All the traditional expressions of religion fade.
All the alternative neologisms of spirituality do not gain traction.
What is left?
What remains is the walk to gate to open or close it.
The walk back to barn passing overturned dinghy under bookshed light.
Moon on snow
Cold on everything
Prospect of death looking out from night path up mountain —
I would take the cocktail
After one last double chocolate donut
A final bell chant
There's a need to cut off confusion.
Watching Senate Armed Services Committee question nominee Hegseth for Secretary of Defense position, I am reminded of Chinul:
Some people, not knowing the essential emptiness of good and evil, think practical cultivation of mind means to sit rigidly immobile, subduing mind and body, like a rock placed on top of grass.
This is ludicrous. That is why it is said that followers cut off confusion in every state of mind, yet the mind that does the cutting off is a brigand. Chinul (1158-1210)
You can't catch someone out about any fact, however documented and obvious, if they simple deny and obfuscate with the support and approval of partisan-minded aficionados who are in the majority. What we call "truth" is a sometimes thing.
We're not dealing with facts, we're experiencing mind -- that which is burrowed deep within the Within, a place seldom visited by side-takers and self-aggrandizers. The outside dwellers know (vaguely) only the outside. This is where love has gone to die. Where it loses breath and -- like the sonic beating of an MRI claustrophobia cadence -- searches the body for signs of any residual interiority.
T h e triple world is blazing in defilement as if it were a house on fire. I How can you bear to tarry here and complacently undergo such long suffering? If you wish to avoid wandering in samsara there is no better way than to seek Buddhahood. If you want to become a Buddha, understand that Buddha is the mind. How can you search for the mind in the far distance? It is not outside the body. The physical body is a phantom, for it is subject to birth and death; the true mind is like space, for it neither ends nor changes. Therefore it is said, "These hundred bones will crumble and return to fire and wind. But One Thing is eternally numinous and covers heaven and earth."
It is tragic. People have been deluded for so long. They do not recognize that their own minds are the true Buddhas. They do not recognize that their own natures are the true dharma. They want to search for the dharma, yet they still look far away for holy ones. They want to search for the Buddha, yet they will not observe their own minds. If they aspire to the path of Buddhahood while obstinately holding to their feeling that the Buddha is outside the mind or the dharma is outside the nature, then, even though they pass through kalpas as numerous as dust motes, burning their bodies, charring their arms; crushing their bones and exposing their marrow, or else write sutras with their own blood, never lying down to sleep, eating only one offering a day at the hour of the Hare [5 to 7 A.M.], or even studying through the entire Tripitaka and cultivating all sorts of ascetic practices, it is like trying to make rice by boiling sand -- it will only add to their tribulation. 3 If they would only understand their own minds, then, without searching, approaches to dharma as numerous as the sands of the Ganges and uncountable sublime meanings would all be understood. As the World Honored One said, "I see that all sentient beings everywhere are endowed with a tathāgata's wisdom and virtue.'" He also said, "All the illusory guises in which sentient beings appear take shape in the sublime mind of the tathāgata's complete enlightenment."5 Consequently you should know that outside this mind there is no Buddhahood which can be attained. All the Buddhas of the past were merely persons who understood their minds. All the sages and saints of the present are likewise merely persons who have cultivated their minds. All future meditators should rely on this dharma as well.
I hope that you who cultivate the path will never search outside. The nature of the mind is unstained; it is originally whole and complete in itself. If you will only leave behind false conditioning, you will be "such" like the Buddha.'
(--in Secrets on Cultivating the Mind, by Susim Kyǒl, pp 140-41)
If we do not understand the mind we settle for preferences and opinion. If we understand the mind -- wisdom and virtue are heard in conversation.
There might not be much hope for the structures of governance with its contentious manipulation and divisive dismembering of what once we valued as truth. Smug dissembling, shucking and jiving, opting for convenient mistruths -- these flood airways and print columns, and dissociative social media.
"All the Buddhas of the past were merely persons who understood their minds." This reflection gives pause as we wonder where the Buddhas of the present dwell.
I suspect it is not outside the body.
Let me in whee-ooh (whee-ooh, whee-ooh, hoop-whee-ooh)
(Whee-ooh, whee-ooh, hoo-ooh-oop-whee-ooh, whee-ooh)
("Let Me In" by The Sensations, 1962)
Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.
. . .
The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
--Stanley Kunitz
This is one of the benefits of having such an elder.
And there having been a Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)
Gracias!
I know why so many
do not like poetry
because it is being
written
To see in words
what is unforseeable
in ordinary experience
feels
Like early fog
over bog and hills
There and not there
Simultaneously
We are not comfortable
with ghosts or wraithful
near-appearances like
memory or dreamstates
Poetry
Presents the world
we seldom see — particular,
inter-dimensional, near
Feeling itself feeling Itself
as man in prison said:
“this, and this, and this —
I do not know that”
Poem becomes for so
many the whole of their
lives seen from center
out in all directions
Centrifugal, as high as deep,
wide as infinite interior,
as specific as speculative —
*Nowhere, nowhere
to be, found
Will you marry
me?
No!
Thank you . . .
Don’t ask again.
Ask what?
In prison this morning,
wondering whether rivers
and mountains
going on without us (so it seems)
actually carry us along
(How?)
We don’t know
We cannot yet fathom
How the feeling-spiritual
The way we remain with
Everything we’ve touched
Felt and seen
Continuing (seemingly)
undetected
But there
Along for the unfinishing life
unborning and undeathing
looking out
through swelling droplet
and bare branch
over everything
(How?)
clearly undifferentiated
with neither
Noise
nor
Smoke
I know who to blame
for Los Angeles fires
for small fee I'll tell
(ka ching) -- Here is my report --
it was a dragon -- it was
We’re waiting for something already here
It wears our name and slips on our shoes
We wait
The way stream-bed waits when downpour
Runs through it with abandon
You don’t have to say anything to me
I’ve been listening to you since last lifetime
When you crossed the road to gather horse
Back to gate and inside
We’ve always been lovers
Like rushing water and unsettled stone
Beside the inclines of footpaths moving away
By not understanding
human/earth kinship, cosmos
Ponders suicide —
What hotline can be called —who
will talk us down from the edge
What do you know about love?
I’d like to look into it.
Are you in love?
There is nothing outside love.
What is nothing like?
Just like this.
There was a time Sunday meant church
A punctuation of week
These days landscape of snowy trees
Sun on freshly fallen overnight white
Lovely quiet voice of God bird singing
Cracking seed flying back to feeder
Everything remains as it is where it is —
dusting snow falling from branch
Ground feeders dance aside one
another their eucharistic uncovering
Watched Interstellar again after many years.
Dimensions beyond understanding. Love as force beyond gravity, direction, or choice.
One who gives rise to the awakened mind
should know that
what is called a self or person,
a living being or a life span,
is not so in essence,
but only in concept.
Names like self, person, living being, or life span
are names only.
Subhuti, you should know
that all things of the world
are like this,
and you should have confidence
in their essence without names.
Diamond Sutra
Ending of The View from the Bridge, A Play in Two Acts, 1955, by Arthur Miller:
Alfieri, who is in the crowd, turns out to the audience. The lights have
gone down, leaving him in a glow, while behind him the dull prayers of
the people and the keening of the women continue.
Alfieri Most of the time now we settle for half and I like it
better. But the truth is holy, and even as I know how wrong he
was, and his death useless, I tremble, for I confess that something
perversely pure calls to me from his memory – not purely good,
but himself purely, for he allowed himself to be wholly
known and for that I think I will love him more than all my
sensible clients. And yet, it is better to settle for half, it must be!
And so I mourn him – I admit it – with a certain . . . alarm.
Curtain.
It feels the final monologue, the final line, could be epitaph for Donald Trump.
We note the "himself purely" and we note the mourning him (hymn?) with "a certain . . . alarm."
It occurs to me that many will shake their heads, as if attempting to rouse themselves from a spell or trance, and wonder how they were so captivated by the man.
Flaws flagrant, character fragmented, steely adhaerence to misalliance, inability to feel, commiserate or bond with another outside of transaction or diminishing putdown.
Like Eddie in the play he remains unaware of himself and oblivious to insight.
I'd say it is sad, but it is more infuriating that such a man could be used and encouraged by so many people surrounding him (for their own benefit) and by so many voting Americans (for their own cynicism.)
However much longer he might continue to remain on his feet and walk, he is already dead, having been killed by his own obtuse desire to "show them" how he wanted to be respected and brought in to the elite paradigm of being the best, the greatest, the undefeatable, the most charming, most sexy, wealthiest and singularly the most indefatigable big shot that ever lived.
We will grow alarmed that we mourn his passing.
All the way on mountain trail
Om mani Padme hum
Behold what is within without
The president-to-be is now a fully convicted felon. (At least until his conviction is possibly overturned by the Supreme Court.)
In prison today, there was uncertainty as to whether anything fair was taking place with regard to the way the very rich, extremely powerful, and decidedly higher-ups are treated.
We didn't spend much time on such a difficult and obnoxious question.
Instead there was a consideration that language began to come to be when God said "I am not alone."
There is considerable conversation as to whether there is only inner reality and that the notion of "outside" or "other" has something to do with where love goes to die.
The prospect that love is the expansion of inner source, emerging and manifesting itself in an expanding emergence of encompassing wholeness, where all is inclusion and there is no other, draws furrowed brow consideration that wants to designate the proponent of such a notion as loopy and loony. Which is a safe designation in the group.
When we are in love, there is no out love.
Everyone is contemplating
Isaiah's 45:5 wording in the New International Version:
I am the LORD, and there is no other *
Or
1 Kings 8:60
...so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the LORD is God. There is no other!
It wasn't just the sentencing today that befuddled our circle, it was this notion that "there is no other."
We spoke about the blind men encountering and identifying the elephant. We spoke about Waiting for Godot. We spoke about the Native American woman seeing the journey of those who've passed over. We talked about doing a college independent study on physics and spirituality. We spoke about ancient civilizations and signs of advanced technology. We talked about philology and the necessity of continual hermeneutics. We sat in silence at beginning. We enjoyed one another's company.
Is there a benefit in exploring further the notion that there is no other?
Not unlike the internal combustion engine, for love to rehabilitate existence it has to be an internal comportment rearrangement
It would be as though Logos-Energy, coming to word, inspired facing one another, nodding yes, and yes, and yes.
VLADIMIR:
Where were you? I thought you were gone for ever.
ESTRAGON:
They're coming!
VLADIMIR:
Who ?
ESTRAGON:
I don't know.
VLADIMIR:
How many?
ESTRAGON:
I don't know.
VLADIMIR:
(triumphantly). It's Godot! At last! Gogo! It's Godot! We're saved! Let's go and meet him! (He drags Estragon towards the wings. Estragon resists, pulls himself free, exit right.) Gogo! Come back! (Vladimir runs to extreme left, scans the horizon. Enter Estragon right, he hastens towards Vladimir, falls into his arms.) There you are again again!
ESTRAGON:
I'm in hell!
VLADIMIR:
Where were you?
ESTRAGON:
They're coming there too!
VLADIMIR:
We're surrounded! (Estragon makes a rush towards back.) Imbecile! There's no way out there. (He takes Estragon by the arm and drags him towards front. Gesture towards front.) There! Not a soul in sight! Off you go! Quick! (He pushes Estragon towards auditorium. Estragon recoils in horror.) You won't? (He contemplates auditorium.) Well I can understand that. Wait till I see. (He reflects.) Your only hope left is to disappear.
ESTRAGON:
Where?
VLADIMIR:
Behind the tree. (Estragon hesitates.) Quick! Behind the tree. (Estragon goes and crouches behind the tree, realizes he is not hidden, comes out from behind the tree.) Decidedly this tree will not have been the slightest use to us.
ESTRAGON:
(calmer). I lost my head. Forgive me. It won't happen again. Tell me what to do.
VLADIMIR:
There's nothing to do.
ESTRAGON:
You go and stand there. (He draws Vladimir to extreme right and places him with his back to the stage.) There, don't move, and watch out. (Vladimir scans horizon, screening his eyes with his hand. Estragon runs and takes up same position extreme left. They turn their heads and look at each other.) Back to back like in the good old days. (They continue to look at each other for a moment, then resume their watch. Long silence.) Do you see anything coming?
VLADIMIR:
(turning his head). What?
ESTRAGON:
(louder). Do you see anything coming?
VLADIMIR:
No.
ESTRAGON:
Nor I.
They resume their watch. Silence.
(--from Waiting for Godot, by Samual Beckett
We do seem to be waiting.
But wait.
The outer world is killing education and learning, thinking and the amble of wisdom.
Vita interior, hoc, est, enim, corpus meum
(The inner life, for this, is, my body.)
There is no salvation outside the inner world.
(Hoc ego sedeo, aliud facere non possum. Here I sit, I cannot do other.)
Mythology is our visible, albeit partially fantastical, access to the invisible imaginative world.
The stories we tell are enough to shake our sanity and befuddle our prayer life.
If you return to the Truth,
To the emptiness of delusion,
You’ll know that Buddha and people
Are not different.
Delusion is a butterfly
Plunging into the fire,
Enlightenment, a crane flying
From its cage.
Buhyu Sunsoo (1543-1615) dialyzen
Truth will become rare commodity in the United States beginning 20 January. Bluster, puffery, and absurd dominance prevaricating as pompous buffoonery will reign. It will test sanity and threaten ability to not become insanely reactive. In other words, we are expected to submit in squeamish grovel under the dictates of the Prime Felon's Megaphonic Announcements.
There's something to be said for returning to truth. Lies are a weak floorboard to stand on. Collapse and painful falling are the consequences of false persona and fictitious glower.
When the crane flaps its wings into open landscape, we take notice -- there is a way out.
Get out of my poem!
Excuse me?
Get out of my poem!
I’m not in your poem.
Yes you are, I can feel your fingerprints, I can sense your eyes. Get out!
I don’t know what you are talking about,
Yes you do. Get out of my poem!
Just as a poem turns its reader into accomplice, so, too, the detectives become accomplice to the murder. But unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved; if, of course, it is murder, or poetry, at all.
(in novel, Thirteen Ways of Looking, by Colum McCann)
I was just walking by.
No, you looked in.
I didn't see anything.
That's not the point. You looked over at the poem being written.
[silence]
Admit it!
[silence]
You owe me.
[silence]
You owe me
I'll never tell.
... ... ...
Another piece of evidence:
Four Thousand Days and Nights
by Tamura Ryuichi
For one poem to be born
we must kill
We must kill many things
We shoot, assassinate, poison the many things we love
Look
We shot
the silence of four thousand nights and the glare of
four thousand days
simply because we wanted the trembling tongue of one small bird
from the sky of four thousand days and nights
Listen
We assassinated
the love of four thousand days and the pity of four thousand nights
simply because we needed the tears of one hungry child
from all the rainy cities and blast furnaces
and the midsummer wharves and the coal mines
Remember
We see things our eyes cannot see
We hear things our ears cannot hear
We poisoned
the power of imagination of four thousand nights
and the cold memories of four thousand days
simply because we wanted the fear of one stray dog
To give birth to one poem
we must kill the things we love
This is the only road to take to resurrect the dead
This is the road we have to take
Translation by Samuel Grolmes and Tsumura Yumiko
If they question you, admit nothing.
Be wary of becoming accomplice to either murder or poetry.
Absurdity unpacks its bags and settles into its stay on couch down hall from bathroom in third floor walk up. It plans to stay a while. It has no roundtrip ticket. It doesn’t fear incarceration or assassination. Nothing can touch it. It is hard and nearly insensate from unhearing. It likes those clothes. They never have to be changed.
absurd (adj.)
"plainly illogical," 1550s, from French absurde (16c.), from Latin absurdus "out of tune, discordant;" figuratively "incongruous, foolish, silly, senseless," from ab- "off, away from," here perhaps an intensive prefix, + surdus "dull, deaf, mute," which is possibly (Watkins) from an imitative PIE root meaning "to buzz, whisper" (see susurration). The basic sense could be "out of tune."
But de Vaan writes, "Since 'deaf' often has two semantic sides, viz. 'who cannot hear' and 'who is not heard,' ab-surdus can be explained as 'which is unheard of' ..." The modern English sense is the Latin figurative one, perhaps "out of harmony with reason or propriety." Related: Absurdly; absurdness. Theater of the absurd is attested by 1961.
also from 1550s
The whispering murmur you think you detect is faint recall that once, a long time ago, there were words that brought joy to famished hearts.
And now?
No!
(Ow!)
Oh, pardonnez-moi is that your sleeping foot or your sleeping spirit I am stepping on?
Will you wait with me?
