There’s hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.


We are lutes, no more, no less. If the sound box 
is stuffed full of anything, no music.

If the brain and belly are burning clean 
with fasting, every moment a new song comes out of the fire.


The fog clears, and new energy makes you 
run up the steps in front of you.

Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.

Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.


When you’re full of food and drink, Satan sits 
where your spirit should,

an ugly metal statue 
in place of the Kaaba.

When you fast,
 good habits gather like friends who want to help.


Fasting is Solomon’s ring.

Don’t give it 
to some illusion and lose your power,
 but even if you have, if you’ve lost all will and control, 
they come back when you fast, like soldiers appearing 
out of the ground, pennants flying above them.


A table descends to your tents, 
Jesus’ table. 


Expect to see it, when you fast, this table 
spread with other food, better than the broth of cabbages.


Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273)





"It's like this my friend -

If nothing that you didn't want

Should ever fall upon you,

It would be impossible

For what you want to manifest.

When the wise have finished,

Everything they didn't want

Becomes the source of all they want;

So take it on, with pleasure!"

Walking Through Fire, Jamyang Shepay Dorje 1648- 1721

'It is this beggar's play, his lila, not work.' 'When there is activity which is motivated by self-interest and ends with pleasure or pain, we may call it work.  It requires exertion.  But when we live outside the reach of pleasure or pain, a realized man is untouched by these.  Our activities are effortless.  Our work is really our play.'

Yogi Ramsuratkumar 



The Work wants your life--but only when you are in a love affair with life itself, only when you are bright, strong, confident, capable, in short: ALIVE.  the Work does not want some kind of dull, dispassionate, struggling, agonizing humanoid.  To give your life to the Work is to give breath and activity to the Work everyday; to give passion to the Work everyday. You have to have a childlike, eternal beginner's mind, a belief in miracles, like, 'Any day anything can happen!'

It is the nature of this Work that a revelation, a breakthrough, could happen at any time, and has many times!  But, how easily we forget.

         Lee Lozowick - The ALCHEMY of love and sex.

“The problem with you is not that you have desires but that you desire so little. Why not desire it all? Why not want complete fulfillment joy and freedom?"

Sri Nisargadatta


"Both good (shreya) and pleasant (preya) present themselves to a man. The calm soul examines them well and discriminates. He prefers the good (shreya) to the pleasant (preya); but the fool chooses the pleasant (preya) out of greed and avarice." 

Katha Upanishad - 1.2.2


"Man has little needs and deeper needs. We fall into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness. Let us prepare now for the death of our present little life and reemergence in a bigger life in touch with the moving cosmos."

D.H. Lawrence – Lady Chatterlys Lovers

Bucky’s Self-Disciplines

I decided that Nature might support a man who was doing what Nature wanted to be done and concluded that I would be informed by Nature if I proceeded in the following manner:

1. Use myself as an experiment to see what, if anything, a healthy, young male human of average size, experience, and capability with an economically dependent wife and new born child, starting without capital or any kind of wealth, cash savings, credit or university degree could effectively do that could not be done by great nations or great private enterprise to lastingly improve the physical protection and support of all human lives.

2. Commit all of my productivity toward dealing only with the whole planet Earth and all its resources and cumulative know-how. Observation of my life to date shows that the larger the number for whom I work, the more positively effective I become. Thus, it is obvious that if I work always and only for all humanity, I will be optimally effective. 

3. Seek to do my own thinking, confining it to only experientially gained information. 


4. Seek to accomplish whatever is to be attained in such a manner that the advantage attained would never be secured at the cost of another or others. 


5. Seek to cope with all humanly unfavorable conditions by searching for the family of relevant physical principles involved. 


6. Reduce my inventions to physically working models and must never talk about the inventions until physically proved or disproved. 


7. Seek to reform the environment, not the humans. I am determined never to try to persuade humanity to alter its customs and viewpoints. 

8. Never promote or sell either my ideas or artifacts or pay others to do so. All support must be spontaneously engendered by evolution’s integrating of my inventions with the total evolution of human affairs. 

9. Assume that nature has its own gestation rates, not only for the birth of each new biological component, but also for each inanimate technological artifact. 


10. Seek to develop my artifacts with ample anticipatory time margins so that they will be ready for use by society when society discovers–through evolutionary emergencies–a need for them. 


11. Seek to learn the most from my mistakes. 


12. Seek to decrease time wasted in worried procrastination and to increase time invested in discovery of technological effectiveness. 


13. Seek to document my development in the official records of humanity by applying for and being granted government patents.
 

14. Above all, seek to comprehend the principles of eternally regenerative universe and discover how humans function in these principles. 


15. Seek to educate myself comprehensively regarding nature’s inventory of chemical elements, their weights, performance characteristics, relative abundance's, geographical whereabouts, metallurgical alloys, and chemical associabilities and disassociabilities. 


16. Seek to comprehend the full gamut of production tool capabilities, energy resources, and all relevant geological, meteorological, demographic, and economic data. 


17. Seek to operate only on a do-it-yourself basis and only on the basis of intuition. 


18. Plan for my design science strategies to advantage the new life to be born on Earth, life born unencumbered with the conditioned reflexes so prevalent today. 


19. Commit whole-heartedly to the above and pay no attention to "earning a living" in humanity’s established economic system, yet find that my family’s and my needs are provided for by seemingly pure happenstance and always 



Ben Franklin


1. Temperance - Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence - Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself, avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order - Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have it's time.
4. Resolution - Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality - Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself, i.e., waste nothing.
6. Industry - Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off al unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity - Use no hurtful deciet; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice - Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation - Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness - Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloths, or habitation.
11. Tranquility - Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. Chastity - Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
13. Humility - Imitate Jesus and Socrates. 

17
"I have much material wealth as well as honour,
And many people like me,"
Nurturing self-importance in this way
I shall be made terrified after death.

18
So, you thoroughly confused mind,
By piling up whatever objects
You are attached to,
Misery a thousandfold will ensue.