頂きます（いただきます）

Jo-Ann taught me the word during 50 years of friendship.

THE MEANING OF ITADAKIMASU 

In its simplest form, Itadakimasu 頂きますいただ　 is used before receiving something. That's why the most common itadakimasu translation is:
頂きます（いただきます）TO RECEIVE; TO GET; TO ACCEPT; TO TAKE (HUMBLE).

A year ago tomorrow (2nov16) she bowed to the guest who bowed back to her.

And went beyond.

Receiving, accepting, love.

I am a slow student.

In memory, today, I say はい!

Hai!

Yes!

do not hide your face from me

It matters, a sense of the holy.

This eve, it matters.

names

No one dying doesn’t want to live.

Does that desire propel life through death into another version of life pre-death?

I look into this. And see only to the edge of disappearance.

At Sunday Evening Practice we spoke aloud the many names of departed meetingbrook community members who’ve disappeared at that edge the last twenty five years. So many names!

patient visitor

In hospital rooms we laugh about things that are petits riens.

In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing. Antonio Porchia

When you think about it, what else is there?

touching her hand

when someone dies,

      in that place, that instant,

in your presence;

      the very next breath we take —

still, silent,

      unseeing,

the wonder of it . . .

this realization

Adonai, you have made me alone!

I am alone as you are alone.

There are, it has been said, no others.

Shema’ yisrael Adonai elohenu Adonai echad!
   (Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord alone!)

It means there are no others.

Does that sound scary?

If this were a horror film with horror thinking, yes, it would.

But as an ontological theological existential consideration, it suggests that our beliefs — that we are isolated alienated antagonistic individuals vying against one another for goods, possessions, and power — are error-ridden and illusory misunderstandings about the true nature of reality and being, illusions that keep us warlike and cruel.

We are alone.

Notions of a god that chooses some over others are deluded notions. Notions of a god that is better than other gods are mistaken notions. And notions of superior races, purer peoples, advanced intelligences, and higher classes of cultured and wealthy people — are historical and psychological aberrations of sociological and colonial fabrication.

We are alone.

And it takes courage to see this.

And willingness to realize this.

An awareness beyond ego myopia.

A humility to recognize god alone.

God is this realization!

hoc est enim corpus meum

In prison we spoke of current koan. I tell of eating apple cider toast in truck driving to Warren. I held it up and said, “this is my body.”

I bite into toast while aware of sky, fields, trees, colorful leaves — and, looking around, I think, “this is my body.”

I come to prison building, walk in with AA volunteer, NAACP volunteer, and loose shoelace caseworker. In front desk area I greet D’s father arriving for visit. In inside corridor I greet D being patted down for visit. In yard I greet S going to job repairing furniture. Arriving at education area I greet N assisting an inmate in class. In room used for Buddhist group I greet the men attending.

And I realize: this is my body, these are my body.

As the morning continued.

All of it . . .

Is my body.

what everything is filled with.

There are times when you don’t care. When you stay at home and rain falls persistently. When nothing seems to enliven.

He who has seen everything empty itself is close to knowing what everything is filled with. — Antonio Porchia

It is too difficult trying to follow the news out of DC.

As much as I’d like to think there’s something there, there isn’t.

I turn.

And leave.

let’s start with this

All this will pass.

A zen master said, “truth is just like this.” He said that definition of truth would still be true in 500 years. Truth is just like this!

So, we ask: What is this?

Many centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Socrates used to walk through the streets and marketplaces of Athens, teaching his students. He would say to them, “You must understand yourself! You must understand yourself! You must understand yourself.” Then one day a student said, “Sir, you always say we must understand ourselves. But do you understand yourself?”   

“No, I don‘t know myself,” Socrates replied. “But I understand this ‘don‘t know.‘“ This is very interesting teaching. Buddhist practice points at the same experience, because most human beings pass through their lives without the slightest sense of what they are.   

We understand many things about this world, but we don‘t understand ourselves. So why do human beings come into this world? Why do we live in this world? For love? For money? For respect or fame? Do you live for your wife, husband, or children? Why do you live in this world? If someone asked you these question, you might very well answer, “I live for my children. I live to earn enough money for them, or maybe just to have a good life.” Most people think like this. They live only for their family, for some fleeting social respectability, perhaps to enjoy art or to get some powerful position. Everyone wants to have a good situation for themselves. If you look at this world very closely, it is easy to see that most people eat and sleep and live merely for their own personal happiness. Yet these things are not the real purpose of human beings‘ life. They are just temporary means for living in the world. If human beings cannot find who they are, how can they ever be truly happy?  

(—from The Compass of Zen  p.28, by Zen Master Seung Sahn)

 The events of these days and months in America’s political landscape have been, and will continue to be, bizarre and confusing. The president, some feel, is unhinged, petty, mean, and a narcissist of enormous and dangerous proportions. Others feel he is the perfect antidote to a stuffy, controlled, and ineffective governance in Washington DC.

I don’t know.

I have an opinion. It is my opinion that the divide between philosophies of governance, the divide between ethnic groups and races, the divide between sane use of force and insane use of guns and violence, the divide between responsible and respectful behavior of men to women and the crude, power abusing, sex using disrespect of women by pretentious men, the divide between wealthy and poor — all these divides have deepened and separated and stand against each other with little hope of reconciliation or harmonious outcome.

But this opinion, too, will pass.

We live in an existence that is fluid and ephemeral.

In this impermanent circumstance — Who are we?

What am I?

Socrates didn’t know.

I don’t know.

It becomes our task, our profound duty, to understand this “don’t know.”

I am “don’t know.” As are you.

Let’s start with this!

the word, of

Hear, O Lord, the sound.

Of.

My voice.

. . .

Note:  

of 

əv/
        preposition 

1.
expressing the relationship between a part and a whole.
"the sleeve of his coat"
2.
expressing the relationship between a scale or measure and a value.
"an increase of 5 percent"

fed up

The notions of truth or falsehood have been tossed out by this White House. Now the standard is ‘whatever we say is true; what you think about what we say is false.’

It will have to be a serious and concerted effort on the part of thoughtful people to resist and counterbalance the distortion and newspeak that cynical provocateurs serve as rancid food to hungry citizens.

gone

No
t
me

No
me

No
thing

Per
fect 

zen in- sight

Not one, not two.

Therefore,

don’t make two

Don’t make one

Come to

Think of it —

Don’t make

Don’t take . . .

Be-

hold!

Be

whole

we’ve got you

We’ve got you.

Is what we say when someone’s soul is shared and held by those whose love is shared.

Shared.

Soul.

and here we are

We don’t want to get used to it. Nor make lite of it. We don’t want to shrug and say, “He’s just being who he is!” as though that was both excuse and pardon for behavior and speech that is . . . troubling . . . and unfortunate.

According to James Murphy’s translation of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”:

“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”

The text continues:

“It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”

(--from, Trump Isn’t Hitler. But the Lying …by Charles M. Blow OCT. 19, 2017 NYTimes)

 Cheslaw Milosz wrote:

If among pairs of opposites which we use every day, the opposition of life and death has such an importance, no less importance should be ascribed to the oppositions of truth and falsehood, of reality and illusion. 

 ... 

Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn't allow one to think of anything else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external exile. It is not certain, however, that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with actuality. He may also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in other countries, on other shores, to recover, at least for short moments, his true vocation - which is to contemplate Being. 

(--from, Czeslaw Milosz - Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1980)

Saying truth is elusive mirrors Heidegger’s saying that truth conceals as much as it reveals.

In letting beings as a whole be, which discloses and at the same time conceals, it happens that concealing appears as what is first of all concealed. Insofar as it ek-sists, Da-sein conserves the first and broadest undisclosedness, untruth proper. The proper non-essence of truth is the mystery. Here non-essence does not yet have the sense of inferiority to essence in the sense of what is general (koinon genos), its possibilitas and the ground of its possibility. Non-essence is here what in such a sense would be a pre-essential essence. But "non-essence" means at first and for the most part the deformation of that already inferior essence. Indeed, in each of these significations the non-essence remains always in its own way essential to the essence and never becomes inessential in the sense of irrelevant. But to speak of non-essence and untruth in this manner goes very much against the grain of ordinary opinion and looks like a dragging up of forcibly contrived paradoxes. Because it is difficult to eliminate this impression, such a way of
speaking, paradoxical only for ordinary doxa (opinion), is to be renounced. But surely for those who know about such matters the “non-” of the primordial non-essence of truth, as untruth, points to the still unexperienced domain of the truth of Being (not merely of beings). 

...  

Man errs. Man does not merely stray into errancy. He is always astray in errancy, because as ek- sistent he in-sists and so already is caught in errancy. The errancy through which man strays is not something which, as it were, extends alongside man like a ditch into which he occasionally stumbles; rather errancy belongs to the inner constitution of the Da-sein into which historical man is admitted. Errancy is the free space for that turning in which insistent ek-sistence adroitly forgets and mistakes itself constantly anew. The concealing of the concealed being as a whole holds sway in that disclosure of specific beings, which, as forgottenness of concealment, becomes errancy.

Errancy is the essential counter-essence to the primordial essence of truth. Errancy opens itself up as the open region for every opposite to essential truth. Errancy is the open site for and ground of error. Error is not just an isolated mistake but rather the realm (the domain) of the history of those entanglements in which all kinds of erring get interwoven. 

(--from, On the Essence of Truth, by Martin Heidegger. Date of original version: 1943) 

Perhaps the real estate salesman turned president is become, for us, a meditation on errancy and concealment.

But we are not as opaque as Heidegger, nor as poetic as Milosz.

We are simple creatures intent on imprinting what we experience, as Conrad Lorenz studied:

In the latter part of his career, Lorenz applied his ideas to the behaviour of humans as members of a social species, an application with controversial philosophical and sociological implications. In a popular book, Das sogenannte Böse (1963; On Aggression), he argued that fighting and warlike behaviour in man have an inborn basis but can be environmentally modified by the proper understanding and provision for the basic instinctual needs of human beings. Fighting in lower animals has a positive survival function, he observed, such as the dispersion of competitors and the maintenance of territory. Warlike tendencies in humans may likewise be ritualized into socially useful behaviour patterns. In another work, Die Rückseite des Spiegels: Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens (1973; Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge), Lorenz examined the nature of human thought and intelligence and attributed the problems of modern civilization largely to the limitations his study revealed.  

(--Konrad Lorenz,  AUSTRIAN ZOOLOGIST )

The question could be posed: Are we, the citizens of the USA, imprinting the chief executive of the executive branch of government? Or, is he imprinting the citizens of this country -- himself a creature of the culture he so unawaredly foists himself and his opinions upon -- to the consternation and paralytic unbelief of the majority of the voting populace?

The final numbers:
Clinton received 65,844,610 votes, or 48.2% of the total vote.
Trump received 62,979,636 votes, or 46.1% of the total vote. (That's a difference of 2.86 million votes.) 

(cf. Public Records Branch Public Disclosure and Media Relations Division Office of Communications Federal Election Commission)

And here we are! 

you in the end find your way . . . with clarity, compassion, and caring consequence

Anthony Sanborn review is held in Portland. The stress, I suspect, must be high.

I know Tony. He is a good man. I’m rooting for him.

What we call truth is a variable thing. We can only experience what is going on now. So, it can be asked, right now, do we know what occurred surrounding Jessica Briggs death in 1989?

Reviewing the trial 25 years later, was it truthful and fair in 1992? Was the information and the testimonies given believeable and accurate?

They review these questions along with transcripts and personnel involved in the case.

The fact is, only Tony knows where he was and what he was doing that day. For the rest of the people only surmise and speculation surround.

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

The iffy and precarious fate of any individual is held aloft amid words and recollection, deduction and inference.

“Only describe, don't explain.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

For the rest of us we hold our direct and hopeful experience of one another in the courtroom of personal appraisal and long for, pray for, what is right to now take place.

My experience of Tony in the time I’ve known him over these twenty eight years going into Maine state prison is that he is a man who has helped people learn and better themselves during their incarceration.

He is a good and true individual.

“If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

Prayers for Jessica Briggs. Prayers for Tony Sanborn. Prayers that truth now reveals itself.

We are variable human beings.

May what changes become itself with clarity, compassion, and caring consequence!

particularly complicated

Listening to Yuval Hoah Harari’s work on audio book.

Helps.

“Homo Deus” takes off where “Sapiens” left off; it is a “brief history of tomorrow.” What is the natural culmination of the scientific revolution, Harari asks. What will the future look like? “At the dawn of the third millennium,” he writes, “humanity wakes up, stretching its limbs and rubbing its eyes. Remnants of some awful nightmare are still drifting across its mind. ‘There was something with barbed wire, and huge mushroom clouds. Oh well, it was just a bad dream.’ Going to the bathroom, humanity washes its face, examines its wrinkles in the mirror, makes a cup of coffee and opens the diary, ‘Let’s see what’s on the agenda today.’ ” 

... To describe this ascendancy, Harari examines the factors that made the human species so special. “Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal,” he writes. So how did this animal come to claim dominion over all other beasts? The answer, he argues, lies not in the uniqueness of our emotions, sensations, morals or moods. Pigs and monkeys share many of these with us — including the capacity to feel anger, envy, pain — and even a desire for justice. Humans exceed these capacities by encoding complex algorithms — “a methodological set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions.” Pigs, dogs and monkeys — indeed, all living beings — also encode algorithms, Harari tells us; the human ones happen to be particularly complicated and powerful.  

(--from NYTimes Book Review,  The Future of Humans? One Forecaster Calls for Obsolescence, about HOMO DEUS, A Brief History of Tomorrow, By Yuval Noah Harari. Reviewed by SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE, MARCH 13, 2017  Harper/HarperCollins Publishers.

In the United States a great deal of attention is taken up trying to decipher whether the president of the country is competent to lead, whether he is a threat to initiate a conflagration with North Korea or Iran, whether he will escalate hostilities with rhetoric presaging warfare replete with nuclear weapons and massive destruction, casualties, and disruption of global security.

To begin with, we’d like more gracious behavior.

It’s hard to walk tall when the ceiling you’ve set for yourself is so low. 

pre-dawn

Stillness

prayer, detectionless presence beyond

At Sunday Evening Practice, at table, we read interview from Beliefnet: Caroline Myss: ‘God Doesn’t Want Your Real Estate’.

It helps:

In the new book, “Entering the Castle,” you talk about “mystics without monasteries.” What does it mean to be a contemporary mystic?A mystic is someone who has a sense of interior connection with a force of life, of meaning, much greater than themselves, a connection to God. There are people who are called to be a part of the world with the same passion that once drew people out of society and into monasteries or into ashrams. And now, the calling is to engage [with God] and remain within the mainstream of life. It is the need to live a life that is very clearly full of meaning and clear direction. When somebody says, “For what reason have I been born?” that is a question they are, in fact, releasing to God. That type of invocation ignites a deeper force from within. 
And can that kind of question lead to a more mystical life? I do believe that. I think that leads to a longing for a much more passionate connection to the divine. There is a fundamental need in us to connect to something greater than ourselves. And that’s just the way we are designed. We do not want to think that, at the end of the day, we are simply flesh and bones. The second thing is we have a need to believe that, if we close our eyes and say, “God help us,” there really is someone on the end of that phone call. There is a part of us that absolutely longs to know that’s real.
The tortured mystic seems on a unrelenting search to find out where they should be, what they should be doing, what perfect prayer should they pray.   (--Beliefnet)

The ordinary mystic is where they are, doing what they are doing, praying as they look and listen in their longing to realize what is real in each here and now of their daily existence.

Prayer is how we step into circumstance, reflectively.

Prayer is how we sit silently centering the surround even as it resounds inward to outward pulsing the mystery of God’s detectionless presence beyond any experience or belief thereof.

Oremus!

wait a minute

flaws

(like clouds)

dissolve

soon enough

into other

dawns and

weather

continually

changing

our views