Sagehood has nothingSelf-realization is the end of ego.
To do with governing others
But is a matter of ordering oneself.
Nobility has nothing
To do with power and rank,
But is a matter of self realization;
Attain self-realization,
And the whole world
Is found in the self.
Happiness has nothing
To do with wealth and status,
But is a matter of harmony.
- Lao-tze
If other people offer you advice, instead of thinking, What business is it of yours to be making suggestions? Respect what they have to say and consider yourself as the disciple of all beings.No preface. No apology.
--The Dalai Lama
Every thing,Their bodies were there to see, hear, and remember.
Every place is real,
Each particle makes
Up the Original Person.
Still, the absolutely real
Is voiceless,
The true body’s
Majestically out of sight.
- Chosha (9th century)
Only One TeacherGurus and gadgets don't guarantee holiness or skill. We need to practice both. There are enough (to too many) teachers and savants, celebrities and adepts. For the ordinary person, practice and life are two of the best resources.
There is only one teacher. What is that teacher? Life itself. And of course each one of us is a manifestation of life; we couldn't be anything else. Now life happens to be both a severe and an endlessly kind teacher. It's the only authority that you need to trust. And this teacher, this authority, is everywhere. You don't have to go to some special place to find this incomparable teacher, you don't have to have some especially quiet or ideal situation; in fact, the messier it is, the better. The average office is a great place. The average home is perfect. Such places are pretty messy most of the time--we all know from firsthand experience! That is where authority, the teacher is.
--Charlotte Joko Beck
"All thinking men are atheists." -- Ernest HemingwayI burnt the chocolate chip cookies. Either the oven wasn't measuring right, or I left them in too long. Like religion and religions, cookies are at the mercy of human attention.
When I think of all the harm [the bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it. --Oscar Wilde
SAINT, n. A dead sinner revised and edited. --Ambrose Bierce
There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer. --Gertrude Stein
Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are skeptical. --Friedrich Nietzsche
Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. --Susan Ertz
God is love, but get it in writing. --Gypsy Rose Lee
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. --George Bernard Shaw
(--from The Atheist's Bible, By Joan Konner)
[Mircea] Eliade [1907-1986] was a Christian and Jungian - he met Carl Jung for the first time in 1950, and two years later he interviewed Jung at the Eranos Conference. "The modern world is desacralized," Jung said in the interview, "that is why it is in a crisis. Modern man must rediscover a deeper source of his own spiritual life."The aesthetics, the mnemonics, and the periodic glimpses of inspiration would be missed if religions continue their spiral toward inconsequence and irrelevance. But these glimpses are insufficient yield to warrant grasping on to dissolving forms.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/eliade.htm
Dharma Talk on One MindImagine a child sleeping next to its parents and dreaming it is being beaten or is painfully sick. The parents cannot help the child no matter how much it suffers, for no one can enter the dreaming mind of another. If the child could awaken itself, it could be freed of this suffering automatically. In the same way, one who realizes that his own Mind is Buddha frees himself instantly from the sufferings arising from [ignorance of the law of] ceaseless change of birth-and-death. If a Buddha could prevent it, do you think he would allow even one sentient being to fall into hell? Without Self-Realization one cannot understand such things as these.(--Bassui Tokusho Zenji, from Tricycle's Daily Dharma: July 17, 2007)Of course there is upset with the world, the war, and the worrisome weaknesses of human ambition. Ceaseless change cuts both ways -- peace is knifed by war, and war is worn out by peaceful longings. The turnings and nods of both the reputable and the disreputable are part of the cycle of change. We grow dizzy with such fluctuation.Still, one must speak. Silence in the face of cruel imprisonment is too costly a virtue. We are not of the stuff that being shielded from the world be considered some spiritual accomplishment. Ours is an incarnational prayer -- our bodies are not enemies. Mind, severed from the wholeness of enlightenment, daggers the heart and ruptures the body. This is why ideologues are so dangerous. They disdain humanity while glorifying a perfection devoid of human experience. They want a God that doesn't exist. So, they create themselves in the image of that non-existent God as substitute for humankind and divinity. Only their ideas, their power, their control, and their distorted purity are worth anything in the world they continually try to manipulate.
Fairy TaleThe little elf is dressed in a floppy capand he has a big rosy nose and flaring white eyebrowswith short legs and a jaunty step, though sometimeshe glides across an invisible pond with a bonfire glow on his cheeks:it is northern Europe in the nineteenth century and peopleare strolling around Copenhagen in the late afternoon,mostly townspeople on their way somewhere,perhaps to an early collation of smoked fish, rye bread, and cheese,washed down with a dark beer: ha ha, I have eaten this excellent mealand now I will smoke a little bit and sit back and stare downat the golden gleam of my watch fob against the coarse dark wool of my vest,and I will smile with a hideous contentment, because I am an evil man,and tonight I will do something evil in this city!(--Poem: "Fairy Tale," by Ron Padgett, from You Never Know, Coffee House Press.)Small self says: I am the only thing important; you will serve me.True Self says: Welcome home, everyone belongs here; let us be of service to one another!
In his 1936 essays on Hölderlin, Heidegger writes that “Poetry is the establishment of Being by means of the Word.” He clearly is thinking of this poem [Patmos] and particularly of its last lines, in which Hölderlin writes that God most wants that: “the established Word be/Caringly attended, and that/Which endures be construed well./German song must accord with this.”(--from The Tower Between Being and Time, by Scott Horton, Harpers Magazine, http://harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000529)We practice sitting, walking, chanting, listening, eating, speaking, and praying so that, every once in a while, we might remember who we are with one another.It is easy to forget. It happens all the time. When we forget, we busy making ideas and ideologies that try to fashion a fairy tale which holds that those who are evil must be eliminated, and that only a precious few really know which people and ideas are valuable and worthwhile. Once these fabrications are designed, they are administered and promulgated by means of smirks and sneers communicating triumphal disdain for anyone not imprisoned in airtight pronouncements.As an alternative, we try to remember the reciprocals of "Word" and "Being."We practice remembrance."Bodies belong," Dan Berrigan said, "where words lead."When we practice we do so in memory of the one who said "This, this is my body;" and This, this is my blood."This.All of this.Each of this.Is.Our.Community
Peace and disorder in the world,Surprise is the awkward gift time takes from behind its back, extending to you what is not yours to choose. We like it, or don't -- but there it is.
The distinction between
Friend and foe,
Follow upon one another
As illusion begets delusion.
A person of spiritual insight
Will immediately recognize
What is wrong and
Before long be rid
Of such an illusion;
In such a case one’s true
Friend may seem a foe and
One’s implacable foe
May appear a friend.
Enmity and friendship
Have no permanent character;
Both of them are illusions.
- Muso (1275-1351)
We must not play with his toys. Acceptance of the phrase "war on terror" is an implicit acceptance of endless war. Terror has been a component of this world from the start--along with sin and death, chaos and night. Terrorists who attack us must be fought, and must be stopped. But terrorists, like other people, act on motives; and one way of fighting them is to remove those motives. A war on terror conceived, as Cheney's experiment has been conceived, as a global war of extermination that ends with the killing of the last terrorist, in fact creates more terrorists than it destroys. A global war on terror means a war to the end of time. It is, in essence, a totalitarian idea.Mr. Bush's face is a boy's unimagined viciousness. Perhaps that's why it is hard to separate any more the visages of Mr Bush and Mr. Cheney. They, like William Golding's Samneric, suffer from short-sheeted loyalty, betray the hiding place of holdouts for democracy, and set fire to our small island of liberty. They've turned us over to a deception more surprising than invading and ravaging a country whose leader belonged to their club but who was himself surprised by their substanceless and meaningless stare.
The global war on terror is a pure product of the mind of Cheney working on the mind of Bush. On the one hand, the craving for secrecy, order, and acts of executive will that brook no opposition; on the other hand, the need for simplicity, the love of vicarious battles and intoxicating emotions, and a cause as irrefutable as a local team to lead the cheering for.
"Never wholly separate in your mind," wrote Edmund Burke, "the merits of any political question from the men who are concerned in it." We have seen the men, and we know them by their actions.
They are gathering the forces now for Iran. The carriers on patrol in the Persian Gulf, the series of accusations that hold Iran responsible for the violence in Iraq, the propaganda corps at the American Enterprise Institute turning up the heat--all the preparations are in place in the summer of 2007, just as they were in the summer of 2003. An administration with a modicum of prudence would not risk setting the Muslim world aflame by carving up a second theater of devastation in the Middle East. Yet these are men of wild imaginings.
(--by David Bromwich, "Character of G.W. Bush," Posted July 13, 2007 | 02:11 PM (EST)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/character-of-gw-bush_b_56118.html
On the terrace Max took a couple of deep breaths. What a night! But now it had hit them, and on other nights other people were the victims, and tonight countless other people were being struck too -- there had never been a day or a night or even a moment when something like this was not happening to someone, for as long as humanity had existed. Doom roamed the earth constantly, like a swallow through a swarm of gnats, with sharp twists and turns,its beak wide open.Something is turning in this country.
(--p.269, in the novel, The Discovery of Heaven, by Harry Mulisch)
In the realm of True PurityThe Second Coming is surely at hand. That, and Barry Bonds' breaking out of his slump to inch toward Hank Aaron's home run record. With the Yankees ten games behind Boston there is not much concern that Roger Clemons will get the 4 million dollars for the 4 games he's lost as mercenary pitcher for the New York team. Receiving one million dollars for one or two hours throwing a round ball that others hit with a wooden stick makes as much sense as paying 2.5 billion dollars a week to shoot and bomb and kill men and women who only want to do their laundry, make bread, and talk about the weather. Oh yes, there are bad people in Iraq too. They want to kill Americans who walk and drive their streets with deadly force seeking to root out and destroy evil and evil-doers.
there is no such thing as
“I” or “he” or “she;”
nor can “friend” and “foe”
be found.
The slightest confusion of mind
and innumerable differences
and complications arise.
- Muso (1275-1351)
“Russel,” said Father Ivanov, “is in dire need of our prayers whether he stays with us or passes on.”I grieve the young police officer. His loss, like a country's loss of sanity and grace during an immoral time of terror, is grave and terrible.
At the hospital, George Kallaur, an archpriest in the Russian Orthodox Church, conducted a 10-minute service after Officer Timoshenko was pronounced dead. Twenty people crammed into the officer’s hospital room while others stood in the doorway and halls. As part of Russian Orthodox tradition, Mr. Kallaur said, friends and family members kissed the officer’s hands and feet.
Mr. Kallaur said that on Friday he had brought Officer Timoshenko a large silver crucifix from Russia and placed it around the officer’s neck, hoping it would help him recover. The crucifix, which has a compartment inside, contained the bones of a third-century martyr.
Earlier this week, Mr. Kallaur performed Officer Timoshenko’s absolution, called a “dumb and blind” confession because the officer was unable to communicate. The Russian Orthodox church believes that a dead person’s soul remains present for three days near the deceased’s family members.
“The soul,” said Mr. Kallaur, “while it is still alive, can absolutely still hear.”
(-- Officer Dies Five Days After Shooting in Brooklyn, By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: July 15, 2007, New York Times, "Police officers hung bunting outside the 71st Precinct station in memory of Officer Russel Timoshenko, who died Saturday from his injuries.")