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David Hodges
Live Journal
Deeper Than Love
by D.H. Lawrence
There is love, and it is a deep thing
but there are deeper things than love.
First and last, man is alone.
He is born alone, and alone he dies
and alone he is while he lives, in his deepest self.
Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.
But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives
alone
and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy
and alone.
Love is a thing of twoness.
But underneath any twoness, man is alone.
And underneath the great turbulent emotions
of love, the
violent herbage,
lies the living rock of a single creature's pride,
the dark, naif pride.
And deeper even than the bedrock of pride
lies the ponderous fire of naked life
with its strange primordial consciousness of justice
and its primordial consciousness of connection,
connection with still deeper, still more terrible life-fire
and the old, old final life-truth.
Love is of twoness, and is lovely
like the living life on the earth
but below all roots of love lies the bedrock of naked pride,
subterranean,
and deeper than the bedrock of pride is the primordial fire of
the middle
which rests in connection with the further forever unknowable
fire of all things
and which rocks with a sense of connection, religion
and trembles with a sense of truth, primordial consciousness
and is silent with a sense of justice, the fiery primordial
imperative.
All this is deeper than love
deeper than love.
~ D. H. Lawrence
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fa20050105a3.htm
TANCHU TERAYAMA
Following the line to enlightenment
By T. ROBIN KELLEY
Special to The Japan Times
In order to write an article about renowned Zen master Tanchu
Terayama's Hitsuzendo calligraphy exhibition, I was offered the
rare opportunity to visit his mountain retreat in
|
| Tanchu
Terayama (top) bowing before his calligraphy
"Treasure True Insight" and (below) doing
ki-raising and breathing exercises. |
|
Like the master, she holds an inka (certificate of
enlightenment), and is qualified to teach Zen calligraphy.
I'm not an
In one exercise, she raised her hands and softly swayed in the
air, making the shape of the character mu (nothing). We
repeated the motion over and over, first with our arms, then with
our bodies, arching to the right and then slumping over
lifelessly, exhaling with the last kinetic "stroke."
What did all this have to do with calligraphy?
True to the spirit of Zen: everything . . . and nothing.
"[The exercises] are important in achieving 'no mind,'
" Terayama said the at the workshop. "With them we can
cut through the daily distractions of life. Then the line will be
clean and pure and those looking at it will be purified."
Terayama's teachings of Hitsuzendo (The Way of the Zen Brush)
were inspired by a lineage of Zen greats beginning with Yamaoka
Tesshu in the late 1800s, who sought to elevate calligraphy above
a fine art form to a spiritual tool for focusing the mind. What
makes Hitsuzendo unique is that it eschews the methods of
calligraphy prevalent everywhere.
The theoretical study of aesthetics, symmetry and form takes a
backseat -- Hitsu zendo would rather focus on the energy within
the line. "You're not trying to aim for attractive
lines," Moate said. "What happens is you become
awakened by the writing, and in that way you may produce
something beautiful, but that's not the goal."
This focus was apparent at the dojo when were were first asked
to practice by painting kanji on sheets of newspaper. Each piece
was whisked away as soon as the brush was lifted off the paper,
then folded and stacked on to a pile to be discarded. "The
idea is, nothing is precious," Moate explained.
If the quality of the line reveals the inner person, my inner
person was clumpy, uneven and prone to sailing off the paper. Yet
Terayama had nothing but praise for me, saying that the
characters were strong, and that I did a great job holding my
brush softly. "Soft but strong, you can't get much better
than that!" Moate whispered.
Such an encouraging approach, and handy English translation,
makes it hardly a surprise the workshop is popular with
foreigners. Terayama, a Rinzai Zen master, has taught more than
250 students from 10 countries, and the English translation of
his book "Zen Brushwork: Focusing the Mind With Calligraphy
and Painting," (Kodansha) is widely available.
Aiming for as broad an appeal as possible, the book includes
black-and-white photographs of Terayama and Moate practicing the ki
(vital energy) exercises in addition to a calligraphy how-to and
an appreciation of work by ancient Zen masters who have
influenced Hitsuzendo.
Moate started her search for for a master after receiving her
inka, which is the highest honor you can receive from a teacher,
it also represents the permission for you to become one.
Throughout her six years of study, Terayama and Moate have often
traveled to
Moate has also earned the distinction of being the only
foreigner with a piece of work in the Hitsuzendo exhibition
currently showing in
The exhibition will consist of an assortment of work from
students ranging in age from 20 to 97 years old. It also boasts
some museum-worthy relics from Terayama's personal collection.
One is a piece by Ekaku Hakuin (1685-1765). Terayama calls
Hakuin the most influential Zen monk of the past 500 years. A
prolific artist who produced over 1000 brush paintings and
calligraphy during his lifetime, Hakuin was one of the first to
develop breathing and exercise techniques to aid the study of
Zen. The piece is called "Settled" and reads: "Fix
yourself in the best place. Know exactly where to stop." It
was painted in 1765 and is one of Hakuin's most revered works.
"These are the kinds of treasures that people keep hidden
in temples and are only revealed at certain times of the
year," Moate says. "It would be like seeing an original
Leonardo [da Vinci], first-hand, not behind glass." Hakuin
was 80 years old when he created the piece. It is fitting since
the age of the contributors is one of the most striking aspects
of this exhibition. Shown alongside the work of his students,
Terayama has assembled calligraphy and paintings from many guests
-- all of whom are over 80 years old.
"Older people are more aware of the links between the
things in the natural world," Terayama said. The master
won't have much of his own work in the show. He said he will wait
a few more years for his 70th birthday, as exhibitions could
become distractions that will take over his world. For now, this
one will suffice.
"All I really hope for is that people will see it and
leave the exhibition feeling healthy and more uplifted,"
says Terayama. And as the master himself will be on hand to
discuss the work, visitors may even find the experience
enlightening.
The Hitsuzendo calligraphy exhibition will be shown till
Jan. 9,
The
(C) All rights reserved
http://www.globalideasbank.org/befaft/B&A-4.HTML
John Wren-Lewis
Professor John Wren-Lewis's review of Peter Weir's film Fearless
(now available on video in the
'... This knot intrinsicate / Of life at once untie!'
Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra
'All changed, changed utterly; / A terrible beauty is born.'
W. B. Yeats, Easter 1916
For readers of a publication like this, dedicated to showing
that dying doesn't have to be terrifying and can even be a
positive experience, Peter Weir's Fearless is a marvellous
gift. Perhaps the best evidence of its masterpiece status is that
airline companies haven't got together to buy up and destroy all
copies, lest the public be put off flying forever by its vivid
re-enactment of a jetliner crash from a passenger's eye view.
This occurs not just once in the film but three times, as the
hero, Max (superbly acted by Jeff Bridges), flashbacks to the
events that occurred when his flight home from Texas to San
Francisco crashed somewhere in prairie-country. The wreckage we
see in the film's opening shots is gruesome enough, but because
Max is meant to be discovering progressively more in these
flashbacks about what happened in the crash itself, each rerun
shows progressively more of the howling destruction going on all
around him as the plane breaks up, with no punches pulled and no
detail spared. Yet far from aggravating fear of dying, the final
effect is the absolute reverse. Weir has pulled off the
incredible achievement of enabling viewers actually to feel for
themselves how at such moments human consciousness can transcend
fear, and indeed mortality itself, by moving out of time.
So effective is it, I even wonder if the film wouldn't be
positively reassuring as in-flight entertainment on a bumpy run -
or perhaps that would be going too far! The same cautionary
thought makes me hesitate to press anyone with a really weak
heart to see it, though I've not heard of any casualties in
cinemas yet. But readers of this publication should be more
prepared than most to envision what are, after all, well-known
facts about death in air disasters, so having entered my caveat,
I'll go ahead and urge you to catch Fearless on the big
screen if you still can when this article comes out. If that's
impossible, get a video without delay, and sit as close to the
screen as you comfortably can when you watch it - because to get
the full 'feeling-message' from the climactic final rerun of the
crash, just before the film ends, you need to be surrounded by
the vision and sound.
Then, if you've really gone along with Weir's enormously
skilful lead-up to that scene in the rest of the film and can let
yourself experience the roaring, screaming disintegration with
Max himself, I believe you'll find a meaning you've never dreamed
of in Shakespeare's now hackneyed statement that love 'looks on
tempests and is never shaken'. I'll admit unashamedly that tears
were streaming down my face as I watched it, for it recaptured
for me the most important experience of my life, when I myself
came to the brink in 1983 and discovered, in the moment of
time-stop, that human consciousness is grounded in the same
fundamental energy that moves the sun and other stars and
tempests too - an energy for which 'love' is the only word we
have, though its common sentimental associations are hopelessly
misleading.
And from quizzing other viewers who have not had the
experience personally, I believe Weir's artistic genius has
succeeded in the almost impossible task of getting across even to
'outsiders' the fundamental feeling of Near-Death Experiences
(NDEs), and why they change lives. Earlier movies on the subject
which have tried to re-enact scenes of people floating up out of
their bodies and moving down tunnels to heavenly light, fall so
far short of capturing the life-changing feeling that I think
they deserve the Monty Python send-up in The Meaning of Life.
There, the middle-class couples who have died of food-poisoning
float out of their bodies into 'astral' forms, drive down the
tunnel in astral versions of their family cars, and find that the
light at the tunnel's end is a luxury hotel, with a
Hollywood-style Grand Christmas Cabaret perpetually in progress
'especially for you!)
Moreover it's not just lack of feeling in those feeble
re-enactment movies that sells the reality of NDEs short. The
feeling they do convey actually does violence to what I
believe to be the most significant feature of the experience, for
they suggest going away ffrom this world and this life to
find the heavenly light and love in some other realm, whereas the
life-changes that have impressed even hard-nosed sceptics into
taking NDEs seriously, happen because experiencers find their
eyes have been opened to light and love right here, in the
world to which they return on resuscitation. The genius of Weir's
film is that he starts from this fact and makes it the main focus
of his story; he builds up to the time-stopping climax as the
explanation of the extraordinary way Max has been changed by what
seems, at the beginning, like nothing more than the shock of
relief at having survived.
From interviews with Weir in the Australian media, I gather he
hasn't himself had an NDE, and I know nothing about the author of
the novel on which the screenplay was based, but between them the
folk responsible for Fearless have managed to capture the
feelings of a Near-Death Experience in an extraordinary way. For
starters, it's still not at all widely realised that all the
classic experiences which make the headlines when people are
resuscitated from the brink of clinical death - disappearance of
fear and pain, feelings of blissful peace, slowing-down or total
stoppage of time, even the famous tunnel and encounter with
celestial beings and heavenly light - can also occur to people
who, like Max, narrowly avoid death without being sick or
damaged in any way.
In fact one of the very first serious studies in this whole
area was made by a Swiss alpine climber named Albert Heim back in
the 1890s, who fell off a cliff to what seemed like certain
death, only to land on soft snow with very minor injuries. As he
went down, time seemed to become infinitely extended, fear
vanished, and he experienced wonderful colours and music, plus a
panoramic review of his life right from childhood, with a sense
that even his nastiest acts were now somehow accepted without
being in any way whitewashed. He was moved to write a scientific
paper about it when he found many other mountaineers had similar
experiences, but this received little if any attention outside
Switzerland, and wasn't translated into English until Professor
Russell Noyes of the University of Iowa did so in the 1970s,
after Raymond Moody had begun to draw attention to NDEs
experienced in clinical situations.
Even then very little attention was paid to this kind of
Near-Death Experience, because journalists - and for that matter
most professional researchers - were concerned mainly with
finding possible evidence of a soul that could survive the body's
death, which meant concentrating attention on people who might
actually have been dead for a short time, as in the movie Flatliners.
Australian sociologist Alan Kellahear, now at La Trobe
University, played a major role in drawing attention to the
similarity between clinical NDEs and the experiences of people in
crisis-situations like shipwrecks and air disasters. In Fearless,
however, this is one of the major plotlines. The movie's climax
is the revelation that Max's strange post-crash behaviour - an
apparently total loss of fear, disappearance of a long standing
allergy, an aversion to lying even for 'good causes',
estrangement from his wife and son while feeling great love for
another crash survivor who is deranged at the loss of her baby -
are due to his having experienced in the crash the same 'moment
of death' that recurs weeks later when he comes close to clinical
death through the return of his allergy.
The moral ambiguity of Max's post crash behaviour, which is
the film's main plotline, brings out another feature of NDEs that
doesn't get much discussed. Here again, researchers in the 1970s
and early 1980s had an agenda that led them to bypass important
facts. They were anxious to establish that NDEs were not just
hallucinations produced by disturbed brains, so they were at
pains to demonstrate, by means of interviews and psychological
tests, that experiencers showed no signs of mental sickness, but
were actually living healthier, more creative lives than before.
The impression created was one of 'all sweetness and light',
until in 1988 housewife researcher Phyllis Atwater of Idaho blew
the whistle in her book Coming Back to Life, by showing
that healthier and more creative living often involved upsetting
conventional domestic and social applecarts.
Yes, experiencers do indeed come back with new spiritual drive
and urge towards a better world, but that often means preferring
poverty to dull jobs that would keep families in the style to
which they're accustomed, helping strangers rather than going to
neighbourhood cocktail parties, and looking at scenery for hours
instead of taking Junior to Little League. Fearless
explores this issue with enormous sensitivity, showing how Max's
changed behaviour - sometimes generous beyond all expectation,
but sometimes apparently foolhardy or even cruel - springs from
his inability to countenance the compromises with fearful
self-protection that are involved in even the 'happiest'
marriages and the most 'regular guy' lifestyles.
In that timeless moment of the crash, he has experienced the
wonder of infinite Aliveness which gets continually blocked out
in so-called normal life by fearful evasion of any facts we've
been taught to find unpleasant. As a consequence, he rescues
several other passengers from the wreck in a way which they and
observers consider heroic, though to him it really is, as he
insists, nothing special. Yet the same 'fearlessness' later leads
him to take risks that could harm people, both physical risks
like crashing a car to jerk one of his fellow survivors out of
irrational guilt about the fact that her baby was killed and she
lived, and social risks like challenging the routine evasions
practised by insurance agents getting the best pay-out for crash
victims.
For Weir, however, the exploration of these moral ambiguities
is more than just a human drama; what makes the film a work of
genius rather than just a fine movie is the way he uses the story
of Max's perplexing behaviour to introduce viewers gradually,
step by step, to the experience of timelessness at the climax.
First, he joins some of those earlier makers of NDE re-enactments
in employing slow-motion photography, just to get us used to the
idea of time-sense being changed. In Max's first and second
flashbacks to the crash, we see how his rescue of other
passengers was indeed no heroic defiance but something he can do
quite naturally because time has slowed down for him, enabling
him to see how to avoid falling debris, etc. For me, this echoes
a story of my friend, Jack Geddes of
However, there's an added twist in Weir's presentation of the
rescue scene which I wonder if I may perhaps be the only viewer
to appreciate. As the plane breaks up all around, Max picks up a
baby and then calls out to the passengers who are still
relatively unhurt 'Follow me towards the light!' This apparently
straightforward directive about how they can get safely out of
the wreckage takes on highly symbolic significance when, in the
final climactic flashback to the scene, the long body of the
plane through which Max leads them becomes identified with the
tunnel of his allergy-NDE. Since he clearly wasn't asking the
others to follow him to the light of heaven beyond the grave, but
taking them back to life on earth, Weir seems to be anticipating
my own hypothesis (which I've never seen advanced by anyone else,
and haven't yet published outside Australia) that the
tunnel-to-the-light-phenomenon in NDEs is a discovery of
'heavenliness' as the true nature of this world when it's
perceived without the veil of fear. And since it is timeless
heavenliness, the question of whether it continues after physical
death is entirely secondary.
Weir keeps giving hints of Max's 'heavenly' experience of the
world all through the film - for example, in the way he finds the
buildings of San Francisco fascinating when others don't even
notice them, and is truly at a loss to understand how his
fellow-survivor (the girl whose baby was killed) fails to see
what he sees. Another example is his description of being free
from society's entanglements because death brings freedom and he
feels he's already dead. Some notable statements to this effect
have been made by real-life Near-Death Experiencers: One that
comes most immediately to mind is the great pioneer of humanistic
and transpersonal psychology, Abraham Maslow, who described the
blissful calm he experienced in the two years he lived on after
his near-fatal heart attack in 1968 as 'my posthumous life'.
But here again, Weir introduces a twist which resonates with
my own experience in a way I've not seen mentioned anywhere else
in NDE literature. Max tells the girl survivor as they walk
through the
The most interesting thing of all about the film as a whole
for me, however, is the way it explores what I have come to see
as the $64,000 question - why is it that something like a close
brush with death is normally needed for the heavenliness of the
world to be experienced? (And even that only works in a minority
of cases!) The film's answer, if I understand it right, seems to
be that the natural biological fear-response seems to have gotten
out of hand in the human species, to the point where it governs
the whole organisation of social life down to the minutest
detail, blocking out aliveness in the process. For the fortunate
minority, coming close to death unravels the knot, but then we
have the problem of finding out how to organise practical affairs
with fear as life's servant rather than its master, something
about which even the world's greatest mystics and religious
teachers have left us only very partial blueprints.
NDEs are often spoken of as rebirths; mine felt more like a
resurrection, because I was reconstructed with all my past
experience, but with the fear-response now operating 'to one
side', as it were, so that for most of the time I can heed it
rationally but not be run by it. For Max, however, the process
seems to have been incomplete, in that he doesn't seem able to
handle fear at all without it taking over and removing his pearl
of great price, which of course he won't allow. I find in his
story a quite uncanny parallel, in modern secular Western terms,
to what happened in real-life history at the beginning of our
century to the South Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, widely
acknowledged as probably the most truly 'enlightened' mystic of
recent centuries.
Though not at all given to religious life, he came to
recognise in his late teens that fear was in some fundamental way
keeping him from really living, so he put himself through what
might be described as an artificial NDE. He emerged from it
completely aware of the heavenly aliveness in all being, but
quite unable to cope with routine living along the line of time.
Because he lived in Hindu culture, where such consciousness
changes are understood and catered for, he was promptly
surrounded by devotees who looked after him almost like a child
for seventeen years, simply for the privilege of being in his
presence and hearing what few observations he chose to make about
reality. Towards the end of that time he began to have anoxial
fits, and after one of these he suddenly emerged able to cope,
with delightful ease and simplicity and astonishing efficiency -
the state known in Hindu philosophy as sahaj samadhi. It
was as if the resurrection-process had only gone halfway with his
artificial NDE, but now had completed itself.
I can't help wondering if the film isn't saying that Max too
experienced only a half-resurrection process because in the crash
he, like Ramana, didn't actually come to the point of real death.
In the film's climax, his inability to cope with society's
fear-organised conventions does indeed cause fear to overwhelm
him, making his allergy return and really take him to the
dying-point - and when his wife saves him by mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation, he comes back out of that tunnel saying, 'I'm
alive!' in an entirely new tone of voice and with a new look of
'solid' aliveness which I find a triumph both of acting and
direction. Are we to conclude that now the resurrection process
has gone to term, leaving him able to be in the world of
compromise without being compromised? And if so, will he stay
with his wife and child or not?
I don't know, and maybe when you see the film you'll have your
own views about what its ending means. Meantime, I hope I've said
enough to make clear that it's not to be missed on any account.
The remarkable story of Abraham Maslow and his 'post-mortem
life' is told in The Right to be Human by
Professor John Wren-Lewis, 1/22 Cliffbrook Parade, Clovelly
NSW 2031,
Excerpt
NONDUAL ECOLOGY
In Praise of Wildness and In Search of Harmony With
Everything That Moves
John McClellan
We can chose to regard all of existence as «alive», or we
can regard it as «not alive»; we can regard it as «both alive
and not alive», or as «neither alive nor not alive». These are
all valid ontological constructions. What we cannot do, is divide
existence into two classes, and call one of them alive, and the
other one not. One a 'natural', kind, pure and nice biological
nature, and the other a raw, unnatural, alien, bad and ugly
machine industrial nuclear warfare pollution starvation toxic
materialist greed poverty and television urban nature. There's
just one nature around here.
As environmentalists, we must learn this way too. Bowing to
what is, working hard and politely to improve it on a local level
at the same time. Not trying to change the larger design, but
simply contributing some tidiness and sanity to our immediate
surroundings. Keeping a nice camp in this great howling universal
wilderness, a reasonably safe and comfortable place where the
gods are honored, the children are cared for, and good fun is
had.
Outside such a camp there is Great Wildness. Sacred beings
roam out there, on the street, enjoying dangerous degrees of
sacred freedom. The gods are in charge out there. What they
choose to do and to leave undone is their business, not ours. No
one tries to control what goes down on the street, no one but
gangs, drug lords, and cops. You don't want to be like that. You
want to be a bodhisattva of compassion and awakeness, with
sympathy for all forms of life. You want to tiptoe through the
street in a state of reverence and awe, armed and able to defend
yourself, as necessary, as in any wilderness area. But basically
respectful of whatever you meet out there. Whatever. The
street, regional ecosystem, or planet, should be considered a
wilderness area, free to define itself, no matter what happens.
This is basic Wilderness Ethic, and is the first and greatest
rule of all deep ecology.
Reality does not need or want to be changed. It has gone to
great trouble to establish itself as it is, and it's perfect.
This very world of today, as it appears before us in all its
glory and horror, this is God's will. What is. Our role is not to
arrogantly critique this Great Perfection, picking and choosing
in it according to the conventional wisdom of the day-our job is
simply to join in with it. And there's no need to have a poverty
mentality about the life in this world. It is not now, and has
never been in any danger, no matter what happens on this
planet. There will always be plenty of good life-filled world for
us to join in with.
Don't Underestimate Any One
Everything moves. This alone should be enough to demonstrate
inherent aliveness. From mindless hydrogen clouds swirling
purposelessly in interstellar spacetime, to clouds of thoughts
swirling around in the brain, all cloud forms are the same. They
move-they have buddhanature. None of these patterns from
beginning to end have any greater or more distinct 'separate
self' than any other. All are meaningless, empty of personal
intent. All are falling into their own true nature, effortlessly,
along with all other illusory phenomena.
We must not underestimate them. All are beautiful to
behold, including the ugly ones, all are precious, including the
worthless ones, all are friends & relatives, even the
dangerous ones, even when they kill you! Their value cannot be
conceived in ordinary ways. Some of these (not all) have a
tendency to grow in complexity, energy, and information density,
to blow off greater & greater clouds of waste heat, to become
increasingly improbable, ephemeral and fragile. Others prefer to
stay simple. They are all good, because complete. Even the rocks
& clouds are like this, even the technobiotia. This good life
stuff is the swirling of clouds-nothing more-it's what evolution
does around here.