Man Lept Nur Einmal

Carpe frickin Diem. Words you hear over and over again, words that have been put into many different forms over the ages. Carpe Diem, live in the moment, live for now, man lept nur einmal!, stop and smell the roses, you only live once. But they all mean the same thing; the only time you possess is now. The only thing you can control is now. Today is a blank canvas in front of you, the future is a blank canvas in another room, paint on the canvas in front of you. It has often been said that even the best-laid plans go awry, and that is because one cant entirely depend on planning, we must live in each and every moment. We cannot affect what happens in the future, we can only affect what happens, when it happens. We must find our salvation now, in this life, because we cannot find salvation in waiting for it to come in the future. If you plan to eat a chocolate cake tomorrow, why not eat it today? It still has as many calories, it is still incredibly awesome, you still experience the same amount of Euphoria in eating that cake. If you can find god now, why wait until you die to find the answer to The Great Question, why wait until you die to experience the embrace of enlightenment.

            Kabir, an old Indian mystic, a man who lived long before Drake, wrote (or rather spoke, he was illiterate) a poem on this. Friend, Hope for The Guest While You Are Alive is about finding salvation before death. That you cannot find salvation in death, you find it in living, in being alive. And he also says that you cannot control the future, that the only thing you control is now. Surprisingly enough, Master Oogway in Kung Fu Panda teaches this same lesson to us. “look at this tree Shifu, I cannot make it blossom when it suits me nor make it bear fruit before its time [but I can control when the fruit will fall, where the seed will be planted] yes, but no matter what you do, that seed will grow into a peach tree, you may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will still get a peach”(Aibel/Berger). You can only alter things when they are upon you. You can determine when the peach will fall, when it falls. You can control where and when the seed is set, but that all would have happened eventually. Yes you may control ‘when’ things happen, but that is not altering the fate of things. You can control ‘when’ you attain enlightenment. So why not sooner rather than later? The Buddha didn’t plan to attain enlightenment; he made it happen.

            Kabir says that just because you are dead, does not mean you will achieve salvation- ‘the idea that the body will join the ecstatic/ just because the body is rotten-/ that is all just a fantasy"(Kabir 9-11) 

When he says 'the ecstatic' he means finding  "The Guest". The Guest could be anything, it could be God, it could be a diety of your understanding, it could be happiness, it could be enlightenment. Everyone has a Guest, except maybe nihilists, because they aren't looking for anything or striving. Many will not find The Guest in their lives, they will live a life of mediocre bliss, just subsisting on their daily occasional entertainment. Those people will end up with "an apartment in the valley of death"- kabir, they will not reach the place of eternal enlightenment. They will live mediocre forever, because that is what they did in life, so they will continue in death. If one finds The Guest in life, they will live in the afterlife eternally knowing that they have fulfilled their one goal on this earth. 

          In the process of scrutinizing over every aspect of this poem, I have found that it is much easier to

understand a piece of work with extra information. It is good to research the author first, to find out

their religious beliefs, activities, lifestyle, childhood. This way, you can relate their experiences and

 such to the way that they write and the interpretations of lines in accordance with their faith. It is also a 

good idea to interview someone else whilst analyzing the poem. They might think of it differently than 

you do. They might offer a totally new spectrum of thought on a topic you had already closed. My dad 

(whom i interviewed) offered to me a look into his brain and the way it works and showed me his side 

of things, and I am grateful for this. He gave me the idea of maybe the poem being pantheistic, that god

is all around us in the world.

          This poem has taught me a lot. it teaches me that god is in and around us, he can be found simply 

by looking around, right now, in this moment. And that we shouldn't try to control time, but control 

what happens now. "if you make love with the divine now, in the next life / you will have the face of 

satisfied desire"(Kabir 16-17) So live in the moment, live for now, you only live once, you have but 

one life to give for your salvation.

Tomorrow is a mystery, yesterday is history, but today is a gift, thats why it is called the present 

Scotterview

He sat down after getting his glasses. Wayne Scott was being interviewed by his son Ian today, and he needed to see the poem he was interpreting. "are you ready?" Ian said."sure" Wayne confirmed. "alright" Ian said, Preparing his mac recorder. "Ok, so what do you think of it?"
"I think it sounds familiar."
"Familiar?
"Yes, it sounds familiar, it sounds like new age philosophy"
"Well what does that mean?"Ian said, puzzled.
"That you shouldn't live for the future, you should live for now, that if you believe in god you should find god now, that god is around you, its almost pantheistic"
"okay" Ian said, "And what stands out to you?"
"well there is a lot of intensity, its very enthusiastic. its almost like he's preaching"
"well he was a mystic and this was probably originally a spoken poem, because he was illiterate"Ian Explained.
"well it reads like that, it reads like he's preaching to a large group of people."
"okay, so are you confused by anything?"
"no, like i said its similar to things I've read in the past, like Eckhart Tolle"
"And who is that?"
"hes a contemporary philosopher who believes in living in the moment, living in the now.
"okay, and who do you think The Guest is?"
"I think the guest is probably like i said, it could be a god of your understaning, a god of your religion or it could be you, your soul."
"is there anything else you want to elaborate on"
"no but again, the way it speaks to me is to know where you are, and where your at today and not constantly looking to the future, the future being your salvation after death"
"have you found The Guest?" Ian asked
"I think i have, yes"
"do you think I have?"
Wayne stated quite firmly, but not in an angry way "no"
"neither do I... okay so explain the guest in your life."
"whats in front of you is opportunity and how you live your life is opportunity for nirvana because you shouldn't look to the future for salvation because you don't have the future."
Ian thanked Wayne for his interview, pausing the recorder on his macbook. They both chuckled at the post interview awkwardness. "is that what you wanted?" Wayne asked.
"yeah that's fine"
"do you want to record it again?"
"oh no its good, raw"
they chuckled again and Ian resumed his biology homework.

Hope for the Guest

Kabir was a mystic poet and saint in india. He is most remembered for his religious community called 'the path of Kabir', Whose members number about 9,600,000 and are dispersed throughout central and north india. Much of his history is of legend, but it is known that he was raised among muslim weavers. He was raised totally illiterate and could only write the word 'Rama', referring to the seventh avatar of vishnu. According to legend, he lived to be 120 years old. A Famous legend states that after his death, his hindu and muslim followers fought over the rites. They then lifted the veil over his body and he had turned into flowers, which they split up, muslims burying them, hindi cremating them. his religious beliefs are a culmination of hinduism and islam. He accepts the idea of reincarnation and is a monotheist at the same time.

The poem I chose, Friend, Hope for The Guest While You Are Alive, basically covers the idea that you should live and experience earth while you are alive. You should find salvation before you die otherwise in the next life you will regret it. The word Guest could be interpreted to mean different things. The dictionary definition of a guest is something that takes a host in some form or another. Guest could mean happiness and liveliness, taking host in the soul. Or it could mean a god of some sort. but the general idea of the poem is clear. Live in the moment, it is the only time you own.

"Do you realize? That everyone you know, someday, will die. And instead of saying all of your goodbyes, let them know you realize that life goes fast, its hard to make the good things last, you realize the sun don't go down, its just an illusion caused by the world spinning round"-The Flaming Lips

bib

Works Cited

"Bill Moyers Talks with Poet Robert Bly." PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 13 May 2014. <http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08312007/transcript1.html>.

Kabir, The Biography of. "The Biography of Kabir." Poemhunter.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 May 2014.

"Kabir." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 05 Dec. 2014. Web. 13 May 2014.

The Navajo Blanket

Everybody wants to be perfect. We don’t realize the secret. We don’t realize that what they have been seeking is already achieved. The world, in all of its complexity, is totally perfect the way it is. Yes, the world suffers from flaws like hatred, greed, and other things that are totally bad. But the fact that we know the difference between good and bad is good in itself. One cannot know perfection if he does not know imperfection. So we take the bad with the good, cherishing the good and surviving the bad. Because we know while there are terribly unfair things in the world, there are still wonderfully beautiful, awesome things at the same time. Everything, good and bad, fair or unfair, in  in perfect balance. The balance being perfect means that the world is perfect. Perfectly balanced. Siddhartha figures this out towards the end of his life; he learns it from the river. He figures out that for his son to be able to find happiness and enlightenment, he must go through the same trial and error as he did. One cannot know enlightenment if one does not know bewilderment. He realizes that he himself went through the struggles that young Siddhartha will have to go through to get to this point in his life. Everything breaks even, everything comes around eventually, and that is the perfection of the world.

            Siddhartha, on his quest to enlightenment, experiences karma. Karma being the belief that everything comes back around in the end. Good deeds will merit good deeds upon you. The show My Name Is Earl is entirely based off of karma. In the show a redneck wins the lottery, loses the ticket and gets hit by a car. He finds out from Carson daily about karma and he makes a list of all the bad things he did in an effort to gain forgiveness. Siddhartha goes through the process of being an ascetic, and he wasn’t satisfied with it. So he took the opposite route, gambling and living for money. In return, he wasn’t happy with himself, he felt empty, trapped by possessions. “The world had caught him; pleasure, covetousness, idleness, and finally also that vice that he had always despised and scorned as the most foolish- acquisitiveness. Property, possessions, and riches had also finally trapped him.”(Hesse 78-79) He had fallen to materialism and in return he received guilt and unhappiness. He then goes back to the woods, trying to find enlightenment. Where he finds the ferryman, as foreshadowed earlier in the story. “’I did not expect any payment or gift from you. You will give it to me some other time.’ ’do you think so?’...’Certainly, I have learned that from the river too; everything comes back. You too, Samana, will come back’”(Hesse 49). The ferryman, who is already enlightened, knows the effects of karma and that things have their own way of figuring themselves out. So he lets Siddhartha go, knowing that someday he will repay him in some way or another. Karma will solve everything in the end. Because that is how the world works. Although there are unpleasant things or bad occurrences, there is always some way that the situation stabilizes itself.

            The world is visually perfect too, not just in the way that it balances itself out. Sometimes we, as humans, take for-granted what time has done to this planet. Earth is gorgeous, and much of the time, in our efforts to find perfection and achieve perfection ourselves, we forget that perfection is all around us. Years, uncountable, have made the world into the crazy beautiful thing that it is today. Siddhartha has little epiphanies where he feels the intensity of the world around him and how he came to be there and wondering about the things he had done. “He looked up and was surprised to see the trees and the sky above him. He remembered where he was and how he came to be there. He felt a desire to remain there for a long time.”(Hesse 90) He stops and looks around, and when he does, he gets a glimpse of enlightenment. He isn’t quite enlightened yet, but he gets a feeling here and there. He kind of sees that the world, in that second is living, dying, and birthing, all at the same time. Each species functioning entirely off the rest of the ecosystem. The world is one big machine, with each cog in perfect synchronicity. “He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new. Who could understand, conceive this? He did not understand it” (Hesse 102) No one can explain it, so many things happening at once. It is crazy that the world can function separately but in unison, in total perfection.

            The world has many lessons to teach us. We should learn from it, because after all it has much more experience with life than we do. Some people fight the teachings of nature; they try to tame the world. They think of society as nothing but a tactical game to be played emotionless and without passion. Humans don’t understand  humanity, morality, and the instinctual gut feelings of humans. But no one can truly understand, no one can truly understand why humans like a specific sequence of noises called music. No one can truly understand why we find a picture or a painting beautiful, we only know that they are beautiful. “’I have taken thousands of people across and to all of them my river is nothing but a hindrance on their journey. They have travelled for money and business, to weddings and on pilgrimages; the river has been in their way… However amongst the thousands there have been a few, four or five, to whom the river was not an obstacle’”(Hesse 106) People need to live in the moment rather than planning so much ahead. It is always good to think ahead, but don’t get so caught up in what is going to happen in your life that you don’t see what’s going on around you. Appreciate the world you own rather than waiting on the future. There is no way to make the world better or worse. The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray, you don’t own the future.

            The world is perfect. It is perfect because it is imperfect. We love it because it appears to us the way it is now, not because it will be perfect later. “The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people- eternal life”(Hesse 144). There are faults in everything, propriety in everything too, and they balance each other out. This balance is the perfection in the world, and the reason there is happiness.

Poem Rewrite

Friend, Hope for The Guest While You Are Alive

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 a fantasy.
What is now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment
in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
believe in the great sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being search for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the guest
that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity


Kabir

Beautiful Sadness

At the end of Siddhartha, Siddhartha is an old, possibly dying man. Govinda goes down to the ferry because the ferryman was rumored to be a sage. He later finds out that it is Siddhartha that is the ferryman. they talk together and Siddhartha explains that he is enlightened. The way I interpreted it was that he said The world is imperfect and but it isn't constantly striving to achieve perfection. It is perfect in its imperfections. The fact that the world is a balanced place with flaws makes you know realize the better parts of it. Butters, from South Park gives us some insight on this after a breakup- "Well yeah, and I'm sad, but at the same time I'm really happy that something could make me feel that sad. It's like, it makes me feel alive, you know? It makes me feel human. And the only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt somethin' really good before. So I have to take the bad with the good, so I guess what I'm feelin' is like a, beautiful sadness."(Parker/Stone S7E14). This Beautiful sadness is necessary in life, Siddhartha feels the beautiful sadness after Young Siddhartha runs away. It makes him sad, but he later comes to realize that his son leading his own life and making his own mistakes is good. The bird must leave the nest in order to fly.

Siddhartha becomes enlightened, he realizes the ultimate question he set out to find. He achieves the ultimate enlightenment. The answer cannot be accurately put into words. Even siddhartha says that he distrusts words, he distrusts teachers. He knows that he can learn from the whole world. Holy or unholy, animate or inanimate, he understands that he can take the same lessons from the average joe as he can take from the buddha. The world is the teacher, and our soul is the student, taking bits from each and every teacher. Which makes the soul an individual of itself and yet, the whole world at the same time.

Find yourself, I'm not going to help you

Siddhartha is a book about a man who has a similar story to that of the buddha, he leaves hinduism to pursue asceticism and meditate all the time. He begins to look for the answer to the one question, the big, important question that can't be taught from teachers. He wants to find himself. He goes to the buddha at first for guidance, but he finds that the buddha can't tell him because the only way Siddhartha can find what he is looking for, is to look to himself. He is trying to find the self. He says that each with their own way, they finds escape from the self. The drunk escapes from himself in drinking, the ascetic in meditation, etc.

Also on his journey, Siddhartha learns to live without possessions. For three years he lived with nothing but a loincloth, and he didn't even realize it until the merchant asks him how he can live without possessions- "'I have never thought about it, sir. I have been without possessions for nearly three years and I have never thought on what I should live"(Hesse 64). I am way too bloody sentimental about things to be like that. It would be cool, traveling the land with nothing but what I can carry, but I'm very attached to possessions. Minimalism is a good practice but is very difficult for many people. I don't see how Siddhartha does it so easily.