Books

Yesterday 420 books came from Thailand - three tipitaka sets, two with commentaries, one with sub-commentaries. Thai-Thai, Thai-Pali and Devanagari-Pali. The rest of the books are miscellaneous leftovers from my seven years there. Three cabinets as well, altogether 695 kgs. Tomorrow comes, coincidentally, A 43-book set of the English PTS tipitaka. We could open a library.

Attempts at seclusion derailed by all of this, and by laziness, and so on. Try and try again, round and round again :)

An interesting book, The Book of the Damned:

If all things are of a oneness, which is a state intermediate to unrealness and realness, and if nothing has succeeded in breaking away and establishing entity for itself, and could not continue to "exist" in intermediateness, if it should succeed, any more than could the born still at the same time be the uterine, I of course know of no positive difference between Science and Christian Science -- and the attitude of both toward the unwelcome is the same -- "it does not exist."

A Lord Kelvin and a Mrs. Eddy, and something not to their liking -- it does not exist.

Of course not, we Intermediates say: but, also, that, in Intermediateness, neither is there absolute non-existence.

Or a Christian Scientist and a toothache -- neither exists in the final sense: also neither is absolutely non-existent, and, according to our therapeutics, the one that more highly approximates to realness will win.

A secret of power --

I think it's another profundity.

Do you want power over something?

Be more nearly real than it.

-- The Book of the Damned, Chapter 3

Not that I agree with it entirely, but with the sentiment, which is what the author would have, I think.

Anyway, back to meditation, here's this Wednesday's Haiku:

escape, it follows
chase, it leads you round and round
stop, it's still at last