reframe

The Dream That Must Be Interpreted

// September 27th, 2007 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry, Leadership Development

“This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief. But there’s a difference with this dream. Everything cruel and unconscious done in the illusion of the present world, all that does not fade away at the death-waking. It stays, and it must be interpreted…

And this groggy time we live, this is what it’s like: A man goes to sleep in the town where he has always lived, and he dreams he’s living in another town. In the dream, he doesn’t remember the town he’s sleeping in his bed in. He believes the reality of the dream town. The world is that kind of sleep.

The dust of many crumbled cities settles over us like a forgetful doze, but we are older than those cities. We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again.

That’s how a young person turns toward a teacher. That’s how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively. Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.”

Rumi (مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی)

Artwork; Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above a sea of fog

Update: Burmese Protests Expand

// September 24th, 2007 // No Comments » // World Issues

Photography by the AP.

Things have escalated in the Burmese Buddhist led protests over the weekend-

“Up to 100,000 people took part, among them perhaps 20,000 barefoot red- and orange-robed monks. At first, the monks limited themselves to chanting prayers and sermons, and urged the Burmese public not to join their marches. But over the weekend, a hitherto unknown group, the All Burma Monks’ Alliance, urged people to “struggle peacefully against the evil military dictatorship” until its downfall. Monday’s march was joined by some of the country’s best-known actors and musicians, as well as leaders of the opposition National League of Democracy (NLD) and crowds of ordinary Burmese.”

The Economist has the full story. Wikipedia news is tracking events as they unfold.

The International Crisis Group considers the situation in Myanmar. Human Rights Watch doubts that reforms will bring change in the country.

Pitiless Kings

// September 21st, 2007 // No Comments » // World Issues

Today is the U.N. International Day of Peace. I look at the UN, at our collective governments, and wonder if this is really the best they can achieve? A feel good factor that might make some of us feel that we can take control of this huge, violent monstrosity, even for a moment. When my bile settles, I reflect that anything that raises awareness and brings our focus closer to compassion is a good thing and that cynicism is too often the refuge of a crushed idealist.

The interview: Robert Pirsig

// September 19th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry

“At 78, Robert Pirsig, probably the most widely read philosopher alive, can look back on many ideas of himself. There is the nine-year-old-boy with the off-the-scale IQ of 170, trying to work out how to connect with his classmates in Minnesota. There is the young GI in Korea picking up a curiosity for Buddhism while helping the locals with their English. There is the radical, manic teacher in Montana making his freshmen sweat over a definition of ‘quality’. There is the homicidal husband sectioned into a course of electric-shock treatment designed to remove all traces of his past. There is the broken-down father trying to bond with his son on a road trip. There is the best-selling author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, offering solutions to the anxieties of a generation. And there is, for a good many years, the reclusive yachtsman,
trying to steer a course away from cultish fame.

Pirsig doesn’t do interviews, as a rule; he claims this one will be his last. He got spooked early on. ‘In the first week after I wrote Zen I gave maybe 35,’ he says, in his low, quick-fire Midwestern voice, from behind his sailor’s beard. ‘I found it very unsettling. I was walking by the post office near home and I thought I could hear voices, including my own. I had a history of mental illness, and I thought: it’s happening again. Then I realised it was the radio broadcast of an interview I’d done. At that point I took a camper van up into the mountains and started to write Lila, my second book…’”

Reflections over Istanbul

// September 17th, 2007 // No Comments » // My Personal Journey

Amy Winehouse – In My Bed

// September 10th, 2007 // 8 Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry

In Memory of Those Who Melt the Soul Forever

// September 10th, 2007 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry

(Photo by Arun Siva)

Their spring meadows

are desolate now. Still, desire

for them lives always

in our heart, never dying.

These are their ruins.

These are the tears

in memory of those

who melt the soul forever.

I called out, following after

love-dazed:

You so full with beauty,

I’ve nothing!

I rubbed my face in the dust,

laid low by the fever of love.

By the privilege of the right of desire for you

don’t shatter the heart

Of a man drowned in his words,

burned alive

in sorrow.

Nothing can save him now.

You want a fire?

Take it easy. This passion

is incandescent. Touch it.

It will light your own.

- Ibn Arabi (أبن عربي),