Garbage and Roses

"What is real remains."

A principle text of Buddhism, the Prajnaparamita "Heart" Sutra, perhaps the principle text for all practitioners on the way is also called "the Heart of Understanding." This text is central to many and universal in its wisdom. It traces its roots within the Buddhist Canon back 2,000 or more years. Surely other traditions at that time had some access to it, and other like teachings.
Technology may have changed over that time, but the Heart, or Perfect Understanding Sutra in its reflection of human nature and practice has not. Despite the passage of time, it remains a reality.

For me a student of the Way, and a learner of the teaching, I have used other study texts to understand and learn more; however, the best one I have used whether in Zendo or on my own, is the 1988 translation and commentaries written by Buddhist monk and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of Understanding.
 It is written with emphasis to make the teaching more accessible to the Western mind. By writing the commentary on Garbage and Roses, he seeks to further our understanding of emptiness. "To be empty does not mean nonexistence... Emptiness is the ground of everything... if I am not empty, I cannot be here [in this moment] writes the philosopher, Nagarjuna... Empty is quite a positive concept... because you are there, I can be here."

"Neither defiled nor immaculate"

"Defiled or immaculate. Dirty or pure. These are concepts we form in our minds... A beautiful rose is pure, immaculate." A garbage can is dirty, evil, rotten. These are experiences that may fill our mind with the idea of the word.
Looking more carefully, more deeply, you will see that the rose is born out of the garbage. The garbage is composted, and forms the base of humus for the soil that the rose needs to survive. Organic gardeners know that in a few months, plant matter, and natural things, decay into compost. Thus roses and garbage inter-be.
They need each other! Likewise, the Buddhist teaching of the human Genesis is very short and simple, yet it is very deep:

This is, because that is. This is not, because that is not. This is like this, because that is like that.

Meditate a while upon this and you will see more clearly the inter-being of things. Sometimes, we in our lives, are like that because this is like that. We all inter-be. So, "we must be very careful. We should not imprison ourselves in concepts. We can only inter-be. We cannot just be." Only through the eyes of inter-being can we be freed of suffering, can we find forgiveness and blessings.

For example, many of us want to "be good." But we forget that part of good is evil. For without evil, what then is the good? "You cannot be good alone,' Thich Nhat Hanh states, 'you cannot hope to remove evil, because thanks to evil, good exists and vice versa...
So Buddha needs Mara to take the evil role so Buddha can be a Buddha. Buddha is empty; Buddha is made of non-Buddha elements... Buddha needs Mara in order to reveal himself... When you perceive reality in this way, you will not discriminate against the garbage for the sake of the rose."

Saint Paul needed Saint Matthew to become Saint Paul, who himself initially was a vicious persecutor of Christians, yet through a vision, and contacts with the disciples, with Saint Matthew the Evangelist, Paul (Saul) became transformed into one of the early Fathers of the Christian Church. Without Saint Matthew and others to open his eyes, like Mara and Buddha, he would not be Saint Paul of the Bible.
 Clearly that is because this is; it is the work of inter-being that we may look deeply to perceive that. The Feast of Saint Paul is June 29 in the Roman Church Calendar.

"So do not hope that you can eliminate the evil side. It is easy to think that we are on the good side, and that the other side is evil. But wealth is made of poverty, and poverty is made of wealth." And if we look very carefully into the world, into ourselves, we may see that we suffer, we bear the pains of all.

The Moon is Always the Moon

"There is neither increasing nor decreasing" --The Heart Sutra

Writing on the essential topic of the Prajnaparamita, the Heart Sutra, Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, notes in his commentary, The Heart of Understanding, that there is neither increasing nor decreasing. He says we, for example, "worry because we think that after we die, we will not be a human being anymore, we'll be a speck of dust."

We think that in terms of increase and decrease--to live or to die. But this is not so; Hanh teaches us that rather, the sutra means to say that big and small are concepts in our minds; they may not have any reality in the world, because everything depends upon everything else by the Buddhist principle taught as interpenetration, or inter-being.

Thus everything contains everything else. In the sun is contained the rain; in the moon is contained the moon herself, and everything that makes up the idea of the moon. It then cannot be destroyed, the idea alone is too small, too insignificant.
Mara, when in balance, is no danger any more than the Buddha. So, "when they assassinated Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., they hoped to reduce them to nothingness", Hanh writes. But no thing can be reduced to nothing.

Existing is matter within the elements of other things, of other persons, in the very molecules that constitute form. These molecules, persons and others in history, exist and continue to exist, perhaps more greatly than before, precisely because "they continue in other forms."
We, ourselves, continue their being. So let us not be afraid of decreasing. It is like the moon. We see the moon increasing and decreasing, but it is always like the moon." Suchness.

Ethics and the Universe Lights on Life

"The roots of heaven are of great emptiness, for in emptiness there is energy, incalculable, vast and profound." --Krishnamurti to Himself, by J. Krishnamurti

Writing in his book, Lights on Life Problems, Sri Aurobindo and Kisher Gandhi say,"the universe is not solely an ethical proposition, a problem of the antinomy [a contradiction or opposition] of the good and the evil; the Spirit of the universe can in no way be imagined as a rigid moralist concerned with only making all things obey the law of moral good, or a stream of tendency towards righteousness attempting hitherto with only a very poor success, to prevail and rule, or a sterner Justicer[sic] rewarding and punishing creatures in a world he has made, or has suffered to be full of suffering, wickedness and evil. 
The Universal Will evidently has many other and more supple modes than that, an infinity of interests, many other elements of its being to manifest, many lines to follow and many laws and purposes to pursue."
 
The law of the world is not this alone: that good brings good and evil brings evil; nor is its key, the ethical-hedonistic rule that our moral good brings us happiness and success, and that our moral evil brings to us sorrow and misfortune. 
There is a rule of right in the world, but it is the right of the truth of Nature and of the truth of the Spirit, and that is a vast and various rule which takes many forms that have to be understood and accepted before we can reach either its highest or its integral principle."

Many of us have these experiences in our lifetime. We, by chance encounter, perhaps with the police, are arrested unjustly, called out by others unfairly, lied to or about; while we maintain a stance in justice and truth, we are not rewarded. 
Rather, we suffer as did Mahatma Gandhi in calling attention to injustice in India, as do truth minded individuals protesting against any form of violence or destruction which can be imagined. Against the status quo, the faithful are castigated, humiliated, reviled, objects of malicious gossip.

Clearly as Aurobindo and Gandhi write, good doesn't always beget good. Just as often, at least initially, good begets evil--it stirs it up and it may be a long standing evil such as racism, slavery, war or any other thing against matters of human and social justice. 
And yet what is the response? In the end, as M. Gandhi demonstrated in India, where there is peace there is justice; where there is justice, there is faith; where there is faith, there is love. In the end then, finally, if we do love one another, we must find the way to love through faith, through peace and justice. Trust now becomes the issue.

Spirit, Grace, Tantra and the Bliss of Identity

Joy is prayer--joy is strength--joy is love. --Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Bliss of Identity

All nature is taught in radiant ways to move
All beings are in myself embraced
O fiery boundless heart of joy and love,
How are you beating in a mortal's breast!

It is your rapture flaming through my nerves
and my cells and atoms thrill with You;
My body your vessel is and only serves
As a living wine-cup of Your ecstasy.

I am a center of your golden light
And I its vast and vague circumference;
You are my soul great, luminous and white
And Yours, my mind and will, and glowing sense.

Your spirit's infinite breath I feel in me;
My life is a throb of your eternity. 

--Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems
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The Idea of Tantra 

When you are alone and in your own place, you are dancing for the god and identifying with it. This whole idea is basic to Tantra: to worship a god, you must become that god. No matter what you call the god or think it is, the god you worship is the god you are capable of becoming.
The power of a deity is that it personifies a power that is in Nature and in your nature. When you find that level, then you are in play. That is the work of art in general, because art is really worship.
 

--Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living

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Does God Exist? 

Perceptible and yet not perceptible; invisible and yet powerful, real like the energy--charged air, wind, storm, as important for life as the air we breathe: this is how in ancient times people imagined the Spirit, and God's "invisible" workings... Spirit as understood in the Bible, means--as opposed to flesh, the force or power moving from God. An "invisible" force that is effective, powerful, creative, or destructive for life in judgement, in creation, in history, in Israel and later in the [Christian] Church. It comes upon one powerfully or gently, stirring up love, ecstasy, often producing extraordinary phenomenon, active in great minds of courage, of Moses, warriors, singers, prophets and prophetesses.
The Spirit is not--as the word itself might suggest--the spirit of mankind. This is the Spirit of God, who in the [oneness] Holy Spirit is the light of all creation and the world. He is not any sort of magic, supernatural aura, or magical being of an animistic kind. The Spirit is the One, the God himself. He is God close to mankind and the world... comprehending, bestowing, but not bestowable, free, not controllable; he is life giving love, power and force. A wind blowing through all of Creation by divine will, but not by any force."
He comes where he is willed and stays afar from where he is not, in a sort of Divine wisdom, the Spirit waits to be called.
 

--Hans Kung, Does God Exist?

 

Thomas Merton: Union and Division

"We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord."

If you read these posts, and think perhaps, that the blog is misnamed, think carefully, look deeply, because the raft is not the shore. The way to enlightenment may be fast as Suzuki, or it may be slow; the simple mind sees in possibility. Revelation is ongoing in Buddhist commentary, as indeed it is in the oral Torah of Judaism, or in the Christ revealed. Thomas Merton, an important 20th century theologian, a member of the Catholic Christian sect, or order, the Cistercians, whose roots date back nearly a thousand years.

Thomas Merton was French, born in Prades, France. His parents, artists, Ruth and Owen Merton died when he was young. His early years were spent in the south of France; later, he went to private school in England and then to Cambridge University. By the time Merton was a young teen, he moved to his grandparents' home in the United States to finish his education at Columbia University in New York City.

Merton's active social and political conscience was also informed by his conversion to Catholic Christianity in his early twenties. In December 1941, he resigned his teaching post at Bonaventure College, Olean, NY, and journeyed to the Trappist (Cistercian) monastery, Abbey of Gethsemani, near Louisville, Kentucky.
There, Merton undertook the life of a scholar and man of letters, in addition to his formation as a Cistercian monk.

The thoroughly secular man was about to undertake a lifelong spiritual journey into faith and monasticism, and the pursuit of his own spirituality. His importance as a writer in the American literary tradition is becoming clear. His influence as a religious thinker and social critic is taking its place. His explorations of the religions of the east initiated Merton's entrance into inter-religious dialogue, placing him in worldwide ecumenical movements, in the spirit of Saint Peter (I Peter 3:15), "to give an explanation for the reason of our hope [that we may be as one]."
Excerpt from the website, Thomas Merton Society of Canada:

Union and Division

"In order to become myself, [my original face] I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself, I must go out of myself, and in order to live, I have to die [to myself].
The reason for this is that I am born in selfishness and therefore my natural efforts to make myself more real and more myself, make me less real and less myself, because they revolve around a lie."--Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Merton writes in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation, that "people who know nothing of God, and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world. They try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating... and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and the other men who have less than they, or nothing at all... they conceive of only one way of becoming real: cutting themselves off... and building a barrier of contrast and distinction... they do not know that reality is to be sought not in division, but in unity, for we are members of one another.'

"The man who lives in division is not a person but only an individual. I have what you have not; I am what you are not... thus I spend my life admiring the distance between you and me... The man who lives in division, lives in death.
He cannot find himself because he is lost; he ceases to be a reality...
Once he has started on this path, there is no limit to the evil his self satisfaction may drive him to..."

Finally Merton notes, the start of the Way for this man begins in emptiness; "I must look for my identity, somehow, not only in God, but in other men. I will not ever be able to find myself if I isolate myself." Co-union in support, in Sangha, is the beginning of the Way.

Acts of Liberation

"We must not discriminate." -- Cultivating the Mind of Love by Thich Nhat Hanh

Writing on the Ultimate Dimension, Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh points out in this book, Cultivating the Mind of Love, that there is a moment when, for each of us, we wake up to the moment, just this moment. We feel alive and vibrant.
 He writes about French author, Albert Camus who wrote in his novel, L' Etranger, that Mersault, in prison, condemned to die in three days, for the very first time, notices the blue sky. It was a sudden opening, a moment of mindfulness; he realized that he had spent a lot of time, as people sometimes do, feeling frustrated, imprisoned by anger, lust, or by notions that peace and happiness are out there, somewhere, sometime.
At that moment he saw, really saw the blue sky for the first time, it was a revelation to him. Life did have meaning; there were things that mattered to him. He could live his short time remaining deliberately, with awareness of sun and sky. His seeing deeply made his life real; it became his true life.

Hanh notes that many persons walk about in their daily lives as though they were dead, not noticing much or allowing the world close enough to be touched. He insists that these persons must be helped to realize that they matter; this realization is an act of liberation.
The Christian faith teaches that the Christ wears many different clothing; he has many disguises. Often others fail to recognize him in the sick, the poor or the lame. For Mersault God comes to rescue him with a sudden, burning realization of the beauty of Creation in the form of a blue sky. Anything might bring us to awareness of the Avatamsaka realm, we may wake up to this moment, just this moment and see the beauty and peace of it all. "We must not discriminate," Hanh insists.

On Right and Mistaken Paths

"If one not yet having attained true perception were to gather followers... discoursing from limited perception, he would become a demon and his followers hell-dwellers." --Bassui

Bassui writes, "The way of Zen began without the establishment of any sect. It is simply a religion that points to the original mind of all buddhas and ordinary people. The mind is nothing other than Buddha nature. To see this nature is what is meant by religious practice. When you realize your buddha nature, wrong relationships will disappear, will not be of concern, the dust of dharma will not stain you. This is what is called Zen. This real buddha is nothing other than the heart of all beings, the master of seeing, hearing, and perceiving."

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Misguided Students of the Way

Said Bassui, "They care only about their relation to the teacher and his name, not knowing whether he is a teacher of the Right or a misguided heretic. They count names, journeys to the East, West, North and South, and take pride in having met many teachers. Some may for example, place their faith in one place, spending their summer training there. During this summer period, however, they are just spending their time preparing for a pilgrimage in the Fall. Some may consider a summer and a winter place, counting the days. Others may hold onto sacred relics, secretly forming groups of three to five persons, discoursing upon inferiority or superiority among them... some burn their bodies, inflicting severe pain to their minds and bodies... Others ignore the laws of cause and effect, meeting others and desiring what they possess, they desire it for themselves. They love to talk Zen and wish only to be victorious in Zen combat. They talk of their long practice of Zen while they drag their juniors down the road of heresy."

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"Today's students of the Way go to teachers everywhere, but they don't want to penetrate all the way to the bottom of the great matter... They try to surpass others with great Zen stories and they collect paradoxical words and clever expressions from old masters. These are examples of the way of heretics." --Zen Master Bassui, 14th century Japan

Niccolo Machiavelli and Religion

“Hypocrisy is the tribute which vice pays to virtue.” --French thinker and writer, La Rochefoucauld

While many suppose that religion and politics are opposed to one another, the renaissance prince, Niccolo Machiavelli would disagree. Machiavelli lived in Florence, Italy; he was born there in 1469, the son of an established Tuscan family, and died in the city in 1527. His father was a lawyer working under the Medici regime. The Machiavelli family considered themselves to be republicans, that is to say they favored a republic form of government over despots.

While nearly 500 years have passed since his life, some things are more perennial than he. His world was one of the famous Florentine princes who succeeded in ruling over Italy's various city-states, or polis as Aristotle had referred to them 500 years earlier. As a modern nation-state Italy had yet to come into her own. She existed as a geographic place on the European map, composed of a number of cities, each which behaved as independent entities unto themselves. Thus to travel from one city to another, was to voyage into a foreign territory without citizenship beyond the city of one's birth.

It is in this world that the Roman Popes as well as the Florentines came to influence, one with religion and the others with political might bought by great financial acumen. It is also this world that is the setting for the Christian bible.

The advent of Martin Luther's famous dissent in the German states brought further angst to the renaissance world. Astonishingly Machiavelli's books were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559; the inquisition nearly led to the erasure of his books, and the Council of Trent later affirmed their inclusion on the Index. In 1579 French Protestants wrote and widely circulated pamphlets against the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli; even bard William Shakespeare mentions Machiavelli in his works! Over time his writings have been variously viewed as” the “devil,” pragmatic, amoral, and satirical, among others

As a religious thinker, Machiavelli was in his day, necessarily involved with religion. Under monarchy or emperorship, the Roman tradition of dictating religion to the masses was common, widely enforced and widely followed. It was this for which Machiavelli was most hostile.

Forgiveness, Sorting Through Your Secrets

"Some harm that people do to themselves or others may appear to 
outsiders to be less grave..." -- Forgiving Yourself by Beverly Flannigan

Many people find it difficult to forgive themselves for the simple, secret reason that they felt some benefit or pleasure from the now regretted experience. It may have been a sense of power, control, emotion, energy or mastery. It may have been a degree of delight in depriving another of a benefit such as needed material items, or the plain truth.

Keeping secrets for these reasons may make a later impulse to self-forgiveness more difficult; self forgiveness is self-confrontation and requires for many, a measure of courage. We don't like what we see in the mirror, yet we live with it day after day. Forgiving Yourself by Beverly Flannigan, discusses forgiveness and includes the issue of secrets.
 "Some harm that people do to themselves or others may appear to outsiders to be less grave than it is to the person unable to forgive himself. You may have been told that you 'did the best you could' or 'didn't know.' You may not have been able to listen to other peoples' condolences because you knew something no one else knew about the situation. For example, you may have felt momentarily good about hurting someone or physically aroused, assaulted, or angry at a person."

If what you know about your situation, you keep 'secret,' it likely is at the center of your inability to forgive yourself. Flannigan recommends to such transgressors that they write down as much as they can remember about the situation, include all the details without fearing the memory; express those parts of yourself in writing that you think or thought then, were unacceptable.
She advises the writing be kept in a safe place; refer to it as often as needed, adding details or feelings which you may have not recalled at first writing. This may take weeks as things surface in your mind.

Concluding this discussion Flannigan notes that, "With each phase of forgiving yourself, you come closer and closer to truth. Eventually you will expose more of your truth to another person."
  For now, the hard work of confronting what you most dislike in yourself takes you closer to the time you feel genuine relief and can say to yourself, "I feel whole, I forgive myself."

A Zen Koan, "What is this?"

There are many seemingly simple spiritual practices that when engaged often bring to a person some surprising and purely deep results. While many may interpret "simple" to mean naive or stupid, these are actually that word's lesser implications.
A check with your dictionary will likely reveal that its first definition is actually "free from guile; innocent; free from vanity, modest; singular, unified without clauses."

So from this one, simple practice, ask the question, "what is this?" Ask yourself often and sit quietly, listening for the answer, which will come if you do.
You may find this difficult to do because many times in fact, we want to run away from ourselves and our reasons. Why? For lots of reasons or no clear reason at all, like a habit. And like Nasrudin looking for his key the dark, the familiar seems so much better than anything else. That is until we discover what else there is.

What is it that you think; what are your habits? What is it that you feel? Can you label your thoughts, your feelings? Will you sit quietly long enough for them to present themselves? For many, labeling a thought or feeling is surprisingly a challenge. Will you sit for the days, weeks, months or the years that it may take?
Asking what is this is a first step in the "willingness to just be," as Zen teacher Eric Bayada describes in his book, Being Zen.

Salvation in History

"I think, therefore I am."   -- Rene Descartes, French philosophe

Not the least of accomplishments, the late Pope John Paul II was an artist, an actor, an able statesman for his Polish homeland, exhibiting both bold love for the people, and courage against their Communist oppressors; as well, he was a highly articulate Pastor, tending his flock as priest, bishop and later as Pope, the spiritual leader of the world's Roman Catholic Christians.

Despite his high scholarship and extensive intellectual abilities, it is sometimes less known that John Paul possessed a formidable intellect for the humanities, the sciences, mathematics and philosophy of all kinds. He had a great interest in astronomy. In one of his many works of literature and philosophy, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, John Paul chooses as his subject, salvation in history. Why does the Christian story of Jesus seem so complicated? Is God really so loving? What about other faith groups who look to their traditions for wholeness, peace, for salvation, for unity? John Paul II (JP II) muses that the answers are long, yet he endeavors to make them simple in this essay for those who are not philosophers, to better carry the message of salvation, as he sees it.

"To be redeemed in salvation, is a profound question." Many faiths' practice for spiritual redemption; it is not limited to Christians. Jews and Buddhists are two other faiths that come to mind. In history, salvation in the west finds its modern roots in the teaching of the Enlightenment thinkers of Europe. John Paul writes, "I put Descartes at the forefront, because he marks the beginning of a new era of European thought, and because this philosopher, who certainly is the greatest France has given the world, inaugurated a great shift in philosophy: 'I think, therefore I am'...the motto of modern rationalism."

"The objective truth of this thought is not as important as the fact that something exists in human consciousness." Descartes inaugurates the modern development of the sciences, including those humanistic sciences, ushering in the new, modern age of western thought.

The French Enlightenment ushered in the "cult of the goddess of reason." To those minds shaped by a naturalistic consciousness of the world, God is decidedly outside of the world. "God working through man turned out to be useless...to modern science, to modern knowledge...which examines the workings of the conscious, the unconsciousness. The Enlightenment, thus, put God, the redeemer to one side."

Consequently, man, divorced from traditions of faith, of spirit, is now expected to live by reason alone. The collected wisdom of the ages, ever present in traditional society is cast aside in favor of reason alone. The presence of a divine Creator, a loving intellect that knows the heart of his creation, that so loved the world, does not need God's love.

The modern world is self sufficient; thus this world must be the world that makes man happy. Yet in the world today, man continues to suffer in body and mind, in poverty and neglect, in loneliness and greed, this world suffers alienation, aimlessness, anxiety, poverty, and suffers alone. Science has not been its help.

"This world,' says JP II, 'in which knowledge is developed by man, which appears as progress and civilization, as a modern system of communication, in a structure of democratic freedoms without limits, is today a world in which man suffers." The world is not capable, despite its reason, to make man happy, to free him from his sufferings, his pain, his death; it cannot save man from evil, illness or catastrophes. Still, now today, the world needs, wants to be saved, to be redeemed and renewed.

Immortality is not part of the world; that is why the Christ speaks in the Gospels of God's love which expresses itself in the offering of his son, so that man may not perish, but have life, eternal. He came that man might be free in love, to lift him and embrace in a redeeming love. For love is always greater than any force of evil."

"The Easter story is the culmination of the story of the "return," of redemption possible and available to all humankind. The history of salvation "not only addresses the question of human history, but also confronts the problem of the meaning of man's existence. It is both a confrontation of history and metaphysics; the encounters between man and God in the world, the divine mysteries of souls constitutes the modern Church." --paraphrased.

Treasures, Our Abundance, Our Gift

While many of us have "stuff," collect stuff, keep stuff, we hang on to it-- even things we may no longer need or use. Sometimes we forget what stuff we have!
The more the stuff, the more the distractions taking us further from that really matters to us.  And while we are not all required to keep or give everything up, such as trading our day to day lives for that of a hermit, we might consider what we do have-- can we share?

While we may not feel an imperative to sacrifice, there are things we can do. First there is our treasure. Each one holds a treasure, stored up for just that moment. There is the tug then to share, because a candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.

Your personal treasures are your wealth, your abundance, be it knowledge, your wisdom or experience, ability, faith or talent. Often treasure is the things we value the most, and paradoxically have the least control over.
Spiritually your treasure is you, unique. It need not be perfect nor inimitable, but it is something you have a lot of and can share. Treasure encompasses wonder.

Treasure for French philosopher, Descartes, is among the Passions of the Soul, first published in 1649. Describing what he calls generosity and wonder he writes that these particular passions are caused, strengthened and maintained by some movement of the Spirit. And he admits to his correspondent, Elisabeth, that it is difficult to 'disentangle these from the body and soul.' Further, he makes an attempt to classify the passions in this same writing. And he addresses both generosity and wonder, "generous people do good without self interest, they are courteous, gracious and obliging, living free from contempt, jealousy, envy, hatred, fear or anger for others."
Finally he contends that the imagination plays a significant part on the imaging of ones' treasures and what one may really hold.

Gathering Communities

We gather together to work, to learn, to grow; we gather into communities, towns, universities. People everywhere, they live in groups, they live in families; they cherish their friends and they spend time together, supporting and enjoying their ways and their company. We get sick, we go to hospitals to help us recover.
What all these things have in common, with each of us in our everyday lives, is that inescapable fact that humanity, as a species, seems hard wired for gathering.

 Into groups we collect and revel. Together. It all seems so natural. Why, by working together, supporting and accomplishing worthwhile tasks, what could be better?
The person who lives stalwartly alone, who is friendless, who has very little or no community to speak of, that is a person often pitied and eyed suspiciously. We exclaim, "are they ill? Why are they such loners?"
This all makes simple sense. It seems so natural to gather, to enjoy the company of our brothers and sisters, our loves and loved here on earth.
Yet when the matter turns to named things such as 'religion', many of us recoil. Why? Well, it seems we don't think to belong after all. Some don't want to belong. Thus reinventing the 'spiritual' wheel is okay.

In fact, it's better than okay. It may be for these persons, the only way to demonstrate their will to 'pull themselves up by the bootstraps.' Many among us think, in spiritual terms, that there are aliens around us, to be avoided at all costs.
Infected with perhaps a strong sense of humanist enlightenment, a person with such notions eschews anything of community within the context of faith.

Yet if a faith community is true, existing for a higher purpose, for the common good, then it is, it must be and it will do something. Let me say this again: Churches, mosques, temples, ashrams and so forth exist because they do something for others.
If they do not, they they exist not for long. Communities survive and thrive because of the activities of each of its constituents. What each of us contributes to the good of all, is the community.

It is this fact that escapes many in the blog-sphere. Simply talking isn't sufficient, nor are kind thoughts or nice words and graphics. Communities must do something, and religious communities continue and persist for this very simple reason!
 Join the collective, engage in acts of social justice. Learn about yourself from another's eyes.
Help a friend. Be a community, be a support.

Wisdom Brings It Home

Proverbs 9:1-6

Wisdom has built her house,

she has set up her seven columns;

She has prepared her meat, mixed her wine,

Yes, she has spread her table.

She has sent out her maidservants; she calls

from the heights out over the city:

“Let whoever is naive turn in here;

to any who lack sense I say,

Come, eat of my food,

and drink of the wine I have mixed!

Forsake foolishness that you may live;

advance in the way of understanding.”

Sometimes, when I think I don't understand, I really do. If we are willing to open our ears, our hearts and even our minds, understanding is available to all. In the great wisdom of the world, we have been provided naturally with the means to make sense of our surroundings and the environments in which we find ourselves. This Proverb makes clear some of the ways to understanding.

The video here is the inter-denominational community of Taize, France offers a sense of the ineffable, the mystery of all that comprises wisdom.

Being "open" is simply a matter of being present and available just one more time than we are "closed." Just once more

Where Is the Self, the Non-Self?

"Love has very much to do with Bodhichitta...When you are animated by bodhichitta, the strong desire to devote yourself... is all you need." -- T.N. Hanh, Cultivating the Mind of Love

"Love has very much to do with bodhichitta," writes Buddhist monk and teacher, T.N. Hanh. "Love had to do with a strong desire to become a monk, to practice for a whole generation, and a whole society... Bodhichitta was our support and protection.
When you are animated by bodhichitta, the strong desire to devote yourself to the practice of dharma (dharmakaya) for the well being of others, is all you need. Bodhichitta is a source of power within you. The best thing you can do for others is to help them touch the bodhichitta in themselves. The seed of bodhichitta is there; it is a matter of watering that seed to bring it to life."

Hanh writes, "Where is the self? Where is the non-self? Who is your first love? Who is the last? What is the difference? How can anything die? If you want to touch my love, please touch yourself." Can water be grasped by its form? Can it be traced to its beginning? Do you know where it ends?

It 's the same with love. Love is without beginning; it is without end. "It is still alive within the stream of your being." Live now, consciously in the moment, looking deeply. Your world is a joy; your love lives. Looking deeply into your love, you discover that the Buddha lives.

"When the unreal is taken for the real, then the real becomes unreal;
when non-existence is taken for existence, then non-existence
becomes existence."
--Dream of the Red Chamber, by Tsao Hsueh-Chin

Pissing In the Wind

"The shadow gone autonomous is a terrible monster in our house..."
The Shadow by Robert Johnson


As children most us learn that you can't spit into the wind or throw sand into the wind; you get back the same result: it flies into your own face! But somewhere along the way to adulthood we seem very often to forget this truth. Many of us seek to level our relations with others by these very means. There are relatively few facts in the world; most are about nature herself. For example, day follows night and night evolves again into day; there is the sun and the moon and all the seasons exerting their force and pull upon earth and its inhabitants.

There are airplanes, and then there are pilots; drivers who drive cars; wind and ice which foils them, sometimes with injurious or deadly results. We like to think of our self as master of all, in control. The sad fact of physics is that often we aren't. For many this provokes a deep anxiety or unconscious dread. We are protective, even defensive of ourselves and our positions. This often leads to a sort of self blindness, not unlike that experienced by the Emperor in the Hans Christian Anderson story, The Emperor's New Clothes. Regular readers here will recognize the theme...
Simple acknowledgment of our desire to make things safe for our self in relations with others goes a long way to enlightening the mind.

In the spiritual life, we seek to find a unity with these unacknowledged parts of ourselves, parts which often riotously erupt at sometimes the most inopportune, the most inconvenient moments. For some the solution, at least temporarily, is to squelch or sequester these emotions, this energy out of sight and effectively, out of mind.
"In the cultural process, we sort out our God given characteristics... we begin to divide our lives." This process Robert Johnson calls, 'shadow making' in his book, Owning Your Own Shadow.
Without some measure of self-regulation, routine social interactions would become potentially very messy on a very regular basis. However these now "forgotten" traits don't often slink away; instead they lay in wait for another time. Lying in the darkness of the anterior mind, the shadow strength builds. In some it provokes deep depression or anxiety, in others a general mental disorder.

There is the sorting process which we think of as culture, by which the facets of the accepted and unaccepted self are rendered either active or passive; the active parts we think of as personality and the inactive become unknown, or from time to time emerge as 'bad manners' which culture seeks to rope in and regulate.
Yet this sorting process is "quite arbitrary," Johnson observes. For the spiritual growth of a person in mid-life, the two must reconnect for a balance, for unity to arise.
The Hindus for example, acknowledge the presence of the gods of creation and destruction simultaneously. In Hinduism, the balance of these natural forces is called Ananda.
In the west, the word we use to describe this same process is religion, from the Latin, it means to re-relate, to put back together again, to restore. It is in this move towards restoration that our spiritual selves find rest, peace and balance of the whole.

Christianity and India

"Christians living in Kerala astutely relate the Christ to the Vedic tradition."

Christianity in India is about as old as Christianity itself. In the south, in the Tamil province, especially, the cult of the Christian is especially well developed. In parts of India it easily adopted the Brahminic mode of expression. Syrian Christians living in Kerala engage in casting their horoscopes for example, and astutely relate the life of the Christ to Vedic traditions. In some regard, Christian-ways in these regions are ubiquitous; in turn it gives culture to India.

 The deeply imbedded notion of the Avatar inspires many. Through divining the personality of the Christ, Indians see the Christ as something of a Supreme Being, incarnated, come to earth to save mankind. The idea of wrong, of sin is overlooked. In this type of salvation drama, Christ, the Avatar is most appealing. Sabrania Bharati, a Tamil poet of national prominence and a Shakti devotee wrote:

My Lord expired on the Cross

and ascended in three days.
Beloved Mary Magdalene

 saw this happen.
Friends! Here's the esoteric sense.
The gods will enter us
and guard us from all ills 

if we transcend pride.
 

Mary Magdalene is Love,
Jesus the Soul.
The outer evil destroyed,
the good life sprouts.
She praised the radiance 

in that golden face.
That was the love of Magdalene,

ah, what joy!
If Sense is bound to the Cross of Truth,
and crucified with nail austerity,
Jesus of the strengthened soul 

will rise as the boundless sky

Magdalene is Eternal Feminine,
Jesus Christ is deathless dharma,
Draw we close to the symbol:
look, an inner meaning glows.

The poet does not mean to give a philosophical view here. Instead he is deeply moved to record his experience in poetry, the song of words. Praising the image of the Christ upon the Cross, he attempts to reconcile this image with the sure knowledge of deep suffering, of passion. Why should there be so much suffering? Is the persecutor Pilate to be the ever source of this suffering? What remains now of godliness, of mercy, of holiness? The heart in ascension rises and opens to the eternal, to hope.

How, muses the poet, shall we coax, the Lord of Hosts to enter our consciousness, making us the carriers of the imperishable Dharma? With Mary Magdalene as love incarnate, love then is the entrailing of the gods to combine the human with Jivatman and Supreme, the Paramatman.
Where love is expressed, smallness falls away; there lives instead the Divine, for God is Love, we learn. The Supreme responds to the sincere strivings of the Human being.

Another Indian of great repute, Sri Aurobindo also felt the indescribable pull towards the imagery of  Christ upon the Cross. Affected by the story of The Divine Comedy,  Dante who remarks with simple clarity, 'in His will is our peace,' reflects the view of Aurobindo equally himself.
Aurobindo freely engaged the life and gospels of the Christ in his own writings. For Aurobindo, the Christ represented the ideal, the strivings of the One to completeness, to wholeness. The Avatar, he believed, was significant for man's spiritual progress, for his ultimate ascension. In his epic poem, Savitri, he writes about the Christ as Avatar in a step towards human unity.

Centers of Light

 "Joy is prayer--joy is strength--joy is love." --Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Bliss of Identity

All nature is taught in radiant ways to move
All beings are in myself embraced
O fiery boundless heart of joy and love,
How are you beating in a mortal's breast!

It is your rapture flaming through my nerves
and my cells and atoms thrill with You;
My body your vessel is and only serves
As a living wine-cup of Your ecstasy.

I am a center of your golden light
And I its vast and vague circumference;
You are my soul great, luminous and white
And Yours, my mind and will, and glowing sense.

Your spirit's infinite breath I feel in me;
My life is a throb of your eternity.
--Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Idea of Tantra
When you are alone and in your own place, you are dancing for the god and identifying with it. This whole idea is basic to Tantra: to worship a god, you must become that god. No matter what you call the god or think it is, the god you worship is the god you are capable of becoming.
The power of a deity is that it personifies a power that is in Nature and in your nature. When you find that level, then you are in play. That is the work of art in general, because art is really worship.
--Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Does God Exist?
Perceptible and yet not perceptible; invisible and yet powerful, real like the energy--charged air, wind, storm, as important for life as the air we breathe: this is how in ancient times people imagined the Spirit, and God's "invisible" workings... Spirit as understood in the Bible, means--as opposed to flesh, the force or power moving from God.
An "invisible" force that is effective, powerful, creative, or destructive for life in judgement, in creation, in history, in Israel and later in the [Christian] Church. It comes upon one powerfully or gently, stirring up love, ecstasy, often producing extraordinary phenomenon, active in great minds of courage, of Moses, warriors, singers, prophets and prophetesses.

The Spirit is not--as the word itself might suggest--the spirit of mankind. This is the Spirit of God, who in the [oneness] Holy Spirit is the light of all creation and the world. He is not any sort of magic, supernatural aura, or magical being of an animistic kind.
The Spirit is the One, the God himself. He is God close to mankind and the world... comprehending, bestowing, but not bestowable, free, not controllable; he is life giving love, power and force. A wind blowing through all of Creation by divine will, but not by any force."
He comes where he is willed and stays afar from where he is not, in a sort of Divine wisdom, the Spirit waits to be called.
--Hans Kung, Does God Exist?

In Praise of the Holy Fool

"The soul prospers in the failure of perfection."--Thomas Moore

While we may perceive events either as immanent or as transcendent, the soul of a person knows no time but its own. When relating to others, it isn't always easy to open the soul to another, to risk opening the self, hoping that another person will be able to tolerate its sometimes rationality, and sometimes irrationality. It may also be equally difficult to be open, or receptive to the revelations of others.

The light of Oneness not withstanding, there is great temptation to separate, to judge, to make comparisons of these oddities of soul. Yet this mutual vulnerability is one of the great gifts of love. To give another sufficient space in which to live and express one's soul in its reason and unreason, and then to further risk revelations of your self, in all its potential absurdities may be perceived as quite loving.
The courage required for this process is not easy; it is infinitely more demanding than either judgment or comparisons. While most of us contain ourselves fairly well, the soul and its ways eventually surface bringing forth the unexpressed that we sense stirring inside.

We all have to some extent, a sense of the fearfulness of such an enterprise. Oneness by its nature asks that we move aside, that we move beyond with others to a place that may ask a share of soul in its completed form.
 In the story, In Praise of Folly, Erasmus says, "it is precisely in their foolishness that people can become friends and intimates. For the greatest part of mankind are fools... and friendship, you know, is seldom made, except among equals."

As modern thinkers, we may present to the world a well developed intellect, a sense of proportion, but the soul is more fertile in its own imagination, in its own earth, finding value in sometimes irrationality. Perhaps this is in part why great artists and inventive minds seem a bit eccentric or mad to the average onlooker. At times when seized by strong passions, our greatest anxieties often comprise the fear of being seen by others as foolish.
We fear in love, in Oneness that we appear irrational, foolish, but that is just the point. The soul is not the least concerned with reason or intellect. It operates more deeply, and more persuasively. So then, love in Oneness calls for acceptance of a Soul's less rational outposts, a recognition that a heart may contain both love and contempt.

We need not only to know more about ourselves, but also we need to love more of ourselves, in an unsentimental way; that is the way to oneness. Tolerance, "honoring that aspect of the self that may be irrational or extreme is the basis for intimacy," writes Thomas Moore.
We have fewer expectations of perfection, less judgement; less and less are we separated by these notions. We come to recognize that the soul, in its meanderings, tends to move into new and positive areas in spite of, and because of the oddities expressed.
In Oneness a beloved may be surprised by these developments, but not be undone by their unexpected appearance. The soul, the creative being, does prosper within the failures of perfection.

Fearing the Beloved

"Most of us go into relationships to find security; we want to be with someone else who makes us feel safe… Spiritually the answer to fear… [is] you are already safe." The Path to Love by Deepak Chopra

Writing about a compelling topic, a concern for individuals and societies the world over, Deepak Chopra in his book, The Path to Love, makes a simply profound observation. That is the simple realization that we are safe, as safe as we can be in any given moment.
If we have suffered previously, we are safe. What has occurred is past and we have survived it. It is spiritually unnecessary to make events "larger than life." Everything as a part of the whole has its place in the world. Traumatized though we may be by events, they are survivable.

It may be part of your life experience that you were left alone together with your mother by your father to fend for yourselves; possibly your experience has been war, or criminal acts; maybe you have experienced the effects of serious illness, possibly ongoing events such as cancer or mental illnesses like serious depression.
But it remains true that you have survived each and all of these events day by day! The worst is not, what is before you, as you fear; it isn't unknown.
 Looking into the face of an assailant or one who abandons you, treats you poorly, may well inspire fears, or it may initiate a 'substitute life,' one provoked by the mind's imagination.

"If you felt truly safe, fear wouldn't arise," writes Chopra. He makes the point that from a position of spirituality, all fears are projections, a term coined by psychologist Carl Jung to state that one's thoughts, feeling and perceptions are outwardly focused or projected away from the self in an effort to defend the 'ego' from jolts.
"As long as these projections continue, you will keep generating fearful situations to accommodate them… the threats you perceive around you now, or coming at you in the future are the long shadow being cast by your past."
In relationships of long time standing, we often counteract this impulse to fear precisely because the lengthiness of the relationship.
In other words, according to this observation made by Chopra, if it was going to happen, it has already occurred, and you have already survived the worst of it. There is nothing more to fear today.

Now in romantic love, we feel protected and loved. But it was love, all along, whose protection we sought. "The love you have for one person is a safe zone and thus a good place to begin.'
'The beloved is like a harbor" in which you may take refuge. In an effort to protect ourselves from pain or disappointment, we may perform many maneuvers, either consciously or unconsciously.

Spiritually it is something like the child who places their hands over their ears. It's good for muffling overly loud noises or frustrating conversations. But it isn't selective; it blocks out most everything. So our efforts to protect our self from what we fear, often also accomplishes the banishment of the possibilities for love.

We can begin to replace controlling with allowing, writes Chopra. "If you can begin to replace controlling with allowing to your Beloved, the effect is to release you from attachment--both of you are spiritually served from the same act."
Examples of allowing are things like letting go of controls such as judgment, impatience, resistance; these may be replaced by allowing yourself and others some tolerance, acceptance, and open, non-resistance. There is a great freedom here; energy is released for other, constructive uses.

"Needing to control life, either yours or your partner, is based on spiritual desperation." When you allow, the self-serving facade of a demanding, critical, impatient, perfectionist partner begins to crumble.
An easy, more comfortable friendliness then may take its place, at least, in increasing amounts. Blame becomes unnecessary, love flows as a heart-felt sensation.
So then, from Chopra's view, the most loving thing one can do is to encourage and support these shifts within our self and our Beloved.