Being A Student: Week 4

Are you looking for me? 

I am in the next seat.

My shoulder is against yours.

you will not find me in the stupas, 

not in Indian shrine rooms, 

nor in synagogues, 

nor in cathedrals:

not in masses, 

nor kirtans, 

not in legs winding around your own neck, 

nor in eating nothing but vegetables.

When you really look for me, 

you will see me instantly —

you will find me in the tiniest house of time.

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God? 

He is the breath inside the breath.

— Kabir

 

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
—Henry Thoureau

 

 

A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.

— Alan Wilson Watts

 

 

True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own.

— Nikos Kazantzakis

 

 

 

Most schools have a loud system of loud bells, which startle the students and teachers at regular intervals and remind them that time is passing even more slowly than it seems.

— Lemony Snicket 

 

 

I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

— Ray Bradbury

 

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

— Gautama Buddha

 

 

Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren't these the same questions as last year's [physics] final exam?

Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.

— Albert Einstein

 

 

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. 

– Gandhi

Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.
― Benjamin Franklin

 Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.
― Richard P. Feynman

The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.
― Voltaire

 

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
― Doris Lessing

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

—Aristotle 

  

The knowledge of all things is possible
― Leonardo da Vinci

We are all failures- at least the best of us are.

 ― J.M. Barrie

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom. Without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.
― Albert Einstein

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.
― Socrates

The expert knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing.

 ― Mahatma Gandhi

How to be a great student

Week 3: Baking Bread

Buddha wanted to find out how human beings develop this ideal character—how various sages in the past became sages. In order to find out how dough became perfect bread, he made it over and over again, until he became quite successful. That was his practice.

—Shunryu Suzuki

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

  

You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

― Billy Collins 

There is a basket of fresh bread on your head, yet you go door to door asking for crusts.

― Rumi 

For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

― Mary Oliver 

 People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

― James Baldwin 

How can a nation be great if their bread tastes like kleenex? 

- Julia Childs

Rather a piece of bread with a happy heart than wealth with grief.

 – Egyptian Proverb

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

 Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread. 

― Richard Wright

 There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

― Mahatma Gandhi 

The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life. 

― Robert Louis Stevenson 

Actual practice is repeating over and over again until you find out how to become bread. There is no secret in our way. Just to practice zazen and put ourselves into the oven is our way. 

—Shunryu Suzuki


Desikachar/Pose-counterpose Part 2

Right Attitude/Suzuki

Week Two: Pose and Counterpose and Circles:

Excerpts

 from 

Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay

 Circles

1841

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle.

 


Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

  Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease: all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are all forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction flowing from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all; throw up their hope; renounce aspiration; accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power. This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

The new position of the advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning.

The simplest words,—we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire.

 


Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it.  The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.

But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

“Blessed be nothing” and “The worse things are, the better they are” are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.

 The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations which apprize us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this chemistry and vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there for their own sake, are means and methods only, are words of God, and as fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need not be pursued with pains and cost?

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful. It is by abandonment.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manner and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.

There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness.

….the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.

all images courtesy of dear, wonderful james prochnik's  art centered


The Careful Construction of a Personal Practice Part 1 
(pose and counter pose theory)

Circles by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Asana for Home Practice from The Heart of Yoga

Week One: Beginner's Mind

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

William Shakespeare

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryo Suzuki
Sun Salutations w/ variations