various, mobile, and alone.

This morning in prison, we observed this:

I don't know how many souls I have

I don't know how many souls I have.

I've changed at every moment.

I always feel like a stranger.

I've never seen or found myself.

From being so much, I have only soul.

A man who has soul has no calm.

A man who sees is just what he sees.

A man who feels is not who he is.

Attentive to what I am and see,

I become them and stop being I.

Each of my dreams and each desire

Belongs to whoever had it, not me.

I am my own landscape,

I watch myself journey -

Various, mobile, and alone. 

Here where I am I can't feel myself.

That's why I read, as a stranger,

My being as if it were pages.

Not knowing what will come

And forgetting what has passed,

I note in the margin of my reading 

What I thought I felt. 

Rereading, I wonder: "Was that me?"

God knows, because he wrote it.

(--Poem by Fernando Pessoa, 1888-1936)

 Together, we speak what we observe.

Krisnamurti said "the observer is the observed."

the sphere of genuine suchness

 Enlightenment is not difficult.

Just give up everything you think is true, and stay with what is true.

The realm of non-thinking
Can hardly be fathomed by cognition;
In the sphere of genuine suchness
There is neither “I” nor “other.”

—Yunmen (864-949) dailyzen

 If you think this is difficult, you’re not yet thinking.

sine proprio

Reading Horan on Francis and Merton. 

Thinking of poverty, that of so many by inadvertence, of self by affirmation, and the radical view of poverty taken by Jesus and Francis.

How such occasions shape spirituality, mindful appreciation, and poetic intuition.

As for the issue of poverty, it is true that Francis desired that he and his brothers should live sine proprio (without anything of one’s own). But he didn’t value poverty for its own sake, nor did he hold what most people think of when they hear poverty as a good. Like many modern models of holiness, such as Dorothy Day and Catherine de Heuck Doherty, Francis saw the latent injustices that are perpetuated by economic systems. He detested abject poverty and was moved to action by the dehumanizing effects that this type of poverty and social marginalization has on the poor and voiceless of society. It was, in large part, this ongoing experience and awareness that allowed him to understand better what Jesus’ life of itinerancy and evangelical poverty meant for all Christians. Francis would strive to follow in the footprints of Jesus Christ, who said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Lk 9:58). Yes, Francis loved poverty but in a way very different than we might initially think and in such a manner that a statement so simple could never adequately portray.   

(—p.4 in The Franciscan Heart of Thomas Merton : A New Look at the Spiritual Inspiration of His Life, Thought, and Writing, by Danial P Horan OFM)

It seems the franciscan notion of ad usam (for the use of) that once was written inside of any book or other material thing that others might have thought of as "theirs" -- has stayed with me for over sixty years of an ersatz franciscan life, one with no official connection, sanction, or affiliation. 

Unaffiliated is a good word and an interesting reflection. (In Maine, you cannot register to be an Independent, politically. The category here is Unaffiliated.)

When meetingbrook began in the early nineties we chose to enwrap ourselves in the letters m.o.n.o. -- at first the thought was that it might mean 'monastics of no order.' Then we realized that it meant for us 'monastics of no other.' Both interpretations could attenuate our intention. But the latter prevailed.

The intuition was (and is) that God is no-other. That Christ is no-other. Nor is the Spirit an-other.

Buddha is no-other. Bodhisattvas are no others. And, perhaps most important, neither are all our brothers and sisters -- whether human, animal, plant, cosmos, eternity or infinity -- none of them are other.

Living sine proprio (without anything of one’s own), is an unburdening and invitatory to prayer and compassion for all beings wherever and however they are.

If I were to say 'I own nothing' it would be an ambiguous statement. I do not own anything, but I do not own nothing. 

Nothing cannot be possessed. It can only be passed through, inasmuch as it passes through you.

Nor is nothing an 'it.'

Nothing is sine proprio -- without anything of one's own.

Perhaps we could say that 'One' is unpossesive, has no possessions, nor longs to appropriate anything -- not our souls, not our bodies, not our minds, not creation itself.

Perhaps 'One' is the freedom of emptiness -- that is, unseparateness and interconnective interrelationality.

How did poet e.e.cummings put it? 

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

Yeah, that seems worth consideration.

hêsychia*

 with foul weather hat

walking with dog up rain-soaked

trail, close yurt window

bowing, pet cemetery

brook moving with clear stillness*

we must step back

Rohr writes about a daily examination of consciousness. 

Consciousness is not the seeing but that which sees me seeing. It is not the knower but that which knows that I am knowing. It is not the observer but that which underlies and observes me observing. We must step back from our compulsiveness, and our attachment to ourselves, to be truly conscious. [1] 

[1] Selected from Richard Rohr, Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, 10th anniv. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), 81–82

I dwell within, and experience, rain falling on porch roof, car tires sloshing along road leading to town, chocolate donuts lost and unable to find their way into downstairs kitchen.

Consciousness is not something we have. It is something we are.

It’s why we don’t particularly like pointed questions like “Who are you?” or “What are you?” These questions threaten, if deeply considered, to disappear the person attempting either to ask or answer them. 

Consciousness is the disappearance of anything “other” and the permeative absorption of “what is itself” into itself distinctively individualized as whole and entire unto itself, completely emerging as itself within and as each particular thing, each appearing being into the landscape.

Such as a chocolate donut.

Or a child visiting Tuesday Evening Conversation and showing off their Eeyore and Tigger companions.

Such a lovely exchange!

bodies as the testing ground of thinking

What better way to study death than to purview our own diminishing bodies?

Vultures have been out for President Biden. He's growing old. Old age is fodder for sharp claws and savage beaks. 

Now that he has withdrawn from candidacy for a second term, the vultures look around for his carrion and see abandoned space where carcass was expected to be.

Poet Gary Snyder gave a heads-up:

"When making an axe handle

                 the pattern is not far off."

And I say this to Kai

"Look: We'll shape the handle

By checking the handle

Of the axe we cut with—"

And he sees. And I hear it again:

It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century

A.D. "Essay on Literature"-—in the

Preface: "In making the handle

Of an axe

By cutting wood with an axe

The model is indeed near at hand."

(--from poem Axe Handles) 

Our subject matter is at hand. And leg, torso, neck, and head. Our body is the tutor of entropy and diminishment. And thought is where the data withdraws to in order to be turned into meditation and contemplation. 

Most of us don't walk those alleys. We prefer brightly lighted avenues and streets, concourses and malls replete with foot traffic and honking taxicabs.

But some take on the duty to peruse the subject matter.

 Living philosophically presupposes the body, but so does the  

philosophical death. These philosophers need the body not only  

to practice their philosophy, but more importantly to validate it.  

In Dying for Ideas | examine, in a manner that hasn't been tried  

before, the philosophers' dying bodies as the testing ground of  

their thinking.         

(--in Dying For Ideas, The Dangerous Lives of The Philosophers, by Costica Bradaton, 2015)

The book of personal evanescent time is worth a read.

One more chapter. One last page. A final sentence. Comes the pause.

Turning the rear cover back over the previous pages.

Mulling the fragrance, like disappeared smoke from burning wood fire,  prescinding after the whole.

Nearness.

At hand.

Ours.

where wisdom hides

We listen

Not to anything specifically

But to listening

Where nothing

Is left out

Just so

Gift extending itself

The unexpected 

the moonlight also leaks / between the roof planks

One of the men at the prison loves to read about Mary Magdalene. He prefers to think that Mary and Jesus were intimately connected, outlived the crucifixion narrative, and went on to have a family. His copy of Jean-Yves Le Loup's book The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is dog-eared and well-referenced by him.

He prefers to think that there was not a death on the cross. "Jesus was too powerful a being to allow that to occur," he says. 

Listening to Ilia Delio speak about the mutational reality of Jesus and the Not-Yet God of our participatory emerging cosmic consciousness spoken of by Teilhard de Chardin, it becomes a transformational consideration of God as internal energy in matter and biology moving through emergence of complexity/consciousness.

 Teilhard de Chardin’s Sense of

Cosmogenesis in Relation to Wisdom Traditions 

The concept of

Cosmogenesis is an idea

and an approach in the

thought of Pierre Teilhard

de Chardin that I have

admired over the years.

As an idea, he was

influenced in this

direction by the work of

the Belgian cosmologist

and priest, Georges

Lemaître, who based his

theory of universe

expansion on the

recession of nearby

galaxies before Edwin

Hubble’s telescopic work

proved this was the case.

As an approach, however, Teilhard brought

cosmogenesis as an evolutionary question to every

issue he thought about. His sense not only of a

changing cosmos, but also of an expanding

universe was a radical position on cosmology

during the first forty years of the 20th century. The

normative understanding was of a steady-state

cosmos that allowed for dynamic change within

the universe, even as the whole of the universe was

seen as unchanging.

For Teilhard, cosmogenesis described the

unfolding universe from its initial flaring forth

continuing into galaxies, our solar system, life on

Earth, and the

emergence of the

human. We did not

live in a static

cosmos but in a

universe of dynamic

movement. He

writes, for example,

that: “…the universe

no longer appears to

us as an established

harmony but has

definitely taken on

the appearance of a

system in movement.

No longer an order

but a process. No

longer a cosmos but a

cosmogenesis”

[Reflections on the

Scientific Probability and the Religious

Consequences of an Ultra-human, 1951, VII, 272

E; 282 F).

The central manifestation of cosmogenesis

for Teilhard was increasing complexity-

consciousness in the universe. The universe shows

movement from lesser to greater complexity, as

well as from less to more consciousness.

(--in Teilhard Perspective, Vol 52, # 1, Spring 2019) 

For years listening to New Dimensions Radio and Michael Toms, there was this:

At the beginning of each New Dimensions’ program you hear the New Dimensions manifesto:

It is only through a change in human consciousness that the world will be transformed. The personal and the planetary are connected. As we expand our awareness of mind, body, psyche, and spirit and bring that awareness actively into the world, so also will the world be changed. This is our quest as we explore New Dimensions.

It seems each of our prison conversations twice weekly are enjoying and exploring (unidentifiably) this process of the nascent exploration of our own consciousness and that of the cosmos. We are not afraid to disagree. We are not reluctant to agree. 

This morning we moved through the political landscape, the changes in dynamics, and the exploration of our different preferences. And this with good cheer, much laughter, noticeable difference of opinion, and the addition of two Japanese haiku and one Cavafy poem at end.

If the metaphoric question were whether I am a churchgoer, the answer would be "not as you think of church."

Conversations are scripture as now-being-written. No need to write down what is said. We live in an ephemeral momentary spirituality where arrival and departure, listening and speaking, a phenomenology of emergent manifestation, suffices.

GATE 1. PERMEABILITY

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house. 

Izumi Shikibu (Japan, 974?-1034?) [translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani]

salude

Thanks, President Biden! 

Good health and smooth completion of your presidency.

morning meeting attendance mandatory

                     

three bells

Reading The Humility of God: A Franciscan Perspective by Ilia Delia.

 “Love gives itself away.” (Ilia Delia)

Until nothing is left.