resulting

It was a long conversation. 

One of the things she said was, “Because of where we are, God resulted in Jesus’ suffering.”

The words are worth a prolonged meditation.

As is, wording is important.

as long as they present themselves

Each breath might be the final breath.

With this knowledge, I gratefully take this breath.

And this one.

la condition humaine

No need to add to or take away from presence.

Imagine.

Mere and sufficient presence. 

Sans doubte; ohne versprechen; sin explicación.

Such as beauty must be when unattached to any opinion or judgement.

Utterance, not narrative.

The other deepest thing

The secret is poetry.

Can you keep it?

Well, don't.

Free it.

daddy long-legs

It was inside the screen.

Then, moving screen aside, was outside.

Did it want back in?

So it is with us.

In then out.

Uncertain where one

is wanted;

where one

Is 

to be

found.

No; response

Excerpts sans merci:

Kalief Browder, Held at Rikers Island for 3 Years Without Trial, Commits Suicide              By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ and MICHAEL WINERIP, JUNE 8, 2015 

Kalief Browder was sent to Rikers Island when he was 16 years old, accused of stealing a backpack. Though he never stood trial or was found guilty of any crime, he spent three years at the New York City jail complex, nearly two of them in solitary confinement.In October 2014, after he was written about in The New Yorker, his case became a symbol of what many saw as a broken criminal justice system. Mayor Bill de Blasio cited the article this spring when he announced an effort to clear the backlogs in state courts and reduce the inmate population at Rikers. 

For a while, it appeared Mr. Browder was putting his life back together: He earned a high school equivalency diploma and started community college. But he continued to struggle with life after Rikers. 

On Saturday, he committed suicide at his parents’ home in the Bronx. 

(-- The New York Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/nyregion/kalief-browder-held-at-rikers-island-for-3-years-without-trial-commits-suicide.html?_r=0

And:

As his father explained, he’d apparently decided that these torn strips of sheet were not strong enough. That afternoon, at about 12:15 P.M., he went into another bedroom, pulled out the air conditioner, and pushed himself out through the hole in the wall, feet first, with a cord wrapped around his neck. His mother was the only other person home at the time. After she heard a loud thumping noise, she went upstairs to investigate, but couldn’t figure out what had happened. It wasn’t until she went outside to the backyard and looked up that she realized that her youngest child had hanged himself.

(--The New Yorker, Kalief Browder, 1993–2015, BY JENNIFER GONNERMAN), http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief-browder-1993-2015 

Is there someone to say -- ‘Amen’?

No.

lofty emptiness

hidden stillness

nothing moves

only . . .

nowhere to go

A precise mapping for the explorer on the path to enlightenment.

An indulgent reçu.

“You see, my dear, goodness is the greatest force in the world -- and he’s got it.”

(--final line in 1946 film “The Razor’s Edge,” after novel by Somerset Maugham, said to Isabel of Larry Darrell)

With some elaboration:

The Katha Upanishad (commonly assigned to the forth or fifth century B.C.E.) is the first instance when we see a recognizable tradition of Yoga emerge. Within this poetic text there lies the first descriptions of the fundamentals of a yoga practice; the preparation of the body and the cultivation of stability in the mind that steel the aspirant for the discoveries of consciousness. The story unfolds as a conversation between a young, but spiritually endowed Naciketas and Yama the God of Death. Seeking the knowledge of the mysteries of life after death, Naciketas is initiated by the God Yama onto the path of emancipation. He is instructed in the practice of involution, the climbing of consciousness to ever higher levels of being, the transcendental self and the psychospiritual work that prepares the yogi for the event of grace. Reminiscent of the Baghavada Gita’s (500-200 B.C.E.) classic dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna that occurs in a chariot, so the poetic metaphor of the charioteer is used by Yama to instruct Naciketas of man’s relationship to the Higher Self.

Chapter 3, 3-9 

Know the self a rider in a chariot,
and the body, as simply the chariot.
Know the intellect (buddhi) as the charioteer,
and the mind (manas), as simply the reins.
The senses, they say, are the horses,
and the sense objects are their pastures;
He who is linked to the body (atman), senses, and mind,
the wise proclaim as the one who enjoys (bhoktri).
When a man lacks understanding,
and his mind is never controlled;
His senses do not obey him,
as bad horses, a charioteer.
But when a man has understanding,
and his mind is ever controlled;
His senses do obey him,
as good horses, a charioteer.
When a man lacks understanding,
is unmindful (amanaska) and always impure;
He does not reach that final step,
but gets on the round of rebirth.
But when a man has understanding,
is mindful and always pure;
He does reach that final step,
from which he is not reborn again.
When a man’s mind is his reins,
intellect, his charioteer;
He reaches the end of the road,
that highest step of Vsihnu.
And here exactly we find the first instance of the word Yoga used in context with its definition. A precise mapping for the explorer on the path to enlightenment. 

Chapter 6.10-11, 

When the five perceptions are stilled,
Together with the mind.
And not even reason bestirs itself;
they call it the highest state.
When the senses are firmly reined in (dharana),
that is Yoga, so people think.
From distractions a man is then free (apramatta),
for Yoga is the coming-into-being,
as well as the ceasing-to-be.

(--from Times Quotidian,) http://www.timesquotidian.com/2010/01/29/razors-edge/ 

Q: What will zen now look like? A: Like this -- “sense see say.”

Yes.

This.

What will zen, come to America, look like, roughly speaking, in 500 years?

I think it will become here the:

σχολείο γνώση καταλαβαίνω λέγω, (scholeío gnó̱si̱ katalavaíno̱ légo̱) * -- 

or, school of “sense see say.”

Thus, American zen hosts the traveling feast of Dhyana turned Chan turned Zen turns into sense/see/say -- an IAE, intuiting articulating engaging, where science and service blend with a poetry of expressive creativity that embodies the heart and soul of feeling sense, direct seeing, simple saying.

The meditative tradition arising with Upanishads and bouncing forward through haiku to Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell lyrics -- accompanied by Robert Lax, Naomi Shihab Nye, e.e.cummings, William  Carlos Williams. Marilyn Hacker, Philip Levine, Adrienne Rich, Stephen Dunn, Alice Walker, Li-Young Lee.

Basho, Santoka Teneda, Issa, Han Shan, Rumi, Machado, Neruda, Yeats, Ginsburg, Logan, Lowell, Pastan.

Zen in North America actively intuits articulating engagement. This is done in either stillness and silence or in movement and speech -- both expressions of inner/outer service and nondual insight.

So, get on and off your cushion, walk briskly and amble thoughtfully, debate vigorously and carefully quietly listen.

Zen is coming to the USA.

It will dismantle the obsession currently known as security, and speak with science and ecology the musings of entire cosmos reflecting on each part articulating the whole with engaging service.

And, as the man in the white ME cap suggested at Friday Evening Conversation, comes quiescence.

Finally, through everything.

Further finally, of David Foster Wallace, in Tributes to David Foster
Wallace, someone wrote:

The first time I finished Infinite Jest, I had to pick up the phone. I needed to talk to someone. I needed human contact, a genuine connection, in the face of the loneliness of the book. I’ve wondered if this was intentional: that we were meant to be so saddened we had to reach out, to forget our petty concerns, and to feel the warmth of other people. 

The commencement address DFW gave at Kenyon convinces me that this compassion and connection, this humanness, was what he wanted. This passage comes to mind:

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

I did not know Mr. Wallace, but I know what his work means to me. Whether he was writing about addiction, John McCain, tennis, or dictionaries, he taught me that irony and apathy mask the truth of how we feel, and that we are capable of much more, that beauty and transcendence are out there, and we just need to know to look for them.

(—Namir Y)

(--from McSweeney's Internet Tendency)
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/tributes-to-david-foster-wallace

[*Note: To those thinking the use of Greek words to describe American experience is odd, remember we are talking 500 years from now. Surely some recurrent cyclic retrieval of expressive language will occur and we will be back to Greek origins embarking on a new homecoming Odyssey from another useless devastation of interminable war.]   

averse and perverse: correlating necessary reciprocity

Reading about police corruption.

The Chicago Police Department fought to keep private this horrendous photo taken between 1999 and 2003 of Officers Jerome Finnigan and Timothy McDermott posing with a black man as if he were a dead deer.  

Maybe it's because the cash-strapped city has already paid over a half a billion dollars in settlements because of police misconduct the past 10 years alone? 

Maybe it's because it was recently revealed that the Chicago Police Department has a secret facility it has been using to harass people off the record? 

Maybe it's because the City of Chicago just passed a reparations bill for the many victims their police have tortured? 

Even more likely, though, is that they really didn’t want the identity of these two officers in the spotlight.                                                                                    http://opcoa.st/HcxM6

Maybe Mencius was wrong in this case. 

Mencius' philosophy of human nature is summed up in the following argument from The Book of Mencius.Since man is originally good, it follows that1. he possesses the innate knowledge of the good and the "innate ability" to do good; (7A:15)2. if one "develops his mind to the utmost" he can "serve Heaven" and "fulfill his destiny;" (7A:1)3. evil is not inborn but due to man's own failures and his inability to avoid evil external influences; (6A:8) 4. serious efforts must be made to recover our original nature; (ibid) and5. the end of learning is none other than to "seek for the lost mind." (6A:11) http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~cp28/confuc.htm

Maybe America is exempt from such thinking.

Xunzi’s most famous dictum is that “the nature of man is evil; his goodness is only acquired training.” What Xunzi preached was thus essentially a philosophy of culture. Human nature at birth, he maintained, consists of instinctual drives which, left to themselves, are selfish, anarchic, and antisocial. Society as a whole, however, exerts a civilizing influence upon the individual, gradually training and molding him until he becomes a disciplined and morally conscious human being. Of prime importance in this process are the li (ceremonies and ritual practices, rules of social behaviour, traditional mores) and music (which Xunzi, like Plato, regarded as having a profound moral significance).Xunzi’s view of human nature was, of course, radically opposed to that of Mencius, who had optimistically proclaimed the innate goodness of man. Both thinkers agreed that all men are potentially capable of becoming sages, but for Mencius this meant that every man has it within his power to develop further the shoots of goodness already present at birth, whereas for Xunzi it meant that every man can learn from society how to overcome his initially antisocial impulses. Thus began what became one of the major controversies in Confucian thought.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/274068/Xunzi

Perhaps it is a case of caring. Who cares about corruption? Current thinking is that everyone -- everyone -- is a liar and a thief. As such, corruption headlines are merely human nature writ large. Anyone who says “I have nothing to hide," is hiding something.

What to do?

Nothing.

Do nothing.

It is the effort to right wrong that shifts wrong into righteous crusade masquerading as law enforcement that mimics and cynically takes on role and persona of wrongdoing, only now with patina of official untouchability.

It is little wonder that so much of the gun ownership conversation revolves around protecting the individual from both the law-averse and the law-perverse, the criminals breaking the law and the other criminals broken with law as cudgel.

China today debates rule of law versus values middle way.

Confucianism as the old ideology had been criticized for a long time from the official point of view in the past. However, Confucianism didn’t lose its core value actually. Perfect virtue, the Middle Way, and the authority admiration are still its salient features. The authority with the perfect virtue doing in the middle way is the perfect ideal to Chinese people. Zhou Enlai is just that type of man who is regarded as the person with all these characteristics.
There is confusion when the rule of law tries to come into China and be the fundamental pattern to rule the country. Whether the tradition rooted in Chinese be the obstacle to the rule of law, or the rule of law can replace the traditional value successfully with its distinguishing values
(--The Thinking Way of Confucianism and the Rule of Law, by Guoji Qin, Department of Politics and Law, Shenyang Institute of Engineering, in Journal of Politics and Law, 

Abstract: Confucianism as the old ideology had been criticized for a long time from the official point of view in China; however, its core value is still influencing Chinese society. On the way towards road of the rule of law, Confucianism is considered playing the negative role. It is necessary to study the framework of Confucianism systematically so as to understand why the rule of law shows difference in between China and western world, and why Chinese would rather resolve disputes in Confucianism way than the rule of law. I will discuss the thinking way of Confucianism, analyze its core value and the relation between Confucianism and the rule of law, through which get to the conclusion that Confucianism value has the inclination to avoid the law. http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jpl/article/viewFile/763/739

It might be a good idea to reconsider reciprocality and reciprocity as fulcrum points for moderating human behavior and society. Punishment and incarceration are only small particular points on a long and wide spectrum of the ethics of reciprocity. We have to look longer down the line of emergent creativity in order to moderate a harmonious way of being in the world with one another.

(At 4:43am the New York Times inside blue plastic covering is tossed from car onto front gravel gateway dooryard.)

 Day dawns.

3:15am pee patrol with old German Shepherd and middle-aged Border Collie to same dooryard was successful leading to Chinese philosophers as night seeped into twilight.

Time to nap a while.

My sympathies to all who suffer deviance in human justice.