A POEM FROM MY OLD FRIEND LAILA
YOU are my one true love You are there when no-one else is. You make me excited , but then I can`t sleep You give me ideas but make me nervous You are bitter and make me rush I`m not sure I like your taste but can`t wait for it
I watch you before I sip you You are so beautiful Texture like hot velvet black rich creamy top with swirls I finally have you and I'm relieved before I devour you
You spread electricity through my body awaken my senses improve my mood I remember passion a flood of inspired creativity. that later looks like a moment of madness
I realise I can`t have more or I`m going to be delirious I need to stop I want more I stare at the bottom of the cup try to read the pictures in the grains see if I have a future without you
You are always there for me and you only cost £ 2.40
Without you I can`t stand train journeys ,hospital visits, foreign holidays, meeting friends in cafes , GREEN TEA?
Maybe I should just give up sleeping? You`ve taken me places I would never have gone alone Old atmospheric cafes in European cities with mesmerising patterned high ceilings where old wrinkled men sit for days talking about what has happened to the world and playing cards sipping on one sweet black coffee kept me up long enough to watch the sunrise for days on end until falling asleep standing up outside Amsterdam central station
You`ve been my traveling companion You`ve taught me right from wrong never go to cafe Nero , the coffee tastes of dish water , - or hang out with people who want to meet in cafe Nero
Long black is the best but not in bad cafes where it`s burnt and bitter
You`ve helped me out when I haven`t known what to do
Honestly have you ever met an interesting person who has given up coffee?
Did Picasso paint on mint tea?
Coffee i Love you
But now its time to say goodbye You are so attractive and mind curdlingly nice, but know you have other lovers and don`t need me You hurt my body chase my mind while it runs away prevent me from lying peacefully next to a lover who has FALLEN ASLEEP BEFORE ME made me talk too fast without listening made me want you when I should be doing yoga
Without you I`ll be free of attachment clear in mind spend less time in cafes and more time doing the washing up Green tea can`t help me now nobody can Goodbye my love parting is such sweet sorrow except it isn`t you are often bitter and I don`t like you
so fuck you coffee
I' m gone, well just one more...
I like it. A little bitter-sweet, but smooth, quite piquant, not at all harsh and pleasantly nutty!
Completely seduced by the aroma (Arabic) blown by these words.
The fire of desires, the more it burns and the more it wants other objects to burn…waiting for the next coffee – does anyone have a cigarette?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_and_Cigarettes
Ciao,
VF
P.S.
http://lyricstranslate.com/en/cosa-hai-messo-nel-caff%C3%A8-what-did-you-put-coffee.html
1) Coffee is a caustic drug that causes addiction and severe withdrawal crises. Even those who take one coffee a day find it extremely difficult to get rid of that slavery. Coffee can be considered a legal version of cocaine.
2) Coffee is teratogenic, so it causes genetic defects to future offspring. Many experiments show that it is too often a cause of malformations and defects in babies’ arts.
3) Coffee is mutagenic. A cup contains 250 mg of chlorenic acid, actractylasides (extremely toxic) and glutathione transferase inducers (cafestol palmitates).
4) Coffee is carcinogenic for its combustible material and its content in the mutagenic pyrolysis product, and is associated with ovarian cancer, bladder, pancreas, stomach and intestines.
5) Coffee contains caffeine, one of the 20 most dangerous poisons on the planet, a toxic alkaloid that irritates the nervous system, unbalancing the sympathetic system and causing heart arrhythmias.
6) Coffee is roasted and bitter. It bleeds the breath, yellowing the teeth, irritating the stomach and damaging the liver heavily. As if that was not enough, it has destructive effects on the kidney system. A cup of coffee takes 21 hours to pass through the kidneys and the urinary system. There are 8 cups a day to make a healthy person a dialysis and transplant client.
7) Coffee is loaded with oxalic acid that binds and seizes calcium, and causes calcium and other parts of the body.
8) Coffee is loaded with uric acid. Acidifies the body and causes osteoporosis. It overcomes digestion and sleep. It causes migraine, fatigue and depression in the inevitable stages of deficiency.
9) Coffee produces a blood vessel restriction, high blood pressure, irregular coronary circulation, kidney failure, gastric ulcers, ringing in the ears, muscle tremors, restlessness, agitated sleeps, diabetes in infants, gastrointestinal irritations, blood glucose upsets (pushes The pancreas To secrete more insulin).
10) Coffee, both meal and after meal, makes it an unnatural digestive accelerator as it forces food to leave the stomach and even the intestines too quickly, causing food malabsorption and slowing down the intestinal peristalsis. Milk in coffee is a further nutritional mistake, with coffee tannin that goes into fermentation and causes intestinal irritations.
Wow! It`s heavy stuff.
I`m glad that I`ve always had the sense to balance out some of those bad effects by adding in a large shot of cognac or grappa, or both!
“So fuck you, coffee! I’m gone…well, just one more…!”
Indians too are getting used to with the taste of real coffee.
Till now India used to have only Nestle instant coffee.
Coffee tastes good when it is expansive and gives the feeling of being brown in white men´s world. Coffee chains are doing brisk business because they give escape from real India of 10 Rupees chai.
Makes me think of…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3MqmV47Lq8
Liked the link, Lokesh. Thanks.
This poem just makes me want to drink some coffee.
It does not make me want to give up coffee.
Man is certainly an addictive animal…even when consciousness reaches near the tops. Gurdjieff – all kinds of spirits and food, Alan Watts – all kinds of alcohol, Osho – nitrous oxide, Laila – coffee, Navajat – coffee, De Quincey – Opium, Nisajadatta – nicotine, and so on and so forth…
I liked Laila’s poem. Drew me in. Honest. some great phrases…and painting a real dilemma in a very human way.
Now, I am wondering if Life is addictive to Life!
Thanks, Parmartha, for mentioning Osho´s addiction.
Human Osho I love and not that branded Osho in catchy slogan; ‘Never Born, Never Died’. I wonder which advertising genius created this over-hyped punch line.
I don´t think Osho has said something like this. If it was, must be under the influence of His Coffee!
I`ve said it before but when it comes to catchphrases the East has always been way ahead of the West.
We come up with stuff like:
“Nice to see you, to see you nice!”
“You are the weakest link, goodbye.”
“Is that your final answer?”
“Eat my shorts”
and
“Doh!”
While the East has given us
“Don`t worry, be happy.”
“Thou art that.”
“I am that.”
“It`s nice to be important but it`s more important to be nice.”
“Be a joke unto yourself.”
“Enough for today”
and
“Never born, never died.”
No contest!
Humans have always loved getting stoned.
It has been established now that the organised making of alcohol was the major motivation in humans moving from hunter-gatherer to agrarian.
This happened all over the world independently.
Organised brewing of alcohol changed the world forever.
Apes eat rotten fruit to get a buzz, but humans settled down, got their shit together and cranked the level right up to Wine, Champagne, Chang, Beer, Sake, Scotch and all the rest.
Ganga, mushrooms and peyote and psychedelics grew on people’s doorsteps and shamans wasted no time in setting about necking that stuff and coming up with parallel universes, alternate realities and mind-blasting journeys all over the inner universe.
All this stuff severely heightened and stoked up the entertainment value of sitting round the campfire listening to better and better, more and more far-out and taller and taller stories – also set to music with a plenty of freaky dancing dressed up as animals, gods, demons etc. to really blow the roof off.
The bards, the prophets, the visionaries and the avatars, the enlightened ones were the akashik DJs and vehicles of the crazed Dionysian energies that delivered the goods that took people out of their everyday lives and plugged them straight into the livewire of the cosmos itself. And the the crowd, buzzed out of their minds, couldn`t get enough of it.
Still can`t.
No wonder that right into the 20th and 21st century so many of our gurus, avatars, masters etc. were/are stoners.
What made you think it could be any other way?
Because, Frank, as Buddha said, life is nothing but misery & we all humans try our best to be free & be happy…whether it is meditation or medication.
“Human Osho I love and not that branded Osho in catchy slogan, ‘Never Born, Never Died’. I wonder which advertising genius created this over-hyped punch line.”
The most over-hyped one is “I leave you my dream.”!
“I leave you my dream” seems to be a scene from Bollywood movie. It is all scripted.
Osho left his body as a bird in the golden cage!
Yes a lockless – diamond studded golden cage !
My addiction is tea. Especially English breakfast tea.
Some of the Yogi tradition reckon they have reached, and reach, beyond addiction.
Iyengar, as I understand it, did…but such a boring lot….
I heard that Iyengar, the founder of Iyengar Yoga and Osho’s contemporary, also based in Pune,considered Osho to be a fraud.
When Osho heard that Iyengar was due to speak at an International Yoga Conference, he played a little trick on Iyengar. He got his secretary to send word to the organisers of the event that Iyengar would be representing Osho at the conference.
Apparently, Iyengar was furious.
“What I am saying is that you are neither. My approach transcends Gurdjieff and J. Krishnamurti together.
Gurdjieff was more interested in physical efforts, hard labor, dancing, exercises. He was basing his action on the body. Krishnamurti is not interested in the body. He is interested in the activity of the mind, so his whole approach is simply logical, analytical. But you will be surprised that he himself personally has been practicing yoga his whole life.
And this is very strange – he never teaches yoga, never even mentions it, because that is not his own ground. His own ground, his territory, is logical, analytical; it is thinking. He can create philosophers, not mystics. He himself is more of a philosopher, but he knows that yoga is significant. They are parts of the same hemisphere, so he has been practicing yoga – but he is a sincere thinker.
He has had teachers in yoga. We had in Pune one of the best teachers of yoga, Iyengar, who has been traveling with J. Krishnamurti and teaching him yoga. He even approached me – because he had been listening to me – and he wanted to teach me yoga. And it is true that he is the best expert in India.
But I simply refused. I told him, “I have seen your books – you are not doing right in saying that you are the master of J. Krishnamurti. It is true that he learns yoga from you, but you are not his master; you are simply a teacher. But proclaiming yourself as master of J. Krishnamurti has much bigger implications than just being a teacher of yoga.
“Somebody may be massaging him, somebody may be a physician to him, somebody may be taking care of his food – that does not mean that they become masters! You are simply taking care of his body – you should make it clear.
“And now you have approached me for the simple reason that now you can add this too to your propaganda, that you are my master. No one is my master – and I am not interested in yoga at all.” Krishnamurti is interested because yoga belongs to the same hemisphere of the mind. Physiological activity or mental activity – activity as such is one part of the mind.
I cannot say that I belong to the traditions of Zen or Tao, although I love those traditions more than any other. But I cannot be part of their group because they are using the other side of the mind – the inactive mind. Their whole effort is how to shift your consciousness, which is focused on action.
Naturally, in the world, action is needed, not inaction. For every success action is needed, not inaction. For all ambitions, action is needed. So the whole world, by and by, has become focused on the active part. But the active part is going to create tensions; it is going to create anguish, sadness. Even if you achieve your goal, you will find that you have not achieved anything – you simply wasted your time and your energy.
The active part of your mind cannot leave you in a state of silence, relaxation, just at ease, at home. That is impossible for the active mind. (Light on the Parf)
“To attain ultimate freedom you have to be pure consciousness which can move into the blue skies and disappear. This disappearance is not annihilation; this disappearance into the blue skies is becoming one with the whole.
Just by the way.one yoga teacher, Iyengar, in Pune, has given an interview to some journalists, and they asked him about me because we are both in Pune. He used to come to listen to my lectures in those old days when they did not exactly understand my meaning.
He used to come to my meditation camps – there are here witnesses for it – and he wanted me to do some yoga exercises, because I was traveling continually, and that would have an adverse effect on my body.
I said, “I would rather have that adverse effect than learn some stupid distortions of the body. And moreover, I remember perfectly how you exploit people.”
He was teaching J. Krishnamurti a few yoga postures to help him overcome his forty years’ migraines. Now, a yoga teacher is a professional; all that he teaches you is certain exercises of the body. But when he wrote his book on yoga, on the flap paper he wrote, “I am the guru of J. Krishnamurti.”
I told him, “I don’t want such exploitation. ‘Guru of J. Krishnamurti’ – just because you have taught him a few exercises? Then any idiot who can teach a few exercises, then any doctor who treats you with medicine, then any psychiatrist, any psychoanalyst, can claim to be your guru.”
“I don’t want to be included in your disciples. I am nobody’s disciple. Hence, I have to refuse your offer for teaching me some exercises. I don’t need them.”
Instead of talking about me – he was asked to talk about me – he said, “Everybody is a part of God, but nobody can claim to be God himself.” In his mind he thinks that I think myself God.
Just look around the world: if I were God there would not be such a mess. This mess is enough to prove that I am not God. But his statement is so stupid, that everybody is a part of God – which part? You are dissecting God into parts, and if the whole of God is dissected nothing remains behind, no God, because everybody has got a part and run away.
Such illogical, irrational statements people go on making, and nobody even objects. I am simply ashamed of the retarded minds that surround us.”
(Zen: “The mystery and poetry of the beyond)
I like my saints rascalous too.
Take Krishnamurti for example
Instead of poncing about down Savile Row choicelessly choosing himself posh new shirts- he shoulda got himself down the East End on a pub crawl and had a bloody good knees-up!
Gurdjieff woulda done.
And he`d of given Phil Mitchell a short,sharp shock while he was at it, know wot I mean?
Thanks, SS.
Good selection of a quote.
Krishnamurti may have liked yoga, but he was not a yogi like Iyengar claimed to be.
He knocked around with women quite a bit, and got at least one of them to have abortions. Frank will know more detail, I wager.
I know little about the Buddha or Ramana, but people I know have said today that they would be good examples of enlightened beings who did not have these flaws of addiction or other flaws…hence could be said to be ‘really’ enlightened, unlike the ones I mentioned in this string….
But no doubt some bloggers will disagree!
We only know what has been written after the lifetime of Buddha. There may be incidents in his lifetime that we are unaware of.
The story thing about Buddha isthat he had enough of everything, as a young man with the life of a prince he was provided with all material luxuries and sex possible, he would have had his own harem of women as a young prince and he had a beautiful wife.
So had already dropped or had enough of these things and left them behind in search of something more meaningful, and permanently satisfying, well before he became ‘enlightened’.
SS, are you saying if Buddha got enlightened before leaving his princely life he would have had a different eight-fold path from his now famous one?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path
Buddha became a yogi after he left his palace. But the practices he adopted would have been influenced by which gurus and masters he met on his way.
If he had met a bunch of chillum- smoking hash-heads who covered their bodies with vibhuti ash he probably would have continued this pastime during his time as Gautama ‘the Buddha’.
Some masters forbid any intoxicants at all, even tea. Babaji did this (can’t think why), very different to Zen monks who worship tea.
And Hari Krishnas are not meant to have any intoxicants, illicit sex or gambling. But the ones I know find it too difficult to follow those rules.
Thank God! Osho was wise enough not to give any rules!
Buddha was a prince in his youth.
He was living in an air-conditioned palace whose marble was imported from Italy. For his various girlfriends, lingerie was delivered by DHL from the head quarters of Victoria Secret…
I wonder when humanity will raise the question among the cooked stories. Surely lies are very convenient!
O God, O dear God, tell me, how to get rid of addiction from the cult?
Form your own cult !
Free your mind and your ass will follow.
(Freedom is free from the need to be free).
Does this mean, freedom from any need is nirvana?!
Books say, freedom from oneself is Nirvana.
I don’t know some living being who is so.
Me too, yet to come across someone who is Nirvanoed!
Re ‘Freedom is free from the need to be free`- apart from being rather a good line from a classic psychedelic 70s funk song, I would see it more in terms of if you are really free of something you don`t obsess with it. I am more familiar with addiction than Nirvana, so I could understand it in a more everyday way than as being about nirvana etc.
For example, people at AA and NA meetings talk endlessly about the things they are trying to stay off. Yet, surely,to be really free of it, it`s better not to even have to talk about the stuff,let alone be tempted by it, isn`t it?
I suspect that the same may be true of nirvana, otherwise the enlightened ones would all be sitting around in a circle chatting away about samasara in an attempt not to relapse into it!
This means we have to go beyond all! Ssshhhhh….
Dear Frank,
Not just for you addictions are more familiar than Nirvana. I think it’s a bit the same for everyone, from coffee to sex, from spaghetti carbonara to heroin (by Bayer).
Although they say there are more insidious addictions for which the saying goes: “Once an addict, always an addict”.
In my opinion, this is not the case for those of us who at the foot of the Master have internalized a bit of his sense of humour in deconstructing things, as the most powerful marketing targeting the human being: God.
I do not know many sannyasins who are back to the drug, but no one who has come back to church.
https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/08/30/once-an-addict-always-an-addict/
Ciao,
VF
P.S:
As I have said at other times, by quoting Fromm there is “freedom from” and “freedom for”… Comparing nirvana to an addiction, as a metaphor, does not work, it is asymmetric.
In fact, usually one throws a stone when there is a diamond, not the opposite. However, if the nirvana is like an addiction, before going back to church my samsara (wandering) will have very different sympathies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hw1uVfeByg
(The band complains, maybe about the thermal state, some blasphemy … mimicking the addicted ones, about the honey for the voice that is going to end)
“I wander at night with lost souls
Yes of the family I am the rebel
You give me the soul and I’ll send you to the stars
And paradise is a crazy lie
All life is a fat lie
Yup!
Hard life is a big deal, yes
But sometimes a transgression is a necessity
Whoever is good, for me it’s bad!
And I’m an animal and it is!
All history is a big lie
All the lifes, first mine
Ah, mamamia (mamma mia / oh mother, mine) el Diablo!
Ah, Ariba ariba el Diablo!
Ah, mamamia el Diablo!
666
Shoot the snake of the first apple, eh, el Diablo
That steals strength to who condemned him, eh, el Diablo
And with the music I change my skin, eh, el Diablo
But paradise is a crazy lie
All the lifes, first mine
Ah, mamamia el Diablo
Ah, ariba ariba el Diablo
Ah, (mamamamamama) mamamama mia el Diablo
Ah, his holiness el Diablo!
666″.
Why are you following me? Not following just going in the same direction…good. Blessed are the peacemakers, they shall inherit…which direction?