Another Spring

The seasons revolve and the years change
With no assistance or supervision.
The moon, without taking thought,
Moves in is cycle, full, crescent, and full.

The white moon enters the heart of the river;
The air is drugged with azalea blossoms;
Deep in the night a pine cone falls;
Our campfire dies out in the empty mountains.

The sharp stars flicker in the tremulous branches;
The lake is black, bottomless in the crystalline night;
High in the sky the Northern Crown
Is cut in half by the dim summit of a snow peak.

O heart, heart, so singularly
Intransigent and corruptible,
Here we lie entranced by the starlit water,
And moments that should each last forever

Slide unconsciously by us like water.

~Kenneth Rexroth

"The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man extinguished his."
Hugo St. Victor, 12th Century.

In the smithy of the Sun

It is one of the wonders of science that we can tell exactly what distant galaxies, stars and nebulas are made of by a spectral analysis of their light. And the unsurprising answer is that they are made of exactly the same elements as the Earth. I say "unsurprising," but that is only from our modern perspective. For most of human history it was assumed that the heavens were made of other stuff, less mundane, more ethereal. But no. It's hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, and all the other familiar atoms that make up our terrestrial environment. But not in uniform abundances. There is about ten times more of the heavier elements -- carbon and oxygen, say -- relative to hydrogen and helium in the shell of an exploded star (such as the Cat's Eye Nebula above) than in the surrounding gaseous medium. That's because heavy elements are forged in stars as they burn, fused from hydrogen and helium, and when a star dies explosively it sheds these elements to space -- to perhaps become in the fullness of time other stars and planets. In the beginning, in the wake of the big bang, there was only hydrogen and helium. Stars, yes. Galaxies of stars. And big gassy planets like Jupiter. But no solid planets like Earth with cores of iron, shells of silicon and oxygen, and biospheres of carbon-based life. Many stars had to live and die in the arms of the Milky Way Galaxy to make the stuff of Earth and life. Starlight is the product. We are the ash. There are about 10²⁷ carbon atoms in a human body. That's 1000000000000000000000000000 carbon atoms, and every one was fused in a star that lived and died before the Sun and Earth were born. These atoms are passed around. I got mine from food, ultimately from the air and soil. I'm only using them temporarily. I'll give them back. Maybe some of my carbon atoms once resided in the body of Archimedes. Maybe some will eventually end up in my great-great-great-great -grandchildren's shoe polish or cucumbers. You can never step in the same river twice, said Heraclitus. Everything flows. We are a river of atoms -- we coalesce, we effervesce, we disperse. A human soul is an eddy in a whirlwind. Enjoy it while you can.
~~~Science Musings Blog

Death is Smaller Than I Thought

My Mother and Father died some years ago
I loved them very much.
When they died my love for them
Did not vanish or fade away.
It stayed just about the same,
Only a sadder colour.
And I can feel their love for me,
Same as it ever was.

Nowadays, in good times or bad,
I sometimes ask my Mother and Father
To walk beside me or to sit with me
So we can talk together
Or be silent.

They always come to me.
I talk to them and listen to them
And think I hear them talk to me.
It's very simple –
Nothing to do with spiritualism
Or religion or mumbo jumbo.

It is imaginary.
It is real.
It is love.
Adrian Mitchell

The Earth is a Satellite of the Moon

Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty

Apollo 3 cost more than Apollo 2
Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty

Apollo 4 cost more than Apollo 3
Apollo 3 cost more than Apollo 2
Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty

Apollo 8 cost a fortune, but no one minded
because the astronauts were Protestant
they read the Bible from the moon
astounding and delighting every Christian
and on their return Pope Paul VI gave them his blessing.

Apollo 9 cost more than all these put together
including Apollo 1 which cost plenty.

The great-grandparents of the people of Acahualinca were less
hungry than the grandparents.
The great-grandparents died of hunger.
The grandparents of the people of Acahualinca were less
hungry than the parents.
The grandparents died of hunger.
The parents of the people of Acahualinca were less
hungry than the children of the people there.
The parents died of hunger.
The people of Acahualinca are less hungry then the children
of the people there.
The children of the people of Acahaulinca, because of hunger,
are not born
they hunger to be born, only to die of hunger.
Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the moon.

Leonel Rugama


translation: Sara Miles, Richard Schaaf & Nancy Weisberg
from: Poetry Like Bread, Curbstone Press, 1994

Vaishakh Poornima

Lotus Lantern Festival celebrating
Buddha's Birthday, in South Korea

Laughing at . . .

LISTEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one's laughing at God when they're starving or freezing or so very poor

No one laughs at God when the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one's laughing at God when it's gotten real late
And their kid's not back from the party yet
No one laughs at God when their airplane starts to uncontrollably shake
No one's laughing at God when they see the one they love
Hand in hand with someone else and they hope they're mistaken

No one laughs at God when the cops knock on their door
And they say we got some bad news, sir
No one's laughing at God when there's a famine, fire or flood

But God can be funny
At a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke
Or when the crazies say He hates us
And they get so red in the head you think they're 'bout to choke

God can be funny
When told he'll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus
God can be so hilarious
Ha ha
Ha ha

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one's laughing at God when they've lost all they've got
And they don't know what for

No one laughs at God on the day they realize that the last sight they'll ever see
Is a pair of hateful eyes
No one's laughing at God when they're saying their goodbyes

But God can be funny
At a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke
Or when the crazies say He hates us
And they get so red in the head you think they're 'bout to choke

God can be funny
When told he'll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus
God can be so hilarious

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one laughing at God in a hospital
No one's laughing at God in a war

No one's laughing at god when they're starving or freezing or so very poor

No one's laughing at God
No one's laughing at God
No one's laughing at God
No one's laughing at God
We're all laughing with God

Thanks to jasimotx for the lyrics!

Kent State 4 May 1970

Here . . . .

The New Yorker

"Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and
effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now, all
is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only."
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

In the mechanics of intellect, conceptualization is a process where only one part of the mental operation is favored, not just by ignoring the other part but by specifically rejecting it. We have thus become so conditioned to accept the rational intellect and reject wild intuition that we feel ourselves enslaved by nature, where as it is not nature that enslaves us but our attachment to our particular interpretation of it. We forget that nature is not different from us - we are nature. Indeed, it is this separation from the rest of nature that we ourselves create which is the cause of all our conflict both within and without and of our wanton destruction of nature itself.
Ramesh S. Balsekar

Dance of the Five Elements

"Seeing all things as naked, clear and free from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realize. The nature of phenomena appears naturally and is naturally present in time-transcending awareness. Everything is naturally perfect just as it is. All phenomena appear in their uniqueness as part of the continually changing pattern. These patterns are vibrant with meaning and significance at every moment; yet there is no significance to attach to such meanings beyond the moment in which they present themselves.

This is the dance of the five elements in which matter is a symbol of energy and energy a symbol of emptiness. We are a symbol of our own enlightenment. With no effort or practice whatsoever, liberation or enlightenment is already here. The everyday practice of dzogchen is just everyday life itself. Since the undeveloped state does not exist, there is no need to behave in any special way or attempt to attain anything above and beyond what you actually are. There should be no feeling of striving to reach some 'amazing goal' or "advanced state."

~HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Onwards from AKQA on Vimeo.

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