I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 today.
If anyone is capable of transcending politics, there are only tears of sorrow, laughter at absurdity dressed in Orwellian phrases, and anger at the foolish arrogance perpetrated on Iraqi and American citizens.
Evening mountains
Veiled in somber mist,
One path entering
The wooded hill:
The monk has gone off,
Locking his pine door.
From a bamboo pipe
A lonely trickle of water flows.
- Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672)
Bypass the commentary if you wish, but do not take your eyes off the faces of the men and women in the film. Do not turn attention from the anguish and grief in face and voice telling their experience.
No matter our politics, if we do not listen to one another, if we do not watch with one another, then we are vacant opinions posing naked and spewing mocking farce. There must be better ways of serving each other than serving sewage that tries to pass as noble act, confident ideology, or patriotic pride.
I recommend the documentary.
Let's learn to feel again.
Let's laugh, and cry, and be angry, and finally pray for the men, women, and children who suffer.
Let's find a way through and beyond this troubling entourage who have sidetracked sense and sanity into a dark, sullen alley.
Let's leave stupidity behind.
Let's try intelligent reflection.
And be courageous.
Heart-feeling.
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Lloyd read a Fernando Pessoa line Saturday that went, "Nature has no inside." It was from a poem in the Portuguese poet's book The Keeper of Sheep. Pessoa lived 1888-1935 and wrote under four names.
The poet Fernando Pessoa...puts us on the right track when he observes in his work how the layman and the scientist look at the world and collect knowledge about it in a fundamentally different manner. A layman, argues Pessoa, notices the complexity of nature and man from the outside. The expert, on the other hand, will brush aside the exterior as a distraction from a deeper-rooted order; an order that is essentially simple and unchangeable. Pessoa, for his part, would appear to prefer to look through the eyes of the layman, for he understands Nature on the outside, as Nature has no inside: only poets will dream of this and only philosophers have something like this in mind.
(from "Public Participation In Decision-Making On Technology: A Challenge For Citizens And Experts" -- Lieve Goorden and Joke Vandenabeele, STEM (Study Centre Technology, Energy and Environment) University of Antwerp, 27-11-2002)
Does having no inside erase the outside of things? Or is it a matter of transparency? Or the mere 'fact' of a thing?
Seven at Sunday Evening Practice. Reading letter from C.S. Lewis in A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken. Is it the unwillingness to assent to each moment of life that diverts life from us? Is the attempt to parcel and appropriate bits and fragments of life that which deadens us to the vibrancy of life passing through us on its way through and through?
"Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse." "To sail is necessary; to live is not necessary." (-Gnaeus Pompeius)
Destination is fictitious. The sail is the thing itself. To navigate through ever-changing sea is continual course correction. We calculate and plot, take sightings and record in log the day's movement taking place between sleep, coffee, and looking through all manner of weather. In fact, we remain exactly where we are at any instant.
Practicing one's life relinquishes the inside and abandons the outside.
Really -- what is flowing through everything with no inside and no outside?
We sail through this question with no expectation of answer.
That's our nature.
Sourcing.
The poet Fernando Pessoa...puts us on the right track when he observes in his work how the layman and the scientist look at the world and collect knowledge about it in a fundamentally different manner. A layman, argues Pessoa, notices the complexity of nature and man from the outside. The expert, on the other hand, will brush aside the exterior as a distraction from a deeper-rooted order; an order that is essentially simple and unchangeable. Pessoa, for his part, would appear to prefer to look through the eyes of the layman, for he understands Nature on the outside, as Nature has no inside: only poets will dream of this and only philosophers have something like this in mind.
(from "Public Participation In Decision-Making On Technology: A Challenge For Citizens And Experts" -- Lieve Goorden and Joke Vandenabeele, STEM (Study Centre Technology, Energy and Environment) University of Antwerp, 27-11-2002)
Does having no inside erase the outside of things? Or is it a matter of transparency? Or the mere 'fact' of a thing?
Seven at Sunday Evening Practice. Reading letter from C.S. Lewis in A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken. Is it the unwillingness to assent to each moment of life that diverts life from us? Is the attempt to parcel and appropriate bits and fragments of life that which deadens us to the vibrancy of life passing through us on its way through and through?
"Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse." "To sail is necessary; to live is not necessary." (-Gnaeus Pompeius)
Destination is fictitious. The sail is the thing itself. To navigate through ever-changing sea is continual course correction. We calculate and plot, take sightings and record in log the day's movement taking place between sleep, coffee, and looking through all manner of weather. In fact, we remain exactly where we are at any instant.
Practicing one's life relinquishes the inside and abandons the outside.
Really -- what is flowing through everything with no inside and no outside?
We sail through this question with no expectation of answer.
That's our nature.
Sourcing.
Saturday, June 26, 2004
Mother Purple Finch flies to feeder.
Young one follows noisily. On wet ground outside kitchen window three small chipmunks forage fell-seed in newly shortened grass.
A man of the Way comes
Rapping at my brushwood gate,
Wants to discuss the
Essentials of Zen experience.
Don’t take it wrong if this
Mountain monk’s too lazy
To open his mouth:
Late spring warblers
Singing their hearts out,
A village of drifting petals.
- Jakushitsu (1290 –1367)
Grey rainy summer's day. I turn around to see where I've come from. Nothing there.
As they were proceeding on their journey someone said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus answered him, "Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head." And to another he said, "Follow me." But he replied, "Lord, let me go first and bury my father." But he answered him, "Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." And another said, "I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home." To him Jesus said, "No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God."
(from Luke 9:51-62)
I don't fit anywhere it is suggested one might, or might not, fit. The road-less road the homeless travel seems a fit-less footloose flight.
On the day before Thomas Merton retired to his hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani he used an apt metaphor to describe for his novices the new dimension of life as a monastic hermit. The date was August 20, 1965--the eve of the feast of the great early Cistercian, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). No doubt with Bernard (the reformer and creative thinker) in mind, Merton reclaimed the essence of every monk's vocation. Only three short years would intervene before his journey to Asia where he invested himself in dialogues with Buddhist and Hindu monks. Yet on that late summer day in 1965 Merton articulated for those novices a bold imperative when he said:
"At this particular point in the monastic life people need real evidence that it is possible to go further than just simply the convoy of routine work: everybody travelling at the speed of the slowest ship."
(from ‘When the Heart is Right,’ Thomas Merton's Contemplative Contribution to Interreligious Dialogue," by George A. Kilcourse, Jr., Parliament of World Religions)
The hermit conveys nothing. The convoy inches through surface pitch and yaw mapped for some destination. The hermit has no destination. The hermit knows it is the thinnest of upholding engineering that floats the convoy ships above unfathomed depths. The hermit has already sensed the sinking helplessness of slipping below surface.
It is a solitary and uncharted descent. No provision is made for return. No return is conceived. Jesus would be surprised to learn there was a return ticket for him.
It is a Saturday afternoon filled with chirping birds, purring cat on lap, three dogs snoozing in tossed dischevel on floor.
Too lazy to open mouth, this ill-fitting hermit silence floats on precarious wave of empty listening. It is the open alone, with little understanding, conveys the silence of God passing through this, this now here, and this nowhere. This -- without end. This – without beginning.
This, our attentive presence.
Drifting petals.
Real evidence.
Young one follows noisily. On wet ground outside kitchen window three small chipmunks forage fell-seed in newly shortened grass.
A man of the Way comes
Rapping at my brushwood gate,
Wants to discuss the
Essentials of Zen experience.
Don’t take it wrong if this
Mountain monk’s too lazy
To open his mouth:
Late spring warblers
Singing their hearts out,
A village of drifting petals.
- Jakushitsu (1290 –1367)
Grey rainy summer's day. I turn around to see where I've come from. Nothing there.
As they were proceeding on their journey someone said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus answered him, "Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head." And to another he said, "Follow me." But he replied, "Lord, let me go first and bury my father." But he answered him, "Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." And another said, "I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home." To him Jesus said, "No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God."
(from Luke 9:51-62)
I don't fit anywhere it is suggested one might, or might not, fit. The road-less road the homeless travel seems a fit-less footloose flight.
On the day before Thomas Merton retired to his hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani he used an apt metaphor to describe for his novices the new dimension of life as a monastic hermit. The date was August 20, 1965--the eve of the feast of the great early Cistercian, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). No doubt with Bernard (the reformer and creative thinker) in mind, Merton reclaimed the essence of every monk's vocation. Only three short years would intervene before his journey to Asia where he invested himself in dialogues with Buddhist and Hindu monks. Yet on that late summer day in 1965 Merton articulated for those novices a bold imperative when he said:
"At this particular point in the monastic life people need real evidence that it is possible to go further than just simply the convoy of routine work: everybody travelling at the speed of the slowest ship."
(from ‘When the Heart is Right,’ Thomas Merton's Contemplative Contribution to Interreligious Dialogue," by George A. Kilcourse, Jr., Parliament of World Religions)
The hermit conveys nothing. The convoy inches through surface pitch and yaw mapped for some destination. The hermit has no destination. The hermit knows it is the thinnest of upholding engineering that floats the convoy ships above unfathomed depths. The hermit has already sensed the sinking helplessness of slipping below surface.
It is a solitary and uncharted descent. No provision is made for return. No return is conceived. Jesus would be surprised to learn there was a return ticket for him.
It is a Saturday afternoon filled with chirping birds, purring cat on lap, three dogs snoozing in tossed dischevel on floor.
Too lazy to open mouth, this ill-fitting hermit silence floats on precarious wave of empty listening. It is the open alone, with little understanding, conveys the silence of God passing through this, this now here, and this nowhere. This -- without end. This – without beginning.
This, our attentive presence.
Drifting petals.
Real evidence.
Friday, June 25, 2004
This morning, Billy said that in prison you are prey, predator, or you swim in your own pond.
In the awakened eye
Mountains and rivers
Completely disappear.
The eye of delusion
Looks out upon
Deep fog and clouds.
Alone on my zazen mat
I forget the days
As they pass.
The wisteria has grown
Thick over the eaves
Of my hut.
- Muso (1275-1351)
In Guantanimo, prey and predator are interchanged.
According to The Washington Post, the U.S. Vice-President tells a U.S. Senator to "Go fuck yourself."
Several guys in Maine State Prison used the "F" word today describing their point of view about the chaos and control, the discomforting of the environment, and pervasive tension of prison life. We'd been reading Robert Lax on learning to live on a Greek island.
At conversation on Islam at shop this evening a woman suggested that Islamic punishment that cuts off finger, hand, or foot might be more effective and kinder than America's ten to thirty years behind bars with the predation, fear, and warping of men's minds by fear and resentment -- especially when they might carry their lessons learned with them when they walk out and return to the streets.
"Pan metron ariston" is Greek for "all things in moderation."
We need to moderate the excesses of war and the regressive paralysis of hopelessness. We need to moderate extremes of division fomented by political factions racing to far right and left with nasty rhetoric and behavioral incivility.
It is good to visit prison for conversation.
It is like mystery. The more we understand about a mystery the deeper the mystery becomes. There's no end to the depths of mystery.
Passing through prison with heart and mind a little more open is like passing through mystery with new appreciation even the smallest understanding brings.
Billy, Rusty, Chris, Ryan, Saskia and I passed through today.
Our small understanding, shared each with each around table, deepens the mystery of who we are and what God is in our moderated midst.
And Harold visited with Erika in another part of the mystery this morning.
"That big something else," is what one of the guys said of God.
In the awakened eye
Mountains and rivers
Completely disappear.
The eye of delusion
Looks out upon
Deep fog and clouds.
Alone on my zazen mat
I forget the days
As they pass.
The wisteria has grown
Thick over the eaves
Of my hut.
- Muso (1275-1351)
In Guantanimo, prey and predator are interchanged.
According to The Washington Post, the U.S. Vice-President tells a U.S. Senator to "Go fuck yourself."
Several guys in Maine State Prison used the "F" word today describing their point of view about the chaos and control, the discomforting of the environment, and pervasive tension of prison life. We'd been reading Robert Lax on learning to live on a Greek island.
At conversation on Islam at shop this evening a woman suggested that Islamic punishment that cuts off finger, hand, or foot might be more effective and kinder than America's ten to thirty years behind bars with the predation, fear, and warping of men's minds by fear and resentment -- especially when they might carry their lessons learned with them when they walk out and return to the streets.
"Pan metron ariston" is Greek for "all things in moderation."
We need to moderate the excesses of war and the regressive paralysis of hopelessness. We need to moderate extremes of division fomented by political factions racing to far right and left with nasty rhetoric and behavioral incivility.
It is good to visit prison for conversation.
It is like mystery. The more we understand about a mystery the deeper the mystery becomes. There's no end to the depths of mystery.
Passing through prison with heart and mind a little more open is like passing through mystery with new appreciation even the smallest understanding brings.
Billy, Rusty, Chris, Ryan, Saskia and I passed through today.
Our small understanding, shared each with each around table, deepens the mystery of who we are and what God is in our moderated midst.
And Harold visited with Erika in another part of the mystery this morning.
"That big something else," is what one of the guys said of God.
Thursday, June 24, 2004
The personal and the political are not separate in our spiritual lives.
1.
I fear George Bush and his Republican frost will prevail in November. His reign is a desiccated flower which, come November, should not be seen following the icy glare of public reflection about him and his term in office.
Good deeds stand tall
Like a green pine,
While evil deeds
Bloom like flowers
It seems the pine is not
As brilliant as the flowers.
When the frost comes,
The pine will still stand tall,
While the flowers, withered,
Can be seen no more.
- Anon
Now that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Department Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have taken to unsaying what they deceptively mis-said about Iraq, Al Quada and war, it is time for us to listen more clearly and more honestly as citizens claiming to love freedom.
2.
The institutional church, as it declines and reconfigures itself, must come to dialogue and interact with other forms of religion and spiritual inquiry. People in pews are not exposed to or benefiting from open exchange of philosophical and theological conversation.
The faithful are seldom invited by their churches to plumb the difficult questions about belief and doubt, perennial truths and multiplicity of explanation, or disturbing compromises and affronts to genuine colloquy impeding open-hearted inquiry into the intuited reality of what is called God.
There are choices. Among them: We could take refuge in emerging and ongoing revelation of what is true in all its expressions; Or we could be laid bare in the frozen doctrines of former ages and left to icy sleep as capillaries and cells constrict and die.
Religion is not historical study and reenactment of what has been signed and sealed. Religion is inquiry into and celebration of what is flowing and emerging at this moment in this place through reverential attention.
This inquiry is not an unquestioning affirmation, but is, rather, an unending willingness to call into question and maturely respond to each revelation and fact as it appears.
God could never belong to any one church or even the aggregate of them. God belongs to what God is. God belongs to God Self -- whether revealed, evolved, or emerged -- wherever and to whomever God Self comes clear.
3.
We think God is love. We think God is truth. We think God is life.
These are suitable thoughts about God. They might not be all of it, but enough to keep us asking what they mean and what else is there.
Whenever love is missing or perverted, wherever truth is distorted or flat-out ignored, however life is murdered, abused, or degraded -- it is there and then God is hated, God is made a lie, and God is tortured to death.
If politicians do this, we as citizens are in great trouble. If we allow the politics of hate, lies, and death to continue -- we are lost. If the behavior of perversion and deception is our personal behavior, we as individuals and everyone we touch are vulnerable to annihilation if we do not reconnect to the vital and retrieving source of our being.
The political and the personal are not separate.
4.
Like green pine standing tall, we must take heart.
No matter how cold.
Look beyond.
See more.
1.
I fear George Bush and his Republican frost will prevail in November. His reign is a desiccated flower which, come November, should not be seen following the icy glare of public reflection about him and his term in office.
Good deeds stand tall
Like a green pine,
While evil deeds
Bloom like flowers
It seems the pine is not
As brilliant as the flowers.
When the frost comes,
The pine will still stand tall,
While the flowers, withered,
Can be seen no more.
- Anon
Now that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Department Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have taken to unsaying what they deceptively mis-said about Iraq, Al Quada and war, it is time for us to listen more clearly and more honestly as citizens claiming to love freedom.
2.
The institutional church, as it declines and reconfigures itself, must come to dialogue and interact with other forms of religion and spiritual inquiry. People in pews are not exposed to or benefiting from open exchange of philosophical and theological conversation.
The faithful are seldom invited by their churches to plumb the difficult questions about belief and doubt, perennial truths and multiplicity of explanation, or disturbing compromises and affronts to genuine colloquy impeding open-hearted inquiry into the intuited reality of what is called God.
There are choices. Among them: We could take refuge in emerging and ongoing revelation of what is true in all its expressions; Or we could be laid bare in the frozen doctrines of former ages and left to icy sleep as capillaries and cells constrict and die.
Religion is not historical study and reenactment of what has been signed and sealed. Religion is inquiry into and celebration of what is flowing and emerging at this moment in this place through reverential attention.
This inquiry is not an unquestioning affirmation, but is, rather, an unending willingness to call into question and maturely respond to each revelation and fact as it appears.
God could never belong to any one church or even the aggregate of them. God belongs to what God is. God belongs to God Self -- whether revealed, evolved, or emerged -- wherever and to whomever God Self comes clear.
3.
We think God is love. We think God is truth. We think God is life.
These are suitable thoughts about God. They might not be all of it, but enough to keep us asking what they mean and what else is there.
Whenever love is missing or perverted, wherever truth is distorted or flat-out ignored, however life is murdered, abused, or degraded -- it is there and then God is hated, God is made a lie, and God is tortured to death.
If politicians do this, we as citizens are in great trouble. If we allow the politics of hate, lies, and death to continue -- we are lost. If the behavior of perversion and deception is our personal behavior, we as individuals and everyone we touch are vulnerable to annihilation if we do not reconnect to the vital and retrieving source of our being.
The political and the personal are not separate.
4.
Like green pine standing tall, we must take heart.
No matter how cold.
Look beyond.
See more.
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
We are shocked at beheadings.
Contemplate the mind;
This king of emptiness
Is subtle and abstruse.
Without shape or form,
It has great spiritual power.
It can eliminate all calamities
And accomplish all merits.
Though its essence is empty,
It is the measure of dharmas.
- Master Fu (497-569)
1.
No need to go anywhere.
Where else is there?
A common failing of practice is the phrase, “I am not like that.” The practice of (what is called) enlightenment is seeing the embodiment of truth in what is revealed in each moment in each person.
When the Zen Master says that, “Truth is just like this,” or, “Truth is just like that,” what they are saying is, “Look here, there you are, you are just like what is appearing, just like what is being revealed.”
All knowledge is self-knowledge. We are the beheaded. We are the beheaders. We are the righteous indignation claiming superiority over bloody-handed terrorists. And we are the fractious thinking that believes something useful is accomplished by murderous deeds.
If you think it is awful beheading people, don’t do it. Factually or actually, do not cut a person’s head off. But more than that -- figuratively or metaphorically, do not “take someone’s head off.” Nations and/or corporations that behead other nations, peoples, or adversaries by means of political or economic cutting-blades, perpetuate the terrifying act. Personal anger and frustration often lead to ripping another apart with cutting words or emotional severance.
Shunryu Suzuki, in the reading leading to last evening’s conversation, suggested that each is the only one. Each is Buddha-nature. Practice is this realization. Enlightenment is this practice. There is no one without the other -- and there is no other with the one.
There is no eliminating an enemy we perceive to be outside us, or other than us.
It is thinking that makes one an “other”.
It is awaking that sees one another.
2.
The executioner's argument was, that you couldn't cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn't going to begin at HIS time of life.
The King's argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren't to talk nonsense.
The Queen's argument was, that if something wasn't done about it in less than no time she'd have everybody executed, all round. (It was this last remark that had made the whole party look so grave and anxious.)
(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll from Chapter 8: The Queen's Croquet-Ground)
3.
We need to contemplate beheadings.
In the world of Zen not having a head means seeing with one’s whole being. No-mind, no-self, no-body, no-head are ways of saying no-divide.
In a more prosaic formulation, the notion of no-head is saying that rational enumeration of rights and privileges which separate out one group from another and posit some as worthy of reward and some to be deprived of it. — is unbecoming of our true nature.
Calculated, logical, and rational discrimination based on a system of value which excludes “others” from participation in good and goods because of their “otherness” – is a product of “head” analysis. “Head” analysis has as its operating system a dualistic mechanism the prime task of which is to divide into two, decide what portion of resource goes to which, and create categories of worthiness based on arbitrary priority to be evaluated by self-interest and inbred perpetuation of a narrow focal point of restricted ownership.
The metaphor of beheading is chilling. It suggests something wrong with the larger metaphor of head-hunters and head-honcho, as well as heads-of-state and heads-of-industry.
Heads are often disdainful of bodies at the same time as they are fed by and dependent on bodies..
4.
There is no need to sever head from body.
If we look, just look, and see what is there to be seen – we begin the contemplative life of just-seeing.
"My soul thirsts for God, the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?" (Ps 42:2)
“The living God” is the heart’s way of saying/seeing, “What is whole and complete.”
Keep on -- by emptying mind.
Contemplate the mind;
This king of emptiness
Is subtle and abstruse.
Without shape or form,
It has great spiritual power.
It can eliminate all calamities
And accomplish all merits.
Though its essence is empty,
It is the measure of dharmas.
- Master Fu (497-569)
1.
No need to go anywhere.
Where else is there?
A common failing of practice is the phrase, “I am not like that.” The practice of (what is called) enlightenment is seeing the embodiment of truth in what is revealed in each moment in each person.
When the Zen Master says that, “Truth is just like this,” or, “Truth is just like that,” what they are saying is, “Look here, there you are, you are just like what is appearing, just like what is being revealed.”
All knowledge is self-knowledge. We are the beheaded. We are the beheaders. We are the righteous indignation claiming superiority over bloody-handed terrorists. And we are the fractious thinking that believes something useful is accomplished by murderous deeds.
If you think it is awful beheading people, don’t do it. Factually or actually, do not cut a person’s head off. But more than that -- figuratively or metaphorically, do not “take someone’s head off.” Nations and/or corporations that behead other nations, peoples, or adversaries by means of political or economic cutting-blades, perpetuate the terrifying act. Personal anger and frustration often lead to ripping another apart with cutting words or emotional severance.
Shunryu Suzuki, in the reading leading to last evening’s conversation, suggested that each is the only one. Each is Buddha-nature. Practice is this realization. Enlightenment is this practice. There is no one without the other -- and there is no other with the one.
There is no eliminating an enemy we perceive to be outside us, or other than us.
It is thinking that makes one an “other”.
It is awaking that sees one another.
2.
The executioner's argument was, that you couldn't cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn't going to begin at HIS time of life.
The King's argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren't to talk nonsense.
The Queen's argument was, that if something wasn't done about it in less than no time she'd have everybody executed, all round. (It was this last remark that had made the whole party look so grave and anxious.)
(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll from Chapter 8: The Queen's Croquet-Ground)
3.
We need to contemplate beheadings.
In the world of Zen not having a head means seeing with one’s whole being. No-mind, no-self, no-body, no-head are ways of saying no-divide.
In a more prosaic formulation, the notion of no-head is saying that rational enumeration of rights and privileges which separate out one group from another and posit some as worthy of reward and some to be deprived of it. — is unbecoming of our true nature.
Calculated, logical, and rational discrimination based on a system of value which excludes “others” from participation in good and goods because of their “otherness” – is a product of “head” analysis. “Head” analysis has as its operating system a dualistic mechanism the prime task of which is to divide into two, decide what portion of resource goes to which, and create categories of worthiness based on arbitrary priority to be evaluated by self-interest and inbred perpetuation of a narrow focal point of restricted ownership.
The metaphor of beheading is chilling. It suggests something wrong with the larger metaphor of head-hunters and head-honcho, as well as heads-of-state and heads-of-industry.
Heads are often disdainful of bodies at the same time as they are fed by and dependent on bodies..
4.
There is no need to sever head from body.
If we look, just look, and see what is there to be seen – we begin the contemplative life of just-seeing.
"My soul thirsts for God, the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?" (Ps 42:2)
“The living God” is the heart’s way of saying/seeing, “What is whole and complete.”
Keep on -- by emptying mind.
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Today it is silence. We can seek with words or seek with silence.
You are a seeker.
Delight in the mastery
Of your hands and your feet,
Of your words and your thoughts.
Delight in meditation and in solitude.
Compose yourself, be happy.
You are a seeker.
- Buddha in the Dhammapada
It is twenty-nine years my father died on this date. The telephone call. Sitting with still and cooling body on bed in small room mine once where inverted lampshade over clothes hook was basket to rolled sox those playing days.
Rain finally drenches mountainside after dogs and I finish walking slowly short loop then settle on cabin porch and now rest in house.
My son arrives from away. A time will come when he will reflect the death of his father. Some detail will stay with him. Some recollection floating over dripping leaves near a place prayer allows the word open. Today he is happy to stay over shop where sea and mountain both welcome rain.
Father's day is an easy celebration. As is mother's. Both near my parent's deaths in May and June.
In this solitude and silence, we are composed.
In this collation and recollection, we are happy.
Mu-ge leaps to belly and chest, purring. The sudden always-surprising arrival of anything at all!
Yawning as water splashes from rolling tires outside window.
You are a seeker.
Delight in the mastery
Of your hands and your feet,
Of your words and your thoughts.
Delight in meditation and in solitude.
Compose yourself, be happy.
You are a seeker.
- Buddha in the Dhammapada
It is twenty-nine years my father died on this date. The telephone call. Sitting with still and cooling body on bed in small room mine once where inverted lampshade over clothes hook was basket to rolled sox those playing days.
Rain finally drenches mountainside after dogs and I finish walking slowly short loop then settle on cabin porch and now rest in house.
My son arrives from away. A time will come when he will reflect the death of his father. Some detail will stay with him. Some recollection floating over dripping leaves near a place prayer allows the word open. Today he is happy to stay over shop where sea and mountain both welcome rain.
Father's day is an easy celebration. As is mother's. Both near my parent's deaths in May and June.
In this solitude and silence, we are composed.
In this collation and recollection, we are happy.
Mu-ge leaps to belly and chest, purring. The sudden always-surprising arrival of anything at all!
Yawning as water splashes from rolling tires outside window.
Saturday, June 19, 2004
"Zenshi Ichimi" is a Japanese phrase meaning - "Poetry and Zen are one."
This body’s existence is like a bubble’s
May as well accept what happens
Events and hopes seldom agree
Who can step back doesn’t worry
We blossom and fade like flowers
Gather and part like clouds
Worldly thoughts I forgot long ago
Relaxing all day on a peak
- Stonehouse
Annie, Joanie, Erika, Saskia, Lloyd, Pia, Mike, and I gathered for poetry Saturday afternoon. Rilke, Schwartz, Pessoa, Whyte, Bozarth, and Connelly were there in words they wrote.
It is the moment. The moment poetry captures. The moment Zen sees. These moments gathered in small bookshop alongside small harbor in Maine of a rainy afternoon at end of spring with fire waning in fireplace.
One week ago a young man hung himself one block inland. Today poems find their way as if epitaphs for his death and all our deaths. In the poems, not specifically written for him, but written for each one passing through this way, whether alone or with others, we attend to the sound of the moment as it passes. In this attention no one is lost, no one left out. No sorrow dismissed. No hope abandoned.
Events and hopes seldom agree.
Every conflict looks for amicable environment to be fully heard and brought to safe resolution.
So, we read poems, listen to poetry clamber our awkward incline, and lend attention to the sound of what is being said.
We might not be able to divert death. We might, however, be capable of allowing life a longer hearing.
This is the practice of poetry.
This, the practice of zen.
Blossom and fade.
Gather and part.
Say and see.
Each one.
This body’s existence is like a bubble’s
May as well accept what happens
Events and hopes seldom agree
Who can step back doesn’t worry
We blossom and fade like flowers
Gather and part like clouds
Worldly thoughts I forgot long ago
Relaxing all day on a peak
- Stonehouse
Annie, Joanie, Erika, Saskia, Lloyd, Pia, Mike, and I gathered for poetry Saturday afternoon. Rilke, Schwartz, Pessoa, Whyte, Bozarth, and Connelly were there in words they wrote.
It is the moment. The moment poetry captures. The moment Zen sees. These moments gathered in small bookshop alongside small harbor in Maine of a rainy afternoon at end of spring with fire waning in fireplace.
One week ago a young man hung himself one block inland. Today poems find their way as if epitaphs for his death and all our deaths. In the poems, not specifically written for him, but written for each one passing through this way, whether alone or with others, we attend to the sound of the moment as it passes. In this attention no one is lost, no one left out. No sorrow dismissed. No hope abandoned.
Events and hopes seldom agree.
Every conflict looks for amicable environment to be fully heard and brought to safe resolution.
So, we read poems, listen to poetry clamber our awkward incline, and lend attention to the sound of what is being said.
We might not be able to divert death. We might, however, be capable of allowing life a longer hearing.
This is the practice of poetry.
This, the practice of zen.
Blossom and fade.
Gather and part.
Say and see.
Each one.
Friday, June 18, 2004
Islam believes in charging no interest.
The depression and crisis in trade mostly results from the payment of high rate of interest. The socialists have wrongly attributed such crises to capitalism. In fact interest is the greatest evil of capitalism and it is rather the worst form of capitalism, The Islamic economy which accepts a form of capitalism without interest has almost eliminated its harmful aspects. The Holy Prophet of Islam has advised Muslims to avoid seven harmful things and the third among these is interest, He stated,' Although interest brings increase, yet its end tends to scarcity'. The Holy Quran says, "That which ye give in interest in order that it may increase other peoples' wealth hath no increase with God; but that which ye give in growth tax, seeking God's countenance hath increases manifold" (XXX-39).
(--Economic System of Islam, http://www.netmuslims.com/info/economic.html)
Reading The Heart of Islam by Seyyed Hossein Nasr at Friday Evening Conversation, we spoke of money. It is money, always, that evokes passion in politics and religion. Too much, too little, unfairly taken, profligately spent -- money is the measure of personal blessing and political value in our culture.
Have it or not, like it or not, concerning the who, why, when, and where of death -- money's hand determines who lives and who dies in the world.
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
While nature offers us all the abundance we need, we seek wealth in all the wrong places.
Jesus Christ, although he shared God's nature, did not try to seize equality with God for himself; but emptied himself, took on the form of a slave, and became like a man -- not in appearance only, for he humbled himself by accepting death -- even death on a cross.
-- Philippians 2
Christianity is a forsaken religion because it asks us to empty ourselves and to unclutch our grasping hands from that which we consider secure wealth -- so as to move freely through life of Christ-reality with nothing for the journey.
Then he said to all, "If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it."-- Luke 9
There is no system better than others to cement a true relationship with money, with one another, and with wholesome equanimity. More than a system, we need a sense of clear light -- one that allows us, not to stare at the opacity of monied self-definition, but to see through the medium of money and rest gaze on the many who inhabit this world with us.
Money has been and still is a difficult koan. The sound of one hand full of money is not going to clap -- not with joy, and not with the other hand fending off those who pose a threat to the money hand. So too, there are few hands motionless in casket that have tucked in them folded tens, twenties, fifties, or hundreds -- but rather, empty hands, done with scratch for gaining ground, fold finished with whatever work they found to be in their interest.
Thus the Islamic economic principles if strictly followed would eliminate the possibility of accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and would ensure the greater circulation of money as well as a wider distribution of wealth. Broadly speaking these principles are (1) Zakat or compulsory alms giving (2) The Islamic law of inheritance which splits the property of an individual into a number of shares given to his relations (3) The forbiddance of interest which checks accumulation of wealth and this strikes at the root of capitalism.
The sound economic system evolved by Islam if given a fair trial would solve the basic economic problems which have been troubling the modern world.
(-- Economic System of Islam, http://www.netmuslims.com/info/economic.html)
There is a different and deeper 'interest' needing attention. Disparity and divisiveness have made us all indigent. Greed and dispassionate scorn have shown us the dim colorless and dismal trouble disproportionate hoarding makes of the world -- a gloomy and dangerous place.
Our interest, I submit, might better be what is taking place between us. To be between one another is to live in touch with the center place from which all life originates, and through which all life gravitates.
There is an unending between, a shared homeground -- where the human/divine sees through one set of eyes, and hears through one set of ears, the sound of one hand noiselessly alongside another hand in the eternal instant of correspondence -- the one just before arriving, and just after leaving.
Right there. The crossroad.
Blood and water.
One's heart.
The depression and crisis in trade mostly results from the payment of high rate of interest. The socialists have wrongly attributed such crises to capitalism. In fact interest is the greatest evil of capitalism and it is rather the worst form of capitalism, The Islamic economy which accepts a form of capitalism without interest has almost eliminated its harmful aspects. The Holy Prophet of Islam has advised Muslims to avoid seven harmful things and the third among these is interest, He stated,' Although interest brings increase, yet its end tends to scarcity'. The Holy Quran says, "That which ye give in interest in order that it may increase other peoples' wealth hath no increase with God; but that which ye give in growth tax, seeking God's countenance hath increases manifold" (XXX-39).
(--Economic System of Islam, http://www.netmuslims.com/info/economic.html)
Reading The Heart of Islam by Seyyed Hossein Nasr at Friday Evening Conversation, we spoke of money. It is money, always, that evokes passion in politics and religion. Too much, too little, unfairly taken, profligately spent -- money is the measure of personal blessing and political value in our culture.
Have it or not, like it or not, concerning the who, why, when, and where of death -- money's hand determines who lives and who dies in the world.
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
While nature offers us all the abundance we need, we seek wealth in all the wrong places.
Jesus Christ, although he shared God's nature, did not try to seize equality with God for himself; but emptied himself, took on the form of a slave, and became like a man -- not in appearance only, for he humbled himself by accepting death -- even death on a cross.
-- Philippians 2
Christianity is a forsaken religion because it asks us to empty ourselves and to unclutch our grasping hands from that which we consider secure wealth -- so as to move freely through life of Christ-reality with nothing for the journey.
Then he said to all, "If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it."-- Luke 9
There is no system better than others to cement a true relationship with money, with one another, and with wholesome equanimity. More than a system, we need a sense of clear light -- one that allows us, not to stare at the opacity of monied self-definition, but to see through the medium of money and rest gaze on the many who inhabit this world with us.
Money has been and still is a difficult koan. The sound of one hand full of money is not going to clap -- not with joy, and not with the other hand fending off those who pose a threat to the money hand. So too, there are few hands motionless in casket that have tucked in them folded tens, twenties, fifties, or hundreds -- but rather, empty hands, done with scratch for gaining ground, fold finished with whatever work they found to be in their interest.
Thus the Islamic economic principles if strictly followed would eliminate the possibility of accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and would ensure the greater circulation of money as well as a wider distribution of wealth. Broadly speaking these principles are (1) Zakat or compulsory alms giving (2) The Islamic law of inheritance which splits the property of an individual into a number of shares given to his relations (3) The forbiddance of interest which checks accumulation of wealth and this strikes at the root of capitalism.
The sound economic system evolved by Islam if given a fair trial would solve the basic economic problems which have been troubling the modern world.
(-- Economic System of Islam, http://www.netmuslims.com/info/economic.html)
There is a different and deeper 'interest' needing attention. Disparity and divisiveness have made us all indigent. Greed and dispassionate scorn have shown us the dim colorless and dismal trouble disproportionate hoarding makes of the world -- a gloomy and dangerous place.
Our interest, I submit, might better be what is taking place between us. To be between one another is to live in touch with the center place from which all life originates, and through which all life gravitates.
There is an unending between, a shared homeground -- where the human/divine sees through one set of eyes, and hears through one set of ears, the sound of one hand noiselessly alongside another hand in the eternal instant of correspondence -- the one just before arriving, and just after leaving.
Right there. The crossroad.
Blood and water.
One's heart.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Watching "Frontline" on PBS -- "The Plea" -- about justice or the lack of it in our judicial system.
One could weep at the suffering of the guilty and their victims. One also weeps for the suffering of the not guilty and the price we pay to have our integrity so abused.
There is no cowardice like refusal to admit mistakes. Or to hide behind false assertion so as to bolster the pretense of strength. This is compounded in the readying report of the 9/11 Commission.
Buddhas don't save buddhas. If you use your mind to look for a buddha, you won't see the buddha. As long as you look for a buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the buddha. And don't use a buddha to worship a buddha. And don't use the mind to invoke a buddha. Buddhas don't recite sutras. Buddhas don't keep precepts. And buddhas don't break precepts. Buddhas don't keep or break anything. Buddhas don't do good or evil.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
The system we swear by is conditioned by dualistic evaluation wherein there must always be the innocent and the guilty, the saved and damned, haves and have nots, and the wealthy and the impoverished.
This evening's conversation wondered about the metaphor of Jesus being the worded embodiment of divine life, the metaphor of crossroad wherein one stands still at center of many separate directions. This is where the divine and the human intersect -- at the heart where the visible and invisible exchange points of view -- the place where Jesus and Siddhartha Gautama suddenly disappear and the Christ and the Buddha emerge.
Two resigns. One carries on. But not the one one was. That one is gone. One still remains.
Run with eager desire to this source of life and light, all you who are vowed to God's service. Come, whoever you may be, and cry out to him with all the strength of your heart. "O indescribable beauty of the most high God and purest radiance of eternal light! Life that gives all life, light that is the source of every other light, preserving in everlasting splendour the myriad flames that have shone before the throne of your divinity from the dawn of time! Eternal and inaccessible fountain, clear and sweet stream flowing from a hidden spring, unseen by mortal eye! None can fathom your depths nor survey your boundaries, none can measure your breadth, nothing can sully your purity. From you flows 'the river which gladdens the city of God' and makes us cry out with joy and thanksgiving in hymns of praise to you, for we know by our own experience that 'with you is the source of life, and in your light we see light'."
(From Office of Readings, Feast of the Sacred Heart, by St Bonaventure,"With you is the source of life ")
Morning turns attention to Sacred Heart.
I bow to each heart. I bow to each crossroad where stillness and depth root the disappearance of each one dropping through circumstances and conditions of their lives. It is time to abandon rhetoric, to leave the deceptive reasons and narrative we tell and think to be our identity.
It is the still, profound place of heart -- heart calling us to be our truth -- that transmutes us from what once we were into what now we are.
What we call heart is the only sound the silence of God recognizes.
This silence is the loving stillness of God detected in our heart.
Follow only what heart hears, heart says, and what heart is doing.
Shut up. Listen. Go home.
Live life well.
One could weep at the suffering of the guilty and their victims. One also weeps for the suffering of the not guilty and the price we pay to have our integrity so abused.
There is no cowardice like refusal to admit mistakes. Or to hide behind false assertion so as to bolster the pretense of strength. This is compounded in the readying report of the 9/11 Commission.
Buddhas don't save buddhas. If you use your mind to look for a buddha, you won't see the buddha. As long as you look for a buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the buddha. And don't use a buddha to worship a buddha. And don't use the mind to invoke a buddha. Buddhas don't recite sutras. Buddhas don't keep precepts. And buddhas don't break precepts. Buddhas don't keep or break anything. Buddhas don't do good or evil.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
The system we swear by is conditioned by dualistic evaluation wherein there must always be the innocent and the guilty, the saved and damned, haves and have nots, and the wealthy and the impoverished.
This evening's conversation wondered about the metaphor of Jesus being the worded embodiment of divine life, the metaphor of crossroad wherein one stands still at center of many separate directions. This is where the divine and the human intersect -- at the heart where the visible and invisible exchange points of view -- the place where Jesus and Siddhartha Gautama suddenly disappear and the Christ and the Buddha emerge.
Two resigns. One carries on. But not the one one was. That one is gone. One still remains.
Run with eager desire to this source of life and light, all you who are vowed to God's service. Come, whoever you may be, and cry out to him with all the strength of your heart. "O indescribable beauty of the most high God and purest radiance of eternal light! Life that gives all life, light that is the source of every other light, preserving in everlasting splendour the myriad flames that have shone before the throne of your divinity from the dawn of time! Eternal and inaccessible fountain, clear and sweet stream flowing from a hidden spring, unseen by mortal eye! None can fathom your depths nor survey your boundaries, none can measure your breadth, nothing can sully your purity. From you flows 'the river which gladdens the city of God' and makes us cry out with joy and thanksgiving in hymns of praise to you, for we know by our own experience that 'with you is the source of life, and in your light we see light'."
(From Office of Readings, Feast of the Sacred Heart, by St Bonaventure,"With you is the source of life ")
Morning turns attention to Sacred Heart.
I bow to each heart. I bow to each crossroad where stillness and depth root the disappearance of each one dropping through circumstances and conditions of their lives. It is time to abandon rhetoric, to leave the deceptive reasons and narrative we tell and think to be our identity.
It is the still, profound place of heart -- heart calling us to be our truth -- that transmutes us from what once we were into what now we are.
What we call heart is the only sound the silence of God recognizes.
This silence is the loving stillness of God detected in our heart.
Follow only what heart hears, heart says, and what heart is doing.
Shut up. Listen. Go home.
Live life well.
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Just before coming out from wooded path on eastern side of morning walk along Ragged, a white board with black letters leans between branches of young tree. The words on it are: “Out of Bounds”.
In this small hut
Are worlds beyond number
Living here alone
I have endless company
Already I have
Attained the essence
How could I dare
To want something higher?
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
Earlier, reading snippet from Theological Dictionary of New Testament, the word for “heaven” transliterated from Greek as “ouranos.”
‘Ouranos,' in classical Greek almost without exception in the singular, always means “heaven.” The word always has a double reference. Heaven is the firmament, the arch of heaven over the earth. But it is also that which embraces all things in the absolute, a “Theion.” (p.497, Vol.V, Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, Editors)
“Theos” in Greek is God.
Theion is divine fire: (brimstone, divine incense, because burning brimstone was regarded as having power to purify, and to ward off disease).
It was Cesco, Britta and I today.
“Out of Bounds” resounded on the walk. Heaven is out of bounds -- meaning, when free of what binds and closes us, we enter heaven.
Where is that heaven?
It is the place which embraces all things in the absolute. The ‘absolute’ is that which has “no restriction, exception, or qualification.” (Webster’s Seventh, p.3)
Whole.
When that which is unnecessary, binding, limiting, and fragmentary has been burnt away by fires of longing for what is whole and complete -- we glimpse heaven.
Today, we suffer the partial and incomplete. In the transformative light of alert and aware heart/mind we do the work of allowing what has been broken to be refashioned and reimagined into its primary state of wholeness within all beings.
Heaven is out of bounds.
Profound -- the unending between which flows in and through each and every being in existence .
The profound is what is. The profound is all encompassing.
Meet one another there.
Make it here.
In this small hut
Are worlds beyond number
Living here alone
I have endless company
Already I have
Attained the essence
How could I dare
To want something higher?
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
Earlier, reading snippet from Theological Dictionary of New Testament, the word for “heaven” transliterated from Greek as “ouranos.”
‘Ouranos,' in classical Greek almost without exception in the singular, always means “heaven.” The word always has a double reference. Heaven is the firmament, the arch of heaven over the earth. But it is also that which embraces all things in the absolute, a “Theion.” (p.497, Vol.V, Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, Editors)
“Theos” in Greek is God.
Theion is divine fire: (brimstone, divine incense, because burning brimstone was regarded as having power to purify, and to ward off disease).
It was Cesco, Britta and I today.
“Out of Bounds” resounded on the walk. Heaven is out of bounds -- meaning, when free of what binds and closes us, we enter heaven.
Where is that heaven?
It is the place which embraces all things in the absolute. The ‘absolute’ is that which has “no restriction, exception, or qualification.” (Webster’s Seventh, p.3)
Whole.
When that which is unnecessary, binding, limiting, and fragmentary has been burnt away by fires of longing for what is whole and complete -- we glimpse heaven.
Today, we suffer the partial and incomplete. In the transformative light of alert and aware heart/mind we do the work of allowing what has been broken to be refashioned and reimagined into its primary state of wholeness within all beings.
Heaven is out of bounds.
Profound -- the unending between which flows in and through each and every being in existence .
The profound is what is. The profound is all encompassing.
Meet one another there.
Make it here.
Saturday, June 12, 2004
Pema Chodron wants us to consider the non-grasping mind. Open mind. The mind that finds its capacity to let go and relax into its true nature.
Inbreath and outbreath.
We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground. - (from "In the Gap Between Right and Wrong" by Pema Chodron)
Two parents come into the shop worrying about the draft -- will it be re-instituted? They have two sons -- and two daughters -- of an age that would be affected.
Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.
This place, if you can touch it, will help you train yourself throughout your life to open further to whatever you feel, to open further rather than shut down more. You'll find that as you begin to commit yourself to this practice, as you begin to have a sense of celebrating the parts of yourself that you found so impossible before, something will shift in you. Something will shift permanently in you. Your ancient habitual patterns will begin to soften and you'll being to see the faces and hear the words of people who are talking to you.
- (from "In the Gap Between Right and Wrong" by Pema Chodron) http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/dailylife/pema01.html
Yesterday and today there has been much talk of Ronald Reagan's week of tribute and funeral. It occurs to me that the nation needed a time to mourn, and former President Reagan's death served to provide that time for mourning. The deaths we experience worldwide. The loss of trusted community. The country needed to mourn even if it didn't know why. It feels better today.
This morning our trusted community of two doggie companions allowed a visiting third, Britta, to wander Ragged. It is her first visit to the hermitage. This long-haired black German Shepherd, Britta, dwells with Saskia's mom, who visits her daughter on this her giving-birth day and her daughter's receiving-birth day.
So many at Meetingbrook sign a book to be given to Saskia on her birthday.
The book is by John O'Donohue and is called Beauty: The Invisible Embrace.
With which we have been graced by Saskia.
Inbreath and outbreath.
We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground. - (from "In the Gap Between Right and Wrong" by Pema Chodron)
Two parents come into the shop worrying about the draft -- will it be re-instituted? They have two sons -- and two daughters -- of an age that would be affected.
Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.
This place, if you can touch it, will help you train yourself throughout your life to open further to whatever you feel, to open further rather than shut down more. You'll find that as you begin to commit yourself to this practice, as you begin to have a sense of celebrating the parts of yourself that you found so impossible before, something will shift in you. Something will shift permanently in you. Your ancient habitual patterns will begin to soften and you'll being to see the faces and hear the words of people who are talking to you.
- (from "In the Gap Between Right and Wrong" by Pema Chodron) http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/dailylife/pema01.html
Yesterday and today there has been much talk of Ronald Reagan's week of tribute and funeral. It occurs to me that the nation needed a time to mourn, and former President Reagan's death served to provide that time for mourning. The deaths we experience worldwide. The loss of trusted community. The country needed to mourn even if it didn't know why. It feels better today.
This morning our trusted community of two doggie companions allowed a visiting third, Britta, to wander Ragged. It is her first visit to the hermitage. This long-haired black German Shepherd, Britta, dwells with Saskia's mom, who visits her daughter on this her giving-birth day and her daughter's receiving-birth day.
So many at Meetingbrook sign a book to be given to Saskia on her birthday.
The book is by John O'Donohue and is called Beauty: The Invisible Embrace.
With which we have been graced by Saskia.
Friday, June 11, 2004
What do we see when we cease halving life?
"I can't see you with me." That's what Ben said in prison conversation today. "Me" has to diminish for any "you" to be seen.
What is between me and you?
Ben came in at end. Jason, Billy, Rusty, Ben, Saskia and I read some from John O'Donohue's book Beauty. He wrote about betweenness.
We wondered what was there between us.
White stones glow in Chaste Tree River.
With the cold sky, red leaves thin out.
No rain on the mountain path
Yet greenness drips on my clothes.
- Wang Wei (699-759)
The thing about prison is the attempt always to get something on or from someone else. More intense than life on the street, but similar in culture, what imprisons us is the constant attempt to drive wedges, set apart, set up debtor relationships, call in favors owed, establish top force, use whatever you've got on someone to your advantage.
The notion of "anam cara" or soul friend, someone to open heart, mind, and soul with, is a miraculous thing in prison. In talking of the miracle you could feel the longing.
As Bo Lozoff's book title says it -- "We're All Doing Time." As the six of us looked at today, so much depends on how we transform and are transformed by each now. A slight can become bright; pain can become gain. Doing time can become being just now. "Now" is beyond time. It is without half.
When we help one another see, say, feel, and think about the whole of it, the whole of life -- we are beginning to live now.
Unhalf yourself.
Be what we are in that shared reality between you and me, between each and all.
Unsay the narrative line that puts us away from what is wholly together.
Our own, one's own.
"What is" -- between you and me.
Beauty.
"I can't see you with me." That's what Ben said in prison conversation today. "Me" has to diminish for any "you" to be seen.
What is between me and you?
Ben came in at end. Jason, Billy, Rusty, Ben, Saskia and I read some from John O'Donohue's book Beauty. He wrote about betweenness.
We wondered what was there between us.
White stones glow in Chaste Tree River.
With the cold sky, red leaves thin out.
No rain on the mountain path
Yet greenness drips on my clothes.
- Wang Wei (699-759)
The thing about prison is the attempt always to get something on or from someone else. More intense than life on the street, but similar in culture, what imprisons us is the constant attempt to drive wedges, set apart, set up debtor relationships, call in favors owed, establish top force, use whatever you've got on someone to your advantage.
The notion of "anam cara" or soul friend, someone to open heart, mind, and soul with, is a miraculous thing in prison. In talking of the miracle you could feel the longing.
As Bo Lozoff's book title says it -- "We're All Doing Time." As the six of us looked at today, so much depends on how we transform and are transformed by each now. A slight can become bright; pain can become gain. Doing time can become being just now. "Now" is beyond time. It is without half.
When we help one another see, say, feel, and think about the whole of it, the whole of life -- we are beginning to live now.
Unhalf yourself.
Be what we are in that shared reality between you and me, between each and all.
Unsay the narrative line that puts us away from what is wholly together.
Our own, one's own.
"What is" -- between you and me.
Beauty.
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Five lobsters are sent from Maine to Ronkonkoma NY.
A man is dying. He said on phone he’d have some. They will give their lives for him and his family. He has lent his life to his family and the family of all beings. “The machine is breaking down,” he said. His body closes. We say goodbye on the phone.
No form, no sound.
Here I am;
White clouds fringing the peaks,
River cutting through the valley.
- Daito
The nature of everything in existence is to pass through.
We greet with love each one passing through.
From Maine, with love, Frank!
A man is dying. He said on phone he’d have some. They will give their lives for him and his family. He has lent his life to his family and the family of all beings. “The machine is breaking down,” he said. His body closes. We say goodbye on the phone.
No form, no sound.
Here I am;
White clouds fringing the peaks,
River cutting through the valley.
- Daito
The nature of everything in existence is to pass through.
We greet with love each one passing through.
From Maine, with love, Frank!
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Word is birdsong and baking fragrance.
If you understand the first word of Zen
You will know the last word.
The last word or the first word,
Is not a word.
- Wu-men
Two dogs snooze on mattress and floor. Earlier five of us (with cat in and out) took to stillness in chapel/zendo for 40 minutes. Candles before Buddha and Icon of Mother/Child move incense smoke through swirl of flame funnel.
Four did mindfulness walking beyond brook up Ragged Mtn stopping at tumbling falls, through wooded path, down runway to Snow Bowl parking lot, over to Hosmer Pond where two ducks nonchalance dog's arrival for brief swim.
We are mendicant monastics wandering hillside with begging souls. The mountain opens heart and drops sweet green bud, moist brown trail, birdsong, broken twig, last year's leaves, and stately quiet -- drops all this and more into our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and hands. Fingers climb and fall beads. We are filled with gifts given wanderers.
Mu-ge is stretched in front of barn when we return. The three four-legged animals line up at kitchen door like livestock at feeding time, patter in together and go to respective flopping places.
Sun is warm. Birdsong strong. Silence surrounds. Prayer hides within everything.
There's no urgency to uncover prayer and make it speak -- not the way we've tried to torture out the secrets of nature, or torture out fragments of intelligence from so-called enemies. Prayer's hiding place must be left alone.
Where prayer hides is where God cannot be seen and never will be seen. Prayer is the place from which each sound springs and to which all noise falls. The ground of prayer is not to be found by any searching we can do or science we can know. Prayer is beyond us.
Prayer is the unseeable face of God.
God is wisdom itself. We cannot see wisdom. We might be able to hear the sound of wisdom. We might be able to touch the fruits of wisdom. We might be able to see the path leading to and emerging from the residing place of wisdom. But wisdom itself? Wisdom itself is hidden in its own home ground.
To our eyes the home ground of wisdom is groundless.
All we can do is pass -- pass by it and pass it by -- open and empty as the begging bowl of the soul.
We will not know what has been dropped in that bowl. We'll not be able to evaluate its worth, or count it, or bank it, or buy anything with it. What we are given will remain as unknown to us as green is to pine-tip bud.
It is not ours to see. As God's face has no specific and exclusive location, the grace we receive from openly passing through the dwelling place of God is meant only to pass through us and fall into others only when need is present, open, and unexpected.
Beggers, they say, can't be choosers. To walk the mendicant path near and through the hidden reality of God is to follow the laura footpath of no-choice. It is to wander, unknowing and unknown, the pathless path to and from, in and out this wondrous, incomprehensible moment, this place through which we pass.
Games with God
I played, a child both wild and meek,
with God at games of hide-and-seek.
I searched in vain the usual places
and found a thousand saddened faces.
"Your God is hidden in heaven," they said;
"You'll see him only when you're dead."
How could I make them understand
God often took me by the hand?
Then as my tears began to fall
I felt his touch and heard his call,
"I never hid from you at all."
I played with God a game of tag,
his mantle flying like a flag.
I gave my God a good head start
but caught him running in my heart.
I played with God the game "I Spy,"
but lost him with my fading eye,
till playmate God in his pure kindness,
printed his image on my blindness.
(poem "Games with God," by Virginia Hamilton Adair, from Beliefs and Blasphemies, as found in The Writer's Almanac, Sunday, 6 June, 2004, with Garrison Keillor)
Singing chorus from tree branches.
Saskia bakes in kitchen.
Calling in.
If you understand the first word of Zen
You will know the last word.
The last word or the first word,
Is not a word.
- Wu-men
Two dogs snooze on mattress and floor. Earlier five of us (with cat in and out) took to stillness in chapel/zendo for 40 minutes. Candles before Buddha and Icon of Mother/Child move incense smoke through swirl of flame funnel.
Four did mindfulness walking beyond brook up Ragged Mtn stopping at tumbling falls, through wooded path, down runway to Snow Bowl parking lot, over to Hosmer Pond where two ducks nonchalance dog's arrival for brief swim.
We are mendicant monastics wandering hillside with begging souls. The mountain opens heart and drops sweet green bud, moist brown trail, birdsong, broken twig, last year's leaves, and stately quiet -- drops all this and more into our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and hands. Fingers climb and fall beads. We are filled with gifts given wanderers.
Mu-ge is stretched in front of barn when we return. The three four-legged animals line up at kitchen door like livestock at feeding time, patter in together and go to respective flopping places.
Sun is warm. Birdsong strong. Silence surrounds. Prayer hides within everything.
There's no urgency to uncover prayer and make it speak -- not the way we've tried to torture out the secrets of nature, or torture out fragments of intelligence from so-called enemies. Prayer's hiding place must be left alone.
Where prayer hides is where God cannot be seen and never will be seen. Prayer is the place from which each sound springs and to which all noise falls. The ground of prayer is not to be found by any searching we can do or science we can know. Prayer is beyond us.
Prayer is the unseeable face of God.
God is wisdom itself. We cannot see wisdom. We might be able to hear the sound of wisdom. We might be able to touch the fruits of wisdom. We might be able to see the path leading to and emerging from the residing place of wisdom. But wisdom itself? Wisdom itself is hidden in its own home ground.
To our eyes the home ground of wisdom is groundless.
All we can do is pass -- pass by it and pass it by -- open and empty as the begging bowl of the soul.
We will not know what has been dropped in that bowl. We'll not be able to evaluate its worth, or count it, or bank it, or buy anything with it. What we are given will remain as unknown to us as green is to pine-tip bud.
It is not ours to see. As God's face has no specific and exclusive location, the grace we receive from openly passing through the dwelling place of God is meant only to pass through us and fall into others only when need is present, open, and unexpected.
Beggers, they say, can't be choosers. To walk the mendicant path near and through the hidden reality of God is to follow the laura footpath of no-choice. It is to wander, unknowing and unknown, the pathless path to and from, in and out this wondrous, incomprehensible moment, this place through which we pass.
Games with God
I played, a child both wild and meek,
with God at games of hide-and-seek.
I searched in vain the usual places
and found a thousand saddened faces.
"Your God is hidden in heaven," they said;
"You'll see him only when you're dead."
How could I make them understand
God often took me by the hand?
Then as my tears began to fall
I felt his touch and heard his call,
"I never hid from you at all."
I played with God a game of tag,
his mantle flying like a flag.
I gave my God a good head start
but caught him running in my heart.
I played with God the game "I Spy,"
but lost him with my fading eye,
till playmate God in his pure kindness,
printed his image on my blindness.
(poem "Games with God," by Virginia Hamilton Adair, from Beliefs and Blasphemies, as found in The Writer's Almanac, Sunday, 6 June, 2004, with Garrison Keillor)
Singing chorus from tree branches.
Saskia bakes in kitchen.
Calling in.
Monday, June 07, 2004
Some say God is not to be thought; but what is actually felt.
Do we think that if we penetrated the mystery of the Trinity in our theological history we would change our thinking about each other and change our behavior toward each other?
And if we actually felt that which is our very life on this earth -- would anything change?
Preserve both mind and objects
This means that when we are practicing, mind remains in its place and objects remain in their place. If there is a time when the mind and the objects come in contact with each other, then the mind does not grasp at the objects and the objects do not intrude upon the mind. If neither of them contacts the other, then, naturally, deluded thoughts will not arise and there will be no obstacles to the path.
- Chinul (1205)
The following excerpts from thinking on the Trinity in the Christian tradition and of Circumincessional Interpenetration in the Buddhist tradition are examples of the path thought takes attempting to enter into and through the curious existential intuition of three-and-one.
1. What is the Trinity?
It is a doctrine formulated in the 4th century to describe the view of some leading churchmen concerning the nature and relationship of God, Jesus and the holy Spirit. It was enunciated in a series of creeds: The Nicene Creed (325 ad), The Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381 ad), and the Athanasian Creed (ca. 5th century ad). It took various forms and used multitudes of words so complex and enigmatic it is incomprehensible. Some Christians consider "trinity" simply to imply belief in God, Jesus and the holy Spirit — a broad platform all Christians can endorse. Differently, but still quite simply, the first use of this word in early Christian writings referred merely to the existence of "God, his Word, and his Wisdom" (Theophilus of Antioch, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 2, page 201). But as the doctrine evolved in the 4th-6th centuries, it became much more mysterious. It asserted that God is actually composed of three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all co-equal and co-eternal.
The Scriptural truth, on the other hand, is neither mysterious nor incomprehensible: God is one person, his son Jesus is a second person, and the holy Spirit is not a person at all. It is the spirit, power and influence of God. Jesus is subordinate to his Heavenly Father. God existed from eternity, but there was a time before the creation of his son Jesus when God was alone.
http://members.aol.com/SDBible/sdbs1.htm
2. Keiji Nishitani on Circuminsessional Interpenetration
All things that are in the world are linked together, one way or the other. Not a single thing comes into being without some relationship to every other thing. Scientific intellect thinks here in terms of natural laws of necessary causality; mythico-poetic imagination perceives an organic, living connection; philosophic reason contemplates an absolute One. But on a more essential level, a system of circuminsession has to be seen here, according to which, on the field of shunyata, all things are in a process of becoming master and servant to one another. In this system, each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself. Its being is illusion in its truth and truth in its illusion. This may sound strange the first time one hears it, but in fact it enables us for the first time to conceive of a force by virtue of which all things are gathered together and brought into relationship with one another, a force which, since ancient times, has gone by the name of 'nature' (physis).
To say that a thing is not itself means that, while continuing to be itself, it is in the home-ground of everything else. Figuratively speaking, its roots reach across into the ground of all other things and helps to hold them up and keep them standing. It serves as a constitutive element of their being so that they can be what they are, and thus provides an ingredient of their being. That a thing is itself means that all other things, while continuing to be themselves, are in the home-ground of that thing; that precisely when a thing is on its own home-ground, everything else is there too; that the roots of every other thing spread across into its home-ground. This way that everything has of being on the home-ground of everything else, without ceasing to be on its own home-ground, means that the being of each thing is held up, kept standing, and made to be what it is by means of the being of all other things; or, put the other way around, that each thing holds up the being of every other thing, keeps it standing, and makes it what it is. In a word, it means that all things 'are' in the 'world'.
To imply that when a thing is 'on its own home-ground, it must at the same time be on the home-ground of all other things' sounds absurd; but in fact it constitutes the 'essence' of the existence of things. The being of things in themselves is essentially circuminsessional. This is what we mean by speaking of beings as 'being that is in unison with emptiness', and 'being on the field of emptiness'. For this circuminsessional system is only possible on the field of emptiness or shunyata.
(adapted from Religion and Nothingness, by Prof. Keiji Nishitani, translated with an introduction by Prof. Jan van Bragt, and with a foreword by Prof. Winston L. King, 1982, Berkeley 1983)
http://www.euronet.nl/~advaya/excerpts.htm#nishitani
3. Teilhard DeChardin on the Trinity
The time comes, however, when God, speaking through the prophets or his Son, allows his influence to be openly apparent. He manifests himself as living and personal at once one and three. Faith comes by hearing. At that moment, if the soul holds to its faith, its hitherto vague desires embody themselves around the new truth. Accompanying faith in the revealed dogma, it feels coming down into it a clearly defined, conscious need for that dogma. All revealed truth, accordingly, including even the distant Trinity, is seen by the soul henceforth to be indispensable to its beatification. … …It is, therefore, a mistake to distinguish in man two different attractions that influence him: one, towards a hypothetical natural end of the cosmos, and the other towards the supernatural end that awaits us in the presence of God. There is only one single centre in the universe; it is at once natural and supernatural; it impels the whole of creation along one and the same line, first towards the fullest development of consciousness, and later toward the higher degree of holiness: In other words towards Christ Jesus, personal and cosmic.
(DeChardin Teilhard 1973. The Prayer of the Universe; In the Form of Christ pages 23 & 24. Paras. 3,4 & 5.)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/dechardin.html
4. Alan Watts on the Holy Trinity
Worship is the action in which man is drawn into the vortex of love which revolves eternally between the Persons of the Trinity. In the Mass, the congregation becomes God the Son speaking to the Father with the words of the Spirit, and therefore the saying and singing of these words should forbid the intrusion of personal idiosyncrasies. This is why the Gregorian chant has been the most perfect vehicle for the Western liturgy, since it is entirely free of military bombast and personalized sentimentality. It is pre-eminently the music of contemplation, and of a majestic serenity that has no need for pomp. Yet even in its most triumphant moods it is profoundly and marvelously sad, because it is the music of God in exile, and thus of the human ego possessed with a longing which is as deep as it is undefined.
(Watts Alan (1964). Beyond Theology; The Art of Godmanship. Page 164)
For as soon as religion begins to think about the one God existing prior to the universe, it begins to slip into monism. Here is the one God all by himself with no reality other than his own essence. Is not this the purest monism? If God becomes Love and Consciousness only by finding the necessary object for loving and knowing in his created universe, we are making the universe necessary to God, and is not this the purest pantheism? The idea of the Trinity saves Christianity from the monistic predicament. It gives God significance even prior to the universe, because he always contains both the subject and the object of his own love, the everlasting I-Thou relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit of love. Thus the Trinity comes as close as the language of religion permits to the doctrine of non-duality, for the One is seen as including Three, the Unity as not opposed to diversity.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Pages 69 & 70)
This view of the function of evil in the finite order is, however, profoundly consistent with such truly fundamental Christian dogmas as the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity. The God-man Christ on the cross is without doubt our most eloquent religious analogy of the infinite as the experiencer of all human pain and evil. And if the universe is a finite image of the Trinity, it must express, in the successive order of time, both the union of the Son with the Father and the distinction of the Son from the Father—the latter as the fall of man from God in Adam, and the former as the union of man with God in Christ, the Second Adam. It throws light, too, on the great ‘dark saying’ of Jesus, ‘It needs be that offences must come, but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh’, a saying that calls to mind the problematic role of Judas, whose betrayal of his Master precipitated the Redemptive Sacrifice.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 116)
For Berdyaev, as for the Christian mind in general, there can be no significant relation between man and God which is not free on both sides, and where there is not an ontological distinction between the two. While he has seen that pure monotheism is substantially monism, and that the significance of God can only be vindicated by the doctrine of the Trinity, he does not apply the logic of the relations between the Persons of the trinity to the relation between God and man. If man and God cannot have a true relation without the ontological distinction, and without a freedom of man distinct from the freedom of God, it must follow that a true and significant relation is impossible between the persons of the Trinity. ‘The mystery of the unity between two persons finds its solution in the ......... The kingdom of Love in freedom is the kingdom of the Trinity. The experience of freedom and its inherent tragedy bring us to the Trinity. . . . Absolute monotheism is always despotic, for it regards God as an absolute monarch and leaves no place for freedom. Only the religion of God in Three Persons succeeds in definitely getting past this monarchist or imperialist conception of God by revealing the life of God as a divine Trinity and thus vindicating liberty." But if the idea of the Trinity vindicates liberty within God, if the fact that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all God does not deprive them of significance and freedom, there is likewise no deprivation if man’s Self and the infinite, atma and Brahma, are also distinct and yet one. For the same reason, as has been shown, there is also no monarchist or imperialist tyranny of God over the human puppet.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page118)
That this process may be understandable to finite thought, the supreme Self must be regarded under two aspects. To one aspect, both phases are simultaneous because the eternal and omniscient viewpoint is never actually lost; the infinite remains infinite however much it may identify itself with the finite. To the other aspect the phases are successive, because, while remaining infinite, the Self becomes voluntarily subject to space and time. These two aspects are analogous to the Father and the Son in the doctrine of the Trinity. The first phase, involution, manifests in finite form the Son’s distinction from the Father; the second, evolution, manifests his union with the Father. The infinite, in the act of manifesting and identifying itself with the finite, is the formative logos, God the Son, whose image is the entire finite order considered simultaneously, 'sub specie aeternitalts'. Although we speak of the infinite as having two aspects, one in eternity and the other in time and space, one omniscient and the other taking finite viewpoints, this is simply a concession to the inherent dualism of human thought. In reality the infinite remains undivided, but the idea of the double aspect is a symbol for its non-duality, its ability to be at once infinite and finite, itself and another, one and many, without the slightest contradiction.’
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 142)
It is for this reason that Catholic doctrine has always maintained that true prayer is not simply man relating himself to God, but rather something which God is performing in and through man. Prayer has its origin, not in the soul, but in the indwelling Holy Spirit, and thus prayer is man’s participation in the interior life of the Holy Trinity—even in its most stumbling and rudimentary form.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 173)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/trinitywatts2.html
5. Thomas Merton on the Holy Trinity
Furthermore it is highly significant that a Japanese thinker schooled in Zen should be so open to what is basically the most obscure and difficult mystery of Christian theology: the dogma of the Trinity and the mission of the Divine Persons in the Christian and in the Church. This would seem to indicate that the real area for investigation of analogies and correspondences between Christianity and Zen might after all be theology rather than psychology or asceticism. At least theology is not excluded, but it must be theology as experienced in Christian contemplation, not the speculative theology of textbooks and disputations.
(Merton T. 1968 Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Page 58)
St. Paul compares this knowledge of God, in the Spirit, to the subjective knowledge that a man has of himself. Just as no one can know my inner self except my own "spirit," so no one can know God except God’s Spirit; yet this Holy Spirit is given to us, in such a way that God knows Himself in us, and this experience is utterly real, though it cannot be communicated in terms understandable to those who do not share it. (See I Cor. 2:7-15.) Consequently, St. Paul concludes, "we have the mind of Christ." (I Cor. 2:16)… …We cannot push our investigation further here, but it is significant that Suzuki, reading the following lines from Eckhart (which are perfectly orthodox and traditional Catholic theology), said they were "the same as Prajna intuition." (D.T. Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p.40; the quotation from C. de B. Evans’ translation of Eckhart, London, 1924, p. 147) "In giving us His love God has given us the Holy Ghost so that we can love Him with the love wherewith He loves Himself ." The Son Who, in us, loves the Father, in the Spirit, is translated thus by Suzuki into Zen terms: "one mirror reflecting another with no shadow between them." (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 4!)
(Merton T. 1968. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. pages 56 & 57)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/tmerton.html
Beyond the barn, cooing of Mourning Dove. Fire in middle-room fireplace after mid-day brunch. Raw chill day. Sando on mattress in upstairs study. Mu-ge pulling stick-string toy in hallway. Cesco not far from hearth.
Saskia told the story last evening of sitting next to Methodist man at ordination of Catholic deacons. At time of eucherist she left to receive communion, the man stayed where he sat. Later he told her he was a Minister. that he'd been the last professor of the final course these candidates took prior to their special day. Yet, while he was there to honor them, he knew he was not invited to the table, he was not permitted to receive communion in the Catholic ceremony. He told the story with simple narrative, She heard the story with attentive presence.
What use the thought of communion if the feeling is exclusion?
The real ordination took place off to the side. It was the trinity of the man, Saskia, and the inside/outside story they shaed with each other.
God is not to be thought. God is what is felt.
Ordinary. Today. Here. And now.
Feeling and telling communion.
One with another.
Do we think that if we penetrated the mystery of the Trinity in our theological history we would change our thinking about each other and change our behavior toward each other?
And if we actually felt that which is our very life on this earth -- would anything change?
Preserve both mind and objects
This means that when we are practicing, mind remains in its place and objects remain in their place. If there is a time when the mind and the objects come in contact with each other, then the mind does not grasp at the objects and the objects do not intrude upon the mind. If neither of them contacts the other, then, naturally, deluded thoughts will not arise and there will be no obstacles to the path.
- Chinul (1205)
The following excerpts from thinking on the Trinity in the Christian tradition and of Circumincessional Interpenetration in the Buddhist tradition are examples of the path thought takes attempting to enter into and through the curious existential intuition of three-and-one.
1. What is the Trinity?
It is a doctrine formulated in the 4th century to describe the view of some leading churchmen concerning the nature and relationship of God, Jesus and the holy Spirit. It was enunciated in a series of creeds: The Nicene Creed (325 ad), The Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381 ad), and the Athanasian Creed (ca. 5th century ad). It took various forms and used multitudes of words so complex and enigmatic it is incomprehensible. Some Christians consider "trinity" simply to imply belief in God, Jesus and the holy Spirit — a broad platform all Christians can endorse. Differently, but still quite simply, the first use of this word in early Christian writings referred merely to the existence of "God, his Word, and his Wisdom" (Theophilus of Antioch, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 2, page 201). But as the doctrine evolved in the 4th-6th centuries, it became much more mysterious. It asserted that God is actually composed of three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all co-equal and co-eternal.
The Scriptural truth, on the other hand, is neither mysterious nor incomprehensible: God is one person, his son Jesus is a second person, and the holy Spirit is not a person at all. It is the spirit, power and influence of God. Jesus is subordinate to his Heavenly Father. God existed from eternity, but there was a time before the creation of his son Jesus when God was alone.
http://members.aol.com/SDBible/sdbs1.htm
2. Keiji Nishitani on Circuminsessional Interpenetration
All things that are in the world are linked together, one way or the other. Not a single thing comes into being without some relationship to every other thing. Scientific intellect thinks here in terms of natural laws of necessary causality; mythico-poetic imagination perceives an organic, living connection; philosophic reason contemplates an absolute One. But on a more essential level, a system of circuminsession has to be seen here, according to which, on the field of shunyata, all things are in a process of becoming master and servant to one another. In this system, each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself. Its being is illusion in its truth and truth in its illusion. This may sound strange the first time one hears it, but in fact it enables us for the first time to conceive of a force by virtue of which all things are gathered together and brought into relationship with one another, a force which, since ancient times, has gone by the name of 'nature' (physis).
To say that a thing is not itself means that, while continuing to be itself, it is in the home-ground of everything else. Figuratively speaking, its roots reach across into the ground of all other things and helps to hold them up and keep them standing. It serves as a constitutive element of their being so that they can be what they are, and thus provides an ingredient of their being. That a thing is itself means that all other things, while continuing to be themselves, are in the home-ground of that thing; that precisely when a thing is on its own home-ground, everything else is there too; that the roots of every other thing spread across into its home-ground. This way that everything has of being on the home-ground of everything else, without ceasing to be on its own home-ground, means that the being of each thing is held up, kept standing, and made to be what it is by means of the being of all other things; or, put the other way around, that each thing holds up the being of every other thing, keeps it standing, and makes it what it is. In a word, it means that all things 'are' in the 'world'.
To imply that when a thing is 'on its own home-ground, it must at the same time be on the home-ground of all other things' sounds absurd; but in fact it constitutes the 'essence' of the existence of things. The being of things in themselves is essentially circuminsessional. This is what we mean by speaking of beings as 'being that is in unison with emptiness', and 'being on the field of emptiness'. For this circuminsessional system is only possible on the field of emptiness or shunyata.
(adapted from Religion and Nothingness, by Prof. Keiji Nishitani, translated with an introduction by Prof. Jan van Bragt, and with a foreword by Prof. Winston L. King, 1982, Berkeley 1983)
http://www.euronet.nl/~advaya/excerpts.htm#nishitani
3. Teilhard DeChardin on the Trinity
The time comes, however, when God, speaking through the prophets or his Son, allows his influence to be openly apparent. He manifests himself as living and personal at once one and three. Faith comes by hearing. At that moment, if the soul holds to its faith, its hitherto vague desires embody themselves around the new truth. Accompanying faith in the revealed dogma, it feels coming down into it a clearly defined, conscious need for that dogma. All revealed truth, accordingly, including even the distant Trinity, is seen by the soul henceforth to be indispensable to its beatification. … …It is, therefore, a mistake to distinguish in man two different attractions that influence him: one, towards a hypothetical natural end of the cosmos, and the other towards the supernatural end that awaits us in the presence of God. There is only one single centre in the universe; it is at once natural and supernatural; it impels the whole of creation along one and the same line, first towards the fullest development of consciousness, and later toward the higher degree of holiness: In other words towards Christ Jesus, personal and cosmic.
(DeChardin Teilhard 1973. The Prayer of the Universe; In the Form of Christ pages 23 & 24. Paras. 3,4 & 5.)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/dechardin.html
4. Alan Watts on the Holy Trinity
Worship is the action in which man is drawn into the vortex of love which revolves eternally between the Persons of the Trinity. In the Mass, the congregation becomes God the Son speaking to the Father with the words of the Spirit, and therefore the saying and singing of these words should forbid the intrusion of personal idiosyncrasies. This is why the Gregorian chant has been the most perfect vehicle for the Western liturgy, since it is entirely free of military bombast and personalized sentimentality. It is pre-eminently the music of contemplation, and of a majestic serenity that has no need for pomp. Yet even in its most triumphant moods it is profoundly and marvelously sad, because it is the music of God in exile, and thus of the human ego possessed with a longing which is as deep as it is undefined.
(Watts Alan (1964). Beyond Theology; The Art of Godmanship. Page 164)
For as soon as religion begins to think about the one God existing prior to the universe, it begins to slip into monism. Here is the one God all by himself with no reality other than his own essence. Is not this the purest monism? If God becomes Love and Consciousness only by finding the necessary object for loving and knowing in his created universe, we are making the universe necessary to God, and is not this the purest pantheism? The idea of the Trinity saves Christianity from the monistic predicament. It gives God significance even prior to the universe, because he always contains both the subject and the object of his own love, the everlasting I-Thou relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit of love. Thus the Trinity comes as close as the language of religion permits to the doctrine of non-duality, for the One is seen as including Three, the Unity as not opposed to diversity.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Pages 69 & 70)
This view of the function of evil in the finite order is, however, profoundly consistent with such truly fundamental Christian dogmas as the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity. The God-man Christ on the cross is without doubt our most eloquent religious analogy of the infinite as the experiencer of all human pain and evil. And if the universe is a finite image of the Trinity, it must express, in the successive order of time, both the union of the Son with the Father and the distinction of the Son from the Father—the latter as the fall of man from God in Adam, and the former as the union of man with God in Christ, the Second Adam. It throws light, too, on the great ‘dark saying’ of Jesus, ‘It needs be that offences must come, but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh’, a saying that calls to mind the problematic role of Judas, whose betrayal of his Master precipitated the Redemptive Sacrifice.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 116)
For Berdyaev, as for the Christian mind in general, there can be no significant relation between man and God which is not free on both sides, and where there is not an ontological distinction between the two. While he has seen that pure monotheism is substantially monism, and that the significance of God can only be vindicated by the doctrine of the Trinity, he does not apply the logic of the relations between the Persons of the trinity to the relation between God and man. If man and God cannot have a true relation without the ontological distinction, and without a freedom of man distinct from the freedom of God, it must follow that a true and significant relation is impossible between the persons of the Trinity. ‘The mystery of the unity between two persons finds its solution in the ......... The kingdom of Love in freedom is the kingdom of the Trinity. The experience of freedom and its inherent tragedy bring us to the Trinity. . . . Absolute monotheism is always despotic, for it regards God as an absolute monarch and leaves no place for freedom. Only the religion of God in Three Persons succeeds in definitely getting past this monarchist or imperialist conception of God by revealing the life of God as a divine Trinity and thus vindicating liberty." But if the idea of the Trinity vindicates liberty within God, if the fact that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all God does not deprive them of significance and freedom, there is likewise no deprivation if man’s Self and the infinite, atma and Brahma, are also distinct and yet one. For the same reason, as has been shown, there is also no monarchist or imperialist tyranny of God over the human puppet.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page118)
That this process may be understandable to finite thought, the supreme Self must be regarded under two aspects. To one aspect, both phases are simultaneous because the eternal and omniscient viewpoint is never actually lost; the infinite remains infinite however much it may identify itself with the finite. To the other aspect the phases are successive, because, while remaining infinite, the Self becomes voluntarily subject to space and time. These two aspects are analogous to the Father and the Son in the doctrine of the Trinity. The first phase, involution, manifests in finite form the Son’s distinction from the Father; the second, evolution, manifests his union with the Father. The infinite, in the act of manifesting and identifying itself with the finite, is the formative logos, God the Son, whose image is the entire finite order considered simultaneously, 'sub specie aeternitalts'. Although we speak of the infinite as having two aspects, one in eternity and the other in time and space, one omniscient and the other taking finite viewpoints, this is simply a concession to the inherent dualism of human thought. In reality the infinite remains undivided, but the idea of the double aspect is a symbol for its non-duality, its ability to be at once infinite and finite, itself and another, one and many, without the slightest contradiction.’
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 142)
It is for this reason that Catholic doctrine has always maintained that true prayer is not simply man relating himself to God, but rather something which God is performing in and through man. Prayer has its origin, not in the soul, but in the indwelling Holy Spirit, and thus prayer is man’s participation in the interior life of the Holy Trinity—even in its most stumbling and rudimentary form.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 173)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/trinitywatts2.html
5. Thomas Merton on the Holy Trinity
Furthermore it is highly significant that a Japanese thinker schooled in Zen should be so open to what is basically the most obscure and difficult mystery of Christian theology: the dogma of the Trinity and the mission of the Divine Persons in the Christian and in the Church. This would seem to indicate that the real area for investigation of analogies and correspondences between Christianity and Zen might after all be theology rather than psychology or asceticism. At least theology is not excluded, but it must be theology as experienced in Christian contemplation, not the speculative theology of textbooks and disputations.
(Merton T. 1968 Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Page 58)
St. Paul compares this knowledge of God, in the Spirit, to the subjective knowledge that a man has of himself. Just as no one can know my inner self except my own "spirit," so no one can know God except God’s Spirit; yet this Holy Spirit is given to us, in such a way that God knows Himself in us, and this experience is utterly real, though it cannot be communicated in terms understandable to those who do not share it. (See I Cor. 2:7-15.) Consequently, St. Paul concludes, "we have the mind of Christ." (I Cor. 2:16)… …We cannot push our investigation further here, but it is significant that Suzuki, reading the following lines from Eckhart (which are perfectly orthodox and traditional Catholic theology), said they were "the same as Prajna intuition." (D.T. Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p.40; the quotation from C. de B. Evans’ translation of Eckhart, London, 1924, p. 147) "In giving us His love God has given us the Holy Ghost so that we can love Him with the love wherewith He loves Himself ." The Son Who, in us, loves the Father, in the Spirit, is translated thus by Suzuki into Zen terms: "one mirror reflecting another with no shadow between them." (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 4!)
(Merton T. 1968. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. pages 56 & 57)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/tmerton.html
Beyond the barn, cooing of Mourning Dove. Fire in middle-room fireplace after mid-day brunch. Raw chill day. Sando on mattress in upstairs study. Mu-ge pulling stick-string toy in hallway. Cesco not far from hearth.
Saskia told the story last evening of sitting next to Methodist man at ordination of Catholic deacons. At time of eucherist she left to receive communion, the man stayed where he sat. Later he told her he was a Minister. that he'd been the last professor of the final course these candidates took prior to their special day. Yet, while he was there to honor them, he knew he was not invited to the table, he was not permitted to receive communion in the Catholic ceremony. He told the story with simple narrative, She heard the story with attentive presence.
What use the thought of communion if the feeling is exclusion?
The real ordination took place off to the side. It was the trinity of the man, Saskia, and the inside/outside story they shaed with each other.
God is not to be thought. God is what is felt.
Ordinary. Today. Here. And now.
Feeling and telling communion.
One with another.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Steady awareness helps.
Jory says he dreamt of Kapleau Roshi. Even in his fading from view with death, he assists a former student. Delia is a threaded needle moving through the many churches in the area, sewing gem of awareness to each Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist and Buddhist celebration. Saskia returns from Bob C's ordination to deaconate at Catholic cathedral in Portland.
What we call God is in attendance everywhere. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) said, "God is like an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,"
All day long people repeat the
Word prajna aloud,
But do not know their
Self-natured prajna.
They are like one who
Cannot satisfy their hunger
By only talking about eating.
Just talking of voidness
Will not enable one to
Perceive one's nature for
Myriads of eons, and there
Will be no advantage in the end.
- Altar Sutra
June 6 -- the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's death by assassination at age 42 in 1968, feels more moving than the death at 93 of former president Ronald Reagan. We are often struck by what might have been. The 60th anniversary of D-Day Normandy Invasion is celebrated by world leaders and surviving civilian and military personnel. War is forever an open parenthesis, murder a sorrow without surcease, and dementia by alzheimer's a long irretrievable goodbye.
We think things should be other than they are. We want things to be other than they are. But if practice and steady awareness show us anything, it is that things are exactly what they are. Further -- about this "other" we want things and people to be? -- the paradoxically tough but tender realization is that there is no other. Everything is what it is -- and we are invited in particular to that embodying realization.
"The only field in which this [oneness] is possible is the field of sunyata [emptiness] which can have its circumference nowhere and its center everywhere. Only on the field of sunyata can the totality of things, each of which is absolutely unique and an absolute center of all things, at the same time be gathered into one."
(-- Keiji Nishitani, 1900-1990, in Religion and Nothingness, c.1983.)
Forms change. Old forms deteriorate. Surprising replacement forms arise. Some forms continue, reform, and endure. It is the emptiness that permeates and sustains form that seems ever unchanging. Emptiness centers the spinning world of changing forms on an axis of transparency.
In On Cause, Principle, and Unity, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) wrote:
This entire globe, this star, not being subject to death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts. There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the centre of things.
We are incessantly related.
One and one and one -- some say make three. Today is feast of Trinity in Christian metaphor.
But one and one and one really reveal the one that each is, incessantly relative each to each, unendingly between and center to the revelation of each and all.
Who can begin to grasp and embody this center without periphery?
Steady awareness helps.
Let service begin.
With us.
Jory says he dreamt of Kapleau Roshi. Even in his fading from view with death, he assists a former student. Delia is a threaded needle moving through the many churches in the area, sewing gem of awareness to each Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist and Buddhist celebration. Saskia returns from Bob C's ordination to deaconate at Catholic cathedral in Portland.
What we call God is in attendance everywhere. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) said, "God is like an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,"
All day long people repeat the
Word prajna aloud,
But do not know their
Self-natured prajna.
They are like one who
Cannot satisfy their hunger
By only talking about eating.
Just talking of voidness
Will not enable one to
Perceive one's nature for
Myriads of eons, and there
Will be no advantage in the end.
- Altar Sutra
June 6 -- the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's death by assassination at age 42 in 1968, feels more moving than the death at 93 of former president Ronald Reagan. We are often struck by what might have been. The 60th anniversary of D-Day Normandy Invasion is celebrated by world leaders and surviving civilian and military personnel. War is forever an open parenthesis, murder a sorrow without surcease, and dementia by alzheimer's a long irretrievable goodbye.
We think things should be other than they are. We want things to be other than they are. But if practice and steady awareness show us anything, it is that things are exactly what they are. Further -- about this "other" we want things and people to be? -- the paradoxically tough but tender realization is that there is no other. Everything is what it is -- and we are invited in particular to that embodying realization.
"The only field in which this [oneness] is possible is the field of sunyata [emptiness] which can have its circumference nowhere and its center everywhere. Only on the field of sunyata can the totality of things, each of which is absolutely unique and an absolute center of all things, at the same time be gathered into one."
(-- Keiji Nishitani, 1900-1990, in Religion and Nothingness, c.1983.)
Forms change. Old forms deteriorate. Surprising replacement forms arise. Some forms continue, reform, and endure. It is the emptiness that permeates and sustains form that seems ever unchanging. Emptiness centers the spinning world of changing forms on an axis of transparency.
In On Cause, Principle, and Unity, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) wrote:
This entire globe, this star, not being subject to death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts. There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the centre of things.
We are incessantly related.
One and one and one -- some say make three. Today is feast of Trinity in Christian metaphor.
But one and one and one really reveal the one that each is, incessantly relative each to each, unendingly between and center to the revelation of each and all.
Who can begin to grasp and embody this center without periphery?
Steady awareness helps.
Let service begin.
With us.
Saturday, June 05, 2004
What is passing?
Sando has taken to throwing-up. There's a sense of "uh-oh." There are tears on Saskia's face. Everywhere, what is passing is life from form to form, emptiness to emptiness.
It is our lot in life to pass through life's forms and emptiness.
Truth’s naked radiance,
Cut off from the sense and the world,
Shines by itself.
No words for it.
- Pai-chang (720-814)
In trees this cool morning -- birdsong. Blue jay lights on branch. Chickadee and finch at feeder. Chatter of squirrel complaining of something in its way this morning.
I loved you for your beauty
but that doesn't make a fool of me:
you were in it for your beauty too
and I loved you for your body
there's a voice that sounds like God to me
declaring, declaring, declaring that your body's really you
And I loved you when our love was blessed
and I love you now there's nothing left
but sorrow and a sense of overtime
and I missed you since the place got wrecked
And I just don't care what happens next
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's CLOSING TIME
(--from CLOSING TIME Lyrics, Artist(Band):Leonard Cohen)
What is between freedom and death?
Is the reason so few surrender into the life of God that there is a requirement asked which we find confusing? The requirement is that we let go of all we know, fall from every image of self-identity, and pass through the unending-between that reduces each either/or to God's compassionate yet whimsical face flashing million-fold likenesses all smiling with loving, tender, and empathic readiness for our consternating and tentative approach.
This unending-between, where we turn and turn looking into and through mirror images of one and all, is at first dizzying, and then mystifying, finally mere seeing what is there.
Jesus said to his disciples: "I have much more to tell you, but you cannot
bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to
all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears,
and will declare to you the things that are coming.
(from John 16:12-13)
What the Spirit hears is echoing and resounding in the morning prayerful drone and whisper of the innumerable everything permeating each distinct form making its way through existence.
Sit or stand in the choir of green leaf, rolling tire, flying bird, crawling insect, barking dog, barn-side plank, piles of plates with crumbs and spoons, worried thoughts, appreciative light, and tumbling water down shade-sweet brook.
We are what we are where we are.
Where all this is fine for now.
For, what is this? And, what is now? Just, we are here.
Sando still bounds sfter Saskia and groans when changing position on floor. Such a sweet companion!
Who cares what happens next?
Sando has taken to throwing-up. There's a sense of "uh-oh." There are tears on Saskia's face. Everywhere, what is passing is life from form to form, emptiness to emptiness.
It is our lot in life to pass through life's forms and emptiness.
Truth’s naked radiance,
Cut off from the sense and the world,
Shines by itself.
No words for it.
- Pai-chang (720-814)
In trees this cool morning -- birdsong. Blue jay lights on branch. Chickadee and finch at feeder. Chatter of squirrel complaining of something in its way this morning.
I loved you for your beauty
but that doesn't make a fool of me:
you were in it for your beauty too
and I loved you for your body
there's a voice that sounds like God to me
declaring, declaring, declaring that your body's really you
And I loved you when our love was blessed
and I love you now there's nothing left
but sorrow and a sense of overtime
and I missed you since the place got wrecked
And I just don't care what happens next
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's CLOSING TIME
(--from CLOSING TIME Lyrics, Artist(Band):Leonard Cohen)
What is between freedom and death?
Is the reason so few surrender into the life of God that there is a requirement asked which we find confusing? The requirement is that we let go of all we know, fall from every image of self-identity, and pass through the unending-between that reduces each either/or to God's compassionate yet whimsical face flashing million-fold likenesses all smiling with loving, tender, and empathic readiness for our consternating and tentative approach.
This unending-between, where we turn and turn looking into and through mirror images of one and all, is at first dizzying, and then mystifying, finally mere seeing what is there.
Jesus said to his disciples: "I have much more to tell you, but you cannot
bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to
all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears,
and will declare to you the things that are coming.
(from John 16:12-13)
What the Spirit hears is echoing and resounding in the morning prayerful drone and whisper of the innumerable everything permeating each distinct form making its way through existence.
Sit or stand in the choir of green leaf, rolling tire, flying bird, crawling insect, barking dog, barn-side plank, piles of plates with crumbs and spoons, worried thoughts, appreciative light, and tumbling water down shade-sweet brook.
We are what we are where we are.
Where all this is fine for now.
For, what is this? And, what is now? Just, we are here.
Sando still bounds sfter Saskia and groans when changing position on floor. Such a sweet companion!
Who cares what happens next?
Friday, June 04, 2004
Something empties out.
It feels like whatever is not yet emptiness is falling away.
In an article about hermits, the following:
"One of our newsletter contributors described hermits as 'sacristans of emptiness,' " Karen Fredette said. "Hermits stay in the present moment, which is eternal because it is neither past nor future, dwelling in the temple of God's presence, letting everything flow from and back into the source. Eremites strip life to its essentials and live deliberately. They have much to say to an overactive and over-social world."
(Sacristans of emptiness - Religious Life, National Catholic Reporter, Feb 27, 2004 by Rich Heffern)
Rosina, Lloyd, Richard, Tommy, Pia, Michael, Saskia, Mike, Daniel, and I read from The Heart of Islam at Friday Evening Conversation. We spoke about the tension between secularism and religion in America and Middle East. About "God willing" and free will. It was, and is, a captivating conversation.
Efface both mind and objects.
This means that when we are practicing, we initially make the external sense-objects void and calm and then relax the internal--the mind. Since internal and external are both calmed, where can delusion arise? As Kuan-ch'I said, "In the ten directions there are no walls; at the four sides there are no gates. All is innocent, pure and undefiled."
- Chinul (1205)
Afterwards, John and Tommy laughed on planked deck overlooking harbor sunset. Boats held by mooring and dock lines obeyed securing tethers.
To this discourse, we conclude, being appears as the pure fullness of the permanent, gathered within it, untouched by unrest and change. Even today it is customary in describing the beginning of Western philosophy to oppose the doctrine of Heraclitus to this doctrine of Parmenides. A much-quoted saying is attributed to Heraclitus: panta rhei, everything is in flux. Accordingly there is no being. Everything "is" becoming.
(p.82, in An Introduction to Metaphysics, by Martin Heidegger)
These days, everything is in flux. Lines are slack and uncleted. Within and around it feels like something set adrift in an unfamiliar tide. At any second coming aground threatens. Or perhaps promises.
God willing.
We're becoming.
Unsettled.
Here.
It feels like whatever is not yet emptiness is falling away.
In an article about hermits, the following:
"One of our newsletter contributors described hermits as 'sacristans of emptiness,' " Karen Fredette said. "Hermits stay in the present moment, which is eternal because it is neither past nor future, dwelling in the temple of God's presence, letting everything flow from and back into the source. Eremites strip life to its essentials and live deliberately. They have much to say to an overactive and over-social world."
(Sacristans of emptiness - Religious Life, National Catholic Reporter, Feb 27, 2004 by Rich Heffern)
Rosina, Lloyd, Richard, Tommy, Pia, Michael, Saskia, Mike, Daniel, and I read from The Heart of Islam at Friday Evening Conversation. We spoke about the tension between secularism and religion in America and Middle East. About "God willing" and free will. It was, and is, a captivating conversation.
Efface both mind and objects.
This means that when we are practicing, we initially make the external sense-objects void and calm and then relax the internal--the mind. Since internal and external are both calmed, where can delusion arise? As Kuan-ch'I said, "In the ten directions there are no walls; at the four sides there are no gates. All is innocent, pure and undefiled."
- Chinul (1205)
Afterwards, John and Tommy laughed on planked deck overlooking harbor sunset. Boats held by mooring and dock lines obeyed securing tethers.
To this discourse, we conclude, being appears as the pure fullness of the permanent, gathered within it, untouched by unrest and change. Even today it is customary in describing the beginning of Western philosophy to oppose the doctrine of Heraclitus to this doctrine of Parmenides. A much-quoted saying is attributed to Heraclitus: panta rhei, everything is in flux. Accordingly there is no being. Everything "is" becoming.
(p.82, in An Introduction to Metaphysics, by Martin Heidegger)
These days, everything is in flux. Lines are slack and uncleted. Within and around it feels like something set adrift in an unfamiliar tide. At any second coming aground threatens. Or perhaps promises.
God willing.
We're becoming.
Unsettled.
Here.
Thursday, June 03, 2004
I am confused and not hearing particularly well.
I imagined I heard the sound of a different world.
If at ground is the mother, say earth, that nurtures us in life, wouldn't we honor and care for her?
If all around us is the father, say heaven, that inspires us through life, wouldn't we see and be grateful for him?
If within and without us is the holy breath-sound, say spirit/word, that resonates each of us with one another, wouldn't we listen to it?
What makes an authentic monk? I think clarity of mind and sight, simplicity of life and gratitude in the heart. In short, what Brother David calls a "listening heart."
It takes self-knowledge and freedom from projection to render the heart a listening one. The monk listens.
(p.xi from Introduction by Matthew Fox to A Listening Heart, The Spirituality of Sacred Sensuousness, book by Brother David Steindl-Rast, c. 1983, 1999)
I have always longed to be what I am where I am. I've often forgotten. I continue to forget. At times I sit and stare at nothing in particular, lost in stillness, often despairing the impossible complexity of human social character and financial exchange economics.
In short, poverty, and avowed reliance on gift -- the courage to submit to the unsuspecting grace and kindness of unidentified passersby -- is an odd way to live in the world today.
The daily discipline of listening and responding to meaning is called obedience. This concept of obedience is far more comprehensive than the narrow notion of obedience as doing-what-you-are-told-to-do. Obedience in the full sense is the process of attuning the heart to the simple call contained in the complexity of a given situation. The only alternative is absurdity. Ab-surdus literally means absolutely deaf. If I call a situation absurd I admit that I am deaf to its meaning. I admit implicitly that I must become ab-audiens -- thoroughly listening, obedient. I must give my ear, give myself, so fully to the word that reaches me that it will send me. Being sent by the word, I will be obedient to my mission. Thus by doing the truth lovingly, not by analyzing it, I will begin to understand.
(Pp 2-3, Steindl-Rast)
It seems vast majorities of the world live by recompense and earned reward. Whole systems of world finance and religion operate under that rubric. Pay the price, earn rewards, be ransomed by savior, yield dividends on investment, and bank on what you deserve.
Lesser minorities look to grace, graciousness, and grateful acceptance of gift. Those that do this are not merely a lower-class tier of deprived unfortunates. Some are willing participants in the promise that all are loved, all are equal, and all are in one another's care.
What is my confusion?
Isn't earth, heaven, and spirit/word -- (sacred compassion, stillness itself, and true silence/creative sound) -- my true home?
Lao-tzu said, "The greatest revelation is stillness."
Dare I dwell there?
Obediently.
Within each.
Hermitage.
I imagined I heard the sound of a different world.
If at ground is the mother, say earth, that nurtures us in life, wouldn't we honor and care for her?
If all around us is the father, say heaven, that inspires us through life, wouldn't we see and be grateful for him?
If within and without us is the holy breath-sound, say spirit/word, that resonates each of us with one another, wouldn't we listen to it?
What makes an authentic monk? I think clarity of mind and sight, simplicity of life and gratitude in the heart. In short, what Brother David calls a "listening heart."
It takes self-knowledge and freedom from projection to render the heart a listening one. The monk listens.
(p.xi from Introduction by Matthew Fox to A Listening Heart, The Spirituality of Sacred Sensuousness, book by Brother David Steindl-Rast, c. 1983, 1999)
I have always longed to be what I am where I am. I've often forgotten. I continue to forget. At times I sit and stare at nothing in particular, lost in stillness, often despairing the impossible complexity of human social character and financial exchange economics.
In short, poverty, and avowed reliance on gift -- the courage to submit to the unsuspecting grace and kindness of unidentified passersby -- is an odd way to live in the world today.
The daily discipline of listening and responding to meaning is called obedience. This concept of obedience is far more comprehensive than the narrow notion of obedience as doing-what-you-are-told-to-do. Obedience in the full sense is the process of attuning the heart to the simple call contained in the complexity of a given situation. The only alternative is absurdity. Ab-surdus literally means absolutely deaf. If I call a situation absurd I admit that I am deaf to its meaning. I admit implicitly that I must become ab-audiens -- thoroughly listening, obedient. I must give my ear, give myself, so fully to the word that reaches me that it will send me. Being sent by the word, I will be obedient to my mission. Thus by doing the truth lovingly, not by analyzing it, I will begin to understand.
(Pp 2-3, Steindl-Rast)
It seems vast majorities of the world live by recompense and earned reward. Whole systems of world finance and religion operate under that rubric. Pay the price, earn rewards, be ransomed by savior, yield dividends on investment, and bank on what you deserve.
Lesser minorities look to grace, graciousness, and grateful acceptance of gift. Those that do this are not merely a lower-class tier of deprived unfortunates. Some are willing participants in the promise that all are loved, all are equal, and all are in one another's care.
What is my confusion?
Isn't earth, heaven, and spirit/word -- (sacred compassion, stillness itself, and true silence/creative sound) -- my true home?
Lao-tzu said, "The greatest revelation is stillness."
Dare I dwell there?
Obediently.
Within each.
Hermitage.
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