s'il vous plait

There's no excuse for rudeness.

Don't be.

Rather, be excuselessly mannerly.

Nothing need be made up.

asking is receiving; communion

In prison one of the men says, "The question itself is the answer."

Paroxysm of possibility emerges.

Is God "the Question-Itself"?

It makes sense. If God is Question-Itself, then everytime we question we seek God.

To every question the answer is itself God. Hence, whenever we ask for anything we are seeking God.

We ask, we pray.

We must become people of prayer.

Go ahead, ask me why.

[sic] = thus, such

Sometimes you have to wonder.

It might not be true in its parts, but it could be all true as a whole.

Consider idealism:

Idealism is the philosophical theory that reality is essentially mental or spiritual. Idealism is opposed to materialism, the theory that reality is physical. In philosophy there are two schools of idealism. The older school, which began with the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, is called objective idealism. It maintains that reality consists of ideal, immaterial forms existing outside the mind and that the material world is merely a pale reflection of the ideal world. Philosophers of the school of subjective idealism, on the other hand, maintain that reality exists only in the mind and that what are known as physical objects have no existence outside the mind. 

Subjective Idealism  

The major philosophers of subjective idealism were Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) and David Hume (1711-1776). As a student at Trinity College in Dublin, Berkeley studied the works of John Locke (1632-1704), which greatly influenced the development of his idealistic theories. Locke had held that a distinction can be made between what he considered the primary qualities of an object, such as its size, shape, and motion, and its secondary qualities, such as color, odor, and taste. He claimed that only the primary qualities belong to the object. The secondary qualities exist in the mind of the person perceiving the object. A rose has a certain size and shape, but without an eye to perceive them it has no color.  

Berkeley carried Locke's theory further and contended that both primary and secondary qualities exist in the mind. If one imagines seeing an apple hanging from a limb, he is certain only of the sensation and of the idea aroused in his mind of an apple and a limb. He is not at all certain of the actual existence of the objects. Whereas Locke had maintained that notions about an object originated in the object, Berkeley denied the very existence of the object. He concluded that reality consists only of minds and their ideas and that these ultimately depend on the mind of God.  

The Scottish philosopher David Hume pressed subjective idealism to its logical conclusion. He maintained that if he could not posit the existence of objects, he could not believe in the existence of other minds. If he rigorously applied Berkeley's theory, he would have to exclude everything but the one fact of his own mental existence. This extreme position is called solipsism. Hume claimed the objective realist would have to deny even the existence of his own mind and affirm his own existence as being no more than a chain of sensations or impressions.  

Hume's skeptical position inspired the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) to find a way out of the dilemma. Kant claimed that knowledge does not come wholly through experience, but that the mind has to impose forms on nature before man can understand his experiences. He emphasized the structure of nature, rather than its qualities. He held that certain forms, such as those of space and time, are not to be found in nature or through experience and that they must therefore arise in the mind. Kant was thus able to affirm the mind's existence. However, Kant was not a thoroughgoing idealist. He believed that objects exist physically outside the mind, but he claimed that man can never fully understand the essential nature of objects. Kant called this his thing-in-itself theory. Kant's theories concerning logic and mathematics and such forms as space and time led to objective idealism, which is the theory that forms exist independent of man. 

Objective Idealism  

The German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) used Kant’s theories to »te [sic]  the objective existence of nature. Hegel an idealist in that he stressed the spiritual char- [sic] of the world. Unlike Berkeley and Hume, he maintained that much of what is real lies outside the mind and that the individual human mind is only a fragment of the Absolute, or the all-embracing realm of Spirit. Hegel further contended that the world must be an intelligible system in order to be understood. His central doctrine is that "the real is rational", or that the world is a logical system and philosophy is the attempt by the human mind to understand it.  

Hegel's philosophy led to several conclusions, one of which was determinism, the belief that nothing happens merely by chance. Another belief is that the nature of an object can be understood only by comprehending its relation to the whole reality, called the Absolute.   

Other objective idealists who followed Hegel were the British philosophers Thomas Hill Green '1836-1882) and Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924), the American philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916), and the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952).  

(--from, HubPages» Education and Science» Philosophy,  What is Idealism?Updated on May 15, 2010)  http://philosophos.hubpages.com/hub/idealism 

So it is, each thought introduces us to its friends. We sit around speaking of things held in common

Thus it is.

Such are we.

something beyond itself

There is no reason for hope.

three thursday haiku
                 (for morning sunshine) 

      

from morning sun porch, facing east,
dripping water house roof to clear roof, 

breeze rustling branches across dooryard,
sends you new pencils for new words; 

nine reasons for hope, nine points --
each sunrise clear paper creates presence 

                                                                                              (-wfh) 

Hope is where reason abandons what it knows for something beyond itself.  

wobble

They pick up a gun. They nurture resentment, anger, disappointment.

They shoot someone, or two, or nine.

Then the reporting of it. The repetitive details and minutia of the occasion.

And this is our life now.

Idiocy masquerading as some principled stance, some corrective to a deluded belief or opinion.

No.

I say no.

No to delusion. No to eliminating life.

exeunt omnes

What's that sound?

Oh, nothing.

(Stillness.)

practitioners

Rokie and I walk Ragged Mountain. Die Happily There are three types of practitioners: practitioners of small capacity, who die without fear; practitioners of middle capacity, who die without regrets; and practitioners of the utmost capacity, who die happily. (-- Tanya Piven, “‘Like Roaring Earth’” Tricycle)  It grows dark earlier. I light candle in chapel/zendo, in wohnkuche, in small lantern on hillside grave. Cicadas in August sound baseline beat for darkening summer. Pizza arrives. Life goes on.

saying goodbye to Cody

A few minutes after this photo was taken tonight a vet who does "peaceful passages" at home came and administered the necessary syringes to legs and back, and the dear sweet lumbering big fellow gave up consciousness, then feeling, then breath and heartbeat, and went beyond what we know.

Tom, earlier, brought "Daisy" the landscaping backhoe up past the yurt to the doggy/cat graveyard and finished what I had feebly begun to dig this last week. Tomorrow morning we'll move him from cabin to new grave and  put him in the ground.

Saskia grieves and is relieved. 

Now you see him, now you don't!

With love,

he calls it "Introception"

The things you wrestle with in prison meetingbrook conversations!

The new word created by Franklin Merrill-Wolff is "Introception." Or, "The power whereby the Light of Consciousness turns upon Itself toward Its Source." 

https://books.google.com/books?id=ZnTfTNTXTzAC&pg=PA196&lpg=PA196&dq=franklyn+perception+conception.introception&source=bl&ots=9amCG4nGyX&sig=3kCiJ-tD52UCcP5MFfa1vNik-UE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CC8Q6AEwB2oVChMIlNLHiuS9xwIVBDY-Ch3yawkd#v=onepage&q=introception&f=false

Last night, in a riot storm of pounding rain, I sat and slept zazen in our chapel/zendo. 

The solitude!

the landscape, the mindscape, the inscape

 Shovelful by pickaxe fall the dirt and rocks move from long settle to edge of coming hole.

The elderly German Shepherd panting by sliding door slowly inches closer up toward pet graveyard.

These three disciplines of life are truly the key to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. It is in fact around each of them that the different dogmas . . . are organized, are crystallized. To the discipline of judgment are linked the dogmas that affirm the freedom of judgment, the possibility that man has to criticize and modify his own thought; around the discipline that directs our attitude with regard to external events are gathered all the theorems on the causality of universal nature; lastly, the discipline of action is nourished by all the theoretical propositions relative to the mutual attraction that unites reasonable beings.
   Finally, one discovers that behind an apparent disorder, one can uncover, in the Meditations, an extremely rigorous conceptual system. 56
( footnote 56, La Citadelle interieure, Hadot, p.62, 

Each maxim, aphorism, sentence of the meditations is an exercise of actualization and assilimation of one or more of the three disciplines of life. 

(--in Introduction, by Arnold I. Davidson,  p.12; from Philosophy As A Way Of Life,g by Pierre Hadot 

As we learn to think, to listen, and to see -- that which lay hidden comes to surface to be seen.

The house is full.

Minute by minute time moves through. 

it’s way beyond time

When nothing seems to work, try nothing.

When absurdity arises in peoples’ behaviors, see absurdity as what it is, absurd.

When people are chained by their religious beliefs, give a wide berth.

There’s no accounting for the ways we enslave ourselves and call it the freedom of obedience.

a candle burns near the chair that held her

Carolyn Louise Perkins,  2/2/1935--8/14/2015

http://ripostafh.com/obituary.aspx?MemberId=1520685

On Thursday evenings, recent years ago, Kali, from chair with green throw, 

would listen deeply and speak thoughtfully during conversations about
the “required course” that is life.

She was a delight, a gentle presence, a joy to sit beside.

We trust, for her, that is a continuous and moveable feast.

Lucky those who have been and will be recipients of her grace!

tent-dwelling; therapy

The joy of conversation is in continuance.

First the tears.

Then laughter.

Love is acceptance of other as other.

True love understands nothing, and still, does nothing anyway.

Dormition; Assumption: Many years = Χρόνια Πολλά

Xronia Polla

The Koimisis tis Theotokou, Dormition of the Virgin Mary, or Assumption of the Virgin Mary all are names referring to the feast commemorating what is believed to be the miraculous transport of Mary, in bodily form, to Heaven after her death. Some accounts claim that she died in Jerusalem; others put her death at the Graeco-Roman city of Ephesus, now in Turkey, and the site of an alleged "House of the Virgin Mary".  

About the Dormition The Ephesian origin is plausible as it was the Council of Ephesus which first proclaimed the feast. The story itself does not appear in the Bible, but is found in apocryphal stories and folklore, with written records dating back to as early as the third century. Accounts of the story differ, but here are the basic details. 

Saint Thomas, who had been preaching in far-off India, found himself swept up in a swirling cloud which took him to a spot in the air above her tomb, where he witnessed her ascent. He asked her where she was going; in answer, she tossed her girdle to him.
Thomas ultimately landed near the tomb, where he met the other surviving apostles. He begged them to let him see her body so that he could say goodbye, and that's when it was discovered that she had left the earth in body and in spirit, to intercede on the behalf of the faithful. The apostles found her clothes left behind in the tomb, where it was said that they emanated a wonderful fragrance, a true “odor of sanctity". http://gogreece.about.com/cs/folkloreevents/a/dormition.htm

Χρόνια Πολλά  

In giving birth, you preserved your virginity.

In falling asleep, you did not forsake the world, 

O Birthgiver of God. 

You were translated to life, 

O Mother of Life.

And by your prayers, you deliver our souls from death.

~ Troparion of the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God ~

http://www.dormitionmonastery.org

ΧΡΟΝΙΑ ΠΟΛΛΑ

The feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God is celebrated on August 15 by the Christian world and is the greatest of those established by the Church in honour of the Mother of the Lord. It may be the oldest of all. The first evidence we have for it dates from the 5^th century, round about the time when the 3^rd Ecumenical Synod was called in Ephesus (451), at which the dogma of the Mother of God was defined and the honour due to her was developed. It appears that it was first held in Jerusalem on 13 August and was transposed soon afterwards to the 15^th of the same month. It was a general feast of the Virgin, without particular reference to her Dormition. 

It was called “the day of Mary, the Mother of God”. The centre for the celebrations initially was a kathisma (seat), a church in her name, which was located outside Jerusalem, some three miles along the road leading to Bethlehem. The association of the feast with the Dormition of the Mother of God occurred at the famous church of Our Lady in Gethsemane, “Mavrikios’ house of prayer”, where her grave was. This church quickly acquired the status of the most important pilgrimage site of the Mother of God, and its renown became the reason why the feast on 15 August quickly spread throughout the Christian world, East and West, as the feast of the Dormition.

http://pemptousia.com/2015/08/the-dormition-of-the-mother-of-god-ii/ 

 When enlightenment takes place there is no other place to be.

Asleep or awake there is only what is there and true.

Beyond our or any belief is a reality that is true and whole.

Neither time nor no-time reveals the whole to us.

Whole is what we are beyond time and no-time.

Chary. We are chary about enlightenment, about awakening.

That’s ok.

I wish us Χρόνια Πολλά to realize what we are, what Holy Mother births us to be! 

assuming there, is heaven

Here does the body go at death?

Some say Mary went, without dying, to heaven.

There's a hospice plan.

obstructions

Meddling, meddling!

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions. 

(--Marcus Aurelius, from brainpickings, 13aug15, http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/13/marcus-aurelius-meditations-begin-each-day/ 

Here is for no obstruction.

Here’s to no obstruction!

the absence of any visible way

Call me a John Cage/Leonard Cohen zen buddhist and a Daniel Berrigan/Thomas Merton catholic christian! 

The wait not to get into prison this morning was spent with a nice pastor telling me about Paul and forgiveness and the new life (cf. born again) that is necessitated by aware attention to letting go and moving through the unknown into a way of being fresh and without precedent because of  an a-causal, a-synchronicity, a-temporality, and a-historicity. Put differently, I was simultaneously translating his words into aphasic apophatic attentivity surrounding a cosmotheandric wholeness without and within, no separation, no delusion, no mind.

He was a perfect companion for our Samuel Beckett Waiting For Godot meets Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations reenactment.

Secularity—which is to say, our time in history—is the age of science and technology. To the extent that we’re secular, we no longer experience ourselves as being looked upon, overseen by powers out beyond us. Modern subjectivity is secular insofar as we experience our own human agency as supreme—we are the agents of creation and strive toward greater and greater control. Hence Immanuel Kant defined “enlightenment” as maturity: growing up to capitalize on the rational powers in our own hands. The danger that we vaguely sense in this historical development is that our drive to control everything is precisely what we can no longer control. We see the cosmos as being at our disposal, something there for us that we can manipulate toward our own ends and desires. In addition, by aligning itself so closely with science, secular thinking tends to identify truth with the empirical, the calculable, the measureable, and thus the spiritual dimension of human life—questions about the very meaning of human life—begin to seem illusory. Because no other vision of the Good has yet arisen to replace previous concerns such as afterlife in heaven or liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth, consumerism has tended to become our default mode of fulfillment, a kind of global faith in our secular world.  

Nietzsche hints in this direction in his famous “death of God” passage in The Gay Science. The madman proclaims the “death of God” and is distraught—he cares deeply and fears the repercussions of this loss. He assumes that with this loss the grounds for higher values have been undermined. The jeering atheists who just laugh at him are thoughtless, smug, and self-satisfied. They are perfectly content not to strive for higher values or for deeper self-awareness or to seek new forms of freedom. Rather than discipline themselves to ponder the meaning of birth and death, these secularists much prefer their current pursuit of poisonous greed, disdainful aversion, and pleasurable delusion. Although Nietzsche’s madman is crazed and disabled by the enormous implications of his insight, the atheists, already dead to any value beyond the most banal forms of self-satisfaction, are worse off.  

In the absence of any viable way to assert the existence of God or any other absolute foundation, two paths have opened up. The first is reactionary, a form of nostalgia for the premodern past that manifests in dogmatic attempts to live as though we still reside in some earlier epoch, as though we could still live medieval lives, as though a static human nature can still be taken to sanctify static values. The second path is secularity, which simply accepts our loss of values, rejects the religious past, and tries to make due by focusing elsewhere. Both reactions can’t help but adopt modern ways of thinking about religion. Both theists and atheists assume that faith is a certain kind of belief: certainty about the truth of otherworldly, supernatural propositions. They both proceed as though the question of the existence of God is ultimately an empirical hypothesis about what really exists or doesn’t exist out there, and like all good modernists, both pursue evidence for their convictions about belief and disbelief. While the hopelessness of the theistic effort is obvious, we should recognize that contemporary atheism is equally immersed in an untenable, uninspired vision of who we are as human beings.

(from, Religion Resurrected A secular Buddhist, recoiling from the ills of both theism and atheism, suggests that we move beyond both. by Dale S. Wright)   http://www.tricycle.com/feature/religion-resurrected

Later, in Special Management Unit (or segregation) we return to sit with man in orange behind plexi-glass for a conversation on Stoicism, Buddhism, German prisons, bravery and warrior culture, forgiveness, and trust.

It is a wonderful education.

We are such open students.

Something unforeseen this way comes!

rain falls Tuesday night

Song for the Last Act

BY LOUISE BOGAN

Now that I have your face by heart, I look   

Less at its features than its darkening frame   

Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,   

Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.   

Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease 

The lead and marble figures watch the show   

Of yet another summer loath to go 

Although the scythes hang in the apple trees. 

Now that I have your face by heart, I look. 

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read   

In the black chords upon a dulling page   

Music that is not meant for music’s cage, 

Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.   

The staves are shuttled over with a stark   

Unprinted silence. In a double dream   

I must spell out the storm, the running stream.   

The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark. 

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read. 

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see 

The wharves with their great ships and architraves;   

The rigging and the cargo and the slaves 

On a strange beach under a broken sky. 

O not departure, but a voyage done! 

The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps 

Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps   

Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun. 

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

Louise Bogan, “Song for the Last Act” from The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178041

quelle heure est-il?

There’s still time, brother.

A study of more than 200,000 galaxies, encompassing wavelengths of light from the far ultraviolet to infrared, shows that the universe is producing half as much energy as it did 2 billion years ago and continues to fade.

A giant supercomputer created a virtual version of our entire universe! How does that help us? 

“Newer galaxies are simply putting out less energy than galaxies did in the past,” astronomer Mehmet Alpaslan, with NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., told Discovery News.

Older stars are fading out faster than new stars are forming, a trend that eventually will leave the universe a cold and lonely place. “At some point, all matter will eventually decay. We’re observing the lights slowly shutting down," Alpasian said. 

“The timeline for all this to come to pass is very long, hundreds of trillions of years,” he added. 

The study, released Monday at the International Astronomical Union conference in Hawaii, culminates a seven-year, international effort to measure both the distances and energy output of more than 200,000 galaxies.

(--from, Universe Is Dying, Galactic Survey Shows, AUG 10, 2015 04:00 PM ET // BY IRENE KLOTZ) http://news.discovery.com/space/galaxies/universe-is-dying-galactic-survey-shows-150810.htm 

Time?

Yes.

But...for what? 

face

Nagasaki Mary

The photo is of the charred statue of the virgin Mary in the Catholic cathedral that was close to ground zero 9 August 1945.

(--from louie, louie, http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/2015/08/nagasaki-mary.html#comment-form)