Breathing in and out
Isn’t just for the cushion;
It’s the entire thing.
If you practice just sitting,
This moment is everywhere.
Try to stop breathing,
And your attention can’t last;
You are mind and body.
Pretending at something else
Requires a lot of thinking.
Everything you do
Requires breathing in and out;
It’s all important.
So everything is sacred,
And that is also empty.
21 JUL 2024
In a dharma talk given July 15th for the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care (as part of their Summer 2024 Commit to Sit program), Zen teacher Norman Fischer said something quite interesting and profound. He was discussing the viewpoint and attitude toward life of Zen master Tongen Harada Roshi, who although Japanese was of the same generation as Norman’s father (and my father, as well) born in the late 1920s. He observed that each generation, each culture, each country, has their own unique way of defining and understanding what it means to be human – and that once everyone from that generation is dead, there is no one who really understands that point of view and how it affected and influenced the lives those people led, the choices they made, or the way they looked at relationships, religion, spirituality, friendship, love, conflict, or any other profound lens for the human experience. Norman, now in his late 70s, also noted that his own generation, those who grew up in the 1960s and experienced that whole counter-culture, e.g., hippies, free love, exposure to Eastern religions, the anti-war movement, the Kennedy assassination, the “birth” of television, etc., would soon suffer the same fate. Likewise, each of us living now – my own Generation X, across continents, countries, and cultures, for example. It made me think that ultimately, that inability to really understand another generation’s “definition of human” was the real failing of the “hard” sciences of anthropology, archaeology, and history. After all, the truth of my humanity is not defined in what I write down, or the long-lasting artifacts I create. It’s something much more ephemeral: a feeling, a notion, a sense of ennui, angst, fear or hope that pervades how I think, who I think I am, what I think is important, and who I include or exclude. To think that we understand the “mind” of Julius Caesar by reading his battle journals, or Sigmund Freud by his technical interpretation of dreams, is an illusion. Perhaps a useful illusion, but given that it’s filtered through our own judgment and definition of humanity, hardly a “true” and “accurate” grokking of reality. Makes you wonder. We THINK we know so much. We BELIEVE the world is the way we think it is. We have no idea, really. And the more fractured we become in our own time and place, the more that bucket of water you draw from the ocean that you believe to be the wholeness of everything and true representation of the sea, seems so small, separate, distinct, and alien to the bucket of water I draw from the shore just a few miles further down the coast. Neither is the whole ocean.
18 JUL 2024
With what great faculty would you describe
a something that is nothing in itself –
an emptiness that does not rise or fall,
but is and isn’t, both, at the same time,
and lights, but doesn’t land, adrift in time
(which is not quite a ribbon, nor a wheel),
a thought that thinking has no way to grasp
or shape into a solid universe.
Beyond, beyond, beyond what is beyond;
if you can see it, do not trust your eyes.
25 JUN 2024
Borrowed from Ed Book. After reading his results, I was intringued, but did not imagine that my own results would prove equally as insightful. I’m really quite surprised at how closely this set of ten selected interests REALLY sums up a good part of who I am.
Om namah shivaya
Split ends of clock’s tick and flee
from the circle of power where union is meet
in a cooper’s wheel, hard and hot like fire
from welding’s arc and concentrated blue flame.
It’s not so much the trip, he says,
but the fact that you are traveling together,
down dark and musty paths that lead
to places only memory maps can ponder.
The time, she says, the time is passing by
like blades of grass — we see the green in toto,
but each separate tine we step upon
like grains of sand on a beach.
He speaks of love and power and control.
It’s like this: isn’t it defined as someone who is freaked out
by the fact that they might be
under the control of another?
And isn’t it so: that when you ask someone
to admit they are controlling you
that you’re looking for a reason not to have control?
Love, she said, is not about control –
it’s not a question, at least, of how much
you control and mold and shape another,
but how much control you have over Self.
I cannot, she said, taken responsibility
for the fact that your life is unfulfilling,
that you are unhappy.
That is not my business,
and by asking me why I must control,
asking if I do want control,
you are making it my problem
without giving the responsibility to change it.
Furthermore, I cannot change it,
even if you or I wanted me to.
Because, she added, it is not in my power
to change anything except myself.
So, he asked, is it like that?
Then who is it that must suffer,
if you do not allow me to pick the lice from your head,
and yet do nothing yourself about them,
and so if I am to be close to you I must then be infected?
You choose, she replied, to suffer,
rather than to ask me, to command —
the lice or me —
or accept infestation as the price you pay
for what you want.
For that, that is your choice,
the only thing you can control.
If you ask me to make the choice
between cleanliness and you,
or dirtiness and solitude,
you are hoping to influence my decision
by controlling me, which IS control.
Hope, she said, is control,
if it is by hope that you want to change me.
Your desire for change in anyone but yourself is control,
for you have externalized upon me
your need to control yourself,
your desire to have the world conform
to a pattern you perceive yourself by,
rather than changing your perception
to admit yourself into the world as it exists.
You and I, then, he answered, cannot strike a compromise?
The only compromise you make,
that you have the power to make,
break or negotiate,
is with yourself,
between what you truly want and desire
(which, when considered and balanced
with the desires of the flow of the universe, is Truth)
and what you are afraid to face
in yourself and for yourself,
that is,
alone and tired,
destitute and cold,
you FOR and BY YOURSELF
are willing to accept
as your reality.
We need each other, you see,
not as pillars or beams to support us in our weakness,
but rather as parts of the same soul and being that share,
because of their own fullness,
the journey we all make together.
01 SEP 1995
