Will there be a time of truce and peace?

Is Islam, is Judaism, is Christianity capable of abiding in peace?

Impermanence, aging, and illness
Do not give people a set time.
One may be alive in the morning,
Then dead at night,
Changing worlds in an instant.
We are like the spring frost,
Like the morning dew
Suddenly gone.
- Kuei-Shan (771-854)

If religions and cultures want conflict and strife, there will be conflict and strife.

Count me out. I've no faith in egoistic destructive exclusivity divinity triumphalistic servitude to deathknell diatribe and dark certitude's wilful obsession with murderous false righteousness.

Call me Infidel.

The simplemindedness of dualistic contending exhausts the heart and mind that seeks understanding and compassion.

I hope to deepen that longing and plead nolo contendere.

September is lovely.

So far.

We hold our first conversation at Quarry Hill, an extended care facility in Camden. It is called "Poetry, Tea, and Thee." We read three Billy Collins poems. Gertrude will be 92 tomorrow. Marjorie, Catherine, Veronica, and Suzanne were also in the circle with Saskia and I.

The First Night
by Billy Collins

The worst thing about death must be
the first night.
—Juan Ramón Jiménez

Before I opened you, Jiménez,
it never occurred to me that day and night
would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

but now you have me wondering
if there will also be a sun and a moon
and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

then repair, each soul alone,
to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.
Or will the first night be the only night,

a darkness for which we have no other name?
How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,
How impossible to write it down.

This is where language will stop,
the horse we have ridden all our lives
rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

The word that was in the beginning
and the word that was made flesh—
those and all the other words will cease.

Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,
how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?
But it is enough to frighten me

into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,
to sunlight bright on water
or fragmented in a grove of trees,

and to look more closely here at these small leaves,
these sentinel thorns,
whose employment it is to guard the rose.
(Poem by Billy Collins)

Poetry invites things out of hiding. Only for a while. A brief hello. Then go.

Like our lives.

Gertrude recited Robert Burns.

In the midst of such lovely faces and the Scottish lines we remember Sylvia who died three years ago this date. A candle burned in the cabin for her after morning sitting.

It is good to miss someone loved.

A single holy ground. A single principle. All in each. Each in all.

Sisters and Brothers of America,

It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects

My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: "Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me." Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.

(--from Swami Vivekananda's Speech, The World Parliament of Religions, Chicago, WELCOME ADDRESS - Chicago, Sept 11, 1893)

There's a talk and a date to ponder.

Still -- we seem to struggle: What to do with what is true?

I'll sit with the question.

There's not much to live for.

Beside love.

You ask why I stay in the mountains
I smile without speaking, my heart content
Peach blossoms in the stream float into the distance
There's another realm beyond the world of man.
- Li Pai

The wind blows clear the night.

Not for a minute am I fooled.

I am the night clearing.

We've shown up. Some say we've been born. Some say we'll die. We'll disappear.

Temporarily.

In the meantime we'll try to realize the imaginative infinity of what it means to become human, to actually be human, in this world.

East Mountain Temple

I looked all around me and up to the bluest heaven
The moon shone alone through a veil of white clouds
In this boundless world and infinity of people
How many people are worthy of their stature?
- Pai chu-yi (772-846)

We're all worthy of our stature.

We're all Buddhas, or Buddhas to be.

We just don't know it yet.

Soon we will. Someone among us will help. A Bodhisattva who has taken a vow to help all beings become enlightened and to be happy.

I look around every day. Who is it? When will they appear?

When you come into view, I look at you.

Is it you?

It's a nightmare. Your house catches fire. Your three daughters die. You are accused of setting the fire. Convicted. Imprisoned. Executed.

And you are innocent. Proven so years later by science, an intelligent researcher, a friend. And so what

Dozens of studies have shown that witnesses’ memories of events often change when they are supplied with new contextual information. Itiel Dror, a cognitive psychologist who has done extensive research on eyewitness and expert testimony in criminal investigations, told me, “The mind is not a passive machine. Once you believe in something—once you expect something—it changes the way you perceive information and the way your memory recalls it.”
(--fromTRIAL BY FIRE, Did Texas execute an innocent man?, by David Grann, The New Yorker, 31Aug2009, re Cameron Todd Willingham, accused of arson that killed his 3 daughters in 1991. He was executed on Feb 17,2004.)

We watch film on the destruction of the Great Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Both the man killed by state sanctioned lethal injection and the thousand plus year old carved into stone statues were destroyed. By what?

By certainty. By a belief that has failed to question. By an unwillingness to open to uncertainty.

Just before Willingham received the lethal injection, he was asked if he had any last words. He said, “The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for twelve years for something I did not do. From God’s dust I came and to dust I will return, so the Earth shall become my throne.”
(--final lines, Grann, TRIAL BY FIRE article)

Certainty must not be our goal.

Curiosity and compassion come first.

I mourn the death of the Texas man. And the destruction of the Buddhas.

I celebrate the birthday of the lad who walks the mile each day to his job at the state offices in Vermont. If he wasn't born I would not be a father.

We must continue to grow more comfortable with uncertainty.

To think of nothing is to think of the Buddha. So what does to think of nothing mean? What thinks of nothing is the mind that thinks of the Buddha. Apart from the mind, there is no Buddha somewhere else. And apart from the Buddha, there is no mind somewhere else. To think of the Buddha is to think of the mind. To search for the mind is to search for the Buddha.
- Tao-hsin

We are safe.

A quiet night.

A perfect end.

I'm skeptical.

I don't know.

Hardly anything.

Are you really ready to let go?

Working intimately with a teacher is the same as learning to stop shielding ourselves from the completely uncertain nature of reality. All the ways that we hold back and shut down, all the ways that we cling and grasp, all our habitual ways of limiting and solidifying our world become very clear to us, and it's unnerving. At that painful point, we usually want to make the teacher wrong or make ourselves wrong or do anything that is habitual and comforting to get ground back under our feet. But when we make an unconditional commitment to hang in there, we do not run away from the pain of seeing ourselves—and this is a revolutionary thing to do and it transforms us. But how many of us are ready for this? One has to gradually develop the trust that it is ultimately liberating to let go of strongly held assumptions about reality.
–Pema Chodron, from "Unconditionally Steadfast: An Interview with Pema Chodron," Tricycle, Fall 1999

I might never believe anything that happened during the Bush/Cheney years -- from 9/11 to WMD's to torture to wiretapping to two elections decided by awkward incongruities to a war started under false pretenses to the use of fear fear fear in order to keep the American people afraid afraid afraid to deregulation and incompetence at every level of governmental undertaking.

This distress is bilateral. Many today doubt and revile the current Obama/Biden administration for their policies and plans for health care, resolving the economic crises, and international negotiations for stability and peace.

We're generally ambivalent about those in authority, the precariousness of finances, and the underlying fuming of those inclined toward aggressive or violent response.

A man tonight worried about his anger. It is so much with him.

Yes, there is anger. At a right-wing threatening more violence and harm to an elected president and to legislation geared to equalize health care; to a policy of negation negation negation. At a left-wing threatening more governmental control, more benefits to more people, and perhaps more than can be expressed, the changing ethnography of race and religion accelerating across borders and traditional comfort zones.

I told the angry man it was good he came to meditation practice.

I'm glad I was there.

Skepticism.

And all.

(Since Dick died, I no longer receive notes from him chiding such foolish references to ersatz political matters.)

'TAISIAT.'

That's the mnemonic for 'Truth as I see it all through.' It could also stand for: Let it be itself, let itself be.

The water has no mind and just winds along
The mountain has a shape that circles all around
The seclusion never ends and only grows deeper
Sitting on a boulder I forget the way home
- Wang An-shih (1021-1086)

Don't be attached to form. Don't be attached to emptiness. Neither suffice. Both need the other to go on.

Bodhisattva

When the young man on State Street
approached as if to ask directions,
saying, ”Can you help me out a little here?”
and I, though I already knew, said,
“Help you out how, exactly?”
“A dollar or two if you can,”
he said, and I took a deep breath,
holding in what I might’ve held out,
hearing When someone asks, you
give what you can, from my bank
of training in the ways of compassion,
and though I didn’t want to,
opened my wallet, and
with the munificence of a toad,
pulled out a five and bought him off.
(--Poem by Dan Gerber)

All we can say is: This is what I see; this is how I see it.

Be modest. Even humble

Life is too big to claim it is yours.

Reading Tolle at conversation. Something about "consciousness without form."

I think about being an agnostic listening to the ways some participants describe what is meaningful to them. I don't know whether what they are emphasizing is merely a temporary metaphor to them or a fixed truth. Mostly I don't know what they mean. Which does not interfere with my appreciation of them in the process of revealing and discovering what is true for them.

It is, I think, just the way pure consciousness filters through individual forms that choose to hold a particular expression as meaningful. We call these expressions 'beliefs' or 'thoughts' or 'feelings.'

They are forming consciousness -- or, they are particularized presentations of consciousness.

Mostly, we try to do our best.

I have read your words and they are true
Indistinct from the deepest truths
At first we mistake this magic gem as rubble
Then suddenly we see it is a jewel
Ignorance and wisdom aren’t different
The ten thousand dharmas are simply so
But for those who cling to dualistic views
I take out my brush and write down these words
Don’t see yourself as anything but a Buddha
Why search for a place where nothing at all remains? (nirvana)
- Hui-ko’s response

Augustine said:

Urged to reflect upon myself, I entered under your guidance the innermost places of my being; but only because you had become my helper was I able to do so. I entered, then, and with the vision of my spirit, such as it was, I saw the incommutable light far above my spiritual ken and transcending my mind: not this common light which every carnal eye can see, nor any light of the same order; but greater, as though this common light were shining much more powerfully, far more brightly, and so extensively as to fill the universe. The light I saw was not the common light at all, but something different, utterly different, from all those things. Nor was it higher than my mind in the sense that oil floats on water or the sky is above the earth; it was exalted because this very light made me, and I was below it because by it I was made. Anyone who knows truth knows this light.
(--from The Confessions of Saint Augustine of Hippo, bishop, 354 - 430)

I've always enjoyed being informal.

Along with open.

And free.

Once I tried to write love letters. They came out like puzzles chasing evasion through a maze.

I no longer write these letters.

Our body creates a shadow, and our voice produces an echo. And yet people exhaust their body to chase their shadow without realizing that their shadow comes from their body. And people raise their voice to stop its echo unaware that the echo comes from their voice.

Getting rid of affliction to attain nirvana is like trying to find one’s shadow apart from one’s body. And abandoning one’s humanity to achieve Buddhahood is like stilling one’s voice and listening for its echo. Thus we know that delusion and awareness are the same and ignorance and wisdom aren’t different.

From what has no name, we make names. And once we have names, right and wrong appear. From what has no principle, we make principles. And once we have principles, arguments arise. Illusions aren’t real. So who is right and who is wrong? Delusions aren’t true. So are they empty or do they exist?

I would like to know how to gain what cannot be gained and how to lose what cannot be lost. Unable to pay you a visit, I send these thoughts and dare hope for a reply.
- Layman Hsiang to Hui-ko (550)

It's good to know there have been letters that are so true they make no sense.

Don't bother replying.

Simply dare hope.

Keep quiet.

Seeds and shotgun.

The man who stops by says he could go live in northern Maine with a pail of seeds to plant and a shotgun for whatever the need might be. It's that way when the world turns on the fire-hose, when the drip drip drip of faucet troubles turns into full ferocious nozzle blast.

So we talk about suffering. About the perfect loving embrace of God -- that blessing that says 'Lose it all, find me.' It's a little different from the 'Love God and get wealthy; Give yourself to Jesus and drive a Cadillac which is parked in front of the 10 bedroom mountain estate you will occupy if you send me money.'

May the sound of the bell and drum dispel afflictions
May it nourish the roots of wisdom
And give rise to the fruit of awareness
May it carry to the depths of Hell
And echo through the Three Realms
(Desire, Form, and Formlessness)
And may all who hear it become Buddhas
And vow to liberate others
- Evening song of offering from Wuhsiang Temple

We hang large cylindrical gong on cabin porch. It will be rung before and after sittings. The mountain will know. Neighbors will hear it. Trees and birds and earth itself will nod with affirmation. These humans, they will say, are learning to be still and know.

Tom speaks of his experience with a 'han.' We look it up. These words Tom finds:

A ‘han’ is a wooden board struck by a mallet with a particular rhythm to announce the beginning of a zazen period in a Zen monastery. It is also sometimes struck before the monks retire for bed.

Often, a variation of this verse of the Buddha’s is engraved on the han:

Let me respectfully remind you,

Life and death are of supreme importance.

Time passes by swiftly and opportunity is lost.

Each of us should strive to awaken.

Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.

[or]

Great is the matter of birth and death

Life flows quickly by

Time waits for no one

Wake up! Wake up!

Don't waste a moment!

We move wood, we cart brush and branches, we travel to dump. A site begins to be readied for a book shed.

Pink clouds over Bald Mountain.

Everything might just be perfect.

As it is.

We don't know.

So we are.

Saying this.

Emotions are emotions. But views change everything without changing anything.

Don't try to get rid of particular emotions; rather, see what is taking place with clarity.

Views, not emotion

As the Buddhist view has consistently demonstrated, it is the perspective of the sufferer that determines whether a given experience perpetuates suffering or is a vehicle for awakening. To work something through means to change one's view; if we try instead to change the emotion, we may achieve some short-term success, but we remain bound by forces of attachment and aversion to the very feelings from which we are struggling to be free.
(- Mark Epstein, from "Shattering the Ridgepole," Tricycle, Spring 1995, Daily Dharma, Learn how to change how you see, not how you feel)

Mice in my walls leave me less alone. Still, as the saying goes, I'm not lonely when I'm alone, I'm just alone.

I'm grateful that, today, I can experience silence and solitude. All my brothers and sisters that are burdened by voices and unwanted mental interruptions have my compassionate attention. Someone writes that she sees a young man we know "walking on the street, talking angrily to his voices." I have greeted him in passing. He generously ceases the argument for a spell to say hello through the weariness of the colloquy.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?
(--Poem by Elizabeth Alexander)

The young man sat in the back row, right side, third seat in for two courses at university college.

Sometimes I think we are a poem being written as we mutter and negotiate with voice and tone, context and revelation, echoing through the writing.

Some lines don't want to see the page of their presentation in public. We are crumpled paper of scratched-through phrases haunting our minds with no peace until snub-point pencil lead finds conciliation arrived at, jotted down, and passed over to resident critic's wary eye.

My mind is tortured by counter-terror experts steering armed drones from long distances at desert battlefields where wandering psyches face insurgent demons.

I cannot escape the world. It is not something I am in to escape. Rather, the world is what I am.

I can only wander endless warrens with every expression of me.

There I am! Where was I? Am I recognizable?

Can you see me?

Will you even look?

Is there any interest?

The hobo statuette smiles in tea candle glow cooking hot dog over campfire.

It is a metier specific to my interior template. It is my vocation and trade, an area of activity in which one excels.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary... depend[s] upon his not understanding it.”
(--from All the President’s Zombies, by Paul Krugman, OpEd, NYTimes, Published: August 23, 2009)

Sometimes cheats and liars make a great deal of money. Lobbyists and politicians are Alfonse and Gaston at the revolving door of the bank where they wash out their gotten goods.

My great disappointment is that I am not a successful cheat. We all cheat. Some of us are successful. Not me.

It is silly to say I am poor. Owning nothing is a double entendre.

Without saying anything, can you tell me the correct way to live?

I'll wait for you.

The Heart Sutra says, "No attainment, with nothing to attain."

To attain means to compass, which means to bring about, accomplish. Nothing to accomplish. No bringing about.

What to do?

You should train yourself: Even though I may be sick in body, my
mind will be free of sickness. That's how you should train yourself....
And how is one sick in body but not sick in mind? There is the case
where an instructed noble disciple ... does not assume the body to be
the self, or the self as possessing the body, or the body as in the
self, or the self as in the body. He is not obsessed with the idea that
"I am the body" or "The body is mine." As he is not obsessed with these ideas, his body changes and alters, but he does not fall into sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, or despair over its change and alteration. (Similarly with feeling, perception, mental processes, and consciousness.) This is how one is sick in body but not sick in mind.
- The Buddha

No hurricane hit Maine. It hit Nova Scotia.

Two dogs run barking into the yard.

The injured cat must surely take notice.

In prison yesterday one man wanted the new inmate to understand being Buddhist didn't mean being passive in the face of someone putting their hands on you or getting in your face.

He no longer has to beat a man beyond sense, he said, since he began his practice. Sometimes, just enough exertion to let him know where not to go. There are, I suspect, listening, expedient benefits to practice.

Make it out of clay or wood or silk
Paint it blue or green and gild it with gold
But if you think a Buddha looks like this
The Goddess of Mercy will die from laughter.
- Tao-ch’uan (12th c)

Don't worry how a Buddha looks. Don't worry how you look. Just look out. Just look in.

On cushion the other day I remember thinking that truth reveals here and now what is as it is. Truth might not cure what goes wrong in prison or in life. Truth does help me to care.

The Way Things Work

is by admitting
or opening away.
This is the simplest form
of current: Blue
moving through blue;
blue through purple;
the objects of desire
opening upon themselves
without us; the objects of faith.
The way things work
is by solution,
resistance lessened or
increased and taken
advantage of.
The way things work
is that we finally believe
they are there,
common and able
to illustrate themselves.
Wheel, kinetic flow,
rising and falling water,
ingots, levers and keys,
I believe in you,
cylinder lock, pully,
lifting tackle and
crane lift your small head--
I believe in you--
your head is the horizon to
my hand. I believe
forever in the hooks.
The way things work
is that eventually
something catches.
(--Poem by Jorie Graham)

"Is there a heaven? Do you think you will get to heaven? "-- someone asked the intern hospital chaplain.

"There is." -- she wondered thoughtfully, contemplating how to answer honestly from her own wandering faith.

For me, her response was already sounding through her in the very fact of her being there with the questioner:

I am.

Here.

&

There.

With you.

I've been thinking about showing up in my life.

A recluse planned to spend the night in my shack
I unbarred the gate and faced the night sky
Beneath the fall moon he played somewhere else
All night below the pines I listened to the wind
- Chia Tao (779-843)

But I've gotten lost.

Am no

-w-

here to be

found.

What means should be used to allow truth to reveal itself?

Any means possible?

"Upaya," (Sanskrit for "Expedient Means"), refers to something which goes or brings you up to something (i.e., a goal). The term is often used with kaushalya, ("cleverness"); upaya-kaushalya means roughly "skill in means". Upaya-kaushalya is a concept which emphasizes that practitioners may use their own specific methods or techniques in order to cease suffering and introduce others to the dharma. The implication is that even if a technique, view, etc., is not ultimately "true" in the highest sense, it may still be an expedient practice to perform or view to hold; i.e., it may bring the practitioner closer to true realization anyway. The exercise of skill to which it refers, the ability to adapt one's message to the audience, is of enormous importance in the Pali Canon.
To make things convenient (for somebody); do (somebody) a favor". (An edited version, from Wikipedia)

An article in the New York Times tells of the aftereffects suffered by shop owners who've shot and killed those attempting to rob them. ("Storeowners Act in Self-Defense, but Scars Remain", By KAREEM FAHIM, Published: August 20, 2009). Thieving and robbery are wrong, but even doing what might be considered right in response has its consequences.

At venues where the President Obama appears, men have taken to strapping loaded holstered guns to their legs, or, sling AR57s over shoulders. Intimidation and dread are re-introduced into the public forum. They say they are exercising freedom to carry weapons for protection. It's hard to remember if such a show of freedom was done near a Bush gathering.

The world (as it is called) is a difficult and dangerous place.

Who speaks with a voice worth listening to? Who is willing to word the madness of the human psyche? Who tells us of its loving heart?

In 1128 Bernard of Clairvaux assisted at the Council of Troyes, after which the Bishop of Verdun was deposed.

There then arose against Bernard unjust reproaches and he was denounced even in Rome, as a monk who meddled with matters that did not concern him. Harmeric, on behalf of the pope, wrote Bernard a sharp letter of remonstrance. "It is not fitting" he said "that noisy and troublesome frogs should come out of their marshes to trouble the Holy See and the cardinals".
(--from the Catholic Encyclopedia, on St Bernard of Clairvaux)

Speaking truth to power is an iffy occupation. This is perhaps why citizens shout "Heil Hitler" and call officials Nazis and Communists and Death Panelists. Rhetoric runs ahead of inane characterizations. These "angry ordinary citizens" when not shilling for corporations and graft pretend to be asking questions about health care by yelling slurs tainted with innuendo. It is a side of us that is difficult to experience.

Where is the sanity of honest presence?

The Holy Instant is the interval in which the mind is still enough to hear an answer that is NOT entailed within the question asked. It offers something new and DIFFERENT from the question. How COULD it be answered if it but repeats itself. Therefore, attempt to solve NO problem in a world from which the answer has been barred. But bring the problem to the only place which holds the answer lovingly FOR you. Here are the answers which will SOLVE your problems, because they stand APART from them, and see what CAN be answered; what the QUESTION is. Within the world, the answers merely raise ANOTHER question, though they leave the first unanswered. In the holy instant, you can bring the question TO the answer, and receive the answer that was MADE for you. [sic: caps in text]
(--from A Course In Miracles, Chapter 26, section 5 "The Quiet Answer", http://courseinmiracles.com/urtext/chapter_27/section_5.htm)

It is as through we are children given knives and guns and set out to play in the schoolyard. Someone is enjoying the sight of the present and looming carnage.

If you make subjective,
Personal judgments
Of past and present events,
Not having been through
The process
Of refining and purifying
Your insight,
This is like trying to do a sword
Dance without having learned
To handle a sword.
- Fayan

At mass this morning the reminder of the scriptural prayer:" Lord I am not worthy to receive you under my roof, but only say the word and my servant shall be healed." (Matt.8:8)

I wonder what the "word" is? When the holy word is spoken, presence is without barrier, beyond boundary. Is that the "holy instant?" False speech, fraught with doubt and accusation, falls away when true speech, filled with compassion and authentic inquiry, emerges whole and hospitable.

I tire of my false rhetoric.

I long for the sound of true articulation.

If we are willing to listen long and lovingly -- will not that be suitable invitation for true presence to emerge?

We will serve one another under the infinite open illimitable universe present and without end.

Who will say "So Be It"?

Tom showed images of crop circles.

I think they are the earth revealing itself.

Turn your attention within;
Don’t memorize my words.
You have been turning from light to darkness
Since before you can remember,
So the roots of your subjective ideas are deep
And hard to uproot all at once.
This is why I temporarily use expedients
To take away your coarse perceptions.
- Yangshan

And we are the articulation of the earth itself.

Soon we'll be intelligent enough to hear and see what we are.

Saying.

The invitatory psalm began:

God our protector, keep us in mind.
(--from Psalm 84)

It's a good prayer because we often become mindless. If, as some say, there is only One Mind, I'd prefer to reside in that unity.

It occurred to me sitting on cushion at sunrise just how easy it is to become confused. But then, thinking of the words "Be still and know that I am God" -- I formulate a four word mantra, choosing German, Sanskrit, Greek, and Japanese: Stille, Jnana, Eimai, Jitai.

The sun came gently emerging an already hot day.

The six supernormal faculties of the enlightened
Are the ability to enter the realm of form without
Being confused by form, to enter the realm of sound
Without being confused by sound,
To enter the realm of scent without being confused
By scent, to enter the realm of flavor without being
Confused by flavor, to enter the realm of feeling
Without being confused by feeling, to enter the realm
Of phenomena without being confused by phenomena.
- Linji (d. 867)

Talking with a man about drugs and drug use today I find I am asking the naive question: What is it about ordinary life/ordinary mind that is so dissatisfying so as to alter, embellish, numb, or fracture it with drugs?

Ego says: I'll tell you what you need.

Jitai (Itself, or, God) says: What you need is what you are -- you need nothing.

Sally said we like the idea of 'void' or nothing outside. But we are terrified of the 'void' or nothing within.

As attracted as I am to the political drama taking place with healthcare, it really is not interesting to watch bullying and coercion trying to pass for the voice of the common man and woman. The great lie is dressing like sheep and carrying assault weapons of rabid wolves. Some fear violence is nigh.

America is hypnotized by mindless pushers of all things "No."

It's hard to imagine which way next it will go.

And like a Dying Lady, Lean and Pale

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East,
A white and shapeless mass--
(--Poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822)

I'll go with Silence, Knowing, I Am Being, Itself.

What do Buddhism and Christianity have in common? They must change or die.

Buddha’s Satori

For six years sitting alone
Still as a snake
In a stalk of bamboo
With no family but the ice
On the snow mountain.
One night, seeing the empty sky
Fly into pieces, he shook
The morning star awake
And kept it in his eyes.
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)

What do families and traditions have in common? They must change or die.

I know, deprived of me,
God could not live a wink.
He must give up the ghost
if into naught I sink.
(A rhyme by the German mystic Angelus Silesius, 1624-1677, trans. by Paul Carus. c.1909)

What do you and I have in common with God?

Only God knows.

We must change. And die.

As God.

Is.

My truth.