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ORNAMENTALMIND
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"The mind that understands itself is the Enlightened mind. Nothing else, by the way, is Enlightenment." Oscar Ichazo
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The Boatman's Flute
Today there is no wind on the Yangtze;
the water is calm and green
with no waves or ripples.
All around the boat
light floats in the air
over a thousand acres of smooth, lustrous jade.
One of the boatmen wants to break the silence.
High on wine, he picks up his flute
and plays into the mist.
The clear music rises to the sky --
an ape in the mountains
screaming at the moon;
a creek rushng through a gully.
Someone accompanies on the sheepskin drum,
his head steady as a peak,
his fingers beating like raindrops.
A fish breaks the crystal surface of the water
and leaps ten feet in the air.
---
from _Heaven my Blanket, Earth my Pillow_
Poems from Sumg-Dynasty China
by Yang Wan-li
From Idres Shah
1) The truth, certainty, truest, without untruth.
2 )What is above is like what is below. What is below is like what is above. The miracle of unity is to be attained.
3) Everything is formed from the contemplation of unity, and all things come about from unity, by means of adaptation.
4) Its parents are the Sun and Moon.
5) It was borne by the wind and nurtured by the Earth.
6) Every wonder is from it
6a) and its power is complete.
7) Throw it upon earth,
7a) and earth will separate from fire. The impalbable separated from the palpable.
8) Through wisdom it rises slowly from the world to heaven. Then it descends to the world combining the power of the upper and the lower.
9 )Thus you will have the illumination of all the world, and darkness will disappear.
10) This is the power of all strength- it overcomes that which is delicate and penetrates through solids.
11a) This was the means of the creation of the world.
12) And in the future wonderful developements will be made, and this is the way.
13) I am Hermes the Threefold Sage, so named because I hold the three elements of all wisdom.
14) And thus ends the revelation of the work of the Sun.
(Shah 1964: 198).
A friend came across an old reading note on Plato (Phaedrus 248d,e)which gives the declension of the soul as it becomes more and more attached to materiality:
seeker after wisdom or beauty
just king, warrior
statesman, businessman
athelete, physician
prophet or mystical priest
poet, imaginative artist
artisan, farmer, craftsman
sophist, demagogue
tryant
The sophist seems to be pretty low down in the hierarchies here.
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