a good read

Yesterday at practice we read the following article from Tricycle: Son of a Gun, An arms manufacturer’s son visits home after moving to a Zen monastery, by Shozan Jack Haubner 

Here’s an excerpt:

As I sat on the phone with him, reaching deep inside for the right words to explain all this, how much he means to me and why I’ve set out on the course I have, the answer was right there in front of me all along. In my journal, instead of “The Death of God Left a God-Sized Hole,” I’d accidentally scribbled “The Death of God Left a God-Sized Whole.” 

For years, I was convinced that the death of a spiritual father figure—the death of God—was cause for eternal mourning and headshaking and teeth-gnashing. Now I’m beginning to see that it may be the very path to liberation. The first thing people want to know when they find out I’m a Buddhist monk is whether or not I still believe in God. If they’re atheists I tell them no; Christians, yes (or the other way around if I’m feeling truculent). But the truth is more complex and personal, and it mirrors my feelings toward my father. I still believe in Dad’s sincerity, integrity, and intentions, for instance, but long ago I stopped looking to him for answers or intervention, for him to rescue me—“guns ablazin’!”—from whatever personal Vietnam I might be suffering through. As with God, my relationship with my father has been marked by disillusionment, reassessment, and, finally, a search for deeper understanding. While I agree with him that our first job is to protect our families and then our country, for example, I don’t think our responsibility stops there, not anymore. In this day and age, it extends to the whole planet. 

God’s death creates a wide-open chasm of responsibility that we must fill. For me, the God-sized hole, through the prism of Buddhist thinking, has become a God-sized whole. 

After hanging up the phone, having resolved nothing, I said a quiet prayer back in my cabin, the kind I learned as a kid—a true prayer, the type that releases itself from within and is a kind of call, a cry, a blind thrust in what always turns out to be the right, the only, direction. It did not begin with “Our Father,” although I did have my forebears in mind. It went, simply, “Help,” repeated over and over with increasing intensity, until suddenly I came out the other side of the request. Instead of begging for help from some unknown source of the universe, I was telling myself to give it. The plea was its own answer, its own solution—a vocation.
http://www.tricycle.com/feature/son-gun

It is a good read. 

This anniversary of my father’s death.

Good, indeed.

no calculation

Only compassion.

Religious awakening does not depend initially on who we are or what we do; rather, it is becoming attuned to the working of great compassion at the heart of existence 

(.--  Taitetsu Unno, "Into the Valley" 
The path of imperfection)

The result of listening, of conversing.

Mere looking; correspondence.

“The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.” (--James Hillman)

by extension everything whole is progenitor

I send the lad an umbrella for Father's Day.

He sends Zabars.

It's raining here.

don't ask

Monsanto owns Blackwater?

Stop

There's something about the culture of exclusion and elimination. Take the south. Take racism and intransigent pretense of superiority on the part of white people. Take legislators with their code phrases, voter suppression, and gerrymandering doubletalking democratic values but enacting closet supremacy laws.

The murders in South Carolina yesterday are not a surprise "crazy" act, but a logical outcome of a century and a half effort to preserve and reinstate legalized slavery by harassing, imprisoning and disenfranchising black people.

The insanity has been institutionalized. It votes. It preens and struts to the tune of patriotic reels proclaiming us uber allies.

There is no sin to forgive by a forgiving Jesus, no criminal act for good legal minds to punish.  There is only perverted consciousness and deluded ideas carried by whole geographies of distracted people intent on punishing northern spoilsports for taking away a very lucrative slave economy. The new ruling class, bankers and corporate boards, now take their tax free profits and sweatshops off shore in the name of acting like real Americans. Just follow the wars and jump on equally lucrative reconstruction.

But I digress. What I really mean to say is -- stop!

Stop!

Just stop!

The stupidity, abandoned character, and inane "more guns" mantra coupled with "it's the black man in the White House's fault" spread an excruciatingly painful ignorance far and wide from the rotting core of an unembarrassable nation.

Das Erinnern

Viel, viel sind meiner Tage 
Durch Sünd entweiht gesunken hinab. 
O großer Richter, frage 
Nicht wie, o lasse ihr Grab 
Erbarmende Vergessenheit 
Lass, Vater der Barmherzigkeit, 
Das Blut des Sohns es decken. 

Ach wenig sind der Tage 
Mit Frömmigkeit gekrönt entflohn, 
Sie sinds, mein Engel, trage 
Sie vor des Ewigen Thron, 
Lass schimmern die geringe Zahl, 
Dass einsten mich des Richters Wahl 
Zu seinen Frommen zähle.

Friedrich Hölderlin

what is, being said, in our surround

My stomach just said something. Right there, next to Ruth Ozeki's novel "A Tale For The Time Being," it spoke a phrase. 

I don't expect the human species to be here for a very long time. At least, not me. One of these mornings this bed will be empty. "Was that his bed?" Someone will answer, "Yes, it was." And that will be that.

Thoughts come and go. Feelings come and go. Allow yourself to experience the transient nature of thoughts and feelings, welcoming everything that arises as Just this, not me, not mine.
(--- Sandra Weinberg, "Eating and the Wheel of Life")

Until then, there is just this morning. Squirrel on bird feeder. Chickadee chanting in green-leaf branch. Gray mottle cat on folded blanket at foot of bed in other room.

What you learn going in and out of prison is why not residing in prison is such a good idea. Arbitrary and ambivalent exercising of authority and power -- a practice mimicked at every juncture of interaction within the walls. Stay out of crime and prison. Unless, going in and out of prison, a shared equivalence of experience evokes Buddhist sympathetic joy or Christian corporal mercy that turns you inside out.

We are, each of us, where we are.

Sacred syllables waiting to be pronounced. 

Holy utterance waiting to be heard.

hebdomadarian silence

walking mountain

listening vespers

falling asleep

practice by seeing

Listening to talk today, (Just This: Integration and Harmonious Communion) delivered 24May2015,  http://www.ancientdragon.org/dharma/audio/adzg_podcast.rss   the speaker refers to phrasing used in 2002 talk citing Dogen’s words about enlightenment and delusion. I’ve highlighted the two phrases in the 2002 talk.

I want to talk today about enlightenment. Usually in my tradition, in Suzuki Roshi's lineage, we don't talk so much about enlightenment, because it's kind of a dangerous word. You might imagine that there is such a thing as enlightenment. But enlightenment is not a thing, but perhaps rather a verb. Dogen says in Genjokoan that deluded people have delusions about enlightenment. So having heard this word you probably all have such delusions. This is very natural that we would have delusions about some wonderful realm of enlightenment that exists someplace else. We hear this word enlightenment and think there's something we need to get, that we need to get higher, or that we need to be somebody other than who we are. And when you realize you are thinking that, this is actually an enlightened thought, because enlightened people are enlightened about their delusions, as Dogen says. So when you are sitting and aware of your restlessness, or fidgeting, or sleepiness, or wanting to be somebody or someplace else than where you are on your cushion, that is this basic delusion, and that is what we need to be enlightened about. We practice by seeing the ways in which we think we are not where enlightenment is.

(-- from Ancient Dragon Zen Gate, Talk: Enlightenment Day, by Taigen Dan Leighton, Mt. Source Sangha, Bolinas - December 12, 2002)  http://www.ancientdragon.org/dharma/dharma_talks/enlightenment_day

There it is: “deluded people have delusions about enlightenment”; "enlightened people are enlightened about their delusions".

I’ll sit with this. 

Leading in; leading out

After recent conversations, Dunn’s poem arrives.

ALL THAT WE HAVE

               To John Jay Osborn, Jr.

It’s on ordinary days, isn't it,

   when they happen,

those silent slippages.

a man mowing the lawn, a woman

   reading a magazine,

each thinking it can’t go on like this,

then the raking, the turning

   of a page.

The art of letting pass

what must not be spoken, the art

   of tirade, explosion,

are the martial arts, and we,

their poor practitioners, are never

  more than appearances.

At night in bed the day visits us,

happily or otherwise. In the morning

   the words good morning

have a history of tones; pray to say them

evenly. It’s so easy, those moments

   when affection is what

the hand and voice naturally coordinate.

But it’s that little invisible cloud

   in the livingroom, 

floating like boredom, it’s the odor

of disappointment mixing with

   kitchen smells,

which ask of us all that we have.

The man coming in now

   to the woman.

The woman going out to the man.

                         (—Poem by Stephen Dunn) 

Mr Dunn has been listening.

We can take his lead.

round 22:22

I've been looking at my brothers and sisters.

An odd bunch.

I'm thinking to stop looking.

Will the oddness stop?

Spirits and souls of the just, bless the Lord -- Sunday morning Hermitage walking willing

resulting

It was a long conversation. 

One of the things she said was, “Because of where we are, God resulted in Jesus’ suffering.”

The words are worth a prolonged meditation.

As is, wording is important.

as long as they present themselves

Each breath might be the final breath.

With this knowledge, I gratefully take this breath.

And this one.

la condition humaine

No need to add to or take away from presence.

Imagine.

Mere and sufficient presence. 

Sans doubte; ohne versprechen; sin explicación.

Such as beauty must be when unattached to any opinion or judgement.

Utterance, not narrative.

The other deepest thing

The secret is poetry.

Can you keep it?

Well, don't.

Free it.

daddy long-legs

It was inside the screen.

Then, moving screen aside, was outside.

Did it want back in?

So it is with us.

In then out.

Uncertain where one

is wanted;

where one

Is 

to be

found.

No; response

Excerpts sans merci:

Kalief Browder, Held at Rikers Island for 3 Years Without Trial, Commits Suicide              By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ and MICHAEL WINERIP, JUNE 8, 2015 

Kalief Browder was sent to Rikers Island when he was 16 years old, accused of stealing a backpack. Though he never stood trial or was found guilty of any crime, he spent three years at the New York City jail complex, nearly two of them in solitary confinement.In October 2014, after he was written about in The New Yorker, his case became a symbol of what many saw as a broken criminal justice system. Mayor Bill de Blasio cited the article this spring when he announced an effort to clear the backlogs in state courts and reduce the inmate population at Rikers. 

For a while, it appeared Mr. Browder was putting his life back together: He earned a high school equivalency diploma and started community college. But he continued to struggle with life after Rikers. 

On Saturday, he committed suicide at his parents’ home in the Bronx. 

(-- The New York Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/nyregion/kalief-browder-held-at-rikers-island-for-3-years-without-trial-commits-suicide.html?_r=0

And:

As his father explained, he’d apparently decided that these torn strips of sheet were not strong enough. That afternoon, at about 12:15 P.M., he went into another bedroom, pulled out the air conditioner, and pushed himself out through the hole in the wall, feet first, with a cord wrapped around his neck. His mother was the only other person home at the time. After she heard a loud thumping noise, she went upstairs to investigate, but couldn’t figure out what had happened. It wasn’t until she went outside to the backyard and looked up that she realized that her youngest child had hanged himself.

(--The New Yorker, Kalief Browder, 1993–2015, BY JENNIFER GONNERMAN), http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief-browder-1993-2015 

Is there someone to say -- ‘Amen’?

No.

lofty emptiness

hidden stillness

nothing moves

only . . .

nowhere to go

A precise mapping for the explorer on the path to enlightenment.

An indulgent reçu.

“You see, my dear, goodness is the greatest force in the world -- and he’s got it.”

(--final line in 1946 film “The Razor’s Edge,” after novel by Somerset Maugham, said to Isabel of Larry Darrell)

With some elaboration:

The Katha Upanishad (commonly assigned to the forth or fifth century B.C.E.) is the first instance when we see a recognizable tradition of Yoga emerge. Within this poetic text there lies the first descriptions of the fundamentals of a yoga practice; the preparation of the body and the cultivation of stability in the mind that steel the aspirant for the discoveries of consciousness. The story unfolds as a conversation between a young, but spiritually endowed Naciketas and Yama the God of Death. Seeking the knowledge of the mysteries of life after death, Naciketas is initiated by the God Yama onto the path of emancipation. He is instructed in the practice of involution, the climbing of consciousness to ever higher levels of being, the transcendental self and the psychospiritual work that prepares the yogi for the event of grace. Reminiscent of the Baghavada Gita’s (500-200 B.C.E.) classic dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna that occurs in a chariot, so the poetic metaphor of the charioteer is used by Yama to instruct Naciketas of man’s relationship to the Higher Self.

Chapter 3, 3-9 

Know the self a rider in a chariot,
and the body, as simply the chariot.
Know the intellect (buddhi) as the charioteer,
and the mind (manas), as simply the reins.
The senses, they say, are the horses,
and the sense objects are their pastures;
He who is linked to the body (atman), senses, and mind,
the wise proclaim as the one who enjoys (bhoktri).
When a man lacks understanding,
and his mind is never controlled;
His senses do not obey him,
as bad horses, a charioteer.
But when a man has understanding,
and his mind is ever controlled;
His senses do obey him,
as good horses, a charioteer.
When a man lacks understanding,
is unmindful (amanaska) and always impure;
He does not reach that final step,
but gets on the round of rebirth.
But when a man has understanding,
is mindful and always pure;
He does reach that final step,
from which he is not reborn again.
When a man’s mind is his reins,
intellect, his charioteer;
He reaches the end of the road,
that highest step of Vsihnu.
And here exactly we find the first instance of the word Yoga used in context with its definition. A precise mapping for the explorer on the path to enlightenment. 

Chapter 6.10-11, 

When the five perceptions are stilled,
Together with the mind.
And not even reason bestirs itself;
they call it the highest state.
When the senses are firmly reined in (dharana),
that is Yoga, so people think.
From distractions a man is then free (apramatta),
for Yoga is the coming-into-being,
as well as the ceasing-to-be.

(--from Times Quotidian,) http://www.timesquotidian.com/2010/01/29/razors-edge/ 

Q: What will zen now look like? A: Like this -- “sense see say.”

Yes.

This.

What will zen, come to America, look like, roughly speaking, in 500 years?

I think it will become here the:

σχολείο γνώση καταλαβαίνω λέγω, (scholeío gnó̱si̱ katalavaíno̱ légo̱) * -- 

or, school of “sense see say.”

Thus, American zen hosts the traveling feast of Dhyana turned Chan turned Zen turns into sense/see/say -- an IAE, intuiting articulating engaging, where science and service blend with a poetry of expressive creativity that embodies the heart and soul of feeling sense, direct seeing, simple saying.

The meditative tradition arising with Upanishads and bouncing forward through haiku to Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell lyrics -- accompanied by Robert Lax, Naomi Shihab Nye, e.e.cummings, William  Carlos Williams. Marilyn Hacker, Philip Levine, Adrienne Rich, Stephen Dunn, Alice Walker, Li-Young Lee.

Basho, Santoka Teneda, Issa, Han Shan, Rumi, Machado, Neruda, Yeats, Ginsburg, Logan, Lowell, Pastan.

Zen in North America actively intuits articulating engagement. This is done in either stillness and silence or in movement and speech -- both expressions of inner/outer service and nondual insight.

So, get on and off your cushion, walk briskly and amble thoughtfully, debate vigorously and carefully quietly listen.

Zen is coming to the USA.

It will dismantle the obsession currently known as security, and speak with science and ecology the musings of entire cosmos reflecting on each part articulating the whole with engaging service.

And, as the man in the white ME cap suggested at Friday Evening Conversation, comes quiescence.

Finally, through everything.

Further finally, of David Foster Wallace, in Tributes to David Foster
Wallace, someone wrote:

The first time I finished Infinite Jest, I had to pick up the phone. I needed to talk to someone. I needed human contact, a genuine connection, in the face of the loneliness of the book. I’ve wondered if this was intentional: that we were meant to be so saddened we had to reach out, to forget our petty concerns, and to feel the warmth of other people. 

The commencement address DFW gave at Kenyon convinces me that this compassion and connection, this humanness, was what he wanted. This passage comes to mind:

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

I did not know Mr. Wallace, but I know what his work means to me. Whether he was writing about addiction, John McCain, tennis, or dictionaries, he taught me that irony and apathy mask the truth of how we feel, and that we are capable of much more, that beauty and transcendence are out there, and we just need to know to look for them.

(—Namir Y)

(--from McSweeney's Internet Tendency)
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/tributes-to-david-foster-wallace

[*Note: To those thinking the use of Greek words to describe American experience is odd, remember we are talking 500 years from now. Surely some recurrent cyclic retrieval of expressive language will occur and we will be back to Greek origins embarking on a new homecoming Odyssey from another useless devastation of interminable war.]   

averse and perverse: correlating necessary reciprocity

Reading about police corruption.

The Chicago Police Department fought to keep private this horrendous photo taken between 1999 and 2003 of Officers Jerome Finnigan and Timothy McDermott posing with a black man as if he were a dead deer.  

Maybe it's because the cash-strapped city has already paid over a half a billion dollars in settlements because of police misconduct the past 10 years alone? 

Maybe it's because it was recently revealed that the Chicago Police Department has a secret facility it has been using to harass people off the record? 

Maybe it's because the City of Chicago just passed a reparations bill for the many victims their police have tortured? 

Even more likely, though, is that they really didn’t want the identity of these two officers in the spotlight.                                                                                    http://opcoa.st/HcxM6

Maybe Mencius was wrong in this case. 

Mencius' philosophy of human nature is summed up in the following argument from The Book of Mencius.Since man is originally good, it follows that1. he possesses the innate knowledge of the good and the "innate ability" to do good; (7A:15)2. if one "develops his mind to the utmost" he can "serve Heaven" and "fulfill his destiny;" (7A:1)3. evil is not inborn but due to man's own failures and his inability to avoid evil external influences; (6A:8) 4. serious efforts must be made to recover our original nature; (ibid) and5. the end of learning is none other than to "seek for the lost mind." (6A:11) http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~cp28/confuc.htm

Maybe America is exempt from such thinking.

Xunzi’s most famous dictum is that “the nature of man is evil; his goodness is only acquired training.” What Xunzi preached was thus essentially a philosophy of culture. Human nature at birth, he maintained, consists of instinctual drives which, left to themselves, are selfish, anarchic, and antisocial. Society as a whole, however, exerts a civilizing influence upon the individual, gradually training and molding him until he becomes a disciplined and morally conscious human being. Of prime importance in this process are the li (ceremonies and ritual practices, rules of social behaviour, traditional mores) and music (which Xunzi, like Plato, regarded as having a profound moral significance).Xunzi’s view of human nature was, of course, radically opposed to that of Mencius, who had optimistically proclaimed the innate goodness of man. Both thinkers agreed that all men are potentially capable of becoming sages, but for Mencius this meant that every man has it within his power to develop further the shoots of goodness already present at birth, whereas for Xunzi it meant that every man can learn from society how to overcome his initially antisocial impulses. Thus began what became one of the major controversies in Confucian thought.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/274068/Xunzi

Perhaps it is a case of caring. Who cares about corruption? Current thinking is that everyone -- everyone -- is a liar and a thief. As such, corruption headlines are merely human nature writ large. Anyone who says “I have nothing to hide," is hiding something.

What to do?

Nothing.

Do nothing.

It is the effort to right wrong that shifts wrong into righteous crusade masquerading as law enforcement that mimics and cynically takes on role and persona of wrongdoing, only now with patina of official untouchability.

It is little wonder that so much of the gun ownership conversation revolves around protecting the individual from both the law-averse and the law-perverse, the criminals breaking the law and the other criminals broken with law as cudgel.

China today debates rule of law versus values middle way.

Confucianism as the old ideology had been criticized for a long time from the official point of view in the past. However, Confucianism didn’t lose its core value actually. Perfect virtue, the Middle Way, and the authority admiration are still its salient features. The authority with the perfect virtue doing in the middle way is the perfect ideal to Chinese people. Zhou Enlai is just that type of man who is regarded as the person with all these characteristics.
There is confusion when the rule of law tries to come into China and be the fundamental pattern to rule the country. Whether the tradition rooted in Chinese be the obstacle to the rule of law, or the rule of law can replace the traditional value successfully with its distinguishing values
(--The Thinking Way of Confucianism and the Rule of Law, by Guoji Qin, Department of Politics and Law, Shenyang Institute of Engineering, in Journal of Politics and Law, 

Abstract: Confucianism as the old ideology had been criticized for a long time from the official point of view in China; however, its core value is still influencing Chinese society. On the way towards road of the rule of law, Confucianism is considered playing the negative role. It is necessary to study the framework of Confucianism systematically so as to understand why the rule of law shows difference in between China and western world, and why Chinese would rather resolve disputes in Confucianism way than the rule of law. I will discuss the thinking way of Confucianism, analyze its core value and the relation between Confucianism and the rule of law, through which get to the conclusion that Confucianism value has the inclination to avoid the law. http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jpl/article/viewFile/763/739

It might be a good idea to reconsider reciprocality and reciprocity as fulcrum points for moderating human behavior and society. Punishment and incarceration are only small particular points on a long and wide spectrum of the ethics of reciprocity. We have to look longer down the line of emergent creativity in order to moderate a harmonious way of being in the world with one another.

(At 4:43am the New York Times inside blue plastic covering is tossed from car onto front gravel gateway dooryard.)

 Day dawns.

3:15am pee patrol with old German Shepherd and middle-aged Border Collie to same dooryard was successful leading to Chinese philosophers as night seeped into twilight.

Time to nap a while.

My sympathies to all who suffer deviance in human justice.

OAM! (Open air monastery)

Medieval days are over. When boys and girls were smothered by monasteries and convents in feudal motif and absolute obedience.

Gone.

For good.

Today, a different understanding of God. 

Unsheltered.

Open.

And -- we can only hope -- not half as neurotic, psychotic, or officiously unbearable.

As it was in the beginning

Is now

And ever

Shall be

World without

End

This is how 

We pray

Nothing

Matters.

It's where it all comes from.

Creatio ex.

Nihilo.

(If you don't mind

It

Being

Said.)

after reading poem by Denise Levertov on variation of a theme by Rilke

On the mountain the aging German Shepherd tires during walk. His hind quarters buckle two or three times. Time nears.

In prison talk is of trust and feeling. Is stoicism for civilians? one asks. Is broken trust thrown in garbage? Is detachment the end of feeling?

We engage in dialectic. We converse. We argue.

It is learning.

We're doing it.

Her honor and task, once knighted, is an awakened "I can."

wool blanket stays on bed

44 degrees and raining.

Maine.

Whether winter or late spring.

There's always weather.

For the talking.

One meets the Other

Found correlative to zero and one post:

Before there was One,” he said, “there was Zero, and inside that circle dwells the mind of God. One is the creation of the world. But when you have a world, you have things. So once you have One, you have Two, and then, sooner or later, infinity, infinite infinities. These are not just concepts; this is what creation is all about. Before the beginning was the Zero; in the beginning was the One. And since Two is already implied, you get curious about what would happen if the One meets the Other. Besides, there are so many things you can play with. Everyone knows that opposites attract. Well, sometimes there’s a kind of magnetic field between two opposite truths. You can use that to create something new. Or you can contemplate the two truths in such a way that they become one greater truth. They appear as if you were seeing the same thing with the right eye and the left eye, in a kind of depth vision.”

(--from, Meetings with the Archangel,  A COMEDY OF THE SPIRIT, by Stephen Mitchell  )http://stephenmitchellbooks.com/fiction/meetings-with-the-archangel/

This is what we spoke about in prison Friday morning.

Our professors educate us for free. They are kind. No pomp. Just circumstance, just standing around, or, in our case, sitting around.

A seminar of circumstance.

We are grateful students.

papers please?

Soaker rain Monday morning new month. How passing of time changes clothes and assumes new names in its flight!

One by one we fall away from where we were. A seamless recycling continuance like water from cloud to mountain through brook to well through faucet into pitcher into glass then sipped coursing body passing out and back into earth.

How I hope to pass away 

While gazing at a round moon 

In a cloudless sky   

Shining over lotus flowers in full bloom. 

              -- Rengetsu (1791-1875)

I have no papers.

expire-ring

Thank you NSA for holding our stuff for US. We'll take it from here. 

We...

Begin again. God is zero.

Everything else is one.

One imagines two and three.

We...

Trimurti; Three Treasures; Trinity; 

Islam, Iman, & I'hsan.

questions follow answers

Like a passing train.

What life feels like?

Itself alone.

What is held as true about God?

(There's no
grade for
This
inquiry.)

Heal all ill. Free all imprisoned. Visit each transitioning.

What is worth
doing
today?

Ground. Planet. Universe. Mind

A world comes into being.

Being is not a world.

Being is itself. 

Alibhai-Brown appeal to a notion of the “world” as constituted by a web of implicitly evaluative descriptions or “ideas” that inform our perceptions as well as our self-image. In the present case, the claim is that they conceal and mystify -- in that sense a “world” is vulnerable to critical scrutiny. A “world” is saturated by evaluative thought, ideas, general descriptions -- hence the primal, deeply uncomfortable, and now somewhat abandoned role of the philosopher as the critic of the ideas that inform the world we inhabit, the uncomfortable role of the philosopher, therefore, as the undermining critic of the unconscious function of our self-images. 

(--p.257, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Ancients and moderns, Essays in Honor of Pierre Hadot, Edited by Michael Chase, Stephen R.L. Clack, and Michael M. McGhee; in chapter 14, “Wittgenstein’s Temple, Or How Cool is Philosophy? by Michael McGhee) 

Someone said that God is zero. Everything else is one.

Unborn. 

Not two.

Then there is prayer.

When one sees nothing. 

Allowing what is true itself to feel its way into one-an-other.

Ground. Planet. Universe. Mind.

in the dream, a backyard

When is accident not substance? Does experience have any replication or extension? Is experience a solitary dwelling in the moment with no retrieval apart from what we call memory?

The impulse was to look up a childhood block-mate from Brooklyn.

There is a fiction of historical connection. We don’t know each other. That was then, an accident of proximity. What is here is what is now.

Death itself gets rid of all that is still sinful; this isn’t magic but good theology. There is nothing then left to purge. Some older teachers suggested that purgatory would still be necessary because one would still need to bear some punishment for one’s sins, but any such suggestion is of course abhorrent to anyone with even a faint understanding of Paul, who teaches that “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ.”
(--p.170, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, by  N. T. Wright)

What does it mean to be “in Christ?” Definition suggests “awaited Messiah.” Anointed. A hallowing experience. Holy. Consecrated to God.

The terms substance and accident arise.

Natural Philosophy - Substance and Accident 

What the meaning of "IS" is 

First, as a kind of preliminary and as tool for philosophical discourse, one should be familiar with the basic distinctions of Aristotle's logic. The basic logical distinction for our purposes is between accident (what exists in and is said of another) and substance (what does not exist in another & not said of another). As an example of what Aristotle means, consider what is named by the word "white." The reality that this word names (a particular color) can be said of some other thing as eg. "This thing is white." "White" is said of "this thing" as though the color belonged to "this thing." Furthermore, it is understood to exist in "this thing;" one does not find any "white" except that is in "this thing" or some other thing. This way of speaking can be contrasted with another, as for example "This thing is Socrates." "Socrates" does not name the same kind of reality that "white" does in the previous example. "Socrates" is not said of "this thing" in the same way as "white" is, and "Socrates" does not exist IN "this thing." Rather, "Socreates" IS "this thing," and the sentence "this thing is Socrates" is understood to assert an identity between the two realities named. 

This basic notion of Aristotle's logic reflects the basic distinction in the way reality is stuctured and reflects the basic way that we view reality. The fundamental distinction is between substance and accident. Substance is whatever is a natural kind of thing and exists in its own right. Examples are rocks, trees, animals, etc. What an animal is, a dog for example, is basically the same whether it is black or brown, here or there, etc. A dog is a substance since it exists in its own right; it does not exist in something else, the way a color does. 

Substance and Accidents 

Accidents are the modifications that substance undergo, but that do not change the kind of thing that each substance is. Accidents only exist when they are the accidents of some substance. Examples are colors, weight, motion. For Aristotle there are 10 categories into which things naturally fall. They are

• Substance, and

• Nine Accidents:

• Quantity, 

• Quality, 

• Relation, 

• Action, 

• Passion, 

• Time, 

• Place, 

• Disposition (the arrangement of parts), and

• Rainment (whether a thing is dressed or armed, etc.)

All these distinctions are basically logical, but in a sense they reflect the structure of reality. One never finds any substance that we experience without some accidents, nor an accident that is not the accident of a substance. Every dog, for instance, has some color, place, size. Nevertheless, it is obvious that what a dog is is not the same as its color, or its size, etc.  

(--Joseph M. Magee, Ph.D. Thomistic Philosophy Page)  http://www.aquinasonline.com/Topics/substacc.html  

The accidents of Bensonhurst have dissolved.

Something, perhaps something holy, transcends.

What is this ‘holy?’

Outside, morning birdsong.

Inside, dark grey cat enters room.

Then leaves.

As I did the old neighborhood.

Which ceases to exist as accident of time.

Now, is, solitary.

the show; untidiness here

Why do we pray even when the notion of prayer seems absurd?

No reason.

(Something much different from reason.)

Fear is what happens when reality collides with our personal fiction. Our practice is based on expectations—expectations about who we are, why we are practicing, and what our practice should be. As our hope disintegrates, it may be replaced by fear. Our characteristics, personality, all of our beautiful plans and ideas are like snowflakes about to fall on the hot stone of our meditation practice. 

Maybe you’ve poked through boredom and have had a first taste of spaciousness. Until your experience has become stable, the fear remains that your dreams, your life, and your base could fall apart. The more you contemplate space, the more you are aware of the dissolution of everything you have assumed to be real, lasting, and reliable—including your motivation and your practice. Now it all feels transitory and unreliable. This crisis, rooted in dissolution, translates as fear. 

(--from, Facing Fear, by Lama Tsony, Tricycle). http://www.tricycle.com/cushion/facing-fear

Prayer is dissolution of separate self and reintegration of what is one with itself.

In other words, we pray because there is no one praying. There is only prayer.

And prayer is the wistful joy that compassion visits upon absurd people performing and practicing open and absurd prayer.

Prayer is where meaning disappears into the revelation of truth.

And truth is meaningless.

There is only truth, not meaning.

There you are.

And here I am.

And here's the show.

Unceasing.

Prayer.

nullification

Sebastian Junger said it was brotherhood veterans missed when coming home. Who to trust? When? To what length?

When we forget life and death are right now, we forget our real connection.

Those in combat know this real connection.

We are not alive when we forget death's proximity.

Hence, contemporary life is forgetful of death and forgetful of life.

No life, no death, then no resurrection.

It was Pentecost

And nothing happened.

The morning was the morning.

The walk in solitude was just that.

The air was warm and early fresh.

If I were to say "Holy Spirit" it would be unnecessary words.

So I won't.

I'll say nothing other than...

It was Pentecost

One Pennsylvania morning in May 

And the next and next

numbers

As I drove north from Maryland and Delaware into Pennsylvania to New Jersey on Saturday afternoon, up ahead, some distance of miles and luck of the draw, John Nash and his wife were ending their lives in an automobile crash at interchange 8a of route 95 only a matter of distance from the car I drove, and I, oblivious but for distance, was not near the accident.

What was called a beautiful mind went off into an uncharted theorem free of body and mind.

We ate Chinese food with Maria.

Maria is 87.

Nash was 86.

The true beauty of your life

Sunday stillness sitting with arisen yet invisible reality dressed in transparency.

Everything seen is unseeable. Everything unseen is yet-to-be presenced.

The elderly couple know these words.

One unseeably nearing the beyond; one presenced in lazy boy meditation on other side of sliding door.

(--from,  Living Wabi Sabi: The True Beauty of Your Life, by Taro Gold)

Wood birdhouse swings gently in light breeze.

Anybody home?

We all are.

Meadowbrook Rd, Lower Gwynedd, PA, Sunday Morning

Sitting where
Tom sat

and
Maria sits

these
lovely two

one