I am confused and not hearing particularly well.
I imagined I heard the sound of a different world.
If at ground is the mother, say earth, that nurtures us in life, wouldn't we honor and care for her?
If all around us is the father, say heaven, that inspires us through life, wouldn't we see and be grateful for him?
If within and without us is the holy breath-sound, say spirit/word, that resonates each of us with one another, wouldn't we listen to it?
What makes an authentic monk? I think clarity of mind and sight, simplicity of life and gratitude in the heart. In short, what Brother David calls a "listening heart."
It takes self-knowledge and freedom from projection to render the heart a listening one. The monk listens.
(p.xi from Introduction by Matthew Fox to A Listening Heart, The Spirituality of Sacred Sensuousness, book by Brother David Steindl-Rast, c. 1983, 1999)
I have always longed to be what I am where I am. I've often forgotten. I continue to forget. At times I sit and stare at nothing in particular, lost in stillness, often despairing the impossible complexity of human social character and financial exchange economics.
In short, poverty, and avowed reliance on gift -- the courage to submit to the unsuspecting grace and kindness of unidentified passersby -- is an odd way to live in the world today.
The daily discipline of listening and responding to meaning is called obedience. This concept of obedience is far more comprehensive than the narrow notion of obedience as doing-what-you-are-told-to-do. Obedience in the full sense is the process of attuning the heart to the simple call contained in the complexity of a given situation. The only alternative is absurdity. Ab-surdus literally means absolutely deaf. If I call a situation absurd I admit that I am deaf to its meaning. I admit implicitly that I must become ab-audiens -- thoroughly listening, obedient. I must give my ear, give myself, so fully to the word that reaches me that it will send me. Being sent by the word, I will be obedient to my mission. Thus by doing the truth lovingly, not by analyzing it, I will begin to understand.
(Pp 2-3, Steindl-Rast)
It seems vast majorities of the world live by recompense and earned reward. Whole systems of world finance and religion operate under that rubric. Pay the price, earn rewards, be ransomed by savior, yield dividends on investment, and bank on what you deserve.
Lesser minorities look to grace, graciousness, and grateful acceptance of gift. Those that do this are not merely a lower-class tier of deprived unfortunates. Some are willing participants in the promise that all are loved, all are equal, and all are in one another's care.
What is my confusion?
Isn't earth, heaven, and spirit/word -- (sacred compassion, stillness itself, and true silence/creative sound) -- my true home?
Lao-tzu said, "The greatest revelation is stillness."
Dare I dwell there?
Obediently.
Within each.
Hermitage.
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
What if we felt the actual world, accepting what we felt?
It is a troubling consideration:
1. We are not who we think we are; and
2. Wherever we go, there we are.
All people fundamentally
Possess the wisdom of
Bodhi-prajna.
If they cannot be
Awakened to it,
It is because their minds
Are under delusion.
You should know that
The Buddha nature of the
Ignorant and of the
Enlightened are the same,
The only difference being
That the former are deluded whereas
The latter are awakened to it.
- Altar Sutra
Mu-ge, in drizzly rain outside kitchen window, hunkered and leapt into tall grass under bird feeder. He aimed for chipmunk stepping off bulkhead into grass under dining room window. Mu-ge missed. Back in house he knocks strawberry basket off kitchen table to floor -- a consolation conquest.
Each one of us is where we are. More than a statement about location, saying we are where we are is a statement about our essence and existence.
Q: What are we?
A: We are where we are!
What's troubling about this consideration is that, if we are where we are, there is no separation between who we are and where we are. Nor is there any "othering" between who we are and who we are with. The old saying goes: "Show me your friends and I'll show you who you are."
Christians have had difficulty comprehending the theological statement that God is omnipresent. At worst and narrowly interpreted it suggests that God is on their side as long as they are in the right for a noble cause. At best it means God is everywhere and wherever they go they will meet God because God will show up, even if only in prayer, thought, or intention.
We seem to be insistent on separation. We might claim a longing for communion and union with God, but it is a longing better left just that, and not realized. We're quite comfortable just knowing of the longing and the possibility. Think the thought, and let it be dual.
If Mu-ge catches the chipmunk he will kill it. If we catch God -- who will die?
The Buddhists are more direct. The say, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."
Why is that?
Because the Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha?
Then, who is true Buddha?
Who's asking?
(That's what they'd say. Leaving you to ponder.)
We ponder what the world would be like without us, or without God. When suicide is pondered it is the same question. When war is pondered it is the same question.
In our ignorance we commit suicide or go to war (usually the same thing) in order to relieve or be relieved of something extraneous, some burden or displeasure we feel must go, must be eliminated. The dualistic mind assisted by fierce but clouded emotion sees resolution of problems by cutting off the problem and disposing of it, and being done.
The sorrow of suicide and war is profound -- most often too profound for conscious, rational thought. That's what the profound is. It is beyond our capacity to consider. The sorrow plunges to its profound origin and lays bare and open there.
At origin, in that place ever-present, is where realization beyond sense or thought resides. Dogen said, "dropping off mind and body."
We ask, "What is holding us as we tumble through profound bottomless sorrow?"
Who would go to that place of their own volition? Some do. I think some go there to open the reality to less fearful dwelling. These compassionate beings are gift to humankind and all existence. Whether they are the mystics, contemplatives, holy ones, heroes, hermits, solitaries of every stripe, as well as everyone who falls into feeling the actual world.
As a Christian I'm always surprised there is not clearer teaching that the fall the church calls sin is incomplete. Isn't what really happens the falling through mistakes, through the bottomless compassionate love of the Christ, through the unfathomable reality of omnipresence falling idiorhythmically and isomorphically, falling through all of life with all of life? If such falling continues without end, where is the rest? The rest, I submit, does not reside in a fixed place, but in the free fall as God is falling as we are falling as we are what is in its very nature a circumincessional interpenetration within and throughout.
As a Buddhist I practice letting fall. I practice within the silent presence of what is there.
Mu-ge snoozes on black chair against brown leather soft briefcase as Gregorian Chant loops from middle room. Sando and Cesco are on kitchen floor. The cake is out of oven. Bread thaws. Unsalted butter near plastic bag to go into shop where Saskia makes soup in harbor room today -- a first.
As clean as the thought might be, we cannot kill ourselves, we cannot kill God. Try as we might -- with war or suicide -- to eliminate appearances, there is something immeasurably beyond and profoundly below appearance that upholds, sustains, and urges toward wholeness all that thinks it is not upheld, sustained, or whole.
Our complete being longs for this realization -- longs for it in each and every appearance of each and every being in each and every moment.
In our actual world this feeling behind feeling, this fact beyond fact, is our very reality.
Look as this reality.
Seeing one's self.
As oneself.
Completely.
Feeling.
It is a troubling consideration:
1. We are not who we think we are; and
2. Wherever we go, there we are.
All people fundamentally
Possess the wisdom of
Bodhi-prajna.
If they cannot be
Awakened to it,
It is because their minds
Are under delusion.
You should know that
The Buddha nature of the
Ignorant and of the
Enlightened are the same,
The only difference being
That the former are deluded whereas
The latter are awakened to it.
- Altar Sutra
Mu-ge, in drizzly rain outside kitchen window, hunkered and leapt into tall grass under bird feeder. He aimed for chipmunk stepping off bulkhead into grass under dining room window. Mu-ge missed. Back in house he knocks strawberry basket off kitchen table to floor -- a consolation conquest.
Each one of us is where we are. More than a statement about location, saying we are where we are is a statement about our essence and existence.
Q: What are we?
A: We are where we are!
What's troubling about this consideration is that, if we are where we are, there is no separation between who we are and where we are. Nor is there any "othering" between who we are and who we are with. The old saying goes: "Show me your friends and I'll show you who you are."
Christians have had difficulty comprehending the theological statement that God is omnipresent. At worst and narrowly interpreted it suggests that God is on their side as long as they are in the right for a noble cause. At best it means God is everywhere and wherever they go they will meet God because God will show up, even if only in prayer, thought, or intention.
We seem to be insistent on separation. We might claim a longing for communion and union with God, but it is a longing better left just that, and not realized. We're quite comfortable just knowing of the longing and the possibility. Think the thought, and let it be dual.
If Mu-ge catches the chipmunk he will kill it. If we catch God -- who will die?
The Buddhists are more direct. The say, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."
Why is that?
Because the Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha?
Then, who is true Buddha?
Who's asking?
(That's what they'd say. Leaving you to ponder.)
We ponder what the world would be like without us, or without God. When suicide is pondered it is the same question. When war is pondered it is the same question.
In our ignorance we commit suicide or go to war (usually the same thing) in order to relieve or be relieved of something extraneous, some burden or displeasure we feel must go, must be eliminated. The dualistic mind assisted by fierce but clouded emotion sees resolution of problems by cutting off the problem and disposing of it, and being done.
The sorrow of suicide and war is profound -- most often too profound for conscious, rational thought. That's what the profound is. It is beyond our capacity to consider. The sorrow plunges to its profound origin and lays bare and open there.
At origin, in that place ever-present, is where realization beyond sense or thought resides. Dogen said, "dropping off mind and body."
We ask, "What is holding us as we tumble through profound bottomless sorrow?"
Who would go to that place of their own volition? Some do. I think some go there to open the reality to less fearful dwelling. These compassionate beings are gift to humankind and all existence. Whether they are the mystics, contemplatives, holy ones, heroes, hermits, solitaries of every stripe, as well as everyone who falls into feeling the actual world.
As a Christian I'm always surprised there is not clearer teaching that the fall the church calls sin is incomplete. Isn't what really happens the falling through mistakes, through the bottomless compassionate love of the Christ, through the unfathomable reality of omnipresence falling idiorhythmically and isomorphically, falling through all of life with all of life? If such falling continues without end, where is the rest? The rest, I submit, does not reside in a fixed place, but in the free fall as God is falling as we are falling as we are what is in its very nature a circumincessional interpenetration within and throughout.
As a Buddhist I practice letting fall. I practice within the silent presence of what is there.
Mu-ge snoozes on black chair against brown leather soft briefcase as Gregorian Chant loops from middle room. Sando and Cesco are on kitchen floor. The cake is out of oven. Bread thaws. Unsalted butter near plastic bag to go into shop where Saskia makes soup in harbor room today -- a first.
As clean as the thought might be, we cannot kill ourselves, we cannot kill God. Try as we might -- with war or suicide -- to eliminate appearances, there is something immeasurably beyond and profoundly below appearance that upholds, sustains, and urges toward wholeness all that thinks it is not upheld, sustained, or whole.
Our complete being longs for this realization -- longs for it in each and every appearance of each and every being in each and every moment.
In our actual world this feeling behind feeling, this fact beyond fact, is our very reality.
Look as this reality.
Seeing one's self.
As oneself.
Completely.
Feeling.
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
We bury our dead the way some bury their problems in the back yard. Dig up soil, lay in problem, cover over, walk away.
We do not ever get rid of problems. We learn, rather, to enter into a new relationship with them. Like the Nobel mathematician who learned to live with his delusions, we learn to live with our mistakes, but only after acknowledging them and addressing them by their correct names.
Do not believe anything on the mere authority of teachers or priests. Accept as true and as the guide to your life only that which accords with your own reason and experience, after thorough investigation. Accept only that which contributes to the well-being of yourself and others.
- Buddha
When Giovanni Bernardone, known to us as Francesco (Francis of Assisi), opened scripture three times, his lot fell on:
1. Go sell what you have,,,,(Mk 10:21)
2. Proclaim the kingdom of God. (Lk 9:60)
3. Whoever wishes to be my follower must deny his very self....(Lk 9:23)
I look at these fragments and see a way through the contemporary veil of ignorance and delusion covering these days.
1. If I do not own even the nothing I have, no adding or subtracting will take place.
2. If the sole reality is God, and God is good, then to dwell in the near presence of shucking openness is to simply say what one sees.
3. If everything is what it is, and my "self" is not separate from what is right here and now, then any idea I retain of an isolated, separate, disconnected self is denied by the very fact of what is.
One problem we have is the recurring illusion of what we think we are. We are what we are -- all of it -- the whole of what is found in the world. By thinking we are this and not that, by imagining we are better or worse than others, by clinging to ideas that promise victory or threaten defeat -- we fail to enter openly the unveiling of this present moment.
This present moment is the enormity of infinite energy continually transforming itself through our presence and awareness.
This awareness does not belong to us.
This awareness is the dwelling place of Wholeness, Integrity, Love -- what is called God.
This awareness transcends any notion of "self" or "no-self" and beyond into One and All.
Whatever we do, think, or say to anyone, we are creating the world in that image.
There is no place to hide, no other place to conquer and own, no future separate from the behavior engaged in with the illusion things will be better when we eliminate this obstacle before us.
This is it!
What we do is what is done, now and forever.
Our problem, the one we try to bury in the backyard, is the convenient delusion some are winners and some are losers, some are the chosen and some are disinherited, some are the elect and many are the outsiders cut off from secret societies of insiders. This problem of dualistic nihilism or monistic triumphalism plagues the mind of rational man and drives the human race insane.
What to do? Some say pray. Meditate. Watch. Contemplate. Do things with a concentrated mind. Breathe. Walk carefully. See through silence.
Myriad holes dug in countless backyards and dark cellars cannot cover that which longs to be uncovered.
The veil is rent. The one who came to show us the way through is the one showing us the way through. Whatever name given him or her, whatever time we say they've lived, whatever culture, race, language, or geography appeals to us as their indigenous dwelling -- it doesn't matter -- the one showing us the way through is doing so right now, right here, as you are.
Only God.
You see.
We do not ever get rid of problems. We learn, rather, to enter into a new relationship with them. Like the Nobel mathematician who learned to live with his delusions, we learn to live with our mistakes, but only after acknowledging them and addressing them by their correct names.
Do not believe anything on the mere authority of teachers or priests. Accept as true and as the guide to your life only that which accords with your own reason and experience, after thorough investigation. Accept only that which contributes to the well-being of yourself and others.
- Buddha
When Giovanni Bernardone, known to us as Francesco (Francis of Assisi), opened scripture three times, his lot fell on:
1. Go sell what you have,,,,(Mk 10:21)
2. Proclaim the kingdom of God. (Lk 9:60)
3. Whoever wishes to be my follower must deny his very self....(Lk 9:23)
I look at these fragments and see a way through the contemporary veil of ignorance and delusion covering these days.
1. If I do not own even the nothing I have, no adding or subtracting will take place.
2. If the sole reality is God, and God is good, then to dwell in the near presence of shucking openness is to simply say what one sees.
3. If everything is what it is, and my "self" is not separate from what is right here and now, then any idea I retain of an isolated, separate, disconnected self is denied by the very fact of what is.
One problem we have is the recurring illusion of what we think we are. We are what we are -- all of it -- the whole of what is found in the world. By thinking we are this and not that, by imagining we are better or worse than others, by clinging to ideas that promise victory or threaten defeat -- we fail to enter openly the unveiling of this present moment.
This present moment is the enormity of infinite energy continually transforming itself through our presence and awareness.
This awareness does not belong to us.
This awareness is the dwelling place of Wholeness, Integrity, Love -- what is called God.
This awareness transcends any notion of "self" or "no-self" and beyond into One and All.
Whatever we do, think, or say to anyone, we are creating the world in that image.
There is no place to hide, no other place to conquer and own, no future separate from the behavior engaged in with the illusion things will be better when we eliminate this obstacle before us.
This is it!
What we do is what is done, now and forever.
Our problem, the one we try to bury in the backyard, is the convenient delusion some are winners and some are losers, some are the chosen and some are disinherited, some are the elect and many are the outsiders cut off from secret societies of insiders. This problem of dualistic nihilism or monistic triumphalism plagues the mind of rational man and drives the human race insane.
What to do? Some say pray. Meditate. Watch. Contemplate. Do things with a concentrated mind. Breathe. Walk carefully. See through silence.
Myriad holes dug in countless backyards and dark cellars cannot cover that which longs to be uncovered.
The veil is rent. The one who came to show us the way through is the one showing us the way through. Whatever name given him or her, whatever time we say they've lived, whatever culture, race, language, or geography appeals to us as their indigenous dwelling -- it doesn't matter -- the one showing us the way through is doing so right now, right here, as you are.
Only God.
You see.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Come, creator breath, pass through us!
Breath is sacred.
Today the Christian calendar celebrates breath passing from source through word to our hearts and minds.
Every breath is the receiving of communion.
It is transitory.
One breath follows another. Like the pattern of son following father, word emanates from source.
Each breath a birth.
Once, the church carried the story through scripture. Now the story falls into everyday parlance.
Ground, wind, and sound reconstitute trinitarian Source, breath, and word.
The filioque is resolved. One doesn't proceed from the other. One is the other. And if that is so, then, there is no other.
One, and one, and one do not make three. Rather, each one is one -- no matter how many twos and threes and further quantities try to accumulate.
Something new is born.
It is Pentecost.
Celebrate passing through.
Each, one.
Breath is sacred.
Today the Christian calendar celebrates breath passing from source through word to our hearts and minds.
Every breath is the receiving of communion.
It is transitory.
One breath follows another. Like the pattern of son following father, word emanates from source.
Each breath a birth.
Once, the church carried the story through scripture. Now the story falls into everyday parlance.
Ground, wind, and sound reconstitute trinitarian Source, breath, and word.
The filioque is resolved. One doesn't proceed from the other. One is the other. And if that is so, then, there is no other.
One, and one, and one do not make three. Rather, each one is one -- no matter how many twos and threes and further quantities try to accumulate.
Something new is born.
It is Pentecost.
Celebrate passing through.
Each, one.
Saturday, May 29, 2004
Sun returns. Week of rain seeps into water table.
The mind of war wanders through streets and history with alternative furtive and forlorn glances to left and right. No one asks for that mind. It is odd guest at kitchen table in scores of countries sipping coffee looking out window in silence. Like a relative battered by confusion and uncertain impulse this guest is by turns fearfully left alone and gingerly addressed by watchful householder.
All the explanations of past patriarchs about the practice of no-mind are unique. Now, I will give a synopsis of these different techniques and briefly describe ten of them.
One: attention. This means that when we are practicing, we should always cut off thoughts and guard against their arising. As soon as a thought arises we destroy it through attention. As a patriarch stated, "Do not fear the arising of thoughts; only be concerned lest your awareness of them be tardy." A gatha says, "There is no need to search for truth; you need only put all views to rest." This is the method of extinguishing delusion through attention.
- Chinul (1205)
Monday is Memorial Day in the United States.
The noun "memorial day" has 1 sense in WordNet.
1. Memorial Day, Decoration Day -- (U.S., last Monday in May; commemorates the members of the United States armed forces who were killed in war)http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn?stage=1&word=memorial+day
We pay.
We pay attention.
This paying, we are reminded, is the way to extinguish delusion.
Imagine -- only by putting all views to rest does truth appear.
The mind of war arises from kitchen table and looks through fog and confusion at visions so horrible and delusions so vivid that it cannot distinguish what is actually real from that which is sorrowful nightmare.
Perhaps touch will clarify. Go ahead. Pour another cup of coffee. Offer some toast and jam. Put hand gently on shoulder. Speak and invite a soothing simple sound of solace to touch the troubled guest and calm that mind.
Mere attention. Mother awareness.
Loving presence. Stark gift.
One and all.
Peace.
The mind of war wanders through streets and history with alternative furtive and forlorn glances to left and right. No one asks for that mind. It is odd guest at kitchen table in scores of countries sipping coffee looking out window in silence. Like a relative battered by confusion and uncertain impulse this guest is by turns fearfully left alone and gingerly addressed by watchful householder.
All the explanations of past patriarchs about the practice of no-mind are unique. Now, I will give a synopsis of these different techniques and briefly describe ten of them.
One: attention. This means that when we are practicing, we should always cut off thoughts and guard against their arising. As soon as a thought arises we destroy it through attention. As a patriarch stated, "Do not fear the arising of thoughts; only be concerned lest your awareness of them be tardy." A gatha says, "There is no need to search for truth; you need only put all views to rest." This is the method of extinguishing delusion through attention.
- Chinul (1205)
Monday is Memorial Day in the United States.
The noun "memorial day" has 1 sense in WordNet.
1. Memorial Day, Decoration Day -- (U.S., last Monday in May; commemorates the members of the United States armed forces who were killed in war)http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn?stage=1&word=memorial+day
We pay.
We pay attention.
This paying, we are reminded, is the way to extinguish delusion.
Imagine -- only by putting all views to rest does truth appear.
The mind of war arises from kitchen table and looks through fog and confusion at visions so horrible and delusions so vivid that it cannot distinguish what is actually real from that which is sorrowful nightmare.
Perhaps touch will clarify. Go ahead. Pour another cup of coffee. Offer some toast and jam. Put hand gently on shoulder. Speak and invite a soothing simple sound of solace to touch the troubled guest and calm that mind.
Mere attention. Mother awareness.
Loving presence. Stark gift.
One and all.
Peace.
Friday, May 28, 2004
Ryan in prison this morning said there is a silence below silence. Below the silence, he said, is where the dead are.
Where no face is seen no voice heard -- only disconnected dividuals. Isn't that the real punishment of prison? No face no voice no particular compassion?
Do not be concerned with who is
wise and who is stupid.
Do not discriminate the
sharp from the dull.
To practice whole-heartedly
is the true endeavor of the way.
Practice-realization is not
defiled with specialness;
it is a matter for every day.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
When we arrive to recognize faces to listen to voices to practice community with individuals, we are recipients of gift requiring no special label no special wrapping.
Ryan wondered whether Jesus, after death but before resurrection, went to the dead -- but to do...what?
Joe and Chris come in and join in after the tour-de-force of Ryan at felt-tip board schematizing the chaotic arrival and departure of word-and-symbol, appearance and disappearance of meaning and significance. His heart and center, our heart and center, the fulcrum of friction one against the other -- until resolved by compassionate presence.
After erasing willy-nilly letters from two sets of words there remains on the board the following: "The flaw...ties in...the world."
And from the book on table we read, "Again, God. Only He is everywhere and with Him everything is connected." (P. 22, G.I. GurdJieff, in Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am')
The only real conversation is to turn with one another in being -- to continue breathing. Dropping story-line, transforming, and passing through, trust.
We are not divided when we attend with compassionate attention the one, each one, in our midst.
Faces seen, voices heard, dead raised in the prayer of open mind open heart.
Our gratitude for this gift.
Everyday.
Where no face is seen no voice heard -- only disconnected dividuals. Isn't that the real punishment of prison? No face no voice no particular compassion?
Do not be concerned with who is
wise and who is stupid.
Do not discriminate the
sharp from the dull.
To practice whole-heartedly
is the true endeavor of the way.
Practice-realization is not
defiled with specialness;
it is a matter for every day.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
When we arrive to recognize faces to listen to voices to practice community with individuals, we are recipients of gift requiring no special label no special wrapping.
Ryan wondered whether Jesus, after death but before resurrection, went to the dead -- but to do...what?
Joe and Chris come in and join in after the tour-de-force of Ryan at felt-tip board schematizing the chaotic arrival and departure of word-and-symbol, appearance and disappearance of meaning and significance. His heart and center, our heart and center, the fulcrum of friction one against the other -- until resolved by compassionate presence.
After erasing willy-nilly letters from two sets of words there remains on the board the following: "The flaw...ties in...the world."
And from the book on table we read, "Again, God. Only He is everywhere and with Him everything is connected." (P. 22, G.I. GurdJieff, in Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am')
The only real conversation is to turn with one another in being -- to continue breathing. Dropping story-line, transforming, and passing through, trust.
We are not divided when we attend with compassionate attention the one, each one, in our midst.
Faces seen, voices heard, dead raised in the prayer of open mind open heart.
Our gratitude for this gift.
Everyday.
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Walking foot of Ragged, at dawn, rain.
What is the inner way?
Maria said she walks over the stones on the dirt road. Tom, she said, looks under each one.
I'm with Maria.
The contemplative observes the way.
This morning, sitting in chair on screened porch with dog alongside at 5AM, rain dripping on green leaves, scent of incense coming from inside cabin.
Earlier, while walking to brook, Cesco and I step quietly. From Sally's land a white-tail deer leaps equally quietly up the mountain.
Brook tumbling under footbridge.
Observing is the way.
The way is what is.
There is no secret.
Tom says the divine allows what is near it to rest in its own loveliness. That's how the divine is recognized.
At Ragged mountain, at dusk, two dogs, two people look up. Cloud covers peak.
What is the inner way?
Maria said she walks over the stones on the dirt road. Tom, she said, looks under each one.
I'm with Maria.
The contemplative observes the way.
This morning, sitting in chair on screened porch with dog alongside at 5AM, rain dripping on green leaves, scent of incense coming from inside cabin.
Earlier, while walking to brook, Cesco and I step quietly. From Sally's land a white-tail deer leaps equally quietly up the mountain.
Brook tumbling under footbridge.
Observing is the way.
The way is what is.
There is no secret.
Tom says the divine allows what is near it to rest in its own loveliness. That's how the divine is recognized.
At Ragged mountain, at dusk, two dogs, two people look up. Cloud covers peak.
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Have we confused comparison and compassion?
Is it the failure to live inside one’s true life that throws us out into the odd world of commerce and the religion of comparison?
Beyond the point where the rivers
End and the mountains vanish
You have kept on walking
Originally the treasure lies
Just under one’s feet
You made the mistake of thinking
That now you would be able
To retire in peace
Look: in your own hut the
Meditation mat has never been warm.
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
Silence resides on the mat. The noise of comparison, explanation, and accumulation crowds every square inch of the mistake we make in the way we think of the world.
It is a true statement that money is the only religion most of us worship in the world with attention and careful accounting. When religion becomes money and money becomes religion it is time to look very hard at the profession of faith in comparison that has been substituted for direct experience of the grace of compassion.
We are in an enormous hurry to produce, consume, invade, impose, trump, and possess. In our haste to compare and emerge triumphantly superior to the next person, business, country, and religion – we become artless and crude with lust and power. Poet Theodore Roethke said, "Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't."
Art is grace of compassion.
A banner hangs in chapel/zendo above MoGLIAD print (Mother of God, Light in All Darkness). It is from the ephemeral presence of Tibetan monks in this area, and displays Tibetan characters for Om Mani Padme Hum (or, Om Mani Peme Hung, Tibetan mantra of Chenrezig {Avalokiteshvara})
Thus the six syllables, om mani padme hum, mean that in dependence on the practice of a path which is an indivisible union of method and wisdom, you can transform your impure body, speech, and mind into the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha. It is said that you should not seek for Buddhahood outside of yourself; the substances for the achievement of Buddhahood are within. As Maitreya says in his Sublime Continuum of the Great Vehicle (Uttaratantra), all beings naturally have the Buddha nature in their own continuum. We have within us the seed of purity, the essence of a One Gone Thus (Tathagatagarbha), that is to be transformed and fully developed into Buddhahood.
(From a lecture given by His Holiness The Dalai Lama of Tibet at the Kalmuck Mongolian Buddhist Center, New Jersey.)
Unfortunately, not gone thus, I am far too full of the crowded and noisy self I call my own -- a reverberating hall full of opinion and chattering un-necessities.
OM MANI PADME HUM -- (Tibetan pronunciation - Om Mani Pémé Hung)-- "I invoke the transformation and purification of the six negative emotions of pride, jealousy, desire, ignorance, greed and anger into their true nature, enlightened mind." It is the mantra of compassion – Avalokiteshvara.
(http://www.worldprayers.org/frameit.cgi?/archive/prayers/invocations/om_mani_padme_hum.html)
This transformation and purification is high priority right now.
Rainy damp weather in Maine mid-coast this morning.
I must find the mat of acceptance and surrender. There are so few breaths willing to be abandoned to compassion.
As Christian feast of descent of sacred breath approaches I look to prepare a place for it by abandoning my airless mind for the breath of compassion and wisdom.
I cannot stand in the way.
The way belongs to itself.
Absent me.
Is it the failure to live inside one’s true life that throws us out into the odd world of commerce and the religion of comparison?
Beyond the point where the rivers
End and the mountains vanish
You have kept on walking
Originally the treasure lies
Just under one’s feet
You made the mistake of thinking
That now you would be able
To retire in peace
Look: in your own hut the
Meditation mat has never been warm.
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
Silence resides on the mat. The noise of comparison, explanation, and accumulation crowds every square inch of the mistake we make in the way we think of the world.
It is a true statement that money is the only religion most of us worship in the world with attention and careful accounting. When religion becomes money and money becomes religion it is time to look very hard at the profession of faith in comparison that has been substituted for direct experience of the grace of compassion.
We are in an enormous hurry to produce, consume, invade, impose, trump, and possess. In our haste to compare and emerge triumphantly superior to the next person, business, country, and religion – we become artless and crude with lust and power. Poet Theodore Roethke said, "Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't."
Art is grace of compassion.
A banner hangs in chapel/zendo above MoGLIAD print (Mother of God, Light in All Darkness). It is from the ephemeral presence of Tibetan monks in this area, and displays Tibetan characters for Om Mani Padme Hum (or, Om Mani Peme Hung, Tibetan mantra of Chenrezig {Avalokiteshvara})
Thus the six syllables, om mani padme hum, mean that in dependence on the practice of a path which is an indivisible union of method and wisdom, you can transform your impure body, speech, and mind into the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha. It is said that you should not seek for Buddhahood outside of yourself; the substances for the achievement of Buddhahood are within. As Maitreya says in his Sublime Continuum of the Great Vehicle (Uttaratantra), all beings naturally have the Buddha nature in their own continuum. We have within us the seed of purity, the essence of a One Gone Thus (Tathagatagarbha), that is to be transformed and fully developed into Buddhahood.
(From a lecture given by His Holiness The Dalai Lama of Tibet at the Kalmuck Mongolian Buddhist Center, New Jersey.)
Unfortunately, not gone thus, I am far too full of the crowded and noisy self I call my own -- a reverberating hall full of opinion and chattering un-necessities.
OM MANI PADME HUM -- (Tibetan pronunciation - Om Mani Pémé Hung)-- "I invoke the transformation and purification of the six negative emotions of pride, jealousy, desire, ignorance, greed and anger into their true nature, enlightened mind." It is the mantra of compassion – Avalokiteshvara.
(http://www.worldprayers.org/frameit.cgi?/archive/prayers/invocations/om_mani_padme_hum.html)
This transformation and purification is high priority right now.
Rainy damp weather in Maine mid-coast this morning.
I must find the mat of acceptance and surrender. There are so few breaths willing to be abandoned to compassion.
As Christian feast of descent of sacred breath approaches I look to prepare a place for it by abandoning my airless mind for the breath of compassion and wisdom.
I cannot stand in the way.
The way belongs to itself.
Absent me.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Often, words are bottomless. In this instance, the word 'instrument.'
Inspired by Francis of Assisi, someone wrote a prayer that appeared in the early 1900s. It is about being and becoming an instrument of peace.
Lord,
make me an instrument
of your peace.
Where there is hatred . . . let me sow love
Where there is injury . . . pardon
Where there is doubt . . . faith
Where there is despair . . .hope
Where there is darkness . . . light
Where there is sadness . . .joy
Divine Master,
grant that I may not
so much seek
To be consoled . . .as to console
To be understood . . .as to understand,
To be loved . . . as to love
For it is in giving . . .that we receive,
It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned,
It is in dying . . .that we are born to eternal life.
'Instrument' -- (from Latin instruo -struere -struxi -structum [to build in or into; to set up , construct; furnish], hence [to train a person]; [to prepare, provide]; milit., [to draw up the order of battle]. Hence partic. instructus -a -um, [equipped, supplied]; of persons, [trained, instructed]).
per prep. with acc.: of space , [through, along, over]; sometimes [before, in the presence of]; of time, [throughout, during; in the course of, in a time of]; of means or instrument, [through, by, by means of, with, by way of]; of cause, [because of, on account of]; 'per me licet', [you may as far as I'm concerned]; in entreaties, oaths, etc., [in the name of]. (from University of Notre Dame website Latin-English, http://catholic.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookdown.pl?instrument
Instrument is a passing-through place. If we ask to be instruments of sacred peace, we ask to be a place creative peace passes through on its way to where it is needed.
It is a significant thing to ask to be a construct of peace, to be an instruct of peace. It is a formidable request to be a structure of peace.
'Structure,' -- (also from Latin instruo -struere -struxi -structum [to build in or into;)-- is
1. a thing consisting of a number of elements joined together in a certain way.
2. the way in which such a thing is joined together
3. anything, esp. a building, that has been constructed
4. the relationship between and among the parts of a relatively complex process or entity.
As transitive verb -- Inflected Forms: structured, structuring, structures
Definition 1. to give organization to; arrange. (http://www.wordsmyth.net)
For peace or sanity to flow through us there first must be an open way made for the passage through. For me, and for many of us, this way is clogged with debris and detritus of hoarded gift. If we affirm that all life is gift, we have to come to terms with gift.
Coming to terms with gift means appreciating the creative movement of gift. The artist is one who recognizes that there is only gift and we are each the passageway gift moves into and through the world.
The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition -- and therefore, more permanently enduring. (Joseph Conrad, quoted in The Gift)
Two additional lovely lines from the same book on gift:
1. "The only essential is this: the gift must always move. There are other forms of property that stand still, that mark a boundary or resist momentum, but the gift keeps going." (p.4)
2. "Another way to describe the motion of the gift is to say that a gift must always be used up, consumed, eaten. The gift is property that perishes." (p.8)
(from The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde, c.1979)
The gift celebrated today in the Christian calendar is that of the Ascension, forty days following Easter. Jesus ascends into heaven. The gift moves into and through the present. Jesus doesn't go anywhere else. Heaven is no other place -- it is the absolute present. He permeates the reality of what is here and now with the gift of what some call grace. At Wednesday Evening Conversation grace was referred to as loving attention and surrender to the open -- which is the passing-through place where one and all meet in truth.
If you cannot find the truth where you are,
Where do you expect to find it?
Truth is not far away; it is ever present.
It is not something to be attained
Since not one of your steps leads away from it.
Dogen
Where else is there to go?
We pray today for this passing-through.
Bottomless peace?
Open.
Inspired by Francis of Assisi, someone wrote a prayer that appeared in the early 1900s. It is about being and becoming an instrument of peace.
Lord,
make me an instrument
of your peace.
Where there is hatred . . . let me sow love
Where there is injury . . . pardon
Where there is doubt . . . faith
Where there is despair . . .hope
Where there is darkness . . . light
Where there is sadness . . .joy
Divine Master,
grant that I may not
so much seek
To be consoled . . .as to console
To be understood . . .as to understand,
To be loved . . . as to love
For it is in giving . . .that we receive,
It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned,
It is in dying . . .that we are born to eternal life.
'Instrument' -- (from Latin instruo -struere -struxi -structum [to build in or into; to set up , construct; furnish], hence [to train a person]; [to prepare, provide]; milit., [to draw up the order of battle]. Hence partic. instructus -a -um, [equipped, supplied]; of persons, [trained, instructed]).
per prep. with acc.: of space , [through, along, over]; sometimes [before, in the presence of]; of time, [throughout, during; in the course of, in a time of]; of means or instrument, [through, by, by means of, with, by way of]; of cause, [because of, on account of]; 'per me licet', [you may as far as I'm concerned]; in entreaties, oaths, etc., [in the name of]. (from University of Notre Dame website Latin-English, http://catholic.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookdown.pl?instrument
Instrument is a passing-through place. If we ask to be instruments of sacred peace, we ask to be a place creative peace passes through on its way to where it is needed.
It is a significant thing to ask to be a construct of peace, to be an instruct of peace. It is a formidable request to be a structure of peace.
'Structure,' -- (also from Latin instruo -struere -struxi -structum [to build in or into;)-- is
1. a thing consisting of a number of elements joined together in a certain way.
2. the way in which such a thing is joined together
3. anything, esp. a building, that has been constructed
4. the relationship between and among the parts of a relatively complex process or entity.
As transitive verb -- Inflected Forms: structured, structuring, structures
Definition 1. to give organization to; arrange. (http://www.wordsmyth.net)
For peace or sanity to flow through us there first must be an open way made for the passage through. For me, and for many of us, this way is clogged with debris and detritus of hoarded gift. If we affirm that all life is gift, we have to come to terms with gift.
Coming to terms with gift means appreciating the creative movement of gift. The artist is one who recognizes that there is only gift and we are each the passageway gift moves into and through the world.
The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition -- and therefore, more permanently enduring. (Joseph Conrad, quoted in The Gift)
Two additional lovely lines from the same book on gift:
1. "The only essential is this: the gift must always move. There are other forms of property that stand still, that mark a boundary or resist momentum, but the gift keeps going." (p.4)
2. "Another way to describe the motion of the gift is to say that a gift must always be used up, consumed, eaten. The gift is property that perishes." (p.8)
(from The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde, c.1979)
The gift celebrated today in the Christian calendar is that of the Ascension, forty days following Easter. Jesus ascends into heaven. The gift moves into and through the present. Jesus doesn't go anywhere else. Heaven is no other place -- it is the absolute present. He permeates the reality of what is here and now with the gift of what some call grace. At Wednesday Evening Conversation grace was referred to as loving attention and surrender to the open -- which is the passing-through place where one and all meet in truth.
If you cannot find the truth where you are,
Where do you expect to find it?
Truth is not far away; it is ever present.
It is not something to be attained
Since not one of your steps leads away from it.
Dogen
Where else is there to go?
We pray today for this passing-through.
Bottomless peace?
Open.
Monday, May 17, 2004
Old distinctions don't die. They collapse against one another gasping for new breath.
Living a religious life in the world means dwelling in the thin place between politics and prayer. To live a monastic life in the marketplace necessitates occupying the thin place between what is called the sacred and the secular. A hermit's balance between work and worship is the tension of a tightrope walk along the thin place strung between head and heart.
The soul makes its way between distinctions and divisions that no longer stand alone and separate.
The liturgical costume of ecclesiastical celebration and the dress-up and dressing gowns of congressional, executive, and judicial branches must morph into ordinary ethical and moral clothing of common, decent behavior. Hiding is no longer possible. There are no longer any hiding places. We cannot escape the eyes of men and women watching and waiting for the right thing to be done.
Ill, believe me, is power proved by insult; ill can terror command veneration, and far more effectual is affection in obtaining one's purpose than fear. For terror operates no longer than its object is present, but love produces its effects with its object at a distance: and as absence changes the former into hatred, it raises the latter into respect.
Therefore you ought (and I cannot but repeat it too often) you ought to well consider the nature of your office, and to represent to your self how great and important the task is of governing a free state. For what can be better for society than such government, what can be more precious than freedom? How ignominious then must his conduct be who turns good government into anarchy, and liberty into slavery?
(Pliny The Younger, {62-113CE} in "On Government")
Contemporary spirituality can no longer be shunted off behind doors of mosque, temple, church, or cathedral. Nor can governing be arrogated to halls, wings, and benches of power where words are divorced from vibrant truth-telling, and decrees issued are shill and insurance for private power and gain.
This country, as collapses virulent division and ignorant tripe, is readying itself for what is coming. Not apocalypse hoped for by fundamentalists, nor revolution wanted by anarchists. What is coming is a new heart and new mind. This heart and mind listens to and sees the profound. The profound is emerging with and through the ordinary in our midst. It is showing through as a creative thin place. It is not devious nor cunning, neither product of strong-arm policy, nor default of wilting pride. What is showing through in the thin place is contemplative action and mindful engagement of each fact in the open.
Even a casual reader of Nietzsche will be struck by his repeated arguments that our beliefs about the world are false: "The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e. it is not a fact but a fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is 'in flux,' as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for — there is no truth" (WP 616). Our truths are "merely ... irrefutable errors" (GS 265) "without which a certain species of life could not live" (WP 493). Nietzsche's error theory is one of the most unusual positions in the history of epistemology, and making sense of it is an important test of the adequacy of an interpretation of his epistemology.
(p.17, in Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition, by Michael Steven Green)
Richard Hugo's first line of his poem "Villager" says, "What's wrong will always be wrong." I wondered, upon hearing the line twenty five years ago, whether what's right is created each time new. There's nothing set and permanent to fall back on. Each act and each thought is about bringing something new into existence -- not about retrieving something from attic or antiquity to overlay current reality. What's right is created new -- even if it is reminiscent of what once was, or it is brought down from storage. It is the infusion of vital emerging presence leaping from the undivided (the individual) that helps what is becoming true be what is in fact true.
Nietzsche's rejection of a real world of "being" in favor of a contingent world of "becoming" is less a claim about what the world is like than a claim about our cognitive relation to the world. It means questioning our ability to make objectively valid judgments about the world at all, despite Nietzsche's tendency to put the point in ways that suggest that it is itself an objectively valid judgment that the world becomes:
“[Philosophers] will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of cognition has become.... The philosopher here sees "instincts" in man as he now is and assumes that these belong to the unalterable facts of mankind and to that extent could provide a key to the understanding of the world in general: the whole teleology is constructed by speaking of the man of the last four millennia as of an eternal man towards whom all things in the world have had a natural relationship from the time he began. But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. (HA 2)”
Nietzsche's denial of "eternal facts" or "absolute truths" suggests that his main point is the rather trivial one that nothing in the world is permanent, as if he could make objectively valid judgments about change. But his real point is that the reasons we come to our judgments are not permanent. Since they are merely contingent, our judgments lose their objective validity and so their ability to be true: "Knowledge is possible only on the basis of belief in being" (WP 518). In contrast, "a world in a state of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be 'comprehended' or 'known'" (WP 520).
(in, Green, “Spir and Nietzsche,” from Chapter 2, “Nietzsche's Neo-Kantian Roots,”)
Texts reminiscent of mystical spirituality are here recalled: the incomprehensibility of the vast universe; the unknowing of ungraspable God; the dark nights and clouds veiling our ability to see, claim, or attain certainty.
Just because we are not real substances, and do not possess a real self or a content really proper to us, our individuality could not subsist without the natural delusion by virtue of which we appear as substances in our self-consciousness and by which we apparently have a proper, persistent and independent essence, without this delusion we would not be ourselves, and there would be no question of our ego. Our existence is therefore inseparable from our self-consciousness, or rather our existence consists of it. We only exist because we are understanding ourselves.
(from "On Individual Immortality," Thought and Reality c.1873, by Afrikan Spir, included in p.1140 Treasure of Philosophy, edited by Dagobert D. Runes, c.1955)
Are we a different "substance?" Is our substance "to-be-revealed?" Are we, as the intricate thin place between being/becoming, no-other to what-is? If we are unceasingly "to-be-revealed," without fixed abode, without separate self, and without division from true interdependent co-origination -- then, who are we? Do we share that substance, that consubstantial, transubstantial fluidity with what we call God?
Is "reality" the coming to be of what is true? Is God "what is true"? Is God not the destination, not the path already there, but the path revealed now, and here, and this again as we let fall our foot on the way? Is this unknowable God and our unknowable self the very constitutive substance of existence?
It is as though our "substance" is referred to in the final three lines of the poem --
What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, towards desire.
We come to something without knowing why.
(from poem "The Manifestation" by Theodore Roethke)
This is our substance, form, and energy: We come to something -- without knowing why.
The Original Self
Even those who have set aside all judgments of right and wrong and do not view people in terms of self and other cannot be said to be truly on the Way as long as they have not seen the original state before personal history.
- Muso Kokushi (1275-1351)
It is a riddle for us. His story, her story, our story is in the telling. It is before and beyond personal. What is before and beyond the personal? Go ahead, open eyes and ears, but not mouth, not yet. For a moment do not say anything. Rest in silence awhile.
In the collapse of old distinctions we are urged along a way that breathes new life into a middle place. That middle way, centering prayer, and thin place is how we go on, step by step, moving through what is encountered there, as we find the revelation of this moment, this place, and this sweet face -- the original one, the one we had before our parents were born.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Afternoon sun through new green waving leaves.
Inhaling.
The silent loving play of life within itself.
Exhaling.
Living a religious life in the world means dwelling in the thin place between politics and prayer. To live a monastic life in the marketplace necessitates occupying the thin place between what is called the sacred and the secular. A hermit's balance between work and worship is the tension of a tightrope walk along the thin place strung between head and heart.
The soul makes its way between distinctions and divisions that no longer stand alone and separate.
The liturgical costume of ecclesiastical celebration and the dress-up and dressing gowns of congressional, executive, and judicial branches must morph into ordinary ethical and moral clothing of common, decent behavior. Hiding is no longer possible. There are no longer any hiding places. We cannot escape the eyes of men and women watching and waiting for the right thing to be done.
Ill, believe me, is power proved by insult; ill can terror command veneration, and far more effectual is affection in obtaining one's purpose than fear. For terror operates no longer than its object is present, but love produces its effects with its object at a distance: and as absence changes the former into hatred, it raises the latter into respect.
Therefore you ought (and I cannot but repeat it too often) you ought to well consider the nature of your office, and to represent to your self how great and important the task is of governing a free state. For what can be better for society than such government, what can be more precious than freedom? How ignominious then must his conduct be who turns good government into anarchy, and liberty into slavery?
(Pliny The Younger, {62-113CE} in "On Government")
Contemporary spirituality can no longer be shunted off behind doors of mosque, temple, church, or cathedral. Nor can governing be arrogated to halls, wings, and benches of power where words are divorced from vibrant truth-telling, and decrees issued are shill and insurance for private power and gain.
This country, as collapses virulent division and ignorant tripe, is readying itself for what is coming. Not apocalypse hoped for by fundamentalists, nor revolution wanted by anarchists. What is coming is a new heart and new mind. This heart and mind listens to and sees the profound. The profound is emerging with and through the ordinary in our midst. It is showing through as a creative thin place. It is not devious nor cunning, neither product of strong-arm policy, nor default of wilting pride. What is showing through in the thin place is contemplative action and mindful engagement of each fact in the open.
Even a casual reader of Nietzsche will be struck by his repeated arguments that our beliefs about the world are false: "The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e. it is not a fact but a fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is 'in flux,' as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for — there is no truth" (WP 616). Our truths are "merely ... irrefutable errors" (GS 265) "without which a certain species of life could not live" (WP 493). Nietzsche's error theory is one of the most unusual positions in the history of epistemology, and making sense of it is an important test of the adequacy of an interpretation of his epistemology.
(p.17, in Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition, by Michael Steven Green)
Richard Hugo's first line of his poem "Villager" says, "What's wrong will always be wrong." I wondered, upon hearing the line twenty five years ago, whether what's right is created each time new. There's nothing set and permanent to fall back on. Each act and each thought is about bringing something new into existence -- not about retrieving something from attic or antiquity to overlay current reality. What's right is created new -- even if it is reminiscent of what once was, or it is brought down from storage. It is the infusion of vital emerging presence leaping from the undivided (the individual) that helps what is becoming true be what is in fact true.
Nietzsche's rejection of a real world of "being" in favor of a contingent world of "becoming" is less a claim about what the world is like than a claim about our cognitive relation to the world. It means questioning our ability to make objectively valid judgments about the world at all, despite Nietzsche's tendency to put the point in ways that suggest that it is itself an objectively valid judgment that the world becomes:
“[Philosophers] will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of cognition has become.... The philosopher here sees "instincts" in man as he now is and assumes that these belong to the unalterable facts of mankind and to that extent could provide a key to the understanding of the world in general: the whole teleology is constructed by speaking of the man of the last four millennia as of an eternal man towards whom all things in the world have had a natural relationship from the time he began. But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. (HA 2)”
Nietzsche's denial of "eternal facts" or "absolute truths" suggests that his main point is the rather trivial one that nothing in the world is permanent, as if he could make objectively valid judgments about change. But his real point is that the reasons we come to our judgments are not permanent. Since they are merely contingent, our judgments lose their objective validity and so their ability to be true: "Knowledge is possible only on the basis of belief in being" (WP 518). In contrast, "a world in a state of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be 'comprehended' or 'known'" (WP 520).
(in, Green, “Spir and Nietzsche,” from Chapter 2, “Nietzsche's Neo-Kantian Roots,”)
Texts reminiscent of mystical spirituality are here recalled: the incomprehensibility of the vast universe; the unknowing of ungraspable God; the dark nights and clouds veiling our ability to see, claim, or attain certainty.
Just because we are not real substances, and do not possess a real self or a content really proper to us, our individuality could not subsist without the natural delusion by virtue of which we appear as substances in our self-consciousness and by which we apparently have a proper, persistent and independent essence, without this delusion we would not be ourselves, and there would be no question of our ego. Our existence is therefore inseparable from our self-consciousness, or rather our existence consists of it. We only exist because we are understanding ourselves.
(from "On Individual Immortality," Thought and Reality c.1873, by Afrikan Spir, included in p.1140 Treasure of Philosophy, edited by Dagobert D. Runes, c.1955)
Are we a different "substance?" Is our substance "to-be-revealed?" Are we, as the intricate thin place between being/becoming, no-other to what-is? If we are unceasingly "to-be-revealed," without fixed abode, without separate self, and without division from true interdependent co-origination -- then, who are we? Do we share that substance, that consubstantial, transubstantial fluidity with what we call God?
Is "reality" the coming to be of what is true? Is God "what is true"? Is God not the destination, not the path already there, but the path revealed now, and here, and this again as we let fall our foot on the way? Is this unknowable God and our unknowable self the very constitutive substance of existence?
It is as though our "substance" is referred to in the final three lines of the poem --
What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, towards desire.
We come to something without knowing why.
(from poem "The Manifestation" by Theodore Roethke)
This is our substance, form, and energy: We come to something -- without knowing why.
The Original Self
Even those who have set aside all judgments of right and wrong and do not view people in terms of self and other cannot be said to be truly on the Way as long as they have not seen the original state before personal history.
- Muso Kokushi (1275-1351)
It is a riddle for us. His story, her story, our story is in the telling. It is before and beyond personal. What is before and beyond the personal? Go ahead, open eyes and ears, but not mouth, not yet. For a moment do not say anything. Rest in silence awhile.
In the collapse of old distinctions we are urged along a way that breathes new life into a middle place. That middle way, centering prayer, and thin place is how we go on, step by step, moving through what is encountered there, as we find the revelation of this moment, this place, and this sweet face -- the original one, the one we had before our parents were born.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Afternoon sun through new green waving leaves.
Inhaling.
The silent loving play of life within itself.
Exhaling.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Setting out, following this.
If God is the path beyond path, are there only trails foot-worn by those passing by, walking the expanse of each step along earth as though there was no place to go, no arrival envisioned, only the stretch of this next turn, this next branch hitting hat, this very telling step by step along footpath God sees fit to tumble worn stone with water, worn soil imprinted by sole on soul itself passing through, going on?
When you took on flesh, Lord Jesus, you made a marriage of mankind with God. Help us to be faithful to your word and endure our exile bravely, until we are called to the heavenly marriage feast, to which the Virgin Mary, exemplar of your Church, has preceded us. (Psalm-prayer, Saturday Daytime Prayer, Week IV, in The Liturgy of the Hours)
We are in exile, bravely wending way home where there is no home, saying when we get where we arrive, "Ah, home!" -- the sweet nothing we utter in the middle of accommodation made with familiar objects on mantelpiece where we place keys that have opened door.
47
On an incredibly clear day,
The kind when you wish you'd done lots of work
So that you wouldn't have to work that day,
I saw -- as if spotting a road through the trees --
What may well be the Great Secret,
That Great Mystery the false poets speak of.
I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn't exist,
That there are hills, valleys and plains,
That there are trees, flowers and grass,
That there are rivers and stones,
But that there is no whole to which all this belongs,
That a true and real emsemble
Is a disease of our own ideas.
Nature is parts without a whole.
This is perhaps the mystery they speak of.
This is what, without thinking or pausing,
I realized must be the truth
That everyone tries to find but doesn't find
And that I alone found, because I didn't try to find it.
(from "The Keeper of Sheep," in Fernando Pessoa & Co., Selected Poems Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), edited and translated by Richard Zenith, c.1998)
I try to find it. Thus it is I skirt truth the way a bird flying through wood-thick acre manages to alight unbroken, feathers frayed yet attached, on branch near feeder, a chirping prelude before swooping to nearly empty hanging gift.
Where all gifts are.
Right there.
Not whole.
Partial. As is.
Oneself.
If God is the path beyond path, are there only trails foot-worn by those passing by, walking the expanse of each step along earth as though there was no place to go, no arrival envisioned, only the stretch of this next turn, this next branch hitting hat, this very telling step by step along footpath God sees fit to tumble worn stone with water, worn soil imprinted by sole on soul itself passing through, going on?
When you took on flesh, Lord Jesus, you made a marriage of mankind with God. Help us to be faithful to your word and endure our exile bravely, until we are called to the heavenly marriage feast, to which the Virgin Mary, exemplar of your Church, has preceded us. (Psalm-prayer, Saturday Daytime Prayer, Week IV, in The Liturgy of the Hours)
We are in exile, bravely wending way home where there is no home, saying when we get where we arrive, "Ah, home!" -- the sweet nothing we utter in the middle of accommodation made with familiar objects on mantelpiece where we place keys that have opened door.
47
On an incredibly clear day,
The kind when you wish you'd done lots of work
So that you wouldn't have to work that day,
I saw -- as if spotting a road through the trees --
What may well be the Great Secret,
That Great Mystery the false poets speak of.
I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn't exist,
That there are hills, valleys and plains,
That there are trees, flowers and grass,
That there are rivers and stones,
But that there is no whole to which all this belongs,
That a true and real emsemble
Is a disease of our own ideas.
Nature is parts without a whole.
This is perhaps the mystery they speak of.
This is what, without thinking or pausing,
I realized must be the truth
That everyone tries to find but doesn't find
And that I alone found, because I didn't try to find it.
(from "The Keeper of Sheep," in Fernando Pessoa & Co., Selected Poems Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), edited and translated by Richard Zenith, c.1998)
I try to find it. Thus it is I skirt truth the way a bird flying through wood-thick acre manages to alight unbroken, feathers frayed yet attached, on branch near feeder, a chirping prelude before swooping to nearly empty hanging gift.
Where all gifts are.
Right there.
Not whole.
Partial. As is.
Oneself.
Friday, May 14, 2004
If this moment was the only moment -- if there was nothing else -- what would we do?
"We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." This is a good response.
When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.
Dr. [Mark] Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.
("Cold Turkey," by Kurt Vonnegut, Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by In These Times)
It is a good response. Whether at prison conversation on retributive vs. restorative justice Friday morning , at Thursday evening conversation on esoteric Christianity, or Interreligious Dialogue conversation Friday evening reading about Islam -- the notion we are helping one another through is a good enough practice. It suggests no goal, no special knowledge, and no ulterior motive -- only being of service, helping without expectation.
Nature may be compared to a vast ocean. Thousands and millions of changes are taking place in it. Crocodiles and fish are essentially of the same substance as the water in which they live. People are crowded together with the myriad other things in the Great Changingness, and their nature is one with that of all other natural things. Knowing that I am of the same nature as all other natural things, I know that there is really no separate self, no separate personality, no absolute death and no absolute life.
- T’ien T’ung-Hsu (8th century A.D.)
If God had ten thousand aspects, and any one of us grabbed on to only one aspect thinking it to be the sole essence of God, we would have what we currently have in the world -- narrow, unenlightened, and fragmented ideas of God that we use as clubs against others holding other fragments.
None of us see the whole picture. Some posture and pretend omniscience -- which is both unbecoming and full of failure. Like this war in the American psyche being fought on Iraqi soil. One side says, "We are the superpower, despair ye who look upon us;" while the other side says, "We will save and protect you, trust our kindness." This intra-psychic conflict plays out in real time on Arab ground with no hope of insight or understanding. Defeat is now dismantling the sanity of the body-combatant. All suffer the disintegration.
Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. (Vonnegut)
A friend wrote and asked why I felt crazed.
I am crazed because this war is my war.
Each death my death.
Each despair mine.
Still, I go on as each one of us goes on -- teetering between attention to the facts of the war, and faith the war will pass through us leaving tolerable, not terminal, wounds.
On the tightrope, seeking equilibrium between news of chaos and hope of sane solution.
It is this madness we try to help get through.
And once through -- what will we see?
We'll see only that we have been helped through.
If we can let go of who we think we are, then we can become free and ready to love others. Our communities should be places of joyful commitment. Touch your heads and your robes and see something beautiful and joyful you are doing for the whole world. If you become able to see your impermanence, you will live for the moment and not miss opportunities to love by pushing things into the future. (Thich Nhat Hanh)
This moment -- whatever it is.
"We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." This is a good response.
When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.
Dr. [Mark] Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.
("Cold Turkey," by Kurt Vonnegut, Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by In These Times)
It is a good response. Whether at prison conversation on retributive vs. restorative justice Friday morning , at Thursday evening conversation on esoteric Christianity, or Interreligious Dialogue conversation Friday evening reading about Islam -- the notion we are helping one another through is a good enough practice. It suggests no goal, no special knowledge, and no ulterior motive -- only being of service, helping without expectation.
Nature may be compared to a vast ocean. Thousands and millions of changes are taking place in it. Crocodiles and fish are essentially of the same substance as the water in which they live. People are crowded together with the myriad other things in the Great Changingness, and their nature is one with that of all other natural things. Knowing that I am of the same nature as all other natural things, I know that there is really no separate self, no separate personality, no absolute death and no absolute life.
- T’ien T’ung-Hsu (8th century A.D.)
If God had ten thousand aspects, and any one of us grabbed on to only one aspect thinking it to be the sole essence of God, we would have what we currently have in the world -- narrow, unenlightened, and fragmented ideas of God that we use as clubs against others holding other fragments.
None of us see the whole picture. Some posture and pretend omniscience -- which is both unbecoming and full of failure. Like this war in the American psyche being fought on Iraqi soil. One side says, "We are the superpower, despair ye who look upon us;" while the other side says, "We will save and protect you, trust our kindness." This intra-psychic conflict plays out in real time on Arab ground with no hope of insight or understanding. Defeat is now dismantling the sanity of the body-combatant. All suffer the disintegration.
Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. (Vonnegut)
A friend wrote and asked why I felt crazed.
I am crazed because this war is my war.
Each death my death.
Each despair mine.
Still, I go on as each one of us goes on -- teetering between attention to the facts of the war, and faith the war will pass through us leaving tolerable, not terminal, wounds.
On the tightrope, seeking equilibrium between news of chaos and hope of sane solution.
It is this madness we try to help get through.
And once through -- what will we see?
We'll see only that we have been helped through.
If we can let go of who we think we are, then we can become free and ready to love others. Our communities should be places of joyful commitment. Touch your heads and your robes and see something beautiful and joyful you are doing for the whole world. If you become able to see your impermanence, you will live for the moment and not miss opportunities to love by pushing things into the future. (Thich Nhat Hanh)
This moment -- whatever it is.
Thursday, May 13, 2004
No other sound. No other sense.
When it feels everything is gone away, when the only stability is whoosh of passing vehicle, flutter-chirp of blur-flight bird, swallow-gulp of well water mid-afternoon one Thursday in May -- where turn?
I could say it is the war that breaks my heart. The war at center surrounded by ugliness of leaders, perversions of behavior, deceits of arrogance, and punishment of innocent, young, patriotic, confused, and obedient fighters on both sides of the conflict.
I could say it is my inability to stand in the middle of contradiction without losing heart.
Or I could say it is the very impermanence of change – wheeled conveyance enroute elsewhere, spring birdsong on branches abloom with fresh green, the movement of water down mountain into well from spigot into bottle to mouth through body – it is this impermanence I bow to, gassho, silently step into and through which I fade away into the disappearance of life living itself without notice.
Or I could say nothing.
If you miss the mark even by a strand of hair,
you are as distant as heaven from earth.
If the slightest discrimination occurs,
you will be lost in confusion.
You could be proud of your understanding;
have abundant realization, or acquire
outstanding wisdom and attain the way
by clarifying the mind. Still, if you
are wandering about in your head,
you may miss the vital path of letting your body leap.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
I think I’ve missed the mark. No leap.
Giving up, not going on -- what a mistake!
But it is my mistake. It is embodied into whatever I am in this moment at this place. All mistakes, all falls and foment, gather into this one place I pass through with conveyance, birdsong, and water. And this place, this ephemeral embodiment, is all that remains. I am defeated, utterly.
A monk once said to Foketsu Osho: “Speech and silence tend toward separation [from It] or concealment [of It]. How shall we proceed so as not to violate It?”
Fuketsu replied with the following verse:
“I always remember Konan in the spring
The partridges crying and flowers spilling their fragrance.”
Riku No said: “The Dharma Master Jo has said: ‘Heaven-and-Earth and I have the same source; the ten thousand things and I have one and the same body.’ Is this not extraordinary?”
Pointing to a flower in the garden Nansen replied: “When men of today look at this flower, it seems to them like a dream.”
(--quoted in pp.248-9, Mystics and Zen Masters, by Thomas Merton, c.1961)
A woman on the radio says, “Sometimes we suffer from too much talk. Sometimes silence is golden.” She is speaking about the temptation to blame and slam in times of turmoil and obscene news. She may be right. Still, about some things, we have to say something.
Zen meditation is not quietist tranquility, and Zen practice is not tolerant of drifting. It repeatedly demands and even forces an active response. That is the function of the koan, of the long periods of zazen meditation (upon the koan), and the frequent interviews with the Roshi in which the student reports on his progress in koan study. What does the Roshi look for, and often provoke, even with certain violence? Personal response. The purpose of koan study is to learn to respond directly to life by practicing on the koan, that is to say, by striving to meet the koan with an adequate and living response. What the Roshi wants is not a correct answer or a clever reaction but the living and authentic response of the student to the koan. If he finally responds directly and immediately to the koan, he shows that he is now able to respond fully, directly, and immediately to life itself.
(p.249, Merton)
How do we disappear in plain sight? How remain present at the same time transparent – not there while here?
Jade is tested by fire, gold is tested by a touchstone, a sword is tested by a hair, water is tested by a stick. In our school one word or one phrase, one action or one state, one entrance or one departure, one “Hello!” or one “How are you!” is used to judge the depth of the student’s understanding, to observe whether he is facing forward or backward. If he is a fellow with blood in his veins he will immediately go off shaking his sleeves behind him and though you shout out after him he will not come back.
(p.249, Merton, quoting Hekigan Roku, quoted in The Zen Koan, Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller, c.1965)
Is there any coming back?
(No response. No sound.)
Rolling wheels, distant birdsong, soothing water.
No other sense.
When it feels everything is gone away, when the only stability is whoosh of passing vehicle, flutter-chirp of blur-flight bird, swallow-gulp of well water mid-afternoon one Thursday in May -- where turn?
I could say it is the war that breaks my heart. The war at center surrounded by ugliness of leaders, perversions of behavior, deceits of arrogance, and punishment of innocent, young, patriotic, confused, and obedient fighters on both sides of the conflict.
I could say it is my inability to stand in the middle of contradiction without losing heart.
Or I could say it is the very impermanence of change – wheeled conveyance enroute elsewhere, spring birdsong on branches abloom with fresh green, the movement of water down mountain into well from spigot into bottle to mouth through body – it is this impermanence I bow to, gassho, silently step into and through which I fade away into the disappearance of life living itself without notice.
Or I could say nothing.
If you miss the mark even by a strand of hair,
you are as distant as heaven from earth.
If the slightest discrimination occurs,
you will be lost in confusion.
You could be proud of your understanding;
have abundant realization, or acquire
outstanding wisdom and attain the way
by clarifying the mind. Still, if you
are wandering about in your head,
you may miss the vital path of letting your body leap.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
I think I’ve missed the mark. No leap.
Giving up, not going on -- what a mistake!
But it is my mistake. It is embodied into whatever I am in this moment at this place. All mistakes, all falls and foment, gather into this one place I pass through with conveyance, birdsong, and water. And this place, this ephemeral embodiment, is all that remains. I am defeated, utterly.
A monk once said to Foketsu Osho: “Speech and silence tend toward separation [from It] or concealment [of It]. How shall we proceed so as not to violate It?”
Fuketsu replied with the following verse:
“I always remember Konan in the spring
The partridges crying and flowers spilling their fragrance.”
Riku No said: “The Dharma Master Jo has said: ‘Heaven-and-Earth and I have the same source; the ten thousand things and I have one and the same body.’ Is this not extraordinary?”
Pointing to a flower in the garden Nansen replied: “When men of today look at this flower, it seems to them like a dream.”
(--quoted in pp.248-9, Mystics and Zen Masters, by Thomas Merton, c.1961)
A woman on the radio says, “Sometimes we suffer from too much talk. Sometimes silence is golden.” She is speaking about the temptation to blame and slam in times of turmoil and obscene news. She may be right. Still, about some things, we have to say something.
Zen meditation is not quietist tranquility, and Zen practice is not tolerant of drifting. It repeatedly demands and even forces an active response. That is the function of the koan, of the long periods of zazen meditation (upon the koan), and the frequent interviews with the Roshi in which the student reports on his progress in koan study. What does the Roshi look for, and often provoke, even with certain violence? Personal response. The purpose of koan study is to learn to respond directly to life by practicing on the koan, that is to say, by striving to meet the koan with an adequate and living response. What the Roshi wants is not a correct answer or a clever reaction but the living and authentic response of the student to the koan. If he finally responds directly and immediately to the koan, he shows that he is now able to respond fully, directly, and immediately to life itself.
(p.249, Merton)
How do we disappear in plain sight? How remain present at the same time transparent – not there while here?
Jade is tested by fire, gold is tested by a touchstone, a sword is tested by a hair, water is tested by a stick. In our school one word or one phrase, one action or one state, one entrance or one departure, one “Hello!” or one “How are you!” is used to judge the depth of the student’s understanding, to observe whether he is facing forward or backward. If he is a fellow with blood in his veins he will immediately go off shaking his sleeves behind him and though you shout out after him he will not come back.
(p.249, Merton, quoting Hekigan Roku, quoted in The Zen Koan, Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller, c.1965)
Is there any coming back?
(No response. No sound.)
Rolling wheels, distant birdsong, soothing water.
No other sense.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Is there a way to see without adopting views?
Three views:
1.
America is good and loving and not to be confused with hating and evil peoples worldwide seeking to crush the freedoms and life style she symbolizes.
2.
America has lost its way. Cruel and cynical leaders have hoodwinked its own citizens and the world into an ugly war where murder, torture, and lies abound.
3.
There is no nation, no state, no country, no government, and no kingdom on earth that remotely understands the essence of existence or sees the heart of being-in-the-world.
These views are only perceptions. What counts are the questions:
a) What is my practice?
b) How does any one of these perceptions impact my practice?
c) Is it possible for one person to be the antidote to war and the cruelty evoked by it?
Dewdrops,
let me cleanse
in your brief,
sweet waters
these dark hands of life.
- Basho (1644-1694)
Practice prepares antidote.
It is time to practice.
Wash hands.
Reach in.
Clear out.
Views.
To see.
Three views:
1.
America is good and loving and not to be confused with hating and evil peoples worldwide seeking to crush the freedoms and life style she symbolizes.
2.
America has lost its way. Cruel and cynical leaders have hoodwinked its own citizens and the world into an ugly war where murder, torture, and lies abound.
3.
There is no nation, no state, no country, no government, and no kingdom on earth that remotely understands the essence of existence or sees the heart of being-in-the-world.
These views are only perceptions. What counts are the questions:
a) What is my practice?
b) How does any one of these perceptions impact my practice?
c) Is it possible for one person to be the antidote to war and the cruelty evoked by it?
Dewdrops,
let me cleanse
in your brief,
sweet waters
these dark hands of life.
- Basho (1644-1694)
Practice prepares antidote.
It is time to practice.
Wash hands.
Reach in.
Clear out.
Views.
To see.
Monday, May 10, 2004
What does it mean to fuse monastery and marketplace?
Is it time to unveil a perception and interpretation of God’s life in the world that invites a new way of dwelling in and as the world? Is there a way to live a contemplative life in the world without the slightest intention to remove oneself from the world? But more than that – is the world itself, theologically speaking, the missing piece of the mystery Christians call the Incarnation and Buddhists call Buddha-Mind? Are all religions ready to reveal their shared commonality -- with their ethical, ecological, ontological, and aesthetic descriptive of God-Life-With-Us?
Is God -- this, now, here?
Do we have the world we want? Do we have a working image of who and where God is? Who and where we are?
Is it fair to say -- Look at where you are to find out what you want.
Erich Heller, the German philosopher and literary critic, cautioned: "Be careful how you interpret the world. It is like that."
If a pencil falls to the floor, there's a way of speaking about it that says, 'It wanted to be there.' When water breaks through any inhibition to seek lower ground, it could be said, 'It wanted to go there.' It is a question with perplexing implication that asks: Do we belong where we are?
Is where we are what we want? Is it too stark to suggest -- Where you are is what you want? Is anything ever other than what it is?
Thus the question we ask in silence, “What is this?”
Buddhas of the past and future only talk about this mind. The mind is the buddha. And the buddha is the mind. Beyond the mind there’s no buddha. And beyond the buddha there’s no mind. If you think there’s a buddha beyond the mind, where is he? There’s no buddha beyond the mind, so why envision one? You can’t know your real mind as long as you deceive yourself. As long as you’re enthralled by a lifeless form, you’re not free. If you don’t believe me, deceiving yourself doesn’t help. It’s not the buddha’s fault. People, though, are deluded. They’re unaware that their own mind is the buddha. Otherwise, they wouldn’t look for a buddha outside the mind.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
At Meetingbrook we are beginning to glimpse the indwelling nature of monastery within marketplace -- in our case, hermitage within bookshop and bakery. We slowly approach the insight (what some have suspected all along) that our longing for vital hermitageis the bookshop/bakery at the harbor in the midst of the marketplace. Beyond this slow arrival is the additional intuition that the place wants to dwell there in an alternative way – one that stretches both the perception and interpretation of monastery and marketplace.
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions.
(--from Wallace Stevens, in Opus Posthumous, "Adagia," 1959)
The interrelations and interactions of monastery and marketplace in the forms of Meetingbrook Hermitage and Meetingbrook Bookshop/Bakery will become more obvious as we approach the Feast of the Ascension. Rather than seeing the Ascension as departure from the world, an alternative intuition sees it as a profound re-entering, a re-incarnation into the realm of existence. Retrieving the words ‘this’ and ‘now’ and ‘here’ we look again at what elements want to be where we are. This mysterious dwelling of the Christ-Reality, now engaging Buddha-Mind, and here serving an absolute gratuity permeating present and presence.
Over the years practicing contemplation at Meetingbrook we have engaged silence.
What is spiritual silence? It is not just the absence of talk. Silence has substance. It is the presence of something.
Thomas Merton claims that silence is our admission that we have broken communication with God and are now willing to listen. We can be reduced to silence in times of doubt, uncertainty, nothingness, and awe. When we have exhausted all our human efforts, experience the limitations of human justice, or the finitude of human relationships, we are left with silence. Those who have experienced the sacrament of failure are more likely to know the emptying power of silence.
(--from, A Quaker Ministry of Prayer and Learning devoted to the School of the Spirit, "Some Thoughts on Silence" by Kathryn Damiano)
Our failures have begun to take up residence alongside accomplishments in one unbroken acceptance of who we are and where we are. In this regard hermitage between two mountains enters bookshop/bakery at harbor as one undifferentiated place practicing hospitality, community, and generous gifting of one another. God returns to the world in silence.
How should we image God and the world in an ecological, nuclear age? If not in the monarchical model --God as king and the world as his realm -- what other possibilities are there?
Needless to say, there are many, for no metaphor or set of metaphors can exhaust the varied experiences of relating to God. But I would like to suggest very briefly an alternative to the picture of the world as the king's realm: let us consider the world as God's "body." While that notion may seem a bit shocking, it is a very old one with roots in Stoicism; it tantalized many early Christian theologians, including Tertullian and Irenaeus: it surfaces in a sacramental understanding of creation -- the world charged with the glory of God, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it. Moreover, remember that a metaphor is not a description. To say that the world is God's body is to use the same kind of language we use in saying the world is the king's realm. Both phrases are pictures, both are imaginative constructions, both offer ways of thinking about God and the world.
Christians should, given their tradition, be inclined to find sense rather than nonsense in body language, not only because of the resurrection of the body, but also because of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist and the images of the church as the body of Christ. Christianity is a surprisingly "bodily" tradition. Nonetheless, there is a difference between these uses of body and the world seen as God's body: the latter is not limited to Christians or to human beings and it suggests, as the others do not, that embodiment in some fashion be extended to God. It is possible to speculate that if Christianity had begun in a time less dualistic and antiphysical than was first century Mediterranean culture, it might, given the more holistic anthropology and theology of its Hebraic roots, have been willing to extend its body metaphors to God.
(--in, "The World as God's Body" by Sallie McFague, http://www.surfinthespirit.com/environment/world-as-Gods-body.shtml)
The question whether the world is God’s body has perplexing implication. It gives, nevertheless, new meaning to the words “We live in the world,” or “I am in the world,” or “We are the world.”
What this experiment regarding the world as God's body comes to, finally, is an awareness, both chilling and breathtaking, that we, as worldly, bodily beings, are in God's presence. We do not have to go to some special place --a church, for instance --or to another world to find God for God is with us here and now. This view provides the basis for a revived sacramentalism – that is, a perception of the divine as visible and palpably present. But it is a kind of sacramentalism that is painfully conscious of the world's vulnerability. The beauty of the world and its ability to sustain a vast multitude of species cannot be taken for granted. The world is a body that must be carefully tended, guided, loved and befriended both as valuable in itself -- for like us, it is an expression of God -- and as necessary to the continuation of life. (--McFague, "The World as God's Body")
If we perceive the world as God’s body we will detect no absence, no separation of each from each. If our interpretation of human behavior is made within the context of mere sacred dwelling place, we will then approach one another – not according to theory and concepts – but with experiential intimate reverence.
To fuse monastery and marketplace is to posit generosity, gift, and grace as standard operating procedure.
If life is gift, will we allow ourselves to live the gift by giving gift, receiving gift, and being gift?
Is that what faith is?
No recompense.
Complete trust.
Fusion.
Is it time to unveil a perception and interpretation of God’s life in the world that invites a new way of dwelling in and as the world? Is there a way to live a contemplative life in the world without the slightest intention to remove oneself from the world? But more than that – is the world itself, theologically speaking, the missing piece of the mystery Christians call the Incarnation and Buddhists call Buddha-Mind? Are all religions ready to reveal their shared commonality -- with their ethical, ecological, ontological, and aesthetic descriptive of God-Life-With-Us?
Is God -- this, now, here?
Do we have the world we want? Do we have a working image of who and where God is? Who and where we are?
Is it fair to say -- Look at where you are to find out what you want.
Erich Heller, the German philosopher and literary critic, cautioned: "Be careful how you interpret the world. It is like that."
If a pencil falls to the floor, there's a way of speaking about it that says, 'It wanted to be there.' When water breaks through any inhibition to seek lower ground, it could be said, 'It wanted to go there.' It is a question with perplexing implication that asks: Do we belong where we are?
Is where we are what we want? Is it too stark to suggest -- Where you are is what you want? Is anything ever other than what it is?
Thus the question we ask in silence, “What is this?”
Buddhas of the past and future only talk about this mind. The mind is the buddha. And the buddha is the mind. Beyond the mind there’s no buddha. And beyond the buddha there’s no mind. If you think there’s a buddha beyond the mind, where is he? There’s no buddha beyond the mind, so why envision one? You can’t know your real mind as long as you deceive yourself. As long as you’re enthralled by a lifeless form, you’re not free. If you don’t believe me, deceiving yourself doesn’t help. It’s not the buddha’s fault. People, though, are deluded. They’re unaware that their own mind is the buddha. Otherwise, they wouldn’t look for a buddha outside the mind.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
At Meetingbrook we are beginning to glimpse the indwelling nature of monastery within marketplace -- in our case, hermitage within bookshop and bakery. We slowly approach the insight (what some have suspected all along) that our longing for vital hermitage
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions.
(--from Wallace Stevens, in Opus Posthumous, "Adagia," 1959)
The interrelations and interactions of monastery and marketplace in the forms of Meetingbrook Hermitage and Meetingbrook Bookshop/Bakery will become more obvious as we approach the Feast of the Ascension. Rather than seeing the Ascension as departure from the world, an alternative intuition sees it as a profound re-entering, a re-incarnation into the realm of existence. Retrieving the words ‘this’ and ‘now’ and ‘here’ we look again at what elements want to be where we are. This mysterious dwelling of the Christ-Reality, now engaging Buddha-Mind, and here serving an absolute gratuity permeating present and presence.
Over the years practicing contemplation at Meetingbrook we have engaged silence.
What is spiritual silence? It is not just the absence of talk. Silence has substance. It is the presence of something.
Thomas Merton claims that silence is our admission that we have broken communication with God and are now willing to listen. We can be reduced to silence in times of doubt, uncertainty, nothingness, and awe. When we have exhausted all our human efforts, experience the limitations of human justice, or the finitude of human relationships, we are left with silence. Those who have experienced the sacrament of failure are more likely to know the emptying power of silence.
(--from, A Quaker Ministry of Prayer and Learning devoted to the School of the Spirit, "Some Thoughts on Silence" by Kathryn Damiano)
Our failures have begun to take up residence alongside accomplishments in one unbroken acceptance of who we are and where we are. In this regard hermitage between two mountains enters bookshop/bakery at harbor as one undifferentiated place practicing hospitality, community, and generous gifting of one another. God returns to the world in silence.
How should we image God and the world in an ecological, nuclear age? If not in the monarchical model --God as king and the world as his realm -- what other possibilities are there?
Needless to say, there are many, for no metaphor or set of metaphors can exhaust the varied experiences of relating to God. But I would like to suggest very briefly an alternative to the picture of the world as the king's realm: let us consider the world as God's "body." While that notion may seem a bit shocking, it is a very old one with roots in Stoicism; it tantalized many early Christian theologians, including Tertullian and Irenaeus: it surfaces in a sacramental understanding of creation -- the world charged with the glory of God, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it. Moreover, remember that a metaphor is not a description. To say that the world is God's body is to use the same kind of language we use in saying the world is the king's realm. Both phrases are pictures, both are imaginative constructions, both offer ways of thinking about God and the world.
Christians should, given their tradition, be inclined to find sense rather than nonsense in body language, not only because of the resurrection of the body, but also because of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist and the images of the church as the body of Christ. Christianity is a surprisingly "bodily" tradition. Nonetheless, there is a difference between these uses of body and the world seen as God's body: the latter is not limited to Christians or to human beings and it suggests, as the others do not, that embodiment in some fashion be extended to God. It is possible to speculate that if Christianity had begun in a time less dualistic and antiphysical than was first century Mediterranean culture, it might, given the more holistic anthropology and theology of its Hebraic roots, have been willing to extend its body metaphors to God.
(--in, "The World as God's Body" by Sallie McFague, http://www.surfinthespirit.com/environment/world-as-Gods-body.shtml)
The question whether the world is God’s body has perplexing implication. It gives, nevertheless, new meaning to the words “We live in the world,” or “I am in the world,” or “We are the world.”
What this experiment regarding the world as God's body comes to, finally, is an awareness, both chilling and breathtaking, that we, as worldly, bodily beings, are in God's presence. We do not have to go to some special place --a church, for instance --or to another world to find God for God is with us here and now. This view provides the basis for a revived sacramentalism – that is, a perception of the divine as visible and palpably present. But it is a kind of sacramentalism that is painfully conscious of the world's vulnerability. The beauty of the world and its ability to sustain a vast multitude of species cannot be taken for granted. The world is a body that must be carefully tended, guided, loved and befriended both as valuable in itself -- for like us, it is an expression of God -- and as necessary to the continuation of life. (--McFague, "The World as God's Body")
If we perceive the world as God’s body we will detect no absence, no separation of each from each. If our interpretation of human behavior is made within the context of mere sacred dwelling place, we will then approach one another – not according to theory and concepts – but with experiential intimate reverence.
To fuse monastery and marketplace is to posit generosity, gift, and grace as standard operating procedure.
If life is gift, will we allow ourselves to live the gift by giving gift, receiving gift, and being gift?
Is that what faith is?
No recompense.
Complete trust.
Fusion.
Saturday, May 08, 2004
End deceitful punishing.
The shame of war atrocities committed in the name of American freedom stands side by side with increasing anger and resentment on the part of those longing for freedom without humiliation. Between callous operational torture and cynical reactive impotence -- where can we go to be antidote and healing alternative?
The real way circulates everywhere;
how could it require
practice or enlightenment?
The essential teaching is fully available;
how could effort be necessary?
Furthermore, the entire mirror is
free of dust; why take steps to polish it?
Nothing is separate from this
very place; why journey away?
- Dogen (1200-1253)
If each one of us is not the embodied origin of the path to peace, then there is no peace, no path, and no authentic way to dwell bodily in this world. There is no system that has the answer. No government. No religion. No philosophy. No psychology. No product to buy. No political stance, left or right, to champion.
There is no place to run, no place to hide. The enormous world which we have known as easily manipulated and controlled is collapsing into a small sliver of geography, into a slight space of minuscule hope. That thin place is you. Is me. Is each and every person. Is every individual waking slowly and finding themselves in that stark and solitary dwelling place named "original."
When we find ourselves at origin, the world begins -- again.
"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times."(Gary Snyder, quoted in The Writer's Almanac)
Consult no timepiece. Seek no guru. Choose no political party. Follow no other truth. It is now up to you, up to each one of us, to embody what is found with original presence.
Be what is found.
Honor what is emerging through and within the embodied reality we are discovering.
Be father/mother with original presence.
Whole. And full of grace.
Birth alternative antidote.
Begin true healing.
The shame of war atrocities committed in the name of American freedom stands side by side with increasing anger and resentment on the part of those longing for freedom without humiliation. Between callous operational torture and cynical reactive impotence -- where can we go to be antidote and healing alternative?
The real way circulates everywhere;
how could it require
practice or enlightenment?
The essential teaching is fully available;
how could effort be necessary?
Furthermore, the entire mirror is
free of dust; why take steps to polish it?
Nothing is separate from this
very place; why journey away?
- Dogen (1200-1253)
If each one of us is not the embodied origin of the path to peace, then there is no peace, no path, and no authentic way to dwell bodily in this world. There is no system that has the answer. No government. No religion. No philosophy. No psychology. No product to buy. No political stance, left or right, to champion.
There is no place to run, no place to hide. The enormous world which we have known as easily manipulated and controlled is collapsing into a small sliver of geography, into a slight space of minuscule hope. That thin place is you. Is me. Is each and every person. Is every individual waking slowly and finding themselves in that stark and solitary dwelling place named "original."
When we find ourselves at origin, the world begins -- again.
"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times."(Gary Snyder, quoted in The Writer's Almanac)
Consult no timepiece. Seek no guru. Choose no political party. Follow no other truth. It is now up to you, up to each one of us, to embody what is found with original presence.
Be what is found.
Honor what is emerging through and within the embodied reality we are discovering.
Be father/mother with original presence.
Whole. And full of grace.
Birth alternative antidote.
Begin true healing.
Friday, May 07, 2004
Over barn through trees back behind brook beyond Ragged Mountain -- moon slips cover of cloud reappearing into this room. Gift of 3:15am.
Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space. Space has a name but no form. It’s not something you can pick up or put down. And you certainly can’t grab it. Beyond this mind you’ll never see a buddha. The buddha is a product of your mind. Why look for a buddha beyond this mind?
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
Why look for anything?
Reading Inner Christianity by Richard Smoley at Thursday Evening Conversation we wonder whether anything with an outside is rife with secrets. Anything with an outside has initiations, attitudes of exclusion, rules for membership, special handshakes winks and nods, and tends to evaluate or judge who is worthy to belong. In the circle there is a preference for something not so controlled. Do we not see what is right here before us because something has veiled our understanding? Would an innocent heart and open mind allow the revelation of what is both ground and groundlessness of existence – a revelation full of grace?
It seems there are three phases of the traditional problem of God’s face, stated, “No one sees the face of God and lives.”
1. If we can’t look at God,
2. The potential is we can we look as God --
3. And so, what is this/now/here looking?
From Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas our thinking has sought to solve dualistically the distinctive fluctuation between potential and act. Contemporary psychology phrases this as – If we can only actualize our potential we’d be better. happier people. A subtle dualism pervades this thinking about act and potency. Could we rather say that every act or actual thing or actual being is its own power? The very fact of being is the very fact of the power inherent within being.
By saying power is undifferentiated from the locus of power, something odd occurs. Intention and act remain inseparable. Thus when I say, “I am writing” the reality is that writing is what I am. Or “I am walking” doesn’t mean that walking is an activity some separate “I” is doing, rather, walking is what I am.
Still, there is a paradox here. If power resides in what is being done, there is a diminished emphasis on who is doing the doing. What we in the west call the “I” or “ego” or “self” begins to be de-emphasized. A curious presence emerges. Something whole begins to come into view. Surprisingly there is less an “I” seeing what is there than there is mere seeing what is there.
We are “impotens” i.e. Latin for “feeble, powerless, not master of.” At the same time the adverbial “impotenter” means “weakly, intemperately, passionately.”
“Impotentia” also means “poverty.” Poverty emerges as its own presence. It no longer exclusively means penniless. Poverty emerges through undifferentiated realization as mere seeing, unadorned and liberated to be itself.
(Birdsong brings first light inviting dawn.)
With dawn is passing spirited morning breeze. Everyone and everything has received the passing invitation of this night. I dreamt of two friends from 40 years ago, Bob Coles and Steve Hoder. It is a Franciscan dream and we are saying goodbye. When I wake I continue shallow breathing from sleep, remembering Bob was killed on a Mexico beach 25 years ago. I’d not seen him for years. At his wake there was a video. He circled a large studio as one running laps through a modern dance the purpose of which was not immediately evident. Abrupt endings extend mourning. Goodbyes are waved in lieu of fond recollection. Everyone and everything once met remains not other than us.
Yesterday at the shop Robert and Su.Sane spoke spiritedly of gift and giving. A refreshing interchange focused on new spirit of understanding art and poetry – artful and poetic life. They feel the Tibetan Buddhist monks living in the area are “to be given to” – as if their very being was “to be given to” and everyone is exposed to this new appreciation of being they embody. Of course the “Family/Clarity” Robert and Su.Sane share with their household is a genre of gift which is itself infectious.
Their insight, spoken by Su.Sane, applies to Meetingbrook – “Take the large, put it into the small, you get immense.” It is example of mere-seeing. In our case, Dogen & Francis Hermitage at Bald & Ragged Mountain enters Meetingbrook at Camden Harbor. The prevailing intuition is donation. We will cultivate a presence that blurs the dualistic separation of monastery and marketplace. The primary charism is hospitality, generosity, and communal concretion of contemplation, conversation, and correspondence. This, now, and here.
When we intuit the place as one of collation and recollection we begin to experience how deep listening and loving speech become invitatory prelude for finding one’s original voice.
We become marked people. When we enter the prayer or dream of authentic selfless giving we are marked with the reception of that authenticity. Sandra called it grace some Wednesdays ago, an approaching maturity.
Here ‘mark’ is seen as something conspicuous serving as guide for travelers. Mark (in Webster’s dictionary) is also said to be “one of the bits of leather or colored bunting placed on a sounding line at intervals,” a lasting or strong impression of the attention each individual finds on their way,
Ed stopped by yesterday. He stood outside in sunlight and recited a quote he’d read in a book on Intention by Wayne Dyer:
When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all the animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.” (An ancient Hasidic saying)
It might have been in Heidegger I read the line: Life is gift and not recompense.
This morning I find it in Levinas.
The legacy of the life and work of Emmanuel Levinas [1905-1995] is the teaching of an absolute gratuity.
ABSOLUTE GRATUITY
To give, to offer up, to sacrifice - of one's substance, of one's time, of oneself - without the expectation of recompense. It is only absolute when it takes place without expectation.
ABSOLUTE
That is, an absolute gratuity is an infinite expenditure. It signifies, most particularly, an inverse economy, a total inversion that is most properly thought when it is first construed as a divine inversion, a total expenditure beginning with God's own self-absolution.
GOD'S OWN SELF-ABSOLUTION
Absolute gratuity is the significance of God. From the beginning God gives up God's self absolutely, hence there is creation. God's utter expenditure is, at the same time, incarnation. The flesh of God is the world. Therefore, whenever anything is, it is by way of participation in the event of God's creative sacrifice. Being is sacrifice, primordially. The event of being is therefore most properly called a gift and, paradoxically, a gift that has been abandoned by its giver, God having withdrawn into the gift itself. Creation will therefore find it impossible to return to its origin.
THE ORIGIN
Whenever the origination of a gift is lost, the directionality of generosity is always toward-the-other. This means, in particular, that my generosity must seek an infinity beyond me, beyond a circuit of exchange that begins and ends with me. The conclusion of giving is infinity.
THE CONCLUSION
Because the origin is lost and the conclusion is infinity, the beginning and the end exchange places and they do so always at the same time. Eternity, the time of origins, and infinity, the time of the finite, cross each other in creation. The crux of this crossing is the fixing of obligation. Obligation, one to the other, is the linchpin that holds it all together. Obligation itself is nothing. Obligation is the essence of alterity.
ALTERITY AND OBLIGATION TO AND FOR THE OTHER
Alterity, the otherness of the other, gives obligation. Alterity, in the face of the disappearance of God, now traces itself across the face of the other person. Divine inversion has now produced a work of human inversion, a reversal of each ego's relationship to itself, so that now each self, having lost its ties to the origin, finds itself only other and utterly alien. It is this for it is only what it is by being other and not itself. This is by no means a Hegelian self-difference that calls out to identity, but an absolute difference, an identity whose identity is difference. Now, when all identity is difference, the self cannot lodge within itself, finding there a restful space of introspection. One finds, now, that the inner is the outer. The other, no longer transcendent, is the seat of the psyche. Therefore now, expenditure, which is the gift of creation, has no other direction than toward the other. This obligation to the other is the first and most absolute responsibility and, since this predeeds eternally any conscious decision, it simply is. It is the body of matter itself.
IM/POSSIBILITY
An absolute gratuity is, of course, impossible, which is exactly why it becomes a matter of utmost urgency. It becomes a matter of the thinking of an actual historical crossing between time and eternity, which is a truly historical or cultural or social thinking. This "exigency," as Levinas would say, is the im/possibility of being otherwise. As our time may be described as one of diversity, pluralism or difference, the thinking of this exigency for or toward the other or the different is the thinking of an ontology that privileges plurality under the sign of ethical responsibility. Obligation to and for the other is now the very reason for being. This is the novel element of our age, what some call the postmodern. It is a profound mistake to understand postmodernity as merely a literary production - an invention. Rather its essence is one of critique and ethical critique at that, a critique that charges - according to my translation - save the lost and preserve the different. This is no longer merely theory but the only possibility of contemporary virtue. That it will be met with suspicion only gives voice to the deep skepticism of our age, a skepticism or material secularity that defines our culture but is simultaneously necessary as the foundation for a radical critique of the metaphysics and ontology of the past. The term "postmodernity" has been criticized for, some say, referring to nothing other than modernity. But, at the same time, reverberating in the extremity of the prefix "post," there is an intuition of or hope for something radically new, beyond the possible. And this im/possible day is dawning. (Piece {as is} by Eric C. Helmer.) http://home.att.net/~alterity/Layers/lev.html
It approaches 10am. Richard came by to fix weed-wacker. Diane and Ernesto are ready to have breakfast at Corner Shop.
Clarity and charity are lovely gift in all forms and times appearing.
Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space. Space has a name but no form. It’s not something you can pick up or put down. And you certainly can’t grab it. Beyond this mind you’ll never see a buddha. The buddha is a product of your mind. Why look for a buddha beyond this mind?
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
Why look for anything?
Reading Inner Christianity by Richard Smoley at Thursday Evening Conversation we wonder whether anything with an outside is rife with secrets. Anything with an outside has initiations, attitudes of exclusion, rules for membership, special handshakes winks and nods, and tends to evaluate or judge who is worthy to belong. In the circle there is a preference for something not so controlled. Do we not see what is right here before us because something has veiled our understanding? Would an innocent heart and open mind allow the revelation of what is both ground and groundlessness of existence – a revelation full of grace?
It seems there are three phases of the traditional problem of God’s face, stated, “No one sees the face of God and lives.”
1. If we can’t look at God,
2. The potential is we can we look as God --
3. And so, what is this/now/here looking?
From Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas our thinking has sought to solve dualistically the distinctive fluctuation between potential and act. Contemporary psychology phrases this as – If we can only actualize our potential we’d be better. happier people. A subtle dualism pervades this thinking about act and potency. Could we rather say that every act or actual thing or actual being is its own power? The very fact of being is the very fact of the power inherent within being.
By saying power is undifferentiated from the locus of power, something odd occurs. Intention and act remain inseparable. Thus when I say, “I am writing” the reality is that writing is what I am. Or “I am walking” doesn’t mean that walking is an activity some separate “I” is doing, rather, walking is what I am.
Still, there is a paradox here. If power resides in what is being done, there is a diminished emphasis on who is doing the doing. What we in the west call the “I” or “ego” or “self” begins to be de-emphasized. A curious presence emerges. Something whole begins to come into view. Surprisingly there is less an “I” seeing what is there than there is mere seeing what is there.
We are “impotens” i.e. Latin for “feeble, powerless, not master of.” At the same time the adverbial “impotenter” means “weakly, intemperately, passionately.”
“Impotentia” also means “poverty.” Poverty emerges as its own presence. It no longer exclusively means penniless. Poverty emerges through undifferentiated realization as mere seeing, unadorned and liberated to be itself.
(Birdsong brings first light inviting dawn.)
With dawn is passing spirited morning breeze. Everyone and everything has received the passing invitation of this night. I dreamt of two friends from 40 years ago, Bob Coles and Steve Hoder. It is a Franciscan dream and we are saying goodbye. When I wake I continue shallow breathing from sleep, remembering Bob was killed on a Mexico beach 25 years ago. I’d not seen him for years. At his wake there was a video. He circled a large studio as one running laps through a modern dance the purpose of which was not immediately evident. Abrupt endings extend mourning. Goodbyes are waved in lieu of fond recollection. Everyone and everything once met remains not other than us.
Yesterday at the shop Robert and Su.Sane spoke spiritedly of gift and giving. A refreshing interchange focused on new spirit of understanding art and poetry – artful and poetic life. They feel the Tibetan Buddhist monks living in the area are “to be given to” – as if their very being was “to be given to” and everyone is exposed to this new appreciation of being they embody. Of course the “Family/Clarity” Robert and Su.Sane share with their household is a genre of gift which is itself infectious.
Their insight, spoken by Su.Sane, applies to Meetingbrook – “Take the large, put it into the small, you get immense.” It is example of mere-seeing. In our case, Dogen & Francis Hermitage at Bald & Ragged Mountain enters Meetingbrook at Camden Harbor. The prevailing intuition is donation. We will cultivate a presence that blurs the dualistic separation of monastery and marketplace. The primary charism is hospitality, generosity, and communal concretion of contemplation, conversation, and correspondence. This, now, and here.
When we intuit the place as one of collation and recollection we begin to experience how deep listening and loving speech become invitatory prelude for finding one’s original voice.
We become marked people. When we enter the prayer or dream of authentic selfless giving we are marked with the reception of that authenticity. Sandra called it grace some Wednesdays ago, an approaching maturity.
Here ‘mark’ is seen as something conspicuous serving as guide for travelers. Mark (in Webster’s dictionary) is also said to be “one of the bits of leather or colored bunting placed on a sounding line at intervals,” a lasting or strong impression of the attention each individual finds on their way,
Ed stopped by yesterday. He stood outside in sunlight and recited a quote he’d read in a book on Intention by Wayne Dyer:
When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all the animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.” (An ancient Hasidic saying)
It might have been in Heidegger I read the line: Life is gift and not recompense.
This morning I find it in Levinas.
The legacy of the life and work of Emmanuel Levinas [1905-1995] is the teaching of an absolute gratuity.
ABSOLUTE GRATUITY
To give, to offer up, to sacrifice - of one's substance, of one's time, of oneself - without the expectation of recompense. It is only absolute when it takes place without expectation.
ABSOLUTE
That is, an absolute gratuity is an infinite expenditure. It signifies, most particularly, an inverse economy, a total inversion that is most properly thought when it is first construed as a divine inversion, a total expenditure beginning with God's own self-absolution.
GOD'S OWN SELF-ABSOLUTION
Absolute gratuity is the significance of God. From the beginning God gives up God's self absolutely, hence there is creation. God's utter expenditure is, at the same time, incarnation. The flesh of God is the world. Therefore, whenever anything is, it is by way of participation in the event of God's creative sacrifice. Being is sacrifice, primordially. The event of being is therefore most properly called a gift and, paradoxically, a gift that has been abandoned by its giver, God having withdrawn into the gift itself. Creation will therefore find it impossible to return to its origin.
THE ORIGIN
Whenever the origination of a gift is lost, the directionality of generosity is always toward-the-other. This means, in particular, that my generosity must seek an infinity beyond me, beyond a circuit of exchange that begins and ends with me. The conclusion of giving is infinity.
THE CONCLUSION
Because the origin is lost and the conclusion is infinity, the beginning and the end exchange places and they do so always at the same time. Eternity, the time of origins, and infinity, the time of the finite, cross each other in creation. The crux of this crossing is the fixing of obligation. Obligation, one to the other, is the linchpin that holds it all together. Obligation itself is nothing. Obligation is the essence of alterity.
ALTERITY AND OBLIGATION TO AND FOR THE OTHER
Alterity, the otherness of the other, gives obligation. Alterity, in the face of the disappearance of God, now traces itself across the face of the other person. Divine inversion has now produced a work of human inversion, a reversal of each ego's relationship to itself, so that now each self, having lost its ties to the origin, finds itself only other and utterly alien. It is this for it is only what it is by being other and not itself. This is by no means a Hegelian self-difference that calls out to identity, but an absolute difference, an identity whose identity is difference. Now, when all identity is difference, the self cannot lodge within itself, finding there a restful space of introspection. One finds, now, that the inner is the outer. The other, no longer transcendent, is the seat of the psyche. Therefore now, expenditure, which is the gift of creation, has no other direction than toward the other. This obligation to the other is the first and most absolute responsibility and, since this predeeds eternally any conscious decision, it simply is. It is the body of matter itself.
IM/POSSIBILITY
An absolute gratuity is, of course, impossible, which is exactly why it becomes a matter of utmost urgency. It becomes a matter of the thinking of an actual historical crossing between time and eternity, which is a truly historical or cultural or social thinking. This "exigency," as Levinas would say, is the im/possibility of being otherwise. As our time may be described as one of diversity, pluralism or difference, the thinking of this exigency for or toward the other or the different is the thinking of an ontology that privileges plurality under the sign of ethical responsibility. Obligation to and for the other is now the very reason for being. This is the novel element of our age, what some call the postmodern. It is a profound mistake to understand postmodernity as merely a literary production - an invention. Rather its essence is one of critique and ethical critique at that, a critique that charges - according to my translation - save the lost and preserve the different. This is no longer merely theory but the only possibility of contemporary virtue. That it will be met with suspicion only gives voice to the deep skepticism of our age, a skepticism or material secularity that defines our culture but is simultaneously necessary as the foundation for a radical critique of the metaphysics and ontology of the past. The term "postmodernity" has been criticized for, some say, referring to nothing other than modernity. But, at the same time, reverberating in the extremity of the prefix "post," there is an intuition of or hope for something radically new, beyond the possible. And this im/possible day is dawning. (Piece {as is} by Eric C. Helmer.) http://home.att.net/~alterity/Layers/lev.html
It approaches 10am. Richard came by to fix weed-wacker. Diane and Ernesto are ready to have breakfast at Corner Shop.
Clarity and charity are lovely gift in all forms and times appearing.
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Out of sight out of mind?
To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible. The reality of your own self-nature, the absence of cause and effect, is what's meant by mind. Your mind is nirvana. You might think you can find a buddha or enlightenment somewhere beyond the mind, but such a place doesn't exist.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
If we put Jesus and Buddha out of mind, where do they go? If the mind they have abandoned is left on its own with nothing in it, does it even exist? And if the Christ and the Bodhisattva are beyond mind, do I have to completely not think when I look at the poster we took home from Vermont symposium in 1984 entitled "The Christ and the Bodhisattva"?
And Jesus cried out and said, "He who believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And he who sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. If any one hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. He who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge; the word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own authority; the Father who sent me has himself given me commandment what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has bidden me".
(John 12:44 - 50 )
Can we be 'judged' by word? (Maybe.) Especially if body is manifestation of word which is expression of thought which itself is concretion of spirit which emanates from mind which is staging ground for the reality of God -- then -- it is easier to consider word looking around and saying, "This is this and that is that, and thus have I spoken, thus I have judged."
If something is what it is, can we say it is good? If something is not what it is, dare we say it is not good?
Or, is each thing exactly what it is and every body exactly what they are no matter what we think?
Student: Roshi, I may put my hands together in gassho and someone may look at me and say, "Oh, that is good gassho," but there maybe a cold heart behind it.
Suzuki Roshi: Cold heart or warm heart is not the question.
Student: Is it still good gassho?
Suzuki Roshi: Perfect!
(-- from Discussion with Suzuki Roshi, in July 2000 Berkeley Zen Center Newsletter.)
David S. from Belfast used to say "Perfect!" a lot over the years he attended Wednesday Evening Conversations. Last night Tuesday Evening Conversation was just that, and Joanie, Lloyd, John, Saskia, Richard, and I had fun with Shunryu Suzuki's words as they unjudged us around the fireplace.
We had a mind to allow one another all the room needed to find manifestation, expression, concretion, and emanation in the midst of what was there.
And what was not there? Such a place doesn't exist.
There you are!
Bidden. Invited.
What a sight!
To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible. The reality of your own self-nature, the absence of cause and effect, is what's meant by mind. Your mind is nirvana. You might think you can find a buddha or enlightenment somewhere beyond the mind, but such a place doesn't exist.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)
If we put Jesus and Buddha out of mind, where do they go? If the mind they have abandoned is left on its own with nothing in it, does it even exist? And if the Christ and the Bodhisattva are beyond mind, do I have to completely not think when I look at the poster we took home from Vermont symposium in 1984 entitled "The Christ and the Bodhisattva"?
And Jesus cried out and said, "He who believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And he who sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. If any one hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. He who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge; the word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own authority; the Father who sent me has himself given me commandment what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has bidden me".
(John 12:44 - 50 )
Can we be 'judged' by word? (Maybe.) Especially if body is manifestation of word which is expression of thought which itself is concretion of spirit which emanates from mind which is staging ground for the reality of God -- then -- it is easier to consider word looking around and saying, "This is this and that is that, and thus have I spoken, thus I have judged."
If something is what it is, can we say it is good? If something is not what it is, dare we say it is not good?
Or, is each thing exactly what it is and every body exactly what they are no matter what we think?
Student: Roshi, I may put my hands together in gassho and someone may look at me and say, "Oh, that is good gassho," but there maybe a cold heart behind it.
Suzuki Roshi: Cold heart or warm heart is not the question.
Student: Is it still good gassho?
Suzuki Roshi: Perfect!
(-- from Discussion with Suzuki Roshi, in July 2000 Berkeley Zen Center Newsletter.)
David S. from Belfast used to say "Perfect!" a lot over the years he attended Wednesday Evening Conversations. Last night Tuesday Evening Conversation was just that, and Joanie, Lloyd, John, Saskia, Richard, and I had fun with Shunryu Suzuki's words as they unjudged us around the fireplace.
We had a mind to allow one another all the room needed to find manifestation, expression, concretion, and emanation in the midst of what was there.
And what was not there? Such a place doesn't exist.
There you are!
Bidden. Invited.
What a sight!
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
How far beyond?
We forget where we are going. We do this when we refuse to acknowledge where we are.
So our Lord’s sheep will finally reach their grazing ground where all who follow him in simplicity of heart will feed on the green pastures of eternity. These pastures are the spiritual joys of heaven. There the elect look upon the face of God with unclouded vision and feast at the banquet of life for ever more.
Beloved brothers [and sisters], let us set out for these pastures where we shall keep joyful festival with so many of our fellow citizens. May the thought of their happiness urge us on! Let us stir up our hearts, rekindle our faith, and long eagerly for what heaven has in store for us. To love thus is to be already on our way. No matter what obstacles we encounter, we must not allow them to turn us aside from the joy of that heavenly feast. Anyone who is determined to reach his destination is not deterred by the roughness of the road that leads to it. Nor must we allow the charm of success to seduce us, or we shall be like a foolish traveller who is so distracted by the pleasant meadows through which he is passing that he forgets where he is going.
(--From a homily on the Gospels by Saint Gregory the Great, pope; Office of Readings, 4th Sunday of Easter)
Tonight, steady rain. In the past two days soft green emergence of sprig leaf on edge of branch the mountain length.
Metamorphosis
Always it happens when we are not there--
The tree leaps up alive into the air,
Small open parasols of Chinese green
Wave on each twig. But who has ever seen
The latch sprung, the bud as it burst?
Spring always manages to get there first.
Lovers of wind, who will have been aware
Of a faint stirring in the empty air,
Look up one day through a dissolving screen
To find no star, but this multiplied green,
Shadow on shadow, singing sweet and clear.
Listen, lovers of wind, the leaves are here!
Poem: "Metamorphosis," by May Sarton, from Collected Poems 1930-1993.)
“We arrive at something,” Roethke said in a poem, “without knowing why.”
Psalms, Chapter 73
1. How good God is to the upright, the Lord, to those who are clean of heart!
2. But, as for me, I lost my balance; my feet all but slipped,
3. Because I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
4. For they suffer no pain; their bodies are healthy and sleek.
5. They are free of the burdens of life; they are not afflicted like others.
6. Thus pride adorns them as a necklace; violence clothes them as a robe.
7. Out of their stupidity comes sin; evil thoughts flood their hearts.
8. They scoff and spout their malice; from on high they utter threats.
9. They set their mouths against the heavens, their tongues roam the earth.
10. So my people turn to them and drink deeply of their words.
11. They say, "Does God really know?" "Does the Most High have any knowledge?"
12. Such, then, are the wicked, always carefree, increasing their wealth.
13. Is it in vain that I have kept my heart clean, washed my hands in innocence?
14. For I am afflicted day after day, chastised every morning.
15. Had I thought, "I will speak as they do," I would have betrayed your people.
16. Though I tried to understand all this, it was too difficult for me,
17. Till I entered the sanctuary of God and came to understand their end.
18. You set them, indeed, on a slippery road; you hurl them down to ruin.
19. How suddenly they are devastated; undone by disasters forever!
20. They are like a dream after waking, Lord, dismissed like shadows when you arise.
21. Since my heart was embittered and my soul deeply wounded,
22. I was stupid and could not understand; I was like a brute beast in your presence.
23. Yet I am always with you; you take hold of my right hand.
24. With your counsel you guide me, and at the end receive me with honor.
25. Whom else have I in the heavens? None beside you delights me on earth.
26. Though my flesh and my heart fail, God is the rock of my heart, my portion forever.
27. But those who are far from you perish; you destroy those unfaithful to you.
28. As for me, to be near God is my good, to make the Lord GOD my refuge. I shall declare all your works in the gates of daughter Zion.
(in New American Bible)
The mistake we make is thinking anyone has a lock on the mind of God. The equal mistake is imagining nature has gone any further than coming close to mere beginning to disclose her mystery. The tragic mistake is the perennial imposition of personal or narrow psychological interpretation on the enormous and immeasurable realm of human existence.
Garrison Keillor writes that yesterday, the 3rd, was the birthday of Niccolo Machiavelli, born in Florence, Italy (1469)
Machiavelli's main point in The Prince is that the most important task for a ruler is to keep his country secure and peaceful, using whatever means possible. Sometimes, this means doing things that most people would consider immoral, but Machiavelli said that that's just part of the job.
He was cynical about human nature: he argued that it was natural for most people to be selfish, and so a great ruler has to accept that he lives in an immoral world. He wrote, "A man who might want to make a show of goodness in all things necessarily comes to ruin among so many who are not good. Because of this it is necessary for a prince, wanting to maintain himself, to learn how to be able to be not good and to use this and not use it according to necessity."
He also argued that most people value their property more than the lives of their friends and family, and so in some situations it's okay for rulers to kill their citizens, but it's almost never okay to take away their property. He wrote, "Men must be either pampered or crushed, because they can get revenge for small injuries, but not for grievous ones. So any injury a prince does a man should be of a kind where there is no fear of revenge."
(in "The Writer's Almanac", by Garrison Keillor, May 3, 2004)
As a friend often says, “It is difficult trying to overcome the human.” I'd, rather, prefer to see the difficulty as proprietary opinion claiming sovereignty over depth consciousness. The ‘human’ is a particular mode of intelligence. It is not the whole of intelligence. It is, however, an intelligence adept at protecting and preserving its own interests. It is a combative intelligence that seeks to win – (however ‘win’ is understood) -- the real or perceived contests it engages in, the benefit of which is usually some prize, or power, or reward available only to the winner.
Nature seems a different intelligence. The majestic mystery of nature bursts forth in Midcoast Maine these days. Winter behind us. Now is flowering time. The intelligence of nature stands still within itself -- where it is, as it is.
Meetingbrook remains uncertain. No inspiration resolves. It is a change of season. Nothing special, nothing comprehensible emerges. What has occurred?
MME MARTIN: Quelle a la morale?
LE POMPIER: C'est a vous de la trouver.
(Ionesco, La Cantatrice Chauve)
So much feels absurd. The shop is absurd. The war is absurd. The bickering, posturing, and attacks on each other by presidential incumbent and candidate – this too is absurd.
And then I realize most of my life is absurd.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus tried to diagnose the human condition in a world of shattered beliefs:
"A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is a irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity." (Camus, p.18)
"Absurd" originally means "out of harmony," in a musical context. Hence its dictionary definition: "out of harmony with reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical." In common usage in the English-speaking world, "absurd" may simply mean "ridiculous." But this is not the sense in which Camus means the word, and in which it is used when we speak of the Theatre of the Absurd. In an essay on Kafka, Ionesco defined his understanding of the term as follows: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose.... Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless."
(Eugene Ionesco, "Dans les Armes de la Ville") (p.xix, in The Theatre of the Absurd, by Martin Esslin, c.1961)
Luckily (or not) I was steeped in existential philosophy, theatrical, and political expressions of absurdity during formative years. Poetry and spirituality seemed the only sanity. I wonder -- with what are we out of harmony? With what imperceptible sphere of being are we attempting to find harmony?
When we forget where we are going, when we feel lost, we can at least look, and try to see where we are.
Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
(Poem “Lost” by David Wagoner)
We lose our way. We wander in circles -- first wide, then narrow. Artists we know say it is going to the large to return to the small. This time it feels like plunging through the open earth. What is the consequence? What retrieval is possible in this unknowing return?
But what about things that we love?
We see sun shining on the ground, and the dry dust,
And at home the forests deep with shadows,
And smoke flowering from the rooftops,
Peacefully, near the ancient crowning towers.
These signs of daily life are good,
Even when by contrast something divine
Has injured the soul.
For snow sparkles on an alpine meadow,
Half-covered with green, signifying generosity
Of spirit in all situations, like flowers in May —
A wanderer walks up above on a high trail
And speaks irritably to a friend about a cross
He sees in the distance, set for someone
Who died on the path... what does it mean?
(from poem "Mnemosyne" —Third version, by Friedrich Hölderlin)
Is the function of sighted cross for us to ask…"What does it mean?"
We turn around and find ourselves, uncertainly, where we are. Near origin.
For whatever dwells
Close to its origin is loath to leave the place
(from “The Journey” by Holderlin)
We listen, nesciently. The sound of rain through the night – the sound of it saying: stand still; dwell close to origin. C'est a vous de la trouver.
In the encircling swirl of absurdity, we are lovers of the wind.
It moves where it will. And who knows?
Beyond me.
We forget where we are going. We do this when we refuse to acknowledge where we are.
So our Lord’s sheep will finally reach their grazing ground where all who follow him in simplicity of heart will feed on the green pastures of eternity. These pastures are the spiritual joys of heaven. There the elect look upon the face of God with unclouded vision and feast at the banquet of life for ever more.
Beloved brothers [and sisters], let us set out for these pastures where we shall keep joyful festival with so many of our fellow citizens. May the thought of their happiness urge us on! Let us stir up our hearts, rekindle our faith, and long eagerly for what heaven has in store for us. To love thus is to be already on our way. No matter what obstacles we encounter, we must not allow them to turn us aside from the joy of that heavenly feast. Anyone who is determined to reach his destination is not deterred by the roughness of the road that leads to it. Nor must we allow the charm of success to seduce us, or we shall be like a foolish traveller who is so distracted by the pleasant meadows through which he is passing that he forgets where he is going.
(--From a homily on the Gospels by Saint Gregory the Great, pope; Office of Readings, 4th Sunday of Easter)
Tonight, steady rain. In the past two days soft green emergence of sprig leaf on edge of branch the mountain length.
Metamorphosis
Always it happens when we are not there--
The tree leaps up alive into the air,
Small open parasols of Chinese green
Wave on each twig. But who has ever seen
The latch sprung, the bud as it burst?
Spring always manages to get there first.
Lovers of wind, who will have been aware
Of a faint stirring in the empty air,
Look up one day through a dissolving screen
To find no star, but this multiplied green,
Shadow on shadow, singing sweet and clear.
Listen, lovers of wind, the leaves are here!
Poem: "Metamorphosis," by May Sarton, from Collected Poems 1930-1993.)
“We arrive at something,” Roethke said in a poem, “without knowing why.”
Psalms, Chapter 73
1. How good God is to the upright, the Lord, to those who are clean of heart!
2. But, as for me, I lost my balance; my feet all but slipped,
3. Because I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
4. For they suffer no pain; their bodies are healthy and sleek.
5. They are free of the burdens of life; they are not afflicted like others.
6. Thus pride adorns them as a necklace; violence clothes them as a robe.
7. Out of their stupidity comes sin; evil thoughts flood their hearts.
8. They scoff and spout their malice; from on high they utter threats.
9. They set their mouths against the heavens, their tongues roam the earth.
10. So my people turn to them and drink deeply of their words.
11. They say, "Does God really know?" "Does the Most High have any knowledge?"
12. Such, then, are the wicked, always carefree, increasing their wealth.
13. Is it in vain that I have kept my heart clean, washed my hands in innocence?
14. For I am afflicted day after day, chastised every morning.
15. Had I thought, "I will speak as they do," I would have betrayed your people.
16. Though I tried to understand all this, it was too difficult for me,
17. Till I entered the sanctuary of God and came to understand their end.
18. You set them, indeed, on a slippery road; you hurl them down to ruin.
19. How suddenly they are devastated; undone by disasters forever!
20. They are like a dream after waking, Lord, dismissed like shadows when you arise.
21. Since my heart was embittered and my soul deeply wounded,
22. I was stupid and could not understand; I was like a brute beast in your presence.
23. Yet I am always with you; you take hold of my right hand.
24. With your counsel you guide me, and at the end receive me with honor.
25. Whom else have I in the heavens? None beside you delights me on earth.
26. Though my flesh and my heart fail, God is the rock of my heart, my portion forever.
27. But those who are far from you perish; you destroy those unfaithful to you.
28. As for me, to be near God is my good, to make the Lord GOD my refuge. I shall declare all your works in the gates of daughter Zion.
(in New American Bible)
The mistake we make is thinking anyone has a lock on the mind of God. The equal mistake is imagining nature has gone any further than coming close to mere beginning to disclose her mystery. The tragic mistake is the perennial imposition of personal or narrow psychological interpretation on the enormous and immeasurable realm of human existence.
Garrison Keillor writes that yesterday, the 3rd, was the birthday of Niccolo Machiavelli, born in Florence, Italy (1469)
Machiavelli's main point in The Prince is that the most important task for a ruler is to keep his country secure and peaceful, using whatever means possible. Sometimes, this means doing things that most people would consider immoral, but Machiavelli said that that's just part of the job.
He was cynical about human nature: he argued that it was natural for most people to be selfish, and so a great ruler has to accept that he lives in an immoral world. He wrote, "A man who might want to make a show of goodness in all things necessarily comes to ruin among so many who are not good. Because of this it is necessary for a prince, wanting to maintain himself, to learn how to be able to be not good and to use this and not use it according to necessity."
He also argued that most people value their property more than the lives of their friends and family, and so in some situations it's okay for rulers to kill their citizens, but it's almost never okay to take away their property. He wrote, "Men must be either pampered or crushed, because they can get revenge for small injuries, but not for grievous ones. So any injury a prince does a man should be of a kind where there is no fear of revenge."
(in "The Writer's Almanac", by Garrison Keillor, May 3, 2004)
As a friend often says, “It is difficult trying to overcome the human.” I'd, rather, prefer to see the difficulty as proprietary opinion claiming sovereignty over depth consciousness. The ‘human’ is a particular mode of intelligence. It is not the whole of intelligence. It is, however, an intelligence adept at protecting and preserving its own interests. It is a combative intelligence that seeks to win – (however ‘win’ is understood) -- the real or perceived contests it engages in, the benefit of which is usually some prize, or power, or reward available only to the winner.
Nature seems a different intelligence. The majestic mystery of nature bursts forth in Midcoast Maine these days. Winter behind us. Now is flowering time. The intelligence of nature stands still within itself -- where it is, as it is.
Meetingbrook remains uncertain. No inspiration resolves. It is a change of season. Nothing special, nothing comprehensible emerges. What has occurred?
MME MARTIN: Quelle a la morale?
LE POMPIER: C'est a vous de la trouver.
(Ionesco, La Cantatrice Chauve)
So much feels absurd. The shop is absurd. The war is absurd. The bickering, posturing, and attacks on each other by presidential incumbent and candidate – this too is absurd.
And then I realize most of my life is absurd.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus tried to diagnose the human condition in a world of shattered beliefs:
"A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is a irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity." (Camus, p.18)
"Absurd" originally means "out of harmony," in a musical context. Hence its dictionary definition: "out of harmony with reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical." In common usage in the English-speaking world, "absurd" may simply mean "ridiculous." But this is not the sense in which Camus means the word, and in which it is used when we speak of the Theatre of the Absurd. In an essay on Kafka, Ionesco defined his understanding of the term as follows: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose.... Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless."
(Eugene Ionesco, "Dans les Armes de la Ville") (p.xix, in The Theatre of the Absurd, by Martin Esslin, c.1961)
Luckily (or not) I was steeped in existential philosophy, theatrical, and political expressions of absurdity during formative years. Poetry and spirituality seemed the only sanity. I wonder -- with what are we out of harmony? With what imperceptible sphere of being are we attempting to find harmony?
When we forget where we are going, when we feel lost, we can at least look, and try to see where we are.
Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
(Poem “Lost” by David Wagoner)
We lose our way. We wander in circles -- first wide, then narrow. Artists we know say it is going to the large to return to the small. This time it feels like plunging through the open earth. What is the consequence? What retrieval is possible in this unknowing return?
But what about things that we love?
We see sun shining on the ground, and the dry dust,
And at home the forests deep with shadows,
And smoke flowering from the rooftops,
Peacefully, near the ancient crowning towers.
These signs of daily life are good,
Even when by contrast something divine
Has injured the soul.
For snow sparkles on an alpine meadow,
Half-covered with green, signifying generosity
Of spirit in all situations, like flowers in May —
A wanderer walks up above on a high trail
And speaks irritably to a friend about a cross
He sees in the distance, set for someone
Who died on the path... what does it mean?
(from poem "Mnemosyne" —Third version, by Friedrich Hölderlin)
Is the function of sighted cross for us to ask…"What does it mean?"
We turn around and find ourselves, uncertainly, where we are. Near origin.
For whatever dwells
Close to its origin is loath to leave the place
(from “The Journey” by Holderlin)
We listen, nesciently. The sound of rain through the night – the sound of it saying: stand still; dwell close to origin. C'est a vous de la trouver.
In the encircling swirl of absurdity, we are lovers of the wind.
It moves where it will. And who knows?
Beyond me.
Sunday, May 02, 2004
Note: Shop back open Tuesday.
...............
I attend the hermitage of the alone.
Where is it?
Where are you right now?
Now, in this world and in other worlds, in India and China, buddha ancestors equally carry the buddha seal and teach the practice of sitting immersed in steadfastness. Although circumstances may vary in a thousand ways, whole-heartedly practice Zen, giving yourself fully to the way. Why give up the sitting platform of your own house and wander uselessly in the dust of a remote land? Once a wrong step is taken, you depart from the way.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
This season of solitude -- shop not open, no trips away, staying close in -- is a lovely simplicity.
"I and the Father are one," says Jesus, according to John 10:30.
It's odd that modern culture sees 'one' as a lonely number. Preferring twos, threes, and millions to the bare simple sanctuary of one -- our world runs in circles trying to gather and accumulate more and even more as a sign of wealth, success, popularity, and importance.
(God) did not make the heavens in his image, nor the moon, the sun, the beauty of the stars, nor anything else which you can see in the created universe. YOU ALONE are made in the likeness of that nature which surpasses all understanding; YOU ALONE are a similitude of eternal beauty, a receptacle of happiness, an image of the true light; and if YOU look up to him, you will become what he is, imitating him who shines within you, whose glory is reflected in your purity. Nothing in all creation can equal your grandeur. All the heavens can fit into the palm of God's hand; the earth and the sea are measured in the hollow of his hand. And though he is so great that he can grasp all creation in his palm, you can wholly embrace him; he dwells within you, nor is he cramped as he pervades your entire being (...).
(Gregory of Nyssa, "Commentarius in Canticum Canticorum, Oratio 2," 807-8. Quoted in Jean Danielou S.J., From Glory to Glory, P.162-3, quoted within R.C. Zaehner, Evolution in Religion, pp.65-6)
You're the one!
Among all beings, each being is the one and only. This realization is free of solipsism and selfishness, free of me and mine and shoot to kill those trespassing my private property. It is not an easy understanding -- the one that sees 'what is,' even the great 'What Is,' as sole loving reality (soul-loving reality?).
Once awareness sees through the lies and deceits of propaganda and advertisement, once the undivided is understood, once the individual wakes up to true home -- all is blessed, all is full of joy, all is surrendered to and disappears from contentious view.
May all be happy and safe! May all beings gain inner joy - all living beings whatever ... seen or unseen. Dwelling afar or near, born or yet unborn - may all beings gain inner joy. May no beings deceive another, nor in any way scorn another, nor, in anger or ill-will, desire another's sorrow. As mother cares for her son, her only son, all her days, so toward all things living a man's mind should be all-embracing. Friendliness for the whole world, all-embracing, he should raise his mind above, below, and across, unhindered, free from hate and ill-will.
(Sutta Nipata, The Buddhist Tradition, PP.37-38) (http://www.onegodsite.net/archives.html)
My 'church' this morning is green canoe on blue water under sweet warm sun.
Do not allow the noise of division and justification of divisiveness to insult integrity.
Listen to the lovely sound of what is -- being -- spoken in silence, stillness, and sweet song.
One's breath.
...............
I attend the hermitage of the alone.
Where is it?
Where are you right now?
Now, in this world and in other worlds, in India and China, buddha ancestors equally carry the buddha seal and teach the practice of sitting immersed in steadfastness. Although circumstances may vary in a thousand ways, whole-heartedly practice Zen, giving yourself fully to the way. Why give up the sitting platform of your own house and wander uselessly in the dust of a remote land? Once a wrong step is taken, you depart from the way.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
This season of solitude -- shop not open, no trips away, staying close in -- is a lovely simplicity.
"I and the Father are one," says Jesus, according to John 10:30.
It's odd that modern culture sees 'one' as a lonely number. Preferring twos, threes, and millions to the bare simple sanctuary of one -- our world runs in circles trying to gather and accumulate more and even more as a sign of wealth, success, popularity, and importance.
(God) did not make the heavens in his image, nor the moon, the sun, the beauty of the stars, nor anything else which you can see in the created universe. YOU ALONE are made in the likeness of that nature which surpasses all understanding; YOU ALONE are a similitude of eternal beauty, a receptacle of happiness, an image of the true light; and if YOU look up to him, you will become what he is, imitating him who shines within you, whose glory is reflected in your purity. Nothing in all creation can equal your grandeur. All the heavens can fit into the palm of God's hand; the earth and the sea are measured in the hollow of his hand. And though he is so great that he can grasp all creation in his palm, you can wholly embrace him; he dwells within you, nor is he cramped as he pervades your entire being (...).
(Gregory of Nyssa, "Commentarius in Canticum Canticorum, Oratio 2," 807-8. Quoted in Jean Danielou S.J., From Glory to Glory, P.162-3, quoted within R.C. Zaehner, Evolution in Religion, pp.65-6)
You're the one!
Among all beings, each being is the one and only. This realization is free of solipsism and selfishness, free of me and mine and shoot to kill those trespassing my private property. It is not an easy understanding -- the one that sees 'what is,' even the great 'What Is,' as sole loving reality (soul-loving reality?).
Once awareness sees through the lies and deceits of propaganda and advertisement, once the undivided is understood, once the individual wakes up to true home -- all is blessed, all is full of joy, all is surrendered to and disappears from contentious view.
May all be happy and safe! May all beings gain inner joy - all living beings whatever ... seen or unseen. Dwelling afar or near, born or yet unborn - may all beings gain inner joy. May no beings deceive another, nor in any way scorn another, nor, in anger or ill-will, desire another's sorrow. As mother cares for her son, her only son, all her days, so toward all things living a man's mind should be all-embracing. Friendliness for the whole world, all-embracing, he should raise his mind above, below, and across, unhindered, free from hate and ill-will.
(Sutta Nipata, The Buddhist Tradition, PP.37-38) (http://www.onegodsite.net/archives.html)
My 'church' this morning is green canoe on blue water under sweet warm sun.
Do not allow the noise of division and justification of divisiveness to insult integrity.
Listen to the lovely sound of what is -- being -- spoken in silence, stillness, and sweet song.
One's breath.
Saturday, May 01, 2004
Note: The bookshop/bakery is closed today. No conversations. We will re-open Tuesday.
...................
Two ways of hearing Sam Manning's oft-spoken words:
1.
"It is too nice to be inside today."
2.
"It is,
too,
nice --
to be,
inside-today."
Charlie and Llamar, Saskia and I read Kunitz's "Reflection" in prison conversation Friday.
Part of it goes:
Poems would be easy if our heads weren't so full of the day's clatter. The task is to get through to the other side, where we can hear the deep rhythms that connect us with the stars and the tides.
I keep trying to improve my controls over language, so that I won't have to tell lies. And I keep reading the masters, because they infect me with human possibility.
Our poems can never satisfy us, since they are at best a diminished echo of a song that maybe once or twice in a lifetime we've heard and keep trying to recall.
(In The Collected Poems, by Stanley Kunitz)
We are talking about 'being,' 'existence,' and what Kunitz calls 'the pool of energy at the core of one's existence.' Charlie says at one point, "It makes sense that it is what it is, but it doesn't say what it is."
We speak about what everything in existence shares in the deep unknown. Llamar says, "I think we give God too much credit and too much blame."
Saskia speaks about conversation as the way we invite one another both into and out from that common core of energy so many names try to capture.
Camus assumes Sisyphus to be happy -- even in the unrelenting and absurd tasks he must perform. How so? Because he is alive, able to reflect on his very being, and capable in the pauses to delight in the fact of it all.
If God is nothing else, there is nothing else to do but what we are doing, nothing else to be but what we are in our profoundly ordinary existence.
The Varaha-Upanishad (II.18-23) states:
The eye of gnosis beholds the all-pervasive Being-Awareness-Bliss The eye of nescience does not see the Resplendent, just as a blind person [does not see] the sun. That Absolute, characterized by truth and awareness (prajnana), is awareness alone. It is only by thus fully knowing the Absolute that a mortal becomes immortal. Upon knowing for oneself that Bliss of the Absolute, which is non-dual, devoid of opposites, filled with truth and awareness, one does not fear any form wherever. The position of the knowers of the Absolute is that clearly nothing exists but the Absolute alone, which is pure Awareness (cit), all-pervading, eternal, full, blissful, and imperishable. For the ignorant person the world is inundated with misery, whereas for the sage it is full of Bliss. To a blind person the world is dark, whereas for the clear-sighted it is bright.
(--from p.190, in Wholeness or Transcendence? Ancient Lessons For The Emerging Global Civilization, by Georg Feuerstein, c.1992)
Being-Awareness-Bliss, {Sat-Chit-Ananda}, like Sam's sentence above, can be read several ways. Llamar uses the word 'existence' -- to stand out from what-is. So too, 'insistence' -- to stand in what is. Thus, to say, "I must insist," takes on new meaning -- namely, "I must stand within -- who, what, and where -- I am."
What part of "I Am" do we not yet see?
Look there.
Look here.
Speak now!
...................
Two ways of hearing Sam Manning's oft-spoken words:
1.
"It is too nice to be inside today."
2.
"It is,
too,
nice --
to be,
inside-today."
Charlie and Llamar, Saskia and I read Kunitz's "Reflection" in prison conversation Friday.
Part of it goes:
Poems would be easy if our heads weren't so full of the day's clatter. The task is to get through to the other side, where we can hear the deep rhythms that connect us with the stars and the tides.
I keep trying to improve my controls over language, so that I won't have to tell lies. And I keep reading the masters, because they infect me with human possibility.
Our poems can never satisfy us, since they are at best a diminished echo of a song that maybe once or twice in a lifetime we've heard and keep trying to recall.
(In The Collected Poems, by Stanley Kunitz)
We are talking about 'being,' 'existence,' and what Kunitz calls 'the pool of energy at the core of one's existence.' Charlie says at one point, "It makes sense that it is what it is, but it doesn't say what it is."
We speak about what everything in existence shares in the deep unknown. Llamar says, "I think we give God too much credit and too much blame."
Saskia speaks about conversation as the way we invite one another both into and out from that common core of energy so many names try to capture.
Camus assumes Sisyphus to be happy -- even in the unrelenting and absurd tasks he must perform. How so? Because he is alive, able to reflect on his very being, and capable in the pauses to delight in the fact of it all.
If God is nothing else, there is nothing else to do but what we are doing, nothing else to be but what we are in our profoundly ordinary existence.
The Varaha-Upanishad (II.18-23) states:
The eye of gnosis beholds the all-pervasive Being-Awareness-Bliss The eye of nescience does not see the Resplendent, just as a blind person [does not see] the sun. That Absolute, characterized by truth and awareness (prajnana), is awareness alone. It is only by thus fully knowing the Absolute that a mortal becomes immortal. Upon knowing for oneself that Bliss of the Absolute, which is non-dual, devoid of opposites, filled with truth and awareness, one does not fear any form wherever. The position of the knowers of the Absolute is that clearly nothing exists but the Absolute alone, which is pure Awareness (cit), all-pervading, eternal, full, blissful, and imperishable. For the ignorant person the world is inundated with misery, whereas for the sage it is full of Bliss. To a blind person the world is dark, whereas for the clear-sighted it is bright.
(--from p.190, in Wholeness or Transcendence? Ancient Lessons For The Emerging Global Civilization, by Georg Feuerstein, c.1992)
Being-Awareness-Bliss, {Sat-Chit-Ananda}, like Sam's sentence above, can be read several ways. Llamar uses the word 'existence' -- to stand out from what-is. So too, 'insistence' -- to stand in what is. Thus, to say, "I must insist," takes on new meaning -- namely, "I must stand within -- who, what, and where -- I am."
What part of "I Am" do we not yet see?
Look there.
Look here.
Speak now!
What do we hear? What do we see?
A TV news show late Friday night read the names and showed the faces of most of the 725 Americans killed so far in the war with Iraq.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(-- ending lines of poem "Epilogue" by Robert Lowell)
How it becomes controversial to read names, show faces, or pictures of coffins returning from Iraq, is not easy to decipher. Do we dishonor the dead by acknowledging their deaths?
I listened for my name.
To drink up the ocean and turn a mountain
Upside down is an ordinary affair for a Zennist.
Zen seekers should sit on the site of universal
Enlightenment right in the midst of all the thorny
Situations in life,
And recognize their original face while mixing
With the ordinary world.
( - Huanglong)
I watched for my face.
It is with great honor and deep sorrow that name was heard and face seen.
Yours was there too.
The war ends with our recognition.
Come home.
A TV news show late Friday night read the names and showed the faces of most of the 725 Americans killed so far in the war with Iraq.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(-- ending lines of poem "Epilogue" by Robert Lowell)
How it becomes controversial to read names, show faces, or pictures of coffins returning from Iraq, is not easy to decipher. Do we dishonor the dead by acknowledging their deaths?
I listened for my name.
To drink up the ocean and turn a mountain
Upside down is an ordinary affair for a Zennist.
Zen seekers should sit on the site of universal
Enlightenment right in the midst of all the thorny
Situations in life,
And recognize their original face while mixing
With the ordinary world.
( - Huanglong)
I watched for my face.
It is with great honor and deep sorrow that name was heard and face seen.
Yours was there too.
The war ends with our recognition.
Come home.
Friday, April 30, 2004
Note: Shop is closed today. No conversation this evening.
..............
Nor is disease what we think it is.
"When ordinary and sacred
Feelings are forgotten,
Being is revealed, real and eternal.
Just detach from arbitrary involvements,
And you awaken to Being as it is."
Although these are the leavings
Of an ancient Zen master,
There are many people who
Cannot partake of them.
I've lost considerable respect
Just by bringing them up.
Can anyone discern? If you can,
You will recognize the disease of "Buddhism"
And the disease of "Zen."
- Huanglong
Is there a way out of war?
Death trampled our Lord underfoot, but he in his turn treated death as a highroad for his own feet. He submitted to it, enduring it willingly, because by this means he would be able to destroy death in spite of itself. Death had its own way when our Lord went out from Jerusalem carrying his cross; but when by a loud cry from that cross he summoned the dead from the underworld, death was powerless to prevent it.
Death slew him by means of the body which he had assumed, but that same body proved to be the weapon with which he conquered death. Concealed beneath the cloak of his manhood, his godhead engaged death in combat; but in slaying our Lord, death itself was slain. It was able to kill natural human life, but was itself killed by the life that is above the nature of man.
Death could not devour our Lord unless he possessed a body, neither could hell swallow him up unless he bore our flesh; and so he came in search of a chariot in which to ride to the underworld. This chariot was the body which he received from the Virgin; in it he invaded death's fortress, broke open its strong-room and scattered all its treasure.
(From a sermon by Saint Ephrem, deacon, from Office of Readings, Friday, Third Week of Easter)
This meditation on our way to prision today.
Father,
by the love of your Spirit,
may we who have experienced
the grace of the Lord's resurrection
rise to the newness of life in joy.
(Prayer completing Lauds)
Being is revealed, real and eternal.
And we awaken to Being as it is.
The newness!
..............
Nor is disease what we think it is.
"When ordinary and sacred
Feelings are forgotten,
Being is revealed, real and eternal.
Just detach from arbitrary involvements,
And you awaken to Being as it is."
Although these are the leavings
Of an ancient Zen master,
There are many people who
Cannot partake of them.
I've lost considerable respect
Just by bringing them up.
Can anyone discern? If you can,
You will recognize the disease of "Buddhism"
And the disease of "Zen."
- Huanglong
Is there a way out of war?
Death trampled our Lord underfoot, but he in his turn treated death as a highroad for his own feet. He submitted to it, enduring it willingly, because by this means he would be able to destroy death in spite of itself. Death had its own way when our Lord went out from Jerusalem carrying his cross; but when by a loud cry from that cross he summoned the dead from the underworld, death was powerless to prevent it.
Death slew him by means of the body which he had assumed, but that same body proved to be the weapon with which he conquered death. Concealed beneath the cloak of his manhood, his godhead engaged death in combat; but in slaying our Lord, death itself was slain. It was able to kill natural human life, but was itself killed by the life that is above the nature of man.
Death could not devour our Lord unless he possessed a body, neither could hell swallow him up unless he bore our flesh; and so he came in search of a chariot in which to ride to the underworld. This chariot was the body which he received from the Virgin; in it he invaded death's fortress, broke open its strong-room and scattered all its treasure.
(From a sermon by Saint Ephrem, deacon, from Office of Readings, Friday, Third Week of Easter)
This meditation on our way to prision today.
Father,
by the love of your Spirit,
may we who have experienced
the grace of the Lord's resurrection
rise to the newness of life in joy.
(Prayer completing Lauds)
Being is revealed, real and eternal.
And we awaken to Being as it is.
The newness!
Thursday, April 29, 2004
War feeds secrets with falsity.
Secrets are better not kept.
The secret of war is that it doesn't care. It doesn't matter for war who lives, who suffers, or who dies. The only interest war has is to keep itself and its manipulators fed with the force of blood, secrets, and fear.
Secrets are best unveiled.
The sixth ancestor of Zen
Said to someone who had
Just been awakened,
"What I tell you is not a secret.
The secret is in you."
Another Zen master said to a companion,
"Everything flows from your own heart."
- Fayan
When the heart opens, the flow of learning appears, and secrets disappear.
Jesus said, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught by God?'. Every one who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. (John 6:44 -45)
God-life is flowing learning that yearns for opening to dissolve secrets -- and appear in full sight. This inner reality arrives at outer reality. At the thin place of arrival, inner and outer glance across to the edge of the other, and disappear in the glimpse. Edges gone, hearts inform one another.
God-life is another name for silent-seeing. Intuitive grasp is another expression for open heart.
War is blind. Men who advocate violence, who believe in war, seldom come to see the dissolution of secrets. These men live in secrets. Secrets not only mute those who live in them, secrets also maim the spirits of those who hold them tight.
Keepers of secrets are kept by them.
We long for another life. We long to open and release what no longer needs to remain hidden.
Silently, free captor and captive.
God's life is silently seeing.
Be this unveiling.
Fast from war.
Breakfast peace.
Secrets are better not kept.
The secret of war is that it doesn't care. It doesn't matter for war who lives, who suffers, or who dies. The only interest war has is to keep itself and its manipulators fed with the force of blood, secrets, and fear.
Secrets are best unveiled.
The sixth ancestor of Zen
Said to someone who had
Just been awakened,
"What I tell you is not a secret.
The secret is in you."
Another Zen master said to a companion,
"Everything flows from your own heart."
- Fayan
When the heart opens, the flow of learning appears, and secrets disappear.
Jesus said, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught by God?'. Every one who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. (John 6:44 -45)
God-life is flowing learning that yearns for opening to dissolve secrets -- and appear in full sight. This inner reality arrives at outer reality. At the thin place of arrival, inner and outer glance across to the edge of the other, and disappear in the glimpse. Edges gone, hearts inform one another.
God-life is another name for silent-seeing. Intuitive grasp is another expression for open heart.
War is blind. Men who advocate violence, who believe in war, seldom come to see the dissolution of secrets. These men live in secrets. Secrets not only mute those who live in them, secrets also maim the spirits of those who hold them tight.
Keepers of secrets are kept by them.
We long for another life. We long to open and release what no longer needs to remain hidden.
Silently, free captor and captive.
God's life is silently seeing.
Be this unveiling.
Fast from war.
Breakfast peace.
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