if we step outside of the metaphysical understanding

What is beyond metaphysics? 

Abstract

In his text What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger refers to thinking as thanking and states that thinking is a gift to humankind from Being. Despite Heidegger's insistence that Being is not a being, the language he uses to describe Being appears to characterize Being as a being. Heidegger's insistence that Being is not a being is related to his attempt to step outside of metaphysics, since metaphysics is unable to see the difference between beings and Being, and thereby focuses on beings when it searches for Being. It is not simply that Heidegger's language appears to make Being into a being, but rather that it appears to make Being into God, which Heidegger thinks of as a being. Yet Heidegger's conception of God as a being is limited to the metaphysical conception of God, and, as I will present in my thesis, there is a difference between the metaphysical conception of God, and the God of faith. Thus, it is only the narrowness of Heidegger's conception of God which makes Being into a being. Therefore, if we step outside of the metaphysical understanding of God we see that Being can be thought of as analogous to God, without being thought of as a being. This is precisely what I shall argue in my thesis. -- Along with discussing the analogy between God and Being I will consider whether Heidegger is successful in his attempt to step outside of metaphysics, thereby avoiding the representational and subjectivist thinking metaphysics entails. It is the language Heidegger uses in describing man's relation to Being that suggest an analogy between God and Being. Yet this analogy presents the possibility that Heidegger is able to think Being through faith in much the same way that other thinkers within the metaphysical tradition think of God. Furthermore, Heidegger appears to be trapped by a language that is inherently metaphysical, yet he attempts to escape this language by resorting to a phenomenology based on faith and poetry. In this thesis I will explore Heidegger's conception of thinking as he presents it in What Is Called Thinking?, and argue that the language Heidegger uses to describe Being make Being analogous to God. Following from this I will examine the implication of this analogy on Heidegger's attempt to step outside of metaphysics.

(-- Heidegger's concept of thinking and its relation to concepts of thanking and the gift, Keppler, Amy (2001) Heidegger's concept of thinking and its relation to concepts of thanking and the gift. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.)

Ok, maybe "what is" is beyond metaphysics. 

our elder sends poem germane to the day

 Our real work

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.

( --Poem by Wendell Berry)

meeting with resident/inmate/prisoner on labor day morning

1.

Quality

the origin of this instant arising

You and me

that which quality gives birth to

Subject and object

a convenience of duality for comparison and contrast

2.

The art of maintaining original thinking

the willingness to return to origin

To think

is alert readiness to see, hear, and appreciate what is this instant arising

Conversation

is allowing what is here to turn with participants through language & gaze

3.

Learning 

about oneself is the invitation to engage what is emerging

Sanity

is faith that what is presenting itself has quality beyond and below appearance

To become human

requires learning about suffering, learning to suffer, 

        learning to transcend     

suffering

wfh/5sept2022

an active, self-maintaining whole

What if the earth were a living being giving birth to all known life?

Would we rethink our understanding of mothering, our behavior toward the planet, and our religious metaphors? 

 GAIA, named after the ancient Greek mother-goddess, is the notion that the Earth and the life on it form an active, self-maintaining whole. By its use of personification it attacks the view that the physical world is inert and lifeless. It has a scientific side, as shown by the new university departments of earth science which bring biology and geology together to study the continuity of the cycle. It also has a visionary or spiritual aspect. What the contributors to this book believe is needed is to bring these two angles together. With global warming now an accepted fact, the lessons of GAIA have never been more relevant and urgent.

(-- description on Scribd of book, Earthy Realism: The Meaning of Gaia, By Mary Midgley, c.2012)

What if Christ were creation?

Mary, earth?

Jesus, the human mature paradigm prototype?

God, Being Itself? 

Christ Creation Fresco,

Our mythological narratives and imaging attempt to engage imagination and intuition in a journey of transcendence and diaphaneity toward integrality of intelligence and manifestation of beings, becoming and being itself.

It's an out-ing and in-ing we do not embark upon often enough.

Either way, it's a roundtrip.

such is his life

Sometimes, not showing up is just not showing up. Our egos are vulnerable possessions. 

One last story I am moved to mention here, but which, for reasons of discretion, I have not done before, concerns Derrida’s final reconciliation with Ricoeur. After Derrida’s Dublin lecture on the lie we retired to my house for dinner. During the course of the conversation, the question of Derrida’s depression came up – we had both experienced ‘dark nights’ in our lives – and he happened to mention how one of his worst bouts followed his doctoral defence when Ricoeur (his director) never showed up for the post-dissertation toast. Derrida confided that this withholding of the ceremonial blessing (as he read it) had devastated him, because Ricoeur had been an intellectual father for him since leaving his own family in Algeria to come to Paris as an émigré student. When I informed him that Ricoeur had not come to my doctoral toast either, Derrida was speechless. You too? He exclaimed. ‘Were you not shocked?’ I said not at all. I had simply picked up the phone and asked Ricoeur why he had not shown up – and had received this frank and moving response:

I am sorry Richard, but I never attend any of my student’s dissertation toasts. I have so many and must also look after my own family. I am a bad father to both my intellectual and actual children. I never give either enough time. Such is my life. I do two jobs badly, but it is all I can do. (n.p.)

Derrida was deeply affected and as soon as he returned to Paris the next day phoned Ricoeur. They agreed to meet that same afternoon in the Jardin du Luxembourg (it was early May) and stayed talking non-stop until the gardiens sent them home when the gates closed at 21:00. What they realised during their exchange was that for 30 years their respective philosophical positions (deconstructive and hermeneutic) had been speaking

Chapter 2

43

Where I speak from: A short intellectual autobiography

past each other – mishearing, misreading, miswriting – in part because of a dialogue manqué at a pivotal moment in their lives: Derrida looking for a surrogate father, Ricoeur unable to respond to a surrogate son.

Ricoeur confessed to me subsequently that after this reunion, they continued to talk on a weekly basis right up to Derrida’s untimely death from pancreatic cancer in 2002. Ricoeur wept at Derrida’s passing, confiding to me: ‘It was not fair. He should not have died before me’. Ricoeur joined his adopted spiritual son two years later in 2004. In one of the last conversations I had with Ricoeur, he told me that when he and Derrida had read my book, The God Who May Be, Derrida thought it too hermeneutic while Ricoeur thought it too deconstructionist! I shared with him a line from Seamus Heaney: ‘Two buckets are easier carried than one, I grew up in between’. He smiled.

-- Kearney, R., 2018, ‘Where I speak from: A short intellectual autobiography’, in D.P. Veldsman & Y. Steenkamp (eds.), Debating Otherness with Richard Kearney: Perspectives from South Africa, pp. 31–62, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://richardmkearney.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/where-i-speak-from-a-short-intellectual-autobiography.pdf

Sometimes, when we do enter conversation, a great deal of who we're not sure we are does show up. 

Just like that. 

haiku. (for s. gregory magni)

Dum páginæ sacræ mystéria pánderet,

While he was interpreting the Mysteries of the Sacred Volume, 

colúmba nive candídior appáruit.

there was seen upon him a dove whiter than snow.

                                                                                                                                                                          (-- Vesperas - Antiphona) 

as often I read

this has not happened to me --

still, wing-brushed leaves move 

subito, alerta

 inmate asks for a

philosophy course on Jung --

(ay mi persona) 

as the doctor's father died

 "We waited to see

if there was one more breath, and

there wasn't," he said

unsay that

 No one exists in 

isolation, not no one —

Only with (MU) one

therapeutic αρχικό philosophy

 What is your intent?

What persona faces out?

What are you hiding?

it’s september

Firstly: 

Art Of Philosophy

@Deep_philo

Become a ghost. Forget attention. Just grow in private.

2:29 PM · Aug 31, 2022·Twitter Web App

Secondly…

Hey, where’d you go?

zum beispiel

 no longer in class-

room, the aging mendicant

forgets what he knew

a good lad

Alles Gute zum Geburtstag!

frohes neues jahr

 It is New Year’s Eve

This end of august, morning

Brings a fresh new start

let me know

 Wake me when he is

Arrested, put on trial, sent

Away to prison

first day

 when the teacher is

ready, the student will show

up and stare at him

as summer packs to leave, late august 2022

There are no events

only one continuous 

unveiling instant

Right there, where you are

bow reverently, stay home

your own holy place

slow to anger, abounding in love

 I haunt the zendo the way an old memory hides in the shadows of recall, or a dream dissipates with each waking second as night fades.

This porch of chapel/zendo is seldom visited now that covid-19 has detoured traffic to other roads and living rooms. 

There's no place I'd rather be -- leaves and sun-patch, distant bells from France and wheels on repaved road heading to and from town. 

If you are ok with being alone there is nothing not with you. But quietly. No inclination to instruct or correct, no obligation to make you better or demand compliance with some ritual hard to remember..

There must be a love of solitude.

Just this instant arising.

And passing away.

Like mid-afternoon breeze traveling up mountain.

God, arising as perpetual origin, has forgotten why -- with each careful step.

Creation accompanies on silent trail.

Slow and abounding!

what one man has wrought

 Dastardly lying

Shameless self promotion, raw

Insinuation 

prison conversation monday morning

 To be patient is to suffer. 

To want things to be other than they are is to suffer.

To be human is to suffer.

This instant arising

This instant arising

This instant arising

...is where quality dwells alone and undifferentiated.

Before thinking, before wanting, before dividing — this is our true face our true name.

Go figure!

leucippus would be proud but unanswering

And if opinions were abnegated? 

“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.” —Democritus

Hello?

Can’t hear you!.

Anyone there?  

Oh God, nothing!

 "Nothing happens at random, but everything from reason and by necessity.^[3]" — Leucippus, On Mind^[4]

mercy, a hortative intention

 Who are we asking?

Miserére mihi Dómine,

O Lord, be merciful to me,  

quóniam ad te clamávi tota die:

for I have cried out to you all day long. 

quia tu Dómine suávis ac mitis es,

For you are sweet and mild, Lord,  

et copiósus in misericórdia

and plentiful in mercy 

ómnibus invocántibus te.

to all who call upon

(—from Introitus, 28aug22, feast of Augustine of Hippo)

Who wants to know? 

みんなを兄弟のように扱う *

 What reason to live — 

Ikigai — ageing slowly

Sound mind sound body

…   …   …

        * treat everyone like a brother (Japanese)

原初的內在性 *

 At edge of nowhere

Stepping into nothing i

Look through you for you

…   …   …

      * originary immanence  (traditional Chinese)

no worse, but different

Each has disappeared

Looking this way and that none

Are seen — love dissolved

nothing left to give

 bee at jule flower

quickly assesses stay go

cohorts following

out of darkness leading to dim light

center origin

where nothing becomes something

an absolute gift

followed by subject object

evaluation judgment

norma jeane's sorrowful death

"It's hard to know where to start

if you don't start with the truth." 

                        (-Marilyn Monroe, d. 4aug1962)

 the surprise isn't 

that loveless things occur, but

sometimes kindness does

ya na (you are not) alone

 I am 

Not

Alone

There is 

No

Alone

(Don’t you)

See

metaphorically unmistaken

 Who do you serve, who

receives your ministration —

(everyone) — amen

santoka’s view

 When in the mountains,

I will watch the mountains,

On rainy days

I will listen to the rain,

Spring, summer, fall, winter,

Morning is good,

Evening is good.

— Santōka Taneda 種田 山頭火

English translation: James Abrams

kvetching the contours of notoreity

 Waking with two words

grizzling, greyling — shear complaint

freshwater fishes

 habitat pollution, both

psyche and surface unclear

one bell, consecration, si nous regardons

 ask me, I prefer

propel to excel -- to move through

not surpass, but thrive

...   ...   ... 

excel (v.)

c. 1400, transitive, "to surpass, be superior to;" early 15c., intransitive, "be remarkable for superiority, surpass others," from Latin excellere "to rise, surpass, be superior, be eminent," from ex "out from" (see ex-) + -cellere "rise high, tower," related to celsus "high, lofty, great," from PIE root *kel- (2) "to be prominent; hill."

propel (v.)

mid-15c., propellen, "to drive away, expel," from Latin propellere "push forward, drive forward, drive forth; move, impel," from pro "forward" (see pro-) + pellere "to push, drive" (from PIE root *pel- (5) "to thrust, strike, drive"). Meaning "to drive onward, cause to move forward" is from 1650s.

Online Etymological Dictionary)

 

and you don’t know me

 Night office bell rings

What earthly good might it sound[s]—

Comes now to our ears

cough from down hall

 Cucumbers in bin

by road at house across from 

Snow Bowl ‘for free’ sign

indirizzo

This is what I recall.

 No traces left

             of the house where I was born:

fireflies.

                (—Sandoka Taneda) 

Hearing no further sound. 

I,

still,

listen.

as simple as you can

round bread from Whole Foods

peanut butter and chivers

umm, umm, with coffee

mind one's own, (busyness)

The eternal feminine and the wise old man. Jung looked into these two. The reality of the psyche. An apriori fact of nature, an objective phenomenon.

Each night a visit. Every dream an orientation. An ordinary psychosis disenchanting the solid belief two plus two is four.

Mandalas, found all over the world, primordial images of wholeness or totality, the Jungian investigation.  

This Wednesday, in mid-coast Maine, between mountains, my psyche drifts amnesiac between two worlds, (or is it three?) completely uncertain as to who has lived my life up to now.

Wandering through mind with Jung, Campbell, Joyce, Santoka, Pirsig, Heidegger, Dogen, and Lowell.

Not their minds.

But mind.

One's hermitage.

One's cell.

One's anchorage.

Bowing to all residue of personage who've aggregated and aggravagated the sluice passage I and every other have taken enroute here and elsewhere. 

Fellow pilgrims wandering. 

An aesthetic collating the interdisciplinary obvious. All these years later. Still wondering where any of us belong.

My brothers in prison. We meet, sit, and converse. We consider what there is to learn, how learning is teaching itself. The one revolutionary emancipation, becoming free, even in the most restrictive spaces, even between cranial confines, between sternum spine enclosure.

Our elder in Carmel encourages that I attend the shakuhachi player's 80th birthday celebration. I tell her only if I drive the 359 miles to pick her up and bring her back the 329 miles to the gathering and then take the 718 mile roundtrip returning her to her anchorite homestead.

She demurs. 

I will have to write a haiku. I will not have been not at the gathering, only not as one might appear.

I suspect, if there is a continuity of life beyond this material/physical existence, I will have to devise a series of mythopoetic contrivances to obfuscate the seemingness of anti-phenomenological semblance while honoring the integrity of affective fondness even in absentia.

"Law is born from despair of human nature."  -- Jose Ortega y Gasset

A non-sequitur doesn't mean it doesn't follow.  

Despair is as good as repair.

One could argue, less expensive.

beginning raps on wooden invitatory

 Reading Joseph Campbell on James Joyce while walking snow bowl between Ragged mountain Bald mountain Melvin hills and Hosmer pond.

The sound of words encircling archetypal foundations of thought from which all symbols form and fall and feel their way into thin air which fills our fleeting awareness with facts and falderal and fanciful fennels of  recollection.

Such as the dream I wake from tonight. The cast of characters and unopened package of pipe tobacco in jacket pocket along with honey soft cough drops.

“They lived and laughed and loved and left.”

—James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

One by one.

Eaves sending drops to sun porch roof.

The sound of it.

Like Basho’s unaccountable surface broken.

forgiving yourself

Not easy, being fooled.

"Treat them nice in a world that just spit on you" (--Manti T'eo, in documentary, Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist" Netflix)

Coming through the other end, the difficult bow at end, this inexplicable play.

tagata lelei, faafetai 

 (Samoan)

good man, thank you

why not be it

Perspicacious, see

Through and through a bullet clean

And clear not killing

think/unthink intimate presence

 Heidegger was tricking us.

He said we are still not thinking. 

And we conclude that he was saying we must begin to think.

He let us mull that, and we concluded an erroneous conclusion.

Here's what I think: To think is to unthink.

To unthink is to be still. (He said:

"We are still not thinking" -- and we missed it.)

To unthink is to be

still, silent, present.

To think is to disappear into somewhere undiscoverable.

If you embrace zen, you hold nothing

and that nothing is (paradoxically) intimate presence.

Intimate presence has no outside no inside --

Only the energy* moving through the physical/spiritual universe

enroute through here/elsewhere.

Now, what if we think/unthink that?

...   ...   ...      

Definition of energy

en· er· gy |  \ ˈe-nər-jē  \

plural energies

1a : dynamic quality  narrative energy

b : the capacity of acting or being active  intellectual energyc : a usually positive spiritual force  the energy flowing through all people

2 : vigorous exertion of power : effort  investing time and energy

3 : a fundamental entity of nature that is transferred between parts of a system in the production of physical change within the system and usually regarded as the capacity for doing work

4 : usable power (such as heat or electricity)  also  : the resources for producing such power

  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/energy 

ainsi soit-il

 In the silence of an afternoon, sun through tree canopy, bright splotches of light on years-old crumpled leaves, branches unwavering in breezeless stillness, the ending of terce from France a time differential recording across Atlantic, this meditation cabin screened porch at foot of Ragged Mountain, solitude.

Moss-covered stone wall, bowsaw hanging around camping candle, photograph of Han from Hosmer Pond neighbor's house, clouds passing out of view cooling wooded stretch between cabin and yurt, brook not flowing but watered from 24 hour rain this week, no bell sounds from chapel-zendo.

This is how prayer sounds. Nothing to hear from no-one praying. 

Glance and listening.

I suspect God is the the entirety of whatever is, well within itself, glancing and listening to whatever is seen whatever uttered with an interested reciprocity to each appearance each resonance each attenuation fitting the shape and size of beings in Being as they are.

I don't believe in a God.

I sense God is what is surrounding and embodying all which appears -- actually, surround-itself, embodiment-itself.

We walk through God moving within each thing glancing and listening as itself with itself to and as itself . . .

No other

Way

Psalmic love and compassion 

as it is

Ainsi soit-il

revealing source once and for all

 Here

is what 

I think

Now

hear this

exclusion into beneficent seclusion

 I’ve gotten older

Everything is just itself

Nothing going on

smoothing small stones

 One thing after an-

other, oscillating tide 

successive wavelets 

a revolving circle of good humor and trusting contribution

 The young man from the South was explaining the intricacies of Tantric philosophy.

The cautious man from the Aegean seacoast town expressed his wariness of police and priests.

The quiet man from years of military service drew on a sheet of paper while others spoke.

The excited man from New Jersey wrote on the board: "That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is" -- and invited punctuation.

The tall man when he finally spoke quoted Sartre and Existentialism and challanged with push back.

The old man at corner of table marveled at the variety and depth of conversation and inquiry as to whether we die at the end of our lives or if we are dead from the beginning and emerge into life by resurrecting through a veil of ignorance.

We read and ruminated:

Death is not at end of life. Death is that from which and through which we emerge as we become alive to the manifestation and revelation of what is being asked of us in this existence.

We will not see this, cannot be taught or told this, until we undergo this and emerge through this into this present moment, this unveiled illusion, this naked truth -- all we are is all this is -- completely and wholly integrated with love.

(--meetingbrook blog, 4:59am, 6aug22) 

A Friday morning conversation in prison.

Others dropped in and out, or greeted in hallway enroute their meetings with teachers or administrators concerning plans for graduate studies or other projects.

Friday morning Meetingbrook Conversation at Maine State Prison, after thirty years, remains a catch-as-catch-can continuity of poetry, philosophy, personal stories, beliefs, experiences, current events, sorrowful recollections and hopeful plans all in a revolving circle of good humor and trusting contribution to the ambiance of thoughtful communication and wondering attentiveness.

The lobby guard started the process before wanding ritual by asking, "Do you know what the reading of a will is? (Silence.) "A dead giveaway!"

At end of morning, barbed wire and steel doors left behind, one is reminded how even the most unusual places are occasions of joy and friendship, even hearing the resonance of deep affection of one to another, these mates-in-residence together.

what did you say

 It seems I do not much like it when people in a group share their experiences of times when you were not there, or, to regale you with what might be accounted for as a recounting of their activities so as to fill the time hanging loosely overhead like misting rain on a long afternoon.

It surprises me that I said so aloud at a Tuesday evening conversation. I wondered if it might be construed as not being interested in what people said. It gave me pause.

If I were to amend my words, I’d add that to speak about what is right there, to engage vision or idea or inquiry or insight as it emerges from the immediacy of presence revealing itself right here right now, the refreshing realization of now and now and now manifesting itself as new arrival in fresh perspective — would be what delights, would be what creates, the unfolding immanence of the invisible being urged into creative transparent diaphaneity.

Or, maybe, I’m just a cranky reclusive misanthrope.

religion has not been banned from the world at all

When is relationality no longer relationality but reality-itself formerly known by concepts no longer sustainable by thought? 

A question of presuppositions, I suppose? Postmodernity and the ‘Return of Religion’

Caputo is often aligned to what today is called postsecularism, the awareness that after secularization religion has not been banned from the world at all. On the contrary, postsecularists argue, whereas the traditional theory of secularization suspected the complete downfall of religion at least in industrial and urbanized societies, a return of religion is to be noted even in those civilized circles consisting of religion’s former despisers. This section will show just how this postsecular world takes shape for Caputo. Modernity, and enlightened thought in general, falls prey to its own excesses. It is far from difficult to come up with a few examples of all this: an overestimation of rationality, a craving for progress at all costs, etc. Caputo names the following, from a more philosophical perspective: “Good riddance to the idea of pure wordless and solipsistic subjects, to the ideal of pure presuppositions to science, to a pure prelinguistic world, to pure objects, to pure consciousness, and to pure reason”.1

The Enlightenment, and its call to freedom and autonomy, may in effect have turned rather soon to a new form of oppression—‘thou shalt not be irrational’—a fate which it obviously shares with many revolutions. The search for pure reason soon became as dogmatic as the religion it rejected. The quest for the ‘conditions of possibility of knowledge’, knew in the end very little: the one thing it could be certain of was the object, of which it could configure the geometrical coordinates in a clear and distinct manner; it, of course, knew of the human being—the subject who knew the object—but this being was perhaps already on the verge of losing its humanity if only because it was expected to prescribe to the world its being in a stable, permanent and unaltered way. The transcendental subject, Lacoste writes, is nothing less than a monster and the illusion of autonomy, of a being unrelated to any other being if only with itself, has fortunately been overturned. Yet we know that this critique of the Enlightenment, this “New Enlightenment, one that is enlightened about the limits of the old one”2 all too readily reverses in its counterposition. One might for instance think of the idea of relationality: if the desire for autonomy is abandoned because it too easily turns into a bloodless, lifeless and worldless monadic monster then this ‘new’ Enlightenment all too easily opts for the contrary and posits the dream of a total openness of one subject to another—I am nothing without my network and my relations—which, in the best of all possible worlds, would of course be accompanied with a complete openness of the other toward myself. If the reference to the world of managers and business is perhaps not to be interpreted as a coincidence, the philosophical point about this reversal is nevertheless more important: one can indeed legitimately wonder whether this dream of total openness not simply repeats the old, metaphysical idea of adequatio, of a correspondence of thought with the matter at hand, of a clear and no less distinct idea of this matter on another level, for this correspondence may well no longer lie in a relation-less subject (relating everything that is to itself) but now rather lies in the dream of an adequate—since total—openness, ‘between’ subjects (relating to one another and, through, this to everything else).3 Just as the causa sui, in the old days, was configured as the cause that caused everything else but remained itself uncaused, so it is easy to configure ‘God’ as the relation that instigates all the other relations but is not and cannot be related to itself—remember, for instance, that for Aquinas already, there is no ‘real relation’ between the world and God. The end of metaphysics? Are we there yet?

For Caputo, we are however well on our way to this ‘end’, if only through at times taking a step back. Caputo will in effect argue that there is an analogy between the precritical thought of the Middle Ages and postcritical postmodernity: it is not that we all of a sudden have relapsed in an age of obscurity (although some might like to see postmodernity in this way) in which faith is accorded a more primordial role than reason, it is rather that the postsecular account of deconstruction now notes that faith is not entirely bereft of reason just as reason does not seem to be entirely exempt of belief. In this way, deconstruction is held between premodern and modern thought: it does neither opt for blind faith without reason nor for a pure reason without faith but rather for a faith in and of rationality.

(—from,  Holy Ignorance? John Caputo's Religion without Religion (Draft), by joeri schrijvers)

 The course I took with John Caputo at Villanova was on Heidegger. It was the late seventies. He had just published (1978) The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (Ohio University Press). 

Philosophy, poetry, and zen encircled me as I wandered an alternative country path.

 

Ein anderer Weg

 

see without knowing

know without seeing — now — this 

faith/reason saunter

     

      (wfh)

heiliges meer

refracting (yes)

 We are looking for

that which is looking through us

seeing   (yes)   itself

kenotic shunyata

 Buddha, Jesus, earth's

fine brothers, their christic minds

one is no other

noch einmal bitte

 from the cosmos, earth

from the earth, humanity

comes then christic whole 

die große stille

capturing stillness

each and every movement sees 

universe praying

needs (to be) thought about

 This:

 "To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy." --Martin Heidegger.

And this:

“The poet is the priest of the invisible.” —Wallace Stevens

Needs 

to be 

thought 

about. 

go ahead, go on

 hospice patient dies

disappears, goes off further

confounding those left

itadakimasu *

fifty five years gone

since drive to Nicolet for

Jo-Ann's vows ... taken 

...   ...   ...

    * Japanese, in a literal sense "I humbly receive"

a directionality in evolution

There is, they say, a band of thought encircling the planet. Not just the bits and data of internet cloud stringing every house and town from Russia to California, from Manilla to Iceland. 

Rather a realm of thought, conscious or unconscious, emanating from the evolutionary impacted emergence of human ratiocination translating consciousness into mental deliberation, theorizing, and opinionating judgment.

(cf. The Third Story of the Universe | Brian Swimme | TEDxBerkeley, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLJ-MSUQsh0.    Time 15:11)

For better or worse, a new phylum of evolutionary appearance that becomes an active player in the specific cosmic neighborhood of planet earth and its extensions.

 In the theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In contrast to the conceptions of the Gaia theorists, or the promoters of cyberspace, Vernadsky's noosphere emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear processes, begins to create resources through the transmutation of elements. It is also currently being researched as part of the Global Consciousness Project.^[19]

Teilhard perceived a directionality in evolution along an axis of increasing Complexity/Consciousness. For Teilhard, the noosphere is the sphere of thought encircling the earth that has emerged through evolution as a consequence of this growth in complexity/consciousness. The noosphere is therefore as much part of nature as the barysphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. As a result, Teilhard sees the "social phenomenon [as] the culmination of and not the attenuation of the biological phenomenon."^[20] These social phenomena are part of the noosphere and include, for example, legal, educational, religious, research, industrial and technological systems. In this sense, the noosphere emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. The noosphere thus grows in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. Teilhard argued the noosphere evolves towards ever greater personalisation, individuation and unification of its elements. He saw the Christian notion of love as being the principal driver of "noogenesis", the evolution of mind. Evolution would culminate in the Omega Point—an apex of thought/consciousness—which he identified with the eschatological return of Christ.

(--Noösphere, Wikipedia)

I'm not sure we've ever come close to understanding the story, the mythology and imaginative urge, of Christ-reality. 

Is Mary the earth?

Is Christ the cosmos?

Is Jesus humanity?

...

Elsewhere --In her Monday poem email Doris sends William Carlos Williams:

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

                                                William Carlos Williams

….  ….  …

I respond: 

plum, tuckered, out

no, not forgiveness,

i cannot abide your cheek —

leave here, don’t come back

                               -wfh

I don't want to be harsh to the poet thief, after all, he seems contrite with a dubious delight in his caper. And maybe my haiku response will soften and relent and simply savor the good doctor's playful confession. 

Human thought, in all its myriad shapes and stretching extension, leaves us no longer at the mercy of elemental materiality and biologic viability. We become what we think. The earth becomes what we think of it and what we think for it.

This is not merely an anthropocentric or anthropomorphic  conceit. It is raw and serious impactful reality.

What question, what koan, is being presented to us for our practice as novices in this interstellar zendo we call "my life," "our life," "life-itself?"

The state department of transportation dumptrucks, layers, steamrollers, and men with shovels and rakes have moved past our roadside gate after asphalting the other lane of Barnestown Road.

This feast of Mary's Assumption.

This liturgy of Monday morning.

festina

 Prime bells across earth

The presenting of something

Not physically there

as these things go

For the moment no

Pain. And for the moment mere

Gratitude, for this

songs of hope and comfort

 Hospice patient breathes

Inside sound of Yo Yo Ma —

Simply passing time