Circus comes to town.
Even if just the town of our psyche -- it is festival time -- at nexus of winter into spring in New England, Lent into Easter (in Christian metaphor) through that glorious center ring of Holy Week. Add personal emergence, from appearance through illusion, a sweet and unfathomable solitude transfixed by silence collapsing into befuddling stillness. We have no idea what is happening.
The rare gaze from clown hermit heart sees aloneness without circumference.
For penetrating to the depths
Of one's own true self-nature,
And for attaining a vitality
Valid on all occasions,
Nothing can surpass
Meditation in the midst of activity.
- Hakuin (1686-1769)
Both coffee grounds and pipe tobacco fall outside kitchen window. Some impulse to light "Smooth Dutch Cavendish" in new Italian Briar picked up unbidden in Brunswick before falling ill last week brings decades to an old fragrance. Cat jumps to kitchen roof as smoke from chimney wood fire and Sail Regular rises height of barn. Cool breeze.
The Jewish Passover drew near, and many of the country people who had gone up to Jerusalem to purify themselves looked out for Jesus, saying to one another as they stood about in the Temple, "What do you think? Will he come to the festival or not?"
(--from John 11:45 - 56)
Who could miss the festival? Who doesn't want to attend the circus? Walking into and through center ring is price of admission. Don't mind the distractions. The bells and whistles, tumblers and trapezist, trainers and trombonist -- they are distracting prelude. The spotlight will show you the one to watch. "Will he come?" He'll show.
The Waitresses
The waitresses
At the restaurant
Have to keep reminding
The schizophrenic man
That if he keeps acting
Like a schizophrenic man
They'll have to ask him to leave the restaurant.
But he keeps forgetting that he's a schizophrenic man,
So they have to keep reminding him.
(Poem: "The Waitresses" by Matt Cook from Eavesdrop Soup)
We're a bit schizophrenic about Jesus, Judas, Jeremiah, and Jehovah. We want to follow the show, listen to the story, but we're uncertain how it ends. Like some garishly costumed midnight feature with spooks and ghouls mouthing lines everyone recites by tingling rote in unison, the story of the man from Nazareth (by contrast) is played out throughout Christendom in muted tones with plaintive chant by devoted players in somber attire. How does it end?
Upstake, fold canvas, lower wires, wash vases, wipe counter, rake ground, don white, race to emptiness. The circus tells it all, but like that spinster poet, tells it slant. There's a clown lingering at the edge of our awareness, one foot lifting as if something was there to receive it.
Never did I have the slightest doubt, not even at age nine, when I joined my friends at the railroad station at dawn to meet the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus train and actually got to water the elephants, never (and especially not then) did I ever have the slightest doubt that the circus was about Something Big, that it asked and answered Large Questions. The greatest show on earth -- had I known the word -- was metaphysical.
That lower-case curmudgeon, American poet e e cummings, put the matter succinctly in the opening moments of his play "Him," when the main character, Him, hurls a burning, contradictory curse to the heavens: 'Damn everything but the circus!' The circus, an oasis of sanity, goes un-damned because it represents an alternative to the spoiled, moronically contaminated world at large. It seems to me, however, that the circus is infinitely more a compression and crystallization of our large world than any kind of momentary relief from it. Poor old Him is hoist on the horns of a tautology. Mind you, he gets closer to the truth when he muses to himself, 'And here am I, patiently squeezing fourdimensional ideas into a twodimensional stage, when all of me that's anyone or anything is in the top of a circustent...' Why in 'the top of a circustent?' Because that's where the aerialists are, the angels of the metaphysical circus.
...The sad and beautiful Auguste, tragic hero of Henry Miller's "The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder" (1948), is a useful emblem for this vertical division into levels of rarefication and breeding. Auguste, descended from the ancient and noble white-faced clown of the "Commedia dell'arte," stands throughout much of his act at the foot of a ladder -- the stairway to paradise, the essential symbol of human aspiration. The knockabout laughter of the ordinary street clowns has given way to an 'extraordinary smile which was engraved on Auguste's sad countenance. In the ring,' writes Miller,
"...this smile took on a quality of its own, detached, magnified, expressing the ineffable. At the foot of the ladder reaching to the moon, Auguste would sit in contemplation, his smile fixed, his thoughts far away. This simulation of ecstasy, which he had brought to perfection, always impressed the audience as the summation of the incongruous... Never had a buffoon thought to depict the miracle of ascension."
(from article by Gary Michael Dault, "The Clowns" -- in BorderCrossings, Vol. 13 #4, Fall 1994. http://www.ccca.ca/c/writing/d/dault/dau012t.html)
Something, someone, is rising from the earth, perhaps rising through the earth. We're unsure. What clownish enterprise is it that walks straight into a wall -- once, twice, three times -- then (of a sudden and incalculable surprise) must have passed through without notice while we were wincing or laughing. We were expecting another thud. Only disappearance instead.
Poet T.S. Eliot wondered what is seen when what is seen is difficult to count or measure:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-- But who is that on the other side of you?
(Lines 359-365, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), in poem "The Waste Land." 1922.)
We do not know yet how to count. That's why we're so in debt. There's a place left open at table, even though everyone coming has arrived. An additional umbrella leans by door even though everyone has left. There's a conversation unfinished even though it's impossible to figure what's being said, by whom, where, and (absent the realization you are remarkably alone) how?
The smile both infuriates and seduces. Someone knows something. Nothing's being told.
So it is with the circus. So too the clown. When we step right up to see the show -- we are certain, this time, we'll pay attention. We'll watch, this time, where he goes. We won't be seduced by the smile that intimates it doesn't matter our eyes can't follow. Some seeing is beyond image and icon, beyond vision.
Whatever the trick, it's a good one. The smile is legacy. What treasure it transmits, we cannot grasp. But we'll reach out. Fingers wide in handshake or gassho. If not this time, next time. We're intent on touching -- on being touched.
Even though we doubt...we hope. Briefly. Then hope crumbles. And when the 'h' abandons its lead spot and loses its head and runs to the end of the word, we find ourselves open.
There we are.
In the open.
We'll see.
Friday, April 07, 2006
Prayer is one's being.
If prayer is one's being, this one is idiorhythmic. It's all over the place, at the same time, nowhere to be found.
"When I was visiting the monastic republic of Mount Athos on the Chalkidiki Peninsula of northern Greece in 1998 to learn what I could about the manuscript collections that have been maintained there for a thousand years, I ran across a lovely word, idiorhythmic, which describes a kind of relaxed monasticism no longer in favor in which adherents could more or less follow their own rules, not those of an inflexible abbot. Translated from the Greek, idiorhythmic means "living by one's own life patterns," and it suggests for me a way to go about the business of scouting out books."
-- Nicholas A. Basbanes, from, "Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the Twenty-First Century" c.2002)
My life pattern went into prison this morning, escorted to education, finding out it was indeed true the one staff person there was elsewhere; then catching another escort back across the portico, through corridors, collecting keys, signing out, and leaving into parking lot.
Like a cipher riding the droll edge of senseless chatter, in and out, I regard my life encapsuled in this morning's wonderful errant.
Meditation is not
A way to enlightenment,
Nor is it a method
Of achieving anything at all.
It is peace and blessedness itself.
It is the actualization of wisdom,
The ultimate truth
Of the oneness of all things.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
There's actually nothing I enjoy more than a cancelled appointment, conversation, class, or practice session. Similarly, I sometimes purchase a megabucks lottery ticket -- but hardly ever look to see if it was a winner. I might apply for a position, as recently done, but prefer not to hear that (yes, or, no) my name seems suitable, but, "ah, the small matter of" (fill in the blank) perhaps, "the idiorhythmia of your being...so...unordinary, or, shall I say, dis-affiliated?" It's a less annoying quality than disaffection -- one might not be...that), but hermits, especially idiorhythmic hermits (the worse kind: they don't follow the ordinary ways of the unordinary way), are rain in April, which, (being the cruelest month), does not even ask rain to do anything specific, like make flowers grow in Maine while it's still thirty degrees. No, rain is expected to merely fall.
We Bring Democracy To The Fish
It is unacceptable that fish prey on each other.
For their comfort and safety, we will liberate them
into fishfarms with secure, durable boundaries
that exclude predators. Our care will provide
for their liberty, health, happiness, and nutrition.
Of course all creatures need to feel useful.
At maturity the fish will discover their purposes.
Poem: "We Bring Democracy To The Fish" by Donald Hall, from, White Apples and the Taste of Stone.)
Everyone thought they knew Judas' purpose -- to be the betraying scapegoat. Turns out, not so. Judas conspired with Jesus so that Jesus could break the pattern. Kazantzakis had it.
We are blest with so many who know our purpose. The world is full of patterns with remarkable programming designed to relieve the lot of us from having to dive headlong into chaos and God. We're saved from both God and chaos, given programs to bide time, fret completion, fasten credential, smile for the camera..."oh, you didn't have any questions, did you?"
Dogen is on to something -- what's there to be achieved? Judas smiled and cried and couldn't bear his friend's choice. And Schopenhauer's drifting suggestion about our becoming what is not achieved:
5.1 Aesthetic Perception as a Mode of Transcendence:
Schopenhauer's violence-filled vision of the daily world leads him on a quest for tranquility, and he pursues this end by retracing the path through which the will is objectified. Schopenhauer discovers more peaceful states of mind by directing his everyday, practically-oriented consciousness towards more extraordinary, universal and less-individuated states of mind, since he believes that the violence that a person experiences, is proportional to the degree to which that person's consciousness is individuated and objectifying. He believes that with less individuation and objectification, there is less conflict, less pain and more peace.
One way to achieve a more tranquil state of consciousness, according to Schopenhauer, is through aesthetic perception. This is a special state of perceptual consciousness, where we apprehend some spatio-temporal object and discern through this object, the Platonic Idea that corresponds to the type of object in question. In this special form of perception, Schopenhauer maintains, we lose ourselves in the object, we forget about our individuality, and we become the clear mirror of the object. For example, through the aesthetic perception of an individual tree, we perceive shining through it, the archetype of all trees (i.e., the Ur-phenomenon, as Goethe would describe it).
Since Schopenhauer assumes that the quality of the subject of experience must correspond to the quality of the object of experience, he infers that in the state of aesthetic perception, where the objects are universal, the subject of experience must likewise become universal (WWR, Section 33). Aesthetic perception thus raises a person into a pure will-less, painless, and timeless subject of knowledge (WWR, Section 34).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/#5.1
The idiorhythmic achieves nothing worth describing.
Being what she or he is, seems like going nowhere.
There's no order, not there, not anywhere.
Only orderly confidence shilling promises what it cannot produce.
Don't go there.
Be every-here.
Be prayer.
If prayer is one's being, this one is idiorhythmic. It's all over the place, at the same time, nowhere to be found.
"When I was visiting the monastic republic of Mount Athos on the Chalkidiki Peninsula of northern Greece in 1998 to learn what I could about the manuscript collections that have been maintained there for a thousand years, I ran across a lovely word, idiorhythmic, which describes a kind of relaxed monasticism no longer in favor in which adherents could more or less follow their own rules, not those of an inflexible abbot. Translated from the Greek, idiorhythmic means "living by one's own life patterns," and it suggests for me a way to go about the business of scouting out books."
-- Nicholas A. Basbanes, from, "Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the Twenty-First Century" c.2002)
My life pattern went into prison this morning, escorted to education, finding out it was indeed true the one staff person there was elsewhere; then catching another escort back across the portico, through corridors, collecting keys, signing out, and leaving into parking lot.
Like a cipher riding the droll edge of senseless chatter, in and out, I regard my life encapsuled in this morning's wonderful errant.
Meditation is not
A way to enlightenment,
Nor is it a method
Of achieving anything at all.
It is peace and blessedness itself.
It is the actualization of wisdom,
The ultimate truth
Of the oneness of all things.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
There's actually nothing I enjoy more than a cancelled appointment, conversation, class, or practice session. Similarly, I sometimes purchase a megabucks lottery ticket -- but hardly ever look to see if it was a winner. I might apply for a position, as recently done, but prefer not to hear that (yes, or, no) my name seems suitable, but, "ah, the small matter of" (fill in the blank) perhaps, "the idiorhythmia of your being...so...unordinary, or, shall I say, dis-affiliated?" It's a less annoying quality than disaffection -- one might not be...that), but hermits, especially idiorhythmic hermits (the worse kind: they don't follow the ordinary ways of the unordinary way), are rain in April, which, (being the cruelest month), does not even ask rain to do anything specific, like make flowers grow in Maine while it's still thirty degrees. No, rain is expected to merely fall.
We Bring Democracy To The Fish
It is unacceptable that fish prey on each other.
For their comfort and safety, we will liberate them
into fishfarms with secure, durable boundaries
that exclude predators. Our care will provide
for their liberty, health, happiness, and nutrition.
Of course all creatures need to feel useful.
At maturity the fish will discover their purposes.
Poem: "We Bring Democracy To The Fish" by Donald Hall, from, White Apples and the Taste of Stone.)
Everyone thought they knew Judas' purpose -- to be the betraying scapegoat. Turns out, not so. Judas conspired with Jesus so that Jesus could break the pattern. Kazantzakis had it.
We are blest with so many who know our purpose. The world is full of patterns with remarkable programming designed to relieve the lot of us from having to dive headlong into chaos and God. We're saved from both God and chaos, given programs to bide time, fret completion, fasten credential, smile for the camera..."oh, you didn't have any questions, did you?"
Dogen is on to something -- what's there to be achieved? Judas smiled and cried and couldn't bear his friend's choice. And Schopenhauer's drifting suggestion about our becoming what is not achieved:
5.1 Aesthetic Perception as a Mode of Transcendence:
Schopenhauer's violence-filled vision of the daily world leads him on a quest for tranquility, and he pursues this end by retracing the path through which the will is objectified. Schopenhauer discovers more peaceful states of mind by directing his everyday, practically-oriented consciousness towards more extraordinary, universal and less-individuated states of mind, since he believes that the violence that a person experiences, is proportional to the degree to which that person's consciousness is individuated and objectifying. He believes that with less individuation and objectification, there is less conflict, less pain and more peace.
One way to achieve a more tranquil state of consciousness, according to Schopenhauer, is through aesthetic perception. This is a special state of perceptual consciousness, where we apprehend some spatio-temporal object and discern through this object, the Platonic Idea that corresponds to the type of object in question. In this special form of perception, Schopenhauer maintains, we lose ourselves in the object, we forget about our individuality, and we become the clear mirror of the object. For example, through the aesthetic perception of an individual tree, we perceive shining through it, the archetype of all trees (i.e., the Ur-phenomenon, as Goethe would describe it).
Since Schopenhauer assumes that the quality of the subject of experience must correspond to the quality of the object of experience, he infers that in the state of aesthetic perception, where the objects are universal, the subject of experience must likewise become universal (WWR, Section 33). Aesthetic perception thus raises a person into a pure will-less, painless, and timeless subject of knowledge (WWR, Section 34).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/#5.1
The idiorhythmic achieves nothing worth describing.
Being what she or he is, seems like going nowhere.
There's no order, not there, not anywhere.
Only orderly confidence shilling promises what it cannot produce.
Don't go there.
Be every-here.
Be prayer.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Time to think about home. Where it is. Where it isn't.
The grief of injustice and assassination, its power-lust and heartless stare, is contemporary mediation this season toward Holy Week. In the secular church, the liturgy of Final Four and Opening Day are celebrated with great spirit and verve. Off to the side, in what might be a new version of the Underground Church, Underground Railroad, other iconic images, from Jesus to Martin, fill this Lent. The underground, like that of Maine's weeping waking earth, tries to remember how to emerge from suspended awareness, evolve through sun-inviting surface into new being,
More than his birthday, Martin Luther King Jr's deathday, his transition day, takes my attention. In Washington DC to study philosophy and theology in 1968, I felt the pulsing grief, disbelief, and anger of a city and a people. Driving bus filled with franciscan absurd ethos of presence, we felt the riot of despair, even sharp sound of bullet against metal in middle of night. Later, sitting in sanctuary with front page report of troops and fire and sorrow, David S. is captured in photo with Washington Post open, tabernacle in relief to the other mystery of assassination and its emptiness.
Will M. sends a piece from Aurobindo. It strikes me as a sun-invitation to consider, in new wording, the perennial story which, in the Christian metaphor, we call "resurrection":
The strife was over, the respite lay in front.
Happy they lived with birds and beasts and flowers
And sunlight and the rustle of the leaves,
And heard the wild winds wandering in the night,
Mused with the stars in their mute constant ranks,
And lodged in the mornings as in azure tents,
And with the glory of the noons were one.
Some deeper plunged; from life's external clasp
Beckoned into a fiery privacy
In the soul's unprofaned star-white recess
They sojourned with an everliving Bliss;
A Voice profound in the ecstasy and the hush
They heard, beheld an all-revealing Light.
All time-made difference they overcame;
The world was fibred with their own heart-strings;
Close drawn to the heart that beats in every breast,
They reached the one self in all through boundless love.
Attuned to Silence and to the world-rhyme,
They loosened the knot of the imprisoning mind;
[Page 382]
Achieved was the wide untroubled witness gaze,
Unsealed was Nature's great spiritual eye;
To the height of heights rose now their daily climb:
Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;
Above them blazed eternity's mystic suns.
Nameless the austere ascetics without home
Abandoning speech and motion and desire ...
[From Book Four, Canto IV, "The Quest". Savitri travels the countryside, in search of her soul's mate. In Savitri -- A Legend and a Symbol By Sri Aurobindo, Pp. 379, 382)
To loosen the knot. The wide untroubled witness gaze. Are these signs of resurrection?
Are we evolving?
Play with the etymology pronouncing the presence and movement of spirit through being-itself. "For the willingness to love" -- [e; vol; love]
The Latin helps: volo (1) velle volui (vin = visne; sis = si vis; sultis = si vultis); [to be willing , to wish, want; to will, ordain; to suppose, maintain that]; 'sibi velle', [to mean, signify]. Hence partic. volens -entis, [willing, favorable].
No wonder there is so much difficulty with the word "evolve" and its maligned cousin, "evolution."
The willingness to love would entail an encircling surrender to the whole of life/being/itself.
This, I submit, in contrast to thought/determining/our-(my)-way-is-right.
Life is not what we think it is. Life is what it is. The difficulty we face at this current level of rational consciousness is the knot of thought/belief that attempts to hold everything in suspended isolation, fixed fast according to our lights, our arbitrary level of understanding. In moments of brief clarity, we suspect life is beyond thought and beyond belief. At those moments we ourselves are suspended somewhere at a distance from our fixed thought and belief, open to what is being revealed.
Learning opens. Going beyond traditional measurements of worth and success, helps.
Recognizing knots, and loosening them, helps. Being astounded, helps. As does wording oneself through resurrecting sound.
It occurs to me that the way we evolve is awareness of the astonishment involving being-itself. This "Oh!" -- this opening vowel, world rhyme, inserts itself into the very word "evolve" and becomes "evolove".
This neologism, the word, "evolove" is not just a misspelling of "evolve" -- it is the addition ("Oh!") of wonder, astonishment, at what is revealing itself in our midst.
The word "evolove" is a palindrome. Etymology: Greek palindromos running back again, from palin back, again + dramein to run; akin to Greek polos axis, pole. (Merriam-Webster Online)
A palindrome is a word or phrase which reads the same in both directions.
I submit we have a need for palindromic consciousness, namely, one that arrives at core (at care?), at center, the middle reality of inquiry that bypasses, and possibly dissolves the exclusive mechanistic duality and twoness of our contemporary mind.
An inclusive ecologic wholeness would be the invitation of consciousness.
Such a consciousness would begin to experience, practice, and declare interdependence. Martha Nussbaum's Capability Approach. "Compassionate individuals construct institutions that embody what they imagine; institutions influence the development of compassion in individuals. In connection with a form of political liberalism going for overlapping consensus." (Nussbaum 2001, quoted in "Reflection on Martha Nussbaum's Work on Compassion from a Buddhist Perspective", by Maria Vanden Eynde, in "Journal of Buddhist Ethics", Volume 11, 2004)
Retrieving Aurobindo:
Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;
Above them blazed eternity's mystic suns.
Nameless the austere ascetics without home
Abandoning speech and motion and desire ...
Sheer wonder!
Silences.
The grief of injustice and assassination, its power-lust and heartless stare, is contemporary mediation this season toward Holy Week. In the secular church, the liturgy of Final Four and Opening Day are celebrated with great spirit and verve. Off to the side, in what might be a new version of the Underground Church, Underground Railroad, other iconic images, from Jesus to Martin, fill this Lent. The underground, like that of Maine's weeping waking earth, tries to remember how to emerge from suspended awareness, evolve through sun-inviting surface into new being,
More than his birthday, Martin Luther King Jr's deathday, his transition day, takes my attention. In Washington DC to study philosophy and theology in 1968, I felt the pulsing grief, disbelief, and anger of a city and a people. Driving bus filled with franciscan absurd ethos of presence, we felt the riot of despair, even sharp sound of bullet against metal in middle of night. Later, sitting in sanctuary with front page report of troops and fire and sorrow, David S. is captured in photo with Washington Post open, tabernacle in relief to the other mystery of assassination and its emptiness.
Will M. sends a piece from Aurobindo. It strikes me as a sun-invitation to consider, in new wording, the perennial story which, in the Christian metaphor, we call "resurrection":
The strife was over, the respite lay in front.
Happy they lived with birds and beasts and flowers
And sunlight and the rustle of the leaves,
And heard the wild winds wandering in the night,
Mused with the stars in their mute constant ranks,
And lodged in the mornings as in azure tents,
And with the glory of the noons were one.
Some deeper plunged; from life's external clasp
Beckoned into a fiery privacy
In the soul's unprofaned star-white recess
They sojourned with an everliving Bliss;
A Voice profound in the ecstasy and the hush
They heard, beheld an all-revealing Light.
All time-made difference they overcame;
The world was fibred with their own heart-strings;
Close drawn to the heart that beats in every breast,
They reached the one self in all through boundless love.
Attuned to Silence and to the world-rhyme,
They loosened the knot of the imprisoning mind;
[Page 382]
Achieved was the wide untroubled witness gaze,
Unsealed was Nature's great spiritual eye;
To the height of heights rose now their daily climb:
Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;
Above them blazed eternity's mystic suns.
Nameless the austere ascetics without home
Abandoning speech and motion and desire ...
[From Book Four, Canto IV, "The Quest". Savitri travels the countryside, in search of her soul's mate. In Savitri -- A Legend and a Symbol By Sri Aurobindo, Pp. 379, 382)
To loosen the knot. The wide untroubled witness gaze. Are these signs of resurrection?
Are we evolving?
Play with the etymology pronouncing the presence and movement of spirit through being-itself. "For the willingness to love" -- [e; vol; love]
The Latin helps: volo (1) velle volui (vin = visne; sis = si vis; sultis = si vultis); [to be willing , to wish, want; to will, ordain; to suppose, maintain that]; 'sibi velle', [to mean, signify]. Hence partic. volens -entis, [willing, favorable].
No wonder there is so much difficulty with the word "evolve" and its maligned cousin, "evolution."
The willingness to love would entail an encircling surrender to the whole of life/being/itself.
This, I submit, in contrast to thought/determining/our-(my)-way-is-right.
Life is not what we think it is. Life is what it is. The difficulty we face at this current level of rational consciousness is the knot of thought/belief that attempts to hold everything in suspended isolation, fixed fast according to our lights, our arbitrary level of understanding. In moments of brief clarity, we suspect life is beyond thought and beyond belief. At those moments we ourselves are suspended somewhere at a distance from our fixed thought and belief, open to what is being revealed.
Learning opens. Going beyond traditional measurements of worth and success, helps.
Recognizing knots, and loosening them, helps. Being astounded, helps. As does wording oneself through resurrecting sound.
It occurs to me that the way we evolve is awareness of the astonishment involving being-itself. This "Oh!" -- this opening vowel, world rhyme, inserts itself into the very word "evolve" and becomes "evolove".
This neologism, the word, "evolove" is not just a misspelling of "evolve" -- it is the addition ("Oh!") of wonder, astonishment, at what is revealing itself in our midst.
The word "evolove" is a palindrome. Etymology: Greek palindromos running back again, from palin back, again + dramein to run; akin to Greek polos axis, pole. (Merriam-Webster Online)
A palindrome is a word or phrase which reads the same in both directions.
I submit we have a need for palindromic consciousness, namely, one that arrives at core (at care?), at center, the middle reality of inquiry that bypasses, and possibly dissolves the exclusive mechanistic duality and twoness of our contemporary mind.
An inclusive ecologic wholeness would be the invitation of consciousness.
Such a consciousness would begin to experience, practice, and declare interdependence. Martha Nussbaum's Capability Approach. "Compassionate individuals construct institutions that embody what they imagine; institutions influence the development of compassion in individuals. In connection with a form of political liberalism going for overlapping consensus." (Nussbaum 2001, quoted in "Reflection on Martha Nussbaum's Work on Compassion from a Buddhist Perspective", by Maria Vanden Eynde, in "Journal of Buddhist Ethics", Volume 11, 2004)
Retrieving Aurobindo:
Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;
Above them blazed eternity's mystic suns.
Nameless the austere ascetics without home
Abandoning speech and motion and desire ...
Sheer wonder!
Silences.
Monday, April 03, 2006
At footbridge on lower trail along Mt. Megunticook east toward Lincolnville from Camden, psalm of tumbling water telling of its joy falling, falling, falling.
Every sentient being is
Ready to be enlightened
At every moment.
The only hindrance
Is not recognizing
The purity and limitlessness
Of buddha nature.
We may have inklings
Of our limitless quality,
But we don't fully recognize it,
So we become focused
On the relative I, the self.
- Tesshu Tokusai (? -- 1366)
No self in water. Only wet, only cool, only song of abandon going God knows where.
On either side and everywhere on the mountain, a billion fallen leaves -- earthen, winter worn, ready for soil, given wood to tree -- feel urge beneath them, root lust to green not yet bud-born branch.
The child grew up; one day he went out to his father who was with the reapers, and exclaimed to his father, "Oh, my head! My head!" The father told a servant to carry him to his mother. He lifted him up and took him to his mother, and the boy sat on her knee until midday, when he died. She went upstairs, laid him on the bed of the man of God, shut the door on him and went out.
Elisha then went to the house, and there on his bed lay the child, dead. He went in and shut the door on the two of them and prayed to the Lord. Then he climbed on to the bed and stretched himself on top of the child, putting his mouth on his mouth, his eyes to his eyes, and his hands on his hands, and as he lowered himself on to him, the child's flesh grew warm. Then he got up and walked to and fro inside the house, and then climbed on to the bed again and lowered himself on to the child seven times in all; then the child sneezed -- and opened his eyes. He then summoned Gehazi. "Call our Shunammitess" he said; and he called her. When she came to him, he said, "Take up your son". She went in and, falling at his feet, bowed down to the ground; and taking up her son went out.
(2 Kings 4:18 - 37)
Yogananda says Elisha will reincarnate as Jesus. Green lust rooting life.
After silence after mass after coffee after donuts I climb Beech Hill to see the sea its beauty. From that lovely vantage I call Saskia who tucks in monastery later in day.
Two mice in zendo watch me watch them.
Sharing root greening practing.
Bell chant. Follows. Silence.
Every sentient being is
Ready to be enlightened
At every moment.
The only hindrance
Is not recognizing
The purity and limitlessness
Of buddha nature.
We may have inklings
Of our limitless quality,
But we don't fully recognize it,
So we become focused
On the relative I, the self.
- Tesshu Tokusai (? -- 1366)
No self in water. Only wet, only cool, only song of abandon going God knows where.
On either side and everywhere on the mountain, a billion fallen leaves -- earthen, winter worn, ready for soil, given wood to tree -- feel urge beneath them, root lust to green not yet bud-born branch.
The child grew up; one day he went out to his father who was with the reapers, and exclaimed to his father, "Oh, my head! My head!" The father told a servant to carry him to his mother. He lifted him up and took him to his mother, and the boy sat on her knee until midday, when he died. She went upstairs, laid him on the bed of the man of God, shut the door on him and went out.
Elisha then went to the house, and there on his bed lay the child, dead. He went in and shut the door on the two of them and prayed to the Lord. Then he climbed on to the bed and stretched himself on top of the child, putting his mouth on his mouth, his eyes to his eyes, and his hands on his hands, and as he lowered himself on to him, the child's flesh grew warm. Then he got up and walked to and fro inside the house, and then climbed on to the bed again and lowered himself on to the child seven times in all; then the child sneezed -- and opened his eyes. He then summoned Gehazi. "Call our Shunammitess" he said; and he called her. When she came to him, he said, "Take up your son". She went in and, falling at his feet, bowed down to the ground; and taking up her son went out.
(2 Kings 4:18 - 37)
Yogananda says Elisha will reincarnate as Jesus. Green lust rooting life.
After silence after mass after coffee after donuts I climb Beech Hill to see the sea its beauty. From that lovely vantage I call Saskia who tucks in monastery later in day.
Two mice in zendo watch me watch them.
Sharing root greening practing.
Bell chant. Follows. Silence.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Holy Week approaches. Easter approaches.
What does silence call for? What does solitude look for? What-is-called itself?
Does it matter that Jesus be God? God and Man? Man only?
What matters is kindness. What also matters is seeing and treating each person, each sentient being, and each moment of creation as sacred moment, sacred being, sacred person.
Long ago, with a shift in consciousness, Jeremiah was led to realize and reveal:
Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people. There will be no further need for neighbour to try to teach neighbour, or brother to say to brother, "Learn to know the Lord!" No, they will all know me, the least no less than the greatest -- it is the Lord who speaks -- since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind.
(from Jeremiah 31: 31 -)
Not to mind sin. If sin is separation, pay it no mind. The divisive, the worries, the fretting, goals and dreams, attachment to outcomes, the anxiety of grasping for security -- these are ways the mind refuses to trust. If we pay sin no mind, will trust, will faith emerge?
I sometimes look hard at this. The word "faith" needs reviewing. It is not owned, does belong to anyone or anything claiming sole rights. It belongs only to itself.
Sometimes I think I've faith but no belief. I'm not sure what to say when asked what I believe. I want to shift the conversation, the way Jeremiah did. I want to say it doesn't matter what I believe. Rather, call it what you will, what I'd call "faith" is an unknowing trust in the benevolence of life. This unknowing trust surrounds all and permeates all. Not one thing is excluded. Faith is open-handed. My faith doesn't cling to a particular set of beliefs, denomination, master, guru, bishop, administrator, or understanding of (what is called) God. This faith is what-is-called.
What-is-called by us -- by our presence? What-is-called by another -- by their presence? If not God -- why not...God?
"The kingdom of God comes...to the individual, by entering into his soul and laying hold of it. True, the kingdom of God is the rule of God; but it is the rule of the holy God in the hearts of individuals...." (Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) from What is Christianity? c.1901; quoted in The First Coming, How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity, p.14, by Thomas Sheehan, c.1986)
God is either in the heart, the heart of everything, or there is no God. God in the heart of each piece of creation, each angle of face, each turn of phrase. Or, nowhere. It is hard to understand the thinking that puts God outside creation. It is equally difficult to comprehend how particular people, particular church, or particular individual(s) constitute the exclusive domain of God -- all others bow, genuflect, tithe, alms-give, sacrifice, revere, devote, surrender, deny themselves, defer, or allow themselves to be told (or believe) they are separated from that which they cannot be separated from.
Now my soul is troubled. (Jesus, in John 12)
He was troubled, the writer suggests, because he intuited his imminent death. He probably was frightened in the same way we all become frightened at the thought of our own death. Did the fear of separation suddenly enter his mind? Did he experience that fear which pervades the minds of so many? Did he own it? Hold it? Did he realize that such a fear, and such a mind that welcomes and cultivates it, is a great death? Is that why, exhausted by the awful fear others scourged him with, he came to the dropping-off point, saying: "Your will, not mine;" saying, "Into your hands I commend my spirit."? He'd been completely human. At his dropping-off point (of mind, of body) Jesus realizes what-is-called God and lets-go wholly into that Itself.
So it is. The vague despondency that haunts us like sudden April wind crossing hillside passes. We go on, and/or, we die. What carries us through is an unknowing trust in the benevolence of existence and life that passes us on to the next thing we find ourselves doing, the next thing we choose to do. Anything. Like swaying trees in early afternoon breeze. Sunlight giving dignity to tired brown leaves on loosening soil. Or lives, like clouds, passing. We go on.
Some Clouds
Now that I've unplugged the phone
no one can reach me --
At least for this one afternoon
they will have to get by without my advice or opinion.
Now nobody else is going to call
& ask in a tentative voice
if I haven't yet heard that she's dead,
that woman I once loved --
nothing but ashes scattered over a city
that barely itself any longer exists.
Yes, thank you, I've heard.
It had been too lovely a morning.
That in itself should have warned me.
The sun lit up the tangerines
& the blazing poinsettias
like so many candles.
For one afternoon they will have to forgive me.
I am busy watching things happen again
that happened a long time ago,
as I lean back in Josephine's lawn chair
under a sky of incredible blue,
broken -- if that is the word for it --
by a few billowing clouds,
all white & unspeakably lovely,
drifting out of one nothingness into another.
(Poem: "Some Clouds" by Steve Kowit from The Dumbbell Nebula. The Roundhouse Press.)
Part of taking time for a retreat is loosening oneself from the tight freezing survival demands of winter. Retrieving resurgence of spirit. The heart longs to rest away from the cacophony of dissident views about who's right who's wrong; who's a disgrace, who's going to triumph; whose God is more powerful, whose God is really truly God?
I like this piece. It is Krishnamurti's secret.
There's a story about J. Krishnamurti that speaks reams about what it means to be free of this limiting, fear-based pattern of thinking. Every spring he used to give talks in a beautiful oak grove in Ojai, in southern California. He had been speaking there for over sixty years. On this particular occasion when I went to hear him, in the late nineteen-seventies, there must have been close to two thousand people in attendance, sitting on the grass, or in their folding chairs.
It was always an extraordinary experience, hearing Krishnamurti in person. Aldous Huxley, who was a friend of Krishnamurti's, described it as: "Like listening to a discourse of the Buddha—such authority, such intrinsic power."
Part way through this particular talk, Krishnamurti suddenly paused, leaned forward, and said, almost conspiratorially, "Do you want to know what my secret is?" Almost as though we were one body we sat up, even more alert than we had been, if that was possible. I could see people all around me lean forward, their ears straining and their mouths slowly opening in hushed anticipation.
Krishnamurti rarely ever talked about himself or his own process, and now he was about to give us his secret! He was in many ways a mountaintop teacher—somewhat distant, aloof, seemingly unapproachable, unless you were part of his inner circle. Yet that's why we came to Ojai every spring, to see if we could find out just what his secret was. We wanted to know how he managed to be so aware and enlightened, while we struggled with conflict and our numerous problems.
There was a silence. Then he said in a soft, almost shy voice, "You see, I don't mind what happens."
I don't mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom. It is a timeless spiritual truth: release attachment to outcomes, and—deep inside yourself—you'll feel good no matter what. You’ll feel good because you are connected to, one with, the energy of the universe, the beauty and power of creation itself. Or, as Krishnamurti himself put it:
‘When you live with this awareness, this sensitivity, life has an astonishing way of taking care of you. Then there is no problem of security, of what people say or do not say, and that is the beauty of life.’
(c. Jim Dreaver, 2005, www.jimdreaver.com, http://www.geocities.com/thereisonlynow/kirishnamurtissecret.html)
And so, we're on retreat. We're following winter, going off into spring, thawing in solitude, stopping a while, turning off the engine, walking out back, a monastic quiet -- watching, contemplating, and engaging whatever service the authentic will reveal.
We're not waiting. Waiting implies expectation. We aren't expecting anything.
Does it matter that God is not found separate from creation?
Itself. Each is called to be itself. Is this another side of the mystery of resurrection?
Such a beautiful day!
Yes?
Go on!
What does silence call for? What does solitude look for? What-is-called itself?
Does it matter that Jesus be God? God and Man? Man only?
What matters is kindness. What also matters is seeing and treating each person, each sentient being, and each moment of creation as sacred moment, sacred being, sacred person.
Long ago, with a shift in consciousness, Jeremiah was led to realize and reveal:
Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people. There will be no further need for neighbour to try to teach neighbour, or brother to say to brother, "Learn to know the Lord!" No, they will all know me, the least no less than the greatest -- it is the Lord who speaks -- since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind.
(from Jeremiah 31: 31 -)
Not to mind sin. If sin is separation, pay it no mind. The divisive, the worries, the fretting, goals and dreams, attachment to outcomes, the anxiety of grasping for security -- these are ways the mind refuses to trust. If we pay sin no mind, will trust, will faith emerge?
I sometimes look hard at this. The word "faith" needs reviewing. It is not owned, does belong to anyone or anything claiming sole rights. It belongs only to itself.
Sometimes I think I've faith but no belief. I'm not sure what to say when asked what I believe. I want to shift the conversation, the way Jeremiah did. I want to say it doesn't matter what I believe. Rather, call it what you will, what I'd call "faith" is an unknowing trust in the benevolence of life. This unknowing trust surrounds all and permeates all. Not one thing is excluded. Faith is open-handed. My faith doesn't cling to a particular set of beliefs, denomination, master, guru, bishop, administrator, or understanding of (what is called) God. This faith is what-is-called.
What-is-called by us -- by our presence? What-is-called by another -- by their presence? If not God -- why not...God?
"The kingdom of God comes...to the individual, by entering into his soul and laying hold of it. True, the kingdom of God is the rule of God; but it is the rule of the holy God in the hearts of individuals...." (Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) from What is Christianity? c.1901; quoted in The First Coming, How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity, p.14, by Thomas Sheehan, c.1986)
God is either in the heart, the heart of everything, or there is no God. God in the heart of each piece of creation, each angle of face, each turn of phrase. Or, nowhere. It is hard to understand the thinking that puts God outside creation. It is equally difficult to comprehend how particular people, particular church, or particular individual(s) constitute the exclusive domain of God -- all others bow, genuflect, tithe, alms-give, sacrifice, revere, devote, surrender, deny themselves, defer, or allow themselves to be told (or believe) they are separated from that which they cannot be separated from.
Now my soul is troubled. (Jesus, in John 12)
He was troubled, the writer suggests, because he intuited his imminent death. He probably was frightened in the same way we all become frightened at the thought of our own death. Did the fear of separation suddenly enter his mind? Did he experience that fear which pervades the minds of so many? Did he own it? Hold it? Did he realize that such a fear, and such a mind that welcomes and cultivates it, is a great death? Is that why, exhausted by the awful fear others scourged him with, he came to the dropping-off point, saying: "Your will, not mine;" saying, "Into your hands I commend my spirit."? He'd been completely human. At his dropping-off point (of mind, of body) Jesus realizes what-is-called God and lets-go wholly into that Itself.
So it is. The vague despondency that haunts us like sudden April wind crossing hillside passes. We go on, and/or, we die. What carries us through is an unknowing trust in the benevolence of existence and life that passes us on to the next thing we find ourselves doing, the next thing we choose to do. Anything. Like swaying trees in early afternoon breeze. Sunlight giving dignity to tired brown leaves on loosening soil. Or lives, like clouds, passing. We go on.
Some Clouds
Now that I've unplugged the phone
no one can reach me --
At least for this one afternoon
they will have to get by without my advice or opinion.
Now nobody else is going to call
& ask in a tentative voice
if I haven't yet heard that she's dead,
that woman I once loved --
nothing but ashes scattered over a city
that barely itself any longer exists.
Yes, thank you, I've heard.
It had been too lovely a morning.
That in itself should have warned me.
The sun lit up the tangerines
& the blazing poinsettias
like so many candles.
For one afternoon they will have to forgive me.
I am busy watching things happen again
that happened a long time ago,
as I lean back in Josephine's lawn chair
under a sky of incredible blue,
broken -- if that is the word for it --
by a few billowing clouds,
all white & unspeakably lovely,
drifting out of one nothingness into another.
(Poem: "Some Clouds" by Steve Kowit from The Dumbbell Nebula. The Roundhouse Press.)
Part of taking time for a retreat is loosening oneself from the tight freezing survival demands of winter. Retrieving resurgence of spirit. The heart longs to rest away from the cacophony of dissident views about who's right who's wrong; who's a disgrace, who's going to triumph; whose God is more powerful, whose God is really truly God?
I like this piece. It is Krishnamurti's secret.
There's a story about J. Krishnamurti that speaks reams about what it means to be free of this limiting, fear-based pattern of thinking. Every spring he used to give talks in a beautiful oak grove in Ojai, in southern California. He had been speaking there for over sixty years. On this particular occasion when I went to hear him, in the late nineteen-seventies, there must have been close to two thousand people in attendance, sitting on the grass, or in their folding chairs.
It was always an extraordinary experience, hearing Krishnamurti in person. Aldous Huxley, who was a friend of Krishnamurti's, described it as: "Like listening to a discourse of the Buddha—such authority, such intrinsic power."
Part way through this particular talk, Krishnamurti suddenly paused, leaned forward, and said, almost conspiratorially, "Do you want to know what my secret is?" Almost as though we were one body we sat up, even more alert than we had been, if that was possible. I could see people all around me lean forward, their ears straining and their mouths slowly opening in hushed anticipation.
Krishnamurti rarely ever talked about himself or his own process, and now he was about to give us his secret! He was in many ways a mountaintop teacher—somewhat distant, aloof, seemingly unapproachable, unless you were part of his inner circle. Yet that's why we came to Ojai every spring, to see if we could find out just what his secret was. We wanted to know how he managed to be so aware and enlightened, while we struggled with conflict and our numerous problems.
There was a silence. Then he said in a soft, almost shy voice, "You see, I don't mind what happens."
I don't mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom. It is a timeless spiritual truth: release attachment to outcomes, and—deep inside yourself—you'll feel good no matter what. You’ll feel good because you are connected to, one with, the energy of the universe, the beauty and power of creation itself. Or, as Krishnamurti himself put it:
‘When you live with this awareness, this sensitivity, life has an astonishing way of taking care of you. Then there is no problem of security, of what people say or do not say, and that is the beauty of life.’
(c. Jim Dreaver, 2005, www.jimdreaver.com, http://www.geocities.com/thereisonlynow/kirishnamurtissecret.html)
And so, we're on retreat. We're following winter, going off into spring, thawing in solitude, stopping a while, turning off the engine, walking out back, a monastic quiet -- watching, contemplating, and engaging whatever service the authentic will reveal.
We're not waiting. Waiting implies expectation. We aren't expecting anything.
Does it matter that God is not found separate from creation?
Itself. Each is called to be itself. Is this another side of the mystery of resurrection?
Such a beautiful day!
Yes?
Go on!
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