Sunday Sermon IV

They Ask: Is God, Too, Lonely?
When God scooped up a handful of dust,
And spit on it, and molded the shape of man,
And blew breath into it and told it to walk—
That was a great day.

And did God do this because he was lonely?
Did God say to Himself he must have company
And therefore he would make a man to walk the earth
And set apart churches for speech and song with God?

These are questions.
They are scrawled in old caves.
They are painted in tall cathedrals.
There are men and women so lonely they believe
God, too, is lonely.
Carl Sandburg
from Harvest Poems 1910-1960; Harvest Books 1960

"I Am That I Am"

sums up the whole truth; the method is summarized in "Be Still."

To know the truth of one's Self as the sole Reality, and to merge and become one with it, is the only true Realization. Just be the Self, that is all.

Because people want something elaborate and mysterious, so many religions have come into existence. Only those who are mature can understand the matter in its naked simplicity. The ultimate truth is so simple; it is nothing more than being in one's natural, original state. It is a great wonder that to teach such a simple truth a number of religions should be necessary, and so many disputes should go on between them as to which is the God-ordained teaching. What a pity!

Your duty is to Be, and not be this or that.

The state we call Realization is simply being one's self, not knowing anything or becoming anything. It is not a matter of becoming but of Being. Because people love mystery and not the truth, religions cater to them, eventually bringing them around to the Self.

Whatever be the means adopted, you must at last return to the Self; so why not abide in the Self here and now? There is no greater mystery than this: Being Reality ourselves, we seek to gain Reality. Abide as the Self. Do not look for teachings...for the Self is beyond knowledge and ignorance.

- Ramana Maharshi, from The Essential Teachings of Ramana Maharshi- A Visual Journey

Meh

Since one was not concerned with the phenomenon of one's birth, why should one be concerned with phenomenon of death? Indeed, there really is no ONE who need be concerned with anything. It is only this very concern, in fact, that constitutes one's bondage as a personal entity.

Impermanence

Monk Mojo's 1,000 Cuts

Sunday Sermon III

Believe those who are seeking the truth.
Doubt those who find it.
Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)

Dzogchen Practice in Everyday Life

The everyday practice of dzogchen is simply to develop a complete carefree acceptance, an openness to all situations without limit.

We should realize openness as the playground of our emotions and relate to people without artificiality, manipulation or strategy.

We should experience everything totally, never withdrawing into ourselves as a marmot hides in its hole. This practice releases tremendous energy which is usually constricted by the process of maintaining fixed reference points. Referentiality is the process by which we retreat from the direct experience of everyday life.

Being present in the moment may initially trigger fear. But by welcoming the sensation of fear with complete openness, we cut through the barriers created by habitual emotional patterns.

When we engage in the practice of discovering space, we should develop the feeling of opening ourselves out completely to the entire universe. We should open ourselves with absolute simplicity and nakedness of mind. This is the powerful and ordinary practice of dropping the mask of self-protection.

We shouldn't make a division in our meditation between perception and field of perception. We shouldn't become like a cat watching a mouse. We should realise that the purpose of meditation is not to go "deeply into ourselves" or withdraw from the world. Practice should be free and non-conceptual, unconstrained by introspection and concentration.

Vast unoriginated self-luminous wisdom space is the ground of being - the beginning and the end of confusion. The presence of awareness in the primordial state has no bias toward enlightenment or non-enlightenment. This ground of being which is known as pure or original mind is the source from which all phenomena arise. It is known as the great mother, as the womb of potentiality in which all things arise and dissolve in natural self-perfectedness and absolute spontaneity.

All aspects of phenomena are completely clear and lucid. The whole universe is open and unobstructed - everything is mutually interpenetrating.

Seeing all things as naked, clear and free from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realise.

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."

To strive for such a state is a neurosis which only conditions us and serves to obstruct the free flow of Mind. We should also avoid thinking of ourselves as worthless persons - we are naturally free and unconditioned. We are intrinsically enlightened and lack nothing.

When engaging in meditation practice, we should feel it to be as natural as eating, breathing and defecating. It should not become a specialised or formal event, bloated with seriousness and solemnity. We should realise that meditation transcends effort, practice, aims, goals and the duality of liberation and non-liberation. Meditation is always ideal; there is no need to correct anything. Since everything that arises is simply the play of mind as such, there is no unsatisfactory meditation and no need to judge thoughts as good or bad.

Therefore we should simply sit. Simply stay in your own place, in your own condition just as it is. Forgetting self-conscious feelings, we do not have to think "I am meditating." Our practice should be without effort, without strain, without attempts to control or force and without trying to become "peaceful."

If we find that we are disturbing ourselves in any of these ways, we stop meditating and simply rest or relax for a while. Then we resume our meditation. If we have "interesting experiences" either during or after meditation, we should avoid making anything special of them. To spend time thinking about experiences is simply a distraction and an attempt to become unnatural. These experiences are simply signs of practice and should be regarded as transient events. We should not attempt to re-experience them because to do so only serves to distort the natural spontaneity of mind.

All phenomena are completely new and fresh, absolutely unique and entirely free from all concepts of past, present and future. They are experienced in timelessness.

The continual stream of new discovery, revelation and inspiration which arises at every moment is the manifestation of our clarity. We should learn to see everyday life as mandala - the luminous fringes of experience which radiate spontaneously from the empty nature of our being. The aspects of our mandala are the day-to-day objects of our life experience moving in the dance or play of the universe. By this symbolism the inner teacher reveals the profound and ultimate significance of being. Therefore we should be natural and spontaneous, accepting and learning from everything. This enables us to see the ironic and amusing side of events that usually irritate us.

In meditation we can see through the illusion of past, present and future - our experience becomes the continuity of nowness. The past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground?

We should free ourselves from our past memories and preconceptions of meditation. Each moment of meditation is completely unique and full of potentiality. In such moments, we will be incapable of judging our meditation in terms of past experience, dry theory or hollow rhetoric.

Simply plunging directly into meditation in the moment now, with our whole being, free from hesitation, boredom or excitement, is enlightenment.

by HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Sunday's Sermon II

Willing to die,

You give up

your will. Keep still

until, moved

by what moves

all else, you move.

Wendell Berry

The entire manifested creation presents a cosmic dance by the Divine Dancer, executed to the tune of time on the stage of space, and the dance cannot be differentiated from the dancer.
Balsekar

The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars. Fire and lightening and winds are there, and all that now is and all that is not.
— The Upanishads

"Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today,
at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least
we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so,
let us all be thankful." - Buddha

Memorial Day 25 May 2009

Soldiers are not chunks of identical clay; each of them has a story,
their own reasons for being caught in a war.

Brave? Maybe - sometimes, under some conditions. Scared, mostly.
The younger they are, the more likely their presence had to do with
restlessness, cockiness. The need to be part of a winning team, the
desire to even a score. Kick ass, take names. Kill them all, let God
sort them out.

The older they are, the more realistic they are. This was a steady
paycheck, or a way to supplement the one they already had. When
they join, it's with their eyes on the future benefit. When they're
in the middle of a war, they think only of surviving the next five
minutes. Please, God, please. Let me see my family again.

And when they die in the war, each death leaves a hole in the
world. It's important to remember that, to not see them as a
monolithic casualty list or as an acceptable loss.

No loss is acceptable. Ask the parents, the spouses, the children.
They try. They tell themselves stories of nobility, sacrifice, a
greater cause. They cover it up with the ritual rhetoric. But deep
down, they must wonder.

Here is how to count the cost: In high school graduation pictures
that will never be replaced with wedding pictures. In wedding
rings that will never be worn smooth by years. By the daughters
who will walk down the aisle with an uncle or brother instead
of Dad. By the sons who will find themselves angry and lost,
not understanding why. The children who will hear about their
mother's eyes, their father's chin but won't ever see themselves
reflected in that face. By the parents who now understand the
quiet obscenity of outliving their own children.


Each and every one of these deaths left a hole in the world.
That is why we count them.

They mattered

~Susan Madrax, Memorial Day 2005

In true acceptance of the will of God, there is no acceptor at all.
Ultimate understanding can only be pure silence. There is no
question of any "one" understanding anything or accepting
anything.
Ramesh S. Balsekar

James Kirkup 23 April 1918 – 10 May 2009

Damn the culture ministry

My lover from Asakusa, a blooming boy,
He who adorned his amber body
With a swirling tattoo
Of the goddess Kwannon surrounded
By ferns, wildflowers, flags
And had a capering carp
Illuminating each vigorous buttock —

He whose suit of ink,
Blue and black and dogrose pink,
Was the one garment
I could not divest him of —
When he pulled back
His periwinkled foreskin, he discovered,
Always with a broken smile,
A gay butterfly on the glans penis.

Now the Culture Ministry
Has proclaimed him
Not only a National Treasure, but
An Intangible National Treasure!

Now I no longer
Hold him in my arms like a warm
Sheaf of poppies and wheat, no more
Stroke that golden-amber shoulder
Stained with a lace of sugarbag blue,
No more bedew
With tears and kisses his
Empurpled butterfly...

I can't get my hands on him.
Our love is finished,
Broken by banal politicians.

Now he belongs to the Nation,
Which means he belongs to no one,
And especially not to me.
I always put him on a pedestal,
But not like this!
He might as well be behind glass,
Stuffed and docketed in the National Museum.


This poem appeared in the seminal anthology of gay
male poets edited by Ian Young in 1972: The Male Muse.

Halleluiah

Everyone should be born into this world happy

and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

~ Mary Oliver

Wonder of Silence

The wonder of silence, of being, of God, of nothingness, of awareness is that there is nothing you need to do to get anything or any of it. I repeat there is nothing that needs to be done, by you or anyone else. Pure Silence is, now. Our only problem is that we have been taught and conditioned by years and years of belief systems that we are not in touch with that which is infinite, that which is unnamed, unknowable and all mighty. And so we have invented philosophies and religions and techniques and there have been prophets and messiahs and teachers and gurus and a myriad of self-help seminars and books about it all. I say to you now, you need none of it. There is nothing to find out which is not already here right now. There is nothing to understand, nothing to learn ,nothing to experience, no enlightenment, no salvation, no heaven and no hell, no savior and no devil. There is only a subtle awareness you have right now that you are and that this awareness is gentle, silent and loving. You are the silence. All you need do is realize that by attending to that. Jesus said "the Kingdom of Heaven is within you." Yes, that is where you should look, within your very being, mind, brain, soul, whatever. See what is always there, always stable, always you. Once you see that, once you feel that, once you know that, there is nothing more to learn or know. Then you start to live your human life with it's myriads of problems and situations out of that. And your life is lived out of this silent peace and anything that arises in your life will be met in the Pure Silence and you will know how to respond to whatever comes your way, in truth, in compassion and in total reliance on that which contains you and is you.
- Mark McCloskey

Meditating deeply

... reach the depth of the source. Branching streams cannot compare to this source! Sitting alone in a great silence, even though the heavens turn and the earth is upset, you will not even wink.
~ Nyogen Senzaki

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.