Those odd encounters of eyes in lonely alleys...

Wandering across a city — walking often quite alone, down dark alleys, through unfrequented districts and debouching suddenly onto main thoroughfares where for a spell one follows the main stream, is adopted by a group "he has come where we come from, wants to go where we want to go". For a while it is true but the side streets are there. Pause in one of them for a moment, and the stream has moved on. So, as there is no catching up with the group, there is no more reason to return to the main street than to wander away from it... more alleys... more thoroughfares... Where shall we be sleeping tonight? And those odd encounters of eyes in lonely alleys...

Nanamoli Thera (May 51)

Cursed ...

Cursed with the blessing of being condemned to be free.
(May 58)

Saints

It is impossible to please everybody, they say. And so that is perhaps why Saints who should be, one supposes, good enough to please everybody, are always dead. For then only the skeleton is left and everyone is free to make of them what he, in person, likes, and the Saints do not appear to confute such opinion.
(Aug. 50)

The recognition of a saint (and not only of a saint) requires two things: that the saint should be held to behave within certain prescribed limits of behaviour, and that people should have the will and capacity to recognize such behaviour. (Aug. 50)

Nanamoli Thera

On the 20th storey of a burning house

One is, as it were, on the 20th storey of a burning house, and from the window there is a narrow plank leading across the street to the balcony of an —apparently — safe building opposite. (The Building Opposite whose blinds are always down, whose chimneys never smoke, whose doors never open, where no light is seen at night, about which there has been one's frequent yet always inconclusive speculation.) To stay is to be burned for certain. By attempting the plank one will probably fall — still one knows one will have to walk that plank or burn.

Osbert Moore (1948, Nov.)

If I had a child ...

If I had a child what could I say to him ? "My child," I could say. "you are here in this world because of my own pleasure and incontinence. I can offer you nothing better than become another 'little man' like myself whom it is the present fashion for politicians and the like to idolize en masse and exploit and ignore as an individual. If you succeed in 'improving' your position this can only be at the expense of others and will increase its instability. If your position deteriorates it will be at your own expense. In a few years time you will, no doubt, be repeating these very words." (1949)

Nanamoli Thera

Five specific limitations of the infinite

The so-called seven colours of the spectrum together go to make up what is known as light — what, in other words, the scientists say is no more than a mere fractional band in the whole range of electro-magnetic waves— the only section of the wave-range which the visual sense can directly grasp. Indeed each colour is experienced as a particular limitation of light: light itself appears to be a particular limitation of the electro- magnetic wave-range. So would the five senses seem to be five specific limitations of the infinite— five exclusive ways of screening off, of shutting out the rest. In fact, the "outer world", as known through the senses, seems to be conditioned by — shall one say our knowledge of it depends on —the limiting and sifting qualities of our five senses. By means of sifting and excluding, form could be said to be created from Chaos and thus our five senses are at the same time five creators and five ways of being partially blind. We live, as it were, in a cathedral with stained windows whose, to us, magnificent colour patterns let in a little of the light which the sun sheds indiscriminately outside. (1947)

(Later addition:) But the "sun" would then stand for Chaos in our simile and how would that be wrong ?

Nanamoli Thera

Wandering on deserted places ...

Wandering on deserted places, there are found many traces, and tracts, from which we deduce the movements of heros and gods and so we weave history. Yet were our vision to become a little clearer, we might discover that all this tracts are merely made by ourselves during our own earlier wonderings.

Nanamoli Thera