A Word to the Wise: Samsara

Samsara

Oh! I watch this wonderful game in a lonely park.
A millionaire strikes a small ball with his iron club
And it flies to infinity, 
He goes behind that happily.
The poor sinner caddy too crawls towards him
with a heavy bag that [is] full of debts on his oblique shoulder[s].

--Nimal Dunuhinga

We will discuss the implications of this poem and the following in our fifth class on May 6th, at Shiva Mandir. If you would like to take part and receive the class materials, as well as access to our class forum,  please let us know by registering for this class at the following link: http://www.vedicstudies.org/a-word-to-the-wise.html — at Shiva Mandir Center for Vedic Studies.

Excerpt from The Turning Seasons of Hell: 

I was an actor on Shakespeare’s stage, and there composed the best of his lines

I was a poet in France and walked across the Alps

I was a singer in Milan, where my reputation was ruined

I was a painter on my back daubing plaster and bright scenes on chapel ceilings day and night

I was a sculptor in stone and clay, making hands and feet for the master

I signed the documents to set this country free

I fought alongside Sitting Bull and killed Custer’s men,

I slept under a tree, and out in the open field,
I contemplated, I practiced,
I slept sitting up, I slept in cemetaries,
I laid down and stayed wherever I happened to be,
I starved my body and my mind and lived on mud and insects,
I ate everything at once, I stopped eating at 5:00 every day
I mastered the sciences of language, logic and philosophy, of medicine and of arts

I was a soldier in a war of the most horrific demise,

a sailor who drowned before the sharks circled in,

a seer who touched the face of the sun,

a prophet, a scoundrel, a rebel and a rat.

A bubble, a lightning flash, a grand revelation, a disco ball, a star and a starship sailing through galaxies, the moon in the water, a pure purple, red, then white, then black, then white, then red, nothing.

a reflection, a reflection, an emanation, an emanation.

-By Caroline Kroll

This is Victory Day!

Today is Victory Day!

--->

The temple priest has rung his bell.

A cloud of smoke from candles and lamps

Haloes the Goddess, glowing bright

This beat of drums both maddens and dulls.

The incense burns: so heady the musk,

Our senses flounder in the flood.

This endless chant of sacred words

Soon drugs our lips and stuns our minds.

The Goddess, always staring down:

Her painted pupils cut through smoke

And read the secret thoughts we think.

We somehow feel this within our hearts.

To Mother, we know, we bow and pray –

Her form not just this image of clay. 

- Anonymous (from iloveindia.com)

Kali Puja from Vedanta Portland on Vimeo.

Let's Get Started

Science endeavors to be objective, but poets have recognized the universality of consciousness through their own subjective awareness. Below follows one example from the poem "Tintern Abbey" which was written by the poet William Wordsworth:

“… and I have felt 

a presence that disturbs me with the joy

of elevated thought; a sense sublime

of something far more deeply interfused,

whose dwelling is in the light of setting sun,

and around oceans and the living air,

and the blue sky, and the mind of man:

a motion and a spirit, that impels

all thinking things, all objects of all thought,

and rolls through all things.”