At Tuesday Evening Conversation someone asked about confession.
It still seems to me that each person knows what is right what is wrong -- emotional distress or lack of loving upbringing not to the contrary.
If so, each person wishes to unburden themselves following promulgation of unseemly, unkind, or unhealthy behavior or thought intentions.
There's a grounded balance of equality of forces that resides within and around each individual. Quite likely, said ground also exists within and around each corporate institution however many officers or administrative personnel engage issues under consideration affecting multiple individuals or general public.
I think we know.
And we want to say what we know.
To be equitably, freely, and refreshingly, there where we are.
Poet Ellen Bass:
The Thing Is
BY ELLEN BASS
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
Poem ©2002 Ellen Bass, "The Thing Is," from Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, (Grayson Books, 2017).
Is that the desired outcome following confession -- "to love you, again"?
The eremitic impulse is to shy away from entangling proximity in favor of solitary attentiveness just off to the side.
Even there, once a clearing of geographical collectivity has been made, there arises a sense of vacuity, an awareness of one without two, a stillness of ding-an-zich
In Kantian philosophy, the thing-in-itself (German: Ding an sich) is the status of objects as they are, independent of representation and observation. The concept of the thing-in-itself was introduced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and over the following centuries was met with controversy among later philosophers.[1] It is closely related to Kant's concept of noumena or the object of inquiry, as opposed to phenomenon, its manifestations. (wikipedia)
Sometimes grief sits with you like reticent friend knowing that to remain wordless is to approximate (or to proximate) presence in a different metaphysic.
Everything, one assumes, is within everything else. What we experience as separateness is our reluctance to see what is there in ways that ordinarily cannot be seen.
Some say that God is within. I think they want to say, but restrain themselves, that God is the within.
When I hermeneutically translated for my own prayerfulness the mantra -- here explicated by the Dalai Lama A Talk On Om Mani Padme Hum, "Om Mani Padme Hum" (Sanskrit pronunciation) or "Om Mani Peme Hung" (Tibetan pronunciation) -- I did it in idiorhythmic fashion.
For me it worded itself as:
Behold what is within without; Behold what is without within.
It is this translation (if you will) of the mantra that stays with me. It suggests for me non-duality, a "don't make two; don't make one" admonishment, an experience of wholeness that eludes definition, categorization, and division.
It is, at times, an experience that nears loneliness. But there is a concomitant realization that aloneness is not necessarily loneliness.
Maybe Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson came close in the chorus of their rendition of Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys.
We greet one another in passing. No need to make anything more, nor less, than that.
Perhaps we've missed the meaning of forgiveness, of sacrifice, of confession, of the teachings of the Buddha, of the revelation of the Christ.
It's an inside job. The external world is perceptual gymnastic parallel bars against and around which we fling our bodies in twirling awkwardness round and round toward dismount and dismantlement.
The words try to tell us. They say:
Be still
and know
that/this --
I am
(--God)
Love, again.
