Cat is crazed. It's only energy. It will subside. Everything subsides. But while here, it is a fullness unto itself.
At a place deep
In green trees,
A lamp’s light
Burns long.
Spring pilgrims
Make their way to the temple;
Blossoms fall
At a monk’s closed gate.
In the mind, the ten
Thousand doctrines are still;
A clear, lone spring
Purls over rocks.
We do not ask
About our lives, our work,
And the silence between us
We keep.
- Ch’i- Chi (864-937)
This late winter has been one of depleted energy poured into demands of work and time. Nature's explosions of winter weather have diverted energy to plow and shovel. In the realm of what used to be called "news" -- now "crazed events" -- are reported regularly as judicial murders, political wars, propaganda posing as news, assassinations, silent coup d'etats that have shifted power without fanfare, and the ongoing collapse of systems by corrupt swindlers rewarded for their chicanery. It is nearly too much to take in -- not the superfluity of data -- but the brazen subterfuge and moral erosion that despoils contemporary polity and culture. It is a cynic's breeding ground; but most of us do not recognize that the instant of conception is the beginning of cynicism's slow gestation intent on corrupting life.
As Holy Week in the Christian metaphor approaches, it is useful to remember the Philippian ancient formula. It warns us about false equations attempting to yield false yet absolute answers. Jesus would have no part in establishing arrogant and despotic power -- certainly not the way contemporary men attempt to shill and spin their actions as those of Jesus and God -- that perennial lie of power by delegation and association with divine ordination so loved by today's politician/pundit/lobbyist impostors. Which of them would empty themselves?
Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality
with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the
form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on
a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the
name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee
should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and
every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the
Father. (Philippians 2:6-11)
As you see, it's been a long, hard winter. But -- a more dangerous time is approaching. The process promising end or emergence from a dark time portends its own danger. Like coming up from ocean depth, a slow ascent must be made. Coming from a dark cave, a gradual introduction to light is necessary. Sanity is a careful step-by-step reconstruction of integrity from the dregs of despair and disintegration. This dangerous time occurs as snow melts, sun warms, and people begin to believe things haven't been as bad as they actually have been. Longing to believe is stronger than skepticism and careful scrutiny.
Something has gone away. Something is lost.
To N, in absentia
I do not know how you went out of my life
or when exactly. The leaves of the Norway maple
are beginning to turn yellow, fall has come.
I last saw you on an evening at the end of July
but I think you were already gone then,
I think by then you had been gone for a long time.
And so it seems meaningless to count the days
yet still I count them, August, September,
October now half over, terrible days,
And I do not know where you are
or when I may have news of you again.
But I remember as if yesterday the day
you came out of my body into this world,
a fine splash in full midsummer, a small cry
like the meow of a Siamese cat,
your eyes wide open and looking all around;
remember how in the early hours of that morning,
before you arrived, I heard pass down our street
(as I had heard each morning that summer
of my thirtieth year) the clopping sound
of a lone horse pulling a calèche,
his sleepy driver bound for the road
that climbs Mount Royal's slope.
No one can take away that morning
or the exactness of its place in time.
I go there often.
I visit it like a temple.
(Poem by Robyn Sarah, from A Day's Grace.)
As a nation, the United States must confront diminishment of the very thing it says it is exporting to the Middle East: freedom and sanity; truthful expression and vox populi (voice of the people); credibility and justice.
It is dangerous to believe the feel-good exhortation to simply trust your betters -- an invitation issued by those wanting you to believe that they are your betters. It is also dangerous to unconsciously follow the hypnotic decals of folded ribbons pasted on cars; clucking commentators telling you that "we are right and they are wrong"; servile ministers, clergy, and preachers suggesting that God somehow has decided a hit-list for murders and executions and we must bow down to God's political will.
It is not only the cat that is crazed. I'm there too. But feeling crazed is no negation of the fact that what crazes us is itself crazy.
I less and less like the world men are making in their own greed-crazed image.
I'm inclined to love the world that God suffuses with God's authentic reality. ("God," that is, what used to be called God when God belonged only to God and humans hadn't concieved the skills of advertisement, public relations, and persuasion). The word, name, and notion "God" has itself been stolen from its sanctuary, reconstituted, and re-introduced into the marketplace as a
modifier of ambition and insincere self-importance. This ersatz God suffers greed in the forms of government, media, sports, corporate profiteers, corrupt law enforcement, and imprecations to trust, trust, trust.
A more radical consciousness is called for in order to save, to retrieve from desolation, our true nature.
#36. My God struggles on without certainty. Will he conquer? Will he be conquered? Nothing in the Universe is certain. He flings himself into uncertainty; he gambles all his destiny at every moment.
#37. He clings to warm bodies; he has no other bulwark. He shouts for help; he proclaims mobilization throughout the Universe.
#38. It is our duty, on hearing his Cry, to run under his flag, to fight by his side, to be lost or to be saved with him.
#39. God is imperiled. He is not almighty, that we may cross our hands, waiting for certain victory. He is not all-holy, that we may wait trustingly for him to pity and to save us.
#40. Within the province of our ephemeral flesh all of God is imperiled. He cannot be saved unless we save him with our own struggles; nor can we be saved unless he is saved.
#41. We are one. From the blind worm in the depths of the ocean to the endless arena of the Galaxy, only one person struggles and is imperiled: You. And within your small and earthen breast only one thing struggles and is imperiled: the Universe.
(from THE ACTION, The Relationship Between God and Man, in THE SAVIORS OF GOD, SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, by Nikos Kazantzakis, Translated by Kimon Friar)
Are we up for it?
Do not believe those-who-pretend-God.
Enter true relationship.
Make this our meditation.
Monday, March 14, 2005
Someone writes, asking: "Forgetfulness of 'What'? That is the question. Can you answer this?"
The German word "Seinsvergessenheit" means "forgetfulness of being."
Introduction
One of the most serious charges that Heidegger leveled against the entire history of Western philosophy is Seinsvergessenheit or the oblivion of Being. This oblivion of Being is very evident in the philosophical field called metaphysics. It is rather quite paradoxical that metaphysics whose subject matter is Being can be forgetful of Being. However, according to Heidegger, it is precisely because Western metaphysics is concerned with the difference between Being and beings that metaphysics has forgotten that which grants the difference. It is the dif-ference that grants the difference between Being and beings that Heidegger says is and should be the concern of thought. In Heidegger's reckoning only the Pre-Socratics came close to thinking about this dif-ference and after them the entire history of Western philosophy has not thought about this dif-ference.
(from The Oblivion of Being: An Overview of Metaphysics and Mysticism in Aquinas, Eckhart and Heidegger, by Ernesto A. Lapitan Jr., O.P.)
Mu-ge the cat tears at papers under boots next to woodstove. Sando sleeps on daybed. Britta (visiting German Shepherd) lays down behind my chair as the tearing begins. Cesco is in middle room in front of last night's cooled ashes. David Steindl-Rast converses with Ken Wilber about "Evolutionary Panentheism: A Godview for Today's World."
The fire in woodstove is slow to take hold. So too is a Godview that empowers. One's "ultimate concern" is one's Godview.
If people want to do the finest thing in the world, nothing compares to learning. If they want to be the best of learners, nothing compares to learning the Way. Master Zhu said, “Learning is for seeking the Way; what is the use of learning otherwise?”
- Anon
What have we forgotten? Heidegger says "Being." What is Being? (A fine tautological question!) Being is what is holding us as we ask the question. Being is what is, as it is.
I might not always like what is. That is part of my argument with God and my argument with myself. I want "what is" not to be all of what is, but an edited and tidied version of the whole picture.
A woman and son stop by for tea and playtime with dogs. The boy and dogs play hard outside and in with snow and tennis balls. She and I talk about her mother who receives hospice care, and her father recovering from heart attack. She tries to make sense of all the confusion -- long trips to their residence several states away, medical information, wanting mom to speak more about the critical brevity of time remaining, seeking solace and companionship in the process.
It is the relationship that counts. Not the words, not the neat schedule, not even settling on a location for care. It is the relationship between daughter and parents at this time, during the confusion, in the face of uncertain outcomes -- the relationship, the being-there through this time that matters most. Everything else is whiskbroom sweeping up details.
Rabbi Marc Gafni, talking with Ken Wilber, speaks of being "on the inside of God's face" and "fullness of presence," "participating in the yearning force of being," and "the experience of interconnectivity, the all in the all." He calls this The Erotic Essence of Existence.
This inner yearning fullness experience -- this, I submit, is remembrance of Being.
Mothers, fathers, lovers, and children -- all in all -- are the "What?" that forgetfulness tries to erase from eros and awareness.
We are meant to live inside Being, an erotic inner life that realizes the relationship of each to each as it is occurring.
The woman and boy have gone. Mu-ge sleeps on my lap; Sando on bed, Britta on floor to my left; Cesco on rug behind chair. The energetic boy has worn them out.
John Macquarrie, Mystical Theologian, has said that God is Reality.
Remember this. This is the lovely face of God. We dwell therein.
The German word "Seinsvergessenheit" means "forgetfulness of being."
Introduction
One of the most serious charges that Heidegger leveled against the entire history of Western philosophy is Seinsvergessenheit or the oblivion of Being. This oblivion of Being is very evident in the philosophical field called metaphysics. It is rather quite paradoxical that metaphysics whose subject matter is Being can be forgetful of Being. However, according to Heidegger, it is precisely because Western metaphysics is concerned with the difference between Being and beings that metaphysics has forgotten that which grants the difference. It is the dif-ference that grants the difference between Being and beings that Heidegger says is and should be the concern of thought. In Heidegger's reckoning only the Pre-Socratics came close to thinking about this dif-ference and after them the entire history of Western philosophy has not thought about this dif-ference.
(from The Oblivion of Being: An Overview of Metaphysics and Mysticism in Aquinas, Eckhart and Heidegger, by Ernesto A. Lapitan Jr., O.P.)
Mu-ge the cat tears at papers under boots next to woodstove. Sando sleeps on daybed. Britta (visiting German Shepherd) lays down behind my chair as the tearing begins. Cesco is in middle room in front of last night's cooled ashes. David Steindl-Rast converses with Ken Wilber about "Evolutionary Panentheism: A Godview for Today's World."
The fire in woodstove is slow to take hold. So too is a Godview that empowers. One's "ultimate concern" is one's Godview.
If people want to do the finest thing in the world, nothing compares to learning. If they want to be the best of learners, nothing compares to learning the Way. Master Zhu said, “Learning is for seeking the Way; what is the use of learning otherwise?”
- Anon
What have we forgotten? Heidegger says "Being." What is Being? (A fine tautological question!) Being is what is holding us as we ask the question. Being is what is, as it is.
I might not always like what is. That is part of my argument with God and my argument with myself. I want "what is" not to be all of what is, but an edited and tidied version of the whole picture.
A woman and son stop by for tea and playtime with dogs. The boy and dogs play hard outside and in with snow and tennis balls. She and I talk about her mother who receives hospice care, and her father recovering from heart attack. She tries to make sense of all the confusion -- long trips to their residence several states away, medical information, wanting mom to speak more about the critical brevity of time remaining, seeking solace and companionship in the process.
It is the relationship that counts. Not the words, not the neat schedule, not even settling on a location for care. It is the relationship between daughter and parents at this time, during the confusion, in the face of uncertain outcomes -- the relationship, the being-there through this time that matters most. Everything else is whiskbroom sweeping up details.
Rabbi Marc Gafni, talking with Ken Wilber, speaks of being "on the inside of God's face" and "fullness of presence," "participating in the yearning force of being," and "the experience of interconnectivity, the all in the all." He calls this The Erotic Essence of Existence.
This inner yearning fullness experience -- this, I submit, is remembrance of Being.
Mothers, fathers, lovers, and children -- all in all -- are the "What?" that forgetfulness tries to erase from eros and awareness.
We are meant to live inside Being, an erotic inner life that realizes the relationship of each to each as it is occurring.
The woman and boy have gone. Mu-ge sleeps on my lap; Sando on bed, Britta on floor to my left; Cesco on rug behind chair. The energetic boy has worn them out.
John Macquarrie, Mystical Theologian, has said that God is Reality.
Remember this. This is the lovely face of God. We dwell therein.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Silent sitting in cabin tonight was silent and still. Four of us. Sitting, walking, chanting. Bell chant at end.
Walking snow path to house, collecting lanterns, hanging them on beam in barn.
Reading Thich Nhat Hanh and Ayya Khema. Nhat Hanh writes:
To shed light on all things? This is the point of departure. If I live without mindfulness, in forgetfulness, I am, as Albert Camus says in his novel The Stranger, living "like a dead person." The ancient Zen masters used to say, "If we live in forgetfulness, we die in a dream." (--in "Necessary Awareness")
Ayya Khema writes:
The emotional aspect of ourselves is of such great importance that its purification is the basis for a harmonious and peaceful life, and also for good meditation.
(--in "Heart Essence")
Our thinking, she says, is dependent on our feelings.
Soup and bread with ten minute silence. Then we talk.
What we say is about our practice. Personal, public, practice.
Each time I go upstairs or come down stairs I bow in the direction of front window altar.
Bowing to that which is within, I make the bow exterior.
In this way, in each bow, nothing is forgotten.
Walking snow path to house, collecting lanterns, hanging them on beam in barn.
Reading Thich Nhat Hanh and Ayya Khema. Nhat Hanh writes:
To shed light on all things? This is the point of departure. If I live without mindfulness, in forgetfulness, I am, as Albert Camus says in his novel The Stranger, living "like a dead person." The ancient Zen masters used to say, "If we live in forgetfulness, we die in a dream." (--in "Necessary Awareness")
Ayya Khema writes:
The emotional aspect of ourselves is of such great importance that its purification is the basis for a harmonious and peaceful life, and also for good meditation.
(--in "Heart Essence")
Our thinking, she says, is dependent on our feelings.
Soup and bread with ten minute silence. Then we talk.
What we say is about our practice. Personal, public, practice.
Each time I go upstairs or come down stairs I bow in the direction of front window altar.
Bowing to that which is within, I make the bow exterior.
In this way, in each bow, nothing is forgotten.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Snow is white whale.
The westering sun
Flares in the willow silk;
The river meanders far off
From the hushed pavilion.
Who, after parting,
Will comfort the weary traveler?
There is only spring wind rising
Where the road forks.
- Chiao-jan (730-799)
Snow dominates mountains and flattens concave bowl between. No chasing nor finishing this fish. He swims the slender valley into Hosmer Pond without touching water. Plows push him thither, yon, and laughably scar small segments of skin.
J.D. McClatchy says that Herman Melville made $556.37 in his lifetime from his novel Moby Dick.
"While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true." (--HACKLUYT, in Moby Dick -- or The Whale, by Herman Melville, ETYMOLOGY.)
In prison yesterday we conversed the struggle of learning. We pondered a quote Jacob Bronowski used in The Ascent of Man, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." (quoting Oliver Cromwell, English general & politician, 1599 - 1658). Charlie and Michael are struggling to reframe their thoughts as representatives of the NAACP chapter so to negotiate through institutional seas. Greg, Saskia, and I joined them in Bronowski's meditation at Auschwitz.
In the chapter "Knowledge or Certainty" Bronowski says:
"I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people." (in the 1973 BBC series "The Ascent of Man,")
Certainty stops thinking. Knowledge continuously explores possibilities. We spoke of the need for continual compassionate invitation of those in institutional power to actively engage those seeking to learn. Charlie said, "What I hear is that although we might not be compatible, we can be compassionate."
"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great wales." --GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON. in Moby Dick -- or The Whale, by Herman Melville, EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
The fable takes place in a Warren pond, with pods for men who've learned to kill. They too know snow. They are in the belly of snow. Melville and Ishmael strain to see the sea as it is, and find a way to swim away with mind and heart, life and limb, still intact.
There is no in or out. Both inmate and outmate undergo snow storm. Does each settle into separate sea? Or are we mates all? No longer in thrall -- but, partnering through a squall?
White wale -- can we faintly hear "Thar she blows!"?
["Wale" = One of the heavy planks or strakes extending along the sides of a wooden ship. Or, A mark raised on the skin, as by a whip; a weal or welt. American Heritage Dictionary]
It is a conceit to note snow, prison, concentration camp, and learning -- alongside one another.
The mistakes we make and the mistaken responses taken as result are often twisted like ropes securing us to uncertain and submerged consequences.
Snow covers everything this late winter Saturday.
Spring, they say, soon will surface.
Snow will swim to deeper place.
Water waits under all.
Retrieve "H" -- add to "elp", "oly", "ospitality", and "eaven"
We have to touch people.
The westering sun
Flares in the willow silk;
The river meanders far off
From the hushed pavilion.
Who, after parting,
Will comfort the weary traveler?
There is only spring wind rising
Where the road forks.
- Chiao-jan (730-799)
Snow dominates mountains and flattens concave bowl between. No chasing nor finishing this fish. He swims the slender valley into Hosmer Pond without touching water. Plows push him thither, yon, and laughably scar small segments of skin.
J.D. McClatchy says that Herman Melville made $556.37 in his lifetime from his novel Moby Dick.
"While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true." (--HACKLUYT, in Moby Dick -- or The Whale, by Herman Melville, ETYMOLOGY.)
In prison yesterday we conversed the struggle of learning. We pondered a quote Jacob Bronowski used in The Ascent of Man, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." (quoting Oliver Cromwell, English general & politician, 1599 - 1658). Charlie and Michael are struggling to reframe their thoughts as representatives of the NAACP chapter so to negotiate through institutional seas. Greg, Saskia, and I joined them in Bronowski's meditation at Auschwitz.
In the chapter "Knowledge or Certainty" Bronowski says:
"I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people." (in the 1973 BBC series "The Ascent of Man,")
Certainty stops thinking. Knowledge continuously explores possibilities. We spoke of the need for continual compassionate invitation of those in institutional power to actively engage those seeking to learn. Charlie said, "What I hear is that although we might not be compatible, we can be compassionate."
"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great wales." --GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON. in Moby Dick -- or The Whale, by Herman Melville, EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
The fable takes place in a Warren pond, with pods for men who've learned to kill. They too know snow. They are in the belly of snow. Melville and Ishmael strain to see the sea as it is, and find a way to swim away with mind and heart, life and limb, still intact.
There is no in or out. Both inmate and outmate undergo snow storm. Does each settle into separate sea? Or are we mates all? No longer in thrall -- but, partnering through a squall?
White wale -- can we faintly hear "Thar she blows!"?
["Wale" = One of the heavy planks or strakes extending along the sides of a wooden ship. Or, A mark raised on the skin, as by a whip; a weal or welt. American Heritage Dictionary]
It is a conceit to note snow, prison, concentration camp, and learning -- alongside one another.
The mistakes we make and the mistaken responses taken as result are often twisted like ropes securing us to uncertain and submerged consequences.
Snow covers everything this late winter Saturday.
Spring, they say, soon will surface.
Snow will swim to deeper place.
Water waits under all.
Retrieve "H" -- add to "elp", "oly", "ospitality", and "eaven"
We have to touch people.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
The question Gale poses at the end of her new book is a good place to begin. She asks:
and
what
is
BEYOND
our
Universe,
our
Matrix
of
light?
(- Gale Albury)
If we would learn to live in this contemporary existence, we would do well to dwell awhile within this question. "What Is" is our meditation -- our inquiry, our beginning, our dwelling place, and our destination.
Looking for Immortals
At the stream’s source,
The path leads on
To gray cliffs.
Everywhere,
Among blossoming apricot trees,
Dwell immortals.
A hermit says,
“More can be found
on West Peak,
and two or three
have their home
in the clouds.”
- Chang chi (776-829)
These immortals are about us everywhere. They sit where they are, reading this. They stand to get water. They ask, "Am I an immortal?" They turn around to see if anyone else has heard them ask. They leave their house, walk across sun-bright ground-snow, and wander off into their day.
Gale has written in Memories of MU:
Once we sang to each other empathically. Once we had no names, no identities, and yet we knew each other intimately. Once we understood each others' hearts, thoughts, and emotions.
Identity was not important to us back then. We were individual; autonomous. We worked singularly and together. Our awareness' were at times singular and at times collective. All experiences were revelations. We reveled in the sights, sounds, and smells of Earth. She filled our senses to overflowing and we beamed in our happiness.
So, identity being so unimportant, we focused our attention all around us, watching carefully to see where and when our energies were needed. Our experience came from the end results of the energy influences around us. We lived to enhance the life of Mother Earth.
(from Memories of MU, By Gale Albury, c.2004, TEA Printers and Publishers, Rockland, Maine)
As spring tarries weaving her way toward Bald Mountain, chickadee, nuthatch, bluejay, and mourning dove, come for seed over deep snow through clear sunlight.
Our Matrix --
["A surrounding substance within which something else originates, develops, or is contained. The womb." (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)]
Of light.
and
what
is
BEYOND
our
Universe,
our
Matrix
of
light?
(- Gale Albury)
If we would learn to live in this contemporary existence, we would do well to dwell awhile within this question. "What Is" is our meditation -- our inquiry, our beginning, our dwelling place, and our destination.
Looking for Immortals
At the stream’s source,
The path leads on
To gray cliffs.
Everywhere,
Among blossoming apricot trees,
Dwell immortals.
A hermit says,
“More can be found
on West Peak,
and two or three
have their home
in the clouds.”
- Chang chi (776-829)
These immortals are about us everywhere. They sit where they are, reading this. They stand to get water. They ask, "Am I an immortal?" They turn around to see if anyone else has heard them ask. They leave their house, walk across sun-bright ground-snow, and wander off into their day.
Gale has written in Memories of MU:
Once we sang to each other empathically. Once we had no names, no identities, and yet we knew each other intimately. Once we understood each others' hearts, thoughts, and emotions.
Identity was not important to us back then. We were individual; autonomous. We worked singularly and together. Our awareness' were at times singular and at times collective. All experiences were revelations. We reveled in the sights, sounds, and smells of Earth. She filled our senses to overflowing and we beamed in our happiness.
So, identity being so unimportant, we focused our attention all around us, watching carefully to see where and when our energies were needed. Our experience came from the end results of the energy influences around us. We lived to enhance the life of Mother Earth.
(from Memories of MU, By Gale Albury, c.2004, TEA Printers and Publishers, Rockland, Maine)
As spring tarries weaving her way toward Bald Mountain, chickadee, nuthatch, bluejay, and mourning dove, come for seed over deep snow through clear sunlight.
Our Matrix --
["A surrounding substance within which something else originates, develops, or is contained. The womb." (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)]
Of light.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
"Self and society," wrote Charles Horton Cooley, "are twin-born."
Why are hermits so few? Even those who are hermits -- why are they so suspect?
As Sherlock Holmes would say, "It is simplicity itself." (Umberto Eco points out that nowhere in the corpus of Arthur Conan Doyle is the phrase "It's elementary!" used.)
Hermits hide from mankind
Most go to the mountains to sleep
Where green vines wind through woods
And jade gorges echo unbroken
Higher and higher enraptured
On and on simply free
Free of what stains the world
Minds pure like the white lotus
- Han shan
While enjoying a measure of solitude and slow return to better health I read a play written by someone who attends conversations at the shop. It speaks of unfamiliar knowledge about history, money, power, and those who know the seldom explicated rule of how the world is negotiated and those who do it well generations apace.
That doesn't happen in this hermitage. Here, this morning, wind rattles bellchime out barnside window, nuthatch lands on screen to drink from icicle hanging in sunlight from gutter above dooryard window, and, I don't care if I ever emerge from seclusion into a more socially understandable set of occurrences. Here the world is not negotiated -- the world is seen as a river might be seen following its impulse, flowing past a hollow from which mere watchfulness blesses with noting attention what is passing enroute elsewhere.
The hermit, in this hollow, can only marvel at the breadth and enormous diversity that passes on each floe toward the far sea. Everything, in time, will reach the sea. No need board any passing ice-floe to ride the length of passage. The hermit does not make the overt trip -- he retains the hollow as his dwelling.
"Self and society," wrote Cooley, "are twin-born." This emphasis on the organic link and the indissoluble connection between self and society is the theme of most of Cooley's writings and remains the crucial contribution he made to modern social psychology and sociology.
Cooley argued that a person's self grows out of a person's commerce with others. "The social origin of his life comes by the pathway of intercourse with other persons." The self, to Cooley, is not first individual and then social; it arises dialectically through communication. One's consciousness of himself is a reflection of the ideas about himself that he attributes to other minds; thus, there can be no isolated selves. "There is no sense of 'I' without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they. (-- Charles Horton Cooley, 1864-1929) http://www.bolender.com/Sociological%20Theory/Cooley,%20Charles%20Horton/
cooley,_charles_horton.htm
There are no isolated selves. Whether rushing headlong across some track of chosen commerce, or nestling quietly in watchful stillness -- no one is separate from another. It is noteworthy that our common experience is separation. The world of appearance seems to yield feelings of distinct and isolated existence in the world even though we exist alongside each other and engage in efforts to bridge the distance and make inroads for intimacy and community.
The hermit learns midwifery. What comes into being via hermit ministration is a new incarnation of that which is twin-born. Self and society reflect one another. What the maieutic hermit allows to emerge is a beginning embodiment that is itself a reflecting place. When we think of a reflecting place we imagine a mirror, or plate glass into which we gaze and receive back what has been given there. The hermit, as reflecting place, is not that type of image-throwing object.
The hermit is the looking-place. The hermit, watching from itself, lets pass through the singularity of each being there. Nothing is thrown back; nothing is held back. Nor is there any subject/object dispersion. Rather, the looking-place which is the hermit resembles no notion we know. Conceive, if you will, a looking-place wherein there is no looking out nor any looking in -- instead, there is only looking-itself. Looking "as" replaces looking "at."
Charles Horton Cooley said, "The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse."
This is the mind of the hermit. Arrivals and departures are noted well. The hermit's mind is what is passing through this.
This. And this. Even, this.
There...is no place to go.
This is why I am staying here.
Why are hermits so few? Even those who are hermits -- why are they so suspect?
As Sherlock Holmes would say, "It is simplicity itself." (Umberto Eco points out that nowhere in the corpus of Arthur Conan Doyle is the phrase "It's elementary!" used.)
Hermits hide from mankind
Most go to the mountains to sleep
Where green vines wind through woods
And jade gorges echo unbroken
Higher and higher enraptured
On and on simply free
Free of what stains the world
Minds pure like the white lotus
- Han shan
While enjoying a measure of solitude and slow return to better health I read a play written by someone who attends conversations at the shop. It speaks of unfamiliar knowledge about history, money, power, and those who know the seldom explicated rule of how the world is negotiated and those who do it well generations apace.
That doesn't happen in this hermitage. Here, this morning, wind rattles bellchime out barnside window, nuthatch lands on screen to drink from icicle hanging in sunlight from gutter above dooryard window, and, I don't care if I ever emerge from seclusion into a more socially understandable set of occurrences. Here the world is not negotiated -- the world is seen as a river might be seen following its impulse, flowing past a hollow from which mere watchfulness blesses with noting attention what is passing enroute elsewhere.
The hermit, in this hollow, can only marvel at the breadth and enormous diversity that passes on each floe toward the far sea. Everything, in time, will reach the sea. No need board any passing ice-floe to ride the length of passage. The hermit does not make the overt trip -- he retains the hollow as his dwelling.
"Self and society," wrote Cooley, "are twin-born." This emphasis on the organic link and the indissoluble connection between self and society is the theme of most of Cooley's writings and remains the crucial contribution he made to modern social psychology and sociology.
Cooley argued that a person's self grows out of a person's commerce with others. "The social origin of his life comes by the pathway of intercourse with other persons." The self, to Cooley, is not first individual and then social; it arises dialectically through communication. One's consciousness of himself is a reflection of the ideas about himself that he attributes to other minds; thus, there can be no isolated selves. "There is no sense of 'I' without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they. (-- Charles Horton Cooley, 1864-1929) http://www.bolender.com/Sociological%20Theory/Cooley,%20Charles%20Horton/
cooley,_charles_horton.htm
There are no isolated selves. Whether rushing headlong across some track of chosen commerce, or nestling quietly in watchful stillness -- no one is separate from another. It is noteworthy that our common experience is separation. The world of appearance seems to yield feelings of distinct and isolated existence in the world even though we exist alongside each other and engage in efforts to bridge the distance and make inroads for intimacy and community.
The hermit learns midwifery. What comes into being via hermit ministration is a new incarnation of that which is twin-born. Self and society reflect one another. What the maieutic hermit allows to emerge is a beginning embodiment that is itself a reflecting place. When we think of a reflecting place we imagine a mirror, or plate glass into which we gaze and receive back what has been given there. The hermit, as reflecting place, is not that type of image-throwing object.
The hermit is the looking-place. The hermit, watching from itself, lets pass through the singularity of each being there. Nothing is thrown back; nothing is held back. Nor is there any subject/object dispersion. Rather, the looking-place which is the hermit resembles no notion we know. Conceive, if you will, a looking-place wherein there is no looking out nor any looking in -- instead, there is only looking-itself. Looking "as" replaces looking "at."
Charles Horton Cooley said, "The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse."
This is the mind of the hermit. Arrivals and departures are noted well. The hermit's mind is what is passing through this.
This. And this. Even, this.
There...is no place to go.
This is why I am staying here.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Mind...World -- not two things.
If one would attain the perfection of purity,
One must purify one’s mind.
As one’s mind is purified,
So the buddha-land is purified.
- Vimalakirti Sutra
If you want to know the condition of the world, look at the condition of your mind.
Tonight in Maine howling wind, snow, and ice. A raw raging emptiness as winter nears end.
There is no saving the world. There is only clearing one's mind. When mind becomes clear, world becomes transparent.
Are we clear about this?
Willing to see this world...through?
If one would attain the perfection of purity,
One must purify one’s mind.
As one’s mind is purified,
So the buddha-land is purified.
- Vimalakirti Sutra
If you want to know the condition of the world, look at the condition of your mind.
Tonight in Maine howling wind, snow, and ice. A raw raging emptiness as winter nears end.
There is no saving the world. There is only clearing one's mind. When mind becomes clear, world becomes transparent.
Are we clear about this?
Willing to see this world...through?
Monday, March 07, 2005
If we wake from a bad dream, will we be willing to soon dream again?
"There is a quick reliance on the use of lethal force." That's what the man in Seattle said on the News Hour tonight about military fire at checkpoints in Iraq.
Here's the thing about this war in Iraq -- the United States military have taken to themselves the power over lives of anybody at any time in any place in that unfortunate country. It's a heady power. It is often described as arrogance, the same arrogance rife within the American administration. It reminds one of an old and antiquated notion held about God.
In my dream I saw
The spring wind gently shaking
Blossoms from a tree;
And even now, though I’m awake,
There’s motion, trembling in my chest.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)
We must wake up. We must enter a new understanding of dream.
The God of arrogant absolute power is a notion of deity falling into decay. So too, the behavior of nations -- whether in the name of dictatorship, democracy, or demagoguery -- is decadent remnant of a theological position. That position claims that whatever is done in the name of good is permissible; whatever undertaken in the name of God is right. God and good are co-opted. So now there is a choice: rehabilitate a decaying notion of God and attempt to convert believers in a corrupt interpretation to a more humane view of human existence; or allow the deterioration of a self-destructive concept of God and state to collapse under its own instability and concentrate energy on creating a new experience of human life and moral agency based on a more foundational reliance on ontological and existential ground.
Would it be too radical an experience to let all concepts and notions of God go? And turn instead to open encounter with the reality of what-is? This encounter would be completely reliant on direct intuitive experience of what is actually there, unencumbered by interpretative theological formula, yet open to careful scrutiny and intelligent investigation. Let's not call this view the substitution of theology with science. Let's think of it as a dreaming poetry of illuminative intuitive seeing.
At one moment in Identitat und Differenz --unique, so far as I am aware, in Heidegger's whole writings --the master concedes with brusque humor that the ontological quest, the attempt to separate Being from beings, is a sort of futile game, a circular catch-as-catch-can. Even this, of course, would not necessarily mean that the game had not been worth playing, that it did not engage the most bracing and ennobling of human impulses. But it would be a bleak tally.
There can, however, be another approach to the tautological core of Martin Heidegger's philosophy of Being. Sein ist Sein and the rejection of paraphrase or logical exposition have their exact precedent in the ontological finality of theology. Formally, as we have seen, they are the absolute equivalent to the Self-utterance and Self-definition of the Deity -- I am that which I am -- and to the refusal, as complete in Kant as it is in the Old Testament itself, to anatomize, to decompose analytically the transcendent oneness of the divine. Heidegger is determined to think outside theology. He insists that his fundamental ontology is extratheological, that it has absolutely nothing to tell us, either way, of the existence or attributes of God. It is, however, my own experience that Heidegger's paradigm and expression of Being, of the ontological cut between Being and beings, adapts at almost every point to the substitution of "God" for the term Sein. Thisdoes not prove that such substitution is latent in Heidegger's design. He would repudiate it. But it does mean, to this reader at least, that the philosophy, the sociology, the poetics and, at some opaque level, the politics of Heidegger embody and articulate an "after," or "post-theology."
(pp.155-6, in Martin Heidegger, by George Steiner)
Perhaps the usurpation of deity is a common flaw of human ambition. It is misdirection to 'myself' what belongs only to 'itself.' Appropriating power is the beginning of the illusion of ownership. Whole swathes of men periodically fall into the desolating crevice of false accomplishment thinking they are on the brink of ambitious success. Their fall is far and fierce, trailing behind them tears and sorrow of many who thought them great. The grief of nations is predicated on the foolish arrogance of unrestrained ideologues and messiahs. What we need is something more ordinary. We need poets and artists, musicians and craftspeople, thinkers and generous bestowers of hospitality. We need powerful dreamers -- not dreams of power.
Dreams of spring blossoms.
A heart-felt experience.
Something that is itself.
Well within itself.
Call this into Being.
"There is a quick reliance on the use of lethal force." That's what the man in Seattle said on the News Hour tonight about military fire at checkpoints in Iraq.
Here's the thing about this war in Iraq -- the United States military have taken to themselves the power over lives of anybody at any time in any place in that unfortunate country. It's a heady power. It is often described as arrogance, the same arrogance rife within the American administration. It reminds one of an old and antiquated notion held about God.
In my dream I saw
The spring wind gently shaking
Blossoms from a tree;
And even now, though I’m awake,
There’s motion, trembling in my chest.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)
We must wake up. We must enter a new understanding of dream.
The God of arrogant absolute power is a notion of deity falling into decay. So too, the behavior of nations -- whether in the name of dictatorship, democracy, or demagoguery -- is decadent remnant of a theological position. That position claims that whatever is done in the name of good is permissible; whatever undertaken in the name of God is right. God and good are co-opted. So now there is a choice: rehabilitate a decaying notion of God and attempt to convert believers in a corrupt interpretation to a more humane view of human existence; or allow the deterioration of a self-destructive concept of God and state to collapse under its own instability and concentrate energy on creating a new experience of human life and moral agency based on a more foundational reliance on ontological and existential ground.
Would it be too radical an experience to let all concepts and notions of God go? And turn instead to open encounter with the reality of what-is? This encounter would be completely reliant on direct intuitive experience of what is actually there, unencumbered by interpretative theological formula, yet open to careful scrutiny and intelligent investigation. Let's not call this view the substitution of theology with science. Let's think of it as a dreaming poetry of illuminative intuitive seeing.
At one moment in Identitat und Differenz --unique, so far as I am aware, in Heidegger's whole writings --the master concedes with brusque humor that the ontological quest, the attempt to separate Being from beings, is a sort of futile game, a circular catch-as-catch-can. Even this, of course, would not necessarily mean that the game had not been worth playing, that it did not engage the most bracing and ennobling of human impulses. But it would be a bleak tally.
There can, however, be another approach to the tautological core of Martin Heidegger's philosophy of Being. Sein ist Sein and the rejection of paraphrase or logical exposition have their exact precedent in the ontological finality of theology. Formally, as we have seen, they are the absolute equivalent to the Self-utterance and Self-definition of the Deity -- I am that which I am -- and to the refusal, as complete in Kant as it is in the Old Testament itself, to anatomize, to decompose analytically the transcendent oneness of the divine. Heidegger is determined to think outside theology. He insists that his fundamental ontology is extratheological, that it has absolutely nothing to tell us, either way, of the existence or attributes of God. It is, however, my own experience that Heidegger's paradigm and expression of Being, of the ontological cut between Being and beings, adapts at almost every point to the substitution of "God" for the term Sein. This
(pp.155-6, in Martin Heidegger, by George Steiner)
Perhaps the usurpation of deity is a common flaw of human ambition. It is misdirection to 'myself' what belongs only to 'itself.' Appropriating power is the beginning of the illusion of ownership. Whole swathes of men periodically fall into the desolating crevice of false accomplishment thinking they are on the brink of ambitious success. Their fall is far and fierce, trailing behind them tears and sorrow of many who thought them great. The grief of nations is predicated on the foolish arrogance of unrestrained ideologues and messiahs. What we need is something more ordinary. We need poets and artists, musicians and craftspeople, thinkers and generous bestowers of hospitality. We need powerful dreamers -- not dreams of power.
Dreams of spring blossoms.
A heart-felt experience.
Something that is itself.
Well within itself.
Call this into Being.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
We need facts more than faith. More than facts or faith, we need a deeper spirituality of question.
It is time to uncover the mind. Faith has often been used as a cover over the mind. This must change.
If we want to throw open the road ahead,
We must first push down the wall that's facing us.
What wall is this?
The wall is in our minds.
If our minds are not covered over,
Then all affairs are open to investigation.
When our intent has been made genuine,
Then our minds are broad and
Our bodies are at ease.
- Hong Yuan (~1533)
For several thousand years we still are not certain what "mind" is and what it does. The Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras lived c. 500 BCE; c. 480-79 BCE. He focused on mind (in Greek, Nous).
We see, then, that the differences which exist in the world as we know it are to be explained by the varying proportions in which the portions are mingled. 'Everything is called that of which it has most in it', though, as a matter of fact, it has everything in it. Snow, for instance, is black as well as white, but we call it white because the white so far exceeds the black. As was natural, the 'things' Anaxagoras chiefly thought of as contained in each 'seed' were the traditional opposites, hot and cold, wet and dry, and so forth. It is of these he is expressly speaking when he says that 'the things in one world are not cut off from one another with a hatchet' (fr. 8). Empedocles had made each of these four opposites a 'root' by itself; each of the 'seeds' of Anaxagoras contains them all. In this way he thought he could explain nutrition and growth; for it is clear that the product of a number of 'seeds' might present quite a different proportion of the opposites than any one of them if they were taken severally.
The other problem, that of the source of motion, still remains. How are we to pass from the state of the world when all things were together to the manifold reality we know? Like Empedocles, Anaxagoras looked to the microcosm for a suggestion as to the source of motion, but he found one such source sufficient for his purpose. He called it Mind (nous) -- pure, passionless reason. It is the source of motion as well as of knowledge in us. He did not, however, succeed in forming the conception of an incorporeal force. Mind, as the cause of motion, is a sort of 'fluid'. It is 'the thinnest of all things' (fr. 12), and, above all, it is 'unmixed', that is to say, it has no portions of other things in it, and this is what gives it the 'mastery', that is, the power both of knowing and of moving other things. Further, it enters into some things and not into others, and that explains the distinction between the animate and the inanimate. At first the seeds lay mingled without order; but nous set the unarranged matter into motion, and thereby created out of chaos an orderly world. The way in which it separates and orders things is by producing a rotatory motion, which begins at the center and spreads further and further. That is really all Anaxagoras had to say about it. Like a true Ionian he tried to give a mechanical explanation of everything he could, and, when once he had got the rotatory motion started, he could leave that to order the rest of the world. (from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/a/anaxagor.htm)
It leads to the question: Does each thing have a mind of its own? In addition, does freedom and truth have to do with the ability to see through one's mind the reality appearing before us, and to act with an engaged integrity with it?
Anaxagoras accepts Parmenides' view that what is, or Being, neither comes into being nor passes out of being. Like Empedocles, Anaxagoras holds that becoming is the result of the combining and separation of imperishable elements. He says in Fr. 17:
"The Hellenes follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being mixture, and passing away separation." (Fr. 17)
What appears to be the coming into being and passing away of things is really only the mixture and separation of "things that are," eternal, unchanging elements. Although no statement to this effect is found in the fragments, probably Anaxagoras rejects that idea that nothing can exist, so that there can be no void or empty space.
http://www.abu.nb.ca/Courses/GrPhil/Anaxagoras.htm
We come together and we go apart. This mixture and separation, repeated regularly, fashions and transforms the landscape of human experience. It is a constant flow through Being into Becoming -- over and over again.
In effect, nothing changes.
We can write Sein: Nichts, says Heidegger. But this question is not negative. The Nichts is not nihil. Nothingness is not negation of Being. The very word teaches us that: no-thing-ness signifies a presentness, an existential "thereness" which is not naively enclosed in or circumscribed by any particular extant, specific object. "Das Nichten des Nichts 'ist' das Sein": "the negation of nothingness 'is' Being."
(p.154, Steiner)
We are what we are.
Because Heidegger has been among us, the notion that the asking of questions is the supreme piety of the spirit, and the uncanny idea that abstract thought is man's pre-eminent excellence and burdon have been affirmed.
(p.157, in Martin Heidegger, by George Steiner)
So we ask, again and again: What are we? Who are we? What are we meant to be doing in the world?
We need facts more than faith.
More than facts or faith, we need to question deeply the profound.
For, if we enter the profound with a spirituality of question, something mysterious occurs.
The mystery that occurs is the transformation of the presenting question into seeing presence.
Seeing...Presence!
No other...Nothing more.
It is time to uncover the mind. Faith has often been used as a cover over the mind. This must change.
If we want to throw open the road ahead,
We must first push down the wall that's facing us.
What wall is this?
The wall is in our minds.
If our minds are not covered over,
Then all affairs are open to investigation.
When our intent has been made genuine,
Then our minds are broad and
Our bodies are at ease.
- Hong Yuan (~1533)
For several thousand years we still are not certain what "mind" is and what it does. The Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras lived c. 500 BCE; c. 480-79 BCE. He focused on mind (in Greek, Nous).
We see, then, that the differences which exist in the world as we know it are to be explained by the varying proportions in which the portions are mingled. 'Everything is called that of which it has most in it', though, as a matter of fact, it has everything in it. Snow, for instance, is black as well as white, but we call it white because the white so far exceeds the black. As was natural, the 'things' Anaxagoras chiefly thought of as contained in each 'seed' were the traditional opposites, hot and cold, wet and dry, and so forth. It is of these he is expressly speaking when he says that 'the things in one world are not cut off from one another with a hatchet' (fr. 8). Empedocles had made each of these four opposites a 'root' by itself; each of the 'seeds' of Anaxagoras contains them all. In this way he thought he could explain nutrition and growth; for it is clear that the product of a number of 'seeds' might present quite a different proportion of the opposites than any one of them if they were taken severally.
The other problem, that of the source of motion, still remains. How are we to pass from the state of the world when all things were together to the manifold reality we know? Like Empedocles, Anaxagoras looked to the microcosm for a suggestion as to the source of motion, but he found one such source sufficient for his purpose. He called it Mind (nous) -- pure, passionless reason. It is the source of motion as well as of knowledge in us. He did not, however, succeed in forming the conception of an incorporeal force. Mind, as the cause of motion, is a sort of 'fluid'. It is 'the thinnest of all things' (fr. 12), and, above all, it is 'unmixed', that is to say, it has no portions of other things in it, and this is what gives it the 'mastery', that is, the power both of knowing and of moving other things. Further, it enters into some things and not into others, and that explains the distinction between the animate and the inanimate. At first the seeds lay mingled without order; but nous set the unarranged matter into motion, and thereby created out of chaos an orderly world. The way in which it separates and orders things is by producing a rotatory motion, which begins at the center and spreads further and further. That is really all Anaxagoras had to say about it. Like a true Ionian he tried to give a mechanical explanation of everything he could, and, when once he had got the rotatory motion started, he could leave that to order the rest of the world. (from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/a/anaxagor.htm)
It leads to the question: Does each thing have a mind of its own? In addition, does freedom and truth have to do with the ability to see through one's mind the reality appearing before us, and to act with an engaged integrity with it?
Anaxagoras accepts Parmenides' view that what is, or Being, neither comes into being nor passes out of being. Like Empedocles, Anaxagoras holds that becoming is the result of the combining and separation of imperishable elements. He says in Fr. 17:
"The Hellenes follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being mixture, and passing away separation." (Fr. 17)
What appears to be the coming into being and passing away of things is really only the mixture and separation of "things that are," eternal, unchanging elements. Although no statement to this effect is found in the fragments, probably Anaxagoras rejects that idea that nothing can exist, so that there can be no void or empty space.
http://www.abu.nb.ca/Courses/GrPhil/Anaxagoras.htm
We come together and we go apart. This mixture and separation, repeated regularly, fashions and transforms the landscape of human experience. It is a constant flow through Being into Becoming -- over and over again.
In effect, nothing changes.
We can write Sein: Nichts, says Heidegger. But this question is not negative. The Nichts is not nihil. Nothingness is not negation of Being. The very word teaches us that: no-thing-ness signifies a presentness, an existential "thereness" which is not naively enclosed in or circumscribed by any particular extant, specific object. "Das Nichten des Nichts 'ist' das Sein": "the negation of nothingness 'is' Being."
(p.154, Steiner)
We are what we are.
Because Heidegger has been among us, the notion that the asking of questions is the supreme piety of the spirit, and the uncanny idea that abstract thought is man's pre-eminent excellence and burdon have been affirmed.
(p.157, in Martin Heidegger, by George Steiner)
So we ask, again and again: What are we? Who are we? What are we meant to be doing in the world?
We need facts more than faith.
More than facts or faith, we need to question deeply the profound.
For, if we enter the profound with a spirituality of question, something mysterious occurs.
The mystery that occurs is the transformation of the presenting question into seeing presence.
Seeing...Presence!
No other...Nothing more.
Saturday, March 05, 2005
There is something practical about meditation.
Coming downstairs just before dawn this morning I bow to altar entering winter zendo. On white couch I prop myself wrapped in dark blue blanket against pillows in semi-sitting position. I was having trouble sleeping, breathing, and swallowing. It was time to meditate.
"The soul is a circle of which the circumference is in a body. God is a circle whose circumference is nowhere but whose center is everywhere."
- Swami Vivekananda, 19th C.
During this time of slowing down body cleansing (what some call illness) everything proportions itself in simple actions. I bow. Wrap blanket. Tilt night-light shining on Mary, Buddha, and Christ. Prop pillows. Attend to breath. Listen to wind in cedar tree outside window. Look at walls. Look at windows. Look at unmoving everything in the room.
"The only field in which this [oneness] is possible is the field of sunyata [emptiness] which can have its circumference nowhere and its center everywhere. Only on the field of sunyata can the totality of things, each of which is absolutely unique and an absolute center of all things, at the same time be gathered into one."
-- Keiji Nishitani, 20th C.
Breathing grows thin and small, allowing breath enough slender room to slide through. Doze in and out. Comes morning.
The entire visible world is only an imperceptible speck in the ample bosom of nature. No idea can come close to imagining it. We might inflate our concepts to the most unimaginable expanses: we only produce atoms in relation to the reality of things. Nature is an infinite sphere in which the center is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere. Finally, it is the greatest sensible mark of God's omnipotence, that our imagination loses itself in that thought.
(from Pascal's Pensees)
One dog then another enters room. Cat paws at edge of blanket. Light comes through four windows. Breath circles through four bodies in front room and one body now in kitchen. The thought passes that human existence is temporary resting place for breath on its way through.
Great Master Dogen quotes Shakyamuni as saying: "that one must turn the stream of compassion within and give up both knowledge and its recognition." This is the way one can harmonize body and mind and enter the stream of Buddhism. This giving up seems to entail the aspect of giving in trust, which has an important function of giving up control. The self no longer dictates our actions based on emotions, likes/dislikes, greed, anger or fear. This is giving up of the knowledge of the intellect and emotions without cutting ourselves off from these things and without letting them control our actions. We cannot fully understand the Buddhist teaching on giving without seeing that giving and receiving are not separate things. Koho Zenji reminds us that if we can give up something as small as the self we can know something as great as the universe. Just as with giving and receiving, we must understand that control in Buddhist practice is not exercised by holding on but by letting go. It is also helpful to see these things in terms of process not in terms of attainment or achievement.
(--from talk, "As Thunder Shakes the Universe," By Rev. Jisho Perry, Sat. 2/14/04)
Stillness finds breath. If wanting achievement, or if trying to attain something, is what we think we are doing by practicing meditation, then we are trying to imitate the way of the world to accumulate by acquisition and accomplishment. But if we are willing to let go of everything we think makes up the larger self we call the world and the personal self we call by our name -- we enter the body in and of itself.
Is there a simplicity of "no-self" we are unwilling to contemplate? On the other hand, is there an equivalence of fear and self that factors us? If we let self go, does fear go too?
When I open eyes and put feet on rug, two tails wag along quiet sunlight crossing Barnestown Road into front room. Bowing to these sweet dogs, folding two blankets (one placed there by Saskia mid-doze), walking to kitchen for grapefruit juice and asperin, there is a fluidity of moment to moment step, moment to moment mind arising and falling away.
It is the practice of Zazen. It is what Myo-O Marilyn Habermas-Scher said in a recent talk: "Zazen is not a sacred activity; it's just completely sacred activity." (Sunday Dharma Talk, 2/27/05, St Paul Minnesota)
Does breath carry nothing but itself through each one of us?
The Christian season of Lent nears Holy Week and Easter. In his life Jesus gave up everything and went the way described by Dogen Zenji as "dropping off mind and body." In this tradition, having this same mind as Christ means not reaching out, not grasping at, and not taking the bait to respectably conform with the delusions of achievement, acquisition, and accomplishment.
What is Jesus' mind? What is Christ-mind?
Breathe in, breathe out. We'll see.
First we'll have to allow our eyes to see -- really see -- what is taking place everywhere they look. And listen -- we'll have to permit ears to hear what is actually being said with each utterance made within our hearing. And speaking -- we'll have to open our mouths and suffer what longs to be said to be said, plain and simple. In these activities dwells the revelation of sacredness finding its way out and into this existence.
It pleases that meditation is practical.
March, with its pause of health, provides good opportunity to investigate the slender slip of sanity that is breath.
It is a good practice to follow the completely sacred activity of breath.
It is a particular consciousness that sees one and all as Thou.
With each breath we Thee wed.
In gratitude.
Coming downstairs just before dawn this morning I bow to altar entering winter zendo. On white couch I prop myself wrapped in dark blue blanket against pillows in semi-sitting position. I was having trouble sleeping, breathing, and swallowing. It was time to meditate.
"The soul is a circle of which the circumference is in a body. God is a circle whose circumference is nowhere but whose center is everywhere."
- Swami Vivekananda, 19th C.
During this time of slowing down body cleansing (what some call illness) everything proportions itself in simple actions. I bow. Wrap blanket. Tilt night-light shining on Mary, Buddha, and Christ. Prop pillows. Attend to breath. Listen to wind in cedar tree outside window. Look at walls. Look at windows. Look at unmoving everything in the room.
"The only field in which this [oneness] is possible is the field of sunyata [emptiness] which can have its circumference nowhere and its center everywhere. Only on the field of sunyata can the totality of things, each of which is absolutely unique and an absolute center of all things, at the same time be gathered into one."
-- Keiji Nishitani, 20th C.
Breathing grows thin and small, allowing breath enough slender room to slide through. Doze in and out. Comes morning.
The entire visible world is only an imperceptible speck in the ample bosom of nature. No idea can come close to imagining it. We might inflate our concepts to the most unimaginable expanses: we only produce atoms in relation to the reality of things. Nature is an infinite sphere in which the center is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere. Finally, it is the greatest sensible mark of God's omnipotence, that our imagination loses itself in that thought.
(from Pascal's Pensees)
One dog then another enters room. Cat paws at edge of blanket. Light comes through four windows. Breath circles through four bodies in front room and one body now in kitchen. The thought passes that human existence is temporary resting place for breath on its way through.
Great Master Dogen quotes Shakyamuni as saying: "that one must turn the stream of compassion within and give up both knowledge and its recognition." This is the way one can harmonize body and mind and enter the stream of Buddhism. This giving up seems to entail the aspect of giving in trust, which has an important function of giving up control. The self no longer dictates our actions based on emotions, likes/dislikes, greed, anger or fear. This is giving up of the knowledge of the intellect and emotions without cutting ourselves off from these things and without letting them control our actions. We cannot fully understand the Buddhist teaching on giving without seeing that giving and receiving are not separate things. Koho Zenji reminds us that if we can give up something as small as the self we can know something as great as the universe. Just as with giving and receiving, we must understand that control in Buddhist practice is not exercised by holding on but by letting go. It is also helpful to see these things in terms of process not in terms of attainment or achievement.
(--from talk, "As Thunder Shakes the Universe," By Rev. Jisho Perry, Sat. 2/14/04)
Stillness finds breath. If wanting achievement, or if trying to attain something, is what we think we are doing by practicing meditation, then we are trying to imitate the way of the world to accumulate by acquisition and accomplishment. But if we are willing to let go of everything we think makes up the larger self we call the world and the personal self we call by our name -- we enter the body in and of itself.
Is there a simplicity of "no-self" we are unwilling to contemplate? On the other hand, is there an equivalence of fear and self that factors us? If we let self go, does fear go too?
When I open eyes and put feet on rug, two tails wag along quiet sunlight crossing Barnestown Road into front room. Bowing to these sweet dogs, folding two blankets (one placed there by Saskia mid-doze), walking to kitchen for grapefruit juice and asperin, there is a fluidity of moment to moment step, moment to moment mind arising and falling away.
It is the practice of Zazen. It is what Myo-O Marilyn Habermas-Scher said in a recent talk: "Zazen is not a sacred activity; it's just completely sacred activity." (Sunday Dharma Talk, 2/27/05, St Paul Minnesota)
Does breath carry nothing but itself through each one of us?
The Christian season of Lent nears Holy Week and Easter. In his life Jesus gave up everything and went the way described by Dogen Zenji as "dropping off mind and body." In this tradition, having this same mind as Christ means not reaching out, not grasping at, and not taking the bait to respectably conform with the delusions of achievement, acquisition, and accomplishment.
What is Jesus' mind? What is Christ-mind?
Breathe in, breathe out. We'll see.
First we'll have to allow our eyes to see -- really see -- what is taking place everywhere they look. And listen -- we'll have to permit ears to hear what is actually being said with each utterance made within our hearing. And speaking -- we'll have to open our mouths and suffer what longs to be said to be said, plain and simple. In these activities dwells the revelation of sacredness finding its way out and into this existence.
It pleases that meditation is practical.
March, with its pause of health, provides good opportunity to investigate the slender slip of sanity that is breath.
It is a good practice to follow the completely sacred activity of breath.
It is a particular consciousness that sees one and all as Thou.
With each breath we Thee wed.
In gratitude.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
It is odd that nothing matters.
Thirty spokes share one hub. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand and you have the use of the cart. Knead clay to make a vessel. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand and you have the use of the vessel. Cut out doors and windows to make a room. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand and you have the use of the house. What we gain is something, yet it is by virtue of nothing that it can be put to use
(Lao Tzu 1963: 31).
If we read creation myths there is a tension about something coming from nothing. We prefer to frame the argument that evil followed good, as in the Genesis story; or that good followed evil in the Tiamat and Marduk Babylonian version.
Does nothing matter? Is what we see and touch the materialization from nothing of something? Or is it turtles all the way down?
The problem is that Zen philosophy asserts that there is no difference between ego and self. Izutsu said: "One enters into the world of Zen only when one realizes that his [or her] own I has turned into an existential question mark" (1977: 65). This refers to the so-called "self" as much as to the so-called "ego." Masao Abe, the Zen philosopher of religion, has put the matter even more strongly, saying that the notion of "self" itself leads to "selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill will, conceit, pride, egoism . . . .all the evil in the world" (1992: 57-58).
(in "NOTHING ALMOST SEES MIRACLES! SELF & NO-SELF IN PSYCHOLOGY & RELIGION," by David Miller)
What did Jesus mean when he said:
Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it." Mark 8:34-35 (NIV)
Deny himself? Or, deny his self?
We are now able to see why the no-self theory does not imply that our language is in need of an overhaul. For it is quite consistent with the nonexistence of the self or I that we continue to employ the words "self" and "I" in their practical everyday usage, provided we do not mistake them for denoting some particular entity at the ultimate level, or, as Hume would say, feign the existence of a fiction. This is why, contrary to what many of Hume's critics think, Hume's own use of the first-person pronoun does not undermine his theory. In Hume's statement "when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception" (p.252), the word "I" is being used at the convectional level: it is merely a generally nderstood term whose proper use is determined by mutual agreement. We should not, therefore, think that in using the first-person pronoun Hume has committed himself to the existence of a self at the ultimate level.
Some will no doubt find it paradoxical that we can use personal language correctly when there is nothing to which these terms ultimately refer. It was reasoning akin to this, it seems, that led Descartes to his famous proclamation "I think, therefore I am." I must exist, reasoned Descartes, because even when I doubt that I exist there is still an I that is doing the doubting.
But Descartes has become led astray by his own language, for there is no need for the "I" in "I think" or "I doubt" to refer to anything. What Descartes was aware of, as both Hume and the Buddha would agree, was just thinking, not an I that was doing the thinking. Consequently Descartes might just as well have said (and should have said if his concern was with ultimate rather than conventional truth) "there is thinking, therefore there are thoughts." And such a deduction, if we may call it that, does not suffice to prove the existence of an I.
(from THE NO-SELF THEORY: HUME, BUDDHISM, AND PERSONAL IDENTITY, By James Giles, in Philosophy East and West. Volume 43, Number 2, April 1993)
Body-ache, sniffles, fever, and general dizziness sit in this chair.
Goes to bed.
Hopes to sleep.
Thirty spokes share one hub. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand and you have the use of the cart. Knead clay to make a vessel. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand and you have the use of the vessel. Cut out doors and windows to make a room. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand and you have the use of the house. What we gain is something, yet it is by virtue of nothing that it can be put to use
(Lao Tzu 1963: 31).
If we read creation myths there is a tension about something coming from nothing. We prefer to frame the argument that evil followed good, as in the Genesis story; or that good followed evil in the Tiamat and Marduk Babylonian version.
Does nothing matter? Is what we see and touch the materialization from nothing of something? Or is it turtles all the way down?
The problem is that Zen philosophy asserts that there is no difference between ego and self. Izutsu said: "One enters into the world of Zen only when one realizes that his [or her] own I has turned into an existential question mark" (1977: 65). This refers to the so-called "self" as much as to the so-called "ego." Masao Abe, the Zen philosopher of religion, has put the matter even more strongly, saying that the notion of "self" itself leads to "selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill will, conceit, pride, egoism . . . .all the evil in the world" (1992: 57-58).
(in "NOTHING ALMOST SEES MIRACLES! SELF & NO-SELF IN PSYCHOLOGY & RELIGION," by David Miller)
What did Jesus mean when he said:
Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it." Mark 8:34-35 (NIV)
Deny himself? Or, deny his self?
We are now able to see why the no-self theory does not imply that our language is in need of an overhaul. For it is quite consistent with the nonexistence of the self or I that we continue to employ the words "self" and "I" in their practical everyday usage, provided we do not mistake them for denoting some particular entity at the ultimate level, or, as Hume would say, feign the existence of a fiction. This is why, contrary to what many of Hume's critics think, Hume's own use of the first-person pronoun does not undermine his theory. In Hume's statement "when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception" (p.252), the word "I" is being used at the convectional level: it is merely a generally nderstood term whose proper use is determined by mutual agreement. We should not, therefore, think that in using the first-person pronoun Hume has committed himself to the existence of a self at the ultimate level.
Some will no doubt find it paradoxical that we can use personal language correctly when there is nothing to which these terms ultimately refer. It was reasoning akin to this, it seems, that led Descartes to his famous proclamation "I think, therefore I am." I must exist, reasoned Descartes, because even when I doubt that I exist there is still an I that is doing the doubting.
But Descartes has become led astray by his own language, for there is no need for the "I" in "I think" or "I doubt" to refer to anything. What Descartes was aware of, as both Hume and the Buddha would agree, was just thinking, not an I that was doing the thinking. Consequently Descartes might just as well have said (and should have said if his concern was with ultimate rather than conventional truth) "there is thinking, therefore there are thoughts." And such a deduction, if we may call it that, does not suffice to prove the existence of an I.
(from THE NO-SELF THEORY: HUME, BUDDHISM, AND PERSONAL IDENTITY, By James Giles, in Philosophy East and West. Volume 43, Number 2, April 1993)
Body-ache, sniffles, fever, and general dizziness sit in this chair.
Goes to bed.
Hopes to sleep.
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Walking frozen Hosmer Pond with two dogs after heavy snowfall in Maine, Saskia and I tread deep snow, returning via toboggan chute. Earlier, Karl comes by to wire and unwire computers. As Bruce leaves with studded-tire snowplow Karl arrives with quick-fingered laptop gear.
Original Buddha-nature, the highest truth, is free from even an atom of otherness. It is empty, calm, pure, and permeates everything. It brings peaceful joy that thrills with wonder. Awaken inwardly, enter its depths. Everything before you is Buddha, blissful and full, complete it itself. All that exists is Buddha; there is nothing else beside.
-Huang Po
Saskia crunches numbers. Classes are cancelled at University College. Snow thins after twelve hours.
Slay anger, give up pride
And overcome all fetters;
For sorrows do not follow knowers of emptiness
Detached from mind and body, clinging to nothing.
Having broken out into freedom and gone beyond all selfish desire,
Free from the world of men, even the worlds of the gods.
Try as you might to find them, their path leaves not the slightest trace.
(The Buddha)
I cut wood outside barn. Now cat curls on lap. History Channel tells of Bible Code.
It is a great misfortune for those
Engaged in learning to take the
Sayings of the sages as mere
Verbal exercises.
- Xue Xuan (1389-1464)
We live with proleptic and proprioceptive possibilities -- to take beforehand by means of sensory receptors arising.
On the other hand, it is merely Tuesday evening. Mu-ge purrs.
This existence is way beyond anything within our grasping.
Not even an atom of otherness.
Original Buddha-nature, the highest truth, is free from even an atom of otherness. It is empty, calm, pure, and permeates everything. It brings peaceful joy that thrills with wonder. Awaken inwardly, enter its depths. Everything before you is Buddha, blissful and full, complete it itself. All that exists is Buddha; there is nothing else beside.
-Huang Po
Saskia crunches numbers. Classes are cancelled at University College. Snow thins after twelve hours.
Slay anger, give up pride
And overcome all fetters;
For sorrows do not follow knowers of emptiness
Detached from mind and body, clinging to nothing.
Having broken out into freedom and gone beyond all selfish desire,
Free from the world of men, even the worlds of the gods.
Try as you might to find them, their path leaves not the slightest trace.
(The Buddha)
I cut wood outside barn. Now cat curls on lap. History Channel tells of Bible Code.
It is a great misfortune for those
Engaged in learning to take the
Sayings of the sages as mere
Verbal exercises.
- Xue Xuan (1389-1464)
We live with proleptic and proprioceptive possibilities -- to take beforehand by means of sensory receptors arising.
On the other hand, it is merely Tuesday evening. Mu-ge purrs.
This existence is way beyond anything within our grasping.
Not even an atom of otherness.
Monday, February 28, 2005
Winter yawns and throws snow our way.
That's ok. We're doing other work this week to earn some money to pay some bills. The bookshop/bakery is closed until Saturday, 5 March. We'll be back for Saturday's Many Faces of Death conversation, as well as Poetry, Tea, and Literature.
At the hermitage at night, something skunky runs up between our walls.
Do away with your old habits and start fresh.
Wash away your old opinions,
And new ideas come in.
- Xue Xuan (1389-1464)
My opinions are somewhat skunky. When they arise they're stinky. Their scent is hard to lose.
If I still the mind and stay attentive the skunk-odor fades into winter cold.
E. writes following a self-directed retreat
One who attends is one who tends.
One who tends is one who is tender.
One who is tender pays kind attention.
One who pays kind attention attends.
It is good to practice presence. We are so often lost and gone with thoughts and opinion. The practice is not to be lost, but to be what-is finding itself -- each and every here and now, with each and every being.
E. ends his note saying: "Just think of what we could do with pretends." It's a fine notion -- to be there even before we realize we are there.
It's like the woman said at the Zen Center in Rhode Island while giving a talk over twenty years ago. She said, "Let's stop pretending we love each other." And then repeated, "Let's stop pretending we love each other." After a long silence she continued, "Because ...we do."
Let's all tend, extend, and attend one another. Will we wed, dedicate, have, and hold each other?
Do you? "I do." Do we? "We do."
Let's hold before us one another.
Without stopping.
(In E’s words) -- Tender attention.
That's ok. We're doing other work this week to earn some money to pay some bills. The bookshop/bakery is closed until Saturday, 5 March. We'll be back for Saturday's Many Faces of Death conversation, as well as Poetry, Tea, and Literature.
At the hermitage at night, something skunky runs up between our walls.
Do away with your old habits and start fresh.
Wash away your old opinions,
And new ideas come in.
- Xue Xuan (1389-1464)
My opinions are somewhat skunky. When they arise they're stinky. Their scent is hard to lose.
If I still the mind and stay attentive the skunk-odor fades into winter cold.
E. writes following a self-directed retreat
One who attends is one who tends.
One who tends is one who is tender.
One who is tender pays kind attention.
One who pays kind attention attends.
It is good to practice presence. We are so often lost and gone with thoughts and opinion. The practice is not to be lost, but to be what-is finding itself -- each and every here and now, with each and every being.
E. ends his note saying: "Just think of what we could do with pretends." It's a fine notion -- to be there even before we realize we are there.
It's like the woman said at the Zen Center in Rhode Island while giving a talk over twenty years ago. She said, "Let's stop pretending we love each other." And then repeated, "Let's stop pretending we love each other." After a long silence she continued, "Because ...we do."
Let's all tend, extend, and attend one another. Will we wed, dedicate, have, and hold each other?
Do you? "I do." Do we? "We do."
Let's hold before us one another.
Without stopping.
(In E’s words) -- Tender attention.
Sunday, February 27, 2005
The inmate wants to learn what a comma is. Pause, then go on.
People who study Buddhism should seek real, true perception and understanding. If you attain real, true perception, birth and death don’t affect you; you are free to go or stay. You needn’t seek wonders, for wonders come of themselves. Just put thoughts to rest and don’t seek outwardly anymore. When things come up, then give them your attention; just trust what is functional in you at present, and you have nothing to be concerned about.
- Sokei-an Sasaki
A woman with brain damage wants a job. Why not? -- she says repeatedly.
“If you come on your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you must lead it back to him. If you see the donkey of a man who hates you fallen under its load, instead of keeping out of his way, go to him to help him."
(from Exodus 22)
We're not asked to choose nor to judge which person to help and which one not to.
As things come up, just give attention.
Cesco barks once from front room.
Saskia attends.
People who study Buddhism should seek real, true perception and understanding. If you attain real, true perception, birth and death don’t affect you; you are free to go or stay. You needn’t seek wonders, for wonders come of themselves. Just put thoughts to rest and don’t seek outwardly anymore. When things come up, then give them your attention; just trust what is functional in you at present, and you have nothing to be concerned about.
- Sokei-an Sasaki
A woman with brain damage wants a job. Why not? -- she says repeatedly.
“If you come on your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you must lead it back to him. If you see the donkey of a man who hates you fallen under its load, instead of keeping out of his way, go to him to help him."
(from Exodus 22)
We're not asked to choose nor to judge which person to help and which one not to.
As things come up, just give attention.
Cesco barks once from front room.
Saskia attends.
Saturday, February 26, 2005
If I give you my word, I have given you my life. When I break my word, my life is broken. Are we nearer to seeing that word and life are not separable? And when we have integrated word and life, will we then be worthy of silence?
As long as people are beguiled by words, they can never expect to penetrate to the heart of Zen. Why? Because words are merely a vehicle on which the truth is carried. Not understanding the meaning of the old masters and their koans, people try to find it in the words only, but they will find nothing there to lay their hands on. The truth itself is beyond all description, but it is by words that the truth is manifested. Let us, then, forget the words when we gain the truth itself. This is done only when we have an insight through experience into that which is indicated by the words.
Lu K'uan Yu
Here's the fear: the bond of trust between word and truth has become broken and beyond repair. That fear is what some call Orwellian, that is, there are people manipulating words so that they mean the opposite of what we've long held them to mean. Both political and street use of words might confuse us today: Is cool hot? Is bad good? Does war bring peace? Is torture the route to kindness? Are lies now presented as truth?
Listen, heavens to what I say;
earth, hear the words of my mouth!
Let my teaching fall like the rain,
my speech descend like the dew,
like a shower on the grass,
like rain on the wheat.
For I shall call on the name of the Lord:
give praise to the greatness of our God!
His works are like a rock: they are perfect,
for all his ways are just.
God is faithful, he can do no wrong:
he is just and upright.
Deuteronomy 32
Perhaps the reason so much seems contradictory is because any one event, word, or act transverses twelve to eighteen dimensions, which are, in themselves, separate worlds in which every experience has three dozen names.
You shall not utter the name of the Lord your God to misuse it, for the Lord will not leave unpunished the man who utters his name to misuse it.
(-- from Exodus 20)
To misuse the name of God is to try to invalidate the felt factual and actual reality of what is there. Sacred sanity is each within itself as it is.
Snowbanks North of the House
Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet
from the house...
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books;
the son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no more
bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party
and loves him no more.
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls leaving
the church.
It will not come closer --
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch nothing,
and are safe.
And the father grieves for his son, and will not leave the
room where the coffin stands;
he turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.
And the sea lifts and falls all night; the moon goes on
through the unattached heavens alone.
And the toe of the shoe pivots
in the dust...
The man in the black coat turns, and goes back down the
hill.
No one knows why he came, or why he turned away, and
did not climb the hill.
(Poem: "Snowbanks North of the House" by Robert Bly, from Selected Poems. )
I give you my word -- you and I are not separate -- and no one can fabricate a reality for you that does not move through me as well.
Our ignorance of this interpenetration is why we are so in need of forgiveness: we know not what we are...doing.
God moves through us.
And we, all of us, are the ways God experiences these myriad worlds.
Each way a world worthy and sacred.
All God's ways and each of us as word are just.
Word belongs to Itself.
As we do, to one another.
As long as people are beguiled by words, they can never expect to penetrate to the heart of Zen. Why? Because words are merely a vehicle on which the truth is carried. Not understanding the meaning of the old masters and their koans, people try to find it in the words only, but they will find nothing there to lay their hands on. The truth itself is beyond all description, but it is by words that the truth is manifested. Let us, then, forget the words when we gain the truth itself. This is done only when we have an insight through experience into that which is indicated by the words.
Lu K'uan Yu
Here's the fear: the bond of trust between word and truth has become broken and beyond repair. That fear is what some call Orwellian, that is, there are people manipulating words so that they mean the opposite of what we've long held them to mean. Both political and street use of words might confuse us today: Is cool hot? Is bad good? Does war bring peace? Is torture the route to kindness? Are lies now presented as truth?
Listen, heavens to what I say;
earth, hear the words of my mouth!
Let my teaching fall like the rain,
my speech descend like the dew,
like a shower on the grass,
like rain on the wheat.
For I shall call on the name of the Lord:
give praise to the greatness of our God!
His works are like a rock: they are perfect,
for all his ways are just.
God is faithful, he can do no wrong:
he is just and upright.
Deuteronomy 32
Perhaps the reason so much seems contradictory is because any one event, word, or act transverses twelve to eighteen dimensions, which are, in themselves, separate worlds in which every experience has three dozen names.
You shall not utter the name of the Lord your God to misuse it, for the Lord will not leave unpunished the man who utters his name to misuse it.
(-- from Exodus 20)
To misuse the name of God is to try to invalidate the felt factual and actual reality of what is there. Sacred sanity is each within itself as it is.
Snowbanks North of the House
Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet
from the house...
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books;
the son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no more
bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party
and loves him no more.
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls leaving
the church.
It will not come closer --
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch nothing,
and are safe.
And the father grieves for his son, and will not leave the
room where the coffin stands;
he turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.
And the sea lifts and falls all night; the moon goes on
through the unattached heavens alone.
And the toe of the shoe pivots
in the dust...
The man in the black coat turns, and goes back down the
hill.
No one knows why he came, or why he turned away, and
did not climb the hill.
(Poem: "Snowbanks North of the House" by Robert Bly, from Selected Poems. )
I give you my word -- you and I are not separate -- and no one can fabricate a reality for you that does not move through me as well.
Our ignorance of this interpenetration is why we are so in need of forgiveness: we know not what we are...doing.
God moves through us.
And we, all of us, are the ways God experiences these myriad worlds.
Each way a world worthy and sacred.
All God's ways and each of us as word are just.
Word belongs to Itself.
As we do, to one another.
Friday, February 25, 2005
Justice doesn't descend from on high; justice emerges from within.
Dream first; then awaken what is necessary and real.
Enlightenment means seeing into
your own essential nature,
and this at the same time means
seeing through to the essential
- Yasutani
If human beings do not embody and manifest divine justice, no deus ex machina will intervene to impose it on us. Which, if you think about it, could be considered a shame -- especially if nobody shows through what could be shown through.
Even if justice begins as a dream, it must materialize through bodies with hands, feet and eyes that see.
So Joseph went after his brothers and found them at Dothan.
They saw him in the distance, and before he reached them they made a plot among themselves to put him to death. "Here comes the man of dreams" they said to one another. "Come on, let us kill him and throw him into some well; we can say that a wild beast devoured him. Then we shall see what becomes of his dreams."
(--from Genesis 37)
What will become of our dreams once we cease dreaming? What will become of us without the dream?
"I tell you, then, that the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit."
(from Matthew 21)
It is not the fault of our leaders that we have ceased dreaming the dream of justice and have begun to acquire a taste for delusion and omnipotence. Rabbi David Aaron says that we desecrate Hashem, (The Name...of God) when we fail to embody and reveal The Name into the world. That presence will emerge with humility. Humility is the fruit of authentic realization.
If we do what is right, the name, (the reality itself), of Hashem will shine through into the world. We will transcend barriers and transform boundaries following light's passage through a new transparency.
God is passing through. (Once we would have said, "God is perfect".)
But this is now.
Our begetting.
Diaphaneity.
For real.
Holiness.
Dream first; then awaken what is necessary and real.
Enlightenment means seeing into
your own essential nature,
and this at the same time means
seeing through to the essential
- Yasutani
If human beings do not embody and manifest divine justice, no deus ex machina will intervene to impose it on us. Which, if you think about it, could be considered a shame -- especially if nobody shows through what could be shown through.
Even if justice begins as a dream, it must materialize through bodies with hands, feet and eyes that see.
So Joseph went after his brothers and found them at Dothan.
They saw him in the distance, and before he reached them they made a plot among themselves to put him to death. "Here comes the man of dreams" they said to one another. "Come on, let us kill him and throw him into some well; we can say that a wild beast devoured him. Then we shall see what becomes of his dreams."
(--from Genesis 37)
What will become of our dreams once we cease dreaming? What will become of us without the dream?
"I tell you, then, that the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit."
(from Matthew 21)
It is not the fault of our leaders that we have ceased dreaming the dream of justice and have begun to acquire a taste for delusion and omnipotence. Rabbi David Aaron says that we desecrate Hashem, (The Name...of God) when we fail to embody and reveal The Name into the world. That presence will emerge with humility. Humility is the fruit of authentic realization.
If we do what is right, the name, (the reality itself), of Hashem will shine through into the world. We will transcend barriers and transform boundaries following light's passage through a new transparency.
God is passing through. (Once we would have said, "God is perfect".)
But this is now.
Our begetting.
Diaphaneity.
For real.
Holiness.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
No trace found of 1,100 WTC victims
(Headline, February 24, 2005, Chicago Sun-Times)
The counting and naming is over. Those gone are gone from view, some without trace. Our science cannot resurrect form nor catalogue spirit.
All this happened to us,
but not because we had forgotten you.
We were not disloyal to your covenant;
our hearts did not turn away;
our steps did not wander from your path;
and yet you brought us low,
with horrors all about us:
you overwhelmed us in the shadows of death.
If we had forgotten the name of our God,
if we had spread out our hands before an alien god --
would God not have known? He knows what is hidden in our hearts.
It is for your sake that we face death all the day,
that we are reckoned as sheep to be slaughtered.
--from Psalm 43 (44)
Nor have we ever pinpointed the reason or purpose of planes flying where they shouldn't, buildings collapsing when they ought not. The image of dusty disintegration is imprinted on our psyche in the same way Christians hold to the image of Jesus hanging from the cross. From that Latinate collapse arose a powerful impulse: When God is involved, what we see is not what we understand.
Awake, Lord, why do you sleep?
Rise up, do not always reject us.
Why do you turn away your face?
How can you forget our poverty and our tribulation?
Our souls are crushed into the dust,
our bodies dragged down to the earth.
Rise up, Lord, and help us.
In your mercy, redeem us.
-- from Psalm 43 (44)
Zen Master Dogen tells us that not leaving a trace is a gift we might not understand:
The geese do not wish to leave their reflection behind; The water has no mind to retain their image. {or} Coming, going, the waterfowl / Leaves not a trace, / Nor does it need a guide. (Dogen Zenji, 1200-1253)
Thomas Merton, after delivering a talk on Marxism and Monasticism in Bangkok, said, "Now I think I'll disappear." During the lunch break, reaching to adjust a standing electrical fan, he was electrocuted, and died.
Disappearance and leaving no trace -- what signs are these?
...And when it is time
for you to leave, they will follow you
to the top of the stairs, the door,
and stand there while you drive away,
their faces behind the wood, the glass--
looking like the faces that you've seen
in all the papers: the proud, pained soldiers torn
from their homes and sent out into the world
for a reason you must read on and on to understand.
(from Poem: "In the Apartments of the Divorced Men" by Sue Ellen Thompson, from The Leaving: New and Selected Poems. )
And so we went to war. Perhaps we went to war in an effort to make visible our anger, grief and desolation. Maybe we went to war for reasons in the minds of men that will some day come out in memos or unclassified secrets. War is very obvious. War is the reminder that destruction has its own solidity.
Today we salute the disappeared. We greet in spirit those gone with no trace. For these, there is no real need for granite memorial or hard emblem of what once was.
Our remembrance is spiritual. These disappeared still are. They pass us on the street. They linger on side of road as we zip past. They are in our minds and hearts everytime there is a pause, a hesitation in our blurry passage. They are our conscience.
What is there to understand?
Our path is see 'what is' and learn compassion with it.
What is hidden in our hearts -- reveal, O Lord!
(Headline, February 24, 2005, Chicago Sun-Times)
The counting and naming is over. Those gone are gone from view, some without trace. Our science cannot resurrect form nor catalogue spirit.
All this happened to us,
but not because we had forgotten you.
We were not disloyal to your covenant;
our hearts did not turn away;
our steps did not wander from your path;
and yet you brought us low,
with horrors all about us:
you overwhelmed us in the shadows of death.
If we had forgotten the name of our God,
if we had spread out our hands before an alien god --
would God not have known? He knows what is hidden in our hearts.
It is for your sake that we face death all the day,
that we are reckoned as sheep to be slaughtered.
--from Psalm 43 (44)
Nor have we ever pinpointed the reason or purpose of planes flying where they shouldn't, buildings collapsing when they ought not. The image of dusty disintegration is imprinted on our psyche in the same way Christians hold to the image of Jesus hanging from the cross. From that Latinate collapse arose a powerful impulse: When God is involved, what we see is not what we understand.
Awake, Lord, why do you sleep?
Rise up, do not always reject us.
Why do you turn away your face?
How can you forget our poverty and our tribulation?
Our souls are crushed into the dust,
our bodies dragged down to the earth.
Rise up, Lord, and help us.
In your mercy, redeem us.
-- from Psalm 43 (44)
Zen Master Dogen tells us that not leaving a trace is a gift we might not understand:
The geese do not wish to leave their reflection behind; The water has no mind to retain their image. {or} Coming, going, the waterfowl / Leaves not a trace, / Nor does it need a guide. (Dogen Zenji, 1200-1253)
Thomas Merton, after delivering a talk on Marxism and Monasticism in Bangkok, said, "Now I think I'll disappear." During the lunch break, reaching to adjust a standing electrical fan, he was electrocuted, and died.
Disappearance and leaving no trace -- what signs are these?
...And when it is time
for you to leave, they will follow you
to the top of the stairs, the door,
and stand there while you drive away,
their faces behind the wood, the glass--
looking like the faces that you've seen
in all the papers: the proud, pained soldiers torn
from their homes and sent out into the world
for a reason you must read on and on to understand.
(from Poem: "In the Apartments of the Divorced Men" by Sue Ellen Thompson, from The Leaving: New and Selected Poems. )
And so we went to war. Perhaps we went to war in an effort to make visible our anger, grief and desolation. Maybe we went to war for reasons in the minds of men that will some day come out in memos or unclassified secrets. War is very obvious. War is the reminder that destruction has its own solidity.
Today we salute the disappeared. We greet in spirit those gone with no trace. For these, there is no real need for granite memorial or hard emblem of what once was.
Our remembrance is spiritual. These disappeared still are. They pass us on the street. They linger on side of road as we zip past. They are in our minds and hearts everytime there is a pause, a hesitation in our blurry passage. They are our conscience.
What is there to understand?
Our path is see 'what is' and learn compassion with it.
What is hidden in our hearts -- reveal, O Lord!
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
A woman or man of prayer cannot fathom the depth of the call.
The waters saw you, O God,
the waters saw you and writhed,
stirred up even to their depths.
The clouds poured down water,
the clouds sounded their voice,
your arrows shot forth.
Your voice thundered in the whirlwind,
your lightnings lit up the world,
the earth trembled and shook.
Your way led through the sea,
your paths through the great waters,
your steps left no trace behind them.
-- from Psalm 76 (77)
Following the call necessitates passing through a traceless way.
We cannot know the way calling us; to claim to is mere fancy.
We cannot know God. We can only know the pause -- the stutter when we hear the call.
Practice is the pause.
No trace.
The waters saw you, O God,
the waters saw you and writhed,
stirred up even to their depths.
The clouds poured down water,
the clouds sounded their voice,
your arrows shot forth.
Your voice thundered in the whirlwind,
your lightnings lit up the world,
the earth trembled and shook.
Your way led through the sea,
your paths through the great waters,
your steps left no trace behind them.
-- from Psalm 76 (77)
Following the call necessitates passing through a traceless way.
We cannot know the way calling us; to claim to is mere fancy.
We cannot know God. We can only know the pause -- the stutter when we hear the call.
Practice is the pause.
No trace.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
We live with skunks. They've been spraying, probably each other. Tomorrow I'll begin a campaign to drive them away. It's only right.
Like the empty sky,
It has no boundaries,
Yet it is right in this place,
Ever profound and clear.
When you seek to know it,
You cannot see it.
You cannot take hold of it.
But you cannot lose it.
In not being able to get it,
You get it.
When you are silent, it speaks.
The great gate is wide open
To bestow alms,
And no crowd is blocking the way.
- Takuan
The trouble with skunks is their smell. It's hard to approach them without fear of being attacked. They engender fear.
Skunks are skunks.
Like war.
An intolerable stink.
Like the empty sky,
It has no boundaries,
Yet it is right in this place,
Ever profound and clear.
When you seek to know it,
You cannot see it.
You cannot take hold of it.
But you cannot lose it.
In not being able to get it,
You get it.
When you are silent, it speaks.
The great gate is wide open
To bestow alms,
And no crowd is blocking the way.
- Takuan
The trouble with skunks is their smell. It's hard to approach them without fear of being attacked. They engender fear.
Skunks are skunks.
Like war.
An intolerable stink.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Dorothy said, "There's no place like home."
Day and night the cold wind
Blows through my robe.
In the forest, only fallen leaves;
Wild chrysanthemums can no longer
Be seen. Next to my hermitage
There is an ancient bamboo grove;
Never changing, it awaits my return.
- Ryokan
Out in the cabin someone from away makes a private retreat. Smoke rises.
The Lord reveals his glory in the presence of chosen witnesses. His body is like that of the rest of mankind, but he makes it shine with such splendour that his face becomes like the sun in glory, and his garments as white as snow.
The great reason for this transfiguration was to remove the scandal of the cross from the hearts of his disciples, and to prevent the humiliation of his voluntary suffering from disturbing the faith of those who had witnessed the surpassing glory that lay concealed.
With no less forethought he was also providing a firm foundation for the hope of holy Church. The whole body of Christ was to understand the kind of transformation that it would receive as his gift. The members of that body were to look forward to a share in that glory which first blazed out in Christ their head.
(From a sermon by Saint Leo the Great, pope)
Each place serving as temporary residence is a place to pass through.
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
(Poem by Derek Walcott )
Maybe there is no place like home.
Strangers passing through.
A temporary and concealed dwelling.
Changing form.
Day and night the cold wind
Blows through my robe.
In the forest, only fallen leaves;
Wild chrysanthemums can no longer
Be seen. Next to my hermitage
There is an ancient bamboo grove;
Never changing, it awaits my return.
- Ryokan
Out in the cabin someone from away makes a private retreat. Smoke rises.
The Lord reveals his glory in the presence of chosen witnesses. His body is like that of the rest of mankind, but he makes it shine with such splendour that his face becomes like the sun in glory, and his garments as white as snow.
The great reason for this transfiguration was to remove the scandal of the cross from the hearts of his disciples, and to prevent the humiliation of his voluntary suffering from disturbing the faith of those who had witnessed the surpassing glory that lay concealed.
With no less forethought he was also providing a firm foundation for the hope of holy Church. The whole body of Christ was to understand the kind of transformation that it would receive as his gift. The members of that body were to look forward to a share in that glory which first blazed out in Christ their head.
(From a sermon by Saint Leo the Great, pope)
Each place serving as temporary residence is a place to pass through.
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
(Poem by Derek Walcott )
Maybe there is no place like home.
Strangers passing through.
A temporary and concealed dwelling.
Changing form.
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Mother? Father? Each being, as it is, is what is.
Thirty years ago my father died. Twenty four years ago so did my mother.
Zen enlightenment is as if you have been away from home for many years, when suddenly you see your father or mother in town. You know them right away, without a doubt. There is no need to ask whether they are your parents or not.
- Dogen
The deaths of my mother and father gave way to looking around at what now become my parents.
This is one of the gifts of zen, namely, all things are seen as mother and as father. In fact, it is the crux of contradiction in Christian/Zen investigation -- that each being, as it is, is what is.
Jesus said, ‘You have learnt how it was said: You must love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say this to you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you; in this way you will be sons of your Father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good, and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike. For if you love those who love you, what right have you to claim any credit? Even the tax collectors do as much, do they not? And if you save your greetings for your brothers, are you doing anything exceptional? Even the pagans do as much, do they not? You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.’
(Matthew 5:43 - 48)
"And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee. And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother?"
Mk.3:32-33
Passing through -- making one's way through -- is the perfection of our heavenly Father/Mother. We don't get to choose our mother or father. They appear each moment in each person. They are revealed now and now and now as each being appearing in our way.
We come to being through our parents. This is the first stage.
We must leave our mother and father as they must leave us. That is only the second stage. Finally, we are invited into a new way of being -- where each encounter is father, each engagement is mother. At this stage we are quickened and resounded.
The very activity of coming into being, passing through our lives with attentive compassionate awareness, and then emerging beyond any barrier or boundary to quiet realization of interdependent origination -- this is the life of prayer, perfection, and practice.
Perfection is not the done deal or final state. Perfection, rather than being understood as a state of completion rid of imperfections or flaws, is the literal process of "making one's way through." [Per=through; facere=to make] In street jargon the word 'perfection' could mean 'keep on keeping on,' or 'see you on the flip side,' or ' you can make it through this.' Jesus is encouraging us to remain open through each encounter -- to allow each engagement to fill us and sound through us -- to come to see what is really and actually passing through us here and now.
Prayer originates; perfection is the middle passageway that leads to the final and unending activity; practice!
Hence, it is: "Thanks mom...Thanks dad."
With gratitude it might dawn on me that love is practicing each of us as we are.
Passing through.
Thirty years ago my father died. Twenty four years ago so did my mother.
Zen enlightenment is as if you have been away from home for many years, when suddenly you see your father or mother in town. You know them right away, without a doubt. There is no need to ask whether they are your parents or not.
- Dogen
The deaths of my mother and father gave way to looking around at what now become my parents.
This is one of the gifts of zen, namely, all things are seen as mother and as father. In fact, it is the crux of contradiction in Christian/Zen investigation -- that each being, as it is, is what is.
Jesus said, ‘You have learnt how it was said: You must love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say this to you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you; in this way you will be sons of your Father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good, and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike. For if you love those who love you, what right have you to claim any credit? Even the tax collectors do as much, do they not? And if you save your greetings for your brothers, are you doing anything exceptional? Even the pagans do as much, do they not? You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.’
(Matthew 5:43 - 48)
"And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee. And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother?"
Mk.3:32-33
Passing through -- making one's way through -- is the perfection of our heavenly Father/Mother. We don't get to choose our mother or father. They appear each moment in each person. They are revealed now and now and now as each being appearing in our way.
We come to being through our parents. This is the first stage.
We must leave our mother and father as they must leave us. That is only the second stage. Finally, we are invited into a new way of being -- where each encounter is father, each engagement is mother. At this stage we are quickened and resounded.
The very activity of coming into being, passing through our lives with attentive compassionate awareness, and then emerging beyond any barrier or boundary to quiet realization of interdependent origination -- this is the life of prayer, perfection, and practice.
Perfection is not the done deal or final state. Perfection, rather than being understood as a state of completion rid of imperfections or flaws, is the literal process of "making one's way through." [Per=through; facere=to make] In street jargon the word 'perfection' could mean 'keep on keeping on,' or 'see you on the flip side,' or ' you can make it through this.' Jesus is encouraging us to remain open through each encounter -- to allow each engagement to fill us and sound through us -- to come to see what is really and actually passing through us here and now.
Prayer originates; perfection is the middle passageway that leads to the final and unending activity; practice!
Hence, it is: "Thanks mom...Thanks dad."
With gratitude it might dawn on me that love is practicing each of us as we are.
Passing through.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
The real war is between cowardice and contrition.
It is time to abandon 'coward.' Will we fall into 'contrite?'
If you have developed great capacity and cutting insight, you can undertake Zen right where you are. Without getting it from another, you understand it on your own. The penetrating spiritual light and vast open tranquility have never been interrupted since beginningless time. The pure, uncontrived, ineffable, complete true mind does not act as a partner to objects of material sense, and is not a companion of myriad things. When the mind is always as clear and bright as ten suns shining together, detached from views and beyond feelings, cutting through the ephemeral illusions of birth and death, this is what is meant by the saying “Mind itself is Buddha.” You do not have to abandon worldly activities in order to attain effortless unconcern. You should know that worldly activities and effortless unconcern are not two different things, but if you keep thinking about rejection and grasping, you make them two.
- Hui Neng
Sometimes we call cowardice by nicknames that seem easier to respond to -- such as 'realism', or 'caution', or a current favorite, 'patriotism.'
John Dear is a Jesuit priest working for peace. Recently, in a talk, he said:
“I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves,” Jesus tells us. Imagine a pathetic, vulnerable, fragile little lamb surrounded by a group of starving wolves. What are they thinking? “Get the mint jelly, fellas, it’s lamb chops for dinner!” If we’re going to follow Jesus, we’re going to be devoured. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to cost us.
But for some reason, we think subconsciously that since we are Americans and Catholics, we can work for peace and justice, we can be active in the church, we can even try to end war and change the world and the church--without getting into trouble. We think that we can do these things without causing problems or upsetting people or getting kicked around like Jesus did, that we don’t need to take up the cross or suffer or risk our lives, that somehow or other, we won’t end up as he did, that we will make everything work out alright with no discomfort at all. And the moment we face opposition, we get upset, we complain, we give up and we walk away. We want everything to be easy.
I’m here to tell you that if we want to follow Jesus, if we want to become his authentic church, if we want to put the Gospel into practice, if we want to help end war and disarm nuclear weapons and serve starving humanity, if we really want to change the church, we have got to expect that we will get into trouble. We have to expect a difficult lifelong struggle because the status quo of injustice is not going to cave in easily. We have to risk the cross and resurrection, we have to enter the Paschal mystery, and it’s going to be messy and we’re not going to like it and everyone’s going to be upset with us and we will feel like failures.
And when this happens, I submit, then we’we're finally getting somewhere. Dorothy Day once said that we measure our discipleship to Jesus by how much trouble we are in. So my message is: Become holy troublemakers for peace and justice just like Jesus.
(from A Talk by John Dear at the Call to Action Conference, November 6, 2004. "Getting Into Trouble for Peace and Justice: The Next Step on the Path of Discipleship to the Nonviolent Jesus", Milwaukee, Wisconsin )
The word coward sounds close to 'cowed' -- that is, as a transitive verb, "to frighten with threats or a show of force." As an adjective it means, "frightened into submission or compliance." (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=cowed)
John Dear is worried about our nation. He is more worried about the heart and soul of each of us. In an article published the 15th of February, yesterday, he writes:
We have become a culture of Pharisees. Instead of practicing an authentic spirituality of compassion, nonviolence, love and peace, we as a collective people have become self-righteous, arrogant, powerful, murderous hypocrites who dominate and kill others in the name of God. The Pharisees supported the brutal Roman rulers and soldiers, and lived off the comforts of the empire by running an elaborate banking system which charged an exorbitant fee for ordinary people just to worship God in the Temple. Since they taught that God was present only in the Temple, they were able to control the entire population. If anyone opposed their power or violated their law, the Pharisees could kill them on the spot, even in the holy sanctuary.
Most North American Christians are now becoming more and more like these hypocritical Pharisees. We side with the rulers, the bankers, and the corporate millionaires and billionaires. We run the Pentagon, bless the bombing raids, support executions, make nuclear weapons and seek global domination for America as if that was what the nonviolent Jesus wants. And we dismiss anyone who disagrees with us.
We have become a mean, vicious people, what the bible calls “stiff-necked people.” And we do it all with the mistaken belief that we have the blessing of God.
(http://www.commondreams.org/)
There is a wonderful teaching and admonition I remember from one of our Tuesday Evening Conversations on Buddhist Study and Practice: Do not call the unlovely lovely -- do not call the lovely unlovely. It is a strong reminder that, whatever our unwillingness to face publicly our cowardice or contrition, at least we must not fail to see the unlovely as unlovely, and the lovely as lovely. In other words, do not lie to ourselves, do not actively cultivate delusion. To pretend not to see, or pretend that what we see is not actually what we are seeing -- is a grave injustice, to ourselves and to others.
John Dear takes us to the doorstep of his metaphor and belief when he says:
There are many problems in the church, and many problems in the world, but there are no problems with Jesus. He remains wonderful, gentle, loving, inviting, and disarming, and he is busy at work transforming our world. My hope and prayer is that we can learn his story more and more, listen to his words, do what he says, become his friends, and get into trouble like him, that we can be nonviolent like him, compassionate like him, and dangerous like him.
So I wrote a little litany for you:
In a world of hate and fear, be holy troublemakers of all-inclusive, universal love.
In a world of merciless cruelty, be holy troublemakers of compassion and mercy.
In a world of lies, be holy troublemakers of truth.
In a world of injustice, racism and sexism, be holy troublemakers of justice and equality.
In a world of death, be holy troublemakers of life.
In a world of despair, be holy troublemakers of hope.
In a world of war, be holy troublemakers for peace.
In a world of violence, be holy troublemakers of Gospel nonviolence in the name of the troublemaking, nonviolent Jesus. Thank you and God bless you.
(from ending of John Dear's talk in Wisconsin)
It is a splash of cold water to read these words that follow in the tradition of Daniel and Phil Berrigan, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, Eddie Doherty and Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Thich Nhat Hanh and Thomas Merton.
Has Jesus been captured by 'believers' and delivered, again, to an undisclosed detention camp as an enemy combatant and detained without representation or contact with the outside world?
Surely the super power of liberty and freedom would not attempt to hijack and breakdown by torture and humiliation the mind and heart of Jesus -- would they? Surely the institution claiming to administrate his will on earth would not alter the words and will Jesus left for us -- would they?
Those questions are too big for me. I have a more personal, and more profound, obligation. Mine is to incarnate what Jesus incarnated. It is a task Christians fear the most; it is the invitation Christians in name only (CINO: See no?) step back from and will readily deny as heresy and scandal, and that is -- to reveal and become what Jesus revealed and became.
O my God! I am heartily sorry. For having offended...everyone -- by not seeing them as they are; by not seeing you where you are.
Teach me to fight, with nonviolence, my cowardice.
I am here to be contrite, to be worn away.
To return to earth.
War is not the way.
Your way is!
It is time to abandon 'coward.' Will we fall into 'contrite?'
If you have developed great capacity and cutting insight, you can undertake Zen right where you are. Without getting it from another, you understand it on your own. The penetrating spiritual light and vast open tranquility have never been interrupted since beginningless time. The pure, uncontrived, ineffable, complete true mind does not act as a partner to objects of material sense, and is not a companion of myriad things. When the mind is always as clear and bright as ten suns shining together, detached from views and beyond feelings, cutting through the ephemeral illusions of birth and death, this is what is meant by the saying “Mind itself is Buddha.” You do not have to abandon worldly activities in order to attain effortless unconcern. You should know that worldly activities and effortless unconcern are not two different things, but if you keep thinking about rejection and grasping, you make them two.
- Hui Neng
Sometimes we call cowardice by nicknames that seem easier to respond to -- such as 'realism', or 'caution', or a current favorite, 'patriotism.'
John Dear is a Jesuit priest working for peace. Recently, in a talk, he said:
“I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves,” Jesus tells us. Imagine a pathetic, vulnerable, fragile little lamb surrounded by a group of starving wolves. What are they thinking? “Get the mint jelly, fellas, it’s lamb chops for dinner!” If we’re going to follow Jesus, we’re going to be devoured. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to cost us.
But for some reason, we think subconsciously that since we are Americans and Catholics, we can work for peace and justice, we can be active in the church, we can even try to end war and change the world and the church--without getting into trouble. We think that we can do these things without causing problems or upsetting people or getting kicked around like Jesus did, that we don’t need to take up the cross or suffer or risk our lives, that somehow or other, we won’t end up as he did, that we will make everything work out alright with no discomfort at all. And the moment we face opposition, we get upset, we complain, we give up and we walk away. We want everything to be easy.
I’m here to tell you that if we want to follow Jesus, if we want to become his authentic church, if we want to put the Gospel into practice, if we want to help end war and disarm nuclear weapons and serve starving humanity, if we really want to change the church, we have got to expect that we will get into trouble. We have to expect a difficult lifelong struggle because the status quo of injustice is not going to cave in easily. We have to risk the cross and resurrection, we have to enter the Paschal mystery, and it’s going to be messy and we’re not going to like it and everyone’s going to be upset with us and we will feel like failures.
And when this happens, I submit, then we’we're finally getting somewhere. Dorothy Day once said that we measure our discipleship to Jesus by how much trouble we are in. So my message is: Become holy troublemakers for peace and justice just like Jesus.
(from A Talk by John Dear at the Call to Action Conference, November 6, 2004. "Getting Into Trouble for Peace and Justice: The Next Step on the Path of Discipleship to the Nonviolent Jesus", Milwaukee, Wisconsin )
The word coward sounds close to 'cowed' -- that is, as a transitive verb, "to frighten with threats or a show of force." As an adjective it means, "frightened into submission or compliance." (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=cowed)
John Dear is worried about our nation. He is more worried about the heart and soul of each of us. In an article published the 15th of February, yesterday, he writes:
We have become a culture of Pharisees. Instead of practicing an authentic spirituality of compassion, nonviolence, love and peace, we as a collective people have become self-righteous, arrogant, powerful, murderous hypocrites who dominate and kill others in the name of God. The Pharisees supported the brutal Roman rulers and soldiers, and lived off the comforts of the empire by running an elaborate banking system which charged an exorbitant fee for ordinary people just to worship God in the Temple. Since they taught that God was present only in the Temple, they were able to control the entire population. If anyone opposed their power or violated their law, the Pharisees could kill them on the spot, even in the holy sanctuary.
Most North American Christians are now becoming more and more like these hypocritical Pharisees. We side with the rulers, the bankers, and the corporate millionaires and billionaires. We run the Pentagon, bless the bombing raids, support executions, make nuclear weapons and seek global domination for America as if that was what the nonviolent Jesus wants. And we dismiss anyone who disagrees with us.
We have become a mean, vicious people, what the bible calls “stiff-necked people.” And we do it all with the mistaken belief that we have the blessing of God.
(http://www.commondreams.org/)
There is a wonderful teaching and admonition I remember from one of our Tuesday Evening Conversations on Buddhist Study and Practice: Do not call the unlovely lovely -- do not call the lovely unlovely. It is a strong reminder that, whatever our unwillingness to face publicly our cowardice or contrition, at least we must not fail to see the unlovely as unlovely, and the lovely as lovely. In other words, do not lie to ourselves, do not actively cultivate delusion. To pretend not to see, or pretend that what we see is not actually what we are seeing -- is a grave injustice, to ourselves and to others.
John Dear takes us to the doorstep of his metaphor and belief when he says:
There are many problems in the church, and many problems in the world, but there are no problems with Jesus. He remains wonderful, gentle, loving, inviting, and disarming, and he is busy at work transforming our world. My hope and prayer is that we can learn his story more and more, listen to his words, do what he says, become his friends, and get into trouble like him, that we can be nonviolent like him, compassionate like him, and dangerous like him.
So I wrote a little litany for you:
In a world of hate and fear, be holy troublemakers of all-inclusive, universal love.
In a world of merciless cruelty, be holy troublemakers of compassion and mercy.
In a world of lies, be holy troublemakers of truth.
In a world of injustice, racism and sexism, be holy troublemakers of justice and equality.
In a world of death, be holy troublemakers of life.
In a world of despair, be holy troublemakers of hope.
In a world of war, be holy troublemakers for peace.
In a world of violence, be holy troublemakers of Gospel nonviolence in the name of the troublemaking, nonviolent Jesus. Thank you and God bless you.
(from ending of John Dear's talk in Wisconsin)
It is a splash of cold water to read these words that follow in the tradition of Daniel and Phil Berrigan, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, Eddie Doherty and Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Thich Nhat Hanh and Thomas Merton.
Has Jesus been captured by 'believers' and delivered, again, to an undisclosed detention camp as an enemy combatant and detained without representation or contact with the outside world?
Surely the super power of liberty and freedom would not attempt to hijack and breakdown by torture and humiliation the mind and heart of Jesus -- would they? Surely the institution claiming to administrate his will on earth would not alter the words and will Jesus left for us -- would they?
Those questions are too big for me. I have a more personal, and more profound, obligation. Mine is to incarnate what Jesus incarnated. It is a task Christians fear the most; it is the invitation Christians in name only (CINO: See no?) step back from and will readily deny as heresy and scandal, and that is -- to reveal and become what Jesus revealed and became.
O my God! I am heartily sorry. For having offended...everyone -- by not seeing them as they are; by not seeing you where you are.
Teach me to fight, with nonviolence, my cowardice.
I am here to be contrite, to be worn away.
To return to earth.
War is not the way.
Your way is!
Monday, February 14, 2005
Don't talk about love.
If you fail to achieve freedom in this life, when do you expect to achieve it? While still alive, you should be tireless in practicing contemplation. The practice consists of abandonments. “The abandonment of what?” you may ask. You should abandon all the workings of your relative consciousness, which you have been cherishing since eternity; retire within your inner being and see the reason of it. As your self-reflection grows deeper and deeper, the moment will surely come upon you when the spiritual flower will suddenly burst into bloom, illuminating the entire universe.
- Wu-hsin
Be what the word signifies.
Silently, the action, with smile.
If you fail to achieve freedom in this life, when do you expect to achieve it? While still alive, you should be tireless in practicing contemplation. The practice consists of abandonments. “The abandonment of what?” you may ask. You should abandon all the workings of your relative consciousness, which you have been cherishing since eternity; retire within your inner being and see the reason of it. As your self-reflection grows deeper and deeper, the moment will surely come upon you when the spiritual flower will suddenly burst into bloom, illuminating the entire universe.
- Wu-hsin
Be what the word signifies.
Silently, the action, with smile.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
We practice incarnation.
Sure, the Buddha dies. Who doesn't? Say what you want about what occurs afterwards, but let's acknowledge -- just as there is suffering, there is death.
The bodhisattva will not allow fear of death to interfere with ascending life.
This life, you must know as the tiny
splash of a raindrop,
A thing of beauty that disappears even
as it comes into being.
Therefore, set your goal.
Make use of every day and night
to achieve it.
-- Tsongkhapa
Saskia says she can read Thich Nhat Hanh's Living Buddha, Living Christ fifty, no, one hundred times. "It's my new bible," she glows. There's something in this Zen Master's being and writing that reveals his embodiment of bodhisattva compassion.
Nirvana Day, Buddha's death, occurred this week.
Mahayana Buddhists are one type of Buddhists. Many of them are Japanese. They celebrate February 13 as the anniversary of Buddha's death.
For Buddhists, this is not a sad day, but a time to remember that Buddha moved from one state of being to the next.
(http://www.kidsturncentral.com/holidays/glossary/defnirvan.htm)
From one form to the formless; from one aspect to transforming vista.
Although Tibetan Buddhism holds that all beings are capable of enlightenment, enlightenment is not the end of the path, for the ultimate goal is to lead all beings to that attainment. For this reason the potential buddha renounces enlightenment for himself and returns to the world to teach until beings are liberated. This is known as the 'bodhisattva ideal." A bodhisattva is a "wisdom being;" of the many bodhisattvas who figure in Tibetan Buddhism, Chenrezik, the Lord of Compassion, is the most revered.
(-- p.xiii from Introduction, in Tibetan Folk Tales, Fredrick and Audrey Hyde-Chambers)
The underlying core of all creation, material or spiritual, is the intention to make manifest what is most real -- the longing of light for love, and the longing of love for light.
At the north window, icy drafts
Whistle through the cracks,
At the south pond, wild geese
Huddle in snowy reeds;
Above, the mountain moon
Is pinched thin with cold,
Freezing clouds threaten
To plunge from the sky.
Buddhas might descend to this world
By the thousands,
They couldn’t add or subtract one thing.
- Hakuin
Is there only one thing? And is that one thing longing light for love, longing love for light?
The six syllables perfect the Six Paramitas of the Bodhisattvas.
Gen Rinpoche, in his commentary on the Meaning of the mantra said:
"The mantra Om Mani Pädme Hum is easy to say yet quite powerful,
because it contains the essence of the entire teaching. When you say
the first syllable Om it is blessed to help you achieve perfection in the
practice of generosity, Ma helps perfect the practice of pure ethics,
and Ni helps achieve perfection in the practice of tolerance and
patience. Päd, the fourth syllable, helps to achieve perfection of perseverance, Me helps achieve perfection in the practice of concentration, and the final sixth syllable Hum helps achieve perfection in the practice of wisdom.
So in this way recitation of the mantra helps achieve perfection in the six practices from generosity to wisdom. The path of these six perfections is the path walked by all the Buddhas of the three times. What could then be more meaningful than to say the mantra and accomplish the six perfections?"
The six syllables purify the six realms of existence in suffering.
For example, the syllable Om purifies the neurotic attachment to bliss and pride, which afflict the beings in the realm of the gods.
Syllable...........Purifies..............................Samsaric Realm
Om.......... -- bliss / pride..................................... -- gods
Ma.......... -- jealousy /lust for entertainment............. -- jealous gods
Ni.......... -- passion / desire................................... -- human
Pe.......... -- stupidity / prejudice............................. -- animal
Me.......... -- poverty / possessiveness......................... -- hungry ghost
Hung........ -- aggression / hatred............................... -- hell
"Behold! The jewel in the lotus!"
http://www.dharma-haven.org/tibetan/meaning-of-om-mani-padme-hung.htm
As our consciousness deepens into awareness and dissolves into pure awareness, we come to see (and be seen as) that which longs for the core of being to be revealed and manifest in (and as) this world. The Christ and the Bodhisattva, in their respective traditions, are narration and engagement with us in the passage through all the diversions, distractions, and dispersions associated with our human journey.
Buddha Amitabha then further instructed him "If you want to relieve the suffering of the six realms, you must propagate the Six-Syllable Mantra "OM MA NI PAD ME HUNG" which will stop the rebirth and sufferings of the beings of the six realms. Each of the syllables will eliminate the cause and condition to be reborn in one of the respective six realms. "OM" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the gods’ realm. "MA" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the demi-gods realm. "NI" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the human realm. "PAD" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the animal realm, "ME" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the hungry ghost realm. "HUNG" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the hell realm. You must engage, keep, recite and absorb this. This will empty the six realms."
http://www.karma-kagyud.org.sg/Voices/voices-Avalo.htm
No birth, no death. "Life" perdures throughout -- a way of being that knows no beginning nor any end. This mysterious way of being -- this "life" -- is that which listens with our ears, looks with our eyes, smells with our nose, touches with our skin, and tastes with our tongue. Life hears, sees, scents, feels, and savours through us and all creation. If we attune to this mystery, this "life," we come to expression and incarnation as that one and same mystery.
"Buddha of great compassion, hold me fast in your compassion. From time without beginning, beings have wandered in samsara, Undergoing unendurable suffering. They have no other protector than you. Please bless them that they may achieve the omniscient state of buddhahood.
With the power of evil karma gathered from beginningless time, Sentient beings, through the force of anger, are born as hell beings and experience the suffering of heat and cold. May they all be born in your presence, perfect deity."
(--from "The Meditation and Recitation of Four-Armed Chenresig")
Recently a health inspector came into the bookshop/bakery. By visit's end she and three of us were in a conversation exploring anger, our own and in general. She was recommended Thich Nhat Hanh's book Anger, Wisdom for Cooling the Flames. As she left, her report indicated a minus one on our yearly evaluation, namely, we need to get a hanging thermometer for our cooler -- which registered 41.2 degrees on her digital device, and well within the regulations. The balance of it! Her visit was a worthwhile exchange of time and temperature.
As long as any living being
draws breath,
Wherever he shall be,
There, in compassion
Will the Buddha appear,
incarnate.
( -- Ngon tok gyen)
Today we practice this breath.
Throughout, and now, we incarnate life.
Life, our mutual longing for light with love.
May we behold this jewel in the lotus of practice with one another!
Sure, the Buddha dies. Who doesn't? Say what you want about what occurs afterwards, but let's acknowledge -- just as there is suffering, there is death.
The bodhisattva will not allow fear of death to interfere with ascending life.
This life, you must know as the tiny
splash of a raindrop,
A thing of beauty that disappears even
as it comes into being.
Therefore, set your goal.
Make use of every day and night
to achieve it.
-- Tsongkhapa
Saskia says she can read Thich Nhat Hanh's Living Buddha, Living Christ fifty, no, one hundred times. "It's my new bible," she glows. There's something in this Zen Master's being and writing that reveals his embodiment of bodhisattva compassion.
Nirvana Day, Buddha's death, occurred this week.
Mahayana Buddhists are one type of Buddhists. Many of them are Japanese. They celebrate February 13 as the anniversary of Buddha's death.
For Buddhists, this is not a sad day, but a time to remember that Buddha moved from one state of being to the next.
(http://www.kidsturncentral.com/holidays/glossary/defnirvan.htm)
From one form to the formless; from one aspect to transforming vista.
Although Tibetan Buddhism holds that all beings are capable of enlightenment, enlightenment is not the end of the path, for the ultimate goal is to lead all beings to that attainment. For this reason the potential buddha renounces enlightenment for himself and returns to the world to teach until beings are liberated. This is known as the 'bodhisattva ideal." A bodhisattva is a "wisdom being;" of the many bodhisattvas who figure in Tibetan Buddhism, Chenrezik, the Lord of Compassion, is the most revered.
(-- p.xiii from Introduction, in Tibetan Folk Tales, Fredrick and Audrey Hyde-Chambers)
The underlying core of all creation, material or spiritual, is the intention to make manifest what is most real -- the longing of light for love, and the longing of love for light.
At the north window, icy drafts
Whistle through the cracks,
At the south pond, wild geese
Huddle in snowy reeds;
Above, the mountain moon
Is pinched thin with cold,
Freezing clouds threaten
To plunge from the sky.
Buddhas might descend to this world
By the thousands,
They couldn’t add or subtract one thing.
- Hakuin
Is there only one thing? And is that one thing longing light for love, longing love for light?
The six syllables perfect the Six Paramitas of the Bodhisattvas.
Gen Rinpoche, in his commentary on the Meaning of the mantra said:
"The mantra Om Mani Pädme Hum is easy to say yet quite powerful,
because it contains the essence of the entire teaching. When you say
the first syllable Om it is blessed to help you achieve perfection in the
practice of generosity, Ma helps perfect the practice of pure ethics,
and Ni helps achieve perfection in the practice of tolerance and
patience. Päd, the fourth syllable, helps to achieve perfection of perseverance, Me helps achieve perfection in the practice of concentration, and the final sixth syllable Hum helps achieve perfection in the practice of wisdom.
So in this way recitation of the mantra helps achieve perfection in the six practices from generosity to wisdom. The path of these six perfections is the path walked by all the Buddhas of the three times. What could then be more meaningful than to say the mantra and accomplish the six perfections?"
The six syllables purify the six realms of existence in suffering.
For example, the syllable Om purifies the neurotic attachment to bliss and pride, which afflict the beings in the realm of the gods.
Om.......... -- bliss / pride..................................... -- gods
Ma.......... -- jealousy /lust for entertainment............. -- jealous gods
Ni.......... -- passion / desire................................... -- human
Pe.......... -- stupidity / prejudice............................. -- animal
Me.......... -- poverty / possessiveness......................... -- hungry ghost
Hung........ -- aggression / hatred............................... -- hell
"Behold! The jewel in the lotus!"
http://www.dharma-haven.org/tibetan/meaning-of-om-mani-padme-hung.htm
As our consciousness deepens into awareness and dissolves into pure awareness, we come to see (and be seen as) that which longs for the core of being to be revealed and manifest in (and as) this world. The Christ and the Bodhisattva, in their respective traditions, are narration and engagement with us in the passage through all the diversions, distractions, and dispersions associated with our human journey.
Buddha Amitabha then further instructed him "If you want to relieve the suffering of the six realms, you must propagate the Six-Syllable Mantra "OM MA NI PAD ME HUNG" which will stop the rebirth and sufferings of the beings of the six realms. Each of the syllables will eliminate the cause and condition to be reborn in one of the respective six realms. "OM" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the gods’ realm. "MA" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the demi-gods realm. "NI" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the human realm. "PAD" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the animal realm, "ME" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the hungry ghost realm. "HUNG" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the hell realm. You must engage, keep, recite and absorb this. This will empty the six realms."
http://www.karma-kagyud.org.sg/Voices/voices-Avalo.htm
No birth, no death. "Life" perdures throughout -- a way of being that knows no beginning nor any end. This mysterious way of being -- this "life" -- is that which listens with our ears, looks with our eyes, smells with our nose, touches with our skin, and tastes with our tongue. Life hears, sees, scents, feels, and savours through us and all creation. If we attune to this mystery, this "life," we come to expression and incarnation as that one and same mystery.
"Buddha of great compassion, hold me fast in your compassion. From time without beginning, beings have wandered in samsara, Undergoing unendurable suffering. They have no other protector than you. Please bless them that they may achieve the omniscient state of buddhahood.
With the power of evil karma gathered from beginningless time, Sentient beings, through the force of anger, are born as hell beings and experience the suffering of heat and cold. May they all be born in your presence, perfect deity."
(--from "The Meditation and Recitation of Four-Armed Chenresig")
Recently a health inspector came into the bookshop/bakery. By visit's end she and three of us were in a conversation exploring anger, our own and in general. She was recommended Thich Nhat Hanh's book Anger, Wisdom for Cooling the Flames. As she left, her report indicated a minus one on our yearly evaluation, namely, we need to get a hanging thermometer for our cooler -- which registered 41.2 degrees on her digital device, and well within the regulations. The balance of it! Her visit was a worthwhile exchange of time and temperature.
As long as any living being
draws breath,
Wherever he shall be,
There, in compassion
Will the Buddha appear,
incarnate.
( -- Ngon tok gyen)
Today we practice this breath.
Throughout, and now, we incarnate life.
Life, our mutual longing for light with love.
May we behold this jewel in the lotus of practice with one another!
Friday, February 11, 2005
Crossed driveway; filled birdfeeders. Closed shop today. Deep snow. Recuperating.
I crossed seas and rivers,
Climbed mountains, and
Forded streams in order
To interview the masters,
To inquire after Truth,
To delve into the secrets of Zen;
And ever since I was enabled to
Recognize the path.
I knew that birth and death are not
The things I have to be concerned with.
For walking is Zen,
Sitting is Zen,
Whether talking or remaining silent,
Whether moving or standing quiet,
The Essence itself is ever at ease;
Even when greeted with swords and spears,
It never loses its quiet way,
And all that befalls cannot perturb
Its serenity.
- Yoko Daishi
It's not about birth or death.
Last night until this morning, the silence of no electrical power to hermitage. It felt like a hermitage. We sat zazen, then spoke of light and "Te igitur" -- "Therefore, you..." beginning the liturgical re-enactment of birth-death-grateful-communion in the Catholic Christian Missale Romanum (a donated book) opened on table to beginning of Canon of Mass.
It is a story of invitation and gathering. I don't think it is about punishment, suffering, and death. I think the story of Jesus is about invitation, gathering, and the mysterious center of our being that longs to manifest fully in this world, in this existence.
I'm not fond of the idea of heaven that is far away and detached from everyday experience. Heaven is within. And the Father is within. The Mother surrounds. We pass through and are blessed with their characteristics and geneology. A new DNA is being written. The script and grammar are borrowed from a Language of Being only barely begun to be heard in our consciousness.
We are meant to become what Father and Mother are -- enlightened and engaged -- in this very world. We forget our family and relatives sometimes -- especially the illimitable expanding endless reach of who all are part of our family. We forget who you are.
There's a need to recuperate from forgetfulness.
There's a need to remember Father and Mother.
Christ, the narration of our story, passes through with us.
Through darkness to light; through anger to compassion; through despondence to active engagement.
Climb mountains, ford streams, rest in bed -- pass through each and every reality with quiet confidence. You are on your way. I am on my way. Each way is surrounded by guiding companions.
Therefore...
You! You! And you...!
I crossed seas and rivers,
Climbed mountains, and
Forded streams in order
To interview the masters,
To inquire after Truth,
To delve into the secrets of Zen;
And ever since I was enabled to
Recognize the path.
I knew that birth and death are not
The things I have to be concerned with.
For walking is Zen,
Sitting is Zen,
Whether talking or remaining silent,
Whether moving or standing quiet,
The Essence itself is ever at ease;
Even when greeted with swords and spears,
It never loses its quiet way,
And all that befalls cannot perturb
Its serenity.
- Yoko Daishi
It's not about birth or death.
Last night until this morning, the silence of no electrical power to hermitage. It felt like a hermitage. We sat zazen, then spoke of light and "Te igitur" -- "Therefore, you..." beginning the liturgical re-enactment of birth-death-grateful-communion in the Catholic Christian Missale Romanum (a donated book) opened on table to beginning of Canon of Mass.
It is a story of invitation and gathering. I don't think it is about punishment, suffering, and death. I think the story of Jesus is about invitation, gathering, and the mysterious center of our being that longs to manifest fully in this world, in this existence.
I'm not fond of the idea of heaven that is far away and detached from everyday experience. Heaven is within. And the Father is within. The Mother surrounds. We pass through and are blessed with their characteristics and geneology. A new DNA is being written. The script and grammar are borrowed from a Language of Being only barely begun to be heard in our consciousness.
We are meant to become what Father and Mother are -- enlightened and engaged -- in this very world. We forget our family and relatives sometimes -- especially the illimitable expanding endless reach of who all are part of our family. We forget who you are.
There's a need to recuperate from forgetfulness.
There's a need to remember Father and Mother.
Christ, the narration of our story, passes through with us.
Through darkness to light; through anger to compassion; through despondence to active engagement.
Climb mountains, ford streams, rest in bed -- pass through each and every reality with quiet confidence. You are on your way. I am on my way. Each way is surrounded by guiding companions.
Therefore...
You! You! And you...!
Thursday, February 10, 2005
A good day to rest. Shop closed today.
Midwinter, the eleventh month.
Wet snow falls unceasingly,
All the mountains have become the same color;
On the myriad paths, human tracks are few.
My past journeys now all seem like dreams,
The door to my grass hut is deeply covered.
All night long I burn small chunks of wood
And silently read poems by masters of the past.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)
The Laura Conversation Wednesday Evening was on Savitri, A Poem by Sri Aurobindo.
Will led conversation pointing out that a great deal of light is placed on more and more events in the world. Light is core of everything. That light is rooted at center of each and every thing -- rock, plant, animal, human. And nation? Of course. Light longs to shine through. God, seen as metaphor of light, longs to be seen through. Who are we? We are to be the seers. With, through, and in the human person, light longs to dwell in this world.
To see this longing through -- reveals the core of being.
By seeing, light is released.
That notion appeals.
Whether rumors of expanding war or data about the expanding universe, from alliances between competing corporations to upcoming marriage between royalty and consort -- it is part of our evolutionary consciousness that so much is revealed which once remained long concealed. It takes seconds -- what once took days, months, or years -- to come to light.
A flood of data arrives, at times, with worrisome consequence. The light of awareness reveals trouble as well as hope. What follows any revelation is story. We make up stories to establish a perspective on data and lack of data. Stories attempt to explain, deflect, or try to settle the new knowledge into an understandable pattern. From this pattern we formulate response.
North Korea unveils nuclear information. Iran warily watches new U.S. Secretary of State build up rhetoric presaging new incursion into Iran. The Pope goes home to recuperate. In Maine it snows.
Awareness is one necessity we do not dare ignore.
New form and new understanding must follow.
Or disintegrate.
Altogether.
Choose light!
Midwinter, the eleventh month.
Wet snow falls unceasingly,
All the mountains have become the same color;
On the myriad paths, human tracks are few.
My past journeys now all seem like dreams,
The door to my grass hut is deeply covered.
All night long I burn small chunks of wood
And silently read poems by masters of the past.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)
The Laura Conversation Wednesday Evening was on Savitri, A Poem by Sri Aurobindo.
Will led conversation pointing out that a great deal of light is placed on more and more events in the world. Light is core of everything. That light is rooted at center of each and every thing -- rock, plant, animal, human. And nation? Of course. Light longs to shine through. God, seen as metaphor of light, longs to be seen through. Who are we? We are to be the seers. With, through, and in the human person, light longs to dwell in this world.
To see this longing through -- reveals the core of being.
By seeing, light is released.
That notion appeals.
Whether rumors of expanding war or data about the expanding universe, from alliances between competing corporations to upcoming marriage between royalty and consort -- it is part of our evolutionary consciousness that so much is revealed which once remained long concealed. It takes seconds -- what once took days, months, or years -- to come to light.
A flood of data arrives, at times, with worrisome consequence. The light of awareness reveals trouble as well as hope. What follows any revelation is story. We make up stories to establish a perspective on data and lack of data. Stories attempt to explain, deflect, or try to settle the new knowledge into an understandable pattern. From this pattern we formulate response.
North Korea unveils nuclear information. Iran warily watches new U.S. Secretary of State build up rhetoric presaging new incursion into Iran. The Pope goes home to recuperate. In Maine it snows.
Awareness is one necessity we do not dare ignore.
New form and new understanding must follow.
Or disintegrate.
Altogether.
Choose light!
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Part of the illness I experience has to do with my failure to comprehend and dwell with "these countless persons of one self" -- the many faces I fail to see as my own.
Will, a man who attends Wednesday's Laura Conversations, sends quote from Savitri, A Poem by Sri Aurobindo.
First, a word from Sri Aurobindo about the poem:
The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.
Sri Aurobindo
Here is the excerpt received today:
All she can do is marvellous in his sight:
He revels in her, a swimmer in her sea,
A tireless amateur of her world-delight,
He rejoices in her every thought and act
And gives consent to all that she can wish;
Whatever she desires he wills to be:
The Spirit, the innumerable One,
He has left behind his lone eternity,
He is an endless birth in endless Time,
Her finite's multitude in an infinite Space.
The master of existence lurks in us
And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;
In Nature's instrument loiters secret God.
The Immanent lives in man as in his house;
He has made the universe his pastime's field,
A vast gymnasium of his works of might.
All-knowing he accepts our darkened state,
Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;
Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,
Immortal, dallies with mortality.
The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance,
The All-Blissful bore to be insensible.
Incarnate in a world of strife and pain,
He puts on joy and sorrow like a robe
And drinks experience like a strengthening wine.
He whose transcendence rules the pregnant Vasts,
Prescient now dwells in our subliminal depths,
A luminous individual Power, alone.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has entered with his silence into space:
He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;
He has built a million figures of his power;
He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;
Space is himself and Time is only he.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,
One who is in us as our secret self,
Our mask of imperfection has assumed,
He has made this tenement of flesh his own,
His image in the human measure cast
That to his divine measure we might rise;
Then in a figure of divinity
The Maker shall recast us and impose
A plan of godhead on the mortal's mould
Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,
Touching the moment with eternity.
This transfiguration is earth's due to heaven:
A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
We are sons of God and must be even as he:
His human portion, we must grow divine.
Our life is a paradox with God for key.
-Sri Aurobindo, in Savitri -- A Legend and a Symbol,Book I Canto 4 Pages 66-67
We are sons and daughters of God. We must grow through this paradox and revelation.
I must meet my family -- my whole family -- with deeper appreciation, acceptance, and engaged interaction.
For us to transfigure into dwelling places of peace, a combination of submission, suffering, and profound inquiry is required.
To see though masks of imperfection.
Homeopathic practitioners say that "like cures like."
This is the balm, the need of one another.
What do we each see?
Will, a man who attends Wednesday's Laura Conversations, sends quote from Savitri, A Poem by Sri Aurobindo.
First, a word from Sri Aurobindo about the poem:
The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.
Sri Aurobindo
Here is the excerpt received today:
All she can do is marvellous in his sight:
He revels in her, a swimmer in her sea,
A tireless amateur of her world-delight,
He rejoices in her every thought and act
And gives consent to all that she can wish;
Whatever she desires he wills to be:
The Spirit, the innumerable One,
He has left behind his lone eternity,
He is an endless birth in endless Time,
Her finite's multitude in an infinite Space.
The master of existence lurks in us
And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;
In Nature's instrument loiters secret God.
The Immanent lives in man as in his house;
He has made the universe his pastime's field,
A vast gymnasium of his works of might.
All-knowing he accepts our darkened state,
Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;
Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,
Immortal, dallies with mortality.
The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance,
The All-Blissful bore to be insensible.
Incarnate in a world of strife and pain,
He puts on joy and sorrow like a robe
And drinks experience like a strengthening wine.
He whose transcendence rules the pregnant Vasts,
Prescient now dwells in our subliminal depths,
A luminous individual Power, alone.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has entered with his silence into space:
He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;
He has built a million figures of his power;
He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;
Space is himself and Time is only he.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,
One who is in us as our secret self,
Our mask of imperfection has assumed,
He has made this tenement of flesh his own,
His image in the human measure cast
That to his divine measure we might rise;
Then in a figure of divinity
The Maker shall recast us and impose
A plan of godhead on the mortal's mould
Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,
Touching the moment with eternity.
This transfiguration is earth's due to heaven:
A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
We are sons of God and must be even as he:
His human portion, we must grow divine.
Our life is a paradox with God for key.
-Sri Aurobindo, in Savitri -- A Legend and a Symbol,Book I Canto 4 Pages 66-67
We are sons and daughters of God. We must grow through this paradox and revelation.
I must meet my family -- my whole family -- with deeper appreciation, acceptance, and engaged interaction.
For us to transfigure into dwelling places of peace, a combination of submission, suffering, and profound inquiry is required.
To see though masks of imperfection.
Homeopathic practitioners say that "like cures like."
This is the balm, the need of one another.
What do we each see?
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