The Revolution

The Revolution

The darkness of night is coming along fast,
and the shadows of love close in the body and the mind.
Open the window to the west, and disappear into the air inside you.
Near your breastbone there is an open flower.
Drink the honey that is all around that flower.

Waves are coming in:

there is so much magnificence near the ocean!

Listen: Sound of big seashells! Sounds of bells!

Kabir says: "Friend, listen,


this is what I have to say:


The Guest I love is inside me!"


Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.


Jump into experience while you are alive.


Think and think while you are alive.


What you call 'salvation' belongs to the time before death.


If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, 


do you think ghosts will do it after?


The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic


just because the body is rotten -
that is all fantasy.


What is found now is found then.


If you find nothing now,


you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.


And if you make love with the divine now, 


in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.


Then plunge into the Truth, 


find out who the Teacher is, believe in the Great Sound! 
  


Kabir says this:


"When the Guest is being searched for, 


it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.


Look at me...


you will see a slave of that intensity."

Kabir

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O Me! O Life!

O Me! O Life!

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

                                       Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Walt Whitman

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The Journey

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver

Listen to and download (for free)  John reading 'The Journey'

Walking The First Line of A Poem - VideoBlog

The Voice of The Devil

The Voice of The Devil

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles,

viz. a Body and a Soul.

2. That Energy, call'd Evil,

is alone from the Body;

and that Reason, call'd Good,

is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity

for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd

Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses,

the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body;

and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

William Blake

Listen to and download (for free)  John reading 'The Voice of The Devil'

'Be In Love With Your Own Life' - Jack Kerouac Quotes

While your correspondent is not the biggest Kerouac fan, he acknowledges a debt of gratitude to the Beat Writers for the gifts they gave him of Blake and Whitman, Ginsberg's Howl & Kaddish, and Burroughs' Junky & the Cities of The Red Night trilogy.

Kerouac always seemed to be an apologetic drunk to me, making literary excuses for his addiction - however these lists and the basic tenets of his philosophy do have a lot of truth in them. 

We have a choice how we live - that much is true, we can walk around in the gloom of capitalism's gasping dying breaths, or we can find a way to take a breath of our own. I particularly am moved by 'Be In Love With Your Own Life,' from this list. To do that for real in these narcissistic times. 

A Joycean YES to that.

# Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
# Submissive to everything, open, listening
# Try never get drunk outside yr own house
# Be in love with yr life
# Something that you feel will find its own form
# Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
# Blow as deep as you want to blow
# Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
# The unspeakable visions of the individual
# No time for poetry but exactly what is
# Visionary tics shivering in the chest
# In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
# Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
# Like Proust be an old teahead of time
# Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
# The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
# Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
# Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
# Accept loss forever
# Believe in the holy contour of life
# Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
# Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
# Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
# No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
# Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
# Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
# In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
# Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
# You're a Genius all the time
# Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven