anywhere -- where Thich Nhat Hanh might be

Neighbor stops by hermitage. Brings rhubarb and daffodils. She and Saskia speak on wood deck about Thich Nhat Hanh.

He remains a light and blessing to this world.

An excerpt of an interview with Phap Dung -- [a senior disciple of the Buddhist monk and author, in interview with Eliza Barclay of Vox]

Phap Dung: 

We are aware that one day we are all going to deteriorate and die — our neurons, our arms, our flesh and bones. But if our practice and our awareness is strong enough, we can see beyond the dying body and pay attention also to the spiritual body. We continue through the spirit of our speech, our thinking, and our actions. These three aspects of body, speech, and mind continues. 

In Buddhism, we call this the nature of no birth and no death. It is the other dimension of the ultimate. It’s not something idealized, or clean. The body has to do what it does, and the mind as well.  

But in the ultimate dimension, there is continuation. We can cultivate this awareness of this nature of no birth and no death, this way of living in the ultimate dimension; then slowly our fear of death will lessen.  

This awareness also helps us be more mindful in our daily life, to cherish every moment and everyone in our life. 

One of the most powerful teachings that he shared with us before he got sick was about not building a stupa [shrine for his remains] for him and putting his ashes in an urn for us to pray to. He strongly commanded us not to do this. I will paraphrase his message: 

“Please do not build a stupa for me. Please do not put my ashes in a vase, lock me inside, and limit who I am. I know this will be difficult for some of you. If you must build a stupa though, please make sure that you put a sign on it that says, ‘I am not in here.’ In addition, you can also put another sign that says, ‘I am not out there either,’ and a third sign that says, ‘If I am anywhere, it is in your mindful breathing and in your peaceful steps.’”

(--Thich Nhat Hanh’s final mindfulness lesson: how to die peacefully, By Eliza Barclay. Updated May 17, 2019, 11:50am EDT, in Vox)

I read.

And listen.

This Wednesday.

standing out, knowing wonder

Wondering what it would be like if I wasn’t here.

If  I wasn’t here.

What it — the world, existence — would be like.

Wondering, what it would be like if I wasn’t here.



What wondering would be like if I wasn’t here.

Wondering would be like if.

Here itself.

No I, knowing it.

evening prayer

 I don’t know.

About?

 Anything.

soon

be over

ha!

we’ll see

time of our culture

Men?  Or

Women?

Yes!

No

Further

Questions

down to earth

Does it matter that the mythic God is dead?

Look under your feet --

The grieving period is vast and long

in the morning

no luck

kitchen window open all night

found

nestled between embroidered

pillow and bed cover

bird

gone beyond

cat in bathroom overnight

in kitchen

flies from beam to picture frame to globe --

visiting bird

room 4

We are

only here for a short time.

These bodies wear out. Organs run down.

Cancers take over. Brain loses electric connections.

We die.

And before death our systems fail.

So it is.

In the meantime we wait. And watch.

We nap. Sip hot chocolate.

Read studies of history and religious thought.

Bide time.

One breath after another.

Together.

questioning this

Yesterday was Ascension Thursday. The invitation arises to consider what location means, what dimensions overlap with our space/time dimensionality, what it means to say ‘I am here.’

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) speaks of the physics and spirituality in a sermon:

Why do we on earth not strive to find rest with him in heaven even now, through the faith, hope and love that unites us to him? While in heaven he is also with us; and we while on earth are with him. He is here with us by his divinity, his power and his love. We cannot be in heaven, as he is on earth, by divinity, but in him, we can be there by love. 

He did not leave heaven when he came down to us; nor did he withdraw from us when he went up again into heaven. The fact that he was in heaven even while he was on earth is borne out by his own statement: No one has ever ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man, who is in heaven. 

These words are explained by our oneness with Christ, for he is our head and we are his body. No one ascended into heaven except Christ because we also are Christ: he is the Son of Man by his union with us, and we by our union with him are the sons of God.

(—from,  Second reading, From a sermon by Saint Augustine, bishop, office of readings, Solemnity of the Ascension)

I remember hearing the phrase in my youth coming from my mother saying, “that’s neither here nor there.”  With yesterday’s solemnity, forty days after Easter, a variation is suggested — “this is both here and there.”

Branes, in the vocabulary of physicists,

The central idea is that the visible, three-dimensional universe is restricted to a brane inside a higher-dimensional space, called the "bulk" (also known as "hyperspace"). If the additional dimensions are compact, then the observed universe contains the extra dimension, and then no reference to the bulk is appropriate. In the bulk model, at least some of the extra dimensions are extensive (possibly infinite), and other branes may be moving through this bulk. Interactions with the bulk, and possibly with other branes, can influence our brane and thus introduce effects not seen in more standard cosmological models. (Wikipedia, Branes)

The way we think, the philosophical system or categories we choose to be familiar with, influence what we hold as our spirituality.

Many, many people have been influence by Plato’s philosophy in fact -everyone who thinks that spirituality is nothing more than a means to escape from this world – are Platonic in their thinking. People who think that when they die  they will be forever free of their bodies in Heaven where they will become angels  are Platonic in their thought. They are also wrong too to think that a human becomes an angel when they die,  is the same as thinking that a frog becomes a human when they die. The point here is that this kind of dualistic thinking has more to do with Platonic thought, than it has to do with the revealed truth in the Bible. When we think about anthropology and cosmology from a biblical perspective we find a unity between the spiritual and material,  that the spiritual flows into the material and the material responds and is elevated.

From a biblical perspective, Heaven or the spiritual realm is where God and Angels dwell. Earth, or the material realm, is where humanity and animals dwell. The two touched each other, they penetrated and influenced one another, and they are never separated.  (—from, The Ascension: Why are you looking up to heaven?) 

Today, Friday, is the celebration of the Visitation, when Mary visited Elizabeth while both were pregnant, one with Jesus, one with John. It is said they both realized something was different about their pregnancies, some new understanding was at hand.

How thin is the veil between worlds?  Between dimensions? Between what we call heaven and earth?

And do we, or, should we, traverse and awaken to the infinite belonging inferred by our participatory residence in a multitude of manifestations interpenetrating this place under our feet and surrounding our shoulders?

What does it mean to be ‘here’ — to be anywhere?

And if we were to ever be ‘here’ — what revelation about presence and the boundless everything would we awaken to?

Will transparency, in time and space, be our liberation, our release from a restricted thinking and limited belief about our true nature, freeing us into our true Self within and without, whole and entire...

Into a new appreciation of who we are as family, community, friends, one another?

Yes, question this!

ordinary zen

Poet Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) wrote:

Napped half the day;   

     no one         

punished me!

Ah — the art of it! 

as we learn how to sing

Some words at Hospice Volunteers luncheon:

Definition: impede | imˈpēd |verb [with object]delay or prevent (someone or something) by obstructing them; hinder: the sap causes swelling that can impede breathing.ORIGINlate 16th century: from Latin impedire ‘shackle the feet of’, based on pes, ped- ‘foot’. Compare with impeach.

….  ….  ….  

     1. Quote:  Rainer Maria Rilke: “Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly, they are passed on unopened.”

     2. Quote: Life and death are a package deal. You cannot pull them apart. In Japanese zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death.” There is no separation between life and death other than a small hyphen, a thin line… 

(—from introduction to the book The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully” by Frank Ostaseski, founder of the Zen Hospice Project and the Metta Institute, is a Buddhist teacher, international lecturer and a leading voice in contemplative end-of-life care.

This is similar to the phrase ji-ji-mu-ge, meaning "between one thing/event and another thing/event there is no barrier (no impediment)."

     3. Quote: Jackson Browne, in the second stanza of his song “For a Dancer” wrote:                

            

I don't know what happens when people die / Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try / It's like a song I can hear playing right in my ear / That I can't sing / I can't help listening

….   ….   … 

Here’s the poem: It was sent me about 8 years ago by Carol, our former director of volunteers, during the planning for a training session on spirituality for new volunteers:

The Real Work           

          by Wendell Berry 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work, 

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey. 

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. 

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

         (—by Wendell Berry, from Collected Poems, 1987)

….   ….   …

Conclusion: And so, however baffled our minds might be about death and dying, and our work in that journey —

may we learn from the stream — making its way over and through difficulties and impediments — may we learn how to sing !

the end of the month

Donald Trump isn't alone. It's a world-wide phenomena. To ignore it is to miss the big picture.

The common thread here isn’t just right-wing populism. It’s contempt for the ideology of them before us: of the immigrant before the native-born; of the global or transnational interest before the national or local one; of racial or ethnic or sexual minorities before the majority; of the transgressive before the normal. It’s a revolt against the people who say: Pay an immediate and visible price for a long-term and invisible good. It’s hatred of those who think they can define that good, while expecting someone else to pay for it. 

When protests erupted last year in France over Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to raise gas prices for the sake of the climate, one gilets jaunes slogan captured the core complaint: “Macron is concerned with the end of the world,” it went, while “we are concerned with the end of the month.”  

This is a potent form of politics, and it’s why I suspect Trump will be re-elected next year barring an economic meltdown or foreign-policy shock. You may think (as I often do) that the administration is a daily carnival of shame. You may also think that conservatives are even guiltier than liberals and progressives of them-before-us politics: the 1-percenters before the 99 percent; the big corporations before the little guy, and so on. 

But the left has the deeper problem. That’s partly because it self-consciously approaches politics as a struggle against selfishness, and partly because it has invested itself so deeply, and increasingly inflexibly, on issues such as climate change or immigration. Whatever else might be said about this, it’s a recipe for nonstop political defeat leavened only by a sensation of moral superiority.

(--from, How Trump Wins Next Year, What’s happened in India and Australia is a warning to the left. ByBrett Stephens, OpEd, NYTimes, 24Masy19) 

  Ayn Rand framed the debate which continues.

Selfishness — a virtue? Ayn Rand chose this book’s provocative title because she was on a mission to overcome centuries of demonization. “In popular usage,” Rand writes, “the word ‘selfishness’ is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends . . . and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment. 

“Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word ‘selfishness’ is: concern with one’s own interests. 

“This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.” 

In this collection of articles, Rand offers a “new concept of egoism” based on reason as man’s means of survival and opposed to all forms of sacrifice. 

It is commonly believed that morality demands we choose between sacrificing other people to ourselves (which is deemed “selfish” and therefore immoral) and sacrificing our own values to satisfy others’ needs (which is deemed unselfish and therefore moral). In this book, Rand rejects both options as forms of selflessness, and offers a new concept of egoism — an ethics of rational selfishness that rejects sacrifice in all its forms. 

Selfishness, however, does not mean “doing whatever you please.” Moral principles are not a matter of personal opinion — they are based in the facts of reality, in man’s nature as a rational being, who must think and act successfully in order to live and be happy. 

Morality’s task is to identify the kinds of action that in fact benefit oneself. These virtues (productivity, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, pride) are all applications of the basic virtue, rationality. Rand’s moral ideal is a life of reason, purpose and self-esteem.

(--about The Virtue of Selfishness, by Ayn Rand, 1964) 

Mr Trump is such an obvious picture, and hard to avert eyes from -- but he is merely close to our eyes. Spanning the globe, nationalism and self-interest, self-identity and me-first, take a more prominent role in the minds of the people. Ideas and ideals, intellectual or ethical, seem an unnecessary elective in the arising core areas of attention.

When an elephant shifts its weight and starts to lean its gait across the road, best be out of its way until it passes.

What sidestep, what shelter, is available during this passage?

It is the end of the month.

decoration day

Vinney died in Vietnam.

It was 1968.

I think of him today.

memorial day -- awaiting within eye and heart

We remember

and pray for

all those

dead

and deadened

by war



All for whom

war and

its sorrowing

does not go away



The day

belongs to the memory

of those for whom

home

without coming home



awaiting within eye

and heart an

incomprehensible

singularity



And so...

we bow, profoundly,

to our brothers and

sisters

this day

die sprache spricht*

          (On writing message when I might have meant 
                            massage — a reconstruction haiku)

What is the message?
   Touch me, one flesh, practicing
Unicity — me/you nique** — a trinity of
   Touching comfort, speaking
Silence

... ... ...

* die sprache spricht 
** The numerical value of nique in Pythagorean Numerology is: 3

without understanding

Or, we might consider Meister Eckhart:

Like other great minds of his time, Eckhart thus considered the question, “Does God exist?” to be meaningless. How can one question whether existence exists? Instead, he counseled, “every word that we can say of it is more a denial of what God is not than a declaration of what He is … the finest thing one can say about God is to be silent from the wisdom of inner riches.” Arguing for what was later called “learned ignorance,” Eckhart claimed, “If I had a God I could understand, I would no longer consider him God.” 

We must accept, in other words, that God is fundamentally unknowable, at least in terms of human language and thought. This was an unsettling, even threatening, idea for many of Eckhart’s contemporaries and it remains so in our own time. Eckhart, however, did not fear this central mystery of existence, of God. Instead, in mid-life he abandoned his own attempts to define God and instead dedicated himself to teaching others how to gain a heightened awareness of the divine presence within themselves. The transcendental nature of reality, he believed, had to be “known” intuitively and subjectively from within, not “objectively” from without. 

Eckhart’s approach challenges us to stop projecting our own concepts and agendas onto “God” and instead focus on an experience of the divine that leads to lives of love and service. It is a profoundly unsettling message. Yet it is one based on a more thorough familiarity with scripture than most modern Christians possess and a more profound philosophical grounding than most contemporary atheists can boast. Unlike many believing and unbelieving proponents of “God talk,” Meister Eckhart recognized all human language as metaphorical. He chose to know his God directly. Is there room for such a radical perspective in the pro- and anti-God debates of twenty-first-century America? 

Almost seven hundred years after his death, Meister Eckhart just might be the man for our moment.

 https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/everybodys-mystic/

What we project, we protect.

Neither president nor God needs either our projection nor our protection.

Things rise or fall of their own weight.

because I do not hope to turn

It is hard not to appreciate this observation by Robert W. Funk:

8. I believe  in original sin, but I take original sin to mean the innate infinate capacity of human beings to deceive themselves.  (—in Honest to Jesus, p11)

It is harder not to think we are experiencing such a blatant, obvious, and intentional manipulation of original sin by the president and chief uninspiring embarrassing person to degrade that position.

I wish to confess my inclination to unforgive such sad pharisaical intentional deception promulgated by such a disappointing crew of illegitimate office holders.

Many will die in the wake of such ignorance.

And, worse, many more will live in the hopeless depravity of cynicism and bad faith irradiated by these poseurs.

It is, conceivably, a horrible time ahead.

Let’s not conceive of such a future.

悲しい （かなしい）

Kanashii -- Japanese, 悲しい （かなしい）-- translates as sad, sorrowful.

More and more, looking at the president of the United States, a feeling of kanashii arises.

I'm not sure how this unsettling reality will play out.

As he often says, it is sad. 

Not as he means it, but that everyone must face, in his, their disturbed self.

on no road

There is no path, Antonio Machado wrote.

Jim Harrison writes a variation:

A Variation on Machado
             BY JIM HARRISON 

I worry much about the suffering
of Machado. I was only one when he carried
his mother across the border from Spain to France
in a rainstorm. She died and so did he
a few days later in a rooming house along a dry canal.
To carry Mother he abandoned a satchel
holding his last few years of poetry.
I've traveled to Collioure several times
to search for Machado's lost satchel.
The French fed him but couldn't save him.
There's no true path to a death —
we discover the path by walking.
We turn a corner on no road
and there's a house on a green hill
with a thousand colorful birds sweeping in a circle.
Are the poems in the basement of the house on the hill?
We'll find out if we remember earth at all. 

(Jim Harrison, "A Variation on Machado" from Dead Man’s Float. Copyright © 2016)

We carry poems with us.

We put them down.

The earth covers them with its love.

dumb, blind love is man’s meaning

Resistance is not a casual game watched from home.

According to Chris Hedges

Resistance entails suffering. It requires self-sacrifice. It accepts that we may be destroyed. It is not rational. It is not about the pursuit of happiness. It is about the pursuit of freedom. Resistance accepts that even if we fail, there is an inner freedom that comes with defiance, and perhaps this is the only freedom, and true happiness, we will ever know. To resist evil is the highest achievement of human life. It is the supreme act of love. It is to carry the cross, as the theologian James Cone reminds us, and to be acutely aware that what we are carrying is also what we will die upon.

(--Chris Hedges, in “The Cost of Resistance”, Truthdig, November 5, 2017 

And , again:

Power is a poison. It does not matter who wields it. The rebel, for this reason, is an eternal heretic. He or she will never fit into any system. The rebel stands with the powerless. There will always be powerless people. There will always be injustice. The rebel will always be an outsider. 

Resistance requires eternal vigilance. The moment the powerful are no longer frightened, the moment the glare of the people is diverted and movements let down their guard, the moment the ruling elites are able to use propaganda and censorship to hide their aims, the gains made by resisters roll backward. We have been steadily stripped of everything that organized working men and women—who rose up in defiance and were purged, demonized and killed by the capitalist elites—achieved with the New Deal. The victories of African-Americans, who paid with their bodies and blood in making possible the Great Society and ending legal segregation, also have been reversed. 

. The corporate state makes no pretense of addressing social inequality or white supremacy. It practices only the politics of vengeance. It uses coercion, fear, violence, police terror and mass incarceration as social control. Our cells of resistance have to be rebuilt from scratch

(--ibid) 

When the time is ripe for active resistance, be prepared to leave home.

I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.  

(—from novel, Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman, 1905-1964)

When meaning comes calling, please, be at home.

Where we all long to be.

not needing to be reborn

 True nature, hidden nature.

It wasn’t until I gave up in desperation that I finally
saw the truth of what my teachers had been telling me all
along. What they taught me over and over again, waiting
patiently for me to see in my own experience what they
had learned themselves, was that love, compassion, and
wisdom are manifesting all the time. It’s not that we are
pure way down in the depths of our being, but some-
how up on the surface everything is messed up. Rather,
we are pure inside and out. Even our most dysfunc-
tional habits are manifestations of this basic goodness. 

There is only one problem: We don’t see this true nature in
the present moment, and even less so the innate compassion and
wisdom that arise from it. Even when we understand intellectu-
ally that we have buddhanature—the potential to awaken our-
selves from the slumber of ignorance and suffering—we rarely
acknowledge this innate purity in the present moment. We see
it as a distant possibility, as something that we can experience sometime in the future, or maybe even in another lifetime.

(from, The Wanderer, BY ANDREA MILLER| MARCH 3, 2012. Shambhala Sun,  about Mingyur Rinpoche)

How to see?

There's the question.

I suspect the answer is tough to come by.

Twelve Kinds of Yogic Joy                                                                                                (Milarepa describes the happy life of the wandering yogi).

Like a criminal gaining his freedom from a dungeon hole

The yogi who gives up his native country knows bliss.  

Like a spirited horse that’s freed of hobbling chains 

The yogi who slips from perceived and perceiver knows bliss. 

Like a deer that has been wounded will lie low  

The yogi who lives on his own all alone knows bliss. 

Like the king of birds that wings his way on high 

The yogi who gains command over view knows liss. 

Like the wild wind that’s roaming through the sky 

The yogi not blocked by any obstruction knows bliss. 

Like a shepherd tending his flock of white-fleeced sheep 

The yogi tending his luminous/empty experience knows bliss. 

Like the massive bulk of the central king of mountain 

The yogi unfazed by transition and change knows bliss. 

Like the constant flow of a great and mighty river 

The unbroken-flow-of-experience-yogi knows bliss. 

Like a human corpse as it lies in a cemetery  

The yogi who shuts all activity down knows bliss. 

Like a stone that’s thrown into the deep blue sea 

The yogi who never turns back again knows bliss. 

Like the sun that rises and lights up the whole sky  

The yogi who lights up everything knows bliss. 

Like a palm tree when you strip it of its leaves 

The yogi not needing to be reborn knows bliss. 

This melody on these twelve kinds of yogic happiness 

Is a dharma gift to all of you, may it answer your question well. 

(Translated by Jim Scott, under the direction of Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche), Shambhala Sun, Macrh 2012 

Well?

black flies, maine

Sooner than
later

Things will
break

Open

Someone with
courage

Will speak/
act

Slapping up-
side

Fathead fluff
Sense

Remind blurry
dazed

Rule of
law

Seeks justice
not

Blowhard rhetoric
biting

two twenty five

Let there be night.

when bluebird visits

On broken seed
   boardwalk
under feeder
   bluebird
foraging —
   first time

If I see
   what is there
empty shells
   reveal the
nothing that
   isn’t

Anywhere else

chu-slih, lay believers outside the establishment

 Some stayed outside the formal settings.

Layman Pang 

The man known to history as Layman Pang became a practicing Buddhist early and became so obsessed with the classic Chinese ideal of a spiritual-poetic hermitage that he actually had a thatched cottage built adjacent to his house. Here he spent time with his wife and children meditating, composing poetry, and engaging in characteristically Chinese musings.  

A story relates that he was sitting in his thatched cottage one day when he became exasperated with the difficulties of his path:

Pang: "How difficult it is! How difficult it is! My studies are like drying the fibers of ten thousand pounds of flax by hanging them in the sun." 

His wife: "Easy, easy, easy. It's like touching your feet to the ground when you get out of bed. I have found the teaching right in the tops of flowering plants.” 

His daughter, Ling-chao, hearing both outbursts, showed them the truth: "My study is neither difficult nor easy. When I am hungry I eat. When I am tired I rest.''

Another version of this story has the Pang family working with Sengsan's "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences."

Layman Pang explained at length how difficult it is to live in accordance with the Great Way.  

His wife: 'What is difficult about that? Everyone in the world is a Buddha!"  

His daughter: "There is nothing difficult or easy about it. When you encounter food you eat it and when you meet up with tea you drink it! That's all there is to it!"

Finally Pang decided to go the final step and sever his ties with the materialism that weighed him down and his daughter helped him wend his now-penurious way through the world by assisting him in making and selling bamboo household articles. Free at last, Pang traveled about from place to place with no fixed abode, living, so the legends say, "like a leaf." 

The image of Pang and his daughter as itinerant peddlers, wandering from place to place, made a searing impression on the Chinese mind, and for centuries he has been admired in China — admired, but not necessarily emulated.

(--from, Layman Pang and Hanshan, Lesson 18, The Study of Zen,  

This, too:

We do have the stories of two Chan poets who operated outside the monastic system: Layman Pang (740?-811) and Hanshan (760?-840?). They were part of a movement called chu-slih, lay believers who were drawn to Buddhism but rejected the formal practices, preferring to remain outside the establishment and seek enlightenment on their own.  (ibid)

You could say -- no inside, no outside -- or not this, not that.

Either way,  "There is nothing difficult or easy about it."

Each becoming itself.

becoming conscious

Panikkar goes on:

The Vedic Revelation is not primarily a thematic communication of esoteric facts, although a few of its sayings, as, for example, certain passages of the Upanisads, disclose some truth that is unknown to the normal range of human experience. But for the most part the Vedic Revelation is the discrete illumination of a veil, which was not seen as a veil but as a layer, one might almost say a skin, of Man himself. The Vedic Revelation unfolds the process of Man's "becoming conscious," of discovering himself along with the three worlds and their mutual relationships. It is not the message of another party speaking through a medium, but the very illumination of the "medium," itself the progressive enlightenment of reality. It is not a beam of light coming from a lighthouse or a powerful reflector; it is dawn. It is the revelation of the Word, of the primordial Word, of the Word that is not an instrument, or even a sign, as if it were handling or pointing to something else. It is the revelation of the Word as symbol, as the sound-and-meaning aspect of reality itself. If there were somebody who had spoken the Word first, by what other word could he communicate the meaning of the original to me? I must assume that the Word speaks directly to me, for the Vedas reveal in an emphatic manner the character of reality.  

In short, the fact that the Vedas have no author and thus no anterior authority, the fact that they possess only the value contained in the actual existential act of really hearing them, imparts to them a universality that makes them peculiarly relevant today. They dispose us to listen and then we hear what we hear, trusting that it is also what was to be heard. 

(79468301-The-Vedic-Experience-Raimon-Panikkar pdf )

Dawn.

Contains the darkness within it as it shines forth. 

only in the spirit

The notion of author-less authority.

Raimon Panikkar, in Preface and Introduction of The Vedic Experience, writes:

We refer, first, to the traditional notion of the apauruseya or non-authorship, either human or divine, of the Vedas. This theory is often been ridiculed as a contradiction of common sense and as a denial of causal thinking; or it has been taken as simply holding that theVedas have no "author" who has written them and no "mind" that has thought them. Without entering into the almost endless subtleties of the Mimamsa, we can simply say that at the core of this conception there is a desire to purify our relationship with the text and to avoid any kind of idolatry. Any one of us is the author of the Vedas when we read, pray, and understand them. Nobody is the author of living words except the one who utters them. The Vedas are living words, and the word is not an instrument of Man but his supreme form of expression. What has no author, according to the apauruseya insight, is the relation between the word and its meaning or object. The relationship is not an artificial or extrinsic relation caused by somebody. There is no author to posit the type of relationship which exists between the word and its meaning. To do this we would require another relationship and so on ad infinitum. When a word ceases to be a living word, when it ceases to convey meaning, when it is not a word for me, it is not Veda, it does not convey real or saving knowledge.  

This conception, paradoxically enough, rescues the Vedas from the grip not only of a certain God functioning as a primal scribe, but also of the Hindu tradition, which cannot be said to be the author of the Vedas. The Vedas without an author cease to be an authoritative book. Only when you become their "author," when through assimilation you are able to utter them, when you yourself are the proper origin, the auctor of the text, do the Vedas disclose their authentic "authority." The Vedic Revelation is not the voice of an anthropomorphic Revealer nor the unveiling of the veil that covers reality. In point of fact, the shruti is that which is heard (rather than seen), so that the metaphor of unveiling may sometimes be misleading, because it is not by lifting up the veil (and thus seeing the naked reality) that we are going to discover the real, but by realizing that the veil covers and conceals and that the discovery of this fact constitutes the actual revelation. To reveal in this sense is not to unveil, to lift up the veil, but to "reveal" the veil, to make us aware that what we see and all we can see is the veil, and that it is left to us to "guess"--or, as we would say, to "think"--reality, which is made manifest precisely by the veil that covers it. We cannot separate the veil from the thing that is veiled, just as we cannot separate a word from its meaning, or what is heard from what is understood. If I were to lift up the veil of maya I would see nothing. We can see only if we see the veil of maya and recognize it for what it is. The shruti is shruti when that which is actually heard is not merely the sound but all that there is to be heard, perceived, understood, realized. Our own discovery, our process of discovery, is part of the revelation itself. Only in the spirit are the Vedas Vedas. And now we can understand why for centuries they were neither written down nor expounded to outsiders.  

(from, 79468301-The-Vedic-Experience-Raimon-Panikkar pdf, Scribd. Preface and Introduction http://www.himalayanacademy.com/books/vedic_experience/Intro/PrefaceIntro.html 

Heard.

And still, yet, resonating prior to and following any wording, much less writing, of what is heard., 

rising from the dead

Standing in the middle,

not often loved by either side.

Who can do this?

No

One

I

Know

sounds

Less tomato sauce

Dog eats

Cat shakes on sofa

want to take a ride

We named our kitchen after Raimon Panikkar. 

There's something intriguing about his idea. 

The Cosmotheandric idea 

Panikkar (1973a:ix) has developed a cosmotheandric idea of reality, referring to three major religious traditions to which he belongs, namely the Christian Trinity, the Vedanta Hindu advaita, and the Buddhist pratityasamutpada. Panikkar (1993:ix-x) claims that this threefold pattern – traditionally speaking, “Theos-anthropos-cosmos” – are invariants of all religions and cultures in the world and adds that, according to the cosmotheandric principle there is an “intuition of the threefold structure of all reality, the triadic oneness existing on all levels of consciousness and reality.” 

Panikkar (1973b:74-75) claims that,  

     God and man are neither two nor one … There are not two realities: God and        man/world; but neither is there one: God or man/world … god and man are, so to speak,      in close constitutive collaboration for the building up of reality, the unfolding of history, and the continuation of creation … [this] cosmotheandric experience and reality that dwell within and are made available through the various religious streams of the world. 

Panikkar (1981:22; 1993:v-xv) says our cosmopolitan world has developed to a critical position that warns all forms of imperialistic and monistic thinking and acting that no religious group should emphasize the superiority of one religion, culture or tradition over peoples of other diverse faiths

 (--Hirschel Heilbron, Researcher in the field of Systematic Theology: Theologies of Religion/ Comparative Theology, in paper Raimundo Panikkar’s Religious-Mystical Bridge) 

Living with diversity, with its invitation to transcend binary thinking and enter the dance of inner intersecting triadic contemplation, beckons us out of familiar duality into twirling consciousness some call non-duality and its next incarnation.

Currently our culture is apt to destroy itself with an eradicating mentality set upon beating down and triumphing over what it perceives as opposite and the perceived need to obviate it. We've lived with the competitive eliminating mind for a long while.

However useful it was in its inception, it has become excruciating in its violent and domineering implementation in mental, physical, and spiritual spheres of human activity. The confusion wrought by antiquated thinking is imprisoning us in irreconcilable deliberation as to how to punish that which falls outside prevailing perception and choice.

Reality is revealing itself in ways beyond recognition. We long believed the sun revolved around the earth. Now we believe the earth revolves around the sun. Yet we have to consider that with further insight into the physics and ontology of matter, dark matter, dark energy, and the further unknowns of cosmic existence, new and stranger revelations will occur.

These manifestations of the workings of the boundless universe will emerge into our evolving and potential integral thinking that will leave our current schema of physics behind as one might leave behind their childhood neighborhood to discover new horizons throughout new worlds.

So too with notions of God.

We will reconsider how we view what we've called "persons."

Who we are, and what we are about, will, undoubtably, traverse and transcend everything we've known.

It will be a thrilling yet unnerving enterprise to travel into the yet undiscovered territory of mind and cosmos.

We will have to navigate the perplexing winding roads of confusion, innovation, and profound imaginative faith.

It will be Hadden asking Ellie in the film Contact, "Want to take a ride?"

be guilty of help

There will come a time when the United States' attitude and behavior toward those who long for safety, security, a life without fear, and a place of compassion -- will be reviewed and assessed with the cold eye of justice and humanitarian ethics.

Sicora told the audience that, for her, history provided useful guidance. “When slavery was legal and slaves were running away, and people were helping them, it was probably illegal,” she said. All of this, Sicora argued, was a matter of doing what one knows to be right, regardless of the government’s current position. When Warren’s verdict comes down, whether he’s found “innocent, of being a human being,” or “guilty of providing help to somebody who’s dying,” she suggested that “maybe we can all go out and put water wherever it’s needed.” 

As Sicora returned to her seat, 18-year-old Enzo Javier Mejia stood up. 

The aspiring doctor was not an Ajo resident, but instead one of the Montana State students who Warren had taken into the desert that day. “My parents are both immigrants — my dad’s from El Salvador, my mom’s from Nicaragua,” he explained. “They made that trek over to the United States back in the 80s and 90s. My mom was 7 years old. I have a little sister that’s 13 and I can’t imagine her doing that trek at that age. The fact that this community cares this much and is putting out water, food, and blankets means a lot.” These were things his family didn’t have, Javier Mejia said. “They walked here, miles and miles and miles,” he went on to say. “So, on behalf of them, on behalf of my aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents, thank you so much.”    

(--from, NO MORE DEATHS TRIAL OPENS AS MORE BODIES DISCOVERED ALONG ARIZONA-MEXICO BORDER, Ryan Devereaux, May 14 2019, 9:30 a.m. -- in The Intercept) 

The world is a frightened place populated by frightened people unwilling to look into the pervasive and paralyzing fear that pussyfoots in place of love -- love which is fearless, courageous, and realizes there is nothing to lose and nowhere to go in the face of love.

The face of love is a mirror image.

What glances back is what glances in.

Our current faceless anxiety needs to step up to the looking glass and look fearlessly at what is there.

What is there is not only the resemblance of our inner being, it is the future life of our present soul.

Be guilty of help!

Thank you so much.

now, then, where were we

Monday morning conversation with New York Times:

Ama Nesciri | Camden, Maine  

The House mulls. The Senate smirks. The Justice Department has been hired to defend a dodgy client whose fingerprints are all over indictable acts. The Supreme Court warms up in bullpen keeping eyes on subpoena scores, ready to come in and close out the game in favor of their manager. The people love the shtick and vaudeville act of the man who thinks campaign rallies and tabloid headlines are the quintessence of presidency.   

I resign myself to his mind-numbing nonsense muttering for six more years.   

There are, actually, real people in hospitals, hospice houses, nursing homes, and, yes, prisons who can be visited, conversed with, sat with, and loved. The artificial scripts of political theater are best discarded for authentic conversations with ordinary people whose suffering calls for real response and human presence.  

 Life outside the sideshow of our current administration calls to us for unambiguous healing response.  

(Opinion, An Imperial Presidency?  President Trump’s free rein from political norms puts the United States at risk. By Charles M. Blow, Opinion Columnist, May 12, 2019) 

May I go now?

what I will become

Jung and Merton juxtaposed for Sunday Evening Practice reading.

Earlier listening to The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis.

Our practice is engaged solitude.

Naked presence. Letting go all that is not what is God. A zen diffidence without control allowing all that is not me to become what I am becoming.

When Jehovah Witnesses stopped by this week their literature said God’s name was translated as: "I will Become What I Choose to Become." (Exodus 3:14)

When I tried to remember it, I remembered: "I am becoming what I will become.” It's not easy remembering the future.

The retired lobster fisherman in hospital Saturday said he sees God in people.

The world is more wonderful that we can imagine.

to learn to know.

On a rainy Friday morning a series of sentences about education: 

My one addition to the mix would be to say that a purpose of education is to teach people to find the truth and, more fully, to learn to know.  That is neither happiness nor autonomy, neither citizenship nor employability.  A good university, it seems to me, helps students learn to engage by themselves with truth, goodness, and beauty (theory, practice, and relating) in a dynamic way that opens up and reinforces their being real people who can see what is intrinsically valuable in existence.  A central concern in that pursuit is truth. 

With best wishes,
---
(Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Beamer-Schneider Professor in Ethics, Case Western Reserve University,  Cleveland OH
(—American Philosphical Association, APA Connect General Discussion Digest for Thursday May 9, 2019)

 It is about truth, isn’t it? 

dizzy, to ground

There is a turn to violence throughout the country. And the president is not so much the cause as the symptomatic explosion into the body politic. He appears as carrier. As patient zero spreading the infection.

The mass shootings, the unending and spreading wars, the taking of lives by suicide, abortion, domestic violence, police brutality, environmental cancers, stress related seizures, heart disease, mental instability.

It is a troubling time.

One wonders how sanity appears at all.

Something spirals in wobbly uncertainty.

Capitalism and corporate arrogance grind under heel those not interested or capable in wearing such shoes.

Sexual abuse, clergy crimes, misogynistic rhetoric, rape, sex slavery, prejudice and bias -- along with the fevered escalation of contentious bullying arising with it -- all signal something out of joint reflected in our communal physiognomy.

Hate ascends to surface.

Vituperative speech rolls over airways, launched from lecterns and cable news desks in ever-increasing volume. The swipe, the slander, the slurs, the cynical jargon -- all prevail.

Where are we arriving?

What is it we are cultivating?

When did we become so entranced with the unsightly?

Poet Gregory Corso, from his poem The American Way:

But man is strange and grows where he will
         and chalks it all up to Fate   whatever be—
America rings with such strangeness
It has grown into something strange and
         the American is good example of this mad growth
The boy man   big baby meat
         as though the womb were turned backwards
         giving birth to an old man
The victory that is man does not allow man
         to top off his empirical achievement with death
The Aztecs did it by yanking out young hearts
         at the height of their power
The Americans are doing it by feeding their young to the
         Way
For it was not the Spaniard who killed the Aztec
         but the Aztec who killed the Aztec
Rome is proof   Greece is proof   all history is proof
Victory does not allow degeneracy
It will not be the Communists will kill America
         no   but America itself—
The American Way   that sad mad process
         is not run by any one man or organization
It is a monster born of itself   existing of its self
The men who are employed by this monster
         are employed unknowingly
They reside in the higher echelons of intelligence
They are the educators the psychiatrists the ministers
         the writers the politicians the communicators
         the rich the entertainment world
And some follow and sing the Way because they sincerely
         believe it to be good
And some believe it holy and become minutemen in it
Some are in it simply to be in
And most are in it for gold 

(--Gregory Corso, in “The American Way” from Elegiac Feelings American. Copyright © 1970)

The unsightly doesn't see. It flails and rages

It poisons what it hits. 

If everything is turned to gold, nothing will be able to breathe.

I'd like to move on.

I turn and turn, looking this way and that, until landscape becomes blur.

I fall dizzy.

To ground.

was heisst du

A baby is born.

Two young men die stopping murderers from killing more people.

Birds call out from tree.

Monks in France chant psalms.

The day is upon us.

There will be coffee.

Toast.

Boiled egg.

Sausage.

A walk.

Visit to hospital.

What is the holiest name?

What is: the holiest name!

jean vanier dwelt among us

Jean Vanier (1928-2019) has disappeared through death.

Here's America Magazine's obituary.

And from an older interview:

What is love? 

Love is to reveal to someone: “you are beautiful and you have value.” That is the secret of love. It’s not primarily to do things for people, because then we find our glory in doing things. The secret of love is to reveal to someone that “you are precious,” that “you are beautiful.”

(--Jean Vanier, God Chooses the Despised: An Interview with 2015 Templeton Prize Laureate Jean Vanier, by Sean Salai, 5augi5, America Magazine)

We have been fortunate he dwelt among us. 

metaphors

East:

The color of the mountain
Is the eye of Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva
The sound of the river
Is the ear of Manjushri Bodhisattva.
- Kyong Ho (1849-1912)

Middle East:

Jesus, God's disappearance
becomes Christ's resurrection, an emptiness
you become what is becoming itself 

West:

The experiment called America
is going into the books --
exaggerated results without proof 

Washington DC

What a wonder!
one man without integrity
trumps and loses a whole country 

yes?

yes

within and beyond, us

Yes, it does involve sadness.

And, invoking the novelist and theologian Frederick Buechner, Brooks told me that “faith is change.” It’s here one moment and gone the next. “It’s ups and downs, and it’s always movements. It’s a continued journey of exploration.” And it’s a journey that has created in him new desires. “The temptations of worldliness are very strong,” Brooks acknowledged, “and I’m now glad I have another anchor.” Brooks added that in some respects he’s sadder than he was, in part because faith offers a much higher ideal that we’re sure to fall short of, and can make one more aware of the brokenness of the world and more attuned to the suffering and pain of others. 

(—David Brooks’s Journey Toward Faith, In his new book, The Second Mountain, the columnist describes his path between doubt and belief. By Peter Wehner6:00 AM ET, 6may19, The Atlantic)

Perhaps that’s why we cling to a notion of a God who will do it for us if only we’d pray correctly and fervently.

That’s not going to happen.

Think resurrection. It’s something we don’t believe in. If we did we’d be devastated by its reality — namely, that what we think of as God died. That what we call Christ is the embodied incarnation of what we once considered God. That God has disappeared into creation, into someone completely receptive and capable of the transition, the resurrection, the “I have begotten you” of the scripture. The end of other as not us. The end of sending prayer somewhere else. The awful invitation to realize there is nowhere else.

Only here. As God is, here.

Look around. Cringe at the thought. God died. And resurrection is the new and continuing dwelling place of what we once thought of as God.

Completely different.

Wholly another.

Now tell me — is it any wonder so few engage in authentic love with the true, God?

Resurrection is a terrifying thing — but not for the reasons we think it is.

I can’t look at you without wondering who and what you are, whether we are who we might be, and if belief in Jesus has been a diversion from the true reality revealing itself before us, within us, and beyond us.

perfidious

Doing nothing, going nowhere

Morning arrives —

Ask me if I believe in god

Hard to figure

What the attraction

This charleton 

Several ugly men

Now occupy

The United States

God, if you can

Hear me, remind us

How sin corrupts souls

colloquy

Sin is heartbreaking absence or abuse of love. Whereas, redemption is healing and rebirthing the heart with love.

That’s what talking with the young woman in Maryland yielded after two hours Monday afternoon.

She has been touched by her church congregation’s anointing her with oil. Her heart has opened, she said.

out from shadows

Posting to nytimes: 

Bringing a pen to a sword fight is foolish. Unless you think there is hope for latent decency or authentic honesty. Problem is our republican hit men have been flushed out into the open and blatantly threaten the hostages they’ve taken in plain sight daring anyone still burdened with hope to throw down their worn out collegiality, don blindfolds, and face the wall.

 There’s always Latin: current et abscondam!

last night a lovely hospice patient

If you want to remain silent, do so.

If words have spilled out their meaning, just listen.

Tick of clock.

Sound of red Jeep rolling down road.

Thump of cat landing on floor.

Chainsaw as neighbor begins cutting logs, his annual sculpture stacking alongside dooryard drive.

This is no church, this Sunday morning kitchen.

Black plastic spoon stands upright in yoghurt.