Reclusland

As Judea had given Christianity ethics, and Greece had given it theology, so now Rome gave it organization; all these, with a dozen absorbed and rival faiths, entered into the Christian synthesis. It was not merely that the Church took over some religious customs and forms common in pre-Christian Rome — the stole and other vestments of pagan priests, the use of incense and holy water in purifications, the burning of candles and an everlasting light before the altar, the worship of the saints, the architecture of the basilica, the law of Rome as a basis for canon law, the title of _Pontifex Maximus_ for the Supreme Pontiff, and in the fourth century, the Latin language as the noble and enduring vehicle of Catholic ritual. The Roman gift was above all a vast framework of government, which, as secular authority failed, became the structure of ecclesiastical rule. Soon the bishops, rather than the Roman prefects, would be the source of order and the seat of power in the cities; the metropolitans, or archbishops, would support, if succeed the provincial assembly. The Roman Church followed in the footsteps of the Roman state; it conquered the provinces, beautified the capital, and established discipline and unity from frontier to frontier. Rome died in giving birth to the Church; the church matured by inheriting and accepting the responsibilities of Rome.

from tumblr, apparently from this book

As a Christian, I saw the no-self experience as the true nature of Christ’s death, the movement beyond even is oneness with the divine, the movement from God to Godhead. Though not articulated in contemplative literature, Christ dramatized this experience on the cross for all ages to see and ponder. Where Buddha described the experience, Christ manifested it without words; yet they both make the same statement and reveal the same truth – that ultimately, eternal life is beyond self or consciousness. After one has seen it manifested or heard it said, the only thing left is to experience it.

(from here)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

(from here)

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.

Hexagram 25
Wu Wang – Innocence (The Unexpected)

Ch’ien, heaven is above; Chên, movement, is below. The lower trigram Chên is under the influence of the strong line it has received form above, from heaven. When, in accord with this, movement follows the law of heaven, man is innocent and without guile. His mind is natural and true, unshadowed by reflection or ulterior designs. For wherever conscious purpose is to be seen, there the truth and innocence of nature have been lost. Nature that is not directed by the spirit is not true but degenerate nature. Starting out with the idea of the natural, the train of thought in part goes somewhat further and thus the hexagram includes also the idea of the fundamental or unexpected.

THE JUDGEMENT

INNOCENCE. Supreme success.
Perseverance furthers.
If someone is not as he should be,
He has misfortune,
And it does not further him
To undertake anything.

Man has received from heaven a nature innately good, to guide him in all his movements. By devotion to this divine spirit within himself, he attains an unsullied innocence that leads him to do right with instinctive sureness and without any ulterior thought of reward and personal advantage. This instinctive certainty brings about supreme success and “furthers through perseverance”. However, not everything instinctive is nature in this higher sense of the word, but only that which is right and in accord with the will of heaven. Without this quality of rightness, an unreflecting, instinctive way of acting brings only misfortune. Confucius says about this: “He who departs from innocence, what does he come to? Heaven’s will and blessing do not go with his deeds.”

THE IMAGE

Under heaven thunder rolls:
All things attain the natural state of innocence.
Thus the kings of old,
Rich in virtue, and in harmony with the time,
Fostered and nourished all beings.

In springtime when thunder, life energy, begins to move again under the heavens, everything sprouts and grows, and all beings receive for the creative activity of nature the childlike innocence of their original state. So it is with the good rulers of mankind: drawing on the spiritual wealth at their command, they take care of all forms of life and all forms of culture and do everything to further them, and at the proper time.

(from the Richard Wilhelm translation)

Finished reading Frank Herbert’s Dune a while ago and wanted to gather my underlines passages here.  A really great book, and a source of much knowledge hidden in there behind the words…

On logic, and the times we catch ourselves being irrational:
“Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it.  But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan.  We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.”

On intuition, the Invisible Landscape, and the “safety” of plans:
“Muad’Dib could indeed see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power.  Think of sight.  You have eyes, yet cannot see without light.  If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond your valley.  Just so, Muad’Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious terrain.  He tells us that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us “The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.”  And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning “That path leads ever down into stagnation.”

On evolution and involution:
“Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life.”

On the lessons of the space fire:
“…that metaphysical realm where all physical limitations are removed.  And he knew fear at the thought of such a place, because removal of all limitations meant removal of all points of reference.  In the landscape of a myth, he could not orient himself and say “I am I because I am here .”

On the need for dualities:
“When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself.  You are always a little less than an individual.”

On the staleness of life, leading to war and destruction:
“The race of humans had felt its own dormancy, sensed itself grown stale and knew now only the need to experience turmoil in which the genes would mingle and the strong new mixtures survive”

Time disappears into outer action or inner impulses. Into doings, cravings, or dreamings. But human time is conscious time. And this has been lost, destroyed.

In its place there is now animal time (doing, moving about, preying on others, eating, building, killing, etc. ); plant time (dreaming, languishing, imagining); or “mineral” — that is, mechanical — time: the time of devices such as clocks and computers. What we call logical thinking is often just an internal version of these lifeless machines. Implicitly, we even take pride in the mechanicity of our thinking when, forgetting the metaphorical origin of the usage, we refer to a computer’s “intelligence.” This is mental time, “mineral” in its rigidity and sterility. We lay this logical cement over organic life out there and in ourselves. Carried to its extreme, this becomes the mindset that measures the whole of human life solely by the “bottom line.”

In the Old Testament the lower world is called Sheol. Here there are no images of raging fire. No cacophonous sounds. No sulfurous fumes. Sheol is simply and solely the place of shadows, dark, weak existence, continually fading, ever-paler life. Sheol is the realm of diminishing being.

(from here)

The whole path to awakening consists of sticking to the most skillful desire; you progress along the path as your sense of ‘skillful’ gets more refined. If you act on an unskillful desire, take responsibility for the consequences, using them to educate that desire as to where it went wrong. Although desires can be remarkably stubborn, they share a goal—happiness—and this can form the common ground for an effective dialogue: If a desire doesn’t really produce happiness, it contradicts its reason for being.

The best way to make this point is to keep tracing the thread from the desire to its resulting actions and their consequences. If the desire causes suffering to others, notice how their corresponding desire for happiness leads them to undermine the happiness you seek. If the desire aims at a happiness based on things that can age, grow ill, die, or leave you, notice how that fact sets you up for a fall. Then notice how the distress that comes from acting on this sort of desire is universal. It’s not just you. Everyone who has acted, is acting, or will act on that desire has suffered in the past, is suffering right now, and will suffer in the future. There’s no way around it.

(from here)

->

Nine in the third place means:
He who does not give duration to his character
Meets with disgrace.
Persistent humiliation.

If a man remains at the mercy of moods of hope or fear aroused by the outer
world, he loses his inner consistency of character. Such inconsistency
invariably leads to distressing experiences. These humiliations often come
from an unforeseen quarter. Such experiences are not merely effects
produced by the external world, but logical consequences evoked by his own nature.

Six at the top means:
Restlessness as an enduring condition brings misfortune.

There are people who live in a state of perpetual hurry without ever attaining
inner composure. Restlessness not only prevents all thoroughness but actually
becomes a danger if it is dominant in places of authority.

Anywhere you go, there you are.   Don’t seek out adventure for the sake of restlessness and escape…

In the Buddhist tradition, enlightenment comes first; confusion is an afterthought.

(from here)

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at unfamiliar things
Because you are only one of many things.
And someone who can look that way at himself
Will heal his heart of many troubles,
Perhaps without knowing he has done it.
Then Bird and Tree say to him, “Friend.”
And then he’ll want to use himself, and things
In such a way that each one glows, fulfilled.
And if sometimes he finds he doesn’t understand,
It doesn’t matter. His task is just to serve.

(from here, image links to source)

Through the practice of meditation, we gradually begin to relate with our world, our friends, and other situations. And slowly we begin to trust the world as well. We begin to feel that the world is not as bad as we thought — there might be something worth learning. However, we cannot just go out and love the world. We have to start with ourselves, because the world is our world. Running away from ourselves into the world would be like trying to accept the rays of the sun while rejecting the sun itself.

(from here)

We can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn.  And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.  It is shocking to find how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.  Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries a lesson.

There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!

(from here)

The revealment of the infinite in the finite, which is the motive of all creation, is not seen in its perfection in the starry heavens, in the beauty of flowers. It is in the soul of man. For there will seeks its manifestation in will, and freedom turns to win its final prize in the freedom of surrender.

(from here)

That the world is, is the mystical.

(from here, where there’s more good stuff)

“We can never think of the present. We can only be the present”

(found via here)

->

CHANGING LINE:
Hexagram Sixteen/Line Five

Six in the fifth place means:
Persistently ill, and still does not die.

Here enthusiasm is obstructed. A man is under constant pressure, which prevents him from breathing freely. However, this pressure has its advantage – it prevents him from consuming his powers in empty enthusiasm. Thus constant pressure can actually serve to keep one alive.

J. Krishnamurti in Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal (March 18th, 1983)

An inquirer can never be lonely. He does not have to worry who is going to guide him or instruct him. Leave that to life. Leave that to the law of love. Be concerned with the honesty, the integrity and the intensity of your own inquiry, correlate it with all the life and leave the rest to life itself.

(from here)

Self deception often arises because you are afraid of your own intelligence and afraid you won’t be able to deal properly with your life. You are unable to acknowledge your own innate wisdom. Instead, you see wisdom as some monumental thing outside of yourself. That attitude has to be overcome.

(from here)

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live,” Nietzsche says, “as though the day were here.” It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

(via here)

In sesshin you often speak about recognizing and regulating ki, or energy, in all parts of our life. This has really helped me. How do you suggest working with ki in zazen?

There are many ways of cultivating ki, such as yoga, qigong, and tai chi. However, the ideal way to cultivate the all-embracing ki that informs our entire being is through zazen. Zazen is a matter of physically experiencing our essential oneness with the very existence of the universe, and it is through this experience that our ki develops. What is most important is that we partake of ki in its universal expression.

We can cultivate ki creatively as we go about our daily lives. Such cultivation-in-action is called dochu no kufu. However, a living practice depends on a thorough grounding in jochu no kufu, the quiet cultivation of seated meditation. There is no basic separation between “passive” and “active,” of course, but those who are unable to partake of universal essence in sitting will not be able to partake of it in action. The fundamental point in zazen is to experience oneself not as a separate, limited body but as the body of the entire universe.

The body itself is central to zazen. When meditating we regulate the body, regulate the breath, and regulate the mind. Ki fills our physical being to overflowing and expands through the breath to an ever-widening circle of our surroundings until it permeates the universe itself. This activation of our universal mind is the true meaning of “regulating the mind” in zazen.

Is this word “ki,” as you are using it, synonymous with buddha-nature?

To know buddhanature is to experience the way in which our wisdom, our consciousness, and our sensation are one with all that exists. “Buddhanature” is simply a word we use to indicate that universal functioning in which the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body, and especially mind grasp the whole and not just the part. Buddhanature is recognizing the life of buddha in every creature, in every tree and blade of grass.

Ki is our very essence. Lacking ki, we look with our eyes but cannot see. Lacking ki, we think but cannot understand. To embrace and partake of all existence is possible because ki is the essence of all things. From this, too, manifests the wisdom that recognizes buddhanature.

(from this interview)

Q. If you are feeling very confused and trying to work your way out of the confusion, it would seem that you are trying too hard. But if you do not try at all, then are we to understand that we are fooling ourselves?

A. Yes, but that does not mean that one has to live by the extremes of trying too hard or not trying at all. One has to work with a kind of “middle way,” a complete state of “being as you are. ” We could describe this with a lot of words, but one really has to do it. If you really start living the middle way, then you will see it, you will find it. You must allow yourself to trust yourself, to trust in your own intelligence. We are tremendous people, we have tremendous things in us. We simply have to let ourselves be. External aid cannot help. If you are not willing to let yourself grow, then you fall into the self-destructive process of confusion.

Some years ago I was sitting around a television watching The Wizard of Oz with my family and some family friends including their little 5-year-old, Tommy. When we got to the part where the flying monkeys attack Dorothy, somebody elbowed me and pointed to little Tommy, who was sitting, mouth wide open in abject terror, eyes riveted to the TV screen. The elbowing continued around the room until all of the adults in the room where watching little Tommy, who was completely oblivious to the fact that he was now the center of attention. Little Tommy was embedded. As far as he was concerned, it was he who was being attacked by flying monkeys. Finally, one of the adults, moved to compassion by Tommy’s suffering, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s all right, Tommy. You’re here with us. It’s just a movie.”

It’s possible that different people use the term “radical identification” in different ways (I hadn’t heard the term before I saw it in your post), but I would say that little Tommy was “radically identified.” And he was suffering. It was an act of compassion to reach out and help him dis-embed from his nightmare. We can learn to do that for ourselves; we can be our own wake-up call. It’s a beautiful thing to wake up and look around, only to find that you are safe and sound in your own living room, surrounded by loved ones. You can still watch the movie, but without the suffering. This is enlightenment, and this is why dis-embeddedness is preferable to radical identification.

(from comments on this article)