The Knot in the Current of Time

The Knot in the current of Time

In the world of time, complications always appear. Character likes slowness and desires us to wait. Waiting is not provisional time, servant to another moment yet to come -- it is time in itself. It has its own elegance and disciplines. We wait so that we can catch up with ourselves, so that the rhythm can take shape before we start to dance; we wait because we can imagine far ahead of our ability to embody. A person arriving at a traditional Japanese monastery is turned away at first. It takes three days to get in. During that time, at best, we sit alone in a room, meditating; at worst, we stand in the snow. This is not a time to act, but to allow the world to act. During such days only inner events take place and so, invisibly, a transition occurs, as we move from outside the community to inside it. Afterwards, our actions and our appearance do not necessarily change, but everything has been shifted into the realm of the sacred.

When we are blocked, when circumstances are not ripe, we have to find some way of acknowledging that we are waiting, that we are pregnant and not merely asleep. Pausing like this is at the heart of meditation practice. When we attend closely to our lives, though it seems that nothing is happening, in the subterranean currents, reconciliation is setting off, invisible until the moment of its arrival. This waiting is not an effort at working a problem through, nor is it getting out of the way -- it is being in the way just a little, just enough to allow the universe to work the problem through.

There is a moment when Jesus shows his mastery of such timing. In the story, a crowd has caught a woman sleeping with a man not her husband. They are angry and want to stone her to death. It is not clear why they ask Jesus to speak; perhaps they want his blessing on the murder, perhaps there is some unconscious doubt in them. Jesus does intervene but not straightway -- preaching to an angry mob is a ticklish business. At first he distracts: he draws on the ground with a stick. We are not told what he draws; it is the action itself that is important. This is an inventive gesture: it offers no answer, yet keeps the question in suspension. The crowd becomes unsure whether this is his response or not: a gap opens in their certainty. Time passes, and the moment becomes less fixed. Then, when Jesus speaks, the reproof in his words is indirect and points to the quest for knowledge. "let him who is without sin cast the first stone." The men in the crowd are turned inwards and so walk away, each into his own destiny. Like other good solutions in desperate moments, this one came from nowhere, unpremeditated, given by grace.

In the inner life, readiness is one of the most important things. It is like a horse -- the whole body has to turn toward the stream before she will drink. Our animal selves have to be aligned with the change. We have to be faithful to our lives -- eat the cornflakes, write the memo, change the diapers, take the kids to the beach -- and faithful also to that one small thing, which is the know in the current of time, which brings awareness to our waiting. Our integrity is to observe these periods of waiting, the way in certain religious traditions the faithful observe fast days.

The forces of sleep and oblivion are so great that one conscious thing has to be in our lives every day: we need to touch the talisman that keeps us turned toward awareness. Meditation serves our integrity when it is with us daily. Then, when the horse lowers its head and begins to drink, everything will be changed. We can go through life ignoring the existence of that water, but once we have tasted it, we begin to orient our lives toward it.

Waiting in the dark allows us to rest until a solution comes out of the empty world. When we are impeded, we don't despair utterly, our waiting has a dynamic quality. Developing character can be odd work, since it often goes against our normal thoughts of advantage. A strange and successful example involves a friend who had a brilliant but capricious Zen teacher. Suddenly, after many years of training, he had had enough; furious with his teacher, he could no longer bear even to be in the same room with him. Some marriages are like this.

So the man went away and became a leader in his field, all the while working quietly on his spiritual life. Once a year he would go and, in the Asian fashion, bow to his old teacher. He was still angry and disappointed, and this action was the only thing he could find to do with the problem. Year after year he would bow and the teacher would be polite and the matter would rest there. This went on for seven years. Then the student came as before, but this time, inexplicably, his heart was light. It was as if a debt had been paid. It was like that for the teacher too. They laughed and embraced. Their relationship became simple.

This story has an elegant sparseness. Sometimes we can work at a relationship too hard or in the wrong way. Sometimes we have to be patient, to trust the universe to sort out what is beyond our power. But the student did not just leave the matter to fate. He saw that this issue was not an incidental thing, not just a flaw in the road, but the road itself. It contained the problem of the flaws we always find in our mentors, the problem of the self-centered rage in the student that wants acknowledgment more than it wants life or truth, the problem of where to stand in relation to tradition, the problem of love between the generations, and the problem of how wisdom gets passed down. He saw that whatever his teacher's role, he had a task too. In the eventuality, he was true to both sides of the situation. He didn't betray his anger, which had its own kind of integrity, and he didn't ignore the claim of the relationship, which was deep. He found an action, a spontaneous ritual that indicated to everyone involved -- the universe, the teacher, and the student himself -- that the issue was still in play, struggling to find its true form and to give off light.

This kind of ceremonial waiting both requires and develops strength of character. It is different from the pauses of earlier stages of the journey because it includes an awareness that holds even anger in a larger context of connection.

The Knot in the current of Time

-- From
The Light Inside the Dark
Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life

by John Tarrant

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"The Harvest is the End of the Age and the Reapers Are Angels"

Fr. Jake Stops the World

This is the closing thought from the Archbishop of Canterbury's response to the Gafconites:

...I have in the past quoted to some in the Communion who would call themselves radical the words of the Apostle in I Cor.11.33: ‘wait for one another’. I would say the same to those in whose name this statement has been issued. An impatience at all costs to clear the Lord’s field of the weeds that may appear among the shoots of true life (Matt.13.29) will put at risk our clarity and effectiveness in communicating just those evangelical and catholic truths which the GAFCON statement presents.

Here is the explanation of the parable of the weeds which Dr. Williams' mentioned:

Jesus' disciples approached him, saying, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field." He answered, "The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!
(Matthew 13:36b-43.)

“The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.” For impatient beings such as ourselves, this is a tough message. Even though we see the weeds choking the life out of the wheat, we can’t pull up the weeds. We have to be patient, and wait on the timing of God. In regards to both the wheat and the weeds alike, the message is clear...hands off.

But, we are impulsive people. We see an obviously ugly and evil weed throttling the life out of a golden stalk of wheat stretching toward the sun, and with a shout, we run into the field with our axe, and hack away at the root of the wicked weed. We wrench it from the ground, holding it aloft, expecting to hear the applause of God for our good deed. All we hear is silence. We trudge away, confused, but confident that this day we have been about our Father’s business. We seem not to notice that our path is littered with broken stalks of wheat, the innocent victims of our zealous attack.

Somehow, we humans seem to have gotten the idea that we can surgically remove sin and evil from the world without involving the rest of creation. I think this erroneous thinking is why we finite beings are not the reapers of this harvest. We don’t see the big picture. Our tiny minds cannot fathom the intricate interrelatedness of the created realm. We cannot be trusted to weed the crop, because we are blind to the fact that few things are totally good or totally bad.

Jesus preached the nearness of God’s harvest. He met resistance at every turn, but refused to take up the axe of judgement. Jesus continued to forgive, and to call for repentance, a change of heart. Jesus calls us to be patient. The time of the harvest will arrive, and there will be a separation of the weeds and the wheat. But it must happen in God’s time, not ours. We must be patient.

If God were to step in right now and destroy all evil, do we think that any of us would remain unscathed? Who would be left if God stamped out all selfishness, greed, hate, and violence? No one. God is patient with us, therefore we can be patient with others.

This parable from Jesus does say something I think it is essential that we all hear; always beware of sinners judging other sinners. Good and evil exist side by side, not only in the world, but within each one of us as well. As Carl Jung once pointed out, “The brighter the halo, the smellier the feet.”

This patience does not mean we turn a blind eye to sin and evil in this world. Jesus counsels patience, but Jesus also sensitizes our consciences and makes us aware of evil in ourselves and others. Jesus exposed and confronted sin as we should. We might confront evil, in ourselves and others. We may even be able to make this world a safer place, for the time being. This parable reminds us not to be fooled, though. We will never eradicate all the weeds. We might one day catch Bin Laden and bring him to justice, but we will not eliminate global terrorism. Only God can heal the falleness of creation.

The wisdom of Jesus' counsel also reveals that some of the crusading efforts to eliminate sin, and what some perceive as sin, in our churches may tend to tear up and destroy more than they create. This place we are called to live and witness in is not some kind of spiritual vacuum. It is a world made up of wonderfully good things, and good people, as well as atrociously bad ones, and every combination in between. This knowledge should free us from both indifference and fanaticism, and increase our capacity for toleration. We are free to resist evil without needing to take on the role of God.

The wheat never stifles growth. The wheat endures the weeds. We are called to show the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus. Let us lift our heads towards God, nurtured by the assurance that the harvest will come, and one day, we will all shine like the sun in the Kingdom.

J.

Posted by Jake

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Promiscuous Experientialism ?

The pornographer's dream: or, the problem with contemporary worship

There’s been a lot of speculation in recent years about why so many evangelicals are converting to Rome and to Eastern Orthodoxy. I wonder whether the highly experiential focus of contemporary worship might have something to do with it.

The New York singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega has
an entertaining song entitled “Pornographer’s Dream” (from her 2007 album, Beauty and Crime). In the song, Vega asks what kind of woman a pornographer would dream about:

Would he still dream of the thigh? of the flesh upon high?
What he saw so much of?
Wouldn’t he dream of the thing that he never
Could quite get the touch of?

It’s out of his hands, over his head
Out of his reach, under this real life
Hidden in veils, covered in silk
He’s dreaming of what might be

Out of his hands, over his head
Out of his reach, under this real life
Hidden in veils,
He’s dreaming of mystery.

It’s a nice idea: the pornographer, from whom nothing is concealed, dreams only of concealment itself. Unlike the rest of us, his fantasies involve not naked flesh, but a body “hidden in veils, covered in silk.” For the pornographer, the only thing forbidden is mystery, so that his fantasises are of clothed women, veiled flesh.

As an analysis of pornography, I think this is completely correct. The real problem with pornography is not that it is too erotic, but that it is not erotic enough. In seeking to reveal everything, to fulfil every fantasy, it destroys the very possibility of fantasy and eroticism. And so the use of pornography ultimately results not in erotic ecstasy or euphoria, but in mere boredom.

Perhaps all this can serve as a parable for the contemporary preference for experiential worship styles. Where every church service becomes the opportunity for a life-changing experience of the divine presence; where every song and sermon and prayer is designed to produce immediate emotional impact; where the whole Christian life is transformed into the pursuit of a “naked” experience of the divine – here, the final outcome can only be a profound and paralysing boredom. And for those subjected to such boredom, the only remaining spiritual desire is for a mysterious God, a God not merely naked and exposed, but clothed in ritual, sacrament, tradition.

Why are so many evangelicals converting to Rome and Constantinople? Perhaps their infinitely deferred quest for a Deus nudus has finally resulted in an unbearable boredom. Perhaps they’re dreaming of a God who is not always promiscuously available to immediate experience, but is instead “hidden in veils, covered in silk” – a more modest, and therefore more sexy God.

For what it’s worth, my own opinion is that we should avoid the pitfalls both of a promiscuous experientialism and of any reaction towards ritualism for its own sake. Instead of trying by our own efforts either to strip God or to clothe him, we should look to the place where God has both veiled and unveiled himself for us: in the event of Jesus Christ.

posted by Ben Myers

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Whether we are distracted or not, whether we know it or not, whether we even want it or not, a communication between the soul and God keeps going on beneath the surface of our self-awareness. It is given, everywhere and at all times. There is no need to attain it; there is nothing we have to do to make it happen. Neither can we escape from it. In the psalmist's words, "Where can I flee from your presence? If I take the wings of the morning and dwell beyond the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me."

- Gerald May, "The Awakened Heart: Living Beyond Addiction"


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You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of one who gives and kindles joy in the heart of one who receives.

- St. Seraphim of Sarov

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Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand.
It is wide open.

-- Thomas Merton

and

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"The word ‘humility’ comes from the Latin word humus which means fertile ground. To me, humility is not what we often make of it: the sheepish way of trying to imagine that we are the worst of all and trying to convince others that our artificial ways of behaving show that we are aware of that. Humility is the situation of the earth. The earth is always there, always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone, somewhere we cast and pour out all the refuse, all we don’t need. It’s there, silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out of all the refuse new richness in spite of corruption, transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold out of every seed."

- Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

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A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Wisdom

Alive and Aware: Wisdom and Shiny, New Shoes

June 27, 2008

Hello everyone,

Wisdom comes from living life. I am not talking about experience; wisdom can be found at any age with any level of experience. I am talking about a mental attitude or an approach to life.

Life as we live it is a mixed bag of goods. It has its ups, its downs, and most especially its many uneventful hours where we quest after je ne sais quoi (we know not what). If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that most of us feel unfulfilled much of the time. The reason is simple: we want life to unfold according to our own terms, which generally includes a lot more action, excitement, purpose, or whatever else than we think it does. Wisdom comes in learning through the many ups and downs to accept life as it comes, to be comfortable with the silence and the inaction as well as the ups and downs. Wisdom is a process that unfolds over the course of a lifetime.

I said wisdom involves accepting life as it comes. Wisdom, then, involves acceptance. And in the acceptance of life comes an enjoyment of the quiet, ordinary moments. Wisdom understands that these moments are really the best things in life, and while we enjoy the ups when they come and are not wrong in doing so, they inevitably come with downs as well. We will find, when we learn to see clearly, that the ordinary moments are where our greatest happiness lies.

Wisdom is not perfection as the Greeks imagined it. Certainly we should seek to better ourselves. But nevertheless, wisdom is not perfection. It is acceptance of inevitable imperfection, acceptance that turns into its own enjoyment and insight, acceptance that sees in imperfection its own sort of perfection and winsomeness. Wisdom does not involve a change in the world so much as it involves a change in us. Wisdom involves making peace with ourselves, finding peace within ourselves, accepting and learning to enjoy the many uneventful hours, for that is where all of us live.

I said that wisdom does not involve change in the world so much as it involves change in us. Yet it does involve change in the world: as we learn to live in and accept life on its own terms, we learn a secret that is relevant to every human being alive. We all are learning to live, and the more that we learn to live—the more that we can accept, embrace, and find enjoyment in the dull, lackluster, ordinary moments—the more relevant we will be to everyone else who is on the same quest. Others will see that our lives also are ordinary, yet somehow in that ordinariness is an spark of extraordinariness, a spark of life, that attracts them in some silent, ineffable way. As we change, others take notice, others find inspiration and insight in the changes effected in us, and thus as we change, we change the world simply by seeing it through different eyes.

Wisdom comes from living life. Not trying to control life. Not trying to find meaning or purpose so much as simply living and letting meaning and purpose find us. It will. But there will be lots of uneventful moments in between. That is as it should be. Meaning and purpose will be found in those uneventful moments, even if the more dramatic exceptions bring momentary fireworks of insight and perception. The dramatic exceptions simply inform the ordinary moments, not define them. There will be a great more ordinary events by far than the fireworks, the ups, the excitement of new things, new people, new places. Most of our life will be ordinary, at least outwardly, but it does not have to be ordinary inwardly, or, put another way, in that ordinariness we can find joy.

Life has its seasons. Often the rainy skies produce a feeling of melancholy. Yet rainy skies can be a chance to simply sit back and be, simply exist, simply live life in all of its ordinary aspects. There is rain and there is sun. There is snow and there is the summertime heat. There is the reflective fall and the energizing spring. Throughout it all, wisdom comes.

Wisdom is learning to lie on one’s back in the ocean and let the waves—now large and looming, now soft and lapping—buoy one as they will without being overly concerned where they will take us. Wisdom comes in relaxing, in accepting the fear and concern as the billowing crests threaten to swallow and living through the desire for more when the water is too placid for our content. We surrender to the waves; we surrender to the seasons. In surrender—in acceptance—we find meaning.

Life’s greatest joys are not large. They are invariably the simple things, the simple words, the simple sights and sounds and smells and tastes, the simple touch. We are not wrong to enjoy the big things. But it is in the simple things that we will find our greatest sustenance, and there will be many more simple things by far than big things. There is joy to be found in simple things. There is joy to be found in breathing, in simply sucking air into our lungs. There is joy to be found in waking up in the morning, alive, refreshed, energized, ready for the challenges and routine tasks of a new day. There is joy to be found in sitting with nothing to do. There is joy to be found in simply being and letting be, of simply being in a world with other beings who are also simply being, all sharing the same sun, the same air, the same rain. There is joy to be found in existence. There is even joy to be found in great busyness and the sense of accomplishment that follows. Joy is a product of wisdom, and joy, though prima facie less scintillating and filled with excitement, is more profound than happiness, though it can and often does lead to happiness. Joy, and the wisdom that leads to it, is subtle.

Wisdom is not something we find by striving, though in striving we may find wisdom. Wisdom comes from living life. While we are passive, wisdom is active. While we are active, wisdom is still there, sitting silently by, growing even as we move about throughout our day. Wisdom sneaks up on us unawares, bringing with it joy and understanding and awareness. There is nothing that we must do to gain it, save simply be aware, simply watch, observe, and be. Awareness comes from living. Wisdom is awareness.

Wisdom is not facts and figures. Facts and figures are means to ends, but they are not the ends themselves.

Wisdom is not profound insight, though wisdom is both insightful and profound.

There are many interesting ideas that are not wise. They are not wrong, but they are not wise either. They are what they are, and wisdom is capable of enjoying them, capable of transforming them into life and therefore into itself. For part of wisdom is living life, and part of living life is pleasure: therefore, all things that bring pleasure can and often do bring their own wisdom.

Wisdom comes from God. Lots of people write about God. I have too and likely still will. But writing about God is not wisdom unless it is written with wisdom. And wisdom is a matter of being; wisdom is awareness, and awareness is not possible without life. Therefore, writing about God that is written with wisdom is written from living life with God. God begets life, life begets wisdom, and wisdom in turn begets life.

Being with God is a matter of being, it is not a matter of great words and far-blown ideas. Yet being with God can and does result in great words and far-blown ideas, not in their great complexity (though the simple things in life are always most complex), but in the fact that they truly embody life. For since wisdom comes from living life, wisdom speaks to living life. Wisdom, then, speaks to life, for wisdom comes from living life, and all life comes from God in whom we live and breathe and have our being.

Living life with God is a matter of living life. It isn’t about words or ideas. Words or ideas can communicate a life lived with God—we call such words wise—but living life with God is still a matter of living. It is never anything else. Living life with God is a matter of being.

I have, recently, bemoaned my lack of apparent inspiration in writing newsletters. That is because I often think that spiritual newsletters need to be “spiritual.” But spiritual newsletters do not have to be “spiritual,” they just have to be: they need only reflect living life. For it is only in living life that anything meaningful is to be found, and the most spiritual thoughts are simply reflections twice removed, reflections of life that speak to life and have no real meaning outside that context.

I talk to God all the time. It doesn’t seem spiritual. It just is. But “just is” is spiritual, for wisdom comes from living life. What most of us call spiritual is only a reflection of spirituality. Spirituality “just is” if it is, and isn’t spiritual if it isn’t.

In many ways, talking to God is like a comfortable old pair of shoes. Those shoes are not shiny, they’re not new, they’re not likely to turn too many heads in themselves. But they are heaven on our feet, just as God is heaven to our souls. And while the old shoes will not turn too many heads, the comfort with which we walk in them will. There will be something about how relaxed we feel in our skins when we have them on that will catch the attention of others, at least if their attention is to be caught. If their attention is not to be caught, shiny new shoes will probably not catch it either, or if does, we will not have caught their attention, only our shoes, and that is really far from flattering when one pauses to consider. And the minute we catch the attention of others, most of us, insecure perhaps, run to the store to buy new shoes. Why? Because we have forgotten that wisdom comes from living life. While there is nothing wrong with new shoes in themselves, nevertheless wisdom is not a shiny new pair of shoes.

There is much more to be said, and more that probably should be said, for it seems we have only gotten started only to stop, but this newsletter isn’t about saying. It’s about being, and as such, it has probably said all it needs to say, at least for now. The rest of it is to be written by your own life, in your own growing awareness as you suck air into your lungs and go about your day, however lackluster and ordinary it seems. In the ordinariness it is possible to find great joy, great peace, great contentment: wisdom. Therefore, enjoy the day, and all days, and the busy season of summer, for it soon will soon pass and the leaves will turn yellow and orange, and then the snowy winter will follow, and each season will bring its own insights and joys and sorrows as we all learn to live and breathe and have our being.

.:| The Mr. Renaissance Bi-weekly Newsletter |:.



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Whiskey River

fill the minds of all your enemies with loving kindness

Remember that your thoughts are transformed into speech and action in order to bring the expected result. Thought translated into action is capable of producing a tangible result. You should always speak and do things with mindfulness of loving kindness

For all practical purposes, if all of your enemies are well, happy and peaceful, they would not be your enemies. If they are free from problems, pain, suffering, affliction, neurosis, psychosis, fear, tension, anxiety, etc., they would not be your enemies. Your practical solution toward your enemies is to help them to overcome their problems, so you can live in peace and happiness. In fact, if you can, you should fill the minds of all your enemies with loving kindness and make all of them realize the true meaning of peace, so you can live in peace and happiness. The more they are in neurosis, psychosis, fear, tension, anxiety, etc., the more trouble, pain and suffering they can bring to the world. If you could convert a vicious and wicked person into a holy and saintly individual, you would perform a miracle. Let us cultivate adequate wisdom and loving kindness within ourselves to convert evil minds to saintly minds.

~ Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English

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AND

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link

"What we don't know chains us, leaves us sitting in the valley with a stupid smile. We discover our ignorance as we go. After a lifetime, if we've been attentive, we should fall to our knees before the vastness, the ungraspable minutiae of our world. We should suspect that it constitutes our God. And we so-called experts of this or that, could we have done more than play our one chord? Wisdom is to know, at best, that we make only a little good noise, a few small dents. It's why the wise laugh a lot, why the laughter of metaphysicians echoes in the spaces they probe. We walk out of our houses into the enormity of our task. What kind of ant is that? Who named the phlox? Is that a path or a rut?"

- Stephen Dunn
Ignorance
Riffs & Reciprocities

Terrifying Beings

The text of Wilfred Owen's poem;

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

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Pentecost 7, Proper 8, Year A
Genesis 22:1-14 or Jeremiah 28:5-9
Psalm 13 or 89:1-4,15-18
Romans 6:12-23
Mathew 10:40-42
+
from Geranium Farm

Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.
Genesis 22:11

Somebody walks in off the street, maybe, or come back to church after an absence that began when she was eighteen and is only now coming to an end, and she's forty-seven. She sings her first hymn in all those years, and is quietly pleased that it is one she still remembers. She is glad she came; she has needed something more in her life.

Then someone gets up and reads the story of how Abraham feared God so much that he was willing to kill his own son if God told him to, and she is not so sure. This is barbaric, she thinks, feeling her face grow hot and her heart begin to pound. This sort of thing is why I left, for crying out loud. What kind of God even allows a father to think he wants his child killed? So what if it's only a test of Abraham's faith -- the test itself is barbaric. And what about the terror of a little boy who lives for the rest of his life with the memory of the time his father almost slit his throat?

So don't stand up there and preach about something else. Her anger is righteous. You won't distract her. If you leave it be, she may disappear for another twenty-nine years.

Here is what I think: I think we are witnessing, in this ancient story, a moment of transition in Israel's understanding of who God is. We know that human sacrifice was an occasional feature of Hebrew life -- we hear prophets and holy men inveighing against the practice, which they wouldn't have had to do if people were not drawn to it. We know about the god Moloch, who demanded the sacrifice of children by burning, the very act in which Abraham is engaged when a voice from heaven stops him. Many of the people around Abraham must have sacrificed in this way; he knows just how to do it.

And then God stops him. The words of the story tell us that he is stopped because God is now satisfied with his devotion, but the fact of the story, the fact of its inclusion in our holy scripture, suggests another reason: our God is not Moloch. We don't have to relate to God as if that were the case. If ever you think God is telling you to act violently in defense of his honor, think again -- both about what God is and about what honor is. We're past that now.

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Speaking of angels

“We don’t get to the end of being baffled and amazed [by the universe]. I sometimes think that this is the importance of talking about angels in Christian teaching. Odd as it may sound, thinking about these mysterious agents of God’s purpose, who belong to a different order of being, can be at least a powerful symbol for all those dimensions of the universe about which we have no real idea…. We’re so used to trivializing angels – they are often reduced to Christmas decorations, fairy godmothers almost…. But in the Bible angels are often rather terrifying beings occasionally sweeping across the field of our vision…. Now whether or not you feel inclined to believe literally in angels – and a lot of modern Christians have a few problems with them – it’s worth thinking of them as at the very least a sort of shorthand description of everything that’s ‘round the corner’ of our perception and understanding in the universe – including the universal song of praise that surrounds us always.”

—Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville: WJKP, 2007), pp. 51-52.

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In the anagogical world, one wonders about the nature of God, of mercy, of repentence.
There is a dual responsibility in the heavens, it seems, as the angels cry out to stop the murder.
The story seems to be asking us how we distinguish between God's voice and our own.

***
So I read. Angels, I read, belong to nine different orders. Seraphs are the highest; they are aflame with love for God; cherubs, they are second, possess perfect knowledge of him. So love is greater than knowledge; how could I have forgotten? The seraphs are born of a stream of fire issuing from under God's throne. They are, according to Dionysius the Areopagite, "all wings," having, as Isaiah noted, six wings apiece, two of which they fold over their eyes. Moving perpetually toward God, they perpetually praise him, crying Holy Holy, Holy...But, according to some rabbinic writings, they can sing only the first "Holy" before the intensity of their love ignites them and dissolves them again, perpetually, into flames. "Abandon everything," Dionysius told his disciple. "God despises ideas."

--Annie Dillard
Holy the Firm

**

SPIRITS, FURIOUS

By Karen D. Rickenbach

Rogue angels chiffon my nights, twelve arms flailing,
Those long whispers of limbs that curl a pale blood around my throat.
They are maddened by my breath, as constant as God’s bare foot.

I saw their burning flesh drop and felt the slow vibration of death,
A hum-drone known to the ages.
Jet fuel streamed under the lime-stripe of a firecoat, poof!
Then I ate them, I swallowed their stardust exploding on glass,

One hundred freight trains crashing.

Come tonight, I’ll cream your skin and feed you cowfoot and beans.
There will be a love song, then you could find my keys and my checkbook and maybe
In my room everything would feel new, like a red birth or a
Muscled and panting fish gill, or just green grass that serves as a bed
For dragonflies.

If not, we'll talk about it when I get there.

**
On Angels

~Czeslaw Milosz

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice -- no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draw near
another one
do what you can.

Links

From a Master of Weather, 4 Waterfalls for New York

By CAROL VOGEL

Olafur Eliasson, a Danish-Icelandic artist, plans to create four waterfalls ranging from 90 to 120 feet in height on the New York waterfront.

**

‘Waterfalls’ Display Opens on Harbor

By SEWELL CHAN

Olafur Eliasson’s four “New York City Waterfalls,” a $15.5 million public art project, opened Thursday after two years of planning.

• Guide to Viewing 'Waterfalls'
• Slide Show

**
Is Dobson's Obama Hit Backfiring?
TIME -
"He oughta read the Bible," said Dobson. Obama, he charged, was "deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview ...

**

Ecstasy Is the Key to Treating PTSD By Amy Turner, The Times of London UK At last the incurably traumatized may be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And controversially, ecstasy may be key to taming their demons. Read more »

Pointless & Sadistic

Major David J. R. Frakt's Closing Argument in Favor of Dismissal of the Case Against Mohammad Jawad

I urge you to read the entire document. It is both eloquent and moving. The story it tells must be understood by all Americans. We have indeed gone down a dark road, and ignoring or justifying will not heal this national wound.

Excerts:

"With these fateful and ill-advised words, President Bush, our Commander-in-Chief, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not, started the U.S. down a slippery slope, a path that quickly descended, stopping briefly in the dark, Machiavellian world of “the ends justify the means,” before plummeting further into the bleak underworld of barbarism and cruelty, of “anything goes,” of torture. It was a path that led inexorably to the events that brings us here today, the pointless and sadistic treatment of Mohammad Jawad, a suicidal teenager.

**
For those of us in the military who have faithfully attended our annual Law of Armed Conflict training, or in my case, have given the training many times, the Geneva Conventions and humane treatment were synonymous, they were one and the same. The Geneva Conventions represented the baseline, they embodied the determination of the world to make war a more humane enterprise, to prevent a descent into wholesale barbarity, as had occurred during the Second World War. But now we were being told that humane meant something else, something less, than the Geneva Conventions. And we were being told that we could act inconsistently with the Geneva Conventions, when military necessity demanded it. Those of us who were familiar with the Geneva Conventions, whose job it was to know them, were puzzled and deeply troubled by the President’s order and had serious forebodings about the implications of such a decision. We understood that there were no gaps in Geneva, there were was no one who fell outside their protection, that Common Article 3 applied to everyone.

**

I’m sure that all of these people, the President included, thought they were doing what was best. But what sometimes appears to be in the interests of America at first glance, upon further reflection reveals itself not to be. Interning Japanese-Americans during World War II perhaps seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight we can see that it was a terrible injustice, inconsistent with American ideals and utterly unconstitutional. It is a shameful episode in our history, a xenophobic overreaction. The conscious, deliberate decision to abandon the Geneva Conventions and the entire fiasco that is Guantanamo will undoubtedly be viewed by historians as an even more disgraceful chapter in our history.

The Feb 7, 2002, order of President Bush invited the rule of law to be circumvented. Even though the President paid lip service to humane treatment, by stating that detainees were not legally entitled to be treated humanely, and by his qualification of “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity” the implication was clear — it was only policy to be humane, not a legal requirement, and there would be no legal consequences to those who didn’t treat detainees humanely, if there was some military justification for it.

**
If there was any doubt that the President intended unlawful tactics to be used, all doubt was erased when Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld authorized, on Dec 2, 2002, numerous extra-legal special interrogation techniques. These techniques and how they were developed and utilized were the subject of hearings before the Senate Armed Service Committee yesterday and are described in detail in the book Torture Team, which I have attached to this motion. I’m sure Phillipe Sands would be honored to have his book included in the record of this commission.

**
Under the Constitution all men are created equal, and all are entitled to be treated with dignity. No one is “undeserving” of humane treatment. It is an unmistakable lesson of history that when one group of people starts to see another group of people as “other” or as “different,” as “undeserving” as “inferior,” ill-treatment inevitably follows. In the Global War on Terror generally and in the detention camps of Guantanamo especially, the detainees were seen as “terrorists,” as “the worst of the worst” something less than human, and were treated accordingly. After six and a half years, we now know the truth about the detainees at Guantanamo: some of them are terrorists, some of them are foot soldiers, and some of them were just innocent people, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the detainees at Guantanamo have one thing in common — with each other, and with us — they are all human beings, and they are all worthy of humane treatment. We should also never forget that no one in Guantanamo has been convicted of a single crime and that even in these deeply flawed military commissions, they are entitled to a presumption of innocence.

**
He said, as did Maj Gen Hood, that there was no special effort to collect intelligence from Mr. Jawad, that he was not believed to possess any valuable intelligence. This is borne out by the fact, at least based on the information provided to me by the government, that no interrogations of Mr. Jawad took place at or near the time that he was being tortured. Thus, the most likely scenario is that they simply decided to torture Mr. Jawad for sport, to teach him a lesson, perhaps to make an example of him to others. Whatever the reason, it was a direct violation of MG Hood’s orders, and a grave breach of the Geneva Convention and the Convention against Torture.

According to MG Hood, the first he learned of this is when I informed him a couple of weeks ago. He was provided the DIMS report, the motion, and the spreadsheet that I prepared. What was his reaction? A resounding thud of indifference. In fact, it took an order from you, your honor, to even get him to talk me about it. Here was a Major General in the Army who has just learned that a detainee was subjected to grave abuse, on his watch, in direct violation of his orders. One would have expected him to go through the roof, to order heads to roll, to launch an immediate investigation and he couldn’t even be bothered. Quite a contrast from the way General Hartmann reacted when he thought his orders weren’t being followed.

As for MG Cannon, he was similarly apathetic, if not more so about the plight of Mohammad Jawad. It is an absolute disgrace that this officer has been promoted twice after allowing a suicidal teenager to be subjected to this kind of abuse in his detention facility. It is my recommendation that charges be preferred against MG Cannon under the UCMJ for cruelty, maltreatment and abuse, dereliction of duty, and violation of a lawful order at the earliest opportunity. He was the Commander of the Detention Group. He completely and utterly failed to prevent the flagrant abuse of a detainee under his protection. It is high time that someone in a position of authority be held accountable, and not just the guards who were carrying out orders this time.

Why was Mohammad Jawad tortured? Why did military officials choose a teenage boy who had attempted suicide in his cell less than 5 months earlier to be the subject of this sadistic sleep deprivation experiment? Not that anything would justify such treatment, of course, but at least in the case of the other detainees known to have been subjected to sleep deprivation, they were believed to possess critical intelligence that might save American lives. Unfortunately, we may never know. I’ve asked to speak to the guards who actually carried out the program, and I’ve been denied. In the absence of information to the contrary, which the government would surely provide if it existed, we are left to conclude that it was simply gratuitous cruelty.

**

February 7, 2002. America lost a little of its greatness that day. We lost our position as the world’s leading defender of human rights, as the champion of justice and fairness and the rule of law. But it is a testament to the continuing greatness of this nation, that I, a lowly Air Force Reserve Major, can stand here before you today, with the world watching, without fear of retribution, retaliation or reprisal, and speak truth to power. I can call a spade a spade, and I can call torture, torture.

Today, Your Honor, you have an opportunity to restore a bit of America’s lost luster, to bring back some small measure of the greatness that was lost on Feb 7, 2002, to set us back on a path that leads to an America which once again stands at the forefront of the community of nations in the arena of human rights.

Sadly, this military commission has no power to do anything to the enablers of torture such as John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Robert Delahunty, Alberto Gonzales, Douglas Feith, David Addington, William Haynes, Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, for the jurisdiction of military commissions is strictly and carefully limited to foreign war criminals, not the home-grown variety. All you can do is to try to send a message, a clear and unmistakable message that the U.S. really doesn’t torture, and when we do, we own up to it, and we try to make it right.

Consciousness Is 24 Hours

NYTimes

The view from Lori Mehmen’s front door on Tuesday evening. (via Associated Press)

What a picture.

When the weather turned violent and stormy on Tuesday evening, Lori Mehmen, who lives in the small farming town of Orchard in northeastern Iowa, looked out her front door and saw a funnel cloud bearing down — and evidently had the presence of mind to grab her digital camera and capture this shot before taking cover. The local paper, The Mitchell County Press-News, posted the photo on Wednesday and The Associated Press picked it up today.

***

From "Bookslut"

Interview With Jeff Warren

What's the origin of The Head Trip? From internal evidence, it seems to have been in the works for some time...

The genesis of The Head Trip was an accident I had at 21, when I fell out of a tree and busted my neck on a street in Montreal. The hardest part of the recovery was psychological; when I returned to my studies I found I couldn’t write essays the way I once could. My style of processing had changed. My thinking went from being very linear and progressive to more lateral and associative. I don’t know how much of this interpretation is a flabby split-brain gloss on a problem I had long ago, but I can say that at the time I knew nothing about neurobiology, I only knew I couldn’t direct my attention the way I once could; the mental objects I did retrieve were often two preoccupations over from my main concern. It was like fishing for trout and hooking clams. My roommate tells me I used to bawl at my desk and moan about leaving “my brains on the road.” Eventually I developed a technique of color-coding my notes by tangent, so that when I veered off into 10 different tangents a day at the end of the week I could still string all the, say, purple tangents together into something like a coherent theme.

After this transformation I became more attuned to inner experience. This was augmented by several years of tedious seasonal tree-planting work, where there was literally nothing to do for weeks on end but plant saplings, swat black flies and endure the shifting rhythms of my own shallow stream of consciousness. I became obsessed with how writers described the texture of everyday awareness, whether it was Edgar Allen Poe describing his sleep onset visions, David Foster Wallace on the fugue state of athletic absorption, or Annie Dillard talking about the unselfconscious moment. I began to collect these descriptions, with the vague idea that one day I would put together a taxonomy of elemental states of mind. A separate interest in the biological function of sleep led me into the fantastically variegated world of sleep and dreaming consciousness. In 2004 I started writing The Head Trip.

**

Is it fair to say that a chief point of the book is to displace the mind/body (or, psychology/chemistry) distinction? On the one hand, almost all the science you describe is pretty nascent; on the other hand, it also seems as if they tend to point quite clearly to a reciprocal relationship between thoughts and chemicals.

The chief point of the book is to re-empower the mind. The mind -- in the form of expectations, beliefs and, most optimistically, intention -- is a more-than-epiphenomenal driver of actual physical change in the body and brain. You can learn to create your own special effects. You have agency. As I write in the book, “this is both supremely hopeful and utterly depressing, since it means in nurturing, enlightened environments we may be able to cultivate whole new standards of mental health, but in violent, regressive environments we risk spawning awful new permutations of mental affliction. Technology -- that great onrushing field within which our minds are shaped -- compounds all of this, for better and for worse.”

As far as the actual relationship between mind and body, that, thankfully, is still a mystery, despite the exaggerated claims of the neuro-reductos, whom I love, and the exaggerated claims of the quantum mysticos, whom I love.

I guess the two other chief points of the book are: 1. to wake people up to the deliriously varied terrain of their nighttime lives, and 2. to help people look beyond black and white waking rationality, which turns out to be just one capacity on a very bright and colorful palette. Different states of consciousness seem to privilege different styles of knowledge.

**

It turns out sleep is more interesting than we usually expect -- and that it even has a history! What are some key misconceptions about sleep?

I would like to spiel about dreaming for a moment if you don’t mind. The writer Rodger Kamenetz tipped me off to a great Borges quote. Borges once wrote: “Lately I've been rereading psychology books, and I have felt singularly defrauded. All of them discuss the mechanisms of dreams or the subjects of dreams, but they do not mention, as I had hoped, that which is so astonishing, so strange -- the fact of dreaming.”

The fact of dreaming. When you wake up in a dream and actually take a look around -- it’s bananas. It’s the absolute craziest goddamn thing in all of human life. Every night we beam down into an elaborate virtual world where we can pound the walls with our oven-mitt fists and sniff giant daisies and have elliptical conversations with archetypal bus drivers. From inside a dream there is nothing vague or washed out about the experience -- dreams are totally real, as real as getting off the plane in Lagos and ordering a beer from some guy at the side of the road. You are at this place -- you’re IN it! At the time it’s every bit as solid and real as waking. Except… and this is what’s so cool… except when you’re self-consciously aware inside the dream you can then squeeze up real close to the walls with your little magnifying glass and look for suture marks. You can conduct experiments. You come to realize that there is a set of laws operating in the dream world that is every bit as real as the laws of physics in the waking world. What are these laws? And why aren’t there as many scientists down here with their slide rules and theories as there are out there? We spend our lives in two worlds and yet we only pay attention to one of them -- the other is seen as an embarrassing curiosity, a forum for banality-rehearsal and botched sex.

People protest: “but it’s not real, stop living in fantasy.” All experience is real. On the personal side, dreams reveal all kinds of junk about the self. On the scientific side, our dreams represent an unparalleled opportunity to examine the dynamics of consciousness. I mean think about it: without sensory input to dilute everything, you get consciousness in a pure culture. And it so happens that this pure culture -- The Dream -- runs like an underground creek beneath the waking world, muddying the ground in all kinds of interesting ways.

And that’s just the conventional science. Who knows what else we may discover digging around in the dream world. For those interested in the wooly world of mind-matter speculation, the epistemological rabbit hole goes very deep indeed.

This is going to sound hyperbolic but I really believe we’re at are at the dawn of a new age of scientific exploration. The external world is mapped; now the explorers are turning inward. The galleons have left port. They’re approaching a huge mysterious continent. They won’t be the first to arrive. There are paths already cut in the forest, where shamans and monks and others have set up outposts and launched their own expeditions into the interior.

It’s a thrilling story, a lurid epic in the making, and yet almost no one has any idea it’s happening.

As far as our misconceptions about sleep, I would say the biggest one is this idea that we lose consciousness when the lights go out. This couldn’t be further from the truth. At night consciousness just turns inside out. Instead of moving through a world constructed from sensory input, we move through a world constructed from memory and imagination. We do lose certain self-reflective properties, and -- critically -- our short-term memories are compromised so we don’t remember many of our experiences. But when you wake people up in the night most of them report some kind of mental activity -- either the strange snap-shot narratives of sleep onset, the fully immersive dreams of REM, or the low-level “mentation” of deep sleep. Even in the emptiest bliss-saturated realms of slow wave sleep the experiencing self remains. Consciousness is 24-hours.

***
One of your key images is the "wheel of consciousness" (at least, that's what it's called in the illustrations and the title; early on you write that "the brain is a wheel, and consciousness is a pliant membrane pressed into the rim.")

***
Recommended by the Salt Box

“Let this be my annual reminder”: The Hold Steady album is out on iTunes

The Hold Steady’s new album, Stay Positive, is available today on iTunes, a month ahead of its announced release date. (Presumably this is a consequence of the album’s being leaked on the internet.)

You can hear the album on their MySpace page. The opening song, “Constructive Summer,” is their most accessible yet, and only gets better the louder you play it.

Let this be my annual reminder that we could all be something bigger

I went to your schools & did my detention

but the walls were so gray I couldn’t pay attention

I read your gospel, it moved me to tears

but I couldn’t find the hate and I couldn’t find the fear

I met your savior, I knelt at his feet

and he took my ten bucks and he walked down the street

I tried to believe all the things that you said

but my friends that aren’t dying are already dead

RAISE A TOAST TO ST JOE STRUMMER

I think he might have been our only decent teacher

Getting older makes it harder to remember

We are our only saviors.

We’re going to build something this summer.

Nothing else you could possibly do this afternoon would make you as happy as downloading this album.

Links

Sick Days

By EMILY MITCHELL

In her second year of college, the poet Sarah Manguso developed a blood disease so uncommon it doesn’t even have a real name. The autoimmune condition, a rarer form of the already rare Guillain-Barré syndrome, is known as chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy, and it took more than four years to run its course. For several of them, Manguso had to undergo periodic treatments in which her plasma was completely removed and replaced. The treatments worked, but sometimes only for a few days. Later, she moved to steroid treatments, which restored a degree of physical well-being but created complicated side effects.

In her sharp, affecting new memoir, “The Two Kinds of Decay,” Manguso writes from the far side of a long period of remission. “For seven years I tried not to remember much because there was too much to remember,” she writes. From an original welter of experience, she has carefully culled details that remain vivid. Filtered through memory, events during her illness seem like “heavenly bodies” that “fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.” Manguso is acutely interested in these processes of renaming and remembering, the way time changes what we say about the past. Her book is not only about illness but also about the ways we use language to describe it and cope with it.

The author of two books of poetry, Manguso brings the virtues of that form to the task of writing memoir. Her book is divided mostly into one- and two-page chapters titled like poems. She mixes high and low language, the crass and the scientific, with a lyric poet’s sure-handedness. The chapters themselves — among them “The Hematologist,” “The Forgetful Nurse,” “Corroboration” — resemble her own poetry, broken into aphoristic, discrete sections on the page. This disjointedness gives the prose a rhythm that mirrors the confusion and fragmentation of illness.

It also clears space for one of the book’s most remarkable aspects: its dark humor. What makes this account both bearable and moving is Manguso’s keen sense of the absurdities that accompany severe illness. Often these come from its odd proximity to ordinary life. In the hospital, one of her nurses turns out to be a former cheerleader from her own high school. Manguso remembers how the woman and her squad “cartwheeled in their red and white and black regulation skintight uniforms in rows across the gym, then danced like strippers to bass-pumping music.” Now this woman is a caregiver, helping with some of the less pleasant aspects of Manguso’s illness.

There is something surreal about Manguso’s protracted alienation from her own body. In the chapter “The Wrong Symptom,” she describes how, after having her nervous responses tested by “a metal tool resembling a pizza cutter,” she reports a numb area on her stomach “coincidentally, about the size of a slice of pizza.” Because there is no diagnostic explanation for her symptom, her doctors conclude she is reporting the wrong symptom. In fact, what she is feeling is not numbness but indigestion. Later, at a rehabilitation facility, a nurse takes her temperature. “She reported my body temperature as 82 degrees Fahrenheit,” Manguso writes. “I suggested that that was not possible since I was still living.” Elsewhere, she considers the metaphorical dimensions of her condition. “All autoimmune diseases invoke the metaphor of suicide,” she writes. “The body destroys itself from the inside.”

Manguso was already a writer when she became ill, and her obsession with words, their capacities and limitations, permeates her book. The world of hospitals and doctors has its own language, which she translates for the uninitiated reader. Her plasma replacement treatment is called “apheresis,” which she notes is “from the Greek aphairein, to take away.” She is amused that hematologist-oncologists abbreviate their titles to “‘hem-oncs’ (pronounced almost like he-monks).” But her interest is more than literary curiosity. When she has a line implanted directly into her chest so her plasma can be replaced more easily, she parses her reaction: “I had read Freud in school. He distinguishes fear, a state of worrying anticipation, ... from fright, the momentary response of our mind to a danger that has caught us by surprise but is already over.” For hours, she writes, “I lay there, weeping in fright. Not fear. Fright.”

Manguso’s desire for precision is urgent, even if it cannot always be fulfilled. “I need to describe that feeling,” she says of the deep cold induced by apheresis. “Make a reader stop reading for a moment and think, Now I understand how cold it felt. But I’m just going to say it felt like liquid, 30 degrees colder than my body, being infused slowly but directly into my heart, for four hours.”

As much as anything, this book is a search for adequate descriptions of things heretofore unnamed and unknown. Manguso concludes her account with questions — and an exhortation to the reader to pay attention. Through her own attentiveness, Manguso has produced a remarkable, cleareyed account that turns horror into something humane and beautiful.

Emily Mitchell’s novel, “The Last Summer of the World,” was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions fiction award.

***

Conservative Government Destroys Atlanta Like Gen. Sherman Never Could

By Rick Perlstein

The colossal mismanagement of water in Georgia has produced an urban crisis with no clear solution other than a return to smart government.

**
The Sideshow

The subtitles added in this video of Joe Cocker's Woodstock performance of "A Little Help From My Friends" had me laughing out loud with tears in my eyes. You gotta see it.)

**
I'm reading

"The Brain that Changes Itself
Stories of Personal Triumph fro the Frontiers of Brain Science"

by Normal Doidge, M.D.

Highly recommended!

**

George Carlin

George Carlin
Obit

He was “a hugely influential force in stand-up comedy,” the actor Ben Stiller told The Associated Press. “He had an amazing mind, and his humor was brave, and always challenging us to look at ourselves and question our belief systems, while being incredibly entertaining. He was one of the greats.”

**

Although some criticized parts of his later work as too contentious, Mr. Carlin defended the material, insisting that his comedy had always been driven by an intolerance for the shortcomings of humanity and society. “Scratch any cynic,” he said, “and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”

Still, when pushed to explain the pessimism and overt spleen that had crept into his act, he quickly reaffirmed the zeal that inspired his lists of complaints and grievances. “I don’t have pet peeves,” he said, correcting the interviewer. And with a mischievous glint in his eyes, he added, “I have major, psychotic hatreds.”

Summer Reruns

This is from the Atlantic archives.
Friday was my Father's 82nd birthday.
So this is for him.

by Ian Frazier

Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father

Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the hoofed animals, broiled or ground into burgers, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cloven-hoofed animal, plain or with cheese, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cereal grains, of the corn and of the wheat and of the oats, and of all the cereals that are of bright color and unknown provenance you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the quiescently frozen dessert and of all frozen after-meal treats you may eat, but absolutely not in the living room. Of the juices and other beverages, yes, even of those in sippy-cups, you may drink, but not in the living room, neither may you carry such therein. Indeed, when you reach the place where the living room carpet begins, of any food or beverage there you may not eat, neither may you drink.

But if you are sick, and are lying down and watching something, then may you eat in the living room.

And if you are seated in your high chair, or in a chair such as a greater person might use, keep your legs and feet below you as they were. Neither raise up your knees, nor place your feet upon the table, for that is an abomination to me. Yes, even when you have an interesting bandage to show, your feet upon the table are an abomination, and worthy of rebuke. Drink your milk as it is given you, neither use on it any utensils, nor fork, nor knife, nor spoon, for that is not what they are for; if you will dip your blocks in the milk, and lick it off, you will be sent away. When you have drunk, let the empty cup then remain upon the table, and do not bite it upon its edge and by your teeth hold it to your face in order to make noises in it sounding like a duck; for you will be sent away.

When you chew your food, keep your mouth closed until you have swallowed, and do not open it to show your brother or your sister what is within; I say to you, do not so, even if your brother or your sister has done the same to you. Eat your food only; do not eat that which is not food; neither seize the table between your jaws, nor use the raiment of the table to wipe your lips. I say again to you, do not touch it, but leave it as it is. And though your stick of carrot does indeed resemble a marker, draw not with it upon the table, even in pretend, for we do not do that, that is why. And though the pieces of broccoli are very like small trees, do not stand them upright to make a forest, because we do not do that, that is why. Sit just as I have told you, and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me; for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the syrup. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass.

Laws Pertaining to Dessert

For we judge between the plate that is unclean and the plate that is clean, saying first, if the plate is clean, then you shall have dessert. But of the unclean plate, the laws are these: If you have eaten most of your meat, and two bites of your peas with each bite consisting of not less than three peas each, or in total six peas, eaten where I can see, and you have also eaten enough of your potatoes to fill two forks, both forkfuls eaten where I can see, then you shall have dessert. But if you eat a lesser number of peas, and yet you eat the potatoes, still you shall not have dessert; and if you eat the peas, yet leave the potatoes uneaten, you shall not have dessert, no, not even a small portion thereof. And if you try to deceive by moving the potatoes or peas around with a fork, that it may appear you have eaten what you have not, you will fall into iniquity. And I will know, and you shall have no dessert.

On Screaming

Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault. Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you, and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming. Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even now I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat of it myself, yet do not die.

Concerning Face and Hands

Cast your countenance upward to the light, and lift your eyes to the hills, that I may more easily wash you off. For the stains are upon you; even to the very back of your head, there is rice thereon. And in the breast pocket of your garment, and upon the tie of your shoe, rice and other fragments are distributed in a manner wonderful to see. Only hold yourself still; hold still, I say. Give each finger in its turn for my examination thereof, and also each thumb. Lo, how iniquitous they appear. What I do is as it must be; and you shall not go hence until I have done.

Various Other Laws, Statutes, and Ordinances

Bite not, lest you be cast into quiet time. Neither drink of your own bath water, nor of bath water of any kind; nor rub your feet on bread, even if it be in the package; nor rub yourself against cars, nor against any building; nor eat sand.

Leave the cat alone, for what has the cat done, that you should so afflict it with tape? And hum not that humming in your nose as I read, nor stand between the light and the book. Indeed, you will drive me to madness. Nor forget what I said about the tape.

Complaints and Lamentations

O my children, you are disobedient. For when I tell you what you must do, you argue and dispute hotly even to the littlest detail; and when I do not accede, you cry out, and hit and kick. Yes, and even sometimes do you spit, and shout "stupid-head" and other blasphemies, and hit and kick the wall and the molding thereof when you are sent to the corner. And though the law teaches that no one shall be sent to the corner for more minutes than he has years of age, yet I would leave you there all day, so mighty am I in anger. But upon being sent to the corner you ask straightaway, "Can I come out?" and I reply, "No, you may not come out." And again you ask, and again I give the same reply. But when you ask again a third time, then you may come out.

Hear me, O my children, for the bills they kill me. I pay and pay again, even to the twelfth time in a year, and yet again they mount higher than before. For our health, that we may be covered, I give six hundred and twenty talents twelve times in a year; but even this covers not the fifteen hundred deductible for each member of the family within a calendar year. And yet for ordinary visits we still are not covered, nor for many medicines, nor for the teeth within our mouths. Guess not at what rage is in my mind, for surely you cannot know.

For I will come to you at the first of the month and at the fifteenth of the month with the bills and a great whining and moan. And when the month of taxes comes, I will decry the wrong and unfairness of it, and mourn with wine and ashtrays, and rend my receipts. And you shall remember that I am that I am: before, after, and until you are twenty-one. Hear me then, and avoid me in my wrath, O children of me.

An Existential Sense of Unavoidable Death

dust storms over the Sahara
The Sky From Above:
The Big Picture

**
Quotes from "The Healing Path" by Marc Ian Barasch


***

"In a world of fugitives, those taking the opposite direction will always be said to be running away."

-T.S. Eliot

**
"Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time."

--Hebrew proverb

**
A plant in the courtyard isn't medicine, but a plant on the other side of the mountain is.

--Old Hindu dictum
The Healing Path

**
"The idea of therapeutic relaxation, which has become such a watchword in holistic medicine, doesn't tell the whole story. It's a little like putting a piece of toast in an unplugged toaster: the toast may relax a little in the darkness of the slot, but it won't change. It has to be plugged in for this mysterious transformation called toast to happen. What provides the power is a powerful motivation: "I really , really want to get better." Absent this, you'll see NADA in the way of healing.

From this standpoint, the Helper is less the provider of the cure than an awakener, instigator, and even provocateur of the patient's own slumbering inner powers."

--The Healing Path

**
"Because what cures a patient is so often not what a practitioner knows, but who the practitioner is, real and prolonged contact with him or her can be crucial."

--The Healing path

**
Pressed to describe what the healer had done for him, and what he now tries to do for others, May once explained, "A lot of Healing is breaking habits. It's changing the personal story. My story was, "I'll never walk again, I'll be in pain, I'll be in and out of a wheelchair my whole life."

Then Jack came along. His story was that we were created in the image of God and that everything we need is within us. It was his guidance that enabled me to shift."

--The Healing Path

**
"The Japanese shamanic healer Ikuko Osumi states that one of the main causes of illness is "the accumulation of tiredness due to the overuse of nerves and body functioning, resulting from unwise ways of living and working."

--The Healing Path

**
"God's timing isn't our timing. He can use things for our teaching if we allow it ......"

".....Faith to me is not attachment to life, just wishing to be saved, but the gratitude to god (sic) who saved my spirit. I had begun to live a real life" .... They embraced a perspective, particularly prevalent in Japanese culture, called wabi sabi: "an existential sense of unavoidable death and its positive acceptance."

--The Healing Path

**
Fata volentem ducunt, trahunt no lentem

"Whoever is willing, the fates will lead; those who are not, the fates will drag along...."

--The Healing Path

**
"We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

-W.H. Auden

This One Evening On Earth

Moonset over Caribbean
The Sky From Above:
The Big Picture



"Light
will someday split you open;
even if your life is now a cage...
Love will surely burst you wide open
into an unfettered, blooming new galaxy."

-- Hafiz

**
from Annie Dillard's
"Mornings Like This -- found poems"

"Usually those happy poets (including me) who write found poetry go pawing through popular culture like sculptors on trash heaps. They hold and wave aloft usable artifacts and fragments: jingles and ad copy, menus and broadcasts -- all objects trouves, the literary equivalents of Warhol's Campbell's soup cans and Duchamp's bicycle. By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles. The poet adds, or at any rate increases , the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry. It serves up whole texts, or uninterrupted fragments of texts."

**

We are not interested in tree limbs
Weighted with Spanish moss.
What we want to know is
Why arms go limp.

Is it the pain of blocking
Too many hooks? Is it the aching
That comes from throwing
Too many punches too soon?

We want facts, not French phrases.

--A letter to Sports Illustrated
by James P. Lewandowski, Toledo, Ohio
February 18, 1974


**

Dash It
--Mikhail Prishvin,
Nature's Diary
1925,
trans. by L. Navrozov

How wonderfully it was all arranged that each
Of us had not too long to live. This is one
Of the main snags -- the shortness of the day.
The whole wood was whispering, "Dash it, dash it..."

What joy -- to walk along that path! The snow
Was so fragrant in the sun! What a fish!
Whenever I think of death, the same stupid
Question arises: "What's to be done?"

As for myself, I can only speak of what
Made me marvel when I saw it for the first time.
I remember my own youth whan I was in love.
I remember a puddle rippling, the insects aroused.

I remember our own springtime when my lady told me:
You have taken my best. And then I remember
How many evenings I have waited, how much
I Have been through for this one evening on earth.

**

A Land of Deepest Shade

Idumea

June 1st, 2008

(this style of communal singing is known as Sacred Harp Singing)

And am I born to die?
To lay this body down!
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown?

A land of deepest shade,
Unpierced by human thought;
The dreary regions of the dead,
Where all things are forgot!

Soon as from earth I go,
What will become of me?
Eternal happiness or woe
Must then my portion be!

Waked by the trumpet sound,
I from my grave shall rise;
And see the Judge with glory crowned,
And see the flaming skies!

- Charles Wesley

from poetix

Plant Your Feet and Tell the Truth

The Sky From Above:
The Big Picture

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerst not the beam that is in thine own eye?" :
Holy Bible, Matthew 7:3

=
"Not the faults of others, nor what others have done or left undone, but one's own deeds, done and left undone, should one consider.":
50th Stanza from the Dhammapada (The Path of Wisdom)

=
"Believers, let not a group of you mock another. Perhaps they are better than you. - - - Let not one of you find faults in another nor let anyone of you defame another.":
Holy Quran, Chapter 49:11 (Al-Hujarat)

=
"You see in others what you actually see in yourself.":
The Guru Dronacharya in Mahabharata

=
"I went in search of a bad person; I found none as I, seeing myself, found me the worst.":
Kabir, Saint Poet of North India

=
"I wonder whether there is any one in this generation who accepts reproof, for if one says to him: Remove the mote from between your eyes, he would answer: Remove the beam from between your eyes!":
Talmud: Baraitha: Rashi (1050-1115 AD) quoting Rabbi Tarfon

=

"It is easy to see the faults of others, but not so easy to see one's own faults":
Gautama Buddha (563 - 483 BC)

From Information Clearinghouse

***

The Body' Grace
NPR with Matthew Sanford

**
Ascent Magazine
Breathing Through


***
Adventures With the Flux Factory

"Devil's Work"
Secret Doings at the Queens Museum of Art
by Morgan Meis

"We gather some nice fabric, a clarinet, a balalaika, a toy phonograph, a mounted deer's head, a chandelier, some glasses, and some aged tequila for the new tunnel room. It is agreed that the secret room should contrast in decadence with the stark environs of the room outside and the rest of the museum. We agree that the room should be kept secret from everyone else in the group. It will be part of the evolving complexity of everything happening at the museum, but we start taking pictures of ourselves in the room and leaving various hints and clues of what we have done in full public view."

===
Driftglass Tribute to Steve Gilliard

A Matzevah for Steve

The matzevah, roughly translated, means ”The unveiling of the headstone.”

From the Jewish Virtual Library:

Jewish law requires that a tombstone be prepared, so that the deceased will not be forgotten and the grave will not be desecrated.

It is customary in some communities to keep the tombstone veiled, or to delay in putting it up, until the end of the 12-month mourning period.

The idea underlying this custom is that the dead will not be forgotten when he is being mourned every day. In communities where this custom is observed, there is generally a formal unveiling ceremony when the tombstone is revealed.
…

This tradition is not native to my faith, but it seemed appropriate for this particular Monday, a day that'll be a little tough for some of us as it will mark the one-year anniversary of the passing of our friend, Steven Gilliard.

So in memoriam, for one day I want to set aside the transient fevers and furies of the campaign long enough to enjoy a nice, thick slice of occasion-appropriate goodness by Gilly himself (with a few words of my own fore and aft.)

Steve, like everybody else, got stuff wrong (Dubya is never gonna resign, and never gonna be impeached), and his views on dating sometimes seemed to run a gamut between, oh, say, "rustic" and "Neolithic", but typos and all (Where do you think I learned mine?) Steve used his blog like USS Missouri used her sixteen inch guns, and almost always delivered his ordnance smack in the wheelhouse.

As in this post from February 21, 2005 about the death and life of Hunter S. Thompson entitled “Outlaw journalism and the blogs”.

Enjoy.

Outlaw journalism and the blogs

Monday, February 21, 2005

A worthy legacy

It goes without saying that the death of Hunter Thompson is a tragedy, but it comes at an odd time for journalism. Thompson and his peers, like Lucian Truscott, Frances Fitzgerald and others who came of age in the 1960's and early 70's were largely ignored inside the newsroom. They were outsiders and remained largely outside the journalism mainstream. Some broke through, like Sy Hersh, but they never stayed for long, or eventually shoved aside for years. Bloggers act as if their treatment in the press and by the press is something new and unique. It isn't.

(More) ***

Steve wanted a new, active, unapologetic journalism that could stand up and make its own way in the world unbought and unbossed. A journalism whose practitioners would write the way Jimmy Cagney said actors should act:

"Plant your feet, and tell the truth”

Gilly managed to do more than his fair share to move the blogosphere in that direction before he died; in one post after another -- rain or shine, month after month, year in and year out -- he offered his readers a singular voice and an implacable clarity of thought; unaffected genuineness filtered though a fierce bullshit-detector made out of impressive scholarship and pure, New York street savvy.

And he did it every day, on spec.

(And what I wouldn't give to "hear" him just one more time, taking up his sword and buckler to vivisect both Scott McClellan's sweaty, high school drama club performance as Senator Joe Paine from the last reel of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” --

“I'm not fit to live. Expel me! Expel me! Not him. Every word that boy said is the truth! Every word about Taylor and me and graft and the rotten political corruption of our state. Every word of it is true. I'm not fit for office! I'm not fit for any place of honor or trust. Expel me!”

And, yes, I still miss him every day.

posted by driftglass


****

Julie Andrews’s Bliss

By Lawrence Downes

“Home,” the well-received new memoir by Julie Andrews, pulls back the curtains on her early years, before Hollywood and her megamusicals. It’s an honest book, but it’s no sloppy tell-all. The famously composed Ms. Andrews serves up her revelations with discretion, and even the ruder bits seldom stray far beyond the safe territory of the talk-show couch.

**

She went, of course. The rest is history, told here with a scripted reserve.

But then, on page 254, she tackles a tired old topic: “What Theater Means to Me.” This is where she pulls out all the stops. The passage is startlingly effusive, and a joy to read:

Once in a while I experience an emotion onstage that is so gut-wrenching, so heart-stopping, that I could weep with gratitude and joy. The feeling catches and magnifies so rapidly that it threatens to engulf me.

It starts as a bass note, resonating deep in my system. Literally. It’s like the warmest, lowest sound from a contrabass. There is a sudden thrill of connection and an awareness of size — the theater itself, more the height of the great stage housing behind and above me, where history has been absorbed, where darkness contains mystery and light has meaning.

Light is a part of it … to be flooded with it, to absorb it and allow it through the body.

The dust that has a smell so thick and evocative, one feels one could almost eat it; makeup and sweat, perfume and paint; the vast animal that is an audience, warm and pulsing, felt but unseen.

Most of all, it is the music — when a great sweep of sound makes you attempt things that earlier in the day you might never have thought possible. When the orchestra swells to support your voice, when the melody is perfect and the words so right there could not possibly be any others, when a modulation occurs and lifts you to an even higher plateau … it is bliss. And that is the moment to share it.

Irving Berlin said it shorter — “There’s no business like show business” — but Ms. Andrews, a trouper from the old school, could hardly have said it better.

***

Blessed Unrest

Part One of Two from Reckonings

Reflections on Paul Hawken's "Blessed Unrest" - Part 1

Hawken begins Blessed Unrest with an overview of the world-wide movement devoted to re-imagining and recovering social justice and environmental sustainability, in his view an organic and sacred web of tasks entailing "deep listening" as well as activism, essentially "restoring grace, justice and beauty to the world." They are ancient tasks of compassion possessed of an entirely new urgency, for "the planet has a life-threatening disease, marked by massive ecological degradation and rapid climate change," fueled by thoughtless consumption and the rapaciousness of a capitalist fundamentalism devoted not to true sustenance but to a narrow conception of economic growth.

It is fundamentally a movement based not only on human rights but the rights of all sentient beings - all life, as we are essentially one collective and interactive being. As John Muir wrote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." It is a perspective common to the world's religions - especially Buddhism's conception of co-evolution and the sacred traditions of indigenous cultures. Like evolution and hope, it arises from the bottom up.

Whether such a diverse collectivity of creative and resistant organizations deserves the name movement may be a matter of personal judgement; but with Hawken I think it is more than that. It surely embodies one dictionary definition--"a change in policy or general attitudes seen as positive." It is, as Hawken realizes, not a singular enterprise, nor is it driven by a singular ideology. I am drawn to one use of the word--the progressive development of a poem or story. It is coextant with the regenerative character of life itself.

Posted by John Roosevelt Boettiger | Permalink

***
Boettinger adds:

Hawken has also been instrumental in establishing a database of the astonishing number--one or two million he says--of organizations now working toward ecological sustainability and social justice in every corner of the earth. The database may be found at www.wiserearth.com, and is an open-source, user created and edited "community directory and networking forum that maps and connects non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals addressing the central issues of our day: climate change, poverty, the environment, peace, water, hunger, social justice, conservation, human rights and more."

Idea Lab

June 15, 2008

Idea Lab

Darwinists for Jesus

By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE

In 1981, Michael Dowd would have counted himself among the millions of conservative Christians who blame Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the idea of a godless, purposeless universe for the moral decline of society. That year, as a freshman at Evangel University in Springfield, Mo., Dowd felt a rush of indignant anger in biology class when the professor held up a textbook that taught evolution. As he stormed out of the classroom, Dowd could not have imagined that he would come to view evolution as a spiritually inspiring idea that religion must embrace.

In the years that followed, Dowd shed his more conservative views and served as a pastor in the liberal United Church of Christ. Today he calls himself an evolutionary evangelist. For the last six years, he has traveled across North America with his wife, Connie Barlow, in a van that displays an image of two fish kissing each other — one labeled Jesus, the other Darwin — explaining to conservative and liberal congregations why understanding and accepting evolution will bring them closer to spiritual fulfillment. The religious advantage to embracing the evolutionary worldview, Dowd says, is that it explains our frailties, our addictions, our infidelities and other moral deficiencies as byproducts of adaptation over billions of years. And that, he says, has a potentially liberating effect: never mind guilt; once we understand our sinful ways, we can get past them and play a conscious role in the evolution of humanity.

The message is laid out in Dowd’s book, “Thank God for Evolution,” published by Council Oak Books last November and acquired this spring by Viking Penguin for $750,000. In the book and in his sermons, Dowd presents evolution as a sacred epic of emerging complexity that can be seen as “14 billion years of grace.” He sidesteps the question of whose grace this is supposed to be, although the book’s title offers a hint. Dowd makes it clear that he’s not talking about an intelligent designer. Instead, he exhorts his audience to supplant — or complement — their individual notions of God with sometimes-fuzzy concepts like “cosmic creativity.”

Of course, Dowd is hardly the first religious figure to reconcile God and evolution. In 1996, Pope John Paul II declared that evolution was “more than just a hypothesis.” And next year, the Vatican will hold a conference to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s “On the Origins of Species.” In many respects, Dowd’s work echoes the once highly influential writings of the 20th century French Jesuit and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who described evolution as a part of God’s plan, driving all of creation toward a sort of magnetic pole of higher consciousness that he called the Omega Point. In the 1960s, treatises by Chardin like “The Phenomenon of Man” and “The Future of Man” were campus best sellers. Such an interpretation transforms evolution from a process of random mutations with no purpose — which is how most scientists see it — to a more hopeful narrative. Though Dowd shies away from ascribing a divine plan to the unfolding of the cosmos, he finds it spiritually satisfying to look back at the unfolding and see in it a pattern of emerging complexity.

But Dowd’s preaching also draws on more contemporary scientific thinking. Central to his pitch about a “God-glorifying, Christ-edifying, Scripture-honoring way of thinking about evolution” is how findings from evolutionary psychology might help people overcome guilt about their immoral or unhealthful behaviors. “We live in a world today that is very different from the world that our instincts evolved to deal with,” he says. “We have cravings for sugar, salts and fats because for 99 percent of human history, we didn’t have easy access to those things.” Likewise, he says, addictions like sex and drugs are part of our inner proclivities. “Today we have a far more empirical way of talking about human nature than through stories like the original sin,” Dowd says.

More-conservative Christians, however, are unlikely to be satisfied with such a formulation. Ken Ham, who conceived the $25-million Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., avows that Dowd’s evolutionary gospel is of no religious value because it does not provide any of the answers that people want from religion. “What’s his message?” Ham asks. “Who is God? Is the universe God? What is our purpose and meaning? What is good and evil? Who determines our future? The Bible gives us very specific answers.” Ham says that what Dowd is telling his audience is “no different from what an evolutionary atheist would preach” with some of Dowd’s merely subjective feelings “mixed in.”

Yet to scientists and philosophers skeptical about religion, Dowd’s efforts are no less misguided. “I find it fascinating that we are descended from something like Lucy,” says Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science at Florida State University in Tallahassee, referring to a hominid that walked on earth 3.2 million years ago. “But I’m not sure I find it upsetting or comforting, spiritually.” Daniel Dennett, the Tufts University philosopher and outspoken atheist, maintains that Dowd is right that self-knowledge gleaned from evolution “can and should temper our judgments about our morality and immorality.” But even though he applauds Dowd’s “effort at diplomatic teaching” of evolution, he worries that evangelical followers may be less likely to pursue Darwinism further than to develop a “healthy distrust” for such obvious “sugar-coating.”

For his part, Steven Case, a biologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, says that Dowd’s message has the potential to confuse listeners about where scientific explanation ends and religious interpretation begins. That could eventually hurt science, Case says, making society less willing to ask theologically discomfiting yet scientifically legitimate questions like when the human race might become extinct.

Nonetheless, Dowd’s views do bring solace to some, going by reactions from parishioners who claim that a scientific perspective has helped them come to terms with their follies of the past. For some at least, the recognition of genetic and biochemical frailty is a healing act. Last fall, for example, after Bob Miller, an 81-year-old man, heard Dowd’s sermon at a Unitarian church in Pensacola, Fla., he felt his guilt over a string of affairs from four decades ago melting away. “I could never quite understand why I had behaved that way,” says Miller, who was climbing the corporate ladder when his infidelities began, leading to the breakup of his marriage. When Dowd began talking about viewing moral lapses against the backdrop of evolution, “suddenly a light went on inside my head,” Miller says. His rising status at his company, he concluded, had probably contributed to increased testosterone. “I think the physical change in my body was so strong that it completely overpowered any moral teachings and religious beliefs I had,” Miller says. “It was still inexcusable, but it made more sense.”

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a writer on the staff of Science magazine.

*

Our 21st century fascination with fundamentalism (especially by the mass media) mostly shows that the media editors have limited understanding of the traditions of Western Civilization. This presentation of religion/science as an either/or fits the prescribed narrative. There always seems to be that sort of boxing-match framing. Western culture, the traditions of Judaism and of Christianity, the Enlightenment -- all together have delivered us to our current place of peril. The fundamentalist strain has always been present, but does not speak for any thoughtful consensus put forth by people of good will who share faith traditions.

**

Hell Hath No Limits

photo from: wood_s_lot

The following is from Harpers Magazine, May '08 issue. The article is long, but do read the entire thought process to the end. It's well worth your time.

It strikes me that Wendell Barry encapsulates the forces in our world that are making thinking artists, humanists and people of faith not just uneasy and unhappy, but grief stricken. The thinking behind the policies put into action by our 21st century power brokers is flawed thinking that runs counter to our ethical and religious traditions. It falls to the artists , humanists and people of faith to speak and write about this modern deal-making with our contemporary devils.
This is not done simply to protest or to object but to constantly re-articulate the vision behind our deepest beliefs about ourselves, our fellows and our world.

****

Excerpts Harpers.org May '08
FAUSTIAN ECONOMICS
Hell hath no limits
by Wendell Berry

The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such :"biofuels" as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that "science will find an answer." The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

This belief was always indefensible -- the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed --- and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are "free" to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry , but -- thank God! -- still driving.)

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. We have insistently, and with relief, defined ourselves a animals or as " higher animals." but to define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves a limitless animals -- which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define Himself : "I am that I am."

***
In keeping with our unrestrained consumptiveness, the commonly accepted basis of our economy is the supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy , and limitless debt. the idea of a limitless economy implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness: all are entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable, -- a license that classifies the most exalted Christian capitalist with the lowliest pornographer.

This fantasy of limitlessness perhaps arose from the coincidence of the Industrial Revolution with the suddenly exploitable resources of the New World -- though how the supposed limitlessness of resources can be reconciled with their exhaustion is not clear. Or perhaps it comes from the contrary apprehension of the world's "smallness," made possible by modern astronomy and high-speed transportation. Fear of the smallness of our world and its life may lead to a kind of claustrophobia and thence, with apparent reasonableness, to a desire for the "freedom" of limitlessness. But this desire, paradoxically, reduces everything. The life of this world is small to those who think it is, and the desire to enlarge it makes it smaller, and can reduce it finally to nothing.

However it came about, this credo of limitlessness clearly implies a principled wish not only for limitless possessions but also for limitless knowledge, limitless science, limitless technology, and limitless progress. And, necessarily, it must lead to limitless violence, waste, war, and destruction. That it should finally produce a crowning cult of political limitlessness is only a matter of mad logic.

***
The normalization of the doctrine of limitlessness has produced a sort of moral minimalism: the desire to be efficient at any cost, to be unencumbered by complexity. The minimization of neighborliness, respect, reverence, responsibility, accountability, and self-subordination -- this is the culture of which our present leaders and heroes are the spoiled children.

Our national faith so far has been: "There's always more." Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine. Thus an X marked on a paper ballot no longer fulfills our idea of voting. One problem with this state of affairs is that the work now most needing to be done -- that of neighborliness and caretaking -- cannot be done by remote control and the greatest power on the largest scale. A second problem is that the economic fantasy of limitlessness in a limited world calls fearfully into question the value of our monetary wealth, which does not reliably stand for the real wealth of land, resources, and workmanship but instead wastes and depletes it.

That human limitlessness is a fantasy means, obviously, that its life expectancy is limited. There is now a growing perception, and not just among a few experts, that we are entering a time of inescapable limits. We are not likely to be granted another world to plunder in compensation for our pillage of this one. Nor are we likely to believe much longer in our ability to outsmart, by means of science and technology, our economic stupidity. The hope that we can cure the ills of industrialism by the homeopathy of more technology seems at last to be losing status. We are, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.

This constraint, however, is not the condemnation it may seem. On the contrary, it returns us to our real condition and to our human heritage, from which our self-definition as limitless animals has far too long cut us off. Every cultural and religious tradition that I know about, while fully acknowledging our animal nature, defines us specifically as humans -- that is, as animals (if the word still applies) capable of living not only within natural limits but also within cultural limits, self-imposed. As earthly creatures, we live, because we must, within natural limits, which we may describe by such names as "earth" or "ecosystem" or "watershed" or "place." But as humans, we may elect to respond to this necessary placement by the self-restraints implied in neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.

In our limitless selfishness, we have tried to define "freedom," for example, as an escape from all restraint. But, as my friend Bert Hornback has explained in his book The Wisdom in Words, "free" is etymologically related to "friend." These words come from the same Indo-European root, which carries the sense of "dear" or "beloved." We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. And this suggests that our "identity" is located not in the impulse ofselfhood but in deliberately maintained connections.

***
Thinking of our predicament has sent me back again to Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. This is a play of the Renaissance; Faustus, a man of learning, longs to possess "all Nature's treasury, " to "Ransack the ocean.../ And search all corners of thenewfound world..." To assuage his thirst for knowledge and power, he deeds his soul to Lucifer, receiving in compensation for twenty-four years the services of the sub-devilMephistophilis , nominally Faustus's slave but in fact his master. having the subject of limitlessness in mind, I was astonished on this reading to come uponMephistophilis's description of hell. When Faustus asks, "How comes it then that thou art out of hell?" Mephistophilis replies, "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it." And a few pages later he explains:

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, but where we {the damned} are is hell,
And where hell is must we ever be.

For those who reject heaven, hell is everywhere, and thus is limitless. For them, even the thought of heaven is hell.

If is only appropriate, then, that Mephistophilis rejects any conventional limit: "Tut, Faustus, marriage is but a ceremonial toy. If thou lovest me, think no more of it." Continuing this theme, for Faustus's pleasure the devils present a sort of pageant of the seven deadly sins, three of which -- Pride, Wrath, and Gluttony -- describe themselves as orphans, disdaining the restraints of parental or filial love.

Seventy or so years later, and with the issue of the human definition more than ever in doubt, John Milton is Book VII of Paradise Lost returns again to a consideration of our urge to know. To Adam's request to be told the story of creation, the "affable Archangel" Raphael agrees, "to answer thy desire/Of knowledge within bounds [my emphasis] ...," explaining that

Knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her temperance over appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain;
Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.

Raphael is saying, with angelic circumlocution, that knowledge without wisdom, limitless knowledge, is not worth a fart; he is not a humorless archangel. But he also is saying that knowledge without measure, knowledge that the human mind cannot appropriately use, is mortally dangerous.

I am well aware of what I risk in bringing this language of religion into what is normally a scientific discussion. I do so because I doubt that we can define our present problems adequately, let alone solve them, without some recourse to our cultural heritage. We are, after all, trying now to deal with the failure of scientists, technicians, and politicians to "think up" a version of human continuance that is economically probably and ecologically responsible, or perhaps even imaginable. If we go back into our tradition, we are going to find a concern with religion, which at a minimum shatters the selfish context of the individual life, and thus forces a consideration of what human beings are and ought to be.

This concern persists at least as late as our Declaration of Independence, which holds as "self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...." Thus among our political roots, we have still our old preoccupation with our definition as humans, which in the Declaration is wisely assigned to our Creator; our rights and the rights of all humans are not granted by any human government but are innate, belonging to us by birth. This insistence comes not from the fear of death or even extinction but from the ancient fear that in order to survive we might become inhuman or monstrous.

***
And so our cultural tradition is in large part the record of our continuing effort to understand ourselves as beings specifically human: to say that, as humans, we must do certain things and we must not do certain things. We must have limits or we will cease to exist as humans; perhaps we will cease to exist, period. At times, for example, some of us humans have thought that human beings, properly so called, did not make war against civilian populations, or hold prisoners without a fair trial, or use torture for any reason.

Some of us would-be humans have thought too that we should not be free at anybody else's expense. And yet in the phrase "free market," the word "free" has come to mean unlimited economic power for some, with the necessary consequence of economic powerlessness for others. Several years ago, after I had spoken at a meeting, two earnest and obviously troubled young veterinarians approached me with a question: How could they practice veterinary medicine without serious economic damage to the farmers who were their clients? Underlying their question was the fact that for a long time veterinary help for a sheep or a pig has been likely to cost more than the animal is worth. I had to answer that, in my opinion, so long as their practice relied heavily on selling patented drugs, they had no choice, since the market for medicinal drugs was entirely controlled by the drug companies, whereas most farmers had no control at all over the market for agricultural products. My questioners were asking in effect if a predatory economy can have a beneficent result. The answer too often is No. And that is because there is an absolute discontinuity between the economy of the seller of medicines and the economy of the buyer, as there is in the health industry as a whole. The drug industry is interested in the survival of patients, we have to suppose, because surviving patients will continue to consume drugs.

****
It is this economy of community destruction that, wittingly or unwittingly, most scientists and technicians have served for the past two hundred years. These scientists and technicians have justified themselves by the proposition that they are the vanguard of progress, enlarging human knowledge and power, and thus they have romanticized both themselves and the predatory enterprises that they have served.

As a consequence, our great need now is for sciences and technologies of limits, of domesticity, of what Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has called "homecoming." These would be specifically human sciences and technologies, working, as the best humans always have worked, within self-imposed limits. The limits would be the accepted contexts of places, communities, and neighborhoods, both natural and human.

I know that the idea of such limitations will horrify some people, maybe most people, for we have long encouraged ourselves to feel at home on "the cutting edges" of knowledge and power or on some "frontier" of human experience. But I know too that we are talking now in the presence of much evidence that improvement by outward expansion may no longer be a good idea, if it ever was. It was not a good idea for the farmers who "leveraged" secure acreage to buy more during the 1970s. It has proved tragically to be a bad idea in a number of recent wars. It is is a good idea in the form of corporate gigantism, then we must ask, For whom? Faustus, who wants all knowledge and all the world for himself, is a man supremely lonely and finally doomed. I don't think Marlowe was kidding. I don't think Satan is kidding when he says in Paradise Lost, "Myself am Hell."

***
If the idea of appropriate limitation seems unacceptable to us, that may be because, like Marlowe's Faustus and Milton's Satan, we confuse limits with confinement. But that, as I think Marlowe and Milton and others were trying to tell us, is a great and potentially a fatal mistake. Satan's fault, as Milton understood it and perhaps with some sympathy, was precisely that he could not tolerate his proper limitation; he could not subordinate himself to anything whatever. Faustus's error was his unwillingness to remain "Faustus, and a man." In our age of the world it is not rare to find writers, critics, and teachers of literature, as well as scientists and technicians, who regard Satan's and Faustus's defiance as salutary and heroic.

On the contrary, our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible. For example, an ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm, so long as it remains ecologically intact, is inexhaustible. A small place, as I know from my own experience can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure -- in addition to its difficulties -- that cannot be exhausted in a life time or in generations.

***
To recover from our disease of limitlessness, we will have to give up the idea that we have a right to be godlike animals, that we are potentially omniscient and omnipotent, ready to discover "the secret of the universe." We will have to start over, with a different and much older premise: the naturalness and, for creatures of limited intelligence, the necessity, of limits. We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of what we are, what we have, what we have been given. If we always have a theoretically better substitute available from somebody or someplace else, we will never make the most of anything. It is hard to make the most of one life. If we each had two lives, we would not make much of either. Or as one of my best teachers said of people in general: "They'll never be worth a damn as long as they've got two choices."

To deal with the problems, which after all are inescapable, of living with limited intelligence in a limited world, I suggest that we may have to remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology and have a new look at the arts. For an art does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension but rather to enrich itself within bounds that are accepted prior to the work.

It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer's and the reader's memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. And probably most of us can name a painting, a piece of music, a poem or play or story that still grows in meaning and remains fresh after many years of familiarity.

We know by now that a natural ecosystem survives by the same sort of formal intricacy, ever-changing, inexhaustible, and no doubt finally unknowable. We know further that if we want to make our economic landscapes sustainably and abundantly productive, we must do so by maintaining in them a living formal complexity something like that of natural ecosystems. We can do this only by raising to the highest level our mastery of the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and , ultimately, the art of living.

It is true that insofar as scientific experiments must be conducted within carefully observed limits, scientists also are artists. But in science one experiment, whether it succeeds or fails, is logically followed by another in a theoretically infinite progression. According to the underlying myth of modern science, this progression is always replacing the smaller knowledge of the past with the larger knowledge of the present, which will be replaced by the yet larger knowledge of the future.

In the arts, by contrast, no limitless sequence of works is ever implied or looked for. No work of art is necessarily followed by a second work that is necessarily better. Given the methodologies of science, the law of gravity and the genome were bound to be discovered by somebody; the identity of the discoverer is incidental to the fact. But it appears that in the arts there are no second chances. We must assume that we had one chance each for The Divine Comedy and King Lear. If Dante and Shakespeare had died before they wrote those poems, nobody ever would have written them.

***
The same is true of our arts of land use, our economic arts, which are our arts of living. With these it is once-for-all. We will have no chance to redo our experiments with bad agriculture leading to soil loss. The Appalachian mountains and forests we have destroyed for coal are gone forever. It is now and forevermore too late to use thriftily the first half of the world's supply of petroleum. In the art of living we can only start again with what remains.

And so, in confronting the phenomenon of "peak oil," we are really confronting the end of our customary delusion of "more." Whichever way we turn, from now on, we are going to find a limit beyond which there will be no more. To hit these limits at top speed is not a rational choice. To start slowing down, with the idea of avoiding catastrophe, is a rational choice, and a viable one if we can recover the necessary political sanity. Of course it makes sense to consider alternative energy sources, provided they make sense. But also we will have to re-examine the economic structures of our lives, and conform them to the tolerances and limits of our earthly places. Where there is no more, our one choice is to make the most and the best of what we have.

****

Brightest Clouds Were Saturated

Earth and Moon as Seen From Mars

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 142 kilometers (88 miles) per pixel, an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disk of the Earth and the disk of the moon have direct illumination. We could image Earth and moon at full disk illumination only when they are on the opposite side of the sun from Mars, but then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail.

On the day this image was taken, the Japanese Kayuga (Selene) spacecraft was en route from the Earth to the moon, and has since returned spectacular images and movies (see http://www.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/selene/index_e.html).

On the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. These clouds are so bright, compared with the moon, that they are saturated in the HiRISE images. In fact the red-filter image was almost completely saturated, the Blue-Green image had significant saturation, and the brightest clouds were saturated in the infrared image. This color image required a fair amount of processing to make a nice-looking release. The moon image is unsaturated but brightened relative to Earth for this composite. The lunar images are useful for calibration of the camera.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the instrument was built by Ball Aerospace and Technology Corp., Boulder, Colo.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

***
The fool doesn't have a thought
as he sits in his house of sand.
Stupefied men say, "my house!"
That house you're sleepwalking in
isn't yours.
So many owners share this body.
As the city blazes the watchman
sleeps happily, thinking,
"My house is secure.
Let the town burn, as long as my things
are safe."

-Kabir
The Bijak

**
"Alaskan eskimos believe in many souls. An individual soul has a series of after lives, returning again and again to earth, but only rarely as a human. Since it's appearances as a human being are rare, it is thought a great privilege to be here as we are, with human companions who also, in this reincarnation, are privileged and therefore greatly to be respected."

Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek

**

"Frazer's first law of magic, then , is that "like produces like," an effect resembles its cause; and his second, that "things which once were in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed."

Myths To Live By
Joseph Campbell

***

"God is an earthquake not an uncle"

-Yiddish proverb

**

Humility is Endless

Humility is Endless

"It was T.S. Eliot who said once that the only lesson we can hope to learn is humility. "Humility," Eliot said, "is endless."

-Roger Housden



**
"The poet Ellery Akers speaks to the longing (for the perfect, the finished) in us in a poem called "Advice from an Angel":

I know it's in your nature to want air,
ozone. To float; to be free. But stick with what you know:
you'd be surprised at the effect of sheer blundering
and doggedness. To evaporate is nothing:
to sprint, to travel. It's weight
that divides the known and unknown worlds. It's your boots
that impress us, your squads of boulders...


In his ninth elegy of the Duino Elegies, Rilke says,

Praise the world
to the angel,
not the unsayable."


-Roger Housden

***
WHAT THE LIVING DO
-by Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days,
some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and
the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is
the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep headstrong blue, and
the sunlight pours through

the open living room windows because the heat's on too
high in here, and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries
in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And
yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my
coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a
hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What
you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come
and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want
more and more and then more of it.

but there are moments, walking, when I catch a
glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm
gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned
coat that I'm speechless:

I am living, I remember you.

**
Something I saw on my mother's nightstand, July 29, 1988

"More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.
Wherefore let thy voice rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
that nourish a blind life within the brain
If knowing God they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is everyway
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

When moral difficulties are taken so seriously where they torment and enslave man, because they do not leave him open to the freeing activity of obedience, it is there that his total godlessness is revealed."

**

Well!

Not too many people really knew my mother, far fewer understood her.

My mother's mind was a testament to the weighty , the dogged, the unwillingness to capitulate in the face of unbeatable odds.

She was herself entirely, for which I salute her and remember her tenderly despite the fact that she could be (and frequently was) hell on wheels.

Brilliant Literary Device

Bob Dylan: He's got everything he needs, he's an artist, he don't look back

The legendary singer/songwriter has an art exhibition opening in London next week and loves to talk about it. But you risk his 1,000-yard stare if you touch on his personal life

**

You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber

The integral philosopher explains the difference between religion, New Age fads and the ultimate reality that traditional science can't touch.

By Steve Paulson

***

Where do you think the scientific worldview falls short when dealing with religion?

Conventional science has correctly dismantled the pre-rational myths but it goes too far in dismantling the trans-rational. The mythic and magic approaches tend to be pre-rational and pre-verbal, but the meditative or contemplative practices tend to be trans-rational. They completely accept rationality and science. But they point out that there are deeper modes of awareness, which are scientific in their own way.

What do you mean by trans-rational?

People at these higher stages of spiritual development report a "nondual awareness," a type of awareness that transcends the dichotomy between subject and object. The mystical state is often beyond words. It is trans-rational because you have access to rationality but it's temporarily suspended. A 6-month-old infant, for instance, is in a pre-rational state, whereas the mystic is in a trans-rational state. Unfortunately, "pre" and "trans" get confused. So some theorists say the infant is in a mystical state.

Are you saying people with a rationalist orientation can't make these distinctions?

I'm saying that when people look at mystical states, they often confuse them with pre-rational states. People like Sigmund Freud take trans-rational, oceanic states of oneness and reduce them to infantile states of unity.

Why has the scientific worldview dismissed this trans-personal dimension? For most intellectuals around the world, the secular scientific paradigm has triumphed.

It's understandable. Historically, if you look at these broad stages, the magical era tended to be 50,000 years ago, the mythic era emerged around 5,000 B.C., and the rational era -- secular humanism -- emerged in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.

You can't prove a higher stage to someone who's not at it. If you go to somebody at the mythic stage and try to prove to them something from the rational, scientific stage, it won't work. You go to a fundamentalist who doesn't believe in evolution, who believes the earth was created in six days, and you say, "What about the fossil record"? "Oh yes, the fossil record; God created that on the fifth day." You can't use any of the evidence from a higher stage and prove it to a lower stage. So someone who's at the rational stage has a very hard time seeing these trans-rational, trans-personal stages. The rational scientist looks at all the pre-rational stuff as nonsense -- fairies and ghosts and goblins -- and lumps it together with the trans-rational stuff and says, "That's nonrational. I don't want anything to do with it."

So where does God fit into this picture? Do you believe in God?

God is a perfect example of how these two types of religion treat ultimate reality. You asked, "Do you believe in God?" In exoteric religion, it's a matter of belief. Do you believe in the kind of God who rewards and punishes and will sit with you in some eternal heaven? But in the esoteric form of religion, God is a direct experience. Most contemplatives would call it "godhead." It's so different from the mythic conceptions of God -- the old man in the sky with a gray beard. The word "God" is much more misleading than it is accurate. So there's a whole series of terms that are used instead by the esoteric traditions -- super-consciousness, Big Mind, Big Self. This ultimate reality is a direct union that is felt or recognized in a state of enlightenment or liberation. It's what the Sufis call the "supreme identity," the identity of the interior soul with the ultimate ground of being in a direct experiential state.

It does raise the question of whether God -- or ultimate reality -- has some independent existence, or whether this is just a mental state that our minds can conjure up.

That's right. One way we try to find out is by doing cross-cultural studies of individuals who've had the experience of the supreme identity and see if it shows similar characteristics. The most similar characteristic is it doesn't have characteristics. It's radically undefinable, radically free, radically empty. This formless ground of being is found in virtually all esoteric religions around the world. For the final test, take scientists with a Ph.D. who are studying brain patterns and put them in a contemplative state of the supreme identity and ask them whether they think that state is real or just a brain state. Nine out of 10 will say they think it's real. They think this experience discloses a reality that's independent of the human organism.

Next page: What neuroscience will never measure

***

Philip Kapleau, in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen Keys.

“Sitting astride the senses is a shadowy, phantomlike figure with insatiable desires and a lust for dominance. His name? Ego, Ego the Magician, and the deadly tricks he carries up his sleeve are delusive thinking, greed, and anger. Where he came from no one knows, but he has surely been around as long as the human mind. This wily and slippery conjurer deludes us into believing that we can only enjoy the delights of the senses without pain by delivering ourselves into his hands. Of the many devices employed by Ego to keep us in his power, none is more effective than language. The English language is so structured that it demands the repeated use of the personal pronoun “I” for grammatical nicety and presumed clarity. . . . All this plays into the hands of Ego, strengthening our servitude and enlarging our sufferings, for the more we postulate this I the more we are exposed to Ego’s never-ending demands.”

***

Relax. On a very deep and profound level, everything is okay. There is no need to fear. It’s the separation that hurts, but really it’s just an illusion. How can you really be separate from that in which you live and breathe and find your being? How could you ever be separate from Reality and Truth? Relax. There’s no reason to fight it.

Basically what I am proposing is that Satan is a brilliant literary device used to help you understand your own psychology. None of this really has to do with objective beings sitting over kingdoms of imaginary places full of flames and fluffy white clouds. This has to do with you. It’s your heart that this story is about. You are the characters in the Bible. Essentially, the entire Bible is about *you,* not events that happened 2000 years ago. It’s your story. Listen to it with all your heart and apply it in your life. It’s meant to help you understand yourself and transform yourself so that you can lead the best life possible…one of awareness of your true nature of unity with God/Reality, one of love and trust and compassion.

What do you think?

(from Common Ground)

***
link

"The human mind is a kind of original egg, endlessly hatching. Extraordinary and intimate transformations are continually secreted beneath the curved white bones of the cranium. They are always rippling beneath our thoughts, gestating within the oyster folds of the brain. Metaphor surges toward thought; dream becomes perception, perception becomes dream. Endless rich becomings that dream themselves serenely as one thing becoming another; this fluid state can be glimpsed underneath and in between the agitations of all the little schemes and notions of the self, the person we call "I".
Some of the ripples and murmurings we catch in daylight are associations, wordplay, puns, jokes, daydreams, fantasies, creative mishearings, mistaken glimpses, memories, hummed phrases, and those rich reflective thoughts you catch sight of as you step from the shower and reach for your towel. Other more deliberative footprints we might call novels, plays, films, paintings, sonatas."

- Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen

Interplanetary Travel is Wishful Thinking

Fight to escape from your own cleverness. If you do, then you will find salvation and uprightness
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

    --John Climacus

****

"Our fantasies of enlightenment are rather mechanistic. We'd never approach a work of art
the way that we approach our minds. But we think that if I have an enlightenment experience,
something static will happen. Nothing static ever happens. It's a river. It's always changing.
Your contact with your enlightenment experience will die to the extent that you hang onto
it in my own experience. So there's a lot about letting go and then you can have multiple enlightenment
experiences. Over and over again we have to let it go. We have to be a person - Lin-chi called it
"a person without rank." Because if you've got rank, you're a person walking around with a hat on,
a fancy hat of some kind, and some kind of role, and you're not living. And the ecstatic is there
everywhere. It's in every moment. It's not just in an enlightenment experience."

 - John Tarrant

***
Working
Mark Nowak
Harriet
Walk into any Target, Dollar General, Aldi, Taco Bell, or any of the other countless workplaces 
in the service sector strips that repeat themselves, ad nauseam, across the American
landscape, and look at the workers, particularly the adult workers,those people trying to raise
families or trying to supplement their (meager or lost) retirement, those just trying to survive,
and ask,

"What is the relationship between what (my) poetry has to say and her?

And him? And them? (And us?)"

(from wood_s_lot )

**



 Leonard Cohen Interview

Shambhala Sun

"I always felt it was of one piece. I never felt I was
going off on a tangent. Mainly because I think we develop images of
ourselves quite early on, and certainly one of the images I had of
myself came from reading Chinese poetry at a very young age. There was
a kind of solitary figure in some of those poems by Li Po and Tu Fu. A
monk sitting by a stream. There was a notion of solitude, a notion of
deep appreciation for personal relationships, friendships, not just
love, not just sensual or erotic or the love of a man or a woman, but a
deep longing to experience and to describe friendship and loss and the
consequences of distance. So those images in those poems had their
effect, and thirty years later, I found myself in robes and a shaved
head sitting in a meditation hall. It just seemed completely
natural(....)

What happens in meditations that last ten, fifteen hours is that you
run through your top ten erotic fantasies, ambition fantasies, revenge
fantasies, global ratification fantasies. You run through them all
until you bore yourself to death, basically, and the faculty that
produces opinions and snap judgments and unrealistic scenarios for your
own prominence, after you run through them for a number of years, they
cease to have charge. They bore themselves into non-existence. You see
them as diversions from another kind of intimacy that you become more
interested in—and that is what Socrates said: Know Thyself.”...(more) 
via NewPages Blog
and wood_s_lot  

***
Frederich Buechner

Christianity is mainly wishful thinking.  Even the part about Judgment and Hell
reflects the wish that somewhere the score is being kept.

Dreams are wishful thinking.  Children playing at being grown-up is wishful thinking. 
Interplanetary travel is wishful thinking.

Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on.

Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.

All Peeled Grapes and Self-Indulgence in Private

WE CALL UPON THE AUTHOR TO EXPLAIN
From THE TIMES:

Terry Pratchett, the fantasy writer suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, has suggested he may have found God after years of atheism. The 60-year-old creator of the Discworld series has spoken of an unexplained experience shortly after his diagnosis with the condition.

“I’m certainly not a man of faith, but as I was rushing down the stairs one day . . . it was very strange. And I say this reluctantly, because I am trying to deal with this situation in as hardheaded a way as I can. I suddenly knew that everything was okay, that what I was doing was right, and I didn’t know why,” Pratchett said.

“It was a thought that all the right things are happening in the circumstances; and I thought, ‘Well, that’s all right then.’ I don’t actually believe in anyone who could have put that in my head – unless it was my dad, and he’s been dead a few years.”

In an interview in today’s News Review, the author also said: “It is just possible that once you have got past all the gods that we have created with big beards and many human traits, just beyond all that, on the other side of physics, there just may be the ordered structure from which everything flows.

“That is both a kind of philosophy and totally useless – it doesn’t take you anywhere. But it fills a hole.”

Previously, Pratchett has said he was “rather angry with God for not existing”.

The novelist, who has sold more than 55m books, described his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s last year as an “embuggerance”.

COMMENT: Lovely and possibly the start of something important. Perhaps we could get a meaningful conversation going on life, the universe and everything, between atheists who are angry at God for not existing and those Christians who are angry at God for exactly the opposite reason. I expect we have much in common.

****


POSTED BY MADPRIEST

***

"Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'."

-- Rincewind discussing Twoflower (Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic)

There was a thoughtful pause in the conversation as the assembled Brethren mentally divided the universe into the deserving and the undeserving, and put themselves on the appropriate side.

-- The Elucidated Brethren see the light (Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!)

YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE? "Yes. Yes, of course." Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.

-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god).

-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

"All holy piety in public, and all peeled grapes and self-indulgence in private."

-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

"He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at."

-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil...prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...

-- (Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

Terry Pratchett

Apocalyptic Pop Prophecy

Shamanic cheerleaders

+

"Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action."

- Gandhi

"I can't understand why people are afraid of new ideas, I'm afraid of the old ones."

- John Cage

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


From: FreeWillAstrology.com

*PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA:

How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings*

is available for sale at amazon.

Here's an excerpt:

HYPE-OCALYPSE

Rank your favorite doomsday scenarios in order of preference.

____A new ice age

____Destruction of ozone layer

____Dramatic upsurge in earthquakes, volcanoes, and hurricanes

____Universal drug addiction

____Mass starvation

____Takeover by monsters created through genetic engineering

____Genocide of the imagination; lethal proliferation of dangerous images

____Terrifying, contagious superstitions spread by apocalyptic pop prophecy

____Insects and bacteria conspire to cull planet's most dangerous species

____Multinational corporate criminals create a single, globe-spanning totalitarian state with concentration camps that are the setting for popular reality TV shows

____Mutated flu strain becomes unstoppable plague

____Extraterrestrial invasion

____Cataclysmic degeneration of language into incomprehensible babble and cliché

____Anthrax and LSD dumped in water supplies

____Revolt of super-intelligent machines

____Stupidity becomes popular

____Mass hypnosis by evil political and religious leaders

____President, suffering from mental illness, goes berserk and nukes Mecca, Moscow, Beijing

____Virus from outer space

____Virus from inner space

____Essential natural resources run out

____Global addiction to porn results in accidental mass suicides through excessive masturbation

____Psychic terrorists administer mass brainwashing that causes millions to buy so many products they can't afford that they become destitute, can't afford health care, and die from diseases caused by eating junk food out of garbage cans

____The Internet births itself as a sentient global brain, but it's so riddled with spam that it becomes a god-like cripple suffering from the Artificial Intelligence version of Alzheimer's

____Earth is hit by comet, asteroid, or mini-black hole

____Wealthy philanthropists give everyone in the world $100,000, causing mass insanity

____Sun goes supernova

____Breakthroughs in disease control make it hard for people who are tired of living to die, leading to a pandemic of depression

____The devil possesses everyone in the world

____Nuclear war

____Other
(describe)______________________________________________
__


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Live Model
Marie Ponsot


Who wouldn't rather paint than pose—
Modeling, you're an itch the artist
Doesn't want to scratch, at least
Not directly, and not yet.
You think, "At last, a man who knows
How bodies are metaphors!" (You're wrong.)

First time I posed for him he made
A gilded throne to sit me on
Crowned open-armed in a blue halfgown.
I sat his way, which was not one of mine
But stiff & breakable as glass,
Palestill, as if
With a rosetree up my spine.
We had to be speechless too,
Gut tight in a sacring thermal
Hush of love & art;
Even songs & poems
Were too mundane for me to quote
To ease our grand feelings
So I sat mute, as if
With a rosetree down my throat.

Now I breathe deep, I sit slack,
I've thrown the glass out, spit,
Evacuated bushels of roses.
I’ve got my old quick walk
& my big dirty voice back.
Why do I still sometimes sit
On what is unmistakably like a throne?
Why not. Bodies are metaphors
And this one's my own.

*****
WHAT HAS BEEN DONE HAS BEEN DONE

Here is the truth: I will not wear the dresses I wore for either of my daughters' weddings ever again. I just need to give them to the thrift shop, while they are still in style..

And I will not read the magazines I've saved. Not even Martha Stewart Living. I will not make a lampshade out of photocopied autumn leaves or pillows out of ribbons. These are such painful thoughts that I cannot continue to write about them.

I think I will not use the stone bread baker I bought some years ago and have never used. It holds a long loaf that would feed a family of six with some left over, and there are only two of us. I make four smaller loaves every two weeks, and freeze them. One long loaf would sprout penicillin before we'd half finished it. I need to give that bread baker to the church for the Christmas Fair.

I will not discuss here the eight or nine teacher's copies each of Pride and Prejudice, Clarissa, Gulliver's Travels, Tom Jones, and every other novels of note from within the tradition of western letters. It is not my place: they are Q's. Besides, there is no need: somebody will just haul them away someday, and we'll be fine with that. Because we'll be dead.

This is the time when we want to shine the house, want to see vistas of empty, clean space within it. We want to look through sparkling clean windows at the garden outside, to have a place inside for everything and everything in its place. We want this, but all the duties that fill our days continue to fill them, and we are weary at the end of the day. We need to find a place of spiritual peace with this fact. Not all of our clean, crisp ideas of order will come true.

At least, not all of mine. They never do.

Night Prayer

Lord,
it is night.
The night is for stillness.
Let us be still in the presence of God.
It is night after a long day.
What has been done has been done;
what has not been done has not been done;
let it be.
The night is dark.
Let our fears of the darkness of the world and of our own lives
rest in you.
The night is quiet.
Let the quietness of your peace enfold us,
all dear to us,
and all who have no peace.
The night heralds the dawn.
Let us look expectantly to a new day,
new joys,
new possibilities.
In your name we pray.
Amen.

-New Zealand Prayer Book, p.184

+

By Barbara Crafton at Geranium Farm

Sunday Meditations

Mimi VL

Canticle

By: Mark Jarman

Beautiful repetition, the caress repeated, again,
That makes one say and repeat "Don't stop."

Reiteration, restatement, the beat brushed into skin,
The pulse responding to breath, counted, touched.

Beautiful pattern of change, cyclical as blood,
The axle pivots, the planet wanders.

The moon comes back and leaves, a total story or slice
Of life, shining with meaning, like a life.
Beautiful repetition, the haze of new grass
Rises from scattered seeds, a green dawn.

A chickadee's claim rings the seed bell by the window.
The world tilts too, a ball dented by song.

Look at it happen again, always in a new pattern:
Famine again, war, after the odd peace.

Habit, the great deadener, narrows our affections
To one face, reappearing in the mirror.

Look at it happen again, always for the first time:
Death of the father, the mother, absolute.

No way to bring them back, except to become them.
Tragic re-enactment, beautiful repetition.

****

F. Buechner

Christian

Some think of a Christian as one who necessarily believes certain things. That Jesus was the son of God, say . Or that Mary was a virgin. Or that the Pope is infallible. Or that all other religions are all wrong.

Some think of a Christian as one who necessarily does certain things. Such as going to church. Getting baptized. Giving up liquor and tobacco. Reading the Bible. Doing a good deed a day.

Some think of a Christian as just a Nice Guy.

Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father , but by me" (John 14: 6). He didn't say that any particular ethic, doctrine, or religion was the way, the truth, and the life. He said that he was. He didn't say that it was by believing or doing anything in particular that you could "come to the Father." He said that it was only by him -- by living, participating in, being caught up by, the way of life that he embodied, that was his way.

Thus it is possible to be on Christ's way and with his mark upon you without ever having heard of Christ, and for that reason to be on your way to God though maybe you don't even believe in God.

A Christian is one who is on the way, though not necessarily very far along it, and who has at least some dim and half-baked idea of whom to thank.

***

Unforeseen
Buechner

My own heart let me more have pity on," Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote... and then he goes on: "Leave comfort root-room; let joy size / At God knows when to God know what; whose smile / 's not wrung, see you: unforeseen times rather." Nor its it only the joy of God and the comfort of God that come at unforeseen times. God's coming is always unforeseen, I think, and the reason, if I had to guess, is that if he gave us anything much in the way of advance warning, more often than not we would have made ourselves scarce long before he got there.

***
In The Alphabet of Grace , Frederick Buechner writes,

"And yet it is in this same dark that like Thursday* I am commissioned. A face I cannot see, a voice that by faith alone I think I can recognize, says, 'Come,' says speak my true and lively word, says bring the good news into whatever bad news your feet may find, says translate such ragged glimpses of the mystery as you stumble on into F, G, H, I, J and into U, V, W. What's to be done? the plump Prince** asks, staring down at those morocco slippers. Uncork your felt-tip. Write the date at the top of the page. For all I know the whole creation holds its breath. The ant lays down its crumb and listens. I can think of a hundred places I would rather be. But this is my place."

[*refers to the character named Thursday in The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesteron; **refers to Prince Oblansky in Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy]

And,

"If there is in heaven or on earth or under the earth anywhere any justification for my presence at this table in this room it is that I have something so good to say that I can be forgiven everything else if I will only say it. I must believe that I have such a thing to say. I do not always believe it. Let somebody else now say it for me."

The book concludes with,

"Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. O Thou. Thou who didst call us this morning out of sleep and death. I come, we all of us come, down through the litter and the letters of the day. On broken legs. Sweet Christ, forgive and mend. Of thy finally unspeakable grace, grant to each in his own dark room valor and an unnatural virtue. Amen."

**

Karen Armstrong

Third Things

"In a circle of trust, we learn a "third way" to respond to the violence of the world, so called because it gives us an alternative to the ancient animal instinct of "fight or flight." To fight is to meet violence with violence, generating more of the same; to flee is to yield to violence, putting private sanctuary ahead of the common good. The third way is the way of nonviolence, by which I mean a commitment to act in every situation in ways that honor the soul."

*********

What T.S. Eliot said about poetry is true of all third things:

"Poetry may make us.... a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."

***

Parker J. Palmer
A Hidden Wholeness

***

A Vague Trace

Soul gave me this box of emptiness.
What I say is one truth I know. I

go to neither side of any argument. I
stay in the center letting explanations

rise from failure, this weeping witness
face, this saffron tulip, a vague trace.

Whoever understands me like Saladin
does, this is for you, this opening.

--Rumi

***

A Skill So Small As Mine

Here is a video from a coaching session with Byron Katie, author of Loving What Is and creator of The Work. Here is a powerful example of how she coaches someone through her fear of generalized anxiety in the future (click on link to view video if you can't see YouTube screen on this blog): I fear suffering in the future.

My biggest takeaway: "This moment is all there is. It is all there ever will be."

www.escapefromcubiclenation.com/.../spirit.jpg

***

from "Contemplative Listening"

Emily Dickinson:

They might not need me—yet they might—

I’ll let my heart remain in sight—

A skill so small as mine might be

Precisely their necessity—

The practice for all group members: Without stepping out of the practice for the listener-responder, a group setting requires the additional task of following the exchanges between the teller and other members of the group and moving with them to the next present moment. The conversation is not static, not simply each one in turn responding as an individual to what they heard in the story—the conversation moves and grows in the group. That means listening to what is now the reality, and responding to that reality, both its content and feeling tone. As in the pastor’s office, one listens within a dynamic reality of an unfolding story, one that is being created in this very moment of speaking, listening, responding, hearing.

Returning to the Dickinson poem: “I’ll let my heart remain in sight...” You, present. You, your heart “remains in sight.” Not intruding, taking over from the speaker, interpreting the speaker’s experience to him/her, just “remaining in sight” as a companion who hears, attends, waits, while God works directly in the teller. Like a sounding board amplifies a musical tone, so contemplative listening magnifies the teller’s experience so that he or she can “hear” it more fully, more deeply. Contemplative listening “hears another into speech.” as Nel Morton has so aptly put it.

As we tell stories in a group setting, the group members’ responses create a collage, each person polishing a small facet of the teller’s experience and giving it back to the teller. A few minutes of this kind of rich exchange can bring out whole new understandings in the teller. It’s not uncommon to hear: “I never made that connection before—it’s really true.” The most subtle and amazing thing happens as we tell stories to each other and try to respond contemplatively for a period of time. (#30) Communities are formed! Communities of shared life, communities of trust, communities of tears and laughter. People are affirmed. Do you know how rare it is to be really heard? What a precious gift, one that the receiver so often experiences as grace. . .

***

Contemporary Jesuit Willi Lambert has tried to summarize the essential operations of the Ignatian style of conversation:

1. Be convinced of the surprising worth of conversation, and thus of the importance of preparing oneself while recognizing that a really successful conversation is a gift.

2. Speak slowly, carefully and affectionately.

3. Listen with peaceful attention to the whole person.

4. Come to conversations free of prejudice

5. Rarely, if ever use arguments from authority to trump the other speaker.

6. Speak with modest lucidity.

7. Take enough time.

***

From blog "The Corner"

For me, spirituality is about connection and conversation. That is, becoming spiritual is about becoming connected to my Self, to others and ultimately, to Allah. It is also about conversation, or dialogue if you will, because in becoming connected it is necessary to communicate. For me, connection is a positive metaphor because it suggests a freely chosen association. It also suggests a deeper, inward meeting; when two hearts connect, the distance between them falls away and they stand as one.

Connection begins and ends in communication. The soul at rest (nafs al-mutma’inna) is able to converse, in the imaginal realm, with Allah. For those of us still on the open road, we need to converse to understand. I talk to my Self, to others and to God - to puzzle out this riddle of me, this strange thing called life. Conversation and connection therefore are really just another way of saying suhba (or sohbet) - ‘companionship’. Thus, I am being ’spiritual’ when I am honestly striving to connect, to communicate.

*****

"Spiritual Conversation, or Sohbet, is the heart of group practice. It is the connecting point of all the other activities: individual practice, group remembrance, music, study, social life, ethics. It is the primary relationship with the shaikh and the context n which people come to know one another. It is the activity that connects and makes sense of all others.

Sohbet is not sermon or lecture, but discourse, storytelling, encounter, and spiritual courtship. It is how God's lovers share and intensify their love."

***
In order to realize the potential of true sohbet, it is necessary to maintain an active listening and keep oneself out of the way in order to learn to attend. Without the proper quality of attention, it would be easy to drift off. Sohbet helps to develop a sustained attentiveness in the processing of ideas. Something vast opens up and connections begin to be made; one can absorb a lot of essential material. Sometimes we have to work to contain our enthusiasm to monopolize the group's attention We learn to weigh what really is important.

The way this is most often accomplished involves a clear understanding within the group that we have not come together for an exchange of opinions. It is necessary, first of all, to begin in a state of presence, usually after some preparatory inner work: meditation, inner exercises, and the like.

***
The way to God passes through servanthood. The point is to love and be connected with others in that love. The form of Sufi work is typacally a group, or spiritual guild. The Sufis created a milieu in which human love was so strong that it naturally elevated itself to the level of cosmic love. All forms of love eventually lead to spiritual love. " 'Ashq aosun'," they say in Turkish: "May it become love." The Sufis cultivated a kindness and refinement in which love fermented into a fine wine. They encouraged service to humanity as an expression of the love they felt. They accepted a rigorous discipline in order to keep the fire of love burning strongly.

***

from

"A Knowing Heart --
A Sufi path of Transformation"

Kabir Helminski

Hell n' Stuff

faith-theology

Hell's most wanted

In a memorable scene in The Empire Strikes Back, Princess Leia tells Han Solo: “Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf-herder!” To which he replies: “Who’s scruffy-looking?” Similarly, when the Day of Judgment arrives, at least I’ll be able to say: “Hey, who’s a sports fan?”

H/T Mrs Thinky

***

You Say Journalism, I Say Betrayal

03 June 2008

Sharlet: Harper's editor Bill Wasik and I talk about The Family and how the article we collaborated on as author and editor five years became a book. Here's an excerpt:

WASIK: I remember that when you were writing >“Jesus Plus Nothing,” the themes of secrecy and betrayal loomed very large in your mind. The Family was a self-avowedly secret group, engaged in essentially subversive acts of behind-the-scenes power-brokering. And you, meanwhile, were learning all this undercover, fully prepared to betray these young men with whom you lived. How do you look back on that betrayal?

SHARLET: I used my real name, I took notes openly, I told them I was a journalist and that I was working on a book (my first), about unusual religious communities around the country. I told them the title, too, Killing the Buddha. Maybe they thought I meant it literally. Regardless, they had a pretty full dossier on me. I even talked about writing and betrayal with them—I tend to agree with Joan Didion’s assessment that “writers are always selling somebody out.” It’s inherent in the process. “Undercover” is a funny word, in that many people think it means the journalist has some kind of secret identity, maybe a fake mustache. I didn’t—it wasn’t necessary. The Family couldn’t imagine that someone might learn to speak their language without sharing their beliefs.

That sentiment is reflected in a letter I found in The Family’s archive, from an inner circle leader to a South African operative. “The Movement,” he writes, “is simply inexplicable to people who are not intimately acquainted with it.” The Family’s political initiatives, he goes on, “have always been misunderstood by ‘outsiders.’” Then he talks about how whole projects have been hurt when Family members leak information to the public. “Thus,” he writes, in conclusion, “I would urge you not to put on paper anything relating to any of the work that you are doing… [unless] you know the recipient well enough to put at the top of the page, ‘PLEASE DESTROY AFTER READING.’”

This is one of my favorite documents out of the hundreds of thousands I reviewed because A, it’s funny—the recipient immediately wrote back to say that he understood and he’d made multiple copies of the letter for all of his associates, one of which I now have; B, it reveals the sense of persecution and victimhood which undergirds so much of that culture of secrecy on the right.

This secrecy is pragmatic—“The more you can make your organization invisible,” preaches Doug Coe, “the more influence it will have”—but it’s also a way for these very influential people to conceive of themselves as akin to the Christians of the first century, struggling nobly against a dominant culture of secularism. Family members imagine themselves as revolutionaries, even as they function as defenders of status quo power.

That kind of self-deception allows a writer only two real responses—deference, or betrayal.

I should add that the question of "undercover" has been one Wasik and I have been arguing about for years. I don't think I was undercover, he thinks I was. "Betrayal" is another one of those complicated terms -- he doesn't think telling stories people don't want you to tell is necessarily a betrayal, I do. He makes his case in a forthcoming anthology he's edited, Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person, in which "Jesus Plus Nothing" is included along with work by Charles Bowden, Barbara Ehrenreich, William Vollman, and Wasik's own undercover adventure, deemed a betrayal by some and a brilliant, deeply moral exercise in irony by me. Pre-order Wasik's book so you can decide for yourself.

**
3 Quarks Daily

CAN SCIENCE AND GOD EVER GET ALONG?

Tim Hames in The Telegraph:

A brilliant series of 13 short essays published by the John Templeton Foundation (at www.templeton.org/belief) offers different responses to the question: “Does science make belief in God obsolete?” The appeal of this slender volume is threefold.

The first part of its charm is the unexpected nature of many of the answers. Although about half of the contributors are in the “Yesish” camp, only one (Professor Victor Stenger) is willing to state unambiguously that: “Science has not only made belief in God obsolete. It has made it incoherent.”

Some of those whose opinions might have been considered predictable turn out not to be. Professor Robert Sapolsky is an outright “No”, because: “Despite the fact that I am an atheist, I recognise that belief offers something that science does not.”

Yet Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, answers both “No, and Yes”, because although he contends that the knowledge acquired by science makes belief in God “more reasonable than ever”, a reductive “scientific mentality” has, he says, “helped push the concept of God into the hazy twilight of agnosticism”. This is a brave concession from him.

The second element of the book’s appeal is the data that comes with some of the responses. Thanks to Christopher Hitchens (his answer was “No, but it should”)...

More here. Original debate here. [Thanks to Bilal Siddiqi.]

Posted by Abbas Raza | Permalink

***

CATHOLIC WOMEN PRIESTS NOW
AS GOOD AS ANGLICAN PRIESTS


Women who are ordained as priests will now incur automatic excommunication according to a new decree published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The decree was published in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, giving it immediate effect.

Fr Tom Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Centre at Georgetown University, told reporters he thought the decree was meant to send a warning to the growing number of Catholics who favour admitting women to the priesthood.

"I think the reason they're doing this is that they've realised there is more and more support among Catholics for ordaining women, and they want to make clear that this is a no-no," Fr Reese said.

Excommunication is usually "ferendae sententiae", imposed as punishment. But some offences, including heresy, schism, and laying violent hands on the Pope, are considered so disruptive of ecclesiastical life that they trigger automatic excommunication, or "latae sententiae."

COMMENT: Laying hands on the pope? No way! Not even with a barge pole as we say in these parts.

POSTED BY
MADPRIEST

Deep Healing

by Mimi VL


The wise know nothing at all -- well, maybe one song."

--Ikkyu

***
If you do not follow somebody, you feel very lonely. Be lonely then."

--J. Krishnamurti

**
Come out of the circle of time
and into the circle of love.

--Rumi

**
Whoever brought me here
will have to take me home.

--Rumi

**
Compassion is but another word for the refusal to suffer for imaginary reasons.

--Nisargadatta Maharaj

**
Fred preached an interesting sermon this a.m. about Bonhoeffer and
'religion- less Christianity' . Here was Bonhoeffer, back in Germany, his church having made its peace with Hitler. Who was opposing the tyranny? Those outside the church. To be sure, there were individual Christians who were resisting, but the Church, that is, Capital 'C' Church, had followed its institutional destiny and accommodated to survive. It had capitulated and contributed to the 'war effort.'

The first time I read 'The Cost of Discipleship' I had to quit reading because it was too scary. I've often thought that some of the kindest and most compassionate human beings I've met were not necessarily believers, or even particularly religious. The spirit of Christ is not confined to churches , creeds, sects, beliefs, goodness, righteousness or any particular thing. It's as if Jesus was saying, "You think that you know what God is about, what life is about, what the Law is about, but you are looking in the wrong places. When you wake up and look around, and begin to be transformed by God's love and respond to THAT, you won't believe it!

"Whoever discovers the true meaning of these sayings will never die:
Let the seeker not stop seeking until he finds. And when he finds, he will be greatly troubled. And after he has been troubled, he will be astonished, and he will reign over the All."
-Jesus of Nazareth (The Gospel of Thomas)

Bonhoeffer's home has been preserved and is known as a 'place of encounter.'
In his "Letters and Papers from Prison" he observes "The time when people could be told everything in terms of words is over." If the Kingdom of Heaven is here and now, Jesus is talking about a way of viewing and a way of living life. Jesus is describing a way of encountering life and human beings that will go against the grain. It is 'costly' grace, because that grace requires that we act, that we surrender to the transformation that God wants for us.

"Abandon the effort to 'make something of yourself' and throw yourself completely into the arms of God. When success has made us arrogant and failure has led us astray, we must come to the place where God loves and accepts us all. If this love is to be more than just words, it requires a response. This costly grace costs us our 'norms' -- our usual and accustomed ways and customs. Our tribalism our entitlement, our exceptionalism. This costly Grace is the incarnation of God, our own incarnation, our own response to the gift of grace. What would you attempt, if you knew that you could not fail?

I've been mulling over that last question -- in terms of some of the work I do. The trap that I fall into is to try to be 'the one' -- the magic person that heals that comes up with the answer that no one else thought of. It's all those kinds of temptations that keep me from true surrender. If I am anxious about MY success and MY outcome, I will miss the opportunity to do what God is showing me and asking me to do. I will miss the clues and the help that God always sends. I'll get stuck on me and miss the grace that might be offered. I miss the window, the invitation.

I run the risk of missing the prayer of my own heart.

My strengths tend to lead me astray, allowing me to believe that I have the power to work my will, keeping me stuck in the illusion of my own strength and effectiveness. It's subtle. Of course there is strength and effectiveness that is real and true. But the trap is to get stuck there and forget the prayer, the surrender. There is always something beyond that. That's where the deep healing takes place. The healing place is God doing it, not me.

**