For the Almost Blind

“Every person is a half-open door / leading to a room for everyone.”

—Tomas Tranströmer

[Thanks to Crashingly Beautiful ]

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Only after philosophy will he live. Only when he has brought philosophy to an end.

A little kindness. That's what he looks for.

What he wants: simple, direct communication, he says. To speak of ordinary things.

He is touched by platitudes. The porter says, 'How are you today, sir?', with a friendly wink. The cleaner: 'Am I disturbing you?' There is nothing more moving, he says.

Wittgenstein Jr: Normal people are are a balm. And on another occasion, We must be normal, normal.

Life is very close to us, he says. It is almost here.

- Wittgenstein Jr

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Got to doodle

by Kim Fabricius

If posts are getting longer, that might be because bloggers are spending less time writing them.

I’ve got the attention-span of a mayfly. That’s why I pray: to upgrade to a gnat.

That’s also why I write. If I didn’t write, I wouldn’t notice a damn thing.

On Moby-Dick: Does Moby-Dick symbolise God, evil, chaos, blind fate? Yes. Here’s how great a book Moby-Dick is: God symbolises the White Whale.

In his memoir Nothing to Be Frightened of, Julian Barnes says, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.” Shoot, I believe in God because I miss him.

It has often been observed that Milton’s God in Paradise Lost is insipid, his Satan grand and dynamic. And that, of course, is because it’s much harder to draw enthralling virtuous characters than wicked ones. Compare the main problem that pacifists face: namely, convincing people that nonviolence is more noble and compelling than the inferno of war.

Flannery O’Connor, describing her literary style, famously said that for “the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Her mentor was the Creator: hence Moses, Elijah, Jesus and the saints.

Mary Magdalene: Hey, Jesus, what’re you rebelling against?

Jesus: Whadda you got?

(From The Wild One, 1953.)

Hastening and waiting are the two poles of Christian existence. Waiting prevents hastening from becoming hurrying; hastening prevents waiting from becoming loitering.

For the pastor, preaching is the hastening, praying the waiting.

Any preacher who doesn’t think he’s a fraud is – a fraud.

I like the idea of Liquid Church – as in liquid lunch. And Messy Church has got to be better than the usual anal retentive one. But the church patterned on saints I love and admire is Circus Church (William Stringfellow) – a travelling freak show.

In the Roman Catholic Church, the issue of women priests is gynaecological, in the Orthodox Church pogonological.

Basically, the Church Dogmatics is two things: Barth’s album of love-songs to Jesus, and a long pastoral letter to Christians in via, his Epistle to the Roaming.

The tragedy of much Christian witness is that the accused seem to think they are the Judge.

The demons recognise Christ when they see him. Which can’t always be said of Christians.

What are the debates of presidential candidates if not demonic forms of glossolalia?

The optimising of the optional is as old as Judges 21:25. Except that in Israel it was a sign of national chaos, whereas in the US it’s called freedom.

Beware the patriot who doesn’t have a passport.

I once heard someone say that if you want some idea of the reality of systemic racism, consider a woman in a wheel chair on the fourth floor of a hotel who sees a sign by the elevator: “In Case of Fire, Take Stairs”.

What is Facebook but a form of mass electronic cosmetic surgery?

Have you observed that while bad times may drive a person to lose faith, good times rarely move a person to gain it? And that while undeserved misfortune may drive a person to lose faith, underserved good fortune never seems to have the same effect? That’s lose-lose, Lord.

How does one prevent oneself from lying to oneself? Sages say by trying to lie to oneself. Bachelors all. More effectively, try lying to your wife.

Tim Tebow claims to be an evangelical, but I reckon he’s half-way to Rome. After all, the quarterback prays on one knee, and every pass he throws is a Hail Mary.

Poor Tom Eliot clearly didn’t care for baseball, otherwise he would have chosen a different month than April for the first line of The Waste Land. As his family was originally from the Boston area, surely September.

Sign of God's Pity

"While talking to my mother I neaten things. Spines of books by the phone.
Paperclips
in a china dish. Fragments of eraser that dot the desk. She speaks
longingly
of death. I begin tilting all the paperclips in the other direction.
Out
the window snow is falling straight down in lines. To my mother,
love
of my life, I describe what I had for brunch. The lines are falling
faster
now. Fate has put little weights on the ends (to speed us up) I
want
to tell her—sign of God’s pity. She won’t keep me
she says, she
won’t run up my bill. Miracles slip past us. The
paperclips
are immortally aligned. God’s pity! How long
will
it feel like burning, said the child trying to be
kind."

Anne Carson, “Lines”

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“

“Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.”

”

—	Groucho Marx, American comedian and film star famed as a master of wit (1890-1977)

Obsessed By A Fairy Tale ....

"And throughout all Eternity

I forgive you, you forgive me."

-- William blake from "Broken love"

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“My mother lives in the panhandle of Maryland, near West Virginia. I visited her not long ago and we went to her small hilltop Methodist church. The service was halfway between evangelical (PowerPoint) and mainstream (hands clasped, not raised, in prayer). The minister spoke against internet pornography and warned of the unchecked rise of godlessness. Darwin was not in fashion there. The pews were half-full. When they passed the plate I put in $5. It’s not atheism keeping people at home.”

-from “Just Like Heaven” by Paul Ford

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“Wisdom is bright and does not grow dim … and is found by those who look for her.”

~ Wisdom 6:12-13

Wisdom is not the gathering of more facts and information, as if that would eventually coalesce into truth. Wisdom is precisely a different way of seeing and knowing the “ten thousand things” in a new way. I suggest that wisdom is precisely the freedom to be truly present to what is right in front of you. Presence is wisdom! People who are fully present know how to see fully, rightly, and truthfully.

Presence is the one thing necessary for wisdom, and in many ways, it is the hardest thing of all. Just try to keep 1) your heart space open, 2) your mind without division or resistance, and 3) your body not somewhere else—and all at the same time! Most religions just decided it was easier to believe doctrines and obey often-arbitrary laws than the truly converting work of being present. Those who can be present will know what they need to know, and in a wisdom way.

Richard Rohr: From The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, pp. 59-60

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from: Dennis Lewis

"The straightjacket of a tense, controlling mind filled with expectations and assumptions knows neither how to breathe nor how to live. Let your thoughts and feelings loosen up through awareness and your life will be transformed."

and

"For several breaths when you remember, exhale your habitual sense of self and return home to the silent, peaceful spaciousness underlying all experience."

and

"Do you live in front of or behind yourself most of the time. Or do you occupy the infinite space that is zero distance from yourself? Take a look!"

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“Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.”

—	Eugene O’Neill

What Do We Know ?

“ Our real journey in life is interior”

—	Thomas Merton; “The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton” p.296

**

What Do We Know Of The Universe?

Carl Zimmer profiles astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Here’s Tyson explaining the problem of dark matter to a young boy:

[E]verything we’ve ever seen in the universe has gravity—Earth, the moon. And you can tell how much gravity something has by how fast something moves around it. … Add it all up. We’ve done this. Add it all up and say that should give me this much gravity. But when you look at how fast things are moving, you get six times as much gravity as the stuff that we know about is generating. It was originally called the missing matter problem. Where is the matter that’s making this gravity that we see? Because everything we do count up doesn’t get us where we need. We now call this the dark matter problem.

But really we have no idea what’s causing it. We so don’t know what’s causing it that we shouldn’t even call it dark matter because that implies we have some understanding that it’s matter. We don’t know what it is. I could call it Fred. Eighty five percent all the gravity in the universe comes from something about which we know nothing. …

[Add that to dark energy and] it is ninety six percent of the universe. Everything we know and love—electrons, protons, neutrons, light, black holes, planets, stars, everything we know and understand—occupies four percent of the universe. Dark matter and dark energy is everything else.

(“Cluster Crash Illuminates Dark Matter Conundrum” from NASA)

What Do We Know Of The Universe? - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast

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“Introspect daily, detect diligently, negate ruthlessly.”

—	Swami Chinmayananda

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“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.”

—	D.H. Lawrence

Why Add Another Horse?

photo by Ben Heine

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“ It’s like putting a horse on top of a horse and then climbing on and trying to ride. Riding a horse is hard enough. Why add another horse? Then it’s impossible.
[Suzuki Roshi, on questioning one’s life and purpose.]

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"Isa (Jesus), son of Mary said: 'The world is a Bridge , pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day, may hope for eternity; but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer for the rest is unseen.'"

Original Persian:
-"عیسی پسر مریم (در آنان می شود صلح) گفت :' جهان است پل ، عبور بیش از آن است ، اما هیچ ساخت خانه بر آن او امیدوار است که برای یک روز ، ممکن است برای ابدیت امیدواریم ، اما ماندگار جهان اما ساعت آن را صرف در دعا و نماز برای استراحت است نهان ".'

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[via am: http://oldgirlfromthenorthcountry.blogspot.com/]

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Living in the second half of life, I no longer have to prove that I or my group is the best, that my ethnicity is superior, that my religion is the only one that God loves, or that my role and place in society deserve superior treatment. I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort—every day—is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received. I now realize that I have been gratuitously given to–from the universe, from society, and from God. I try now, as Elizabeth Seton said, “to live simply so that others can simply live.”
-Richard Rohr: From Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, p. 121

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“And now I think the things that matter are unfinished paintings that everyone creates and no one owns. Rather we are created each time we touch the breath of being, and we are connected to everyone who ever lived each time we add a stroke. And sometimes we are briefly aware that we are living parts of the most elemental community of all, the community of life force that moves through everything.”

—Mark Nepo: “The Unfinished Painting,” from Parabola, Volume 36, No 4., Winter 2011: “Many Paths, One Truth.”[Thanks to Parabola Magazine and Luke Storms]

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“... I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply moulding one's inner life. And that too is a deed."

—Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life, p. 87

[Thanks to Parabola Magazine and Luke Storms]

[Who might be one and the same - right? Have you ever seen them in the same place at the same time - like Superman and Clark Kent? They keep reminding me of books that I both want and need to read, but it's so great to catch a glimpse on the web]

AND FURTHERMORE.............

"....even if endorphins did mediate some kinds of placebo analgesia, that analgesia was not thereby explained […]. Endorphin release, rather, became just one more placebo-generated phenomenon to be explained—and we still did not understand the processes whereby a person's belief in a sham treatment could send a message to his or her pituitary gland to release its own endogenous pharmaceutics."
Harrington [1, p. 5]

I now return to my studies. Anatomy Trains !!

Let Me Respectfully Remind You

The Super heated imagination of Ben Heine

Ben Heine - Art + Pencil

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“If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.
The only usefulness of map or a language depends on the similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map-languages.” ”

—	Alfred Korzybski, Polish-American philosopher and scientist. He is remembered most for developing the theory of general semantics (1879-1950), Science & Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics

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“Wondering” is a word connoting at least three things:

• Standing in disbelief,
• Standing in the question itself,
• Standing in awe before something.

Try letting all three “standings” remain open inside of you. This is a very good way to grow spiritually, as long as the disbelief moves beyond mere skepticism or negativity.

When Scholastic philosophy was at its best (in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries), the development of an idea proceeded by what the great teachers called the questio (Latin, “to seek”). Our English word “quest” comes from that same understanding. The systematic asking of questions opened up wonder and encouraged spiritual curiosity, refining the question itself instead of just looking for the perfect answer. I am sure the Magi’s questions changed before, during, and after their epiphany.

Richard Rohr: Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, pp. 46-47

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[RISING TO THE CHALLENGE: Filling the Well with Snow by Bonnie Myotai Treace in Tricycle Magazine]

"We have this challenge right now: As we practice in these dangerous times, how can we be at peace? How can we become a source of compassion, and let our lives be a clear expression of wisdom? I find that so many of the traditional teachings are suddenly hitting home in fresh ways, as if they were designed for this particular moment in history. When we chant the evening gatha—the traditional verse that closes the day of training—it seems as if the ancient teachers had gathered that very day to write these words:

Let me respectfully remind you:
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken!
Take heed—do not squander your life.

When I’m working with students who feel trapped in their anger, fear, or hopelessness, instead of trying to talk them out of what they’re experiencing, I often simply point out that they’ve arrived at the stark reality of the Buddha’s First Noble Truth: Life is suffering. There are three more Noble Truths, and that’s where we can lean in, aware that our experience is the necessary first step toward coming to peace.

We’re all prisoners of life and death. The question is: What kind of prisoners do we want to be? We have beautiful examples of people who have literally been prisoners, yet who found reasons to be loving, compassionate, strong, and at ease with the reality of their lives. Not that they didn’t feel grief and anguish, but they were able to access something else as well—the human spirit. Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel, Gerda Lerner—these are just a few examples. You can look at many others who have faced “inescapable” trauma of all kinds. Over and over in human history, people have accessed this well of strength and peace.

To me, one of the great lies is that fear is the only natural response. Without denying our fear, we can keep going deeper. We can stay in basic attention and explore: Who am I? What’s the possibility here? This takes diligence, so that we don’t slip into letting others define our reality and falsely limit the possibilities that are always present. That diligence is the practice of responsibility that the evening gatha implies. Too often we get hung up on the exhortation “Do not squander your life” and interpret it as a scolding, as if we were naughty children caught wasting time. I see the teaching “Be responsible” more as an expression of absolute trust in the possibility of awakening. The message is “Hey, you! You can do it. You can respond. You’re capable of the perfect living and dying of this moment.”

I’ve been asked if I think the world is getting worse. That, to me, isn’t the point. However the world is—whether there are swirling forces of confusion or immense waves of clarity around us—we’re still responsible. When we turn diligence into an intellectual process, we end up feeling exhausted by the intensity of the obligation. But if we just respond the way the eyelid responds to a dry eye, then the work of peace naturally arises out of our innate wisdom and compassion.

When we’re afraid, the mind tends to dart away instead of diligently and deeply entering the fear. It gets confused and thinks, “Let me take care of myself first,” as if it weren’t responsible for the whole world. Part of what zazen—sitting meditation—does is to help us settle down into gentle, unswerving attention and peel away that false sense of separation.

Rage—whether in reaction to social injustice, or to our leaders’ insanity, or to those who threaten or harm us—is a powerful energy that, with diligent practice, can be transformed into fierce compassion. However much we disagree with those we have decided to call our enemies, our task is to identify with them. They, too, feel justified in their point of view. Everybody protects what they value and see as important. If we fail to recognize the universality of that basic impulse to protect and defend, we just perpetuate the urge to create a false enemy and eliminate it. We’re now at a point where human survival depends on letting go of that urge and realizing our common bond. Attention opens the mind to intimacy. And from intimacy, a very different sort of action can arise.

But why is it so hard to practice this sort of attention right now? Maybe because we want answers—and there are none. It is impossible to know what to do. The old standards don’t apply: going out and protesting, for example, doesn’t have the impact it once did. We need a kind of attentiveness that is more than just being present. It means being available in an unconditioned way, not knowing what action will be required or how much patience will be called for.

Intense times call for intense practice. But in the world, as in the zendo, intensity does not mean straining or pushing; rather, it is a willingness to begin fresh. To feed that willingness, we use the tools of practice: Work with a teacher. Have spiritual friends. Create situations where you have permission and support to go deep, so that feelings of fear and anger don’t just build up until you find you’ve gone numb. Much of my work right now is just getting people to show up for each other and for their practice. Once they do that, a reservoir of peace and wisdom is right there. But they don’t know that till they show up.

I think the palliative for fear and anger is to stand firmly and wakefully in the moment. It’s like the old Zen master saying, “Come with me. Let’s fill the well with snow.” It’s a hopeless task: The snow melts; the process is endless. We don’t take action because we expect a certain result; we do it because it needs to be done. We pick up the shovel not because we’re going to fill the well with snow but because shoveling is the dharma activity of that moment. We show up for the impossible. Is that so different from saying, “Come with me. Let’s be peacemakers”?

Bonnie Myotai Treace is spiritual director of Zen Center of New York City, Fire Lotus Temple, in Brooklyn.

Image: © James Welling. Courtesy of the artist and Gorney Bravin + Lee, New York.

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