No.
That’s all.
No
That’s all.
No
Panta keeps watch of dooryard, looking through screened window.
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He had heard something about the Holy Trinity at the Choir School of St. John the Divine. So I just said that the father was the Father and the Son was the Father’s idea of Himself and the Holy Ghost was the love of the Father for the Son, and that these Three were One nature, and that nevertheless they were Three Persons—and they dwelt within us by faith. (—Excerpt from: "The Seven Storey Mountain" by Thomas Merton. Scribd)
In "The Time of the End is the Time of No Room," he portrays the contemporary period as one in which humans have lost touch with their roots and are heading toward a kind of spiritual death. Of the contemporary world he writes:
We live in a time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with the lack of time, lack of space . . . projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power, and acceleration . .. . As the end approaches there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it off the face of the earth .. . There is no desire for living.The time of the end is the time when men call upon the mountains to fall upon them .... It is haunted by the demon of emptiness. And out of this unutterable void come the armies, the missiles, the weapons, the bombs, the racist murders, and all the other crimes of mass society. ("Time," pp. 70-71)
In such a world where the mechanized, "the technological furies" obscure the natural, Merton foresees humans confronting " not necessarily the end of the world, but a .. . point of no return, a climax of absolute finality ... in absurdity" ("Prologue," p. 4). In such a world, humans have no place, no purpose.
(--from, THOMAS MERTON'S MYTH FOR MODERN TIMES: A Tale of the City, by Gloria Kitto Lewis)In my room, empty of anything or anyone other, it seems that everyone and everything is there.
The many do not pay attention to what is right in front of their nose; and when these things are pointed out to them, they do not take note of them though they think they do.They are estranged from that with which they are always in contact.The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own. ("Herakleitos," p. 96, ibid)Elsewhere, in a review about Merton's The Behavior of Titans, these opening quotes:
St. Justin Martyr refers to Herakleitos, along with Socrates, as a “Saint” of pre-Christian paganism…the logos of Herakleitos seems to have much in common with the Tao of Lao-tse as well as with the Word of St. John. (Thomas Merton)
Fools, when they do hear, are like the deaf: of them does the saying bear witness that they are absent when present. (Herakleitos)
He that is awake lights up from sleeping. (Herakleitos)
There is a kind of self-fulfillment that fulfills nothing but your illusory self. (Br. Steindl-Rast)
(from, Thomas Merton's, The Behavior of Titans -- 50 Year Review by Ron Dart, in Journal of Religion, Peace, and Justice, August, 2011)And these concluding words:
We live in an age and ethos driven by false notions of the self that lead from one illusion to another. How do we find the ‘immortal diamond’ within and allow such a diamond to shine forth? Merton has offered us a variety of titans in The Behavior of Titans. There are titans such as Hesiod-Homer’s Zeus-Prometheus, the Fat Man, indulgent and cynical intellectuals and mediocre people are present but absent. There are titans such as the Prometheus of Aeschylus, Atlas, Hera and Herakleitos that can massage our soul into health and healing. Much hinges on the titan we choose to hear, heed and follow. (--ibid)
Today's translation of the P[rajna] Paramita --
release thinking
release thinking
completely release thinking
what’s happening?
relax and respond!
I hear your translation as release-thinking.
Not so much as release thinking.
Release-thinking is a thinking that lets go (and “let’s go!”) in a constant act of release all we’ve been holding on to, moving us toward what is becoming more and more obviously ground and earth of what-is-truly-real.
Happy earth day!
In his hánd are the dépths of the éarth; *
the héights of the móuntains are hís.
To hím belongs the séa, for he máde it *
and the drý land sháped by his hánds.
(—from psalm 95)
In their hands are the depths of the earth,
The heights of the mountains are theirs,
To them belongs the sea, for they made it
And the dry land shaped by their hands.
(—from psalm 95)
one’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one:
which halves reintegrating,shall occur
no death and any quantity;but than
all numerable mosts the actual more
minds ignorant of stern miraculous
this every truth-beware of heartless them
(given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss;
or,sold the reason,they undream a dream)
one is the song which fiends and angels sing:
all murdering lies by mortals told make two.
Let liars wilt,repaying life they’re loaned;
we(by a gift called dying born)must grow
deep in dark least ourselves remembering
love only rides his year.
All lose,whole find
(—poem by e.e. cummings)
Song
God give you pardon from gratitude
and other mild forms of servitude --
and make peace for all of us(in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-1975, By Robert Creeley, p.186; from, For Love)
with what is easy.
“From now on, Brother, everybody stands on his own feet,”1 proclaims Thomas Merton on the day of his death. He was quoting an abbot who gave this advice to the Tibetan monk, Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche, confronted with fleeing or staying in the face of an advancing Chinese communist army. Merton interprets this saying to be “an extremely important monastic statement” and asserts that “The time for relying on structures has disappeared” (AJ 338).
(--Stand on Your Own Feet! Thomas Merton and the Monk without Vows or Walls, by Nass CannonThe new structure is no structure.
The hermit, all day and all night, beats his head against a wall of doubt. That is his contemplation. . . . a kind of unknowing of his own self, a kind of doubt that questions the very roots of his existence, a doubt which undermines his very reasons for existing and for doing what he does. It is this doubt which reduces him finally to silence, and in the silence which ceases to ask questions, he receives the only certitude he knows: the presence of God in the midst of uncertainty and nothingness, as the only reality. (MJ 159) (Ibid)Stand here.