Reclusland

The more a man studies the obstacles and deceptions which lie in wait for him at every step in this realm, the more convinced he becomes that it is impossible to travel the path of self-development on the chance instructions of chance people, or the kind of information culled from reading and casual talk.

At the same time he gradually sees more clearly—first a feeble glimmer, then the clear light of truth which has illumined mankind throughout the ages. The beginnings of initiation are lost in the darkness of time, where the long chain of epochs unfolds. Great cultures and civilizations loom up, dimly arising from cults and mysteries, ever changing, disappearing and reappearing.

The Great Knowledge is handed on in succession from age to age, from people to people, from race to race. The great centers of initiation in India, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, illumine the world with a bright light. The revered names of the great initiates, the living bearers of the truth, are handed on reverently from generation to generation. Truth is fixed by means of symbolical writings and legends and is transmitted to the mass of people for preservation in the form of customs and ceremonies, in oral traditions, in memorials, in sacred art through the invisible quality in dance, music, sculpture and various rituals. It is communicated openly after a definite trial to those who seek it and is preserved by oral transmission in the chain of those who know. After a certain time has elapsed, the centers of initiation die out one after another, and the ancient knowledge departs through underground channels into the deep, hiding from the eyes of the seekers.

The bearers of this knowledge also hide, becoming unknown to those around them, but they do not cease to exist. From time to time separate streams break through to the surface, showing that somewhere deep down in the interior, even in our day, there flows the powerful ancient stream of true knowledge of being.

To break through to this stream, to find it—this is the task and the aim of the search; for, having found it, a man can entrust himself boldly to the way by which he intends to go; then there only remains “to know” in order “to be” and “to do.” On this way a man will not be entirely alone; at difficult moments he will receive support and guidance, for all who follow this way are connected by an uninterrupted chain.

(full quote can be found here)

Mahayana motivation is born with the arising of bodhichitta. The Sanskrit boddhichitta is made up of two words: bodi, enlightenment, and chita, mind or heart; it may be translated as the “mind of enlightenment” or “heart of enlightenment”.  (The word chitta refers to the seat of human intelligence, which is considered to reside in the heart center.  Since it includes general awareness as well as affective capacities, chitta is actually considerably broader in meaning than the English word mind.)  It refers to the unconditioned intelligence of a realized buddha, existing within each sentient being.

The birth of bodhichitta is like a clear, fresh spring appearing in a dry desert.  The dry desert is the territory of the ego, where everything is preplanned, expected, and under control.  Nothing can grow in this environment, because the ego itself is noting more than dry sand.  The ego, in fact, is opposed to life as too disturbing to its territoriality.  Into this dead environment of ego, we have brought our Hinayana practice.  Through this, we have dug down, deep beneath the lifeless desert.  Now the miraculous spring of boddhichitta appears, pointing to the enlightened wisdom that exists in a limitless reservoir beneath the desert’s surface.

And now for something a little different.  A free-write, of sorts, which I will be leaving up for a while (ie: no new posts), so as to give people a chance to read it.  Let me know what you think…

A vast dry wasteland, nothing but scrub horizon to horizon, the sky distant above. Blue canvas, white smears, intentional perhaps, but only subjectively so. A wind arises, not a “languid” wind because “languid” implies sensuality. “Apathetic”, perhaps, but oilier than that. “Unctuous”, but less morally abhorrent. This very wind oozes out along the plane, picking up tumble weeds here, turning on itself in the sudden frenzy of whirling there. Grains of sand are blown about, scattered like refugees, so used to these sudden abductions that they are numb; empty husks in the hands of the careless wind. Above, the clouds stir restlessly, like a lover, horny but only in the half-dead way brought on by a hot summer morning spent over-long in bed.

I should not go back over and read this, because it does not matter what it says, it only says what it said when it was saying it, and now it is saying this, and now it is saying this and now it is saying this. To hold a concern what it was saying moments ago is to make this into something other than it is. This is a wet cough of a paragraph, that is all. A white space filled with phlegmy goo. Want to see? Well… I didn’t want to show it to you anyway. There should be an exclamation point at the end of that last sentence, but there’s not. Or, I should say, it might seem like there should be an exclamation point, but there shouldn’t. This is fun, this endless falling, flailing through the void that is a blank page. What does one think about when one feels the terror of falling, but at the same time, feels pretty sure that hitting bottom isn’t actually an option? How absurd the terror that simultaneously knows its existence and its own untruth. You have to feel sorry for it, in a way, even if only to avoid the social gaffe of laughing at its dilemma. Not a good habit to get into, laughing at the absurdity of terror.

So then terror is put soundly to bed, occasionally giving out cute little wheezings, but otherwise pretty much satisfied, a little smile on its face. Such a happy guy, you want to tousle its hair a bit. You refrain, but now what? At one point, perhaps boredom peeked in around the door, but boredom can only be a momentary companion at best, so long as one is aware of one’s constant falling. Perhaps the scenery doesn’t change, but you can’t claim to be bored by the constant wind whipping past your face and your limbs flailing about in all directions. So no, no boredom, unless you go back to sleep, and that’s not really an option, is it? What else is around then? Ah, I see. Pride. Pride rises like a sun within, warming seeds, bringing forth the first green shoots of future plans. I see, indeed. A precious thing, this pride, though impossible to trust, because while watching and watering those green shoots, it’s all too easy to slip into a dream about gardening, and then what? You forget you’re falling, that’s what, and forgetting your falling (even though you’re still falling) is cutting your self off from that vast void. “Only the doors to emptiness support the hive”.

But hey, look, I seem to be doing a bit of the old “holy fool” act here. Arid wasteland is turned into root-of-all-that-is. Or is it? Actually, no, you see, the wasteland’s not healed if the king’s just having pretty dreams. The dude needs to wake up and start fixing shit. Pride’s just the last (the last?) defense of good old Mara. If he can convince you you’ve won before you’ve actually won, you’ll spend all day polishing your trophy while the other racers decay around you.

Sadly, here is where the real world comes in. I’ve been distracted, you see, pulled away from the blankness. Maintenance, both physical and emotional, is requiring attention. But then, is there ever really anything else? What does it mean to be satisfied? How does satisfaction differ from death? Movement requires friction, and if all life is dukha, then what’s satisfaction? How to spend what is given to you when it is both priceless and worthless? But I wander into the dangerous shores of solipsistic speculation here, and while extreme close-ups of my bellybutton lint might hold some small possibly being of slight interest to perhaps one or maybe two people, but they don’t really help anyone much, do they?

I have a tendency, just like that wind, to either pick up tumble weeds and play with them idly, or turn inwards in a sudden frenzy of self-chasing (and what happens when you catch your self, that ever-fading echo of after-image?). Meanwhile, the sands of my emotional life are thrown hither and thither, numb by the tireless movement of it all. Perhaps they’d sprout, if they could just sit in one place long enough to get some light and perhaps put down some roots…

But then, are these more dream flowers, or are they the real thing? Now I’ve cast myself as Grail King it seems, but is it pride or masochism to take on the archetype of The Divine Sufferer? Or is it neither? God sends his son, ever minute of every day, to be crucified at the crossroads of the here and the now, and most people just sit and stare blankly: “Oh my, look at what their showing on the TV!”

If awareness voluntarily takes on form, why does it do so? It seems the best to consider this as done-for-the-purpose-of-healing, but that which is healed is only ever injured in the first place because of word-taking-flesh having seemingly gone awry. It’s as if we’re little psychic platelets, coming to patch a wound in the universe’s side, except that on coming out of the wound, we only make it wider when we harden into scab. It’s a gross picture, but there you have it. I can find no source this wound , it seems.

Still, I must do something, mustn’t I? Looking at things from the perspective of the wounded seems like it might be a good way to go about healing said wound, perhaps. After all, when “things-as-they-are are perfect only we don’t see it as such”, perhaps we are the one who’s wounded. What’s a God but a blown up picture of a man? It wasn’t Satan who rebelled from God, it was the ego, but the ego’s still God nonetheless, it just doesn’t know it. And the Garden of Eden, well, that’s going on every moment of every day. In everything we do there is the Garden and there is Good and there is Evil. And never the three shall meet (though is it three or only two? is it two, or only one?) Can the garden ever be truly left behind, or is it spread across the earth and we just do not see it? Bah. Hall of pretty mirrors. When will you reflect clearly? When I am both reflected and reflector, it is hard to get a complete picture, but when I am neither, how do I see?

So there you have it: there is no self. Buddha was right. Then again, such philosophies can create a false sense of doneness and this scares me more than anything else. And all this here? Simple more grass in the hole. I look around, I check my downloads, I pull out my storage cases. Having doesn’t mean understanding, and understanding doesn’t mean being able to recall, and being able to recall doesn’t mean skillfully using. Why not just jump to that last step, since there is no guarantee any one of these will lead to the next? Oh, because you might hurt yourself (or someone else)? Hmm… Good point. Can that, then, be avoided through the means of utter sincerity?

I wish to do more descriptions but find myself at a loss. Trees, this time perhaps. More fitting for my surroundings anyway. Fronds on trees. Bark puckered by the moisture, flowering. Moss abounding everywhere, its softness joyfully greeting your touch. Or maybe better vice-versa: your touch joyfully greeting its softness. Everything is wet here, everything drips, everything gleams. Everything is ALIVE. You feel like a bubble full of noxious gas in a children’s softly scented daycare. Afraid to let go the horrors you cling to inside, but longing for your deep tortured-bits to be touched by that humming song of life-full-ness.

And they tell me I have to de-humidify the building! Bah! Let me live in the mould and the mildew. Let the ferns and moss sprout on every wall, give me the trees beneath my feet, the rain in my hair, and the world as my room. But leave me a small dry corner in which to start a fire, yeah? Cause there’s no reason to make it one or the other. Is it two or is it three? Or is it one-with-two-faces-which-we-confuse-as-three? Or does it need to be anything at all? Perhaps it doesn’t, but try to tell yourself that when it’s cold and there’s a hole in your wall that the whole damp forest spills through, and you’re too afraid it’d be another social gaffe if you brought out the matches so you sit shivering.

This is fun. I like this. I hope to do more of this, yes, much more, and maybe at some point the whole thing will spontaneously burst into form, noise into signal, or better yet, noise into symphony. Yes. Let us keep our fingers crossed, and our rabbit’s feet fondled, eh? First-planted-seeds seem to grow the quickest around here, but, as always, there is the question of maintenance. Work is needed, struggle. If it were effortless, you’d be always satisfied, and if always satisfied, there’d be no friction, and if you were frictionless you’d be dead. What joy is there in death? But then, what joy in endless trips to the dungeon just to enjoy the light on your face when you finally remember how to get out? None, to my mind, and besides, you only forgot the way out in the first place because it’s no fun to trying to escape a dungeon when you already know all the exits. Bah! Another stupid game.

But then, what to do if it’s the only game in town? Go to a new town? Now there’s a step into the unknown. I’ve heard it said that there are only ever two real stories: A stranger enters town. Or someone leaves town. And yet here we are making a heads-or-tails decision out of a single coin again. We’ve escaped from the dungeon game into an exact and identical copy of the same thing. New towns might hold new games, but learning a new game means you’ve just built another dungeon around yourself. It’s not “the only game in town” it’s town-as-game, civilization-as-sideshow, but when the genii’s out the bottle how can it possibly be pushed back in? How can we convince it to stop distracting us?

The only way out is through, the only way forward is to pick up our tools where they were left (by ourselves? by others? it doesn’t matter) and carry on. The work continues, and we are only given the instructions as we need them. The blueprint’s too big to carry, so we get a page at a time and even that gets taken away when we get confused and start endlessly building door-frame after door-frame, instead of putting in a hallway. But they let us go on, regardless. After all, it’s our house we’re building. We have to live in it. There ain’t no one else ready to do the building, and it’s a sunuvabitch to train a new work-crew.

Touba felt that there were things in her life that did perhaps belong to a previous life, just like this music.  She had to wipe aside the dust in order to reach the spring that every soul possessed and touch its clean, crystal water.  All of this was just the beginning.  Eventually, the spring water would flow unhindered through the prairies, mountains, and deserts, and pick up worldly soils on its way to the sea.

(special thanks to touba.tumblr.com for the pointer)

Everything is good.  Life bubbles up as goodness and mixes with allthatis.

While mixing, certain things are misunderstood, certain things seem to be blocked, and certain things are abandoned before they are resolved back into the goodness from which they come and which they carry within them.

There is not a weakness in this misunderstanding, in this blockage, nor in this abandonment.  Or, if there is a weakness, it is a weakness we all share.

But after a certain amount of time, these things that are misunderstood, blocked, and abandoned start to hurt.  They both are pain and cause pain.  To say that this is evil is to say that your hand should not burn when it is placed into the fire.

But how to respond to the pain, either our own or others?  We can become numb, or we can seek momentary pleasure (wait, same thing…)

Or we can give into the pain, and allow it to express itself through us, amplify it so that it’s voice is even more easy to hear.  And it is here that we appear evil.  But we are not evil, we are just in pain.  Because we are misunderstood, blocked, and abandoned.

There is no evil.  There is only ignorance, and the pain it gives rise to, and our identification with that pain, and our expression of that identification.  All else is always already good.

What else can we  do? Rest in this, and let (it) go.  It might hurt to pass the pain, a piece of spiritual kidney stone built up from the blockage, but don’t let that dissuade you.

God is love, because love is always open.  Alwaysopen, isGod, may peacebewithus…

You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. (emphasis mine)

This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It’s the emotional pain body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active.

The pain body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, “become you,” and live through you. It needs to get its “food” through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness.

So the pain body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.

Once the pain body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn’t really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others.

If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.

Many I’s is a term which indicates the different feelings and thoughts of ‘I’ in a person: I think, I want, I know best, I prefer, I am happy, I am hungry, I am tired, etc. These feelings and thoughts of ‘I’ usually have nothing in common with one another, and are present for short periods of time. They tie in directly with Gurdjieff’s claim that man has no unity in himself. This lack of unity results in wanting one thing now, and another, perhaps contradictory, thing later.

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.  So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.

Remember the animals?

The seventh consciousness is called klesa mind.  It is a mind-consciousness (the sixth type of consciousness).  It is the ignorant moment of consciousness that immediately follows a sense consciousness, causing outer perceived and inner perceiving aspect to appear as separate entities.  The first moment of sense consciousness is free from this ignorance, but it is so swift, one is not aware of it and all one’s conceptual notions follow on the basis of the following moment, the klesa-mind.

For he who eats of the tree of the knowledge of good, appropriates to himself his own will and thus exalts himself over the good things which the lord says and does in him.

1) Barriers often bar our path, sometimes for many years.  It can take a lot of work to get ourselves to the point where we feel ready to tackle them.  For sometimes, the root of the barrier exists in a place we dare not look.  Yet, upon climbing over a hated barrier for the first time, we often make the mistake of clinging to it with our back, huddled against the very thing you sought to escape.

2) We are so angered by the presence of a barrier in our life that we refuse to let it go, once we have climbed over it.  We must work to accept the thing we once fought against, for without accepting the fact of its existence, we do not feel safe letting it go.  After all, if we let it go, wouldn’t we just come upon it again?

3) Our very inability to accept the barrier, coupled with our desire to be rid of it, ties us to it deeply, in places we cannot bring ourselves to look.  In this case, the repetitive nature of the barrier, the fact that it comes up again and again in our lives, shows that this barrier is actually a friend, albeit one wearing the mask of an enemy.  It has come to show us just how deeply we have allowed this thing we dub “enemy” to sink its claws into us.

4) Coming to a bar across our path, we may eventually leap over it, but afterwards, we often rest the back of our knees against it, like a child hiding his unwanted diner underneath his chair.  We can end up carrying many heavy barriers behind our knees this way, and not even know they are there.  And then we wonder why they keep showing up in our lives.

5) All too readily, this leads to the loathing of the barrier, and sadly, this loathing is nothing more than another layer of pearlescent moulding we excrete, tying ourselves more tightly to this barrier that is enemy-friend.  We cannot bring ourselves to trust a reality in which such a barrier is allowed to exist.  And yet, our very inability to accept the barrier’s existence is what brings it back again and again.  Because despite our unwillingness to accept it, it does exist, otherwise, we would not be blocked in the first place.

6) If we cannot accept the existence of this truly existing thing, then the only thing we seem to be able to do is keep it around and willfully blind ourselves to it, hoping to ensure that it can never take us by surprise.  And so, it is obvious to see why it does take us by surprise, every single time.

7) Thus does clinging spring from hatred, desire from dislike.  Thus does the wheel spin without traction, bringing us the same challenges, over and over again, dressed in slightly different costumes. Can we ever break free of such things?  How could we, when we have built up such a pattern of willful ignorance to the very existence of the roots that give rise to these things.  Still, it could be possible, yes?  I do not presume to answer this, but I leave it up to you, who wish to, to try to see that weight they carry, and in seeing it truly, drop it without hesitation.

(1) The view of meditation as disembodiment involves not only our idea that we meditate to remove ourselves from the dirt and detritus of our habitual mental states. More subtly, it is our mental image of an ideal, disembodied state that we (perhaps unconsciously) hold up before ourselves every time we sit down to practice. This may be based on a memory of a state experienced in our practice or with a respected teacher, or something we have read or heard. No matter what specific practice we may be using, this mental image, whether conscious or unconscious, is guiding and directing our meditation. It will limit how we are able to engage and how much we are able to experience, and it will restrict what we are able to see.

(2) Based on such a view, meditation too easily involves a perversion of the basic Buddhist practice of mindfulness. For example, we may “follow the breath” in such a way that we try to factor out everything else in our experience—the physical sensations, feelings, energy and emotions that are given in our physical being, the openendedness that true physicality entails. When problematic or confusing mental states arise, we may all to easily “go back to the breath” and thus avoid engaging these phenomena. In a similar manner, if we meditate with chants, mantras, or visualizations, we may use these as a way to distance ourselves from our more usual, problematic experience.

(3) The result of this kind of practice may be, in the short run, a state that is clean and clear, devoid of pain. While that may sound appealing, the long term result is not: our bodies are left untransformed and the givenness of our lives is left as it was, unredeemed. This is disastrous for the spiritual life for a very simple reason: the meditative path unfolds only to the extent that we engage in the transformation of our ordinary experience. Simply distancing ourselves from the pain of our experience and removing ourselves from it will produce no long-term results. We will be able to remain in a disembodied state for a certain period of time and then, when the energy of maintaining such a state runs out, we will fall back into our usual ignorance and neurotic patterns. Our response to this sad result may be that we begin to distrust meditation, our meditation teachers, and even the dharma itself.

I’ve been reading Thomas Merton lately, as yesterday’s post makes pretty obvious, and there is a lot in that little book about surrendering to God, letting God come into your self and light you up from within. That we should not cling to “created things” but should seek God’s Love only, and let it permeate our whole being. This feels intuitively to be true to me, and I admit, I do enjoy the God language. If that’s not your thing, you can always switch the word “God” with “Reality”. It’s my belief that a proper understanding of either makes the difference between the two very small indeed.

However, as much as I like Merton’s idea of surrender to a higher power, it brought about a conflict in me when I first read it.  My teacher in the ways of the shaman, Malidoma Some, often points out that Spirit doesn’t like it when we approach It as one with an attitude of groveling, one who is somehow in deficit, with an attitude of “please sir (or mam, if you prefer), if it’s not too much trouble, could you please perhaps take a few minutes out of your busy schedule and possibly help me with this one small little request I have, please, I’m sorry, please please please?”.  He points out that, when confronted with such a request, Spirit will just ignore you, because Spirit prefers to deal with people who show competence and strength.  This too has felt intuitively true to me.

And this leaves me rather at an impasse.  Does the divine want our submission, our recognition that it is higher and that next to it we are as nothing, or does the divine want us to show it our strength and competence?  It seemed both couldn’t be true at the same time.  Was it simply a problem of mixing traditions?  Perhaps, but this really didn’t feel correct either.  I wasn’t mixing traditions so much as I was trying to understand the underlying truth that both traditions point to, and if there’s something wrong with that, kill me now, because that’s all my life is about, really.

While out for a jog a little later,  I was ruminating on Malidoma’s insistence that we not appear weak before Spirit, and I kept pondering the idea of what it means to be strong.  And then I remembered the Tarot:

The Strength card shows a lion, docilely allowing it’s mouth to be opened by a woman.  And this picture from a friend’s Facebook feed points to the same idea:

This is how it came to me to be understood. We are full formed beings, and it is our job in this life to integrate and re-member the different parts of our body/heart/mind/soul/spirit/whatever.  And we are to grow strong in this manner. But in the end, these things are all, and have always been, part of the Oneness of the Whole.  As we integrate ourselves, we integrate aspects of the Whole, and then we have to sacrifice this whole self to the Whole Self, allowing the Reality of the Divine (or the Divinity of Reality) to flow through us, offering up all in strength, humility, and modesty to that higher power that needs our strength to be strong in this world.

God
dissolved
my mind – my separation.
I cannot describe my intimacy with Him.
How dependent is your body’s life on water and food and air?
I said to God, “ I will always be unless you cease to Be,”
And my Beloved replied, “And I
would cease to Be
if you
died.”
-Teresa Of Avila

This love sacrifices all souls, however wise, however “awakened”
Cuts off their heads without a sword, hangs them without a scaffold.
We are the guests of the one who devours his guests
The friends of the one who slaughters his friends….
Although by his gaze he brings death to so many lovers
Let yourself be killed by him: is he not the water of life?
Never, ever, grow bitter: he is the friend and kills gently.
Keep your heart noble, for this most noble love
Kills only kings near God and men free from passion.
We are like the night, earth’s shadow.
He is the Sun: He splits open the night with a sword soaked in dawn….
-Rumi

Except the thing is, it’s not really a sacrifice, it’s simply an acknowledgement of the Truth of the Way things already Are.  And this process of building and dissolving, building and dissolving, goes on and on, possibly without end, until we die and are forced to admit that same very Truth.  And even then, we don’t have to if we don’t want to.

“Quietism, while bearing a superficial resemblance to Christian contemplation, is actually its complete contradiction.  The contemplative empties himself of every created love in order to be filled with the love of God alone, and divests his mind from all created images and phantasms in order to receive the pure and simple light of God directly into the summit of his soul.  The quietist, on the other hand, pursuing a false sense of absolute “annihilation” of his own soul, seeks to empty himself of all love and all knowledge and remain inert in a kind of spiritual vacuum in which there is no motion, no thought, no apprehension, no act of love, no passive receptivity, but a mere blank without light or warmth or breath of interior life.  Thus the quietist imagines he is being passively moved by God.”

(from page 71 of this slim little volume)

“That Moses was given the Tablets of the Law on a mountain is significant: every mountain is that dreadful mountain of the Law, there move over it the thunder and the lightnings, there move on it the smoke and fire, there sounds from it the trumpet of the dreadful summons. The dread is that now is Now, that here is Here, that everything that is actually is, and everything is irrevocably moving”

- – -

“But what’s it all about?” I cry.
“If I could tell you, then it wouldn’t be a mystery,” says God. “Let it be enough that I ask for your help.”

- – -

“How startling are the secret colors that in time of peace are hidden beneath the skin.  We slaughter sheep and cattle and chickens as a matter of course; we are the vertical ones with the knives so we assume this as a right: we slit the throat, the heart pumps out its last bursts of blood into a basin, we open their bodies and lay hands on their varicolored mysteries of red and purple, blue and yellow inner parts.  But in time of war, each man is a cattle to his enemy and they struggle to see which one will be the slaughterer.  The stranger, the unknown to whom one must always offer hospitality, that sacred stranger has now become a murderer whom we must murder first.  How strange that this is not strange.”

—>

CHANGING LINE:
Hexagram Twelve/Line Six

Nine at the top means:
The standstill comes to an end.
First standstill, then good fortune.

The standstill does not last forever. However, it does not cease of its own accord; the right man is needed to end it. This is the difference between a state of peace and a state of stagnation. Continuous effort is necessary to maintain peace: left to itself it would change into stagnation and disintegration. The time of disintegration, however, does not change back automatically to a condition of peace and prosperity; effort must be put forth in order to end it. This shows the creative attitude that man must take if the world is to be put in order.

A paradox, of sorts, for your consideration:

“I once ascended to the firmaments. I first went to see Hell and the sight was horrifying. Row after row of tables were laden with platters of sumptuous food, yet the people seated around the tables were pale and emaciated, moaning in hunger. As I came closer, I understood their predicament.”

“Every person held a full spoon, but both arms were splinted with wooden slats so he could not bend either elbow to bring the food to his mouth. It broke my heart to hear the tortured groans of these poor people as they held their food so near but could not consume it.”

“Next I went to visit Heaven. I was surprised to see the same setting I had witnessed in Hell – row after row of long tables laden with food. But in contrast to Hell, the people here in Heaven were sitting contentedly talking with each other, obviously sated from their sumptuous meal.”

“As I came closer, I was amazed to discover that here, too, each person had his arms splinted on wooden slats that prevented him from bending his elbows. How, then, did they manage to eat?”

“As I watched, a man picked up his spoon and dug it into the dish before him. Then he stretched across the table and fed the person across from him! The recipient of this kindness thanked him and returned the favor by leaning across the table to feed his benefactor.”

—

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

—

Buddha puts forth the absolute truth of anatta, not-self, and yet, his first words upon realizing enlightenment were: “I and all sentient beings on earth, together, attain enlightenment at the same time.”