gone

No
t
me

No
me

No
thing

Per
fect 

zen in- sight

Not one, not two.

Therefore,

don’t make two

Don’t make one

Come to

Think of it —

Don’t make

Don’t take . . .

Be-

hold!

Be

whole

we’ve got you

We’ve got you.

Is what we say when someone’s soul is shared and held by those whose love is shared.

Shared.

Soul.

and here we are

We don’t want to get used to it. Nor make lite of it. We don’t want to shrug and say, “He’s just being who he is!” as though that was both excuse and pardon for behavior and speech that is . . . troubling . . . and unfortunate.

According to James Murphy’s translation of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”:

“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”

The text continues:

“It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”

(--from, Trump Isn’t Hitler. But the Lying …by Charles M. Blow OCT. 19, 2017 NYTimes)

 Cheslaw Milosz wrote:

If among pairs of opposites which we use every day, the opposition of life and death has such an importance, no less importance should be ascribed to the oppositions of truth and falsehood, of reality and illusion. 

 ... 

Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn't allow one to think of anything else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external exile. It is not certain, however, that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with actuality. He may also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in other countries, on other shores, to recover, at least for short moments, his true vocation - which is to contemplate Being. 

(--from, Czeslaw Milosz - Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1980)

Saying truth is elusive mirrors Heidegger’s saying that truth conceals as much as it reveals.

In letting beings as a whole be, which discloses and at the same time conceals, it happens that concealing appears as what is first of all concealed. Insofar as it ek-sists, Da-sein conserves the first and broadest undisclosedness, untruth proper. The proper non-essence of truth is the mystery. Here non-essence does not yet have the sense of inferiority to essence in the sense of what is general (koinon genos), its possibilitas and the ground of its possibility. Non-essence is here what in such a sense would be a pre-essential essence. But "non-essence" means at first and for the most part the deformation of that already inferior essence. Indeed, in each of these significations the non-essence remains always in its own way essential to the essence and never becomes inessential in the sense of irrelevant. But to speak of non-essence and untruth in this manner goes very much against the grain of ordinary opinion and looks like a dragging up of forcibly contrived paradoxes. Because it is difficult to eliminate this impression, such a way of
speaking, paradoxical only for ordinary doxa (opinion), is to be renounced. But surely for those who know about such matters the “non-” of the primordial non-essence of truth, as untruth, points to the still unexperienced domain of the truth of Being (not merely of beings). 

...  

Man errs. Man does not merely stray into errancy. He is always astray in errancy, because as ek- sistent he in-sists and so already is caught in errancy. The errancy through which man strays is not something which, as it were, extends alongside man like a ditch into which he occasionally stumbles; rather errancy belongs to the inner constitution of the Da-sein into which historical man is admitted. Errancy is the free space for that turning in which insistent ek-sistence adroitly forgets and mistakes itself constantly anew. The concealing of the concealed being as a whole holds sway in that disclosure of specific beings, which, as forgottenness of concealment, becomes errancy.

Errancy is the essential counter-essence to the primordial essence of truth. Errancy opens itself up as the open region for every opposite to essential truth. Errancy is the open site for and ground of error. Error is not just an isolated mistake but rather the realm (the domain) of the history of those entanglements in which all kinds of erring get interwoven. 

(--from, On the Essence of Truth, by Martin Heidegger. Date of original version: 1943) 

Perhaps the real estate salesman turned president is become, for us, a meditation on errancy and concealment.

But we are not as opaque as Heidegger, nor as poetic as Milosz.

We are simple creatures intent on imprinting what we experience, as Conrad Lorenz studied:

In the latter part of his career, Lorenz applied his ideas to the behaviour of humans as members of a social species, an application with controversial philosophical and sociological implications. In a popular book, Das sogenannte Böse (1963; On Aggression), he argued that fighting and warlike behaviour in man have an inborn basis but can be environmentally modified by the proper understanding and provision for the basic instinctual needs of human beings. Fighting in lower animals has a positive survival function, he observed, such as the dispersion of competitors and the maintenance of territory. Warlike tendencies in humans may likewise be ritualized into socially useful behaviour patterns. In another work, Die Rückseite des Spiegels: Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens (1973; Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge), Lorenz examined the nature of human thought and intelligence and attributed the problems of modern civilization largely to the limitations his study revealed.  

(--Konrad Lorenz,  AUSTRIAN ZOOLOGIST )

The question could be posed: Are we, the citizens of the USA, imprinting the chief executive of the executive branch of government? Or, is he imprinting the citizens of this country -- himself a creature of the culture he so unawaredly foists himself and his opinions upon -- to the consternation and paralytic unbelief of the majority of the voting populace?

The final numbers:
Clinton received 65,844,610 votes, or 48.2% of the total vote.
Trump received 62,979,636 votes, or 46.1% of the total vote. (That's a difference of 2.86 million votes.) 

(cf. Public Records Branch Public Disclosure and Media Relations Division Office of Communications Federal Election Commission)

And here we are! 

you in the end find your way . . . with clarity, compassion, and caring consequence

Anthony Sanborn review is held in Portland. The stress, I suspect, must be high.

I know Tony. He is a good man. I’m rooting for him.

What we call truth is a variable thing. We can only experience what is going on now. So, it can be asked, right now, do we know what occurred surrounding Jessica Briggs death in 1989?

Reviewing the trial 25 years later, was it truthful and fair in 1992? Was the information and the testimonies given believeable and accurate?

They review these questions along with transcripts and personnel involved in the case.

The fact is, only Tony knows where he was and what he was doing that day. For the rest of the people only surmise and speculation surround.

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

The iffy and precarious fate of any individual is held aloft amid words and recollection, deduction and inference.

“Only describe, don't explain.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

For the rest of us we hold our direct and hopeful experience of one another in the courtroom of personal appraisal and long for, pray for, what is right to now take place.

My experience of Tony in the time I’ve known him over these twenty eight years going into Maine state prison is that he is a man who has helped people learn and better themselves during their incarceration.

He is a good and true individual.

“If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

Prayers for Jessica Briggs. Prayers for Tony Sanborn. Prayers that truth now reveals itself.

We are variable human beings.

May what changes become itself with clarity, compassion, and caring consequence!

particularly complicated

Listening to Yuval Hoah Harari’s work on audio book.

Helps.

“Homo Deus” takes off where “Sapiens” left off; it is a “brief history of tomorrow.” What is the natural culmination of the scientific revolution, Harari asks. What will the future look like? “At the dawn of the third millennium,” he writes, “humanity wakes up, stretching its limbs and rubbing its eyes. Remnants of some awful nightmare are still drifting across its mind. ‘There was something with barbed wire, and huge mushroom clouds. Oh well, it was just a bad dream.’ Going to the bathroom, humanity washes its face, examines its wrinkles in the mirror, makes a cup of coffee and opens the diary, ‘Let’s see what’s on the agenda today.’ ” 

... To describe this ascendancy, Harari examines the factors that made the human species so special. “Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal,” he writes. So how did this animal come to claim dominion over all other beasts? The answer, he argues, lies not in the uniqueness of our emotions, sensations, morals or moods. Pigs and monkeys share many of these with us — including the capacity to feel anger, envy, pain — and even a desire for justice. Humans exceed these capacities by encoding complex algorithms — “a methodological set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions.” Pigs, dogs and monkeys — indeed, all living beings — also encode algorithms, Harari tells us; the human ones happen to be particularly complicated and powerful.  

(--from NYTimes Book Review,  The Future of Humans? One Forecaster Calls for Obsolescence, about HOMO DEUS, A Brief History of Tomorrow, By Yuval Noah Harari. Reviewed by SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE, MARCH 13, 2017  Harper/HarperCollins Publishers.

In the United States a great deal of attention is taken up trying to decipher whether the president of the country is competent to lead, whether he is a threat to initiate a conflagration with North Korea or Iran, whether he will escalate hostilities with rhetoric presaging warfare replete with nuclear weapons and massive destruction, casualties, and disruption of global security.

To begin with, we’d like more gracious behavior.

It’s hard to walk tall when the ceiling you’ve set for yourself is so low. 

pre-dawn

Stillness

prayer, detectionless presence beyond

At Sunday Evening Practice, at table, we read interview from Beliefnet: Caroline Myss: ‘God Doesn’t Want Your Real Estate’.

It helps:

In the new book, “Entering the Castle,” you talk about “mystics without monasteries.” What does it mean to be a contemporary mystic?A mystic is someone who has a sense of interior connection with a force of life, of meaning, much greater than themselves, a connection to God. There are people who are called to be a part of the world with the same passion that once drew people out of society and into monasteries or into ashrams. And now, the calling is to engage [with God] and remain within the mainstream of life. It is the need to live a life that is very clearly full of meaning and clear direction. When somebody says, “For what reason have I been born?” that is a question they are, in fact, releasing to God. That type of invocation ignites a deeper force from within. 
And can that kind of question lead to a more mystical life? I do believe that. I think that leads to a longing for a much more passionate connection to the divine. There is a fundamental need in us to connect to something greater than ourselves. And that’s just the way we are designed. We do not want to think that, at the end of the day, we are simply flesh and bones. The second thing is we have a need to believe that, if we close our eyes and say, “God help us,” there really is someone on the end of that phone call. There is a part of us that absolutely longs to know that’s real.
The tortured mystic seems on a unrelenting search to find out where they should be, what they should be doing, what perfect prayer should they pray.   (--Beliefnet)

The ordinary mystic is where they are, doing what they are doing, praying as they look and listen in their longing to realize what is real in each here and now of their daily existence.

Prayer is how we step into circumstance, reflectively.

Prayer is how we sit silently centering the surround even as it resounds inward to outward pulsing the mystery of God’s detectionless presence beyond any experience or belief thereof.

Oremus!

wait a minute

flaws

(like clouds)

dissolve

soon enough

into other

dawns and

weather

continually

changing

our views

Saturday Morning Practice, bell chant

• Into 

• As 

• With

Three options.

Which one fits between:

“Seeing”

      
 (and)

“One’s true nature”?

lament

(From Wikipedia)

lament or lamentation is a passionate expression of grief, often in music, poetry, or song form. The grief is most often born of regret, or mourning. Laments can also be expressed in a verbal manner, where the participant would lament about something they regret or someone they've lost, usually accompanied by wailing, moaning and/or crying.^[1] Laments constitute some of the oldest forms of writing and examples are present across human cultures. 
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lament

Lament we do.

can fools be turned around

this country

suffers

sloof

gladly

what we spoke of in prison today

As it is
contrasts
As we are

until

As it is
and
As we are

coincide.

(Ah, kensho!)

on thich nhat hanh, love, from brain pickings, maria popover

Echoing legendary Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki’s memorable aphorism that “the ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow,” Nhat Hanh considers how the notion of the separate, egoic “I” interrupts the dialogic flow of understanding — the “interbeing,” to use his wonderfully poetic and wonderfully precise term, that is love:

Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self. We think we have a self. But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower can only inter-be with all of us… Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see the nature of interbeing between you and the other person, you can see that his suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is his own happiness. With this way of seeing, you speak and act differently. This in itself can relieve so much suffering.

The remainder of How to Love explores the simple, profoundly transformative daily practices of love and understanding, which apply not only to romantic relationships but to all forms of “interbeing.” Complement it with John Steinbeck’s exquisite letter of advice on love to his teenage son and Susan Sontag’s lifetime of reflections on the subject, then revisit the great D.T. Suzuki on how Zen can help us cultivate our character.

(—from Brain Pickings, Maria Popova) https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/31/how-to-love-thich-nhat-hanh/

silence of

road empty

reading Friday

middle night

cool temperature

I note

I have

nothing to

say only

the silence

of it

what’s left us

Paul Simon wrote, ’Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.’

Big and bully seem to have become standard in our culture and country these days.

I remember

other

wise

the circumstance, poetics, and semiotics of living/dying

At hospice gathering yesterday we speak about what might be called the semiotics of living/dying.

       *semiotic

/ˌsɛmɪˈɒtɪk; ˌsiːmɪ-/ adjective1. relating to signs and symbols, esp spoken or written signs2. relating to semiotics 3.of, relating to, or resembling the symptoms of disease; symptomatic             Word Origin C17: from Greek sēmeiōtikos taking note of signs, from sēmeion a sign Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Cite This Source 

Word Origin and History for semiotic adj.1620s, “of symptoms, relating to signs of diseases,”from Greek semeiotikos "significant," also "observant of signs," adjective form of semeiosis "indication,"from semeioun "to signal, to interpret a sign," from semeion "a sign, mark, token," from sema "sign" (see semantic). Its use in psychology dates to 1923. Related: Semiotical (1580s). Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
Cite This Source

Our culture is reluctant to observe the signs of dying and death. 

In hospice we learn from the poet Hölderlin and philosopher Heidegger:

In "What Calls for Thinking" Heidegger describes our concealing linguistic familiarity as "common speech" and implicitly proposes that poetic language steps toward resolving that problem by using uncommon speech. According to him, “We meet [the common speech] on all sides, and since it is common to all, we now accept it as the only standard.”21 When this common speech becomes “current speech” by invading the consciousness and the communication of the species we begin to conceal, to seal off options. That is part of the cost of quick, efficient communication: we no longer have to think very deeply about the words themselves. We rarely have to think deeply at all because the prosaic nature of our language does not call for it. Continuing the previous thought, Heidegger says this split from true thinking comes, “as soon as we regard the common as the only legitimate standard, and become generally incapable of fathoming the commonness of the common.”22 

Holderlin interested Heidegger particularly because his poetry uses uncommon speech to depart; “to inhabit the formerly habitual proper speaking of language.”23 Along the lines of Heidegger’s previous claim that the pre-Socratics used aletheia more as uncovering than truth, Heidegger thinks that humans used to speak much more carefully and properly in their communication. Referring back to Plato’s fateful truth-as-supremacy turn, Rorty says that Heidegger wants to “direct our attention to the difference between inquiry and poetry, between struggling for power and accepting contingency.”24 Heidegger sees the Greeks as doing philosophy as much in the poetry of the language they used as in anything else. They had no previous tradition on which to draw, no “accepted” terminology about which to debate, so their language had to be particularly meaningful, particularly poetic. 

In light of this, Holderlin’s lines from a draft of “Mnemosyne” are particularly meaningful:

We are a sign that is not read, 

We feel no pain, we almost have  

Lost our tongue in foreign lands.

Common language does not require us to read signs very deeply, whether those signs be beings in the world or other humans. Heidegger sees us as losing “our tongue in foreign lands.” We still communicate, certainly, but our tongue and heritage are not often enough the aletheia of the pre- Socratics, the tongue that spoke in the world instead of breezing over it. (—from,  Poetic Uncovering in Heidegger, by Ben Rogers)

We are the signs that are not read.

We do not feel the pain of others in our surround who undergo the oblique approach of death.

We have almost lost our ability to gracefully speak with one another about the circumstance, poetics, and semiotics of uncovering and presencing one another’s real meaning.

* yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella  no me salvo yo.  (I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save  it, I do not save myself.)                   —Jose Ortega y Gasset We are still infants in our abilities to see and speak what is here. We continue to refuse wisdom because we do not like where it comes from. Is reference to that which is yet beyond us while residing within us something we still cannot recognize? Domine, labia mea aperies.- Et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.  (Lord, open my lips.— And my mouth will proclaim your praise.) (--Invitatory) It is time to begin to read the sign we are and the sign that surrounds us as well as the sign that appears before us in the poetics and circumstance of one another. From Rachel Naomi Remen: The Buddhists talk about samsara, the world of illusion. It is the place that most of us live. Mistaking illusion for reality is said to be the root cause of our suffering. Yet in some immensely elegant way suffering itself can release us from illusion. Often in times of crisis when we reach for what we have considered our strength we stumble on our wholeness and our real power. How we were before we fixed ourselves to win approval. What has been fixed is always less strong than what is whole. In a time of real need we may remember and free ourselves.  ......... Actually, we are all more than we know.  Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten. Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves : it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about  who we are and ways we have about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to “fix” ourselves  to know who we genuinely are. Even after many years of seeing, thinking , and living one way, we are able to reach past all that to claim our integrity and live in a way we may never have expected to live.  (--in, kitchen table wisdom, pg 105ff) (recommended here by a chemo patient between drips)  Let us speak with one another!  The entire world awaits being revealed in the conversation.

it won’t be; long now

Waning moon up over east this 10/10

Time for sleep

Let the world go away

two trillion galaxies — to become feeling and aware

At Sunday Evening Practice we read from:

What is Aboriginal spirituality? (Creative Spirits):

Everything is connected 

For the Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal people from north-west South Australia the law of Kanyini implies that everybody is responsible for each other. [10] It is the principle of connectedness that underpins Aboriginal life. [11]. And because of connection, Kanyini teaches to look away from oneself and towards community: “We practise Kanyini by learning to restrict the ‘mine-ness’, and to develop a strong sense of ‘ours-ness’,” explains Aboriginal Elder Uncle Bob Randall [21]. 

Uncle Bob continues: “We do not separate the material world of objects we see around us with our ordinary eyes, and the sacred world of creative energy that we can learn to see with our inner eye. …. We work through ‘feeling’, what white people call intuitive awareness.” [12]. “White people,” he says, “separate things out, even the relationship between their minds and their bodies, but especially between themselves and other people and nature… [and] spirit.” [13] 

Aboriginal spirituality sees the interconnectedness of the elements of the earth and the universe, animate and inanimate, whereby people, the plants and animals, landforms and celestial bodies are interrelated. These relations and the knowledge of how they are interconnected are expressed in sacred stories. These creation stories describe how the activities of powerful creator ancestors shaped and developed the world as people know and experience it. [14] 

Those sacred Aboriginal stories (also known as Dreamtime, Dreaming stories, songlines, or Aboriginal oral literature) find expression in performances within each of the language groups across Australia [15]. 

What Mudrooroo and Uncle Bob Randall are referring to when they use the terms ‘feelings’, ‘inner eye’ and ‘intuitive awareness’ are ‘things’ that cannot be defined by words and thoughts because they are beyond the mind. Only by negation – what they are not – can we start comprehending what they might be. 

https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/spirituality/what-is-aboriginal-spirituality

It was Canadian Thanksgiving weekend and while we were not in Cape Breton this year, we hear the roots of all cultures in music, story, and felt awareness.

How lucky to hear the results of Hubble’s discoveries:

An international team of astronomers, led by Christopher Conselice, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nottingham, have found that the universe contains at least 2 trillion galaxies, ten times more than previously thought. The team's work, which began with seed-corn funding from the Royal Astronomical Society, appears in the Astrophysical Journal today. 

Astronomers have long sought to determine how many galaxies there are in the observable universe, the part of the cosmos where light from distant objects has had time to reach us. Over the last 20 years scientists have used images from the Hubble Space Telescope to estimate that the universe we can see contains around 100 - 200 billion galaxies. Current astronomical technology allows us to study just 10% of these galaxies, and the remaining 90% will be only seen once bigger and better telescopes are developed.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-01-universe-trillion-galaxies.html#jCp

That’s a lot of stories, songs, and things with which to become feeling and aware!

from dépêcher "to dispatch,"

We’re alone.

God is the Alone.

We are alone with the Alone.

Forgive me — I don’t understand what I am nor where I am.

This odd and crowded world!