Art Wortd Coop

Basho gave this advice to his disciplines:

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must let go of your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and don't learn. Your poetry arises by itself when you and the object become one, when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden light glimmering there. However well-phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling isn't natural--if you and the object are seperate--then your poetry isn't true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.

Basho, pen name for Matsuo Basho, Japanese Poet
(Qtd. in The Enlightened Heart ed. Stephen Mitchell)

You don't delve deeply enough into the intimacies of form. You don't pursue them with sufficient love and perseverance in all their disguises and evasions. Beauty is something difficult and austere which can't be captured that way: you must bide your time, lie in wait, seize it, hug it close with all your might in order to make it yield. Form's a Proteus much more elusive and resourceful than the one in the myth--only after a long struggle can you compel it to reveal to its true aspect. Artists like you are satisfied with the first likeness it yields, or at most the second or third; that's not the way this victory is won! The victorious painter is never deceived by all those subterfuges, he perseveres until Nature's forced to show herself stark naked, in her true spirit.

Honore de Balzac, from The Unknown Masterpiece

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight--as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to redeem.

William James
(qtd. Robert D. Richardson in William James: In the Maelstrom of Modernism)

To those familiar with Taoist teaching, it meant the invisible, formless matrix that gives rise to the endless succession of forms which are no more apart from or different from the matrix than waves are apart from or different from the sea . . .

The use of a term meaning "way" to describe the vast, unfathomable reality of which every form is but a transient manifestation has very subtle implications, pointing to the non-dual nature of reality; for, if reality is in fact non-dual, then the source, the way to the goal, the wayfarer, and the goal are all indivisible from one another . . .

What this means in practice is that one seeks to attain to a state of intuitive understanding in which the unity of "I" and "other" is experienced as vividly as the heat of fire or the coldness of ice . . .

Thus realization of the identity of one's true nature and the true nature of the Tao leads to acceptance of health and illness, gain and loss, up and down, life and death as being equally essential to the natural functioning of things, and therefore in no way to be deplored.

From John Blofeld's Introduction to The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain