Before The Flood

Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey

to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming.

W. S. Mervin

(Painting: Edward Hicks.)

Deep gratitude to Andrew Sullivan

This Dream

Why is it all so beautiful,
this fake dream,
this craziness?
Why?

Oh! green, green willow
wonderfully red flower,
but I know the colors are not there.

- Ikkyu 1394-1481

Earth Day 2009

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

~John Lennon

You are not an individual being, let alone an individual doer.
You're not even an individual entity! You are nothing. You
are merely a pattern of vibrating energy. Truly understanding
that, with conviction, will help tremendously.

The joke is that it is the ego, the "me," that wants enlightenment,
and enlightenment cannot come until the "me" is demolished.

Ramesh S. Balsekar

Watching

"Develop the witness attitude and you will find in
your own experience that detachment brings control.
The state of witnessing is full of power; there is
nothing passive about it."

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

It's All So Elegant

There is no attainment and no cultivation of original nature. You are Consciousness, not a farmer! Why work for that which you already are? Do not mentate, do not stir a thought. Trying to get out of superimposed bondage, which is the notion that you are separate from Existence, you will land in superimposed freedom.
- Papaji

A Week With Eckhart Tolle (day 1)

"Fear arises through identification with form, whether
it be a material possession, a physical body, a social role,'
a self-image, a thought, or an emotion. It arises through
unawareness of the formless inner dimension of
consciousness or spirit, which is the essence of who you are.
You are trapped in object consciousness, unaware of the
dimension of inner space which alone is true freedom."

A Week With Eckhart Tolle (day 2)

"Internal and external are ultimately one. When you no longer
perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when
there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently.
Love and compassion arise, and they affect the world."

A Week With Eckhart Tolle (day 3)

"Most people's lives are run by desire and fear. Desire is the
need to add something to yourself in order to be yourself more
fully. All fear is the fear of losing something and thereby
becoming diminished and being less. These two movements obscure
the fact that Being cannot be given or taken away. Being in its
fullness is already within you, Now."

A Week With Eckhart Tolle (day 4)

"Choice implies consciousness - a high degree of consciousness.
Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you
disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment
you become present....Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain.
Nobody chooses insanity. They happen because there is not enough
presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to dispel the
darkness. You are not fully here. You have not quite woken up yet.
In the meantime, the conditioned mind is running your life."

A Week With Eckhart Tolle (day 5)

"The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions,
the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and
education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships,
personal and family history, belief systems, and often political,
nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications.
None of these is you."

A Week With Eckhart Tolle (day 6)

"There is never a time when your life is not "this moment."
Is this not a fact?"

A Week With Eckhart Tolle (day 7)

"Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad
forms of life that are subject to birth and death. However, Being
is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost
invisible and indestructible essence. This means that it is
accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature.
But don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to understand
it. You can know it only when the mind is still."

The Long-Term Marriage

At last she's happy, reigning with her creams,
rubbing his scalp's roof until it gleams.
As the squamous-cell carcinomas sprout,
the local dermatologist cuts them out

or frosts the lunar surface with liquid nitrogen.
The creams come from West Fourteenth Street, Manhattan,
FedExed from their adopted son's boyfriend's home,
a relationship that remains, to them, unknown.


Their Oriental rugs are steeped in piss
from the bulldog barking like an activist.
Bickering over misplaced books, the tchotchkes
lost, and how she re-remembers her stories,

they wait with an unfinished, finished look,
and note how honeysuckle crowns Old Saybrook
and thistles overrun their last garden.
The dash between their dates is nearly done.
by Spencer Reece

Easter Sunday Sermon

I have often quoted here the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, mostly from the Duino Elegies or The Sonnets of Orpheus. We now have a new translation of Rilke's earlier The Book of Hours, by Susan Ranson, which I have been reading, and on this eve of Easter I offer a short poem from the First Book: The Book of Monkish Life.

I find your trace in all these things, in all
that like a brother I am careful for;
you sun yourself, a seed, within the small
and in the great give yourself the more.

This the mysterious play of forces, then,
that serve in things, over and under ground:
that rise in roots, narrow into the stem,
and in the crown like resurrection stand.

The poems of The Book of Hours, written when Rilke was in his mid-twenties, are as the title suggests addressed to God, but his is a strange and unfamiliar sort of deity. Not quite the transcendent God of the theist, who lives outside of the creation. Nor is he quite the immanent God of the pantheist who is manifest in all things. Rather, Rilke's God is concealed within the creation, within the poems even. The point of the poems, says Ben Hutchinson in an Introduction to Ranson's translations, is to create a "lattice-work" of rhymes and rythms through which the poet encourages God to grow. Rilke's God resides in the interstices of things. The poet -- the poem -- is "your pitcher," writes Rilke, addressing God. If the pitcher shatters that which might quench the thirst is dispersed. A curious God, this God of Rilke. I'm not sure if there is a name for his sort of religion. In a sense, it is an egotistical theology, making God's existence dependent upon the poet's apprehension. But it is also an enobling sort of theology, emphasizing our responsibility to nurture divinity -- to divinize the world. Anyway, the little poem above strkes me as an appropriate Easter meditation for a religious naturalist. On this equinoctial occasion, we praise the things -- call them divine if you wish -- "that rise in roots, narrow into the stem, and in the crown like resurrection stand."

Thanks to Science Musings Blog

When God is Gone, Everything is Holy, by Chet Raymo

Journeying god,
pitch your tent with mine
so that I may not become deterred
by hardship, strangeness, doubt.
Show me the movement I must make
toward a wealth not dependent on possessions,
toward a wisdom not based on books,
toward a strength not bolstered by might,
toward a god not confined to heaven.
Help me to find myself as I walk in other's shoes.

(Prayer song from Ghana, traditional, translator unknown)
Thanks to Joe Riley

(Prayer song from Ghana, traditional, translator unknown)

Two Diamonds

There are many reports of what are popularly considered "death-experiences", which are mistaken as evidence of what happens after death. These are in fact only hallucinations experienced by the ego arising from stimulation of certain centers of the brain before, not after, the completion of the death process. Most of the mystical phenomena recorded as yogic experience are of the same order, movements in consciousness experienced by the ego. But when man finally surrenders his miserable egoic individuality, there is no experience of anything. He is the Totality itself.

It is wanting that is the cause of bondage, irrespective of whether that wanting is for some material benefit or for realization. Man's viewpoint has become so inverted that he thinks of effortless, unfathomable contentment as an abnormal condition that must be attained through want by some special positive "spiritual" efforts!
Ramesh S. Balsekar

Ah, The Beauty . . . . . . .

"Discover all you are not. Body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, time, space, being and not-being, this or that - nothing concrete or abstract you can point out to is you. A mere verbal statement will not do - you may repeat a formula endlessly without any result whatsoever. You must watch yourself continuously - particularly your mind - moment by moment, missing nothing. This witnessing is essential for the separation of the self from the not-self."
~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

1st and Amistad

the frey

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." ~Henry Beston, The Outermost House

"When I'm sitting in a room making a record, I'm pretty much the master of my own universe. Then I step out the door: Forget it. If you sat like the Unabomber and just wrote a manifesto, it would be this completely self-contained psychotic document. But if you go to the store or a bar or to a friend's house, things are going to happen that are going to shift your life and take it off the line you thought you were on. That's the beauty of the ride. That's what we're here for -- to learn to roll with that ride," - Bob Mould.

The Readjustment

Awakening is a readjustment. The state is always present, it is our normal, permanent, real nature - as the Masters of all the doctrines never tire of telling us - but the conscious experience of it is denied us by a deviation of subjectivity on to a concept that, as such, is unreal, an object in consciousness appearing as its own subject. Until this phantom is exorcised by being exposed, subjectivity appears to be bound, and we cannot experience it as it is in reality. When this anomalous situation is understood, we need to start putting this understanding into practice, that is not just thinking about it, but experiencing it. There have been people, apparently born 'ready', for whom the fact of understanding has been sufficient in itself to produce the experience, but for the rest of us habit and practice are a necessary prelude to conscious experience of our reality. However it is important to understand that there is nothing to acquire, but only an error to be exposed, because acquiring necessarily involves using, and so strengthening that spurious 'I' whose dissolution we require. For this merely a readjustment is needed, such readjustment being the abandonment of identification with an nonexistent individual self, an abandonment which leaves us unblindfolded and awake in our eternal nature. To seek to persuade ourselves that we do not exist as individual entities is, however, to ask an eye to believe that what it is looking at is not there. But it is not we alone who have no existence as entities: there are not any anywhere in the reality of the cosmos, never have been, and never could be. Only whole-mind can reveal this knowledge as direct cognition which, once realised, is obvious. That is the total readjustment. And only 'I' remains. - Wei Wu Wei from Ask the Awakened: The Negative Way

Forgiveness is a Rebellion Against the Ego's Self-importance.

The path of forgiveness
is the path of freedom.
Ivan M. Granger

Saint Patricks 17 Mar 2009

The Lake of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

W. B. Yeats

Resting in the Paradox of Opposites

From one of the best Buddhist blogs on the innerwebs.
Here . . . MonkMojo's 1000 Cuts.

"To know itself the self must be faced with its opposite - the not-self. Desire leads to experience. Experience leads to discrimination, detachment, self-knowledge - liberation. And what is liberation after all? To know that you are beyond birth and death. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal creature, you created so much trouble for yourself that you have to wake up, like from a bad dream. "
~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field

The dim boy claps because the others clap.
The polite word, handicapped, is muttered in the stands.
Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

One whole day I sit, contrite, dirt, L.A.
Union Station, '46, sweating through last night.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.

Score, 5 to 3. Pitcher fading badly in the heat.
Isn't it wrong to be or not be spastic?
Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

I'm laughing at a neighbor girl beaten to scream
by a savage father and I'm ashamed to look.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.

The score is always close, the rally always short.
I've left more wreckage than a quake.
Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

The afflicted never cheer in unison.
Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves back
to stammering pastures where the picnic should have worked.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.
~Richard Hugo

Alice Walker's Open Letter to Obama

"We must learn actually not to have enemies,
but only confused adversaries who are ourselves
in disguise."
Full letter here. . . . .

"Edgy, Oxford-Educated Karen"

"METTA" ~Pali

An arresting part of a dialogue between Karen Armstrong and Bill Moyers:

KAREN ARMSTRONG: I used, you know, to be a really spiteful human being.

BILL MOYERS: No.

KAREN ARMSTRONG: I learned a vicious form of rhetoric from my religious superiors, and also, from my teachers at Oxford. You know? And people used to say to me, "I would really hate to be your enemy," because I have this very sharp tongue that I knew how to use it. And I get in first before someone put me down, that kind of thing.

I found that, in my studies I had to practice, what I found called in a footnote, the "science of compassion." There was a phrase coined by great Islamist, Louis Massignon. Science, not in the sense of physics or chemistry, but in the sense of knowledge, scientia, the Latin word for knowledge.

And Latin--the knowledge acquired by compassion. Feeling with the other. Putting yourself in the position of the other. And this footnote said that a religious historian, like myself, must not approach the spiritualities of the past from the vantage point of post enlightenment rationalism. You mustn't look on this in a superior way and look at the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing," a 14th century text as, poor soul, you know. And you had to recreate in a scholarly fashion, all the circumstances which had resulted in this spirituality or this teaching and not leave it, or certainly not write about it, until you can imagine yourself putting yourself in that position. Imagine yourself feeling the same. So when I wrote about Muhammad, for example, I had to put myself in the position of a man living in the hell of seventh century Arabia, who sincerely believed he had been touched by God.

And unless I did that, I would miss Muhammad. I had to put clever Karen, edgy Oxford educated Karen on the back burner. And go out of myself and enter into the mind of the other. And I found, much to my astonishment, it started changing me.

I couldn't any longer be quite as vicious as I was or dismissive as I was in the kind of clever conversations -

BILL MOYERS: Why? This is the first time I've heard of a born again experience beginning with a footnote. Was it your imagination that said, "I have to see this world the way Muhammad saw it and experienced it?"

KAREN ARMSTRONG: I said that this footnote is right. If I go on writing, as I had been doing up to this point for saying, "This is all rubbish." You know, I know it all. These poor benighted souls in the past didn't know what they were talking about. I was not fulfilling my job as a historian.

It was my job to go in and recreate it, enter into that spirit. Leave myself behind and enter into the mind and society and outlook of the other. It's a form of what the Greeks called ekstasis. Ecstasy. That doesn't mean you go into a trance or have a vision. It means-- ekstasis means standing outside yourself. Putting yourself behind. And it is self, it's ego that hold us back from what we call God.

BILL MOYERS: You speak of the change in you. You're talking about a personal transformation. But take the next step. What would bring about the kind of real change in society and in politics that would be an extrapolation of or a continuation in community of what you're talking about?

KAREN ARMSTRONG: Okay. Not to treat other nations or other... in a way that we would not wish to be treated ourselves.

BILL MOYERS: Unless they've attacked you.

KAREN ARMSTRONG: Even so, I mean, there was a chance after 9/11, you know, when something different could have been done...

Hat tip

The Daily Dish

On Barbie's Birthday

Buddhist Barbie

In the 5th century B.C.
an Indian philosopher
Gautama teaches "All is emptiness"
and "There is no self."
In the 20th century A.D.
Barbie agrees, but wonders how a man
with such a belly could pose,
smiling, and without a shirt.

~ Denise Duhamel ~