it can be safely exchanged … (origin-al*)

 If we learned to read, to really read, would we be able to discern what is true even in the midst of the most blatant partisan propaganda?

If we learned to listen, to really listen, would we become capable of hearing the submerged truth hidden below surface of every comment, description, or argument?

We believe, falsely, that we know how to read, how to listen. We search, in vain, for political views similar to ours. Or, more impossibly, we long for some mythic equivalence in news broadcasts that somehow presents (as if possible) an equitable scale of proportionate right/left ideology, good/bad news, optimistic/depressive offerings.

It is a fruitless desire.

Rather it is up to us, to each one of us, to deepen our intelligence, widen our capacity, cultivate a wisdom heart and compassionate mind, one that sees into and sees through what is presented with clear alacrity and full-feeling awareness of what truth, concealed, seeks unconcealment, what suffering, obscured, seeks reconciling manifestation.

“Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.” ― George Santayana

 Our education, like our chastity, is always beginning, where each time is the first time. Each person the first person. Each moment of encounter, of reading, of listening — is our first experience with what seems to be other, but is more intimately interior that we initially realize.

There is an emancipation from illusion connected to autogenerated autodidactic learning.

No one gives it to us.

It is constructed out of the material of the moment appearing in front of us.

In summary, it doesn’t matter if your formal education is primary school, secondary school, a GED, an associates or bachelor's degree, or some graduate or professional course of studies. 

What matters is readiness for “the ripeness of instinct and discretion” that accompanies each situation and circumstance, yielding it’s own intelligence, presenting itself to our attending inquiry and curiosity, revealing its own schematic blueprint for our direct, personal, and immediate assessment and action.

Education has little to do with schooling.

Pragmatic, utilitarian, and intelligent learning arises from direct and immediate experience of the really real revealing itself in our presence without barrier or boundary — as the really real does, and is always doing.

This, this intersection of time and history, this coincidence of seeming opposites, this crossroad of all possible directions, this radical emergence of the already and the not yet…

This cruciform compassionate consciousness, this reflexive synchrony of undifferentiated awareness and act — is our learning curriculum of each present moment.

What would you give up in exchange for origin-al learning?

…   …   … 

*al- (1)

Proto-Indo-European root meaning "beyond."

*al- (2)

Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to grow, nourish." 

— Online Etymology Dictionary

logos (to make manifest) and phainesthai (to show oneself)

 I'm still in the late sixties studying with John Macquarrie at Union Theological, (translator of Sein und Seit by Martin Heidegger), and William Richardson at Fordham, (author of Heidegger -- Through Phenomenology to Thought.)

I'm still curious about (Sein) Being, and (Da-Sein) There-Being. 

How All-That-Is might find resonance and replication in Here-I-am. (With apologies to Herr MH.) 

How each being might be a distinctive dimensional development of the Being-Beyond-Being that entirely transcends the ability of conscious understanding and practical manipulation.

How the enactment of ordinary and everyday being-and-becoming in particular and distinct occasions of current expressions of beings-in-this-world are ipso facto occasions of isomorphic congruence, correspondence, conversation, and contemplation of What-Is in all its manifestations.

Thus, this/that elides into is/at.  (Or, as Apple might suggest, "be/at" {Could this be what the "beat" movement was on to?})

• be | bē | 

verb (singular present am | am | ; are | är | ; is | iz | ; plural present are; first and third singular past was | wəz, wäz | ; second singular past and plural past were | wər | ; present subjunctive be; past subjunctive were; present participle being | ˈbēiNG | ; past participle been | bin | )  

1 (usually there is/are) exist:  

• be present:  

2 [with adverbial] occur; take place: 

• occupy a position in space: 

• stay in the same place or condition: 

• attend: 

• come; go; visit: 

3 [as copular verb] having the state, quality, identity, nature, role, etc., specified: 

• cost: 

• amount to: 

• represent:  

• signify:  

• consist of; constitute:   

4 informal say: .

...   ...   ... 

• at1 | at, ət | 

preposition 1 expressing location or arrival in a particular place or position: • used in speech to indicate the sign @ in email addresses, separating the address holder's name from their location. 2 expressing the time when an event takes place:• [without adjective] denoting a particular period of time: the sea is cooler at night. • [without adjective] denoting the time spent by someone attending an educational institution, a workplace, or their home: 3 denoting a particular point or segment on a scale: • referring to someone's age: 4 expressing a particular state or condition: • expressing a relationship between an individual and a skill: 5 expressing the object of a look, gesture, thought, action, or plan: • expressing the target of a shot from a weapon: • emphasizing the directing of an action toward a specified object: 6 expressing the means by which something is done: 

..        (Apple dictionary) 

Listening to Carl Sagan's novel "Contact." The chapter eleven discussion between Ellie Arroway and the two religious representatives made me wonder whether there might be a new catagory to place alongside the many religious denominational designations in our world, namely, that of 'non-theist christian.'

The christic manifestation, with help from wiktionary, points out: 

From Middle English Crist, from Old English Crist, from Latin Christus, from Ancient Greek Χρῑστός (Khrīstós), proper noun use of χρῑστός (khrīstós, “[the] anointed [one]”), a calque of Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ‎ (māšīaḥ, “anointed”) (whence English messiah). 

We've come through the waters of our planet's womb, we've come through the waters of our mothers' uterus, we move through the waters of our physical bodies. The anointing urges us to continue to move through the ocean of Being toward the ever-present and ever-continuing origin of what is unfolding and manifesting itself.

Perhaps the thinking expressed over the course of two centuries, that "God" or what we've thought of as "God", is, indeed, dead. This thought has angered some. Perhaps it is time to enter the feeling present. It is time to allow the felt presence of what is revealing itself to be what it is, within and without, no longer making it other, or separate, or not-us. 

"Us" excludes no one or no thing. "Us" includes the increasingly obvious truth that our interconnective isomorphism is of a piece, one without two, one within one. 

I've begun to suspect such an unfolding is not what our classical theism has suggested to us in the past. Rather, going forward in a non-theistic christic pilgrimage, we might be the emergence of christ as active compassion, inclusive caring, and isomorphic revelation of what we once thought was above and beyond as now within and without. 

By beholding what is within/without, by beholding what is without/within, we reside, in and with, the here and the now as the perennial, beginningless and endless, Origin-Al, Being-Itself.

Which brings me back to Heidegger and Richardson:   

I take him to mean that if the later Heidegger has any relevance for Christians at all, it will extend beyond the field of exegesis. The relation

between revelation and faith, between faith and speculative thought,

between the ministerial function of theological speculation and the

magisterial character of the Church- all these matters would deserve

to be rethought in the light of Heidegger's thought, if, indeed, it offers

any light at all.

But whether it offers any light or not, the ecumenical importance

of Heidegger's influence, especially for us in America, is unquestion-

able. This would be the second reason for discussing it. The New

Frontiers in Theology series already includes such titles as The Later

Heidegger and Theology (1963) and The New Hermeneutic (1964).

Another volume (now in preparation) will contain the proceedings of

a consultation of Protestant theologians held at Drew University,

Madison, N.J., in April, 1964, on the theme "The Problem of Non-

objectifying Thinking and Speaking in Theology"-Heideggerian

terminology of the purest water.

Let us, then, formulate the question for ourselves: Does the later

Heidegger have any relevance for the Catholic exegete or theologian?

Are his spectacles worth trying on? Heidegger himself, when he ad-

dressed a group of Bultmann's former students at Marburg in 1960,

suggested that if his effort had any relevance at all, it might be con-

sidered in terms of an analogy: as philosophical thinking is to Being,

so theological thinking (the thinking of faith) is to the self-revealing

God." To be sure, this covers a multitude of sins. In the narrow com-

pass of these pages, let us simply try to understand the relationship

between Being and thinking for the later Heidegger, and then restrict

our attention to only one way in which its application, by analogy,

might be suggestive to the Catholic thinker.

BEING AND THINKING

Being and thinking, indeed! This is the whole of Heidegger. It is now a commonplace that the express intention of Sein und Zeit, his masterwork of 1927, was to interrogate the sense, or meaning, of Being. He has told us since then that the question first occurred to him in 1907 when, during his last year at the Gymnasium in Constance, a priest-friend gave him the doctoral dissertation of the Neo-Scholastic thinker Franz Brentano, entitled The Manifold Sense of Being in Aristotle (where "being" translates the Greek on and the German Seiendes). Writing of the experience in 1962, he says:

. . . On the title page of his work, Brentano quotes Aristotle's phrase to on legetai

pollachôs. I translate: "A being becomes manifest (seil., with regard to its Being) in

many ways." Latent in this phrase is the question that determined the way of my

thought: What is the pervasive, simple, unified determination of Being that per-

meates all of its multiple meanings? This question raised another: What, then, does 7

This, then, was his initial question. But it is important for us to understand that the Being whose sense he sought entered his experience as a process of revelation. There are several reasons, I think, for this. The first was his early experience of theology. After leaving the Gymnasium, he spent three semesters as a seminarian (with a brief interlude as a Jesuit novice). In the courses on exegesis he first heard the word "hermeneutic," and this suggested to him a relationship between language (the language of Sacred Scripture) and Being. We shall return to the problem of language later. Here let us remark simply that Being in this experience is the Being of God, to be sure, but of God insofar as He reveals Himself.

After leaving the seminary, Heidegger fell under the influence of Husserl. From the philosophical point of view this was decisive. He writes (1962): "Dialogues with Husserl provided the immediate experience of the phenomenological method In this evolution a normative role was played by the reference back to fundamental words of Greek thought which I interpreted accordingly: logos (to make manifest) and phainesthai (to show oneself)."8 The beings, there­fore, whose Being Heidegger wanted to legein (make manifest) were phainomena, i.e., were beings only insofar as they appear. For Heideg­ger, beings are only to the extent that they are revealed.

(--from, Heidegger and Theology, by William Richardson S.J., Theological Studies, February, 1965)

 The question arises: What is being revealed at this time? Or, put differently: What is Being revealing in, with, and through us as this time?

The urge to meaning, wholeness, and identity is felt through and through.

I urge you...

to

Feel well!

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.