This is my body

Brent Scowcroft said about the end of the Cold War, “...we were confused, befuddled. We didn’t know what was going on, and we didn’t think it mattered much.” (--in The Strategist, by Bartholomew Sparrow)

Today we know a lot more. We know that the confused, befuddled, and unknowing are rife and resolute in their setting and carrying out of foreign and domestic policy.

We know that a new extinction is afoot. What is disliked, mistrusted, or simply hated is now shot and murdered, bypassing any mediate steps to constrain, dissuade, assist or detain anyone considered a threat or antagonist to prevailing force and opinion.

Elimination, one observes, is current work of police, military, and covert forces of national security. 

I abjure this creeping toward Bethlehem to be spawned.

Fear mothers desperation as control fathers delusion.

This new family is not viable.

Walk away.

Leave home.

Pull up stakes.

Wander.

Take the whole 40 days, forty years, forty centuries.

Become human. Act human. Observe the human surrendering to that which transforms the human into what is beyond human.

What is beyond human?

Try this!

And this.

Then this.

arational accord...awaken interest.

From  Scott D. Moringiello review of a Robyn Horner book about Jean‐Luc Marion in The Journal of Religion:

In the first section of the book, “Situating Marion,” Horner devotes individual chapters to Marion’s intellectual biography (including his philosophical and theological mentors), to his philosophical context, to a superb distillation of Husserl’s phenomenology as it bears on Marion’s work, and to the fate of phenomenology in light of the criticisms of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. It is in this first section that the question of metaphysics comes to the fore. Marion works in the wake of Heidegger, who “uncovers the fragility of and inadequacy of a metaphysical thinking of being as substance, as cause, and as presence” (36). Moreover, Heidegger “protests a thinking of God as highest being” (36). Horner explores how Marion overcomes thinking of God as the highest being in the second section of the book and how he renews phenomenology to stand as the new first philosophy in the third section. 

For Marion, according to Horner, thinking of God as the highest being is nothing short of idolatry. In trying to think God other than by way of metaphysics, Marion’s theological writings employ four basic motifs: distance, the icon, love, and the gift. “God enters into thought as distance, gives Godself to contemplation in the icon, is only to be known as and through love, and this more particularly as a gift of love” (49). In the second part of the book, “The Theological Destitution of Metaphysics,” Horner analyzes Marion’s writings on each of these four motifs and devotes individual chapters to Marion’s On Descartes' Metaphysical Prism (Chicago, 1999) and God without Being. 

If Marion’s theological writings try to rethink God other than by way of metaphysics, his phenomenological writings attempt to overcome metaphysics by way of the saturated phenomenon and love. Horner discusses these writings in the third section, “Exceeding Excess.” The first chapter in this section treats Marion’s rehabilitation of Husserl’s phenomenological project. Instead of seeing presence (Husserl) or being (Heidegger) as the phenomenological horizon, Marion understands this horizon to be “givenness” (110). With this horizon, Marion can argue that the subject is “a screen upon which phenomena become visible” (106). With this understanding of subjectivity in place, Horner, in the following chapter, goes on to give a detailed account of saturated phenomena, which are phenomena that are in excess of the subject’s intentional aim, and examines the premier examples of saturated phenomena: the event, the idol and icon, the flesh, and the face. Horner’s final chapter, “A Thought of Love,” is an exposition and analysis of Marion’s Le phénomène érotique (Paris, 2003). Horner notes that in this work Marion “essentially argues that metaphysics is deficient because it cannot think what matters, and what matters is loving and being loved” (146). Horner concludes that for Marion, “metaphysics can only be settled by a kind of faith,” one that can be “solely characterized in terms of a leap” (146).

(--from, Book Review, Reviewed work: Robyn Horner, . Jean‐Luc Marion: A Theo‐logical Introduction. London: Ashgate, 2005. xii+222 pp. $29.95 (paper). Scott D. Moringiello, Notre Dame, Indiana. In The Journal of Religion   >  Vol. 86, No. 3, July 2006)
  

Our Sunday Morning Breakfast Seminar had to do with looking at the institutional and structural economic reasons for cruelty and dominance, failure to consider a way of dwelling between capitalism and socialism, one that attends to eradicating the negative conditions and prejudicial thinking of those who are behind the suffering in this world, and working toward a more thoughtfully investigatory, collaboratively cooperative, and contextually appropriate method of engaging all members of the human race with dignity, respect, compassion, and love.

Yes, love.

As Marion evokes, so too participants in this morning’s colloquy, there is a need to rethink what love is, to reconsider God, and to re-evaluate the frustration centered on those whose debilitating physical, moral, or intellectual conditioning has left them antagonistic and unrepentantly averse to a more benevolent look at both themselves and everyone else.

(I do not consider what comes next Marion’s.) The thought that God “is not” but comes loving as the action of relational service and arational accord, awakens interest.

If the category of ‘being’ is not posited for God a-priori, there arises a process of “becoming” through  evolving engagement with what is presenting itself in an inter-relational occasion prompting new and creative responses to phenomenal manifestation in the moment.

In other words -- there’s nothing there until arising occasion responds with love. And then there is God.

There is (il y a) (da-sein) God.

To “is” God is what God is ising.

To “there” God is to love God into the present, or, God theres reality for the duration of what manifests itself there in the realization of loving engagement.

There “is” no God.

God theres what becomes itself in act(s) of caring connection.

No need to ask where God is.

Rather, step into God-becoming-apparent with love.  

“But can you define what you call Being?"

             

From La Repubblica. Pope Francis being interviewed by Eugenio Scalfari.  An interesting read: 

But just a few days ago you appealed to Catholics to engage civilly and politically.  

"I was not addressing only Catholics but all men of good will. I say that politics is the most important of the civil activities and has its own field of action, which is not that of religion. Political institutions are secular by definition and operate in independent spheres. All my predecessors have said the same thing, for many years at least, albeit with different accents. I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I'm here."  

But that has not always being the case with the Church.  

"It has almost never been the case. Often the Church as an institution has been dominated by temporalism and many members and senior Catholic leaders still feel this way. But now let me ask you a question: you, a secular non-believer in God, what do you believe in? You are a writer and a man of thought. You believe in something, you must have a dominant value. Don't answer me with words like honesty, seeking, the vision of the common good, all important principles and values but that is not what I am asking. I am asking what you think is the essence of the world, indeed the universe. You must ask yourself, of course, like everyone else, who we are, where we come from, where we are going. Even children ask themselves these questions. And you?"  

I am grateful for this question. The answer is this: I believe in Being, that is in the tissue from which forms, bodies arise.  

"And I believe in God, not in a Catholic God, there is no Catholic God, there is God and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being. Do you think we are very far apart?"  

We are distant in our thinking, but similar as human beings, unconsciously animated by our instincts that turn into impulses, feelings and will, thought and reason. In this we are alike.  

"But can you define what you call Being?"  

Being is a fabric of energy. Chaotic but indestructible energy and eternal chaos. Forms emerge from that energy when it reaches the point of exploding. The forms have their own laws, their magnetic fields, their chemical elements, which combine randomly, evolve, and are eventually extinguished but their energy is not destroyed. Man is probably the only animal endowed with thought, at least in our planet and solar system. I said that he is driven by instincts and desires but I would add that he also contains within himself a resonance, an echo, a vocation of chaos.  

"All right. I did not want you to give me a summary of your philosophy and what you have told me is enough for me. From my point of view, God is the light that illuminates the darkness, even if it does not dissolve it, and a spark of divine light is within each of us. In the letter I wrote to you, you will remember I said that our species will end but the light of God will not end and at that point it will invade all souls and it will all be in everyone."  

Yes, I remember it well. You said, "All the light will be in all souls" which - if I may say so - gives more an image of immanence than of transcendence.  

"Transcendence remains because that light, all in everything, transcends the universe and the species it inhabits at that stage. But back to the present. We have made a step forward in our dialogue. We have observed that in society and the world in which we live selfishness has increased more than love for others, and that men of good will must work, each with his own strengths and expertise, to ensure that love for others increases until it is equal and possibly exceeds love for oneself." 

(--from “The Pope: how the Church will change." {Translated from Italian to English by Kathryn Wallace},  Dialogue between Francis and La Repubblica’s founder, Eugenio Scalfari: “ Starting from the Second Vatican Council, open to modern culture”. The conversation in the Vatican after the Pope's letter to La Repubblica: "Convert you? Proselytism is solemn nonsense. You have to meet people and listen to them. ) “http://www.repubblica.it/cultura/2013/10/01/news/pope_s_conversation_with_scalfari_english-67643118/  

This in the afternoon.  Along with poem by Terrance Keenan for Saturday Morning Practice. (With now dusking new snow falling over and on everything, again). Makes for a dash of feeling, sanity visiting in an increasingly less-than-sane, mostly absent, world.

A Sweetness Appears and Prevails
                    By Terrance Keenan 

The reason we bother 

to get up in the morning 

is because of everything; 

is because there is another arithmetic 

without internal sense 

and we ache at the borders; 

is because the grey music 

of the first chickadee before dawn 

in the hemlocks 

is the grinding engines of the humpyard 

carried on morning air; 

is because we are afraid 

and know everyone is afraid 

and do not know 

who will soothe our tears 

nor how many tears 

we will hold unshed. 

You seem to be you 

and I seem to be me. 

My sorrows are no greater 

than your sorrows. 

Thou art beautiful, 

o my loves, 

as tears are.

(Poem by Terrance Keenan, a Rinzai Zen Buddhist priest, is an Irish artist and writer. From Zen Encounters with Loneliness, by Terrance Keenan. Reprinted with permission of Wisdom Publications. Tricycle Magazine, Spring 2015) http://www.tricycle.com/parting-words/sweetness-appears-and-prevails#comment-55395 

Being, someone said at practice, is showing up.

Just like that. Like this.

I like these words.

                             

Homo hominis; human, human is; creative action

This is what we spoke about in prison this morning.

The Right & The Best 

Homo faber seeks certainty – she needs to have the ‘right’ answers to problems; whereas Homo cognitoaims at achieving the best solutions in collaboration with others in the unique context of the situation. This always leaves open the possibility of there being even better solutions. 

This is not to say that there aren’t right answers to keep bridges from crumbling, or buildings from collapsing during an earthquake. This form of thinking is certainly not irrelevant. However it cannot be the only form of thinking. Right answers depend on the right tools being applied; but too much can be ignored when the focus is solely on using the technologically ‘right’ tool for the job. On the other hand, Homo cognito, freed from the need for absolute certainty, can engage in the knowledge-making process with others. Collaborative teamwork works out case-by-case solutions to problems too complex to be reduced to fixed problems with fixed answers. 

Homo cognito also has to evaluate the information gathered and determine its reliability and relevance. With so much information available to us these days, we generally need to know how to evaluate the knowledge (or ‘knowledge’) that is out there. We cannot depend on all the information being accurate, trusting that someone with authority stands behind the claims made. Instead of relying on the authority of the teacher or on possibly outdated textbook or internet sources, we ourselves have to determine the reliability of sources. We have to become our own authority, so to speak. 

Thus Homo cognito becomes the authority on her contribution to the collaborative process, and is directly involved with deciding the relevance, importance and reliability of the information gathered. She is accountable for how she has made her decisions, and is able to give reasons and explanations for these decisions. In this way, instead of depending on the authority of instructor or text, Homo cognito now makes her thinking and reasoning visible and transparent to the collaborating group.

(--from, The Need To Move Beyond Homo Faber, by Maria daVenza Tillmanns, in Philosophy Now, February/March 2015 https://philosophynow.org/issues/106/The_Need_To_Move_Beyond_Homo_Faber

Then I became very tired.

Homo somnolent.

blah

Cold surrounds.

For Zen students the most important thing is not to be dualistic. Our "original mind" includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. You should not lose your self-sufficient state of mind. This doesn't mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few. 

In the beginner's mind there is no thought "I have attained something." All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something. The beginner's mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless. Dogen-zenji, the founder of our school, always emphasized how important it is to resume our boundless original mind. Then we are always true to ourselves, in sympathy with all beings, and can actually practice.

http://www.dailyzen.com/journal/

Weary. 

replying to a student’s paper

Here are some observations of some points you make:

*     It sounds, at first, horrifying when it is said “This thing or that thing, or life, has no meaning.” Upon further reflection, perhaps what is meant is that things, and life, are only things, and life. They do not come with meaning. They are only themselves. ‘Meaning’ is something that is conferred upon things or life by someone doing the conferring. In other words, we place meaning on things, on life. 

Which is why different things mean differently to different people. The world is a variety and variation of meaning. Which makes us jumpy when others do not value what we value, nor we what they value. We are meant to converse about our differences.

   Meaning is a creative act. (You could say.) It occurs when attention, awareness, and personal creativity places something as meaningfully before us. Self-knowledge flows from this process. (I submit.)

**      If there is no present, only past and future, might we say that past and future are the present…blink, blink, blink…a present that has been/will be without any static fixed place to reside for longer than a blink?

***      I wonder if by ‘relative’  [comparative, respective, comparable, correlative, parallel, corresponding] we might consider that time does not really exist, i.e. does not stand out from its corresponding parallel relatedness to what has been or what will be. 

In typical Buddhist paradox, might we suggest that time is no-time? (And ‘no-time’ is the definition or meaning of ‘eternity.’ )

 So, do we long for eternity? For no-time? Perhaps ‘time’ is a pivoting point, turning this way and that, as an exchange takes place so fast that it eludes us and we are left wondering (always) “what is happening?” And that question contains the gist of human experience — we are ‘what is’ happening.  

I once sent a telegram (it was the late 70s) to Martha’s Vineyard where a friend was getting married. It read, “May you become for one another a resting place for time to change hands.” 

The Western Union operator (it was done by phone) did a sharp intake of breath and asked, “Oh my, whose words are those?” 

“Mine,” I answered. 

“You’re kidding me,” she said. 

“No, I’m not.” I said. “I wouldn’t lie to you; I don’t know you. We only lie to someone we know.” [An odd thing to say, even now!] 

She laughed. 

****      A terrific expression of the individual as learning creative experience. Pace yourself well!

—bh

becoming new part, departing a new whole

The old master had his fill of his time and the behavior of it.

So, he left for outer territory.

The magic structure
The emergence of the magic structure is above all a transition from undifferentiated identity to one-dimensional unity. The magic consciousness is focused on a single “point,” which can be interchanged with other “points” or, as a part, stand for a whole.

The man of the magic structure has been released from his harmony or identity with the whole. With that a first process of consciousness began; it was still completely sleep-like: for the first time not only was man in the world, but he began to face the world in its sleep-like outlines. Therewith arose the germ of a need: that of no longer being in the world but of having the world.
The more man released himself from the whole, becoming “conscious” of himself, the more he began to be an individual, a unity not yet able to recognize the world as a whole, but only the details (or “points”) which reach his still sleep-like consciousness and in turn stand for the whole. Hence the magic world is also a world of pars pro toto, in which the part can and does stand for the whole. Magic man’s reality, his system of asso- ciations, are these individual objects, deeds, or events separated from one another like points in the over-all unity.
These points can be interchanged at will. It is a world of pure but meaningful accident; a world in which all things and persons are interrelated, but the not-yet centered Ego is dispersed over the world of phenomena. . . . In a sense one may say that in this structure consciousness was not yet in man himself, but still resting in the world. The gradual trans- fer of this consciousness, which streams towards him and which he must assimilate from his standpoint, and the awakening world, which he gradually learns to confront (and in the confrontation there is something hostile), is something that man must master.
Man replies to the forces streaming toward him with his own corresponding forces: he stands up to Nature. He tries to exorcise her, to guide her; he strives to be independent of her; then he begins to be conscious of his own will. Witchcraft and sorcery, totem and taboo, are the natural means by which he seeks to free himself from the transcendent power of nature, by which his soul strives to materialize within him and to become in- creasingly conscious of itself. . . . Here, in these attempts to free himself from the grip and spell of nature, with which in the beginning he was still fused in unity, magic man begins the struggle for power which has not ceased since; here man becomes the maker. (46  

(--p.54, Evolution of Consciousness According to Jean Gebser, by Ulrich J. Mohrhoff, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education )

Lao tzu never looked back. 

would you like bitter impropriety with your umeboshi

Our dear umeboshi begin to leap into a coup.

Seems US Senate Republicans begin the dissolution of governance the House Republicans have been itching and inching towards of late.

A letter to Iran saying pay no attention to our President.

A Foreign leader from Israel in their Chamber saying our President is wrong.

A slew of arrogant and bombastic voices halting and hexing reasonable dialogue toward meaningful governing, guttering good efforts, replaced with poorly masked ideological bigotry and tepid denials of insidious antipathy toward ordinary people, in favor of the few, the rich, the lording, the fingers on guns and eye-poking bullying become so prevalent in our culture of celebrity cynicism cutting across spectrum of media, politics, sports, corporations, religions, and street-cruel switchblades bleeding bodies out.

The open revolution of right wing ideologues commences.

What do we have here?

All the Difficult Hours and Minutes

                       ( by JANE HIRSHFIELD)

All the difficult hours and minutes  

are like salted plums in a jar.  

Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves,  

they mutter something the color of  sharkfins to the glass.  

Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.  

First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does. 

(--Source: Poetry (May 2008))

Will there be mushrooms or mushroom clouds side-dishing the Toynbee-esque dominant minority masquerading majority sliding downhill toward new uncivil war?

White rice elbows aside brown rice in broken serving bowl.

with seaweed soup

Poetry has no reason to be.

My Sandwich   

So many things  

you’d not have thought of 

until they were given. 

Even the simple- 

a cottage cheese sandwich, 

a heron’s contractable neck. 

You eat. You look. 

Then you look back and it’s over. 

This life. This flood - 

unbargained for as lasting love was - 

of lasting oddness.                                                                                                                  

(--poem, “My Sandwich” by Jane Hirshfield from The Beauty. © Knopf, 2015. 

Theology has its roots in trees.

 realizing the nature of heaven 

Love god; god is love.  

Love one another; you are 

each. 

Serve each other, render 

assistance,   

be of use, help; 

presence 

like 

this   

is true life. 

(wfh,, 22apr2014, prior to msp)  

  Philosophy is what we think about everyday life.

GRANDMOTHER TALKING CAMPTOWNS  

At 77 years old all my teeth are gone
and the wind blows past my gums.
No windscreen in Dongducheon
where homeless live alone. 

Rather than live alone
I wanted to be a monk in Buddha’s temple
but they kicked me out—
I sneaked the bacon. 

The Deacon’s ad in the newspaper
offered a room at his church—
In exchange for cleaning I lived well.
One rainy night I drank Soju and smoked
so they kicked me out. 

Damn hard work on my back for GIs—
pounded and pounded me inside
so one day it had to go.
The khanho-won removed my womb
no pension for sex trade
no yungkum. 

American couple adopted
my half white son—
my half black daughter
I left at the orphanage door
and never knew her fate. 

At one time I had money saved.
My brother came in his guilty face
Because I can’t protect you— you do this.
He used my handling money
to become a lawyer and soon removed
my name from the family—
like scraping a baby from the womb. 

Still, on my birthdays my sister Sook
secretly came to see me,
came with seaweed soup—
Unni, Unni…I waited for her to come
saved a gift chocolate so carefully wrapped—
gum, perfume, Dove soap…  

Now that she’s engaged
Sook cannot come again—
Why can’t you go to America like the others?
For the first time that day I was weeping,
Mother, mother, we should not live Let’s die together! but Mother was already gone. 

The time goes so fast that people on the moon
didn’t know where Korea was. 

One day I met a man
and I am a woman making rice
washing his work clothes
submissive and joyful
until he found my American dollars
ran away and never came back. 

Now in Dongducheon
look—
stars shimmer in the wind. 

(--poem by Tanya Ko, poet and translator who was born and raised in South Korea on Paris Press website)  .http://www.parispress.org/blog/ 

Science knows things beyond belief.

ma guarda e passa

Where do you look?

“Religion, poetry have to do with the actual goings-on of the universe. False religion, which is nothing more than magic disguised, twists the past, present and future, builds them nearer to the hearts desire. False poetry does the same thing, though with less disastrous results. it is also a world of escape, a world of literature, but not of life. If this is so, it might seem that science can be our only salvation from unreality. That is true up to a point. It can indeed save us from what is unreal, but it cannot give us more than a mechanically correct universe in place of phantasy. It cannot tell us what life is, nor can it give it to us more abundantly. This is the function of poetry, but as in the passage from the Inferno above-quoted, [Inferno, III, 34-51], we have to look for poetry, that is, for reality, in the most unlikely places also, in the mere sounds of the lines, in the perverse denial of truth, and the impossible desires of human beings, in the tremendous castles of intellectual air that they have erected, in the lies and sophistries which are only inverted truths.”
(--p.170, Haiku, Volume 1, Eastern Culture, by R.H. Blyth, 1981)

To what do you listen?

Nothing seems to
     embody the
longing of eyes
     and ears --
more than poetry --
     that which makes
wording life’s inner
     breath, as each falls   

                                                    (wfh) 

The myths caught something important when they pointed to a fall from perfection and singularity. It has been interpretation that has dropped original insight.

        The grasses of the garden, --
 They fall,
        And lie as they fall.     

                                                       (--Ryokan)

What sense do you make of it?

Looking and moving on.

vast, no, don't

It wasn't what Wu expected. This barbarian wasn't answering as he thought he might.

He said: Vast emptiness. Nothing holy. No merit.

When asked by Emperor Wu who he was, what he meant, what was to come -- Bodhidharma answered, Don't know. I don't know.

Hell, why did he come from the west?

Why do we stay east?

nugatory; who can finish the unfinishable

Jung wrote:

Ulysses is a book which pours along for seven hundred and thirty-five pages, a stream of time of seven hundred and thirty-five days which all consist in one single and senseless every day of Everyman, the completely irrelevant 16th day of June 1904, in Dublin — a day on which, in all truth, nothing happens. The stream beings in the void and ends in the void. Is all of this perhaps one single, immensely long and excessively complicated Strindbergian pronouncement upon the essence of human life, and one which, to the reader’s dismay, is never finished? Perhaps it does touch upon the essence of life; but quite certainly it touches upon life’s ten thousand surfaces and their hundred thousand color gradations. As far as my glance reaches, there are in those seven hundred and thirty-five pages no obvious repetitions and not a single hallowed island where the long-suffering reader may come to rest. There is not a single place where he can seat himself, drunk with memories, and from which he can happily consider the stretch of the road he has covered, be it one hundred pages or even less… But no! The pitiless and uninterrupted stream rolls by, and its velocity or precipitation grows in the last forty pages till it sweeps away even the marks of punctuation. It thus gives cruelest expressions to that emptiness which is both breath taking and stifling, which is under such tension, or is so filled to bursting, as to grow unbearable. This thoroughly hopeless emptiness is the dominant note of the whole book. It not only begins and ends in nothingness, but it consists of nothing but nothingness. It is all infernally nugatory."

(-- Carl Jung, writing about James Joyce's Ulysses,) 

Of course, this outrage over hopelessness and nothingness is only natural for a man who believed that “man cannot stand a meaningless life” and that “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

 (--in BrainPickings by Maria Popova)
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/02/carl-jung-ulysses-james-joyce-review-letter/

i-magi-nation

If a man becomes the language he speaks, who and what is he if he remains silent?

Word itself before language is unarticulated becoming.

Passing.

Movement.

Of.

Imagination.

no matter what (or better) never the less (Dan Berrigan)

Yes

We spoke

dialogic, dialectic

language

coming to word

carefully

with Lao Tzu

in class

last night

attending

Amos Wilder's

revelation, "The

language of

a people is

its fate."

Wondering

about

Source

visiting owl

Looking over

Snowy ground

feeling glance(d)

Don't record the dream. Just say there was a dream. Dreams are about you and what surrounds you composed by you with emotions as architects with camouflaged meaning coincidental with emergence.

In other words, life.

There was a brown paper bag. There was bed from center room of Brooklyn family house. There was a man who'd moved, it was said, to Long Island. There was a campground. A large cast of extras. Mixed themes. E-with us. Uncertainty.

In other words, life.

Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a dream.
(--1852)

It is amazing there is any order.

A dream out of which some will awaken.

Into what?

That's another tale within another unknowing series of uncontrolled imaginings tucked behind a semblance of occurring facts comprised of melting images across a collapsing screen in a transparent landscape occupied by morphing shapes with partially recognized faces that shift and refashion in an infinitely dancing surrounding projection of mostly forgotten arising and falling phantasms interchangeable feeling glanced at by omnipresent gaze merely glimpsing periphery of one's circumferential assertion of being.

Until it is time for tea and toast.

Nullified void.

Residual remains.

Returning sleep.

Ha! (postscript)

These days (actually just today) I hear the God response to Job 38:41 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job+38-41) differently. From the Advaita Vedanta point of view, God asks: 

Where were you? Have you ever given orders to the morning? Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
    or seen the storehouses of the hail? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?
    Can you loosen Orion’s belt? etc etc...

I wonder if God is waiting for an answer from Job that is worthy of a new view of being, a new grasp of proper relationality? 

Perhaps Job is getting ready (in 2015) to respond to God: 

"As long as you were there, I was there. As long as you've done what you've done, I've done  it with you. As long as you are, I am!" 

Perhaps the bible is unfinished. 

Perhaps God smiles at Job’s audacious awakening! 

“Ha!” says God.

nowhere to be, found; not imitating the powerful nor following the rich

"They shall not enter into my rest." (Ps.95)

Is God rest?

And if we do not know God's way, we shall not rest?

Busy and busier we are busiest when we are way-less and ungenerous.

I was young and now I am old.

When will it be that we will will be home forever?

And finally resting in Rest's rest itself?

Nowhere to be, found.

no, I'll sit this dance out

The idea is disorded. Money value cannot be held in higher regard than life value.

Yet, that is the way of belief in capital. Money makes money. Life makes life. Our thinking has become unbalanced by the belief that money makes life and life makes money.

This is the source of suffering and misery.

Ill-health is the product of disorded thinking.

Our economic and social way of conducting human existence is doomed to fail with disastrous results. We will kill one another. We will not care. We will import and export cynicism, hatred, inequality, and violence.

Look at police killing the unfortunate. Only property is now valued. Life is expendable. Police protect property. People are the enemies of the propertied.

I know of no solution.

I know no resolution.

It is lent.

The desolate and dissolute wander our roads and sidewalks.  Desolation and dissolution hang heavy over the country.

The monk's words to cheer up, things are only going to get worse -- come back. 

We have only each other to pray for.

We can do nothing -- and that's what we should be doing.

never (the less)

Daniel Berrigan’s piece, “September 27, 1971,” has long captured my attention:

A Chinese ideogram
shows someone
standing
by his word.
Fidelity. Freedom
consequent
on the accepted
necessity of
walking where
one’s word
leads.
Wherever.
Hebrew prophets and
singers also
struck the theme;
bodies belong
where words
lead
though the com-
mon run of exper-
ience be
that stature
shrinks as
the word
inflates.
The synthesis;
no matter what (or
better) never                                                                                       the less.  

    (--Daniel Berrigan in, And the Risen Bread: Selected Poems, 1957-1997)

Other favorite names emerge in conversation:

William Carlos Williams first said “No ideas but in things,” and it’s no surprise that between Williams and Charles Olson—himself another pillar of the Black Mountain School, along with Eigner—was a mutual admiration for the imagistic projects of both. Around 1950, Olson spent eight months in Yucatan, where he did field work excavating Mayan ruins; it was here that he first encountered hieroglyphs, the ideogrammic qualities unlike anything his own language possessed. He was so struck by this non-alphabetic system of representation that he wrote a letter to Robert Creeley claiming that the approach “on its very face, is verse, the signs so clearly and densely chosen that, cut in stone, they retain the power of the objects of which they are the images.” 

 (6) man standing by word 

William’s quote gets to the heart of the ideogram: something pre-linguistic that captures what language tries to express but which it ends up muddling. Ginsberg makes reference to the Poundian ideogram when he writes “ChineseWritten Character for truth / defined as man standing by his word / Word picture: …” in his poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” In this sense, then, the poetic ideogram is a hail to return to the most atomic unit of all artworks: the perceptions of “truth” that precede their creation. Whether or not one “reads” or “looks at” a Chagall, as I mentioned earlier, makes no difference. 

(from The Kenyon Review, Of ideogrammar  by Andrew David King, February 28, 2012) https://www.kenyonreview.org/2012/02/ideogrammar/ 

... 

Note: (6) The Chinese ideogram Allen Ginsberg mentions in his poem, which Pound found attractive. A note next to the image reads: “Durable Speech (xìn, 信): man (rén, 人) standing by word (yán, 言).” 

(--from The Kenyon Review, Of ideogrammar, by Andrew David King, February 28, 2012)   https://www.kenyonreview.org/2012/02/ideogrammar/ 

wobbly

     "There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past." ~George Carlin

first light

grows toward window --

Maine turns

to March

thanks February

for stepping off

Commentary: 

This has beneficial consequences for hermits who are nowhere occupying no place in no present. In this regard one steps off the path into a reformulating silence. It is the stillness of effortless contradiction that suggests no time to conform and no bridge to transform what becomes mere motionless movement disappearing into what word would be if its breathing vision could see its evanescent transparency.

Or, glossing:

Hermit transforms into what becomes mere motionless movement disappearing into word's empty breathing vision seeing evanescent transparency.

mountain grooming through night

Yes

walking to merton retreat

snow squeaks underfoot

Yurt hermit close to frozen brook

must hear the gripping treads

on mountain the beeping groom,

In shed, soon, shikantaza

Opus justitiae pax

"I go back to an old Latin motto, opus justitiae pax: Peace is the work of justice," Hesburgh said in a 2001 interview. "We've known 20 percent of the people in the world have 80 percent of the goodies, which means the other 80 percent have to scrape by on 20 percent."

(--Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame, who died yesterday at 97)

la la la la

There is a quiet of 4AM that endures. When each sound is prayer. When fulcrum of night balances, monks and nuns and spirits of longing hearts reside quietly with this teetering dark.

The Buddha presented a radical challenge to the way we see the world, both the world that was seen two millennia ago and the world that is seen today. What he taught is not different, it is not an alternative, it is the opposite. That the path that we think will lead us to happiness leads instead to sorrow. That what we believe is true is instead false. That what we imagine to be real is unreal. A certain value lies in remembering that challenge from time to time.
(- Donald S. Lopez, Jr., “The Scientific Buddha" Tricycle)

Getting wood from barn for embering stove, stepping out on squeaking snow, looking up at vast space whited with points of light, I think of recent discovery of black hole some 18 billion light years away. 

I am silenced...

Also,

Some 2,500 years after the lifetime of the historical Buddha, the following quotation about Buddhism was ascribed to Albert Einstein: “The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.” This statement cannot be located in any of Einstein’s writings. But there is something about Buddhism, and about the Buddha, that caused someone to ascribe these words to Einstein. And since the time when Einstein didn’t say this, intimations of deep connections between Buddhism and science have continued, right up until today. In any given month, such publications as The New York Times and The Washington Post report on clinical studies investigating the affinity of Buddhism and science, particularly neurobiology. 

(--Lopez, ibid) 

The human body has +/- 50 trillion cells. That’s a big number. They put match to paper and twigs. They all cooperate to make toast in the morning.

 I am learning what prayer is.

Looking to sky, bowing to white dog on wohnkuche futon, trusting that embers with pass on their dying memory to cold and snowy split wood, I climb stairs with chitta-cat criss-crossing my feet, arriving here content that what has taken place has taken place at least with fledgling attention and gratefulness.

This attention and gratefulness for the billions and trillions of family members seems, for now, a wonder of passing appreciatory awareness that attends to itself in all directions at all times in all spheres with all expressions of  life-always-longing-after-light-and-love-alone. (la la la la.)

Music of spheres tuning up with stillness and silence.

The sonorous gaze of it!

I’ll start. The art of farseeing.

From Analects of Confucius, Ch 12. 

Tsze-chang asked what constituted intelligence. The Master said, "He with whom neither slander that gradually soaks into the mind, nor statements that startle like a wound in the flesh, are successful may be called intelligent indeed. Yea, he with whom neither soaking slander, nor startling statements, are successful, may be called farseeing.”      http://www.analects.org/analectschaptertwelve.php

I realize more and more these days that this kind of intelligence is, actually, kindly. When the slander that enters my mind gets less and little attention, it gets quieter and shuts up. Consequentially, it doesn't (I can only hope) get put into statements that would cut and hurt another (and ultimately myself). 

.

This is the philosophical virtue of “Li":

Li is a companion virtue to jen in many respects - the other side of the same coin, so to speak. It is translated as "ritual" "propriety" or "etiquette." It is this dimension of Confucian philosophy and ethics that makes it "religious" more than anything else - the element of ritual..
Confucius was a conservative - he believed in tradition and in conserving and respecting tradition. Therefore, respect for rituals, traditional practices and conventional mores became important in his thought for restoring and maintaining order in society. And these rituals extend throughout all of life - the imperial palace, the marketplace, and the home.
http://www.world-religions-professor.com/jen.html

This is far-(seeing)-out!

how much longer? you don't want to know

Nothing serious. Just an additional 6+".

I've been thinking about how I grow weary.

Sports, celebrities, politicians, media personalities, advertisements, the rubric of institutional public relation-speak, opinionating (even mine), imprecatory outbursts (condemning or prayerful), tone-deaf governance, and general overall prolific unawareness masquerading as principled stance.

Winter, it seems, is clouding my equanimity.

Thanks be to goodness there's only 15 more weeks of it.

minus 14 degrees

It's February. 

Maine. 

And it's cold.

-14

wissen ganz nicht anderer

To think things through.

That's a way to approach philosophy. To think clearly, yes. To understand referential and logical analysis of data, detail & place before us. The ability to analyze, deduce, infer, and arrive at tentative conclusions open to revision and reconsideration.

Thinking, is this regard, means more than requisite analytic and dialectic elaboration. Thinking means seeing. Thinking means seeing through. Thinking means seeing things through in a manner that places the thinker near, around, within, and diaphaneously through the other side of the person, place, thought, or thing being looked at and divined.

Thinking as seeing is a contemplative act. It is an analytic exercise as well. The balance is vital.

Recognizing something or someone present as it is as they are is vital. Being able to ask into that present reality is also vital. This asking into is done and acted upon without objectifying what is there. It is a temporary disappearance into the situation and circumstance of the other as subject without an object, an inter-subjectivity encircling, permeating, and passing through what-is-there.

In this way, you might say, there is other, then there is no-other, and (once again) there is an-other seen and visited and celebrated as ganz nicht anderer (wholely or entirely no other).

Becoming entirely no other suggests a new being, one infused and suffused by a new presence that is a result of one being interpenetrating with another being. 

This is not a series of sequential beings connected to one another. This is a wholeness realizing a new wholeness in and through another wholeness. 

A distinction without separation.

To think things through is a process of knowing without dissecting that which is known. It is a morphological union of interbeing wherein two subjects occupy the same space for a time during which envisioning inspiration takes place as the moving action completes its quest.

This envisioning inspiration might be described as seeing and breathing as the other, or, no-other. 

It is the harmonization of theoria and praxis, theory and practice, seeing and doing, being and becoming, beginning and ending.

Perhaps it might be called, awkwardly, autodidallocism, self teaching/learning through others.

Or, more simply, wissen ganz nicht anderer, knowing wholly no other.

Is this why we are still not thinking?

rokpa snoozing under OM

we come to something

Wrestling with Raimon Panikkar at Sunday Evening Practice. Monday morning, he might not recognize his offspring.

God is yet to come.

History is a somersault. What we consider to have been in the past is actually up ahead. The mythic mind has linear time turning on itself.

Satan, Iblis, knows better than Reality/Being. He will not dishonor the Truth by honoring what Truth wishes him to honor. Like the rest of us, you and me, he thinks he knows better what the Other wants than does the Other Itself.

The Other's will is that there be no other, no hierarchy of praise and glory. All are to be glorified. All honored. All, distinctly, respected and praised and blessed.

Attached to ego we cannot see this.

Liberated and enlightened we know we are this. As Is, each and every being, creature, person, and thing.

All are of, in, with, for, and as, One Divine Reality.

Only in the ignorance of separation and division does there exist no-God, unequal persons, sinful acts, erroneous thinking, or belief some are more worthy than others.

What is true is what is here.

We are here.

Each appearing thing is here.

All sentient beings are here.

God is here.

Let us be here, as who and what we are, let us be here!

Yet-to-come is always and ever arriving.

And, as poet Theodore Roethke wrote, "Many arrivals make us live." 

      (--from his poem, "The Manifestation.) http://lineralucas.blogspot.com/2006/08/theodore-roethke-1908-1963.html

Glory!

do we know how to approach new consciousness

Yes.

Let’s say: stillness silence seeing.

No rationalizing, no explanation, no busyness, no belief, no intentional conceptualizing.

Rather, mere being-there, mere unmoving mind, mere looking.

Simple clear and wise attentiveness.

As Richard, our fond farmer friend, used to ask: What’s the recipe for doing that?

Let’s say: stillness silence seeing.

Eh?