With all your heart, might, mind and strength....

"Whatever name you give it - will, steady purpose, or one-pointedness of the mind - you come back to earnestness, sincerity, honesty.  When you are in dead earnest, you bend every incident, every second of your life to your purpose.  You do not waste time and energy on other things.  You are totally dedicated, call it will, love or plain honesty.  We are complex beings, at war within and without.  We contradict ourselves all the time, undoing today the work of yesterday.  No wonder we are stuck.  A little integrity would make a lot of difference."

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That

Later he sums up the point he is trying to make -

"Desire determines destiny."

D&C 137:9

9 For I, the Lord, will judge all men according to their works, according to the desire of their hearts.

Theories and Experiments

I'm about a third of the way into Nisargadatta Maharaj's I Am That, and he is finally beginning to get interesting in and of himself.

"Theories are neither right nor wrong.  They are attempts at explaining the inexplicable.  It is not the theory that matters, but the way it is being tested.  It is the testing of the theory that makes it fruitful.  Experiment with any theory you like--if you are truly earnest and honest, the attainment of reality will be yours.  As a living being you are caught in an untenable and painful situation and you are seeking a way out.  You are being offered several plans of your prison, none quite true.  But they are of some value, only if you are in dead earnest."

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That

Fallen from Grace

If I'm lost - now
That I was found
Shall still my transport be -
That once - on me - those Jasper Gates
Blazed open - suddenly -

That on my awkward - gazing - face -
The angels  - softly peered -
And touched me with their fleeces,
Almost as if they cared -

I'm banished - now - you know it -
How foreign that can be -
You'll know - sir - when the Savior's face
Turns so - away from you.


Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 316

Attention

"Look within.  Let neither the peculiar quality of anything or its value escape thee."

Marcus Aurelius
Meditiations

We bid Farewell to D. T. Suzuki's "Zen Buddhism" with a Tea Ceremony

I've finished the book.  Overall, I can see much in Zen Buddhism that can improve an individual's lifr.  I've already voiced several things I feel it seems to miss, but perhaps the final lack is pointed out by Suzuki himself when he focuses on Japanese Zen's sense of "eternal loneliness" (Sabi or Wabi or Shibumi).  Thomas Merton once remarked that Buddhist monasticism struck him as Christianity without Christ.  I find that one lack to make all the difference.  Back to my earlier discussion of Hinduism, this quality is why I've always found Ramanuja so much more congenial than Shankara.  The incarnation is God's bridging of that lonely existential gap. 

As a farewell, though, I'd like to dwell not on a lack, but on a beauty.  The book ends with a tea ceremony with powerful evocations of some of what we seek in temple worship --



"Where a series of flagstones irregularly arranged comes to a stop, there stands a most insignificant-looking straw-thatched hut, low and unpretentious to the last degree.  The entrance is not by a door but a sort of aperture; to enter through it a visitor has to be shorn of all his encumbrances, that is to say, to take off both his swords, long and short, which in feudal days a samurai used to carry all the time.  The inside is a small semi-lighted room about ten feet square; the ceiling is low and of uneven height and structure.  The posts are not smoothly planed, they are mostly of natural wood.  After a little while, however, the room grows gradually lighter as our eyes begin to adjust themselves to the new situation.  We notice an ancient looking kakemono in the alcove with some handwriting or a picture of sumiye type.  An incense burner emits a fragrance which has the effect of soothing one's nerves.  The flower vase contains no more than a single stem of flowers, neither gorgeous nor ostentatious; but like a little white lily blooming under a rock surrounded by in no way somber pines, the humble flower is enhanced in beauty and attracts the attention of the gathering of four or five visitors especially invited to sip a cup of tea in order to forget the worldly cares that may be oppressing them."

"Now we listen to the sound of boiling water in the kettle as it rests on a tripod frame over a fire in the square hole cut in the floor.  The sound is not that of actually boiling water but comes from the heavy iron kettle, and it is most appropriately likened by the connoisseur to a breeze that passes through the pine grove.  It greatly adds to the serenity of the room, for a man here feels as if he were sitting alone in a mountain-hut where a white cloud and the pine music are his only consoling companions."

"To take a cup of tea with friends in this environment, talking probably about the sumiye sketch in the alcove or some art topic suggested by the tea-utensils in the room, wonderfully lifts the mind above the perplexities of life.  The warrior is saved from his daily occupation of fighting, and the business man from his ever-present idea of money-making.  Is it not something, indeed, to find in this world of struggles and vanities a corner, however humble, where one can rise above the limits of relativity and even have a glimpse of eternity."

Hope

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
and never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird -
That kept so many warm -

I've heard it in the chilliest land -
And on the strangest sea -
Yet - never - in extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.



Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 314

Zen and Culture - Our Penultimate Farewell to D. T. Suzuki

Suzuki chooses four things to illustrate Zen's impact on Japanese civilization.  The first three are: Sumiye, a rapid improvisational sketch made with ink and brush; Haiku, a short poem, often explosively written as a result of a sudden aesthetic experience or insight; and Kendo, Japan's art of the sword with it's lightning swift attacks and responses.  In all of them there is a certain rapport between the 'unconscious' and the conscious mind with expresses it.  Conciseness, rapidity, artlessness, lack of deliberation and smoothly 'catching spirit as it moves' are valued in all of them.  "You do not have to compose a grand poem of many hundred lines to give vent to the feeling thus awakened by looking into the abyss,"  He tells us.  Here are no oil paintings with their with wiping and overlaying and realism, neither "deliberately designed plans" nor "grandeur of conception."  Here is no "well thought out system of philosophy, each thread of whose logic is closely knitted."  Here is no "grand cathedral, whose walls, pillars and foundations are composed of solid blocks of stone."

In each of the arts enumerated the foes to be conquered are

• lingering
• deliberation, thinking, cogitation
• erasing
• repetition
• retouching
• remodeling
• doctoring
• building up
• logic, reason
• reflection
• deliberate design and correction
• delay, interruption
• hesitation, faltering, wavering, being troubled
• too full expression
• self consciousness

I love sumiye, haiku and martial arts.   I can glimpse how a zen-like effortlessness would have its utility in these and certain other endeavors.  However, I also love cathedrals, epic poems, realistic oil paintings, novels and philosophical structures.   As a goal, zen-like states of consciousness seem to not include the fullness of what makes us human.  I doubt that Suzuki's own essays here were the result of only lightning strikes

The Beam in Our Eye

"Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot?  I know no speck so troublesome as self."

George Eliot
Middlemarch

Charity

"The Love a life can show Below,
Is but a filament, I know
Of that diviner thing....

'Tis this - invites - appalls - endows -
Flits - glimmers - proves - dissolves -
Returns - suggests - convicts - enchants -
Then - flings in paradise."


Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 285


A fragment of a larger poem, but the beginning and end together say something to me quite directly that is lessened by including the carefully wrought fancies of the poem's middle.

Zen for Human Beings

"We cannot remain forever in a state of undifferentiation; we are so mad as to give expression to every experience we go through, and by thus expressing ourselves we realize that the experience grows deeper and clearer.  A dumb experience is no experience at al; it is human to express, that is to appeal to differentiation and analysis; and so, we can say that animals have no experience whatever.  Tathata cannot remain expressionless and undifferentiated; it has to that extent to be conceptualized.  While to utter, "Oh the Morning Glory!" is to come out of the identification, and hence to be no more of tathata, this coming out of itself, this negating itself in order to be itself, is the way in which we are all constituted.  And this conceptualization inevitably leads to contradictions which can only be dissolved in the synthesis of prajna-intuition."

D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism


Tathata "is variously translated as "thusness" or "suchness"." (Wikipedia)
"the ultimate inexpressible nature of all things."  (Google)

Prajna according to Wikipeidia is "often translated as "wisdom", but is closer in meaning to "insight", "discriminating knowledge", or "intuitive apprehension".


Located near the end of the book (after endless Zen stories emphasizing the ineffable nature of all Zen insights), this is the first paragraph where I can begin catch a glimpse of what life might be like for a practitioner of Zen - what it might be like to BE a Zen Buddhist.

Joseph Campbell's picture of the modern task

Finished The Hero With A Thousand Faces.  Found the early chapters, focused on the universal journey of the soul, fascinating, found the second half of the book less so, though as a historian, I find it interesting as a part of the picture of the attitudes of the late forties of the Twentieth Century. Campbell's wide ranging finding of patterns in common from hundreds of myths, legends, folktales and psychiatric writings is in tune with the work of many other scholars of his time. the works of Mircea Eliade, Arnold Toynbee, James Frazer, and our own Hugh Nibley were influenced by the same intellectual climate.  Campbell's optimistic acceptance of Jung and Freud as harbingers of a new dawn of psychic progress is also a product of his particular time and place.

Campbell's last section, The Hero Today, is his summary of what he expects us to take away from the journey through world mythology he has lead us on.  He sees our civilization as founded on a modern myth ("the hero-cycle of the Modern Age") of the emergence of Modernity from the darkness of the past  --

"The spell of the past, the bondage of tradition, were shattered with sure and mighty strokes.  The dream web of myth fell away; the mind opened to full waking consciousness; and modern man emerged from ancient ignorance, like a butterfly from its cocoon, or like the sun at dawn from the womb of mother night." 

For those who (like the New Atheists) have adopted this myth this "wonder-story of mankind's coming to maturity," Science, Technology and the individual self determination of the new democratic man has swept away the old world of religion, something Campbell doesn't necessarily see as bad.  His worry is that the society that religion once created has been swept away as well, and the old symbolic methods of guiding and nurturing human development have gone.  The triumph of economics and politics has left religion in a secondary position in a church goer's life, a "religious pantomime...hardly more...than a sanctimonious exercise for Sunday morning, whereas business ethics and patriotism stand for the remainder of the week."

Man, Campbell believed, needed to turn back to the unconscious and find the symbols that would surface to "render the modern world spiritually significant" and to allow "men and women to come to full human maturity,"  and society to become something more than "an economic political organization...in hard unremitting competition for supremacy and material resources."

Although he found the psychological models of his time easy to integrate into his own model of the mythic unity within our psyche, here at the end of the book he does not even hold them up as the way forward for man's spiritual progress.  Indeed, he finds no more hope in the conscious ideologies of his day than he does in the remnants of the great world religions.  He is waiting for something truly universal and global --

"The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of the 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....It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse."

It's been sixty years since the book was published, and the triumph of economics and politics, on both left and right, over spirituality and religion has become more pronounced not less.  The great world religions have stubbornly refused to fade away, however, and still offer the strongest shelters available to those who prioritize spiritual goals over materialistic concerns.

In the quiet heart is hidden Sorrow that the eye can't see

Her smile was shaped like other smiles -
The dimples ran along -
Still it hurt you, as some Bird
Did hoist herself to sing,
Then recollect a Ball, she got -
And hold opon the twig -
Convulsive, while the music broke -
Like Beads - among the bog -

A happy lip - breaks sudden -
It doesn't state you how
It contemplated - smiling-
Just consummated - now -
But this one wears its merriment
So patient - like a pain -
Fresh gilded - to elude the eyes
Unqualified, to scan -


Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 335

Pre-existence

"All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there."

Rumi
The Essential Rumi
Translated by Coleman Banks

Twain muses on Provicence

"Has everything a purpose and a mission? Did this drop fall patiently during five thousand years to be ready for this flitting human insect’s need? and has it another important object to accomplish ten thousand years to come?"

Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer