Kung Fu

Kungfu.

Hard work over time to accomplish skill.

A painter can have Kungfu.
Or the butcher who cuts meat every day with such skill...his knife never touches bone.

Learn the form, but seek the formless.
Hear the soundless.
Learn it all, then forget it all.
Learn The Way, then find your own way.

The musician can have Kungfu.
Or the poet who paints pictures with words and makes emperors weep.
This, too, is Kungfu.

But do not name it, my friend, for it is like water.
Nothing is softer than water...yet it can overcome rock.
It does not fight.
It flows around the opponent.

Formless, nameles...the true master dwells within.
Only you can free him.

(from "The Forbidden Kingdom")

Waking up to the dream

constantly looking out at the world
feeling alone in myself
and yet there are many voices
the conversations with the past and the future
sometimes i feel like the king of the world
and then sometimes that i don't exist
perhaps both are true
and that this dream is all a dream
and so slowly there is this awakening
not so much from the dream,
but to the realisation that we are the dreamer

In search of nothing

Nothing..
No thing
Impossible to conceptualize
Because this very act is creation
Giving thingness to that which is not this or that.
Nothing..
No thing
That which contains the possibility of all things
Out of which all of this or that is born
Emptiness, Darkness
Pure raw potential out of which universes explode.
And this is not there or here or within or beyond..
Timelessness, Spacelessness, Thinglessness,
No thing nessss

The dance between form and emptiness

The essence of rhythm is movement. If you stop and say 'this is it' you've lost it. There is no way that rhythm can be contained, no specific point in time in which it exists. It's a constant movement and it always exists in relation to what has gone before and where it is going.

Rhythm is like a river. It continuously flows. You can look at it and say "That is a river", but no part of the river can be said to be the river, and at no time is the river ever the same, other than in concept. It’s ‘is-ness’ exists in the mind alone.

This experience of life that seems to be a constant 'thing' is the same. It is a rhythm of energy, experience, information flowing and creating the form which is perceived as 'me' or 'you', but it is no different from a river, or a cloud, or a piece of music or the form of a whirlwind that exists, but at the same time has no inherent existence in and of itself.

It's all a dance..

Step by step

I went walking with my family in the mountains today. On one of the uphills my daughter was getting a little tired. I tried to teach her one of the things I do when I'm walking uphill and start to feel tired. I make my steps shorter and get into a rhythm. That way I forget about the tiredness and my walking becomes a lot easier.
What she immediately tried to do was copy my steps, but her legs are a lot shorter. The thing is, I can teach her how to find a rhythm, I can teach her that this will make it easier, but she is the one who needed to find a rhythm that worked for her. My rhythm just wouldn't do.

Duality

What makes the rhythm. Is it the sound, or is it the spaces in between?

Mystery

Tao called Tao is not Tao (Tao Te Ching - Lao-Tzu)

Life is the flowing and living energy which cannot be frozen into concepts and formulas. Life cannot be understood, only lived. (beatnik)

Being, by it's very nature, can't be known, so words can only give us the direction in which to look. (pg 3: One - Essential writings of non-duality - Jerry Katz)

The reality of a human being is a mystery. There is no answer that can answer it, because it is not a question in the first place. It is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved. (pg 96: Tantra - the way of acceptance - Osho)

We are all manifestations of a mystic power: the power of life, which has shaped all life, and which has shaped us all in our mother's womb. And this kind of wisdom lives in us, and it represents the force of this power, this energy, pouring into the field of time and space. But it's a transcendant energy. It's an energy that comes from a realm beyond our powers of knowledge. And that energy becomes bound in each one of us - in this body - to a certain commitment.
Now, the mind that thinks, the eyes that see, they can become so involved in concepts and local, temporal tasks that we become bound up and don't let this energy flow through. The energy is blocked, and we are thrown off balance ....... So the psychological problem, the way to keep from becoming blocked, is to make yourself - and here is the phrase - transparent to the transcendant. It's as easy as that. (Pathways to Bliss - Joseph Campbell)