something is being said about love

From The Fantastics: 

Love! You are love!

Better far than a metaphor

Can ever, ever be.

Love! You are love!

My mystery of love!

If the world was like an iceberg,

And everything was frozen,

And tears turned into icicles in the eye!

And snow came pouring

And sleet and ice

Came stabbing like a knife!

Then you are heat!

A fire alive with heat!

A flame that thaws the iceberg with its heat!

Repeat!

You are heat!

Ah ah ah ah aaaaaaaaaaa!

Love! (I am love!)

You are love! (I am love!)

Better far than a metaphor

Can ever, ever be.

Love! (I am love!)

You are love! (I am love!)

My mystery (His mystery)

Of love!

(Excerpt from Metaphor lyrics, The Fantasticks)

And this from e.e.cummings:

 

the great advantage of being alive 

                    —by ee cummings

the great advantage of being alive

(instead of undying)is not so much

that mind no more can disprove than prove

what heart may feel and soul may touch

— the great (my darling)happens to be

that love are in we, that love are in we

 

and here is a secret they never will share for whom create is less than have

or one times one than when times where —

that we are in love,that we are in love:

with us they’ve nothing times nothing to do

(for love are in we am in i are in you)

 

this world(as timorous itsters all

to call their cowardice quite agree)

shall never discover our touch and feel

–for love are in we are in love are in we;

for you are and i am and we are(above

and under all possible worlds)in love

 

a billion brains may coax undeath

from fancied fact and spaceful time–

no heart can leap,no soul can breathe

but by the sizeless truth of a dream

whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea.

For love are in you am in i are in we

le matin, joie

 La vie est drôle!

One morning I won’t wake.

One morning there will be headlines Donald Trump died during the night.

Each morning I look to see if it is that time.

This morning I listen to the monks of L'Abbaye de Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux.

When morning bamboo slats are rolled up, there is the hanging cross from Trappist casket-makers in USA.

One morning I will be dead.

One morning Trump will be dead.

In the morning, joy. 

Le matin, joie.

I will be in the joy of the morning.

Je serai dans la joie du matin.

Of course I write about death in the morning beaucoup des temps.

On a morning uncertain I will no longer do so.

Alors, bon matin...

שנה טובה ‎good year

 Shanah Tovah!

 שנה טובה‎

Rosh Hashanah

the white snow / red as strawberries in the summertime

Poetic, engaging, poignant, and koan-like:

 https://youtu.be/DrQRS40OKNE

Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal [OFFICIAL VIDEO]

a tzaddik

Ruth Bader Ginsberg died last evening.

A Jewish teaching says those who die just before the Jewish new year are the ones God has held back until the last moment bc they were needed most & were the most righteous. And so it was that #RBG died as the sun was setting last night marking the beginning of RoshHashanah.

   (—Nina Totenberg, @NinatoTotenberg, 12:06am, 19sept20, tweetdeck)

Her quiet dignity and intelligent presence needs to reverberate through this troubling time.

May her memory be a revolution. 

   (—Amanda Litman, @amandalitman)

qui tacit consentiri

"All words come to an end in the face of love." (--Rupert Spira)

to think is to think/feel

 I agree. We’re not thinking.

Not yet.

Only habitual thought determined by cultural beliefs.

That’s not thinking.

To think is to think/feel this moment.

We’re not doing it yet.

ordinary tasks done with quiet resolve

Woman in final years before her seventies in bosun's chair repairs lazy jack while at dock in Rockport Harbor yesterday.

Let's hear it for sane and mannerly occurrences of ordinary tasks done with quiet resolve and crew's good assistance!

for one

 Something about Our Lady of Sorrows. Something, as well, about Kuan Yin who hears the cries of the world.

These female beings, mythic saints and bodhisattvas, attending to all beings in the world with their attentive presence.

I, for one, am grateful

abrupt change and differentiation

No more opinions. 

 "To escape from the world means that one's mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world." — Dōgen Zenji

No more millionaires selling shrive views.

Just morning breeze through bamboo slats.

Only empty truth.

The fact of it.

Metamorphosing.  

exultation

Cross is where false-self

Corresponds with transcendence—

Dying self finds True Self

turning around and turning inward

After watching documentary about Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, a reminder of the sorrow of separation, I turn to words by Raimon Panikkar about what it means to be a monk in the world.

           Raimon Panikkar : The Universal Monk

Raimon Panikkar-Alemany (November 2, 1918 – August 26, 2010; also known as Raimundo Panikkar and Raymond Panikkar) was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest and a proponent of inter-religious dialogue. As a scholar, he specialized in comparative religion.

“By monk, monachos, I understand that person who aspires to reach the ultimate goal of life with all his being by renouncing all that is not necessary to it, i.e., by concentrating on this one single and unique goal….

The monk is compelled, as it were, by an experience that can only articulate itself in the praxis of one’s life. It is an experience of the presence of the goal of life, on the one hand, and of its absence (of not having reached it), on the other……

There can be no monasticism without this experience of conversion, of turning around and turning inward, of stripping off the very many things that cling to us, of abandoning the ‘usual’, the ‘normal’, and even the secure and often reasonable way. as one Upanisad says: “On the very day that one is ‘brokenhearted’, on that same day one becomes a renouncer”; one brokenhearted, i.e., one indifferent to the world, a disillusioned person. . . .

. . . a fundamental monastic archetype could be described as the life of those who….adopt a solitary journey beyond the supportive environment of their culture, of social life, of religious traditions, etc. The monk is called to go beyond what the culture – even the religious culture – in which he lives allows him to be, or leads him to.”

--From “Blessed Simplicity–The Monk as Universal Archetype” Raimundo Panikkar (Editor) (1982) From CITYDESERT, Desert Spirituality of the City

Then, again:

What changes when we free the monastic vocation from the attitude of mono-cultural dominance? Nothing and everything. Let me give three examples of traditional values of the religious, East and West, that can be reinvigorated by the encounter of monks in dialogue qua monks. 

Paradoxically enough, the first, the classical contemptus mundi of the monk, today takes a new and more subtle turn: not abandoning the world (which is practically impossible), but swimming against the current, like living fish in the rivers, without rage or violence, but with poise and elegance, that is, with love and patience. “La paciencia todo lo alcanza,” used to say Teresa of Avila. Patience does not give up, rather, it perseveres and insists. It never gets discouraged, because it does not believe that a single individual, system, doctrine, or religion has the total answer. Humility, to me, means the courage to be imperfect, not finished.

Secondly, the monastic vocation has meant “solitude.” But solitude does not mean isolation. On the contrary, solitude demands that I be truly myself so that I may share without encumbrances solidarity with the entire reality: Buddhakaya, karma, mystical Body, universal love. The greatest scandal of human history is religious wars—be they explicitly or implicitly religious. Even the fact that sometimes they can disguise themselves under the cloak of religion shows our responsibility: “Not of the world,” but in the world—which the “Father” loved so much.

Thirdly, the monastic “calling” is ever new. It does not repeat itself, and it has no blueprint; it is not prescribed by any law. It needs to be not just discovered, but created by our cooperation with the very dynamism of reality, by holy “obedience,” that is, by attentive listening (obaudire) to the “divine” Voice—which is the Hindu name for revelation (sruti). It is not enough to “imitate” the Buddha, Christ, God. We have to become the Buddha, Christ, God—without asking like Peter, “What about John?” “You follow me” was the answer.

(From “The New Monk” by Raimon Panikkar, in CITYDESERT) 

 Elsewhere, this:

Conclusion

“May the time come when men, having been awakened to a sense of the close bond linking all the movements of this world in the single all-embracing work of the Incarnation, shall be unable to give themselves to any one of their tasks without illuminating it with the clear vision that their work—however elementary it may be—is received and put to good use by a Center of the universe.  

“When that time comes to pass, there will be little to separate life in the cloister from the life of the world . . .”                                         (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu)

We situate new monasticism in terms of a movement, an organic arising of a deep desire to live a meaningful life and serve the world through our work and our compassion. It grows out of the desire to incarnate a contemporary spirituality, one that drinks deeply from the wells of human wisdom that have been dug throughout our ages, but one that also speaks to our modern sensibilities, to the unique occurrence of the convergence of the human race in our times, and that addresses the multiple and complex needs of a humanity in the throes of transition into a hopefully new and better world. The new monk may well be the beginnings of a physical manifestation of what is already true in the spiritual worlds, where a connected and collaborative effort of spiritual energies and truths work together and in harmony for the good of all life on our planet. This can be seen in the new monk’s ability to move seamlessly between wisdom traditions, art, music, solitude, hard work, community and intimate friendships.

New monasticism is a search for the deepest humanity in us all. It is in this search that we are united, not only to our fellow ‘monks,’ but to all who long to birth a new world that lives and breathes of the Spirit, to all who desire to come to the utter depths of their being and then to enter the world through that doorway. A new monk is one who feels the calling to her own Evolution, her own depth of Spirit, her own transformational path and who responds. She embarks on this path in order to better serve all of Life, not knowing where this journey will take her, but knowing that she can no longer view anything in her life as separate from this journey. She is motivated by her ideals of love and compassion for others, as well as an impenetrable belief in the Truth and Reality of human spiritual maturation, of its transformative power, grace and sustaining ground. She is committed to serving the world in growing degrees of sacrificial love, skillful wisdom and joy. It is to this audacious goal that new monastics dare foresee, more than dare, see only it and pledge their life to becoming an ordinary, disciplined loving expression of its attainment.

Any such person may rightly be called a ‘new monk.’

(--from, New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Life in the 21st Century, by Rory McEntee and Adam Bucko, in KOSMOS, The Journal for Global Citizens Creating the New Civilization for the Common Good) 

'Monk' is a word whose origins come from Old English munuc, based on Greek monakhos ‘solitary’, from monos ‘alone’. 

We are, essentially, alone. But alone in the Buddhist sense of shunyata, or emptiness of any separate existence. Hence, radical interconnectedness. Relational individuality, i.e. undividedness. 

As if, completely all-one.

All is change. Mutable. 

And in its enormity, a mute persistent gaze out of which the solitary sees itself as itself sees everything in its entirety.

Wherein, one only imagines, we dwell mit-sein (being-with), one-an-other. 

despite whatever forms of manipulation and control are exercised

A doctoral dissertation on interreligious dialogue contains this excerpt on Raimon Panikkar:

4.4.2.3 The Divine

Hall (2002) states that, according to Panikkar, “The divine dimension of reality is not an ‘object’ of human knowledge, but the depth-dimension to everything that is. The mistake of Western thought was to begin with identifying God as the Supreme Being (monotheism) which resulted in God being turned into a human projection (atheism).” (See also Panikkar, 1996:42-44; “The Cosmotheandric invariant” and “The divine dimension” in “The rhythm of being”, Panikkar’s Gifford Lectures, private manuscript, chapters 6 & 7).

Knitter (2002:129) says this would limit the freedom of the Divine and box God in. God, who is evidently operative in the religions of the world, especially in the lives of those people who exist in the different religions of the world, is highlighted as “no common denominator”. Hall (2004), says this has led “Panikkar move beyond God-talk to speak of the divine mystery now identified in non-theistic terms as infinitude, freedom and nothingness ... despite whatever forms of manipulation and control are exercised, the aspect of (divine) freedom remains” (see also Panikkar, 1993:61).

Panikkar (1993:61) says that God is not a Deus ex machina with whom we maintain formal relations, but a mystery of the inherent inexhaustibility of all things, at once infinitely transcendent, utterly immanent, totally irreducible, absolutely ineffable. This divine dimension is discernable within the depths of the human persons ... this mystery that is alive in the religions does not exist by itself, instead it has its being anchored in the diversity of humanity and the world (Knitter, 2002:129).

4.4.2.4 Humanity

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Panikkar (1993) condemns the technocratic cultures for not recognising the threefold reality of human dimension, which he sees as aesthetic, intellectual and mystical. According to him in these cultures, it is only a two dimensional human experience.

Hall (2004) contends that for him the third dimension of human experience is not remote from ordinary reality, “but a ‘further’ depth-dimension within all human awareness.”

“... if we aren’t aware of the Divine who has its being within us and of the earth that forms us, we don’t know who we are” (Knitter, 2002:127). Hall (2004) says that, “Panikkar’s intention is to show that genuine human experience involves the triad of senses, intellect and mystical awareness in correlation with matter, thought and freedom.” There is an interrelatedness, that exists between the cosmotheandric experience, which is not “just a given, static reality, but is alive, it is growing, and it is changing and dependent on how well the human ingredient is aware of and responds to the Divine and the earthly” (Knitter, 2002:128).

Hall (2004) says, “This cosmotheandric insight stresses human identity with the worldly character and temporal nature of the cosmos [as well as revealing] a human openness towards the infinite mystery that ipso facto transcends human thought.”

And Knitter (2002:128) confirms, “... and because they do, they will know the deeper unity of religions that grounds tremendous diversity ... as well as valuing their own religion and at the same time be free of it.”

4.4.2.5 The universe

Panikkar (1993:79) does not believe in the term, “no disembodied souls or disincarnated gods, just as there is no matter, no energy, no spatio-temporal world without divine and conscious dimensions.” Instead, he says, “every concrete reality is cosmotheandric, that is, a symbol of the ‘whole.’ It is not only God who reveals but the earth has its own revelations” (see also Hall, 2004).

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Panikkar (1993:77) reminds us that relatedness exists between the Divine, human and the world; they cannot exist without relating to each other. [emphasis added] Despite the vast differences; they give life as they interact with each other

(— from,  CHRISTIANS AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY? A THEOLOGICAL EVALUATION OF THE MEANING OF AN ETHIC OF EMBRACE IN A CONTEXT OF RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY, by, Hirschel Lothar Heilbron, Dissertation presented for the degree of Doctor of Theology (DTh) in Systematic Theology at Stellenbosch University, Promoter: Dr. G.V.W. Brand March 2012)

not instruction, but provocation

Epigraph from American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen:

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. 

            --Ralph Waldo Emerson, Divenity School Address" 1838

I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example. 

             --Friedrich Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator" 1874, in Untimely Meditation

Evening conversations at meetingbrook look through such quotes as we speak to one another. 

It is a delightful perusal. 

unimpeded

 "Do not look for a sanctuary in anyone except yourself." 

     — Buddha

as if it were now

The Franciscan who died on 9/11 sat next to me 34 years before his death that day in September.

The Franciscan who eulogized him was a friend for years.

I live in Dogen and Francis Hermitage.

Remembering.

september 11, 2020

Roaring lies fly fast

Crashing American lives —

President smiles, flees

not much else

 Emptiness means empty of separate existence.

Truth means letting go of all opinions.

Peace means what is is exactly what is.

the end of decency

 Even the morally bankrupt can’t possibly take much more of this negligent uncaring man.

radix silentio

We speak words like these 

 but we've not yet come to word -- 

 beginning and end

haecceity

Hic, haec, hoc. 

 This, this, this.

even today i am still arriving

It was merely suite #1 in G major by Johann Sebastian Bach. I cried. Bach has come closer to me since I used to play it on radio for our Border Collie. I think it calmed him. It does me. Orchestral Suite # 2 follows. They are visits as I read Bernard Lonergan's Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. I began reading the work in 1964 in the library of a Franciscan seminary college in Callicoon NY. After 56 years I still look for it in my library and still hold it near begun.

Last night at Sunday Evening Practice we read from Nietzsche and Zen, An Essay in Philosophical Theology, by Stephen Priest. An excerpt: 

The fear of death is not overcome by belief in a metaphysically transcendent afterlife. For example, Nietzsche repudiates, and the Zen Buddhists do not endorse, any reality similar to the Judeo-Christian heaven or hell. Rather they advocate a profound self- transformation in what it is to be human. A human being has to become the kind of being for whom death is not disturbing. This transformation is not essentially brought about by the acquisition of new beliefs but by living in a different way. By the practice of the kind of meditation called za-zen, and by ceasing to be subject to 'herd morality’ or 'slave morality' a person becomes the kind of being who is not afraid to die. Nevertheless, fear of death is defused by the acquisition of two central insights. One concerns rebirth, the other concerns the self.

It is an entailment of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return and the Zen doctrine of rebirth that any human being has been born and has died innumerable times before this life. We face innumerable births and deaths in lives to come. Both doctrines admit of both a metaphysical and a non-metaphysical interpretation, or both a literal and metaphorical reading.

Read metaphorically, Nietzsche is saying that one should have the strength to live one's life as if one could bear for it to be repeated in every detail an infinite number of times in the future. One would then live with a life-affirming energy and an authenticity of commitment which would make living thoroughly worthwhile. The French atheistic existentialist novelist and playwright, Albert Camus, says at the start of his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942):

‘There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.’

Nietzsche would have urged us to answer in the affirmative.
Read literally, Nietzsche is saying that one's life as a matter of metaphysical

fact has been repeated in every detail an infinite number of times in the past and will be in the future. Nietzsche, the anti-metaphysical philosopher, is showing us that he can do metaphysical philosophy of the most disturbing and outrageous kind.

Read metaphorically, the Zen Buddhists are saying that within this life there is a kind of birth and death from moment to moment; a coming to be and passing away of the galaxy of thoughts and emotions that constitute one's 'self' or 'mind'. Inwardly, or mentally, each of us is ceasing to be and beginning to be at any moment of our lives, no matter how brief. I am always dying, always being reborn. (We shall see later, however, that what we think of as the end of a life is not radically different from these transitions. Up to a point, this blurs the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical readings.)

Read literally, the Zen Buddhists are saying that at the moment of one's biological death (or soon after), one is reborn as a new life. There is life after death in the sense of another life after death. Each human person lives many karmically induced lives. The life that one thinks of as 'my life' is only the current one. Clearly, the metaphorical and the literal construals of each doctrine are mutually consistent. I can live my life as though it would be infinitely repeated and it could be true that it will be infinitely repeated. I might be psychologically reborn and die at every moment of a life and be reborn at the end of that life.

(--pp. 10-11, from NIETZSCHE AND ZEN, An Essay in Philosophical Theology, by Stephen Priest) 

Someone mentioned during conversation she thought it would be interesting to know when she would die so as to be prepared. It occurred to me that I just might know when. It is now I die and now I am reborn. And here I go again, and here I return. Gone once more, back once more.

This process of coming and going, going and coming in and out of existence is the fundamental oscillation of being-in-the-world.

The first line of the poem "Please Call Me By My True Names" by Thich That Hanh, often breezed by on the way to the rest of the poem, is: 

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow—even today I am still arriving.

I look around.

A breeze passes through.

For now I am still here. I have nowhere else to go. 

solventur risu tabulae

A time will come when Horace's words will follow dishonorable individuals out of their offices they irresponsibly administered.

I suspect many lips will curl when thinking of the back of them leaving with scorn.

Solventur risu tabulae, tu missus abibis

 The case [person?] is dismissed with a laugh [ridicule?], the court is dismissed, and you are sent away. (Horace) 

It is an odd and awful time we live in.

May both the corrupters and their supporters turn to kinder more respectful ways going forward! 

facing radical core

Heart is for love. Yes

Love is root reality. 

Face what is in heart 

finally, a sign

 

wait a minute

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

I have heard

This

One.

Well done, you’ve stopped ‘me.’

melancholia

I played Bach for him

Before he died. Now cello 

Gives itself to me

far and wide

I was in New York when he pitched there.  I tried, but was never able to say the Mets were my team. My team got lost in 1957 somewhere in the air between Ebbets Field in Crown Heights Brooklyn and Dodgers Stadium somewhere in Los Angeles. I have a blue cap with white 'B' on crown. It is a grave marker and I am a walking funeral procession through a dispossessed ghosted ballpark hovering over the streets in a Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1950s with leather Wilson glove hanging from Louisville Slugger carried across handlebars of Schwinn bicycle.

 Tom Seaver, Pitcher Who Led ‘Miracle Mets’ to Glory, Dies at 75

By Bruce Weber

• Sept. 2, 2020, The New York Times 

Tom Seaver, one of baseball’s greatest right-handed power pitchers, a Hall of Famer who won 311 games for four major league teams, most notably the Mets, whom he led from last place to a surprise world championship in his first three seasons, died on Monday. He was 75.

The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia and Covid-19, according to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

At 6-foot-1 and 200 pounds, give or take a few, with a thick waist and tree-trunk legs that helped generate the velocity on his fastball and hard slider and the spin on his curveball, Seaver at work was a picture of kinetic grace. He had a smooth windup, a leg kick with his left knee raised high, and a stride so long after pushing off the mound that his right knee often grazed the dirt.

With precise control, he had swing-and-miss stuff. He struck out more than 200 batters in 10 different seasons, a National League record, and on April 22, 1970, facing the San Diego Padres, he struck out a record 10 batters in a row to end the game. His total of 3,640 strikeouts in his 20 big-league seasons is sixth on the career list.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/obituaries/tom-seaver-dead-coronavirus.html 

It was 1955 and I was walking home from grammar school on 61st and Bay Parkway to 19th Ave and 69th Street. Every store along the route on 20th Ave had the World Series ballgame either on TV or radio. I'd stop in each doorway to listen to the broadcasters coloring the action. It was the Yankees they were playing. By the time I got to Stein's Deli where I, as an eleven year old, bought quarts of Rheingold Beer for my father, carrying the two bottles each time in brown bag home, it was the final inning.

Brooklyn won the series 4-3. There was joy in the neighborhood.

I wasn't very good as a player as a kid. But when I played in my first college game I hit it over the left fielder's head and made it home on a poor throw in from the edge of the field. I call it a home run, but it wasn't, not really. I never hit as well as I did during those college practice sessions when batting practice was thrown by our coach who was a former Boston Red Sox pitcher. I can feel the crack and sting of swinging contact with his fastball sending it far and wide those brief moments of happy memory. 

near and dear

 Solidarity is recognizing and appreciating the differences and diversity within existence without manufacturing division and detachment.

There’s a difference between not being attached, and detachment.

The subtlety of being there, as you are, near and dear, without clinging.

how we began humanities course in prison by zoom thursday

 Conversation with a Stone

                     by Wislawa Szymborska

I knock at the stone’s front door

“It’s only me, let me come in.

I want to enter your insides,

have a look around,

breathe my fill of you.”

“Go away,” says the stone.

“I’m shut tight.

Even if you break me to pieces,

we’ll all still be closed.

You can grind us to sand,

we still won’t let you in.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.

“It’s only me, let me come in.

I’ve come out of pure curiosity.

Only life can quench it.

I mean to stroll through your palace,

then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.

I don’t have much time.

My mortality should touch you.”

“I’m made of stone,” says the stone.

“And must therefore keep a straight face.

Go away.

I don’t have the muscles to laugh.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.

“It’s only me, let me come in.

I hear you have great empty halls inside you,

unseen, their beauty in vain,

soundless, not echoing anyone’s steps.

Admit you don’t know them well yourself.

“Great and empty, true enough,” says the stone,

“but there isn’t any room.

Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste

of your poor senses.

You may get to know me but you’ll never know me through.

My whole surface is turned toward you,

all my insides turned away.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.

“It’s only me, let me come in.

I don’t seek refuge for eternity.

I’m not unhappy.

I’m not homeless.

My world is worth returning to.

I’ll enter and exit empty-handed.

And my proof I was there

will be only words,

which no one will believe.”

“You shall not enter,” says the stone.

“You lack the sense of taking part.

No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.

Even sight heightened to become all-seeing

will do you no good without a sense of taking part.

You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,

only its seed, imagination.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.

“It’s only me, let me come in.

I haven’t got two thousand centuries,

so let me come under your roof.”

“If you don’t believe me,” says the stone,

“just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.

Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.

And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.

I am bursting from laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,

although I don’t know how to laugh.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.

“It’s only me, let me come in.

“I don’t have a door,” says the stone.

(—From “Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997” by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (Harcourt Brace: 274 pp.)

a sentence

 Morality is action with truth caring for the other.

something visible

This from Center for Action and Contemplation:

The Illusion of the Separate Self

Tuesday,  September 1, 2020

CAC faculty member James Finley studied under Thomas Merton as a young monk in formation. While many have been influenced by Merton’s writings, few have had the opportunity to learn from the mystic himself. Today, Jim reflects on the insights on the True Self and false self that he gleaned from Thomas Merton.

In the following text Merton makes clear that the self-proclaimed autonomy of the false self is but an illusion. . . .

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.

This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.

My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.

We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves—the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin. [1] . . .

The false self, sensing its fundamental unreality, begins to clothe itself in myths and symbols of power. Since it intuits that it is but a shadow, that it is nothing, it begins to convince itself that it is what it does. Hence, the more it does, achieves and experiences, the more real it becomes. Merton writes,

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. [2]

Richard again: Our false self is how we define ourselves outside of love, relationship, or divine union. After we have spent many years laboriously building this separate self, with all its labels and preoccupations, we are very attached to it. And why wouldn’t we be? It’s what we know and all we know. To move beyond it will always feel like losing or dying

(—from Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, 1sept20)

This meditation points out what appears to be the premier problem facing anyone trying to see and act in the world as an integral whole.

These days the thrust of virulent power is to split and fragment, divide and segregate what is in its true nature of a piece, an Itself, difference without division.

If, as a thinker, you wonder about God, you are one contemplating One.

Does this point to an inside within no outside? A vast variety of life-within-itself? A diffusion of multiplicity within unicity?

I suspect that what we long for is love.

Love allows itself, each itself, to be Itself, one-another.

who can hear any more

 Desolation day—

The crass sound of his voice, per-

fidy in practice

this longing can surprise you

Michael McCarthy says that for 50,000 generations, we were wildlife. 

Tippett:

I spoke, once, with a Buddhist teacher, Joanna Macy. I don’t know if you’re familiar with her. She’s been — she was involved in environmentalism before the word was coined. And she talks about, also, our “fierce love for the world” and that when we — when someone you love is sick, is in the hospital, is ailing, is dying, you don’t — you go sit with them, and you don’t say, “Well, I’m busy.” But with the world that we love, with our insects and our birds and our blossoms, it’s so overwhelming, we turn away. And yet, I think you’re making that connection too, that — what is that bond, you say, that bond we have with the natural world? If we could take that seriously, that could keep us, also, attending, and then healing, participating.

If I ask you to start — this vast question, what does it mean to be human, as you’ve lived your life and the things you’ve cared about, the observations you’ve made, how would you begin to speak about how your understanding of that has evolved, what it means to be human?

McCarthy:

Well, the single greatest thing in our lives is the love for another person, that’s what I think, whoever we are and whoever the other person is. But human love is transcendent. I think it’s the single greatest experience we can have, and I rejoice when anyone has it and finds it, and if I could wave a wand, the thing I would do is let every individual find the love of another individual. I think that’s what I would do.

But in terms of the context in which we’ve been talking, clearly, we humans come from somewhere. And where we came from, where we emerged from is the natural world. And for 50,000 generations, we were wildlife. Well, we don’t think we are, anymore, and probably, we’re not. But we were just another species. I think — for myself, I cannot see our identity as humans as separate from the natural world from which we emerged. And what I think is that in the end, our spirits have an urge; they have a longing, still, to be part of it. And I think this longing can surprise you; it could suddenly leap out in certain circumstances; you could suddenly realize you’re surprised by the strength of your feelings. But I do feel that to be fully human is to recognize that the natural world is where we came from, and it remains part of us. And without it, being fully human is something we cannot do. 

 

(--from On Being with Krista Tippett, orig. 3may18, Michael McCarthy, :Nature, Joy, and Human Becoming )

What are we now? 

And where, it should be asked, is our joy?