What is in you is what is outside you once the veil falls away. Divination is the veil seen through

This

is

What-is

Here

for me. 

I have

nothing else.

Reflections

within

reflection.

This earth

this world.

As it is!

21st century inter-tradition interdenominational prayer

What

   Are

      We

         Doing

HERE

What comes of meditating

Nothing comes of meditating.

To the question: 'what is this?'

The response: 'this' is our life!

Here is all there is.

This is everything that is.

Now is what then becomes. 

Wholly aware yes.

Holy still silent nobody nowhere.

Of a day, conversation

1. No judgment

Is

Yes.

2. Returning 

Through the opposite

Is intimacy.

3. After experience

Not interpretation

Not emotion

But feeling awareness.

supposition

I've got to

Make it

Through 

The night --

No I

Don't 

evil, or, live

  Yes

A peregrinating sanyassin sends article from NYT’s The Stone about evil and what to do as response to it. An excerpt:

Ricoeur agrees with many other thinkers that evil is not a thing per se, but rather exists in a sort of black hole of thought, an aporia. This fact alone complicates arguments for the destruction of evil: how do you obliterate something that has no substance? For Ricoeur, we conceive of evil through the realm of myth, or grand narratives that express common human experience. Myth is not false; rather, it encapsulates truth about subjects like evil that cannot be perceived fully through reason alone. In this sense, “the axis of evil” is, arguably, a kind of myth, an explanation that makes sense of calamity in a world we think of as otherwise good and in which we can all participate. 

Because evil exists beyond the limits of reason, what matters for Ricoeur is not that we identify evil, but that we respond to it appropriately. He rightly observes that the tragedy of evil is not the act committed, but the experience of the victim. Separating evil perpetrated from evil suffered shifts the concern from what or who is evil to the best possible action in the face of it, which according to him is “not a solution, but a response.” 

In the common conception, solutions to evil require retribution, and the most obvious way to achieve retribution is through violence. Responses, on the other hand, engender what Ricoeur calls “wisdom,” an unwavering commitment to relieve and prevent suffering. Any violence used in a response to evil would, therefore, be focused on the alleviation of suffering rather than the attempt to stamp out evil where we think we see it. 

(--from, New York Times, “How Should We Respond to ‘Evil’?" by Steven PaulikasTHE STONE JUNE 27, 2016) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/opinion/how-should-we-respond-toevil.htmlmabReward=CTM&moduleDetail=recommendations0&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&region=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&src=recg&pgtype=article

Richard Rohr contributes in his writings with:

Change as a Catalyst for Transformation (Thursday, June 30, 2016 )

The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But transformation, the mystery we're examining, more often happens not when something new begins but when something old falls apart. The pain of something old falling apart--chaos--invites the soul to listen at a deeper level. It invites and sometimes forces the soul to go to a new place because the old place is falling apart. Otherwise, most of us would never go to new places. The mystics use many words to describe this chaos: fire, darkness, death, emptiness, abandonment, trial, the Evil One. Whatever it is, it does not feel good and it does not feel like God. You will do anything to keep the old thing from falling apart. This is when you need patience, guidance, and the freedom to let go instead of tightening your controls and certitudes. Perhaps Jesus is describing this phenomenon when he says, "It is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it" (Matthew 7:14). Not accidentally, he mentions this narrow road right after teaching the Golden Rule. Jesus knows how much letting go it takes to "treat others as you would like them to treat you" (7:12).  

Transformation usually includes a disconcerting reorientation. Change can either help people to find a new meaning, or it can cause people to close down and turn bitter. The difference is determined by the quality of your inner life, what we call your "spirituality." Change of itself just happens; but spiritual transformation must become an actual process of letting go, living in the confusing dark space for a while, and allowing yourself to be spit up on a new and unexpected shore. You can see why Jonah in the belly of the whale is such an important symbol for many Jews and Christians.  

In the moments of insecurity and crisis, "shoulds" and "oughts" don't really help; they just increase the shame, guilt, pressure, and likelihood of backsliding. It's the deep yeses that carry you through. Focusing on something you absolutely believe in, that you're committed to, will help you wait it out. Love wins over guilt any day. It is sad that we settle for the short-run effectiveness of shaming people instead of the long-term life benefits of grace-filled transformation. But we are a culture of progress and efficiency, impatient with gradual growth. God's way of restoring things interiorly is much more patient--and finally more effective. God lets Jonah run in the wrong direction, but finds a long, painful, circuitous path to get him back where he needs to be--and almost entirely in spite of himself! Looking in this rear-view mirror fills you with gratitude for God's work in your life. 

 http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?m=1103098668616&ca=a3bd44fe-8397-4004-a7c4-95c959faeb2e

Steven Paulikas had earlier pointed out in The Stone article:

As it turns out, there is a difference between good theology and bad theology — at least if we consider the exponential escalation of violence to be a bad thing. The almost 3,000 deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks were answered by an estimated 460,000 deaths in Iraq alone, including more American combatant deaths than civilians who died in the World Trade Center. Despite this high cost, evil is, if we accept a point on which O’Reilly actually agrees with President Obama, as plentiful in the region as it ever was and just as threatening to the United States.  (--Op cit)

Evil is responding to evil with evil. A black hole sucking light in and calling the bleak darkness our honor, glory, and sacrifice. It is a mistake to misname actions with intent to make what is wrong appear to appear right.

Surely, some revelation is at hand?

What would a fundamental change in our thinking look like?

Can evil be transformed? Or, perhaps, reversed into our willingness to ‘live’ transformatively with those suffering?

That was then

Twenty years ago today

Bookshop and bakery

On camden harbor

Opened

Staying that way

For thirteen years

Thanks Peter thanks Paul 

all of this is intertwined

There are phrases here,"binary, spectrum; post-truth politics" that feel new to my hearing. So, naturally, I hear them all over the place all at once. To wit:

Boris Johnson does not show up to the Commons; he is busy, presumably. But watch how the Tories are realigning. They can do this post-truth politics, where you say one thing and mean another; where you stab someone in the front as you do the old-boy handshake; where you are accountable to the few, not the many, and you don’t really pretend otherwise. There is a political agility here – some call it “Trumpism”, some psychosis – but recognise it if you want to understand it. It is unencumbered by “truth”, “authenticity” and “beliefs”, which is why the bloodletting over Jeremy Corbyn’s “leadership” is ever more sad. 

The left is still talking in a series of binaries that no longer apply and are no longer helpful. The referendum was, of course, the false binary that bust them. In or out of Europe. You couldn’t be a little bit in, as most now seem to want. It was always destined to be a protest against the life-sucking effects of globalisation. It has unleashed horrendous racism. To say we choose, somehow, between race and class is just dumb. All of this is intertwined and remains in play. 

Now, to see Labour re-enacting some Blair/Brown war a zillion years later is another totally dysfunctional binary. Most Labour MPs are on a spectrum. Most people are and, if we cannot move beyond that, we are, as children, forced to choose between warring parents for ever. The bile flows, the differences are irreconcilable, so we turn on ourselves with another false choice: the morally pure but unelectable against those who have committed vile sins of compromise. 

This is a crisis of all representative democracy – What is it? Who represents us? How is this achieved? – and it is being acted out in a gestalt psychodrama by Labour. In public. Who has a say? Corbyn and his cadre of public school revolutionaries who speak for the members, or the MPs, some of them elected by actual voters? Are the internal party rules more important than external reality? Beam me up, Scotty. Lost in this equation are the Labour voters, more than nine million of them the last time I looked. I guess Labour is doing post-truth after all. 

(--from, The bloodletting over Jeremy Corbyn is sad – the left is stuck in old binaries, by Suzanne Moore. The Guardian, 29June2016)

Indeed, who represents us?

And, how deep will the crisis pointed out by this question actually go?

mangia tutti

Yes.

Strive always to preserve freedom of spirit, so that you need do nothing with the view of pleasing the world, and that no fear of displeasing it will have power to shake your good resolutions.  

(-- Venerable Louis de Blois, 1506-1566)

In the morning, early, there is a symphony of awakening birds conducted by misty fog through rising light. 

For this -- I am grateful.

obtuse and unaware

Now Turkey.

Tomorrow?

It’s too late.

The barn door will stay open.

prêt à partir

Il n'y a pas de quoi.

Pas de tout!

After lengthy conversation, afterwords

I am too much a fatalist to be fond of words like control and demand.

I hear your situation, your thinking and your desire to experience good solid caring and respect from people whose professional duty is to provide these things.

You will continue to seek a level of competence and courtesy that their job and your need both require.

When I said we have to be careful not to crowd out others by filling the room with our opinions and judgments about them and their work, I was not disputing the legitimacy of your desires and rights as patient purchaser. Rather was I expressing sensitivity as to how -- in oppressive and infuriating experiences of unrecalcitrant obtuseness and perceived inattentiveness to proper good practice on the part of skill-set or normal human interaction -- one must transcend the inner rhetoric of blaming others or victim hood, and become partners-in-the-play. 

By this I mean that, as a fatalist, I recognize that we are determined in our rote and ritualized responses to reality as it pops up. But I hold that determinism is caused by absence of awareness. It is the default position of human behavior. It predominates when any individual fails to "show up" in their life at the moment for particular tasks or interactions of an intersubjective nature. 

In other words, we normally have been satisfied with the categories of subjective or objective when assessing acts or thoughts or ways of being in the world. But there are important new ways of seeing and acting in the world that no longer limit us to thinking we are being subjective or objective.

These ways consider the words intersubjectively, interactively, inter-connectively, and interbeing.

The essential difference appears to me to be that a core belief is challenged here, namely, that we are subjects doing things to objects. Rather, if we were to embrace a different understanding of both grammar and human agency, the subject-verb-object template would step aside in our minds and make way for a "between" template that acknowledges difference but behaves and acts with non-difference, or, no-separation. 

Hence, the nurse is not giving medication to you a patient, she is giving medication to her mother her daughter her husband herself.

In any conversation, I am not talking at you or even with you, I am speaking among the trees, my past, God, fears, fondness, and chocolate sprinkles. Every utterance is the act of creation, sustenance, and dissolution of the entire cosmos. 

The act/speech of no-separation does not mean no-difference. We are different. It means non-difference. Namely, we are no-other. As no-other we begin (always) to unravel and understand the marvelous complexity and beauty of being-in-the-world as who-we-are shall-we-be-there.

Pas-autres. No other.

Kein anderer. No other.

Ninguna otra. No other. 

Whether English, French, German, or Spanish, “no other” is a foundational re-construct of perception. I submit there's something here to talk about. I suspect there’s something useful here to work with.

listen, even woodpeckers are at work early

Can you hear them?

The birds?

Dawning songs?

Joyful noise?

in passing

Such a simple profound plea. 

I wonder who's listening.

Arise, Lord; save me, my God (Ps.3)

βλέπω (vlépo̱)

Looking down

Everything is looking up

As June nears end

Something's happening here.

Prepare for the worse.

Expect nothing.

Else.

Tao through and through again returning through the opposite

Yes

is where no

goes when it

sees 

what is 

sourcing

everything

after leaving a cardboard coffee cup on windshield wiper of grey Saab in Rockland

I received an email.

I responded.

 About the cup, there was nothing in it for me. It took the poem. Wiped away a tear. Never said a word. Very French. I drove away wondering if it would notice how moved it would be when it rained. 

Nah, I figured, it was all about agriculture, grain crops, fertility and motherly relationships. She (there, I admit it) was ... done with my lips, holding her, done with black pickups. 

Our morning snacking was over. I'd looked into her ... and felt an emptiness only Wednesday could reflect back.

About that, I had to finally come to terms with something nobody should have to face in the hours before noon, namely, I'd had no cereal, just coffee and -- (donut ask me to go on) -- this town is in my rear view.

You never know when poetry will distinguish or disappoint. Yves Bonnefoy's poem about Ceres, especially the final stanza, does not disappoint.

Still, one must be philosophical.

Once, in my youth, I took a graduate philosophy seminar I thought would be about law and justice: Instead we discussed the semantic implications of punctuation marks. After class, I found myself venting to a friend who’d been a literature professor. I told her I was unsatiated by the course—it felt like when I had discovered poetry and found, in practice, this most lyric of arts often meant writing about flowers or describing an epiphany in the grocery store checkout line. My friend laughed. “You know your problem?” she said. “You thought that philosophy would be Truth and poetry would be Beauty.”
Apparently, this is Ben Lerner’s problem too. In his new book, The Hatred of Poetry, the poet, novelist, and MacArthur “genius” argues that if you love poetry’s promise of transcendence, you must also hate poems for their failure to keep up their end of the bargain. “Poetry,” Lerner writes, “arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine.” The only problem? Poems are ultimately human rather than divine in character. “As soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem,” he continues, “the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time… but when you wake… you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.” 

 (--from, What's the Matter With Poetry?, by Ken Chen, The New Republic, 23June2016)

It is hard to tell anymore where words come from or go; whether they create what we call reality or merely try to describe what we'd like to think of as a factual verifiable world.

That falls away, the sorting and fascination with distinctions.

One is left with white clouds in blue sky through green leaves.

Spadini

Just at dusk.

When thoughts of day begin to dim

Bird song

Begins to say good night

Soup warms

Last drops of earlier rain fall from roof to porch mainsail

                         . Armando Spadini .

trees

So silent they stand.

So still they peekaboo with sky and water sun and reflection.

So may we be for one another a place of silence, stillness, and reflective inquiry.

If you ever change your mind

Nothing.

It arranges itself surrounding solitude.

A yurt near brook.

Tired. 

Day quiets. 

Trees watch.

Sunday evening transitions

Millionaires play basketball tonight. 

Others end zen practice with the words, 

"May all beings come to dwell in their true home.”

 Moon is bright --

 wind blows 

 spring away

No really, I do

In the United States there are many lies. It's hard to figure out which ones are the worse. 

Simple jealousy? Abuse of power? Weak wills?

I have a simple answer.

Pretending to care. The cynical correctness that carries with it no substance.

It is so close to sincerity it is seldom noticed.

It insinuates.

Why do you come in here? Because you're here.

What do we learn in prison?

We learn that we are one another in prison.

A realization so punishing it requires us to forget who we are.

Which is cruel and inhuman.

embracing both extremes of a contradiction

It becomes increasingly curious/silly the distinctive/divisive sorting that accompanies looking at religions/traditions with an eye to distinguishing a hierarchy of better/best for so-called spiritual seekers. More to the point, the contemporary lexical chic distinction between religious/spiritual promises to obliterate interest in traditional religion in favor of irreligion and any individual quest for the liberating/holy might take an idiorhythmic non-institutional direction.

Put differently, similar to current attitudes toward any retrievable dignity of government, there is a corresponding trending toward a view noting the irrelevance and impertinence of religion.

I understand both these attitudes. It has been said that today's young adults do not look to change government; they seek to change that which government is either incapable or unwilling to change, namely, the situation itself or the mindset that contributes toward unacceptable situations. So too the church. There is a bypassing of the authority and authoritativeness of the church -- catholic and protestant -- for a more direct and personal practice of what once the church attempted to represent, namely, encountering God with no barriers.

This discovery of Christ is never genuine if it is nothing but a flight from ourselves. On the contrary, it cannot be an escape. It must be a fulfillment. I cannot discover God in myself and myself in Him unless I have the courage to face myself exactly as I am, with all my limitations, and to accept others as they are, with all their limitations. The religious answer is not religious if it is not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition.  

This matter of “salvation” is, when seen intuitively, a very simple thing. But when we analyze it, it turns into a complex tangle of paradoxes. We become ourselves by dying to ourselves. We gain only what we give up, and if we give up everything we gain everything. We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others, yet at the same time before we can go out to others we must first find ourselves. We must forget ourselves in order to truly become conscious of who we are. The best way to love ourselves it to love others, yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves since it is written, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed, when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others. Yet there is a sense in which we must hate others and leave them in order to find God. Jesus said: “If any man come to me and hate not his father and his mother … yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciples” (Luke 14:26). As for this “finding” of God, we cannot even look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot find Him unless he has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace, yet if we wait for grace to move us, before beginning to seek Him, we will probably never begin.  

The only effective answer to the problem of salvation must therefore be to reach out to embrace both extremes of a contradiction at the same time. Hence that answer must be supernatural.  

(--pp.12-13, Thomas Merton, in, No Man is an Island, 1955)   http://creedalchristian.blogspot.com/2008/06/thomas-merton-on-salvation.html 

The dictionary has supernatural as "(of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature." (apple dictionary) 

This "beyond" suggests there is a ungraspable continuity between what we call natural and that which is beyond-natural, i.e. meta-scientific or meta-law.

What is this 'beyond'? Perhaps, like the ending of the prajnaparamita, after one has gone completely beyond, there is the awake and rejoicing gratefulness -- just this!

There's no place to go beyond here.

There is only this, the realization of this, and the complete transcendent joy of bordering, protecting, and greeting this.

Such it is; such we are.

Such as it is; such as we are.

Here we are; what is here

When the words are spoken, remain silent.

Gassho!

When silence is heard, you are home.

what we do when we do what we do

This is what we have to face today.

I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me -- and I think for all of us -- not only our own hope, but America's everlasting, living dream.                   

(--from, You Can’t Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe)                           https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/wolfe/thomas/you-cant-go-home-again/chapter48.html

If we don't care, it doesn't matter. Then, let there be wars, let there be warriors who continue to suffer life, kill back home, and commit suicide.

But if we care -- alongside medical research, rehabilitative therapy, and compassionate attention -- why not consider no longer fomenting war, no longer responding to that childish mantra of -- “I want that, it’s mine, give it to me!” -- whenever we petulantly, arrogantly, mindlessly decide that our wants and perceived needs come first and foremost, everyone else be damned.

Perl’s findings, published in the scientific journal The Lancet Neurology, may represent the key to a medical mystery first glimpsed a century ago in the trenches of World War I. It was first known as shell shock, then combat fatigue and finally PTSD, and in each case, it was almost universally understood as a psychic rather than a physical affliction. Only in the past decade or so did an elite group of neurologists, physicists and senior officers begin pushing back at a military leadership that had long told recruits with these wounds to “deal with it,” fed them pills and sent them back into battle.  

If Perl’s discovery is confirmed by other scientists — and if one of blast’s short-term signatures is indeed a pattern of scarring in the brain — then the implications for the military and for society at large could be vast. Much of what has passed for emotional trauma may be reinterpreted, and many veterans may step forward to demand recognition of an injury that cannot be definitively diagnosed until after death. There will be calls for more research, for drug trials, for better helmets and for expanded veteran care. But these palliatives are unlikely to erase the crude message that lurks, unavoidable, behind Perl’s discovery: Modern warfare destroys your brain.

(--from, What if PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? By ROBERT F. WORTH, Jun 10, 2016, NYTimes) 

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/magazine/what-if-ptsd-is-more-physical-than-psychological.html?referer=

War is demented.

There still are choices to be made.

I will not rape.

I will not shoot people. 

I will not descend into cynicism.

I merely sorrow for what we do to one another.

no trace

There’s only one thing that matters in life: Arriving here, where we are, fully aware who we are where we are.

And there’s only one difficulty in life: We don’t want to be here. And yet here we are. 

Therefore there’s only one problem we have in life: We are a reluctant community, a reluctant community try to figure out what to do, how to be, here. 

Tea and Rice, by Zen Master Dogen 

When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and essence are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self.  

--To study the way of enlightenment is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.  

–If you attain unsurpassable, complete enlightenment, all sentient beings also attain it. The reason is that all sentient beings are aspects of enlightenment.  

–Great enlightenment right at this moment is not self, not other.  

–If you speak of “achieving enlightenment,” you may think that you don’t usually have enlightenment. If you say, “Enlightenment comes,” you may wonder where it comes from. If you say, “I have become enlightened,” you may suppose that enlightenment has a beginning.  

–Great enlightenment is the tea and rice of daily activity. 

♦From The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt © 2013. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications.

http://tricycle.org/magazine/tea-and-rice-2/?utm_source=Tricycle&utm_campaign=8947c1f89e-Daily_Dharma_June_11_201606_11_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1641abe55e-8947c1f89e-307306085 

Here we are.

We are here.

Why is it we pretend not to know who we are? 

They push each other around; these millionaires shoot baskets

No, this is not really about basketball.

Yes, we are beyond religion. 

Instead we are merely religious, with no structure able to coalesce the longing for truth that rises from each person.

Now what?

As an individual, become the thing itself you long for.

Become, religiously. without structure,  the empty wholeness of solitary communion.

Alone together.

Alone with others.

Alone within community.

Comma period exclamation point question mark

Yes

The article said that punctuation was coming to its end

How silly is that

How would we know when to upwardly inflect

Or whether to pause before

Going on

I don't know why

What is giving self away?

Oh, that's what is called Christ.

What generous love is, giving oneself away.

And where is away?

It is where your self was.

You say hello, I say goodbye.

It's nothing, really

I go to daily mass in order to meditate on the mystery of someone attending daily mass in coastal Maine late May early June after teaching is done and afterward, for $3 even, a 24 ounce coffee and chocolate donut which feels as holy as thin white wafer and minitaste of altar wine.

Which is that and isn't that at same time.

Which just might be nothing other than anything else only completely itself -- a reconciliation, you might say, of everything with everything else, as god is no judge, only itself among us.

It is structures of consciousness elbowing each other for seat in final pew then going silent while something repeats itself from front of church. A 10 year old boy, Schwinn bicycle leaning on iron fence in Bensonhurst, answering first line with ad deum qui laetificat juventutum meum.

Then, the falling into nothing I knew nor know.

As it is now.

And, no doubt, ever will be.

World without end.

Amen

ex opere operato

Sun between top of window and top of trees.

Red vigil candle recognizes, if you will, its source.

PantaRhea moves from east to north window.

It is one thing to wake up of a morning, and another thing to not know anything else.

Not the idea of the room but the room itself.

Out of the work the work itself.

are and are not

I glanced at a job description for a position in the local parish. I looked up. When I looked back at it four and a half decades had passed. I realized there are things inside things, dolls inside dolls, and as morning unfolds, sun rising, Gregorian chant playing, my glance turns to natura. 

Eriugena's theology centers on the notion of an infinite, incomprehensible, transcendent God --"the immovable self-identical one" -- whose freely willed theophanies (divine manifestations) alone can be apprehended by created intellects such as angels and human beings.
...
Natura is defined as universitas rerum, the 'totality of all things' that are (ea quae sunt) and are not (ea quae non sunt).
(--Dermot Moran, Johannes Scottus Eriugena, in The History of Western Philosophy of Relinion, ed. by Oppy & Trakakis, c.2009)

I'm glad to have walked within and circumambulated the Catholic Church. I have done so as an idiorhythmic monastic mendicant.

Something I have come to understand slowly over my lifetime is that nature, earth, the world—whatever you call it—is not simply something I am on but something I am. It is not outside of me: it is me, and I am it. There is no outside.
(—Paul Kingsnorth, "The Witness")

The outside makes me lonely. The inside finds me alone.

The mystery and mysticism silently surround the place I pass through.

I belong nowhere.

I am content as, Camus suggests, was Sisyphus.

ama nesciri

The foolish want perfection.

The ordinary person wants to get through.

The empty minded says "thanks for this" -- and steps aside.

unminding me

Looking back, I thought I missed the liturgical celebrations of the Sacred Heart, and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, doing prison, nursing home, helping with a woman needing medical/support help.

On reflection, these hearts beat without me.

negotiating for release

Prison is both concrete and metaphorical.

So is birth and death.

 The Incarnation announces the radical particularity of each individual and the radical particularity of the things in the world, and that the metaphysical cause of that condition of things is the birth and death and resurrection of Christ who, while being the universal God, took it upon himself to become a radical particular. This fact instigates, progressively, our transformation from being mere copies of eternal paradigms to being fully existent identities. Radical particularity applies universally: it delivers to all particulars their status as particulars; it imparts to each thing the condition of its identity, granting to it what in the past it only had as it were on loan from its eternal original. And yet the Incarnation is able to become a universal cause by becoming a particular fact. What for Platonic thought, for instance, belonged to a realm of atemporal forms or ideas, has entered history. The forms are in the world as the schemata for the things of the world, fully existing only as those things.  

(--from, History and “The Thinking Now Occurring” by Charles Stein)   http://www.charlessteinpoet.com/prose/unpublished-texts/history-and-the-thinking-now-occurring/

I’ve begun to think of my visits to prison these twenty seven years as a succession of three hour sentences I serve with a bevy of cellmates with whom I meet in enclosed rooms and open areas to discuss terms, negotiating for release.

Radical Particularity Outside of the West 

Humanity did not have to wait for the Christian epoch to attend and appreciate particular existence, however the course of Western thought appears, at least in one major stream of its history, to have been determined by the need to shake off the Platonic hypostatization of a realm of ideal forms supervenient upon concrete experience. Zen Buddhism, the Taoist tradition deriving from Chuang Tzu, the Dzogchen tradition in Tibetan Buddhism, and countless examples from animist peoples all give ample evidence of an anchoring of Being in the radically particular that, in terms of precise practice, far exceeds anything propounded in this regard in the West. From the perspective of these practices as spiritual perspectives, the radical particularism of the Thinking Now Occurring appears a bit like too little too late.These traditions offer many and varied forms of practice geared to explore what there is every reason to view as ontological possibilities unknown in the West. (Much of Buddhist thought, of course, abrogates ontological speculation as such. 

In general, it does not seek to deny or affirm the existence of objects or the truth of concepts but seeks rather to transform our relation to that ground in our sentience from which ontological concern arises. But that does not imply the irrelevance of Buddhist experience and practice to our ontological concerns.) The cartoon version of Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu traditions as involving the subsumption of the individual by a supra- or sub-venient continuum, begs the question of the value and nature of the ontological territory these practices open. One does not know what the Buddhist means by his nirvana without undergoing the initiation that reveals it. Gautama Buddha, for instance, refused to answer questions which to us would be essentially ontological ones, including whether there exists an individual entity that survives from birth to birth and which undergoes enlightenment—presumably because he understood that the nature of existence as experienced once the enlightenment process has been undergone is no longer what it was experienced to be prior to this. We need to be as wise as a Buddha in this respect and not exclude from our polyontology the ontological perspectives that these practices quite plausibly might open. Many of the essential practices the Buddhist practitioner masters involve a radical attention to the minute particulars of sensory and mental experience, so that experiential regions which for the Western thinker are matters of speculation, for the Buddhist are open in depth to empirical exploration. In this regard, the attention to the concrete, and in that sense the historical, is far more advanced in the East than it is in the West in spite of the fact that Buddhism does not take a full-blown interest in what we call history. What we think of as history in the sense of a running narrative of the concrete appears to the Buddhist as the run-away elaboration of mental construction. 

(--from, History and “The Thinking Now Occurring” by Charles Stein) http://www.charlessteinpoet.com/prose/unpublished-texts/history-and-the-thinking-now-occurring/

 Friday’s bid was full of good-time.

Every time I walk in and out the twelve locked and clanging doors to open walkway to parked car I get to experience restorative freedom, the gift of particular gratefulness, nonrestrictive movement, the invitation to arrive, to depart, and to wonder about it all.

The minute particulars.

The radical particularity of being-with one another. 

in the opinion of the judges

The victory goes to the heavyweight champion, and still an example of thoughtful kindness and innocent presence, the one, the only, Muhammad Ali!

[The crowd roars~]

("Yay... Yeah...Yah")

Thanks Champ!

a split decision

Of course we love him.
He was irrepressible, Muhammad Ali.
Still, the violence to brains and psyches by bashing bodies for sport.
It is a worrisome glory that courts debility.

this thinking now occurring

In prison this morning the drama players performed pieces of dialogue from Dead Poets, Hamlet, King Richard, Goodfellas, Glass Menagerie, and Purple Rain.

At same time, in back row, sitting between myself (the volunteer) and warden, the tall man (inmate) with goatee passed me articles on Leahy and Heidegger -- intellectual work he is doing now that he is out of segregation after "ten months, this time" (he says).

Like monks in scriptorium during dark ages we eke out fragments of illumination in pericopes of passing phrases during background discourse.

"I'm dying here," he says, as purple rain falls.

This thinking now occurring surrounding us.

...and in the end

This is the way we are. The statistical probability of screwing up is fixed (but not final) and fluctuates between often and far too often.

Some call it the law of averages. Or Murphy's law. Some the human condition. Some weave the notion of sin with its need for redemption into the mix.

Whatever we call it, we know what it is.

The good is not the enemy of the perfect.

The good is a pragmatic and possible goal.

No matter what precedes it.

uncertain improvisation

Tuesday Evening Practice!

As Phoebe nest suddenly falls from under eaves.

Perfectly shaped empty space, sitting now on unplanted flower box -- a sudden uncertain improvisation -- the building Phoebes take their efforts to other side, an older transition site -- as once intended nesting home no longer holds.

Cabin zazen MU!

 Anicca visit!

Anicca, ( Pali: “impermanence”) Sanskrit anitya, in Buddhism, the doctrine of impermanence. Anicca, anatta (the absence of an abiding self), and dukkha (“suffering”) together make up the ti-lakkhana, the three “marks” or basic characteristics of all phenomenal existence. http://www.britannica.com/topic/anicca

 Charles Olson wrote:

There is no intelligence

the equal of

the situation

(--from poem, Love)

lacrima

Yes

Mozart's Requium in D minor at Camden Opera House yesterday, Memorial Day afternoon, was preceded by America the Beautiful.

 Down East Singers, musicians, conducted by Tony Antolini.

Bellissimo e profundo!

wit and winsome wisdom -- pray we learn to care for what is right in front of us.

re. Giant algae blob called ‘emergency’ for Camden pond, By Stephen Betts, BDN Staff, Posted May 29, 2016, at 3:17 p.m.

http://bangordailynews.com/2016/05/29/news/midcoast/giant-algae-blob-called-emergency-for-camden-pond/?ref=comments

Gotta love the wit and winsome wisdom of comments section.

At issue here, as always, is how every commenter and reader is under thumb of the powerful and arrogant. In Camden it is managers of town and snow bowl. In United States it is war-entrepreneurs and thin-thougted enthusiasts demanding wars-for-profit and bodies-for-bullets to prop up in front of news coverage for nationalistic consumption.

There are always those who smugly think they know better and know how to cheer for private interests over common good.

This Memorial Day, what say we stop deployments, remember and pray for those dead and deadened by war, and figure out how to sideline the arrogance and idiocy of war as national pastime?

The dead from war are to be honored. The deadened from war, whether disillusioned veterans or illusional civilians, are to be helped through the terrible toll direct terror and fighting inflicts, or the numbing mindless indifference of the "it's not my problem" crowd. Wit and whimsy are poor substitutes for steady gaze and fierce compassion toward the work that remains to change minds and hearts from the glory of war to the (seemingly impossible to instantiate) love of life and earth and one another.

"What's wrong will always be wrong" said the poet Richard Hugo -- and I submit that what's right is each time created new.

It starts with cleaning up your own barn, back yard, junk room, algae'd pond, local town leader arrogance, state leader imperviousness, federal government patronization and pretentiousness. Finally, clearing up our own minds' cluttered beliefs that what matters most is power and winning, being number one and mocking anyone not inside our narrow and selective way of thinking.

We don't bury the dead and forget them. We remember them. We don’t walk away from polluted ponds, rivers, or oceans -- rather, we work together to revive a sense of belonging, belonging to the earth, your God, family, community, and, finally, belonging to yourself.

But we ought to bury the belief in my country right or wrong, water the ground with sorrow for offenses committed, and cultivate the soil for growth of awakened community.

And pray we learn to care for what is right in front of us.

May those killed in war rest in peace! May we preserve life in peace for the rest of our time on earth!

waking up, looking around

We remember

And pray for

All those dead

And deadened

By war --

This

Memorial Day

a time of defect and imperfection

Remember. So as not to forget.

The "Moving Wall" is in Thomaston. I've not gone to see it yet. It stands, this morning, in rain.

Vinny D's name is on it. I have his letters from Vietnam. My friend the left handed catcher on Brooklyn sandlots. 

I remember. His letters said he didn't want to hear complaints about how we lived in the States.  The people he saw in Vietnam had next to nothing. The contrast lit up his mind and broke his heart.

Then the news came home, and he didn't -- not alive -- a land mine.

We remember so as not to forget.

The way a people suffer.

The deaths of war.

The terrible cost.

The stupidity.

The flaw.

seeing Christ is emerging

Corpus Christi, Yes --

The outer of the inner, the here of the beyond, the within of appearance.

The body of Christ is particular, singular, and historical. 

The Body of Christ is the whole of it, our commonality, the community sangha of each place in every time.

When, at communion, it is said "the body of Christ" -- these words are equally declarative, exclamatory, and interrogative. 

This is the body of Christ. This! This is the body of Christ!!! This? This, is the body of Christ?

Body is Christ -- this -- this is the thing, the mystery we do not understand.

To the question "What is Christ?" comes the answer "What is" is Christ. Everything seen. Everything appearing. As it is . Where it is. When we see it.

Yes, when we see it. There is an observatory aspect to Christ-reality.

It requires present seeing of its phenomenality. A seeing presencing that initiates reciprocal emergence of reality.

Christ is emergence. Not univocality, but reciprocality. There is no Christ without but for reciprocal recognition of Christ within one another and all manner of beings appearing in the world.

Hence, Christ is between us, or not at all.

The question "Do you believe in Christ?" is asking a much more simple, basic and profound question, namely, "Is there anything between us?"

(Not, "What separates us?" But "What is between us?")

Until and unless we come to see "what is" between us, we remain fragmented, separated, cut off from the really real reality longing to emerge from, into, as  this existence this place this time this being this revelation this liberation this no-other realization of complete creation accomplished in our presence.

The words "What is this" are equally declarative, exclamatory, interrogative, as well as evocative, and exhortatory.

These words are a spirituality unto itself, yes, unto Itself!

Combined with "body of Christ" the words "what is this" reveal themselves as a zen phenomenological aseity -- [aseity is defined as existence originating from and having no source other than itself] --

this seeing as itself between us between itself as seeing this.

Either way you look at it, we are not alone as long as Christ is, emerging.

My morning koan:

What                  Quid

is                         est

this ...                 haec ...

body        

of                       Corpus

Christ                  Christi