corporéité -- life’s moments and all transitions between

I like the prospect that when the body goes kaput the signal is lost and there is nothing of the world retained.

    Kaput originated with a card game called piquet that has been popular in France for centuries. French players originally used the term capot to describe both big winners and big losers in piquet. To win all twelve tricks in a hand was called "faire capot" ("to make capot"), but to lose them all was known as "être capot" ("to be capot"). German speakers adopted capot, but respelled it kaputt, and used it only for losers. When English speakers borrowed the word from German, they started using kaput for things that were broken, useless, or destroyed. (--merriam-webster)

Either way, according to early phenomenologist Maurice Marleau-Ponty, the body is the connective/corrective source of knowledge.

Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the perceiving body and its perceived world could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment (corporéité) led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call "indirect ontology" or the ontology of "the flesh of the world" (la chair du monde), seen in his final and incomplete work, The Visible and Invisible, and his last published essay, "Eye and Mind". (--wikipedia)

So many fellow human beings (if, indeed, we were to ascend to such a designation) long for everlasting life beyond death with all the presupposed benefits of Elysian Fields, heaven with God, saints, angels and forebears, and the possibility of reincarnated reinstatement into (supposedly) more and more evolved states of conscious being.

I like the idea of turning the lights out and going into the sleep of indecipherable darkness with no awareness of that fact or any other fact continuing. 

Perhaps the notion of eternality could fit. The word "eternal" is mostly defined as everlasting. I do not think that's what it means. I prefer to see eternal as meaning "no-time." Timelessness. A no-time and un-spaced remainder. A balance of emptiness.

Elsewhere, this consideration:

Focusing solely on the near-death cognizance of the dying, rather than the material perspective of the living, reveals a new understanding of death. Its significance to psychology, philosophy, and religion is huge for what emerges is a long overlooked phenomenon: a nonsupernatural, relativistic, and timelessly eternal consciousness, which can be a natural afterlife. Ironically, the validity of the theory of a natural eternal consciousness (NEC) assumes the loss of all materially based consciousness with death — more specifically, the permanent loss of time perception. The theory claims, and the article deduces from empirical knowledge, that by imperceptibly entering the timelessness before death, one’s last conscious moment, whatever the type, becomes by default — psychologically, from one’s perspective— a forever present moment. To help explain and validate the theory, the article presents thought experiments and a formal model of all of life’s moments and all transitions between periods of time perception and those of timelessness. An open-minded reading should reveal that the NEC does not threaten faith in a god or a heaven.

 . . .

The natural eternal consciousness (NEC) (in a nutshell):

You believe you are having an

experience, and for all eternity

you never know otherwise.—p. 63

(--from, The Theory of a Natural Eternal Consciousness:, The Psychological Basis for a Natural Afterlife, by Bryon K. Ehlmann, © 2020 The Institute of Mind and Behavior, Inc. 

There's something intriguing about never knowing otherwise.

As I approach my inevitable death the company these days of squirrel, chipmunk, sparrow, finch, bluejay, mourning dove, junco, chickadee, nuthatch -- as well as cats, dog, nighttime footsteps in the dark of moving unseen animals -- and, of course,  compañeras and compañeros on the conversing journey through this existence --all suffice, happily and affectionately.

Suffice

and satisfactorily 

go on sufficiently

sustained in their being

as who and where they are

as who and where I was

scurries off into nescient nullity

amen!

with a compassionate heart

To live a zen life is not a hobby.

It is where intent goes to nap.

Since sky and earth are mindless,
They last forever.
What has mind has limits.
A person who has attained
The Path is like this too.
In the midst of no activity,
She carries out her activities,
Accepting all unfavorable
And favorable circumstances
With a compassionate heart.

--Yunmen (864-949)

It is what I do whenever I can.

To nap. And to live a zen life.

I'm not so good with either.

Take right now. 

As an abject failure I cannot find anything to suggest accomplishment.

Such circumstances are troubling.

I am troubled. But why?

Red squirrel and Tchaikovsky Vogel (White-throated Sparrow) dance outside sliding door.

There, there, I am whole and entire.

allocution

 We need 

one another

One 

no other

We need 

No other

That’s God-

Language

There’s 

No other

Way

(To say it)

glancing over to the person sitting next to me

 do you want to spend

the rest of the day

trying to guess

what I'm going to say

the place where they are carried on is, in fact, no place

It becomes a chore to locate who is listening who is speaking.

 I look around. 

Something, clearly, is missing.

If you want to freely live or die, go or stay, to take off or put on your clothes, then right now recognize the one who is listening to my discourse.

That one is without form, without characteristics, without root, without source, and without any dwelling place, yet is brisk and very alive.

As for all manifold responsive activities, the place where they are carried on is, in fact, no place.

Therefore, when you look for that one, it retreats farther and farther, when you seek that, it turns more and more the other way: this is called the “Mystery.”

Lin-chi (d.866)

Something clear is missing.

Can I see through it?

Am I even looking? 

absence of facts is only absence of facts

 lie to me

tell me 

something I

don't know

whether true

or not

good to know

 Yes

I’d say yes

If you really

Want to know

I’d say

Yes

reverberating in a deeper place

 Intelligence speaks

To intelligence, (story

in prison today)

Playing classical music

In hospice room, sounding still

no, I did not hear it

 No opinions, police say

This is a university, stick with facts

Remember when disputation was

Deemed height of academic life?

No more. Shut up. Go back to carrel

Be taught, don’t learn, submit!

We’ll get this college stuff right.

Did you hear the one

About the Jew and Palestinian?

playoffs

 Basketballers fly

tossing down scorching dunks — too 

fast too good — lordy

after low energy mountain walk

 Sitting by flowing

brook as white-streaked head bird jumped

branch to branch above

maraṇasati

 A friend used to say "As I always say." 

Someone else would say "As I always do."

As long as you are subject
To a life bound by force of habit,
You are not free from the
Burden of the body.

Kuei-Shan (771-854)

When I realized I was an idiorhythmic christian eremite and buddhist recluse it surprised me that routine and scheduled practice were not my forte. 

I embraced the conceit that practice was every step, breath, and glance. Then the conceit fell away and practice became every step, breath, and glance.

I'm glad others practice with each other. I know the benefits of group practice. I've done so.  

Then when I realized that I, too, will die, a more pronounced solitary meditative and contemplative attitude came to the fore and stayed.

The Buddhists call it Maraṇasati.

Maraṇasati (mindfulness of death, death awareness) is a Buddhist meditation practice of remembering (frequently keeping in mind) that death can strike at any time (AN 6.20), and that we should practice assiduously (appamada) and with urgency in every moment, even in the time it takes to draw one breath. Not being diligent every moment is called negligence by the Buddha (AN 6.19). In the earliest discourses of the Buddha, the term 'Maranasati' is only explicitly defined twice, in the two suttas AN 6.19 and AN 6.20.  (-wikipedia)

Catholics and others call it Memento Mori. An article in the NYTimes Meet the Nun Who Wants You to Remember You Will Die tells story of one woman who took on the task of reminding us.

These practices cheer me. The five remembrances of buddhism. The hundreds of funeral masses I served as an altar boy. The many years as hospice volunteer. The silent empty shikantaza sittings. 

In 1999 when I visited my sister when she of a sudden went to hospital with diagnosis of late stage lung cancer and left it after her death eight weeks later she quipped "You always would remark "We're all going to die, we're just uncertain when and of what." Then she added, "I guess I know of what."

I've long liked the saying (of uncertain attribution): "If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself."

I know I'm going to die.

When and how might soon become clearer. On one hand it doesn't matter to me. On the other, the prospect pleases me. I've been lucky. I might make it to eighty. My son likes the idea that I've pushed the edge forward by more than a decade of his four grandparent's deaths. He also roots, soberly, for the Red Sox. So there's that.

And cheers for Woody: 

“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.” 

― Woody Allen

Looking out glass door of Wohnkűche, Sparrow kicks at ground for seed just out of sight. Yellow Finch takes flight just as Red Squirrel jumps to hanging feeder. Yew Bush spreads with craggy indifference to all using it for transport, seed cracking, or respite.

It is Saturday morning.

Like flock of Juncos, I am passing through.

cat looks at cushion

 Zazen waking breath

Moving in moving out each

Moment each moment

prayer isn’t difficult, don’t ask

 Morning sun

Empty road

Going nowhere

If you want

Peace of mind

Breathe in, out

benign anarchy with good faith

 Dog pees on leaf pile

Moon nowhere to be seen — let’s

Pretend world is safe

no immunity

Been thinking of nap

after morning at prison 

tuckered, supremely

off with heads

Time to reflect. 

 “[W]here, say some, is the King of America?” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that convinced British colonists in North America to cut ties with their king and start a new nation. “[I]n America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

—in a Letters from an American, 25april24, Heather Cox Richardson

 Democracy or tyranny?

Justice or absolute immunity?

Should not be a hard decision.

full moon slightly with color

“Nature rests by changing” said Heraclitus.

I think of that when I read Luke chapter 4, the story where Jesus goes out into the wilderness for forty days. The idea we’ve been taught is that he is tempted for forty days, but everybody knows that you can’t be tempted for forty days. Let’s say the temptations took up ten days—well, what about the other thirty? What was he doing? Jesus was watching creation. He was observing what was going on around him. He was listening. The reason that we know that is because when he comes back, he talks about creation for the rest of his life. He talks about flowers and birds and trees and seeds and crops and the earth, and the soil. He could have talked about all kinds of things—Roman chariots and their power and aqueducts and the ingenuity involved—but that’s not what we have a record of. What we have a record of is someone who seemed to be at peace with the quietness of creation.… 
 
The Spirit is so contrary to what we might think or desire sometimes. At one time in my life, it was like every time I wanted to hear from God, God would speak through some person. And every time I wanted wisdom from a person, I couldn’t get it, and I could only hear it in silence from God…. When I go out and I listen in creation and I’m listening to the birds, then all of a sudden the Spirit speaks in my heart. It’s not necessarily always silence. Engaged listening is such a sacred thing, and the Spirit works through that so often.

—in Where the Spirit Speaks, by Randy Woodley, CAC

Change is what the mind does while paying attention.

We hear in silence. 

Each sound of every creature a teaching. 

meeting it everywhere

You might consider it a vacant realization. 

Something to stare at out into a gray dusk.

Something like that.

But different.

Just don’t seek from another
Or you’ll be far estranged from the Way.
I now go on alone
Meeting it everywhere
It now is just what I am
I now am one with it.
You must comprehend in this way
To merge with thusness.

--Dongshan Liangjie (807-869) 

 Thusness isn't a vacant dusk, even though you might think it so.

It is that which we move through, ever moving through, coming to no other side.

Like Pema wrote about not worrying about falling, falling, falling -- because there's no bottom to hit.

Or turtles all the way down.

No time. No end. Nothing of concern.

Way! -- Ha!

Who's kidding whom?

Still, I'm good with it.

As Chris Y. said, something that's true but never happened.

Imagine -- something that's true but never happened.

Appearance, disappearance, reappearance; 

Integration, disintegration, reintegration; 

Embodiment, human life, divine presence.

Is that bread you have there?

old cow in hudson valley hollow

full moon 

cool air

in maine dooryard

dog foursquare

pees by leaf pile

the boys together

I've never found

God anywhere

I am just here

I don't know God

don't know (as Doris

says) is most intimate 

circus is in town

Sometimes it’s silly

carnivals of opinion

elephant droppings

brooms sweep the poop right away

wagons cart up to news desks

the ritual of bondage and accusation

 We live in the prison of our enclosed mind. We are our own jailers. We set the sentence, the emotions, and the conditions of our incarceration.

No one has put us there. We walk in and lock the door. We sit and stew. We plead guilty.

Tonight is a good night. To release the prisoner we have only to shut up, do not confess, step away from the scene and conditions of the crime we commit against ourself, and go home.

We imprison ourselves.

Come clean.

Don’t rat yourself out.

Don’t be a patsy.

Rehabilitate yourself.

Get out of jail, free.

earth day — the body serves, entering the earth

Heather Cox Richardson on the background of Earth Day. 

I look out window and there it is. Earth! What a joy!

I’ll add my ashes to this beautiful home. This body knows where it belongs.

Last evening at practice we read  “Water the earth with the tears of your joy”: An Earth Day Reflection from 2020 by Jim Friedrich. Wonderful piece. (Be sure to watch the 2.5 minute YouTube piece at end.)

That piece and this poem by Wendell Berry capped an intimate meditation into our incorporative participation with what is going on with Earth.

        Enriching the Earth

                by Wendell Berry

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. Against the shadow
of veiled possibility my workdays stand
in a most asking light. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind's service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song. 

-- from The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982, by Wendell Berry

There's something worth our undivided attention to attend to our very nature emerging from and as Earth.

first things first

 Earth 

Is where

God has gone

Disappearing

Until you and I

Become human

We don’t need

To find God

We need

To find out 

what being 

human means

Thus

Reappearing

God

writing home every day

I have

run out

of words

Into 

stone silent

gaze

Remember

Africa is a

continent

Although

hard to 

believe

There is

anything

outside of

Maine

Outside 

this looking

to do, absurdly, that which we are, given, to do

Prayer becomes the subtle intake and outflow of breathe. 

It becomes a simple dedication of intention for the wellbeing of others.

 It becomes difficult to pick a goal -- do good and avoid evil, pray for the salvation of souls, the end of terrorism, the diminishment of hate, the cessation of war and violence. 

All worthy of prayer.

But prayer to whom? To implore God to assist good and eliminate evil? Does God need such prodding?

Given the way the world is, perhaps to pray that my fellow humans choose well. Choose between thoughtless unkindness and thoughtful compassion.

It feels a little ridiculous that we human beings have to beg some all-powerful divine being to activate their attention and assist in the diminishment of cruelty, hateful acts, dishonest manipulation of others, and violent acts one upon another.

What kind of divinity requires subservient imploring of intervention?

No.

As long as I continue to breathe I can hold such activity as prayer focused upon my fellow beings to choose well between good and evil.

I don't think the traditional Judeo-Christian God is measuring whether the scale of prayer is tipping enough for heavenly response and intervention.

I suspect, rather, that if I were to understand prayer, it would be a desire for our attentive presence toward one another. A vibrational energy of interconnection evoking a longing for the wellbeing of each and every being in this existence.

Perhaps gratitude.

For being-alive.

Toward being-here.

I do not comprehend the notion of "God". Unless, God is that which is. Unless God is that which is coming to be.

Are we essentially praying toward that which we long to be with one another?

To be with one another in wholeness?

Is God the longing for attentive presence and compassionate wholeness? Not "out there" somewhere, but on its way up from within those beings intent on realizing the emerging wholeness that encompasses and serves all-being in its evolving into what it is meant to be in this realm of appearance?

Meetingbrook is an absurd intention to contribute to the emergence and awareness of those with whom we share the journey through this awkward experience of existence and consciousness.

We try to do, absurdly, that which we are, given, to do.

And so, we pray for each other, for one-another, intending our common breathe and breathing to be beneficial, benevolent, and sufficient for this time.

ecpc — as friday gives way to saturday — stephen dunn

Poetry as door to the invisible. 

Here and Now

            Stephen Dunn 1939 –2021

            for Barbara

        There are words

I've had to save myself from,

like My Lord and Blessed Mother,

words I said and never meant,

though I admit a part of me misses

the ornamental stateliness

of High Mass, that smell

        of incense. Heaven did exist,

I discovered, but was reciprocal

and momentary, like lust

felt at exactly the same time—

two mortals, say, on a resilient bed,

making a small case for themselves.

        You and I became the words

I'd say before I'd lay me down to sleep,

and again when I'd wake—wishful

words, no belief in them yet.

It seemed you'd been put on earth

to distract me

from what was doctrinal and dry.

Electricity may start things,

but if they're to last

I've come to understand

a steady, low-voltage hum

        of affection

must be arrived at. How else to offset

the occasional slide

into neglect and ill temper?

I learned, in time, to let heaven

go its mythy way, to never again

        be a supplicant

of any single idea. For you and me

it's here and now from here on in.

Nothing can save us, nor do we wish

to be saved.

        Let night come

with its austere grandeur,

ancient superstitions and fears.

It can do us no harm.

We'll put some music on,

open the curtains, let things darken

as they will.

From Here and Now, published by W.W. Norton. Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Dunn. 

Where nothing can save us. 

Nor do we wish to be saved.

a world view

Is it 

Our choice —

Good or evil?

what is behind nothing

Kerry Ellen, 

Becca & Megan, 

and Lisa Jean

in Rockport Harbor

of a Thursday

After coffee milk

And blueberry lemon

Slice

Next to white van

Topped with green canoe

Driver listening

To some audio novel

As I do to Dr No

by Percival Everett 

It occurs to me

We are each

Appearing

As if from

Behind 

What is in front

Nothing Being written 

by the nothing that is

And the nothing

That is not — call it

Creatio ex nihilio

and that's that

winter is winter

spring is spring

each belongs

to itself

and one-

another

if there are 

no questions

I'll say 

goodnight

in this dreamworld

This: 

At the sound of the bell

in the silent night, 

I wake from my dream 

in this dreamworld of ours. 

Gazing at the reflection 

of the moon in a clear pool, 

I see, beyond my form, my real form.

—Kojisei (circa 1600) 

 That. 

by their sweet questionings

Chris at Tuesday Evening Conversation brought up revealed truth.

Perhaps, that which can’t be reached by ordinary thought or logical inference.

What is it?

Try this . . .

If Reality is a unified extension of Being, (or vice versa) and if what is whole is the background Source of What Is, do things emerge out into appearance as surprising isomorphic realizations of already inter-existing relational phenomena whose form and formlessness blink on-and-off, in-and-out, throughout time and space, dimensions and imagination revealing Itself by means of Attention and/or Ritual Faith?

Theologians have their word, transubstantiation. One thing becomes another thing even as appearance seems to indicate it is what it was, and (let’s call it) faith seems to hold that it is now what it really is.

“Hocus Pocus” is a diminutive phrase coming from “Hoc est enim corpus meum,”  the words traditionally used at the consecration in Catholic liturgy. One level of reasoning, however incomprehensible, is that bread is no longer bread, wine no longer wine, but, now, body and blood of Jesus the Christ. This contention, patently absurd on its surface, haunts the imagination of nonduality and non-separative wholeness of being.

Perhaps, in effect, the reality of transubstantiation is not really about change, but rather, about pointing to the very nature/fact of what something is.

We acknowledge ordinary temporal and spatial change. Winter becomes spring. Bare trees flower. Youthful bodies become aged bodies.

But what of non-temporal and non-spatial metamorphosis? “Form is emptiness, emptiness form.” The Heart Sutra also claims there is “no old age and death and also no extinction of them.” 

Night becomes day, day becomes night. Things change, we say. 

Woodpecker dismantles tree trunk. Dozens of cars occupy the same space only seconds apart. The 18 year old who rebounded and jump shot is now the 80 year old watching the Warriors end their season with bad shooting losing to the Kings with Klay Thompson 0 for 10 and scoreless in defeat.

But let's re-translate plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, an epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”).(wiktionary) -- usually translated "the more things change, the more they stay the same"

Let's put forward this translation: "The more a thing changes, the more it becomes itself."

Hundreds of thoughts and emotions occupy the same physical emotional intellectual space only milliseconds appending in tandem.

Cats are hungry and watchful at same time. Dog stares and pees at same time. What we call (in ignorant appellation) human and divine, matter and form, one and many, this and that, mine and yours — are separative words for one reality done distinct and believed to be different.

Which brings me back to transubstantiation. Our personal preference hubris makes of one two. (See e.e. cumming’s poem.) Still, I am confounded as to how singularity, morphic resonance, and quantum entanglement figure with the notion that each thing is each thing — and yet each thing is part of and belongs to Itself-as-Itself, one thing as another, another as one thing.

Separation is a great excuse for war, injustice, crime, and punishment. 

Metaphors abound. Is “the body of Christ” a metaphor for what is whole, entire, without beginning or end,  eternal (no time), infinite (without boundary) and non-imaginal (without an image)? 

Our imagination creates worlds. God’s, we say, created this world. (Explain that to someone sitting in a cafe with a New York Times.)

Let Wallace Stevens have his stanza:

She says, “I am content when wakened birds,

Before they fly, test the reality

Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;

But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields

Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”

(From poem, Sunday Morning, by Wallace Stevens)

The mystic looks without discrimination. 

Mystics see what is there to be seen.

Is that awkward word "transubstantiation" a finger pointing to what is, being, revealed?

settling arrears

 Do I think

There’s anything

After death?

I won’t know

So why

Guess.

Lights out

Fire ashes

Scattered

If I owe you

Five bucks

Check coin can

where to live

Dwell here

Go nowhere

Else

There’s

Nothing 

There

it comin’, رِدَّة (ridda).

Let’s consider

Nobody cares

In 100 years

Earth be ridda 

Us

Shaken off

de die in diem *

We dwell from day to day. *

Word is brought back about a gathering at Camden Opera House for Dean J. this afternoon.

Images and music, videos of his singing opera pieces, incidences of his theatre work, stories by those who knew him. It was lovely, I'm told.

What is it about those who sing? Even if, when asked, say nothing about the religious implications of their song?

I suspect the very act of song is value dispersed and dispensed throughout, over, and within those surrounding that which is sung.

Dean was an aspergent.

Earlier the contemplative nuns from Neumz set out this Missa--Coommunio:

Cantáte Dómino, allelúia:
            Sing to the Lord, alleluia:

cantáte Dómino, benedícite nomen ejus:
            sing to the Lord and bless his name: 

bene nuntiáte de die in diem salutáre ejus,
            Announce his salvation from day to day,

allelúia, allelúia.
            alleluia, alleluia.

Had they sung it at his memorial, he'd nod his head at their art. 

occursus

Altar ego 

Lives in monastery

Coming and going

To chant of hours

Clumping of feet

Into wooden stalls

Each of us

An occursus

Of who we are and

Who we really are

persistent inquiry

Woodpecker telephones 

from tree

It rings and rings 

through morning light

brrdrrdrr brrdrrdrr brrdrrdrr

Does not go 

to answering machine

No one home 

No one

wishes to pickup