Andre will soon move from maximum-security razor wire fence to minimum-security farm fenced pastures. At end of conversation he wondered whether soul was what connected mind and heart. It set us thinking.
If you place your body in the realm
Of equanimity and noncontention,
And let your mind roam in the
Territory of evenness and nondisturbance,
And water them every day with
Fair words and fine deeds of sage worthies,
Then you are sure to progress.
- Wu Yubi (1391-1469)
We lose our soul when the connection is broken. It's not possible to dwell soulfully only in mind or only in heart. For we humans, soul moves through heart and mind as breath moves through space between you and me.
Connects, not as clasps hold two things together, but as light illumines what is there for another's appreciation to move through.
Diane says breath and light works well for her. Spirit breathing light in, through, and with what is there, whoever is there.
Andre leaves his poem and this conversation with us.
CONSTRUCTION
I could run as fast as Olympic track stars,
and still my back would be facing the wall,
cornered, I'm a goner,
surrounded by voices warning me to stop annoying them,
they're not the ones who scorn,
and the further I get from them,
the more I hear the talk of politicians,
more trees and land gets destroyed,
then they join me, with the cars and trucks they convoy,
making loud noises with bright spot lights on them
as they perform,
and I'm called awkward, because I don't see anything glorious,
I'm bored by what they call modern,
It's like a segment from the land of the lost,
complete regression,
It's hard to teach people to respect and cherish
the mud they step in,
especially if they believe they're the best thing
to happen to this planet,
and they've got all the weapons and answers,
so who am I to question.
(poem by Andre H)
Perhaps question is soul making its way between heart and mind.
Who am I? What is this? Where are you?
We move through all needing connection with question. Asked out loud or pondered silently within, question contacts one and one, moving through this contact, this connection, on its way beyond and through, going on.
Andre's final line might be asking --- "so who am I to soul?"
Move well through. Dwell still in peace.
Construct.
Soul.
Thursday, June 19, 2003
Think through. See through.
When I look into my life there is much not intelligible. Often what is not understandable is that which is a lie. If it is not true, it is not there. Lies are like that. They disappear what is there.
On Going to see a Taoist Master
A dog barking and the sound of water;
Peach blossoms heavy with dew.
In these deep woods, deer can be seen;
At noon along the stream, I hear no bell.
Wild bamboo divides gray clouds;
Waterfalls hang from blue peaks.
No one knows where you’ve gone;
Disheartened, I lean against a second,
Now a third pine. ( - Li Po)
A Zen Master said when you change your mind now you change the past. Things are seen as what they are, not as the lie told or lived. Seeing though allows things their original shape. Lies distort. Seeing original shape sets clear.
It is sobering to see the lies in one’s life.
David, Lola, Silvia, Lloyd, Susan, Saskia and I thought about what it meant being knots in a fishing web net –- an image used by Raimon Panikkar. To refuse to be that knot, or to appropriate (inappropriately) the knot of another, is to be the lie in the net of relationship. Without perfect (moving through) relationality between one knot and another, there are gaps through which much is lost.
When I lie, I let others fall through where I’d been into a lost space from which only attentive presence might restore and reshape them. I have let many fall through into lost space by my lies, by my not being there, or knot being where it was not called for.
The net of perfect inter-connective inter-relationship is determined by attentive, truthful presence.
If we impose our false self, or withdraw our true self, then the whole net is affected.
Contemplative and meditative practice invites us to look through our lives. When we see absence, presence is called for. When we see lies, truth is called for. And when we see tangled, inappropriate, and misappropriated blockages, patient and compassionate unraveling is called for.
Mostly, a contrite spirit. And a pure heart. This is the sacrifice that is called for.
To make whole again is making holy what has been lost to sight.
I’ve leaned against the second, the third pine. I’ve heard the sound of no bell. I have not known where you’ve gone.
I ask now to look at where I’ve been.
I long to see through who I really am.
When I look into my life there is much not intelligible. Often what is not understandable is that which is a lie. If it is not true, it is not there. Lies are like that. They disappear what is there.
On Going to see a Taoist Master
A dog barking and the sound of water;
Peach blossoms heavy with dew.
In these deep woods, deer can be seen;
At noon along the stream, I hear no bell.
Wild bamboo divides gray clouds;
Waterfalls hang from blue peaks.
No one knows where you’ve gone;
Disheartened, I lean against a second,
Now a third pine. ( - Li Po)
A Zen Master said when you change your mind now you change the past. Things are seen as what they are, not as the lie told or lived. Seeing though allows things their original shape. Lies distort. Seeing original shape sets clear.
It is sobering to see the lies in one’s life.
David, Lola, Silvia, Lloyd, Susan, Saskia and I thought about what it meant being knots in a fishing web net –- an image used by Raimon Panikkar. To refuse to be that knot, or to appropriate (inappropriately) the knot of another, is to be the lie in the net of relationship. Without perfect (moving through) relationality between one knot and another, there are gaps through which much is lost.
When I lie, I let others fall through where I’d been into a lost space from which only attentive presence might restore and reshape them. I have let many fall through into lost space by my lies, by my not being there, or knot being where it was not called for.
The net of perfect inter-connective inter-relationship is determined by attentive, truthful presence.
If we impose our false self, or withdraw our true self, then the whole net is affected.
Contemplative and meditative practice invites us to look through our lives. When we see absence, presence is called for. When we see lies, truth is called for. And when we see tangled, inappropriate, and misappropriated blockages, patient and compassionate unraveling is called for.
Mostly, a contrite spirit. And a pure heart. This is the sacrifice that is called for.
To make whole again is making holy what has been lost to sight.
I’ve leaned against the second, the third pine. I’ve heard the sound of no bell. I have not known where you’ve gone.
I ask now to look at where I’ve been.
I long to see through who I really am.
Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Seeping from myself. Weather coming in.
Silent sitting sunshine in cabin earlier. Tea and yogurt, english muffin and rhubarb, peanut butter and banana on porch. Man, woman, two dogs keep eye on path going up to brook.
Seeking But Not Finding the Recluse
Under the pine
I ask the boy;
He says: “My Mistress is gone
To gather herbs.
I only know
She’s in those mountains,
In those deep clouds,
But I don’t know where.”
- Chia Tao(dalyzen)
Flowers in boxes outside cabin windows. Color peaks bee interest.
Here at the shop John and Bob speak of the way people identify themselves racially and ethnically, their own perceptions and society's perceptions, none of which satisfies
Such green full leaf branching over rough wood stillness.
CF: I would like to proceed with one of your quotes: "When man breaks his connection with Earth, wanting to fulfill himself, he becomes a monster who destroys himself. When man breaks his connection with heaven, wanting to lead himself on his own, he becomes an automaton that destroys others."
You have said both an external and internal peace are indispensable. Which do you sense is our correct relationship with the earth and ‘heavens’?
RP: It would be both horizontal and vertical at the same time. The individual separate from the others, or from the earth or the divine, does not exist. We, by our very nature, belong both to earth and to the divine. We are conscious and free parts of a whole, but not as puppets that can be easily directed by threads, but rather we find ourselves within a cosmic interweaving or network. The human being is a person, not an individual. I understand a person as ‘a knot in a net’ of relationships. These threads connect us with our fellow men, the earth and divinity. The more conscious the person is, the more he realizes that his person reaches out to the confines of the world. That is the realized man.
CF: Within this network, how do we learn to move the right threads? Traditionally, religions have served to provide us with points of reference. Nowadays, however, there are many people who reject these religious systems because they no longer fulfill them, realizing at the same time that there is another dimension of reality which we are still not aware of. What’s changing in us?
RP: The realization that no separation exists between ourselves and our reality, and from that emerges a new consciousness, what I call a new innocence. In broad terms, it emerges from the knowledge of our ‘ignorance’, of knowing that our knowledge does not exhaust knowledge, not because we know ignorance, but because we understand our limitations: it is a consciousness born from a conflict of knowledge. Then we overcome knowledge through a leap of faith, confidence, sensitivity, intuition.
Underlying this there would be what I call the Cosmotheandric Principle, in which what is divine, what is human and what is earthly (let everyone find their own terminology) are the three irreducible dimensions which constitute what is real. These three parts are not juxtaposed simply by chance, but they are essentially related and together constitute the Whole. They are parts because they are not the whole, but they are not parts which can be separated from the whole.
(in The new innocence -- Interview with Raimon Panikkar, by Carmen Font. Interview with the author and President of the Center for Intercultural Studies, Raimon Panikkar, calling for a new awareness of the limitations of human knowledge in order to make room for the Divine.) (From the October 1996 issue of Share International)
Holly rounds rim of Tibetan bowl. Sounds it. Sam and Susan leave. Tonight is Erika's art opening in Rockland.
Yellow bags are readied for dump.
Tide levels.
Silent sitting sunshine in cabin earlier. Tea and yogurt, english muffin and rhubarb, peanut butter and banana on porch. Man, woman, two dogs keep eye on path going up to brook.
Seeking But Not Finding the Recluse
Under the pine
I ask the boy;
He says: “My Mistress is gone
To gather herbs.
I only know
She’s in those mountains,
In those deep clouds,
But I don’t know where.”
- Chia Tao(dalyzen)
Flowers in boxes outside cabin windows. Color peaks bee interest.
Here at the shop John and Bob speak of the way people identify themselves racially and ethnically, their own perceptions and society's perceptions, none of which satisfies
Such green full leaf branching over rough wood stillness.
CF: I would like to proceed with one of your quotes: "When man breaks his connection with Earth, wanting to fulfill himself, he becomes a monster who destroys himself. When man breaks his connection with heaven, wanting to lead himself on his own, he becomes an automaton that destroys others."
You have said both an external and internal peace are indispensable. Which do you sense is our correct relationship with the earth and ‘heavens’?
RP: It would be both horizontal and vertical at the same time. The individual separate from the others, or from the earth or the divine, does not exist. We, by our very nature, belong both to earth and to the divine. We are conscious and free parts of a whole, but not as puppets that can be easily directed by threads, but rather we find ourselves within a cosmic interweaving or network. The human being is a person, not an individual. I understand a person as ‘a knot in a net’ of relationships. These threads connect us with our fellow men, the earth and divinity. The more conscious the person is, the more he realizes that his person reaches out to the confines of the world. That is the realized man.
CF: Within this network, how do we learn to move the right threads? Traditionally, religions have served to provide us with points of reference. Nowadays, however, there are many people who reject these religious systems because they no longer fulfill them, realizing at the same time that there is another dimension of reality which we are still not aware of. What’s changing in us?
RP: The realization that no separation exists between ourselves and our reality, and from that emerges a new consciousness, what I call a new innocence. In broad terms, it emerges from the knowledge of our ‘ignorance’, of knowing that our knowledge does not exhaust knowledge, not because we know ignorance, but because we understand our limitations: it is a consciousness born from a conflict of knowledge. Then we overcome knowledge through a leap of faith, confidence, sensitivity, intuition.
Underlying this there would be what I call the Cosmotheandric Principle, in which what is divine, what is human and what is earthly (let everyone find their own terminology) are the three irreducible dimensions which constitute what is real. These three parts are not juxtaposed simply by chance, but they are essentially related and together constitute the Whole. They are parts because they are not the whole, but they are not parts which can be separated from the whole.
(in The new innocence -- Interview with Raimon Panikkar, by Carmen Font. Interview with the author and President of the Center for Intercultural Studies, Raimon Panikkar, calling for a new awareness of the limitations of human knowledge in order to make room for the Divine.) (From the October 1996 issue of Share International)
Holly rounds rim of Tibetan bowl. Sounds it. Sam and Susan leave. Tonight is Erika's art opening in Rockland.
Yellow bags are readied for dump.
Tide levels.
Tuesday, June 17, 2003
We touch.
Then go on.
The effect of Father Zossima's death on Alyosha, and the latter's ecstasy when he dashes out of the hermit's cell, probably better express Dostoevsky's own sense of the divinity of all creation. Alyosha falls face downwards on the earth, swearing to love it until the end of the ages, as though threads from all these countless of God's worlds had all coincided within his soul at once, and it trembled all over, in "the contiguity with other worlds"'.
((Pp.33-34 in A Pelican in the Wilderness, Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses, c. 2002, by Isabel Colegate)
At shop a man says his mother is not dissolving but being chopped up at the nearing end of her life. She tells him she doesn’t know what will happen. She asks him to pray for her.
A woman's father is dying. She will go to visit at end of week. Out on sea wind blows in gusts tonight. Saskia tells her we'll pray for him and for her. She says she doesn't know much about prayer.
No one knows. This is what we hear. To pray is to open heart and mind to God. To invite one another into same place. However unknown.
Cherry blossoms filling the ground,
Sunset filling my eyes:
Blossoms vanished, spring old,
I feel the passing years.
When blossoms were at their finest
I neglected to call.
The blossoms did not betray me.
I betrayed the blossoms.
- Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672)
Everything tells us to call.
That all might be well.
We go on.
Touched.
Then go on.
The effect of Father Zossima's death on Alyosha, and the latter's ecstasy when he dashes out of the hermit's cell, probably better express Dostoevsky's own sense of the divinity of all creation. Alyosha falls face downwards on the earth, swearing to love it until the end of the ages, as though threads from all these countless of God's worlds had all coincided within his soul at once, and it trembled all over, in "the contiguity with other worlds"'.
((Pp.33-34 in A Pelican in the Wilderness, Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses, c. 2002, by Isabel Colegate)
At shop a man says his mother is not dissolving but being chopped up at the nearing end of her life. She tells him she doesn’t know what will happen. She asks him to pray for her.
A woman's father is dying. She will go to visit at end of week. Out on sea wind blows in gusts tonight. Saskia tells her we'll pray for him and for her. She says she doesn't know much about prayer.
No one knows. This is what we hear. To pray is to open heart and mind to God. To invite one another into same place. However unknown.
Cherry blossoms filling the ground,
Sunset filling my eyes:
Blossoms vanished, spring old,
I feel the passing years.
When blossoms were at their finest
I neglected to call.
The blossoms did not betray me.
I betrayed the blossoms.
- Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672)
Everything tells us to call.
That all might be well.
We go on.
Touched.
Sunday, June 15, 2003
Cosmotheandric?
Ask Now -- Facing One Another.
Creation. Creator. Creating.
Alone on my zazen mat
I forget the days as they pass
The wisteria has grown thick
Over the eaves of my hut
The subtle Way of Bodhidharma
I never give it a thought
Does anyone know the truth of Zen
Or what to ask about it?
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
Moses said to the people: "Ask now of the days of old, before your time, ever since God created man [woman, and all sentient beings] upon the earth; ask from one end of the sky to the other: Did anything so great ever happen before? Was it ever heard of? Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live?
(Deut.4:32-34)
Sitting circle, we surround surrender. Who will give in first?
And behold I am with you always until the end of the age. (Mt.28:29)
The abstract concept of the Trinity is moving from triangle to circle. No longer tripodal image of three. Now, with you and me, we are a-round.
We pray for each moving through all. We pray for the inspiration with which each permeates each in everyday life. We pray all will be one as one is itself.
The mystery of the Trinity as portrayed by the church seems to leave woman out of the picture. This will change. It will change because awareness asks it to change. Woman-mother and man-father are gendered approximations of the reality of creativity.
Creativity itself, creative-being itself, and intuitive-inspiring-creating itself!
These relating, undifferentiating, and unfolding aspects of sacred reality surround us in our ordinary day-to-day living cosmotheandric experience in the world.
Church need not fret. It is confirmation. New names are taken. Spirit creates something new.
Come, we say, Holy Spirit.
Bless, we say, all unceasing surrounding interpenetrating movement of the Sacred Itself.
Today it rains.
Glistening green festive beloved solemnity!
Ask Now -- Facing One Another.
Creation. Creator. Creating.
Alone on my zazen mat
I forget the days as they pass
The wisteria has grown thick
Over the eaves of my hut
The subtle Way of Bodhidharma
I never give it a thought
Does anyone know the truth of Zen
Or what to ask about it?
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
Moses said to the people: "Ask now of the days of old, before your time, ever since God created man [woman, and all sentient beings] upon the earth; ask from one end of the sky to the other: Did anything so great ever happen before? Was it ever heard of? Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live?
(Deut.4:32-34)
Sitting circle, we surround surrender. Who will give in first?
And behold I am with you always until the end of the age. (Mt.28:29)
The abstract concept of the Trinity is moving from triangle to circle. No longer tripodal image of three. Now, with you and me, we are a-round.
We pray for each moving through all. We pray for the inspiration with which each permeates each in everyday life. We pray all will be one as one is itself.
The mystery of the Trinity as portrayed by the church seems to leave woman out of the picture. This will change. It will change because awareness asks it to change. Woman-mother and man-father are gendered approximations of the reality of creativity.
Creativity itself, creative-being itself, and intuitive-inspiring-creating itself!
These relating, undifferentiating, and unfolding aspects of sacred reality surround us in our ordinary day-to-day living cosmotheandric experience in the world.
Church need not fret. It is confirmation. New names are taken. Spirit creates something new.
Come, we say, Holy Spirit.
Bless, we say, all unceasing surrounding interpenetrating movement of the Sacred Itself.
Today it rains.
Glistening green festive beloved solemnity!
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