I don't think I can stay awake for the end of the game. San Francisco jumps ahead by a run.

When water is pure and sparkling clear
You see straight to the bottom
When your mind holds no concern
No circumstance can turn you
And once your mind doesn't stray
A kalpa has no changes
From such awareness nothing hides.

- Cold Mountain

The women come to visit Saskia with the broken ankle.

Everyone brings something.

Possibilianism is a philosophy which rejects both the idiosyncratic claims of traditional theism and the positions of certainty in atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground. The term was first defined by neuroscientist David Eagleman in relation to his book of fiction Sum. Asked whether he was an atheist or a religious person on a National Public Radio interview in February, 2009, he replied "I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now." In a subsequent interview with the New York Times, Eagleman expanded on the definition:

"Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position -- one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story."
(--from Wikipedia)
http://www.possibilian.com/

Tell me a story.

Any one of them.

Of course I will question the story.

And it will answer.

The over-paid baseball celebrity strikes out, looking, to end his team's chance to advance to the World Series.

People who study Buddhism
Should seek real, true
Perception and understanding for now.
If you attain real, true
Perception and understanding,
Birth and death don't affect you;
You are free to go or stay.
You needn't seek wonders,
For wonders come of themselves.
- Linji (d.-867)

Not even the fact that a former government high official used to own the team can diminish the poetics of such muted conceit.

I remain a fan of the phantom team of Bedford Avenue.

That other New York team remains too...uptown... for this sbrodolone.

My meals lack a sherbert interlude.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

People sometimes talk about having an experience of God. I think God is no experience. I could be mistaken. "I" usually is.

O Master of the Secret, what is enlightenment?

It means knowing your own mind as it really is.
This is unexcelled complete perfect enlightenment,
In which there is nothing at all that can be attained.
Why?
Because the form of it is enlightenment,
It has no knowledge and no understanding.
Why?
Because enlightenment has no form.
The formlessness of all things
Is called the form of space.

- The Scripture of Vairochana

I like the notion that God usually is.

Artists, dead people, enlightened beings, and Christ Reality share a similar understanding. It is an understanding rooted in transparent awareness.

“We went into the building next door, and it was empty, and we went up to the tower, and nobody stopped us, so we just started working,” he said. “It’s crazy. This city is so huge and overgrown, the more you’re in the middle of things, the more you feel transparent."
(--TED Prize goes to J.R., Award to Artist Who Gives Slums a Human Face, By RANDY KENNEDY, Published: October 19, 2010, The New York Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/arts/design/20ted.html?r=1&hp

We are already connected, or, interconnected, to one another and everything there is in the universe. This union or unity is our ground reality. Do we feel it? Do we know it? Are we it without feeling or knowing it? Can we be and act in such a way that being and acting are not a result of preference, thought, feeling, or obligation and necessity? But, rather, our being and action flow seamlessly into and through the core of reality which is our commonality, communion, and creativity.

On a website, "Beyond the Mind ..." dedicated to the views of Krishnamurti, this:

The Core

The core of Krishnamurti’s teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when he said: ‘Truth is a pathless land’. Man cannot come to it through any organisation, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.

Man has built in himself images as a fence of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man’s thinking, his relationships and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind. The content of his consciousness is his entire existence. This content is common to all humanity. The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all mankind.

So he is not an individual. Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not choice. It is man’s pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity.

Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever-limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts he will see the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical mutation in the mind.

Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence.

Krishnamurti first wrote a statement of the core of the teaching in October 1981 for Mary Lutyens, at her request.

She included it in her book The Years of Fulfilment, the second volume of her biography of Krishnamurti.

On re-reading the statement in 1983, Krishnamurti made changes which are included above.

This is the complete and final statement.

Copyright © 2002 Krishnamurti Foundation Trust

(From the Spring Newsletter, 2008; paragraphs added)

http://www.beyondthemind.net/corequotes.html

Can we see through what is right before us? Can we be transparent, and therefore, seen through? What would be seen if what is looked at becomes looking as and is thereby only seeing itself?

Many years ago, I saw my sister into her death and through the story of our common parents, her family, and the notions of end-of-life and no-longer-here. I sat with her in the hospital for eight weeks. I fell asleep and she fell asleep. She remained asleep and when I opened my eyes there was a quiet in the room that no number of people attending vigil could penetrate. What was seen through?

This morning's sun slants through the small window in this cluttered room. Saskia, in her foot-cast-boot, is one week into knitting-anklebone recovering in the Wohnkuche. I don't go rowing. I will tidy the kitchen for Wednesday hospitality. Then, make coffee, toast, and eggs for visitors. Whereupon I will prepare midterm experience for tonight's ethics class. I'll walk the dog. Sit zazen. Stoke the woodstove. Observe the rituals of the day.

This is what is seeing through.

This is what is seen through.

Love compassion and intelligence.

Each is the other, hence, there is no other.

Here we are, strolling the pathless land ...

From Prakriti to Purusha. That which gives shape and that which is clear creative consciousness.

After awakening, it is still necessary to observe and examine yourself. When errant thoughts suddenly arise, do not go along with them at all; reduce them, reduce them, until you reach the point of noncontrivance, which alone is the ultimate end. This is the ox-herding practice carried on by all illuminates after their enlightenment. Even though there is subsequent cultivation, they have already realized sudden enlightenment.
- Master Chinul (1158-1210)

The cycle repeats. We must not try to stop or freeze it.

We live in an extended, dualistic, world.

We need to be attentive. Be awake. Be present.

Everything alive moves.

Even stillness.

Breathes.

Rangers beat Yankees to take AL lead 2-1. Lee pitched so sharply that Yankees were numb.
It's the playoffs.

Election's not until a few weeks. There's time for statistics that don't mean as much as other statistics.

What happens in politics has become numbing.

We need wisdom. And compassion. Until then, we'll take a shutout against New York.

What sages learn
Is to return their nature
To the beginning
And let their minds
Travel freely in
Openness.
What developed people
Learn is to link their nature
To vast emptiness and
Become aware of the
Silent infinite.
- Huai-nan-tzu

I still root for the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s. The Yankees were too uptown for us. The Giants were like the Mets -- too marginal.

Tommy's keeping stats on Harden Avenue tonight.

I read tonight that Connie Conover, our lighthouse keeper at Curtis Island, has died.

That's a loss much more valuable than sports or politics. His summer was one of preparation for leaving the island. I waved to him every morning in July and August and into September as I rowed around the island until he returned ashore in the Boston Whaler.

He was a sweet man.

I would like to be more aware of the silent.

Infinite.

The stones become flesh when mind realizes the expanse of the dharma.

There's nothing mysterious about that sentence. Flesh and stones are not two things. Unless you think they are, then for you, they are.

One continuous clear void, the night precisely midway; the moon, cool, spews frost. When light and dark are merged without division, who distinguishes relative and absolute herein?

Thus it is said, "Although the absolute is absolute, yet it is relative; although the relative is relative, yet it is complete." At this precise moment, how do you discern? How clear. Twin shining eyes before any impulse! How stately. The eternal body outside forms!
- Hung-chih

We visit folks and drink tea in their kitchen talking about the brain, Alzheimer's, awareness, and the mystery of soul. It is, we agree, an awful experience to lose a loved one long before death arrives.


There is only mind. It's where we live. But at times the brain loses its connection, the key doesn't turn. It grows lonely and frightening.

We must become mediators between mind and the disconnected. Bridge. Passageway. Conduit.

Even if there is no recognition, we must be recognizable for everyone as long as life surrounds.