Love the contemplative life?

David Whyte tells the story: “Why are you unhappy?” asks the ancient Chinese poet Wu Wei We. And he answers his own question: “Why are you unhappy? Because 98.98% of everything you do and all that you say is for yourself, and there isn’t one.”

At Wednesday Evening Laura Conversation at the bookshop tonight it was suggested that when we arrive at authentic question, it contains its own answer. When answer breaks through, question is abandoned.

Love -- the contemplative life.

So too, self. When self is authentically arrived at, it contains within itself everything it is. When this inner expanse is seen and realized, self disappears. It is as though what we call "self" never existed -- but to reveal all that is arising within.

When Jesus came to the end of his days -- comes to the end of his self -- Christ is revealed.

It is a long curiosity why Christians cling to Jesus. Is it similar to the act of clinging to self?

As the week follows itself day by day into Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday -- we step into metaphor and mystery so intimate we forget our own name.

It is the 1.2% invitation.

One's passion.

Inside out.

"I'm tired," Saskia says as she herds the dogs out door through barn to go for walk with Annie and her dog. She is tired; and the bag of birdseed has not been taken from back of car. The one-dog-too-many staying with us these three weeks creates dyadic crabbiness.

Sun arrives earlier, stays later, is warmer. On zafu during quiet this morning spectral light dots room through hanging glass sliced into triangular segments of globe at window.

David Steindl-Rast converses with Ken Wilber about Gratefulness as Great Fullness.
Belonging is established with gratitude and trust.

Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father.
(John 13:1)

There is often ambivalence about "this world." Stay or go? Good or bad? Save or let rot? Use up or respectfully preserve? In the text we are told Jesus knew his time in this world was at its end. The text says "to pass...to the Father."

Passing to the Father is passing through this world with gratefulness. "Father" -- however else we conceive that referential word -- is perfect equanimity.

Wilber says, "The mirror loves all of its objects equally."

Like the mirror mind -- we love equally what presents itself before us -- seeing each as is.

The worthies of old all had
means of emancipating people.
What I teach people just requires
you not to take on the confusion of others.
If you need to act, then act,
without any further hesitation or doubt.
- Lin Chi (d 867?)

Loving each as is -- equaling what is in our seeing.

Jesus is the mirror. Christ is the mind.

Mirror mind looks out through us.

Be nowhere to be found.

No confusion.

Act.

President Bush relents and repents. He begins to see beyond ego and beyond politics.

The Congress and President have passed legislation to keep a woman in Florida alive. "Culture of Life" is their way of saying that all life is sacred and should not be taken away.

I like this notion.

President Bush will soon announce that he was wrong to allow over one hundred executions of death-row inmates while he was governor of Texas. He will apologize for bombing and killing innocent men, women, and children in Afghanistan and Iraq. He will sign a letter of sorrow stipulating he did not know what he was doing when he authorized the taking of life from poor disabled persistive vegetative people in Texas; the taking of anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 civilian lives in the Middle East; and the taking of life in the name of interrogation at holding facilities during America's time of honoring the 9/11 victims.

He and his newly awakened political colleagues are a courageous flock. His remorse and their conversion come during a holy week in the Christian faith.

Kuei-shan was asked, "Is there any further cultivation for people who have suddenly awakened?" He replied, "If they awaken truly, realizing the fundamental, they know instinctively when it happens. The question of cultivation or not is two-sided. Suppose beginners have conditionally attained a moment of sudden awakening to inherent truth, but there are still longstanding habit energies that cannot as yet be cleared all at once? They must be taught to clear away streams of consciousness manifesting habitual activity. That is cultivation, but there cannot be a particular doctrine to have them practice or devote themselves to."
- Kuei-Shan (771-854)

By clearing away longstanding habit energies whose activitiy kills those who are alive, I am confident that President Bush, as witnessed by his signing of the Schiavo Law, is setting a long needed example for this country.

If abortion is wrong, so is capital punishment. If murder is wrong, so is collateral damage in warfare. No excuse given will be accepted -- not "I didn't know the gun was loaded;" not, "We didn't intend to kill civilians;" not, "We only do God's work when we judge and murder evil people." If 9/11 was wrong, so is blasting bodies to death and gunning down whole neighborhoods in Middle East countries.

Mr. Bush, with his new declaration proclaiming the sanctity of life, is happily admitting he wants to correct any wrong he has participated in perpetuating, especially the habit activity cultivating and enabling a culture of death that haunts his presidency.

Rather than lowering his head to remember Jesus' death during this yearly memorial, he will do well to look straight ahead at the faces and eyes of individuals demolished by policies of death. Rather than caving in to nominally religious political financial supporters, he would do well to climb out from the hole dug by behavior that denies sacred life. Rather than an insincere "Thank you, Jesus for helping me kill and eliminate evil-doers", Mr Bush would come to stand silently in the presence of Christ, experience authentic compassion, and see the face of forgiveness contemporary Christianity has hooded and forgotten.

Let's not worship history. Let's honor, love, and respect all life -- right here, right now, right away.

That would be a holy week!

That would be Terri Schiavo's gift.

Does Mr. Bush see this?

Do any of us?

It's not whether Jesus dies or lives, goes away or comes back, resurrects or disappears in plain sight. The matter is whether he abandons his self to the consciousness of Christ.

Jesus is liturgically welcomed as messiah today. In a few days we will scripturally allow him to die again with full anticipation of a dawn resurrection three days hence. There's no need to tease the drama beyond formulations carried forward two thousand years. He will die. Emotions will relay sorrow. A day of emptiness will be followed by a retelling of mythic memories from creation's garden through sunrise narrative where new creation calls Mary by name generating revelation of transformed theology.

There will be a suitable period of awe followed by unaccountable materialization -- peripatetic pedagogy, bread breaking beholding, biological beckoning of finger and fist to unveil and prove that what could not possibly have happened did indeed take place. Death, it is asserted, has been penetrated and passed-through.

Then Jesus said to them, "You will all lose faith in me this night, for the scripture says: I shall strike the shepherd and the sheep of the flock will be scattered, but after my resurrection I shall go before you to Galilee." (from Matthew 26)

Of course we lose faith in Jesus. Why not. After palm fronds fall to the dirt, the man himself in a few days will be stepped on and abandoned. His Father in heaven has nothing to say. It is a script we know by heart.

You live beyond
The wards of Blue Gate;
Walking or sitting,
There's South Mountain view.
A safe distance
From the general hubbub,
I'm sure you're at peace
When day ends.
Below the fence
Frogs are calling;
Grass greens
The entrance to your door.
I'm fond of passing by your residence;
It's only sad I must return
At dusk alone.
- Chang Chi (776-829)

This is only Act One. Like most initial impressions and political immaturity there is enthusiasm for heady ideology that goodness triumphs over duplicity, awareness over unconsciousness. We like that prospect.

The week dashes hope that good intention yields good outcome.

The metaphor of a man forced to abandon his self to what itself resides between creation and return.

Jesus goes nowhere. Christ emerges from there alone.

I would like to applaud the United States' effort to keep the Florida woman alive.

Now, if only they felt similarly about not killing women, children, and men in Iraq and Afghanistan -- some real revelation would be at hand.

We can hope and pray for those this nation kills; and those it demands stay alive.

Politics and morality are such difficult choices.

Let's give up both.

Consider, instead, this.

What does paramita mean?
It is an Indian word and means in
Chinese "reaching the other shore."
It is interpreted as freedom from birth
And death.
Attachment to externals produces
Birth and death,
Just as water rises in waves;
This is called "this shore."
Detachment from externals
Ensures freedom from birth and death,
Like water which flows freely
And uninterruptedly;
This is called the "other shore."
- Altar Sutra

Choose neither birth nor death

Practice no-choice.

Near other shore.

Irish celebrate St. Patrick's Day. He lived during 4th/5th century.

We are all born mad. Some remain so. (-- Samuel Beckett, in Waiting for Godot)

My family on 69th street loved celebrating this day. They've gone to the invisible. They drank a beer or two, boiled corned beef, tolerated cabbage, told stories, and shook their heads at lies heard. Lies are what we tell when threatened by the truth. I've told plenty. Some lies were longer and more hurtful than others. I, then and now, dislike lies. Whether or not forgiveness enters the equation, we are desolate liars. Who are "we"? -- someone will ask. That person, asking, is a liar.

Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.
(Beckett in Molloy, Part I)

I believe him, I know it's my only chance to -- my only chance, I believe all I'm told, I've disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallow everything, greedily. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I'm not sure of it.
(Molloy, Part I, major prose narratives, 1951)

I fancy madness in the way poet Theodore Roethke does. He asks:
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance?
(from poem "In a Dark Time")

The circumstance of contemporary culture in the world is maddening. Perhaps it is a good thing. Maybe as we move to what some call transparency we will more easily be able to see what we couldn't before -- namely, the wall of deceit and falsity created by those who benefit by deceit and falsity. Moving to transparency means passing through cutting shards hanging where wall disintegrates.

I like Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). I grew up with his absurd take on things and life. The way he describes those who don't think as I do:
His plan therefore was not to refuse admission to the idea, but to keep it at bay until his mind was ready to receive it. Then let it in and pulverise it. Obliterate the bastard.
(in More Pricks Than Kicks)

Say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down.
(in More Pricks Than Kicks
(The volume More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) contained 10 stories describing episodes in the life of a Dublin intellectual, Belacqua Shuah)

I note that Patrick of Ireland suffered what has become an American tactic.
The defining event of Patrick's life was his abduction. Ripped from a comfortable upbringing and forced into servitude, Patrick never recovered from the trauma. Upon his return to Britain many of his friends had gone on to fine educations and prominence whereas Patrick, an outsider as a slave in Ireland, became an outsider in his home society. To his dismay, Patrick was neither a great orator nor did he have a facility with the written word. He wrote late in life "that is why I am now ashamed and am seriously afraid of revealing my unskilfulness, the fact that I cannot hold forth in speech to cultivated people in exact language." As an older man he still regarded himself as a "poor ignorant orphan" and an "exile and refugee" who was "very little educated". After returning as Bishop to the land that had once considered him a slave, he never left again, becoming more closely identified with the Irish people than the British.

As a man, Patrick was devastated by captivity. In his years of slavery he developed a deep faith and sense of conviction in his God which provided him tremendous missionary zeal. Perhaps finding more acceptance among the society of his captors, Patrick dedicated his life's energy to the Irish christian mission and he died there around 460 A.D. with no ordained successor.
As a saint, Patrick is larger than life for those who need him to be. Perhaps this March 17 we can forgo the green beer and the snake charming and remember just the man who overcame great odds to carry out his life's work on the beautiful and cruel island of Eire. (in SAINT PATRICK The man and the myth -- by C. Austin)

In our country we learn how to get along. We worry that what we say will be taken by the government as oppositional, and thereby, dangerous.
If I have said anything to the contrary I was mistaken. If I say anything to the contrary again I shall be mistaken again. Unless I am mistaken now. Into the dossier with it in any case, in support of whatever thesis you fancy.
(in The Unnamable, L'Innommable,1953)

I watched last night Frank McCourt's visit back to Limerick Ireland where he grew up after moving there from Brooklyn. He's amazed how prosperous and happy everyone seems to be. He'd been poor and miserable. The Irish have a curious relationship with hope.
Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken. Company too up to a point. Better a sick heart than none. Till it starts to break. So speaking of himself he concludes for the time being. For the time being leave it at that.
(in Company, composed between May 1977 and August 1979, is a Beckett lengthy prose fiction)

So much of contemporary history is bald-face lie. Or is it better called farce?
I say farce deliberately, in the hope of covering up for you. That's what our best authors do, they call their most serious works farces, in case no one is prepared to take them seriously.
(Beckett in Eleuthéria)

It is difficult to read the farce of political governance these days. But we might wish to learn how to read through and beyond the words. It might affect our sanity.

And when we become mad, or return to madness, we might find our house empty and friends departed.

Once, we believed we had friends in reporters and journalists -- surely they would tell the truth, investigate through the deception, and champion justice.
...when it comes to those bastards of journalists, I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind. That's for those bastards of critics.
(Beckett, in Letter to Alan Schneider, 1957)

It is a good day to be Irish. So much blather and blarney!

If I was dead, I wouldn't know I was dead. That's the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death. That's where liberty lies: to see oneself dead.
(Eleuthéria)

There's something resonant here with what Ken Wilber said about ego. He said that a good definition of the ego is "The capacity in us to deny the obvious."

Death of the ego, therefore, might result in seeing and engaging the obvious.

There are probably at least two sources for the snakes which Patrick "drove" out of Ireland. A symbol for the goddess worship practiced in Ireland prior to Christianity was the snake or serpent. The conversion of Ireland to Christianity symbolically banished the "snake" from the land. Secondly, the bloody cult of Crom Cruaich in County Caven demanded human sacrifice to a serpent deity and the dismantling of this cult by Christianity is now remembered as the "snakes being driven from Ireland."
(From SAINT PATRICK The man and the myth -- by C. Austin)

Snakes abound in this country. We'd better pray to Patrick.

To drive them out.

Take their green.

Un-metaphor.

Remain mad.

Cat is crazed. It's only energy. It will subside. Everything subsides. But while here, it is a fullness unto itself.

At a place deep
In green trees,
A lamp’s light
Burns long.
Spring pilgrims
Make their way to the temple;
Blossoms fall
At a monk’s closed gate.
In the mind, the ten
Thousand doctrines are still;
A clear, lone spring
Purls over rocks.
We do not ask
About our lives, our work,
And the silence between us
We keep.
- Ch’i- Chi (864-937)

This late winter has been one of depleted energy poured into demands of work and time. Nature's explosions of winter weather have diverted energy to plow and shovel. In the realm of what used to be called "news" -- now "crazed events" -- are reported regularly as judicial murders, political wars, propaganda posing as news, assassinations, silent coup d'etats that have shifted power without fanfare, and the ongoing collapse of systems by corrupt swindlers rewarded for their chicanery. It is nearly too much to take in -- not the superfluity of data -- but the brazen subterfuge and moral erosion that despoils contemporary polity and culture. It is a cynic's breeding ground; but most of us do not recognize that the instant of conception is the beginning of cynicism's slow gestation intent on corrupting life.

As Holy Week in the Christian metaphor approaches, it is useful to remember the Philippian ancient formula. It warns us about false equations attempting to yield false yet absolute answers. Jesus would have no part in establishing arrogant and despotic power -- certainly not the way contemporary men attempt to shill and spin their actions as those of Jesus and God -- that perennial lie of power by delegation and association with divine ordination so loved by today's politician/pundit/lobbyist impostors. Which of them would empty themselves?

Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality
with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the
form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on
a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the
name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee
should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and
every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the
Father. (Philippians 2:6-11)

As you see, it's been a long, hard winter. But -- a more dangerous time is approaching. The process promising end or emergence from a dark time portends its own danger. Like coming up from ocean depth, a slow ascent must be made. Coming from a dark cave, a gradual introduction to light is necessary. Sanity is a careful step-by-step reconstruction of integrity from the dregs of despair and disintegration. This dangerous time occurs as snow melts, sun warms, and people begin to believe things haven't been as bad as they actually have been. Longing to believe is stronger than skepticism and careful scrutiny.

Something has gone away. Something is lost.

To N, in absentia

I do not know how you went out of my life
or when exactly. The leaves of the Norway maple
are beginning to turn yellow, fall has come.
I last saw you on an evening at the end of July
but I think you were already gone then,
I think by then you had been gone for a long time.

And so it seems meaningless to count the days
yet still I count them, August, September,
October now half over, terrible days,
And I do not know where you are
or when I may have news of you again.
But I remember as if yesterday the day
you came out of my body into this world,
a fine splash in full midsummer, a small cry
like the meow of a Siamese cat,
your eyes wide open and looking all around;
remember how in the early hours of that morning,
before you arrived, I heard pass down our street
(as I had heard each morning that summer
of my thirtieth year) the clopping sound
of a lone horse pulling a calèche,
his sleepy driver bound for the road
that climbs Mount Royal's slope.

No one can take away that morning
or the exactness of its place in time.
I go there often.
I visit it like a temple.
(Poem by Robyn Sarah, from A Day's Grace.)

As a nation, the United States must confront diminishment of the very thing it says it is exporting to the Middle East: freedom and sanity; truthful expression and vox populi (voice of the people); credibility and justice.

It is dangerous to believe the feel-good exhortation to simply trust your betters -- an invitation issued by those wanting you to believe that they are your betters. It is also dangerous to unconsciously follow the hypnotic decals of folded ribbons pasted on cars; clucking commentators telling you that "we are right and they are wrong"; servile ministers, clergy, and preachers suggesting that God somehow has decided a hit-list for murders and executions and we must bow down to God's political will.

It is not only the cat that is crazed. I'm there too. But feeling crazed is no negation of the fact that what crazes us is itself crazy.

I less and less like the world men are making in their own greed-crazed image.

I'm inclined to love the world that God suffuses with God's authentic reality. ("God," that is, what used to be called God when God belonged only to God and humans hadn't concieved the skills of advertisement, public relations, and persuasion). The word, name, and notion "God" has itself been stolen from its sanctuary, reconstituted, and re-introduced into the marketplace as a
modifier of ambition and insincere self-importance. This ersatz God suffers greed in the forms of government, media, sports, corporate profiteers, corrupt law enforcement, and imprecations to trust, trust, trust.

A more radical consciousness is called for in order to save, to retrieve from desolation, our true nature.
#36. My God struggles on without certainty. Will he conquer? Will he be conquered? Nothing in the Universe is certain. He flings himself into uncertainty; he gambles all his destiny at every moment.
#37. He clings to warm bodies; he has no other bulwark. He shouts for help; he proclaims mobilization throughout the Universe.
#38. It is our duty, on hearing his Cry, to run under his flag, to fight by his side, to be lost or to be saved with him.
#39. God is imperiled. He is not almighty, that we may cross our hands, waiting for certain victory. He is not all-holy, that we may wait trustingly for him to pity and to save us.
#40. Within the province of our ephemeral flesh all of God is imperiled. He cannot be saved unless we save him with our own struggles; nor can we be saved unless he is saved.
#41. We are one. From the blind worm in the depths of the ocean to the endless arena of the Galaxy, only one person struggles and is imperiled: You. And within your small and earthen breast only one thing struggles and is imperiled: the Universe.
(from THE ACTION, The Relationship Between God and Man, in THE SAVIORS OF GOD, SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, by Nikos Kazantzakis, Translated by Kimon Friar)

Are we up for it?

Do not believe those-who-pretend-God.

Enter true relationship.

Make this our meditation.

Someone writes, asking: "Forgetfulness of 'What'? That is the question. Can you answer this?"

The German word "Seinsvergessenheit" means "forgetfulness of being."

Introduction
One of the most serious charges that Heidegger leveled against the entire history of Western philosophy is Seinsvergessenheit or the oblivion of Being. This oblivion of Being is very evident in the philosophical field called metaphysics. It is rather quite paradoxical that metaphysics whose subject matter is Being can be forgetful of Being. However, according to Heidegger, it is precisely because Western metaphysics is concerned with the difference between Being and beings that metaphysics has forgotten that which grants the difference. It is the dif-ference that grants the difference between Being and beings that Heidegger says is and should be the concern of thought. In Heidegger's reckoning only the Pre-Socratics came close to thinking about this dif-ference and after them the entire history of Western philosophy has not thought about this dif-ference.
(from The Oblivion of Being: An Overview of Metaphysics and Mysticism in Aquinas, Eckhart and Heidegger, by Ernesto A. Lapitan Jr., O.P.)

Mu-ge the cat tears at papers under boots next to woodstove. Sando sleeps on daybed. Britta (visiting German Shepherd) lays down behind my chair as the tearing begins. Cesco is in middle room in front of last night's cooled ashes. David Steindl-Rast converses with Ken Wilber about "Evolutionary Panentheism: A Godview for Today's World."

The fire in woodstove is slow to take hold. So too is a Godview that empowers. One's "ultimate concern" is one's Godview.

If people want to do the finest thing in the world, nothing compares to learning. If they want to be the best of learners, nothing compares to learning the Way. Master Zhu said, “Learning is for seeking the Way; what is the use of learning otherwise?”
- Anon

What have we forgotten? Heidegger says "Being." What is Being? (A fine tautological question!) Being is what is holding us as we ask the question. Being is what is, as it is.

I might not always like what is. That is part of my argument with God and my argument with myself. I want "what is" not to be all of what is, but an edited and tidied version of the whole picture.

A woman and son stop by for tea and playtime with dogs. The boy and dogs play hard outside and in with snow and tennis balls. She and I talk about her mother who receives hospice care, and her father recovering from heart attack. She tries to make sense of all the confusion -- long trips to their residence several states away, medical information, wanting mom to speak more about the critical brevity of time remaining, seeking solace and companionship in the process.

It is the relationship that counts. Not the words, not the neat schedule, not even settling on a location for care. It is the relationship between daughter and parents at this time, during the confusion, in the face of uncertain outcomes -- the relationship, the being-there through this time that matters most. Everything else is whiskbroom sweeping up details.

Rabbi Marc Gafni, talking with Ken Wilber, speaks of being "on the inside of God's face" and "fullness of presence," "participating in the yearning force of being," and "the experience of interconnectivity, the all in the all." He calls this The Erotic Essence of Existence.

This inner yearning fullness experience -- this, I submit, is remembrance of Being.

Mothers, fathers, lovers, and children -- all in all -- are the "What?" that forgetfulness tries to erase from eros and awareness.

We are meant to live inside Being, an erotic inner life that realizes the relationship of each to each as it is occurring.

The woman and boy have gone. Mu-ge sleeps on my lap; Sando on bed, Britta on floor to my left; Cesco on rug behind chair. The energetic boy has worn them out.

John Macquarrie, Mystical Theologian, has said that God is Reality.

Remember this. This is the lovely face of God. We dwell therein.

Silent sitting in cabin tonight was silent and still. Four of us. Sitting, walking, chanting. Bell chant at end.

Walking snow path to house, collecting lanterns, hanging them on beam in barn.

Reading Thich Nhat Hanh and Ayya Khema. Nhat Hanh writes:
To shed light on all things? This is the point of departure. If I live without mindfulness, in forgetfulness, I am, as Albert Camus says in his novel The Stranger, living "like a dead person." The ancient Zen masters used to say, "If we live in forgetfulness, we die in a dream." (--in "Necessary Awareness")

Ayya Khema writes:
The emotional aspect of ourselves is of such great importance that its purification is the basis for a harmonious and peaceful life, and also for good meditation.
(--in "Heart Essence")
Our thinking, she says, is dependent on our feelings.

Soup and bread with ten minute silence. Then we talk.

What we say is about our practice. Personal, public, practice.

Each time I go upstairs or come down stairs I bow in the direction of front window altar.

Bowing to that which is within, I make the bow exterior.

In this way, in each bow, nothing is forgotten.

Snow is white whale.

The westering sun
Flares in the willow silk;
The river meanders far off
From the hushed pavilion.
Who, after parting,
Will comfort the weary traveler?
There is only spring wind rising
Where the road forks.
- Chiao-jan (730-799)

Snow dominates mountains and flattens concave bowl between. No chasing nor finishing this fish. He swims the slender valley into Hosmer Pond without touching water. Plows push him thither, yon, and laughably scar small segments of skin.

J.D. McClatchy says that Herman Melville made $556.37 in his lifetime from his novel Moby Dick.

"While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true." (--HACKLUYT, in Moby Dick -- or The Whale, by Herman Melville, ETYMOLOGY.)

In prison yesterday we conversed the struggle of learning. We pondered a quote Jacob Bronowski used in The Ascent of Man, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." (quoting Oliver Cromwell, English general & politician, 1599 - 1658). Charlie and Michael are struggling to reframe their thoughts as representatives of the NAACP chapter so to negotiate through institutional seas. Greg, Saskia, and I joined them in Bronowski's meditation at Auschwitz.

In the chapter "Knowledge or Certainty" Bronowski says:
"I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people." (in the 1973 BBC series "The Ascent of Man,")

Certainty stops thinking. Knowledge continuously explores possibilities. We spoke of the need for continual compassionate invitation of those in institutional power to actively engage those seeking to learn. Charlie said, "What I hear is that although we might not be compatible, we can be compassionate."

"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great wales." --GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON. in Moby Dick -- or The Whale, by Herman Melville, EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).

The fable takes place in a Warren pond, with pods for men who've learned to kill. They too know snow. They are in the belly of snow. Melville and Ishmael strain to see the sea as it is, and find a way to swim away with mind and heart, life and limb, still intact.

There is no in or out. Both inmate and outmate undergo snow storm. Does each settle into separate sea? Or are we mates all? No longer in thrall -- but, partnering through a squall?

White wale -- can we faintly hear "Thar she blows!"?
["Wale" = One of the heavy planks or strakes extending along the sides of a wooden ship. Or, A mark raised on the skin, as by a whip; a weal or welt. American Heritage Dictionary]

It is a conceit to note snow, prison, concentration camp, and learning -- alongside one another.

The mistakes we make and the mistaken responses taken as result are often twisted like ropes securing us to uncertain and submerged consequences.

Snow covers everything this late winter Saturday.

Spring, they say, soon will surface.

Snow will swim to deeper place.

Water waits under all.

Retrieve "H" -- add to "elp", "oly", "ospitality", and "eaven"

We have to touch people.

The question Gale poses at the end of her new book is a good place to begin. She asks:

and
what
is

BEYOND
our
Universe,

our
Matrix
of
light?
(- Gale Albury)

If we would learn to live in this contemporary existence, we would do well to dwell awhile within this question. "What Is" is our meditation -- our inquiry, our beginning, our dwelling place, and our destination.

Looking for Immortals

At the stream’s source,
The path leads on
To gray cliffs.

Everywhere,
Among blossoming apricot trees,
Dwell immortals.

A hermit says,
“More can be found
on West Peak,

and two or three
have their home
in the clouds.”
- Chang chi (776-829)

These immortals are about us everywhere. They sit where they are, reading this. They stand to get water. They ask, "Am I an immortal?" They turn around to see if anyone else has heard them ask. They leave their house, walk across sun-bright ground-snow, and wander off into their day.

Gale has written in Memories of MU:
Once we sang to each other empathically. Once we had no names, no identities, and yet we knew each other intimately. Once we understood each others' hearts, thoughts, and emotions.

Identity was not important to us back then. We were individual; autonomous. We worked singularly and together. Our awareness' were at times singular and at times collective. All experiences were revelations. We reveled in the sights, sounds, and smells of Earth. She filled our senses to overflowing and we beamed in our happiness.

So, identity being so unimportant, we focused our attention all around us, watching carefully to see where and when our energies were needed. Our experience came from the end results of the energy influences around us. We lived to enhance the life of Mother Earth.
(from Memories of MU, By Gale Albury, c.2004, TEA Printers and Publishers, Rockland, Maine)

As spring tarries weaving her way toward Bald Mountain, chickadee, nuthatch, bluejay, and mourning dove, come for seed over deep snow through clear sunlight.

Our Matrix --
["A surrounding substance within which something else originates, develops, or is contained. The womb." (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)]

Of light.

"Self and society," wrote Charles Horton Cooley, "are twin-born."

Why are hermits so few? Even those who are hermits -- why are they so suspect?

As Sherlock Holmes would say, "It is simplicity itself." (Umberto Eco points out that nowhere in the corpus of Arthur Conan Doyle is the phrase "It's elementary!" used.)

Hermits hide from mankind
Most go to the mountains to sleep
Where green vines wind through woods
And jade gorges echo unbroken
Higher and higher enraptured
On and on simply free
Free of what stains the world
Minds pure like the white lotus
- Han shan

While enjoying a measure of solitude and slow return to better health I read a play written by someone who attends conversations at the shop. It speaks of unfamiliar knowledge about history, money, power, and those who know the seldom explicated rule of how the world is negotiated and those who do it well generations apace.

That doesn't happen in this hermitage. Here, this morning, wind rattles bellchime out barnside window, nuthatch lands on screen to drink from icicle hanging in sunlight from gutter above dooryard window, and, I don't care if I ever emerge from seclusion into a more socially understandable set of occurrences. Here the world is not negotiated -- the world is seen as a river might be seen following its impulse, flowing past a hollow from which mere watchfulness blesses with noting attention what is passing enroute elsewhere.

The hermit, in this hollow, can only marvel at the breadth and enormous diversity that passes on each floe toward the far sea. Everything, in time, will reach the sea. No need board any passing ice-floe to ride the length of passage. The hermit does not make the overt trip -- he retains the hollow as his dwelling.

"Self and society," wrote Cooley, "are twin-born." This emphasis on the organic link and the indissoluble connection between self and society is the theme of most of Cooley's writings and remains the crucial contribution he made to modern social psychology and sociology.

Cooley argued that a person's self grows out of a person's commerce with others. "The social origin of his life comes by the pathway of intercourse with other persons." The self, to Cooley, is not first individual and then social; it arises dialectically through communication. One's consciousness of himself is a reflection of the ideas about himself that he attributes to other minds; thus, there can be no isolated selves. "There is no sense of 'I' without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they. (-- Charles Horton Cooley, 1864-1929) http://www.bolender.com/Sociological%20Theory/Cooley,%20Charles%20Horton/
cooley,_charles_horton.htm

There are no isolated selves. Whether rushing headlong across some track of chosen commerce, or nestling quietly in watchful stillness -- no one is separate from another. It is noteworthy that our common experience is separation. The world of appearance seems to yield feelings of distinct and isolated existence in the world even though we exist alongside each other and engage in efforts to bridge the distance and make inroads for intimacy and community.

The hermit learns midwifery. What comes into being via hermit ministration is a new incarnation of that which is twin-born. Self and society reflect one another. What the maieutic hermit allows to emerge is a beginning embodiment that is itself a reflecting place. When we think of a reflecting place we imagine a mirror, or plate glass into which we gaze and receive back what has been given there. The hermit, as reflecting place, is not that type of image-throwing object.

The hermit is the looking-place. The hermit, watching from itself, lets pass through the singularity of each being there. Nothing is thrown back; nothing is held back. Nor is there any subject/object dispersion. Rather, the looking-place which is the hermit resembles no notion we know. Conceive, if you will, a looking-place wherein there is no looking out nor any looking in -- instead, there is only looking-itself. Looking "as" replaces looking "at."

Charles Horton Cooley said, "The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse."

This is the mind of the hermit. Arrivals and departures are noted well. The hermit's mind is what is passing through this.

This. And this. Even, this.

There...is no place to go.

This is why I am staying here.

Mind...World -- not two things.

If one would attain the perfection of purity,
One must purify one’s mind.
As one’s mind is purified,
So the buddha-land is purified.
- Vimalakirti Sutra

If you want to know the condition of the world, look at the condition of your mind.

Tonight in Maine howling wind, snow, and ice. A raw raging emptiness as winter nears end.

There is no saving the world. There is only clearing one's mind. When mind becomes clear, world becomes transparent.

Are we clear about this?

Willing to see this world...through?

If we wake from a bad dream, will we be willing to soon dream again?

"There is a quick reliance on the use of lethal force." That's what the man in Seattle said on the News Hour tonight about military fire at checkpoints in Iraq.

Here's the thing about this war in Iraq -- the United States military have taken to themselves the power over lives of anybody at any time in any place in that unfortunate country. It's a heady power. It is often described as arrogance, the same arrogance rife within the American administration. It reminds one of an old and antiquated notion held about God.

In my dream I saw
The spring wind gently shaking
Blossoms from a tree;
And even now, though I’m awake,
There’s motion, trembling in my chest.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)

We must wake up. We must enter a new understanding of dream.

The God of arrogant absolute power is a notion of deity falling into decay. So too, the behavior of nations -- whether in the name of dictatorship, democracy, or demagoguery -- is decadent remnant of a theological position. That position claims that whatever is done in the name of good is permissible; whatever undertaken in the name of God is right. God and good are co-opted. So now there is a choice: rehabilitate a decaying notion of God and attempt to convert believers in a corrupt interpretation to a more humane view of human existence; or allow the deterioration of a self-destructive concept of God and state to collapse under its own instability and concentrate energy on creating a new experience of human life and moral agency based on a more foundational reliance on ontological and existential ground.

Would it be too radical an experience to let all concepts and notions of God go? And turn instead to open encounter with the reality of what-is? This encounter would be completely reliant on direct intuitive experience of what is actually there, unencumbered by interpretative theological formula, yet open to careful scrutiny and intelligent investigation. Let's not call this view the substitution of theology with science. Let's think of it as a dreaming poetry of illuminative intuitive seeing.

At one moment in Identitat und Differenz --unique, so far as I am aware, in Heidegger's whole writings --the master concedes with brusque humor that the ontological quest, the attempt to separate Being from beings, is a sort of futile game, a circular catch-as-catch-can. Even this, of course, would not necessarily mean that the game had not been worth playing, that it did not engage the most bracing and ennobling of human impulses. But it would be a bleak tally.
There can, however, be another approach to the tautological core of Martin Heidegger's philosophy of Being. Sein ist Sein and the rejection of paraphrase or logical exposition have their exact precedent in the ontological finality of theology. Formally, as we have seen, they are the absolute equivalent to the Self-utterance and Self-definition of the Deity -- I am that which I am -- and to the refusal, as complete in Kant as it is in the Old Testament itself, to anatomize, to decompose analytically the transcendent oneness of the divine. Heidegger is determined to think outside theology. He insists that his fundamental ontology is extratheological, that it has absolutely nothing to tell us, either way, of the existence or attributes of God. It is, however, my own experience that Heidegger's paradigm and expression of Being, of the ontological cut between Being and beings, adapts at almost every point to the substitution of "God" for the term Sein. This does not prove that such substitution is latent in Heidegger's design. He would repudiate it. But it does mean, to this reader at least, that the philosophy, the sociology, the poetics and, at some opaque level, the politics of Heidegger embody and articulate an "after," or "post-theology."
(pp.155-6, in Martin Heidegger, by George Steiner)

Perhaps the usurpation of deity is a common flaw of human ambition. It is misdirection to 'myself' what belongs only to 'itself.' Appropriating power is the beginning of the illusion of ownership. Whole swathes of men periodically fall into the desolating crevice of false accomplishment thinking they are on the brink of ambitious success. Their fall is far and fierce, trailing behind them tears and sorrow of many who thought them great. The grief of nations is predicated on the foolish arrogance of unrestrained ideologues and messiahs. What we need is something more ordinary. We need poets and artists, musicians and craftspeople, thinkers and generous bestowers of hospitality. We need powerful dreamers -- not dreams of power.

Dreams of spring blossoms.

A heart-felt experience.

Something that is itself.

Well within itself.

Call this into Being.

We need facts more than faith. More than facts or faith, we need a deeper spirituality of question.

It is time to uncover the mind. Faith has often been used as a cover over the mind. This must change.

If we want to throw open the road ahead,
We must first push down the wall that's facing us.
What wall is this?
The wall is in our minds.
If our minds are not covered over,
Then all affairs are open to investigation.
When our intent has been made genuine,
Then our minds are broad and
Our bodies are at ease.
- Hong Yuan (~1533)

For several thousand years we still are not certain what "mind" is and what it does. The Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras lived c. 500 BCE; c. 480-79 BCE. He focused on mind (in Greek, Nous).
We see, then, that the differences which exist in the world as we know it are to be explained by the varying proportions in which the portions are mingled. 'Everything is called that of which it has most in it', though, as a matter of fact, it has everything in it. Snow, for instance, is black as well as white, but we call it white because the white so far exceeds the black. As was natural, the 'things' Anaxagoras chiefly thought of as contained in each 'seed' were the traditional opposites, hot and cold, wet and dry, and so forth. It is of these he is expressly speaking when he says that 'the things in one world are not cut off from one another with a hatchet' (fr. 8). Empedocles had made each of these four opposites a 'root' by itself; each of the 'seeds' of Anaxagoras contains them all. In this way he thought he could explain nutrition and growth; for it is clear that the product of a number of 'seeds' might present quite a different proportion of the opposites than any one of them if they were taken severally.

The other problem, that of the source of motion, still remains. How are we to pass from the state of the world when all things were together to the manifold reality we know? Like Empedocles, Anaxagoras looked to the microcosm for a suggestion as to the source of motion, but he found one such source sufficient for his purpose. He called it Mind (nous) -- pure, passionless reason. It is the source of motion as well as of knowledge in us. He did not, however, succeed in forming the conception of an incorporeal force. Mind, as the cause of motion, is a sort of 'fluid'. It is 'the thinnest of all things' (fr. 12), and, above all, it is 'unmixed', that is to say, it has no portions of other things in it, and this is what gives it the 'mastery', that is, the power both of knowing and of moving other things. Further, it enters into some things and not into others, and that explains the distinction between the animate and the inanimate. At first the seeds lay mingled without order; but nous set the unarranged matter into motion, and thereby created out of chaos an orderly world. The way in which it separates and orders things is by producing a rotatory motion, which begins at the center and spreads further and further. That is really all Anaxagoras had to say about it. Like a true Ionian he tried to give a mechanical explanation of everything he could, and, when once he had got the rotatory motion started, he could leave that to order the rest of the world. (from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/a/anaxagor.htm)

It leads to the question: Does each thing have a mind of its own? In addition, does freedom and truth have to do with the ability to see through one's mind the reality appearing before us, and to act with an engaged integrity with it?

Anaxagoras accepts Parmenides' view that what is, or Being, neither comes into being nor passes out of being. Like Empedocles, Anaxagoras holds that becoming is the result of the combining and separation of imperishable elements. He says in Fr. 17:

"The Hellenes follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being mixture, and passing away separation." (Fr. 17)

What appears to be the coming into being and passing away of things is really only the mixture and separation of "things that are," eternal, unchanging elements. Although no statement to this effect is found in the fragments, probably Anaxagoras rejects that idea that nothing can exist, so that there can be no void or empty space.
http://www.abu.nb.ca/Courses/GrPhil/Anaxagoras.htm

We come together and we go apart. This mixture and separation, repeated regularly, fashions and transforms the landscape of human experience. It is a constant flow through Being into Becoming -- over and over again.

In effect, nothing changes.

We can write Sein: Nichts, says Heidegger. But this question is not negative. The Nichts is not nihil. Nothingness is not negation of Being. The very word teaches us that: no-thing-ness signifies a presentness, an existential "thereness" which is not naively enclosed in or circumscribed by any particular extant, specific object. "Das Nichten des Nichts 'ist' das Sein": "the negation of nothingness 'is' Being."
(p.154, Steiner)

We are what we are.

Because Heidegger has been among us, the notion that the asking of questions is the supreme piety of the spirit, and the uncanny idea that abstract thought is man's pre-eminent excellence and burdon have been affirmed.
(p.157, in Martin Heidegger, by George Steiner)

So we ask, again and again: What are we? Who are we? What are we meant to be doing in the world?

We need facts more than faith.

More than facts or faith, we need to question deeply the profound.

For, if we enter the profound with a spirituality of question, something mysterious occurs.

The mystery that occurs is the transformation of the presenting question into seeing presence.

Seeing...Presence!

No other...Nothing more.

There is something practical about meditation.

Coming downstairs just before dawn this morning I bow to altar entering winter zendo. On white couch I prop myself wrapped in dark blue blanket against pillows in semi-sitting position. I was having trouble sleeping, breathing, and swallowing. It was time to meditate.

"The soul is a circle of which the circumference is in a body. God is a circle whose circumference is nowhere but whose center is everywhere."
- Swami Vivekananda, 19th C.

During this time of slowing down body cleansing (what some call illness) everything proportions itself in simple actions. I bow. Wrap blanket. Tilt night-light shining on Mary, Buddha, and Christ. Prop pillows. Attend to breath. Listen to wind in cedar tree outside window. Look at walls. Look at windows. Look at unmoving everything in the room.

"The only field in which this [oneness] is possible is the field of sunyata [emptiness] which can have its circumference nowhere and its center everywhere. Only on the field of sunyata can the totality of things, each of which is absolutely unique and an absolute center of all things, at the same time be gathered into one."
-- Keiji Nishitani, 20th C.

Breathing grows thin and small, allowing breath enough slender room to slide through. Doze in and out. Comes morning.

The entire visible world is only an imperceptible speck in the ample bosom of nature. No idea can come close to imagining it. We might inflate our concepts to the most unimaginable expanses: we only produce atoms in relation to the reality of things. Nature is an infinite sphere in which the center is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere. Finally, it is the greatest sensible mark of God's omnipotence, that our imagination loses itself in that thought.
(from Pascal's Pensees)

One dog then another enters room. Cat paws at edge of blanket. Light comes through four windows. Breath circles through four bodies in front room and one body now in kitchen. The thought passes that human existence is temporary resting place for breath on its way through.

Great Master Dogen quotes Shakyamuni as saying: "that one must turn the stream of compassion within and give up both knowledge and its recognition." This is the way one can harmonize body and mind and enter the stream of Buddhism. This giving up seems to entail the aspect of giving in trust, which has an important function of giving up control. The self no longer dictates our actions based on emotions, likes/dislikes, greed, anger or fear. This is giving up of the knowledge of the intellect and emotions without cutting ourselves off from these things and without letting them control our actions. We cannot fully understand the Buddhist teaching on giving without seeing that giving and receiving are not separate things. Koho Zenji reminds us that if we can give up something as small as the self we can know something as great as the universe. Just as with giving and receiving, we must understand that control in Buddhist practice is not exercised by holding on but by letting go. It is also helpful to see these things in terms of process not in terms of attainment or achievement.
(--from talk, "As Thunder Shakes the Universe," By Rev. Jisho Perry, Sat. 2/14/04)

Stillness finds breath. If wanting achievement, or if trying to attain something, is what we think we are doing by practicing meditation, then we are trying to imitate the way of the world to accumulate by acquisition and accomplishment. But if we are willing to let go of everything we think makes up the larger self we call the world and the personal self we call by our name -- we enter the body in and of itself.

Is there a simplicity of "no-self" we are unwilling to contemplate? On the other hand, is there an equivalence of fear and self that factors us? If we let self go, does fear go too?

When I open eyes and put feet on rug, two tails wag along quiet sunlight crossing Barnestown Road into front room. Bowing to these sweet dogs, folding two blankets (one placed there by Saskia mid-doze), walking to kitchen for grapefruit juice and asperin, there is a fluidity of moment to moment step, moment to moment mind arising and falling away.

It is the practice of Zazen. It is what Myo-O Marilyn Habermas-Scher said in a recent talk: "Zazen is not a sacred activity; it's just completely sacred activity." (Sunday Dharma Talk, 2/27/05, St Paul Minnesota)

Does breath carry nothing but itself through each one of us?

The Christian season of Lent nears Holy Week and Easter. In his life Jesus gave up everything and went the way described by Dogen Zenji as "dropping off mind and body." In this tradition, having this same mind as Christ means not reaching out, not grasping at, and not taking the bait to respectably conform with the delusions of achievement, acquisition, and accomplishment.

What is Jesus' mind? What is Christ-mind?

Breathe in, breathe out. We'll see.

First we'll have to allow our eyes to see -- really see -- what is taking place everywhere they look. And listen -- we'll have to permit ears to hear what is actually being said with each utterance made within our hearing. And speaking -- we'll have to open our mouths and suffer what longs to be said to be said, plain and simple. In these activities dwells the revelation of sacredness finding its way out and into this existence.

It pleases that meditation is practical.

March, with its pause of health, provides good opportunity to investigate the slender slip of sanity that is breath.

It is a good practice to follow the completely sacred activity of breath.

It is a particular consciousness that sees one and all as Thou.

With each breath we Thee wed.

In gratitude.

It is odd that nothing matters.

Thirty spokes share one hub. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand and you have the use of the cart. Knead clay to make a vessel. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand and you have the use of the vessel. Cut out doors and windows to make a room. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand and you have the use of the house. What we gain is something, yet it is by virtue of nothing that it can be put to use
(Lao Tzu 1963: 31).

If we read creation myths there is a tension about something coming from nothing. We prefer to frame the argument that evil followed good, as in the Genesis story; or that good followed evil in the Tiamat and Marduk Babylonian version.

Does nothing matter? Is what we see and touch the materialization from nothing of something? Or is it turtles all the way down?

The problem is that Zen philosophy asserts that there is no difference between ego and self. Izutsu said: "One enters into the world of Zen only when one realizes that his [or her] own I has turned into an existential question mark" (1977: 65). This refers to the so-called "self" as much as to the so-called "ego." Masao Abe, the Zen philosopher of religion, has put the matter even more strongly, saying that the notion of "self" itself leads to "selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill will, conceit, pride, egoism . . . .all the evil in the world" (1992: 57-58).
(in "NOTHING ALMOST SEES MIRACLES! SELF & NO-SELF IN PSYCHOLOGY & RELIGION," by David Miller)

What did Jesus mean when he said:
Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it." Mark 8:34-35 (NIV)

Deny himself? Or, deny his self?

We are now able to see why the no-self theory does not imply that our language is in need of an overhaul. For it is quite consistent with the nonexistence of the self or I that we continue to employ the words "self" and "I" in their practical everyday usage, provided we do not mistake them for denoting some particular entity at the ultimate level, or, as Hume would say, feign the existence of a fiction. This is why, contrary to what many of Hume's critics think, Hume's own use of the first-person pronoun does not undermine his theory. In Hume's statement "when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception" (p.252), the word "I" is being used at the convectional level: it is merely a generally nderstood term whose proper use is determined by mutual agreement. We should not, therefore, think that in using the first-person pronoun Hume has committed himself to the existence of a self at the ultimate level.

Some will no doubt find it paradoxical that we can use personal language correctly when there is nothing to which these terms ultimately refer. It was reasoning akin to this, it seems, that led Descartes to his famous proclamation "I think, therefore I am." I must exist, reasoned Descartes, because even when I doubt that I exist there is still an I that is doing the doubting.

But Descartes has become led astray by his own language, for there is no need for the "I" in "I think" or "I doubt" to refer to anything. What Descartes was aware of, as both Hume and the Buddha would agree, was just thinking, not an I that was doing the thinking. Consequently Descartes might just as well have said (and should have said if his concern was with ultimate rather than conventional truth) "there is thinking, therefore there are thoughts." And such a deduction, if we may call it that, does not suffice to prove the existence of an I.
(from THE NO-SELF THEORY: HUME, BUDDHISM, AND PERSONAL IDENTITY, By James Giles, in Philosophy East and West. Volume 43, Number 2, April 1993)

Body-ache, sniffles, fever, and general dizziness sit in this chair.

Goes to bed.

Hopes to sleep.

Walking frozen Hosmer Pond with two dogs after heavy snowfall in Maine, Saskia and I tread deep snow, returning via toboggan chute. Earlier, Karl comes by to wire and unwire computers. As Bruce leaves with studded-tire snowplow Karl arrives with quick-fingered laptop gear.

Original Buddha-nature, the highest truth, is free from even an atom of otherness. It is empty, calm, pure, and permeates everything. It brings peaceful joy that thrills with wonder. Awaken inwardly, enter its depths. Everything before you is Buddha, blissful and full, complete it itself. All that exists is Buddha; there is nothing else beside.
-Huang Po

Saskia crunches numbers. Classes are cancelled at University College. Snow thins after twelve hours.

Slay anger, give up pride
And overcome all fetters;
For sorrows do not follow knowers of emptiness
Detached from mind and body, clinging to nothing.
Having broken out into freedom and gone beyond all selfish desire,
Free from the world of men, even the worlds of the gods.
Try as you might to find them, their path leaves not the slightest trace.
(The Buddha)

I cut wood outside barn. Now cat curls on lap. History Channel tells of Bible Code.

It is a great misfortune for those
Engaged in learning to take the
Sayings of the sages as mere
Verbal exercises.
- Xue Xuan (1389-1464)

We live with proleptic and proprioceptive possibilities -- to take beforehand by means of sensory receptors arising.

On the other hand, it is merely Tuesday evening. Mu-ge purrs.

This existence is way beyond anything within our grasping.

Not even an atom of otherness.

Winter yawns and throws snow our way.

That's ok. We're doing other work this week to earn some money to pay some bills. The bookshop/bakery is closed until Saturday, 5 March. We'll be back for Saturday's Many Faces of Death conversation, as well as Poetry, Tea, and Literature.

At the hermitage at night, something skunky runs up between our walls.

Do away with your old habits and start fresh.
Wash away your old opinions,
And new ideas come in.
- Xue Xuan (1389-1464)

My opinions are somewhat skunky. When they arise they're stinky. Their scent is hard to lose.

If I still the mind and stay attentive the skunk-odor fades into winter cold.

E. writes following a self-directed retreat
One who attends is one who tends.
One who tends is one who is tender.
One who is tender pays kind attention.
One who pays kind attention attends.

It is good to practice presence. We are so often lost and gone with thoughts and opinion. The practice is not to be lost, but to be what-is finding itself -- each and every here and now, with each and every being.

E. ends his note saying: "Just think of what we could do with pretends." It's a fine notion -- to be there even before we realize we are there.

It's like the woman said at the Zen Center in Rhode Island while giving a talk over twenty years ago. She said, "Let's stop pretending we love each other." And then repeated, "Let's stop pretending we love each other." After a long silence she continued, "Because ...we do."

Let's all tend, extend, and attend one another. Will we wed, dedicate, have, and hold each other?

Do you? "I do." Do we? "We do."

Let's hold before us one another.

Without stopping.

(In E’s words) -- Tender attention.

The inmate wants to learn what a comma is. Pause, then go on.

People who study Buddhism should seek real, true perception and understanding. If you attain real, true perception, birth and death don’t affect you; you are free to go or stay. You needn’t seek wonders, for wonders come of themselves. Just put thoughts to rest and don’t seek outwardly anymore. When things come up, then give them your attention; just trust what is functional in you at present, and you have nothing to be concerned about.
- Sokei-an Sasaki

A woman with brain damage wants a job. Why not? -- she says repeatedly.

“If you come on your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you must lead it back to him. If you see the donkey of a man who hates you fallen under its load, instead of keeping out of his way, go to him to help him."
(from Exodus 22)

We're not asked to choose nor to judge which person to help and which one not to.

As things come up, just give attention.

Cesco barks once from front room.

Saskia attends.