zen buddhists chant heart sutra
virginia roberts giuffre’s book is
read over cloud library -- this
sitting, this chant, for her, for
the men and women who used
her, for the rest of us who cannot
remember what justice and decency
could be in human life -- I dedicate
this practice, to save all beings,
to offer a measure of sorrowful hope,
to drown in the chaos of compassion
I still don’t know
How killing and murdering
With war benefits anyone
It takes a very particular
Delusion to calculate such
Death and destruction
I don't think the president is a pedophile. It's none of my business. And if he is, I was brought up Catholic and understand the theology of the sacrament of reconciliation or plenary indulgences.
Nor am I in law enforcement, nor a member of the Bar where I am duty bound to be concerned with justice and crime.
No, I'm just a zen fool who looks at things trying to see what they really are. When I look at the president I have trouble focusing. Must be the cataracts.
It takes a lot not to judge and condemn. Like the US Congress, it takes a lot to avert gaze and phone for dollars so as to win reelection returning to power so as to avert gaze for another few years.
Some say it is a collapse of morality and ethics. Some say it is a cultural collapse and failure of credible leadership.
Not me.
I think it is something altogether different.
I think it is the deficiency of the mental structure of consciousness we've carried now for almost three thousand years.
That and sports betting, TikTok, and substack.
We've grown to believe our opinion matters.
Someone thinks war will be beneficial. Someone thinks botoxing lips, cheeks, and forehead will be stylish. Someone thinks twenty billion dollars is not enough to retire on. Someone thinks killing their wife or husband would be good to do before the Ides of March.
I have no opinions. That's my opinion, i.e. "a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge."
But if the president were a pedophile, that would matter to the American people. If it doesn't matter to them, then he is not a pedophile. (I failed logic in school.)
It is good form to proclaim one loves their country. As a Buddhist I understand that form is emptiness, and vice versa. ("Versa" in Latin means to "turn around or turnabout.") Emptiness is also form.
It often seems so much of our posturing and proclaiming is empty and without substance, mere propaganda and pretense. Like saying we're a good Christian nation and tossing Jesus into the Schuylkill River, hands tied, feet in cement bucket.
Preachers make millions on televised broadcasts and priests continue to hide their faces in shame over their crimes. Politicians pretend to be deacons of the gospel and federal border patrol are finally permitted to beat the hell out of minorities and immigrants like they've wanted to do since grade school.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will be murdered again. (We've changed the liturgy in America.)
There's no mistaking the new hierarchy in this country. The cabinet is the College of Cardinals. The Pont-Neuf is the president. The Supreme Court are the inquisitors. And we, (God help us), are the mindless and stupid who hold on to the belief that the current president is the savior-in-chief who has buttonholed the ear of the Almighty Creator, unceasingly trying to convince the Sublime Presence that naming rights now belong to the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the soon-to-be new Cathedral of Ballroom Tech and Triumph.
I am a simple monk.
I eat, sleep, and walk mindfully.
I have no opinions, make no judgments, and only lie when I write the first two phrases of this sentence.
I do not ask for forgiveness.
I look forward to being condemned to perdition.
I don't expect I will be seeing you there.
So, good luck!
And thanks for tinning such tasty sardines.
I’m not stupid
You’re not?
I know you're lying
You do?
You're a pedophile
I am?
And I don’t care
You don’t?
No, I don’t
Why not?
You're my saviour
You think so?
Touch me bless me
(See, how easy?)
… … …
[Announcer: if this had been a real dialogue
You would have been instructed to give up
All principles and worship pedophilia,
All its perversions, and all its perverts.]
War is
The pedophile’s way
Of saying
“So what
If I raped and abused
That child”
Stand back
The adults are showing
You what power means
Walking through the mythic structure of consciousness
We enter a large monastery, a temple where we meditate
Study the four bodhisattva vows, converse about bees
In the mental structure we are in prison Friday morning
Wondering if we will get to Sherman Alexie poem (we
don’t), some final words about integral structure and Ramadan
So much about the Epstein Files and Donald Trump.
Things appear. If I’ve learned anything teaching philosophy over the years is that if something is there it will ultimately appear.
I have no doubt truth, as they say, will out.
Yes we grow impatient, doubtful, even cynical.
But some FBI agent, some DOJ staff person, some personal lawyer, some family member, some victim, or someone else belittled by the abuser will spill the beans, leak what has been hidden, and exercise their troubled conscience.
So, too, here.
He won’t get away.
Time will tell.
We’ll be listening
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) once wrote, "Better the world should perish
than I or any other human being should believe a lie."
Let's hope the world doesn't perish.
I know we're tempted, but...
Don't believe what is not true.
Something from E. M. Cioran, (1911-1995)
2
If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could
avoid canonization.
#
No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from
which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither
to accept nor to reject.
#
It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating
by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the
jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything
their incompatibility and their intolerance.
#
It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should
avoid simulacra and even “realities;” you should take up a position external
to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live,
according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a “solitary elephant.”I forgive X everything because of his obsolete smile.
#
Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
Only what you hide is profound, is true. Whence the power of base feelings.
#
Ama nesari [sic], says the Imitation of Christ. Love to be unknown. We are
happy with ourselves and with the world only when we conform to this
precept.
#
The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its
subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the
manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the
infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.
#
The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of
belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity …
#
Negation never proceeds from reasoning but from something much more
obscure and old. Arguments come afterward, to justify and sustain it. Every
no rises out of the blood.
#
With the help of the erosion of memory, to recall the first initiatives of
matter and the risk of life which followed from them …Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
#
There are nights that the most ingenious torturers could not have invented.
We emerge from them in pieces, stupid, dazed, with neither memories nor
anticipations, and without even knowing who we are. And it is then that the
day seems useless, light pernicious, even more oppressive than the darkness.
(--from The Trouble With Being Born, by E. M. Cioran, 1973, trans 1976)
"[F]rom something much more obscure and old. ... Every no rises out of the blood."
The complications we encounter in interactions with difficult persons, ourselves or others, introduce wariness and remembrance of past traumas.
So it goes.
At after-party
Someone said
Nice speech
I was lying
He said
That doesn’t matter
Truth doesn’t matter
Only you matter
I am lying
He said
That’s ok
We only care about
Power, not truth
These fools
Believe my lies
That’s what makes
You great, makes
US great, your lies
I guess I am great
Look at my face
(--from poem “Cape Breton” by Elizabeth Bishop)
i'd rather be
doing what
I am
doing
reading introduction
to Words In Air: The
Complete Correspondence
Between Elizabeth Bishop
and Robert Lowell -- an
intelligent and creative
engagement, rather than
listen to the blathers and
blithers of that fellow who
sometimes sleeps in White
House with white nationalist
dreams and perfect
accomplishments -- may we
not wander in to skunk hours
and armadillo meanderings full
of self inflation and flatulence
Perhaps I am dead.
I'm no angel unsure whence I move among the living or the dead.
It seems strange to see so much injustice while flittering off to nap through night or day as the gyroscope of slumber and falling into it after arising out of it teeters on edge of room where my tutors, two cats and dog, practice flawlessly their temperaments of nod and doze, turn and absent their waking duties.
Although I suspect I'll know I'm actually dead when, with mouth open no sound emerges, or when fingers move along spectral keyboard no letters appear anywhere. Those clues might instruct me of my incommunicative status and untransmittable intuitions out beyond the desire to do so.
Voices, voices. Hear, O my heart, as only
saints have heard; heard till the giant-call
lifted them off the ground; yet they went impossibly
on with their kneeling, in undistracted attention:
so inherently hearers. Not that you could endure
the voice of God—far from it. But hark to the suspiration,
the uninterrupted news that grows out of silence.
Rustling towards you now from those youthfully-dead.
Whenever you entered a church in Rome or in Naples
were you not always being quietly addressed by their fate?
Or else an inscription sublimely imposed itself on you,
as, lately, the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.
What they require of me? I must gently remove the appearance
of suffered injustice, that hinders
a little, at times, their purely-proceeding spirits.
True, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to use no longer customs scarcely acquired,
not to interpret roses, and other things
that promise so much, in terms of human future;
to be no longer all that one used to be
in endlessly anxious hands, and to lay aside
even one’s proper name like a broken toy.
Strange, not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange,
to see all that was once relation so loosely fluttering
hither and thither in space. And it’s hard, being dead,
and full of retrieving before one begins to espy
a trace of eternity.—Yes, but all of the living
make the mistake of drawing to sharp distinctions.
Angels, (they say) are often unable to tell
whether they move among the living or the dead. the eternal
torrent whirls all the ages through either realm
for ever, and sounds above their voices in both.
--from The First Elegy, in The Duino Elegies, by Rainer Maria Rilke, (1912-1923), (translated from German by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender)
We become a people of whispers and susurrent sibilance hissing our unhappiness with the dominant political culture stomping roughshod over decency, human feeling, and nascent longing for justice.
Bullies bellow and belch out their disdain for weak nobodies with little wealth, hispanic accents, browned skin, and little access to competing power. These arrogant politicos simply do not care for the citizens and longing-to-be-citizens living outside their gates of power and influence.
Of course I am dead.
If I were alive I'd do something with meaning and substance to turn the indifference and disdain into caring and helpful assistance. But I seem to be floating in some anachronistic simulation of indecipherable spiritual realm where prayer, meditation, contemplation and intellectual life effectively could influence the bare material, mechanistic, digital, and (these days) mostly mendacious realms of pernicious power greed.
Rilke says it:
Strange, not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange,
to see all that was once relation so loosely fluttering
hither and thither in space. (op cit)
At least it seemed to me, perhaps in my fugue incomprehension, "that all was once relation," that there was some sort of mystical body that enigmatically held all of conscious and pre-conscious life together in an indecipherable trinitarian unity -- the flowing life of what we casually called "God" coursing through everything, no matter how confusing and distracting the behavior of so many could be.
Bob Dylan's line applies:
"But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." (--from "My Back Pages", 1964)
Joan Baez's words apply even more:
Now you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
'Cause I need some of that vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly
Yes, I loved you dearly
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid
(-- final verse, "Diamonds and Rust" 1975, by Joan Baez)
When I open my eyes, I look around and am uncertain what temporal space I occupy. I can recall the younger man rapt in the attraction of participating with the whole gathering of community intent on manifesting an Ekklesia:
ekklesia: (or ecclesia) is a Greek term, translated as "church," referring to an assembly or congregation of people "called out" for a specific purpose. Rooted in ek ("out of") and kaleo ("to call"), it describes a gathered, purposeful community rather than a physical building. Biblically, it signifies people called by God to be his body.
(--Ekklesia, AI search)
I'm not sure of that.
I'll take a bit of a think before I let you know what I actually think.
He went to cabin
To meet his lover
The Mexican drug-
lord, stepped into
Death, this is how
Much we know of love
buddha sits and watches
Jesus hangs and watches
what they see, I’m sure,
disappoints
but they watch all the same
buddha asks Jesus if he sees
what he sees --“yes”
buddha gets up from cushion
Jesus comes down from cross
un abbraccio,
they are men of honor
they will turn what they see into
something filled with joy and
justice -- they know how to do
that -- they feel reality from within,
and this feeling -- a quiet delight
changing the exterior chaos into
inner peace -- the knowledge of
something worth watching for
worth seeing through
In Assisi, nytimes writes, they are displaying the bones of Francis.
Ok. Something to do.
My response:
We named our hermitage after Francis and a Japanese zen master contemporary of his. Francis was an intense mirror of Christ.
Still, I can imagine Dogen Zenji looking across time at the relics of Il Poverello and saying “Drop the bones, the mind and body, and enjoy a fig and mineral water with the poor surrounding you!”
Ciao Francisco, sei bellissimo!