Dormition,
Death resembling
Falling asleep
The heart
Of contemplation
Doing
What
You are
Doing —
What is
Called
Integration
Doing, being
Nothing other
Than
What
You
Are —
If you
want
To be
A contemplative
Be
One
Dormition,
Death resembling
Falling asleep
The heart
Of contemplation
Doing
What
You are
Doing —
What is
Called
Integration
Doing, being
Nothing other
Than
What
You
Are —
If you
want
To be
A contemplative
Be
One
I no longer endorse The Washington Post's no longer endorsing anyone for the presidential election.
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The MAGA
Absurdity:
“Give me death
Or we‘ll take
Your liberty.”
No one dares
Believe the
Dangerous hatred
They spew —
Just good clean fun
(They do not
Listen
They
Do not
See)
a desperate
philosophy
loading gun
sighting target
firing
we no
longer care
for ideas
but for
blood seeping
no ideas
but in slings
no poetry
but in-
valid words
when ideas
are run
out of, all
you have left
is bullets
ugly rhetoric
shoots from
hate-filled
mouths barreling
lethal dumbdumbs
as if no
decency could
remain — they
choose to
eliminate all
of US
Which room is he speaking about?
This room is so wide and empty
Every thought vanishes in it.
A narrow lane carved in rock,
A well sprung from a hole in a stone.
The bright moon hangs at the
End of the eaves,
And a cold gust shakes the valley.
Who can follow in the footsteps of the recluse
And, sitting quietly, learn true happiness?
--Deagam Tanyon (1070-1179) dailyzen
My room is a splay of too many shirts and jackets, shoes, books, and empty containers of medicines and matches. An unmade bed, tossed pillows, meditation beads, and scattered papers that once meant something I now forget.
Candle holders and incense holders, reminders on wall of what my attention once wanted me to remember.
We the elderly, about to forget everything, salute you!
Oh friendly space where sleep and wisdom wander in and out, and a snoring dog keeps suspicious vigil over near door by bookcase!
I understand why trump is so popular. He is the shadow side of our contemporary cultural personality and character manifested in full for those reluctant to expose that jungian identification.
The sexism, racism, derogatory hostility, the “I don’t give a sh#t about you…I’m all and only about me and me alone.” The bragging, the lying, the threats, the insulting, the demand for unthinking loyalty, the mocking, the inability to feel, sympathize, empathize or commiserate.
He’s a genius of shadow recividism.
And he will win the election.
The American people want this raw obsessive self shadow disclosure full of resentment and mockery to be their masthead of unrepressed f*#k you, I’m the man, get over here babe, I’m the one, the one and only, fantasy man, fantastical cardboard poster, huckster salesman, no one can near to my unstoppable revelation of underside sea-slime magnificence.
And he will be out next president.
Of this I’m . . . resigned.
For Jung:
Shadow: The shadow archetype is the darker aspects of a person, the part that embraces what we view as frightening, hateful and even evil about ourselves.
https://www.harleytherapy.co.uk/counselling/carl-jung-introduction-jungian-psychology.htm#:~:text=The%20self%20provides%20the%20balance,and%20even%20evil%20about%20ourselves.
And,
Complementary to Jung’s idea of the persona, which is “what oneself as well as others thinks one is” [CW9 para 221], the “shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors…If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is his shadow does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses etc “ [CW9 paras 422 & 423].
https://www.thesap.org.uk/articles-on-jungian-psychology-2/about-analysis-and-therapy/the-shadow/
To recognize and come to know the shadow self is beneficial to understanding the whole of our psychological character and to moderate our presentation to the world.
Not to know it is to be enslaved to its dark influence on our personality and to remain ignorant as to the mask we present to the world.
Wholeness or halfness.
These days this country loves the halfness that trump irradiates.
We smile and snarl allegiance to the unsuppressed arrogance and calculated insouciance of his demi-morbid proclamations of festering sores and cynical projections of his personality onto perceived enemies and critics.
He is gold ornamentation to a cardboard half-self.
We learn to live with our shadow self, to incorporate it and to utilize its necessary aspects completing our psychological health in the face of a radiant yet troubling world.
Without this integration we remain a halfness and a macabre presentation of charicatured noncompleteness — a proverbial sliced personality staggering forward with no understanding of the creature we present to those who see us.
This problem is reciprocal. Those looking on and experiencing such a half-human are themselves masking their wholeness and responding with diminished comprehension to the diminished halfness urging their halfness to merge with his halfness effectuating a diminishing vision of the nonwhole into figments and fragments of a newly splintered perception and view of this country as garbage and carnage and everyone being sh*ts.
And this will become our half-life going forward.
As halloween approaches, we divert from the sacred “holy eve” before the celebration of All Saints’ Day and we retreat to the ghoulish half-dead caricatures of terrifying incompleteness and half-life.
(For a deeper reflection on shadow, see Spiritual Life and Our Shadow, by Anne Solomon.)
The old saw that “elections have consequences” is true as ever.
John Fowles’ opening line of his novel Daniel Martin remains my favorite:
“Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.”
Andiamo!
And—
(Oremus sum iniuriam!)
If I drop my beliefs, what remains?
A nice old temple against a green mountain;
A white cloud opens and closes
Its two brushwood doors.
All I have is a water bottle and a staff
And don’t care if time passes or not.
--Daegak Euchon (1055-1101) dailyzen
Once I was encouraged to ask for absolution.
Now I ask of the absolute resolute encouragement.
Soon, I pray, I will have nothing but courage to absolve the absolute.
According to the sudden teaching,
all things are nothing
but the one mind of suchness,
wherein all discriminations have utterly ceased.
-- Treatise on the Five Teachings. (dailyzen)
I consulted with God. God said "Look at those lovely leaves, red and gold. And look at the millions and millions of chestnuts dropping to mountain ground. And look up at the billions of stars in pre-moon sky."
The small waves pushed by breeze at slipway on pond. The happy dog greeting Rivian driver. The darkness of the evening walk after dropping off borrowed car.
And God said, "Do you think I would encourage those who love me in these things to choose a man such as is running to become president to actually become president?"
And God once again became silent.
And God was disappointed to think that those who claim to love God would think that such a man actually cared for them and actually cared for God.
But God knows that the ways of humans, their deceit and their foolish followings, must be allowed slack reins for the ride they choose.
Why?
God is no controller. Despite what social media posters two thousand years ago posted in their book of books. Despite what contemporary social media and main street media post and pontificate about during this theater of the absurd prelude to civilization's singularity postlude of artificial intelligence and political artifice of self-aggrandizing conclave of "Habemus Sapum."
My cat looks up at me. October leaves smother the ground outside screen door. They know it is time to fall.
And fall they do.
Letting go.
Arriving at ground-earth.
As the story tells it, so did Adam, so did Eve.
Adam -- A well-known Hebrew name, Adam means "son of the red Earth." Its meaning comes from the Hebrew word adamah meaning "earth," from which Adam is said to be formed.
Eve -- Eve /iːv/ is an English given name for a female, derived from the Latin name Eva, in turn originating with the Hebrew חַוָּה (Chavah/Havah – chavah, to breathe, and chayah, to live, or to give life).
There's so much of which we are unaware.
And the unaware continue to want power to promulgate their unawareness.
We say, parenthetically, we wish to live a life of prayer.
What is prayer but a plea that what-is reveal itself again and again before our eyes, within our minds, through our hearts.
Between these parentheses we dwell for a time in a place with an accompanying group of individuals with whom we are recommended to love and respect -- each one of them.
Each one of us is a parenthesis within a greater parenthesis.
We are included.
Set in a dwelling place necessary for our thriving and nurturance.
My prayer today -- let us not forget where we are, who we are, why we are. This!
And of those who have forgotten?
Let's remember "this."
As in: "Do this in memory of me."
Just as we have forgotten "Being" -- we are forgetting "word" and "God."
In my religious tradition there has been a struggle to come to terms with the distinction between "many" and "all."
Is it "all of you"? Or is it "many of you"?
I prefer to think "all of you". I prefer to think "the many that are you."
From a 2011 article about "Eucharistic Prayer I":
Current Translation
The day before he suffered he took bread in his sacred hands and looking up to heaven, to you, his almighty Father, he gave you thanks and praise. He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said:
TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND EAT IT; THIS IS MY BODY WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU.
When supper was ended, he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples, and said: TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND DRINK FROM IT; THIS IS THE CUP OF MY BLOOD, THE BLOOD OF THE NEW AND EVERLASTING COVENANT. IT WILL BE SHED FOR YOU AND FOR ALL SO THAT SINS MAY BE FORGIVEN. DO THIS IN MEMORY OF ME.
Latin Original
Qui, pridie quam paterétur, accépit panem in sanctas ac venerábiles manus suas, et elevates óculis in caelum ad te Deum Patrem suum omnipoténtem, tibi grátias agens benedíxit, fregit, dedítgue discípulis suis, dicens: ACCÍPITE ET MANDUCÁTE EX HOC OMNES: HOC EST ENIM CORPUS MEUM, QUOD PRO VOBIS TRADÉTUR.
Símili modo, postquam cenátum est, accípiens et hunc praeclárum cálicem in sanctas ac venerábiles manus suas, item tibi grátias agens benedíxit, dedítque discípulis suis, dicens: ACCÍPITE ET BÍBITE EX EO OMNES: HIC EST ENIM CALIX SÁNGUINIS MEI, NOVI ET AETÉRNI TESTAMÉNTI, QUI PRO VOBIS ET PRO MULTIS EFFUNDÉTUR IN REMISSIÓNEM PECCATÓRUM. HOC FÁCITE IN MEAN COMMEMORATIÓNEM.
New Translation
On the day before he was to suffer he took bread in his holy and venerable hands, and with eyes raised to heaven to you, O God, his almighty Father, giving you thanks he said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to his disciples, saying: TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND EAT OF IT: FOR THIS IS MY BODY WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU.
In a similar way, when supper was ended, he took this precious chalice in his holy and venerable hands, and once more giving you thanks, he said the blessing and gave the chalice to his disciples, saying: TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND DRINK FROM IT: FOR THIS IS THE CHALICE OF MY BLOOD, THE BLOOD OF THE NEW AND ETERNAL COVENANT, WHICH WILL BE POURED OUT FOR YOU AND FOR MANY FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. DO THIS IN MEMORY OF ME.
It has been a while since I have attended in person a Catholic mass. But when I did, many years ago, from altar boy years at St A's on Bay Parkway, through following times of Franciscan studies, and years of retreats at Trappist monastery -- I listened to the words. (These days I listen to the Offices de chaque jour, from Abbaye Sainte Madeleine du Barroux in France)
Words.
That originary place where original energy resides and emerges through into an outer flow of movement and manifestation.
Words are not meant to be co-opted into lies and deceit. Not by politicians. Not by those who would constrict and contract meaning into narrow spaces to be used by narrow minds to influence an unattending and unrealizing following uninterested in a fuller consciousness.
Words are the passing wind that whispers into all hearing receptors willing to listen.
Like memory, longing to be incorporated.
A dwelling in the open with all.
As it is.
As-is wholly-possible.
With verition.
Verition
—from Jean Gebser's Ever-Present Origin
•
Aperspectivity is the "veriition," the "awaring in truth" of
the whole and consequently of its spiritual
manifestation, the diaphainon, inasmuch as the whole is
perceptible only as transparency wherein origin, also
containing the entire future, is time-free present.
•
To attain this consciously, without abandoning the
"earlier" consciousness structures, is to overcome
rationality in favor of arationality, and to break forth
from mentality into diaphaneity (EPO 412).
https://www.academia.edu/17563075/Gebser_Verition_and_Metaphysics_The_Integral_Skeptic
When Doris and Chris
Arrive at Tuesday evening
Something good happens
Thought occurred during Tuesday Evening Conversation that the common denominator to each of the Ten Commandments is the phrase “there is no other.”
There's something comforting about this.
Not a single soul
Knows why he is born
Or his real dwelling place;
We go back to our origin,
And become earth again.
Ikkyu (1394-1481)
Not much else to say.
When I heard it, when I picked up my beads this morning, it mattered.
…et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.
“...and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus”
(—fragment of prayer Ave Maria, Hail Mary)
The womb is named “Jesus.”
And if the womb is named Jesus, then what begins in the womb and comes through the womb is called “Christ.”
Makes you wonder — how does a Christ come to be?
By being born.
Being, born.
Have we forgotten this? Or simply never noticed it before?
The womb is named Jesus. What is carried through the womb is Christ itself.
To be christian is to be born.
Again,
To be, born, is Christ-reality, mattering.
If this is true, if this is what-is, it is given to us to become what we are.
Now…
And at the hour of our death —
Amen!
Perhaps we all are full of grace.
“Talent is grace made visible.” (Stephen King)
And if we pray the Ave Maria we are not coaxing that which is inchoate into manifestation in our midst?
Asked when earthen civilization will end, the visitor to their cabin said:
“When intelligence outraces emotional stability it’s just a matter of time.” (—visitor from away in You Like It Darker: Stories, by Stephen King, 2024)
Seems a sensible, albeit chilling, consideration.
vespers on mountain
one step then another -- we
cross bridges -- listen
Full bright moon through trees
Shines on best and worst of us —
Light finds its way through
Once out of our mind
We will be the earth, this rock
Four billion years old
Two by Merton, helping to clarify:
"The language used by Zen is therefore in some sense an antilanguage, and the “logic” of Zen is a radical reversal of philosophical logic. The human dilemma of communication is that we cannot communicate ordinarily without words and signs, but even ordinary experience tends to be falsified by our habits of verbalization and rationalization. The convenient tools of language enable us to decide beforehand what we think things mean, and tempt us all too easily to see things only in a way that fits our logical preconceptions and our verbal formulas. Instead of seeing things and facts as they are we see them as reflections and verifications of the sentences we have previously made up in our minds. We quickly forget how to simply see things and substitute our words and our formulas for the things themselves, manipulating facts so that we see only what conveniently fits our prejudices. Zen uses language against itself to blast out these preconceptions and to destroy the specious “reality” in our minds so that we can see directly. Zen is saying, as Wittgenstein said, “Don’t think: Look!”"
(-Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, pp. 48-49)
"You have made us together, you have made us one and many, you have placed me here in the midst as witness, as awareness, and as joy. Here I am. In me the world is present and you are present. I am a link in the chain of light and of presence. You have made me a kind of center, but a center that is nowhere. And yet I am 'here,' ... 'here' under these trees, not others. The prayers of your friends and my own prayers have somehow been answered, and I am here ... My being here is a response you have asked of me, to something I have not clearly heard. But I have responded, and I am content ...." (--Thomas Merton, Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander)
After a while, it feels silly, what I don’t know or can’t conceptualize in such a way that I could say,“Yeah, I understand that.”
Standing near midnight down by wood gate at end of driveway at Barnestown Rd, I look up over Bald Mountain at night sky at what I’m told are stars, other suns, billions of miles away as Ensō stands and stares at hedge off to the side mulling his doggy mulls.
However you slice it, 13.8 billion years is very old indeed. By comparison, the sun and the solar system formed around 4.6 billion years ago, life on Earth emerged 4 billion ago, our planet’s first multicellular organisms 1.7 billion years ago and modern animals 550 million years (or, 0.55 billion years) ago, while the first modern humans (the species Homo sapiens) didn’t walk the planet until just 200,000 years ago – that’s just 0.0002 billion years back, or around a hundred-thousandth of the age of the universe.
Put another way, if the history of the universe could be condensed into a year, with the Big Bang taking place just after midnight on 1 January, and the present day corresponding to midnight on 31 December, then humans arose around eight minutes before the end of the year. Modern science all happened in the last 1.4 seconds. All the timescales that we’re familiar with from everyday experience are utterly dwarfed next to the gargantuan age of our cosmos.
(—in, The Beginning and End of Everything: From The Big Bang to the End of the Universe, by Paul Parsons, 2018)
But, then again, I cannot comprehend the neuroscience of my brain synapses and electrical pulsations between hemispheres of my brain. I don’t know what and how the universe is, nor do I know what and how I am here or anywhere.
My zen studies suggest none of that is a problem. That the “don’t know mind” is a good one to have. And yet, that curiosity and inquiry are healthy activities to nurture.
I do my traveling from inside. Having become a reclusive and stationary abgrund-wanderer, watching concentric circles at pond on windless morning ruffle reflections of sky into wavering abyss deep below surface.
I think: here I am!
I feel that I am here — disheveled and uncertain— but here, cool air pushing through window, sunlight (8.5 minutes away from its source) on wavering branches tenuously holding pale green, orange, and red leaves.
And there is coffee to be made.
Walk to be taken.
Crossword and wordle to be figured.
Amazement that this pericope of consciousness is still able to gaze out into the existent cosmos, through the wohnküche, out barn door at patient rowboat still roped to bookshed ridgepole.
For now.
We seem to want joyful outcomes but not difficult journeys. We think something is wrong when things are difficult. Why, we ask, should I suffer? Why should anyone?
Reading Caputo:
The cross is not magic. It does
not magically dispel the course of evil, or stop glob-
al warming, or alter the laws of thermodynamics.
The cross is an event in which the difficulty is not
dispelled but disclosed, not extinguished but ex-
posed, not crossed out but made visible. The cos-
mos at large shares the same fate as the body of
Jesus. What mortal hand has framed the fearful
symmetry of the crucified body of Jesus, of the
crucified body of the cosmos, of the crucified body
of God? The body of Jesus is a figure of both a
human and a cosmic outcome, an icon through
which we could catch sight, sub contraria specie, of
the glory of God and of the world rising up from the
difficulty.
The difficulty is that the truth is bittersweet and
the glory transient. Life goes hand in hand with
death, a deeper joy with suffering and mortality.
Only when we come face-to-face with the difficulty,
without illusion, without compromise, without call-
ing a good thing bad, is it possible to affirm the
genuine glory of the world—and to do so uncondi-
tionally, with nothing up our sleeve. I have had a
lifelong love of mystical theology but not of the
Neoplatonic metaphysics that back it up. At the
heart of the dark night explored here is the Deus ab-
sconditus who unnerved Luther himself, where both
reason and revelation are crucified. Instructed by a
world that as far as we can understand exists “with-
out why,” the difficult lesson of the cross is to learn
to live “without why.” Love is an expenditure made
without the expectation of a return, without support
or guarantees. Love is the heart of a heartless world,
the difficult glory of a crucified world.
(from, Cross and Cosmos, A Theology of Difficult Glory, by John Caputo, 2019)
In prison today reading an excerpt from Indigenous Americans: Spirituality and Ecos, by Jack D. Forbes in Daedalus (Fall 2001), we wondered whether there is consciousness in a rock.
You might as well ask if there is consciousness in yourself.
The (proposed and nascent) law of interrelational complementarity requires a “yes” to both considerations.
To suffer is to consequence the ignorance or denial of the realization of interrelational complementarity.
The cross is the harsh symbol of putting to death the erroneously held belief that we are separate from and not incorporated with all that is in Being.
The narration that Jesus died on such a cross is an act of love incarnating consciousness with anatta (no separate self) thus “saving” us from ignorant and harmful belief and action punishing all “anothers” as “others.”
We can, as perhaps Jesus did, come down from the cross of ruptured humanity and fragmented creation/nature so as to dwell wholly and holy in the world.
It is, after all, October. Nearing the time of the thin place.
Where wholeness and holiness reside inter-dimensionally.
Heartfully conscious of one-another.
This upcoming election should not be this close.
“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.”
This is how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the primary military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council, described former president Donald Trump to veteran journalist Bob Woodward. Trump appointed Milley to that position. (—in Letters from an American, by Heather Cox Richardson, Oct.13, 2014)
Yet it is.
And that is beyond worrisome.
https://www.youtube.com/live/ao8bbdv2mgE?si=57Q43iNEZ2rzwpYu
At times, a surprising clarity.
“I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page,” said Anne Carson to Will Aitken in her Art of Poetry interview, which was published in issue no. 171 of the Review. “It is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.” (--from Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry, Interviewed by Will Aitken, issue 171, Fall 2004)
Watching season one episode ending of "House" -- he is playing piano, a meditative rendition of "Silent Night."
It occurs to me that current spiritual/meditative inquiry and scholarship looks to silence/stillness as foundational to an essential concretion of urgrund reality in human experience.
I look up lyrics and get a semiotic glimpse of word/reality so often blurred by unreflective familiarity.
Silent
Holy night
Calm and bright
All is
Tender and mild
The peace of
Heavenly
Sleep
Sometimes there is a call inviting a descent into the interior of logos where resides the energy of origin re-constituting itself (Itself) in constantly new creation and meaning.
Perhaps a transcendence beyond our religious encasements of the emergent birth of what is our referent experience.
It represents a gratitude of attention.
Something worth paying.
That’s a long time.
The Earth is thought to be about 4.54 billion years old. Along with other planets, the Earth was born in the early days of the Solar System, which first started forming about 4.6 billion years ago.
By about 4.3 billion years ago, the Earth's surface had cooled enough for water vapor in the atmosphere to condense on the surface, leading to the formation of oceans. Volcanic activity, which was more widespread at the time, released gasses that shaped the early atmosphere. Life emerged around 3.5 to 4 billion years ago in the form of simple, single-celled organisms.
The Earth has probably been as we know it today — with recognizable continents, oceans, a hospitable climate, and diverse life — for the past few hundred million years. But it continues to evolve through its own gradual tectonic and volcanic activity, and through the more rapid effects of climate change.
There’s a lot to dig up.
A lot.
Seems right.
The two American atomic bombs that were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 killed approximately 120 000 people. A comparable number died later of burn and radiation injuries. It is estimated that 650 000 people survived the attacks. These survivors are known as Hibakusha in Japanese.
The fate of the survivors was long concealed and ignored. In 1956, local Hibakusha associations along with victims of nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific formed The Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations, shortened in Japanese to Nihon Hidankyo. This grassroots movement soon became the largest and most widely representative Hibakusha organisation in Japan.
Nihon Hidankyo has two main objectives. The first is to promote the social and economic rights of all Hibakusha, including those living outside Japan. The second is to ensure that no one ever again is subjected to the catastrophe that befell the Hibakusha.
Through personal witness statements, Nihon Hidankyo has carried out extensive educational work on the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. Hence the motto “No more Hibakusha”.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2024/nihon-hidankyo/facts/
Is right.
And nuclear weapons are savage and inhuman.
Jamais plus!
Woodward put out an interview with Trump from the 1980’s.
Give the real estate hustler turned politician credit for finding the deficiencies in the American system of politics and exploiting them for his own benefit.