It's hard to believe what you see. It's hard believing anything. Most things turn out to be somewhere between no-way and get-lost.

He was still speaking when suddenly a bright cloud covered them with shadow, and from the cloud there came a voice which said, "This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour. Listen to him." When they heard this the disciples fell on their faces overcome with fear. But Jesus came up and touched them. "Stand up," he said "do not be afraid." And when they raised their eyes they saw no one but only Jesus. (from Matthew 17)

Jesus seen through. Japanese seen through. The odd juxtaposition of August 6th -- Transfiguration, and Hiroshima Atomic Bomb blast. The transparency.

ii

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasped no more --
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
(Poem: excerpts from "In Memorium" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

What's odd is the emptiness.

Holding my jacket and facing the fragrant peony,
I sense how different our viewpoints are.
Someday our hair will turn gray,
Yet the flowers will be this red each year;
Following the morning dew, each blooms gorgeously
Then their sweet scent is chased by the evening winds.
Why wait till they have withered and fallen
To understand such emptiness?
- Fa Yen (885–958)

To see through and be seen through is to be empty.

The beauty of the memorium and the ugliness of so many incinerated -- stuns mind into emptiness.

The oddity that one of us is God -- that each one of us just might be -- shuts down comprehension.

It is not enough to hate the mind that chooses, and the act that commits, murder.

We look on ourselves, in each form, and weep.

Love the emptiness.

For sixty years a belief there was no alternative to dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.

I don't share that belief. Absent this non-believer. A child nearly one year old, the feeling of horror found its way to Brooklyn streets.

If your ears see,
And eyes hear,
Not a doubt you'll cherish
How naturally the rain drips
From the eaves!
- Daito Kokushi

That long ago remains close tonight. If my hand could I would stay the order, un-push the button, and find some hint of genuine compassion for those below a terrible idea.

I call off the bombing of Hiroshima sixty years ago.

Tomorrow will be a day of grace and kindness.

A toast -- to you, my brothers and sisters!

Communion is a better idea.

Itadaki-masu!

It is hard to tell if anyone is saying anything anymore.

So many listening ears, so many watching eyes. It hardly seems necessary to explain why the teaching someone follows needs to be spoken aloud. If the teaching isn't in his or her silence, what use sounding it?

Soundless Sound

I like bamboo as the symbol of constancy and simplicity.
I built my house deep within the grove.
Do not strike my bamboo with a piece of brick.
Perhaps the sound might be heard by other Zen monks
And cause trouble.
- Jakushitsu (1290 - 1368)

I suspect a time approaches when even the most garrulous will comprehend the uselessness of the words and sounds made to convince others of the insight and advancement of the speaker. (Some say there is no advance, there is no place to be gotten to quicker; there is only here. There is nowhere to go. Each is already in their own place.)

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.... Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
(--Jean Arp (1887 - 1948), French-German artist, poet. "Sacred Silence," On My Way, ed. Robert Motherwell (1948).)

As that day approaches, silence will allow man to go his noisy way. With man gone off to the extreme edges of deafening polemic, there remains in the center silence in every sound. Even in the soundless pause between sounds -- a rich quietude resides in interim.

Preserve silence.

Observe it visiting here.

As it is...on its way...nowhere else.

Chapels are places for prayer and respite.

Before the night is even through,
I rise and sit,
Watching fireflies.
The night air clear as water,
The meditating mind
Is light as a reed.
The moon outlines
Trees on the western ridge;
A bell rouses
Home up above.
There may be those in the dark
Who know just how fine
Is what I have found.
- Wen-siang (1210-1280)

I fall from the odd news of the world. What sense there is in the ways of the world -- escapes me these days.

Francis was now attracted to a tiny chapel known as St. Mary of the Portiuncula, belonging to a Benedictine monastery on Monte Subasio. It stood in the wooded plain, some two miles below Assisi, forsaken and in ruins. Francis rebuilt it as he had done the others, and seems to have thought of spending his life there as a hermit, in peace and seclusion. Here on the feast of St. Matthias, in 1209, the way of life he was to follow was revealed to him. The Gospel of the Mass for this day was Matthew X, 7-19: "And going, preach, saying The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.... Freely have you received, freely give. Take neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses . . . nor two coats nor shoes nor a staff.... Behold I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves...." These words suddenly became Christ's direct charge to him. His doubts over, he cast off shoes, staff, and leathern girdle, but kept his rough woolen coat, which he tied about him with a rope. This was the habit he gave his friars the following year. In this garb he went to Assisi the next morning and, with a moving warmth and sincerity, began to speak to the people he met on the shortness of life, the need of repentance, and the love of God. His salutation to those he passed on the road was, "Our Lord give you peace." (http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/FRANCIS.htm)

Lets make chapels our first visit. Make chapels of ourselves.

Make bells the threshold of silence.

Of loving prayer.

After silent sitting, meditative walking, and chanting of Heart Sutra, we bow and prepare to leave the chapel/zendo.

Extinguishing the candle that lights the icon of Mary and Jesus in the cabin after first part of Sunday Evening Practice, I think of the insight during a half-hour cycling exercise in front room of hermitage facing similar icon while listening to Dalai Lama healing chant from middle room. I am suddenly aware that the words below cabin icon – “Mother of God, Light in all Darkness” – have a reference I’d not thought of before.

The reference is to the combination of Mary and Jesus – not to Mary alone, as if Jesus were a prop for purposes of lending legitimacy to the woman and mother. No, the icon is of both of them, equally chosen and equally represented as relational iconography. Is this an icon of a new reality? This reality emerges by means of pregnancy, birth, and offspring. This new reality is interim. It is the middle emergence that holds and permits continuance through an unbroken and unceasing wholeness that involves each of us and everything going on.

The icon invites the observer, especially the praying observer, into the sequential circumference of pregnancy, birth, and offspring as center, radial energy, and spiral wholeness.

The “Mother of God” in this observation is the relational sequence of Mary/Jesus. This sequence of Mary/Jesus is the Mother of God. It is also the sequence of each of us as we attend prayerfully that-which-is unfolding in this existence. I say “in this existence” because we begin where we are and we need to be here while we are here.

The wording of threes, namely: “that-which-is”, or, things “as-they-are”, or, something “as-it-is” – begins to emerge more and more frequently as descriptive of simple and ultimate reality.

To investigate that-which-is invites inquiry and experience to encounter what is there with willing mind and open heart.
To face things as-they-are is to face reality without illusions.
To accept someone or something as-it-is is to surrender to and into the reality before us.

A monk from a Catholic community of hermits visiting at table said that Marian devotion had changed in that he had a strong understanding of Jesus the Christ as mother. A woman who had attended a Bat Mitsva the day before related that the Rabbi (a woman) said that the Hebrew word for “compassion” and “mercy” was the same as for “womb.”

It is here the sequence takes shape and makes sense. There has been a tension in Catholic theology as to the place of Mary. There have been impulses to have her take on the role that the Goddess plays in spirituality. There have been attempts to define her role as co-redemptrix, mother of God, or even the feminine third person in the metaphor of the Trinity. It seems Catholic Christians are never quite sure what to think of their Marys.

But in the quiet evening cycling, and in extinguishing cabin candle, it occurs that part of the mystery is in the threefold sequence of pregnancy, birth, and offspring -- a sequence which is a never-ending revelation spiraling up from and beyond things as-they-are. It is the way earthly existence and human emergence contribute to the coming to be of consciousness relating to the reality of what is called God.

Jesus/Mary is the Mother of God.

Like a Zen koan – not one, not two – only, Jesus/Mary.

Father is Life Itself.
Mother is Jesus/Mary.
Spirit is Making-Its-Way-Through-Us.

The question emerges -- Who are we in this revelation?

A circumference "carries round."

The soup and bread, as usual, were delicious.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s words, as usual, were nourishing.

The simple circle of mindful gatherers was, as usual, blessing.

Sunday morning news programs do not encourage. Congress passes legislation that makes us long for individuals now that most grease, pork, and boons go to corporations and their lobbying legal partners and patrons. So much talk; so little said.

I might have to listen more closely to those who say it doesn't matter. Even the most conservative and most liberal of folks hereabouts are beginning to look at government and realize the so-called red-blue (conservative-liberal) split so touted and loved by politicians and commentators is illusory -- a public deception. It is not a war of ideas, nor a war between religions that is being fought. It is a matter of money. Who has it, who wants it, who has the power to keep it where it is? Sometimes money has a hard sound to it.

When a country is in harmony with the Tao,
the factories make trucks and tractors.
When a country goes counter to the Tao,
warheads are stockpiled outside the cities.

There is no greater illusion than fear,
no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,
no greater misfortune than having an enemy.

Whoever can see through all fear
will always be safe.
(#46, Lao Tzu, in Tao Te Ching, trans. by Stephen Mitchell)

I don't think it is a matter of money. I think it is something else. I think we have forgotten what it means to be. Being, to be at all, is a silence with remarkable sounds and stillness.

It is a matter of Being. And we have forgotten Being. For religious folks, this translates that we have forgotten God. So many for so long have gotten used to fighting over the ideas and their political implications we have about God, fighting about a notion of God that arranges power and control in the hands of those for whom power and control are the only things of true value. God Itself -- with nothing added -- has been forgotten.

Some say it would be good if we forgot about God entirely. Forgot about religion. Forgot about anything that is not real, here, and now.

The Master has no mind of her own.
She works with the mind of the people.

She is good to people who are good.
She is also good to people who aren't good.
This is true goodness.

She trusts people who are trustworthy.
She also trusts people who aren't trustworthy.
This is true trust.

The Master's mind is like space.
People don't understand her.
They look to her and wait.
She treats them like her own children.
(#49, Lao Tzu, in Tao Te Ching, trans. by Stephen Mitchell)

The heart does not break when we look at suffering. The heart deepens into Itself.

Silence

Sometimes we don't say anything. Sometimes
we sit on the deck and stare at the masses of
goldenrod where the garden used to be
and watch the color change from day to day,
the high yellow turning to mustard and at last
to tarnish. Starlings flitter in the branches
of the dead hornbeam by the fence. And are these
therefore the procedures of defeat? Why am I
saying all this to you anyway since you already
know it? But of course we always tell
each other what we already know. What else?
It's the way love is in a late stage of the world.
(Poem: "Silence" by Hayden Carruth, from Collected Shorter Poems ©. Copper Canyon Press.)

We need to turn again.

To Being.

And ask, with silence: How should I be?

Perhaps the dead have an advantage. It is possible they see and are seen through in a way that the living cannot. The living continue to think they have something to hide, something to prove, and something they are not ready to see.

Revelation

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.
(Poem by Robert Frost)

So many of those alive cannot be seen. They hide behind opinions, history, roles, and fears.

Perhaps the dead have no opinions, exist only now, without a role to play, with nothing to fear.

We must reconsider death.

While alive, to pass through death every minute, until the space-between -- the passageway -- reveals the benefits of death in life.

Benefits?

Of passing through.

There is no place apart.

Where shall I wander? Tyler delivered envelope with proposed new rent for our shop at the harbour. It's not lower. (That, and the expectation monthly rent be exchanged in a timely manner -- imagine!) It puts John Ashbery's book and poem before mind.

Composition

We used to call it the boob tube,
but I guess they don't use tubes anymore.
Whatever, it serves a small purpose after waking
and before falling asleep. Today's news --
but is there such a thing as news,
or even oral history? Yes, when you want to go back
after a while and appraise the accumulation
of leaves, say in a sandbox.
The rest is rented depression,
available only in season
and the season is always next month,
a pure but troubled time.

That's why I don't go out much, though
staying at home never seemed much of an option.
And speaking of nutty concepts, surely "home"
is way up there on the list. I feel more certain about "now"
and "then," because they are close to me,
like lovers, though apparently not in love with me,
as I am with them. I like to call to them,
and sometimes they reply, out of the deep business of some dream.
(Poem: "Composition" by John Ashbery, from Where Shall I Wander)

I don't go out much. Except for daily to the shop, weekly for tutoring and Meetingbrook Conversations to the state prison, driving the distance of Maine with Saskia as she does audits, and the twice weekly trips to teach university courses in Thomaston or Warren. Aside from these forays -- as well as hikes around and across Ragged Mountain -- I don't go out much.

John Ashbery said, "I've always felt myself to be a rather frustrated composer who was trying to do with words what musicians are able to do with notes."

Like Ashbery, I've always felt myself to be a hermit wandering the edges of the monastery that is the world. It is like Fr. Theophane the Monk's work, Tales of a Magic Monastery. The tale I hear says world is monastery. That story is a template that experiences Benedictine, Franciscan, and Zen versions of hospitable listening, natural sanctity, and grounded seeing. We are monastics wandering cloistered passageways through the sanctity of everydayness.

Besides, where is there to go? We've heard it said that wherever we go, there we are.

Last evening's conversation followed the reading of Thich Nhat Hanh's 14 Precepts and the next chapter from Peace is Every Step, The River. We noted that interconnectedness and intimate compassion just might be the natural condition of contemporary humanity. We surmised that it might be extra work for us to attempt to detach and separate ourselves from innate and inchoate connection -- extra effort to forge a hiatus between what we consider to be our thinking commanding self and the feeling interpenetrating self we actually are.

Now and then we fall into what we are. That falling is gift. In that fall there is no escaping and no regretting what and who we are. It is liberating. There we are, right at the center of the universe. But not alone.

"each of us is at the center of the universe.so is everyone else." -- e.e. cummings

I wander where I am. Wonder has come to wander.

Don't look anywhere for me or for yourself.

Just wander about.

Nearing.

Home.

Walking mountain trail on Ragged is an extension of drive to Lincoln Maine, then Veazie to pick up Tunturi exercise bike advertised in Uncle Henry's, followed at dusk in dust cutting branches from roadside bushes and dooryard intrusions.

The wind blows through my tiny hermitage,
Not one thing is in the room.
Outside, a thousand cedars;
On the wall, several poems are written.
Now the kettle is covered with dust,
And no smoke rises from the rice steamer.
Who is pounding at my moonlit gate?
Only an old man from East Village.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

The fantastic story told by Brown's Da Vinci Code on History Channel is watched with chocolate ice cream.

I think about the icon and template of hermit.

The hermit is not one who lives alone without others.

The hermit is one who is with others when alone and alone when with others.

Undetached and intimately aloof, the hermit is the knitting of sacred silence with what-is-between one and all.

Taking in any knitting, dear?

It is a fool's errand to prove a negative. But, what-is-real -- that's a horse of a different color.

Every thought is Buddha mind;
Buddha mind dwells on Buddha.
If you wish to accomplish this soon,
Be vigilant and disciplined
If you wish to seek Buddhahood,
Don't stain a single thing.
Though the nature of mind is empty,
Greed and hatred are real.
- Master Fu (497-569)

Journalists are asking "What did Bush know? And when did he know it?" Along with Frank Rich's op-ed piece in today's New York Times, "Eight Days in July" -- there are increasing signs it is time for reckoning.

We all remember Dorothy getting by the blustering doorman at the entrance to the Emerald City by the skin of her Ruby Slippers, and hailing a carriage drawn by a horse whose color keeps changing. "What kind of a horse is that? I've never seen a horse like that before!" she exclaims. To which the cabbie replies, "No, and never will again, I fancy. There's only one of him, and he's it. He's the Horse of a Different Color you've heard tell about." The cabbie is referring to an expression used when you encounter something significantly different from what is expected--you say that it's a horse of a different (or another) color.
(http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20010430)

Two years ago the anguish of many at what was felt to be lies and distortions leading the United States into a reckless action in Iraq is now changing from anguish to cautious unveiling -- and accompanying sorrow -- that a willing people were misled by a willful administration into unnecessary war and repercussions worldwide..

It is passing curious, on a related plane, that I will be assigning the novel The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett for a course that will include convicted (or plead) men who might (or might not) have been liars, conspirators, or murderers. These men know the facts of their current condition -- they'll tell you -- they're in prison -- and they wish to learn more about what might have gotten them there, and how a life aided and abetted with knowledge and insight might help them in time to come.

I like these men. They are where they are and have to make some kind of peace with that reality. Some do; some don't. By and large, theirs is a time and place where the invitation to explore the facticity of their existence is an unusual opportunity. I've always considered learning, the practice of insight, and contemplative life of being-with-seeing to be an unusual invitation and opportunity.

I wish them well. So too, on a different plane, I wish the nation well. I wish the prosecutors, witnesses, those under suspicion, those hiding in plain sight, and those who actually believe they are exempt from ethical standards and the law -- well. I wish all of us well. As the poet Theodore Roethke wrote, "In a dark time the eye begins to see."

Truth, no matter what philosophers say, isn't a fragile thing. It might be hard to see, but it is what is -- the ground of any hope for human existence. It is very difficult to smash -- no matter how adept and powerful the blows against it. Lies, on the other hand, are fragile things, much easier to see (but harder to acknowledge because they cling close to our favorite idea we hold about ourselves), causing considerable sorrow, pain, and disconnection.

We watch our thoughts. We try to see Thought-Itself in the midst of thoughts and opinions.

Every thought is Buddha mind.

If we look.

Carefully enough.

We'll see.

What is, truly.

Free.

When too many words are spoken, quiet slips in undetected. .

In my youth I put aside my studies
And I aspired to be a saint.
Living austerely as a mendicant monk,
I wandered here and there for many springs.
Finally I returned home to settle under a craggy peak.
I live peacefully in a grass hut,
Listening to the birds for music.
Clouds are my best neighbors.
Below a pure spring where I refresh body and mind;
Above, towering pines and oaks that provide shade and brushwood.
Free, so free, day after day --
I never want to leave!
-- Ryokan

Dusk explains nothing.

Let's rest there.

Ryokan's leaves are gone; ours are full fresh green. It's the path that remains itself.

A single path through a dense forest,
Mountains peek out from between the floating mist.
Not yet autumn, the leaves have already disappeared,
And without rain, the rocks are always dark.
I gather mushrooms in a basket
And draw spring water into a jar.
Except for a stray traveler,
No one finds the way here.
- Ryokan

In prison I tutor basic reading skills in Saskia's classroom,. Robert looks at the letters "c,o,o,k" and says "chef." His mind leaps beyond phonic recognition. I tell him to first trust his eyes, trust his ears.

Sando at home bolts during thunderclaps before we arrived. She came back tired and deranged along Barnestown road. There are certain things we cannot hear and remain sane.

We practice stray spirituality. It is by doubtful indirection we stumble upon what is called "here."

By miraculous, paradoxical, and generous idiorhythmic grace -- no one finds the way here.

Become no one.

Find way.

Here.

Opinions, often, are chains.

On Larry King Live a prosecutor from Boston tried to cast doubt on the case of a man released from prison after eight years of a death sentence conviction for rape and murder of a nine year old girl. DNA testing in this instance -- the first case of reversal -- had been used to exonerate him and to convict someone else who admitted committing the crime. The released man was pardoned by the Governor.

On the show during a panel, nevertheless, the prosecutor -- representing the view that DNA results say nothing about innocence -- did her best to implicate the released man by means of innuendo and retrieval of information she recalled of the case -- a case from another state, a case she had nothing to do with.

Happiness was not freedom from chains but release from chains. Chains were an indispensable part of happiness! (p.23 in The Discovery of Heaven, by Harry Mulisch)

For the man released from prison, the chains rattle against metal and concrete. He hears them in her voice.

She said one thing true -- she doesn't know if the released man is innocent of the crime. Nor does Larry King; nor do I; nor does anybody not there.

The chains are indispensable.

Happiness is an inner fact.

Sometimes people are too insistent on their opinions. We crowd each other this way.

Grant me the ability to be alone,
May it be my custom to go outdoors each day
among the trees and grasses
among all growing things
and there may I be alone,
and enter into prayer
to talk with the one
that I belong to.
- Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav

Zen masters say don't seek truth, just drop opinions.

Riverbanks lined with
green willows, fragrant grasses:
A place not sacred?
Where?
( - Zen saying)

Refreshing breeze comes in kitchen window.

Maybe Bob is wrong. He says there are two kinds of people in the world: them that say there are two kinds of people in the world; and them that don't.

I say there are only two people in the world: the one who is here; and the one who isn't.

Love Like Salt

It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet
without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine
we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays and the sea.
(poem from "Alive Together: New and Selected Poems" (LSU Press, 1996) by Lisel Mueller.)

The one who loves is always here. The one who doesn't is seldom present anywhere.

This is why I sometimes worry about where I am. When absent I am nowhere. When present I am not here.

This is why I think about God.

Like salt, God is love. In the flavoring -- God dissolves into wherever here is.

I'll consider this.

We have a vocation when we are responsive to what is calling our name.

When you look, it is formless;
When you call, it echoes.
It is the great Dharma commander,
Transmitting the sutras
Through precepts of mind.

As saltiness in water,
Transparency in color,
Surely it is there,
But its form is invisible;
The Mind King is also thus,
Residing in the body.
- Master Fu (497-569)

Many things call. True. But. What-Is, alone, knows our name.

When we listen carefully, our work and our life are one thing -- when we respond faithfully to what is calling our name.

We prepare well by residing well within our body.

Transparent.

There was conversation at the Bhagavad Gita reading tonight about simple and complex.

The simple is not involved or complicated; easy.

There is much complexity in being human.

CHAPTER XIV

THE THREE GUNAS

1. The Blessed Lord said: I will again declare the supreme Knowledge, the highest of all knowings, which having known, all the sages have gone hence to the highest perfection.
2. Having taken refuge in this knowledge and become of like nature and law of being with Me, they are not born in the creation, nor troubled by the anguish of the universal dissolution.
3. My womb is the Mahat Brahman; into that I cast the seed; thence spring all beings, O Bharata.
4. Whatever forms are produced in whatsoever wombs, O Kaunteya, the Mahat Brahman is their womb, and I am the Father who casts the seed.
5. The three gunas born of Prakriti, Sattwa, Rajas and Tamas bind in the body, O great-armed one, the imperishable dweller in the body.
6. Of these Sattwa is by the purity of its quality a cause of light and illumination, and by virtue of that purity produces no disease or morbidity or suffering in the nature: it binds by attachment to knowledge and attachment to happiness, O sinless one.
7. Rajas, know thou, has for its essence attraction of liking and longing; it is a child of the attachment of the soul to the desire of objects; O Kaunteya, it binds the embodied spirit by attachment to works.
8. But Tamas, know thou, born of ignorance, is the deluded of all embodied beings; it binds by negligence, indolence and sleep, O Bharata.
9. Sattwa attaches to happiness, rajas to action, O Bharata; tamas covers up the knowledge and attaches to negligence of error and inaction.
10. Now sattwa leads, having overpowered rajas and tamas, O Bharata; now rajas, having overpowered sattwa and tamas; and now tamas, having overpowered sattwa and rajas.
11. When into all the doors in the body there comes a flooding of light, a light of understanding, perception and knowledge, one should understand that there has been a great increase and uprising of the sattwic guna in the nature.
12. Greed, seeking impulsions, initiative of actions, unrest, desire - all this mounts in us when rajas increases.
13. Nescience, inertia, negligence and delusion - these are born when tamas predominates, O joy of the Kurus.
14. If sattwa prevails when the embodied goes to dissolution, then he attains to the spotless worlds of the knowers of the highest principles.
15. Going to dissolution when rajas prevails, he is born among those attached to action; if dissolved during the increase of tamas, he is born in the wombs of beings involved in nescience.
16. It is said the fruit of works rightly done is pure and sattwic; pain is the consequence of rajasic works, ignorance is the result of tamasic action.
17. From sattwa knowledge is born, and greed from rajas; negligence and delusion are of tamas, and also ignorance.
18. They rise upwards who are in sattwa; those in rajas remain in the middle; the tamasic, those enveloped in ignorance and inertia, the effect of the lowest quality, go downwards.
19. When the seer perceives that the modes of Nature are the whole agency and cause of works and knows and turns to That which is supreme above the gunas, he attains to mad-bhava (the movement and status of the Divine).
20. When the soul thus rises above the three gunas born of the embodiment in Nature, he is freed from subjection to birth and death and their concomitants, decay, old age and suffering, and enjoys in the end the Immortality of its self-existence.
21. Arjuna said: What are the signs of the man who has risen above the three gunas, O Lord? What is his action and how does he surmount the gunas?
22. The Blessed Lord said: He, O Pandava, who does not abhor or shrink from the operation of enlightenment (the result of rising sattwa) or impulsion to works (the result of rising rajas) or the clouding over of the mental and nervous being (the result of rising tamas), nor longs after them, when they cease.
23. He who, established in a position as of one seated high above, is unshaken by the gunas; who seeing that it is the gunas that are in process of action stands apart immovable.
24-25. He who regards happiness and suffering alike, gold and mud and stone as of equal value, to whom the pleasant and the unpleasant, praise and blame, honour and insult, the faction of his friends and the faction of his enemies are equal things; who is steadfast in a wise imperturbable and immutable inner calm and quietude; who initiates no action (but leaves all works to be done by the gunas of Nature) - he is said to be above the gunas.
26. He also who loves and strives after Me with an undeviating love and adoration, passes beyond the three gunas and he too is prepared for becoming the Brahman.
27. I (the Purushottama) am the foundation of the silent Brahman and of Immortality and imperishable spiritual existence and of the eternal dharma and of an utter bliss of happiness.
( -- From The Bhagavad Gita, as translated by Sri Aurobindo)

I agree with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin -- the more complexity the more consciousness.

If anything is simple, it is that complexity is the field within which we live, and move, and have our being.

Even with flooding of light it is all far beyond me.

Things are not what we say they are. Things are always and only what they are.

Calming the Mind

Too much knowledge
Leads to overactivity;
Better to calm the mind.
The more you consider,
The greater the loss;
Better to unify the mind.
- Shih Wang Ming (6th century)

To inquire, to ask into something, is to investigate things as they are.

But you have spurned and rejected him;
you are enraged against your anointed.
You have repudiated the covenant of your servant,
you have trampled his crown in the dust.
You have demolished his walls
and laid his fortifications in ruins.
Anyone who passes can despoil him;
he is a mockery among his neighbours.
( from Psalm 88 (89))

We have got to face something as it is. Not as we wish it to be.

We'll ask this in prison in the morning: how does something being what it is transform the whole world?

Don't give a psychological answer to this, rather, give an essential answer.

No explanation.

Just be it.

At times you are simply tired.

When the mind is properly adjusted
And quietly applied
The Way is attainable;
But when you are too fervently bent
On it, your body grows tired;
When your body is tired, your spirit
Becomes weary.
When you spirit is weary, your discipline
Will relax, and with relaxation of
Discipline, there follows many distractions
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

When that happens, rest.

Walking trail up Bald Rock Mountain in Lincolnville Monday afternoon. It begins to rain. Cool rain on hot dry mountain. One step after another. Dogs apace. Two Canadian women ahead. Just roots and rocks with rain soaking relief through climb. Just that.

And when That is seen in its
immanence and transcendence
Then the ties that have bound the
Heart are loosened, the doubts
Of the mind vanish, and the law
Of karma works no more.
- Mundaka Upanishad

Later Saskia takes friends from Ontario for early evening sail. Windless drift off bell buoy 2 and Curtis Island, they catch up with downpour again rowing back to dock. Their swordfish and salad, I'm told, was placed on plate downstairs just after 11pm.

Beware the leader who bangs the drum of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor. For patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.
(--Julius Caesar, born in Rome around 100 B.C.)

In America, slash and burn arrogance begins to fray at edges. For the president, the shadows of second term scandal creep from behind curtain. July slows nearing fulcrum mid-month pause -- a baseball all-star game today, a deputy chief-of-staff finally revealed as source for CIA agent name-leak, Jane in a novel dies as Rose and Son are given her family's land surrounding home for unwed mothers in Kentucky. The days quietly stretch alongside reading material and silent watchfulness.

The Writer's Almanac tells that today is the birthday of Henry David Thoreau.
He was 27 years old when he built that little cabin on the edge of Walden Pond and moved in, in an attempt, he said, to "Simplify, simplify, simplify ... to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach."

When Jesus said: "This is my body...This is the cup of the new and eternal covenant," he was teaching essential facts of life. We are -- each and all of us -- the bread and wine, yogurt and strawberry muffins of existence. The very "stuff" of the universe and creation is the very "stuff" of religious symbolism. "Tat tvam asi" -- we are that, "That" is what we are. Jesus was a profound teacher. He refused to make God other, nor did he claim equality with God something to be grasped at.

It is Tuesday. A bumble bee surveys screen at window. Birds ask about sunflower seed. Sun slants across paper in milk crate. Truck climbs Barnestown Road.

Gratitude at being alive types these words. Even as I am being killed in London, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Mid-west, in Cuba, Haiti, and along the Florida panhandle -- I sit in the pause of gratitude for...

Being,

Alive.