the plain meaning

There are those who hold we are dreaming. The world, they say, is the dream. 

If we were to awaken, where would we be? What would we see? Who would we be?

 Is anything ever what we think it is?

 

Pesher (/ˈpɛʃər/ (listen); Hebrew: פשר, pl. pesharim), from the Hebrew root meaning "interpretation," is a group of interpretive commentaries on scripture. The pesharim commentaries became known from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The pesharim give a theory of scriptural interpretation of a number of biblical texts from the Hebrew Bible, such as Habakkuk and Psalms.

The authors of pesharim believe that scripture is written in two levels; the surface level for ordinary readers with limited knowledge, and the concealed level for specialists with higher knowledge. This is most clearly spelled out in the Habakkuk Pesher (1QpHab), where the author of the text asserts that God has made known to the Teacher of Righteousness, a prominent figure in the history of the Essene community, "all the mysteries of his servants the prophets" (1QpHab VII:4–5). By contrast, the prophets, and other readers of the texts, only had a partial interpretation revealed to them.^[1] The result of this pesher method creates a fixed-literary structure, which is seen most in the continuous Pesharim, with the goal of giving the plain meaning of the prophets' words.^[2]

(--wikipedia)

 A skeptic agnostic is someone who says 'I don't know' -- and is willing to dwell there in hypothetical inquiry for as long as necessary.

Meanwhile, the earth continues to turn. Stars and galaxies continue to dazzle the night sky. Poets continue to word evanescent stories onto disappearing tableaus along a field of consciousness slowly transmogrifying into obscure patterns of barely discernible affirmation stating, 'Yes, I see.'

Even if we don't. 

no repetition, no me, just as you are

 for no life of me

I cannot see you again

only for first time

no next place, always just this place

 new arrival, zen

poet looks right, looks left, bows

respectfully, leaves

it's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

Animals live in the wild. Let them.

Men in war are forced into the wild. Pity them 

Hear the trumpets hear the pipers

One hundred million angels singin'

Multitudes are marchin' to the big kettledrum

Voices callin', voices cryin'

Some are born and some are dyin'

It's alpha and omega's kingdom come

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree

The virgins are all trimming their wicks

The whirlwind is in the thorn tree

It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks 

Till armageddon no shalam, no shalom

Then the father hen will call his chickens home

The wise man will bow down before the throne

And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns

When the man comes around 

Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still

Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still

Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still

Listen to the words long written down.                                                                                When the man comes around             

(--from song, The Man Comes Around, by Johnny Cash)

 Wilderness is a thin demarcation from civilized society. It's hard to discern the line.

This side and that side are indecipherable.

Inside and outside have no boundary.

Heaven and earth were once a comfortable distinction.

We're not so sure of any of the previous dualities anymore.

That is both a blessing and a curse.

ne le dis à personne

 tell no one

not one

what you tell 

would not be all

be content

(faire taire)

l'histoire d'aujourd'hui

 narrative

is the 

story we tell

as if true

and call it

our life

as if

 nothing but

christ

who is nothing

but

the void

beyond

what seems

to be

behind

appearance

without

shape

invisible

presence itself

as if, as is

completely there

on any given day

 Should I like? Or dislike? This?

It is tempting to postulate technological determinism as the answer to this question: Why are extremism, irrationality, fear and censoriousness especially rampant where they should be next to nonexistent? However, to blame social media for the anti-social behaviors that today characterize academia misses a larger, darker truth. 

What is still referred to, reflexively and anachronistically, as higher education is supposedly run by and for persons who are products of, and devoted to, learning. Today, this supposition is false. 

The Chronicle of Higher Education, the reading of which is in equal measures fascinating and depressing, recently published Joseph M. Keegin’s bracing essay“The Hysterical Style in the American Humanities: On the ideological posturing and moral nitpicking of the very online.” Keegin, a philosophy student at Tulane University, argues that, confronted with “the slow slide of academe into oblivion,” scholars — especially in humanities departments, which are losing undergraduates, prestige, jobs and funding — “desperately grasp for relevance.” They seek it by becoming “professors of ‘academic Twitter.’” 

They have, Keegin says, “by and large subordinated their work as professional intellectuals and historians to the news cycle, yoking their reputations to the delirious churn of outrage media.” Succumbing to “Twitter-induced presentism,” academics are “captured by” and “shackled to” — Keegin’s terms — social media, and they treat the past as “not of interest either for its own sake or as a means of illuminating the complexity of the present. It is, rather, little more than a wellspring of justifications for liking and disliking things in the world today.” 

(Opinion, Blaming social media for academia’s ruin misses a larger, darker truth, by. George F. Will,Washington Post, 29july2022)

In prison yesterday, a resident gave a tour-de-force spontaneous whiteboard lecture about yoga philosophy and a variety of intellectual concepts and constructs that would have fit in Oxford and Cambridge on any given day. 

He said about his return to prison, “I’ll be out in six years.”

faith goes beyond god

 No

Ellie Arroway could not prove or provide evidence of her 18 hours journey to and from Vega.

No, experienced reality is not always obvious.

projective return

 Yes

Even with no

Yes

at once his own physical and metaphysical path or way.

  Sometimes, all one can do is look at what is or what is worded and wonder.

The Tradition of Han Shan

In his introduction to Chinese Poems, Arthur Waley sums up the qualities that made Han Shan so valuable as a visual icon.

In his poems Cold Mountain is often the name of a state of mind rather than a locality. It is on this conception, as well as on that of the “hidden treasure”, the Buddha who is to be sought not somewhere outside us, but “at home” in the heart, that the mysticism of the poems is based.

So the Cold Mountain name suggests Buddhist images of spiritual ascension and the image of a ragged but determined monk evokes the run-down hermitages of Taoist immortals.  Han Shan presents this combination of person, place and state-of-mind. 

From within these hagiographic and iconic conventions, however, the poems themselves perform a different task.  While talking about a Han Shan poem, Paul Kahn marks the change in this fashion.

The presentation of ideas . . . is different from the poetic conventions of its period. Han Shan is not describing a vision he has had of an immortal while traveling in the mountains, nor is he describing his own personal enlightenment while journeying to a remote holy place, both common themes in Tang poetry. The poet here is stepping right into the landscape, climbing a path that is at once his own physical and metaphysical path or way. He tells us this is the “way” to his home as well as his enlightenment. He directs his voice to the reader, challenging (or inviting) him to follow.   https://thenewblackbartpoetrysociety.wordpress.com/2017/12/01/snyders-cold-mountain/

It is no longer clear what is mind what is not-mind.  Nor what is here what is not.

Dreamscape Haiku

sits hermit porch, breeze

old sailor looks up checks sail —

Just waving green leaves 

                           (wfh/nunc) 

After zazen, deer does not disappoint — crosses up by yurt, sun-speckled.

without hindrance of desire or fear,

Years ago Peter S. spelled it out to me. It hangs next to the pictures of Robert Lowell and Thomas Merton 

Commenting today on a review of "Memoirs" by Robert Lowell, I post to NYTimes: 

There are two pictures on my wall, one of Thomas Merton, one of Robert Lowell. These two men were inspired intellects and knew troubled times. It was, perhaps, within those warrens their creativity sought and found expression. Lowell wrote in his poem Epilogue: "All's misalliance. / Yet why not say what happened?"

 

A further reflection: 

Ji-ji-mu-ge  

DESCRIPTION: 

The experience of the world as it is, without hindrance of desire or fear, and the realization that this is [nirvana]. This is the aim of the [jiriki] approach described in Zen Buddhism. http://encyclopedia.uia.org/en/development/12320340

  Elsewhere:

“I can have the feeling ‘self’ only in relations to, and by contrast with, the feeling ‘other.’  In the same way, I am what I am only in relation to what everything else is.  The Japanese call this ji-ji-mu-ge, which means that between every thing-event (ji) and every other thing-event there is no (mu) barrier (ge).  Each implies all, and all implies each.” https://quotesfromtheunderground.wordpress.com/tag/ji-ji-mu-ge/

Unseen dimensions, yes, but no barriers. Yes, no barriers.

The implications of which suggest that, while undetectable, different realms, both of materiality and of consciousness, co-exist without barrier or separation, except, perhaps, to our distinct awareness. our physical perception.

Poets and thinkers, perhaps, weave themselves through such warrens without obvious recollection or trace logs accurately notating the bumper ride taken. Rather, imagination has travelled the turns and travails through the seen-unseen and the unseen-seen in the realms of mind and soul so as to carry in deep unconscious repository the stuff of contemplative rumination for later expression.

All is misalliance.

So...

Why not say what happened?

a stranger and afraid

“This is already it. This is already what we are looking for.” That’s what the guy talking about non-duality began with. 

Elsewhere, Professor John Lennox spoke in favor of God at the Oxford Union in 2012.

Thus, This and God, a meditation of a Wednesday morning.

“I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.”

― A.E. Housman, Last Poems

 Lapsing into my retiro, I shelter in place, reluctant and reticent, not feeling well, nor knowing why.

And so, there and thus, with nescience and oblique intransigence, I remain.

being-in-front-of-another

We sat together in the correctional center’s library during a thunder storm downpour talking about personas, masks, chameleons, truth’s revealing and concealing, preceded by one saying the important person, the reason I’m tolerated, was missing, but we’d go on anyway. (The big fellow, cringing and holding his head, says ”That’s cold man.”)  We all laugh.

We wobble through Monday morning with the white service dog in training nibbling at my handheld meditation beads as we spoke about the appearances and disappearances of who we are, have been, and moving through the revelations that each choice augurs.

It’s not an either/or, either you stand with, or you stand alone.

Rather, one stands with by standing alone, one stands alone by standing with.

There is being alone-with-others, as in never am I so alone as when I am with others. Or, never am I so with others as when I am alone.

Solitude is where one is. Community is where others are.

The eremite and the cenobite walk into a bar. One says, “I’ll have one.” The other says, “I’ll have another.”

Ein Witz ist die Art und Weise, wie sich Wahrheiten offenbaren. (A joke is the way truths reveal themselves.)

This chapter has described the difficulty that awaits us in our attempt to articulate philosophically an experience of God, a difficulty that oscillates between the either/or of the following metaphysical dilemma: either an unknowable, imperceptible, wholly other God, or a conceptual, and therefore equally fleshless, Idol; either Gott or Götze. In the modern past, metaphysics was content with the latter, that is, with the idea of God (see, for example, Descartes’s Third Meditation). It is that contentment that has been called ontotheology. Phenomenology, on the other hand, all too often rushes toward the former, mesmerized by the lure of the otherness of the Other like a but- terfly bedazzled by fire. Between the two positions, a third one is opened up in the paradox of the Pauline “icon of the invisible God.” That icon is par excellence Christ, “begotten in our image and likeness” but, by extension, every person “created in the image and likeness” of God. It was an iconic feature, namely, that of inverted perspective, that helped us to sketch out a phenomenological analysis of inverted intentionality, of a “vision,” in other words, that does not objectify God but allows Him to give Himself in the experience of myself as seen. Alongside our filled intentions (of presence and perception) and empty intentionality (of absence and imagination), a third kind of intention needs to be recognized. That third kind is the inverted intentionality of reflexive sensibility (and, as we shall see in the third part of this work, all sensibility is reflexive), where the intuition “yielded” is precisely me, that is, the self-experience of myself as experienced. Strictly speaking, in the “experience of God,” as given through the inverted intentionality, the phenomenon is not God but rather me (my inability to comprehend God, my lack of knowledge or intuition that becomes knowledge and intuition, etc).

The second half of this chapter addressed the phenomenological merit of prosopon, the Greek definition of the person as being-in-front-of-another, that is, as fundamentally a relational being. In the chapter that follows, we shall examine whether the prosopic understanding of myself and others, as well as the inverse intentionality through which such an understanding is gained, supple- ments the phenomenological reductions to the things themselves (Husserl), to being (Heidegger), and to givenness (Marion), and by doing so, whether it safeguards the person’s particularity.

(—from, p.34: God after Metaphysics A Theological Aesthetic! By John Panteleimon Manoussakis, 2007)

Then comes Kearney 

Richard Kearney is one of the phenomenologists of the new generation who follows the lead of Husserl, Heidegger, Marion and Lévinas. This Catholic and Irish philosopher proposes a fourth phenomenological reduction, i.e., going back to the eschaton which is entrenched in everyday existence: finding the voice and the face of the higher within the lower. It is like the realization of the following heideggerian idea which is found in "The Thing": "Only what conjoins itself out of the world becomes a thing". In everyday language and life a possibility is found to overcome skepticism, indifference and the boredom resulting from the world being into turned [being turned into] consumption and man into a marketing piece. In the face-to-face meeting the possibility of a revelation is presented, which makes the relation with the other, and especially with the foreigner, a wonder; and not a doubt, suspicion or distrust.

(Abstract for, Richard Kearney and the fourth phenomenological reduction! July 2014 Escritos22(49):313-335! Project: Fenomenología y teología! Author: Carlos Arboleda, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana 

Have you heard the one about the three eggs?

No?

Two bad! 

(Ha — now

the yoke’s

on us!)

you do not know

 You’re right.

There are some things, some words, better left unseen, unheard.

The sons of Zebedee press Christ: Promise that one may sit at your right side and the other at your left. What does he do? He wants to show them that it is not a spiritual gift for which they are asking, and that if they knew what their request involved, they would never dare make it. So he says: You do not know what you are asking, that is, what a great and splendid thing it is and how much beyond the reach even of the heavenly powers. Then he continues: Can you drink the cup which I must drink and be baptized with the baptism which I must undergo? He is saying: “You talk of sharing honours and rewards with me, but I must talk of struggle and toil. Now is not the time for rewards or the time for my glory to be revealed. Earthly life is the time for bloodshed, war and danger.” 

Consider how by his manner of questioning he exhorts and draws them. He does not say: “Can you face being slaughtered? Can you shed your blood?” How does he put his question? Can you drink the cup? Then he makes it attractive by adding: which I must drink, so that the prospect of sharing it with him may make them more eager. He also calls his suffering a baptism, to show that it will effect a great cleansing of the entire world. The disciples answer him: We can! Fervour makes them answer promptly, though they really do not know what they are saying but still think they will receive what they ask for.

(From a homily on Matthew by Saint John Chrysostom, bishop)

I’ll take a cold lemon lime seltzer and a pretzel rod and leave it at that, if you don’t mind. 

portending

 Some worry we are sliding too far off-center on the seesaw 

That a chainsaw is cutting through the wood of the elevated side

Leaving the fantasy weighted side rooted against the ground 

No longer balanced or budgeable bloated by bombast and bullshit

No fun remaining, nothing 

but a real estate of swindled airspace

Look on this and weep

Democracy will not keep

is that so

Spirituality  

is not what we think 

it is

Not lovely, 

not easy, 

not blissful

There, right there at the edge 

of comfort zone, 

Outside favorite harbor — 

there is where 

practice 

begins 

for 

true

beginners

abiding empty appreciation

 My prayer is silence and unknowing.

No God interferes with this nescience.

No church, temple, or cult beckons.

There is no return ahead, no relapse behind.

My prayer is to linger with you

At the end of the day

In a world gone astray

Where all is aseity 

This prayer is no prayer

This prayer abides

In empty appreciation

Mere facticity without purpose

It is Sunday morning

I sit in cabin, incense near end

No deer shows up yet

Revolving earth, endless cosmos

You, each of you, may you

Always be there

At the end of

Open heart open mind open yes

chivalric garbage in front of truck

 At town dump, woman 

shuffles to hatch as worker

Helps her transfer bags

no place to stand, step along

 all the stances fail

only dancers know the truth

they turn turn and turn

final circle

                “Poetry is the orphan of silence.” — Charles Simic

When here, so lovely

Now gone, what was really here?

Letter on lintel

sunny travel companion

 “God is us,” He said

In prison yesterday — on

Our way through the field

we have all been here before

the sad case of the man who lost and refused to admit it

 Hard to imagine

Anyone not disgusted —

Derilect disgrace

commentary

 When everything falls

Away, nothing remains — there,

Stay there, go nowhere

there’s nothing else (to say)

Ask me my belief —

Day sits within itself, there’s 

No belief, just day

have you learned nothing yet

 those names you look for -- 

they belong to themselves, stop,

stay with the nameless

your turn

 I am who am

It is what it is

Who do you think you are?

sleep is where nothing hides

 The original

Reveal — light traveling dark

Is where cosmos lives

there is no going away

 If now is alone

Time will have gone away -- you

meet oneself always

Time means change, no time no change

Alone, now, God is as is

turn around, look at me (see what is not there)

 Opposite silence

Isn’t noise, it’s words —

Gaze is all one needs

covering a bet made long ago

If I speak to you 

will you promise stark silence —

light afternoon breeze

embarrassment of jaded contributions

 It’s  hard to ask for

Help to stop guns of war kill

Brothers and sisters —

America’s a hateful 

Place the ignorant get rich

do I know you

 Anyone might be

Anyone, we come far to

Where we who we are

passing intimation of mortality

 Ah, it rains, surprise

Sounds on porch roof lightly —

Forget me, it says 

of all, the earth

 This is my body

Given, for all, night gust, here

Prayer feels passing —

It doesn’t matter when God

Silence itself, makes no sound

some righteous religious reliquary

 Being Catholic, for me, is trying to take the universal view. It is a Christian focus that looks wide and wants deep understanding and human generosity. 

Not 'my' will. but what is good for many if not all. Not 'my' God, but that which heralds compassion, care, and service for many if not all.

Abortion banning feels to me to be an excuse to pin all the failures to be authentically Christian/human on a philosophically ambiguous standpoint about when a 'person' begins and how to protect that person.

Our failures are many. Gun violence, racial inequity, judicial injustice, penal obsession, financial wealth and corporate exclusive dispensation from fair tax responsibility.

Those who choose to protect the unborn and punish the born, give tax shelter to the rich and contemn the needy to nightly shelters, are masking their failure to give equal regard to all our brothers and sisters. 

They posture and pontificate in the name of some righteous religious reliquary of the sacred fecund womb to illustrate their pure and arrogant beliefs rather than seeing the whole picture that protects all life and works to sustain and improve a good and healthy life for all. 

a sort of thinking that suspects

 Someone asked at Friday Evening Conversation, when we were talking about the many trillions of galaxies in the universe, and the interest renewed about the enormity, "Why do you want to know?"

It's a fair question.

I thought and suggested, "Because it's my body, extended and contracted." 

And because, considering the thinking that our particular minds are perhaps only 5% of the 100% 0f mind/consciousness that is the integral net of all awareness. "Because it's my mind, particular and universal."  

Some astrophysicists are thinking that we do not yet have a suitable mental construct of the universe and dimensionality, of time, space, visibility and invisibility, A sort of thinking that suspects, "When the mind is ready, the universe will reveal itself to it."

I have nowhere to go.

And, for the moment, I have time, whatever its duration.

Someone else mentioned mites. Another, tortillas. A third his childhood town in Vermont and the space exploration contributions it has made. Another person mentioned her uncle who was involved in designing and building a radio disc in California.

It's a pretty big place wherein we dwell!

When I die, I'll either know or not know more than I now know.

Why, now, do I want to know?

(What an interesting koan is on the cushion!) 

this also can be

 In prison today, after meditation, after wondering about fear and coming face to face with a staring tiger, we read Charles Olson:

LOVE   

 

(down    

 

to my soul: 

                         assume your nature as yourself      

                     

                         for the love of God

                                                             not even good enough      

 

Stories                   

               only                             

                           the possibility                                                       

                                                                      of discrete                                          

                                                                                             men  

 

 

There is no intelligence  

 

the equal of 

 

the situation   

There are only 

                                  two ways: 

 

                                  create the situation 

 

                                                                     (and this is love) 

 

                                  or avoid it. 

 

                                                         This also can be 

 

Love. 

                                                                                                       

                    ( Poem by Charles Olson)

 

It rang true, they said, conversing openly.

We spoke about the difference (where they live) between stares and stairs.

About tigers and the fears we carry.

About accepting, adjusting, and overcoming.

About extending one's self out and closer to One-Self.

About the commonality of community gathering together. 

john keats was right

 Mourning Dove’s dooryard

Laudes faint light from eastern sky 

Choral antiphons —

I don’t know about you, but

I love this monastery

….  …   …

*  “My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk”.  ― John Keats

he had nothing left to do

He got what was coming to him.

Monk (98) died after living in a French cave for 50 years

                            by admin_l6ma5gus  October 27, 2021 in Uncategorized 

Louis Chauvel, aka Brother Antoine, was born in 1923 and has lived in the cave since 1966. The man had withdrawn from the world after being sent to military prison for a transcription error in his documents. “I had a twisted mind, and I was looking for a place that was as twisted as I was,” he explained. 

The Cistercian spent his days praying, meditating and writing. The hermit was not averse to visitors, but as a sign clearly indicated: “Antoine’s cave is not a tourist curiosity, but a place of brotherly encounter”. He talked to walkers about philosophy and spirituality. 

After a heavy fall in October 2017, he had no choice but to leave his cave. After first being accommodated in a retirement home, he has been welcomed in the municipality of Dieulefit in the Drôme since 2020. There he stayed with a traveling companion with whom he had gone to India 20 years ago. According to a friend, monk Antoine wanted to ‘die with the feeling that he had nothing left to do on earth’. 

He was ‘an example of love, of simplicity, and of generosity’. 

cf. https://pledgetimes.com/monk-98-died-after-living-in-a-french-cave-for-50-years/

and,  https://newsrnd.com/news/2021-10-23-after-fifty-years-in-the-rocher-de-roquebrune--a-hermit-monk-dies-at-the-age-of-98.HyQmwZMIF.html)  

Perhaps, those lucky few who came to him, not put off by signs. 

not me

 Are you afraid to die? To be no more? To disappear without further appearance?

Yes?

No?

I'll tell you what I know.

What we call life is what is revealing itself. What we call death is what is not revealing itself.

(What-is-not?)

or

(What is not-revealing?) 

Either way -- nothing is being revealed -- or there is nothing to reveal.

But if we talk about space:

The Universe is a vast place, filled with more galaxies than we’ve ever been able to count, even in just the portion we’ve been able to observe. Some 40 years ago, Carl Sagan taught the world that there were hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way alone, and perhaps as many as 100 billion galaxies within the observable Universe. Although he never said it in his famous television series, Cosmos, the phrase “billions and billions” has become synonymous with his name, and also with the number of stars we think of as being inherent to each galaxy, as well as the number of galaxies contained within the visible Universe.

But when it comes to the number of galaxies that are actually out there, we’ve learned a number of important facts that have led us to revise that number upwards, and not just by a little bit. Our most detailed observations of the distant Universe, from the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, gave us an estimate of 170 billion galaxies. A theoretical calculation from a few years ago — the first to account for galaxies too small, faint, and distant to be seen — put the estimate far higher: at 2 trillion. But even that estimate is too low. There ought to be at least 6 trillion, and perhaps more like 20 trillion, galaxies, if we’re ever able to count them all. Here’s how we got there. 

    (--from, There  are  more  galaxies  in  the  Universe  than  even  Carl  Sagan  ever  imagined,  by Ethan Siegel,   Big Think,  22june22)

It’s true that there are hundreds of billions of stars within the Milky Way, which is just one galaxy among trillions — likely between 6 and 20 trillion — in this enormous, expanding Universe. But even though we’re seeing just the tip of the cosmic iceberg with even today’s greatest, most powerful observatories, we really are capturing most of the stellar activity that’s present throughout our cosmos. With the advent of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, we might finally get the observational confirmation of these faint, distant, early-type galaxies that we know must be out there. The Universe, no matter how we conceive or misconceive of it, cannot hide its truths when faced with superior data.  (--Ibid)     

Yeah, 20 trillion galaxies!

Still want to talk about death?

Not me!

(Which two words remain, as good as any, a definition of what death is, what death means.) 

storyboard

 I’m afraid someone

Will harm the former guy, blame

and name democrats --

Hence, war, hot and bloody, will

Stretch over the coming years

pilgrimage *

 My day (mon jour) feast

Benedict of Nursia

Monday work prayer

…   …   …

* προσκύνησις

St. Benedict (ortodox icon); iscriptions "Benedictus abbas", "Nihil amori Christie praeponere" {Regula Benedicti 4,21) (Public domain)

hidden within the words, the way sounds through

 gospel writers wrote,

"why have you forsaken me?"

whole teaching right there!

(reread it): — “why, have ‘you’?” [dear],

[asks] forsaken me. [écoute bien!]

not at, but as

 Are you seeking God?

Stop! Sit down, take a rest. Look

left, right, up, down. God

is the direction you are

looking, the wonder, looking

laudate

 It is such delight

Mornings, cool air, sunlight — just 

One is enough, this

Passing realization

Gratitude for Being, Here

beyond operating system, the unknowable

Hardly anything

Is what you think it — rather,

(Don’t make —me—  say it)

that living web

We spoke of guns, open carry, concealed permits. Prison meetingbrook conversation, and Friday evening conversation both weave through the concerns of gun owners, the unbalanced attacks on innocent crowds, and what mental health really is.

We attempt to reverse engineer what learning is.

Those who fall into the safety net of silence find that it is not at all a fall into individualism. True prayer or contemplation is instead a leap into commonality and community.

—Richard Rohr

We wonder if toothpaste will ever re-enter its tube once squeezed out. 

And you know your lives are as intricately interwoven as nerve cells in the mind of a great being. . . . Out of that vast net you cannot fall. . . . No stupidity or failure or cowardice can ever sever you from that living web.
—Joanna Macy 

https://email.cac.org/t/ViewEmail/d/7613640F63DACB0C2540EF23F30FEDED/F62860CEBA66D37F4BD7C9066BE4161D?alternativeLink=False

I don't own a gun. Never have. My father kept a sawed off pool cue in his car. If I had a knife, would I even use it on an assailant? 

As a resigned fatalist, I expect death every moment. Or is that the readiness of a contemplative monastic?

Walking through the prison mile we meet and greet old friends. One with a puppy. One inviting to visit in his new pod for honors residents. “Namaste,” he calls, walking down corridor.

We meet the librarian at final doors. She says she’ll be the last librarian the prison will have. Books are fading. Times are changing.

The lobby officer calls goodbye and we leave.

It’s a Poustinia.

A fecund silence, like trust, washes over each gathering.

Words like water slake drouth.

The flow of it!

katherine

 Anniversary 

Mother’s birth, 

     because of her

I am 

     not

     [h]

     ing 

     this

as long as we can

 Nordic walking sticks

Accompany white sneakers

Around snow bowl field

one reason so many dislike silence

 Remember the dead

They attend thought, memory

Sound of nothing else

when no sense is nonsense

 When he went insane

No one noticed. They thought “He’s 

Just a hermit, is all.”

who dares say anything

 We don’t know what God

Is. Nor know who we are. Here

We stand, abject, gone

Trace of opinion scattered

Belief strewn on vacant street 

with voice, aspiration and inspiration

 Those who pray know just

One thing — that prayer is mere

Active wonder — voice

despite funny poem, she circles back to thây’s stark kind teaching

 So many hungry 

ghosts — the ninety plus year old

sangha elder mourns

now and then

 The deficient mental structure of consciousness seeke to eliminate what it considers, projecting its own deficiency, enemy or other.

We must get beyond this, transcending the deficiencies in order to allow a new structure of consciousness to emerge.

Gebser and Wilber write of this.

By remaining in our deadly dualistic either/or mentality we will perpetuate shootings, killings, hostile takeovers, and wars of all unkindnesses..

Yes it is guns. Yes it is mental illness. Yes it is ignorance and fundamentalist stupidity.

But more, and deeper than that, it is the fear of evolving out of familiar beliefs and opinions into authentic freedom of seeing proper relationality and wholesome inter-connectivity.

Fear.

Paralyzes.

And terrifies.

Let’s help one another through liberation and emancipation.

Now.

And.

Then.

evil has no doubt, good is more circumspect

 I would pray but no

Matter thought and prayer — what

Counts most is resolve

person of disinterest

 Mitch McConnell aims

Weapon pointed into crowd —

He does so much wrong

if you don’t see it, you’re the problem

 Capitalism

And cowardice, these two things

Corrupt this country —

Give me money, House, Senate

Say — and we will run and hide

it's what we do, it makes us great (again)

 We shoot each other

this is America -- we

shoot, kill, each other

be alone

 My brothers and sisters are shot dead in Illinois in Ohio in Kentucky in New York in Texas in many other places in America. 

Can you hear the weeping through the silence?

Of course you can. 

What to do with this sorrow? 

We know.

Do not listen to those who say we must eliminate  one  another.

That’s how the mind kills everyone and everything.

Change that mind.

Don’t say you don’t know where to look.

You know.

Look where compassion looks.

Look where (what we once called) love looks.

It’s a lonely place, that looking.

Be alone.

Say what you see.

what will you have for dinner

 Nothing for me, I’m

Trying to avoid bitter

American fair*—

I’d have to wash it down with

Penance and absolution 

….  …   …

          *[sic]

just call me raca *

I remember when

I was not insane, a brief 

while — without this mind

Everyone was kind, said “You’re 

Lucky!” I didn’t know why

….  …   …

      *    Matthew 5:22 is the only passage in the Bible where the term raca is used. Raca comes from the Aramaic term reqa. It was a derogatory expression meaning “empty-headed,” insinuating a person’s stupidity or inferiority. It was an offensive name used to show utter contempt for another person. Jesus warned that the use of such a word to describe someone was tantamount to murder and deserving of the severest punishment of the law. https://www.gotquestions.org/raca.html

benefit

 For its own sake, yes,

Philosophy — no other

Sake, only it’s own 

4th

 Dawn

Mourning Dove

Lamenting

after dream, darkening night, mare*

 America still

Born after all these years, grief

Mother republic

       …   …   …

 * cognate with the Greek μόρος (Indo-European *móros), meaning 'doom'.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mare_(folklore) 

hungry ghosts

Emotional wraiths

 Every opinion ghost

These former selves tag

Along on left and right, box

Of donuts everywhere crumbs

like an unexpected thought

 Noisy hummingbird

Knows what it is doing, turns

My head to see it

nothing (to be) seen

It’s a curious thought, that there is nothing to be seen. As my eyesight gets more and more blurry I’m grateful for the sight I’ve had all these years.

Still, the prospect that there is nothing to be seen, intrigues. What does this mean, this nothing?

Imagine there is One Thing. That there is nothing other. That our notion of “other” is a delusional belief that posits separational fragmentation instead of communal wholeness as the fundamental ground of existence and being.

You might come to suspect that wholeness intimates there is nothing inside itself and nothing outside itself. There is only Itself.

This is odd stuff to us. Here’s Kierkegaard with his thinking on the matter:

“The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”

― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

Perhaps wholeness suggests there are circles within circles, that seeing anything is seeing everything, that nothing remains to be seen.

Wallace Stevens’ wonderful poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird includes this:

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,   

It marked the edge   

Of one of many circles.   

I suspect we consider our edges to be geographical demarcations signaling personal or property boundaries with ‘no trespassing’ signs aloft — rather than intimate embracing connectivity whose touch and trembling nearness longs to seed new life and growth along the rows of grounded fertilization.

There’s nothing to be seen because we are nothing other than the wholeness perennially becoming itself throughout what is itself emerging.

Richard Rohr writes of Reality as Communion with help from Thomas Merton:

We come to know who God is through exchanges of mutual knowing and loving. God’s basic method of communicating God’s self is not the “saved” individual, the rightly informed believer, or even a person with a career in ministry. God communicates primarily through the journey and bonding process that God initiates in community: in marriages, friendships, families, tribes, nations, schools, organizations, and churches who are seeking to participate in God’s love, maybe without even consciously knowing it. 

Thomas Merton wrote, “The Christian is not merely ‘alone with the Alone’ in the Neoplatonic sense, but [is] One with all ‘brothers and sisters in Christ.’ The Christian’s inner self is, in fact, inseparable from Christ and hence it is in a mysterious and unique way inseparable from all the other ‘I’s’ who live in Christ, so that they all form one ‘Mystical Person,’ which is ‘Christ.’” [1]

Until and unless Christ is experienced as a living relationship between people, the gospel remains largely an abstraction. Until Christ is passed on personally through faithfulness and forgiveness toward another, through concrete bonds of union, I doubt whether he is passed on by words, sermons, institutions, or ideas.

 (—from, Reality as Communion, Week Twenty-Seven: Humanity is a Community! Richard Rohr)

They say that no one has ever seen God. 

I don’t want to see God.

What some people over history have seen, I suspect, are projections of partiality that have been filed under partitioned beliefs affixed to segregated systems of who’s in and who’s out.

God is nothing to be seen. Or, nothing (to be) seen. We cannot see what is (to be).

There’s nothing there.

It’s all here. Not (to be) seen.

Or, as the first line of Daniel Martin, the novel by John Fowles, presents itself — (as a koan):

“Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.”