what is questioning this

God is speaking here.

Listen carefully.

I am as God is creating me.

The Wise Ones of Old

The wise ones of old had subtle wisdom
And depth of understanding,
So profound that they could not be understood.
Because they could not be understood,
I can only describe how they appeared in the world:

Cautious, like crossing a wintry stream,
Irresolute, like one fearing danger all around,
Ceremonious, as one who pays a visit;
Yielding, like ice beginning to melt,
Genuine, like a piece of uncarved wood,
Open-minded, like a valley,
And mixing freely, like murky water.
--Lao Tzu

Give or take -- it's the same thing.

Thursday Evening Conversation ends with final circle reflection.

What is this?

God is what is questioning this.

Trust questioning. Don't listen to those who say doubt is wrong.

Doubt is God's way of clarifying what is here.

Don't know! See what is here.

morning traffic through open door

We return to zendo with return of spring.

The dharma, like an oyster
Washed atop a high cliff:
Even waves crashing against
The reefy coast, like words,
May reach, but cannot wash it away
(--Dogen)

Yesterday, with guest hermit from down-east, resident meetingbrook hermit sweeps and cleans the wintered space.

To what shall
I liken the world?
Moonlight, reflected
In dewdrops,
Shaken from a crane’s bill
(--Dogen, 13c)

This morning, sun through windows, one bell sounds beginning, three bells sound ending, our sitting.

Four-thirty am

No movement. Nothing stirs. White dog on white couch.

Zazen practice

Train comes in. Train doors open. Train leaves station. Like smooth scoop of ground ball by graceful shortstop, shuffle of feet, the throw.

Take away nothing; what is there

Most of the time there are too many words.

When one contemplates
Sickness, old age, and death,
One sees that no one and nothing
Can escape them.
When compassion is born
In the heart,
One sees that there is no reason
To add to the evil and pain.
- Sutra on the Perfection of Wisdom

Tonight, there are just enough.

Nothing needs adding.

mi casa es su casa

We travel long distances in hours that would have taken weeks.

We never leave home -- our true home -- but we go a long way to do the things asked of us.

Look around.

We've never moved.

Welcome home!

We will all, verily, abide by the Will of God.

In the house, on opposite walls, complimentary images, a marriage takes place between, and halves no longer think they are what their name suggests.

Light touches us

In that instant of space.

Halves

Once again after dawn before questions
arrange themselves
into what we do, who to see, and each of us

is most pleasurably alone -- the first sounds
of traffic, muffled
by trees, find their way to the ear;

we don’t know what we’re hearing, and don’t
care. The light
touches us. We turn toward the dark.

Soon the equally mysterious world of women
and men, of momentary
common agreement and wild misunderstanding,

will impose itself naturally on the simplest event.
Anatomy will send
its differing messages to syntax and sense,

and beyond sense -- among the senses --
unbuttoned women
will witness grown men become babies again

and later watch their mouths shape perfectly
controlled sentences
from distances laughable and immense.

In the morning, though, now, while the secret
intercoms in our dream rooms
are still open and each separate body knows

but does not reach for what it wants,
we all live in the same
country, share the same absurd flag.

We keep our eyes closed as long as we can,
hang on to the vestiges
of night as if we were balancing

two delicate and always vanishing halves.
Then the alarm, and the body rises
to yearn for what is here and gone

(--Poem by Stephen Dunn, in, New and Selected Poems 1974-1994)

When we could be anything.

Or anywhere.

You are it

Sometimes, there's no place to hide.

C Becoming

1. Unity of Being and Nothing
§ 134
Pure Being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same. What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being — does not pass over but has passed over — into nothing, and nothing into being. But it is equally true that they are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet that they are unseparated and inseparable and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore, this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which both are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself.
(-- from, Hegel’s Science of Logic,
Volume One: The Objective Logic
Book One: The Doctrine of Being)

Hide as you might wish.

The sheer elegance of such a plight.

radical nothing belonging; no possessions

Call the names. You know them. From every country. From every age.

Those who rose from dead imprisonment of mind and spirit. Those who saw, embraced, were reborn in the unfettered freedom of mind and spirit. Those whose bodies walked through thick fear and emerged light and empty the other side.

Easter is a wonderful retelling of the story of transcendence by means of immersion. Moving through the curious and odd admixture of slant deception and trivial distraction that so many of us human beings carry along like backpacks loaded with heavy rocks.

In meditation we leave
The fires of defilement
For the coolness of clear samadhi.
And this feels just like the joy
Of falling into cool, clear water
After burning in the heat of the sun.
(- Great Treatise on the Perfection of Wisdom)

Anyone is capable of entering the story of death and resurrection. Jesus did. So did Uncle Whatshisname and Aunt Whatshername. And that old guy that lived down the block. And the young woman who went by way of cancer in that small town. The child in Iraq. The soldier in Afghanistan. The monk in Tibet. The nun in El Salvador. The junkie in the abandoned warehouse. Your mother. Your father.

Yourself.

Jim Harrison, again:

Barking

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.
(--Poem by Jim Harrison)

Wandering without chain, through empty yard, rock rolled away, the vacant pews and choir stalls, at night when prayer points in no direction, the surrounding intimate realization of Christ -- radical, nothing, belonging.

Nothing belongs but to itself.

Nothing belongs but to itself.

Nothing belongs but to itself.

There is nothing wrong with Easter --

In an emptying room of an emptying house sun goes off west in late afternoon.

If all the special wording is forgotten, there is only what remains of the day.

We often get lost in stories about stories failing to feel the weakening sun or hear the wind-soaked chime in a spate of solitude.

Come back to yourself.

Save -- (that is, create what is right now whole within) -- the world.

Mu! -- Sending toward horizon

What a joy!



Where else but in monastic enclosure is "No" admitted?

Awake sleeper ... together we are one undivided person.

A reading from an ancient homily for Holy Saturday

"What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.

Truly he goes to seek out our first parent like a lost sheep; he wishes to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, he who is God, and Adam's son.

The Lord goes in to them holding his victorious weapon, his cross. When Adam, the first created man, sees him, he strikes his breast in terror and calls out to all: 'My Lord be with you all.' And Christ in reply says to Adam: ‘And with your spirit.’ And grasping his hand he raises him up, saying: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.

‘I am your God, who for your sake became your son, who for you and your descendants now speak and command with authority those in prison: Come forth, and those in darkness: Have light, and those who sleep: Rise.

‘I command you: Awake, sleeper, I have not made you to be held a prisoner in the underworld. Arise from the dead; I am the life of the dead. Arise, O man, work of my hands, arise, you who were fashioned in my image. Rise, let us go hence; for you in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person.

‘For you, I your God became your son; for you, I the Master took on your form; that of slave; for you, I who am above the heavens came on earth and under the earth; for you, man, I became as a man without help, free among the dead; for you, who left a garden, I was handed over to Jews from a garden and crucified in a garden.

‘Look at the spittle on my face, which I received because of you, in order to restore you to that first divine inbreathing at creation. See the blows on my cheeks, which I accepted in order to refashion your distorted form to my own image.

'See the scourging of my back, which I accepted in order to disperse the load of your sins which was laid upon your back. See my hands nailed to the tree for a good purpose, for you, who stretched out your hand to the tree for an evil one.

`I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side, for you, who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side healed the pain of your side; my sleep will release you from your sleep in Hades; my sword has checked the sword which was turned against you.

‘But arise, let us go hence. The enemy brought you out of the land of paradise; I will reinstate you, no longer in paradise, but on the throne of heaven. I denied you the tree of life, which was a figure, but now I myself am united to you, I who am life. I posted the cherubim to guard you as they would slaves; now I make the cherubim worship you as they would God.

"The cherubim throne has been prepared, the bearers are ready and waiting, the bridal chamber is in order, the food is provided, the everlasting houses and rooms are in readiness; the treasures of good things have been opened; the kingdom of heaven has been prepared before the ages."

origin, again, virginal

Good Friday 2012

(poem after Robert, monk)

1.

When candle in dark

sanctuary extinguished --

wisp smoke rises up

2.

Origin point was

space, bursting out, universe

Still expanding -- cools

3.

Christ died as we live

He becomes for us the point,

vierge dawning -- slowly

4.

How silly to think

things settled -- void flame

unmooring mind wind

5.

Once love is revealed

Nothing remains unloved -- you

Have this fond regard

(wfh, Spencer, MA, 6apr2012)

                                 

                                   .....

                      Across the universe;


                         a cross junctures --

     



                         
                           Entering silence

I cannot see God...

But moon, sunset, tree, steeple, twilight...

See me seeing them.

Compline continues

Even after rain
Highest branches
Dry with light of moon

(wfh, nunc ipsum)

We look as we are looking

Whatever we say of God is not God. This is true. Actually, "this" is an interesting word for God.
God is greater than "this." But "this" is as good a word for God as any.

"Can we understand the Trinity as an infinite emergent process?" asks Ilia Delio in "The Emergent Christ, Exploring the Meaning of Catholic in an Evolutionary Universe." She adds that "...God is a continuous becoming in love because of the absolute dynamism of divine love." (p.4, c.2011)

We're not used to thinking of God as moving, becoming, or changing. It's those Greek categories of thought that want to "fix" essence and substance into static incontrovertible lock boxes.

"Hsiao also reports [Heidegger's] saying, in his lecture on culture and technology:

One would have to see old things with a newer, farther look. If we were to attempt, for example, to 'ground' God through the traditional proofs of his existence -- the ontological, cosmological, or teleological -- would then diminish God, who is more, and ineffable 'like the dao' (EMH 127)."

(--p.3, in "Heidegger's Hidden Sources,, East Asian influences on his work," by Reinhard May 1989, tr. by Graham Parkes 1996)

We are urged these days to look into new thinking that travels the swirling immanent transcendence of impermanence and uncertainty -- a looking that peers through different lens, whether particle physics or zen poetry, ancient Chinese philosophy or contemporary evolutionary neurobiology -- until we find ourselves not looking at a split and illusory 'objective' world, but, rather, gazing from an intersubjective participation with all appearing and disappearing phenomena, a looking as reality, a looking as itself toward itself with every allowance for difference, distinctiveness, and an "individuality" that straddles benevolently the alternate meanings of the word as both distinct and undivided.

The wind blows through sunlight.

Ineffably, the day, like this, like God, goes on.

We look through. We look out.

We look as we are, looking itself.

This is all there is...

"Und Petrus ging hinaus und weinte bitterlich." (bibeltext.com/luke/22-62.htm)

The German monk in the hot conference room, wondered aloud why Judas, betraying by collaborating, went (in the story) and hung himself; and Peter, betraying by denying, wept bitterly and allowed to stand the realization of his action.

Here in my cooler room I bring the question to the silence and cup of coffee.

I wonder why many religious and monks don't take the name "Judas" as their own? There are many Peters, many Pauls, many Judes and Johns and Andrews. But not many, I suspect, Judas'.

I like the Buddhist notion that if you change your mind in the present you are likely to be changing the minded-past.

I think Peter and Judas evolved the story with a Janus-faced rhetorical somersault on the writers' part.

They are the companion story of death and resurrection in the event the Christ theology becomes too vague and lofty.

One offs himself, one swims back to the surface with a new mind, new name, and new job. He, of course, will be offed later on, by others, doing noble organizing, after the style of good-deaths known as martyrdom.

Judas becomes -- well, a metaphor for what his name suggests: judas goats, judas cows, judas sheep, judas co-workers.

Not in my book. Where, metaphorically, we are one story divided into chapters for careful consumption.

Simon Judas Peter Jesus is the evolutionary sight of God: Being-Seen of a piece instead of piecemeal or in pieces.

When Mind is allowed to be Mind, everything is seen "as it is."

Und es geht so weiter! (And so it goes on...).

What goes on?
We go on. The story goes on.

Mind goes on trying to see through us.

Peter Simon Judas Jesus you and I go out and weep bitterly over what we are coming to see.

We are dying to our blind self-centered narrow unkind turn-away mind. There is, we have an inkling, a life seeing selfless illimitable benevolent turning-to Mind that gathers all this into nothing-there.

This is all there is!

With love...

Twilight; retreat

Sky with planets. Space with stars. Voices with psalms sprinkled with silence.

empty gaze; holy

I raise my hands. Palms up.

I begin a week of showing what nothing is there --

Nothing in hand. Ready to receive,

An open-handed attentive

psalmody