouts back
To rescue some balance from the selfish attack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzEGWZbLqzU

cwallatruth wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzEGWZbLqzU

Dig it...

cwallatruth wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzEGWZbLqzU

I've never heard of Father John Misty, but I like this guy a lot.

Very peaceful singer songwriter.

Thanks for the share.

mmmmm.....

Good energy today.

Good music and good poetry.

Epicurus in his garden indulging in simple pleasures...

"If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.” “Epicurus said you should live for pleasure - adding that nothing brings more pleasure than a little sun and a glass of water."

On taking pleasure seriously...

As for me, I delight in the everyday Way, Among mist-wrapped vines and rocky caves. Here in the wilderness I am completely free.

With my friends, the white clouds, idling forever. There are roads, but they do not reach the world. Since I am mindless, who can rouse my thoughts?

On a bed of stone I sit, alone in the night, While the round moon climbs up Cold Mountain.

~Han-Shan

I know what he means, I feel absolutely full in my emptiness.

Yes, the everyday way is the simple way.

Epicurus has much wisdom in his teachings about taming runaway desires, but there is a paradox isn't there, because one could then develop a runaway desire to tame all their desires.

There is no need to abandon society and literally withdraw to a garden or to a cave on cold mountain.

The garden and the cave are states of consciousness.

Wu Wei.

DIFFICULTY AT THE BEGINNING

To realize the Way you must die
and stay dead and go on living.
With one mighty blow, sever the
attachments of mind and self and
dwell in emptiness.

Pouring emptiness into emptiness
like waves coming to shore, you
become quiet, luminous, still.

Where before there were ten
thousand entanglements,
now there is undifferentiated
Oneness, clarity, peace.

- Wei Wu Wei

Aaron wrote:Yes, the everyday way is the simple way.

Epicurus has much wisdom in his teachings about taming runaway desires, but there is a paradox isn't there, because one could then develop a runaway desire to tame all their desires.

There is no need to abandon society and literally withdraw to a garden or to a cave on cold mountain.

The garden and the cave are states of consciousness.

Wu Wei.

We all spend time on the mountain and in the desert.

It’s more allegory to me than anything.

Seneca loved Epicurus. I love Seneca. I have enjoyed what little I could find on him awhile ago.

Seneca speaks a lot about him and I think really makes his teaching practical.

Seneca was a practical stoic, granted, he became the richest in the Roman world which is some accomplishment given the barbarity.

He truly to me embodied the future religion.

Good stuff to channel and mine in his Awareness.

Rational Hedonism is I think fitting to our natures.

Take what resonates.

Yes, allegory is a better way to put it.

True happiness is... to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.
-Seneca

A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature.
-Seneca

This one reminds me of Bukowski..

You want to live but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying....and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead?
-Seneca