[Image: “Spring Lawn Mystery,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

Note to long-time (frequent or occasional) visitors to Running After My Hat: this will be the next-to-last Friday post here. it’s possible I may still drop something else from time to time, but this will begin the process of winding RAMH down to something like stasis as it approaches its eighteenth anniversary. More details to come, especially on that April 20 occasion.

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

So let us now take a critical look at the state of awakening, kensho-satori, and reexamine it from the same broad biological perspective. At its core it is change. Change means shifting from old to new. What is enlightenment’s first crucial contribution? What it sheds. What it subtracts. It destructures, deprograms and deconditions in depth. As a result, the brain becomes less top-heavy; its functions are simplified, revitalized. New systems of adaptive behaviors can develop more readily in such a reorganized brain. Accordingly, one can be cautiously optimistic about this unique capacity of the brain to shift into a wide range of alternate states. For herein resides a potential resource, a resource which could serve as the basis both for our long-range biological survival and for our cultural advancement.

(James Austin [source])

…and:

We must reach the understanding that the world is an apparition, a dream; that life is a dream. But we must feel this deeply. In the Buddhist monasteries, the neophyte must live every moment of his life experiencing it fully. He must think: “Now it is noon; now I am crossing the patio; now I will meet the superior.” And at the same time he must think that the noon, the patio, and the superior are unreal, that they are as unreal as he and his thoughts for Buddhism denies the I.

One of the great delusions is the I… There is no subject; what exists is a series of mental states. If I say “I think,” I am committing an error, because I am assuming a fixed subject and then an act of that subject, which is thought. It is not so. One should say […] not “I think,” but rather “it is thought,” as one says “it is raining.” When we say “it is raining,” we do not think that the rain is performing an act but rather that something is happening. In the same way that we say “it’s hot,” “it’s cold,” we should also say “it’s thinking,” “it’s suffering,” and avoid the subject.

(Jorge Luis Borges [source])

…and:

We see, often, too often, what we want to see. Even the bellowing specter of self-made hell must be fussed over like a fetish, as precious and potent as any great work of art. We choose to commit ourselves to it, if only because, like the Big Dipper, it is what we revisit each night, the habit by which we familiarize the dark. The Promethean gift of our imagination is found at the heart of most tragedy, the real weapon discovered at the crime scene. Why would we fashion such horrors?…

 We can no longer enter into enchantment with life, we enter into a meta-relationship with it — we “interpret” our dreams, reconstruct the narratives of our pasts, hold ourselves at arms length. In the doldrums between the psyche and world it inhabits, imagination exists like a creature in a zoo exhibit, subject to the scrutiny of the intellect, deemed to be both quaint and a curiosity. With no access to its natural habitat, the psyche paces without purpose or dignity. Like Rilke’s panther in the Paris Zoo, its circumnabulations are, “a dance of strength about a center / in which a mighty will stands stupefied”. Imagination is trapped, obsessive, unable to fulfill its nature…

It is one thing, one quite horrible thing, to be lost amid the hall of mirrors of ones own feeble sight, to suspect that your feeling of disorientation is not merely a trick of the mind. You know you have the Mortal Dread within you, and you know how it can cause you to envision the worst: ghastly chimera over the sea and in the skies. It can contaminate the very thing you hold dear, make love itself seem monstrous, unworthy of your best efforts to see beyond and through its most despairing mirage. It can, in effect, make you believe in witches, and in lovers forever held hostage by their own limitations.

(Bia Lowe [source: here, here, and here])

From elsewhere:

Riding Out At Evening

At dusk, everything blurs and softens.
From here out over the long valley,
the fields and hills pull up
the first slight sheets of evening,
as, over the next hour,
heavier, darker ones will follow.

Quieted roads, predictable deer
browsing in a neighbor’s field, another’s
herd of heifers, the kitchen lights
starting in many windows. On horseback
I take it in, neither visitor
nor intruder, but kin passing, closer
and closer to night, its cold streams
rising in the sugarbush and hollow.

Half-aloud, I say to the horse,
or myself, or whoever: let fire not come
to this house, nor that barn,
nor lightning strike the cattle.
Let dogs not gain the gravid doe, let the lights
of the rooms convey what they seem to.

And who is to say it is useless
or foolish to ride out in the falling light
alone, wishing, or praying,
for particular good to particular beings,
on one small road in a huge world?
The horse bears me along, like grace,

making me better than what I am,
and what I think or say or see
is whole in these moments, is neither
small nor broken. For up, out of
the inscrutable earth, have come my body
and the separate body of the mare:
flawed and aching and wronged. Who then
is better made to say be well, be glad,

or who to long that we, as one,
might course over the entire valley,
over all valleys, as a bird in a great embrace
of flight, who presses against her breast,
in grief and tenderness,
the whole weeping body of the world?

(Linda McCarriston [source])