John had a sense.

To keep his promise, God has raised up for Israel one of David’s descendants, Jesus, as Saviour, whose coming was heralded by John when he proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the whole people of Israel. Before John ended his career he said, ‘I am not the one you imagine me to be; that one is coming after me and I am not fit to undo his sandal.’ Acts 13:23-25
(--from Evening Prayer, Feast of the Birthday of John the Baptist)

The ego before the revelation of the true self is not the one that is coming after 'me'. That one, that true self, the ego cannot approach, cannot touch.

We have that sense too.

But to trust in it, to allow the going to be gone, that is the practice.

Telios philios! Complete the friendship.

Go well!

The conversation seemed to ask whether ‘God’ is a supernatural way of being that assumes form to participate in life within this creation, or, if what we call ‘God’ is the hinting wisdom of human interconnection with all of nature and particularly human nature to work toward the accomplishment of beneficial results.

In every human heart
There is one volume
Of the book of Truth,
But all is packed away
On the shelves, pages here
And pages there.
In every human heart
There is one score
For the music of Truth,
But all is buried
Under popular songs
And glamorous dances.
The person who would study
Should sweep away externals
And immediately seek
What has been there
From the beginning.
Only then will he be
Able to put this Truth to use.
- Hung Ying-ming

It influences the search for God.

As though God has gotten lost.

Needing finding.

In Ireland a woman in her 80s falls and breaks her femur. It is replaced. Her son phones and checks on her. She will heal. That's good to hear.

Elsewhere, a guest leaves without a word after a three month stay. When my father left, he with death 37 years ago today, a silence with deeper stillness ensued.

Such departures remind of transience and curiosity. Christ comes and Christ goes. Everything is to be received with mystery and allowed to go with gratefulness. Understanding and certainty are not always traveling companions.

What's there to look for?

Nothing.

Only surrendering to what it is -- as it is -- as we are.

That should be enough.

There’s laundry for outdoor line. Rokpa opens his eyes to see what the movement is. The green shade is lowered. Today begins summer. We prepare pea pod to return to harbor. We paddle canoe at dusk last evening on Hosmer Pond in profound gratitude for our nature, God’s nature, nature itself

The wind is still,

But blossoms fall,

Birds sing in the

Quiet of the mountain.

This is Kannon's wondrous wisdom: Ah!

(-- Ryokan)

At liturgy thus morning there is an invitation to do what we’d like to see and thus to be. The celebrant suggested it is not merely a matter of not doing to others what we’d not like to be done to us -- but to actively treat others as we would like to be treated.

Fair enough. Confucius was wise, but Jesus, he might be suggesting, embodied the wisdom. It might be a highly nuanced observation, but the conversation is not sabotaged by making the distinction. Here, quod erat demonstrandum, the conversation finds itself written and pondered.

POEM WITHOUT A TITLE

I say to the lead

Why did you let yourself

Be cast into a bullet?

Have you forgotten the alchemists?

Have you given up hope

In turning into gold?

Nobody answers.

Lead. Bullet. With names

Such as these

The sleep is deep and long.

(Poem by Charles Simic)

The sleep is deep and long. It is a curiosity that so much effort is placed in making bullets, muzzles, grenades, bombs, missiles, fighter jets, Apache helicopters, black ops, and stealth destruction.

But I digress.

It is summer.

And we are intelligent beings. There is some wisdom.

We’ve got to stop preferring abstraction and idealization and come to earth, embodying wisdom, living as if we truly believed in life.

I’d prefer to step into this creating attention within life on this earth.

Beginning a new season

When Pat Tillman was killed by his own men, there and then the war in Afghanistan ended. The charade began. That was April 22, 2003. Today is June 20, 2011. The charade has continued for 8 years and two months. Would that the American people weren't so easily fooled.

3 - Making thieves

When you praise worthy people, you make other people envious and quarrelsome.
When you value rare things highly, you turn honest people into thieves.
If you show people exciting things, you will make them covetous and greedy.
The wise rule by keeping the peoples' hearts empty (of desire) and their bellies full.
Making their bones strong and their ambitions weak.

Since the people are free of avarice and desire,
even the most cunning grifter has no opportunity to corrupt them.

By using the "act without action" principle,
everything just falls into place.
(ch.3, Tao Te Ching)

War is a lie. Inside the lie a deeper deception takes place -- a charade that says this is a glorious undertaking, heroic adventure, a decorous and patriotic pleasure to die in the service of your country.

Many have so died. I lament their deaths. I salute them.

But I look on those that send men and women to war with a skeptical wariness about the explanations and reasons put forth for the wars.

The charade captivates and enthralls.

We swallow the drugs and pass out.

We desperately need to come to!

James Finley talks about God being the air he breathes and moves through.

Because you grasp labels and slogans,
You are hindered by those labels and slogans,
Both those used in ordinary life and those
Considered sacred.
Thus they obstruct your perception
Of objective truth,
And you cannot understand clearly.
- Linji (d. 867)

Thich Nhat Hanh writes a gatha: Breathing in, I know I am breathing in.

Being within God -- clearly, no label.

Breathing out, Thay says, we smile.

Thunderstorms roll between mountains. We cover Jootje, Anna's double ender, on wood garden timbers in front of Merton bookshed/retreat on shore for scraping, panting, and pine tar/linseed oiling.

Seeing into Nothingness
This is the true seeing,
The eternal seeing
- Shen-hui (8th cent)

The world as we know it is the result of the minds of men who've fashioned it in their ideas and preferences. This same world can be refashioned in a clearer, kinder image with a little more awareness and self-emptying.

Let's consider that God, or that which we call God, is still unborn in this world. Yes, in the Christian metaphor, Jesus realized God-nature and embodied what is called Christ-consciousness. But what if his realization was only the inaugural of the potential of the process of allowing To Be that which we long for, namely, the Source, Oneness, Interconnectedness, & Stillness (SOIS) of each to each, all to all, now and forever?

SOIS, in French, is the present subjunctive of the verb Etre, to be. We suggest, require, and request that which is to be God in our midst.

Use the present subjunctive in statements that express a suggestion, requirement, or request.
-- LB Brief by Jane E. Aaron (Longman: 2002); The Brief Holt Handbook (3rd ed.) by Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell (Harcourt: 2001).

There is, it is said, no time with God. God, soi-disant, is not the egoic creation of man. God, soi-meme en-soi, is oneself Itself.

To be oneself itself is the longing, I submit, of every being in existence.

One hears the words: "Although I'm old, I feel young"; (French: Bien que je sois vieux, je me sens jeune.)

In effect, although we are neither young or old, we call ourselves these things in this manner because it is the way of this world to cast everything in quantitative distinction.

We love to think about God. We would like God to come to be the way of the world, namely, source, oneness, interconnected, & still.

There are two deserts -- that of God and that of man. This is where we wander. Is this all we are to hope for? Is there something else we might see?

AIR

Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.

This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.

I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.

Young as I am, old as I am,

I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.

This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.

(Poem by W. S. Merwin )

Let our singing be the chant of creation.

Just this!

Pay attention!

When I close my eyes, sleep comes easily.

Oneself as others.

What I call perfection of seeing
Is not seeing others
But oneself
- Chuang-tzu (3rd cent BC)

Because there is no others.

Only oneself.

Just.

As is.

Said.

Once I thought I was part of the whole.

Says the Tao Te Ching: “Once the Whole is divided, the parts need names.”

What can Man’s consciousness “say” about the Whole before putting names to it? Is the Whole a formal concept or has it a reality of its own? Even if it were a mere formal concept, its (conceptual) formality would equally belong to the Whole.

Having realized that consciousness of the Whole is both consciousness of the Whole (not of its parts) and the Whole’s consciousness (for there is nothing “outside” the Whole), consciousness is directed toward itself, that is, to introspection, interiority -- as Lao Tzu, the Upanishads, Aristotle, Augustine, and so many others remind us. They do not mean intimacy and solipsism, as it is sometimes interpreted. On the contrary, they mean the attempt to overcome the distraction of the parts to get in touch with the Whole.

In vedic parlance, the Whole is brahman, and the questioner in the Self, atman. Unless and until we have discarded ahamkara , egoism, we cannot even begin to philosophize. Philosophy is not hunting for entities and their links or causes in the critically polished field of consciousness. Philosophy is the opening of our purified conscious being to the self-disclosure of reality -- and this finds an obstacle in our ego. Without mumuksutva (ardent aspiration for liberating truth) philosophy is not possible. The culmination of this process is when the atman realizes atman-brahman.
Says Bhartrhari: “The attainment of Brahman is nothing more than loosing the knot [granthi] of the ego-sense in the form of ‘me’ and ‘mine.’”
(-pp.26-27 in The Rhythm of Being, The Gifford Lectures, by Raimon Panikkar)

Now I suspect I am the whole in individual form.

Which, of course, is emptiness.

Letting it go.

Moving on.

"Blessed To Be A Witness"

Corcovado parted the sky
And through the darkness
On us he shined
Crucified in stone
Still his blood is my own
Glory behold all my eyes have seen
Have seen

I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed to be a witness

Some have flown away
And can't be with us here today
Like the hills of my home
Some have crumbled and now are gone
Gather around for today won't come again
Won't come again

I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed to be a witness

So much sorrow and pain
Still I will not live in vain
Like good questions never asked
Is wisdom wasted on the past
Only by the grace of God go I
Go I

I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed to be a witness

I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed to be a witness

(Lyrics by BEN HARPER)

The line was meant to get a laugh. It went: “What you see is what you get.”

Don’t be afraid to look.

Two friends in prison study friendship with two friends not in prison.

Till now you seriously considered yourself to be the body and to have a form. That is the primal ignorance which is the root cause of all trouble.
- Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950)

The laughter you hear is the direct result of looking at what disagreements arise with Derrida, Montaigne, Aristotle, Kant, and Cicero.

Don't get me wrong, we like what they have to say -- that's why the argument.

Its a thing we have about keeping them ads honest as we'd like to be telling the truth of what we try to understand.

About.

And with.

One another.

When we are through, will we turn out the lights?

Following the talk, Adyashanti answered questions from the audience. A woman sitting near us, whose hands had fidgeted in her lap through most of the evening, took the microphone and said she was feeling a tremendous sadness because she feared that she’d never have an awakening experience. Adyashanti asked what her deepest spiritual yearning was. The woman answered, “I want to know God.”
Adyashanti asked the woman, whose name was Nancy, momentarily to stop her search for God and go in search of Nancy instead. “Where is Nancy?” he asked. “What is Nancy? If I ask you where is your hand, where is your foot, you can answer. But if I ask where is Nancy, where is she? She pretends to be the center of this whole life, but where is she? Is this Nancy anything more than a thought?”
“No,” she said.
Adyashanti described the tendency of the human mind to believe in a limited notion of “me,” a separate self at the core of our being. But when we go in search of that “me,” we discover something deeper and more vast. “What is looking through your eyes right now?” he asked the woman.
After a pause she answered, “It feels like life.”
“OK,” he said. “Let’s go with that. It’s life peering through your eyes. So what is life? Is life male or female? When is life’s birthday? Does it have an age?”
“No,” she responded.
“So, at the very center of this thing called ‘you’ is nothing but life,” he said. “It’s not Nancy; it’s life that’s peering through. Now, just for fun, let’s remove the word life. I like the word life. It’s very unspiritual. But since you’re in search of God, what if we replace the word life with God? Isn’t God life, the essence of all existence?”
“Yes,” the woman answered.
“God is peering through right now,” said Adyashanti. “In this moment.”
The woman seemed profoundly moved. “Whoa,” she said, her eyes widening.
“Hang with that for a while,” Adyashanti told her as she quietly took her seat and the next questioner approached the microphone. I noticed that Nancy’s hands had stopped fidgeting and were folded together peacefully in her lap.
— Luc Saunders--in Who Hears This Sound? On Waking Up From The Dream Of “Me” by LUC SAUNDERS and SY SAFRANSKY
http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/384/who_hears_this_sound

Perhaps when through, there is no need for lights either on or off.

Standing or sitting, they say, just do either -- only, without wobbling.

Through matter, spirit.

Through body, soul.

Through Jesus, Christ.

Through small self, cosmic consciousness.

Spirituality means awareness beyond the limits of self.

The body does not know how to discourse or to listen to a discourse. This which is unmistakably perceivable right where you are, absolutely identifiable yet without form, this is what listens to the discourse. - Rinzai (d.867)

That, and the Dallas Mavericks defeat Miami Heat.

A good feast day.

A satisfying conclusion.

Gone beyond.

No limit

Read articles, watch dvd again with and without commentary, remain puzzled about what happened and why the leadership of government and military decided to so baldly and badly represent themselves.

It is, as Pat Tillman would say, disappointing.

When you are free and independent, you are not bound by anything, so you do not seek liberation. Consummating the process of Zen, you become unified. Then there are no mundane things outside of Buddhism, and there is no Buddhism outside of mundane things.
- Yuanwu

Given the most benign benefit of the doubt, lies were the main ingredient. A more sinister doubt still has to be deliberated.

They never counted on his brother Kevin discovering that there was an initial investigation that vanished. They never counted on a mother and father who were strong enough to demand the truth about what had happened, and determined enough to rescue the real person that was Pat Tillman from the spin machine into which the Pentagon tried to feed his body.

Pat himself, after seeing the Iraq war firsthand and declaring it to be “so fucking illegal,” quipped to his fellow soldiers that the military seemed to be so inept that it couldn’t even construct a credible lie. How prescient was that?

Kauzlarich, like Boykin and all their ilk, has the spiritual depth of his own skin, which is what he is trying to save … whether in an exchange of faith for immortality or in deflecting the sorry truth onto a bereaved and angered family with cheap revival-tent accusations of “atheism.”

Mary Tillman, Pat’s mother, showed me a page from Pat’s journal when he was 16 years old. It was Pat’s reflection on why he had decided, once and for all, that he didn’t need organized religion. The entry was motivated by Pat’s grief at the death of an old family cat. Pat wasn’t comfortable with the idea that one could love another creature that was being excluded from the bargain in the afterlife. He and his brothers grew up between a river and the mountains, where they roamed countless miles and delighted in the ceaseless interplay of geography, climate, flora and fauna. In his journal entry, Pat speculated about this singular universality, and made up his mind that one didn’t need some anti-material monarchy buzzing with angels to accommodate himself to mortality.

Pat never felt separate enough from the world to despise the worms. And so Kauzlarich’s expression of fear and loathing for the world would have amused Pat.

Pat’s ashes are adrift from where they were scattered along the Pacific Ocean, mixing back into the elements with which he was so at home; while Ralph Kauzlarich and the Pentagon fret about a five-foot-two-inch mother who refuses to make them an offering of her fear. Surely Pat Tillman is laughing.
(--Playing the Atheism Card Against Pat Tillman’s Family, 7/28/2006, Truthdig, by Stan Goff)

At morning practice we listened after sitting and chanting to Adyashanti interview about identity and the illusions we cultivate around identity.

We shoot ourselves in the head, or are shot in the head by nameless others for reasons difficult to fathom, when we identify ourselves too closely with what we are not.

We are not the saviors of the world, much less the Middle East, or northern Africa, nor are we the drug policemen of any country, certainly not our own.

Something awkwardly delusional has infected our moral stability, and we lurch violently left and right smashing precious things -- like justice, decency, respect, truthfulness, and a primordial fairness that has been exchanged for power and fear.

Let’s change that!

Please?

Watched film The Tillman Story. Sad the death of one man. Sadder the death of trust that truth be told.

This matter (Zen) is like a great mass of fire: when you approach it your face is sure to be scorched. It is again like a sword about to be drawn; when it is once out of the scabbard, someone is sure to lose his life. The precious vajra sword is right here and its purpose is to cut off the head.
- Tai-hui (1089-1163)

The only thing that forestalls desolate cynicism is that someone knows the truth, even if hidden and distorted, someone knows what happened.

Knows the truth of a particular situation.

This belief, we might call it, is a sustaining hope during a time when belief and hope are desperate commodities to find.

Two thoughts: If we carry trust within us we'll be able to find it when needed; And we cannot misplace trust unless we put it somewhere we are not.

Trust is an inner reality. It is who we are when we are there where it is.

We must stay well within ourselves.

That's where, in silent presence, truth be told, word and act create new worlds.

There is a difference between believing in God and believing in God's way.

As soon as you sense any lingering or obstruction,
all of it is false imagining.
Just make your mind clean and free,
like space, like a mirror, like the sun in the sky.
- Yuanwu

God's way is clear like mirror, free like space.

This helps as we move through something.

Making God's way home.

Avidya, ignorance, runs deep.

Deeper still, beyond form, is emptiness. And yet, emptiness is form. It's not a matter of choice. It's a matter of weathering the ride through both.

It is all pervading, spotless beauty;
It is the self-existence and uncreated
Absolute
Then how can it even be a matter
Of discussion that the real Buddha
Has no mouth and preaches no dharma,
Or that real hearing requires no ears,
For who could hear it?
Ah, it is a jewel beyond all price.
- Huang-po (d. 850)

In the dream the book was a series of green paper bags inside each other. One had a glass dish with crumbs on it. This, I suspected, was a new concept in reading -- the reading of things engaged by the reader's so-called writing of the text in situ.

The book, it might be said, is in the bag.

Wisdom crumbs.

The harbor seal broke surface close to rowing boat.

When no thoughts have arisen and nothing at all is on your mind, you merge with the boundless and become wholly empty and still. Then your actions are not interrupted by doubt and hesitation.
- Yuanwu

Bell buoy to bell buoy.

These long quiet mornings just after sunrise stroke by stroke on Penobscot Bay with what is there.

With us.

Sometimes, in the silence, absent intent or will, there is merely now, with nothing else to distract.

To consider this, one allows stillness.

"The future is unchangeable, then?"
"We have a saying," she told me. "'We don't change the future; we choose the future.'"
(-p.102, in Neverness, a novel by David Zindell, c.1985)

No choice, then, no future?

What will the zen mind think of next?

One instant is eternity;
When you see through this one instant,
You see through the one who sees.
- Wu-men (1183-1260)

Help see me through this: If you see through the one, who sees?

“And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it's seems
It would be easier sometimes to change the past”
--Jackson Browne

No change for the choiceless.

Do you mind?

Return here. That's cushion talk at morning sitting.

When we are not present it's not only our absence, rather we have absconded here itself.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
(--from poem LITTLE GIDDING (No. 4 of 'Four Quartets') by T.S. Eliot)

It's the same with alcohol. Man takes drink; drink takes drink; drink takes man.

It's not addiction to alcohol, primarily, it is theft of here.

Here is gone when human presence is missing. No one here.

So, sit on cushion, return here.

Save the world. Start here. Stay here.

At steamboat landing I drink Irish tea while tossing sticks into salt water for Rokpa. We walk boatyard where shrink-wrap is folded into sheds and slanting boatstands lean against each other after a long winter holding up boats on the hard.

It is that nether time between the official beginning of the season marked by Memorial Day and the veritable start with calendar summer and the 4th of July when visitors buy new sneakers and shorts and take in the shops. I bail peapod.

St Augustine's homilies on St John's gospel
The two lives
There are two ways of life that God has commended to the Church. One is through faith, the other is through vision. One is in pilgrimage through a foreign land, the other is in our eternal home; one in labour, the other in repose; one in a journey to our homeland, the other in that land itself; one in action, the other in the fruits of contemplation.
The first life, the life of action, is personified by the Apostle Peter; the contemplative life, by John. The first life is passed here on earth until the end of time, when it reaches its completion; the second is not fulfilled until the end of the world, but in the world to come it lasts for ever. For this reason Peter is told “Follow me”, but Jesus adds, “If I want John to stay behind till I come, what does it matter to you? You are to follow me”.
You are to follow me by imitating me in the enduring suffering; he is to remain till I come to restore the blessings that last for ever. To put it more clearly: let action, which is complete in itself, follow me and follow the example of my passion; but let contemplation, which has only begun, remain until I come, wait until the moment of its completion.
It is the fulness of patience to follow Christ loyally even to death; the fulness of knowledge lies in wait until Christ comes again, when it will be revealed and made manifest. The ills of this world are endured in the land of the dying; the good gifts of God will be revealed in the land of the living.
We should not understand “I want him to stay behind until I come” as meaning to remain permanently but rather to wait: what is signified by John will not be fulfilled now, but it will be fulfilled, when Christ comes. On the other hand, what is signified by Peter, to whom Jesus says “follow me”, must be realised now or it will never be fulfilled.
But we should not separate these great apostles. They were both part of the present life symbolized by Peter and they were both part of the future life symbolized by John. Considered as symbols, Peter followed Christ and John remained; but in their living faith both endured the evils of the present life and both looked forward to the future blessings of the coming life of joy.
It is not they alone that do this but the whole of the holy Church, the bride of Christ, who needs to be rescued from the trials of the present and to be brought to safety in the joys of the future. Individually, Peter and John represent these two lives, the present and the future; but both journeyed in faith through this temporal life and both will enjoy the second life by vision, eternally.
All the faithful form an integral part of the body of Christ, and therefore, so that they may be steered through the perilous seas of this present life, Peter, first among the Apostles, has received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, to bind and loose from sin. And also for the sake of the faithful, so that they may keep the still and secret heart of his mode of life, John the evangelist rested on Christ’s breast.
It is not Peter alone who binds and looses sins, but the whole Church. It is not John alone who has drunk at the fountain of the Lord’s breast and pours forth what he had drunk in his teaching of the Word being God in the beginning, God with God, of the Trinity and Unity of God — of all those things which we shall see face to face in his kingdom but now, before the Lord comes, we see only in images and reflections — not John alone, for the Lord himself spreads John’s gospel throughout the world, giving everyone to drink as much as he is capable of absorbing.
(-- from Office of Readings, Saturday of the 6th week of Eastertime)

The serrated blocks of launch ramp took a pounding during one of the winter stormy seas and are akimbo. A single orange cone serves as shy semaphore to offloading trailers as tide recedes.

I thought I heard that contemplation should continue until the time of completion of temporary evil. But the word was 'temporal' as in that faith will help the journey through temporal life.

There is much I do not see. If faith helps navigate through things unseen with confidence that all is well and all manner of things are well -- then, I embrace this trusting faith.

I put unfitting scored storm window for screen on southwest 2nd floor window of Merton Retreat, also a screen on new window of new bathroom in Saskia's mom's room, also known as repaired front room.

At Saturday morning practice, with Buddhist emphasis, sitting, heart sutra, reading from Sekito's Sandokai with Suzuki Roshi's help, circle reflection, metta, then bell chant, then coffee and toast.

Tomorrow we return to full Sunday morning practice mirroring Saturday's -- but with a Christian emphasis. The Quakers complete their visitation at meetingbrook this cycle and resume their Sunday Meetings at Children's Chapel in Rockport at 9am.

The words -- contemplative, zen, practice, hermit, silence, solitude, listening, simplicity, correspondence, as it is, and conversation -- all sound right during this quiet time.

More than right, they feel they are exactly what they say they are.

Tom and Lee over four weeks led a study of the Sandokai, a poem written in Eight Century China by Zen Master Sekito Kisen Diaosho.

In prison today we read from Joan Chittister's The Monastery of the Heart: An Invitation to a Meaningful Life.

At nursing home we read Oliver, Simic, Hall, Milosz, Merwin and a number of personal poems.

Mind has no color,
Is neither long nor short,
Doesn't appear or disappear;
It is free from both purity and impurity;
It was never born and can never die;
It is utterly serene.
This is the form of our
Original mind,
Which is also our original body.
- Hui-hai (8th cent)

The men in Protective Custody were interested to hear we consider them part of our monastic community. We're only practicing what is true.

Madmen

They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with bread knives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

Actually, they are the real artists,
you said, spinning the ice in your glass.
The screwdriver is their brush.
The real vandals are the restorers,
you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,
the ones in the white doctor's smocks
who close the wound in the landscape,
and thus ruin the true art of the mad.

I watched my poem fly down to the front
of the bar and hover there
until the next customer walked in--
then I watched it fly out the open door into the night
and sail away, I could only imagine,
over the dark tenements of the city.

All I had wished to say
was that art was also short,
as a razor can teach with a slash or two,
that it only seems long compared to life,
but that night, I drove home alone
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart
except the faint hope that I might
catch a glimpse of the thing
in the fan of my headlights,
maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,
poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,
staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes
(--Poem by Billy Collins)

If we talk with each other, if we listen with each other, we begin to remember who and what we are.

It's that simple.

Really.

What if Ascension is leaving relying on self and ego and moving beyond to non-egoic non-self?

What does that mean?

You cannot describe it or draw it,
You cannot praise it enough or perceive it.
No place can be found in which
To put the Original Face;
It will not disappear even
When the universe is destroyed.
- Mumon (13th cent)

That face is the one you are before mother and father are born and long after the origin is no longer spoken of.

Breath is both inside and outside the body at the same time.

As is what we call God.

We are in the process of being what is creating what is to be God now and forever now.

Amen.

Jesus made the journey so that when we make the journey we'll each have one another to journey with.

Yes.

At end of evening sit, three bells.

Just still the thoughts in your mind. It is good to do this right in the midst of disturbance. When you are working on this, penetrate the heights and the depths.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

Morning listening to Vigils on ocean.

Salting wood planks back at dock.

We attend parade.

We row to Curtis Island. Then around it. We arrive late for afternoon concert at Camden Opera House.

The retired army colonel introduced the civil war songs at the Down East Singers' concert saying it is about longing for the end of war, the pleas of warriors, the weariness and desolation. It's no wonder, he said, facing another dawn of terrible fighting, a prayer rises up.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:

"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;

Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,

Since God is marching on."

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:

Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

While God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,

He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,

So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Our God is marching on.

Warriors fight for the good of their country. They trust their leaders to point them in the right direction.

We are grateful for our warriors. For their sacrifice. But for their attendant sorrows, we grieve.

Vow to achieve the perfect
Understanding that the
Illusory body is like
Dew and lightning. - Hsu Yun (d.1959)

War devastates.

Warriors need protection and our gratitude as they do for us what we cannot.

May their leaders be wise!

It is a time for wisdom and compassion.

This Memorial Day we remember and pray for all those dead and deadened by war.

Which includes most, if not all, of us.

If there is a way to get beyond war with it's deadening effects, we do not seem to yet know it or, perhaps, want it.

I long for that way.

It is for those deadened, and, those working to bring such a way of no-need-to-war, it is for these I pray.

For you.

And me.

And all we love.

Our life is one of practice.

Seeing into Nothingness
This is the true seeing,
The eternal seeing
- Shen-hui (8th cent)

Our life is one with practice.

Nothing else. Nothing more.

Seeing is all.

Buzzing lawn mower. The sound of late May across Barnestown Road.

When you realize the unborn, uncreated, unconditioned, you are liberated from everything born, created, and conditioned.
- Buddha (c. 563- 483 BCE)

To remain in the center of contradiction is to look at this word and that word and realize you are between words, between words that say opposite things.

What to do?

When the koan dissolves I'll let you know. Until then, keep quiet. Go home. Sit down. Don't fret.

You are surrounded. But, there's no sound to hear.

Still, listen carefully!

Rubes.

That's what the carny folks would call an unsophisticated country bumpkin. It might refer to a very large swath of population. Like those who believe without investigation, panic without cause, follow without a lick of sense.

Governments, corporations, professions, street dwellers, churches, church folk, and by and large, all of us -- we are all in complicity with the ruse of belief, any belief, not just erroneous belief.

What these military men were not saying was that there was serious concern among strategists and policymakers that entire segments of the population could be so easily manipulated into thinking that something false was something true. Americans had taken very real, physical actions based on something entirely made up. Pandemonium had ensued. Totalitarian nations were able to manipulate their citizens like this, but in America? This kind of mass control had never been seen so clearly and definitively before.
(-- pp.21-22, about the 1938 radio broadcast of 'War of the Worlds' by Orson Wells, in Annie Jacobsen's Area 51, An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base, c. 2011)

Does a life without belief frighten? What is is what is -- with or without our beliefs. Giving up belief there still remains trust. Maybe faith. But a faith not willingly or easily fooled. A steely-eyed trust and faith that scans with an alert skepticism what arrives packaged and tied with a pretty smooth bow. I've come to appreciate that truth, as we call it, is rough and unfinished, and should be subjected to long conversation in the kitchen before inviting it into the parlor or the bedroom.

Just be straightforward and do not cling to
Anything. Deluded people grasp the
Dharma and hold on to the samadhi of
Universality. They claim that the samadhi
Of universality consists of sitting
Motionless all the time without
Any uprise in the mind.
Such an interpretation makes the
Meditators inanimate and hinders
The realization of self-nature.
- Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra

At conversation last evening words suggesting there's no need to know beforehand...not almost anything...but mostly what is going to happen in the world, or in heaven, or in that place we'd like to call the future.

Let it come.

Keep watch over now.

That's where everything arrives. That's how we get to live our lives with some sanity.

Looking at. Looking as. Acting with. Being with.

What is.

Now.

Sitting on cushion early morning. Sun shows up in quiet. No beliefs.

There is a way through this.

How?

By doing what seems like a question but is really a declarative response to what ails us: What is this!

This phrase: What is this!

When you stop your compulsive mind, to reach the point where not a single thing is born, you pass through to freedom, no longer falling into feelings and not dwelling on concepts, transcending all completely. Then Zen is obvious everywhere in the world, with the totality of everything everywhere turning into its great function. Everything comes from your own heart. This is what one ancient called bringing out the family treasure.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

If the phrase were a question, the response would be simply: This is holy!

But when it is not a question, it is the action of seeing into reality what seems to be not.

We deal best with that which is real.

Be that earth, God, or footsteps heard just outside our seeing.

Like eternal light. Or a night light.

Or, maybe, just a nod given with a recognizing smile to the stranger passing us in their way on our way.

Maybe peace is an absurd idea.

Human beings want to own things -- land, buildings, apparati, books.

We want to own our life. It's hard to consider these things absurd. Maybe we're not listening.

"Read the book and you may live," he said. He reached out and patted the back of my neck. "Your life is all you have; guard it like a treasure."
--p.43, Neverness, by David Zindell, c.1988

Woman at Prompto says, "We'll be growing gills soon." Oil change. Morning wet, again.

At Southend's Old Snow Shipyard fog and mist hang over harbor. Rekord is at dock, deckhouse under cover. Grey morning. Office of Readings is on Revelation about the beast and a thousand years. The Rapture didn't happen this weekend. Instead sea gulls swoop and dogs play along muted wharf.

We loosely talk of Self-realization, for lack of a better term. But how can one real-ize or make real that which alone is real? All we need to do is to give up our habit of regarding as real that which is unreal. All religious practices are meant solely to help us do this. When we stop regarding the unreal as real, then reality alone will remain, and we will be that.
- Ramana Marharshi (1879-1950)

I don't own my life. And I certainly don't own life.

I'd rather be real.

With no estate.

Peace is real.

No?

If ever something wants to go, let it go.

If ever someone wants to go, if they say there is no love anymore, let them go.

One thing it is important to remember -- no one goes anywhere. Nothing goes anywhere.

Be comforted knowing this.

And this alone.

Only this.

Alone.

Still here. Sun might appear after days of fog and moist mist.

Pena Chodron writes:

"I used to have a sign pinned up on my wall that read: Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us...It was all about letting go of everything.

-- p.7” Pema Chödrön (When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times)

That kind man who tried hard to convince people the end of the world was nigh has refocused attention on the impermanent nature of all phenomena. We sat drinking tea as 6pm came and went. The workman, the woman, and the woefully-begone after a day of chores and cleanup. A comfortable silence. Tea. Some words. Then one cycled away and two walked with Border Collie the dripping mountain up and over back down to trillium plant by stairs at toboggan chute.

"If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher."
— Pema Chödrön

I look around. An empty time. No talks to give at prison, or hospice, or college classes to teach. No film series to lead discussion, no scheduled 1to1 conversations, no set meetings, no poetry at nursing home. No on the road audits with Saskia. For the next 9 days -- an empty calendar! Only practice, prayer, and conversations as lay monastics at meetingbrook hermitage.

Only morning and evening silent sittings, walks on mountain, rowing out harbor around Curtis Island, sipping coffee and tea, toast and peanut butter, soup and bread, reading a novel, thinking, watching, breathing. And the silence.

"Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that's all that's happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness--life's painful aspect--softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody's eyes because you feel you haven't got anything to lose--you're just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We'd be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn't have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together."
— Pema Chödrön (Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living)

So, here we are again. Birds chant morning into prayer. Solitude lengthens awareness of dripping green. Cat snoozes at bottom of bed.

Lesson 142
My mind holds only what I think with God
(ACIM, A Course in Miracles)

It is time to prepare the cabin for morning prayer. In will be our silence and words with Thomas Merton's The Book of Hours via Kathleen Daignon CND, psalm and Our Father from Northumbrian Community, a metta blessing for all our being(s), and bell chant. After tea and toast we'll sit with the Quakers for an hour observing the nothing and the everything in silence.

It is with gratitude these words appear. It is with mere humility I am here. It is with surrounding love we move through fear.

Good Sunday to you!

Breathing

Maybe today
Seeing clearly
Will come to see
Nothing other
Only Itself --
No inside
No outside
No yes
No no
Just this
Now here

Nowhere

What is outside is inside. Inside is outside. Everything is between.

Moving through itself.

We should cultivate Buddhahood
Within our own nature and should
Not seek it outside the body.
If deluded, the self-nature is a living being.
If enlightened, the self-nature is a Buddha.
Kindness and compassion are
Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva.
Joy and indifference or renunciation are
Mahasthamaprapta Bodhisattva.
The ability to purify self is
Sakyamuni Buddha.
Impartiality and straightforwardness
Are Amitabha Buddha.
- Altar Sutra

It doesn't matter if you disappear tomorrow. What matters is you are here now.

With no disturbance. No barriers.

Going nowhere.

Quiet of morning. Erik Satie and Debussey. Dog sleeps by wood stove. New York Times digital whispers world.

I don't have an opinion about those who say the end of the world is upon us. Of course fragility. And uncertainty.

Meditation cabin stands ready with pause and practice nearing.

No obstruction. With nothing to obstruct. Even that must go.

Though they liberate their minds directly and develop to this state, they still are unwilling to dwell there. They sense the slightest thing as mountainous; anything that seems to cause obstruction they immediately push away.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

A student writes a brilliant essay. It begins to travel. Good for her. She's on to something.

Mu-ge, our version of no barrier, arrives on the bed. The long haired coon cat has one paw on my right foot.

No one knows anything. We only pretend to understand. It's our best quality -- theater.

The voidness of the universe
Is capable of containing all
Things of various forms and shapes,
Such as the sun, moon, stars,
Mountains, rivers, the great earth,
Springs, streams, mountain torrents,
Plants, trees and woods,
Good and bad people,
Good and bad things,
Heavens and hells,
All the great oceans.
All these are in the void.
The voidness of worldly people
Is also like it.
- Altar Sutra

In prison this morning. A conversation about Kant, Kierkegaard, and Aristotle on friendship. Charlie, Doug, Saskia and I. We have much to think about.

And so we think in the open with one another.

Except that they lose track of things and eat too many ice cream sandwiches.

In those who attain Zen, mental machinations disappear, vision and action are forgotten, and there are no subjective views. Zen adepts just remain free, and are imperceptible to anyone, either would-be supporters or would-be antagonists. They walk on the bottom of the deepest ocean, uncontaminated, with free minds, acting normally, indistinguishable from the average person.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

I think it is odd that we do not assassinate the ocean after it has committed tsunami destruction. Nor do we hang from a gallows a tornado after crashing wide swaths to smithereens. And rivers walk free even after they destroy whole towns. What an outrage!

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights
By MICHELLE ALEXANDER
Published: May 14, 2011

Columbus, Ohio

THE legal scholar Derrick A. Bell foresaw that mass incarceration, like earlier systems of racial control, would continue to exist as long as it served the perceived interests of white elites.

Thirty years of civil rights litigation and advocacy have failed to slow the pace of a racially biased drug war or to prevent the emergence of a penal system of astonishing size. Yet a few short years of tight state budgets have inspired former “get tough” true believers to suddenly denounce the costs of imprisonment. “We’re wasting tax dollars on prisons,” they say. “It’s time to shift course.”http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15alexander.html?_r=1

No one reprimands a rainy day for slippery conditions causing cars to crash.

I'd like to get to the bottom of this discrepancy.

Are only some varieties of violence OK?

We've got to start using our human measuring stick on nature.

That'll get things rolling.

At dawn and dusk today, there, where prayer alone suffices, I sit in cabin on cushion with silence.

It is proper to doubt. Do not be led by holy scriptures, or by mere logic or inference, or by appearances, or by the authority of religious leaders. But when you realize that something is unwholesome an bad for you, give it up. And when you realize that something is wholesome and good for you, do it.
- Buddha

Prayer -- silence alone or with words. -- releases us from the noise of negativity and positivity.

In the awe-full nearness to nothing, that which we call by many names turns with immeasurable patience to us waiting as we do when nothing seems to make sense.

Remember this -- and only this.

There's nothing else.

Don't go for the bait. Don't bite the hook. There are always those wanting to reel you in, own you, sell you off.

There's much to learn about becoming free.

When a buddha appears in the world
And expounds various teachings
According to people's inclinations,
All of the teachings are expedients,
Just for the purpose of breaking through
Obsessions, doubts, intellectual interpretations,
And egocentric ideas.
If there were no such false consciousness
And false views, there would be no need
For buddhas to appear
And expound so many teachings.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

Heidegger says that world worlds and things thing.

If that's not clear, imagine this -- the world is not what we think it is. The world is itself. The world does not stand out from itself. The world, thus, does not exist.

We are looking for someone to encourage our learning.

Finding a Teacher

In the woods I came on an old friend fishing
and I asked him a question
and he said Wait

fish were rising in the deep stream
but his line was not stirring
but I waited
it was a question about the sun

about my two eyes
my ears my mouth
my heart the earth with its four seasons
my feet where I was standing
where I was going

it slipped through my hands
as though it were water
into the river
it flowed under the trees
it sank under hulls far away
and was gone without me
then where I stood night fell

I no longer knew what to ask
I could tell that his line had no hook
I understood that I was to stay and eat with him

(--Poem by W.S. Merwin)

It flows away, without me, no question, unhooked.

The tuna melt and spinach salad with Saskia is delicious.

It matters. The war matters. Assassinations matter. The mind that conceives of war and assassinations -- that mind matters.

No matter how deluded.

There are certain facts. Irrefutable realities.

The Department of Defense has identified 1,555 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations. It recently confirmed the death of the following American:
SPAULDING, Riley S., 21, Specialist, Army; Sheridan, Tex.; Second Squadron, Second Stryker Cavalry.■
(10May2011, NYTimes)

I cannot explain the feeling of grief. Nor do I take solace in jingoistic exclamation of accomplishment. Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead. Still, I cannot abide it being called 'justice.' Justice might no longer be a useful concept, "More honour'd in the breach than the observance." (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

He is dead as is the past the past.

High School Reunion

I didn’t go.
What’s changed over fifty years since graduation?

Faces smile into apertures, they are happy
they remember something I don’t from those years

the glide following final report card
cleats returned to property room

administration recording names and notes
filed in drawers and mostly forgotten

But the smiling faces look through time --
I only recognize three faces -- Joe who became

a Franciscan, Bob who played baseball, and Terry
(unmistakable visage), he played football

I stayed in Maine away from the beer and hail
fellows well met a long commute from those days.

I sent haiku but got no response. No medallion,
no recalling events manufactured in a fog
--10may2011/wfh

The classical music station times off in the middle of The Cakewalk Suite by Gottschalk. There is sudden quiet.

It's hard to imagine the silliness of our quest for and articulation of meaning and reality. The thought passes through and I realize how absurd I am. This cheers. Nothing more than a passing breath, a fleeting glimpse, a moment giving itself up for what is now next.

There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality. We think that there is something hiding our reality and that it must be destroyed before reality is gained. How ridiculous! A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts. That which will be on the day you laugh is also here and now.
- Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950)

Dust and echoes.

Good companions.

En route.

Stephen Hawking wonders about space aliens.

Hell, we're the aliens. The cosmos is the only natural expression of itself. Hawking thinks the contact has been made.

I listen to the oddities of communication parried back and forth between humans and I am certain that intelligent life continues to ignore us.

Mahaprajnaparamita is a Sanskrit
Word which means "the great
Wisdom which enables one to reach
The other shore." This should
Be performed by the mind and has
Nothing to do with verbal
Repetition.
Verbal repetition without using
The mind is like an illusion,
A transformation, dew and
Lightning; but verbal repetition
Coupled with use of the mind,
Will ensure a union of mind and mouth.
- Altar Sutra

I read students' final essays in philosophy. They're no aliens.

They are the beginning phonemes of phenomenological manifestation.

The conversation wants to continue.

"A" you're adorable. "B" you're so beautiful. "C" you're a cutie full of charms. (from the Alphabet Love Song)

We need to sing more.

The wonderful thing about being nobody in this society, culture, and existence is the practice it provides for that which we call 'death' when the body as we know it will lay itself down and be no more.

Do both prospects seem undesirable?

No matter. Pay it no mind.

Over the course of centuries,
Zen has branched out into different schools
With individual methods,
But the purpose is still the same-
To point directly to the human mind.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

We have the opportunity to practice here, in this society, this culture, and this existence that which will assist us in the occasions of life and death.

LISTENING
(A Meditation by Anthony de Mello, SJ)

"Every word, every image
used for God is a distortion
more than a description."
"Then how does one speak of God?"

"Through Silence."

"Why, then, do you speak in words?"

At that, the Master
laughed uproariously.
He said, "When I speak, you
mustn't listen to the words, my dear.
Listen to the Silence."

Whenever the feeling experience of being a stranger arises it is an opportunity to return to the practice.

What is the practice? If I told you I would break it. But when it is felt/experienced by us, it becomes itself whole again.

The Silence Itself.

The silence of God, the silent mind, the mere and simple presence of one another to each other.

Here we are.

As we are.

Nobody...

Home!

As if?

As if?

When your original reason
For studying Zen is not right,
You wind up having labored
Without accomplishment.
This is why ancients used
To urge people to study Zen
As if they were on the brink of death.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

It's not a question of what to do.

It's a matter of how to be.

Brink...?

...Nothing!

To study zen is it.

The song was right:

" Everything is beautiful
In its own way."

Only this:
To see

Through life,
Life.

Hugh Gumpel dies.

"There is," someone says,
and we stick to that "there is."
See there's nothing—
Only the sound
Of the pine wind from the beach.
- Japanese Folk Zen saying

His painting of blue-green rudder graces the bookshed.

This misty rainy night.

Don't tell me that all is well now that our military has shot a man in the face.

The company of all the dead that I include in prayer merely increases.

I'm pleased so many are relieved.

Me?

There's no joy in anyone's murder -- no matter what narrative is pinned on it.

The idea of friendship is true, is real.

In prison this morning Saskia, Charlie, Doug & I talk of Kant, Montaigne, and Aristotle.

No, that's not it. We are talking about ourselves.

We approach one another.

As friends do.

Let there now begin a healing and retrieving of virtue and dignity, respect for human life, justice, and friendship.

We have been haunted, hunting, and hunted for a long time.

Some different grace and way-of-being is now invited by us and is now inviting us.

Let us lead. Let us follow. This emerging truth sustains.

And so it is.

Osama Bin Laden, says President Obama, is dead.

As Sunday gives way to Monday.

We settle things by an ancient, obsolete, and uncertain ritual -- murder for murder, death for death.

We'll continue to try to transcend, and will, someday, find a new way.