mountain grooming through night

Yes

walking to merton retreat

snow squeaks underfoot

Yurt hermit close to frozen brook

must hear the gripping treads

on mountain the beeping groom,

In shed, soon, shikantaza

Opus justitiae pax

"I go back to an old Latin motto, opus justitiae pax: Peace is the work of justice," Hesburgh said in a 2001 interview. "We've known 20 percent of the people in the world have 80 percent of the goodies, which means the other 80 percent have to scrape by on 20 percent."

(--Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame, who died yesterday at 97)

la la la la

There is a quiet of 4AM that endures. When each sound is prayer. When fulcrum of night balances, monks and nuns and spirits of longing hearts reside quietly with this teetering dark.

The Buddha presented a radical challenge to the way we see the world, both the world that was seen two millennia ago and the world that is seen today. What he taught is not different, it is not an alternative, it is the opposite. That the path that we think will lead us to happiness leads instead to sorrow. That what we believe is true is instead false. That what we imagine to be real is unreal. A certain value lies in remembering that challenge from time to time.
(- Donald S. Lopez, Jr., “The Scientific Buddha" Tricycle)

Getting wood from barn for embering stove, stepping out on squeaking snow, looking up at vast space whited with points of light, I think of recent discovery of black hole some 18 billion light years away. 

I am silenced...

Also,

Some 2,500 years after the lifetime of the historical Buddha, the following quotation about Buddhism was ascribed to Albert Einstein: “The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.” This statement cannot be located in any of Einstein’s writings. But there is something about Buddhism, and about the Buddha, that caused someone to ascribe these words to Einstein. And since the time when Einstein didn’t say this, intimations of deep connections between Buddhism and science have continued, right up until today. In any given month, such publications as The New York Times and The Washington Post report on clinical studies investigating the affinity of Buddhism and science, particularly neurobiology. 

(--Lopez, ibid) 

The human body has +/- 50 trillion cells. That’s a big number. They put match to paper and twigs. They all cooperate to make toast in the morning.

 I am learning what prayer is.

Looking to sky, bowing to white dog on wohnkuche futon, trusting that embers with pass on their dying memory to cold and snowy split wood, I climb stairs with chitta-cat criss-crossing my feet, arriving here content that what has taken place has taken place at least with fledgling attention and gratefulness.

This attention and gratefulness for the billions and trillions of family members seems, for now, a wonder of passing appreciatory awareness that attends to itself in all directions at all times in all spheres with all expressions of  life-always-longing-after-light-and-love-alone. (la la la la.)

Music of spheres tuning up with stillness and silence.

The sonorous gaze of it!

I’ll start. The art of farseeing.

From Analects of Confucius, Ch 12. 

Tsze-chang asked what constituted intelligence. The Master said, "He with whom neither slander that gradually soaks into the mind, nor statements that startle like a wound in the flesh, are successful may be called intelligent indeed. Yea, he with whom neither soaking slander, nor startling statements, are successful, may be called farseeing.”      http://www.analects.org/analectschaptertwelve.php

I realize more and more these days that this kind of intelligence is, actually, kindly. When the slander that enters my mind gets less and little attention, it gets quieter and shuts up. Consequentially, it doesn't (I can only hope) get put into statements that would cut and hurt another (and ultimately myself). 

.

This is the philosophical virtue of “Li":

Li is a companion virtue to jen in many respects - the other side of the same coin, so to speak. It is translated as "ritual" "propriety" or "etiquette." It is this dimension of Confucian philosophy and ethics that makes it "religious" more than anything else - the element of ritual..
Confucius was a conservative - he believed in tradition and in conserving and respecting tradition. Therefore, respect for rituals, traditional practices and conventional mores became important in his thought for restoring and maintaining order in society. And these rituals extend throughout all of life - the imperial palace, the marketplace, and the home.
http://www.world-religions-professor.com/jen.html

This is far-(seeing)-out!

how much longer? you don't want to know

Nothing serious. Just an additional 6+".

I've been thinking about how I grow weary.

Sports, celebrities, politicians, media personalities, advertisements, the rubric of institutional public relation-speak, opinionating (even mine), imprecatory outbursts (condemning or prayerful), tone-deaf governance, and general overall prolific unawareness masquerading as principled stance.

Winter, it seems, is clouding my equanimity.

Thanks be to goodness there's only 15 more weeks of it.

minus 14 degrees

It's February. 

Maine. 

And it's cold.

-14

wissen ganz nicht anderer

To think things through.

That's a way to approach philosophy. To think clearly, yes. To understand referential and logical analysis of data, detail & place before us. The ability to analyze, deduce, infer, and arrive at tentative conclusions open to revision and reconsideration.

Thinking, is this regard, means more than requisite analytic and dialectic elaboration. Thinking means seeing. Thinking means seeing through. Thinking means seeing things through in a manner that places the thinker near, around, within, and diaphaneously through the other side of the person, place, thought, or thing being looked at and divined.

Thinking as seeing is a contemplative act. It is an analytic exercise as well. The balance is vital.

Recognizing something or someone present as it is as they are is vital. Being able to ask into that present reality is also vital. This asking into is done and acted upon without objectifying what is there. It is a temporary disappearance into the situation and circumstance of the other as subject without an object, an inter-subjectivity encircling, permeating, and passing through what-is-there.

In this way, you might say, there is other, then there is no-other, and (once again) there is an-other seen and visited and celebrated as ganz nicht anderer (wholely or entirely no other).

Becoming entirely no other suggests a new being, one infused and suffused by a new presence that is a result of one being interpenetrating with another being. 

This is not a series of sequential beings connected to one another. This is a wholeness realizing a new wholeness in and through another wholeness. 

A distinction without separation.

To think things through is a process of knowing without dissecting that which is known. It is a morphological union of interbeing wherein two subjects occupy the same space for a time during which envisioning inspiration takes place as the moving action completes its quest.

This envisioning inspiration might be described as seeing and breathing as the other, or, no-other. 

It is the harmonization of theoria and praxis, theory and practice, seeing and doing, being and becoming, beginning and ending.

Perhaps it might be called, awkwardly, autodidallocism, self teaching/learning through others.

Or, more simply, wissen ganz nicht anderer, knowing wholly no other.

Is this why we are still not thinking?

rokpa snoozing under OM

we come to something

Wrestling with Raimon Panikkar at Sunday Evening Practice. Monday morning, he might not recognize his offspring.

God is yet to come.

History is a somersault. What we consider to have been in the past is actually up ahead. The mythic mind has linear time turning on itself.

Satan, Iblis, knows better than Reality/Being. He will not dishonor the Truth by honoring what Truth wishes him to honor. Like the rest of us, you and me, he thinks he knows better what the Other wants than does the Other Itself.

The Other's will is that there be no other, no hierarchy of praise and glory. All are to be glorified. All honored. All, distinctly, respected and praised and blessed.

Attached to ego we cannot see this.

Liberated and enlightened we know we are this. As Is, each and every being, creature, person, and thing.

All are of, in, with, for, and as, One Divine Reality.

Only in the ignorance of separation and division does there exist no-God, unequal persons, sinful acts, erroneous thinking, or belief some are more worthy than others.

What is true is what is here.

We are here.

Each appearing thing is here.

All sentient beings are here.

God is here.

Let us be here, as who and what we are, let us be here!

Yet-to-come is always and ever arriving.

And, as poet Theodore Roethke wrote, "Many arrivals make us live." 

      (--from his poem, "The Manifestation.) http://lineralucas.blogspot.com/2006/08/theodore-roethke-1908-1963.html

Glory!

do we know how to approach new consciousness

Yes.

Let’s say: stillness silence seeing.

No rationalizing, no explanation, no busyness, no belief, no intentional conceptualizing.

Rather, mere being-there, mere unmoving mind, mere looking.

Simple clear and wise attentiveness.

As Richard, our fond farmer friend, used to ask: What’s the recipe for doing that?

Let’s say: stillness silence seeing.

Eh?