A few moments before the master departed this world he implored them to preserve the faith. "How to preserve it? The answer is in the word sila." After saying this he brought his palms together and enjoined upon his assistants to take good care of themselves. They left the room and returned an hour later to find that Xu Yun had quietly passed away. He was 120 years of age. When his body was cremated, the air was filled with a rare fragrance and a white smoke went up into the sky. In the ashes were found over a hundred relics of five different colors and countless small ones, which were mostly white.
"It was supposed that lost spirits were roving about everywhere in the invisible air, waiting for children to find them if they searched long and patiently enough ... [The spirit] sang its spiritual song for the child to memorize and use when calling upon the spirit guardian as an adult."
Mourning Dove/Christine Quintasket
Image by Edward S. Curtis
"Meanings are different in the other world. Indirection is the only way in which the dead can speak at all; that is, the only way we can understand what they are telling because they aren't actually embodied, say with pharynx, lips, tongue. They don't have a brain or language center. As you know, they left those accoutrements behind, dust to dust. They must rely on telepathy and mutual intention, yours and theirs. They are broadcasting ... They push letters of a sacred alphabet through blankets of radiation and infinitudes. Now and then they may displace objects on bureaus, but not many and not very far. Attend to what they push and ask yourself why. Query it as you would a symbol in a dream."
Richard Grossinger - The Bardo of Waking Life
Excerpt from Floating:
"We wear no form or figure of our own
- a wisp, a thread, a twig, a shred of smoke -
to tell us from the motions of the air."
Sarah Arvio
Visits From the Seventh
An excerpt from
Remedios Varo's Appearances and Disappearances
Roots, fronds, rays, locks of hair, flowing beards, spirals of sound: threads of death, of life, of time, the weft is woven and unwoven: the unreality that we call life, the unreality that we call death ... only the canvas is real ...
Octavio Paz
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and O,
The difference to me!
William Wordsworth
