Kevin's Watch

I take it as the floor is dirty, and needs to be swept. Enlightenment is not the end of the mundane. Your life continues as it was. You can view it in a different light, but pick up the broom.

Here are a few I've quoted before. The first is one of my favorite quotes.

Dan Millman wrote:One time I finished my best-ever pommel horse routine and walked over happily to take the tape off my wrists. Soc beckoned me and said, "The routine looked satisfactory, but you did a very sloppy job taking the tape off. Remember, every-moment satori."

Shunryu Suzuki wrote:If you continue this simple practice every day, you will obtain some wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you attain it, it is nothing special.

Shunryu Suzuki wrote:To have some deep feeling for Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" would be another way of putting this (though not the common understanding of the phrase). The significance of these things will depend greatly on the eyes you see them through, and this applies as much to the sweeping of a floor as to a mountain. Any job done well, any action performed with grace and harmony (even the sweep of a broom) has beauty, bordering at times on the profound. Certainly, I get no satisfaction from doing the job poorly if say, I'm rushed - but a clean well presented store, ready for opening the following day is a thing of beauty in my eyes. It takes all sorts.....

peter wrote:" Any job done well, any action performed with grace and harmony (even the sweep of a broom) has beauty, bordering at times on the profound...

Quick! Fist! Post your "Always Satori" quote!

--A

Well fine, don't, I'll do it for you:

Fist and Faith wrote:From Dan Millman's Way of the Peaceful Warrior:

One time I finished my best-ever pommel horse routine and walked over happily to take the tape off my wrists. Soc beckoned me and said, “The routine looked satisfactory, but you did a very sloppy job taking the tape off. Remember, every-moment satori.”

--A

I posted it in the post above his.

Oops. Must have missed your post and seen only his.

(You know, that is the quote of yours that has come most often to my mind over these last 16 years... )

--A

Good choice.

--A

Fist and Faith wrote:Avatar is still an edgy youth.

Sorry I didn't notice and laugh at this at the time it was posted but I've since corrected the problem

Avatar wrote:

peter wrote: A case in point; take the works of Donaldson. On first coming to this site I was amazed to discover that what I had read just as fantastic stories that had enthralled me and gripped my imagination, were for other people allegorical novels outlining the internal battles we all face with the light and dark parts of our nature.

Yeah, I tend not to read much into stories...for me they're usually just stories.

--A

'just' stories :D

Fist and Faith wrote:Here are a few I've quoted before. The first is one of my favorite quotes.

Dan Millman wrote:One time I finished my best-ever pommel horse routine and walked over happily to take the tape off my wrists. Soc beckoned me and said, "The routine looked satisfactory, but you did a very sloppy job taking the tape off. Remember, every-moment satori."

Shunryu Suzuki wrote:If you continue this simple practice every day, you will obtain some wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you attain it, it is nothing special.

Shunryu Suzuki wrote:To have some deep feeling for Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism.

These are all fantastic. Shunryu Suzuki rosh th man th myth th legend

Professor Harold Bloom once wrote of Shakespeare's works that they were unfathomable in their depth. He said they could be read over and over repeatedly, and you would never exhaust the layers of meaning. The reason for this, he said, is that Shakespeare surpasses all of us.

Similarly I have heard the same said of Wagner's Ring Cycle; that listening to nothing but them for the rest of your life you would still be discovering new things about them at the end.

This, I guess is the kind of depth in which you find your own limit, surpassing some and being surpassed by others.

Art is not dissimilar to mathematics in this respect; there will be aspects of certain works that are, and will forever remain unavailable to some, if not most people, try as they might to understand or get to grips with them.

peter wrote:Professor Harold Bloom once wrote of Shakespeare's works that they were unfathomable in their depth. He said they could be read over and over repeatedly, and you would never exhaust the layers of meaning. The reason for this, he said, is that Shakespeare surpasses all of us.

People can stare at a black circle on a white field for hours, pondering its symbolism and meanings, and thereby call it art.

It's a documented scientific fact that people see patterns and find images in things. I think that half of Shakespeare's genius is that he filled a canvas with colors and shadows in which we might find patterns and images as long as we keep pondering it.

I have deep moments or perhaps moments of awe and reflection.
But only for brief moments.

For example if I'm walking through the woods and I stop to listen to all the sounds that animals and insects make I begin to think of the wonders of nature all around me.
Then I remember that all the sounds they make are basically just booty calls and then I'm like.....

Other things like the sound of a river or watching the waves roll in on a beach I would have considered deep in the past but now I just find it meaningless but very soothing and relaxing.

wayfriend wrote:People can stare at a black circle on a white field for hours, pondering its symbolism and meanings, and thereby call it art.

And so it would be. Art is what anyone says it is, within the eye of the beholder or the creator. It's sweep is broad enough to contain anything or everything. Indeed there is probably a case to be made that depth increases in inverse proportion with complexity (though the Shakespeare and Wagner examples would belie this - so perhaps only so in the visual image) - the simpler the image of study, the more profound the insight that may be gained by immersion in it?