We are shocked at beheadings.
Contemplate the mind;
This king of emptiness
Is subtle and abstruse.
Without shape or form,
It has great spiritual power.
It can eliminate all calamities
And accomplish all merits.
Though its essence is empty,
It is the measure of dharmas.
- Master Fu (497-569)
1.
No need to go anywhere.
Where else is there?
A common failing of practice is the phrase, “I am not like that.” The practice of (what is called) enlightenment is seeing the embodiment of truth in what is revealed in each moment in each person.
When the Zen Master says that, “Truth is just like this,” or, “Truth is just like that,” what they are saying is, “Look here, there you are, you are just like what is appearing, just like what is being revealed.”
All knowledge is self-knowledge. We are the beheaded. We are the beheaders. We are the righteous indignation claiming superiority over bloody-handed terrorists. And we are the fractious thinking that believes something useful is accomplished by murderous deeds.
If you think it is awful beheading people, don’t do it. Factually or actually, do not cut a person’s head off. But more than that -- figuratively or metaphorically, do not “take someone’s head off.” Nations and/or corporations that behead other nations, peoples, or adversaries by means of political or economic cutting-blades, perpetuate the terrifying act. Personal anger and frustration often lead to ripping another apart with cutting words or emotional severance.
Shunryu Suzuki, in the reading leading to last evening’s conversation, suggested that each is the only one. Each is Buddha-nature. Practice is this realization. Enlightenment is this practice. There is no one without the other -- and there is no other with the one.
There is no eliminating an enemy we perceive to be outside us, or other than us.
It is thinking that makes one an “other”.
It is awaking that sees one another.
2.
The executioner's argument was, that you couldn't cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn't going to begin at HIS time of life.
The King's argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren't to talk nonsense.
The Queen's argument was, that if something wasn't done about it in less than no time she'd have everybody executed, all round. (It was this last remark that had made the whole party look so grave and anxious.)
(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll from Chapter 8: The Queen's Croquet-Ground)
3.
We need to contemplate beheadings.
In the world of Zen not having a head means seeing with one’s whole being. No-mind, no-self, no-body, no-head are ways of saying no-divide.
In a more prosaic formulation, the notion of no-head is saying that rational enumeration of rights and privileges which separate out one group from another and posit some as worthy of reward and some to be deprived of it. — is unbecoming of our true nature.
Calculated, logical, and rational discrimination based on a system of value which excludes “others” from participation in good and goods because of their “otherness” – is a product of “head” analysis. “Head” analysis has as its operating system a dualistic mechanism the prime task of which is to divide into two, decide what portion of resource goes to which, and create categories of worthiness based on arbitrary priority to be evaluated by self-interest and inbred perpetuation of a narrow focal point of restricted ownership.
The metaphor of beheading is chilling. It suggests something wrong with the larger metaphor of head-hunters and head-honcho, as well as heads-of-state and heads-of-industry.
Heads are often disdainful of bodies at the same time as they are fed by and dependent on bodies..
4.
There is no need to sever head from body.
If we look, just look, and see what is there to be seen – we begin the contemplative life of just-seeing.
"My soul thirsts for God, the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?" (Ps 42:2)
“The living God” is the heart’s way of saying/seeing, “What is whole and complete.”
Keep on -- by emptying mind.
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Today it is silence. We can seek with words or seek with silence.
You are a seeker.
Delight in the mastery
Of your hands and your feet,
Of your words and your thoughts.
Delight in meditation and in solitude.
Compose yourself, be happy.
You are a seeker.
- Buddha in the Dhammapada
It is twenty-nine years my father died on this date. The telephone call. Sitting with still and cooling body on bed in small room mine once where inverted lampshade over clothes hook was basket to rolled sox those playing days.
Rain finally drenches mountainside after dogs and I finish walking slowly short loop then settle on cabin porch and now rest in house.
My son arrives from away. A time will come when he will reflect the death of his father. Some detail will stay with him. Some recollection floating over dripping leaves near a place prayer allows the word open. Today he is happy to stay over shop where sea and mountain both welcome rain.
Father's day is an easy celebration. As is mother's. Both near my parent's deaths in May and June.
In this solitude and silence, we are composed.
In this collation and recollection, we are happy.
Mu-ge leaps to belly and chest, purring. The sudden always-surprising arrival of anything at all!
Yawning as water splashes from rolling tires outside window.
You are a seeker.
Delight in the mastery
Of your hands and your feet,
Of your words and your thoughts.
Delight in meditation and in solitude.
Compose yourself, be happy.
You are a seeker.
- Buddha in the Dhammapada
It is twenty-nine years my father died on this date. The telephone call. Sitting with still and cooling body on bed in small room mine once where inverted lampshade over clothes hook was basket to rolled sox those playing days.
Rain finally drenches mountainside after dogs and I finish walking slowly short loop then settle on cabin porch and now rest in house.
My son arrives from away. A time will come when he will reflect the death of his father. Some detail will stay with him. Some recollection floating over dripping leaves near a place prayer allows the word open. Today he is happy to stay over shop where sea and mountain both welcome rain.
Father's day is an easy celebration. As is mother's. Both near my parent's deaths in May and June.
In this solitude and silence, we are composed.
In this collation and recollection, we are happy.
Mu-ge leaps to belly and chest, purring. The sudden always-surprising arrival of anything at all!
Yawning as water splashes from rolling tires outside window.
Saturday, June 19, 2004
"Zenshi Ichimi" is a Japanese phrase meaning - "Poetry and Zen are one."
This body’s existence is like a bubble’s
May as well accept what happens
Events and hopes seldom agree
Who can step back doesn’t worry
We blossom and fade like flowers
Gather and part like clouds
Worldly thoughts I forgot long ago
Relaxing all day on a peak
- Stonehouse
Annie, Joanie, Erika, Saskia, Lloyd, Pia, Mike, and I gathered for poetry Saturday afternoon. Rilke, Schwartz, Pessoa, Whyte, Bozarth, and Connelly were there in words they wrote.
It is the moment. The moment poetry captures. The moment Zen sees. These moments gathered in small bookshop alongside small harbor in Maine of a rainy afternoon at end of spring with fire waning in fireplace.
One week ago a young man hung himself one block inland. Today poems find their way as if epitaphs for his death and all our deaths. In the poems, not specifically written for him, but written for each one passing through this way, whether alone or with others, we attend to the sound of the moment as it passes. In this attention no one is lost, no one left out. No sorrow dismissed. No hope abandoned.
Events and hopes seldom agree.
Every conflict looks for amicable environment to be fully heard and brought to safe resolution.
So, we read poems, listen to poetry clamber our awkward incline, and lend attention to the sound of what is being said.
We might not be able to divert death. We might, however, be capable of allowing life a longer hearing.
This is the practice of poetry.
This, the practice of zen.
Blossom and fade.
Gather and part.
Say and see.
Each one.
This body’s existence is like a bubble’s
May as well accept what happens
Events and hopes seldom agree
Who can step back doesn’t worry
We blossom and fade like flowers
Gather and part like clouds
Worldly thoughts I forgot long ago
Relaxing all day on a peak
- Stonehouse
Annie, Joanie, Erika, Saskia, Lloyd, Pia, Mike, and I gathered for poetry Saturday afternoon. Rilke, Schwartz, Pessoa, Whyte, Bozarth, and Connelly were there in words they wrote.
It is the moment. The moment poetry captures. The moment Zen sees. These moments gathered in small bookshop alongside small harbor in Maine of a rainy afternoon at end of spring with fire waning in fireplace.
One week ago a young man hung himself one block inland. Today poems find their way as if epitaphs for his death and all our deaths. In the poems, not specifically written for him, but written for each one passing through this way, whether alone or with others, we attend to the sound of the moment as it passes. In this attention no one is lost, no one left out. No sorrow dismissed. No hope abandoned.
Events and hopes seldom agree.
Every conflict looks for amicable environment to be fully heard and brought to safe resolution.
So, we read poems, listen to poetry clamber our awkward incline, and lend attention to the sound of what is being said.
We might not be able to divert death. We might, however, be capable of allowing life a longer hearing.
This is the practice of poetry.
This, the practice of zen.
Blossom and fade.
Gather and part.
Say and see.
Each one.
Friday, June 18, 2004
Islam believes in charging no interest.
The depression and crisis in trade mostly results from the payment of high rate of interest. The socialists have wrongly attributed such crises to capitalism. In fact interest is the greatest evil of capitalism and it is rather the worst form of capitalism, The Islamic economy which accepts a form of capitalism without interest has almost eliminated its harmful aspects. The Holy Prophet of Islam has advised Muslims to avoid seven harmful things and the third among these is interest, He stated,' Although interest brings increase, yet its end tends to scarcity'. The Holy Quran says, "That which ye give in interest in order that it may increase other peoples' wealth hath no increase with God; but that which ye give in growth tax, seeking God's countenance hath increases manifold" (XXX-39).
(--Economic System of Islam, http://www.netmuslims.com/info/economic.html)
Reading The Heart of Islam by Seyyed Hossein Nasr at Friday Evening Conversation, we spoke of money. It is money, always, that evokes passion in politics and religion. Too much, too little, unfairly taken, profligately spent -- money is the measure of personal blessing and political value in our culture.
Have it or not, like it or not, concerning the who, why, when, and where of death -- money's hand determines who lives and who dies in the world.
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
While nature offers us all the abundance we need, we seek wealth in all the wrong places.
Jesus Christ, although he shared God's nature, did not try to seize equality with God for himself; but emptied himself, took on the form of a slave, and became like a man -- not in appearance only, for he humbled himself by accepting death -- even death on a cross.
-- Philippians 2
Christianity is a forsaken religion because it asks us to empty ourselves and to unclutch our grasping hands from that which we consider secure wealth -- so as to move freely through life of Christ-reality with nothing for the journey.
Then he said to all, "If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it."-- Luke 9
There is no system better than others to cement a true relationship with money, with one another, and with wholesome equanimity. More than a system, we need a sense of clear light -- one that allows us, not to stare at the opacity of monied self-definition, but to see through the medium of money and rest gaze on the many who inhabit this world with us.
Money has been and still is a difficult koan. The sound of one hand full of money is not going to clap -- not with joy, and not with the other hand fending off those who pose a threat to the money hand. So too, there are few hands motionless in casket that have tucked in them folded tens, twenties, fifties, or hundreds -- but rather, empty hands, done with scratch for gaining ground, fold finished with whatever work they found to be in their interest.
Thus the Islamic economic principles if strictly followed would eliminate the possibility of accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and would ensure the greater circulation of money as well as a wider distribution of wealth. Broadly speaking these principles are (1) Zakat or compulsory alms giving (2) The Islamic law of inheritance which splits the property of an individual into a number of shares given to his relations (3) The forbiddance of interest which checks accumulation of wealth and this strikes at the root of capitalism.
The sound economic system evolved by Islam if given a fair trial would solve the basic economic problems which have been troubling the modern world.
(-- Economic System of Islam, http://www.netmuslims.com/info/economic.html)
There is a different and deeper 'interest' needing attention. Disparity and divisiveness have made us all indigent. Greed and dispassionate scorn have shown us the dim colorless and dismal trouble disproportionate hoarding makes of the world -- a gloomy and dangerous place.
Our interest, I submit, might better be what is taking place between us. To be between one another is to live in touch with the center place from which all life originates, and through which all life gravitates.
There is an unending between, a shared homeground -- where the human/divine sees through one set of eyes, and hears through one set of ears, the sound of one hand noiselessly alongside another hand in the eternal instant of correspondence -- the one just before arriving, and just after leaving.
Right there. The crossroad.
Blood and water.
One's heart.
The depression and crisis in trade mostly results from the payment of high rate of interest. The socialists have wrongly attributed such crises to capitalism. In fact interest is the greatest evil of capitalism and it is rather the worst form of capitalism, The Islamic economy which accepts a form of capitalism without interest has almost eliminated its harmful aspects. The Holy Prophet of Islam has advised Muslims to avoid seven harmful things and the third among these is interest, He stated,' Although interest brings increase, yet its end tends to scarcity'. The Holy Quran says, "That which ye give in interest in order that it may increase other peoples' wealth hath no increase with God; but that which ye give in growth tax, seeking God's countenance hath increases manifold" (XXX-39).
(--Economic System of Islam, http://www.netmuslims.com/info/economic.html)
Reading The Heart of Islam by Seyyed Hossein Nasr at Friday Evening Conversation, we spoke of money. It is money, always, that evokes passion in politics and religion. Too much, too little, unfairly taken, profligately spent -- money is the measure of personal blessing and political value in our culture.
Have it or not, like it or not, concerning the who, why, when, and where of death -- money's hand determines who lives and who dies in the world.
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
While nature offers us all the abundance we need, we seek wealth in all the wrong places.
Jesus Christ, although he shared God's nature, did not try to seize equality with God for himself; but emptied himself, took on the form of a slave, and became like a man -- not in appearance only, for he humbled himself by accepting death -- even death on a cross.
-- Philippians 2
Christianity is a forsaken religion because it asks us to empty ourselves and to unclutch our grasping hands from that which we consider secure wealth -- so as to move freely through life of Christ-reality with nothing for the journey.
Then he said to all, "If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it."-- Luke 9
There is no system better than others to cement a true relationship with money, with one another, and with wholesome equanimity. More than a system, we need a sense of clear light -- one that allows us, not to stare at the opacity of monied self-definition, but to see through the medium of money and rest gaze on the many who inhabit this world with us.
Money has been and still is a difficult koan. The sound of one hand full of money is not going to clap -- not with joy, and not with the other hand fending off those who pose a threat to the money hand. So too, there are few hands motionless in casket that have tucked in them folded tens, twenties, fifties, or hundreds -- but rather, empty hands, done with scratch for gaining ground, fold finished with whatever work they found to be in their interest.
Thus the Islamic economic principles if strictly followed would eliminate the possibility of accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and would ensure the greater circulation of money as well as a wider distribution of wealth. Broadly speaking these principles are (1) Zakat or compulsory alms giving (2) The Islamic law of inheritance which splits the property of an individual into a number of shares given to his relations (3) The forbiddance of interest which checks accumulation of wealth and this strikes at the root of capitalism.
The sound economic system evolved by Islam if given a fair trial would solve the basic economic problems which have been troubling the modern world.
(-- Economic System of Islam, http://www.netmuslims.com/info/economic.html)
There is a different and deeper 'interest' needing attention. Disparity and divisiveness have made us all indigent. Greed and dispassionate scorn have shown us the dim colorless and dismal trouble disproportionate hoarding makes of the world -- a gloomy and dangerous place.
Our interest, I submit, might better be what is taking place between us. To be between one another is to live in touch with the center place from which all life originates, and through which all life gravitates.
There is an unending between, a shared homeground -- where the human/divine sees through one set of eyes, and hears through one set of ears, the sound of one hand noiselessly alongside another hand in the eternal instant of correspondence -- the one just before arriving, and just after leaving.
Right there. The crossroad.
Blood and water.
One's heart.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Watching "Frontline" on PBS -- "The Plea" -- about justice or the lack of it in our judicial system.
One could weep at the suffering of the guilty and their victims. One also weeps for the suffering of the not guilty and the price we pay to have our integrity so abused.
There is no cowardice like refusal to admit mistakes. Or to hide behind false assertion so as to bolster the pretense of strength. This is compounded in the readying report of the 9/11 Commission.
Buddhas don't save buddhas. If you use your mind to look for a buddha, you won't see the buddha. As long as you look for a buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the buddha. And don't use a buddha to worship a buddha. And don't use the mind to invoke a buddha. Buddhas don't recite sutras. Buddhas don't keep precepts. And buddhas don't break precepts. Buddhas don't keep or break anything. Buddhas don't do good or evil.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
The system we swear by is conditioned by dualistic evaluation wherein there must always be the innocent and the guilty, the saved and damned, haves and have nots, and the wealthy and the impoverished.
This evening's conversation wondered about the metaphor of Jesus being the worded embodiment of divine life, the metaphor of crossroad wherein one stands still at center of many separate directions. This is where the divine and the human intersect -- at the heart where the visible and invisible exchange points of view -- the place where Jesus and Siddhartha Gautama suddenly disappear and the Christ and the Buddha emerge.
Two resigns. One carries on. But not the one one was. That one is gone. One still remains.
Run with eager desire to this source of life and light, all you who are vowed to God's service. Come, whoever you may be, and cry out to him with all the strength of your heart. "O indescribable beauty of the most high God and purest radiance of eternal light! Life that gives all life, light that is the source of every other light, preserving in everlasting splendour the myriad flames that have shone before the throne of your divinity from the dawn of time! Eternal and inaccessible fountain, clear and sweet stream flowing from a hidden spring, unseen by mortal eye! None can fathom your depths nor survey your boundaries, none can measure your breadth, nothing can sully your purity. From you flows 'the river which gladdens the city of God' and makes us cry out with joy and thanksgiving in hymns of praise to you, for we know by our own experience that 'with you is the source of life, and in your light we see light'."
(From Office of Readings, Feast of the Sacred Heart, by St Bonaventure,"With you is the source of life ")
Morning turns attention to Sacred Heart.
I bow to each heart. I bow to each crossroad where stillness and depth root the disappearance of each one dropping through circumstances and conditions of their lives. It is time to abandon rhetoric, to leave the deceptive reasons and narrative we tell and think to be our identity.
It is the still, profound place of heart -- heart calling us to be our truth -- that transmutes us from what once we were into what now we are.
What we call heart is the only sound the silence of God recognizes.
This silence is the loving stillness of God detected in our heart.
Follow only what heart hears, heart says, and what heart is doing.
Shut up. Listen. Go home.
Live life well.
One could weep at the suffering of the guilty and their victims. One also weeps for the suffering of the not guilty and the price we pay to have our integrity so abused.
There is no cowardice like refusal to admit mistakes. Or to hide behind false assertion so as to bolster the pretense of strength. This is compounded in the readying report of the 9/11 Commission.
Buddhas don't save buddhas. If you use your mind to look for a buddha, you won't see the buddha. As long as you look for a buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the buddha. And don't use a buddha to worship a buddha. And don't use the mind to invoke a buddha. Buddhas don't recite sutras. Buddhas don't keep precepts. And buddhas don't break precepts. Buddhas don't keep or break anything. Buddhas don't do good or evil.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
The system we swear by is conditioned by dualistic evaluation wherein there must always be the innocent and the guilty, the saved and damned, haves and have nots, and the wealthy and the impoverished.
This evening's conversation wondered about the metaphor of Jesus being the worded embodiment of divine life, the metaphor of crossroad wherein one stands still at center of many separate directions. This is where the divine and the human intersect -- at the heart where the visible and invisible exchange points of view -- the place where Jesus and Siddhartha Gautama suddenly disappear and the Christ and the Buddha emerge.
Two resigns. One carries on. But not the one one was. That one is gone. One still remains.
Run with eager desire to this source of life and light, all you who are vowed to God's service. Come, whoever you may be, and cry out to him with all the strength of your heart. "O indescribable beauty of the most high God and purest radiance of eternal light! Life that gives all life, light that is the source of every other light, preserving in everlasting splendour the myriad flames that have shone before the throne of your divinity from the dawn of time! Eternal and inaccessible fountain, clear and sweet stream flowing from a hidden spring, unseen by mortal eye! None can fathom your depths nor survey your boundaries, none can measure your breadth, nothing can sully your purity. From you flows 'the river which gladdens the city of God' and makes us cry out with joy and thanksgiving in hymns of praise to you, for we know by our own experience that 'with you is the source of life, and in your light we see light'."
(From Office of Readings, Feast of the Sacred Heart, by St Bonaventure,"With you is the source of life ")
Morning turns attention to Sacred Heart.
I bow to each heart. I bow to each crossroad where stillness and depth root the disappearance of each one dropping through circumstances and conditions of their lives. It is time to abandon rhetoric, to leave the deceptive reasons and narrative we tell and think to be our identity.
It is the still, profound place of heart -- heart calling us to be our truth -- that transmutes us from what once we were into what now we are.
What we call heart is the only sound the silence of God recognizes.
This silence is the loving stillness of God detected in our heart.
Follow only what heart hears, heart says, and what heart is doing.
Shut up. Listen. Go home.
Live life well.
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Just before coming out from wooded path on eastern side of morning walk along Ragged, a white board with black letters leans between branches of young tree. The words on it are: “Out of Bounds”.
In this small hut
Are worlds beyond number
Living here alone
I have endless company
Already I have
Attained the essence
How could I dare
To want something higher?
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
Earlier, reading snippet from Theological Dictionary of New Testament, the word for “heaven” transliterated from Greek as “ouranos.”
‘Ouranos,' in classical Greek almost without exception in the singular, always means “heaven.” The word always has a double reference. Heaven is the firmament, the arch of heaven over the earth. But it is also that which embraces all things in the absolute, a “Theion.” (p.497, Vol.V, Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, Editors)
“Theos” in Greek is God.
Theion is divine fire: (brimstone, divine incense, because burning brimstone was regarded as having power to purify, and to ward off disease).
It was Cesco, Britta and I today.
“Out of Bounds” resounded on the walk. Heaven is out of bounds -- meaning, when free of what binds and closes us, we enter heaven.
Where is that heaven?
It is the place which embraces all things in the absolute. The ‘absolute’ is that which has “no restriction, exception, or qualification.” (Webster’s Seventh, p.3)
Whole.
When that which is unnecessary, binding, limiting, and fragmentary has been burnt away by fires of longing for what is whole and complete -- we glimpse heaven.
Today, we suffer the partial and incomplete. In the transformative light of alert and aware heart/mind we do the work of allowing what has been broken to be refashioned and reimagined into its primary state of wholeness within all beings.
Heaven is out of bounds.
Profound -- the unending between which flows in and through each and every being in existence .
The profound is what is. The profound is all encompassing.
Meet one another there.
Make it here.
In this small hut
Are worlds beyond number
Living here alone
I have endless company
Already I have
Attained the essence
How could I dare
To want something higher?
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
Earlier, reading snippet from Theological Dictionary of New Testament, the word for “heaven” transliterated from Greek as “ouranos.”
‘Ouranos,' in classical Greek almost without exception in the singular, always means “heaven.” The word always has a double reference. Heaven is the firmament, the arch of heaven over the earth. But it is also that which embraces all things in the absolute, a “Theion.” (p.497, Vol.V, Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, Editors)
“Theos” in Greek is God.
Theion is divine fire: (brimstone, divine incense, because burning brimstone was regarded as having power to purify, and to ward off disease).
It was Cesco, Britta and I today.
“Out of Bounds” resounded on the walk. Heaven is out of bounds -- meaning, when free of what binds and closes us, we enter heaven.
Where is that heaven?
It is the place which embraces all things in the absolute. The ‘absolute’ is that which has “no restriction, exception, or qualification.” (Webster’s Seventh, p.3)
Whole.
When that which is unnecessary, binding, limiting, and fragmentary has been burnt away by fires of longing for what is whole and complete -- we glimpse heaven.
Today, we suffer the partial and incomplete. In the transformative light of alert and aware heart/mind we do the work of allowing what has been broken to be refashioned and reimagined into its primary state of wholeness within all beings.
Heaven is out of bounds.
Profound -- the unending between which flows in and through each and every being in existence .
The profound is what is. The profound is all encompassing.
Meet one another there.
Make it here.
Saturday, June 12, 2004
Pema Chodron wants us to consider the non-grasping mind. Open mind. The mind that finds its capacity to let go and relax into its true nature.
Inbreath and outbreath.
We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground. - (from "In the Gap Between Right and Wrong" by Pema Chodron)
Two parents come into the shop worrying about the draft -- will it be re-instituted? They have two sons -- and two daughters -- of an age that would be affected.
Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.
This place, if you can touch it, will help you train yourself throughout your life to open further to whatever you feel, to open further rather than shut down more. You'll find that as you begin to commit yourself to this practice, as you begin to have a sense of celebrating the parts of yourself that you found so impossible before, something will shift in you. Something will shift permanently in you. Your ancient habitual patterns will begin to soften and you'll being to see the faces and hear the words of people who are talking to you.
- (from "In the Gap Between Right and Wrong" by Pema Chodron) http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/dailylife/pema01.html
Yesterday and today there has been much talk of Ronald Reagan's week of tribute and funeral. It occurs to me that the nation needed a time to mourn, and former President Reagan's death served to provide that time for mourning. The deaths we experience worldwide. The loss of trusted community. The country needed to mourn even if it didn't know why. It feels better today.
This morning our trusted community of two doggie companions allowed a visiting third, Britta, to wander Ragged. It is her first visit to the hermitage. This long-haired black German Shepherd, Britta, dwells with Saskia's mom, who visits her daughter on this her giving-birth day and her daughter's receiving-birth day.
So many at Meetingbrook sign a book to be given to Saskia on her birthday.
The book is by John O'Donohue and is called Beauty: The Invisible Embrace.
With which we have been graced by Saskia.
Inbreath and outbreath.
We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground. - (from "In the Gap Between Right and Wrong" by Pema Chodron)
Two parents come into the shop worrying about the draft -- will it be re-instituted? They have two sons -- and two daughters -- of an age that would be affected.
Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.
This place, if you can touch it, will help you train yourself throughout your life to open further to whatever you feel, to open further rather than shut down more. You'll find that as you begin to commit yourself to this practice, as you begin to have a sense of celebrating the parts of yourself that you found so impossible before, something will shift in you. Something will shift permanently in you. Your ancient habitual patterns will begin to soften and you'll being to see the faces and hear the words of people who are talking to you.
- (from "In the Gap Between Right and Wrong" by Pema Chodron) http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/dailylife/pema01.html
Yesterday and today there has been much talk of Ronald Reagan's week of tribute and funeral. It occurs to me that the nation needed a time to mourn, and former President Reagan's death served to provide that time for mourning. The deaths we experience worldwide. The loss of trusted community. The country needed to mourn even if it didn't know why. It feels better today.
This morning our trusted community of two doggie companions allowed a visiting third, Britta, to wander Ragged. It is her first visit to the hermitage. This long-haired black German Shepherd, Britta, dwells with Saskia's mom, who visits her daughter on this her giving-birth day and her daughter's receiving-birth day.
So many at Meetingbrook sign a book to be given to Saskia on her birthday.
The book is by John O'Donohue and is called Beauty: The Invisible Embrace.
With which we have been graced by Saskia.
Friday, June 11, 2004
What do we see when we cease halving life?
"I can't see you with me." That's what Ben said in prison conversation today. "Me" has to diminish for any "you" to be seen.
What is between me and you?
Ben came in at end. Jason, Billy, Rusty, Ben, Saskia and I read some from John O'Donohue's book Beauty. He wrote about betweenness.
We wondered what was there between us.
White stones glow in Chaste Tree River.
With the cold sky, red leaves thin out.
No rain on the mountain path
Yet greenness drips on my clothes.
- Wang Wei (699-759)
The thing about prison is the attempt always to get something on or from someone else. More intense than life on the street, but similar in culture, what imprisons us is the constant attempt to drive wedges, set apart, set up debtor relationships, call in favors owed, establish top force, use whatever you've got on someone to your advantage.
The notion of "anam cara" or soul friend, someone to open heart, mind, and soul with, is a miraculous thing in prison. In talking of the miracle you could feel the longing.
As Bo Lozoff's book title says it -- "We're All Doing Time." As the six of us looked at today, so much depends on how we transform and are transformed by each now. A slight can become bright; pain can become gain. Doing time can become being just now. "Now" is beyond time. It is without half.
When we help one another see, say, feel, and think about the whole of it, the whole of life -- we are beginning to live now.
Unhalf yourself.
Be what we are in that shared reality between you and me, between each and all.
Unsay the narrative line that puts us away from what is wholly together.
Our own, one's own.
"What is" -- between you and me.
Beauty.
"I can't see you with me." That's what Ben said in prison conversation today. "Me" has to diminish for any "you" to be seen.
What is between me and you?
Ben came in at end. Jason, Billy, Rusty, Ben, Saskia and I read some from John O'Donohue's book Beauty. He wrote about betweenness.
We wondered what was there between us.
White stones glow in Chaste Tree River.
With the cold sky, red leaves thin out.
No rain on the mountain path
Yet greenness drips on my clothes.
- Wang Wei (699-759)
The thing about prison is the attempt always to get something on or from someone else. More intense than life on the street, but similar in culture, what imprisons us is the constant attempt to drive wedges, set apart, set up debtor relationships, call in favors owed, establish top force, use whatever you've got on someone to your advantage.
The notion of "anam cara" or soul friend, someone to open heart, mind, and soul with, is a miraculous thing in prison. In talking of the miracle you could feel the longing.
As Bo Lozoff's book title says it -- "We're All Doing Time." As the six of us looked at today, so much depends on how we transform and are transformed by each now. A slight can become bright; pain can become gain. Doing time can become being just now. "Now" is beyond time. It is without half.
When we help one another see, say, feel, and think about the whole of it, the whole of life -- we are beginning to live now.
Unhalf yourself.
Be what we are in that shared reality between you and me, between each and all.
Unsay the narrative line that puts us away from what is wholly together.
Our own, one's own.
"What is" -- between you and me.
Beauty.
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Five lobsters are sent from Maine to Ronkonkoma NY.
A man is dying. He said on phone he’d have some. They will give their lives for him and his family. He has lent his life to his family and the family of all beings. “The machine is breaking down,” he said. His body closes. We say goodbye on the phone.
No form, no sound.
Here I am;
White clouds fringing the peaks,
River cutting through the valley.
- Daito
The nature of everything in existence is to pass through.
We greet with love each one passing through.
From Maine, with love, Frank!
A man is dying. He said on phone he’d have some. They will give their lives for him and his family. He has lent his life to his family and the family of all beings. “The machine is breaking down,” he said. His body closes. We say goodbye on the phone.
No form, no sound.
Here I am;
White clouds fringing the peaks,
River cutting through the valley.
- Daito
The nature of everything in existence is to pass through.
We greet with love each one passing through.
From Maine, with love, Frank!
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Word is birdsong and baking fragrance.
If you understand the first word of Zen
You will know the last word.
The last word or the first word,
Is not a word.
- Wu-men
Two dogs snooze on mattress and floor. Earlier five of us (with cat in and out) took to stillness in chapel/zendo for 40 minutes. Candles before Buddha and Icon of Mother/Child move incense smoke through swirl of flame funnel.
Four did mindfulness walking beyond brook up Ragged Mtn stopping at tumbling falls, through wooded path, down runway to Snow Bowl parking lot, over to Hosmer Pond where two ducks nonchalance dog's arrival for brief swim.
We are mendicant monastics wandering hillside with begging souls. The mountain opens heart and drops sweet green bud, moist brown trail, birdsong, broken twig, last year's leaves, and stately quiet -- drops all this and more into our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and hands. Fingers climb and fall beads. We are filled with gifts given wanderers.
Mu-ge is stretched in front of barn when we return. The three four-legged animals line up at kitchen door like livestock at feeding time, patter in together and go to respective flopping places.
Sun is warm. Birdsong strong. Silence surrounds. Prayer hides within everything.
There's no urgency to uncover prayer and make it speak -- not the way we've tried to torture out the secrets of nature, or torture out fragments of intelligence from so-called enemies. Prayer's hiding place must be left alone.
Where prayer hides is where God cannot be seen and never will be seen. Prayer is the place from which each sound springs and to which all noise falls. The ground of prayer is not to be found by any searching we can do or science we can know. Prayer is beyond us.
Prayer is the unseeable face of God.
God is wisdom itself. We cannot see wisdom. We might be able to hear the sound of wisdom. We might be able to touch the fruits of wisdom. We might be able to see the path leading to and emerging from the residing place of wisdom. But wisdom itself? Wisdom itself is hidden in its own home ground.
To our eyes the home ground of wisdom is groundless.
All we can do is pass -- pass by it and pass it by -- open and empty as the begging bowl of the soul.
We will not know what has been dropped in that bowl. We'll not be able to evaluate its worth, or count it, or bank it, or buy anything with it. What we are given will remain as unknown to us as green is to pine-tip bud.
It is not ours to see. As God's face has no specific and exclusive location, the grace we receive from openly passing through the dwelling place of God is meant only to pass through us and fall into others only when need is present, open, and unexpected.
Beggers, they say, can't be choosers. To walk the mendicant path near and through the hidden reality of God is to follow the laura footpath of no-choice. It is to wander, unknowing and unknown, the pathless path to and from, in and out this wondrous, incomprehensible moment, this place through which we pass.
Games with God
I played, a child both wild and meek,
with God at games of hide-and-seek.
I searched in vain the usual places
and found a thousand saddened faces.
"Your God is hidden in heaven," they said;
"You'll see him only when you're dead."
How could I make them understand
God often took me by the hand?
Then as my tears began to fall
I felt his touch and heard his call,
"I never hid from you at all."
I played with God a game of tag,
his mantle flying like a flag.
I gave my God a good head start
but caught him running in my heart.
I played with God the game "I Spy,"
but lost him with my fading eye,
till playmate God in his pure kindness,
printed his image on my blindness.
(poem "Games with God," by Virginia Hamilton Adair, from Beliefs and Blasphemies, as found in The Writer's Almanac, Sunday, 6 June, 2004, with Garrison Keillor)
Singing chorus from tree branches.
Saskia bakes in kitchen.
Calling in.
If you understand the first word of Zen
You will know the last word.
The last word or the first word,
Is not a word.
- Wu-men
Two dogs snooze on mattress and floor. Earlier five of us (with cat in and out) took to stillness in chapel/zendo for 40 minutes. Candles before Buddha and Icon of Mother/Child move incense smoke through swirl of flame funnel.
Four did mindfulness walking beyond brook up Ragged Mtn stopping at tumbling falls, through wooded path, down runway to Snow Bowl parking lot, over to Hosmer Pond where two ducks nonchalance dog's arrival for brief swim.
We are mendicant monastics wandering hillside with begging souls. The mountain opens heart and drops sweet green bud, moist brown trail, birdsong, broken twig, last year's leaves, and stately quiet -- drops all this and more into our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and hands. Fingers climb and fall beads. We are filled with gifts given wanderers.
Mu-ge is stretched in front of barn when we return. The three four-legged animals line up at kitchen door like livestock at feeding time, patter in together and go to respective flopping places.
Sun is warm. Birdsong strong. Silence surrounds. Prayer hides within everything.
There's no urgency to uncover prayer and make it speak -- not the way we've tried to torture out the secrets of nature, or torture out fragments of intelligence from so-called enemies. Prayer's hiding place must be left alone.
Where prayer hides is where God cannot be seen and never will be seen. Prayer is the place from which each sound springs and to which all noise falls. The ground of prayer is not to be found by any searching we can do or science we can know. Prayer is beyond us.
Prayer is the unseeable face of God.
God is wisdom itself. We cannot see wisdom. We might be able to hear the sound of wisdom. We might be able to touch the fruits of wisdom. We might be able to see the path leading to and emerging from the residing place of wisdom. But wisdom itself? Wisdom itself is hidden in its own home ground.
To our eyes the home ground of wisdom is groundless.
All we can do is pass -- pass by it and pass it by -- open and empty as the begging bowl of the soul.
We will not know what has been dropped in that bowl. We'll not be able to evaluate its worth, or count it, or bank it, or buy anything with it. What we are given will remain as unknown to us as green is to pine-tip bud.
It is not ours to see. As God's face has no specific and exclusive location, the grace we receive from openly passing through the dwelling place of God is meant only to pass through us and fall into others only when need is present, open, and unexpected.
Beggers, they say, can't be choosers. To walk the mendicant path near and through the hidden reality of God is to follow the laura footpath of no-choice. It is to wander, unknowing and unknown, the pathless path to and from, in and out this wondrous, incomprehensible moment, this place through which we pass.
Games with God
I played, a child both wild and meek,
with God at games of hide-and-seek.
I searched in vain the usual places
and found a thousand saddened faces.
"Your God is hidden in heaven," they said;
"You'll see him only when you're dead."
How could I make them understand
God often took me by the hand?
Then as my tears began to fall
I felt his touch and heard his call,
"I never hid from you at all."
I played with God a game of tag,
his mantle flying like a flag.
I gave my God a good head start
but caught him running in my heart.
I played with God the game "I Spy,"
but lost him with my fading eye,
till playmate God in his pure kindness,
printed his image on my blindness.
(poem "Games with God," by Virginia Hamilton Adair, from Beliefs and Blasphemies, as found in The Writer's Almanac, Sunday, 6 June, 2004, with Garrison Keillor)
Singing chorus from tree branches.
Saskia bakes in kitchen.
Calling in.
Monday, June 07, 2004
Some say God is not to be thought; but what is actually felt.
Do we think that if we penetrated the mystery of the Trinity in our theological history we would change our thinking about each other and change our behavior toward each other?
And if we actually felt that which is our very life on this earth -- would anything change?
Preserve both mind and objects
This means that when we are practicing, mind remains in its place and objects remain in their place. If there is a time when the mind and the objects come in contact with each other, then the mind does not grasp at the objects and the objects do not intrude upon the mind. If neither of them contacts the other, then, naturally, deluded thoughts will not arise and there will be no obstacles to the path.
- Chinul (1205)
The following excerpts from thinking on the Trinity in the Christian tradition and of Circumincessional Interpenetration in the Buddhist tradition are examples of the path thought takes attempting to enter into and through the curious existential intuition of three-and-one.
1. What is the Trinity?
It is a doctrine formulated in the 4th century to describe the view of some leading churchmen concerning the nature and relationship of God, Jesus and the holy Spirit. It was enunciated in a series of creeds: The Nicene Creed (325 ad), The Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381 ad), and the Athanasian Creed (ca. 5th century ad). It took various forms and used multitudes of words so complex and enigmatic it is incomprehensible. Some Christians consider "trinity" simply to imply belief in God, Jesus and the holy Spirit — a broad platform all Christians can endorse. Differently, but still quite simply, the first use of this word in early Christian writings referred merely to the existence of "God, his Word, and his Wisdom" (Theophilus of Antioch, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 2, page 201). But as the doctrine evolved in the 4th-6th centuries, it became much more mysterious. It asserted that God is actually composed of three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all co-equal and co-eternal.
The Scriptural truth, on the other hand, is neither mysterious nor incomprehensible: God is one person, his son Jesus is a second person, and the holy Spirit is not a person at all. It is the spirit, power and influence of God. Jesus is subordinate to his Heavenly Father. God existed from eternity, but there was a time before the creation of his son Jesus when God was alone.
http://members.aol.com/SDBible/sdbs1.htm
2. Keiji Nishitani on Circuminsessional Interpenetration
All things that are in the world are linked together, one way or the other. Not a single thing comes into being without some relationship to every other thing. Scientific intellect thinks here in terms of natural laws of necessary causality; mythico-poetic imagination perceives an organic, living connection; philosophic reason contemplates an absolute One. But on a more essential level, a system of circuminsession has to be seen here, according to which, on the field of shunyata, all things are in a process of becoming master and servant to one another. In this system, each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself. Its being is illusion in its truth and truth in its illusion. This may sound strange the first time one hears it, but in fact it enables us for the first time to conceive of a force by virtue of which all things are gathered together and brought into relationship with one another, a force which, since ancient times, has gone by the name of 'nature' (physis).
To say that a thing is not itself means that, while continuing to be itself, it is in the home-ground of everything else. Figuratively speaking, its roots reach across into the ground of all other things and helps to hold them up and keep them standing. It serves as a constitutive element of their being so that they can be what they are, and thus provides an ingredient of their being. That a thing is itself means that all other things, while continuing to be themselves, are in the home-ground of that thing; that precisely when a thing is on its own home-ground, everything else is there too; that the roots of every other thing spread across into its home-ground. This way that everything has of being on the home-ground of everything else, without ceasing to be on its own home-ground, means that the being of each thing is held up, kept standing, and made to be what it is by means of the being of all other things; or, put the other way around, that each thing holds up the being of every other thing, keeps it standing, and makes it what it is. In a word, it means that all things 'are' in the 'world'.
To imply that when a thing is 'on its own home-ground, it must at the same time be on the home-ground of all other things' sounds absurd; but in fact it constitutes the 'essence' of the existence of things. The being of things in themselves is essentially circuminsessional. This is what we mean by speaking of beings as 'being that is in unison with emptiness', and 'being on the field of emptiness'. For this circuminsessional system is only possible on the field of emptiness or shunyata.
(adapted from Religion and Nothingness, by Prof. Keiji Nishitani, translated with an introduction by Prof. Jan van Bragt, and with a foreword by Prof. Winston L. King, 1982, Berkeley 1983)
http://www.euronet.nl/~advaya/excerpts.htm#nishitani
3. Teilhard DeChardin on the Trinity
The time comes, however, when God, speaking through the prophets or his Son, allows his influence to be openly apparent. He manifests himself as living and personal at once one and three. Faith comes by hearing. At that moment, if the soul holds to its faith, its hitherto vague desires embody themselves around the new truth. Accompanying faith in the revealed dogma, it feels coming down into it a clearly defined, conscious need for that dogma. All revealed truth, accordingly, including even the distant Trinity, is seen by the soul henceforth to be indispensable to its beatification. … …It is, therefore, a mistake to distinguish in man two different attractions that influence him: one, towards a hypothetical natural end of the cosmos, and the other towards the supernatural end that awaits us in the presence of God. There is only one single centre in the universe; it is at once natural and supernatural; it impels the whole of creation along one and the same line, first towards the fullest development of consciousness, and later toward the higher degree of holiness: In other words towards Christ Jesus, personal and cosmic.
(DeChardin Teilhard 1973. The Prayer of the Universe; In the Form of Christ pages 23 & 24. Paras. 3,4 & 5.)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/dechardin.html
4. Alan Watts on the Holy Trinity
Worship is the action in which man is drawn into the vortex of love which revolves eternally between the Persons of the Trinity. In the Mass, the congregation becomes God the Son speaking to the Father with the words of the Spirit, and therefore the saying and singing of these words should forbid the intrusion of personal idiosyncrasies. This is why the Gregorian chant has been the most perfect vehicle for the Western liturgy, since it is entirely free of military bombast and personalized sentimentality. It is pre-eminently the music of contemplation, and of a majestic serenity that has no need for pomp. Yet even in its most triumphant moods it is profoundly and marvelously sad, because it is the music of God in exile, and thus of the human ego possessed with a longing which is as deep as it is undefined.
(Watts Alan (1964). Beyond Theology; The Art of Godmanship. Page 164)
For as soon as religion begins to think about the one God existing prior to the universe, it begins to slip into monism. Here is the one God all by himself with no reality other than his own essence. Is not this the purest monism? If God becomes Love and Consciousness only by finding the necessary object for loving and knowing in his created universe, we are making the universe necessary to God, and is not this the purest pantheism? The idea of the Trinity saves Christianity from the monistic predicament. It gives God significance even prior to the universe, because he always contains both the subject and the object of his own love, the everlasting I-Thou relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit of love. Thus the Trinity comes as close as the language of religion permits to the doctrine of non-duality, for the One is seen as including Three, the Unity as not opposed to diversity.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Pages 69 & 70)
This view of the function of evil in the finite order is, however, profoundly consistent with such truly fundamental Christian dogmas as the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity. The God-man Christ on the cross is without doubt our most eloquent religious analogy of the infinite as the experiencer of all human pain and evil. And if the universe is a finite image of the Trinity, it must express, in the successive order of time, both the union of the Son with the Father and the distinction of the Son from the Father—the latter as the fall of man from God in Adam, and the former as the union of man with God in Christ, the Second Adam. It throws light, too, on the great ‘dark saying’ of Jesus, ‘It needs be that offences must come, but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh’, a saying that calls to mind the problematic role of Judas, whose betrayal of his Master precipitated the Redemptive Sacrifice.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 116)
For Berdyaev, as for the Christian mind in general, there can be no significant relation between man and God which is not free on both sides, and where there is not an ontological distinction between the two. While he has seen that pure monotheism is substantially monism, and that the significance of God can only be vindicated by the doctrine of the Trinity, he does not apply the logic of the relations between the Persons of the trinity to the relation between God and man. If man and God cannot have a true relation without the ontological distinction, and without a freedom of man distinct from the freedom of God, it must follow that a true and significant relation is impossible between the persons of the Trinity. ‘The mystery of the unity between two persons finds its solution in the ......... The kingdom of Love in freedom is the kingdom of the Trinity. The experience of freedom and its inherent tragedy bring us to the Trinity. . . . Absolute monotheism is always despotic, for it regards God as an absolute monarch and leaves no place for freedom. Only the religion of God in Three Persons succeeds in definitely getting past this monarchist or imperialist conception of God by revealing the life of God as a divine Trinity and thus vindicating liberty." But if the idea of the Trinity vindicates liberty within God, if the fact that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all God does not deprive them of significance and freedom, there is likewise no deprivation if man’s Self and the infinite, atma and Brahma, are also distinct and yet one. For the same reason, as has been shown, there is also no monarchist or imperialist tyranny of God over the human puppet.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page118)
That this process may be understandable to finite thought, the supreme Self must be regarded under two aspects. To one aspect, both phases are simultaneous because the eternal and omniscient viewpoint is never actually lost; the infinite remains infinite however much it may identify itself with the finite. To the other aspect the phases are successive, because, while remaining infinite, the Self becomes voluntarily subject to space and time. These two aspects are analogous to the Father and the Son in the doctrine of the Trinity. The first phase, involution, manifests in finite form the Son’s distinction from the Father; the second, evolution, manifests his union with the Father. The infinite, in the act of manifesting and identifying itself with the finite, is the formative logos, God the Son, whose image is the entire finite order considered simultaneously, 'sub specie aeternitalts'. Although we speak of the infinite as having two aspects, one in eternity and the other in time and space, one omniscient and the other taking finite viewpoints, this is simply a concession to the inherent dualism of human thought. In reality the infinite remains undivided, but the idea of the double aspect is a symbol for its non-duality, its ability to be at once infinite and finite, itself and another, one and many, without the slightest contradiction.’
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 142)
It is for this reason that Catholic doctrine has always maintained that true prayer is not simply man relating himself to God, but rather something which God is performing in and through man. Prayer has its origin, not in the soul, but in the indwelling Holy Spirit, and thus prayer is man’s participation in the interior life of the Holy Trinity—even in its most stumbling and rudimentary form.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 173)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/trinitywatts2.html
5. Thomas Merton on the Holy Trinity
Furthermore it is highly significant that a Japanese thinker schooled in Zen should be so open to what is basically the most obscure and difficult mystery of Christian theology: the dogma of the Trinity and the mission of the Divine Persons in the Christian and in the Church. This would seem to indicate that the real area for investigation of analogies and correspondences between Christianity and Zen might after all be theology rather than psychology or asceticism. At least theology is not excluded, but it must be theology as experienced in Christian contemplation, not the speculative theology of textbooks and disputations.
(Merton T. 1968 Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Page 58)
St. Paul compares this knowledge of God, in the Spirit, to the subjective knowledge that a man has of himself. Just as no one can know my inner self except my own "spirit," so no one can know God except God’s Spirit; yet this Holy Spirit is given to us, in such a way that God knows Himself in us, and this experience is utterly real, though it cannot be communicated in terms understandable to those who do not share it. (See I Cor. 2:7-15.) Consequently, St. Paul concludes, "we have the mind of Christ." (I Cor. 2:16)… …We cannot push our investigation further here, but it is significant that Suzuki, reading the following lines from Eckhart (which are perfectly orthodox and traditional Catholic theology), said they were "the same as Prajna intuition." (D.T. Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p.40; the quotation from C. de B. Evans’ translation of Eckhart, London, 1924, p. 147) "In giving us His love God has given us the Holy Ghost so that we can love Him with the love wherewith He loves Himself ." The Son Who, in us, loves the Father, in the Spirit, is translated thus by Suzuki into Zen terms: "one mirror reflecting another with no shadow between them." (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 4!)
(Merton T. 1968. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. pages 56 & 57)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/tmerton.html
Beyond the barn, cooing of Mourning Dove. Fire in middle-room fireplace after mid-day brunch. Raw chill day. Sando on mattress in upstairs study. Mu-ge pulling stick-string toy in hallway. Cesco not far from hearth.
Saskia told the story last evening of sitting next to Methodist man at ordination of Catholic deacons. At time of eucherist she left to receive communion, the man stayed where he sat. Later he told her he was a Minister. that he'd been the last professor of the final course these candidates took prior to their special day. Yet, while he was there to honor them, he knew he was not invited to the table, he was not permitted to receive communion in the Catholic ceremony. He told the story with simple narrative, She heard the story with attentive presence.
What use the thought of communion if the feeling is exclusion?
The real ordination took place off to the side. It was the trinity of the man, Saskia, and the inside/outside story they shaed with each other.
God is not to be thought. God is what is felt.
Ordinary. Today. Here. And now.
Feeling and telling communion.
One with another.
Do we think that if we penetrated the mystery of the Trinity in our theological history we would change our thinking about each other and change our behavior toward each other?
And if we actually felt that which is our very life on this earth -- would anything change?
Preserve both mind and objects
This means that when we are practicing, mind remains in its place and objects remain in their place. If there is a time when the mind and the objects come in contact with each other, then the mind does not grasp at the objects and the objects do not intrude upon the mind. If neither of them contacts the other, then, naturally, deluded thoughts will not arise and there will be no obstacles to the path.
- Chinul (1205)
The following excerpts from thinking on the Trinity in the Christian tradition and of Circumincessional Interpenetration in the Buddhist tradition are examples of the path thought takes attempting to enter into and through the curious existential intuition of three-and-one.
1. What is the Trinity?
It is a doctrine formulated in the 4th century to describe the view of some leading churchmen concerning the nature and relationship of God, Jesus and the holy Spirit. It was enunciated in a series of creeds: The Nicene Creed (325 ad), The Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381 ad), and the Athanasian Creed (ca. 5th century ad). It took various forms and used multitudes of words so complex and enigmatic it is incomprehensible. Some Christians consider "trinity" simply to imply belief in God, Jesus and the holy Spirit — a broad platform all Christians can endorse. Differently, but still quite simply, the first use of this word in early Christian writings referred merely to the existence of "God, his Word, and his Wisdom" (Theophilus of Antioch, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 2, page 201). But as the doctrine evolved in the 4th-6th centuries, it became much more mysterious. It asserted that God is actually composed of three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all co-equal and co-eternal.
The Scriptural truth, on the other hand, is neither mysterious nor incomprehensible: God is one person, his son Jesus is a second person, and the holy Spirit is not a person at all. It is the spirit, power and influence of God. Jesus is subordinate to his Heavenly Father. God existed from eternity, but there was a time before the creation of his son Jesus when God was alone.
http://members.aol.com/SDBible/sdbs1.htm
2. Keiji Nishitani on Circuminsessional Interpenetration
All things that are in the world are linked together, one way or the other. Not a single thing comes into being without some relationship to every other thing. Scientific intellect thinks here in terms of natural laws of necessary causality; mythico-poetic imagination perceives an organic, living connection; philosophic reason contemplates an absolute One. But on a more essential level, a system of circuminsession has to be seen here, according to which, on the field of shunyata, all things are in a process of becoming master and servant to one another. In this system, each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself. Its being is illusion in its truth and truth in its illusion. This may sound strange the first time one hears it, but in fact it enables us for the first time to conceive of a force by virtue of which all things are gathered together and brought into relationship with one another, a force which, since ancient times, has gone by the name of 'nature' (physis).
To say that a thing is not itself means that, while continuing to be itself, it is in the home-ground of everything else. Figuratively speaking, its roots reach across into the ground of all other things and helps to hold them up and keep them standing. It serves as a constitutive element of their being so that they can be what they are, and thus provides an ingredient of their being. That a thing is itself means that all other things, while continuing to be themselves, are in the home-ground of that thing; that precisely when a thing is on its own home-ground, everything else is there too; that the roots of every other thing spread across into its home-ground. This way that everything has of being on the home-ground of everything else, without ceasing to be on its own home-ground, means that the being of each thing is held up, kept standing, and made to be what it is by means of the being of all other things; or, put the other way around, that each thing holds up the being of every other thing, keeps it standing, and makes it what it is. In a word, it means that all things 'are' in the 'world'.
To imply that when a thing is 'on its own home-ground, it must at the same time be on the home-ground of all other things' sounds absurd; but in fact it constitutes the 'essence' of the existence of things. The being of things in themselves is essentially circuminsessional. This is what we mean by speaking of beings as 'being that is in unison with emptiness', and 'being on the field of emptiness'. For this circuminsessional system is only possible on the field of emptiness or shunyata.
(adapted from Religion and Nothingness, by Prof. Keiji Nishitani, translated with an introduction by Prof. Jan van Bragt, and with a foreword by Prof. Winston L. King, 1982, Berkeley 1983)
http://www.euronet.nl/~advaya/excerpts.htm#nishitani
3. Teilhard DeChardin on the Trinity
The time comes, however, when God, speaking through the prophets or his Son, allows his influence to be openly apparent. He manifests himself as living and personal at once one and three. Faith comes by hearing. At that moment, if the soul holds to its faith, its hitherto vague desires embody themselves around the new truth. Accompanying faith in the revealed dogma, it feels coming down into it a clearly defined, conscious need for that dogma. All revealed truth, accordingly, including even the distant Trinity, is seen by the soul henceforth to be indispensable to its beatification. … …It is, therefore, a mistake to distinguish in man two different attractions that influence him: one, towards a hypothetical natural end of the cosmos, and the other towards the supernatural end that awaits us in the presence of God. There is only one single centre in the universe; it is at once natural and supernatural; it impels the whole of creation along one and the same line, first towards the fullest development of consciousness, and later toward the higher degree of holiness: In other words towards Christ Jesus, personal and cosmic.
(DeChardin Teilhard 1973. The Prayer of the Universe; In the Form of Christ pages 23 & 24. Paras. 3,4 & 5.)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/dechardin.html
4. Alan Watts on the Holy Trinity
Worship is the action in which man is drawn into the vortex of love which revolves eternally between the Persons of the Trinity. In the Mass, the congregation becomes God the Son speaking to the Father with the words of the Spirit, and therefore the saying and singing of these words should forbid the intrusion of personal idiosyncrasies. This is why the Gregorian chant has been the most perfect vehicle for the Western liturgy, since it is entirely free of military bombast and personalized sentimentality. It is pre-eminently the music of contemplation, and of a majestic serenity that has no need for pomp. Yet even in its most triumphant moods it is profoundly and marvelously sad, because it is the music of God in exile, and thus of the human ego possessed with a longing which is as deep as it is undefined.
(Watts Alan (1964). Beyond Theology; The Art of Godmanship. Page 164)
For as soon as religion begins to think about the one God existing prior to the universe, it begins to slip into monism. Here is the one God all by himself with no reality other than his own essence. Is not this the purest monism? If God becomes Love and Consciousness only by finding the necessary object for loving and knowing in his created universe, we are making the universe necessary to God, and is not this the purest pantheism? The idea of the Trinity saves Christianity from the monistic predicament. It gives God significance even prior to the universe, because he always contains both the subject and the object of his own love, the everlasting I-Thou relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit of love. Thus the Trinity comes as close as the language of religion permits to the doctrine of non-duality, for the One is seen as including Three, the Unity as not opposed to diversity.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Pages 69 & 70)
This view of the function of evil in the finite order is, however, profoundly consistent with such truly fundamental Christian dogmas as the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity. The God-man Christ on the cross is without doubt our most eloquent religious analogy of the infinite as the experiencer of all human pain and evil. And if the universe is a finite image of the Trinity, it must express, in the successive order of time, both the union of the Son with the Father and the distinction of the Son from the Father—the latter as the fall of man from God in Adam, and the former as the union of man with God in Christ, the Second Adam. It throws light, too, on the great ‘dark saying’ of Jesus, ‘It needs be that offences must come, but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh’, a saying that calls to mind the problematic role of Judas, whose betrayal of his Master precipitated the Redemptive Sacrifice.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 116)
For Berdyaev, as for the Christian mind in general, there can be no significant relation between man and God which is not free on both sides, and where there is not an ontological distinction between the two. While he has seen that pure monotheism is substantially monism, and that the significance of God can only be vindicated by the doctrine of the Trinity, he does not apply the logic of the relations between the Persons of the trinity to the relation between God and man. If man and God cannot have a true relation without the ontological distinction, and without a freedom of man distinct from the freedom of God, it must follow that a true and significant relation is impossible between the persons of the Trinity. ‘The mystery of the unity between two persons finds its solution in the ......... The kingdom of Love in freedom is the kingdom of the Trinity. The experience of freedom and its inherent tragedy bring us to the Trinity. . . . Absolute monotheism is always despotic, for it regards God as an absolute monarch and leaves no place for freedom. Only the religion of God in Three Persons succeeds in definitely getting past this monarchist or imperialist conception of God by revealing the life of God as a divine Trinity and thus vindicating liberty." But if the idea of the Trinity vindicates liberty within God, if the fact that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all God does not deprive them of significance and freedom, there is likewise no deprivation if man’s Self and the infinite, atma and Brahma, are also distinct and yet one. For the same reason, as has been shown, there is also no monarchist or imperialist tyranny of God over the human puppet.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page118)
That this process may be understandable to finite thought, the supreme Self must be regarded under two aspects. To one aspect, both phases are simultaneous because the eternal and omniscient viewpoint is never actually lost; the infinite remains infinite however much it may identify itself with the finite. To the other aspect the phases are successive, because, while remaining infinite, the Self becomes voluntarily subject to space and time. These two aspects are analogous to the Father and the Son in the doctrine of the Trinity. The first phase, involution, manifests in finite form the Son’s distinction from the Father; the second, evolution, manifests his union with the Father. The infinite, in the act of manifesting and identifying itself with the finite, is the formative logos, God the Son, whose image is the entire finite order considered simultaneously, 'sub specie aeternitalts'. Although we speak of the infinite as having two aspects, one in eternity and the other in time and space, one omniscient and the other taking finite viewpoints, this is simply a concession to the inherent dualism of human thought. In reality the infinite remains undivided, but the idea of the double aspect is a symbol for its non-duality, its ability to be at once infinite and finite, itself and another, one and many, without the slightest contradiction.’
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 142)
It is for this reason that Catholic doctrine has always maintained that true prayer is not simply man relating himself to God, but rather something which God is performing in and through man. Prayer has its origin, not in the soul, but in the indwelling Holy Spirit, and thus prayer is man’s participation in the interior life of the Holy Trinity—even in its most stumbling and rudimentary form.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 173)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/trinitywatts2.html
5. Thomas Merton on the Holy Trinity
Furthermore it is highly significant that a Japanese thinker schooled in Zen should be so open to what is basically the most obscure and difficult mystery of Christian theology: the dogma of the Trinity and the mission of the Divine Persons in the Christian and in the Church. This would seem to indicate that the real area for investigation of analogies and correspondences between Christianity and Zen might after all be theology rather than psychology or asceticism. At least theology is not excluded, but it must be theology as experienced in Christian contemplation, not the speculative theology of textbooks and disputations.
(Merton T. 1968 Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Page 58)
St. Paul compares this knowledge of God, in the Spirit, to the subjective knowledge that a man has of himself. Just as no one can know my inner self except my own "spirit," so no one can know God except God’s Spirit; yet this Holy Spirit is given to us, in such a way that God knows Himself in us, and this experience is utterly real, though it cannot be communicated in terms understandable to those who do not share it. (See I Cor. 2:7-15.) Consequently, St. Paul concludes, "we have the mind of Christ." (I Cor. 2:16)… …We cannot push our investigation further here, but it is significant that Suzuki, reading the following lines from Eckhart (which are perfectly orthodox and traditional Catholic theology), said they were "the same as Prajna intuition." (D.T. Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p.40; the quotation from C. de B. Evans’ translation of Eckhart, London, 1924, p. 147) "In giving us His love God has given us the Holy Ghost so that we can love Him with the love wherewith He loves Himself ." The Son Who, in us, loves the Father, in the Spirit, is translated thus by Suzuki into Zen terms: "one mirror reflecting another with no shadow between them." (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 4!)
(Merton T. 1968. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. pages 56 & 57)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/tmerton.html
Beyond the barn, cooing of Mourning Dove. Fire in middle-room fireplace after mid-day brunch. Raw chill day. Sando on mattress in upstairs study. Mu-ge pulling stick-string toy in hallway. Cesco not far from hearth.
Saskia told the story last evening of sitting next to Methodist man at ordination of Catholic deacons. At time of eucherist she left to receive communion, the man stayed where he sat. Later he told her he was a Minister. that he'd been the last professor of the final course these candidates took prior to their special day. Yet, while he was there to honor them, he knew he was not invited to the table, he was not permitted to receive communion in the Catholic ceremony. He told the story with simple narrative, She heard the story with attentive presence.
What use the thought of communion if the feeling is exclusion?
The real ordination took place off to the side. It was the trinity of the man, Saskia, and the inside/outside story they shaed with each other.
God is not to be thought. God is what is felt.
Ordinary. Today. Here. And now.
Feeling and telling communion.
One with another.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Steady awareness helps.
Jory says he dreamt of Kapleau Roshi. Even in his fading from view with death, he assists a former student. Delia is a threaded needle moving through the many churches in the area, sewing gem of awareness to each Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist and Buddhist celebration. Saskia returns from Bob C's ordination to deaconate at Catholic cathedral in Portland.
What we call God is in attendance everywhere. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) said, "God is like an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,"
All day long people repeat the
Word prajna aloud,
But do not know their
Self-natured prajna.
They are like one who
Cannot satisfy their hunger
By only talking about eating.
Just talking of voidness
Will not enable one to
Perceive one's nature for
Myriads of eons, and there
Will be no advantage in the end.
- Altar Sutra
June 6 -- the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's death by assassination at age 42 in 1968, feels more moving than the death at 93 of former president Ronald Reagan. We are often struck by what might have been. The 60th anniversary of D-Day Normandy Invasion is celebrated by world leaders and surviving civilian and military personnel. War is forever an open parenthesis, murder a sorrow without surcease, and dementia by alzheimer's a long irretrievable goodbye.
We think things should be other than they are. We want things to be other than they are. But if practice and steady awareness show us anything, it is that things are exactly what they are. Further -- about this "other" we want things and people to be? -- the paradoxically tough but tender realization is that there is no other. Everything is what it is -- and we are invited in particular to that embodying realization.
"The only field in which this [oneness] is possible is the field of sunyata [emptiness] which can have its circumference nowhere and its center everywhere. Only on the field of sunyata can the totality of things, each of which is absolutely unique and an absolute center of all things, at the same time be gathered into one."
(-- Keiji Nishitani, 1900-1990, in Religion and Nothingness, c.1983.)
Forms change. Old forms deteriorate. Surprising replacement forms arise. Some forms continue, reform, and endure. It is the emptiness that permeates and sustains form that seems ever unchanging. Emptiness centers the spinning world of changing forms on an axis of transparency.
In On Cause, Principle, and Unity, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) wrote:
This entire globe, this star, not being subject to death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts. There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the centre of things.
We are incessantly related.
One and one and one -- some say make three. Today is feast of Trinity in Christian metaphor.
But one and one and one really reveal the one that each is, incessantly relative each to each, unendingly between and center to the revelation of each and all.
Who can begin to grasp and embody this center without periphery?
Steady awareness helps.
Let service begin.
With us.
Jory says he dreamt of Kapleau Roshi. Even in his fading from view with death, he assists a former student. Delia is a threaded needle moving through the many churches in the area, sewing gem of awareness to each Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist and Buddhist celebration. Saskia returns from Bob C's ordination to deaconate at Catholic cathedral in Portland.
What we call God is in attendance everywhere. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) said, "God is like an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,"
All day long people repeat the
Word prajna aloud,
But do not know their
Self-natured prajna.
They are like one who
Cannot satisfy their hunger
By only talking about eating.
Just talking of voidness
Will not enable one to
Perceive one's nature for
Myriads of eons, and there
Will be no advantage in the end.
- Altar Sutra
June 6 -- the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's death by assassination at age 42 in 1968, feels more moving than the death at 93 of former president Ronald Reagan. We are often struck by what might have been. The 60th anniversary of D-Day Normandy Invasion is celebrated by world leaders and surviving civilian and military personnel. War is forever an open parenthesis, murder a sorrow without surcease, and dementia by alzheimer's a long irretrievable goodbye.
We think things should be other than they are. We want things to be other than they are. But if practice and steady awareness show us anything, it is that things are exactly what they are. Further -- about this "other" we want things and people to be? -- the paradoxically tough but tender realization is that there is no other. Everything is what it is -- and we are invited in particular to that embodying realization.
"The only field in which this [oneness] is possible is the field of sunyata [emptiness] which can have its circumference nowhere and its center everywhere. Only on the field of sunyata can the totality of things, each of which is absolutely unique and an absolute center of all things, at the same time be gathered into one."
(-- Keiji Nishitani, 1900-1990, in Religion and Nothingness, c.1983.)
Forms change. Old forms deteriorate. Surprising replacement forms arise. Some forms continue, reform, and endure. It is the emptiness that permeates and sustains form that seems ever unchanging. Emptiness centers the spinning world of changing forms on an axis of transparency.
In On Cause, Principle, and Unity, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) wrote:
This entire globe, this star, not being subject to death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts. There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the centre of things.
We are incessantly related.
One and one and one -- some say make three. Today is feast of Trinity in Christian metaphor.
But one and one and one really reveal the one that each is, incessantly relative each to each, unendingly between and center to the revelation of each and all.
Who can begin to grasp and embody this center without periphery?
Steady awareness helps.
Let service begin.
With us.
Saturday, June 05, 2004
What is passing?
Sando has taken to throwing-up. There's a sense of "uh-oh." There are tears on Saskia's face. Everywhere, what is passing is life from form to form, emptiness to emptiness.
It is our lot in life to pass through life's forms and emptiness.
Truth’s naked radiance,
Cut off from the sense and the world,
Shines by itself.
No words for it.
- Pai-chang (720-814)
In trees this cool morning -- birdsong. Blue jay lights on branch. Chickadee and finch at feeder. Chatter of squirrel complaining of something in its way this morning.
I loved you for your beauty
but that doesn't make a fool of me:
you were in it for your beauty too
and I loved you for your body
there's a voice that sounds like God to me
declaring, declaring, declaring that your body's really you
And I loved you when our love was blessed
and I love you now there's nothing left
but sorrow and a sense of overtime
and I missed you since the place got wrecked
And I just don't care what happens next
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's CLOSING TIME
(--from CLOSING TIME Lyrics, Artist(Band):Leonard Cohen)
What is between freedom and death?
Is the reason so few surrender into the life of God that there is a requirement asked which we find confusing? The requirement is that we let go of all we know, fall from every image of self-identity, and pass through the unending-between that reduces each either/or to God's compassionate yet whimsical face flashing million-fold likenesses all smiling with loving, tender, and empathic readiness for our consternating and tentative approach.
This unending-between, where we turn and turn looking into and through mirror images of one and all, is at first dizzying, and then mystifying, finally mere seeing what is there.
Jesus said to his disciples: "I have much more to tell you, but you cannot
bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to
all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears,
and will declare to you the things that are coming.
(from John 16:12-13)
What the Spirit hears is echoing and resounding in the morning prayerful drone and whisper of the innumerable everything permeating each distinct form making its way through existence.
Sit or stand in the choir of green leaf, rolling tire, flying bird, crawling insect, barking dog, barn-side plank, piles of plates with crumbs and spoons, worried thoughts, appreciative light, and tumbling water down shade-sweet brook.
We are what we are where we are.
Where all this is fine for now.
For, what is this? And, what is now? Just, we are here.
Sando still bounds sfter Saskia and groans when changing position on floor. Such a sweet companion!
Who cares what happens next?
Sando has taken to throwing-up. There's a sense of "uh-oh." There are tears on Saskia's face. Everywhere, what is passing is life from form to form, emptiness to emptiness.
It is our lot in life to pass through life's forms and emptiness.
Truth’s naked radiance,
Cut off from the sense and the world,
Shines by itself.
No words for it.
- Pai-chang (720-814)
In trees this cool morning -- birdsong. Blue jay lights on branch. Chickadee and finch at feeder. Chatter of squirrel complaining of something in its way this morning.
I loved you for your beauty
but that doesn't make a fool of me:
you were in it for your beauty too
and I loved you for your body
there's a voice that sounds like God to me
declaring, declaring, declaring that your body's really you
And I loved you when our love was blessed
and I love you now there's nothing left
but sorrow and a sense of overtime
and I missed you since the place got wrecked
And I just don't care what happens next
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's CLOSING TIME
(--from CLOSING TIME Lyrics, Artist(Band):Leonard Cohen)
What is between freedom and death?
Is the reason so few surrender into the life of God that there is a requirement asked which we find confusing? The requirement is that we let go of all we know, fall from every image of self-identity, and pass through the unending-between that reduces each either/or to God's compassionate yet whimsical face flashing million-fold likenesses all smiling with loving, tender, and empathic readiness for our consternating and tentative approach.
This unending-between, where we turn and turn looking into and through mirror images of one and all, is at first dizzying, and then mystifying, finally mere seeing what is there.
Jesus said to his disciples: "I have much more to tell you, but you cannot
bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to
all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears,
and will declare to you the things that are coming.
(from John 16:12-13)
What the Spirit hears is echoing and resounding in the morning prayerful drone and whisper of the innumerable everything permeating each distinct form making its way through existence.
Sit or stand in the choir of green leaf, rolling tire, flying bird, crawling insect, barking dog, barn-side plank, piles of plates with crumbs and spoons, worried thoughts, appreciative light, and tumbling water down shade-sweet brook.
We are what we are where we are.
Where all this is fine for now.
For, what is this? And, what is now? Just, we are here.
Sando still bounds sfter Saskia and groans when changing position on floor. Such a sweet companion!
Who cares what happens next?
Friday, June 04, 2004
Something empties out.
It feels like whatever is not yet emptiness is falling away.
In an article about hermits, the following:
"One of our newsletter contributors described hermits as 'sacristans of emptiness,' " Karen Fredette said. "Hermits stay in the present moment, which is eternal because it is neither past nor future, dwelling in the temple of God's presence, letting everything flow from and back into the source. Eremites strip life to its essentials and live deliberately. They have much to say to an overactive and over-social world."
(Sacristans of emptiness - Religious Life, National Catholic Reporter, Feb 27, 2004 by Rich Heffern)
Rosina, Lloyd, Richard, Tommy, Pia, Michael, Saskia, Mike, Daniel, and I read from The Heart of Islam at Friday Evening Conversation. We spoke about the tension between secularism and religion in America and Middle East. About "God willing" and free will. It was, and is, a captivating conversation.
Efface both mind and objects.
This means that when we are practicing, we initially make the external sense-objects void and calm and then relax the internal--the mind. Since internal and external are both calmed, where can delusion arise? As Kuan-ch'I said, "In the ten directions there are no walls; at the four sides there are no gates. All is innocent, pure and undefiled."
- Chinul (1205)
Afterwards, John and Tommy laughed on planked deck overlooking harbor sunset. Boats held by mooring and dock lines obeyed securing tethers.
To this discourse, we conclude, being appears as the pure fullness of the permanent, gathered within it, untouched by unrest and change. Even today it is customary in describing the beginning of Western philosophy to oppose the doctrine of Heraclitus to this doctrine of Parmenides. A much-quoted saying is attributed to Heraclitus: panta rhei, everything is in flux. Accordingly there is no being. Everything "is" becoming.
(p.82, in An Introduction to Metaphysics, by Martin Heidegger)
These days, everything is in flux. Lines are slack and uncleted. Within and around it feels like something set adrift in an unfamiliar tide. At any second coming aground threatens. Or perhaps promises.
God willing.
We're becoming.
Unsettled.
Here.
It feels like whatever is not yet emptiness is falling away.
In an article about hermits, the following:
"One of our newsletter contributors described hermits as 'sacristans of emptiness,' " Karen Fredette said. "Hermits stay in the present moment, which is eternal because it is neither past nor future, dwelling in the temple of God's presence, letting everything flow from and back into the source. Eremites strip life to its essentials and live deliberately. They have much to say to an overactive and over-social world."
(Sacristans of emptiness - Religious Life, National Catholic Reporter, Feb 27, 2004 by Rich Heffern)
Rosina, Lloyd, Richard, Tommy, Pia, Michael, Saskia, Mike, Daniel, and I read from The Heart of Islam at Friday Evening Conversation. We spoke about the tension between secularism and religion in America and Middle East. About "God willing" and free will. It was, and is, a captivating conversation.
Efface both mind and objects.
This means that when we are practicing, we initially make the external sense-objects void and calm and then relax the internal--the mind. Since internal and external are both calmed, where can delusion arise? As Kuan-ch'I said, "In the ten directions there are no walls; at the four sides there are no gates. All is innocent, pure and undefiled."
- Chinul (1205)
Afterwards, John and Tommy laughed on planked deck overlooking harbor sunset. Boats held by mooring and dock lines obeyed securing tethers.
To this discourse, we conclude, being appears as the pure fullness of the permanent, gathered within it, untouched by unrest and change. Even today it is customary in describing the beginning of Western philosophy to oppose the doctrine of Heraclitus to this doctrine of Parmenides. A much-quoted saying is attributed to Heraclitus: panta rhei, everything is in flux. Accordingly there is no being. Everything "is" becoming.
(p.82, in An Introduction to Metaphysics, by Martin Heidegger)
These days, everything is in flux. Lines are slack and uncleted. Within and around it feels like something set adrift in an unfamiliar tide. At any second coming aground threatens. Or perhaps promises.
God willing.
We're becoming.
Unsettled.
Here.
Thursday, June 03, 2004
I am confused and not hearing particularly well.
I imagined I heard the sound of a different world.
If at ground is the mother, say earth, that nurtures us in life, wouldn't we honor and care for her?
If all around us is the father, say heaven, that inspires us through life, wouldn't we see and be grateful for him?
If within and without us is the holy breath-sound, say spirit/word, that resonates each of us with one another, wouldn't we listen to it?
What makes an authentic monk? I think clarity of mind and sight, simplicity of life and gratitude in the heart. In short, what Brother David calls a "listening heart."
It takes self-knowledge and freedom from projection to render the heart a listening one. The monk listens.
(p.xi from Introduction by Matthew Fox to A Listening Heart, The Spirituality of Sacred Sensuousness, book by Brother David Steindl-Rast, c. 1983, 1999)
I have always longed to be what I am where I am. I've often forgotten. I continue to forget. At times I sit and stare at nothing in particular, lost in stillness, often despairing the impossible complexity of human social character and financial exchange economics.
In short, poverty, and avowed reliance on gift -- the courage to submit to the unsuspecting grace and kindness of unidentified passersby -- is an odd way to live in the world today.
The daily discipline of listening and responding to meaning is called obedience. This concept of obedience is far more comprehensive than the narrow notion of obedience as doing-what-you-are-told-to-do. Obedience in the full sense is the process of attuning the heart to the simple call contained in the complexity of a given situation. The only alternative is absurdity. Ab-surdus literally means absolutely deaf. If I call a situation absurd I admit that I am deaf to its meaning. I admit implicitly that I must become ab-audiens -- thoroughly listening, obedient. I must give my ear, give myself, so fully to the word that reaches me that it will send me. Being sent by the word, I will be obedient to my mission. Thus by doing the truth lovingly, not by analyzing it, I will begin to understand.
(Pp 2-3, Steindl-Rast)
It seems vast majorities of the world live by recompense and earned reward. Whole systems of world finance and religion operate under that rubric. Pay the price, earn rewards, be ransomed by savior, yield dividends on investment, and bank on what you deserve.
Lesser minorities look to grace, graciousness, and grateful acceptance of gift. Those that do this are not merely a lower-class tier of deprived unfortunates. Some are willing participants in the promise that all are loved, all are equal, and all are in one another's care.
What is my confusion?
Isn't earth, heaven, and spirit/word -- (sacred compassion, stillness itself, and true silence/creative sound) -- my true home?
Lao-tzu said, "The greatest revelation is stillness."
Dare I dwell there?
Obediently.
Within each.
Hermitage.
I imagined I heard the sound of a different world.
If at ground is the mother, say earth, that nurtures us in life, wouldn't we honor and care for her?
If all around us is the father, say heaven, that inspires us through life, wouldn't we see and be grateful for him?
If within and without us is the holy breath-sound, say spirit/word, that resonates each of us with one another, wouldn't we listen to it?
What makes an authentic monk? I think clarity of mind and sight, simplicity of life and gratitude in the heart. In short, what Brother David calls a "listening heart."
It takes self-knowledge and freedom from projection to render the heart a listening one. The monk listens.
(p.xi from Introduction by Matthew Fox to A Listening Heart, The Spirituality of Sacred Sensuousness, book by Brother David Steindl-Rast, c. 1983, 1999)
I have always longed to be what I am where I am. I've often forgotten. I continue to forget. At times I sit and stare at nothing in particular, lost in stillness, often despairing the impossible complexity of human social character and financial exchange economics.
In short, poverty, and avowed reliance on gift -- the courage to submit to the unsuspecting grace and kindness of unidentified passersby -- is an odd way to live in the world today.
The daily discipline of listening and responding to meaning is called obedience. This concept of obedience is far more comprehensive than the narrow notion of obedience as doing-what-you-are-told-to-do. Obedience in the full sense is the process of attuning the heart to the simple call contained in the complexity of a given situation. The only alternative is absurdity. Ab-surdus literally means absolutely deaf. If I call a situation absurd I admit that I am deaf to its meaning. I admit implicitly that I must become ab-audiens -- thoroughly listening, obedient. I must give my ear, give myself, so fully to the word that reaches me that it will send me. Being sent by the word, I will be obedient to my mission. Thus by doing the truth lovingly, not by analyzing it, I will begin to understand.
(Pp 2-3, Steindl-Rast)
It seems vast majorities of the world live by recompense and earned reward. Whole systems of world finance and religion operate under that rubric. Pay the price, earn rewards, be ransomed by savior, yield dividends on investment, and bank on what you deserve.
Lesser minorities look to grace, graciousness, and grateful acceptance of gift. Those that do this are not merely a lower-class tier of deprived unfortunates. Some are willing participants in the promise that all are loved, all are equal, and all are in one another's care.
What is my confusion?
Isn't earth, heaven, and spirit/word -- (sacred compassion, stillness itself, and true silence/creative sound) -- my true home?
Lao-tzu said, "The greatest revelation is stillness."
Dare I dwell there?
Obediently.
Within each.
Hermitage.
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
What if we felt the actual world, accepting what we felt?
It is a troubling consideration:
1. We are not who we think we are; and
2. Wherever we go, there we are.
All people fundamentally
Possess the wisdom of
Bodhi-prajna.
If they cannot be
Awakened to it,
It is because their minds
Are under delusion.
You should know that
The Buddha nature of the
Ignorant and of the
Enlightened are the same,
The only difference being
That the former are deluded whereas
The latter are awakened to it.
- Altar Sutra
Mu-ge, in drizzly rain outside kitchen window, hunkered and leapt into tall grass under bird feeder. He aimed for chipmunk stepping off bulkhead into grass under dining room window. Mu-ge missed. Back in house he knocks strawberry basket off kitchen table to floor -- a consolation conquest.
Each one of us is where we are. More than a statement about location, saying we are where we are is a statement about our essence and existence.
Q: What are we?
A: We are where we are!
What's troubling about this consideration is that, if we are where we are, there is no separation between who we are and where we are. Nor is there any "othering" between who we are and who we are with. The old saying goes: "Show me your friends and I'll show you who you are."
Christians have had difficulty comprehending the theological statement that God is omnipresent. At worst and narrowly interpreted it suggests that God is on their side as long as they are in the right for a noble cause. At best it means God is everywhere and wherever they go they will meet God because God will show up, even if only in prayer, thought, or intention.
We seem to be insistent on separation. We might claim a longing for communion and union with God, but it is a longing better left just that, and not realized. We're quite comfortable just knowing of the longing and the possibility. Think the thought, and let it be dual.
If Mu-ge catches the chipmunk he will kill it. If we catch God -- who will die?
The Buddhists are more direct. The say, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."
Why is that?
Because the Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha?
Then, who is true Buddha?
Who's asking?
(That's what they'd say. Leaving you to ponder.)
We ponder what the world would be like without us, or without God. When suicide is pondered it is the same question. When war is pondered it is the same question.
In our ignorance we commit suicide or go to war (usually the same thing) in order to relieve or be relieved of something extraneous, some burden or displeasure we feel must go, must be eliminated. The dualistic mind assisted by fierce but clouded emotion sees resolution of problems by cutting off the problem and disposing of it, and being done.
The sorrow of suicide and war is profound -- most often too profound for conscious, rational thought. That's what the profound is. It is beyond our capacity to consider. The sorrow plunges to its profound origin and lays bare and open there.
At origin, in that place ever-present, is where realization beyond sense or thought resides. Dogen said, "dropping off mind and body."
We ask, "What is holding us as we tumble through profound bottomless sorrow?"
Who would go to that place of their own volition? Some do. I think some go there to open the reality to less fearful dwelling. These compassionate beings are gift to humankind and all existence. Whether they are the mystics, contemplatives, holy ones, heroes, hermits, solitaries of every stripe, as well as everyone who falls into feeling the actual world.
As a Christian I'm always surprised there is not clearer teaching that the fall the church calls sin is incomplete. Isn't what really happens the falling through mistakes, through the bottomless compassionate love of the Christ, through the unfathomable reality of omnipresence falling idiorhythmically and isomorphically, falling through all of life with all of life? If such falling continues without end, where is the rest? The rest, I submit, does not reside in a fixed place, but in the free fall as God is falling as we are falling as we are what is in its very nature a circumincessional interpenetration within and throughout.
As a Buddhist I practice letting fall. I practice within the silent presence of what is there.
Mu-ge snoozes on black chair against brown leather soft briefcase as Gregorian Chant loops from middle room. Sando and Cesco are on kitchen floor. The cake is out of oven. Bread thaws. Unsalted butter near plastic bag to go into shop where Saskia makes soup in harbor room today -- a first.
As clean as the thought might be, we cannot kill ourselves, we cannot kill God. Try as we might -- with war or suicide -- to eliminate appearances, there is something immeasurably beyond and profoundly below appearance that upholds, sustains, and urges toward wholeness all that thinks it is not upheld, sustained, or whole.
Our complete being longs for this realization -- longs for it in each and every appearance of each and every being in each and every moment.
In our actual world this feeling behind feeling, this fact beyond fact, is our very reality.
Look as this reality.
Seeing one's self.
As oneself.
Completely.
Feeling.
It is a troubling consideration:
1. We are not who we think we are; and
2. Wherever we go, there we are.
All people fundamentally
Possess the wisdom of
Bodhi-prajna.
If they cannot be
Awakened to it,
It is because their minds
Are under delusion.
You should know that
The Buddha nature of the
Ignorant and of the
Enlightened are the same,
The only difference being
That the former are deluded whereas
The latter are awakened to it.
- Altar Sutra
Mu-ge, in drizzly rain outside kitchen window, hunkered and leapt into tall grass under bird feeder. He aimed for chipmunk stepping off bulkhead into grass under dining room window. Mu-ge missed. Back in house he knocks strawberry basket off kitchen table to floor -- a consolation conquest.
Each one of us is where we are. More than a statement about location, saying we are where we are is a statement about our essence and existence.
Q: What are we?
A: We are where we are!
What's troubling about this consideration is that, if we are where we are, there is no separation between who we are and where we are. Nor is there any "othering" between who we are and who we are with. The old saying goes: "Show me your friends and I'll show you who you are."
Christians have had difficulty comprehending the theological statement that God is omnipresent. At worst and narrowly interpreted it suggests that God is on their side as long as they are in the right for a noble cause. At best it means God is everywhere and wherever they go they will meet God because God will show up, even if only in prayer, thought, or intention.
We seem to be insistent on separation. We might claim a longing for communion and union with God, but it is a longing better left just that, and not realized. We're quite comfortable just knowing of the longing and the possibility. Think the thought, and let it be dual.
If Mu-ge catches the chipmunk he will kill it. If we catch God -- who will die?
The Buddhists are more direct. The say, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."
Why is that?
Because the Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha?
Then, who is true Buddha?
Who's asking?
(That's what they'd say. Leaving you to ponder.)
We ponder what the world would be like without us, or without God. When suicide is pondered it is the same question. When war is pondered it is the same question.
In our ignorance we commit suicide or go to war (usually the same thing) in order to relieve or be relieved of something extraneous, some burden or displeasure we feel must go, must be eliminated. The dualistic mind assisted by fierce but clouded emotion sees resolution of problems by cutting off the problem and disposing of it, and being done.
The sorrow of suicide and war is profound -- most often too profound for conscious, rational thought. That's what the profound is. It is beyond our capacity to consider. The sorrow plunges to its profound origin and lays bare and open there.
At origin, in that place ever-present, is where realization beyond sense or thought resides. Dogen said, "dropping off mind and body."
We ask, "What is holding us as we tumble through profound bottomless sorrow?"
Who would go to that place of their own volition? Some do. I think some go there to open the reality to less fearful dwelling. These compassionate beings are gift to humankind and all existence. Whether they are the mystics, contemplatives, holy ones, heroes, hermits, solitaries of every stripe, as well as everyone who falls into feeling the actual world.
As a Christian I'm always surprised there is not clearer teaching that the fall the church calls sin is incomplete. Isn't what really happens the falling through mistakes, through the bottomless compassionate love of the Christ, through the unfathomable reality of omnipresence falling idiorhythmically and isomorphically, falling through all of life with all of life? If such falling continues without end, where is the rest? The rest, I submit, does not reside in a fixed place, but in the free fall as God is falling as we are falling as we are what is in its very nature a circumincessional interpenetration within and throughout.
As a Buddhist I practice letting fall. I practice within the silent presence of what is there.
Mu-ge snoozes on black chair against brown leather soft briefcase as Gregorian Chant loops from middle room. Sando and Cesco are on kitchen floor. The cake is out of oven. Bread thaws. Unsalted butter near plastic bag to go into shop where Saskia makes soup in harbor room today -- a first.
As clean as the thought might be, we cannot kill ourselves, we cannot kill God. Try as we might -- with war or suicide -- to eliminate appearances, there is something immeasurably beyond and profoundly below appearance that upholds, sustains, and urges toward wholeness all that thinks it is not upheld, sustained, or whole.
Our complete being longs for this realization -- longs for it in each and every appearance of each and every being in each and every moment.
In our actual world this feeling behind feeling, this fact beyond fact, is our very reality.
Look as this reality.
Seeing one's self.
As oneself.
Completely.
Feeling.
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
We bury our dead the way some bury their problems in the back yard. Dig up soil, lay in problem, cover over, walk away.
We do not ever get rid of problems. We learn, rather, to enter into a new relationship with them. Like the Nobel mathematician who learned to live with his delusions, we learn to live with our mistakes, but only after acknowledging them and addressing them by their correct names.
Do not believe anything on the mere authority of teachers or priests. Accept as true and as the guide to your life only that which accords with your own reason and experience, after thorough investigation. Accept only that which contributes to the well-being of yourself and others.
- Buddha
When Giovanni Bernardone, known to us as Francesco (Francis of Assisi), opened scripture three times, his lot fell on:
1. Go sell what you have,,,,(Mk 10:21)
2. Proclaim the kingdom of God. (Lk 9:60)
3. Whoever wishes to be my follower must deny his very self....(Lk 9:23)
I look at these fragments and see a way through the contemporary veil of ignorance and delusion covering these days.
1. If I do not own even the nothing I have, no adding or subtracting will take place.
2. If the sole reality is God, and God is good, then to dwell in the near presence of shucking openness is to simply say what one sees.
3. If everything is what it is, and my "self" is not separate from what is right here and now, then any idea I retain of an isolated, separate, disconnected self is denied by the very fact of what is.
One problem we have is the recurring illusion of what we think we are. We are what we are -- all of it -- the whole of what is found in the world. By thinking we are this and not that, by imagining we are better or worse than others, by clinging to ideas that promise victory or threaten defeat -- we fail to enter openly the unveiling of this present moment.
This present moment is the enormity of infinite energy continually transforming itself through our presence and awareness.
This awareness does not belong to us.
This awareness is the dwelling place of Wholeness, Integrity, Love -- what is called God.
This awareness transcends any notion of "self" or "no-self" and beyond into One and All.
Whatever we do, think, or say to anyone, we are creating the world in that image.
There is no place to hide, no other place to conquer and own, no future separate from the behavior engaged in with the illusion things will be better when we eliminate this obstacle before us.
This is it!
What we do is what is done, now and forever.
Our problem, the one we try to bury in the backyard, is the convenient delusion some are winners and some are losers, some are the chosen and some are disinherited, some are the elect and many are the outsiders cut off from secret societies of insiders. This problem of dualistic nihilism or monistic triumphalism plagues the mind of rational man and drives the human race insane.
What to do? Some say pray. Meditate. Watch. Contemplate. Do things with a concentrated mind. Breathe. Walk carefully. See through silence.
Myriad holes dug in countless backyards and dark cellars cannot cover that which longs to be uncovered.
The veil is rent. The one who came to show us the way through is the one showing us the way through. Whatever name given him or her, whatever time we say they've lived, whatever culture, race, language, or geography appeals to us as their indigenous dwelling -- it doesn't matter -- the one showing us the way through is doing so right now, right here, as you are.
Only God.
You see.
We do not ever get rid of problems. We learn, rather, to enter into a new relationship with them. Like the Nobel mathematician who learned to live with his delusions, we learn to live with our mistakes, but only after acknowledging them and addressing them by their correct names.
Do not believe anything on the mere authority of teachers or priests. Accept as true and as the guide to your life only that which accords with your own reason and experience, after thorough investigation. Accept only that which contributes to the well-being of yourself and others.
- Buddha
When Giovanni Bernardone, known to us as Francesco (Francis of Assisi), opened scripture three times, his lot fell on:
1. Go sell what you have,,,,(Mk 10:21)
2. Proclaim the kingdom of God. (Lk 9:60)
3. Whoever wishes to be my follower must deny his very self....(Lk 9:23)
I look at these fragments and see a way through the contemporary veil of ignorance and delusion covering these days.
1. If I do not own even the nothing I have, no adding or subtracting will take place.
2. If the sole reality is God, and God is good, then to dwell in the near presence of shucking openness is to simply say what one sees.
3. If everything is what it is, and my "self" is not separate from what is right here and now, then any idea I retain of an isolated, separate, disconnected self is denied by the very fact of what is.
One problem we have is the recurring illusion of what we think we are. We are what we are -- all of it -- the whole of what is found in the world. By thinking we are this and not that, by imagining we are better or worse than others, by clinging to ideas that promise victory or threaten defeat -- we fail to enter openly the unveiling of this present moment.
This present moment is the enormity of infinite energy continually transforming itself through our presence and awareness.
This awareness does not belong to us.
This awareness is the dwelling place of Wholeness, Integrity, Love -- what is called God.
This awareness transcends any notion of "self" or "no-self" and beyond into One and All.
Whatever we do, think, or say to anyone, we are creating the world in that image.
There is no place to hide, no other place to conquer and own, no future separate from the behavior engaged in with the illusion things will be better when we eliminate this obstacle before us.
This is it!
What we do is what is done, now and forever.
Our problem, the one we try to bury in the backyard, is the convenient delusion some are winners and some are losers, some are the chosen and some are disinherited, some are the elect and many are the outsiders cut off from secret societies of insiders. This problem of dualistic nihilism or monistic triumphalism plagues the mind of rational man and drives the human race insane.
What to do? Some say pray. Meditate. Watch. Contemplate. Do things with a concentrated mind. Breathe. Walk carefully. See through silence.
Myriad holes dug in countless backyards and dark cellars cannot cover that which longs to be uncovered.
The veil is rent. The one who came to show us the way through is the one showing us the way through. Whatever name given him or her, whatever time we say they've lived, whatever culture, race, language, or geography appeals to us as their indigenous dwelling -- it doesn't matter -- the one showing us the way through is doing so right now, right here, as you are.
Only God.
You see.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Come, creator breath, pass through us!
Breath is sacred.
Today the Christian calendar celebrates breath passing from source through word to our hearts and minds.
Every breath is the receiving of communion.
It is transitory.
One breath follows another. Like the pattern of son following father, word emanates from source.
Each breath a birth.
Once, the church carried the story through scripture. Now the story falls into everyday parlance.
Ground, wind, and sound reconstitute trinitarian Source, breath, and word.
The filioque is resolved. One doesn't proceed from the other. One is the other. And if that is so, then, there is no other.
One, and one, and one do not make three. Rather, each one is one -- no matter how many twos and threes and further quantities try to accumulate.
Something new is born.
It is Pentecost.
Celebrate passing through.
Each, one.
Breath is sacred.
Today the Christian calendar celebrates breath passing from source through word to our hearts and minds.
Every breath is the receiving of communion.
It is transitory.
One breath follows another. Like the pattern of son following father, word emanates from source.
Each breath a birth.
Once, the church carried the story through scripture. Now the story falls into everyday parlance.
Ground, wind, and sound reconstitute trinitarian Source, breath, and word.
The filioque is resolved. One doesn't proceed from the other. One is the other. And if that is so, then, there is no other.
One, and one, and one do not make three. Rather, each one is one -- no matter how many twos and threes and further quantities try to accumulate.
Something new is born.
It is Pentecost.
Celebrate passing through.
Each, one.
Saturday, May 29, 2004
Sun returns. Week of rain seeps into water table.
The mind of war wanders through streets and history with alternative furtive and forlorn glances to left and right. No one asks for that mind. It is odd guest at kitchen table in scores of countries sipping coffee looking out window in silence. Like a relative battered by confusion and uncertain impulse this guest is by turns fearfully left alone and gingerly addressed by watchful householder.
All the explanations of past patriarchs about the practice of no-mind are unique. Now, I will give a synopsis of these different techniques and briefly describe ten of them.
One: attention. This means that when we are practicing, we should always cut off thoughts and guard against their arising. As soon as a thought arises we destroy it through attention. As a patriarch stated, "Do not fear the arising of thoughts; only be concerned lest your awareness of them be tardy." A gatha says, "There is no need to search for truth; you need only put all views to rest." This is the method of extinguishing delusion through attention.
- Chinul (1205)
Monday is Memorial Day in the United States.
The noun "memorial day" has 1 sense in WordNet.
1. Memorial Day, Decoration Day -- (U.S., last Monday in May; commemorates the members of the United States armed forces who were killed in war)http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn?stage=1&word=memorial+day
We pay.
We pay attention.
This paying, we are reminded, is the way to extinguish delusion.
Imagine -- only by putting all views to rest does truth appear.
The mind of war arises from kitchen table and looks through fog and confusion at visions so horrible and delusions so vivid that it cannot distinguish what is actually real from that which is sorrowful nightmare.
Perhaps touch will clarify. Go ahead. Pour another cup of coffee. Offer some toast and jam. Put hand gently on shoulder. Speak and invite a soothing simple sound of solace to touch the troubled guest and calm that mind.
Mere attention. Mother awareness.
Loving presence. Stark gift.
One and all.
Peace.
The mind of war wanders through streets and history with alternative furtive and forlorn glances to left and right. No one asks for that mind. It is odd guest at kitchen table in scores of countries sipping coffee looking out window in silence. Like a relative battered by confusion and uncertain impulse this guest is by turns fearfully left alone and gingerly addressed by watchful householder.
All the explanations of past patriarchs about the practice of no-mind are unique. Now, I will give a synopsis of these different techniques and briefly describe ten of them.
One: attention. This means that when we are practicing, we should always cut off thoughts and guard against their arising. As soon as a thought arises we destroy it through attention. As a patriarch stated, "Do not fear the arising of thoughts; only be concerned lest your awareness of them be tardy." A gatha says, "There is no need to search for truth; you need only put all views to rest." This is the method of extinguishing delusion through attention.
- Chinul (1205)
Monday is Memorial Day in the United States.
The noun "memorial day" has 1 sense in WordNet.
1. Memorial Day, Decoration Day -- (U.S., last Monday in May; commemorates the members of the United States armed forces who were killed in war)http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn?stage=1&word=memorial+day
We pay.
We pay attention.
This paying, we are reminded, is the way to extinguish delusion.
Imagine -- only by putting all views to rest does truth appear.
The mind of war arises from kitchen table and looks through fog and confusion at visions so horrible and delusions so vivid that it cannot distinguish what is actually real from that which is sorrowful nightmare.
Perhaps touch will clarify. Go ahead. Pour another cup of coffee. Offer some toast and jam. Put hand gently on shoulder. Speak and invite a soothing simple sound of solace to touch the troubled guest and calm that mind.
Mere attention. Mother awareness.
Loving presence. Stark gift.
One and all.
Peace.
Friday, May 28, 2004
Ryan in prison this morning said there is a silence below silence. Below the silence, he said, is where the dead are.
Where no face is seen no voice heard -- only disconnected dividuals. Isn't that the real punishment of prison? No face no voice no particular compassion?
Do not be concerned with who is
wise and who is stupid.
Do not discriminate the
sharp from the dull.
To practice whole-heartedly
is the true endeavor of the way.
Practice-realization is not
defiled with specialness;
it is a matter for every day.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
When we arrive to recognize faces to listen to voices to practice community with individuals, we are recipients of gift requiring no special label no special wrapping.
Ryan wondered whether Jesus, after death but before resurrection, went to the dead -- but to do...what?
Joe and Chris come in and join in after the tour-de-force of Ryan at felt-tip board schematizing the chaotic arrival and departure of word-and-symbol, appearance and disappearance of meaning and significance. His heart and center, our heart and center, the fulcrum of friction one against the other -- until resolved by compassionate presence.
After erasing willy-nilly letters from two sets of words there remains on the board the following: "The flaw...ties in...the world."
And from the book on table we read, "Again, God. Only He is everywhere and with Him everything is connected." (P. 22, G.I. GurdJieff, in Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am')
The only real conversation is to turn with one another in being -- to continue breathing. Dropping story-line, transforming, and passing through, trust.
We are not divided when we attend with compassionate attention the one, each one, in our midst.
Faces seen, voices heard, dead raised in the prayer of open mind open heart.
Our gratitude for this gift.
Everyday.
Where no face is seen no voice heard -- only disconnected dividuals. Isn't that the real punishment of prison? No face no voice no particular compassion?
Do not be concerned with who is
wise and who is stupid.
Do not discriminate the
sharp from the dull.
To practice whole-heartedly
is the true endeavor of the way.
Practice-realization is not
defiled with specialness;
it is a matter for every day.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
When we arrive to recognize faces to listen to voices to practice community with individuals, we are recipients of gift requiring no special label no special wrapping.
Ryan wondered whether Jesus, after death but before resurrection, went to the dead -- but to do...what?
Joe and Chris come in and join in after the tour-de-force of Ryan at felt-tip board schematizing the chaotic arrival and departure of word-and-symbol, appearance and disappearance of meaning and significance. His heart and center, our heart and center, the fulcrum of friction one against the other -- until resolved by compassionate presence.
After erasing willy-nilly letters from two sets of words there remains on the board the following: "The flaw...ties in...the world."
And from the book on table we read, "Again, God. Only He is everywhere and with Him everything is connected." (P. 22, G.I. GurdJieff, in Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am')
The only real conversation is to turn with one another in being -- to continue breathing. Dropping story-line, transforming, and passing through, trust.
We are not divided when we attend with compassionate attention the one, each one, in our midst.
Faces seen, voices heard, dead raised in the prayer of open mind open heart.
Our gratitude for this gift.
Everyday.
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Walking foot of Ragged, at dawn, rain.
What is the inner way?
Maria said she walks over the stones on the dirt road. Tom, she said, looks under each one.
I'm with Maria.
The contemplative observes the way.
This morning, sitting in chair on screened porch with dog alongside at 5AM, rain dripping on green leaves, scent of incense coming from inside cabin.
Earlier, while walking to brook, Cesco and I step quietly. From Sally's land a white-tail deer leaps equally quietly up the mountain.
Brook tumbling under footbridge.
Observing is the way.
The way is what is.
There is no secret.
Tom says the divine allows what is near it to rest in its own loveliness. That's how the divine is recognized.
At Ragged mountain, at dusk, two dogs, two people look up. Cloud covers peak.
What is the inner way?
Maria said she walks over the stones on the dirt road. Tom, she said, looks under each one.
I'm with Maria.
The contemplative observes the way.
This morning, sitting in chair on screened porch with dog alongside at 5AM, rain dripping on green leaves, scent of incense coming from inside cabin.
Earlier, while walking to brook, Cesco and I step quietly. From Sally's land a white-tail deer leaps equally quietly up the mountain.
Brook tumbling under footbridge.
Observing is the way.
The way is what is.
There is no secret.
Tom says the divine allows what is near it to rest in its own loveliness. That's how the divine is recognized.
At Ragged mountain, at dusk, two dogs, two people look up. Cloud covers peak.
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Have we confused comparison and compassion?
Is it the failure to live inside one’s true life that throws us out into the odd world of commerce and the religion of comparison?
Beyond the point where the rivers
End and the mountains vanish
You have kept on walking
Originally the treasure lies
Just under one’s feet
You made the mistake of thinking
That now you would be able
To retire in peace
Look: in your own hut the
Meditation mat has never been warm.
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
Silence resides on the mat. The noise of comparison, explanation, and accumulation crowds every square inch of the mistake we make in the way we think of the world.
It is a true statement that money is the only religion most of us worship in the world with attention and careful accounting. When religion becomes money and money becomes religion it is time to look very hard at the profession of faith in comparison that has been substituted for direct experience of the grace of compassion.
We are in an enormous hurry to produce, consume, invade, impose, trump, and possess. In our haste to compare and emerge triumphantly superior to the next person, business, country, and religion – we become artless and crude with lust and power. Poet Theodore Roethke said, "Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't."
Art is grace of compassion.
A banner hangs in chapel/zendo above MoGLIAD print (Mother of God, Light in All Darkness). It is from the ephemeral presence of Tibetan monks in this area, and displays Tibetan characters for Om Mani Padme Hum (or, Om Mani Peme Hung, Tibetan mantra of Chenrezig {Avalokiteshvara})
Thus the six syllables, om mani padme hum, mean that in dependence on the practice of a path which is an indivisible union of method and wisdom, you can transform your impure body, speech, and mind into the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha. It is said that you should not seek for Buddhahood outside of yourself; the substances for the achievement of Buddhahood are within. As Maitreya says in his Sublime Continuum of the Great Vehicle (Uttaratantra), all beings naturally have the Buddha nature in their own continuum. We have within us the seed of purity, the essence of a One Gone Thus (Tathagatagarbha), that is to be transformed and fully developed into Buddhahood.
(From a lecture given by His Holiness The Dalai Lama of Tibet at the Kalmuck Mongolian Buddhist Center, New Jersey.)
Unfortunately, not gone thus, I am far too full of the crowded and noisy self I call my own -- a reverberating hall full of opinion and chattering un-necessities.
OM MANI PADME HUM -- (Tibetan pronunciation - Om Mani Pémé Hung)-- "I invoke the transformation and purification of the six negative emotions of pride, jealousy, desire, ignorance, greed and anger into their true nature, enlightened mind." It is the mantra of compassion – Avalokiteshvara.
(http://www.worldprayers.org/frameit.cgi?/archive/prayers/invocations/om_mani_padme_hum.html)
This transformation and purification is high priority right now.
Rainy damp weather in Maine mid-coast this morning.
I must find the mat of acceptance and surrender. There are so few breaths willing to be abandoned to compassion.
As Christian feast of descent of sacred breath approaches I look to prepare a place for it by abandoning my airless mind for the breath of compassion and wisdom.
I cannot stand in the way.
The way belongs to itself.
Absent me.
Is it the failure to live inside one’s true life that throws us out into the odd world of commerce and the religion of comparison?
Beyond the point where the rivers
End and the mountains vanish
You have kept on walking
Originally the treasure lies
Just under one’s feet
You made the mistake of thinking
That now you would be able
To retire in peace
Look: in your own hut the
Meditation mat has never been warm.
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
Silence resides on the mat. The noise of comparison, explanation, and accumulation crowds every square inch of the mistake we make in the way we think of the world.
It is a true statement that money is the only religion most of us worship in the world with attention and careful accounting. When religion becomes money and money becomes religion it is time to look very hard at the profession of faith in comparison that has been substituted for direct experience of the grace of compassion.
We are in an enormous hurry to produce, consume, invade, impose, trump, and possess. In our haste to compare and emerge triumphantly superior to the next person, business, country, and religion – we become artless and crude with lust and power. Poet Theodore Roethke said, "Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't."
Art is grace of compassion.
A banner hangs in chapel/zendo above MoGLIAD print (Mother of God, Light in All Darkness). It is from the ephemeral presence of Tibetan monks in this area, and displays Tibetan characters for Om Mani Padme Hum (or, Om Mani Peme Hung, Tibetan mantra of Chenrezig {Avalokiteshvara})
Thus the six syllables, om mani padme hum, mean that in dependence on the practice of a path which is an indivisible union of method and wisdom, you can transform your impure body, speech, and mind into the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha. It is said that you should not seek for Buddhahood outside of yourself; the substances for the achievement of Buddhahood are within. As Maitreya says in his Sublime Continuum of the Great Vehicle (Uttaratantra), all beings naturally have the Buddha nature in their own continuum. We have within us the seed of purity, the essence of a One Gone Thus (Tathagatagarbha), that is to be transformed and fully developed into Buddhahood.
(From a lecture given by His Holiness The Dalai Lama of Tibet at the Kalmuck Mongolian Buddhist Center, New Jersey.)
Unfortunately, not gone thus, I am far too full of the crowded and noisy self I call my own -- a reverberating hall full of opinion and chattering un-necessities.
OM MANI PADME HUM -- (Tibetan pronunciation - Om Mani Pémé Hung)-- "I invoke the transformation and purification of the six negative emotions of pride, jealousy, desire, ignorance, greed and anger into their true nature, enlightened mind." It is the mantra of compassion – Avalokiteshvara.
(http://www.worldprayers.org/frameit.cgi?/archive/prayers/invocations/om_mani_padme_hum.html)
This transformation and purification is high priority right now.
Rainy damp weather in Maine mid-coast this morning.
I must find the mat of acceptance and surrender. There are so few breaths willing to be abandoned to compassion.
As Christian feast of descent of sacred breath approaches I look to prepare a place for it by abandoning my airless mind for the breath of compassion and wisdom.
I cannot stand in the way.
The way belongs to itself.
Absent me.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Often, words are bottomless. In this instance, the word 'instrument.'
Inspired by Francis of Assisi, someone wrote a prayer that appeared in the early 1900s. It is about being and becoming an instrument of peace.
Lord,
make me an instrument
of your peace.
Where there is hatred . . . let me sow love
Where there is injury . . . pardon
Where there is doubt . . . faith
Where there is despair . . .hope
Where there is darkness . . . light
Where there is sadness . . .joy
Divine Master,
grant that I may not
so much seek
To be consoled . . .as to console
To be understood . . .as to understand,
To be loved . . . as to love
For it is in giving . . .that we receive,
It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned,
It is in dying . . .that we are born to eternal life.
'Instrument' -- (from Latin instruo -struere -struxi -structum [to build in or into; to set up , construct; furnish], hence [to train a person]; [to prepare, provide]; milit., [to draw up the order of battle]. Hence partic. instructus -a -um, [equipped, supplied]; of persons, [trained, instructed]).
per prep. with acc.: of space , [through, along, over]; sometimes [before, in the presence of]; of time, [throughout, during; in the course of, in a time of]; of means or instrument, [through, by, by means of, with, by way of]; of cause, [because of, on account of]; 'per me licet', [you may as far as I'm concerned]; in entreaties, oaths, etc., [in the name of]. (from University of Notre Dame website Latin-English, http://catholic.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookdown.pl?instrument
Instrument is a passing-through place. If we ask to be instruments of sacred peace, we ask to be a place creative peace passes through on its way to where it is needed.
It is a significant thing to ask to be a construct of peace, to be an instruct of peace. It is a formidable request to be a structure of peace.
'Structure,' -- (also from Latin instruo -struere -struxi -structum [to build in or into;)-- is
1. a thing consisting of a number of elements joined together in a certain way.
2. the way in which such a thing is joined together
3. anything, esp. a building, that has been constructed
4. the relationship between and among the parts of a relatively complex process or entity.
As transitive verb -- Inflected Forms: structured, structuring, structures
Definition 1. to give organization to; arrange. (http://www.wordsmyth.net)
For peace or sanity to flow through us there first must be an open way made for the passage through. For me, and for many of us, this way is clogged with debris and detritus of hoarded gift. If we affirm that all life is gift, we have to come to terms with gift.
Coming to terms with gift means appreciating the creative movement of gift. The artist is one who recognizes that there is only gift and we are each the passageway gift moves into and through the world.
The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition -- and therefore, more permanently enduring. (Joseph Conrad, quoted in The Gift)
Two additional lovely lines from the same book on gift:
1. "The only essential is this: the gift must always move. There are other forms of property that stand still, that mark a boundary or resist momentum, but the gift keeps going." (p.4)
2. "Another way to describe the motion of the gift is to say that a gift must always be used up, consumed, eaten. The gift is property that perishes." (p.8)
(from The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde, c.1979)
The gift celebrated today in the Christian calendar is that of the Ascension, forty days following Easter. Jesus ascends into heaven. The gift moves into and through the present. Jesus doesn't go anywhere else. Heaven is no other place -- it is the absolute present. He permeates the reality of what is here and now with the gift of what some call grace. At Wednesday Evening Conversation grace was referred to as loving attention and surrender to the open -- which is the passing-through place where one and all meet in truth.
If you cannot find the truth where you are,
Where do you expect to find it?
Truth is not far away; it is ever present.
It is not something to be attained
Since not one of your steps leads away from it.
Dogen
Where else is there to go?
We pray today for this passing-through.
Bottomless peace?
Open.
Inspired by Francis of Assisi, someone wrote a prayer that appeared in the early 1900s. It is about being and becoming an instrument of peace.
Lord,
make me an instrument
of your peace.
Where there is hatred . . . let me sow love
Where there is injury . . . pardon
Where there is doubt . . . faith
Where there is despair . . .hope
Where there is darkness . . . light
Where there is sadness . . .joy
Divine Master,
grant that I may not
so much seek
To be consoled . . .as to console
To be understood . . .as to understand,
To be loved . . . as to love
For it is in giving . . .that we receive,
It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned,
It is in dying . . .that we are born to eternal life.
'Instrument' -- (from Latin instruo -struere -struxi -structum [to build in or into; to set up , construct; furnish], hence [to train a person]; [to prepare, provide]; milit., [to draw up the order of battle]. Hence partic. instructus -a -um, [equipped, supplied]; of persons, [trained, instructed]).
per prep. with acc.: of space , [through, along, over]; sometimes [before, in the presence of]; of time, [throughout, during; in the course of, in a time of]; of means or instrument, [through, by, by means of, with, by way of]; of cause, [because of, on account of]; 'per me licet', [you may as far as I'm concerned]; in entreaties, oaths, etc., [in the name of]. (from University of Notre Dame website Latin-English, http://catholic.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookdown.pl?instrument
Instrument is a passing-through place. If we ask to be instruments of sacred peace, we ask to be a place creative peace passes through on its way to where it is needed.
It is a significant thing to ask to be a construct of peace, to be an instruct of peace. It is a formidable request to be a structure of peace.
'Structure,' -- (also from Latin instruo -struere -struxi -structum [to build in or into;)-- is
1. a thing consisting of a number of elements joined together in a certain way.
2. the way in which such a thing is joined together
3. anything, esp. a building, that has been constructed
4. the relationship between and among the parts of a relatively complex process or entity.
As transitive verb -- Inflected Forms: structured, structuring, structures
Definition 1. to give organization to; arrange. (http://www.wordsmyth.net)
For peace or sanity to flow through us there first must be an open way made for the passage through. For me, and for many of us, this way is clogged with debris and detritus of hoarded gift. If we affirm that all life is gift, we have to come to terms with gift.
Coming to terms with gift means appreciating the creative movement of gift. The artist is one who recognizes that there is only gift and we are each the passageway gift moves into and through the world.
The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition -- and therefore, more permanently enduring. (Joseph Conrad, quoted in The Gift)
Two additional lovely lines from the same book on gift:
1. "The only essential is this: the gift must always move. There are other forms of property that stand still, that mark a boundary or resist momentum, but the gift keeps going." (p.4)
2. "Another way to describe the motion of the gift is to say that a gift must always be used up, consumed, eaten. The gift is property that perishes." (p.8)
(from The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde, c.1979)
The gift celebrated today in the Christian calendar is that of the Ascension, forty days following Easter. Jesus ascends into heaven. The gift moves into and through the present. Jesus doesn't go anywhere else. Heaven is no other place -- it is the absolute present. He permeates the reality of what is here and now with the gift of what some call grace. At Wednesday Evening Conversation grace was referred to as loving attention and surrender to the open -- which is the passing-through place where one and all meet in truth.
If you cannot find the truth where you are,
Where do you expect to find it?
Truth is not far away; it is ever present.
It is not something to be attained
Since not one of your steps leads away from it.
Dogen
Where else is there to go?
We pray today for this passing-through.
Bottomless peace?
Open.
Monday, May 17, 2004
Old distinctions don't die. They collapse against one another gasping for new breath.
Living a religious life in the world means dwelling in the thin place between politics and prayer. To live a monastic life in the marketplace necessitates occupying the thin place between what is called the sacred and the secular. A hermit's balance between work and worship is the tension of a tightrope walk along the thin place strung between head and heart.
The soul makes its way between distinctions and divisions that no longer stand alone and separate.
The liturgical costume of ecclesiastical celebration and the dress-up and dressing gowns of congressional, executive, and judicial branches must morph into ordinary ethical and moral clothing of common, decent behavior. Hiding is no longer possible. There are no longer any hiding places. We cannot escape the eyes of men and women watching and waiting for the right thing to be done.
Ill, believe me, is power proved by insult; ill can terror command veneration, and far more effectual is affection in obtaining one's purpose than fear. For terror operates no longer than its object is present, but love produces its effects with its object at a distance: and as absence changes the former into hatred, it raises the latter into respect.
Therefore you ought (and I cannot but repeat it too often) you ought to well consider the nature of your office, and to represent to your self how great and important the task is of governing a free state. For what can be better for society than such government, what can be more precious than freedom? How ignominious then must his conduct be who turns good government into anarchy, and liberty into slavery?
(Pliny The Younger, {62-113CE} in "On Government")
Contemporary spirituality can no longer be shunted off behind doors of mosque, temple, church, or cathedral. Nor can governing be arrogated to halls, wings, and benches of power where words are divorced from vibrant truth-telling, and decrees issued are shill and insurance for private power and gain.
This country, as collapses virulent division and ignorant tripe, is readying itself for what is coming. Not apocalypse hoped for by fundamentalists, nor revolution wanted by anarchists. What is coming is a new heart and new mind. This heart and mind listens to and sees the profound. The profound is emerging with and through the ordinary in our midst. It is showing through as a creative thin place. It is not devious nor cunning, neither product of strong-arm policy, nor default of wilting pride. What is showing through in the thin place is contemplative action and mindful engagement of each fact in the open.
Even a casual reader of Nietzsche will be struck by his repeated arguments that our beliefs about the world are false: "The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e. it is not a fact but a fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is 'in flux,' as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for — there is no truth" (WP 616). Our truths are "merely ... irrefutable errors" (GS 265) "without which a certain species of life could not live" (WP 493). Nietzsche's error theory is one of the most unusual positions in the history of epistemology, and making sense of it is an important test of the adequacy of an interpretation of his epistemology.
(p.17, in Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition, by Michael Steven Green)
Richard Hugo's first line of his poem "Villager" says, "What's wrong will always be wrong." I wondered, upon hearing the line twenty five years ago, whether what's right is created each time new. There's nothing set and permanent to fall back on. Each act and each thought is about bringing something new into existence -- not about retrieving something from attic or antiquity to overlay current reality. What's right is created new -- even if it is reminiscent of what once was, or it is brought down from storage. It is the infusion of vital emerging presence leaping from the undivided (the individual) that helps what is becoming true be what is in fact true.
Nietzsche's rejection of a real world of "being" in favor of a contingent world of "becoming" is less a claim about what the world is like than a claim about our cognitive relation to the world. It means questioning our ability to make objectively valid judgments about the world at all, despite Nietzsche's tendency to put the point in ways that suggest that it is itself an objectively valid judgment that the world becomes:
“[Philosophers] will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of cognition has become.... The philosopher here sees "instincts" in man as he now is and assumes that these belong to the unalterable facts of mankind and to that extent could provide a key to the understanding of the world in general: the whole teleology is constructed by speaking of the man of the last four millennia as of an eternal man towards whom all things in the world have had a natural relationship from the time he began. But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. (HA 2)”
Nietzsche's denial of "eternal facts" or "absolute truths" suggests that his main point is the rather trivial one that nothing in the world is permanent, as if he could make objectively valid judgments about change. But his real point is that the reasons we come to our judgments are not permanent. Since they are merely contingent, our judgments lose their objective validity and so their ability to be true: "Knowledge is possible only on the basis of belief in being" (WP 518). In contrast, "a world in a state of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be 'comprehended' or 'known'" (WP 520).
(in, Green, “Spir and Nietzsche,” from Chapter 2, “Nietzsche's Neo-Kantian Roots,”)
Texts reminiscent of mystical spirituality are here recalled: the incomprehensibility of the vast universe; the unknowing of ungraspable God; the dark nights and clouds veiling our ability to see, claim, or attain certainty.
Just because we are not real substances, and do not possess a real self or a content really proper to us, our individuality could not subsist without the natural delusion by virtue of which we appear as substances in our self-consciousness and by which we apparently have a proper, persistent and independent essence, without this delusion we would not be ourselves, and there would be no question of our ego. Our existence is therefore inseparable from our self-consciousness, or rather our existence consists of it. We only exist because we are understanding ourselves.
(from "On Individual Immortality," Thought and Reality c.1873, by Afrikan Spir, included in p.1140 Treasure of Philosophy, edited by Dagobert D. Runes, c.1955)
Are we a different "substance?" Is our substance "to-be-revealed?" Are we, as the intricate thin place between being/becoming, no-other to what-is? If we are unceasingly "to-be-revealed," without fixed abode, without separate self, and without division from true interdependent co-origination -- then, who are we? Do we share that substance, that consubstantial, transubstantial fluidity with what we call God?
Is "reality" the coming to be of what is true? Is God "what is true"? Is God not the destination, not the path already there, but the path revealed now, and here, and this again as we let fall our foot on the way? Is this unknowable God and our unknowable self the very constitutive substance of existence?
It is as though our "substance" is referred to in the final three lines of the poem --
What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, towards desire.
We come to something without knowing why.
(from poem "The Manifestation" by Theodore Roethke)
This is our substance, form, and energy: We come to something -- without knowing why.
The Original Self
Even those who have set aside all judgments of right and wrong and do not view people in terms of self and other cannot be said to be truly on the Way as long as they have not seen the original state before personal history.
- Muso Kokushi (1275-1351)
It is a riddle for us. His story, her story, our story is in the telling. It is before and beyond personal. What is before and beyond the personal? Go ahead, open eyes and ears, but not mouth, not yet. For a moment do not say anything. Rest in silence awhile.
In the collapse of old distinctions we are urged along a way that breathes new life into a middle place. That middle way, centering prayer, and thin place is how we go on, step by step, moving through what is encountered there, as we find the revelation of this moment, this place, and this sweet face -- the original one, the one we had before our parents were born.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Afternoon sun through new green waving leaves.
Inhaling.
The silent loving play of life within itself.
Exhaling.
Living a religious life in the world means dwelling in the thin place between politics and prayer. To live a monastic life in the marketplace necessitates occupying the thin place between what is called the sacred and the secular. A hermit's balance between work and worship is the tension of a tightrope walk along the thin place strung between head and heart.
The soul makes its way between distinctions and divisions that no longer stand alone and separate.
The liturgical costume of ecclesiastical celebration and the dress-up and dressing gowns of congressional, executive, and judicial branches must morph into ordinary ethical and moral clothing of common, decent behavior. Hiding is no longer possible. There are no longer any hiding places. We cannot escape the eyes of men and women watching and waiting for the right thing to be done.
Ill, believe me, is power proved by insult; ill can terror command veneration, and far more effectual is affection in obtaining one's purpose than fear. For terror operates no longer than its object is present, but love produces its effects with its object at a distance: and as absence changes the former into hatred, it raises the latter into respect.
Therefore you ought (and I cannot but repeat it too often) you ought to well consider the nature of your office, and to represent to your self how great and important the task is of governing a free state. For what can be better for society than such government, what can be more precious than freedom? How ignominious then must his conduct be who turns good government into anarchy, and liberty into slavery?
(Pliny The Younger, {62-113CE} in "On Government")
Contemporary spirituality can no longer be shunted off behind doors of mosque, temple, church, or cathedral. Nor can governing be arrogated to halls, wings, and benches of power where words are divorced from vibrant truth-telling, and decrees issued are shill and insurance for private power and gain.
This country, as collapses virulent division and ignorant tripe, is readying itself for what is coming. Not apocalypse hoped for by fundamentalists, nor revolution wanted by anarchists. What is coming is a new heart and new mind. This heart and mind listens to and sees the profound. The profound is emerging with and through the ordinary in our midst. It is showing through as a creative thin place. It is not devious nor cunning, neither product of strong-arm policy, nor default of wilting pride. What is showing through in the thin place is contemplative action and mindful engagement of each fact in the open.
Even a casual reader of Nietzsche will be struck by his repeated arguments that our beliefs about the world are false: "The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e. it is not a fact but a fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is 'in flux,' as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for — there is no truth" (WP 616). Our truths are "merely ... irrefutable errors" (GS 265) "without which a certain species of life could not live" (WP 493). Nietzsche's error theory is one of the most unusual positions in the history of epistemology, and making sense of it is an important test of the adequacy of an interpretation of his epistemology.
(p.17, in Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition, by Michael Steven Green)
Richard Hugo's first line of his poem "Villager" says, "What's wrong will always be wrong." I wondered, upon hearing the line twenty five years ago, whether what's right is created each time new. There's nothing set and permanent to fall back on. Each act and each thought is about bringing something new into existence -- not about retrieving something from attic or antiquity to overlay current reality. What's right is created new -- even if it is reminiscent of what once was, or it is brought down from storage. It is the infusion of vital emerging presence leaping from the undivided (the individual) that helps what is becoming true be what is in fact true.
Nietzsche's rejection of a real world of "being" in favor of a contingent world of "becoming" is less a claim about what the world is like than a claim about our cognitive relation to the world. It means questioning our ability to make objectively valid judgments about the world at all, despite Nietzsche's tendency to put the point in ways that suggest that it is itself an objectively valid judgment that the world becomes:
“[Philosophers] will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of cognition has become.... The philosopher here sees "instincts" in man as he now is and assumes that these belong to the unalterable facts of mankind and to that extent could provide a key to the understanding of the world in general: the whole teleology is constructed by speaking of the man of the last four millennia as of an eternal man towards whom all things in the world have had a natural relationship from the time he began. But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. (HA 2)”
Nietzsche's denial of "eternal facts" or "absolute truths" suggests that his main point is the rather trivial one that nothing in the world is permanent, as if he could make objectively valid judgments about change. But his real point is that the reasons we come to our judgments are not permanent. Since they are merely contingent, our judgments lose their objective validity and so their ability to be true: "Knowledge is possible only on the basis of belief in being" (WP 518). In contrast, "a world in a state of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be 'comprehended' or 'known'" (WP 520).
(in, Green, “Spir and Nietzsche,” from Chapter 2, “Nietzsche's Neo-Kantian Roots,”)
Texts reminiscent of mystical spirituality are here recalled: the incomprehensibility of the vast universe; the unknowing of ungraspable God; the dark nights and clouds veiling our ability to see, claim, or attain certainty.
Just because we are not real substances, and do not possess a real self or a content really proper to us, our individuality could not subsist without the natural delusion by virtue of which we appear as substances in our self-consciousness and by which we apparently have a proper, persistent and independent essence, without this delusion we would not be ourselves, and there would be no question of our ego. Our existence is therefore inseparable from our self-consciousness, or rather our existence consists of it. We only exist because we are understanding ourselves.
(from "On Individual Immortality," Thought and Reality c.1873, by Afrikan Spir, included in p.1140 Treasure of Philosophy, edited by Dagobert D. Runes, c.1955)
Are we a different "substance?" Is our substance "to-be-revealed?" Are we, as the intricate thin place between being/becoming, no-other to what-is? If we are unceasingly "to-be-revealed," without fixed abode, without separate self, and without division from true interdependent co-origination -- then, who are we? Do we share that substance, that consubstantial, transubstantial fluidity with what we call God?
Is "reality" the coming to be of what is true? Is God "what is true"? Is God not the destination, not the path already there, but the path revealed now, and here, and this again as we let fall our foot on the way? Is this unknowable God and our unknowable self the very constitutive substance of existence?
It is as though our "substance" is referred to in the final three lines of the poem --
What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, towards desire.
We come to something without knowing why.
(from poem "The Manifestation" by Theodore Roethke)
This is our substance, form, and energy: We come to something -- without knowing why.
The Original Self
Even those who have set aside all judgments of right and wrong and do not view people in terms of self and other cannot be said to be truly on the Way as long as they have not seen the original state before personal history.
- Muso Kokushi (1275-1351)
It is a riddle for us. His story, her story, our story is in the telling. It is before and beyond personal. What is before and beyond the personal? Go ahead, open eyes and ears, but not mouth, not yet. For a moment do not say anything. Rest in silence awhile.
In the collapse of old distinctions we are urged along a way that breathes new life into a middle place. That middle way, centering prayer, and thin place is how we go on, step by step, moving through what is encountered there, as we find the revelation of this moment, this place, and this sweet face -- the original one, the one we had before our parents were born.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Afternoon sun through new green waving leaves.
Inhaling.
The silent loving play of life within itself.
Exhaling.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Setting out, following this.
If God is the path beyond path, are there only trails foot-worn by those passing by, walking the expanse of each step along earth as though there was no place to go, no arrival envisioned, only the stretch of this next turn, this next branch hitting hat, this very telling step by step along footpath God sees fit to tumble worn stone with water, worn soil imprinted by sole on soul itself passing through, going on?
When you took on flesh, Lord Jesus, you made a marriage of mankind with God. Help us to be faithful to your word and endure our exile bravely, until we are called to the heavenly marriage feast, to which the Virgin Mary, exemplar of your Church, has preceded us. (Psalm-prayer, Saturday Daytime Prayer, Week IV, in The Liturgy of the Hours)
We are in exile, bravely wending way home where there is no home, saying when we get where we arrive, "Ah, home!" -- the sweet nothing we utter in the middle of accommodation made with familiar objects on mantelpiece where we place keys that have opened door.
47
On an incredibly clear day,
The kind when you wish you'd done lots of work
So that you wouldn't have to work that day,
I saw -- as if spotting a road through the trees --
What may well be the Great Secret,
That Great Mystery the false poets speak of.
I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn't exist,
That there are hills, valleys and plains,
That there are trees, flowers and grass,
That there are rivers and stones,
But that there is no whole to which all this belongs,
That a true and real emsemble
Is a disease of our own ideas.
Nature is parts without a whole.
This is perhaps the mystery they speak of.
This is what, without thinking or pausing,
I realized must be the truth
That everyone tries to find but doesn't find
And that I alone found, because I didn't try to find it.
(from "The Keeper of Sheep," in Fernando Pessoa & Co., Selected Poems Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), edited and translated by Richard Zenith, c.1998)
I try to find it. Thus it is I skirt truth the way a bird flying through wood-thick acre manages to alight unbroken, feathers frayed yet attached, on branch near feeder, a chirping prelude before swooping to nearly empty hanging gift.
Where all gifts are.
Right there.
Not whole.
Partial. As is.
Oneself.
If God is the path beyond path, are there only trails foot-worn by those passing by, walking the expanse of each step along earth as though there was no place to go, no arrival envisioned, only the stretch of this next turn, this next branch hitting hat, this very telling step by step along footpath God sees fit to tumble worn stone with water, worn soil imprinted by sole on soul itself passing through, going on?
When you took on flesh, Lord Jesus, you made a marriage of mankind with God. Help us to be faithful to your word and endure our exile bravely, until we are called to the heavenly marriage feast, to which the Virgin Mary, exemplar of your Church, has preceded us. (Psalm-prayer, Saturday Daytime Prayer, Week IV, in The Liturgy of the Hours)
We are in exile, bravely wending way home where there is no home, saying when we get where we arrive, "Ah, home!" -- the sweet nothing we utter in the middle of accommodation made with familiar objects on mantelpiece where we place keys that have opened door.
47
On an incredibly clear day,
The kind when you wish you'd done lots of work
So that you wouldn't have to work that day,
I saw -- as if spotting a road through the trees --
What may well be the Great Secret,
That Great Mystery the false poets speak of.
I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn't exist,
That there are hills, valleys and plains,
That there are trees, flowers and grass,
That there are rivers and stones,
But that there is no whole to which all this belongs,
That a true and real emsemble
Is a disease of our own ideas.
Nature is parts without a whole.
This is perhaps the mystery they speak of.
This is what, without thinking or pausing,
I realized must be the truth
That everyone tries to find but doesn't find
And that I alone found, because I didn't try to find it.
(from "The Keeper of Sheep," in Fernando Pessoa & Co., Selected Poems Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), edited and translated by Richard Zenith, c.1998)
I try to find it. Thus it is I skirt truth the way a bird flying through wood-thick acre manages to alight unbroken, feathers frayed yet attached, on branch near feeder, a chirping prelude before swooping to nearly empty hanging gift.
Where all gifts are.
Right there.
Not whole.
Partial. As is.
Oneself.
Friday, May 14, 2004
If this moment was the only moment -- if there was nothing else -- what would we do?
"We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." This is a good response.
When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.
Dr. [Mark] Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.
("Cold Turkey," by Kurt Vonnegut, Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by In These Times)
It is a good response. Whether at prison conversation on retributive vs. restorative justice Friday morning , at Thursday evening conversation on esoteric Christianity, or Interreligious Dialogue conversation Friday evening reading about Islam -- the notion we are helping one another through is a good enough practice. It suggests no goal, no special knowledge, and no ulterior motive -- only being of service, helping without expectation.
Nature may be compared to a vast ocean. Thousands and millions of changes are taking place in it. Crocodiles and fish are essentially of the same substance as the water in which they live. People are crowded together with the myriad other things in the Great Changingness, and their nature is one with that of all other natural things. Knowing that I am of the same nature as all other natural things, I know that there is really no separate self, no separate personality, no absolute death and no absolute life.
- T’ien T’ung-Hsu (8th century A.D.)
If God had ten thousand aspects, and any one of us grabbed on to only one aspect thinking it to be the sole essence of God, we would have what we currently have in the world -- narrow, unenlightened, and fragmented ideas of God that we use as clubs against others holding other fragments.
None of us see the whole picture. Some posture and pretend omniscience -- which is both unbecoming and full of failure. Like this war in the American psyche being fought on Iraqi soil. One side says, "We are the superpower, despair ye who look upon us;" while the other side says, "We will save and protect you, trust our kindness." This intra-psychic conflict plays out in real time on Arab ground with no hope of insight or understanding. Defeat is now dismantling the sanity of the body-combatant. All suffer the disintegration.
Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. (Vonnegut)
A friend wrote and asked why I felt crazed.
I am crazed because this war is my war.
Each death my death.
Each despair mine.
Still, I go on as each one of us goes on -- teetering between attention to the facts of the war, and faith the war will pass through us leaving tolerable, not terminal, wounds.
On the tightrope, seeking equilibrium between news of chaos and hope of sane solution.
It is this madness we try to help get through.
And once through -- what will we see?
We'll see only that we have been helped through.
If we can let go of who we think we are, then we can become free and ready to love others. Our communities should be places of joyful commitment. Touch your heads and your robes and see something beautiful and joyful you are doing for the whole world. If you become able to see your impermanence, you will live for the moment and not miss opportunities to love by pushing things into the future. (Thich Nhat Hanh)
This moment -- whatever it is.
"We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." This is a good response.
When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.
Dr. [Mark] Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.
("Cold Turkey," by Kurt Vonnegut, Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by In These Times)
It is a good response. Whether at prison conversation on retributive vs. restorative justice Friday morning , at Thursday evening conversation on esoteric Christianity, or Interreligious Dialogue conversation Friday evening reading about Islam -- the notion we are helping one another through is a good enough practice. It suggests no goal, no special knowledge, and no ulterior motive -- only being of service, helping without expectation.
Nature may be compared to a vast ocean. Thousands and millions of changes are taking place in it. Crocodiles and fish are essentially of the same substance as the water in which they live. People are crowded together with the myriad other things in the Great Changingness, and their nature is one with that of all other natural things. Knowing that I am of the same nature as all other natural things, I know that there is really no separate self, no separate personality, no absolute death and no absolute life.
- T’ien T’ung-Hsu (8th century A.D.)
If God had ten thousand aspects, and any one of us grabbed on to only one aspect thinking it to be the sole essence of God, we would have what we currently have in the world -- narrow, unenlightened, and fragmented ideas of God that we use as clubs against others holding other fragments.
None of us see the whole picture. Some posture and pretend omniscience -- which is both unbecoming and full of failure. Like this war in the American psyche being fought on Iraqi soil. One side says, "We are the superpower, despair ye who look upon us;" while the other side says, "We will save and protect you, trust our kindness." This intra-psychic conflict plays out in real time on Arab ground with no hope of insight or understanding. Defeat is now dismantling the sanity of the body-combatant. All suffer the disintegration.
Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. (Vonnegut)
A friend wrote and asked why I felt crazed.
I am crazed because this war is my war.
Each death my death.
Each despair mine.
Still, I go on as each one of us goes on -- teetering between attention to the facts of the war, and faith the war will pass through us leaving tolerable, not terminal, wounds.
On the tightrope, seeking equilibrium between news of chaos and hope of sane solution.
It is this madness we try to help get through.
And once through -- what will we see?
We'll see only that we have been helped through.
If we can let go of who we think we are, then we can become free and ready to love others. Our communities should be places of joyful commitment. Touch your heads and your robes and see something beautiful and joyful you are doing for the whole world. If you become able to see your impermanence, you will live for the moment and not miss opportunities to love by pushing things into the future. (Thich Nhat Hanh)
This moment -- whatever it is.
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