Cold sitting; warm (enough) experience

The zen of D.T. Suzuki is in the fire.

Empirically speaking, our existence.

Explicated.

This is not a test

All we can do is become aware that all we can do is not much.

Reading Vanity Fair article from August 2006, "9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes," by Michael Bronner,
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/08/norad200608.

It's not much. But we do what we can.

The stories some tell afterwards. . . . Well, that's another story.

New and unforeseeable

Carrying wood in from barn five a.m. the thought occurs: if Panikkar is right and cosmotheandric spirituality is our new awareness, then I am walking god through barn, carrying god to woodstove, and placing god on glowing embers in still warm enamel box. If this is so, the wind whipping flags hanging from buildings, the pinpoint white of distant stars in frigid sky, and futile labors of basement furnace all are the shared revelations of one god seen from the perspective of one sharing god with all that is.

Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha are about anything, they are about a profound understanding of identity and the broadest possible meaning of liberty—teachings that sooner or later had to appeal to a people for whom suffering and loss were their daily bread.  (--from Charles Johnson, "A Sangha by Another Name")

 What usefulness is such an awareness of the inseparability of all Being? Would such an identity change how this mind-fragmented world has splintered wholeness into shards of dangerous brokenness?

Dialogue is important for Panikkar but not purely mechanical or informative dialogue but rather what he calls “dialogical dialogue” which leads to recognizing difference but also to what we have in common, which in the end produces mutual fecondation. Dialogue is not a luxury for mankind, it is something absolutely necessary and inter-religious dialogue plays an important role. By this Panikkar does not mean an abstract theoretical dialogue, a dialogue about beliefs, he means a deep-reaching human dialogue in which one seeks the collaboration of the other for mutual realization since wisdom consists in being able to listen. Religion is not an experiment for him, it is an experience, an experience of life through which one is part of the cosmic adventure, with neither worry nor anxiety. This, for example, leads him to put forward the notion of “identity”. He was once asked during an interview: “Where do you find your identity?” His answer was:” By losing it rather than looking for it: by not wanting to hold onto an identity which has not yet been fulfilled and therefore is impossible to find in the past because it would only be a copy of something old. Life is a risk; adventure is radical innovation; creation comes about day after day, it is something absolutely new and unforeseeable”.(--from, Laudatio of Raimon Panikkar Alemany during the solemn academic ceremony of his investiture as Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Girona. Presented by Prof. Josep-Maria Terricabras, sponsor of the new Doctor. http://www.raimon-panikkar.org/english/laudatio.html)

I must, then, be content that "something absolutely new and unforeseeable" is entering from barn to Wohnkuche then slipping back to this writing space as early cars come down Barnestown road from Hope.

There are, I suspect, many ways to praise god and pray with god for peace and light and requisite warmth for all beings creaturely splayed and displayed throughout earth and cosmos. 

The faint blowing air from antiquated registers and workman gas furnace is one example of honest labor seeking to alleviate discomfort and chill. 

In hospital yesterday morning visiting patients, I stand in the field of unknowing with them. We punctuate time for those moments -- an identity unforeseen, surprising, new, and creating itself.

Martin Luthor King said he only wished to do God's will.

As it is.

In heaven

And on earth.

Throughout all.

Of Being.

In the wind

Space is not nothing. It is curved and fabric'd and full of emptiness.

Not unlike ourselves.

It does make you wonder. Even a little bit. About what we are.

WIND ADVISORY
Now - Sunday, Jan 20, 7:00pm...WIND ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 9 AM THIS MORNING TO 7 PM EST THIS EVENING...THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN GRAY HAS ISSUED A WIND ADVISORY... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 9 AM THIS MORNING TO 7 PM EST THIS EVENING.* WINDS...SOUTHWEST 20 TO 30 MPH WITH GUSTS UP TO 55 MPH.* TIMING...MID MORNING THROUGH EARLY EVENING.* IMPACTS...DOWNED TREES AND OR POWER LINES.PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...A WIND ADVISORY MEANS STRONG WINDS OF 31 TO 39 MPH OR GUSTS OF 46 TO 57 MPH CAN LEAD TO DAMAGE DUE TO DOWNED TREE LIMBS AND SCATTERED POWER OUTAGES.

Perhaps we are gusts of wind on unsettled days. Or, maybe, breathless stillness at times of deep settled peace. We might even be intakes of breath between phrases of song that have chosen us to form their ephemeral melodies of an evening's enchantment. There's no predicting nor controlling where we, a passing instant of earth breathing itself as gift with no guarantee of another to follow, will find ourselves after next exhalation.

Abandoning Futile Endeavors 

To look for total satisfaction in oneself is a futile endeavor. Since everything changes from moment to moment, where can self and where can satisfaction be found? Yet these are two things that the whole world is looking for and it sounds quite reasonable, doesn’t it? But since these are impossible to find, everybody is unhappy. Not necessarily because of tragedies, poverty, sickness, or death: simply because of unfilled desire. Everybody is looking for something that isn’t available.
- Ayya Khema, “No Satisfaction

Wind and wonder have myriad names. Yours. Mine. God's.

Marvel is that we find pause to reflect on the transient puff of movement we are in a vast and near completely incomprehensible cosmic magniverse.

I hear cats' running feet along floor above. I hear myself in the settled stillness of this pre-dawn darkness. I hear your silence glancing from your eyes on these words in your thoughts within your breath asking a question voice will not speak.

The wind, it is said, blows where it wills. Freely, some say.

There is a phrase used when someone has escaped their confinement and are unaccounted for.

"In the wind."

We are, "In the wind."

Yes! That's it.

Look for each, look fo each one of us, passing through, out of sight, merely heard and faintly felt.

Not unlike that last fleeting forgetting imagined breeze we wondered about thinking itself a thought suspecting itself a visit in a dream itself a wisp going by itself recalling nothing itself passing...

Gone...as it will...go!

What time is it

The morning has its own way.

"Minutis minuendis (in a smaller yet corresponding way), every person represents and symbolizes all of reality." (p.141, A Dwelling Place For Wisdom, By Raimundo Panikkar, c.1995)

 Mutatis mutandis (only the necessary changes having been made) we appear together appearing in our difference.

Christianity is convinced that it bears a message of integral salvation for Man and thus sees itself as the fullness of all religion and the perfection of each religion.
. . . It should be clear from the very beginning that the Christian attitude not only does not contradict the corresponding Hindu attitude, but elicits in it a homeomorphic way,* for, just as if I really love you I will have to allow you to love me, so if I want to communicate the best I have to you -- even if I want to convert you -- I will have to let you also communicate your best to me -- even to the point of converting me.
[* By homeomorphism we understand the 'topologically' corresponding (analogous) function (a functional equivalent) within another setting, Hinduism in this case. Cf. R. Panikkar, the Intrareligious Dialogue, p.xxii.] (--from The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, by Raimundo Panikkar, c.1964) 

Winter zendo is chilly. Snow falls surrounding. Rokie yawns, white on his white, in front of gas fireplace. Tibetan incense sifts up through holes in burner box. We are alone this morning. Our journey here is short -- out through barn, up short rise to Merton Retreat, around to door, to where we are, always here.

I delay arriving at seiza bench to finish these words, a privilege of solitude. Yesterday it came over me (again) how what is needed is a deeper experience of the primal awareness at origin of the many spiritual traditions found throughout the world and time and history. Even the symbols and images, icons and antiphons, mudras and stillnesses, bows and prostratations, chants and processions, beads and benches, suras and sutras, huts and temples, cathedrals and poustinias -- all these are the breath of participation in the here-holy!

I have fallen in love with the presence of everything. Even those things alerted as not my preference, I am learning to affirm. 'Difference' is a valued guest over coffee or tea. We sit with each other, lending and borrowing insight and intuition amid harmony and discord.

We read a letter from an inmate friend disclosing crimes and categories of classification not until now shared after years of sitting together. Yes, this is his facticity; yes, this is my mit-zein. He sends a poem about children sleighing hill by the Androscoggin River, homage to children of Newtown Connecticut.

Cody is let out through the barn and Rokie is released from zendo to greet him. The big boisterous German Shepherd is a goofy gift following the death of his mistress, Erika. He is one of those 'differences' in my perspective.

This space is still chilly. The small stove will work all day and be ready for the Sunday morning Quakers who will sit warmly with silence.

The ending bells will soon chime. I only sat on seiza a brief spell -- such delight in change of routine -- this big chair, these words, the twisting plume of fragrance, the rumination.

The white Border Collie is back at door. He knows what time it is!

Show me; what is real, what is true

It's not what we know; it's that we're willing to show. Appear. Show up. Present ourselves.

And enter the fray. Enter dialogue. Enter unknowing.

How Hegel structures and presents, from the viewpoint of the stage of the beautiful, as the stage of abstraction, the history of Greek philosophy, will not be further illustrated here. Instead, we will follow a short indication of Hegel's interpretation of four fundamental words of Greek philosophy. They speak the language of the key word "being", 'einai' ('eon','ousia'). They speak in ensuing western philosophy constantly up to our own times.
In the enumeration as translated by Hegel,, the four fundamental words decree: 1.'En', the whole; 2. 'Logos', reason; 3.'Idea', the concept; 4. 'Energeia', actuality. 

'En' is the word of Parmenides.
'Logos' is the word of Heraclitus.
'Idea' is the word of Plato.
'Energia' is the word of Aristotle. 

To understand how Hegel interprets these fundamental words we must attend to the following two points: on the one hand, to that which for Hegel is decisive within the interpretation of the aforementioned philosophers in contrast to what he mentions in passing. Secondly, the manner in which Hegel interprets the four fundamental words within the horizon of the key word "being". 

In the introduction of his Lectures on The History of Philosophy (Hoffmeister a.a.O., S. 240) Hegel explains: "The first universal is the immediate universal, that is, being. The content, the object is therefore objective thought, the thought of what is." Hegel means: being is the pure state of thought of what is immediately thought, without the reflectiveness of thinking that thinks this thought apart from its notification (Ermittelung). The determination of pure thought is "the indeterminate", its notification is the immediate. So understood, being is the immediate indeterminate representation in general,in such a manner, indeed, that it keeps awy from itself the omission of determination and mediation, as it were, inveighs against them. Out of this, it becomes clear: being as the first simple objectivity of the object is thought starting from its relation to the thinking subject thanks to the pure abstraction of the latter. It is important to note this, first of all, to understand the direction according to which Hegel interprets the four philosophers in question, but likewise to measure the power that Hegel attributes each time to the fundamental words. 

Parmenides' fundamental word is 'hen', the one, that which unites all, and so the universal. Parmenides explains 'semanta', the sign, through which 'hen' shows itself, in the great Fragment VIII with which Hegel is acquainted . Nevertheless, Hegel finds the "highest thought" of Parmenides not in 'hen', being as the universal. The "highest thought" according to Hegel is rather ennunciated in the statement:"Being and thought are the same". Hegel interprets this statement namely in the sense: being as "the thought, there is" ("der Gedanke, der ist") is a production of thought. Hegel draws from Parmenides' statement a prefiguration of Descartes, with whose philosphy the determination of being out of the essentially positing subject begins. Accordingly Hegel will explain: "With Parmenides has philosophy proper begun.. This beginning is certainly still nebulous and indeterminate"(WW XIII, S.296f.). 

Heraclitus' fundamental word is 'logos', the gathering, that allows the display and appearance of everything that is, the totality of entities. 'Logos' is the name that Heraclitus gives to the being of entities. But Hegel's interpretation does not orient itself strictly from out of the 'logos'. This is peculiar, very peculiar given that Hegel concludes his preface to the interpretation of Heraclitus with the words: "there is not a proposition from Heraclitus that is not contained in my Logic" (a.a.O.S. 328) From the point of Hegel's Logic, the 'logos' is reason in the sense of absolute subjectivity. But the Logic itself is the speculative dialectic by means of which the movement of the immediate universal and the abstract, being as the objective , is reflected in its opposition to the subject. And this reflection is determined as mediation in the sense of becoming, wherein this opposition is returned to itself, made concrete, and brought to unity. To conceive this unity is the essence of speculation that develops as dialectic. 

(--From Conference of the Academy of Sciences at Heidelberg, July 26, 1958, Hegel and the Greeks, by Martin Heidegger) http://www.morec.com/hegelgre.htm

So much to be considered. For example, each other.

Let us pray!

CONCLUDING PRAYER
Attend to the pleas of your people with heavenly care,
O Lord, we pray,
that they may see what must be done
and gain strength to do what they have seen.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
– Amen.
(--from Office of Readings, Friday morning)

Judy said we are all an extension of God. Creation is the extension of God. We are creation temporarily manifest. God is what is appearing through what is here to be seen.

Mountain. Dog. Cat. Another dog. Another cat. Woman. Man. Buddha. Christ. Holy Relationality. Icons all.

All windows through which what is true and what is real longs to shine through.

We are blessed!

Directly encountering

Ideology is not the answer.

Not even concepts.

In the second century, Nagarjuna wrote The Madhyamika Sastra, in which he used concepts to destroy concepts. He was not trying to create a new doctrine, but to break all the bottles, all the flasks, all the vases, all the containers, to prove that water needs no form to exist. He outlined a dance for us, a dance for us to drop our categories and barriers so that we can directly encounter reality and not content ourselves with its mere reflection.
(--From THE SUN MY HEART, From Mindfulness to Insight Contemplation, by Thich Nhat Hanh, c.1988)

Water.

Water is the teacher.

Direct experience, like water, seeks humble ground.

Mine eyes have looked at...

Be careful what you look at.

You become what you see.

Look with love at love.

Interruption [of friendship] is disappointing but unavoidable

I have friends I've not seen or spoken to for years. For decades. Some for half a century.

This does not lead me to ask if friendship is friendship if it is not practiced in the open and full of bonhomie with pledges of affection, affiliation, and propinquity. Friendship is equally a thing of quiet and spacious distance whose nearness is the air we breath, the sky we see, the ground underfoot. Connection is everything; and all is connected, at all times, in all places, with the realization no time no space separates what is real. Interruption, yes; irrevocable separation, no!

3. IVO.You are right. I am most grateful to realize that you are concerned about your son. Nothing but the spirit of charity has opened my mind and its thoughts to you. Would that your kindness might grant me this favor, that whenever you visit your sons who are here I might have recourse to you alone just once, with no others present, and lay bare without interruption the ardor of my heart.3 

4. AELRED. I shall gladly comply. I am delighted to see that you are not prone to empty and idle talk, that you always introduce something useful and necessary for your progress. Speak then with out anxiety. Share with a friend all your thoughts and cares, that you may have something either to learn or to teach, to give and to receive, to pour out and to drink in. 

5. IVO. I am ready not to teach but to learn, not to give but to receive, not to pour out but to drink in, as my youth prescribes, my inexperience demands, and my monastic profession counsels. But lest on these distinctions I should unwisely waste the time needed for other matters, would you teach me something about spiritual friendship? What is it? What values does it offer? What is its beginning and its end? Can friendship exist among all persons? If not among all, then among whom? How can it remain unbroken and so without any troubling disagreement reach a blessed end? 

6. AELRED. I wonder why you think I should be asked these questions. Obviously all of them were treated more than adequately by the greatest teachers of old. I wonder why especially, when you have spent your boyhood on studies of this kind and have read Tullius Cicero’s volume On Friendship, where in an engaging style he fully treated everything that seems to relate to friendship and gave a sort of outline of some of its laws and precepts.
(P.56, Spiritual Friendship, by Aelred of Rievaulx)

The unbroken nature of friendship becomes apparent in the longing of heart for the friend. Time, distance, circumstance -- these are accidents of existence that color but do not remove the canvas of friendship once it has been marked. Canvas ages, weathers, dulls, and cracks. Still, what has begun continues in its own hue with its own perspective of changed clarity and shifted stance. Pentimento.

I have loved what I could not sustain and deepen at its time of origin. The tenderness of a friend's eyes, the timbre and tone of confiding voice, the ambling meander of strolling conversation through evolving and deepening spiritual friendship -- these etch themselves on both conscious soul and dormant self. I have been asleep during nascent love, unaware during another's reaching hand, distracted during someone's request for simple presence and honest response. For this, I am sorry. For this disappointment, I relent. For this abandonment, I linger in the solitude of slowly emerging awareness, and silently touch the surrounding forgiving emptiness of repentant recollection.

68. AELRED. Have you forgotten that Scripture says “a friend loves always”?64 As you recall, our Jerome also said, “friendship that can end was never true.”65 Sufficient and more than sufficient proof has also been given that friendship cannot subsist without charity. Since in friendship, then, eternity may flourish, truth light the way, and charity delight, see for yourself whether you should withhold the name of wisdom where these three coexist.69. 

IVO. To what does this lead? Should I say of friendship what John, the friend of Jesus, said of charity,“God is friendship”?66,70. 

AELRED.This is novel indeed and lacks the authority of the Scriptures.The rest of that verse about charity,however,I surely do not hesitate to attribute to friendship, because the one who remains in friendship remains in God, and God in him.67 This you will perceive more clearly when we begin our dialogue on the fruit or value of friendship.Now if in our guileless simplicity we have spoken enough about the nature of friendship, let us reserve for another time the remain ing questions you suggested for consideration.71. 

IVO. When I am so keen to learn, this interruption is disappointing but unavoidable, as I am summoned to supper, which I am not allowed to miss, and you must meet your obligations to the many who wait in line for your attention.
Here Ends the First Book on Spiritual Friendship(P.69, Spiritual Friendship, by Aelred of Rievaulx; translation of De Spirituali Amicitiâ by Lawrence Braceland, sj)

Many ask, 'Why is God so difficult?' Perhaps IVO hints at it when he says, "God is friendship."

And we are neverendingly interrupting God.

We break the continuity, but we cannot sever the reality.

Reality, is, I suspect, that what is, is as it is, eternally and infinitely.

This morning I am here with all friends. Those near, those far.

Still, all here.

This . . . this instills joy!

We/you, we/you, up we/you!

What is love?

Love tries to transform everything into itself by leaving everything as it is.

To extract: Love tries to transform, leaving everything; into itself, as it is.

Love turns everything into itself by leaving everything as it is.

To wit: Love turns everything, leaving everything; as it is, into itself.

Love is what is.

Love is what is itself.

No subject, no object.

Just, and only, merely: Itself.

Go ahead, ask yourself: What am I?

Go ahead, answer yourself: Love is the question/answer.

If we must ask, and we must: Be what you ask; Be what you answer.

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

The word "ame" gives a clue. I am me. I ame.

"Ame," in Latin and Old French, means "soul" or "spirit." In Romani it means "we."

We/you, we/you, up we/you!

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

Coming at this sideways, there are two songs found on YouTube:

Two different songs; two views of a similar "ame."

Song "Let Me In" sung by the United Pursuit Band.
"Look My Way,
Look My Way,
Look My Way,
Look My Way,
My Love."
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m4vRL_HwhM

Song Let Me In, sung by The Sensations.
"Whee-ooo, whee-ooo
Hoo-whee-oo.
Whee-ooo, whee-ooo, hoo-ooo-ooo, whee-ooo,
Whee-ooo."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjS-_09839E
(Lyrics under video, press ^)

Stepping aside to pray by oneself

From the center of what we call this apparent cosmos emerges mind. And from this mind emerges everything urging itself with imagination.

It is Sunday. Let there be Christian reflection of this imagination. Let it surround terrestrial, celestial, and far-stretching swirling vibration of matter forming stars, planets, suns, and clusters, galaxies and superclusters, all the observable universe, along with the invisible urge of Being to realize Itself in the center of everything, point vierge -- the virgin point of what is now, to be, and always at origin.

We are baptized into this emergence.

Waters of realization.

Through our nature.

Silence. And deep...

Stillness.

Translation, thou art our fate!

Is it: "Peace and good will to men"?

Or is it: "Peace to men of good will"?

The wording of the story from christian scripture (Luke2:14) of the angels announcing to shepherds the news of a birth, the way you translate it, determines your understanding of god, your attitude to other people, and the way you see yourself.

One translation implies that those lacking good will are not wished peace. They are outside the "glory" wished to god or the extension of its reach.

The other translation invites all into peace and good will. No one is outside the "glory" of god, which reaches to embrace everyone in their present and potential condition.

One pericope, two theologies; two versions of god and those who communicate god to humanity.

With one, you are either in or out. With the other, all surround and are surrounded by the invitation to inclusive intimacy.

God is either a rewarding/punishing god right from the get go; or god is gloriously accepting, patient, and suffering of everyone no matter their understanding, behavior, or belief.

The sentence that formed itself in the following expression last month for me arrives again here this morning: God is any act engaged upon with care, compassion, love, concern, or creativity in service to life.

As Christmas slides from consciousness with the ice and thaw of January, we are still busy trying to figure whether Santa Claus and Jesus are fictions of the good-or-bad mental mechanical exclusionary divisive mind; or if they are mythic multipliers of story creating community and inculcating inclusive benevolent compassionate heart.

The whole world is poised on the teetering edge of Luke two fourteen: concordances and dictionaries in hand, Talmudic scholars and Greek etymologists pondering, preachers and poets poring over fragments of feeling, police and politicians preparing arrest and legislation, courts and prisons polishing shackles for transport, psyches and memories lingering ladened with tortured ambivalence.

Meanwhile -- new coffee pot stands on kitchen stove waiting for first run spewing boiling water up through slender tube to saturate grounds dripping back down in an ever deepening fragrant brown nectar for whatever god you have chosen to sit and sip with you.

May your coffee be strong, your coffee klatch be companionable, and your god be the story the world needs!

Meanwhile -- zafu and zabuton prepare for silent conversation with emptiness in preparation for followup pouring of cup into stillness.

Nothing's gonna change . . . my world

Nada Brahman; God is sound.

What is heard is God.

The rest is interpretation and opinion.

Listen, then.

Listen to the sound of what is being heard.

There, there, is God.

The eternal, infinite, ever-present, originally aware reality moving through the cosmos with every aspect of the manifest and unmanifest . . . presence . . . Itself!

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
(--Galileo Galilei)

Nada Brahman; sound is God.

This is what is...

Resounding

If we could only

Hear, Here, Hari

Jai guru deva!

Aum. . .

Looking through itself; intimacy, connected-with: compassion

Sam read Mary Oliver and a spate of Romans. "Interplay" was a word he used. Cosmos' evolution and human evolution interplay with one another.

If there were nothing beyond the psychological, all the saints from Simon Stylites to the Poverello, to Benedict Joseph Labre, to Therese of Lisieux, would indeed make up a fools' parade. Yet there is no area in which the "nothing but," the reductive principle, is more absurd than the life of the spirit. Under that aspect the spirit evaporates, and life itself becomes reduced to a desiccated specimen.
Pascal has said: "Knowledge has two end points which touch one another: one is the pure, natural ignorance which all men have when they come into this world. At the other end are the great men who, after having traversed all human knowledge, know that they do not know, and who come back to their original state of ignorance; this, however, is a knowing ignorance, an ignorance which looks through itself. Those who have abandoned the first state of ignorance, and never reached the second one, have a varnish of saturated wisdom. They play the role of the initiated ones. They are the people who obscure the world. Their judgment is falser than anybody else's." These words are so appropriate whenever one comes across a study in which something which is of the supernatural order is boiled down to its psychological substrate. With few exceptions, most psychological studies which deal with the supernatural bear that stigma. Nevertheless, we have to admit one thing: the psychological plane and the spiritual plane are not independent of each other. On the contrary, they are most intimately connected.
(--pp. 165-166, in The Third Revolution, A Study of Psychiatry and Religion, by Karl Stern, c.1954)

We have to learn to play

With, not against, one another,

On the field of stillness.

When Francis and Dogen lived apart together

To allow. To say "yes." To fall into compassion.

Heart to heart.

Drops away mind.

And body.

No one is to be called an enemy, all are your benefactors, and no one does you harm. You have no enemy except yourselves. 

(--Francis of Assisi, 1181-1226)

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water. Enlightenment does not divide you, just as the moon does not break the water. You cannot hinder enlightenment, just as a drop of water does not hinder the moon in the sky. The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection, however long or short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky.

(--Dogen Zenji, 1200-1253)

What is emerging; now

 Perhaps the time for institutions of spirituality has drawn short. If not in general, then, for specific individuals. Remnant and dominant minorities, said Toynbee, exert powerful retentive and retaliatory power.

The clench of no-option grasp has loosened and falls away. A cultural change is underway. Over-worked and under-enriched priests laden with mop-up/patch-up duties try to remember their original calling, and are drenched with waters from Lethe. 

Will there be an aggiornamento, a spirit of change and open-mindedness, that visits the people, bypassing the caste created to run the institution, and weaving a course fresh and fluid down the hill from the contemporary calvary of snuffed inspiration? Is it even necessary to contemplate continuance? 

Or will a mutating creativity launch new phylums of φιλοσοφία (philosophia), which literally means "love of wisdom"?

     Our task and our responsibility are to assimilate the wisdom of bygone traditions and, having made it our own, to allow it to grow. Life is neither repetition nor continuation. It is growth, which implies at once rupture and continuity. Life is creation.

     If creation is an act of contemplation, as Plotinus says, real growth would be to reenact  in a contemplative way our partnership in the very creative activity of reality:

And Nature, asked why it brings forth its works, might answer, if it cared to listen [to our queries] and to speak: It would have been better not to ask but to understand and to be silent just as I myself am silent and have no habit of talking.*

The philosopher goes on, questioning Nature and answering in her name:

And what have we to understand? This; that whatsoever comes into being is my vision, seen in my silence. . . . The geometricians from their vision draw their figures: but I draw nothing: I just contemplate [θεωρoυσης] and the figures of the material world take being as if they fell from my contemplation.*           (*Plotinus, Enneads, III, 8, 4) 

(--from Preface, p.xxvii, The Rhythm of Being, by Raimon Panikkar) 

It's not that I seldom enter a church these days. It's more that there's an empty space beyond those doors  when the worshipful gather in their liturgy of repetitive continuation. Curiously, that same space, when not occupied by the faithfully assembled, serves a different field of emptiness that is rich, still, silent, and profound.

The emptiness of church is an equivocal evocation. It cuts dyadically. Where nothing happens; or, where nothing happens. "Nothing," or emptiness, happens when all expectations of something "other" drop. In that dropping comes connection with ground. Ground of being. Original awareness. Some call it "God." A good word. Especially when not co-opted or patented by any group claiming proprietary exclusivity.

I salute the men and women working to prolong, revive, or serve the structure that has long served and recently dis-served the public. A lengthy failing seems to be stretching onto an unclear horizon. 

I'm not sure those who say it is an unChristian slide and nefarious suggestion that the church grows empty in an unprofound manner. I prefer the possibility that it is an invitation into profundity itself beckoning. The new realization of emptiness signals new readiness to abandon the divisions and divisiveness of duality for a new thing -- for non-dual awareness of origin permeating time and eternity toward realization of non-triadic union: divinity, humanity, and cosmos -- dancing in and out, within and through one another in a compassionate creativity of concern and care, love in service to life. Any act engaged upon with such abandon is the movement of God through, with, and in this emerging now.

This is our life together.

This is our contemplation.

Our correlative conversation.

Activity of creative presence!

It's...complicated

Evening descends. Light crawls under ground snow.

Someone, in conversation, allows as how they'd never heard of Building 7 collapsing on 9/11. Curiously, this does not surprise me. I tell the facts, the fantastic explanations, and the phenomenal ambiguation following the event.

Something unsettling lingers. But time stretches, as they say, forward. There is a dark shadow shading our souls. Disambiguation is drunk and despondent in a dark corner of our mental barroom. It cannot focus. It slurs its thought. It is unsightly.

Time will come when light will illumine the ashes and resurrect our longing for a more coherent conversation about that stumbling September Tuesday.

Darker, still, our civic psyche grows into night.

Epiphany: That which is; showing-through appearance

Long hours of conversation with S and C (recuperating former student, when they return from Tolle talk shown in Camden library), about retrieving original awareness down through ascending accretions of experience, words, concepts, context, conditioning and slanted interpretation, societal and cultural trending, chaotic diffusic survival daily necessity. It is an archeological dig undertaken by remnant of true self looking for its wholeness covered by layers of time, space, and forgetfulness.

Can what is originally there be retrieved? Is wisdom the willingness to see and retrieve what is there?
"What Is, There."

Before the puzzle was boxed and readdressed
To the puzzle shop in the mid-Sixties,
Something tells me that one piece contrived
To stay in the boy’s pocket. How do I know?
I know because so many later puzzles
Had missing pieces—Maggie Teyte’s high notes
Gone at the war’s end, end of the vogue for collies,
A house torn down; and hadn’t Mademoiselle
Kept back her pitiful bit of truth as well?
I’ve spent the last days, furthermore,
Ransacking Athens for that translation of “Palme.”
Neither the Goethehaus nor the National Library
Seems able to unearth it. Yet I can’t
Just be imagining. I’ve seen it. Know
How much of the sun-ripe original
Felicity Rilke made himself forego
(Who loved French words—verger, mûr, parfumer)
In order to render its underlying sense.
Know already in that tongue of his
What Pains, what monolithic Truths
Shadow stanza to stanza’s symmetrical
Rhyme-rutted pavement. Know that ground plan left
Sublime and barren, where the warm Romance
Stone by stone faded, cooled; the fluted nouns
Made taller, lonelier than life
By leaf-carved capitals in the afterglow.
The owlet umlaut peeps and hoots
Above the open vowel. And after rain
A deep reverberation fills with stars.

Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?

But nothing’s lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it
(Or found—I wander through the ruin of S
Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness)
And in that loss a self-effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory.

(--from poem, Lost in Translation, by James Merrill http://jeremygregg.com/quotes/lost-in-translation-by-james-merrill-poem/

Nothing's lost. "Nothing" is all there is.

From which creation.

With which emptiness.

Through which movement.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced - even a proverb is not a proverb till your life has illustrated it. (John Keats)

About which more later. That "more" being our reaching into original awareness to retrieve the vibrating élan vital of originating dream emergent presence itself.

There.

Here.

Nowhere else.

Epiphany!

Dance, dance, wherever you may be!

"Dwelling within one another," is the meaning of "perichoresis."

Life is a dance.... This choral dance is a combination of harmony and rhythm, Plato says. It reminds us of the Trinitarian perichoresis, the cosmic and divine dance. Siva is Nataraja, the dancing god. The dance is his creation. Dance is practically for all popular religions the most genuine human sharing in the miracle of creation.... We all participate in rhythm because rhythm is another name of Being and Being is Trinity. 

(--Ramon Panikkar, the Rhythm of Being, p.37)

God is emerging now.

God is now being spoken.

At origin, everything is retrievable.

Brook ice

Water flowing down Ragged Mountain shyly passes under cover.

Let us pass so unnoticed.

Flowing, being heard, passing beneath form.

Community means we am I

No one suffers alone.

The illusion is when the thought occurs: "I am suffering."

We are suffering.

Think again.

Cold morning

I see icy window.

What you see is what you'll forgo

According to the readings, 0 degrees or -5 degrees, with wind chill feels like -16 degrees. At 3:42 a.m., another log into wood stove in Wohnkuche. Two dogs and two cats have opted to stay downstairs. That might have to do with their primary caregiver overnighting in southern Maine between visits to work places for numbers.

Working with Thoughts 

It is helpful at the beginning of your meditation practice to free yourself from the idea that in order to meditate properly you must have no thoughts. Instead, establish a different relationship with your thoughts so that over time they can fade more effortlessly into the background. All meditators have thoughts arising during their practice—it’s what you do with them that matters.
(- Bob Sharples, "Do the Thoughts Ever Stop?" In Tricycle Magazine)

Good advice.

Impermanence cares for everything.

There's no place...

Like home.

There's only home.

For heaven's sake, make it so!

The Pasture 

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too. 

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too. 

(Poem by Robert Frost)

We stand together at origin.

What shall we make of it?

Nothing.

Suffering is the sandpaper of our life. It does its work of shaping us. Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.

-- Ram Das 

Thank you for seeing this through!









 For seeing yourself, and me, through!

Poor resolve; little resolution

A Times opinion writer claims our fiscal difficulties are the fault of the voters. I should make a vow no longer to care what politicians and pundits say.
I'll wait for the new year.

Drat those voters!

We can try to make every Middle-East and Western Asian piece of geography into a United States territory by drone and assassination, or we can feed the hungry and care for the aged and infirm in our own country (even helping people elsewhere), but we cannot do both. Opting to colonize and control seems like our current and shaky strategy.

Voters think they are choosing care and compassion. But manipulators of post-election financing of hegemonic bellicosity are giving us war after war after fiscal fiasco.

It's a new year. Time for new vows.

Voters live in neighborhoods and towns in this country, not in voting booths nor in corporations. Time to change the manipulation into maturation and reign-in the money-mayhem crowd and install a new mutation, a dollars-for-decency-services sanity.

Want a new country? Maybe we should rename the one we have and thereby change the direction of our narrowing thought processes. We could call ourselves -- The United Cooperation of Consciousness!

Let's come home to where we live. Re-invigorate our good will. To "vote" is to "vow." Let's vow to care for each other in sickness and health, in good times and bad, until death takes us all.

Eluctable; an elocution with no "in" or "out"

The kabuki players screech to a halt at the preposterous cliff illusion of political theater and everyone is supposed to feel grateful.

There is no attempt to pretend that sham and subterfuge are not the year-end gimmicks permitting butchers' knives to slice away meat from sacred cow bone.

Everywhere anarchists, left and right, grind their teeth, toast the exiting and arriving year with bitter dregs from hollow barrel in damp cellars of the spirit.

Government is fatally compromised; long live the government!

Meanwhile, monks and nuns, hermits and solitaries, turn quietly to face the silence of a still and hospitable emptiness ascending from a cold and hardened ground under a dark and desolate sky reaching infinitely into nothing and nowhere named This Aware and Intimate Reality.

Once it was called "God."

Now it returns to its nameless ineffable indescribability, its clear gaze seeing everything as Itself.

Be at rest. Everything is falling apart. The center cannot fold.

What remains is your guess.

If I had to guess, I'd say "rum fruitcake" and be satisfied with such tasty elocution.

Our times

At end of year, a meditation about guns and preference:

Fear goes ballistic. Love is disarming.
We do not seem to be ready for the profound vulnerability love asks of us. Rather, we arm ourselves with the mistaken belief that murdering another satisfies fear. It doesn't. Fear is unsatisfiable, divisive, violent, and self-justifying. We recognize ourselves in these descriptions. We are a fearful nation poised on the brink of an all-out war waged against ourselves. Love sees this. Love weeps.
I implore the perpetrators of fear to consider their sorry success -- a frightened itchiness to close life in others.
I choose to live vulnerable and disarmed. The real success, I submit, is openness to life, no matter what.

Cat wonders about birds in blowing storm

If nothing
Else
There is this morning
Filled with snow
Warm fire, novel
Sweet lyrics that
Never grow old