嘆く ( lament )

The ugliness of America dropping Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima has no limit.

The sorrow of decent people everywhere lament the horror of such a terrible choice.

There is nothing worse than rationalized and justified horror and ugliness.

I bow my head for the people of Japan.

If this is prayer, I am praying.

. . .

戦争の無意味さを嘆く

(lament the senselessness of war)

never born...never die

Conferences I missed:

Beginning, then, with the assumption that Ever-Present Origin’s non-treatment of the question of birth represents in these terms a significant form of spiritual refusal or silent negation of birth, my paper investigates the aperspectival structure of the phenomenon of birth by bringing Gebser’s thought into dialogue with more traditional concepts of mystical becoming, in particular those found in the writings of Meister Eckhart and Meher Baba,  according to which spiritual evolution follows the pattern of more radically singular self/world-negation and individualized salvation or God-realization. As birth is a ‘ready-made’ aperspectival and four-dimensional truth par excellence—subjective, objective, both, and neither—so is it precisely the (w)hole one’s leap into which is the next mutation of human consciousness.   

 (—From program description of GEBSER 2014, CRISIS AND MUTATION, NEVER BORN ... NEVER DIE: INDIVIDUATION, MUTATION, AND MYSTICAL BIRTH,  by Nicola Masciandaro PhD,  Keynote Presentation, Forty-Fourth Annual International Jean Gebser Society Conference 17-18 OCTOBER 2014, JUDSON MEMORIAL ASSEMBLY HALL, NEW YORK, NY)
  http://www.gebser.org/conference

But might have enjoyed.

There’s also a volume I might enjoy:

       Diaphany: A Journal and Nocturne

PREFACE

DIAPHANY is an international peer-reviewed volume dedicated to the living confluence of poetic, phenomenological, and empirical perceptions of reality. Drinking deeply from both the arts and the sciences, and then dissolving their boundaries, Diaphany weds the vital, experiential dimension of reality to rigorous, source-based research. By embracing the principle of qualitative presence, Diaphany seeks to breathe life into the academic logos in a way that infuses philosophical gravitas with a sweeping, visionary leaven. 

The concept of diaphany is drawn from the work of German poet and Kulturphilosoph, Jean Gebser. For Gebser, transparency (Durchsichtigkeit) is that which renders both darkness and light present. Diaphany is designed accordingly as both a journal (from French jour, ‘day’) and a nocturne—a hymn to the night. Diaphany thus conceived is a matrix not only for the rational structures of consciousness (wakeful logos and light) but also for the pre-rational structures of consciousness (myth, dream, darkness).  

Drawing on the romantic, integral, and phenomenological traditions in European philosophy, we use the word diaphany to evoke the process by which the nature of the whole shines through its parts; how, like the facets of a diamond, phenomenal surfaces are revealed as unique, living expressions of the deeper, holarchical reality from which they draw their life.  

While strictly peer-reviewed, and while upholding the highest standards of academic research—including an unwavering fidelity to source materials—Diaphany is not a conventional academic journal. That is, Diaphany is not interested in so-called ‘objective’, ‘dispassionate’, or ‘impersonal’ inquiry for its own sake. Rather, Diaphany seeks work that is tempered in the fires of genuine wisdom rather than mere information; work that unveils the metaphysics of beauty through nondualistic perception; and work that emerges as much from a fervent, personal quest as it does from the perception of inexorable, impersonal realities.  

Above all, Diaphany seeks to dissolve the artifical boundaries between philosophy, science, and art. It seeks philosophers in the strict sense—lovers of wisdom (sophia) whose work does not end in criticism for the sake of criticism, but in cultivating the life of the psychē in preparation for death (meletē thanaou); scientists sensitive to the Goethean ideal of ‘delicate empiricism’ (zarte Empirie), in which the harmonic structures of the cosmos are both poetically and pragmatically revealed; and artists of poēsis and presence who make the invisible visible and the eternal tangible according to a Kandinskian ‘inner necessity’ (innere Notwendigkeit).

 -- Aaron Cheak, PhD  

Edited by Aaron Cheak, PhD, Sabrina Dalla Valle, MA, and Jennifer Zahrt, PhD.
http://www.aaroncheak.com/news/2015/7/13/diaphany-a-journal-and-nocturne 

 Here’s to delicate empiricism! 

Octave of Damoclean devastation

The octave of devastation is upon us. 

Just before birthday the insane choice to drop atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. Such a birthday, surrounded by world horror, defines us.

“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.” (— President John F. Kennedy)

 Walking mountain with white dog, listening to Democracy Now segment of the assassination of five people in Mexico:

In Mexico City, thousands of protesters are continuing to denounce the murder of photojournalist Rubén Espinosa. Espinosa, who worked for the leading newsmagazine Proceso, was killed by gunmen alongside human rights activist Nadia Vera and three other women in an apartment in Mexico City Friday. Both Espinosa and Vera had been working in the southern state of Veracruz, which has seen increasingly deadly violence against journalists and activists. According to human rights groups, Espinosa’s murder signals a new level of violence against Mexican journalists, as he may be the first to be killed while in exile in Mexico City. 

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/8/4/are_journalists_activists_safe_anywhere_in 

Nuclear bombs are too big for individuals or small groups to carry or detonate, so criminals and protectors of property, legally or illegally constituted, carry guns to ensure no one deprives them of their belongings -- whether real or personnel -- anywhere they wish to exercise their opinion that they own something and you don’t.

Do you still think that there is a way of life different from an anarchist life of prayer and practice?

The Curé d’Ars thought not:

Second reading
From the catechetical instructions by Saint John Mary Vianney, priest
The glorious duty of man: to pray and to love

My little children, reflect on these words: the Christian’s treasure is not on earth but in heaven. Our thoughts, then, ought to be directed to where our treasure is. This is the glorious duty of man: to pray and to love. If you pray and love, that is where a man’s happiness lies.

Prayer is nothing else but union with God. When one has a heart that is pure and united with God, he is given a kind of serenity and sweetness that makes him ecstatic, a light that surrounds him with marvelous brightness. In this intimate union, God and the soul are fused together like two bits of wax that no one can ever pull apart. This union of God with a tiny creature is a lovely thing. It is a happiness beyond understanding.

We had become unworthy to pray, but God in his goodness allowed us to speak with him. Our prayer is incense that gives him the greatest pleasure.

My little children, your hearts are small, but prayer stretches them and makes them capable of loving God. Through prayer we receive a foretaste of heaven and something of paradise comes down upon us. Prayer never leaves us without sweetness. It is honey that flows into the soul and makes all things sweet. When we pray properly, sorrows disappear like snow before the sun.

Prayer also makes time pass very quickly and with such great delight that one does not notice its length. Listen: Once when I was a purveyor in Bresse and most of my companions were ill, I had to make a long journey. I prayed to the good God, and, believe me, the time did not seem long.

Some men immerse themselves as deeply in prayer as fish in water, because they give themselves totally to God. There is no division in their hearts. O, how I love these noble souls! Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Colette used to see our Lord and talk to him just as we talk to one another.

How unlike them we are! How often we come to church with no idea of what to do or what to ask for. And yet, whenever we go to any human being, we know well enough why we go. And still worse, there are some who seem to speak to God like this: “I will only say a couple of things to you, and then I will be rid of you.” I often think that when we come to adore the Lord, we would receive everything we ask for, if we would ask with living faith and with a pure heart.

http://divineoffice.org/0804-or/?title=Aug+04%2C+Office+of+Readings+-+Memorial+for+St.+John+Vianney%2C+P&date=20150804#sthash.GbvS8pye.dpbs

While I am not currently fond of the phrasing “the Christian’s treasure is not on earth but in heaven,”  I appreciate the sense of frustration with the decorum of our societal/cultural mentality toward eliminating or maiming anyone not interested in our usurious and heavy-handed neck-grip on those not cooperating with our program (however you interpret the “our” usage in this sentence).

There’s much to appreciate viewing of dog after hike swimming with stick in mouth through refreshing pond.

Back in cell, drying afterward, we meditate on the ways earth passes time being itself with no thought of possession or patriotism or perfecting or partitioning or privating. 

Just this.

And this, I submit, is itself. 

And we are part of itself, not owners of it.

áskēsis*

Only a self can hold an opinion. 

When free of self, free of opinion. 

"Is that your opinion," someone asked?

It was then nothing occurred.


* (from Ancient Greek ἄσκησις,“exercise or training”)

the difficulty reading; the work becoming

Try?

Joshua Oppenheimer’s two films The Act of Killing (2012), The Look of Silence (2014), are about the troubles in Indonesia in the 1960’s and following -- Sukarno and Suharto, the slayings, the ‘communist’ rationale for slaughter, the complicity of the US, the corporate bonanza.

This kind of imperial colonial corporate behavior is rife in history. How about the Opium Wars?

What then is to be done?

"Class" may be passé in academic circles, yet the catalogue of cruelty Davis has unearthed is jaw-dropping. A friend to whom I lent the book was reduced to tears by it. Late Victorian Holocausts is as ugly as it is compelling. But, as Conrad's Marlow said in Heart of Darkness : "The conquest of the earth, which means the taking away from those who have a different complexion and slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much." 

(--from Hunger Strike, Sukhdev Sandhu on Late Victorian Holocausts - the famines that fed the empire, by Mike Davis. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jan/20/historybooks.famine

There is something about us, we humans, that does seem flawed and deluded.

The narratives formed and stories told that we cling to are suspect and need to be looked at listened to   prayed over seen through rethought and re-imagined into a mythology more fair, equitable, compassionate, and (let’s say it) completely changed so as to allow life on earth to be ideology-free, cant-free, fascist-free, enslavement-free, ism-free, stupid-free, patronizing-free, insanity-free, know-it-all-free, and exceptionalism-free.

Darwin told us we are cousins of the apes, not the angels. Later on, we learned we emerged from Africa’s jungle and that no stork ever carried us from Paris. And not long ago we discovered that our genes are almost identical to those of mice. 

Now we can’t tell if we are God’s masterpiece or the devil’s bad joke. We puny humans: 

exterminators of everything, 

hunters of our own, 

creators of the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and the neutron bomb, which is the healthiest of all bombs since it vaporizes people and leaves objects intact, 

we, the only animals who invent machines, 

the only ones who live at the service of the machines they invent, 

the only ones who devour their own home, 

the only ones who poison the water they drink and the earth that feeds them, 

the only ones capable of renting or selling themselves, or renting or selling their fellow humans, 

the only ones who kill for fun, 

the only ones who torture, 

the only ones who rape. 

And also 

the only ones who laugh, 

the only ones who daydream, 

the ones who make silk from the spit of a worm, 

the ones who find beauty in rubbish, 

the ones who discover colors beyond the rainbow, 

the ones who furnish the voices of the world with new music, 

and who create words so that neither reality nor memory will be mute.

Eduardo Galeano was one of Latin America’s most distinguished writers, the author of a three-volume history of the Americas, Memory of Fire, and most recently, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History. He was the recipient of many international prizes, including the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, the Casa de las Américas Prize, and the First Distinguished Citizen of the region by the countries of Mercosur. He died on April 13, 2015. These excerpts are taken from his history of humanity, Mirrors, translated by Mark Fried.

(--from, God’s Masterpiece or the Devil’s Bad Joke? Barbarians and Apes -- from the Opium Wars to the Origin of the Species, By Eduardo Galeano http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42529.htm#.Vb5XxXp2ofk.gmail 

Can we do it? Live sanely in mind and body?

Will we do it? See an Ultimate Reality that posits its truth as unadulterated love?

Should we do it? Work to become what we really are -- fearless, free, and formidable -- people without pretense who reverently practice gentle and abiding kindness toward one another?

We are not alone; but we are solitudes.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.                   (--Rainer Maria Rilke)

I’d like to try.

in prison

Friday morning, Doug, in Buddhist group, says: “I’ve been angry at nothing for no reason.”

Time to get out!

merely; here

Do we ever want others to see us as we are?

Or is a polished image preferable?

Is this why “no images” arose in some religions?

BREATH OF THE LIVING ONE
(A rendering of the Sepher Yitzerah) 

Ten channels of sacred variety --
living conversations with
the Limitless Eternal Void,
the Holy No-thing-ness:
one is the Breathing of
the Living One and Many,
acting in all worlds to
do, move, manifest, create.
This Breath is blessing itself,
and, in being blessed,
the name and vibrating light of the
Ever-Living Life of the worlds
approaches and kneels within all
levels, forms, systems, thing-ness.
In sound, with the first beginning.
In breath, stirring the Great Deep.
In word, engraving theFirst Light,
This is the Holy Breath,
the point and crown of existence,
creating sacred space around itself
without boundary or border, 

There is only One Holy Breath:
the next breath.
Blessed be the Vibration, Sound,
           and Name
of the Living One resounding through
all levels of our existence. 

(--from pp,140,141, The Genesis Meditations, A Shared Practice of Peace for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, by Neil Douglas Klotz, c.2003)

If we show up as we are, who we are, where we are, when we are there -- that is the only image of God allowed.

No image.

Face facing faceless.

Merely;

here.

thesis; poetry sive utterance

Why poetry has to do with liberation, creative expression of true nature, and essential communication.

Since my house burned down,   

I now own a better view       

of the rising moon                               

                     --(Masahide, 1657–1723) 

Poetry is what has become of religion and spirituality once they abandoned freedom, the individual undivided, the divine intercommunication. 

Blue moon and Ignacio

July ends.

It's only a moon.

Rising over Hosmer Pond.

Where white dog stands.

return to yes

Yes.

No more killing trophy big game animals. 

No more bullying or shooting people for diddly mistakes. 

No more political or religious posturing.

Return.

To yes.

course of nature

Cats stalk chipmunk in front room.

It's just a fact.

where did the cat go?

Maria Popova relates the story of Zen Master Soen sa Nim speaking to a young child after the death of a cat.

“What happened to Katzie? Where did he go?” 

Soen-sa said, “Where do you come from?” 

“From my mother’s belly.” 

“Where does your mother come from?” Gita was silent. 

Soen-sa said, “Everything in the world comes from the same one thing. It is like in a cookie factory. Many different kinds of cookies are made — lions, tigers, elephants, houses, people. They all have different shapes and different names, but they are all made from the same dough and they all taste the same. So all the different things that you see — a cat, a person, a tree, the sun, this floor — all these things are really the same.” 

“What are they?”

"People give them many different names. But in themselves, they have no names. When you are thinking, all things have different names and different shapes. But when you are not thinking, all things are the same. There are no words for them. People make the words. A cat doesn’t say, ‘I am a cat.’ People say, ‘This is a cat.’ The sun doesn’t say, ‘My name is sun.’ People say, ‘This is the sun.’

So when someone asks you, ‘What is this?’, how should you answer?”

“I shouldn’t use words.” 

Soen-sa said, “Very good! You shouldn’t use words. So if someone asks you, ‘What is Buddha?’, what would be a good answer?” 

Gita was silent. 

Soen-sa said, “Now you ask me. “ 

“What is Buddha?” 

Soen-sa hit the floor. 

Gita laughed. 

Soen-sa said, “Now I ask you: What is Buddha?” 

Gita hit the floor. 

“What is God?” 

Gita hit the floor. 

“What is your mother?” 

Gita hit the floor. 

“What are you?” 

Gita hit the floor. 

“Very good! This is what all things in the world are made of. You and Buddha and God and your mother and the whole world are the same.”

Gita smiled.

Soen-sa said, “Do you have any more questions?” 

“You still haven’t told me where Katz went.” 

Soen-sa leaned over, looked into her eyes, and said, “You already understand.” 

Gita said, “Oh!” and hit the floor very hard. Then she laughed.

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/27/dropping-ashes-on-the-buddha-death/

She also tells the rest of the story:

As she was opening the door, she turned to Soen-sa and said, “But I’m not going to answer that way when I’m in school. I’m going to give regular answers!” Soen-sa laughed.

a time being; in mind of

We have to learn to read.

To understand stories.

The Buddhist myth about Siddhartha’s fateful encounters with an old man, an ill man, a corpse, and a renunciate can be taken as historically factual, or as an imaginative way to represent why Siddhartha left home, or as a literary device that may have nothing to do with the actual life of the Buddha. Yet the myth is an effective way to story his teaching. Understood symbolically, this polyvalence is not a problem, because that is how myths work. It is not a matter of literal truth or falsity. As Rabbi Akiva Tatz writes in Letters to a Buddhist Jew, “All my stories are true. Some happened and some did not, but they are all true.” 

A better way to evaluate a myth—a symbolic story—is to consider what happens when we try to live according to it. The most important criterion for Buddhism is whether a story promotes awakening. A myth that is interpreted for me still needs to be interpreted by me, by what I do with it—and what it does with me. A story about the suffering of old age, illness, and death challenges the stories with which we try to ignore our mortality: the importance of money, possessions, fame, power. Letting go of those preoccupations opens up other possibilities: different stories, and perhaps a different relationship with stories.

(--The World is Made of Stories, --byDavid Loy) 

 http://www.tricycle.com/feature/world-made-stories

I have nothing to say; words do not appear to grasp it. 

poems sent to place miles away

And at conversation we spoke about "mind" -- how there is joy in realizing we share the same one.

Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in

BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,

in me are lives I do not know the names of,

nor the fates of,

nor the hungers of or what they eat.

They eat of me.

Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me 

whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.

And in my streets—the narrow ones, 

unlabeled on the self-map—

they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow,

and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,

in hours uncounted by the self-clock,

they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves. 

There too have been the hard extinctions, 

missing birds once feasted on and feasting.

There too must be machines 

like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day.

A few escape. A mercy.

They leave behind 

small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.

Source: Poetry (September 2012).


And "fado" is "a type of Portuguese singing, traditionally associated with pubs and cafés, that is renowned for its expressive and profoundly melancholic character." http://www.britannica.com/art/fado

Fado

BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

A man reaches close

and lifts a quarter 

from inside a girl’s ear,

from her hands takes a dove

she didn’t know was there.

Which amazes more,

you may wonder:

the quarter’s serrated murmur

against the thumb

or the dove’s knuckled silence?

That he found them, 

or that she never had,

or that in Portugal,

this same half-stopped moment,

it’s almost dawn, 

and a woman in a wheelchair

is singing a fado 

that puts every life in the room

on one pan of a scale, 

itself on the other, 

and the copper bowls balance.

Source: Poetry (September 2012).

truth be told

Hammering nails from old wood, pulling from demolition, an afternoon’s decomposition. Just this. Nothing else. I no longer find opinions to be interesting.  

the achieving of integration

Armin hit the wooden fish (moktak), seven of us sang “happy birthday” to the woman in Maryland whose birthday was yesterday.

It was a sweet exercise.

She’s hurting, they sing for her, and maybe, in an exercise of magical perception and conscious evolution, she might have heard the melodic metta being transported across the miles from maximum security prison.

That’s what prison is for -- thoughtfulness and well-wishing.

According to Hegel, the relationship between self and otherness is the fundamental defining characteristic of human awareness and activity, being rooted as it is in the emotion of desire for objects as well as in the estrangement from those objects, which is part of the primordial human experience of the world. The otherness that consciousness experiences as a barrier to its goal is the external reality of the natural and social world, which prevents individual consciousness from becoming free and independent. However, that otherness cannot be abolished or destroyed, without destroying oneself, and so ideally there must be reconciliation between self and other such that consciousness can "universalize" itself through the other. In the relation of dominance and subservience between two consciousnesses, say lord and bondsman, the basic problem for consciousness is the overcoming of its otherness, or put positively, the achieving of integration with itself. The relation between lord and bondsman leads to a sort of provisional, incomplete resolution of the struggle for recognition between distinct consciousnesses. 

 (--Hegel: Social and Political Thought, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)  http://www.iep.utm.edu/hegelsoc/#H4

Sometimes, even the most unlikely experiences define new neural pathways through human consciousness.

You are not alone.

Never were.

Otherness is self-recognition of distinct intersubjectivity.

other words and other worlds

From Ruth Ozeku novel "A Tale For The Time Being," these words:

   I love to fly. Have I mentioned that? There is truly no feeling more splendid or more transcendental. Sometimes zazen comes close. I am sitting zazen every day. Thank you for suggesting it. I am comforted to know that you are sitting too. 

   I'm afraid my day is approaching and my next "official" letter to you may be th Mothe last one you receive from me. But no matter what nonsense I write in it, please know that those are not my last words. There are other words and other worlds, dear mother. You have taught me that.  (p.258)

Part lll begins with a quote from Dogen Zenji:

Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand "flying" as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. 

To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.
--Dogen Zenji, Uji (p. 259)

For the time being we share this world.

And, in other words, other worlds.

My mother often used the phrase "in other words." 

hoc olfacit*

Sandra Bland died in jail cell from cigarette smoke in trooper's nostrils.

Men with guns and tasers want only to smell your "Yes sir, sir!"

...

• [Latin, "this smells"] 

Quando Omni Flunkus Moritatus

Sonny has a way with words.

He also went to hospital last Friday with unstable palpitations. He stayed overnight. His heart was making him dizzy. He fell in his cell. He has the bruises to show it.

This morning during our Ilu Coto (illusion of boundary) at prison he asks Saskia to read the paper he wrote in response to article in Philosophy Now, The Party Without Me, by David Rönnegard.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/The_Party_Without_Me

Sonny responds, these excerpts:

-- Spiritual eyes cannot see if they are inhibited by belief. Emotions crave emotions and the intellect only gets in the way. Common spiritual sense can become victim to nonsense. My words to an Atheist, “Open your eyes, expressions of spiritual reality exist within each of us and also all about us. Spiritual reality does not depend on any belief system to exist.” 

--The Atheist is correct, the physical consciousness is extinguished when we die and “good riddance.” The physical consciousness is created by our physical senses and is commonly conceptualized as perception. This in turn is provided by evolution. All personally internalized beliefs die with us since none has any foundation in Heaven. 

--Don’t worry about Heaven. Mr. Atheist, you are headed to Heaven whether you believe in God or not. Everybody returns to heaven carrying with them their life experience. That’s right, we remain ourselves after death, but will not understand why and what we were in life. There is no punishment, only an understanding. Hell as it is portrayed in popular culture does not exist. Hell is what beliefs make out of life. 

--You cannot deny God, you can only deny a culturally constructed conception of God. 

--Infinite awareness is our Heavenly fate as we leave our erroneous beliefs behind.

--After death we KNOW.

                                 --(HRE Jr., July 2015, MSP Warren) 

Knowledge without belief; I wonder if such a state would free us from our ridiculous internecine slaughter?

So, for now, we converse with one another. We explore the illusion of boundary, false barriers, erroneous divisions.

Mostly we are listening to one another listening to one another as each listens to the one each other attempts to hear within la diferencia that holds us together.

Finally, some Latin:

1.  SI MINOR PLUS EST ERGO NIHIL SUNT OMNIA 

              If less is more, then nothing is everything.

2. Richard de BuryPhilobiblion, I, 9:

POSTREMO PENSANDUM
QUANTA DOCTRINAE COMMODITAS SIT IN LIBRIS
QUAM FACILIS, QUAM ARCANA!
QUAM TUTO LIBRIS HUMANAE IGNORANTIA PAUPERTATEM
SINE VERECUNDIA DENUDAMUS!
HI SUNT MAGISTRI QUI NOS INSTRUUNT
SINE VIRGIS ET FERULA,
SINE VERBIS ET CHOLERA, SINE PANNIS ET PECUNIA.
SI ACCEDIS, NON DORMIUNT;
SI INQUIRENS INTERROGAS, NON ABSCONDUNT;
NON REMURMURANT SI OBERRES; 

CACHINNOS NESCIUNT, SI IGNORES 

And finally, one must consider how great the ease of learning 

there is in books, how yielding, how trusty! 

How safely we reveal, without shyness, in the face of our books 

the poverty of our human ignorance! 

They are teachers who instruct us without switches or rods, 

without slaps or anger, without notice of rags or riches. 

If you approach them, they are not asleep; 

If you ask a question, they do not hide; 

They do not mutter at you if you make a mistake; 

When you are ignorant, they do not know how to laugh at you.  

3. QUANDO OMNI FLUNKUS MORITATUS 

               When all else fails play dead. 

https://vaipui.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/the-latin-corner/ 

ataraxia

Inner life.  Inner peace.  Inner emptiness.

A vantage point worth seeing.

Epicurus is considered a major figure in the history of science as well as philosophy.  He argued that we should only proportion belief to empirical evidence and logic, and he propounded the scientific view of atomism, according to which all facts in the macroscopic world are caused by the configuration of atoms or indivisible elements in the microscopic world.    In ethics he is famous for propounding the theory of hedonism, which holds that pleasure is the only intrinsic value.  As we shall see, however, his view of pleasure is far from the stereotypical one.  For Epicurus, the most pleasant life is one where we abstain from unnecessary desires and achieve an inner tranquility (ataraxia) by being content with simple things, and by choosing the pleasure of philosophical conversation with friends over the pursuit of physical pleasures like food, drink, and sex. http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/epicurus/

And seeing, taking refuge in wisdom, truth, and community.

as if all worlds were there

What we think we know has to be scuttled to know what we think.

Knowing is thinking, but thinking will always be changing with what is presenting itself  to us.

Hence, the thinking of knowing is changing with each 'this' appearing 'here.'

With this thinking, here is a new set of words for my tombstone:

He wanted

This 

To be written

Here

just barely not dead

Someone writes about causes and conditions of their current life: “...it's not an unacceptance it's literally too much to bare.”  

I like what seems to be a substitution of the word “bare” for “bear.”

To let into the open? Or, to hold up and carry? Both have their wisdom, both their demands. Both, however, involve suffering.

Last night at end of reading at table section of Sunday Evening Practice, Robert Thurman’s words are written: ”For the enlightened, life is art, and for the unenlightened, art gives life.” We took time to unpack the reading titled “The Wonderful Ambiguity of Art” (in Inquiring Mind, Vol 18, #2, Spring 2002).

It leads me to think of our friend. It leads me to think of ourselves.

Pain is disorienting. It narrows the world into a tight unyielding place. It is an unsharable, uninhabitable by others, place. No one can share or take away your pain. What another or others can do is be present to your pain. Attending. Offering whatever comfort possible. Being there as another human being can be there. 

It is difficult to be in pain. It is difficult to be with someone in pain. These two difficulties are not the same. But they are in correspondence. This correspondence might be an unsatisfactory solution to the problem of pain. But it is something. Perhaps not much. But something.

A friend of ours suffers pain and works hard to find suitable plans to move beyond pain to genuine healing strategies to be incorporated into her life.

We practice contemplation, conversation, and correspondence with her. 

For now.

RT: This question, Is loving your enemy a life practice?, I like that question. It is a life practice, certainly, for everyone. It relates to the idea of, Is this a householder practice or is it a monk practice? I think it’s both. Everyone has that practice. Everyone has the same life purpose, which is the quest of happiness for oneself and for others. Human beings are such social animals. We’re very connected with the feelings of those we’re close to, so we can’t really be happy when the ones we are close to are unhappy.  

The most important enemy for everyone is their own illusion that makes them unrealistic or exaggerates their sense of self-importance in the world. Ironically, you’re the super secret enemy. Whether lay or householder, everyone has that internal enemy. 

What Sharon Salzberg and I are really hoping to do in this book, Loving Your Enemies: How to Break the Anger Habit & Be a Whole Lot Happier, we’re using the word “love” in the Buddhist meaning of “love,” which means “the wish for the happiness of the beloved.” It isn’t the meaning of love where you somehow desire that one or you want them or want them to love you.  

If you love your enemy, that means you want your enemy to be happy. If your enemy is happy, then why would they be bothered to be your enemy? Being someone’s enemy is no fun. It does not add to happiness. You take up energy towards someone because you think loving your enemy doesn’t just mean caving into your enemy. It means first of all liberating yourself. Martin Luther King said famously that he was not going to hate the oppressing white people of the South, because the burden of hate was too much to bear for the hater. Hate poisons your life. He was going to love them no matter what they did. Because that made him happier. That’s the kind of practical understanding of the “love your enemy” teaching of Jesus and Buddha and other great spiritual teachers in history. The problem in our society is the ego psychology and conventional wisdom about “look out for #1.” That conventional wisdom thinks that “love your enemy” is to some a principle no one can ever live by, and we don’t think that’s correct.  

Take the example of people who are being most unrealistic—people who are beating monks to death and torturing them. Why shouldn’t you be angry or hate that person? Well, the person who is doing that is very unhappy. They are being ordered by a higher-up. The person who creates the policy is afraid of Tibetans or afraid of religion, or they are afraid that Tibetans are going to demand their country back and China is going to lose their territory.The person who is tormenting the Tibetans feels they have to get rid of the Tibetans in order to be happy.  

If you love that person and say, I can just be like them, do it my way, I want to get rid of them, then there’s the endless, vicious circle back and forth between you and the enemy. Or you say, Well, is what these people really want ownership of Tibet? Is that what is going to make them happy? If someone gets a bigger house, does that automatically make them happy? Maybe for a second. But then they worry about the bigger house and how to take care of it. A possession can’t make you happy. Therefore, what is it that they really want? They want love in their life. They want to be respected. They want to have wealth. How can there be a method of them getting that without destroying Tibet? That love, in the sense of wishing their happiness, will cause your actions to be effective in relation to that person.  

(Robert Thurman Interview, in Origin Magazine)  http://www.originmagazine.com/2013/12/01/robert-thurman-interview/ 

While we’re still alive, we wish one another happiness. Doesn’t matter your religion, politics, ethnic origin, class status, wealth, or any other variable. 

If you are alive, we wish you happiness.

If you are dead, we wish you happiness.

RT: People in Tibet have an expression. When you reach a certain degree of venerableness and age, and people ask, “How are you?,” there is an expression that people use that means, “Just barely not dead.” Some people might be frightened by it but I think it’s quite funny. In that light, what makes me fully alive is anything. Really just being alive is enough.  (Ibid)

If you are just barely not dead, we wish you happiness.

And a life of art.

“The work of art unpins everything, undoing us in the process; it raises a million questions that amount to one question: who are we and what are we doing here?             

 (-- Norman Fisher)

letter to oneself:

Let's suppose we wished the hand of God has been intermixed into this current stretch of apprehension and uncertainty. As such, God is as uncertain as you and as interested in you as those you allow to be troubled with you as to the next step, next move, next difficult act of trust in what is revealing itself before you.

If there is such a presence as God-presence, then such a presence is admixed within the complexity of our situation and circumstance. We, poor examples of clear vision and loving kindness, stumble along with doubt and confusion, distress and despair, tears and sighs, wondering where help will come from. Our insufficient awareness struggles to see.

I suppose there seldom are clear and easy trajectories of sight and understanding about the course of our lives. Some folks, maybe. I don't know. But for the rest of us, not so much.

But-- and here's the kicker -- you are loved. By your kids, by your kids’ other parent, by your mom and dad, by your wider relatives, by your friends and passing acquaintances, by your medical familiars, soft-serve vendors, the nursing personnel, the guy who flies the plane and taxi driver sipping his coffee.

Surprised that everyone does, indeed, love you? Yeah, problem is the vast majority of most of us have poor understanding of what love is what love looks like what love tries to leave out of its behavior. But, under it all it is love that breathes us into each body into each set of eyes into each next circumstance of our lives.

But, again, there's an additional consideration: yes, everyone loves you, and no, some are just not yet aware of how and how much they love you, or how and in what way you feel you prefer to be loved by them. So, at times, they (from above list)  seem distracted or short tempered, argumentative or unkind, presumptive or dismissive, sweet or over sweet, or perhaps just bored with the routine and stuff of their own lives. This happens. Often.

And yet -- they all really love you. How do you know? You know because (here it comes, the buried lead in a 1st term journalism intern's first assigned writing), there's nothing else but love!

TNEBL! 

It's an indefinable intuition usually grokked and vaguely realized at 2AM on Thursday vigil-watch on high-sea ocean trawlers just outside entrance to Black Sea in late autumn. And at bottom, at root, it is the only thing any of us really want really long for really value.  Love is awkward for many of us. It is a stretch. We're ambivalent about recognizing it within ourselves and within others.

But you. But we. But all of us, are both loving and loved. That's the God-presence. That's what we long to discover in ourselves and others -- no matter how annoying we and others are.

So here's my prayer for you, and correspondingly, my bottom line: "I want love to grow in me [in you] through this."

Good journey...

present-centered recollection

Spective; retro-, pro-, per-, propter-

Seeing.

Before. Beyond. Through. Near at hand.

In what ways do the modern accounts differ? While mindfulness (sati) is often equated with bare attention, my conversations with—and recent studies of works by—the learned monks Bhikkhu Bodhi and Bhikkhu Analayo, and Rupert Gethin, president of the Pali Text Society, led me to conclude that bare attention corresponds much more closely to the Pali term manasikara, which is commonly translated as “attention” or “mental engagement.” This word refers to the initial split seconds of the bare cognizing of an object, before one begins to recognize, identify, and conceptualize, and in Buddhist accounts it is not regarded as a wholesome mental factor. It is ethically neutral. The primary meaning of sati, on the other hand, is recollection, non-forgetfulness. This includes retrospective memory of things in the past, prospectively remembering to do something in the future, and present-centered recollection in the sense of maintaining unwavering attention to a present reality. The opposite of mindfulness is forgetfulness, so mindfulness applied to the breath, for instance, involves continuous, unwavering attention to the respiration. Mindfulness may be used to sustain bare attention (manasikara), but nowhere do traditional Buddhist sources equate mindfulness with such attention.

(--from,  A Mindful Balance, by B. Alan Wallace) http://www..com/interview/mindful-balance-0

Yes.

"Present-centered recollection."

Says it. 

Todd, Doug and I talk about loving kindness in prison

Ramadan ends.

I buy a globe of the world at Good Will.

There’s no certainty.

I watch a Harold Camping documentary.

He was thinking a lot about the end of the world.

I don’t think much of it.

I think

     not so

        much of it.

what's in a name

Hospital bed set up. Air mattress extraordinaire.

Who knows who might visit and want such a snoozer?

Waits in front room.

Clock ticks.

Ready.

Wait...

Let's call it, instead, adjustable bed adjustable mattress.

Seems better description.

Domine labia mea aperies et os meum adnuntiabit laudem tuam

4 AM, hour of unfamiliar animal screech outside closed gate on Barnestown Road.

Cats and dog take to stairs and windows, their domestic habitat perches, as continuing short bursts of calling-screech goes back and forth then up toward Hope.

One dog then the other I accompany out through barn to do their vigil pee.

All is predawn still. 

Only unheard chant of Cistercian monastics in faraway choir stalls arrives  at mountain vale the insinuation of night office these men and women intone for the rest of us to the Unseen One we are mostly unaware of in our listening confusion.

The wind kicks up.

Night will yield.

Sleep resumes.

What is not known returns to itself after billions of years wandering away through uncharted meander toward some imagined solution to some imagined problem filling dense minds taken to road underbrush and fluid eddy swirl the movement through seeming final veil obscuring emergent rising light.

Rhythm peal of wind-sway tone from hanging pipes to ready prayer invite waking bird into the choir.

Tangled; web we weave

Delusion.

It's not what you think it is.

It's the story told about what you think.

Never what is not thought.

Fact without opinion.

Something nearing truth.

As it is.

searching for intelligent life

Is there life on other planets across the universe?

Is there life here?

By 'life' I mean intelligent life.

And intelligence means seeing and articulating connections.

For good of all.

Let's find some!

Ralph, Ruth, their green photo flags

Walking cemetery in Lincoln. 

Good company.

A prayer in passing.

Missa est; Ita

The philosopher said don't look for trust, be trustworthy. 

The poet wrote,"What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance."

The hermit, saying nothing, walked the hills.