Mira Prabhu's Blog, page 28
January 10, 2017
MOBA: The Museum of Bad Art
ha ha ha…I am no connoisseur of fine art and hear it takes a lot of training to know what is “good” and what is “bad,” but it cracks me up to think there is a museum of bad art!!!! Its one thing to deliberately create “bad” art – but what about those artists who do their absolute best but can only make it into this museum? Quick a shock to the system, eh? Thanks for sharing, Alk3r.
“Charlie and Sheba”, a painting at the Museum of Bad Art, where “art is too bad to be ignored.”
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January 9, 2017
Creative Complaining
Creative Complaining…I like this idea very much because it allows us to be honest and simultaneously to respect our listener’s threshold/inability/discomfort for listening to the same sad story over and over again…thanks for sharing, Cynthia Reyes and Chris Graham!
Amazing how people can lie, when asked a simple question: “How are you feeling today?”
“Great!” they reply, when what they really mean is: “Horrible! Really horrible!”
Why do they lie?
“No-one wants to listen to a complainer,” says a woman I met in my pain management program at the hospital. “After a while, people don’t want to be around you.”
“Everybody’s already got their own troubles,” says a woman who’s living with cancer.
“What’s the point?” asks a man who recently lost his job. “Even if they listen, they feel helpless.”
And finally, from an elderly woman: “I just don’t want my children to worry.”
They had given up on telling the truth. Even people who find dishonesty repugnant, would sooner lie than admit the sad truth about how they’re feeling on a given day.
~~
In my group at the rehabilitation hospital, most people I asked admitted…
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January 8, 2017
The Power of the Closed Door
“When a door closes – especially when multiple doors close at once – it’s a sign to me to get very quiet for a moment. Get very still – and listen. It means your true intended path forward is about to become quite obvious, but you have to be attentive to your surroundings to sense it. See it. Feel it. Sometimes we’re far too busy worrying about the door that closed that we fail to see the door that’s opened before us, beckoning us to walk through.” Read Andrea Smith’s post on the perspective you can choose to cultivate on all those doors closing in your life….they can a very positive sign!!!
Why Closed Doors Can BeJust as Thrilling as Opened Ones
I have a real fascination about doors. Not just any door, but the architecturally intriguing doors of old and even the newer, sleek modern doors of tomorrow. When I was in Paris this past Spring, I took a picture of every breathtaking door I came across just because I adored them so much!But what’s more incredible to me than a door’s stunning design is what it represents: opportunity. A new doorway to walk through is intriguing. A new career opportunity. A fresh business. That book we always wanted to write and now we see that path forward to get it done. Who’s inside that door – who will we meet in there? What will we see and what will we learn? If that’s what we want – to explore what’s inside the newly opened door – then shouldn’t a…
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January 7, 2017
What artists have to do in times of trouble – Toni Morrison QUOTES FOR WRITERS (and people who like quotes)
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.
Toni Morrison – thanks for a great post, Bridget Whelan!
This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.
Toni Morrison
Surreal Ink Drawings
Amazingly surreal ink drawings….don’t miss the details….thanks for this share, Alk3r!
Ben Tolman is an illustrator based in Washington DC who already exhibited his work at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, among others.
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January 6, 2017
Space Made
I made space for you.
You made space for me.
Space exploded.
Atul Ranchod’s beautiful poetry on being human…read on!
Space made.
Isn’t that the crux of it?
Make space for joy?
Make space for pain?
Make space to lament?
Make space to celebrate?
Make space for nonsense?
Make space for complaining?
I made space for you.
You made space for me.
Space exploded.
Time held at bay.
On this day,
Blended together
Like red and yellow.
Infinite array of orange.
My god, this is being…
Being human.
Not limited to culture, language or creed.
But rather the most basic need.
You loved.
I received.
Transformed.
Nothing more needs to be be said.
Life has lived me.
Nothing left unsaid.
Atul Ranchod
January 5, 2017
THE THREE STATES: WAKING, DREAM AND SLEEP
A while back I re-read a book on Ramana’s teachings and something I had known about for ages struck me in a new way….and like a thunderbolt…that our true nature is actually the substratum of our being and not something to strive toward. Yes, our essence is immortal boundless bliss, perfect brilliant stillness. Thanks for another great post!!!
THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE DREAM and the waking state except that the dream is short and the waking long.
Both are the result of the mind. Our real state is called turiya, which is beyond the waking, dream and sleep states.
The Self alone exists and remains as It is. The three states owe their existence to avichara (non-enquiry), and enquiry puts an end to them. However much one may explain, this fact will not become clear until one attains Self-realization, and wonders how he was blind to the self-evident and only existence for so long.
All that we see is a dream, whether we see it in the dream state or waking state. On account of some arbitrary standards about the duration of the experience and so on, we call one experience a dream and another waking experience. With reference to Reality both the experiences are unreal…
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The Jnani Oath (aka Confessions of a Jnani)
Profoundly beautiful – The Jnani Oath. Whenever my mind is disturbed by some passing event, and all events are passing and considered “unreal” in the Advaitic context (meaning ephemeral and not worthy of more attention than is needed to cross the hurdle so we can get back to the “real” work), I remember my true nature – which is blissful, immortal, loving, wise, fearless and connected to all things. Advaita is Not Two! Thanks for this wonderful post, Ronald!
Jnani Robert Adams
Maybe once a month, at Satsang, Robert would have Mary Skene read aloud one of Robert’s own writings. He would ask Mary to read ‘the Jnani’ or ‘The Jnani Oath’. ‘Jnani’ is a title given to an Advaita Master, one who has obtained the knowledge of the absolute Self, the ground of all existence.
Mary started coming to Satsang about a year after I started. She and I stayed the longest with Robert, but she moved to Sedona with him.
The following is the version Mary would read at Satsang, which differs slightly from the version published in Silence of the Heart as ‘Confessions of a Jnani’.
This is from the June 27, 1991 Satsang.
For a Jnani who has realized the identity
of his inner being with the infinite Brahman.
There is no rebirth, no migration, not even liberation.
For he is already liberated.
He is…
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The Destructive Dance of Monkey Mind
[image error]Last night something happened that disturbed my mind. Unable to sleep, I stayed awake until the wee hours, reading an illuminating book a friend had given me containing the reminiscences of those fortunate enough to have had personal contact with Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi.
I woke up feeling bedraggled—but the sun was shining through many windows, and doggies and humans would soon be calling for my attention, so I rose. I did my morning practice of diving into the Self and was able to dispassionately view the antics of my mind—as if I was a wise old grandfather indulgently watching his rambunctious grandson mess up the living room. Simply being watched with love stopped my mind from spinning into even more chaos—and then bliss arose in a strong wave.
[image error]As Gautama Buddha said so beautifully over two thousand years ago, sometimes the mind is like a drunken wild elephant in rut. Somehow we must stop it from ruining the beauty of our lives, and each of us must find our own way— fortunately, magically, the way is always there, glittering with promise beneath the muck of the dreary highway of the unexamined life.
It may take eons to learn how to halt the charging mind, but it is possible. Those few able to stop the mind permanently evolve into sages, rishis, seers, jnanis and enjoy a permanent state of peace and bliss. This of course is the ultimate goal of Atma-Vichara—and practiced regularly, Atma-Vichara (Ramana’s Direct Path) really does possess the power to destroy the wrong thinking that manufactures all our suffering.
[image error]Greetings from Arunachala, the sacred mountain believed to be God Shiva Himself, who promises to destroy every bit of cheap tinsel that covers the shining gold of who we truly are!
January 4, 2017
Jorge Luis Borges on What Writers Become
“I do not know which of us has written this page.” Jorge Luis Borges
A powerful line and profoundly true – every time we invest our souls in expressing ourselves, we are reflecting all that we are and all that has been poured into our particular crucible…my own trilogy of novels on enlightenment is what I hope will survive my physical death, a small tribute to a life lived in pursuit of the great goal of liberation. Thanks for a great post, Lisa!
Writing, like any art or discipline, takes practice and dedication to learning about the craft from those who have come before you. In learning, I like to teach, so each week I will take a piece of advice from the greats, both living and dead, famous and not, and apply their lessons to my own work and share my thoughts and progress with you.
This week I have chosen a quote from the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges.
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born into an educated middle-class family on 24 August 1899. They were in comfortable circumstances but not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires, so the family resided in Palermo, then a poorer suburb. Borges’s mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of criollo (Spanish) origin. Her family had been much involved in the European settling of South America and…
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