" When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice " !
Why was I born, if it wasn't forever?
"We're finally becoming aware of a process that has been unconscious since human experience began. From the start, humans have perceived a Birth Vision, and then after birth have gone unconscious, aware of only the vaguest of intuitions. At first in the early day of human history, the distance between what we intended and what we actually accomplished was very great, and then, over time, the distance has closed. Now we're the verge of remembering everything."
Where much is born, Much is torn.
We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born.
I breathe you as you dance me birthing we.
I wasn’t sure what was going on or what time it was or where I was or even, for that matter, who I was … but my gut told me something was terribly wrong. I opened my eyes slowly, as sensitive to light as a roll of film: just expose me and I’d vanish.
My body is the fruit of spirits' play.
Thoughts give birth to a creative force that is neither elemental nor sidereal. Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow. When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven.
- Philipus A Paracelsus
If consciousness creates, and reality including biology is a thought-form, and in the beginning was indeed the Word, then it is critical we realize that a divided consciousness employing some type of divisive sound combined with a separatist intention gave birth to our dualistic universe.
For My Grandson
Your blood runs muddled,
My polyglot,
From Dutch and English
And Welsh and Scot;
But to honor you
In this year of shame,
We have named you DAVID
A Jewish name.
Upon your hand--
A scant inch long--
We lay the sense
Of your brother’s wrong.
To this frail case
Of gristle and skin
We trust the fortunes
of all your kin--
Your Negro brother,
Your brother the Jew--
Of all who suffer
From being few.
In cruel times
For a child to share
Your mother has dropped you
Well aware
That flesh must carry
The mind’s high stake,
Since the world we have
Is the world we make.
Let nothing rob you
Of discontent.
Your thin, first protest
Was early spent--
A cradle tempest,
Not loud, not long--
But your puny anger
Will yet be strong;
And we bid you nurse it,
While we nurse you,
To turn on Gentiles
Who hate the Jew,
On gentlemen
Who in pride of race
Would burn black problems
They dare not face.
Poor and lucky,
We can ill afford
A silver spoon
Or a silver cord;
But your name is David--
We bring you, instead,
One smooth flat stone
From the clean brook bed,
And with this for a birthright
May you, at length,
Have little of comfort
Much of strength,
We could wish you homeless
Under a ledge
With a mind that burns
Through the skull’s thin edge--
Better so,
In the steely rain,
Than plump and cozy
In belly and brain.
For there’s work to be done
And all’s not well.
The giants we fostered
Are yours to fell.
The peace we squandered
Is yours to win,
By anger flashed outward
And hate held in.
Let these be single
When each is great;
Anger blown clear
Of the coals of hate--
Keep hate for ideas,
Anger for men,
Now the fools of evil
Are loose again.
And when metals cancel
And wits lock fast
One smooth flat stone
Can win at the last,
Through fear and the will
To master fear
With the sling of David.
The giants are here.
The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.
When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.
People are giving birth underwater now. They say it's less traumatic for the baby because it's in water. But certainly more traumatic for the other people in the pool.
Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.
I suspect that if we could sum up in a single sentence what our purpose in life would be - it's that we were born to be "fully Self-expressive". And we could put a big chunk of the world's suffering under the categories of "suffering because we know that we're not expressing our Selves fully, or mourning that we don't even know who that is, or that we lost touch with that Self somewhere along the way". It's incredibly frustrating to know that you have something inside of you like that and to not be quite reaching the point of giving birth to it - to be bringing it out into the world.
If a man considers that he is born, he cannot avoid the fear of death. Let him find out if he has been born or if the Self has any birth. He will discover that the Self always exists, that the body that is born resolves itself into thought and that the emergence of thought is the root of all mischief. Find from where thoughts emerge. Then you will be able to abide in the ever-present inmost Self and be free from the idea of birth or the fear of death.
...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed -- that is human.
When you are born, Where do you come from?
When you die, where do you go?
Life is like a floating cloud which appears.
Death is like a floating cloud which disappears.
The floating cloud itself originally does not exist.
Life and death, coming and going, are also like that.
But there is one thing which always remains clear.
It is pure and clear, not depending on life and death.
What, then, is the one pure and clear thing?
You were born in darkness but you will make your own light.
Healing the Earth, through Healing Birth.
There are, for most of us, a few singular moments around which we create the rest of our lives. People get stuck in them in all sorts of ways. Being born is a series of stucks.
This means that we have barely
disembarked into life,
that we’ve only just now been born,
let’s not fill our mouths
with so many uncertain names,
with so many sad labels,
with so many pompous letters,
with so much yours and mine,
with so much signing of papers.
I intend to confuse things,
to unite them, make them new-born
intermingle them, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the unity of the ocean,
a generous wholeness,
a fragrance alive and crackling.
From "Too Many Names"
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Wake up! If you knew for certain you had a terminal illness--if you had little time left to live--you would waste precious little of it! Well, I'm telling you...you do have a terminal illness: It's called birth. You don't have more than a few years left. No one does! So be happy now, without reason--or you will never be at all.
The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.
Meek Nature's evening comment on the shows That for oblivion take their daily birth From all the fuming vanities of earth.
"My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So it was when my life began; So it is now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is Father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety." There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream, It is not now as it hath been of yore ;- Turn whereso'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more. . . . . But yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath past away a glory from the earth. . . . . Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, And sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory, do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
