it’s very clear

 I remember a theological treatise, a found haiku, sung by the likes of Tony Bennett and Diana Krall, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Harry Connick jr:

It's very clear,  

 

our love is here  

 

to stay

            (--from song “Love is here to Stay” ) by George Gershwin with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, 1938)

There is profundity in the intimation that there is a simultaneity and synergy between the word/realities expressed as “love is here”.

If “love” and “here” are co-origin and co-terminus of one and the same reality, then it does become very clear that "our love is here to stay.” 

The lyrics are plain and simple. 

"Love Is Here to Stay" was the last musical composition George Gershwin completed before his death on July 11, 1937. Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics after George's death as a tribute to his brother. Although George had not written a verse for the song, he did have an idea for it that both Ira and pianist Oscar Levant had heard before his death. When a verse was needed, Ira and Levant recalled what George had in mind. Composer Vernon Duke reconstructed the music for the verse at the beginning of the song.^[2][8] Originally titled "It's Here to Stay" and then "Our Love Is Here to Stay," the song was finally published as "Love Is Here to Stay." Ira Gershwin said that for years he wanted to change the song's name back to "Our Love Is Here to Stay," but he felt it wouldn't be right since the song had already become a standard.^{[8]     Wikipedia} 

A man in prison who attended meetingbrook conversations never said anything for several weeks when he joined. Sitting across from him, I noticed one day he was mumbling something just outside of hearing. Then again. Later, again. I realized he was speaking lyrics from a song or songs. When I noticed this, I would quote back across the divide a corresponding lyric that his eyes recognized, and he’d smile. This went on for months, even longer. It was the way he’d communicate in a group such as ours. I became fond of him. Then, as will happen in prison, he was gone.

 The poetry of prophets, poets, lyricists and aphasic seers contain insight and wisdom too easily overlooked. 

When, of a sudden, our attention is uncommonly alerted to something being spoken, something being sung, something in ordinary conversation, or in a book, a film script, an article -- something, if you will, unconscious of itself but bearing reference or allusion to something beyond itself -- we are fortunate when such revelation occurs.

"It is as though", as Kazantzakis wrote,  

It is as though we had buried Someone we thought dead, and now hear him calling in the night: Help me! Heaving and panting, he raises the gravestone of our soul and body higher and still higher, breathing more freely at every moment. (#27, The Vision, in THE SAVIOURS OF GOD, Spiritual Exercises, by Nikos Kazantzakis, Translated by Kimon Friar)

Poetry is the breath between words, the connecting air between you and me, it is the sound of what-is being-said resonating in the open.

As is prayer.

For that matter, prayer is “as is,” engaged and attended to, whenever our awareness gives itself to Itself. 

Let us!

見透か, misukasu, see through

 Seen through

Christ is transparence 

See through

You are this Christ

Seeing through

they still wonder why they lived when so many others died

From “Hiroshima", by John Hersey, August 23, 1946, in The New Yorker:

I—A Noiseless Flash

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.

(--opening paragraph, John Hersey’s original article, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/takes/jane-mayer-on-john-herseys-hiroshima 

Then, the final paragraph: 

It would be impossible to say what horrors were embedded in the minds of the children who lived through the day of the bombing in Hiroshima. On the surface their recollections, months after the disaster, were of an exhilarating adventure. Toshio Nakamura, who was ten at the time of the bombing, was soon able to talk freely, even gaily, about the experience, and a few weeks before the anniversary he wrote the following matter-of-fact essay for his teacher at Nobori-cho Primary School: “The day before the bomb, I went for a swim. In the morning, I was eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to little sister’s sleeping place. When we were saved, I could only see as far as the tram. My mother and I started to pack our things. The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding. Hataya-san told me to run away with her. I said I wanted to wait for my mother. We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned and I saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park one night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridge and met my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kikuki’s mother was wounded and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.” ♦  

Published in the print edition of the August 31, 1946, issue.  

oremus

 Breeze from fan

Crosses brown blanket

Like prayer does

This dozing mind

σωφροσύνη

It sometimes felt quaint when studying philosophy to focus on a word or concept that felt attractive or worth pursuing. 

Sophosyne (Ancient Greek: σωφροσύνη) is an ancient Greek concept of an ideal of excellence of character and soundness of mind, which when combined in one well-balanced individual leads to other qualities, such as temperance, moderation, prudence, purity, decorum, and self-control. An adjectival form is "sophron".^[1]

It is similar to the concepts of zhōngyōng (中庸) of Chinese Confucianism^[2] and sattva (सत्त्व) of Indian thought.^[3] (wikipedia)

The pull of philosophy was the investigation of ways of being in the world that ennobled the individual and benevolently considered the well-being of the community. There was a naive yet refreshing preference for a human society that transcended an ignoble descent into egoistic and self-aggrandizing behavior taken at the expense of others and uncaring about shared benefit or mutual support.

Aristotle included discussions of sophrosyne^{[12]: III.10–11} in his pioneering system of virtue ethics. 

 

Aristotle believed sophrosyne described "a mean with regard to pleasures,"^{[12]: III.10} distinct from self-indulgence on the one hand, or perhaps anhedonia on the other. Like courage, sophrosyne is a virtue concerning our discipline of "the irrational parts of our nature" (fear, in the case of courage; desire, in the case of sophrosyne).^{[12]: III.10} 

 

His discussion is found in the Nicomachean Ethics Book III, chapters 10–12, and concludes in this way:

And so the appetites of temperate men (σώφρωνος) should be in harmony with their reason; for the aim of both is that which is noble: the temperate man (σώφρων) desires what he ought, and as he ought, and when he ought; and this again is what reason prescribes. This, then, may be taken as an account of sophrosynes (σωφροσύνης).^{[12]: III.12} 

 

As with virtue generally, sophrosyne is a sort of habit, acquired by practice.^[12]: II.1 It is a state of character, not a passion or a faculty,^[12]: II.5 specifically a disposition to choose the mean^[12]: II.6 between excess and deficit.^[12]: II.2 The mean is hard to attain, and is grasped by perception, not by reasoning.^{[12]: II.9 [Ibid]} 

It seemed an easy study and an accomplishable goal. When living with a group of people whose acclaimed goal was to deepen their lives with character and virtue, it seemed reasonable that something good would emerge.

Good did emerge. Even prayer, service, worthwhile actions done for the betterment of others, and a sense of unravelling the mysterious depths of, as yet, unmanifest revelations emanating from the depths of being emerging through existence.

Idealistic? Yes.

Contemplative? Of course.

Worthwhile? I thought so. And still do.

As Joseph Brodsky and Cheslaw Milosz would say over and over at a reading done with Peter Vierick that I attended once at Mount Holyoke College decades ago: “And yet, And yet, And yet...”.

The Red Wheelbarrow

                        BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

(--William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by Christopher MacGowan.) 

Williams provides us with the finest not-particularly-zen koan that poetry has experienced.

Brodsky and Milosz knew how vital were their “And yets...”.

And now I do too.

hiroshima, nagasaki and transfiguration (3)

               ( a waka)

                  私は死、あなたは生

                  Watashi wa shi, anata wa nama          

               (I am death, you are life)

Christ is not

Nuclear devastation, Still, 

Nor is he not, 

Now, now, what is arising

Shows through comforting

Stillness

hiroshima, nagasaki and transfiguration (2)

               (a waka)

Sun into room, dog

Outside open door, brothers 

Japanese sisters

Candle and incense afire

Bells of matins peal for you

hiroshima, nagasaki and transfiguration (1)

             (a haiku mantra)

Christ Jesus 

One With 

God, allow us 

Within this

Holy loving

Way

the very condition of human existence

When I moved to Maine in 1981 I had a winter rental just off the beach in Old Orchard. I bought the two volume set of Hannah Arendt's Life of the Mind and was lulled by salt air and breaking waves.

It was left unfinished by her death (1906-1975). The volumes were divided into two parts: Thinking; and Willing. Her proposed third volume, Judging, was only just begun. On the day of her death it is said the first page was found in her typewriter.

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please." (--Hannah Arendt, from an interview with Roger Errera in 1973, her last public interview, Found in https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/on-fake-hannah-arendt-quotations-2024-08-04 Roger Berkowitz 08-04-2024)

In writing about truth and the difficult task to discern truth (on the best of days), she points out (what seems to me) that intentional obfuscation and blatant lying has the result of confusing reality with false simulation of propagandized deceit. The sorry outcome is that no-one retains the capacity to believe in the facts that are actual facts. The prevarications that are wrongfully presented as facts to a confused populace become, for them, holy writ from their substituted contemporary messiah.  

This is the intent of our current leadership. They abandon actual fact for deceitfully rewritten narratives of dissembled untruth. The people become indoctrinated to the dissemblance. They no longer know what is up and what is down. They have been duped. They have become deceived persons.

Martin Heidegger spoke of truth as unhiddenness  

("Aletheia" (ἀλήθεια) is a Greek word meaning truth or disclosure. In philosophy, it often refers to the unveiling or revealing of something that was previously hidden or unknown, and is contrasted with "doxa" (opinion). In Greek mythology, Aletheia is also the personification of truth, similar to the Roman goddess Veritas." (AI) 

 

We have become a culture of "doxa."

In classical philosophy, "doxa" refers to opinion or belief, particularly when contrasted with true knowledge or episteme. It represents a less certain form of understanding, often based on perception or social consensus, rather than rigorous reasoning or evidence. The word "doxa" (δόξα) comes from the Greek verb "dokein," meaning "to seem," "to think," or "to accept," according to research papers.   (AI)

I read a sign on someone's door while walking the other day -- something to the effect that we are not living in a political crisis, we are living in a moral crisis -- this time is saturated with philosophical and theological obscuration, i.e. acts of intentionally hiding or concealing something. This is being done by people for whom moral thinking and religious philosophy are considered to be for chumps and losers who do not subscribe to solipsistic and narcissistic personal greed and aggrandizement.

It is a very dangerous time.

The underpinnings of a just and fair society, one representing all people living therein, has become weakened and is being destroyed by the interests of a few who seek to control the finances, institutions, and thinking for their small minority of like-minded wealthy and powerful friends. This type of sect and clique is narrow and self-serving.

They are usurping Christianity. They are fracturing democracy. They are confusing those who have difficulty thinking things through and who cannot think for themselves. They are unkind people who use others for their own ends. As Arendt said "a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

I am not confident as to the outcome ahead.

I do, however, still care. 

In Martin Heidegger's philosophy, "care" (Sorge) is a fundamental structure of Dasein's being, encompassing both concern and solicitude and revealing the way humans exist in the world as beings oriented towards their own being and the world around them. It's not just an emotion or a behavior, but rather the very condition of human existence, revealing how we are fundamentally engaged with ourselves and the world.  (AI) 

 

As do, (I'm certain), you, care.

Sitting or walking meditation is, throughout, the practice of non-deluded looking and open hearted willingness to see.

See you at practice! 

1.34 milliseconds shorter

 My, my! Where does the time go?

Mysterious boost to Earth's spin will make Aug. 5 one of the shortest days on record

EARTH, AUG 5 – Earth's rotation is accelerating due to factors like the moon's recession and melting ice sheets, causing three shorter days in 2025, with one 1.36 milliseconds shorter, scientists say 

• On Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025, Earth's solar day will be 1.34 milliseconds shorter than 24 hours, making it one of the shortest days since records began.
• Amid less understood core dynamics, scientists note that the reasons for Earth's rotation speed increase in recent years are unclear, with liquid core slowdown likely involved.
• In July, scientists forecast solar days shorter than 24 hours on July 9, July 22, and Aug. 5, with Aug. 5 being the shortest at 1.36 milliseconds less.
• While imperceptible to humans, millisecond variations can affect computers, satellites and telecommunications, necessitating atomic clock tracking.
• Experts caution that a negative leap second could be added if Earth's rotation accelerations continue through 2029, with about 40% probability by 2035.   https://ground.news/article/earth-spins-faster-changes-in-earth-rotation

 Short, short my life, and shorter this day of my life.

Texas will have less time to steal five democrat-won seats in congress.

Trump will have less time to shake down universities into paying him for protection in the neighborhood.

ICE will have less time to run down schoolchildren, laborers, and green card holders to throw then into custody, prisons and concentration camps for their crimes against far-right racist ideology.

Meanwhile, on earth:

        At Dusk    

at dusk
i often climb
to the peak of kugami.
deer bellow,
their voices
soaked up by
piles of maple leaves
lying undisturbed at
the foot of the mountain

(--Taigu Royokan, 1758-1831)

It doesn't bother my dog Ensō that at final pee at night there are glowing eyes of deer inside his fenced enclosure. They look at us, casually step toward fence, and gracefully jump over it. Ensō pees, turns, heads into barn, gets treat in wohnkuche.

Time, contrary to song lyrics, is on nobody’s side. It just meanders its footprint allowing everything that could take place to take place even when light shines on its activities.

But this losing of time -- what do we make of it?

Be thou undisturbed. Maple leaves are soaking up our voices. 

Step quietly, carefully.

rendirse

 no

I will not

    will not 

    what

I will not

capitulate

    ok

    don't

but...

I will...

    will 

    what

I will (Dios nos 

ayude) love you

    what

    did you say

I will 

love you

    isn't love

    surrender

yes

 it is

    to 

    what

(A lo que está más 

allá de nosotros dos)

we are not aware of this

Perhaps I might have studied accounting or particle physics as a young man. But I preferred Tagore, Shantideva, Li Po, Philo of Alexandria, Chuang Tzu, Karl Rahner, Reinhold Niebuhr, Dorothy Day and Dan Berrigan 

Theology and philosophy are things just off to the side of buttered toast and day-old coffee. 

Like waka poetry, they pick up from the ground what nature has let fall and place carefully what the mind wonders about next to the fallen object so as to be looked at again the next time passing.

Theological Training   

 

Theology is the science of God and theological education pre-supposes God. It is all the more true in a multi-religious milieu. Theological education in a multi-religious milieu is diferent from theological education in a multi-cultural milieu. Theological education in India takes place mainly in major seminaries, theological colleges and theological faculties.   

 

A. Prime Considerations   

 

1. Human beings are placed in this world with a purpose. Relatedness is very central to every human and it starts with sensation, i.e., relatedness to the world through all the 5 sense organs.   

 

2. The Experience of the predicamental situation. Religions analyse the so-called predicamental situations. The famous three words, experience and expressive of the givenness of situations are – avidya (ignorance), dukha (sadness), and sin.   

 

3. Search for ‘sense’ or meaning of all what we experience. What is real? What is unreal?. All are passing, impermanent and unreliable. Hence a radical dukha bhava [suffering of becoming, or, suffering of existence] and this is part of the teaching of Buddhism. Hinduism believes that we are born in avidya, i.e., not aware of what we really are. God is abiding within us as our own inner self (Atman). But we are not aware of this. We should allow the Atman to guide our life. 

Christianity is a religion, which is centred on Christ, His mission and vision on salvation. Without me, you can do nothing (Jn 15:15 ) 

There are many other faiths and beliefs such as tribal religions, the adivasi (primitive settlements) religions. Many of them are said to be natural religions, because of their love, devotion to nature and objects of nature like the sun, the moon the stars and elements of nature and these are given divine attributes.

(--Theological Education in a Multi-Religious Milieu: An Indian Experience,  Francis Thonippara, Dharmaram College)

 Born in avidya, some of us are content to stay there, some long to crawl out from under ignorance and see things as they are, not as our small mind chooses to fabricate a preference as to what we want things to be for us.

Religion is how things tie together. Philosophy mulls the tying together. Theology asks "Who?"

I was marked early by winning the Religion Medal when I graduated from the 8th grade at St Athanasius in Bensonhurst when I was a kid.

So, as with all early acknowledgements, I have trudged the inquiry into why such is so, where did it come from, what are we making of it, and how are we going to clean up this mess.

Looking around this small room, I see I've not made much progress in that last cleaning up reference.

seeing equally

On website The Dōgen Institute, Disseminating the Teachings of Eihei Dōgen Zenji, this:

                夏冬も

                    Natsu fuyu mo

                思ひに分ぬ

                    Omoi ni wakanu

                越の山

                    Koshi no yama

                ふる白雪も

                    Furu shirayuki mo

                鳴るいかづちも

                    Naru ikazuchi mo 

Translated:

   Whether summer or winter,

   the mountain of Koshi

   is free from discriminative thinking.

   It sees equally

  falling of white snowflakes,

  or roaring of thunder.

(--Poem by Dogen)

I’ve been wondering just how this being "free from discriminative thinking” would change what and how I see that which is taking place in the United States at this time.

Of course I will sit zazen.

Of course I will look at what I look at.

Of course I will (doubtfully) ponder what and how I see what I see.

Of course someone will say to sit zazen again.

And again.

in the ocean of birth and death

bob, bob, bob.

where do I go from here --

nowhere, now here, no wh here  

Wayfarers with enlightened eyes 

Strike down both devil and Buddha.

If you love the holy and despise the ordinary,

You are bobbing in the ocean of birth and death.  

Lin Chi (d 867)

 if not here, then I will walk in circles

until the ground underfoot is worn down

inch by inch worn away until round ground 

comes to eye level and circle becomes deep

enclosure where someone once walked

someone thought they had to talk, someone

disappeared into the earth and was only earth

there

bobbing bobbing bobbing in rise and fall of

cosmos

round and round until nothing goes anywhere