"Giving" means nongreed. Nongreed means not to covet. Not to covet means not to curry favor. Even if you govern the Four Continents, you should always convey the correct teaching with nongreed. It is to give away unneeded belongings to someone you don't know, to offer flowers blooming on a distant mountain to the Tathāgata, or, again, to offer treasures you had in your former life to sentient beings. Whether it is of teaching or of material, each gift has its value and is worth giving. Even if the gift is not your own, there is no reason to keep from giving. The question is not whether the gift is valuable, but whether there is merit.Humans evaluate. That's what we seem to do best. Calculate. Evaluate.
When you leave the way to the way, you attain the way. At the time of attaining the way, the way is always left to the way. When treasure is left just as treasure, treasure becomes giving. You give yourself to yourself and others to others. The power of the causal relations+ of giving reaches to devas, human beings, and even enlightened sages. When giving becomes actual, such causal relations are immediately formed.(--from, Bodhisattva's Four Methods of Guidance, BODAISATTA SHISHŌ-HŌ, This was written on the fifth day, fifth month, fourth year of Ninji (1243) by Monk Dōgen, who transmitted dharma from China..Translated by Lew Richmond and Kazuaki Tanahashi)
http://www.zenonderdedom.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Dogen-Bodhisattvas_Four_Methods_Of_Guidance.pdf
The Greek word deployed by Plato in “The Cave” — aletheia — is typically translated as truth, but is more aptly translated as “disclosure” or “uncovering” — literally, “the state of not being hidden.” Martin Heidegger, in an essay on the allegory of the cave, suggested that the process of uncovering was actually a precondition for having truth. It would then follow that the goal of the truth-seeker is to help people in this disclosure — it is to defeat the illusory representations that prevent us from seeing the world the way it is. There is no propositional truth to be had until this first task is complete.There's no knowing.
(-- THE STONE The Real War on Reality, by Peter Ludlow, in NYTimes) http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/the-real-war-on-reality/?src=recg.
monastics of no other
meeting experience simple awareness
stillness imagines: contemplation
silence interiorizes: conversation
seeing initiates: correspondence
mono / mesa: si, si, si.
Embrace
You know the parlor trick.
wrap your arms around your own body
and from the back it looks like
someone is embracing you
her hands grasping your shirt
her fingernails teasing your neck
from the front it is another story
you never looked so alone
your crossed elbows and screwy grin
you could be waiting for a tailor
to fit you with a straight jacket
one that would hold you really tight.
(Poem by Billy Collins)Ok, so we look a little odd when looked upon straight on. But, in review, from the other side, it always seems different.
Where The Mind Is Without Fear
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
(Poem by Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1941)Yes, I worry about my sanity. I worry about my country's sanity. Fear has a way of making us insane.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind --
(Poem by Emily Dickinson)
[Emmanuel] Levinas was, notoriously, a severe critic of Simone Weil, whom he evidently never met despite their being contemporaries. Levinas’s criticisms, however, were not aimed explicitly at Weil’s notion of decreation, nor even at any aspect of her thought that could conceivably be characterized as philosophical. Instead he condemned her inability, as he saw it, to understand the Judaism into which she was born (but not formally raised)1 and which she seemed evidently determined to reject. Her desire for mystical union with God struck Levinas as merely a selfish pursuit of personal salvation. He was dismissive of her hatred of the Old Testament Jehovah, who could order the extermination of entire peoples, pointing out that she herself—all too true, unfortunately—had strangely little to say about the crimes committed in her own era against Jews, often in the name of Christianity.2 These disagreements, serious as they are, nonetheless conceal a deeper resonance. For Weil, the main form God’s love takes in this world is ordinary human compassion, the neighbor love we show for one another as fellow creatures infinitely removed from their creator. Weil’s God is surprisingly limited, a God “absent from the world, except in the existence in this world of those in whom His love is alive”—those whose “compassion is the visible presence of God here below.”3 As we shall see, the compassion she speaks of is essentially a form of self-denying openness to the other that could easily be characterized in Levinas’s terms as “being divesting itself of being.”
More problematic might seem to be the similarities in the criticisms often leveled at Levinas’s and Weil’s understandings of ethical agency and selfhood. Each has been faulted for proposing an ethical passivity that makes responsible action by a free moral agent impossible. Here it is important to realize, however, that Levinas is not primarily interested in offering moral guidance but is attempting to ground normativity—in fact, the very meaning of human life—in the face-to-face encounter. What is new in Levinas is not a new ethics, but the idea that subjectivity itself is “ethical” in a foundational sense we normally do not notice. Hence the goal of this essay is not to prove that Simone Weil’s is a Levinasian ethics, but to show how Levinas’s fundamental approach to human existence clarifies certain aspects of decreation that many have considered questionable or extreme—such as Weil’s claim that we should desire nonbeing precisely in order to confirm our neighbor’s being. In turning to Levinas, we should not make the mistake of assuming that we are confronted with essentially the same paradox again when he proposes that we are fundamentally passive before we are free moral agents—for as we shall see, Levinas is making a different type of claim altogether: a metaphysical one about the nature of human agency, not an ethical one about how we would best orient or structure our lives. This metaphysical claim, particularly in the form of Levinas’s concept of substitution, seems to provide a plausible philosophical foundation for Weil’s notion of decreation.
I
Decreation, frequently mentioned in Simone Weil’s late writings, is not always referred to by name. In the New York notebook (1942), for example, there are many passages such as the following in which the word never occurs:
Every man, seeing himself from the point of view of God the creator, should regard his own existence as a sacrifice made by God. I am God’s abdication. The more I exist, the more God abdicates. So if I take God’s side rather than my own I ought to regard my existence as a diminution, a decrease.
When anyone succeeds in doing this, Christ comes to dwell in his soul.
As regards myself, I ought to repeat in the opposite sense the abdication of God, I ought to refuse the existence that has been given me, to refuse it because God is good. As regards other people, I ought to imitate God’s abdication itself, to consent not to be in order that they may be; and this in spite of the fact that they are bad. (FLN 213)
- (The Journal of Religion > Vol. 93, No. 1, January 2013, in, Decreation as Substitution: Reading Simone Weil through Levinas* Robert Charles Reed, Boston College )
I bring an unprotected heart to our meeting place
I hold no cherished outcome
I will not negotiate by withholding
I am not subject to disappointment
(From a Druid Vow of Friendship)Biomass, the woman said. Biomass loss is hurting the air, water, and humus. And... humans.
"Centering Prayer, when it reaches the full consent to our nothingness is a perfect preparation for death, because it is death – death to the false self in the Night of Sense and the Night of Spirit and to the ego in the Night of No Self. Even the True Self has been transcended....
"The dying process is designed to create a non-possessive attitude where one gives up all of one’s possessions, including one’s body and loved ones ... and enters into the flow of divine life eternal ... unity with God that sees God in everything and, in a sense, that ultimately everything is God."
(-Thomas Keating, from the new Gift of Life Series: Death & Dying, Life and Living)If you don't feel for anything, if you don't believe in anything right under your feet, then there is no God for you. Here is where atheism has its sting.
"1. Accept everything just the way it is. 2. Do not seek pleasure for its own sake. 3. Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling. 4. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world. 5. Be detached from desire your whole life long. 6. Do not regret what you have done. 7. Never be jealous. 8. Never let yourself be saddened by a separation. 9. Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others. 10. Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love. 11. In all things have no preferences. 12. Be indifferent to where you live. 13. Do not pursue the taste of good food. 14. Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need. 15. Do not act following customary beliefs. 16. Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful. 17. Do not fear death. 18. Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age. 19. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help. 20. You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour. 21. Never stray from the Way.” ― Miyamoto Musashi,. (c.1584 – June 13, 1645)Once free, a person will become and remain exactly what and who they are.
Amen, I say to you: Whatever you ask for in prayer,believe you will receive it, and it will be yours, says the Lord.(--Mk 11: 23, 24)
