There's a weariness about the world. There's too many things to dislodge any fixed opinion. Even the most heinous occurrence is, finally, regarded as a passing glitch in the orderly running of the day. Former candidates for higher office become beauty queens again dancing the polls and are stuffed with dollar bills right where they pontificate.

The brushwood gate to the hermitage
Is closed even in daylight.
What's the use of asking
About fleeting worldly affairs?
Even time slows its pace
When I sit before the blue mountains.
- Mookam Choinul (1722-1795) http://www.dailyzen.com/

Dogen said, "Dropping off body and mind" is the way to go. I can't claim to grasp this. But that doesn't matter. I can't grasp how cold water comes out of our well, through the pump, and out the faucet.

The Main Case
Dogen studied with Master Rujing. One evening during the intensive summer training, in the first year of Pao-chang, 1225, Rujing shouted at a disciple, “When you study under a master, you must drop the body and mind. What is the use of single-minded intense sleeping?”
Sitting right beside this monastic, Dogen suddenly attained great enlightenment. Immediately, he went up to the abbot’s room and burned incense. Rujing said, “Why are you burning incense?” Dogen said, “Body and mind have been dropped off.” Rujing said, “Body and mind dropped off. The dropped-off body and mind.” Dogen said, “This may only be a temporary ability. Please don’t approve me arbitrarily.” Rujing said, “I am not.” Dogen said, “What is that which isn’t given arbitrary approval?” Rujing said, “Body and mind dropped off.” Dogen bowed. Rujing said, “The dropping off is dropped.”
The Commentary
Beginning with his ordination at age fourteen, Dogen’s relentless search for the Way carried him from teacher to teacher throughout Japan. Yet, the Great Doubt persisted. Finally, at age twenty-four, he crossed the ocean to China. When he arrived there, he immediately resumed his search for an authentic teacher. After visiting a number of monasteries, he discovered Rujing. The monastic environment at Rujing’s monastery was marked by a severe and disciplined meditation. By this time, Dogen was as far onto the edge of his practice as anyone can get. When the crack of Rujing’s voice shattered the silence of the darkened meditation hall, the universe collapsed and the edge disintegrated for Dogen.
“Body and mind fallen away” is a realm in which there are no doctrines or marvels, no certainties or mysteries. It’s just “when you see, there is not a single thing.” Having reached this place, Dogen expressed it to his teacher. Rujing then approved and Dogen bowed. Having passed through the forest of brambles, he then passed beyond the other side, too. Rujing said, “The dropping off is dropped.”
We should understand that this body and mind is not the bag of skin. So I ask you, what is it that is dropped off? Who is it that drops off? This is the place of inquiry that must be clarified. Haven’t you heard the words of the teachers of old? When the ten thousand things have been extinguished, there is still something that is not extinguished. What is it?

(--Dharma Discourse by John Daido Loori, Roshi, Koans of the Way of Reality, Case 108, Master Dogen’s Enlightenment, Featured in Mountain Record 21.1, Fall 2002 http://www.mro.org/zmm/teachings/daido/teisho29.php)

Tonight at Thursday Evening Conversation we'll talk about the readings from which the below selections are taken. Some who attend know this stuff. I merely facilitate. I'm unsure I understand anything. I did, however, buy at Goodwill today a fine pair of five dollar fisherman's boots, easily slipped on, burnt orange toes so to see my feet just before I drown off the side of the dinghy I use. (I keep looking for an old, beat-up, rowboat to call my own -- if such claim to proprietorship is seemly -- that costs little or is donatable. The boots will fit well in a salty skiff with character.)

Hate is specific There must be a thing to be attacked. An enemy must be perceived in such a form he can be touched and seen and heard, and ultimately killed. When hatred rests upon a thing, it calls for death as surely as God's Voice proclaims there is no death. Fear is insatiable, consuming everything its eyes behold, seeing itself in everything, compelled to turn upon itself and to destroy.
Who sees a brother as a body sees him as fear's symbol And he will attack, because what he beholds is his own fear external to himself, poised to attack, and howling to unite with him again. Mistake not the intensity of rage projected fear must spawn. It shrieks in wrath, and claws the air in frantic hope it can reach to its maker and devour him.
(--from Lesson 161, A Course in Miracles)

Then there's this:

You have made much progress, and are really trying to make still more, but there is one thing you have never done; not for one instant have you utterly forgotten the body. It has faded at times from your sight, but it has not yet COMPLETELY DISAPPEARED. You are not asked to let this happen for more than an instant, but it is in this instant that the miracle of Atonement happens. Afterwards, you will see the body again, but never quite the same. And every instant that you spend WITHOUT awareness of it gives you a different view of it, when you return.

At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but NEVER experienced just now. Only its past and future make it seem real. Time controls it entirely. For sin is never present. In any SINGLE instant, the attraction of guilt would be experienced as pain and nothing else, and would be avoided. IT HAS NO ATTRACTION NOW. Its whole attraction is imaginary, and therefore MUST be thought of from the past, or in the future.
(- from "I Need Do Nothing", ch.22, ACIM, http://courseinmiracles.com/urtext/chapter_22/section_6.htm)

For now, this body is good enough for me. Beat-up, old, and still wanting to carry on, or drift on into the misty buoyancy.

I dwell with or's and oars.

We drift in sheltered harbors and need not go anywhere that is anywhere else.

I'm told I will vacate my body some day.

I think of this when I tie up, set bumpers, and step out of the Cape Dory 10 that goes with Saskia's LOON IV. I don't go with the sailers, but I do huddle along in solitude when it is not being used. I balance, then slowly swing onto the beaten-up free-floats in Rockport Harbor.

The meditation correlates.

June deepens.

Oil gushes and pollutes. Everything.

No one knows what to do. This is not propitious. Not knowing, we turn to our most cultivated skill, mendacity, smooth and diversionary, placating and preposterous. Mendacity.

I know mendacity. It has been a longtime practice in my life. It's not the same thing as stupidity. It just wears the same clothes.

Account

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle's flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, thought it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own -- but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it's late. And the truth is laborious.

(Poem by Czeslaw Milosz, 1980)

There's a skewed consolation as well as terrifying realization flowing from the BP disaster in the Gulf Coast -- that we, all of us, do not know what we are doing. No one is in control of anything. There is only serial release of mayhem and reactive response of deflective ratiocination.

Then the predation begins. The talking heads and paid shills spew prepared rhetoric applicable to any circumstance. The formula is simple: Them bad; Me good; Send money; America (or Israel, or BP, or My Political Preference) is God's favored choice.

A Partial History of My Stupidity

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge
and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening
without paying attention to the trees,
whose names I didn't know,
or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

I couldn't relinquish my desires
or accept them, and so I strolled along
like a tiger that wanted to spring
but was still afraid of the wildness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,
but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought
and made remarks I shouldn't have made.
I was silent when I should have spoken.

Forgive me philosophers,
I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,
spiritually speaking,
while halfway around the world
thousands of people were being slaughtered,
some of the my by countrymen.

So I walked on--distracted, lost in thought--
and forgot to attend to those who suffered
far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.

(Poem by Edward Hirsch)

We are becoming frightened people. Terrorism has become so attractive it is now a fund-raising goldmine. Anything done in the name of National Security is permitted and saluted, smartly.

Bullets and boarding raids, border protection and bullying behavior become our new Liturgical Celebrations. The Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, having left the desiccated altars of dithering forgetfulness, has taken to showing up milliseconds before the rounds of arms fire enter the bodies aimed at. The blood and the flesh, torn and ripped, is placed on these new mobile altars in the middle of waters, in empty sluices, and in desolate mountain passes where drones scream soundlessly their descent into gatherings of people, all of whom are, de facto of the hit, guilty as sin. No matter that sin has been forgiven. No matter that neighbor is to be treated as oneself. No matter that hell is in the eye of the reloader.

US Border Patrol Agent Shoots Dead Mexican Teen on Mexican Soil

A fourteen-year-old Mexican boy is being buried today, less than forty-eight hours after being shot by a US Border Patrol agent on Mexican soil. Mexican officials say Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca was shot in the head. Graphic photos published in the Mexico press show the boy lying next to a pool of blood. Sergio and his friends were reportedly playing in a dry section of the Rio Grande and throwing rocks at border guards. The Mexican government has condemned the shooting, saying the use of firearms to respond to boys throwing rocks was a "disproportionate use of force." An eyewitness said Hernandez was clearly on the Mexican side of the border when he was shot.
Eyewitness: "Once the youngsters were on Mexican soil, an official—I don’t know if he was an immigration agent or a police officer—arrived on a bike, wearing a white shirt, a helmet and shorts, and he shot at the youngsters, at the whole group. Some ran in one direction, and others in another. This one teenage victim hid behind the wall. He looked out, and that’s when the teenager was shot."
The shooting comes just weeks after President Obama announced a plan to send an extra $500 million and 1,200 National Guard troops to the border. Two weeks ago, a Border Patrol officer in California shot and killed an undocumented Mexican immigrant with a stun gun. The thirty-two-year-old Anastacio Hernandez had lived in San Diego since he was fourteen and had five American-born children. Border Patrol agents claim he had resisted being deported. (--From Democracy Now, 9June2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/9/headlines#5)

I often wonder: What purpose monasteries? I've come to this -- in real monasteries the monastics realize there is no enemy out there. Monks and Nuns practice awareness -- as do myriad lay-practitioners in middle of ordinary lives. Awareness reveals to practitioners the illusions of this world. The primary illusion is antithesis. A setting against. An opposite. A dualistic other that must be eliminated if the you (or separate self) is to survive. At that revelation there is choice to be made -- continue the illusion by taking arms against and watching the destruction, or shatter the illusion by embodying and integrating into whole-sight.

The contemplative is faced with this choice in prayer and stillness. Then, in act and motion, the invitation so reminiscent of heroes and saviors throughout history -- to become the place where illusion ends -- to remain the reality... God is. Embodying.

“The ocean drives climate and weather, shapes the character of the planet. We do know now that the ocean, where 97 percent of earth’s water is, is vital, not just to the dolphins, the whales, the coral reefs, the kelp forests; it’s our life support system, too. We are sea creatures as much as any of the other creatures who actually live in the ocean, because without the ocean, our lives would not be possible. Anything we care about—our economies, our health, our security, life itself—depends on the fact that this is a blue planet. The ocean is the key to our survival."

(--Sylvia Earle, from National Geographic Explorer)

Perhaps all is dream. The task is to awaken. And sleep is actually our never-ending judgments.

At this point, I'd be happy just to realize every belief and judgment as being belief and judgment. It'd be a start.

From there?

To here.

As from a nap.

A well-formed conscience must be followed. It supersedes.

1799 Faced with a moral choice, conscience can make either a right judgment in accordance with reason and the divine law or, on the contrary, an erroneous judgment that departs from them.

1800 A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience.

1801 Conscience can remain in ignorance or make erroneous judgments. Such ignorance and errors are not always free of guilt.

1802 The Word of God is a light for our path. We must assimilate it in faith and prayer and put it into practice. This is how moral conscience is formed.
(--from Catechism of the Catholic Church, http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a6.htm)

That, and walking at least an hour a day.

Its boundary is wider than the world,
But where to find a trace of it
Once relativity is broken?
Only fools examine their own hearts
It's like measuring the sky or binding the wind.
- Chunkyung Haewon (1691-1770)

Once you try to fragment and divide, the whole fabric of the world tears and frays. Like a broken mirror, each piece reflecting what it can, the whole of it is scattered on the ground. The ache for whole-sight is heart-rending.

High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
(Poem by Wallace Stevens)

Inquire into, clear-eyed, then, trust, yourself.

As you must.

Dawn. Time for prayer. Wood seiza bench. Brown cushion. Red blanket. Tibetan incense. Bronze bell.

Leaning on a stick, I entered a deep forest
And wandered freely, enjoying spring.
Its fragrance soaked through my clothes,
Butterflies followed me all the way home.
- Hwansung Jian (1664-1729)

Northeast breeze pushes through screen. Cat does rounds through barn. Purple Finch and young Grosbeak take seed at feeder. Cars descend Barnestown Road.

John relied upon a baptism of conversion; Jesus set out to liberate people from every form of suffering and anguish -- present and future. How?
(p.29, Jesus Before Christianity, by Robert Nolan)

How?

Now?

There is more here than meets the eye. Are we going forward in time, or backward? Or is it only and ever 'now?'

In the Angelus, is the final couplet, "And the Word was made flesh; And dwelt among us." Or is it: "And the Word is made flesh; And dwells among us."?

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
(-- from BURNT NORTON, No. 1 of 'Four Quartets', by T.S. Eliot)

Blue jay clanks green feeder. Sun comes over Melvin Heights. Silence remains the only sound that holds all sounds.

Crude oil in the Gulf sickens. Shooting in Iraq and Afghanistan has not ceased. Celtics even finals with Lakers at one each. The man who pitched a perfect game gets a one hit shutout.

There are doors I've never opened that store consciousness belonging to everyone. I'm not sure what to do with that sentence. Do I write: "I hope they open." Or, "It is better not to know."? There is a curious combination of declarative and interrogatory diacritical marks. I'm uncertain whether it means: "I am." or, "I am?"

I no longer know who or what I am. Even if or why? Someone dropped by last night to bring a pig-in-a-chef's-hat with blackboard at its apron. She arrives, says it's for Saskia if she wants it, takes cookie, tells of books in box returned to bookshed, leaves. The pastry pig stands on center island. After she leaves it occurs to me that it is all a dream. This coming and going. This sitting and praying. The dreams of night. This morning window and rising sun.

A dream that is real and not-real and not what it seems to be.

Car arrives. Man goes to meditation cabin. I have not yet begun to understand. And if truth be known, I'm not sure I wish it. An ambiguation reveals itself.

Cars pass. Radio comes on and soon goes off. Wind blows and leaves and birds give voice. Ground, wet with weekend rain, will dry. Books, demure reminders of conversations waiting to continue, poise.

It is Monday morning.

Time and tide wait for man.

The opposite is myth.

No?

If one were to live the silent life, there are considerations.

St. Romuald's Brief Rule 

Sit in your cell as in paradise;
 put the whole world behind you and forget it;


like a skilled angler on the lookout for a catch


keep a careful eye on your thoughts.

The path you follow is in the psalms -- don't leave it. 
If you've come with a novice's enthusiasm and can't 
accomplish what you want, take every chance you can find 
to sing the psalms in your heart and to understand them 
with your head; if your mind wanders as you read 
don't give up but hurry back and try again.

Above all realize that you are in God's presence;
 hold your heart there in wonder as if before your sovereign.

Empty yourself completely;
 sit waiting, content with God's gift,
 like a little chick tasting and eating nothing 
but what its mother brings.

(Saint Romuald's Brief Rule was written around AD 1006 -- about twenty years before St. Romuald's death.)

If one were to dwell listening, there is a way.

Voila le silence: Laisser le Seigneur

prononcer en nous une parole

égale a` lui.

Sieh, dies ist die Stille: Den Herrn in

uns ein Wort sprechen lassen, das er

selbst ist.

Behold the silence: Allow the Lord

to speak one Word in us…

that He is.

(At 0:58:54 in Le Grand Silence - film de Philip Groning, about the daily life of monks of La Grande Chartreuse, founded by St. Bruno (1030- 1101) based in the Alps, known as The Carthusians)

If one were to think of life as faith/grace, nothing linear or scientific could limit, nothing would be impossible with God.

Things appear and disappear -- people, rainclouds, small animals caught by cat -- still, we are invited into a place that goes nowhere, but is complete; that arrives nowhere, but is the ground you walk on to get right here.

I am, alors, grateful for merely being alive.

Her words rang true: "...where he is is really immaterial."

Mary Ewert said this soon after her husband Craig Ewert's 2006 physician-assisted suicide in Switzerland. The film made by John Zaritsky, The Suicide Tourist chronicled their journey together in the final days of his life. He'd been diagnosed with ALS, a motor neuron disorder, and preferred to die while he still had the capacity to actively take his life before his disease further ravaged his body, and he loses the option to die without what he felt might be unbearable suffering.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/suicidetourist/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=grid&utm_source=grid

He's there. He drinks the potion. He's gone. Anyone who's been at someone's death knows the experience.

The body is no longer his home. We have no particular idea where Craig, as he was known, has gone. Just that he's no longer there in an observable, sensible, communicable way. Some would say his soul took flight. Whether or where that flight alights is beyond the ability of those remaining behind to experience or know...for the time being.

You stop to point at the moon in the sky,
but the finger's blind unless the moon is shining.

One moon, one careless finger pointing --
are these two things or one?

The question is a pointer guiding
a novice from ignorance thick as fog.

Look deeper. The mystery calls and calls:
No moon, no finger -- nothing there at all.
(--Poem by Ryokan, 1758 - 1831)

At first light, 4am, I'm reading the book Rosy left, The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers, by Amy Hollingsworth. At 5am I'm on my cushion in the zendo, the Phoebes arriving and departing in quick succession outside and over the window. Coffee and cereal with silence and solitude moved the morning through deluge with thunder and lightning. Now I sit in Merton Bookshed/Retreat as across Barnestown Road the sounds and balloons of a celebration fill the air while Gregorian Chant plays downstairs. In the interim I nap, mail book to Maine State Prison, and bail dinghy in Rockport Harbor.

I retreat. Sunlight glistening green leaves.

What do you think of death? I don't know what to think.

I know what Lydia thinks - she reads us Milne in our Friday poetry group:

THE END

When I was One,
I had just begun.

When I was Two,
I was nearly new.

When I was Three,
I was hardly Me.

When I was Four,
I was not much more.

When I was Five,
I was just alive.

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.
(Poem by A.A. Milne)

Soon double six with peanut butter and mountain walking sticks. Lapping water under gunnel edge; buoyancy uplifts!

So we go along one day at a time. One hour. One minute. One second. We go along as if there is no end. Who knows? Maybe we go along because there is an end.

COME OUT WITH ME

There's sun on the river and sun on the hill . . .
You can hear the sea if you stand quite still!
There's eight new puppies at Roundabout Farm-
And I saw an old sailor with only one arm!

But everyone says, "Run along!"
(Run along, run along!)
All of them say, "Run along! I'm busy as can be."
Every one says, "Run along,
There's a little darling!"
If I'm a little darling, why don't they run with me?

There's wind on the river and wind on the hill . . .
There's a dark dead water-wheel under the mill!
I saw a fly which had just been drowned-
And I know where a rabbit goes into the ground!

But everyone says, "Run along!"
(Run along, run along!)
All of them say, "Yes, dear," and never notice me.
Every one says, "Run along,
There's a little darling!"
If I'm a little darling, why won't they come and see?
(Poem by Alan Alexander Milne)

Craig ran along.

One day.

We'll come.

To see.

For now, it's immaterial.

In prison we talk about Tony's story about trying to remain human in the midst of aliens. Then Jon reads a paper about trying to remain sane in the midst of insanity. I like conversations. In another room staff talk about stress-reduction meditation programs for inmates. I'm invited as a volunteer to sit in. I'm not fond of meetings.

When I began to learn Vipassana meditation, I became convinced that Buddha was a not a founder of religion, he was a super-scientist. A spiritual super-scientist. When he teaches morality, the point is, of course, there that we are human beings, living in human society, and we should not do anything which would harm the society. It’s quite true. But then—and it’s as a scientist he’s talking here—he says that when you harm anybody, when you perform any unwholesome action, you are the first victim. You first harm yourself and then you harm others. As soon as a defilement arises in the mind, your nature is such that you feel miserable. That is what Vipassana teaches me.
-S.N. Goenka, "Superscience" (Tricycle, Winter 2000)

Instead of trying to siphon and collect the gushing oil to sell it, the company BP might actually now be trying to stop the gushing oil. Or is it the other way round? That's what someone said this morning. It added a perspective unthought before.

It's a long haul.

Truthfulness.

I'm surprised the anarchistic is not mentioned. No ruler. How can we go on without measure?

Organizations and institutions, clubs and cults, professional societies and political fraternities -- all these are outside anarchistic affections. This world is an uneasy one to negotiate. More to the point, it is non-negotiable.

Something eludes me. Stasis surrounds. I stare. I think I am losing interest. Solitude, today, is wordless engagement with silence. Like the pitcher who threw a perfect game, when the 1st base umpire made a universally undisputed (even by his own admission) wrong call on the 27th out, thus voiding the perfect game into one with an umpire's error, the game must be taken as a whole, for some an injustice, for others an absurdity, but in the end, a meaningless distraction, unlike the 19 year old American/Turkish citizen Furkan Dogan shot five times, twice in head, who along with 8 other Turkish members of the flotilla attacked by Israel, was killed while escorting supplies for blockaded Gaza, which is a matter for our attention, which is something to stare at. Or through.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward into ever-widening thought and action -
Into that heaven of freedom, let us awake.
(--by Bengali poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore)

There is nothing on this misty damp day that should be said about our sleep. We must only acknowledge we are asleep, which acknowledgment only can be made once we awaken and realize we've been asleep. Further compounded by the belief on the part of the sleepers that they are functioning exactly as they should. Call 'em as you see 'em. Protect the small nation from enemies. Amass wealth while the getting is good. Damn the complainers and open the oily spigot.

Becket tells Henry in the final act of a favorite play:

I felt for the first time that I was entrusted with something, that's all — there in that empty cathedral somewhere in France, that day when you ordered me to take up this burden. I was a man without honor. And suddenly I found it — one I never imagined would ever become mine — the honor of God. A frail incomprehensible honor, vulnerable as a boy-King fleeing from danger.
(--from final act of play, Becket, or The Honor of God, by Jean Anouilh, 1959)

The honor of God is not absurd. I am absurd. Out of tune. Deaf. Irrational. Dull. I wear these attributes with no ambition to escape them.

To be in tune. Hearing. Reasonable. Alert. These qualities would be gift. Gifts generously extended with no conditions.

I stare.

Through.

A window.

Let's be sure what the so-called spiritual life is about. It is about simplicity, humility, and kindness.

Do not remain in the dualistic state;

Avoid such pursuits carefully.

If there is even a trace

Of this and that, right and wrong,

The Mind-essence will be lost in confusion.

Although all dualities come from the One,

Do not be attached even to this One.

When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way,

Nothing in the world can offend,

And when a thing can no longer offend,

It ceases to exist in the old way.

-- Seng Ts'an (d.606)

It is not control. Not reaching for something elsewhere. Nor is it adherence to some ideological or religious point of view.

It is each to be at home. That is hospitality. Allowing someone to think and feel as they do.
The spiritual so-called life is about forgetting forgetting and remembering to remember.

Whatever happens, if seen again with love, is how memory presages future with whole sight now.

Simplicity's so great that should God lack her might

He would be neither God, nor Wisdom, nor the Light.

( -- Angelus Silesius)

The hardest thing about the spiritual life is allowing what is emerging to do so with alert intelligent attentive presence.

Nothing else has ever been so attractive.

Watch Jim Sheridan's film "Brothers." They say it is about family not war.

It is about war.

After rain, flowers bloom in the night
And refresh the dawn window
With their clear fragrance.
The flowers smile at people,
As if with minds of their own,
But the monks in the Zendo
Waste the spring.
- Pyungyang Ungee (1581-1644)

The line, "Only the dead have seen the end of war," is heartbreaking.

We have the first TOD (talk of death) Pilot to Practice tonight.

“The law is for the wicked; if no commandment were written, the godly would yet love God and their neighbor.” — On the higher level of cognition the innocence of nature is thus given back to man. He accomplishes the tasks which are set for him with the awareness of an eternal necessity. He says to himself, Through this iron necessity is given into your hand to withdraw that part which is assigned to you from this same eternal necessity. “O Men, learn from the flower of the field how you can please God and be beautiful at the same time.” — “The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms; it pays no attention to itself, nor asks whether one sees it.” — When man arises to the higher level he feels in himself the eternal and necessary impulse of the universe, just as the flower of the field; he acts as the flower blooms. In all his actions the awareness of his moral responsibility grows into the immeasurable. For what he does not do is withdrawn from the All, is a killing of this All, insofar as the possibility of such a killing lies with him. “What is it not to sin? Do not ask much; go, the silent flowers will tell you.” — “Everything must be slain. If you do not slay yourself for God, eternal death shall at last slay you for the Enemy.”
(--from, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, Giordano Bruno and Angelus Silesius, by Rudolf Steiner)

Life without 'why' would be something to behold.

As would time without war.

Could we allow that?

I would.

You?

It is Memorial Day.

We remember, pray for, and honor all dead and deadened by war.

Vinnie died in Vietnam
there's nothing more to say --
He wrote me a few times from over there
That all stopped one December day. (-wfh)

Some in graves in the ground. Some at sea. Some in unmarked unknown places

Some who've gone and returned from war... changed.
Some who've never gone to war but who have sent others to fight for reasons never quite comprehended. (These are the most difficult to include, they don't even know what death they've wrought or how they've deadened themselves.)

Today we have to see things differently.

(Art by Clarity)

Let's walk among all of them -- the dead and deadened -- holding hands and singing life. Life for them. Life for those they've killed. Life for those whose lives they've saved.

We walk together.

And we walk alone, together.

In recollection and collation.

Saluting the fallen.

Whatever you think will always want to empty itself here.
Whatever you are will always long to heal itself here.

Wisdom.
Hope.
Truth.

Heal Here!

Maybe the Trinity is best represented by the three stages of awakened being/doing spoken about by Eckhart Tolle. The three modalities are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm.

Because Zen and Doctrine
Have the same origin and taste,
Don't judge them bitter or sweet
According to your own lights.
If you chase after heaving waves,
You'll probably have to ask
Directions to the ferry.
- Soyo Taeneung (1562-1649)

Acceptance is the source and father/mother.

Enjoyment is the expression, the Christ-manifestation of origin.

Enthusiasm is the Holy Spirit, the inspiration through which source manifests.

Accept faith. Enjoy hope. Love enthusiastically.

Be poor, chaste, and obedient.

Contemplate. Converse. Correspond.

There's nothing like what once we thought was.

Everything is new and fresh and beyond itself.

Three is the new one.

Be what and where God is.

Be what is spoken here.

The folksinger schooner deckhand writes telling about her returned interest in Soto Zen and Buddhism. I'd been thinking of her when today walking the float where the J&E Riggin ties up readying for its first meet and greet of the season.

There's only so far down the road you can go with what is not zen.

I wandered for many years
After leaving the dusty world,
Then built a cozy home
On the blue mountain.
Loving fidelity, I plant a
Thousand bamboos
And a hundred foot pine
As symbols of my integrity.
I plant mums around the wall,
I'm comfortably secluded;
I recite poems in the moonlight;
The sound is crisp and clean.
There's no pleasure like growing
Old on the mountain.
Why should I go crazy
When the road is blocked?
- Buhyu Sunsoo (1543-1615)

Memorial Day Weekend begins Maine's season of travelers. We watch the film "11 Minutes" and consider the odd nature of time.

I am happy to be a near-hermit. There's nothing to it. All you have to do is be what you are. With. No expectations. No celebrity. No explanations.

Merely going to sleep, waking up, walking, listening, eating, conversing.

This breath is the first. This breath is the last. This breath is the first. This one will be the last.

picking
the nameless flower
I offer it to buddha
(-santoka taneda)

I counter:

leaving the name
the buddha
is the flower
unpicked
(--wfh)

Rokpa carried home a lacrosse yellow ball from our walk.

We'll return it to the field tomorrow.

...........................

Breathe.

Root with ground.

Forget the illusory ways of men and the state.

To live without a chief, without a ruler is anarchy.

anarchy |ˈanərkē|
noun
a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority : he must ensure public order in a country threatened with anarchy.
• absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via medieval Latin from Greek anarkhia, from anarkhos, from an- ‘without’ + arkhos ‘chief, ruler.’

No need for bombs. I prefer breath, radical seeing, and remembering what is true.

It's Better To Live

It's better to live, Licinius, neither
always pressing out on the deep nor, trembling
and cautious, hugging overly close to the
dangerous shoreline.

Whosoever cherishes the golden mean
safely avoids the squalor of a hovel
and discreetly keeps away from a palace
that excites envy.

Most often it's the huge pine that is shaken
by the wind, and the highest towers that fall
the greatest fall, and the tops of mountains that
attract the lightning.

Hopeful in adversity, apprehensive
in prosperity is the heart that prepares
well for either fate. Zeus brings the winter, but
also takes it back.

Even if times are bad, they won't always be so:
for Apollo doesn't always tense his bow,
but sometimes inspires the silent Muses.

When the straits are narrow, show yourself to be
undaunted and bold — yet wisely tuck your sails
when they're swelled by too strong a following wind.
(--Horace, c.27 BCE)

We can retrieve any original event in our lives, bring it to the present, and heal it with clear sight, forgiveness, and surrender.

We can only do it alone.

We can only do it together.

Only the solitude of community heals.

Up until the end, it is real.

At end, it is real.

Going on, without knowing, it is real.

If you return to the Truth,
To the emptiness of delusion,
You'll know that Buddha and man
Are not different.
Delusion is a butterfly
Plunging into the fire,
Enlightenment, a crane flying
From its cage.
- Buhyu Sunsoo (1543-1615)

From the beginning, it is real.

At origin, it is real.

Ever-present, originating source, is what is real.

See a smattering of photos from Sunday's dedication of The Thomas Merton Bookshed Retreat.

http://meetingbrookhermitageupdate.blogspot.com/2010/05/pentecost-dedication-of-thomas-merton.html

...........

We meet for first conversation in lower level of bookshed. It is the 6th and final session of premier Pilot to Practice about Benedictine Spirituality, Always We Begin Again.

Yesterday so many pitched in to complete walkway, set chairs, put out food, play music,read words A man with sturdy base voice, mowing lawn in front of chapel/zendo, raised his arm and declared, disproportionately, "We're going to make this look like the best goddamn monastery in the world."

The person who is free and easy
Beyond every boundary, is enlightened.
He doesn't hoe much,
But there are no weeds in his field.
- Jungkwan Haean (b 1567)

We're thinking the next PTP (Pilot to Practice) sessions might be called TOD (Talk of Death). For three or four weeks we'll talk of death, in general, experiences we've had with it, and feelings and thoughts of our own death. There's not enough talk about death. It might just be prelude to a richer experience of life.

Outside in the wind in the pines
The night air is cold,
And the sound of the well
Rises up and down.
I sit quietly, seeking Mind-in vain;
A serious disease struggles to comfort my mind.
- Jungkwan Haean (b 1567)

Maybe we are moving from old mind to new mind. It's possible. No longer seeing in fragments and opposites, antagonisms and antitheticals. Maybe not. Maybe it's wishful thinking.

Walking road past golf course by ocean in Rockport, it doesn't occur to watch out for tee shot danger having to overfly road to green by shore. I figure somewhere there's a sign telling me it will be my own fault if I am hit walking a public road.

I know what Middle Eastern men feel like stepping into any street where any discharge of weapon in their direction is their own fault for interfering with a super-power's task of making their land safe for our democracy.

No golf ball hit me. I listen to a short story about a Yiddish writer.

Lauds and nesting Phoebes occurred together this morning.

Prayer is love seeking no other place.

Deep white clouds blanket the ragged roof
Grateful for this old Zen friend's visit
I send him off at the gate
Both of us silent
Standing under the shade of the tall pine
Lingering.
- Jakushitsu (1290–1367)

Reading is entering the other with nothing in-between.

Entering the other with holy spirit is dwelling whole, still honoring the unique itselfness of the other, surrendering to idiorhythmic awareness emerging in its own time.

They will see the face of the Lord, and his name will be marked on their foreheads. There will be no more night: they will not need sunlight or lamp-light, because the Lord God himself will shine upon them.
(-- Apocalypse 22:4-5; from Sunday Compline)

Face to face sees no name. Nothing other than one's own reflective face. Brings light.

The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and strength, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of God came down upon the Lord, ...
(--from A treatise "Against the Heresies" by St Irenaeus, The sending of the Holy Spirit)

The gift is not to fear God. The gift is to fear what God fears.

What would God fear?

That anyone would harm themselves, another, the earth, any animal. That anyone would fall into illusion and begin to believe they were separate and detached from anything in the world, from any person, from one's self, from God. This is what God fears. Because when someone starts to believe the delusion of detachment there is a corresponding harm that slices across the body of being.

Mindlessness easily injures. Mindfulness helps heal.

The gift is to begin to dwell in the awareness of the Holy Spirit. There is nothing in-between. The Holy Spirit dwells as interconnective porous empathy filling what is there with creative truth and loving action.

Trust the face of the one before you.

Let heart be filled with nothing other than what it truly is: presence without distance, wholesight, and wise understanding.

It is Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is nothing in-between, making no-other a realization of love-itself.

The Thomas Merton Bookshed Retreat was dedicated today.

Stones fell to earth filled with prayer.

Shoveling 8.8 ton of crushed stone today.

17, 660 lbs of it.

With wings, I'll fly in the sky,
Like a fish, I'll dive into deep waters.
Only a fool reads his dream in a dream!
He doesn't know his body's in the furnace.
- Jungkwan Haean (b 1567)

You do things when you have to.

Everything hurts.

Tomorrow, on Pentecost Sunday, we'll dedicate the Thomas Merton Bookshed Retreat.

We'll wish upon a stone. We'll be blessed by it.

Between the stone and the ground there's nothing to be said by anyone not one or the other of them.

There's only the story told by the hearts of the falling stone and the receiving ground.

Creative blest. Take up thy rest.

What is the Holy Spirit?

Passion for creative truth?

The mind of a Wayfarer is plain and direct, without artificiality. There is no rejection and no attachment, no deceptive wandering mind. At all times seeing and hearing are normal. There are no further details. One does not, furthermore, close the eyes or shut the ears; as long as feelings do not stick to things, that will do.
- Kuei-Shan (771-854)

What if the Holy Spirit is the absence of fear? What if the absence of fear is no judgment? What if no judgment is love?

If love is freedom and truth with compassion is love, then the Holy Spirit is what you are when no one other is home.

Consider being awake and being asleep. Consider the world of illusion and the world of enlightenment. Consider form and emptiness.

There is nothing in-between.

That nothing is the Holy Spirit.

One and the other have no separation.

This no separation is nothing in-between.

See this, see the Holy Spirit.

Pentecost approaches.

Guilt is when we think we are responsible for things not being the way we think they should be.

The point is that things are always and only the way they are.

Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism – man is free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.
(-- from Existentialism Is a Humanism, by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1946)

The antidote to guilt is awareness.

To live without fear is to live with no judging.

To relinquish judgment is to live without fear.

That would be freeing.

The earth is already awake. It is man that sleeps.

Cut and drilled into, the blue cliff
Has lost its original beauty,
And frightens the birds,
And spills dirt into your eyes.
Nirvana has nothing to do with stones.
Enlightenment isn't limited to man.
Mountains, water, and earth
Are the Buddha's bodies.
- Jungkwan Haean (b 1567)

When man awakens, earth will take its long deserved rest.

Ground receives all patiently.

It is the intention to live aware of the movement of God through the distortions, distractions, and diversions which occur to the contemplative in the midst of the matrix seething with seeming and dissimilation. That intention is the heart of the spiritual life.

That intention is what some have called 'faith' without knowing that their term 'faith' might not be faith at all, but control in costume and disguise.

There is only uncertainty. That's where faith resides undetected by policy, police, and authority in any guise.

Evening mountains veiled in somber mist,
One path entering the wooded hill:
The monk has gone off, locking his pine door.
From a bamboo pipe a lonely trickle of water flows.
- Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672)

In the Benedictine tradition seven times a day there is a stopping to remember the intention to live in God even through chaos and even though creeds and critics say, "No, not here, somewhere else, look there, wherever that is."

As I ponder Merwin, a collaborating student sends me Eliot:

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment

Not a moment too soon.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
(--from poem, East Coker, by T.S. Eliot)

New and shocking valuation. Every moment. We refuse God when we try to sit God in some place we can explain.

TERM

At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through
all its uses and circumstances to
utter at last that meaning of its own
for which it had long been the only word
though it seems now that any word would do
(Poem by W.S. Merwin)

I remember poet Richard Hugo's valediction: "Take my word, it's been fun."

He never said which word. But we took it, whichever it was.

And are grateful for it.

Poetry, like our life, is...in a word, periphrastic.

(Dictionary: ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Greek periphrastikos, from periphrazein ‘declare in a roundabout way.’)

Do you think?

Metaphors annoy some folks. They're so... associative.

His disciples said to Jesus, ‘Now you are speaking plainly and not using metaphors! Now we see that you know everything, and do not have to wait for questions to be put into words; because of this we believe that you came from God.’ (from John 16:29-33)

Heidegger said the past is before us. Not prior to, but stretching ahead of us. Funny thought, eh?

Jesus answered them:
‘Do you believe at last?
Listen; the time will come – in fact it has come already –
when you will be scattered,
each going his own way and leaving me alone. (Ibid)

Maybe Jesus wanted to be left alone. I like the idea he might have said, "Leave me alone!"

Scatter. Go your own way. Believe at. Last.

Once you've heard the word 'what-is' (German 'was ist') -- what is 'vorhanden' ('right there') -- there's no one to lead nor anyone to follow. Christ knew what he was... saying what is right before us.

Know one thing, know everything. Even as it comes to be before and beyond us.

Seek your own Buddha within.

No need to ask others about your father.

If you glimpse your mother's original face,

You'll know everything is Buddha.
- Jaewol Kyunghun (1542-1632)

Associate with peacemakers.

I belong to the HERE Church. It exists between my Catholic Christian Contemplative practice/faith and my Buddhist Engaged Meditative practice/faith. HERE stands for "Help each revere each."

There's only one requirement: You have to be there to be here.

Be human. Dasein.

Here there.

We are being spoken.

"It is not we who speak language, but language which speaks us." (George Steiner quoting Martin Heidegger)

Say what you will, we remain what God is speaking.

Every sound, beat, and arrhythmic fluttering skip.

Ellipses in a kindred loving sentence...

Speech and act reveal our fate.

Tonight we watch the 1997 Academy Award-nominated documentary directed by William Gazecki, Waco: Rules of Engagement, as well as final segments of MSNBC's The [Timothy] McVeigh Tapes.

Horrible and horrible. (Not the film or tapes, both were engaging, but the underlying deception of the ATF and FBI in the first, and the course of stated/actual response by McVeigh in the second.)

The government and the former soldier.

It's little wonder trust -- as well as language -- has been pulverized.

Augustine of Hippo said:

"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are."

(As quoted in Spirituality and Liberation: Overcoming the Great Fallacy (1988) by Robert McAfee Brown, p. 136)

Thomas Merton said,

"But first we realize that we are going to have to create a new language of prayer.'

(from closing statements and prayer from an informal address delivered in Calcutta, India (October 1968), from The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, 1975)

Trust no one?

No, trust the one not asking for trust. One displaying authentic words not trying to convince, excuse, or explain. Language must be allowed to speak for itself and thereby act for itself. We know true sound.

Trust the one whose acts are right and true in harmony with wholeness of sight. No cameras, no payoff, no applause, no promotion or public relations coup attached. We know correct action.

Our time is out of joint. It is halved and quartered. What we know in our profound and hidden center of being is flayed and minced by opportunistic, heartless, and core-less demagogues.

It is a harsh and dangerous time. Nevertheless, we must be prepared for larger and more devious lies.

But, take heart.

Silence originates authentic speech.

Stillness is ever-present origin of healing act.

Prayer pushes through the hardest ground, springing a deeper more redolent hope.

From down the hall in emergency room last evening a lament of tears that continued for a while.

In the sound of this weeping there is for me only the act of prayer.

The Strangeness of Mountains after Rain



When rain-washed coils of mountain

Appear in the sky


A refreshing wind sweeps away


The fog and clouds. 

Where did you acquire the mastery

Of Yongmyon


To paint exquisite beauty

Beyond human art? 

- Jaewol Kyunghun (1542-1632)

Perhaps the Ascension is the realization nothing remains as it was, there's a need to transcend into the facticity of the sacred -- human, natural, everyday reality. Where kindness is kindled.

We are grateful for relief from any suffering and sorrow.

The heart grows weary only when it forgets compassion.

I've thought about this.

consequence [ˈkɒnsɪkwəns]
n
1. a result or effect of some previous occurrence
2. an unpleasant result (esp in the phrase take the consequences)
3. (Philosophy / Logic) significance or importance it's of no consequence a man of consequence
4. (Philosophy / Logic) Logic
a. a conclusion reached by reasoning
b. the conclusion of an argument
c. the relations between the conclusion and the premises of a valid argument
5. the relation between an effect and its cause
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/consequence

Contemplate 'not.'

Not a result. Not unpleasent. Not by reasoning. Not a conclusion. Not a syllogism. Not cause and effect.

God is what is God.

Questions accepted.

No one here.

No one there.

Still, God is.

Every.

Where.

Is.

Inconsequential. That's what we are. Inconsequential.

Nothing to follow.

I can't sleep on the pavilion,

With the lonely lamp burning

On the wall. 


An occasional breath of air 

Outside the window, 


The falling sound of

Pine cones in the yard.

- Jungkwan Ilson (1533-1608)

Perhaps God is inconsequential.

Nothing follows God.

Nothing before, nothing after.

Nothing other. No other.

God.

Of which.

We are.

Monastics.