No other sound. No other sense.
When it feels everything is gone away, when the only stability is whoosh of passing vehicle, flutter-chirp of blur-flight bird, swallow-gulp of well water mid-afternoon one Thursday in May -- where turn?
I could say it is the war that breaks my heart. The war at center surrounded by ugliness of leaders, perversions of behavior, deceits of arrogance, and punishment of innocent, young, patriotic, confused, and obedient fighters on both sides of the conflict.
I could say it is my inability to stand in the middle of contradiction without losing heart.
Or I could say it is the very impermanence of change – wheeled conveyance enroute elsewhere, spring birdsong on branches abloom with fresh green, the movement of water down mountain into well from spigot into bottle to mouth through body – it is this impermanence I bow to, gassho, silently step into and through which I fade away into the disappearance of life living itself without notice.
Or I could say nothing.
If you miss the mark even by a strand of hair,
you are as distant as heaven from earth.
If the slightest discrimination occurs,
you will be lost in confusion.
You could be proud of your understanding;
have abundant realization, or acquire
outstanding wisdom and attain the way
by clarifying the mind. Still, if you
are wandering about in your head,
you may miss the vital path of letting your body leap.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
I think I’ve missed the mark. No leap.
Giving up, not going on -- what a mistake!
But it is my mistake. It is embodied into whatever I am in this moment at this place. All mistakes, all falls and foment, gather into this one place I pass through with conveyance, birdsong, and water. And this place, this ephemeral embodiment, is all that remains. I am defeated, utterly.
A monk once said to Foketsu Osho: “Speech and silence tend toward separation [from It] or concealment [of It]. How shall we proceed so as not to violate It?”
Fuketsu replied with the following verse:
“I always remember Konan in the spring
The partridges crying and flowers spilling their fragrance.”
Riku No said: “The Dharma Master Jo has said: ‘Heaven-and-Earth and I have the same source; the ten thousand things and I have one and the same body.’ Is this not extraordinary?”
Pointing to a flower in the garden Nansen replied: “When men of today look at this flower, it seems to them like a dream.”
(--quoted in pp.248-9, Mystics and Zen Masters, by Thomas Merton, c.1961)
A woman on the radio says, “Sometimes we suffer from too much talk. Sometimes silence is golden.” She is speaking about the temptation to blame and slam in times of turmoil and obscene news. She may be right. Still, about some things, we have to say something.
Zen meditation is not quietist tranquility, and Zen practice is not tolerant of drifting. It repeatedly demands and even forces an active response. That is the function of the koan, of the long periods of zazen meditation (upon the koan), and the frequent interviews with the Roshi in which the student reports on his progress in koan study. What does the Roshi look for, and often provoke, even with certain violence? Personal response. The purpose of koan study is to learn to respond directly to life by practicing on the koan, that is to say, by striving to meet the koan with an adequate and living response. What the Roshi wants is not a correct answer or a clever reaction but the living and authentic response of the student to the koan. If he finally responds directly and immediately to the koan, he shows that he is now able to respond fully, directly, and immediately to life itself.
(p.249, Merton)
How do we disappear in plain sight? How remain present at the same time transparent – not there while here?
Jade is tested by fire, gold is tested by a touchstone, a sword is tested by a hair, water is tested by a stick. In our school one word or one phrase, one action or one state, one entrance or one departure, one “Hello!” or one “How are you!” is used to judge the depth of the student’s understanding, to observe whether he is facing forward or backward. If he is a fellow with blood in his veins he will immediately go off shaking his sleeves behind him and though you shout out after him he will not come back.
(p.249, Merton, quoting Hekigan Roku, quoted in The Zen Koan, Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller, c.1965)
Is there any coming back?
(No response. No sound.)
Rolling wheels, distant birdsong, soothing water.
No other sense.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Is there a way to see without adopting views?
Three views:
1.
America is good and loving and not to be confused with hating and evil peoples worldwide seeking to crush the freedoms and life style she symbolizes.
2.
America has lost its way. Cruel and cynical leaders have hoodwinked its own citizens and the world into an ugly war where murder, torture, and lies abound.
3.
There is no nation, no state, no country, no government, and no kingdom on earth that remotely understands the essence of existence or sees the heart of being-in-the-world.
These views are only perceptions. What counts are the questions:
a) What is my practice?
b) How does any one of these perceptions impact my practice?
c) Is it possible for one person to be the antidote to war and the cruelty evoked by it?
Dewdrops,
let me cleanse
in your brief,
sweet waters
these dark hands of life.
- Basho (1644-1694)
Practice prepares antidote.
It is time to practice.
Wash hands.
Reach in.
Clear out.
Views.
To see.
Three views:
1.
America is good and loving and not to be confused with hating and evil peoples worldwide seeking to crush the freedoms and life style she symbolizes.
2.
America has lost its way. Cruel and cynical leaders have hoodwinked its own citizens and the world into an ugly war where murder, torture, and lies abound.
3.
There is no nation, no state, no country, no government, and no kingdom on earth that remotely understands the essence of existence or sees the heart of being-in-the-world.
These views are only perceptions. What counts are the questions:
a) What is my practice?
b) How does any one of these perceptions impact my practice?
c) Is it possible for one person to be the antidote to war and the cruelty evoked by it?
Dewdrops,
let me cleanse
in your brief,
sweet waters
these dark hands of life.
- Basho (1644-1694)
Practice prepares antidote.
It is time to practice.
Wash hands.
Reach in.
Clear out.
Views.
To see.
Monday, May 10, 2004
What does it mean to fuse monastery and marketplace?
Is it time to unveil a perception and interpretation of God’s life in the world that invites a new way of dwelling in and as the world? Is there a way to live a contemplative life in the world without the slightest intention to remove oneself from the world? But more than that – is the world itself, theologically speaking, the missing piece of the mystery Christians call the Incarnation and Buddhists call Buddha-Mind? Are all religions ready to reveal their shared commonality -- with their ethical, ecological, ontological, and aesthetic descriptive of God-Life-With-Us?
Is God -- this, now, here?
Do we have the world we want? Do we have a working image of who and where God is? Who and where we are?
Is it fair to say -- Look at where you are to find out what you want.
Erich Heller, the German philosopher and literary critic, cautioned: "Be careful how you interpret the world. It is like that."
If a pencil falls to the floor, there's a way of speaking about it that says, 'It wanted to be there.' When water breaks through any inhibition to seek lower ground, it could be said, 'It wanted to go there.' It is a question with perplexing implication that asks: Do we belong where we are?
Is where we are what we want? Is it too stark to suggest -- Where you are is what you want? Is anything ever other than what it is?
Thus the question we ask in silence, “What is this?”
Buddhas of the past and future only talk about this mind. The mind is the buddha. And the buddha is the mind. Beyond the mind there’s no buddha. And beyond the buddha there’s no mind. If you think there’s a buddha beyond the mind, where is he? There’s no buddha beyond the mind, so why envision one? You can’t know your real mind as long as you deceive yourself. As long as you’re enthralled by a lifeless form, you’re not free. If you don’t believe me, deceiving yourself doesn’t help. It’s not the buddha’s fault. People, though, are deluded. They’re unaware that their own mind is the buddha. Otherwise, they wouldn’t look for a buddha outside the mind.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
At Meetingbrook we are beginning to glimpse the indwelling nature of monastery within marketplace -- in our case, hermitage within bookshop and bakery. We slowly approach the insight (what some have suspected all along) that our longing for vital hermitageis the bookshop/bakery at the harbor in the midst of the marketplace. Beyond this slow arrival is the additional intuition that the place wants to dwell there in an alternative way – one that stretches both the perception and interpretation of monastery and marketplace.
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions.
(--from Wallace Stevens, in Opus Posthumous, "Adagia," 1959)
The interrelations and interactions of monastery and marketplace in the forms of Meetingbrook Hermitage and Meetingbrook Bookshop/Bakery will become more obvious as we approach the Feast of the Ascension. Rather than seeing the Ascension as departure from the world, an alternative intuition sees it as a profound re-entering, a re-incarnation into the realm of existence. Retrieving the words ‘this’ and ‘now’ and ‘here’ we look again at what elements want to be where we are. This mysterious dwelling of the Christ-Reality, now engaging Buddha-Mind, and here serving an absolute gratuity permeating present and presence.
Over the years practicing contemplation at Meetingbrook we have engaged silence.
What is spiritual silence? It is not just the absence of talk. Silence has substance. It is the presence of something.
Thomas Merton claims that silence is our admission that we have broken communication with God and are now willing to listen. We can be reduced to silence in times of doubt, uncertainty, nothingness, and awe. When we have exhausted all our human efforts, experience the limitations of human justice, or the finitude of human relationships, we are left with silence. Those who have experienced the sacrament of failure are more likely to know the emptying power of silence.
(--from, A Quaker Ministry of Prayer and Learning devoted to the School of the Spirit, "Some Thoughts on Silence" by Kathryn Damiano)
Our failures have begun to take up residence alongside accomplishments in one unbroken acceptance of who we are and where we are. In this regard hermitage between two mountains enters bookshop/bakery at harbor as one undifferentiated place practicing hospitality, community, and generous gifting of one another. God returns to the world in silence.
How should we image God and the world in an ecological, nuclear age? If not in the monarchical model --God as king and the world as his realm -- what other possibilities are there?
Needless to say, there are many, for no metaphor or set of metaphors can exhaust the varied experiences of relating to God. But I would like to suggest very briefly an alternative to the picture of the world as the king's realm: let us consider the world as God's "body." While that notion may seem a bit shocking, it is a very old one with roots in Stoicism; it tantalized many early Christian theologians, including Tertullian and Irenaeus: it surfaces in a sacramental understanding of creation -- the world charged with the glory of God, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it. Moreover, remember that a metaphor is not a description. To say that the world is God's body is to use the same kind of language we use in saying the world is the king's realm. Both phrases are pictures, both are imaginative constructions, both offer ways of thinking about God and the world.
Christians should, given their tradition, be inclined to find sense rather than nonsense in body language, not only because of the resurrection of the body, but also because of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist and the images of the church as the body of Christ. Christianity is a surprisingly "bodily" tradition. Nonetheless, there is a difference between these uses of body and the world seen as God's body: the latter is not limited to Christians or to human beings and it suggests, as the others do not, that embodiment in some fashion be extended to God. It is possible to speculate that if Christianity had begun in a time less dualistic and antiphysical than was first century Mediterranean culture, it might, given the more holistic anthropology and theology of its Hebraic roots, have been willing to extend its body metaphors to God.
(--in, "The World as God's Body" by Sallie McFague, http://www.surfinthespirit.com/environment/world-as-Gods-body.shtml)
The question whether the world is God’s body has perplexing implication. It gives, nevertheless, new meaning to the words “We live in the world,” or “I am in the world,” or “We are the world.”
What this experiment regarding the world as God's body comes to, finally, is an awareness, both chilling and breathtaking, that we, as worldly, bodily beings, are in God's presence. We do not have to go to some special place --a church, for instance --or to another world to find God for God is with us here and now. This view provides the basis for a revived sacramentalism – that is, a perception of the divine as visible and palpably present. But it is a kind of sacramentalism that is painfully conscious of the world's vulnerability. The beauty of the world and its ability to sustain a vast multitude of species cannot be taken for granted. The world is a body that must be carefully tended, guided, loved and befriended both as valuable in itself -- for like us, it is an expression of God -- and as necessary to the continuation of life. (--McFague, "The World as God's Body")
If we perceive the world as God’s body we will detect no absence, no separation of each from each. If our interpretation of human behavior is made within the context of mere sacred dwelling place, we will then approach one another – not according to theory and concepts – but with experiential intimate reverence.
To fuse monastery and marketplace is to posit generosity, gift, and grace as standard operating procedure.
If life is gift, will we allow ourselves to live the gift by giving gift, receiving gift, and being gift?
Is that what faith is?
No recompense.
Complete trust.
Fusion.
Is it time to unveil a perception and interpretation of God’s life in the world that invites a new way of dwelling in and as the world? Is there a way to live a contemplative life in the world without the slightest intention to remove oneself from the world? But more than that – is the world itself, theologically speaking, the missing piece of the mystery Christians call the Incarnation and Buddhists call Buddha-Mind? Are all religions ready to reveal their shared commonality -- with their ethical, ecological, ontological, and aesthetic descriptive of God-Life-With-Us?
Is God -- this, now, here?
Do we have the world we want? Do we have a working image of who and where God is? Who and where we are?
Is it fair to say -- Look at where you are to find out what you want.
Erich Heller, the German philosopher and literary critic, cautioned: "Be careful how you interpret the world. It is like that."
If a pencil falls to the floor, there's a way of speaking about it that says, 'It wanted to be there.' When water breaks through any inhibition to seek lower ground, it could be said, 'It wanted to go there.' It is a question with perplexing implication that asks: Do we belong where we are?
Is where we are what we want? Is it too stark to suggest -- Where you are is what you want? Is anything ever other than what it is?
Thus the question we ask in silence, “What is this?”
Buddhas of the past and future only talk about this mind. The mind is the buddha. And the buddha is the mind. Beyond the mind there’s no buddha. And beyond the buddha there’s no mind. If you think there’s a buddha beyond the mind, where is he? There’s no buddha beyond the mind, so why envision one? You can’t know your real mind as long as you deceive yourself. As long as you’re enthralled by a lifeless form, you’re not free. If you don’t believe me, deceiving yourself doesn’t help. It’s not the buddha’s fault. People, though, are deluded. They’re unaware that their own mind is the buddha. Otherwise, they wouldn’t look for a buddha outside the mind.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
At Meetingbrook we are beginning to glimpse the indwelling nature of monastery within marketplace -- in our case, hermitage within bookshop and bakery. We slowly approach the insight (what some have suspected all along) that our longing for vital hermitage
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions.
(--from Wallace Stevens, in Opus Posthumous, "Adagia," 1959)
The interrelations and interactions of monastery and marketplace in the forms of Meetingbrook Hermitage and Meetingbrook Bookshop/Bakery will become more obvious as we approach the Feast of the Ascension. Rather than seeing the Ascension as departure from the world, an alternative intuition sees it as a profound re-entering, a re-incarnation into the realm of existence. Retrieving the words ‘this’ and ‘now’ and ‘here’ we look again at what elements want to be where we are. This mysterious dwelling of the Christ-Reality, now engaging Buddha-Mind, and here serving an absolute gratuity permeating present and presence.
Over the years practicing contemplation at Meetingbrook we have engaged silence.
What is spiritual silence? It is not just the absence of talk. Silence has substance. It is the presence of something.
Thomas Merton claims that silence is our admission that we have broken communication with God and are now willing to listen. We can be reduced to silence in times of doubt, uncertainty, nothingness, and awe. When we have exhausted all our human efforts, experience the limitations of human justice, or the finitude of human relationships, we are left with silence. Those who have experienced the sacrament of failure are more likely to know the emptying power of silence.
(--from, A Quaker Ministry of Prayer and Learning devoted to the School of the Spirit, "Some Thoughts on Silence" by Kathryn Damiano)
Our failures have begun to take up residence alongside accomplishments in one unbroken acceptance of who we are and where we are. In this regard hermitage between two mountains enters bookshop/bakery at harbor as one undifferentiated place practicing hospitality, community, and generous gifting of one another. God returns to the world in silence.
How should we image God and the world in an ecological, nuclear age? If not in the monarchical model --God as king and the world as his realm -- what other possibilities are there?
Needless to say, there are many, for no metaphor or set of metaphors can exhaust the varied experiences of relating to God. But I would like to suggest very briefly an alternative to the picture of the world as the king's realm: let us consider the world as God's "body." While that notion may seem a bit shocking, it is a very old one with roots in Stoicism; it tantalized many early Christian theologians, including Tertullian and Irenaeus: it surfaces in a sacramental understanding of creation -- the world charged with the glory of God, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it. Moreover, remember that a metaphor is not a description. To say that the world is God's body is to use the same kind of language we use in saying the world is the king's realm. Both phrases are pictures, both are imaginative constructions, both offer ways of thinking about God and the world.
Christians should, given their tradition, be inclined to find sense rather than nonsense in body language, not only because of the resurrection of the body, but also because of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist and the images of the church as the body of Christ. Christianity is a surprisingly "bodily" tradition. Nonetheless, there is a difference between these uses of body and the world seen as God's body: the latter is not limited to Christians or to human beings and it suggests, as the others do not, that embodiment in some fashion be extended to God. It is possible to speculate that if Christianity had begun in a time less dualistic and antiphysical than was first century Mediterranean culture, it might, given the more holistic anthropology and theology of its Hebraic roots, have been willing to extend its body metaphors to God.
(--in, "The World as God's Body" by Sallie McFague, http://www.surfinthespirit.com/environment/world-as-Gods-body.shtml)
The question whether the world is God’s body has perplexing implication. It gives, nevertheless, new meaning to the words “We live in the world,” or “I am in the world,” or “We are the world.”
What this experiment regarding the world as God's body comes to, finally, is an awareness, both chilling and breathtaking, that we, as worldly, bodily beings, are in God's presence. We do not have to go to some special place --a church, for instance --or to another world to find God for God is with us here and now. This view provides the basis for a revived sacramentalism – that is, a perception of the divine as visible and palpably present. But it is a kind of sacramentalism that is painfully conscious of the world's vulnerability. The beauty of the world and its ability to sustain a vast multitude of species cannot be taken for granted. The world is a body that must be carefully tended, guided, loved and befriended both as valuable in itself -- for like us, it is an expression of God -- and as necessary to the continuation of life. (--McFague, "The World as God's Body")
If we perceive the world as God’s body we will detect no absence, no separation of each from each. If our interpretation of human behavior is made within the context of mere sacred dwelling place, we will then approach one another – not according to theory and concepts – but with experiential intimate reverence.
To fuse monastery and marketplace is to posit generosity, gift, and grace as standard operating procedure.
If life is gift, will we allow ourselves to live the gift by giving gift, receiving gift, and being gift?
Is that what faith is?
No recompense.
Complete trust.
Fusion.
Saturday, May 08, 2004
End deceitful punishing.
The shame of war atrocities committed in the name of American freedom stands side by side with increasing anger and resentment on the part of those longing for freedom without humiliation. Between callous operational torture and cynical reactive impotence -- where can we go to be antidote and healing alternative?
The real way circulates everywhere;
how could it require
practice or enlightenment?
The essential teaching is fully available;
how could effort be necessary?
Furthermore, the entire mirror is
free of dust; why take steps to polish it?
Nothing is separate from this
very place; why journey away?
- Dogen (1200-1253)
If each one of us is not the embodied origin of the path to peace, then there is no peace, no path, and no authentic way to dwell bodily in this world. There is no system that has the answer. No government. No religion. No philosophy. No psychology. No product to buy. No political stance, left or right, to champion.
There is no place to run, no place to hide. The enormous world which we have known as easily manipulated and controlled is collapsing into a small sliver of geography, into a slight space of minuscule hope. That thin place is you. Is me. Is each and every person. Is every individual waking slowly and finding themselves in that stark and solitary dwelling place named "original."
When we find ourselves at origin, the world begins -- again.
"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times."(Gary Snyder, quoted in The Writer's Almanac)
Consult no timepiece. Seek no guru. Choose no political party. Follow no other truth. It is now up to you, up to each one of us, to embody what is found with original presence.
Be what is found.
Honor what is emerging through and within the embodied reality we are discovering.
Be father/mother with original presence.
Whole. And full of grace.
Birth alternative antidote.
Begin true healing.
The shame of war atrocities committed in the name of American freedom stands side by side with increasing anger and resentment on the part of those longing for freedom without humiliation. Between callous operational torture and cynical reactive impotence -- where can we go to be antidote and healing alternative?
The real way circulates everywhere;
how could it require
practice or enlightenment?
The essential teaching is fully available;
how could effort be necessary?
Furthermore, the entire mirror is
free of dust; why take steps to polish it?
Nothing is separate from this
very place; why journey away?
- Dogen (1200-1253)
If each one of us is not the embodied origin of the path to peace, then there is no peace, no path, and no authentic way to dwell bodily in this world. There is no system that has the answer. No government. No religion. No philosophy. No psychology. No product to buy. No political stance, left or right, to champion.
There is no place to run, no place to hide. The enormous world which we have known as easily manipulated and controlled is collapsing into a small sliver of geography, into a slight space of minuscule hope. That thin place is you. Is me. Is each and every person. Is every individual waking slowly and finding themselves in that stark and solitary dwelling place named "original."
When we find ourselves at origin, the world begins -- again.
"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times."(Gary Snyder, quoted in The Writer's Almanac)
Consult no timepiece. Seek no guru. Choose no political party. Follow no other truth. It is now up to you, up to each one of us, to embody what is found with original presence.
Be what is found.
Honor what is emerging through and within the embodied reality we are discovering.
Be father/mother with original presence.
Whole. And full of grace.
Birth alternative antidote.
Begin true healing.
Friday, May 07, 2004
Over barn through trees back behind brook beyond Ragged Mountain -- moon slips cover of cloud reappearing into this room. Gift of 3:15am.
Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space. Space has a name but no form. It’s not something you can pick up or put down. And you certainly can’t grab it. Beyond this mind you’ll never see a buddha. The buddha is a product of your mind. Why look for a buddha beyond this mind?
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
Why look for anything?
Reading Inner Christianity by Richard Smoley at Thursday Evening Conversation we wonder whether anything with an outside is rife with secrets. Anything with an outside has initiations, attitudes of exclusion, rules for membership, special handshakes winks and nods, and tends to evaluate or judge who is worthy to belong. In the circle there is a preference for something not so controlled. Do we not see what is right here before us because something has veiled our understanding? Would an innocent heart and open mind allow the revelation of what is both ground and groundlessness of existence – a revelation full of grace?
It seems there are three phases of the traditional problem of God’s face, stated, “No one sees the face of God and lives.”
1. If we can’t look at God,
2. The potential is we can we look as God --
3. And so, what is this/now/here looking?
From Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas our thinking has sought to solve dualistically the distinctive fluctuation between potential and act. Contemporary psychology phrases this as – If we can only actualize our potential we’d be better. happier people. A subtle dualism pervades this thinking about act and potency. Could we rather say that every act or actual thing or actual being is its own power? The very fact of being is the very fact of the power inherent within being.
By saying power is undifferentiated from the locus of power, something odd occurs. Intention and act remain inseparable. Thus when I say, “I am writing” the reality is that writing is what I am. Or “I am walking” doesn’t mean that walking is an activity some separate “I” is doing, rather, walking is what I am.
Still, there is a paradox here. If power resides in what is being done, there is a diminished emphasis on who is doing the doing. What we in the west call the “I” or “ego” or “self” begins to be de-emphasized. A curious presence emerges. Something whole begins to come into view. Surprisingly there is less an “I” seeing what is there than there is mere seeing what is there.
We are “impotens” i.e. Latin for “feeble, powerless, not master of.” At the same time the adverbial “impotenter” means “weakly, intemperately, passionately.”
“Impotentia” also means “poverty.” Poverty emerges as its own presence. It no longer exclusively means penniless. Poverty emerges through undifferentiated realization as mere seeing, unadorned and liberated to be itself.
(Birdsong brings first light inviting dawn.)
With dawn is passing spirited morning breeze. Everyone and everything has received the passing invitation of this night. I dreamt of two friends from 40 years ago, Bob Coles and Steve Hoder. It is a Franciscan dream and we are saying goodbye. When I wake I continue shallow breathing from sleep, remembering Bob was killed on a Mexico beach 25 years ago. I’d not seen him for years. At his wake there was a video. He circled a large studio as one running laps through a modern dance the purpose of which was not immediately evident. Abrupt endings extend mourning. Goodbyes are waved in lieu of fond recollection. Everyone and everything once met remains not other than us.
Yesterday at the shop Robert and Su.Sane spoke spiritedly of gift and giving. A refreshing interchange focused on new spirit of understanding art and poetry – artful and poetic life. They feel the Tibetan Buddhist monks living in the area are “to be given to” – as if their very being was “to be given to” and everyone is exposed to this new appreciation of being they embody. Of course the “Family/Clarity” Robert and Su.Sane share with their household is a genre of gift which is itself infectious.
Their insight, spoken by Su.Sane, applies to Meetingbrook – “Take the large, put it into the small, you get immense.” It is example of mere-seeing. In our case, Dogen & Francis Hermitage at Bald & Ragged Mountain enters Meetingbrook at Camden Harbor. The prevailing intuition is donation. We will cultivate a presence that blurs the dualistic separation of monastery and marketplace. The primary charism is hospitality, generosity, and communal concretion of contemplation, conversation, and correspondence. This, now, and here.
When we intuit the place as one of collation and recollection we begin to experience how deep listening and loving speech become invitatory prelude for finding one’s original voice.
We become marked people. When we enter the prayer or dream of authentic selfless giving we are marked with the reception of that authenticity. Sandra called it grace some Wednesdays ago, an approaching maturity.
Here ‘mark’ is seen as something conspicuous serving as guide for travelers. Mark (in Webster’s dictionary) is also said to be “one of the bits of leather or colored bunting placed on a sounding line at intervals,” a lasting or strong impression of the attention each individual finds on their way,
Ed stopped by yesterday. He stood outside in sunlight and recited a quote he’d read in a book on Intention by Wayne Dyer:
When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all the animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.” (An ancient Hasidic saying)
It might have been in Heidegger I read the line: Life is gift and not recompense.
This morning I find it in Levinas.
The legacy of the life and work of Emmanuel Levinas [1905-1995] is the teaching of an absolute gratuity.
ABSOLUTE GRATUITY
To give, to offer up, to sacrifice - of one's substance, of one's time, of oneself - without the expectation of recompense. It is only absolute when it takes place without expectation.
ABSOLUTE
That is, an absolute gratuity is an infinite expenditure. It signifies, most particularly, an inverse economy, a total inversion that is most properly thought when it is first construed as a divine inversion, a total expenditure beginning with God's own self-absolution.
GOD'S OWN SELF-ABSOLUTION
Absolute gratuity is the significance of God. From the beginning God gives up God's self absolutely, hence there is creation. God's utter expenditure is, at the same time, incarnation. The flesh of God is the world. Therefore, whenever anything is, it is by way of participation in the event of God's creative sacrifice. Being is sacrifice, primordially. The event of being is therefore most properly called a gift and, paradoxically, a gift that has been abandoned by its giver, God having withdrawn into the gift itself. Creation will therefore find it impossible to return to its origin.
THE ORIGIN
Whenever the origination of a gift is lost, the directionality of generosity is always toward-the-other. This means, in particular, that my generosity must seek an infinity beyond me, beyond a circuit of exchange that begins and ends with me. The conclusion of giving is infinity.
THE CONCLUSION
Because the origin is lost and the conclusion is infinity, the beginning and the end exchange places and they do so always at the same time. Eternity, the time of origins, and infinity, the time of the finite, cross each other in creation. The crux of this crossing is the fixing of obligation. Obligation, one to the other, is the linchpin that holds it all together. Obligation itself is nothing. Obligation is the essence of alterity.
ALTERITY AND OBLIGATION TO AND FOR THE OTHER
Alterity, the otherness of the other, gives obligation. Alterity, in the face of the disappearance of God, now traces itself across the face of the other person. Divine inversion has now produced a work of human inversion, a reversal of each ego's relationship to itself, so that now each self, having lost its ties to the origin, finds itself only other and utterly alien. It is this for it is only what it is by being other and not itself. This is by no means a Hegelian self-difference that calls out to identity, but an absolute difference, an identity whose identity is difference. Now, when all identity is difference, the self cannot lodge within itself, finding there a restful space of introspection. One finds, now, that the inner is the outer. The other, no longer transcendent, is the seat of the psyche. Therefore now, expenditure, which is the gift of creation, has no other direction than toward the other. This obligation to the other is the first and most absolute responsibility and, since this predeeds eternally any conscious decision, it simply is. It is the body of matter itself.
IM/POSSIBILITY
An absolute gratuity is, of course, impossible, which is exactly why it becomes a matter of utmost urgency. It becomes a matter of the thinking of an actual historical crossing between time and eternity, which is a truly historical or cultural or social thinking. This "exigency," as Levinas would say, is the im/possibility of being otherwise. As our time may be described as one of diversity, pluralism or difference, the thinking of this exigency for or toward the other or the different is the thinking of an ontology that privileges plurality under the sign of ethical responsibility. Obligation to and for the other is now the very reason for being. This is the novel element of our age, what some call the postmodern. It is a profound mistake to understand postmodernity as merely a literary production - an invention. Rather its essence is one of critique and ethical critique at that, a critique that charges - according to my translation - save the lost and preserve the different. This is no longer merely theory but the only possibility of contemporary virtue. That it will be met with suspicion only gives voice to the deep skepticism of our age, a skepticism or material secularity that defines our culture but is simultaneously necessary as the foundation for a radical critique of the metaphysics and ontology of the past. The term "postmodernity" has been criticized for, some say, referring to nothing other than modernity. But, at the same time, reverberating in the extremity of the prefix "post," there is an intuition of or hope for something radically new, beyond the possible. And this im/possible day is dawning. (Piece {as is} by Eric C. Helmer.) http://home.att.net/~alterity/Layers/lev.html
It approaches 10am. Richard came by to fix weed-wacker. Diane and Ernesto are ready to have breakfast at Corner Shop.
Clarity and charity are lovely gift in all forms and times appearing.
Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space. Space has a name but no form. It’s not something you can pick up or put down. And you certainly can’t grab it. Beyond this mind you’ll never see a buddha. The buddha is a product of your mind. Why look for a buddha beyond this mind?
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
Why look for anything?
Reading Inner Christianity by Richard Smoley at Thursday Evening Conversation we wonder whether anything with an outside is rife with secrets. Anything with an outside has initiations, attitudes of exclusion, rules for membership, special handshakes winks and nods, and tends to evaluate or judge who is worthy to belong. In the circle there is a preference for something not so controlled. Do we not see what is right here before us because something has veiled our understanding? Would an innocent heart and open mind allow the revelation of what is both ground and groundlessness of existence – a revelation full of grace?
It seems there are three phases of the traditional problem of God’s face, stated, “No one sees the face of God and lives.”
1. If we can’t look at God,
2. The potential is we can we look as God --
3. And so, what is this/now/here looking?
From Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas our thinking has sought to solve dualistically the distinctive fluctuation between potential and act. Contemporary psychology phrases this as – If we can only actualize our potential we’d be better. happier people. A subtle dualism pervades this thinking about act and potency. Could we rather say that every act or actual thing or actual being is its own power? The very fact of being is the very fact of the power inherent within being.
By saying power is undifferentiated from the locus of power, something odd occurs. Intention and act remain inseparable. Thus when I say, “I am writing” the reality is that writing is what I am. Or “I am walking” doesn’t mean that walking is an activity some separate “I” is doing, rather, walking is what I am.
Still, there is a paradox here. If power resides in what is being done, there is a diminished emphasis on who is doing the doing. What we in the west call the “I” or “ego” or “self” begins to be de-emphasized. A curious presence emerges. Something whole begins to come into view. Surprisingly there is less an “I” seeing what is there than there is mere seeing what is there.
We are “impotens” i.e. Latin for “feeble, powerless, not master of.” At the same time the adverbial “impotenter” means “weakly, intemperately, passionately.”
“Impotentia” also means “poverty.” Poverty emerges as its own presence. It no longer exclusively means penniless. Poverty emerges through undifferentiated realization as mere seeing, unadorned and liberated to be itself.
(Birdsong brings first light inviting dawn.)
With dawn is passing spirited morning breeze. Everyone and everything has received the passing invitation of this night. I dreamt of two friends from 40 years ago, Bob Coles and Steve Hoder. It is a Franciscan dream and we are saying goodbye. When I wake I continue shallow breathing from sleep, remembering Bob was killed on a Mexico beach 25 years ago. I’d not seen him for years. At his wake there was a video. He circled a large studio as one running laps through a modern dance the purpose of which was not immediately evident. Abrupt endings extend mourning. Goodbyes are waved in lieu of fond recollection. Everyone and everything once met remains not other than us.
Yesterday at the shop Robert and Su.Sane spoke spiritedly of gift and giving. A refreshing interchange focused on new spirit of understanding art and poetry – artful and poetic life. They feel the Tibetan Buddhist monks living in the area are “to be given to” – as if their very being was “to be given to” and everyone is exposed to this new appreciation of being they embody. Of course the “Family/Clarity” Robert and Su.Sane share with their household is a genre of gift which is itself infectious.
Their insight, spoken by Su.Sane, applies to Meetingbrook – “Take the large, put it into the small, you get immense.” It is example of mere-seeing. In our case, Dogen & Francis Hermitage at Bald & Ragged Mountain enters Meetingbrook at Camden Harbor. The prevailing intuition is donation. We will cultivate a presence that blurs the dualistic separation of monastery and marketplace. The primary charism is hospitality, generosity, and communal concretion of contemplation, conversation, and correspondence. This, now, and here.
When we intuit the place as one of collation and recollection we begin to experience how deep listening and loving speech become invitatory prelude for finding one’s original voice.
We become marked people. When we enter the prayer or dream of authentic selfless giving we are marked with the reception of that authenticity. Sandra called it grace some Wednesdays ago, an approaching maturity.
Here ‘mark’ is seen as something conspicuous serving as guide for travelers. Mark (in Webster’s dictionary) is also said to be “one of the bits of leather or colored bunting placed on a sounding line at intervals,” a lasting or strong impression of the attention each individual finds on their way,
Ed stopped by yesterday. He stood outside in sunlight and recited a quote he’d read in a book on Intention by Wayne Dyer:
When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all the animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.” (An ancient Hasidic saying)
It might have been in Heidegger I read the line: Life is gift and not recompense.
This morning I find it in Levinas.
The legacy of the life and work of Emmanuel Levinas [1905-1995] is the teaching of an absolute gratuity.
ABSOLUTE GRATUITY
To give, to offer up, to sacrifice - of one's substance, of one's time, of oneself - without the expectation of recompense. It is only absolute when it takes place without expectation.
ABSOLUTE
That is, an absolute gratuity is an infinite expenditure. It signifies, most particularly, an inverse economy, a total inversion that is most properly thought when it is first construed as a divine inversion, a total expenditure beginning with God's own self-absolution.
GOD'S OWN SELF-ABSOLUTION
Absolute gratuity is the significance of God. From the beginning God gives up God's self absolutely, hence there is creation. God's utter expenditure is, at the same time, incarnation. The flesh of God is the world. Therefore, whenever anything is, it is by way of participation in the event of God's creative sacrifice. Being is sacrifice, primordially. The event of being is therefore most properly called a gift and, paradoxically, a gift that has been abandoned by its giver, God having withdrawn into the gift itself. Creation will therefore find it impossible to return to its origin.
THE ORIGIN
Whenever the origination of a gift is lost, the directionality of generosity is always toward-the-other. This means, in particular, that my generosity must seek an infinity beyond me, beyond a circuit of exchange that begins and ends with me. The conclusion of giving is infinity.
THE CONCLUSION
Because the origin is lost and the conclusion is infinity, the beginning and the end exchange places and they do so always at the same time. Eternity, the time of origins, and infinity, the time of the finite, cross each other in creation. The crux of this crossing is the fixing of obligation. Obligation, one to the other, is the linchpin that holds it all together. Obligation itself is nothing. Obligation is the essence of alterity.
ALTERITY AND OBLIGATION TO AND FOR THE OTHER
Alterity, the otherness of the other, gives obligation. Alterity, in the face of the disappearance of God, now traces itself across the face of the other person. Divine inversion has now produced a work of human inversion, a reversal of each ego's relationship to itself, so that now each self, having lost its ties to the origin, finds itself only other and utterly alien. It is this for it is only what it is by being other and not itself. This is by no means a Hegelian self-difference that calls out to identity, but an absolute difference, an identity whose identity is difference. Now, when all identity is difference, the self cannot lodge within itself, finding there a restful space of introspection. One finds, now, that the inner is the outer. The other, no longer transcendent, is the seat of the psyche. Therefore now, expenditure, which is the gift of creation, has no other direction than toward the other. This obligation to the other is the first and most absolute responsibility and, since this predeeds eternally any conscious decision, it simply is. It is the body of matter itself.
IM/POSSIBILITY
An absolute gratuity is, of course, impossible, which is exactly why it becomes a matter of utmost urgency. It becomes a matter of the thinking of an actual historical crossing between time and eternity, which is a truly historical or cultural or social thinking. This "exigency," as Levinas would say, is the im/possibility of being otherwise. As our time may be described as one of diversity, pluralism or difference, the thinking of this exigency for or toward the other or the different is the thinking of an ontology that privileges plurality under the sign of ethical responsibility. Obligation to and for the other is now the very reason for being. This is the novel element of our age, what some call the postmodern. It is a profound mistake to understand postmodernity as merely a literary production - an invention. Rather its essence is one of critique and ethical critique at that, a critique that charges - according to my translation - save the lost and preserve the different. This is no longer merely theory but the only possibility of contemporary virtue. That it will be met with suspicion only gives voice to the deep skepticism of our age, a skepticism or material secularity that defines our culture but is simultaneously necessary as the foundation for a radical critique of the metaphysics and ontology of the past. The term "postmodernity" has been criticized for, some say, referring to nothing other than modernity. But, at the same time, reverberating in the extremity of the prefix "post," there is an intuition of or hope for something radically new, beyond the possible. And this im/possible day is dawning. (Piece {as is} by Eric C. Helmer.) http://home.att.net/~alterity/Layers/lev.html
It approaches 10am. Richard came by to fix weed-wacker. Diane and Ernesto are ready to have breakfast at Corner Shop.
Clarity and charity are lovely gift in all forms and times appearing.
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Out of sight out of mind?
To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible. The reality of your own self-nature, the absence of cause and effect, is what's meant by mind. Your mind is nirvana. You might think you can find a buddha or enlightenment somewhere beyond the mind, but such a place doesn't exist.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
If we put Jesus and Buddha out of mind, where do they go? If the mind they have abandoned is left on its own with nothing in it, does it even exist? And if the Christ and the Bodhisattva are beyond mind, do I have to completely not think when I look at the poster we took home from Vermont symposium in 1984 entitled "The Christ and the Bodhisattva"?
And Jesus cried out and said, "He who believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And he who sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. If any one hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. He who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge; the word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own authority; the Father who sent me has himself given me commandment what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has bidden me".
(John 12:44 - 50 )
Can we be 'judged' by word? (Maybe.) Especially if body is manifestation of word which is expression of thought which itself is concretion of spirit which emanates from mind which is staging ground for the reality of God -- then -- it is easier to consider word looking around and saying, "This is this and that is that, and thus have I spoken, thus I have judged."
If something is what it is, can we say it is good? If something is not what it is, dare we say it is not good?
Or, is each thing exactly what it is and every body exactly what they are no matter what we think?
Student: Roshi, I may put my hands together in gassho and someone may look at me and say, "Oh, that is good gassho," but there maybe a cold heart behind it.
Suzuki Roshi: Cold heart or warm heart is not the question.
Student: Is it still good gassho?
Suzuki Roshi: Perfect!
(-- from Discussion with Suzuki Roshi, in July 2000 Berkeley Zen Center Newsletter.)
David S. from Belfast used to say "Perfect!" a lot over the years he attended Wednesday Evening Conversations. Last night Tuesday Evening Conversation was just that, and Joanie, Lloyd, John, Saskia, Richard, and I had fun with Shunryu Suzuki's words as they unjudged us around the fireplace.
We had a mind to allow one another all the room needed to find manifestation, expression, concretion, and emanation in the midst of what was there.
And what was not there? Such a place doesn't exist.
There you are!
Bidden. Invited.
What a sight!
To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible. The reality of your own self-nature, the absence of cause and effect, is what's meant by mind. Your mind is nirvana. You might think you can find a buddha or enlightenment somewhere beyond the mind, but such a place doesn't exist.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
If we put Jesus and Buddha out of mind, where do they go? If the mind they have abandoned is left on its own with nothing in it, does it even exist? And if the Christ and the Bodhisattva are beyond mind, do I have to completely not think when I look at the poster we took home from Vermont symposium in 1984 entitled "The Christ and the Bodhisattva"?
And Jesus cried out and said, "He who believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And he who sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. If any one hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. He who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge; the word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own authority; the Father who sent me has himself given me commandment what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has bidden me".
(John 12:44 - 50 )
Can we be 'judged' by word? (Maybe.) Especially if body is manifestation of word which is expression of thought which itself is concretion of spirit which emanates from mind which is staging ground for the reality of God -- then -- it is easier to consider word looking around and saying, "This is this and that is that, and thus have I spoken, thus I have judged."
If something is what it is, can we say it is good? If something is not what it is, dare we say it is not good?
Or, is each thing exactly what it is and every body exactly what they are no matter what we think?
Student: Roshi, I may put my hands together in gassho and someone may look at me and say, "Oh, that is good gassho," but there maybe a cold heart behind it.
Suzuki Roshi: Cold heart or warm heart is not the question.
Student: Is it still good gassho?
Suzuki Roshi: Perfect!
(-- from Discussion with Suzuki Roshi, in July 2000 Berkeley Zen Center Newsletter.)
David S. from Belfast used to say "Perfect!" a lot over the years he attended Wednesday Evening Conversations. Last night Tuesday Evening Conversation was just that, and Joanie, Lloyd, John, Saskia, Richard, and I had fun with Shunryu Suzuki's words as they unjudged us around the fireplace.
We had a mind to allow one another all the room needed to find manifestation, expression, concretion, and emanation in the midst of what was there.
And what was not there? Such a place doesn't exist.
There you are!
Bidden. Invited.
What a sight!
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
How far beyond?
We forget where we are going. We do this when we refuse to acknowledge where we are.
So our Lord’s sheep will finally reach their grazing ground where all who follow him in simplicity of heart will feed on the green pastures of eternity. These pastures are the spiritual joys of heaven. There the elect look upon the face of God with unclouded vision and feast at the banquet of life for ever more.
Beloved brothers [and sisters], let us set out for these pastures where we shall keep joyful festival with so many of our fellow citizens. May the thought of their happiness urge us on! Let us stir up our hearts, rekindle our faith, and long eagerly for what heaven has in store for us. To love thus is to be already on our way. No matter what obstacles we encounter, we must not allow them to turn us aside from the joy of that heavenly feast. Anyone who is determined to reach his destination is not deterred by the roughness of the road that leads to it. Nor must we allow the charm of success to seduce us, or we shall be like a foolish traveller who is so distracted by the pleasant meadows through which he is passing that he forgets where he is going.
(--From a homily on the Gospels by Saint Gregory the Great, pope; Office of Readings, 4th Sunday of Easter)
Tonight, steady rain. In the past two days soft green emergence of sprig leaf on edge of branch the mountain length.
Metamorphosis
Always it happens when we are not there--
The tree leaps up alive into the air,
Small open parasols of Chinese green
Wave on each twig. But who has ever seen
The latch sprung, the bud as it burst?
Spring always manages to get there first.
Lovers of wind, who will have been aware
Of a faint stirring in the empty air,
Look up one day through a dissolving screen
To find no star, but this multiplied green,
Shadow on shadow, singing sweet and clear.
Listen, lovers of wind, the leaves are here!
Poem: "Metamorphosis," by May Sarton, from Collected Poems 1930-1993.)
“We arrive at something,” Roethke said in a poem, “without knowing why.”
Psalms, Chapter 73
1. How good God is to the upright, the Lord, to those who are clean of heart!
2. But, as for me, I lost my balance; my feet all but slipped,
3. Because I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
4. For they suffer no pain; their bodies are healthy and sleek.
5. They are free of the burdens of life; they are not afflicted like others.
6. Thus pride adorns them as a necklace; violence clothes them as a robe.
7. Out of their stupidity comes sin; evil thoughts flood their hearts.
8. They scoff and spout their malice; from on high they utter threats.
9. They set their mouths against the heavens, their tongues roam the earth.
10. So my people turn to them and drink deeply of their words.
11. They say, "Does God really know?" "Does the Most High have any knowledge?"
12. Such, then, are the wicked, always carefree, increasing their wealth.
13. Is it in vain that I have kept my heart clean, washed my hands in innocence?
14. For I am afflicted day after day, chastised every morning.
15. Had I thought, "I will speak as they do," I would have betrayed your people.
16. Though I tried to understand all this, it was too difficult for me,
17. Till I entered the sanctuary of God and came to understand their end.
18. You set them, indeed, on a slippery road; you hurl them down to ruin.
19. How suddenly they are devastated; undone by disasters forever!
20. They are like a dream after waking, Lord, dismissed like shadows when you arise.
21. Since my heart was embittered and my soul deeply wounded,
22. I was stupid and could not understand; I was like a brute beast in your presence.
23. Yet I am always with you; you take hold of my right hand.
24. With your counsel you guide me, and at the end receive me with honor.
25. Whom else have I in the heavens? None beside you delights me on earth.
26. Though my flesh and my heart fail, God is the rock of my heart, my portion forever.
27. But those who are far from you perish; you destroy those unfaithful to you.
28. As for me, to be near God is my good, to make the Lord GOD my refuge. I shall declare all your works in the gates of daughter Zion.
(in New American Bible)
The mistake we make is thinking anyone has a lock on the mind of God. The equal mistake is imagining nature has gone any further than coming close to mere beginning to disclose her mystery. The tragic mistake is the perennial imposition of personal or narrow psychological interpretation on the enormous and immeasurable realm of human existence.
Garrison Keillor writes that yesterday, the 3rd, was the birthday of Niccolo Machiavelli, born in Florence, Italy (1469)
Machiavelli's main point in The Prince is that the most important task for a ruler is to keep his country secure and peaceful, using whatever means possible. Sometimes, this means doing things that most people would consider immoral, but Machiavelli said that that's just part of the job.
He was cynical about human nature: he argued that it was natural for most people to be selfish, and so a great ruler has to accept that he lives in an immoral world. He wrote, "A man who might want to make a show of goodness in all things necessarily comes to ruin among so many who are not good. Because of this it is necessary for a prince, wanting to maintain himself, to learn how to be able to be not good and to use this and not use it according to necessity."
He also argued that most people value their property more than the lives of their friends and family, and so in some situations it's okay for rulers to kill their citizens, but it's almost never okay to take away their property. He wrote, "Men must be either pampered or crushed, because they can get revenge for small injuries, but not for grievous ones. So any injury a prince does a man should be of a kind where there is no fear of revenge."
(in "The Writer's Almanac", by Garrison Keillor, May 3, 2004)
As a friend often says, “It is difficult trying to overcome the human.” I'd, rather, prefer to see the difficulty as proprietary opinion claiming sovereignty over depth consciousness. The ‘human’ is a particular mode of intelligence. It is not the whole of intelligence. It is, however, an intelligence adept at protecting and preserving its own interests. It is a combative intelligence that seeks to win – (however ‘win’ is understood) -- the real or perceived contests it engages in, the benefit of which is usually some prize, or power, or reward available only to the winner.
Nature seems a different intelligence. The majestic mystery of nature bursts forth in Midcoast Maine these days. Winter behind us. Now is flowering time. The intelligence of nature stands still within itself -- where it is, as it is.
Meetingbrook remains uncertain. No inspiration resolves. It is a change of season. Nothing special, nothing comprehensible emerges. What has occurred?
MME MARTIN: Quelle a la morale?
LE POMPIER: C'est a vous de la trouver.
(Ionesco, La Cantatrice Chauve)
So much feels absurd. The shop is absurd. The war is absurd. The bickering, posturing, and attacks on each other by presidential incumbent and candidate – this too is absurd.
And then I realize most of my life is absurd.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus tried to diagnose the human condition in a world of shattered beliefs:
"A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is a irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity." (Camus, p.18)
"Absurd" originally means "out of harmony," in a musical context. Hence its dictionary definition: "out of harmony with reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical." In common usage in the English-speaking world, "absurd" may simply mean "ridiculous." But this is not the sense in which Camus means the word, and in which it is used when we speak of the Theatre of the Absurd. In an essay on Kafka, Ionesco defined his understanding of the term as follows: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose.... Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless."
(Eugene Ionesco, "Dans les Armes de la Ville") (p.xix, in The Theatre of the Absurd, by Martin Esslin, c.1961)
Luckily (or not) I was steeped in existential philosophy, theatrical, and political expressions of absurdity during formative years. Poetry and spirituality seemed the only sanity. I wonder -- with what are we out of harmony? With what imperceptible sphere of being are we attempting to find harmony?
When we forget where we are going, when we feel lost, we can at least look, and try to see where we are.
Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
(Poem “Lost” by David Wagoner)
We lose our way. We wander in circles -- first wide, then narrow. Artists we know say it is going to the large to return to the small. This time it feels like plunging through the open earth. What is the consequence? What retrieval is possible in this unknowing return?
But what about things that we love?
We see sun shining on the ground, and the dry dust,
And at home the forests deep with shadows,
And smoke flowering from the rooftops,
Peacefully, near the ancient crowning towers.
These signs of daily life are good,
Even when by contrast something divine
Has injured the soul.
For snow sparkles on an alpine meadow,
Half-covered with green, signifying generosity
Of spirit in all situations, like flowers in May —
A wanderer walks up above on a high trail
And speaks irritably to a friend about a cross
He sees in the distance, set for someone
Who died on the path... what does it mean?
(from poem "Mnemosyne" —Third version, by Friedrich Hölderlin)
Is the function of sighted cross for us to ask…"What does it mean?"
We turn around and find ourselves, uncertainly, where we are. Near origin.
For whatever dwells
Close to its origin is loath to leave the place
(from “The Journey” by Holderlin)
We listen, nesciently. The sound of rain through the night – the sound of it saying: stand still; dwell close to origin. C'est a vous de la trouver.
In the encircling swirl of absurdity, we are lovers of the wind.
It moves where it will. And who knows?
Beyond me.
We forget where we are going. We do this when we refuse to acknowledge where we are.
So our Lord’s sheep will finally reach their grazing ground where all who follow him in simplicity of heart will feed on the green pastures of eternity. These pastures are the spiritual joys of heaven. There the elect look upon the face of God with unclouded vision and feast at the banquet of life for ever more.
Beloved brothers [and sisters], let us set out for these pastures where we shall keep joyful festival with so many of our fellow citizens. May the thought of their happiness urge us on! Let us stir up our hearts, rekindle our faith, and long eagerly for what heaven has in store for us. To love thus is to be already on our way. No matter what obstacles we encounter, we must not allow them to turn us aside from the joy of that heavenly feast. Anyone who is determined to reach his destination is not deterred by the roughness of the road that leads to it. Nor must we allow the charm of success to seduce us, or we shall be like a foolish traveller who is so distracted by the pleasant meadows through which he is passing that he forgets where he is going.
(--From a homily on the Gospels by Saint Gregory the Great, pope; Office of Readings, 4th Sunday of Easter)
Tonight, steady rain. In the past two days soft green emergence of sprig leaf on edge of branch the mountain length.
Metamorphosis
Always it happens when we are not there--
The tree leaps up alive into the air,
Small open parasols of Chinese green
Wave on each twig. But who has ever seen
The latch sprung, the bud as it burst?
Spring always manages to get there first.
Lovers of wind, who will have been aware
Of a faint stirring in the empty air,
Look up one day through a dissolving screen
To find no star, but this multiplied green,
Shadow on shadow, singing sweet and clear.
Listen, lovers of wind, the leaves are here!
Poem: "Metamorphosis," by May Sarton, from Collected Poems 1930-1993.)
“We arrive at something,” Roethke said in a poem, “without knowing why.”
Psalms, Chapter 73
1. How good God is to the upright, the Lord, to those who are clean of heart!
2. But, as for me, I lost my balance; my feet all but slipped,
3. Because I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
4. For they suffer no pain; their bodies are healthy and sleek.
5. They are free of the burdens of life; they are not afflicted like others.
6. Thus pride adorns them as a necklace; violence clothes them as a robe.
7. Out of their stupidity comes sin; evil thoughts flood their hearts.
8. They scoff and spout their malice; from on high they utter threats.
9. They set their mouths against the heavens, their tongues roam the earth.
10. So my people turn to them and drink deeply of their words.
11. They say, "Does God really know?" "Does the Most High have any knowledge?"
12. Such, then, are the wicked, always carefree, increasing their wealth.
13. Is it in vain that I have kept my heart clean, washed my hands in innocence?
14. For I am afflicted day after day, chastised every morning.
15. Had I thought, "I will speak as they do," I would have betrayed your people.
16. Though I tried to understand all this, it was too difficult for me,
17. Till I entered the sanctuary of God and came to understand their end.
18. You set them, indeed, on a slippery road; you hurl them down to ruin.
19. How suddenly they are devastated; undone by disasters forever!
20. They are like a dream after waking, Lord, dismissed like shadows when you arise.
21. Since my heart was embittered and my soul deeply wounded,
22. I was stupid and could not understand; I was like a brute beast in your presence.
23. Yet I am always with you; you take hold of my right hand.
24. With your counsel you guide me, and at the end receive me with honor.
25. Whom else have I in the heavens? None beside you delights me on earth.
26. Though my flesh and my heart fail, God is the rock of my heart, my portion forever.
27. But those who are far from you perish; you destroy those unfaithful to you.
28. As for me, to be near God is my good, to make the Lord GOD my refuge. I shall declare all your works in the gates of daughter Zion.
(in New American Bible)
The mistake we make is thinking anyone has a lock on the mind of God. The equal mistake is imagining nature has gone any further than coming close to mere beginning to disclose her mystery. The tragic mistake is the perennial imposition of personal or narrow psychological interpretation on the enormous and immeasurable realm of human existence.
Garrison Keillor writes that yesterday, the 3rd, was the birthday of Niccolo Machiavelli, born in Florence, Italy (1469)
Machiavelli's main point in The Prince is that the most important task for a ruler is to keep his country secure and peaceful, using whatever means possible. Sometimes, this means doing things that most people would consider immoral, but Machiavelli said that that's just part of the job.
He was cynical about human nature: he argued that it was natural for most people to be selfish, and so a great ruler has to accept that he lives in an immoral world. He wrote, "A man who might want to make a show of goodness in all things necessarily comes to ruin among so many who are not good. Because of this it is necessary for a prince, wanting to maintain himself, to learn how to be able to be not good and to use this and not use it according to necessity."
He also argued that most people value their property more than the lives of their friends and family, and so in some situations it's okay for rulers to kill their citizens, but it's almost never okay to take away their property. He wrote, "Men must be either pampered or crushed, because they can get revenge for small injuries, but not for grievous ones. So any injury a prince does a man should be of a kind where there is no fear of revenge."
(in "The Writer's Almanac", by Garrison Keillor, May 3, 2004)
As a friend often says, “It is difficult trying to overcome the human.” I'd, rather, prefer to see the difficulty as proprietary opinion claiming sovereignty over depth consciousness. The ‘human’ is a particular mode of intelligence. It is not the whole of intelligence. It is, however, an intelligence adept at protecting and preserving its own interests. It is a combative intelligence that seeks to win – (however ‘win’ is understood) -- the real or perceived contests it engages in, the benefit of which is usually some prize, or power, or reward available only to the winner.
Nature seems a different intelligence. The majestic mystery of nature bursts forth in Midcoast Maine these days. Winter behind us. Now is flowering time. The intelligence of nature stands still within itself -- where it is, as it is.
Meetingbrook remains uncertain. No inspiration resolves. It is a change of season. Nothing special, nothing comprehensible emerges. What has occurred?
MME MARTIN: Quelle a la morale?
LE POMPIER: C'est a vous de la trouver.
(Ionesco, La Cantatrice Chauve)
So much feels absurd. The shop is absurd. The war is absurd. The bickering, posturing, and attacks on each other by presidential incumbent and candidate – this too is absurd.
And then I realize most of my life is absurd.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus tried to diagnose the human condition in a world of shattered beliefs:
"A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is a irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity." (Camus, p.18)
"Absurd" originally means "out of harmony," in a musical context. Hence its dictionary definition: "out of harmony with reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical." In common usage in the English-speaking world, "absurd" may simply mean "ridiculous." But this is not the sense in which Camus means the word, and in which it is used when we speak of the Theatre of the Absurd. In an essay on Kafka, Ionesco defined his understanding of the term as follows: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose.... Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless."
(Eugene Ionesco, "Dans les Armes de la Ville") (p.xix, in The Theatre of the Absurd, by Martin Esslin, c.1961)
Luckily (or not) I was steeped in existential philosophy, theatrical, and political expressions of absurdity during formative years. Poetry and spirituality seemed the only sanity. I wonder -- with what are we out of harmony? With what imperceptible sphere of being are we attempting to find harmony?
When we forget where we are going, when we feel lost, we can at least look, and try to see where we are.
Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
(Poem “Lost” by David Wagoner)
We lose our way. We wander in circles -- first wide, then narrow. Artists we know say it is going to the large to return to the small. This time it feels like plunging through the open earth. What is the consequence? What retrieval is possible in this unknowing return?
But what about things that we love?
We see sun shining on the ground, and the dry dust,
And at home the forests deep with shadows,
And smoke flowering from the rooftops,
Peacefully, near the ancient crowning towers.
These signs of daily life are good,
Even when by contrast something divine
Has injured the soul.
For snow sparkles on an alpine meadow,
Half-covered with green, signifying generosity
Of spirit in all situations, like flowers in May —
A wanderer walks up above on a high trail
And speaks irritably to a friend about a cross
He sees in the distance, set for someone
Who died on the path... what does it mean?
(from poem "Mnemosyne" —Third version, by Friedrich Hölderlin)
Is the function of sighted cross for us to ask…"What does it mean?"
We turn around and find ourselves, uncertainly, where we are. Near origin.
For whatever dwells
Close to its origin is loath to leave the place
(from “The Journey” by Holderlin)
We listen, nesciently. The sound of rain through the night – the sound of it saying: stand still; dwell close to origin. C'est a vous de la trouver.
In the encircling swirl of absurdity, we are lovers of the wind.
It moves where it will. And who knows?
Beyond me.
Sunday, May 02, 2004
Note: Shop back open Tuesday.
...............
I attend the hermitage of the alone.
Where is it?
Where are you right now?
Now, in this world and in other worlds, in India and China, buddha ancestors equally carry the buddha seal and teach the practice of sitting immersed in steadfastness. Although circumstances may vary in a thousand ways, whole-heartedly practice Zen, giving yourself fully to the way. Why give up the sitting platform of your own house and wander uselessly in the dust of a remote land? Once a wrong step is taken, you depart from the way.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
This season of solitude -- shop not open, no trips away, staying close in -- is a lovely simplicity.
"I and the Father are one," says Jesus, according to John 10:30.
It's odd that modern culture sees 'one' as a lonely number. Preferring twos, threes, and millions to the bare simple sanctuary of one -- our world runs in circles trying to gather and accumulate more and even more as a sign of wealth, success, popularity, and importance.
(God) did not make the heavens in his image, nor the moon, the sun, the beauty of the stars, nor anything else which you can see in the created universe. YOU ALONE are made in the likeness of that nature which surpasses all understanding; YOU ALONE are a similitude of eternal beauty, a receptacle of happiness, an image of the true light; and if YOU look up to him, you will become what he is, imitating him who shines within you, whose glory is reflected in your purity. Nothing in all creation can equal your grandeur. All the heavens can fit into the palm of God's hand; the earth and the sea are measured in the hollow of his hand. And though he is so great that he can grasp all creation in his palm, you can wholly embrace him; he dwells within you, nor is he cramped as he pervades your entire being (...).
(Gregory of Nyssa, "Commentarius in Canticum Canticorum, Oratio 2," 807-8. Quoted in Jean Danielou S.J., From Glory to Glory, P.162-3, quoted within R.C. Zaehner, Evolution in Religion, pp.65-6)
You're the one!
Among all beings, each being is the one and only. This realization is free of solipsism and selfishness, free of me and mine and shoot to kill those trespassing my private property. It is not an easy understanding -- the one that sees 'what is,' even the great 'What Is,' as sole loving reality (soul-loving reality?).
Once awareness sees through the lies and deceits of propaganda and advertisement, once the undivided is understood, once the individual wakes up to true home -- all is blessed, all is full of joy, all is surrendered to and disappears from contentious view.
May all be happy and safe! May all beings gain inner joy - all living beings whatever ... seen or unseen. Dwelling afar or near, born or yet unborn - may all beings gain inner joy. May no beings deceive another, nor in any way scorn another, nor, in anger or ill-will, desire another's sorrow. As mother cares for her son, her only son, all her days, so toward all things living a man's mind should be all-embracing. Friendliness for the whole world, all-embracing, he should raise his mind above, below, and across, unhindered, free from hate and ill-will.
(Sutta Nipata, The Buddhist Tradition, PP.37-38) (http://www.onegodsite.net/archives.html)
My 'church' this morning is green canoe on blue water under sweet warm sun.
Do not allow the noise of division and justification of divisiveness to insult integrity.
Listen to the lovely sound of what is -- being -- spoken in silence, stillness, and sweet song.
One's breath.
...............
I attend the hermitage of the alone.
Where is it?
Where are you right now?
Now, in this world and in other worlds, in India and China, buddha ancestors equally carry the buddha seal and teach the practice of sitting immersed in steadfastness. Although circumstances may vary in a thousand ways, whole-heartedly practice Zen, giving yourself fully to the way. Why give up the sitting platform of your own house and wander uselessly in the dust of a remote land? Once a wrong step is taken, you depart from the way.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
This season of solitude -- shop not open, no trips away, staying close in -- is a lovely simplicity.
"I and the Father are one," says Jesus, according to John 10:30.
It's odd that modern culture sees 'one' as a lonely number. Preferring twos, threes, and millions to the bare simple sanctuary of one -- our world runs in circles trying to gather and accumulate more and even more as a sign of wealth, success, popularity, and importance.
(God) did not make the heavens in his image, nor the moon, the sun, the beauty of the stars, nor anything else which you can see in the created universe. YOU ALONE are made in the likeness of that nature which surpasses all understanding; YOU ALONE are a similitude of eternal beauty, a receptacle of happiness, an image of the true light; and if YOU look up to him, you will become what he is, imitating him who shines within you, whose glory is reflected in your purity. Nothing in all creation can equal your grandeur. All the heavens can fit into the palm of God's hand; the earth and the sea are measured in the hollow of his hand. And though he is so great that he can grasp all creation in his palm, you can wholly embrace him; he dwells within you, nor is he cramped as he pervades your entire being (...).
(Gregory of Nyssa, "Commentarius in Canticum Canticorum, Oratio 2," 807-8. Quoted in Jean Danielou S.J., From Glory to Glory, P.162-3, quoted within R.C. Zaehner, Evolution in Religion, pp.65-6)
You're the one!
Among all beings, each being is the one and only. This realization is free of solipsism and selfishness, free of me and mine and shoot to kill those trespassing my private property. It is not an easy understanding -- the one that sees 'what is,' even the great 'What Is,' as sole loving reality (soul-loving reality?).
Once awareness sees through the lies and deceits of propaganda and advertisement, once the undivided is understood, once the individual wakes up to true home -- all is blessed, all is full of joy, all is surrendered to and disappears from contentious view.
May all be happy and safe! May all beings gain inner joy - all living beings whatever ... seen or unseen. Dwelling afar or near, born or yet unborn - may all beings gain inner joy. May no beings deceive another, nor in any way scorn another, nor, in anger or ill-will, desire another's sorrow. As mother cares for her son, her only son, all her days, so toward all things living a man's mind should be all-embracing. Friendliness for the whole world, all-embracing, he should raise his mind above, below, and across, unhindered, free from hate and ill-will.
(Sutta Nipata, The Buddhist Tradition, PP.37-38) (http://www.onegodsite.net/archives.html)
My 'church' this morning is green canoe on blue water under sweet warm sun.
Do not allow the noise of division and justification of divisiveness to insult integrity.
Listen to the lovely sound of what is -- being -- spoken in silence, stillness, and sweet song.
One's breath.
Saturday, May 01, 2004
Note: The bookshop/bakery is closed today. No conversations. We will re-open Tuesday.
...................
Two ways of hearing Sam Manning's oft-spoken words:
1.
"It is too nice to be inside today."
2.
"It is,
too,
nice --
to be,
inside-today."
Charlie and Llamar, Saskia and I read Kunitz's "Reflection" in prison conversation Friday.
Part of it goes:
Poems would be easy if our heads weren't so full of the day's clatter. The task is to get through to the other side, where we can hear the deep rhythms that connect us with the stars and the tides.
I keep trying to improve my controls over language, so that I won't have to tell lies. And I keep reading the masters, because they infect me with human possibility.
Our poems can never satisfy us, since they are at best a diminished echo of a song that maybe once or twice in a lifetime we've heard and keep trying to recall.
(In The Collected Poems, by Stanley Kunitz)
We are talking about 'being,' 'existence,' and what Kunitz calls 'the pool of energy at the core of one's existence.' Charlie says at one point, "It makes sense that it is what it is, but it doesn't say what it is."
We speak about what everything in existence shares in the deep unknown. Llamar says, "I think we give God too much credit and too much blame."
Saskia speaks about conversation as the way we invite one another both into and out from that common core of energy so many names try to capture.
Camus assumes Sisyphus to be happy -- even in the unrelenting and absurd tasks he must perform. How so? Because he is alive, able to reflect on his very being, and capable in the pauses to delight in the fact of it all.
If God is nothing else, there is nothing else to do but what we are doing, nothing else to be but what we are in our profoundly ordinary existence.
The Varaha-Upanishad (II.18-23) states:
The eye of gnosis beholds the all-pervasive Being-Awareness-Bliss The eye of nescience does not see the Resplendent, just as a blind person [does not see] the sun. That Absolute, characterized by truth and awareness (prajnana), is awareness alone. It is only by thus fully knowing the Absolute that a mortal becomes immortal. Upon knowing for oneself that Bliss of the Absolute, which is non-dual, devoid of opposites, filled with truth and awareness, one does not fear any form wherever. The position of the knowers of the Absolute is that clearly nothing exists but the Absolute alone, which is pure Awareness (cit), all-pervading, eternal, full, blissful, and imperishable. For the ignorant person the world is inundated with misery, whereas for the sage it is full of Bliss. To a blind person the world is dark, whereas for the clear-sighted it is bright.
(--from p.190, in Wholeness or Transcendence? Ancient Lessons For The Emerging Global Civilization, by Georg Feuerstein, c.1992)
Being-Awareness-Bliss, {Sat-Chit-Ananda}, like Sam's sentence above, can be read several ways. Llamar uses the word 'existence' -- to stand out from what-is. So too, 'insistence' -- to stand in what is. Thus, to say, "I must insist," takes on new meaning -- namely, "I must stand within -- who, what, and where -- I am."
What part of "I Am" do we not yet see?
Look there.
Look here.
Speak now!
...................
Two ways of hearing Sam Manning's oft-spoken words:
1.
"It is too nice to be inside today."
2.
"It is,
too,
nice --
to be,
inside-today."
Charlie and Llamar, Saskia and I read Kunitz's "Reflection" in prison conversation Friday.
Part of it goes:
Poems would be easy if our heads weren't so full of the day's clatter. The task is to get through to the other side, where we can hear the deep rhythms that connect us with the stars and the tides.
I keep trying to improve my controls over language, so that I won't have to tell lies. And I keep reading the masters, because they infect me with human possibility.
Our poems can never satisfy us, since they are at best a diminished echo of a song that maybe once or twice in a lifetime we've heard and keep trying to recall.
(In The Collected Poems, by Stanley Kunitz)
We are talking about 'being,' 'existence,' and what Kunitz calls 'the pool of energy at the core of one's existence.' Charlie says at one point, "It makes sense that it is what it is, but it doesn't say what it is."
We speak about what everything in existence shares in the deep unknown. Llamar says, "I think we give God too much credit and too much blame."
Saskia speaks about conversation as the way we invite one another both into and out from that common core of energy so many names try to capture.
Camus assumes Sisyphus to be happy -- even in the unrelenting and absurd tasks he must perform. How so? Because he is alive, able to reflect on his very being, and capable in the pauses to delight in the fact of it all.
If God is nothing else, there is nothing else to do but what we are doing, nothing else to be but what we are in our profoundly ordinary existence.
The Varaha-Upanishad (II.18-23) states:
The eye of gnosis beholds the all-pervasive Being-Awareness-Bliss The eye of nescience does not see the Resplendent, just as a blind person [does not see] the sun. That Absolute, characterized by truth and awareness (prajnana), is awareness alone. It is only by thus fully knowing the Absolute that a mortal becomes immortal. Upon knowing for oneself that Bliss of the Absolute, which is non-dual, devoid of opposites, filled with truth and awareness, one does not fear any form wherever. The position of the knowers of the Absolute is that clearly nothing exists but the Absolute alone, which is pure Awareness (cit), all-pervading, eternal, full, blissful, and imperishable. For the ignorant person the world is inundated with misery, whereas for the sage it is full of Bliss. To a blind person the world is dark, whereas for the clear-sighted it is bright.
(--from p.190, in Wholeness or Transcendence? Ancient Lessons For The Emerging Global Civilization, by Georg Feuerstein, c.1992)
Being-Awareness-Bliss, {Sat-Chit-Ananda}, like Sam's sentence above, can be read several ways. Llamar uses the word 'existence' -- to stand out from what-is. So too, 'insistence' -- to stand in what is. Thus, to say, "I must insist," takes on new meaning -- namely, "I must stand within -- who, what, and where -- I am."
What part of "I Am" do we not yet see?
Look there.
Look here.
Speak now!
What do we hear? What do we see?
A TV news show late Friday night read the names and showed the faces of most of the 725 Americans killed so far in the war with Iraq.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(-- ending lines of poem "Epilogue" by Robert Lowell)
How it becomes controversial to read names, show faces, or pictures of coffins returning from Iraq, is not easy to decipher. Do we dishonor the dead by acknowledging their deaths?
I listened for my name.
To drink up the ocean and turn a mountain
Upside down is an ordinary affair for a Zennist.
Zen seekers should sit on the site of universal
Enlightenment right in the midst of all the thorny
Situations in life,
And recognize their original face while mixing
With the ordinary world.
( - Huanglong)
I watched for my face.
It is with great honor and deep sorrow that name was heard and face seen.
Yours was there too.
The war ends with our recognition.
Come home.
A TV news show late Friday night read the names and showed the faces of most of the 725 Americans killed so far in the war with Iraq.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(-- ending lines of poem "Epilogue" by Robert Lowell)
How it becomes controversial to read names, show faces, or pictures of coffins returning from Iraq, is not easy to decipher. Do we dishonor the dead by acknowledging their deaths?
I listened for my name.
To drink up the ocean and turn a mountain
Upside down is an ordinary affair for a Zennist.
Zen seekers should sit on the site of universal
Enlightenment right in the midst of all the thorny
Situations in life,
And recognize their original face while mixing
With the ordinary world.
( - Huanglong)
I watched for my face.
It is with great honor and deep sorrow that name was heard and face seen.
Yours was there too.
The war ends with our recognition.
Come home.
Friday, April 30, 2004
Note: Shop is closed today. No conversation this evening.
..............
Nor is disease what we think it is.
"When ordinary and sacred
Feelings are forgotten,
Being is revealed, real and eternal.
Just detach from arbitrary involvements,
And you awaken to Being as it is."
Although these are the leavings
Of an ancient Zen master,
There are many people who
Cannot partake of them.
I've lost considerable respect
Just by bringing them up.
Can anyone discern? If you can,
You will recognize the disease of "Buddhism"
And the disease of "Zen."
- Huanglong
Is there a way out of war?
Death trampled our Lord underfoot, but he in his turn treated death as a highroad for his own feet. He submitted to it, enduring it willingly, because by this means he would be able to destroy death in spite of itself. Death had its own way when our Lord went out from Jerusalem carrying his cross; but when by a loud cry from that cross he summoned the dead from the underworld, death was powerless to prevent it.
Death slew him by means of the body which he had assumed, but that same body proved to be the weapon with which he conquered death. Concealed beneath the cloak of his manhood, his godhead engaged death in combat; but in slaying our Lord, death itself was slain. It was able to kill natural human life, but was itself killed by the life that is above the nature of man.
Death could not devour our Lord unless he possessed a body, neither could hell swallow him up unless he bore our flesh; and so he came in search of a chariot in which to ride to the underworld. This chariot was the body which he received from the Virgin; in it he invaded death's fortress, broke open its strong-room and scattered all its treasure.
(From a sermon by Saint Ephrem, deacon, from Office of Readings, Friday, Third Week of Easter)
This meditation on our way to prision today.
Father,
by the love of your Spirit,
may we who have experienced
the grace of the Lord's resurrection
rise to the newness of life in joy.
(Prayer completing Lauds)
Being is revealed, real and eternal.
And we awaken to Being as it is.
The newness!
..............
Nor is disease what we think it is.
"When ordinary and sacred
Feelings are forgotten,
Being is revealed, real and eternal.
Just detach from arbitrary involvements,
And you awaken to Being as it is."
Although these are the leavings
Of an ancient Zen master,
There are many people who
Cannot partake of them.
I've lost considerable respect
Just by bringing them up.
Can anyone discern? If you can,
You will recognize the disease of "Buddhism"
And the disease of "Zen."
- Huanglong
Is there a way out of war?
Death trampled our Lord underfoot, but he in his turn treated death as a highroad for his own feet. He submitted to it, enduring it willingly, because by this means he would be able to destroy death in spite of itself. Death had its own way when our Lord went out from Jerusalem carrying his cross; but when by a loud cry from that cross he summoned the dead from the underworld, death was powerless to prevent it.
Death slew him by means of the body which he had assumed, but that same body proved to be the weapon with which he conquered death. Concealed beneath the cloak of his manhood, his godhead engaged death in combat; but in slaying our Lord, death itself was slain. It was able to kill natural human life, but was itself killed by the life that is above the nature of man.
Death could not devour our Lord unless he possessed a body, neither could hell swallow him up unless he bore our flesh; and so he came in search of a chariot in which to ride to the underworld. This chariot was the body which he received from the Virgin; in it he invaded death's fortress, broke open its strong-room and scattered all its treasure.
(From a sermon by Saint Ephrem, deacon, from Office of Readings, Friday, Third Week of Easter)
This meditation on our way to prision today.
Father,
by the love of your Spirit,
may we who have experienced
the grace of the Lord's resurrection
rise to the newness of life in joy.
(Prayer completing Lauds)
Being is revealed, real and eternal.
And we awaken to Being as it is.
The newness!
Thursday, April 29, 2004
War feeds secrets with falsity.
Secrets are better not kept.
The secret of war is that it doesn't care. It doesn't matter for war who lives, who suffers, or who dies. The only interest war has is to keep itself and its manipulators fed with the force of blood, secrets, and fear.
Secrets are best unveiled.
The sixth ancestor of Zen
Said to someone who had
Just been awakened,
"What I tell you is not a secret.
The secret is in you."
Another Zen master said to a companion,
"Everything flows from your own heart."
- Fayan
When the heart opens, the flow of learning appears, and secrets disappear.
Jesus said, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught by God?'. Every one who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. (John 6:44 -45)
God-life is flowing learning that yearns for opening to dissolve secrets -- and appear in full sight. This inner reality arrives at outer reality. At the thin place of arrival, inner and outer glance across to the edge of the other, and disappear in the glimpse. Edges gone, hearts inform one another.
God-life is another name for silent-seeing. Intuitive grasp is another expression for open heart.
War is blind. Men who advocate violence, who believe in war, seldom come to see the dissolution of secrets. These men live in secrets. Secrets not only mute those who live in them, secrets also maim the spirits of those who hold them tight.
Keepers of secrets are kept by them.
We long for another life. We long to open and release what no longer needs to remain hidden.
Silently, free captor and captive.
God's life is silently seeing.
Be this unveiling.
Fast from war.
Breakfast peace.
Secrets are better not kept.
The secret of war is that it doesn't care. It doesn't matter for war who lives, who suffers, or who dies. The only interest war has is to keep itself and its manipulators fed with the force of blood, secrets, and fear.
Secrets are best unveiled.
The sixth ancestor of Zen
Said to someone who had
Just been awakened,
"What I tell you is not a secret.
The secret is in you."
Another Zen master said to a companion,
"Everything flows from your own heart."
- Fayan
When the heart opens, the flow of learning appears, and secrets disappear.
Jesus said, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught by God?'. Every one who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. (John 6:44 -45)
God-life is flowing learning that yearns for opening to dissolve secrets -- and appear in full sight. This inner reality arrives at outer reality. At the thin place of arrival, inner and outer glance across to the edge of the other, and disappear in the glimpse. Edges gone, hearts inform one another.
God-life is another name for silent-seeing. Intuitive grasp is another expression for open heart.
War is blind. Men who advocate violence, who believe in war, seldom come to see the dissolution of secrets. These men live in secrets. Secrets not only mute those who live in them, secrets also maim the spirits of those who hold them tight.
Keepers of secrets are kept by them.
We long for another life. We long to open and release what no longer needs to remain hidden.
Silently, free captor and captive.
God's life is silently seeing.
Be this unveiling.
Fast from war.
Breakfast peace.
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
See our way through?
It is worth contemplating that God is never other than where God dwells.
Where does God dwell? God dwells in the void, where nothing other is.
It's not that we are nothing -- it's that the void, emptiness, is where God dwells, and we would rather God dwelt elsewhere. The notion -- the very idea of the void, is off-putting. We want to fill that void with something, anything, in order to escape the fear engendered by the void. A French philosopher said, "All sins are attempts to fill voids." (Simone Weil, d.1943).
When something is not there, can we learn to let it not be there? If we cannot allow such an absence of what is not there, then can we simply become exactly who we are in that place we find nothing?
In the sabbath sanctuary, God and self meet, and the self rests and listens in the hushed silence, free of human discourse and filled with God's presence. Holiness is the consummation and counterbalance of all activity, human and divine. Sabbath is the temporal context of Israel's "imitatio Dei." As the approbation of "goodness" denotes creation's ecological integrity, in which all life is preserved and promoted before God, holiness points to an ecology of restoration, in which the integrity of community is formed and reformed before God. (p.387, in The Ethos of the Cosmos, The Genesis of Moral Imagination in the Bible, by William P. Brown, c.1999)
To contemplate the forming and reforming of community is not an easy contemplation. Nor is the meditation an easy one that suggests were we to dwell in community with one another, something might disappear. What something? The something that impedes convergence into union might have to disappear. We each have a sense what that 'something' might be for us.
If we were to dwell in community with God, something would disappear. Which something in this case? The something we have tried to insert into the void, namely anything that is not (our) true self. Is genuine community the absence of everything which is not God?
In other words -- Is there only God in the void?
Do we avoid God by attempting to place something there in order to make God other than the presence of our true self?
Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (Psalm 90: 1-2, NRSV)
The Hebrew Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad, opens with words translated as either "Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord alone," or, "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one." A more colloquial saying of it might be, "Only God is, nothing else is!"
Is God nothing else? And is 'nothing else' the same as or different from 'everything'? Many have attempted to place God in the word 'everything' or the phrase 'in everything' -- as in the phrasing "God is everything," or, "God is in everything," or "Everything is in God." Is our desire to say 'everything' a greater comfort than the phrasing 'nothing else'?
The Takbeer, the Islamic prayer, "Allahu Akbar min kullisay," means, "God is greater than everything."
'Namaste' is the most popular Indian greeting. It means "You and I are one. I bow down, honor and worship the divine within you." The Hindu greeting Namaste, loosely means "the divine in me recognizes the divine in you" -- or, divine sees divine. This might be rendered -- As it is, so it sees.
If God is nothing else, then community with God is the absence of what is not God. In that void of unity there is nothing we can call our own.
What is is what is. Life is life. I am I. God is God. You are you. This is this. And that's that. The words 'same' or 'different' do not apply nor do they compute. No matter how many people tell you how you measure up against someone else or some standard they have in mind, there is no such measurement to be made.
If you want to perceive
And understand objectively,
Just don?t allow yourself
To be confused by people.
Detach from whatever you
Find inside or outside yourself.
Detach from religion,
Tradition, and society,
And only then will you
Attain liberation.
When you are not
Entangled in things,
You pass through
Freely to autonomy.
- Linji (d. 867)
'Autonomy' -- (from Gk auto=self, or one's own; and nomos=law) -- means not just 'a law unto oneself,' but the law itself, or standing within itself.
To stand within itself -- for each to be one's own dwelling place -- is to live alone with the Alone.
Not for nothing -- but for nothing else -- do we dwell here cherishing community.
Where God dwells is God dwelling.
As it is, so it sees.
Passing through.
Freely dwelling.
It is worth contemplating that God is never other than where God dwells.
Where does God dwell? God dwells in the void, where nothing other is.
It's not that we are nothing -- it's that the void, emptiness, is where God dwells, and we would rather God dwelt elsewhere. The notion -- the very idea of the void, is off-putting. We want to fill that void with something, anything, in order to escape the fear engendered by the void. A French philosopher said, "All sins are attempts to fill voids." (Simone Weil, d.1943).
When something is not there, can we learn to let it not be there? If we cannot allow such an absence of what is not there, then can we simply become exactly who we are in that place we find nothing?
In the sabbath sanctuary, God and self meet, and the self rests and listens in the hushed silence, free of human discourse and filled with God's presence. Holiness is the consummation and counterbalance of all activity, human and divine. Sabbath is the temporal context of Israel's "imitatio Dei." As the approbation of "goodness" denotes creation's ecological integrity, in which all life is preserved and promoted before God, holiness points to an ecology of restoration, in which the integrity of community is formed and reformed before God. (p.387, in The Ethos of the Cosmos, The Genesis of Moral Imagination in the Bible, by William P. Brown, c.1999)
To contemplate the forming and reforming of community is not an easy contemplation. Nor is the meditation an easy one that suggests were we to dwell in community with one another, something might disappear. What something? The something that impedes convergence into union might have to disappear. We each have a sense what that 'something' might be for us.
If we were to dwell in community with God, something would disappear. Which something in this case? The something we have tried to insert into the void, namely anything that is not (our) true self. Is genuine community the absence of everything which is not God?
In other words -- Is there only God in the void?
Do we avoid God by attempting to place something there in order to make God other than the presence of our true self?
Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (Psalm 90: 1-2, NRSV)
The Hebrew Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad, opens with words translated as either "Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord alone," or, "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one." A more colloquial saying of it might be, "Only God is, nothing else is!"
Is God nothing else? And is 'nothing else' the same as or different from 'everything'? Many have attempted to place God in the word 'everything' or the phrase 'in everything' -- as in the phrasing "God is everything," or, "God is in everything," or "Everything is in God." Is our desire to say 'everything' a greater comfort than the phrasing 'nothing else'?
The Takbeer, the Islamic prayer, "Allahu Akbar min kullisay," means, "God is greater than everything."
'Namaste' is the most popular Indian greeting. It means "You and I are one. I bow down, honor and worship the divine within you." The Hindu greeting Namaste, loosely means "the divine in me recognizes the divine in you" -- or, divine sees divine. This might be rendered -- As it is, so it sees.
If God is nothing else, then community with God is the absence of what is not God. In that void of unity there is nothing we can call our own.
What is is what is. Life is life. I am I. God is God. You are you. This is this. And that's that. The words 'same' or 'different' do not apply nor do they compute. No matter how many people tell you how you measure up against someone else or some standard they have in mind, there is no such measurement to be made.
If you want to perceive
And understand objectively,
Just don?t allow yourself
To be confused by people.
Detach from whatever you
Find inside or outside yourself.
Detach from religion,
Tradition, and society,
And only then will you
Attain liberation.
When you are not
Entangled in things,
You pass through
Freely to autonomy.
- Linji (d. 867)
'Autonomy' -- (from Gk auto=self, or one's own; and nomos=law) -- means not just 'a law unto oneself,' but the law itself, or standing within itself.
To stand within itself -- for each to be one's own dwelling place -- is to live alone with the Alone.
Not for nothing -- but for nothing else -- do we dwell here cherishing community.
Where God dwells is God dwelling.
As it is, so it sees.
Passing through.
Freely dwelling.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Who cries these days?
"For the tear is an intellectual thing." (William Blake)
Just put thoughts to rest;
Don't seek outwardly anymore.
When things come up,
Then give them your attention;
Just trust what is functional
In you at present,
And you have nothing
To be concerned about.
- Linji (d. 867)
John Joseph was raking leaves with Margarite in Port Clyde. We saw him as we drove by. We stopped. He had his toy tractor in his small hand. The three and a half year old and the sitter in her seventies stood and talked with us and two dogs as fog gathered off shore for dusky assault. Poppa arrived. Margarite and I waved to the rest off in the station wagon and talked a spell on the front lawn. After fifty-six years of marriage five years ago her husband died. "Park here whenever you want," she said. "I will," I told her.
Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole -- that is the consummation of the endeavor of art.
At the core of one's existence is a pool of energy that has nothing to do with personal identity, but that falls away from self, blends into the natural universe. Man has only a bit part to play in the whole marvelous show of creation. (Stanley Kunitz, "Reflections" -- in preface to his own The Collected Poems, c.2000)
We have a few days left. Some write and wonder where we are with our decision. Kevin wants to make pizza. What do we think? It is late as we watch for deer on winding roads. A red squirrel ran under tire mid-afternoon. We go back a little while later. Blood from mouth. Lifeless. I lift him to side of road, bow, and return to car.
At my age, after you're done -- or ruefully think you're done -- with the nagging anxieties and complications of your youth, what is there left for you to confront but the great simplicities? I never tire of bird-song and sky and weather. I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world. (Kunitz at age 95, in "Reflections" in Collected Poems)
If it is true that anything kept too long goes wrong -- (a truism for contents of refrigerator) -- then, only an emptying out of the contents of mind will serve us right.
Kunitz; All power does not flow from the top. Since I've thought a good deal about this subject, I'd like to add some further reflections:
-- To live as a poet in this culture is the aesthetic equivalent of a major political statement.
-- Beware of manifestos: they are the death of poetry.
-- A poet is a citizen, like any other. One of the obligations of citizenship is participation in the political process.
And:
Kunitz: I do not subscribe to any organized religion, yet I think of myself as a religious person, and that's independent of any kind of faith or practice, or belief in God. While I was still in college I fastened on the phrase "the holiness of the heart's affections" in one of Keats's letters, and it has stayed with me ever since. To me, that's religion. "I am certain of nothing," he wrote, "but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination." Though I am in no danger of conversion, the poets you mention as early influences--Herbert, Donne, Blake, Hopkins--still speak to me and light the way.
(Interview: Stanley Kunitz. By Stanley Kunitz and By Mark Wunderlich. From http://www.poets.org/poems/prose.cfm?45442B7C000C04050876)
If we have nothing, what is there to be concerned about?
If we are fools, functionally, we trust what is present in us.
Knock knock!
Come in!
(No joke.)
Trust the heart's affections and the truth of imagination.
Light the way!
"For the tear is an intellectual thing." (William Blake)
Just put thoughts to rest;
Don't seek outwardly anymore.
When things come up,
Then give them your attention;
Just trust what is functional
In you at present,
And you have nothing
To be concerned about.
- Linji (d. 867)
John Joseph was raking leaves with Margarite in Port Clyde. We saw him as we drove by. We stopped. He had his toy tractor in his small hand. The three and a half year old and the sitter in her seventies stood and talked with us and two dogs as fog gathered off shore for dusky assault. Poppa arrived. Margarite and I waved to the rest off in the station wagon and talked a spell on the front lawn. After fifty-six years of marriage five years ago her husband died. "Park here whenever you want," she said. "I will," I told her.
Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole -- that is the consummation of the endeavor of art.
At the core of one's existence is a pool of energy that has nothing to do with personal identity, but that falls away from self, blends into the natural universe. Man has only a bit part to play in the whole marvelous show of creation. (Stanley Kunitz, "Reflections" -- in preface to his own The Collected Poems, c.2000)
We have a few days left. Some write and wonder where we are with our decision. Kevin wants to make pizza. What do we think? It is late as we watch for deer on winding roads. A red squirrel ran under tire mid-afternoon. We go back a little while later. Blood from mouth. Lifeless. I lift him to side of road, bow, and return to car.
At my age, after you're done -- or ruefully think you're done -- with the nagging anxieties and complications of your youth, what is there left for you to confront but the great simplicities? I never tire of bird-song and sky and weather. I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world. (Kunitz at age 95, in "Reflections" in Collected Poems)
If it is true that anything kept too long goes wrong -- (a truism for contents of refrigerator) -- then, only an emptying out of the contents of mind will serve us right.
Kunitz; All power does not flow from the top. Since I've thought a good deal about this subject, I'd like to add some further reflections:
-- To live as a poet in this culture is the aesthetic equivalent of a major political statement.
-- Beware of manifestos: they are the death of poetry.
-- A poet is a citizen, like any other. One of the obligations of citizenship is participation in the political process.
And:
Kunitz: I do not subscribe to any organized religion, yet I think of myself as a religious person, and that's independent of any kind of faith or practice, or belief in God. While I was still in college I fastened on the phrase "the holiness of the heart's affections" in one of Keats's letters, and it has stayed with me ever since. To me, that's religion. "I am certain of nothing," he wrote, "but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination." Though I am in no danger of conversion, the poets you mention as early influences--Herbert, Donne, Blake, Hopkins--still speak to me and light the way.
(Interview: Stanley Kunitz. By Stanley Kunitz and By Mark Wunderlich. From http://www.poets.org/poems/prose.cfm?45442B7C000C04050876)
If we have nothing, what is there to be concerned about?
If we are fools, functionally, we trust what is present in us.
Knock knock!
Come in!
(No joke.)
Trust the heart's affections and the truth of imagination.
Light the way!
Monday, April 26, 2004
Tears through the hurtling wind.
"In a dark time, the eye begins to see," wrote poet Theodore Roethke. It is a dark time. Are we beginning to see?
It seems very hard for some people--especially those in high places, but also those striving for high places--to grasp a simple truth: The United States does not belong in Iraq. It is not our country. Our presence is causing death, suffering, destruction, and so large sections of the population are rising against us. Our military is then reacting with indiscriminate force, bombing and shooting and rounding up people simply on "suspicion."
(--from, "What Do We Do Now?" by Howard Zinn, published in the June, 2004 issue of "The Progressive ")
The dark time is shadowy chronicle of mistrust and disdain. Hussein had it for Iraqi's. Bush and Cheney have it for Americans and other peoples drawn into the lightless mind that wages war and deception.
Reinhold Niebuhr said, The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.
In America, for the next six months, we are distracted by the appearance of a campaign to choose a president for the next four years. It is, we are told, a serious time. One man, some say, has a frightening resemblance to a religious fanatic intent on Armageddon messianism. With him, others say, we have a strong decisive leader who will rid the world of evil and evildoers.
The campaign is a distraction. The real focus of attention is needed elsewhere.
The subtlety of seeing and hearing
Transcends mere colors and sounds.
The whole affair functions
Without leaving traces,
And mirrors without obscurations.
Very naturally mind and dharmas
Emerge and harmonize.
- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091-1157)
It is a fool's seduction that tries to replicate itself by copulating with itself. When I was a kid in the city the strongest words of putdown heard were, "Go screw yourself!" (Words have been interchanged to protect the innocent). To screw yourself, (so went the putdown) seemed the ultimate stupidity and degradation. A replica of yourself (the inference went) would be the worst outcome imaginable.
The United States is not making love to the rest of the world in hopes of fathering freedom. It is, rather, something more like date-rape. First you ply Iraq with intoxicants and toxins, and then you have your way with it because you can. Of course, we first interchange words, not calling it what it is, but substituting words like "liberation," "democracy," and "the will of the Almighty."
Enthusiastic but foolish followers of fundamentalist muscular Christian mythology swoon over the rhetoric of divine missionary messianism preached by Mr. Bush and his ministers. These Christians forget the recent pageantry of their Holy Week remembrance when Jesus, as God's very communication-in-flesh, took the peaceful route of healing and forgiveness to absurd lengths by going through the delusion of the world for power and control, by allowing his own demise at the hands of regal rulers and resolute religionists. Perhaps for contemporary savants Jesus was not the God they can be.
On the next day the people who remained on the other side of the sea saw that there had been only one boat there, and that Jesus had not entered the boat with his disciples, but that his disciples had gone away alone. (from John 6)
Did Jesus miss the boat? Or, did his disciples then and now get on the boat without him because they knew the way better than he? The confusion about where Jesus is, where he goes, and where he will show up baffles and crazes many.
What to do about the rest of the words of John in this scene:
When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come here?" Jesus answered them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labour for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you; for on him has God the Father set his seal". (John 6)
The food that perishes in this dark time is the illusory seduction and use of force and might to extract benefit for ourself. Whether it is rape, assault, hostile takeover, or invasion -- it is a food benefit that rots and spoils. In this metaphor the Son of man is not a replica of arrogant ambition masked as righteous revenge and ransoming from evil. In this metaphor the Son of man is not killing Iraqis, not stealing their resources, not lying about intentions, not taking the presence of God for personal possession, not planning and coveting the elimination of neighbor's goods and belongings because their bad behavior nullifies any rights they do have, not remembering that holiness is indigenous to the indecipherable emergence of God in ways beyond us.
What is the Son of humankind in this metaphor? What is it that endures to eternal life? The answer is as plain as our very face. The answer resides in the very air we breathe. Right now, right where we are -- do we see the face before us? Can we hear the still, silent voice saying: To these, the least. Whatever is done to anyone is done to me. See me, only me, every me. I am not replicable. Each man, woman, and child is my residing place. Everywhere, without exception, without end.
Roethke, in the poem, asks:
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance?
This country's circumstance of 9/11 has had consequence to its noble soul. The madness embarked upon by its leaders is advancing on devastation. It is at odds with the deeper wisdom it needs to transcend the current darkness.
The madness must cease.
Can ordinary men and women see their way through? Which self, which country do we wish to live through?
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
(final lines, poem "In a Dark Time," by Theodore Roethke)
Can we see our way through and out of fear?
Pray the tearing wind!
"In a dark time, the eye begins to see," wrote poet Theodore Roethke. It is a dark time. Are we beginning to see?
It seems very hard for some people--especially those in high places, but also those striving for high places--to grasp a simple truth: The United States does not belong in Iraq. It is not our country. Our presence is causing death, suffering, destruction, and so large sections of the population are rising against us. Our military is then reacting with indiscriminate force, bombing and shooting and rounding up people simply on "suspicion."
(--from, "What Do We Do Now?" by Howard Zinn, published in the June, 2004 issue of "The Progressive ")
The dark time is shadowy chronicle of mistrust and disdain. Hussein had it for Iraqi's. Bush and Cheney have it for Americans and other peoples drawn into the lightless mind that wages war and deception.
Reinhold Niebuhr said, The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.
In America, for the next six months, we are distracted by the appearance of a campaign to choose a president for the next four years. It is, we are told, a serious time. One man, some say, has a frightening resemblance to a religious fanatic intent on Armageddon messianism. With him, others say, we have a strong decisive leader who will rid the world of evil and evildoers.
The campaign is a distraction. The real focus of attention is needed elsewhere.
The subtlety of seeing and hearing
Transcends mere colors and sounds.
The whole affair functions
Without leaving traces,
And mirrors without obscurations.
Very naturally mind and dharmas
Emerge and harmonize.
- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091-1157)
It is a fool's seduction that tries to replicate itself by copulating with itself. When I was a kid in the city the strongest words of putdown heard were, "Go screw yourself!" (Words have been interchanged to protect the innocent). To screw yourself, (so went the putdown) seemed the ultimate stupidity and degradation. A replica of yourself (the inference went) would be the worst outcome imaginable.
The United States is not making love to the rest of the world in hopes of fathering freedom. It is, rather, something more like date-rape. First you ply Iraq with intoxicants and toxins, and then you have your way with it because you can. Of course, we first interchange words, not calling it what it is, but substituting words like "liberation," "democracy," and "the will of the Almighty."
Enthusiastic but foolish followers of fundamentalist muscular Christian mythology swoon over the rhetoric of divine missionary messianism preached by Mr. Bush and his ministers. These Christians forget the recent pageantry of their Holy Week remembrance when Jesus, as God's very communication-in-flesh, took the peaceful route of healing and forgiveness to absurd lengths by going through the delusion of the world for power and control, by allowing his own demise at the hands of regal rulers and resolute religionists. Perhaps for contemporary savants Jesus was not the God they can be.
On the next day the people who remained on the other side of the sea saw that there had been only one boat there, and that Jesus had not entered the boat with his disciples, but that his disciples had gone away alone. (from John 6)
Did Jesus miss the boat? Or, did his disciples then and now get on the boat without him because they knew the way better than he? The confusion about where Jesus is, where he goes, and where he will show up baffles and crazes many.
What to do about the rest of the words of John in this scene:
When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come here?" Jesus answered them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labour for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you; for on him has God the Father set his seal". (John 6)
The food that perishes in this dark time is the illusory seduction and use of force and might to extract benefit for ourself. Whether it is rape, assault, hostile takeover, or invasion -- it is a food benefit that rots and spoils. In this metaphor the Son of man is not a replica of arrogant ambition masked as righteous revenge and ransoming from evil. In this metaphor the Son of man is not killing Iraqis, not stealing their resources, not lying about intentions, not taking the presence of God for personal possession, not planning and coveting the elimination of neighbor's goods and belongings because their bad behavior nullifies any rights they do have, not remembering that holiness is indigenous to the indecipherable emergence of God in ways beyond us.
What is the Son of humankind in this metaphor? What is it that endures to eternal life? The answer is as plain as our very face. The answer resides in the very air we breathe. Right now, right where we are -- do we see the face before us? Can we hear the still, silent voice saying: To these, the least. Whatever is done to anyone is done to me. See me, only me, every me. I am not replicable. Each man, woman, and child is my residing place. Everywhere, without exception, without end.
Roethke, in the poem, asks:
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance?
This country's circumstance of 9/11 has had consequence to its noble soul. The madness embarked upon by its leaders is advancing on devastation. It is at odds with the deeper wisdom it needs to transcend the current darkness.
The madness must cease.
Can ordinary men and women see their way through? Which self, which country do we wish to live through?
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
(final lines, poem "In a Dark Time," by Theodore Roethke)
Can we see our way through and out of fear?
Pray the tearing wind!
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Who's really keeping time?
At 39 minutes 58 seconds into the 40 minute sitting Sunday Evening, a sudden sound -- the falling to wood of the mechanical floor sweeper -- thumped sharply in the loft of meditation cabin. Startle! I invited the bell to sound. We walked for 10 minutes before chanting the Heart Sutra.
Whose hand sounds the echo replacing time?
I climb these hills
As if walking on air
Body too light to fall
Bamboo staff resting
Against a great stone
Torn cloak snapping in the wind
A lone bird soars the azure depths
Far distant springs reflected in its eye
Carefree, singing a timeless song
Gone, on a journey without end.
- Shih-shu (17th century-early 18th)
Earlier along mud-hardening path up blueberry fields on Appleton Ridge we hiked in sun and wind through words about our work these eight years. At round table back in hermitage another's words before chicken soup was ladled.
Perhaps the one question that we don't ask often enough is "What do I have to offer?" We are so intent on analyzing what we can get from a job or an occupation that we rarely consider the sense of satisfaction that comes from offering our unique contribution. We could take the question "What do I have to offer?" as a koan, leaving the world of mental analysis in order to enter into the experience of not knowing. Simply raising the question and focusing on the gestalt of the moment may not bring any immediate answers. Nor is it particularly pleasant, since it brings us once again face-to-face with the experience of no ground. However, there is something about being in the moment that is compelling, real, and far removed from the confused spinning of the mental world.
(p.96, in Being Zen, Bringing Meditation to Life, by Ezra Bayda, c.2002)
How much of our work life do we picture and story as failure? Even our work as member of a family? Maybe a glorious failure? Perhaps mere preface for the real work in life.
We often forget what our real job -- our life job -- is. Our life job is to become awake to who we really are. When we remember this, we will be less likely to separate our work from our practice. We'll begin to understand that it's possible to practice with everything we encounter, even at work. (Bayda, p.98)
Work practice. We dwell in the between. We carry on in the vacant space between work and practice. The more and closer we look we glimpse who we are in the betweens of ordinary existence. We occupy -- (to use the descriptives of the Iona Community's founder George McLeod) -- the slash/space between work/worship, prayer/politics, secular/sacred, and whatever additional dyad that we include in our descriptive attempts to locate ourselves.
We cannot keep out of the middle of everything. We can only pretend to move off to one side or another. Time terrifies us into seeking refuge at extremes where we arrive and find not refuge, but desolation. Our home is in the midst.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
(from poem "Burnt Norton" by T.S. Eliot)
We cannot keep time. It is already gone. Snow that fell on frozen ground has melted into softened mud which hardens dry with sun and wind near thin thicket of blueberry stem.
Other echoes inhabit our stillness facing the broad ridge silence beckoning.
Some unseen gracious hand sounds our way.
Shall we?
Follow?
At 39 minutes 58 seconds into the 40 minute sitting Sunday Evening, a sudden sound -- the falling to wood of the mechanical floor sweeper -- thumped sharply in the loft of meditation cabin. Startle! I invited the bell to sound. We walked for 10 minutes before chanting the Heart Sutra.
Whose hand sounds the echo replacing time?
I climb these hills
As if walking on air
Body too light to fall
Bamboo staff resting
Against a great stone
Torn cloak snapping in the wind
A lone bird soars the azure depths
Far distant springs reflected in its eye
Carefree, singing a timeless song
Gone, on a journey without end.
- Shih-shu (17th century-early 18th)
Earlier along mud-hardening path up blueberry fields on Appleton Ridge we hiked in sun and wind through words about our work these eight years. At round table back in hermitage another's words before chicken soup was ladled.
Perhaps the one question that we don't ask often enough is "What do I have to offer?" We are so intent on analyzing what we can get from a job or an occupation that we rarely consider the sense of satisfaction that comes from offering our unique contribution. We could take the question "What do I have to offer?" as a koan, leaving the world of mental analysis in order to enter into the experience of not knowing. Simply raising the question and focusing on the gestalt of the moment may not bring any immediate answers. Nor is it particularly pleasant, since it brings us once again face-to-face with the experience of no ground. However, there is something about being in the moment that is compelling, real, and far removed from the confused spinning of the mental world.
(p.96, in Being Zen, Bringing Meditation to Life, by Ezra Bayda, c.2002)
How much of our work life do we picture and story as failure? Even our work as member of a family? Maybe a glorious failure? Perhaps mere preface for the real work in life.
We often forget what our real job -- our life job -- is. Our life job is to become awake to who we really are. When we remember this, we will be less likely to separate our work from our practice. We'll begin to understand that it's possible to practice with everything we encounter, even at work. (Bayda, p.98)
Work practice. We dwell in the between. We carry on in the vacant space between work and practice. The more and closer we look we glimpse who we are in the betweens of ordinary existence. We occupy -- (to use the descriptives of the Iona Community's founder George McLeod) -- the slash/space between work/worship, prayer/politics, secular/sacred, and whatever additional dyad that we include in our descriptive attempts to locate ourselves.
We cannot keep out of the middle of everything. We can only pretend to move off to one side or another. Time terrifies us into seeking refuge at extremes where we arrive and find not refuge, but desolation. Our home is in the midst.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
(from poem "Burnt Norton" by T.S. Eliot)
We cannot keep time. It is already gone. Snow that fell on frozen ground has melted into softened mud which hardens dry with sun and wind near thin thicket of blueberry stem.
Other echoes inhabit our stillness facing the broad ridge silence beckoning.
Some unseen gracious hand sounds our way.
Shall we?
Follow?
Saturday, April 24, 2004
Note: Schola Vacation. The bookshop/bakery is closed today. There will be no conversation.
................................
Informing intention and affective attention.
What occurs within and what takes place in the open is isomorphic. (Isomorphic is defined as being of identical or similar form, shape, or structure.)
When it was already dawn, Jesus was standing on the shore; but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus.(from John 21)
We so seldom see what we are looking at.
The knowledge of the pure clean mind
Is as yellow gold to the world;
The spiritual treasury of wisdom is
All in the body and mind.
The uncreated spiritual treasury
Is neither shallow nor deep.
The buddhas and bodhisattvas
Understand this basic mind;
For those who have the chance
To encounter it, it is not
Past, future, or present.
- Fu Shan-hui (487-659)
To live a monastic life in the open calls for a mind without boundaries. The contemplative sees through boundary. To dwell in an open monastery of the ordinary calls for a willingness to practice no-barriers. The hermit in the open is always alone. Everyone met is the one and only, the source and transmission of what we've come to see through.
As Meetingbrook at dawn arrives at the shore, we stumble over something familiar but do not yet realize what it is. "Go fish," says silence to word. We look around. Tide waits to feel the keel of obedience.
Mono: monastics of no other; monastics of now opening.
Cross fertilization: no other is now opening.
We are coming to realize what is at the harbor in early morning calm: no other is informing intention; affective attention is now opening.
We arrive at the unrecognizable.
We wander through what is...
...to follow.
................................
Informing intention and affective attention.
What occurs within and what takes place in the open is isomorphic. (Isomorphic is defined as being of identical or similar form, shape, or structure.)
When it was already dawn, Jesus was standing on the shore; but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus.(from John 21)
We so seldom see what we are looking at.
The knowledge of the pure clean mind
Is as yellow gold to the world;
The spiritual treasury of wisdom is
All in the body and mind.
The uncreated spiritual treasury
Is neither shallow nor deep.
The buddhas and bodhisattvas
Understand this basic mind;
For those who have the chance
To encounter it, it is not
Past, future, or present.
- Fu Shan-hui (487-659)
To live a monastic life in the open calls for a mind without boundaries. The contemplative sees through boundary. To dwell in an open monastery of the ordinary calls for a willingness to practice no-barriers. The hermit in the open is always alone. Everyone met is the one and only, the source and transmission of what we've come to see through.
As Meetingbrook at dawn arrives at the shore, we stumble over something familiar but do not yet realize what it is. "Go fish," says silence to word. We look around. Tide waits to feel the keel of obedience.
Mono: monastics of no other; monastics of now opening.
Cross fertilization: no other is now opening.
We are coming to realize what is at the harbor in early morning calm: no other is informing intention; affective attention is now opening.
We arrive at the unrecognizable.
We wander through what is...
...to follow.
Friday, April 23, 2004
Note: Schola Vacation. The bookshop/bakery is closed today. There will be no conversation.
................
Sudden tears at the playing of Con Te Partiro (Time to say goodbye). It brings to the place when someone dear was nearing death.
Today, finally, pictures of caskets returning from Iraq.
Some say, "They sleep."
Then, this from Puccini's Turandot:
Nessun dorma!
Nessun dorma!
Tu pure, o Principe,
Nella tua fredda stanza guardi le stelle,
Che tremano d'amore e di speranza!
(No-one shall sleep!
No-one shall sleep!
You too, oh Prince,
In your cold room, watch the stars
Trembling with love and hope!)
There is much we do not yet understand. Is it absence of understanding that flows with tears? Yet, if we did understand -- would sorrow and joy bow to each other with the same deep reverence of tears?
Mountain sounds carry a chill wisdom
An upwelling spring whispers subtle tales
Pine breezes stir the fire beneath my tea
Bamboo shadows soak deep into my robe
I grind my ink: clouds scraping across the crags
Copy out a verse: birds settling on branches
As the world rolls right on by
Its every turn tracing out non-action
- Shih-shu (17th century-early 18th)
Would that reverential bow suffice? Is non-action profound surrender to the passage of life through itself to Itself?
It was Teilhard de Chardin who wrote, "If there were no real propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level, indeed, in the molecule itself ~ it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up in the 'hominized' or human form."
Teilhard defines this innate urge to unite as an energy force in his famous Law of complexity-consciousness:
Throughout all time there has been an evolutionary tendency for all matter to unite and become increasingly complex in nature.
With each increase in material complexity, there is a related rise in the consciousness of matter and an even greater urge to unite.
Teilhard called this energy force RADIAL ENERGY and it is this radial energy in matter, this deep urge towards union and completion, which eventually manifests itself as LOVE.
As such, we now have close to 7 billion people on the planet and we have reached a critical state of complexity consciousness with an even greater urge to unite. We have reached THE MOMENT OF TRUTH where we either surrender to this innate urge to unite or perish.
History has conclusively shown that altruism and social cooperation are the deciding factors in the survival of the species ~ not war and survival of the fittest. Richard Leakey in THE BEGINNINGS OF MANKIND argued that there is no evidence that cruelty and hostility are innate in man . On the contrary , all the evidence points to non-violence and social cooperation.
(from Feb 2003 Newsletter, "The Moment of Truth," by Allen Roland, Ph.D (http://allenroland.com/archives/newsletter.php?id=24)
The irony of words -- 'unite' and 'untie' are rearrangement of each other. Is there a clue here? Is it when we continue to perceive 'other' that we untie? Will we unite when our sight becomes clear?
In 1949 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin made an extraordinary remark published after his death in The Future of Man. It is what he called 'the moment of affective attraction'. He was discussing the likelihood that one day we would all together move into a closer union, where our human nature would change for the better, and there would result a 'human totalisation'. The line of reasoning he used, which was in the form of one of his reveries, had in a mere footnote to his main arguments this quite extraordinary statement: 'This totalisation would take place within a field of affective attraction sufficiently intense to influence the human mass as a whole and at the same time'.
Television was in its infancy, commercial computers still ten years away, and the kind of expanded means of intelligence he predicted would become real for millions of us through the Internet in forty years time. But his almost outrageous statement was about a moment or event, which would bring us all together and change us. Could that happen? Has it already started to happen? Did a large proportion of the world's population ever experience something at the same time with such power that it changed how we think and live together?
-- the first NASA photographs of the beautiful, fragile blue and white Earth taken from space, our precious planet which we would never again take for granted and which we might now learn to protect
-- nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phue running naked, burned, crying in terror, from a South Vietnamese air attack
-- the world watching and praying as Apollo 13 limped home, millions wanting the crew to land safely
-- the vast number of people on the planet who experienced the Millennium
-- the 2001 attack on New York's World Trade Center.
Were these moments of affective attraction? Will there be more and then some day a big one? Will it be within the domain of war or love?
(from "The global consciousness project" by Brian Rothery (http://www.philosphere.com/article25.html?&MMN_position=27:2:24)
Kahlil Gibran said, "Ever has it been that love knows not its depth until the hour of separation."
Will we stay asleep?
"No-one" will sleep.
Will 'yes-one' awake?
Trembling.
Good morning!
................
Sudden tears at the playing of Con Te Partiro (Time to say goodbye). It brings to the place when someone dear was nearing death.
Today, finally, pictures of caskets returning from Iraq.
Some say, "They sleep."
Then, this from Puccini's Turandot:
Nessun dorma!
Nessun dorma!
Tu pure, o Principe,
Nella tua fredda stanza guardi le stelle,
Che tremano d'amore e di speranza!
(No-one shall sleep!
No-one shall sleep!
You too, oh Prince,
In your cold room, watch the stars
Trembling with love and hope!)
There is much we do not yet understand. Is it absence of understanding that flows with tears? Yet, if we did understand -- would sorrow and joy bow to each other with the same deep reverence of tears?
Mountain sounds carry a chill wisdom
An upwelling spring whispers subtle tales
Pine breezes stir the fire beneath my tea
Bamboo shadows soak deep into my robe
I grind my ink: clouds scraping across the crags
Copy out a verse: birds settling on branches
As the world rolls right on by
Its every turn tracing out non-action
- Shih-shu (17th century-early 18th)
Would that reverential bow suffice? Is non-action profound surrender to the passage of life through itself to Itself?
It was Teilhard de Chardin who wrote, "If there were no real propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level, indeed, in the molecule itself ~ it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up in the 'hominized' or human form."
Teilhard defines this innate urge to unite as an energy force in his famous Law of complexity-consciousness:
Throughout all time there has been an evolutionary tendency for all matter to unite and become increasingly complex in nature.
With each increase in material complexity, there is a related rise in the consciousness of matter and an even greater urge to unite.
Teilhard called this energy force RADIAL ENERGY and it is this radial energy in matter, this deep urge towards union and completion, which eventually manifests itself as LOVE.
As such, we now have close to 7 billion people on the planet and we have reached a critical state of complexity consciousness with an even greater urge to unite. We have reached THE MOMENT OF TRUTH where we either surrender to this innate urge to unite or perish.
History has conclusively shown that altruism and social cooperation are the deciding factors in the survival of the species ~ not war and survival of the fittest. Richard Leakey in THE BEGINNINGS OF MANKIND argued that there is no evidence that cruelty and hostility are innate in man . On the contrary , all the evidence points to non-violence and social cooperation.
(from Feb 2003 Newsletter, "The Moment of Truth," by Allen Roland, Ph.D (http://allenroland.com/archives/newsletter.php?id=24)
The irony of words -- 'unite' and 'untie' are rearrangement of each other. Is there a clue here? Is it when we continue to perceive 'other' that we untie? Will we unite when our sight becomes clear?
In 1949 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin made an extraordinary remark published after his death in The Future of Man. It is what he called 'the moment of affective attraction'. He was discussing the likelihood that one day we would all together move into a closer union, where our human nature would change for the better, and there would result a 'human totalisation'. The line of reasoning he used, which was in the form of one of his reveries, had in a mere footnote to his main arguments this quite extraordinary statement: 'This totalisation would take place within a field of affective attraction sufficiently intense to influence the human mass as a whole and at the same time'.
Television was in its infancy, commercial computers still ten years away, and the kind of expanded means of intelligence he predicted would become real for millions of us through the Internet in forty years time. But his almost outrageous statement was about a moment or event, which would bring us all together and change us. Could that happen? Has it already started to happen? Did a large proportion of the world's population ever experience something at the same time with such power that it changed how we think and live together?
-- the first NASA photographs of the beautiful, fragile blue and white Earth taken from space, our precious planet which we would never again take for granted and which we might now learn to protect
-- nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phue running naked, burned, crying in terror, from a South Vietnamese air attack
-- the world watching and praying as Apollo 13 limped home, millions wanting the crew to land safely
-- the vast number of people on the planet who experienced the Millennium
-- the 2001 attack on New York's World Trade Center.
Were these moments of affective attraction? Will there be more and then some day a big one? Will it be within the domain of war or love?
(from "The global consciousness project" by Brian Rothery (http://www.philosphere.com/article25.html?&MMN_position=27:2:24)
Kahlil Gibran said, "Ever has it been that love knows not its depth until the hour of separation."
Will we stay asleep?
"No-one" will sleep.
Will 'yes-one' awake?
Trembling.
Good morning!
Thursday, April 22, 2004
Note: Schola Vacation. The bookshop/bakery is closed today. There will be no conversation.
.................
Earth Day.
Foghorn comes through middle of Rockport Harbor. Is there still an other side?
The Monastery of Christ in the Desert in their martyrology today writes of St. Theodore of Sykeon, April 22:
Today we travel to 7th century Asia Minor to meet another unusual and obscure saint. Theodore was born at Sykeon in Asia Minor in the middle of the 6th century. His unmarried mother, Mary, lived the life of a prostitute and innkeeper. His father is listed as Cosmas, a messenger of the royal court. According to his biography, which was written by a contemporary, Theodore was a very prayerful child. At school he would often give up his lunch so as to spend the time in a local church in prayer.
Despite the objections of his mother, he left home at fourteen and lived the life of an ascetic. His holiness and simplicity came to the attention of Bishop Theodosius of Anastasioupolis, who ordained him a lector, then a deacon. At the age of eighteen, Theodore was ordained to the priesthood, which although not common, was not without precedent. He spent the next several years living the life of an ascetic and drew many disciples by his simplicity, humility and austerity. He founded several monasteries to accommodate the many young men drawn to living a life dedicated to God.
He was abbot of the monastery at Sykeon and reports of his holiness and the many wonders, which occurred through his intercession, brought many to conversion of life. Theodore had a great devotion to St. George, who we will meet tomorrow. He reluctantly accepted the position of bishop of Anastasioupolis after the death of Thodosius and remained there for eleven years.
Theodore was never comfortable with the administrative duties and activities of the office of bishop and was finally able to obtain permission to retire to his monastery. He lived the remainder of his life in prayer and solitude except for a brief visit to Constantinople to bless the emperor and the senate. He died on April 22, 613.
We don't have a great deal of historical data about the life of this saint, but the little we do know shows a man who apparently listened to the call of God from the very beginning. One might wonder how he could have come to know God considering his beginnings, but as Scripture tells us, "...my ways are not your ways..." (Is 55:8). Theodore learned of God and heard His call and simply said "yes" for the rest of his life.
"Yes" to everything is a response almost beyond imagining. "Yes" transforms, like Tonglen practice. (Tonglen: in Tibetan, it means "give and take".) We breathe in the dark and hurtful, and we breathe out light and consolation. Nothing stays fixed and shut-in during the process -- in and out, come and go, receive and donate, accept and pass on.
Tonglen is the Tibetan practice of “sending and receiving.” Tong means “sending out” or “letting go,” len means “receiving” or “accepting.” Tonglen is ordinarily practiced in sitting meditation, using the breath. Put simply, the practitioner breathes in the bad and breathes out the good, taking on the suffering of other sentient beings. At first the practice may appear self-defeating, but as the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche said, “The more negativity we take in with a sense of openness and compassion, the more goodness there is to breathe out. So there is nothing to lose.”
(http://www.lighthousewoods.com/buddhist_tonglen.html)
So too God?
What does it mean to be dedicated to God? ('Dedicate': 'de'='from', and 'dicare'='to speak, proclaim'). Hence, to dedicate is to speak from, in this usage, to speak from God. God -- origin and continuation, reality and encounter, foundation and movement, silence and expression, impermanence and surrender.
Breathe in the 'no' of the world; breathe out 'yes.'
Perfumed springs ripple over skeletal outcrops
In the distance a hint of smoke, rising
I hear perpetual stillness in these hills
Sense the rush of swirling waters
White plum blossoms blanket a dozen miles
Save for this single, tiny hut
Tigers, half-tame, loiter near my door
Chattering monkeys guard my gate
A wild mountain-man, white hair streaming
Tops the slate summit on a bamboo staff
Caught unawares, I laugh at the distant bell
Follow the twist and turn of an ancient stream.
Zen hearted, washed free of all desire
Never again will I wander the noisy dust.
- Shih-shu (17th century-early 18th)
Toothless tigers enter the bookshop/bakery at harbor and roar weariness and disconsolate upset at their bodies, their lives, the state of the economy, and the turmoil in the world. Monkey minds jump from one branch of thought to next, from one frond of tasty memory to the next. The noisy dust of desire and regret is thrown against the doors, comes in on shoes to grit the wooden floor and burdened rugs. A sip of tea, a cup of coffee, fire conversing with wood their ashy insights, loll of harmonica, greetings to next arriving face.
It is sometimes difficult to stay through the human. It's not as though there is something else or better that is held out for -- even if someone says, "It will be better on the other side," or, " We must throw off the human, it's bad." Staying through the human is the route to arrive at the human/divine. Whether with body or beyond body, that which we call 'human,' that which we name 'creation' -- these ways of speaking try to hitch a ride with that which is passing through.
Our thinking struggles with the attempt to get in step with what is passing through. Often we overstep. We do this by trying to explain away the reality occurring right before our eyes. We do this by knowing better than another person how to live their life. And we do this by stepping outside emerging reality -- as a casual observer might note a wounded soldier trying to stop blood seeping away his life. Once we step closer to emerging reality we feel the uncertainty and experience the movement of life through realms of unknowing passage beyond our control and out of our awareness.
How love what is passing through?
Spring
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her--
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
(Poem: "Spring," by Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems. © Beacon Press.)
Celebrating Earth Day is taking on the reality of earth and earthly existence. It is stepping into the reality of what is passing through. Not wishing for anything else -- but practicing being that which is. Not condemning the beliefs and actions of others we deem despicable -- but embodying what we hold sacred. Not trying to accumulate and hoard the fragile peduncle (that narrow part by which some larger part or the whole body of an organism is attached) -- but attending with our own fragile presence the emergence.
When friends are overemphasized, enemies also come to be overemphasized. When you are born, you do not know anyone and no one knows you. Even thought all of us equally want happiness and do not want suffering, you like the faces of some people and think, "These are my friends," and dislike the faces of others and think, "These are my enemies." You affix identities and nicknames to them and end up practicing the generation of desire for the former and the generation of hatred for the latter. What value is there in this? None. The problem is that so much energy is being expended for a level no deeper than the superficial affairs of this life. The profound loses out to the trivial.
If you have not practiced and on your dying day you are surrounded by sobbing friends and others involved in your affairs, instead of having someone who reminds you of virtuous practice, this will only bring trouble, and you will have brought it on yourself. Where does the fault lie? In not being mindful of impermanence.
(Pp.50-51, in Advice on Dying And living a Better Life, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Trans. & Ed. by Jeffrey Hopkins, c.2002)
Music and chant sound in this small room. Dom Jean Claire and the Monastic Choir of St Peter's Abbey, Solesmes pray the Night Office: Vigils of Christmas. Earth and Incarnation seem sufficient today. They chant: Diffusa est gratia in labiis tuis, propterea benedixit te Deus in aeternum -- "Grace is poured out upon your lips: therefore God has blessed you forever." Upon lips, and ears, and eyes -- and we are blessed with silence, with sound, and with sight.
For rest of life, a gift of God.
Her perfect love.
Welcome, yes, to earth!
.................
Earth Day.
Foghorn comes through middle of Rockport Harbor. Is there still an other side?
The Monastery of Christ in the Desert in their martyrology today writes of St. Theodore of Sykeon, April 22:
Today we travel to 7th century Asia Minor to meet another unusual and obscure saint. Theodore was born at Sykeon in Asia Minor in the middle of the 6th century. His unmarried mother, Mary, lived the life of a prostitute and innkeeper. His father is listed as Cosmas, a messenger of the royal court. According to his biography, which was written by a contemporary, Theodore was a very prayerful child. At school he would often give up his lunch so as to spend the time in a local church in prayer.
Despite the objections of his mother, he left home at fourteen and lived the life of an ascetic. His holiness and simplicity came to the attention of Bishop Theodosius of Anastasioupolis, who ordained him a lector, then a deacon. At the age of eighteen, Theodore was ordained to the priesthood, which although not common, was not without precedent. He spent the next several years living the life of an ascetic and drew many disciples by his simplicity, humility and austerity. He founded several monasteries to accommodate the many young men drawn to living a life dedicated to God.
He was abbot of the monastery at Sykeon and reports of his holiness and the many wonders, which occurred through his intercession, brought many to conversion of life. Theodore had a great devotion to St. George, who we will meet tomorrow. He reluctantly accepted the position of bishop of Anastasioupolis after the death of Thodosius and remained there for eleven years.
Theodore was never comfortable with the administrative duties and activities of the office of bishop and was finally able to obtain permission to retire to his monastery. He lived the remainder of his life in prayer and solitude except for a brief visit to Constantinople to bless the emperor and the senate. He died on April 22, 613.
We don't have a great deal of historical data about the life of this saint, but the little we do know shows a man who apparently listened to the call of God from the very beginning. One might wonder how he could have come to know God considering his beginnings, but as Scripture tells us, "...my ways are not your ways..." (Is 55:8). Theodore learned of God and heard His call and simply said "yes" for the rest of his life.
"Yes" to everything is a response almost beyond imagining. "Yes" transforms, like Tonglen practice. (Tonglen: in Tibetan, it means "give and take".) We breathe in the dark and hurtful, and we breathe out light and consolation. Nothing stays fixed and shut-in during the process -- in and out, come and go, receive and donate, accept and pass on.
Tonglen is the Tibetan practice of “sending and receiving.” Tong means “sending out” or “letting go,” len means “receiving” or “accepting.” Tonglen is ordinarily practiced in sitting meditation, using the breath. Put simply, the practitioner breathes in the bad and breathes out the good, taking on the suffering of other sentient beings. At first the practice may appear self-defeating, but as the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche said, “The more negativity we take in with a sense of openness and compassion, the more goodness there is to breathe out. So there is nothing to lose.”
(http://www.lighthousewoods.com/buddhist_tonglen.html)
So too God?
What does it mean to be dedicated to God? ('Dedicate': 'de'='from', and 'dicare'='to speak, proclaim'). Hence, to dedicate is to speak from, in this usage, to speak from God. God -- origin and continuation, reality and encounter, foundation and movement, silence and expression, impermanence and surrender.
Breathe in the 'no' of the world; breathe out 'yes.'
Perfumed springs ripple over skeletal outcrops
In the distance a hint of smoke, rising
I hear perpetual stillness in these hills
Sense the rush of swirling waters
White plum blossoms blanket a dozen miles
Save for this single, tiny hut
Tigers, half-tame, loiter near my door
Chattering monkeys guard my gate
A wild mountain-man, white hair streaming
Tops the slate summit on a bamboo staff
Caught unawares, I laugh at the distant bell
Follow the twist and turn of an ancient stream.
Zen hearted, washed free of all desire
Never again will I wander the noisy dust.
- Shih-shu (17th century-early 18th)
Toothless tigers enter the bookshop/bakery at harbor and roar weariness and disconsolate upset at their bodies, their lives, the state of the economy, and the turmoil in the world. Monkey minds jump from one branch of thought to next, from one frond of tasty memory to the next. The noisy dust of desire and regret is thrown against the doors, comes in on shoes to grit the wooden floor and burdened rugs. A sip of tea, a cup of coffee, fire conversing with wood their ashy insights, loll of harmonica, greetings to next arriving face.
It is sometimes difficult to stay through the human. It's not as though there is something else or better that is held out for -- even if someone says, "It will be better on the other side," or, " We must throw off the human, it's bad." Staying through the human is the route to arrive at the human/divine. Whether with body or beyond body, that which we call 'human,' that which we name 'creation' -- these ways of speaking try to hitch a ride with that which is passing through.
Our thinking struggles with the attempt to get in step with what is passing through. Often we overstep. We do this by trying to explain away the reality occurring right before our eyes. We do this by knowing better than another person how to live their life. And we do this by stepping outside emerging reality -- as a casual observer might note a wounded soldier trying to stop blood seeping away his life. Once we step closer to emerging reality we feel the uncertainty and experience the movement of life through realms of unknowing passage beyond our control and out of our awareness.
How love what is passing through?
Spring
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her--
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
(Poem: "Spring," by Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems. © Beacon Press.)
Celebrating Earth Day is taking on the reality of earth and earthly existence. It is stepping into the reality of what is passing through. Not wishing for anything else -- but practicing being that which is. Not condemning the beliefs and actions of others we deem despicable -- but embodying what we hold sacred. Not trying to accumulate and hoard the fragile peduncle (that narrow part by which some larger part or the whole body of an organism is attached) -- but attending with our own fragile presence the emergence.
When friends are overemphasized, enemies also come to be overemphasized. When you are born, you do not know anyone and no one knows you. Even thought all of us equally want happiness and do not want suffering, you like the faces of some people and think, "These are my friends," and dislike the faces of others and think, "These are my enemies." You affix identities and nicknames to them and end up practicing the generation of desire for the former and the generation of hatred for the latter. What value is there in this? None. The problem is that so much energy is being expended for a level no deeper than the superficial affairs of this life. The profound loses out to the trivial.
If you have not practiced and on your dying day you are surrounded by sobbing friends and others involved in your affairs, instead of having someone who reminds you of virtuous practice, this will only bring trouble, and you will have brought it on yourself. Where does the fault lie? In not being mindful of impermanence.
(Pp.50-51, in Advice on Dying And living a Better Life, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Trans. & Ed. by Jeffrey Hopkins, c.2002)
Music and chant sound in this small room. Dom Jean Claire and the Monastic Choir of St Peter's Abbey, Solesmes pray the Night Office: Vigils of Christmas. Earth and Incarnation seem sufficient today. They chant: Diffusa est gratia in labiis tuis, propterea benedixit te Deus in aeternum -- "Grace is poured out upon your lips: therefore God has blessed you forever." Upon lips, and ears, and eyes -- and we are blessed with silence, with sound, and with sight.
For rest of life, a gift of God.
Her perfect love.
Welcome, yes, to earth!
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Note: Schola Vacation. The bookshop/bakery is closed today. There will be no conversation.
..................
Breakfast is a sacred meal.
Jesus said to them,
“Come, have breakfast.” And none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who
are you?” because they realized it was the Lord. (from John 21)
What if we began again? Eight years later, what if we began our original intuition of a community bakery/cafe/bookstore? What if we ran the place differently?
What if all food and baked goods was by donation? And non-new books? And sails?
Comedy is "the only thing worth writing in this despairing age, provided the comedy is truly on the side of the lonely, the neglected and the unsuccessful, and plays its part in the war against established rules."(John Mortimer)
If the Zen Contemplative life is absurd, why not make light of it?
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." (John Muir)
What if everything stayed as it is -- completely different, and open to spirit?
Conversations -- with food -- by workers, artists, writers, practitioners of every spiritual persuasion, the elderly, the teenager, the business owner, the retired, and the poetically or politically active.
Everything by donation.
Plus ca change, plus cela meme chose!
The more a thing changes, the more it becomes itself!
Because -- everything is gift.
..................
Breakfast is a sacred meal.
Jesus said to them,
“Come, have breakfast.” And none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who
are you?” because they realized it was the Lord. (from John 21)
What if we began again? Eight years later, what if we began our original intuition of a community bakery/cafe/bookstore? What if we ran the place differently?
What if all food and baked goods was by donation? And non-new books? And sails?
Comedy is "the only thing worth writing in this despairing age, provided the comedy is truly on the side of the lonely, the neglected and the unsuccessful, and plays its part in the war against established rules."(John Mortimer)
If the Zen Contemplative life is absurd, why not make light of it?
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." (John Muir)
What if everything stayed as it is -- completely different, and open to spirit?
Conversations -- with food -- by workers, artists, writers, practitioners of every spiritual persuasion, the elderly, the teenager, the business owner, the retired, and the poetically or politically active.
Everything by donation.
Plus ca change, plus cela meme chose!
The more a thing changes, the more it becomes itself!
Because -- everything is gift.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Living the Zen life is absurd. (That's what was said at Tuesday Evening Conversation)
Study the Way and never grow old
Distrust emotions; truth will emerge
Sweep away your worries
Set even your body aside
Autumn drives off the yellow leaves
Yet spring renews every green bud
Quietly contemplate the pattern of things
Nothing here to make us sad
- Shih-shu (17th century-early 18th)
'Absurd' is a good word. ('ab' from L. = 'from, away, off'; 'surd' from L. 'surdus' = 'deaf, silent, stupid').
Webster's 7th says of 'absurd' -- ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous.
The words we say about our lives, like words intending to teach, are often not much help.
I feel sorry that I cannot help you very much. But the way to study true Zen is not verbal. Just open yourself and give up everything. Whatever happens, whether you think it is good or bad, study closely and see what you find out. This is the fundamental attitude. Sometimes you will do things without much reason, like a child who draws pictures whether they are good or bad. If that is difficult for you, you are not actually ready to practice zazen.
This is what it means to surrender, even though you have nothing to surrender. Without losing yourself by sticking to a particular rule or understanding, keep finding yourself, moment after moment. This is the only thing for you to do.
(pp. 75-76, "Finding Out for Yourself," in not always so, practicing the true spirit of Zen, by Shunryu Suzuki)
The four of us laughed and marveled at how absurd we are. There is no reason things are as they are. Just as there is no explanation that satisfies telling after the fact. Words that intend to justify or say "I knew that" fall flat when said seriously and soar with laughter when playfully posed.
To be listened to. To listen.
To be heard. To hear.
No matter...what.
Is what is served.
Open and give up.
Going on.
Study the Way and never grow old
Distrust emotions; truth will emerge
Sweep away your worries
Set even your body aside
Autumn drives off the yellow leaves
Yet spring renews every green bud
Quietly contemplate the pattern of things
Nothing here to make us sad
- Shih-shu (17th century-early 18th)
'Absurd' is a good word. ('ab' from L. = 'from, away, off'; 'surd' from L. 'surdus' = 'deaf, silent, stupid').
Webster's 7th says of 'absurd' -- ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous.
The words we say about our lives, like words intending to teach, are often not much help.
I feel sorry that I cannot help you very much. But the way to study true Zen is not verbal. Just open yourself and give up everything. Whatever happens, whether you think it is good or bad, study closely and see what you find out. This is the fundamental attitude. Sometimes you will do things without much reason, like a child who draws pictures whether they are good or bad. If that is difficult for you, you are not actually ready to practice zazen.
This is what it means to surrender, even though you have nothing to surrender. Without losing yourself by sticking to a particular rule or understanding, keep finding yourself, moment after moment. This is the only thing for you to do.
(pp. 75-76, "Finding Out for Yourself," in not always so, practicing the true spirit of Zen, by Shunryu Suzuki)
The four of us laughed and marveled at how absurd we are. There is no reason things are as they are. Just as there is no explanation that satisfies telling after the fact. Words that intend to justify or say "I knew that" fall flat when said seriously and soar with laughter when playfully posed.
To be listened to. To listen.
To be heard. To hear.
No matter...what.
Is what is served.
Open and give up.
Going on.
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