Unlearning what we think we know

Did you see a homeless person? Did it hurt?

Was there a sign that said, "Broke. Hungry"?

Such homelessness is sad. Such suffering is difficult.

What to do?

You deal with your shit in Zen by sitting with it. By breathing right into it. You don’t try and ignore it with pleasant thoughts or lofty ideas, and you don’t try and bury it with solutions. You deal with it, you work with it, one breath at a time. You hold it right there, in your breath. You don’t try and breathe it out; you don’t try and breathe it in. You keep it suspended in your diaphragm like a burning hot coin. Your problems won’t change; only you can change. That’s the point.
(- from, Growing Ground, by Steve Krieger)
http://www.tricycle.com/feature/growing-ground?page=0,1

Go ahead, extend a fiver. Hand over a banana. Don't preach, judge, or ignore.

Suffer the indignity of the sign-carrier.

Be happy you feel what you feel. You could just as easily have scoffed, mocked, or laughed. Instead you brought both of you to Saturday Morning Practice and even shed tears.

It is maddening when our egos do not know how to respond, don't know what to do.

Sei stille, be silence, be calm, shush!

God is speaking to your heart/mind.

Listen with care.

You will learn.

To unlearn.

Hold lightly if not at all what is at hand

Change.

Nowhere is it not.

Then, be there.

As it is, moving elsewhere.

Where you are, going.

Observing

"Creation knows no opposite." (from lesson 138, A Course in Miracles)

Trappist Thomas Keating wrote in a slender volume that "God is existence."

When I see this, I will let you know.

What is sitting meditation?
To remove ourselves from
all external distractions and
quiet the mind is called "sitting."
To observe the inner nature
in perfect calmness is called "meditation."
- Hui-neng

Until then, find me in the cabin.

A transient transcript of trinitarian coursework

God is God. God is O! Good. Then, God is good.

Good itself is God's name. Do good! Be good! See good!

"Bad" is a misapprehension of "good." This happens a lot. Like a cup of coffee. First sip, the best. Next ten sips, Ok! Then, final dregs, cool and uninspiring sip, not so much!

T: You mentioned the use of retreat practice in Roman Catholicism. Does that feature the same combination of solitude and meditation practice? Or is the structured meditation in retreat the unique offering from Buddhism?

RR: Both Buddhism and Roman Catholicism employ structured “form” practices and the formless practices of working with awareness itself. Father Thomas Keating, who runs the Benedictine monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, teaches what he calls centering prayer. My understanding is that this is very much a mindfulness discipline, bringing the mind to a point and training it to be present, then allowing the inner wisdom to gradually unfold from that. If you look at the other contemplative orders in Roman Catholicism, I think you’ll see quite similar practices.
Perhaps an important difference between Buddhism and Christianity is that, within the Christian tradition, there is usually a subject you are contemplating, whereas in Buddhism, especially with the formless practices, you are really opening the mind in and of itself; you are not contemplating a particular subject or figure. Ultimately, we are looking to simply open the mind and lay bare its depths. In Christianity you find that as well, so it’s not an absolute difference but a difference in emphasis.
(--From, INTERVIEW, The Power of Solitude, Shambhala Mountain Center's Reggie Ray talks to Tricycle's Ted Rose about the value of solitary retreat; by Ted Rose) http://www.tricycle.com/interview/power-solitude

I mention to woman in Wohnkuche last night after meditation practice there is a trinity to serve as teacher for us: listen, don't judge, learn!

Stillness in Wohnkuche this morning. White Border Collie asleep on futon. Ticking of two clocks. Hum of refrigerator motor. Silence of books. Mere gaze of every wall hanging, pillow, dream, and forgotten detail. Everything that ever was is here, hidden or unbidden, on or under surface of appearance. It is, as they say, all good.

I listen.

I do not critique or judge.

I'm learning.

of a tuesday morning

Spending time with students' papers. Margaret presents translation of Om Mani Padme Hum as: "Oh, but to see only through Wisdom's eye." It caught my attention.

What is "only through"...?

This morning, sitting in meditation cabin, a translation for Tuesday morning arises:

Looking in
to what is
shining through.

So, I wash last night's pots and plates, brew tea, and sit here to look into this.

Cleaning the bathroom or chopping the onions is no less important than sitting in deep meditation. Grasping this and acting on it is called waking up.
- Janet Jiryu Abels, "Participate Fully"

New green walking up to brook. White dog eyes sticks. Moist fragrance blossoms!

Drips water slowly dropping

Not much noise inside.

Toothbrush leans over rim looking at prone toothpaste.

Neither... nor mind... has anything to say.

Do don't say

Slow motion day. Polly's burial at Seaview. Attending Quaker Meeting.

Hoisting boxes to upper level of bookshed. Then Sunday Evening Practice.

It's the practice, not the narrative.

Some days...

The cookies are burnt.

Reading Fleet Maull at morning practice. Prison hospice stories.

We eat the cookies anyway.

Infinitesimally unknowable

Neutrinos passing through head to toe.

What else?

Hayah.

Life.

Passing through.

Us.

What has a middle but no sides

Justice is a fragile compromise. It does not mean awakening. Justice means that some law -- whether a statute law, or street law -- has been executed, and some renewed balance effected.

Only one who bursts with enthusiasm do I instruct;
Only one who bubbles with excitement do I enlighten.
If I hold up one corner and you do not come back to me
With the other three,
I do not continue the lesson.
--Confucius

The lesson of awakening is that justice is partisan control, only half the narrative exacting satisfaction; while true awakening is the whole story with compassion effecting balance without sides.

The men who were wrong are still wrong

After watching documentary "The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby" (2011) about former covert operator and CIA chief William Colby by his son Carl Colby, I think about the sorrow of it all.

Maybe the generals, spy agency, law officers, ubiquitous political names and faces hawking war and hellish advice, and a series of executive office presidents equally fogged with awkward motivation, were all wrong. Vietnam was so wrong. The same names and faces continued into Iraq and into our homes and domestic surveillance. Two wrongs make a horribly painful time for everyone involved.

The trail enters
Pines, the sound of pines;
The farther one goes,
The rarer the sound.
Mountains' light
Colors the river water.
Among peaks,
A monk sits Zen,
Facing an old branch
Of a cassia tree,
Once a seedling in the Liang.
- Chiao-jan (730-799)

It is not enough to remember. There must also be great sorrow for a people, for betrayal, and for current karmic reverberation.

Violence against another is violence against one's own being, so it is futile.
- Paul Hawken,"Upsurge

I have been wrong. I thought it was outside me. All this time I have labored under an illusion. Forgive me Mr Colby, Mr Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagon, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama. I thought it was you.

Going to sit in meditation cabin, light candle, light incense, alighting on cushion, I sit in the sound of rain on roof, falling to earth, the sound of awareness inviting a new sustenance of forgiveness.

I must go; change longs for me.

Itadakimasu: Thank you Nature for this nourishment and nurturance.

co-response and co-mu-union: a glancing withitness

I don't know which tries to be more insulting: celebrity news or religious/political/economic views. Bare bums or false behinds! Put differently, rear dead-ends and misinformation seem to distract the small amounts of attention allotted to each scanning-bot these days.

The World is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

(Poem by William Wordsworth)

Maybe that's what happens in a time-without-integrity. We turn to sports, celebrity, and numbing drugs. If the world is illusion, some think, then I'll get mine, thank you, the way I want it.

Don't be concerned with
who is wise and who is stupid.
Do not discriminate the
sharp from the dull.
To practice whole-heartedly
is the true endeavor of the way.
Practice-realization is not
defiled with specialness;
it is a matter for every day.
- Dogen 1227

I have no plan, antidote, desire for any kind of revival tent, nor a sense that anything has changed much in the last five thousand years.

All I have is a coffee maker, a zafu/zabuton, a pair of sneakers, some words to listen to and think about, things to tidy up, and this present moment to realize. And that's good enough for now.

Maybe you are the world.

Maybe if I meet you with respect and reverence we will converse the world.

Yeah -- it has never been a matter of converting or conversion, rather our job is to converse the world with an integration of conversation.

Whatever you say, I hear it, and we become the body of word in co-response and co-mu-union.

Ha!

Try that on for sigh/eyes!

while still alive

I like the distinction between being religious and having beliefs.

I don't favor belief.

I'll favor experience.

The yearning itself for what is connecting/felt.

Silence knows no other way

Tell me in silence.

No answers can be found, and no amount of questioning will bring out those answers. We may continue to ask, but as Brown notes, one thing Wiesel's writing suggests is ``that arguments justifying God in the face of evil are not only inadequate, they are diabolical.'' ([Brown], 154) Any answer cannot come from man, but from God himself. This is what Moshe the Beadle had tried to tell Wiesel when he was a young boy in Sighet, before the terrors of the Holocaust destroyed his life. Moshe said, ``Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him...That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!'' ([Night], 2-3) There can be no end to the questioning, even if there are no answers. To expect answers is a mistake, as Wiesel learned from the Wandering Jew, who told him, ``When will you understand that you are living and searching in error, because God means movement and not explanation.'' ([Legends], 93) That is his final discovery. His relationship with God does not depend on answers. We pray to Him. He handles those prayers in His own way. We can agree or disagree with that way. It's all very simple. In one of his prayers in The Six Days of Destruction, Wiesel writes, ``We do not demand answers, God. But if this is the last page of the human chronicles, assure us that we had the right to ask.'' ([Six Days], 55) If we ask and accept God's answer, even if He answers in silence, then we will have reached the level of Elie Wiesel's relationship to God.
http://www.stsci.edu/~rdouglas/publications/suff/suff.html
("Elie Wiesel's Relationship with God" By Robert E. Douglas, Jr., Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Humanities Sufficiency Program, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts)

I need not know any other way.

For this we call; for this we are called

"God means movement, not explanation."(Elie Wiesel)

Movement through illusion.

Outside, with full moon, Barred Owl asks and asks its question.

Use it and less it

Zazen in prison this morning. Former PTSD Marine and I speak of the residual horror of his duty-related killings hand to hand. Five of us read some ACIM sections. Two of the men are studying it inside.

Afternoon with the elderly poetry folk navigating words across the ocean of forgetfulness. Carver, Chaucer, Binet, Oliver, Greg Lamb, Guest.

Evening, David Abram and Edmund Husserl.

What a useless life!

I love it!

One by one, passing, bye

Retreat. Briefly. Cabin porch. Day after. Twenty two students of East Asian Philosophy crowded into meditation space.

Waking from sleep,
I can hear the dew in the trees.
I open my door
Overlooking the garden.
The winter moon
Clears the eastern cliffs;
Water murmurs
Through roots of bamboo.
The mountain stream's
Beyond my hearing,
But a mountain bird cries once,
And then again.
Leaning in the doorway,
I follow night through to dawn.
What words can I summon
For such mystery and peace?
- Liu Tzung-yuan (773-819)

Now, gone. Empty space. Time to tidy.

Polly dies. Mary dies. Christopher dies. I remember them in their transition. I wish them well.


 Up path from chapel/zendo, beyond felled tree, prayer flags behind sprig green.

Nothing. But, gratitude.

question answers

Learning practice. Final class of semester at hermitage.

We get through.

make not-me yourself

Poetry points to what is beyond itself.

To those who claim there is nothing beyond God, I suggest that nothing is the point of poetry.

The real way circulates everywhere;
how could it require practice or enlightenment?
The essential teaching is fully available;
how could effort be necessary?
Furthermore, the entire mirror is free of dust;
why take steps to polish it?
Nothing is separate from this very place;
why journey away?
- Dogen 1227

God is where nothing goes.

Encircling God with what is itself nothing other than itself.

With this, I have nothing to say about God.

Which is exactly what cannot be...said.

breathing time

Things go still.

Yellow finch jump branch to branch looking for seed. Moved feeder last week. These must have been out of town.

Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you. The one no one talks of speaks the secret sound to himself, and he is the one who has made it all.”
― Kabir

Bishops pick on nuns. They are too "feminist" for the men in the church. These men have one hand on the light switch as the backs of thinking people exit their building. It will cut down on the electric bill if no lights are needed.

There's nothing left to do but continue, quietly, breathing. The men of the Supreme Court, the men in Congress, the candidates for high office, the executives in state government all have turned to perverse and pathetic positions at this time of hypocrisy and haute disdain. Things slide to the right at dizzying slant. The right-wing want to weaken the established government. Gun-folk want to re-write justice to be spelled "I've got the power." Some take curious solace that a mythic catastrophe will overwhelm everything this 2012 calendar year.

I'm not so sure. I think it is meanness. The three poisons -- greed, anger, and delusion -- rush through bloodstream and eat into veins on way to brain before corrupting heart. It is a hard time.

Men stuff round ball through round hoop and make millions of dollars making millions scream with elation. Other men swing wood stick against white ball and make millions of dollars running around three white bags. Other men hit small disc with curved sticks into a net splaying ice chips under steel blades to the roar of thousands watching. I'm not sure. I think it is an odd time.

“... What is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.”
― Kabir

I've no insight.

The yellow finch finds feeder. Leaves. Comes chickadee. Goes.

As I do.

And you.

In this our breathing time.

"In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug and we shall want to live more musically."
--Vincent Van Gogh

Things still...go.