There's not much interest in Christ as "King."
What if we ended the liturgical year with Christ Samadhi?
What if we ended the liturgical year with Christ Samadhi?
Saturday, November 21, 2015
white stars in blue-black sky; walking to bookshed, starting zendo heatstove fire
From Tricycle:
The Theater of Reflection
A Tibetan lama invites us to the theater of emptiness.
When we’re watching a movie in the theatre, we can relax and enjoy the show because we know it’s an illusion. This magical display that we’re watching is the result of a projector, film, light, screen, and our own perceptions coming together. In separate momentary flashes of color, shapes, and sound, they create an illusion of continuity, which we perceive as characters, scenery, movement, and language. What we call “reality” works much the same way. Our ability to know, our sense perceptions, the seeds of our past karma, and the phenomenal world all come together to create life’s “show.” All of these elements share a dynamic relationship, which keeps things moving and interesting. This is known as interdependence.
When we look around us, we can see that nothing exists in isolation, which is another way of saying that everything is interdependent. Everything depends upon an infinite number of causes and conditions to come into being, arise, and fall away moment by moment. Because they are interdependent, things don’t possess a true existence of their own. For instance, how could we separate a flower from the many causes and conditions that produce it—water, soil, sun, air, seed, and so forth? Can we find a flower that exists independently from these causes and conditions? Everything is so intricately connected, it is hard to point to where one thing starts and another ends. This is what is meant by the illusory or empty nature of phenomena.
The outer world in all its variety and our inner world of thoughts and emotions are not as they seem. All phenomena appear to exist objectively, but their true mode of existence is like a dream: apparent yet insubstantial. The experience of emptiness is not found outside of the world of ordinary appearance, as many people mistakenly assume. In truth, we experience emptiness when the mind is free of grasping at appearance.
Seeing the emptiness of the phenomenal world relieves us of the heavy notion of things being solid or intrinsic. When we understand that nothing exists independently, everything that does arise seems more dreamlike and less threatening. This brings a deep sense of relaxation, and we feel less need to control our mind and circumstances. Because the nature of everything is emptiness, it is possible to view our life the way we would view a movie. We can relax and enjoy the show.
From It’s Up to You, © 2005 by Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications, Inc. http://www.tricycle.com/insights/theater-reflection
...
Someone asks question. In early morning, this response:
Worthy question: "Where is the moral compass of emptiness?"
Someone is shot -- attend their wound. Someone dies -- grieve the loss. Compass needle points to engaging presence. Points away from judging emotion and absenting concepts formulating separative isolation.
We sorrow together the acts of vengeful delusion and ideological scalpels.
Friday, November 20, 2015
Thursday, November 19, 2015
a pause
Between Going And Coming
- Poem by Octavio Paz
Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Out of shadows
In prison a stoic cried when he presented his paper on prisoners in Plato's cave.
It surprised him.
And everyone else at the academic symposium.
The majorly of whom also cried with him.
It was that kind of intelligent gathering.
Deans cried.
A university president cried.
Some profound learning took place.
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Sound sight
Quote:
Dalai Lama: Humans Created Terrorism, So Stop Praying To God For A Solution,
This is a problem created by mankind, the Dalai Lama said, and God's not going to fix it, by Michael McLaughlin, Reporter, The Huffington Post
Prayer alone will not be enough to stem terrorist attacks like the shootings and bombings last week that devastated Paris and shocked the world, the Dalai Lama said.
The Buddhist spiritual leader from Tibet said in an interview with German media outlet Deutsche Welle on Monday that terrorism is a problem caused by humans and, thus, must be fixed by mankind without God's intervention.
"People want to lead peaceful lives. The terrorists are short-sighted, and this is one of the causes of rampant suicide bombings. We cannot solve this problem only through prayers," the Dalai Lama said as part of a response to a question about how he viewed the attacks.
"I am a Buddhist and I believe in praying. But humans have created this problem, and now we are asking God to solve it," the Nobel Peace Prize winner said. "It is illogical. God would say, solve it yourself because you created it in the first place."http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dalai-lama-terrorism_564b8975e4b045bf3df16e75?cps=gravity_5059_-1421997628689322297
war and veterans
“...there are thousands of US vets that are homeless displaced and can't find a job due to the struggles of coming back,"(MB)
...
It is often pointed out that it takes a very, very, long time for some veterans to “come back."
They have gone to, and become. a different world.
--bh
Monday, November 16, 2015
Sunday, November 15, 2015
November divertissement
Radical love?
Radical love is letting go and falling through wholeness with profound trust.
Letting go of ego partiality.
Falling and falling through wholeness.
Trusting there is nowhere to hit in this formless falling from opinion and preference, through and through, spirit-ready and mind-free, affirming that All is Well, not-knowing, only trusting,
The excruciating transformation of the temporary you into what has always been you.
Est-ce que tu ne vois pas que tout ce que tu fais, tout ce que tu penses, les autres le copient.
S'il vous plait, respondez aussi precisement que possible: solitaire ou solidaire?
Camus nous inviter à penser.
Do you love me?
Ok.
Ok?
(Comes light through eastern window. No other words find way through this.)
No other way finds words through this.
Ok?
(Comes light through eastern window. No other words find way through this.)
No other way finds words through this.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
feeling forming itself
Yes.
Some will look for causes and conditions. They will find them.
Some will claim the righteous punishment by God. They will condemn sinners.
Some will explain nihilistic fate and existential dread. They will find justification.
Some will find solace that class warfare and militant jihad are rife. They, too, nod and shrug.
Some will hear the news and look out window where twilight begins to silhouette bare November limbs against sliver of eastern light. They will silently say that if they could pray they would.
And they do pray.
For what do they pray? They're unsure. Intentions and directions seem an odd wish for control.
They pray, yes, for themselves. That they do not mow down and murder others. That they treat everyone with respect and kindness -- not torturing nor invading, not stealing their land and resources nor assassinating those who reject your way of thinking.
That prayer might effectuate a more profound awareness we are but one breath, one breath shared by billions, one breath entering and leaving the particular forms shaped in particular geographies, forms that walk and sit and work and share their forming creations with one another in an ordinariness of arriving dawns over and over.
Some will obviate prayer. They will buy more guns and bullets, drill and strategize how to identify and prevent "bad" guys from drilling and strategizing against "good" people. These leaders of the "free" world will lockdown and surveille and scrutinize every communication, person, and statement so as to root out any threat, dissidence, or appearance of off-kilter movement.
The sky arises above tree line.
Zabutons in bookshed remain still and empty.
Flame in gas heating blue stove flickers across room.
Some will sit in silence at Saturday Morning Practice. Chant Heart Sutra to steady beat on wooden fish. Read transmission story from one living Buddha to another living Buddha.
Then, from a quiet place of acceptance and surrender, will one by one say words that attempt to reveal what makes us real.
And what is it that makes us real?
I'll have to wait until that time at practice when that single breath sounds itself into that space amid those particular forms following the resonances crisscrossing the room, the planet, the cosmos, the unknown uncreated profundity of Being Itself evolving in this place at this moment writhing these forms as feeling creatures feeling their fellow creatures suffering.
Andiamo.
Prosit.
. . . svāhā!
Some will look for causes and conditions. They will find them.
Some will claim the righteous punishment by God. They will condemn sinners.
Some will explain nihilistic fate and existential dread. They will find justification.
Some will find solace that class warfare and militant jihad are rife. They, too, nod and shrug.
Some will hear the news and look out window where twilight begins to silhouette bare November limbs against sliver of eastern light. They will silently say that if they could pray they would.
And they do pray.
For what do they pray? They're unsure. Intentions and directions seem an odd wish for control.
They pray, yes, for themselves. That they do not mow down and murder others. That they treat everyone with respect and kindness -- not torturing nor invading, not stealing their land and resources nor assassinating those who reject your way of thinking.
That prayer might effectuate a more profound awareness we are but one breath, one breath shared by billions, one breath entering and leaving the particular forms shaped in particular geographies, forms that walk and sit and work and share their forming creations with one another in an ordinariness of arriving dawns over and over.
Some will obviate prayer. They will buy more guns and bullets, drill and strategize how to identify and prevent "bad" guys from drilling and strategizing against "good" people. These leaders of the "free" world will lockdown and surveille and scrutinize every communication, person, and statement so as to root out any threat, dissidence, or appearance of off-kilter movement.
The sky arises above tree line.
Zabutons in bookshed remain still and empty.
Flame in gas heating blue stove flickers across room.
Some will sit in silence at Saturday Morning Practice. Chant Heart Sutra to steady beat on wooden fish. Read transmission story from one living Buddha to another living Buddha.
Then, from a quiet place of acceptance and surrender, will one by one say words that attempt to reveal what makes us real.
And what is it that makes us real?
I'll have to wait until that time at practice when that single breath sounds itself into that space amid those particular forms following the resonances crisscrossing the room, the planet, the cosmos, the unknown uncreated profundity of Being Itself evolving in this place at this moment writhing these forms as feeling creatures feeling their fellow creatures suffering.
Andiamo.
Prosit.
. . . svāhā!
Friday, November 13, 2015
maintenant et
Vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes,
et Jésus, le fruit de vos entrailles, est béni.
Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu,
priez pour nous, pauvres pécheurs,
maintenant et à l'heure de notre mort.
Amen.
comes morning, reading -- Praying to an Absent God: The Poetic Revealing of Simone Weil
And with morning, a lengthy quote from:
The poetic adoption of Weil stems, perhaps, from Wallace Stevens’s use of her philosophy of decreation to explain how it is that ‘the theory of poetry […] often seems to become in time a mystical theology’ (Stevens 1951: 173). In Stevens’s extrapolation, Weil:
says that decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated,
but that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness.
Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our
revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents
of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in
whatever field we discovered it, is that man’s truth is the final resolution
of everything. (1951: 174–75)
Weil thus provides a way to see the human imagination, both individual and collective, at the centre of modern ways of being. Decreation provides a path from the world of belief to the world of the individual; when a system of thought predicated on creation fails, what remains is the truth of the imaginative endeavour. This move does not negate the existence of the world: in fact, the entire notion of decreation is predicated on the pre-existence of a broader creation from which all knowledge and being comes. Yet creation itself does not provide a way for its own understanding; the process of uncreating allows the individual to examine her role in relation to creation through the act of self-negation. As Simon Critchley summarises Stevens’s thesis: ‘God is dead, therefore I am. The problem is that it is not at all clear who I am’ (Critchley 2005: 43). Or as J. Hillis Miller expresses it: ‘God is dead, therefore I am. But I am nothing. I am nothing because I have nothing, nothing but awareness of the barrenness within and without’ (1990: 35).
| Title | Praying to an Absent God: The Poetic Revealing of Simone Weil |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 2006 |
| Authors | Baker, TC |
| Journal | Culture, Theory & Critique |
| Volume | 47 |
| Pages | 133-147 |
| Date Published | October |
| Number | 2 |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Language | English |
| Keywords |
The poetic adoption of Weil stems, perhaps, from Wallace Stevens’s use of her philosophy of decreation to explain how it is that ‘the theory of poetry […] often seems to become in time a mystical theology’ (Stevens 1951: 173). In Stevens’s extrapolation, Weil:
says that decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated,
but that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness.
Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our
revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents
of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in
whatever field we discovered it, is that man’s truth is the final resolution
of everything. (1951: 174–75)
Weil thus provides a way to see the human imagination, both individual and collective, at the centre of modern ways of being. Decreation provides a path from the world of belief to the world of the individual; when a system of thought predicated on creation fails, what remains is the truth of the imaginative endeavour. This move does not negate the existence of the world: in fact, the entire notion of decreation is predicated on the pre-existence of a broader creation from which all knowledge and being comes. Yet creation itself does not provide a way for its own understanding; the process of uncreating allows the individual to examine her role in relation to creation through the act of self-negation. As Simon Critchley summarises Stevens’s thesis: ‘God is dead, therefore I am. The problem is that it is not at all clear who I am’ (Critchley 2005: 43). Or as J. Hillis Miller expresses it: ‘God is dead, therefore I am. But I am nothing. I am nothing because I have nothing, nothing but awareness of the barrenness within and without’ (1990: 35).
It is only in the death of God that the rest of the world is now revealed as unknowable and thus it is only when God is nothing that ‘man’ too may be revealed as nothing. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes: ‘“God”, the motif or theme of God, the question of God, no longer means anything to us. Or else – as is all too obvious to an unbiased eye – what the theme of God might mean to us has already moved or been carried entirely outside of him’ (1991: 112). God has been replaced in the human imagination by the larger created world, but without God the creation of the world is a mystery, and the stance of the individual in relation to that world is even more elusive. The problem, as Stevens phrases it in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, is that we are caught between a world revealed and understood through individual sight and the fear that this world is something which precedes us: ‘we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves’ (Stevens 1976: 102). Decreation is ‘a seeing and unseeing in the eye’ (Stevens 1976: 104); it is what allows the poet not to make the world, but to discover it:
[…] to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it,
To discover winter and know it well, to find,
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,
It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. (Stevens 1976: 125)
The task of decreative art, for Stevens, is to discover the world without imposing on it, to encounter the world as it is created and, knowing the impossibility of creation, still see the world to be what it is. Poetry is no longer, in the words of mid-period Martin Heidegger, ‘the act of establishing by the word and in the word’ (1949: 304). Poetry cannot impose or establish. It is instead the act of revealing what has been uncreated: it sets out to discover, in a world in which godly creation seems impossible, what it is that remains.
(--from, Culture, Theory, & Critique, Volume 47, Issue 2, p.133-147 (2006) http://www.joriegraham.com/baker_2006)
Thursday, November 12, 2015
de-creating, an invisible love
Creation creations.
Dog dogs.
Time times.
Each thing, each reality does itself.
At conversation, Cathy says: "Do me, God."
Cliff, looking at the whole picture from the circle, says, "This thing's big!"
Night nights.
Fire fires.
We do nothing; everything does itself.
God allows this.
God has withdrawn and left room for everything.
It's what you might expect from nothing else.
Dog dogs.
Time times.
Each thing, each reality does itself.
At conversation, Cathy says: "Do me, God."
Cliff, looking at the whole picture from the circle, says, "This thing's big!"
Night nights.
Fire fires.
We do nothing; everything does itself.
God allows this.
God has withdrawn and left room for everything.
It's what you might expect from nothing else.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Before you say anything, consider everything
To be centered is to be at a still point.
To be off-centered is to wander in erratic movement.
By sitting still we settle into center.
By walking awarely we make each step its own.
There is only one peaceful spot in existence.
Do you know where it is?
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