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#1820 - Sunday, June 6, 2004 - Editor: Gloria

Truth’s naked radiance,
Cut off from the sense and the world,
Shines by itself.
No words for it.

- Pai-chang (720-814)

 

Simply give away your beauty
without talk and reckoning.
You are still. She says for you: I am.
And comes in meaning thousandfold,
at last comes over everyone.                                       

                                -- Rainer Maria Rilke

If you want to perceive
And understand objectively,
Just don't allow yourself
To be confused by people.
Detach from whatever you
Find inside or outside yourself.
Detach from religion,
Tradition, and society,
And only then will you
Attain liberation.
When you are not
Entangled in things,
You pass through
Freely to autonomy.
- Linji (d. 867)  

~  ~  ~

  At my age, after you're done -- or ruefully think you're done -- with the nagging anxieties and complications of your youth, what is there left for you to confront but the great simplicities? I never tire of bird-song and sky and weather. I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.   - Stanley Kunitz at age 95, in "Reflections" in Collected Poems  

~  ~  ~  

"the holiness of the heart's affections"  

Kunitz: I do not subscribe to any organized religion, yet I think of myself as a religious person, and that's independent of any kind of faith or practice, or belief in God. While I was still in college I fastened on the phrase "the holiness of the heart's affections" in one of Keats's letters, and it has stayed with me ever since. To me, that's religion. "I am certain of nothing," he wrote, "but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination." Though I am in no danger of conversion, the poets you mention as early influences--Herbert, Donne, Blake, Hopkins--still speak to me and light the way.

- Interview: Stanley Kunitz. By Stanley Kunitz and By Mark Wunderlich  From http://www.poets.org/poems/prose.cfm?45442B7C000C04050876
 

  Lilyfrog photo by b: http://www.1heart.us/gallery/album36/02_G    

from The Manifestation  

Many arrivals make us live: the tree becoming
Green, a bird tipping the topmost bough,
A seed pushing itself beyond itself,
The mole making its way through darkest ground,
The worm, intrepid scholar of the soil--
Do these analogies perplex? A sky with clouds,
The motion of the moon, and waves at play,
A sea-wind pausing in a summer tree.

What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.
We come to something without knowing why.  
(--Poem, "The Manifestation" by Theodore Roethke)
 

'the moment of affective attraction'  

In 1949 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin made an extraordinary remark published after his death in The Future of Man. It is what he called 'the moment of affective attraction'. He was discussing the likelihood that one day we would all together move into a closer union, where our human nature would change for the better, and there would result a 'human totalisation'. The line of reasoning he used, which was in the form of one of his reveries, had in a mere footnote to his main arguments this quite extraordinary statement: 'This totalisation would take place within a field of affective attraction sufficiently intense to influence the human mass as a whole and at the same time'.

Television was in its infancy, commercial computers still ten years away, and the kind of expanded means of intelligence he predicted would become real for millions of us through the Internet in forty years time. But his almost outrageous statement was about a moment or event, which would bring us all together and change us. Could that happen? Has it already started to happen? Did a large proportion of the world's population ever experience something at the same time with such power that it changed how we think and live together?

-- the first NASA photographs of the beautiful, fragile blue and white Earth taken from space, our precious planet which we would never again take for granted and which we might now learn to protect

-- nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phue running naked, burned, crying in terror, from a South Vietnamese air attack

-- the world watching and praying as Apollo 13 limped home, millions wanting the crew to land safely

-- the vast number of people on the planet who experienced the Millennium

-- the 2001 attack on New York's World Trade Center.

Were these moments of affective attraction? Will there be more and then some day a big one? Will it be within the domain of war or love?
  - from "The global consciousness project" by Brian Rothery - http://www.philosphere.com/article25.html?&MMN_position=27:2:24

Anthem

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again,
I heard them say,
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.

The wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again;
the dove is never free

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed,
the marriage spent;
the widowhood
of every government--
signs for all to see.

Can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned up
a thundercloud
They're going to hear from me

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
There is no drum.
Every heart
To love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

(-- From: "Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs," by Leonard Cohen
McClelland & Stewart, 1993)

  Steve Dinan's Consciousness Timeline, which comes to Enlightenment.Com under Special Arrangement with the Transformative Community Network, is a marvel of brevity and depth.

Consciousness Timeline
by Steve Dinan

The following timeline is by necessity somewhat arbitrary and quite partial. The point is not to chart the minutiae of events constituting what I am loosely calling the "consciousness movement," but to give a sense for a few prominent milestones. The last hundred years have witnessed the gradual creation of a new world philosophy, one that sees human beings engaged in an evolutionary process to access a deeper, richer, more playful consciousness and to manifest the fruits of that work in the world. This new amalgam of ideas and practices has drawn from dozens of traditions, thousands of books and experiments, and millions of collectively focused lives. Drawing a firm boundary around this "movement" is thus misleading. It is better likened to the flow of a tumultuous river, its millions of eddies and currents creating, when seen from afar, a cohesive sense of direction. This timeline is best viewed as a snapshot of that river from high above.

 1875 - 1999 list:  http://enlightenment.com/media/essays/consciousnesstimeline.html

Ed note: Makes a nice reading list, or see how many of these books you may have already read.

Su Gandolf - NDS

"How then do we redefine the word 'listening' to include all the
interacting phenomena that occur when a deaf or hearing impaired
person is talking to a friend, walking alone on a beach, occupying
his spot in the world on any particular day? The ears of such a one
miss much. The wonder that is the human body seems willing to soar
over the gap. When earth's auditory energy is received as a whisper,
or perhaps not at all, other senses become sharpened, grasping
communicative clues we have forgotten, in the rush of life, are
there. Listening becomes visual, tactile, intuitive.

Listening...perhaps...is just a mind aware...."

--from Listening: Ways of Hearing in a Silent World, by Hannah Merker

The subtlety of seeing and hearing
Transcends mere colors and sounds.
The whole affair functions
Without leaving traces,
And mirrors without obscurations.
Very naturally mind and dharmas
Emerge and harmonize.
- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091-1157)

Gill Eardley - Allspirit Inspiration

"To no longer resist the present is to see that there is
nothing but the present--no beginning, no end, nothing
behind it, nothing in front of it. When the past of memory
and the future of anticipation are both seen to be present
facts, then the slats to this present collapse. The boundaries
around this moment fall into this moment, and then there is
nothing but this moment, with nowhere else to go."

~Ken Wilber 'No Boundary'

~  ~  ~

From Lankavatara Sutra:

What is meant by nonduality, Mahatmi?

It means that light and shade, long and short, black and
white, can only be experienced in relation to each other;
light is not independent of shade, nor black of white.
There are no opposites, only relationships.

In the same way, nirvana and the ordinary world of suffering
are not two things but related to each other. There is no nirvana
except where the world of suffering is; there is no world of
suffering apart from nirvana. For existence is not mutually
exclusive.

~  ~  ~

"Every man who has once touched the level of the
impersonal is charged with a responsibility towards
all human beings: to safeguard, not their persons,
but whatever frail potentialities are hidden within
them for passing over to the impersonal."

~Simone Weil
'Human Personality'

Do not be concerned with who is
wise and who is stupid.
Do not discriminate the
sharp from the dull.
To practice whole-heartedly
is the true endeavor of the way.
Practice-realization is not
defiled with specialness;
it is a matter for every day.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

I feel sorry that I cannot help you very much. But the way to study true Zen is not verbal. Just open yourself and give up everything. Whatever happens, whether you think it is good or bad, study closely and see what you find out. This is the fundamental attitude. Sometimes you will do things without much reason, like a child who draws pictures whether they are good or bad. If that is difficult for you, you are not actually ready to practice zazen.

This is what it means to surrender, even though you have nothing to surrender. Without losing yourself by sticking to a particular rule or understanding, keep finding yourself, moment after moment. This is the only thing for you to do.
(pp. 75-76, "Finding Out for Yourself," in not always so, practicing the true spirit of Zen, by Shunryu Suzuki)

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