Received email:

Today is the two-year anniversary of the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. That case gave corporations like Exxon or Bank of America approval to spend millions of dollars buying elections.

It is already happening, and it is wrong.

Changing Supreme Court decisions can take decades. A better alternative is to pass a constitutional amendment.

A new campaign called United for the People is underway to do just that. And, since we don’t have time to waste, this effort needs support from the very highest levels. Today we're petitioning President Obama to support a constitutional amendment to boot big money out of elections. http://act.rebuildthedream.com/sign/overturn_citizens_united?akid=390.154765.ct0su5&rd=1&t=1

Returning to contemplate email:

I have not grown sub-clauses and flow charts, nor have corporations grown lungs or hearts. Please help stop illusory legal metaphors such as "a corporation is a person."
Help return our country to real flesh and blood people away from corporate P&L spreadsheets.

If I was a political person, that's what I might say. As a religiously humanitarian person, this is my prayer.

Exactly and doubtlessly

Fire started in Wohnkuche wood stove. Temperature bumped in bookshed/retreat. Additional zafu and zabuton brought across snow covered wooden walkways from cabin to bookshed in faint blue nascent light rising behind bare limbs on Sally's land. Chairs moved in meditation area, incense lighted to welcome dawn -- the chores of Saturday morning preparation for practice. Like some Jikido lighting candles outside meditation hall and fires inside the enclosure, bare legged in calf boots and down vest, shuffling back and forth between buildings in inner silence with crunch underfoot, I carry out these dawning tasks grateful to be alive, walking, breathing, and about to brew coffee.

The Buddhas left their Sutras
Because people are hard to change
It's not just a matter of saintly or stupid
Each and every heart throws up its barricade
Each piles up his own mountain of karma
How could they guess that what they clasp so close
Is sorrow
Unwilling to ponder, as day and night
They do embrace the falsehood of the flesh

- Shih-te

Maybe not falsehood so much as only a fragment of the story. I look at my hand. Without understanding it to be servant of arm, trunk, neck, ears, brain, and mind, it would in it's forgetfulness think it is free without consequences to take what does not belong to it, hit what it thinks should be hit, and spend the whole day picking items from sale bins without any conversation with checkbook.

We are of a piece. We're asleep to this. Sometimes even snoring loudly in blissful unawareness of our enormous body and boundless spirit. Nothing in the universe is not part of our body. Our shutter-blink partitioning consciousness cannot extend the scope of lens wide enough to encompass the magnitude of our seen and unseen reality, so we sketch in miniature tiny canvases with delicate detail some limited acquiescence of our barrierless infinite Self.

There is no hope. Hope is a thought for some other time some other place. There is, however, profound unverifiable faith and love that what we are, although unknown, is exactly and doubtlessly what we are.

Home is where the odd and curmudgeonly truth dwells as a hermit in the forest eager for its solitude yet longing for a visit to pass an afternoon.

Beannacht
("Blessing")

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

(~ John O'Donohue, in Echoes of Memory)

Ah, yes, let gentle poets leave footprints through fresh snow into that hidden place of eremitic dwelling where our belonging sits and converses with Truth of Self of an afternoon with few words awakening delight!

No, one owns; Christ

This is why I love the new interface of blogger: Everytime I navigate away and return there's nothing there. Everything I've written that morning is gone. I've lost hundreds of words. Started over dozens of times. Learned nothing, quite obviously, not saving.

Christ doesn't save.

Every instant is new.

Christ sits in cafe looking out as you approach crossing street entering shoppe slide into booth where Christ sits now looking out as another you glances at watch pays for coffee and wonders whether being Christ will ever become more obvious as you look over to tale and table and see Christ gone, you turn, exit door, look left and right, exhale, create the world, enter it, astonish it with your love and beauty, allow it to destroy illusions you carry as your identity papers, wander nameless and kindly through this next thought and this next one, until you realize the snow falling around you is where you've come from and to which you will return whether or not the sip from coffee cup raised to lips gets to where it naturally goes or if the dream we call our life will kiss the phantasmic companion by our side which waking will only deepen appreciation of the invitation.

15. The face of truth is hidden by your orb
Of gold, O sun. May you remove your orb
So that I, who adore the true, may see

16. The glory of truth. O nourishing sun,
Solitary traveler, controller,
Source of life for all creatures, spread your light
And subdue your dazzling splendor
So that I may see your blessed Self.
Even that very Self am I!

17. May my life merge in the Immortal
When my body is reduced to ashes.
O mind, meditate on the eternal Brahman.
Remember the deeds of the past.
Remember, O mind, remember.
(--from Isha Upanishad, Eknath Easwaran Translation)

Christ does not save creation, doesn't save us from creation, doesn't allow some contract killer to snuff his life for a grander payoff.

Christ is creation. Christ is you and me. There is no payoff. Live and work as Christ as this very place we are.

There is only what is. What is not is not.

No one owns Christ.

Christ is ownerless revelation of the reality we call Christ.

Half and half mixes well swirling cloud in fresh brew
morning awakening in snow over everything.

Remembering what; remains

No matter what -- One is behind it all. Not causing, not determining, not some know-it-all about to say "I told you so!" each time we scrape our shin against coffee tables in the dark. But "behind" as in present beyond and within.

Ya na -- you are not alone! How many ways can that be read?

All this is full. All that is full.
From fullness, fullness comes.
When fullness is taken from fullness,
Fullness still remains.
...

6. Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no fear.
7. Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no grief.
How can the multiplicity of life
Delude the one who sees its unity?
...

9-11. In dark night live those for whom
The world without alone is real; in night
Darker still, for whom the world within
Alone is real. The first leads to a life
Of action, the second to a life of meditation.
But those who combine action with meditation
Cross the sea of death through action
And enter into immortality
Through the practice of meditation.
So have we heard from the wise.
(--from, Isha Upanishad, Translation by Eknath Easwaran, "The Inner Ruler", http://veda.wikidot.com/isha-upanishad-eknath

What's it like to be without alone?
What's it like to be within alone?

If you are not put off
By the voice of the valley
And the starry peaks,
Why not walk through the shady cedars
And come see me?
- Ryokan Taigu (1758-1831)

And so we visit one another. Say, "Hello!" Sip tea or coffee. Tell news of recent days. Share gossip. Wonder and wander about the Alone and being alone with the Alone. Meditation retreat stands ready to catch fallout. Books ready to absorb attention. Mountainside ready to walk up our feet each lift and place of our shoes.

Thursday mornings are hospitality. Hermits visiting hermits. Asking: What's the world doing now? Heads shake. Hands tremble at dexterous tasks. Hearts busy looking around for what it is they feel. Goodbye. Next time. Go well. Here's your hat, there's the door, what's your hurry?

Epiphanies come and go. We are in the captive cold of deep January. Pond ice gone thick. Wiper fluid leaping to salty windshields. Toes growing used to wiggling at edge of frosty hug. Small animals only wanting seeds get caught in traps of insensitivity and freeze. Only profound faith in Brahman/Atman inseparability allows sorrow simply to be sorrow, joy joy, and move through each event and occurrence with ready unfrightened revelation.

Let me know how you are faring.

Keep me informed how things are nearing.

Remember:

Fullness.

Still.

Remains.

What if the web were censured?

Mostly unaware and asleep

Alone in Community is the title of a book by William Claasen, subtitled Journeys into Monastic Life Around the World.

mon·as·ter·y (mn-str)
n. pl. mon·as·ter·ies
1. A community of persons, especially monks, bound by vows to a religious life and often living in partial or complete seclusion.
2. The dwelling place of such a community.
[Middle English monasterie, from Old French monastere, from Late Latin monastrium, from Late Greek monastrion, from Greek monazein, to live alone, from monos, alone; see men-4 in Indo-European roots.]
monas·teri·al (mn-stîr-l, -str-) adj.
(-- from, Free Online Dictionary)

I've lived the monastic life since I was thirteen years old pilgrimaging each morning to Bensonhurst Brooklyn's Twentieth Avenue station Sea Beach Line to rumble north to Manhattan where, at Fourteenth Street Station I would descend stairs to the Canarsie Line to North Sixth Station back in Brooklyn where in a converted fire station I attended high school for four years. The pilgrimage of two hours daily as a mendicant through the urban countryside with great variety of companions taught me solitude, watchfulness, and contemplation. Subway Itinerant Spirituality meant learning the scriptures of passing places, impassive faces, and bodily balance. For five and a half decades I have relied on that early undergrounding, overgrounding, but mostly ungrounding monastic training to find paradoxical urgrund in arrivals and departures, saying and unseating, greeting and loss, prayerful practice and pragmatic wariness, settle and besetting -- the composite experience of finding way in world of strangers to an interior disposition and destination which only serves as a turnaround, a repetitive daily practice where nothing is ever the same and nothing is different. Zen mind was being formed with formlessness.

Pine

The first night at the monastery,
a moth lit on my sleeve by firelight,
long after the first frost.

A short stick of incense burns
thirty minutes, fresh thread of pine
rising through the old pine of the hours.

Summer is trapped under the thin
glass on the brook, making
the sound of an emptying bottle.

Before the long silence,
the monks make a long soft rustling,
adjusting their robes.

The deer are safe now. Their tracks
are made of snow. The wind has dragged
its branches over their history.

(poem, “Pine” by Chase Twichell from The Snow Watcher published by Ontario Review Press. © 1998 by Chase Twichell.)

I love being in this monastery. I love dwelling in this metaphor. So much that I've been taught has been a secret teaching (such as purchasing pretzels the size of a man's hand, squirting mustard on its meandering convex). Thousands of sutras have been pored over ("if u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb") above seats where women rustle shopping bags between ankles. Rituals of indelible import have been performed (holding sliding closing door for running passenger whose timing was seconds slow descending platform stairs). A way of life stamped on an impressionable soul in a faraway land full of mysterious teachings and odd characters, gurus of impeachable habits and troubling pedigree, a community now seen as the face of god gazing at infinite emptiness pronouncing my religious name "Noonehere Noplacetogo."

West Evening Mountain Talk
Part 3, Muso Soseki

The monk asked, “Zen masters these days give a koan to their disciples. This makes students study words, doesn’t it?”

The Master answered, “No it doesn’t. Yuan-wu said, ‘Students who have just started Zen practice have no idea about it. So out of compassion the masters give them a koan as a signpost, so that the disciples can devote themselves to discovering oneness and dispelling random illusions, and to realizing finally that Original Mind is not something that comes from outside. After that, all the koans turn out to be pieces of tile for knocking at the gate.’ (from Dailyzen.com, http://www.dailyzen.com/zen/zen_reading1201.asp

Or, as Bob Dylan pronounced his vows: "Knock, knock, knocking at heaven's door." Where we dwell as community, each and all of us, mostly unaware and asleep, but good to go at any instant.

Alone, with and within, one another.

Seeing any,one

If you are racist, you're not alone.

In a frost-streaked robe.
Here there is no talk
Of the world's affairs—
Those matters that make
Wild the hearts of people.
- Chia Tao (779-843)

If you consider not being racist, you're not alone.

But if you long to be loving and forgiving to those who hurt and harm and have no compunction, you are alone.

God is the Alone.

Turn around.

See any...one?

For Martin: Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā

Martin woke up from sleep. Woke into dream. Told us dream. Fear was gone. He was gone.

We will awake. We will dream. We will speak. Fear will go. We will be gone.

Laetificus Letificus!

Benigne ades! Benigne dicis!

Nihil est!

Just this, Martin, so it is!

"As" Is

Help is on the way

What we need to do is find way to help and be helped.

On way, help is, near.

Near as true Self.

As you to me. As me to you.

Not to, with.

Nearer, my love, with you.

Nearer, my Lord, to thee. And with thee.

Approaching (heretical, to some minds, not merely to, not merely with, but) 'as.'

Kena Upanishad
Translated by F. Max Müller

First Khanda

1. The Pupil asks: 'At whose wish does the mind sent forth proceed on its errand? At whose command does the first breath go forth? At whose wish do we utter this speech? What god directs the eye, or the ear?'

2. The Teacher replies: 'It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of speech, the breath of breath, and the eye of the eye. When freed (from the senses) the wise, on departing from this world, become immortal.

3. 'The eye does not go thither, nor speech, nor mind. We do not know, we do not understand, how any one can teach it.

4. 'It is different from the known, it is also above the unknown, thus we have heard from those of old, who taught us this.

5. 'That which is not expressed by speech and by which speech is expressed, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.

6. 'That which does not think by mind, and by which, they say, mind is thought, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.

7. 'That which does not see by the eye, and by which one sees (the work of) the eyes, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.

8. 'That which does not hear by the ear, and by which the ear is heard, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.

9. 'That which does not breathe by breath, and by which breath is drawn, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.'
(First Khanda from Kena Upanishad,Translated by F. Max Müller)
http://www.realization.org/page/namedoc0/kena/k_1.htm

That alone.

And that, we are coming to see, thou art!

As is.

Wonderfully, as, is!

It is all and only gift; each

What does it mean to surrender oneself to God?

Haiku

returning silence
moonlight on fresh snow -- one look
still empty cloister

(wfh/nunc ipsum)

It is to present itself with what is itself.

Nothing

As simple

As this

Is

Seen...

Which one brings one to itself

There is nonviolence. And there is ignorance.

Only one of the above brings us to our true home.

What's that

Subtle. Not the thing but the thing itself. Back behind and far beyond our ability to see or hear, but that which is ground of seeing and hearing itself occurring.

Invocation

OM! May He protect us both together. May He give us enjoyment. May we exert ourselves through our radiance. May there never be differences between us in understanding. OM peace from heaven, peace from the earth, peace from the body!

OM! May my limbs, speech and prana grow. May my eyes, ears and the strength of the sense grow too. Everything is Brahman described in the Upanishads. Brahman never refuses to accept me. May I never refuse to accept Brahman. Let my Atman show interest in me and may all the virtues described in the Upanishads reside in me!

Chapter 1

By whose commands this mind works? By whose will the life's breath circulates? Who is responsible for man's speech? What intelligence does lead the eyes and the ears?

It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech. Also the life of all life, and the eye of the eye. The wise abandon the sensory world and become immortal.

There the eyes cannot travel, nor speech nor mind. Nor do we know how to explain it to the disciples. It is other than the known and beyond the unknown. So were we taught by our ancients.

That which the speech cannot reveal, but causes the speech to flow, know that alone to be Brahman, not this whom people worship here (through mantras).
(-- beginning of Kena Upanishad, translation by Jayaram V) http://www.hinduwebsite.com/kena.asp

Love that.

And that which that becomes.

To, finally, disappear.

There is no other way.

Playing with sand; forgetting why

Poetry is word for
Word an incomplete
Sentence for
Contemplation

On Amazon, this book description for Wabi-Sabi, which we will contemplate this semester:

Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete . . .
. . . wabi-sabi could even be called the “Zen of things,” as it exemplifies many of Zen’s core spiritual-philosophical tenets ...
Wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty. It occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West . . .
Wabi-sabi, in its purest, most idealized form, is precisely about the delicate traces, the faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness . .
(-- book by author Leonard Koren)

I've never understood the notion of 'perfection' except in an ironic tone, someone's explicative, "Oh, perfect!"

Even when described as "making one's way through," (a phrasing used for years), 'perfect' has a quality of not being there, always en route, an approximate glimpse, a glancing show of ephemeral fade.

Consider the world light,
And the spirit is not burdened;
Consider the myriad things slight,
And the mind is not confused.
Consider life and death equal,
And the intellect is not afraid;
Consider change as sameness,
And clarity is not obscured.
- Lao-tzu

Wandering the edges of scholarship is close enough horseshoes for my recess mind. Glance and glimpse is preferred optic over stare and glare.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness and call that handful of sand the world. Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then.
(--Robert Pirsig, from his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).

On Kwan Um School of Zen website it is good to look at photo of Zen Master standing this past December at ceremony table Buddha's Enlightenment Day in grey robe. I sat across from her at interview time one retreat as we swam together on our zafus that day almost forty years ago in Heidegger's surf before bowing and leaving to be elsewhere and otherwise.

A rich inquiry, then.

And now?

It is always a good time.

No knowing why.

So bright; so full

In zendo I ask silently: Why am I doing this?

It could be the final tug of rounded moon jerking open mouth setting hook this deep water of winter night in fresh snowless new year.

I am beside myself no longer recognizing reflection in image shattered by piercing sharp white.

I send dogs out to investigate bladder and bowel as snow bowl churns water through blower spraying makeshift snow for dry runways until nature ceases demure pouting.

SHE IS

Her voice is a roundness. On full moon days, she talks about
renouncing meat but the butcher has his routine. And blood.

M’s wisdom. Still reliable.

There are sounds we cannot hear but understand in motion.
Slicing of air with hips. Crushing grass, saying these are my feet.
I want my feet in my shadow. Suffice to meet desires halfway.

Quiet. We say her chakras are in place.

When the thermos shatters, she knows the direction of its spill.
She knows how to lead and follow. Know her from this.

Sounds we cannot hear. The wind blows and we say it is cool.

Night slips under the door. We are tucked into bed and kissed
a fleeting one. Through the curtains, her voice loosens like thread
from an old blanket, row upon row. We watch her teeth in the
dark and read her words. She speaks in perfect order, facing where
the breeze can tug it towards canals stretching for sound.

Her faith abides by the cycle of the moon. See how perfect she is.

(Poem by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, “She is” from Rules of the House. 2003)

At table after reading sends silence and soup from tureen, mindful spoonfuls, it seems I might know why the bother to sit so long on zafu without knowing raises itself.

Ignorance: That if I wake, even a little bit, less of it would haunt the world.

Sipping soup -- tomato, leeks, and cauliflower -- under Wolf Moon, Old Moon, Moon After Yule, the pressure finally breaks, bread steeps, water tilts from glass, companions at ready.

The night watches.

Full moon at attention.

Cedars dripping soundless glow.

There is nothing I can do to alleviate suffering. Only wake. To it. And where it visits. Moonlight stepping through mountain trees no snapping twig.

What use waking?

None.

It is a sound we cannot hear.

So, we listen; it is our koan, night practice, on pillow, sleeping or awake.

Dogs return through open slider. One back upstairs, one to white sofa in front room on other side of Mutti's rocking chair. Red blanket and red stitching on throw pillows keeping vigil still.

1. "Wake, awake, for night is flying,"
The watchmen on the heights are crying;
"Awake, Jerusalem, arise!"
Midnight hears the welcome voices
And at the thrilling cry rejoices:
"Oh, where are ye, ye virgins wise?
The Bridegroom comes, awake!
Your lamps with gladness take!
Hallelujah!
With bridal care Yourselves prepare
To meet the Bridegroom, who is near."
(-- from, "Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying"
by Philipp Nicolai, 1556-1608
Translated by Catherine Winkworth, 1829-1878)

Faint trombone treading notation slope, from deep upland animal moan, the reduction is complete.

I return.

To sleep.

Walls have occupants

Scratching. Do they want through into this room? Or just a ruffled sleeping place safe for duration? Being franciscan and buddhist is impetus for wonder about wall-dwellers rather than assassination planning.

CAN BE NO SORROW

That narrow cot, hardly any bigger than a child’s, is where Droste died
(it’s there in her museum in Meersburg),
on that sofa Hölderlin in his tower room at the carpenter’s,
Rilke and George in hospital beds presumably, in Switzerland,
in Weimar, Nietzsche’s great black eyes
rested on white pillows
till they looked their last—
all of it junk now, or no longer extant,
unattributable, anonymous
in its insentient and continual disintegration.

We bear within us the seeds of all the gods,
the gene of death and the gene of love—
who separated them, the words and things,
who blended them, the torments and the place where they come to an end,
the few boards and the floods of tears,
home for a few wretched hours.

Can be no sorrow. Too distant, too remote,
bed and tears too impalpable,
no No, no Yes,
birth and bodily pain and faith
an undefinable surge, a lurch,
a power stirring in its sleep
moved bed and tears—
sleep well!

-- Poem by Gottfried Benn
— Translated by Michael Hofmann

There are times when ruffled beds are sole narrative of disengaging memory. Those glance-backs when crossing carpet stepping from back room body to kitchen mind already down stairs left turn traffic light straight ahead not late the whole complicated array of Noh characters kabuki akimbo hallways and desks, pens and pads, treatment plans and system flaws as thistle and fairy tale weave through morning toward lunch.

Even here
I Am
Still there.

Rather than break my vow to plum blossoms
I have settled here in this disheveled hut
Grey sleet seeps through briars at my window
Plumes of snow dance around its papered panes


Steep scarps loom above frozen woods
Deep clouds conceal the pool's icy stones
Such weather; I stoke up a few charcoal twigs
Wish for a way south, to Chiang-nan's shore.

( - Shih-shu (17th c-early 18th) -- from The clouds should know me by now: Buddhist poet monks of China
By Red Pine, Mike O'Connor)

I love when moon illumines night erasing importance of daylight scurrying. When present moment arises to remind that no other moment is real, that we live in illusion. That all the words spoken and heard are scrapings in walls bedding down for duration restless for clarification like junkies thinking shooting up meaning will dispense with formalities and usher in understanding laced with cream and honey.

Empty beds are artifacts of ancient civilizations replete with shards and sipping bowls for the journey.

Epiphany or Baptism? Churches wrestle with weekends as safeguards of canon celebration texts as pickup trucks with cardboard coffee cups finish Barnestown hill without a spill in new narrative of worship recorded and repeated daily with signs and symbols easily recognizable by all the faithful arriving at and passing beyond stop signs turning into convenience counters where liturgical greeting is monosyllabic and passing unstrange smile.

We love to be alone. It is heretical to want to be alone. Only love allows it. The crowd prays for assembly and receives assurance that the gathered that stays together displays together profession of affiliation and belief in sentences of faith signed and sealed boarding tickets pass-porting angelic checkpoints to foreign concepts welcomed as home.

The walls are silent. Resting time. Moon pulls Ragged Mountain over shoulder. Furnace takes night shift seriously. Pictures fastened to hooks vigil front room.

I love you.

Take that!

Sleep well!

Dwell not on a stumbling-block

Hui-Neng husked rice.

He couldn't read nor write. But he knew emptiness.

How wonderful of Lex Hixon to tell the transmission story for us in writing at Saturday Morning Practice these 38 years after meeting him at the red church of WBAI in NYC as he hosted his radio show "In the Spirit" on Sunday mornings.

I was more of a fool then than now. But now I know what a fool I am. You can guess the rest.

Chapter V. Dhyana

The Patriarch (one day) preached to the assembly as follows:--
In our system of meditation, we neither dwell upon the mind (in contradistinction to the Essence of Mind) nor upon purity. Nor do we approve of non-activity. As to dwelling upon the mind, the mind is primarily delusive; and when we realize that it is only a phantasm there is no need to dwell on it. As to dwelling upon purity, our nature is intrinsically pure; and so far as we get rid of all delusive 'idea' there will be nothing but purity in our nature, for it is the delusive idea that obscures Tathata (Suchness). If we direct our mind to dwell upon purity we are only creating another delusion, the delusion of purity. Since delusion has no abiding place, it is delusive to dwell upon it. Purity has neither shape nor form; but some people go so far as to invent the 'Form of Purity', and treat it as a problem for solution. Holding such an opinion, these people are purity-ridden, and their Essence of Mind is thereby obscured.

Learned Audience, those who train themselves for 'imperturbability' should, in their contact with all types of men, ignore the faults of others. They should be indifferent to others' merit or demerit, good or evil, for such an attitude accords with the 'imperturbability of the Essence of Mind'. Learned Audience, a man unenlightened may be unperturbed physically, but as soon as he opens his mouth he criticizes others and talks about their merits or demerits, ability or weakness, good or evil; thus he deviates from the right course. On the other hand, to dwell upon our own mind or upon purity is also a stumbling-block in the Path.
(--from, SUTRA SPOKEN BY THE SIXTH PATRIARCH ON THE HIGH SEAT OF "THE TREASURE OF THE LAW")
http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/huineng/huineng5.html

I'll have some rice with Tamara sauce, thank you.

One kernel at a time, if you please.

No more hiding. No more seeking.

Show me you love me

So much has to do with emphasis. Putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble changes everything.

Take the phrase: "Show me you love me." It can read like a command: SHOW me you love me! Or, it could sound like a gentle reminder of primal undifferentiated relationality: Show 'me' -- 'You' love me. This second reading invites the other into reciprocal reflective recognition that thee and me are not two, not separate, when love is the lens through which we see one another.

I Want to Know What Love Is

I gotta take a little time
A little time to think things over
I better read between the lines
In case I need it when I'm older
Aaaah woah-ah-aah

Now this mountain I must climb
Feels like a world upon my shoulders
And through the clouds I see love shine
It keeps me warm as life grows colder

In my life there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
Can't stop now, I've traveled so far
To change this lonely life

I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
I wanna feel what love is
I know you can show me
Aaaah woah-oh-ooh

I'm gonna take a little time
A little time to look around me, oooh ooh-ooh ooh-ooh oooh
I've got nowhere left to hide
It looks like love has finally found me

In my life there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
I can't stop now, I've traveled so far
To change this lonely life

I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
I wanna feel what love is
I know you can show me
I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
And I wanna feel, I want to feel what love is
And I know, I know you can show me

Let's talk about love
(-- lyrics from song, I Want to Know What Love Is, by Mick Jones, sung by Foreigner, 1984)

The plea of the song lyrics, "I want you to show me," is a plea for the unity of love. It is profound trust, " I know you can show me." You, me, we: can we see our whole, true, and interpenetrating interdependence? You show me. I show you. Together we appear when love is the lens.

It might take a little time.

Sermons there are, must be a million
Too many to read in a hurry
If you want a friend
Just come to T'ien T'ai mountain
Sit deep among the crags
We'll talk about the Principles
And chat about dark Mysteries
If you don't come to my mountain
Your view will be blocked
By the others.
- Shih-te

Listening to John Dear speaking about Dan Berrigan (now in his 91st year) I am reminded of the loneliness of radical vision. There was a line that suggested Berrigan felt that all that was left was the Bread and the Wine and one another's company. I hear these words as saying the mere elemental transformation of grateful thanksgiving with sacred presence experiencing together ordinary hierophanic revelation of (in this way) What-Is-Love, Being-With, One-Another, In-The-World. For Berrigan, Christ.

I recall the Berrigan lines:

bodies belong
where words
lead

(I misquoted them for forty years, substuting the word "are" for "lead." I've been static, Berrigan looks for movement.)

Turn the page, he says, let flare profound revelation.

Miracles

Were I God almighty, I would ordain, rain
fall lightly where old men trod, no death
in childbirth, neither infant nor mother, ditches firm fenced against the
errant blind, aircraft come to ground like any feather.

No mischance, malice, knives.
Tears dried. Would resolve all
flaw and blockage of mind
that makes us mad, sets lives awry.

So I pray, under
the sign of the world’s murder, the ruined son;
why are you silent?
feverish as lions
hear us in the world,
caged, devoid of hope.

Still, some redress and healing.
The hand of an old woman
turns gospel page;
it flares up gently, the sudden tears of Christ.

(Poem by Dan Berrigan)

Where is it written that it would be awful to gain the world and lose your soul?

It seems to me it would be an awful thing to lose the world to gain a soul.

There is no gain. No loss. 'World' and 'soul' are two only when misplaced emphasis is afoot. Christ longed for the world to be redeemed into the wholeness of sight. For the individual to see. For 'world, soul' to grow into unitive sight. For all creation's longing to be fulfilled in its true nature. For love to be, what it is, in the world, in each one, in time, and beyond.

We are not meant to use love for something else.

Love is useless. Forgiveness is useless. They are not to be used for anything other than what they are, namely, the only things that are.

Be, therefore, love.

Be, therefore, forgiveness.

Don't try to use them for anything other than what they are in themselves.

As you are in yourself; as you are in the world.

You are the world. You are Christ. Be bread. Be wine. With one-another.

No, really: "With" one-another!

We are being told

I love Earth.

If you are not put off
By the voice of the valley
And the starry peaks,
Why not walk through the shady cedars
And come see me?
- Ryokan Taigu (1758-1831)

I love you.

"We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe. All the disasters that are happening now are a consequence of that spiritual ‘autism.’”
(--Thomas Berry, from, The Great Work, 1999)

I love this one loving.

BARKING

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.

(Poem by Jim Harrison)

I love the realization there is so much further to travel in order to get right where we are.

We have not yet discovered what it means to be human. And it seems that this ordinary discovery is the most epiphanic that can be made – for when we have learnt what it is to be human, when we have suffered it, and loved it, we will know our true estate, we will know what gulf separates us from the gods, we will know what it means to be free, and we will know that freedom is really the beginning of our mutual destinies.
(-- by Ben Okri, in, A Way of Being Free, found as epigraph in, An Imperfect Offering, Humanitarian Action For The Twenty-First Century, by James Orbinski, M.D.)

I love the gift life is offering: world, love.

"The natural world itself is our primary language as it is our primary scripture, our primary awakening to the mysteries of existence. We might well put all our written scriptures on the shelf for twenty years until we learn what we are being told by unmediated experience of the world about us". -- Thomas Berry

I love listening to the sound of what is...

Being said!

Debate or Conversation? -- "Language speaks"

1.

Dos-a-dos?

Or, vis-a-vis?

Je ne sais pas.

Et vous?

Parlons!


2.

Language speaks (in the original German Die Sprache spricht), is a famous saying by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger first formulated it in his 1950 lecture Language (Die Sprache),[1] and frequently repeated it in later works.[2]
Adorno expressed a related idea when he said that language "acquires a voice" and "speaks itself."[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_speaks

3.

The Buddhas left their Sutras
Because people are hard to change
It's not just a matter of saintly or stupid
Each and every heart throws up its barricade
Each piles up his own mountain of karma
How could they guess that what they clasp so close
Is sorrow
Unwilling to ponder, as day and night
They do embrace the falsehood of the body

- Shih-te http://www.dailyzen.com/

Ponder well!

Name, please?

Who can pronounce the name of one without name? Go ahead, open your mouth. Give vibration to air rising from diaphragm.
Then, round lips, furrow tongue, and pronounce the name of the unnamable.

What do you hear? What do you see?

No one has ever seen God.

Where have we been looking?

Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us,
by letting us be called God’s children;
and that is what we are.
Because the world refused to acknowledge him,
therefore it does not acknowledge us.
My dear people, we are already the children of God
but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed;
all we know is, that when it is revealed
we shall be like him
because we shall see him as he really is.
Surely everyone who entertains this hope
must purify himself, must try to be as pure as Christ.
(--from First reading, Tuesday, Feast of Holy Name, 1 John 2:29-3:6

The koan "Mu" invites us to undistinguish.

We've been very particular in our finicky looking, only glancing where paid informants point their fingers.

There's a simpler invitation. With the myth of virgin birth comes the myth of ever-present Christ. It is a pure myth, nothing added nothing taken away, always and everywhere, present; all ways and every gaze, presence.

You can't, ultimately, fault the paid informants their attempt to control sight. Everyone has a scheme to get some cash ahead of the creditors and their opulent craving for more and more wealth. The servants of fear and greed feel a mindless loyalty to their masters who, themselves, fear their masters -- and so on, and so on.

"Magis" (more) from "magister" (master or teacher). If a teacher thinks he has more to give students, he might be mistaken. Students have only to open as wide as sky and learn from what is there. A good guide for discovering what is there is a teacher with nothing to give, only to open hand, heart, and mind to allow what is ever-present to be itself experienced, felt, known, revered.

When this ground and grounding reality is revealed, what we call Christ will be newly seen without seeing, called without naming, lived without being contained.

...all we know is, that when it is revealed
we shall be like him
because we shall see him as he really is.

Be like him. Be like her. Be like it.

See what really is!

As you really are.

Name, please?

Yes it is: please!

And, think you!

Mostly, follows: thank you