Religious Anarchy

 

Strangely, I think that anarchy and wholeness belong together. I think that when we think we have "found" we are lost. It is Reality that finds us, and Reality is always movement, radical freedom.

I can trace all this, in a way, back to the words of Thomas Merton when he was speaking of the Shakers, when he wrote....

The Shakers remain as witnesses to the fact that only humility keeps us in communion with truth, and first of all with our own inner truth. This one must know without knowing it, as they did. For as soon as we become aware of "our truth" we let go of it and embrace an illusion.

Possibly there will always be a degree of "anarchy". In my own often stumbling path I remember, way back, gaining a minor form of liberation when someone spoke of having contradictions in their lives/words/beliefs pointed out to them. They said that this no longer caused them any concern, that sometimes we just have to live with "truths" that apparently contradict each other. Each seems "true" to us at any one time and need acknowledgement. Perhaps the point is, if we do not cling too tight to the exact expression, in time the "contradictions" resolve themselves at a "higher" (or perhaps more fundamental) level.

Dogen, the zen guy, has said that though nothing in the entire universe is concealed, nevertheless there is a movement forever forward into a greater intimacy with Reality-as-is. Which I have faith is healing, non-judgemental, full of gifts and grace.

Dogen's Genjokoan

 I mentioned Blooks (a cross between a Blog and a Book) which a company in France prints out for you. Created on Google Blogs (many other platforms can be downloaded from) this is then downloaded to Blookup (the company in France) and then you are able to edit it before print-off.

My latest Blook is of Dogen's "Genjokoan", and includes four translations, all illustrated.

GENJO - to appear, come to be.

KOAN - the problem, but yet again, the solution.

Therefore Genjokoan is variously translated. "The Issue in Hand", "The Actualization of Reality", "The Problem of Everyday Life", "The Actualization of Enlightenment".

Genjokoan is Dogen's most translated text as it is often deemed to be the essence of his thought and the remainder of his copious writings simply expansions of the themes.

For those who well might consider such a text esoteric and of strictly limited purpose, it is well to remember that Dogen first wrote it for a lay-person who can be presumed to have asked quite simple questions. "How should I live?" , "How do I find my own path, time and place?", or maybe just "What is the Dharma, and how should I practice, here in the world, not in a monastery?"

Nevertheless, the text IS obscure in many ways and translations of it vary considerably. Obscure for various reasons. Dogen wrote in a very cultured "olde" Japanese style (rather like Chaucer in Olde English!) and again, presumed readers would be fully aware of certain allusions and references - much like a modern day writer referencing the Good Samaritan, or the Sermon on the Mount, simply assuming that most readers would gather in their mind/hearts the full ambience of such references.

And so in the Genjokoan there are fishes and birds, flowers and weeds, firewood and ash, and even advice on why we always need a fan, this in spite of the wind blowing everywhere.

And so, even when enlightened, nevertheless "flowers fade even though we love them, weeds grow even though we dislike them." Suffering is not eliminated, but our response can be transformed within the pure Grace of Reality if we allow it in, then to be reflected back into our fragile world. Every dewdrop can reflect the entire moon, yet the moon is not diminished nor divided. It remains there, for all. We need only turn our face to it.

Turn in faith and trust, that Reality-as-is is healing. No need to look for proofs, or investigate...........as Dogen writes:-

Therefore, if there are fish that would swim or birds that would fly only after investigating the entire ocean or sky, they would find neither path nor place. When we make this very place our own, our practice becomes the actualization of reality (genjōkōan). When we make this path our own, our activity naturally becomes actualized reality (genjōkōan).

Well, I never really intended to ramble on like this. It must be the McDonald's coffee (if not the burgers)

I really intended just to post a few photos of my latest Blook. Here they are (thank you Blookup, even though your fees are quite steep!)

Desire, Suffering and Paths to Nowhere

 Someone, somewhere spoke of "desire" as the cause of suffering. Not sure how the conversation went, but desire remained - in various ways. Many Dharma books - or books on Buddhism - more often than not translate key words from the Pali into English (Theravada) or from Sanskrit into English (Mahayana). Particularly Introductory books, seeking to make them more comprehensible. But this is not always the best option.

There are many subsequent books and arguments that throw the word "suffering" back and forth. "All is suffering" said the Buddha! What a pessimist! Obviously wrong, so much joy in the world!

But "all is dukkha"? To grasp dukkha, to understand , is far from chewing the cud over the prevalence of "suffering".

To do so we have to enter another world of thought.

As with "desire". Or as in the Pali, tanha which can also be translated as "thirst". But recently, in one Dharma book, an astonishing fact, that in the Theravada texts there can be found seventeen different words which have all been translated as "desire" in various books dedicated to understanding Buddhism. So there is the problem.

Whatever, the common interpretation is that suffering (dukkha) is caused by craving (samudaya) and can be eliminated (nirodha) by following the eightfold path (mārga).

Yet some "revisionists" are known to asserts that "marga" - the path - is not the path to the end of suffering, more THE path, which is endless. This, firstly, because it is evident that Buddha did not become enlightened by following the eightfold path: he found the path by becoming enlightened.

Further, some now say that after deep study of the original texts in the original Pali, with all its nuances, that the ‘four noble truths’ is not a very good rendering of the name for the basics. That in fact a better rendition would be ‘four truths for noble ones’. (Which tends to elimate myself from the equation, but I'll leave that aside)

One such teacher of the Dharma says that Dukkha is not something that is ever eliminated as such. Handing over to this teacher, his words:-

Birth, disease, old age and death, separation from what is loved, confinement with what it unlovely, failure and loss are all inevitable whether one is enlightened or not. The first truth, therefore, is a truth for everybody. The second truth is not just the cause of suffering, but also the result of affliction. It literally means ‘what comes up with dukkha’. What comes up is a bittersweet mixture of emotions, and sometimes even woeful resignation. The way in which an ordinary person handles this eventuality does commonly lead to more dukkha, as when one drowns one’s sorrow in alcohol, for example. The enlightened person, however, has a broader perspective within which to contain (nirodha) the arising energy. This is based on faith, vision and practice. When the arising energies are sublimated in this way, the person may well be found to be on the eightfold path. The path, therefore, is not a way to but a way from enlightenment, as it certainly was for the Buddha. This interpretation has stood the test of time and many people have found it valuable.


Well, anyway, whatever, not many interested. Myself, I find it more interesting than speculating upon the consequences of Donald Trump's arrest, or how the UK's very own Donald Trump Lite, Boris Johnson, will get on when grilled today about his alleged lying to Parliament.

And There's More!

 More on James Joyce. I re-visited my blog on Google and reread a few things there on Joyce. So here a bit of a cut and paste, with a little bit of reworking. Reminded again of Samuel Beckett's "Krapps Last Tape" where Mr Krapp (some joke there maybe?) records his thoughts or whatever every ten years or so and when he listens back each time can find little connection. Then the last tape of course, yet if we escape from a totally linear time frame, which was first and which is last?

I've mentioned liking books about "Finnegans Wake", and one I read was "Pervigilium Finneganis" which purports to be the Wake translated into Latin! I think it is a joke.

It manages the impossible and makes the Wake even more unreadable. Yes, a good joke, and I tend to think that James Joyce would have laughed. Would he have enjoyed it? But a serious point is made (or not) in the introductory essay that proceeds the body of the text, which is well worth the small price of the entire book. A point made in other books on the Wake, including "A Word In Your Ear" by Eric Rosenbloom. That at some point you really do need an ejector seat and stop looking for more and more depth in the various tricks of the text. Don't fall for Joyce's attempt at immortality and become one who lives their life deciphering each and every word, then re-deciphering each word again and again, keeping you busy and away from life itself. I think Sartre had something to say about seeking to immortalise himself in literature and he chose to resist the temptation. Maybe Joyce did not, and Nora Barnacle should have had a quiet word in his ear at some point.

But I do love James Joyce. It was as I said before the "Yes" of Molly Bloom that did it. But it is Yes to life, not yes to pouring over a book looking for clues that can then be used to impress the literati.

Nevertheless, in Latin or Wakese, often both are sometmes welcome alternatives to Zen books, which are all seeking to encourage you to leap from the top of a 100 ft pole without a safety net. So leap! Don't let James Joyce have the last laugh.

Well, to finish I will share a few quotes from books about "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" which I have drawn from on my own often vulnerable and stumbling path through our fragile world.

Bloom (Leopold Bloom of Ulysses) is no perfect hero, but perfection is overrated. Give me a honest human being embracing their mundane humanity any day over a person striving after perfection.

Joyce does not present us with the illusion of a perfect life in this book, a life without pain and sorrow, but in all his honesty Joyce shows us that life as it is and not as we think it should be is worth saying Yes to. The sorrows and difficulties faced in Ulysses are included in Joyce’s affirmation of life, because what good would such an affirmation be if it did not include all of life?

Joyce offers a new litmus test for what we call the hero, not gigantic feats of strength, but small and simple feats of kindness.

But another quote, this from Joseph Campbell, from his book on Joyce, "Mythic Worlds, Modern Words":-

It’s my feeling that our imagery has been deprived of its affect by our strongly rational tendency in the interpretation of images and by our religious traditions concretizing symbols, so that they refer, not past themselves to symbolic themes, but to historical events—when, for example, we interpret the resurrection of Christ as having been an historical event instead of seeing the resurrection as a psychologically crucial moment of crisis, this deprives the imagery of its affect.


And finally: -

An epiphany was not a miraculous dispensation from above but, as Joyce defined it, an insight into 'the soul of the commonest object'.

(Kevin Birmingham, from "The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle For James Joyce's Ulysses.")

James Joyce Revisted

 I've mentioned my love of biographies/autobiographies. They flesh out the subject, bring much of their writings into another focus. I remember knowing only of Shelley from his "Ode to the Western Wind" and imagined a wrinkled old poet stuck up in some musty garret somewhere, bereft of life as I knew it. But in the end, there he was, the Boy George of his own times, gallivanting around the continent, eloping with his love. Joyce I think, his writings, always gain from biographical details.

He was always on the cadge, always short of money. Yet sometimes he displayed a giving heart. Once he was strolling down a Dublin street with a friend when they were accosted by a man asking for a handout. "Can you spare a penny sirs?"

Joyce asked him what he wanted it for and the man said:- "To be honest sir, I'm thirsting for a drink" (obviously alcoholic). Joyce gave him his own last penny.

After the man sped away Joyce said to his friend:- "If he had said he wanted a cup of tea I would have hit him."

But anyway, the more we know of another's life, often the more we can enjoy their words. It is certainly so with Joyce.

Getting back to "Finnegans Wake", there is a review of that book that I wrote for Amazon which is maybe worth sharing. I had downloaded the Penguin edition to my Kindle.

Review:-

Well, first, this particular edition. Begins on the very first page by telling us that Joyce was the oldest often (sic) children. Is this a typo, or are Penguin getting into the spirit of the book? Anyway, whatever, this is certainly the best book I have never read. I have managed the first page or two, but the reality is that I enjoy books ABOUT Finnegans Wake rather than actually attempting to wend my way through it. One book about it informed me that each sentence, even each single word, could be seen as a microcosm of the entire text, so in that context why actually read it all. "riverrun" is enough. Then again, the word play is very enjoyable and the ABC of the book, and a Lexicon, offer endless interest and much humour. Apparently Joyce was heard by his long suffering wife Nora Barnacle late into many a night as he laughed aloud at his own jokes, setting his traps for the future literary critics to decipher, writing yet another un-understandable book that Nora wished was more "understandable" and thus more of a cash cow. But as I grow older I see more clearly that understanding life is a terrible trap - as thoughts, words and beliefs congeal and enclose the mind in circles of self-justification as the inevitable end approaches. But what end? The end of Finnegans Wake (not that I have ever reached it) takes us back to the beginning. As Joyce said about Ulysses as he faced the obscenity trials, "if Ulysses is unfit to read, then life is unfit to live". So life is to be lived rather than "understood". And Molly Bloom, in Ulysses, ends her monologue with a beautiful "Yes". Learning about Finnegans Wake, from various books, does help me to live, hopefully with compassion and not a little gratitude. Not least for the life and writings of James Joyce himself who gave us this last wonderful book using eyes that just might have reduced many others to night and despair. So buy a copy, if not to read it, then to have it on your bookshelf to impress the neighbours.

Absintheminded? Absent, mind drifting? Forgetful? Drunk? Or just a joke, all things, or nothing. Dig deep or skim the surface.

I remember that I did make it to page 16 of the book. What did I make of it? Gradually, from those few pages, and from all previous reading of his words and the words of others about Joyce's words, I learn and see that he never mocks the mundane, never jeers at any expression of humanity. Joyce tends to observe without judgement, reports it, conjures with it in an essentially egalitarian way, seeking moments that have been called "epiphanies", when the mundane is transported to another plane entirely - for those who see.

"God is a shout in the street" as he writes in Ulysses.

Joyce Revisted

 I thought that I would open a thread on James Joyce, the author of several books, most notably "Ulysses".

I have actually read "Ulysses", twice in fact, and various books about it. I first loved the deep "Yes"! of Molly Bloom at the very end. If it had been a "No" I would have long left the book alone.

One of Joyce's books I have never read (apart from small portions) is "Finnegans Wake", written in what has come to be called "Wakese", an amalgamation of languages that Joyce found that he needed, never finding quite the correct word in his native tongue to capture the reality of life as he knew it to be. Quite profound really.

Samuel Beckett said that "Finnegans Wake" wasn't about anything, but was rather the thing itself. Maybe, but I can make little of most of it. Maybe I need to translate it into my own Wakese?

But a few lines here and there have captured my mind/heart, quoted here now:-

They lived and laughed and loved and left.

First we feel. Then we fall.

Let us leave theories there and return to here's hear.

The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity.

Will ye, ay or nay?

A dream of favours, a favourable dream. They know how they believe that they believe that they know. Wherefore they wail.


I particularly love the "gracehoper" line. And maybe I capture the "thing itself" as gift from Joyce's sharing. No word there already known and wrung dry, to be pounded once more by my "self" and its conditioned behaviour and reactivity, but new words calling for new eyes. Beautiful. Life giving. Grace. I Hope(r)!

Various Selves

 Thomas Merton has much to say about what some zennists have termed the "recondite host" that is to be realised/known beneath all our conditionings of time and place, conditionings we can end up killing and dying for. Zen seeks our "original face before we were born."

This not really to displace or erode our day to day self, but more to redeem it, to allow such self its proper place. All religion speaks of the unity of the transitory with the eternal. It can be a life adventure to discover that unity.

Merton explores such themes by contrasting the "modern" Cartesian self with other ways of seeing. Descartes famous "I think therefore I am" which has become much of a bedrock of modern thought, perhaps presumed or assumed too much. Perhaps it should just be "Thought"? Presuming an "I" that has the thoughts, therefore creating a dualism, could well be a step too far, at least as a beginning to constructing a worldview.

Whatever, this cartesian self has led in part to the rampant individualism so prevalent in the West, where self enclosed units of selfhood each seeks to create a persona, a self, as a suitable case for dealing with the world, to display, to sport with.........to judge all others from. Or pass some sort of presumed "test" set by the Almighty!

Merton suggests an alternative form of "Being", but first he speaks of the consequences of cartesian thought for the concept of God:-

Cartesian thought began with an attempt to reach God as object by starting from the thinking self. But when God becomes object, he sooner or later “dies,” because God as object is ultimately unthinkable. God as object is not only a mere abstract concept, but one which contains so many internal contradictions that it becomes entirely nonnegotiable except when it is hardened into an idol that is maintained in existence by a sheer act of will.

Then Merton suggests an alternative:-

Meanwhile, let us remind ourselves that another, metaphysical, consciousness is still available to modern man. It starts not from the thinking and self-aware subject but from Being, ontologically seen to be beyond and prior to the subject-object division. Underlying the subjective experience of the individual self there is an immediate experience of Being. This is totally different from an experience of self-consciousness. It is completely nonobjective. It has in it none of the split and alienation that occurs when the subject becomes aware of itself as a quasi-object. The consciousness of Being (whether considered positively or negatively and apophatically as in Buddhism) is an immediate experience that goes beyond reflexive awareness. It is not “consciousness of” but pure consciousness, in which the subject as such “disappears.”

Posterior to this immediate experience of a ground which transcends experience, emerges the subject with its self-awareness. But, as the Oriental religions and Christian mysticism have stressed, this self-aware subject is not final or absolute; it is a provisional self-construction which exists, for practical purposes, only in a sphere of relativity. Its existence has meaning in so far as it does not become fixated or centered upon itself as ultimate, learns to function not as its own center but “from God” and “for others.” The Christian term “from God” implies what the nontheistic religious philosophies conceive as a hypothetical Single Center of all beings, what T. S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world,” but which Buddhism for example visualizes not as “point” but as “Void.” (And of course the Void is not visualized at all.)

In brief, this form of consciousness assumes a totally different kind of self-awareness from that of the Cartesian thinking-self which is its own justification and its own center. Here the individual is aware of himself as a self-to-be-dissolved in self-giving, in love, in “letting-go,” in ecstasy, in God—there are many ways of phrasing it.

The self is not its own center and does not orbit around itself; it is centered on God, the one center of all, which is “everywhere and nowhere,” in whom all are encountered, from whom all proceed. Thus from the very start this consciousness is disposed to encounter “the other” with whom it is already united anyway “in God.”

(From an essay contained in "Zen and the Birds of Appetite")

From my Buddhist perspective the "self" that has come to be, more often than not, in our modern world, is inevitably prone to suffering (dukkha)

Our modern world seems to value "individualism", but as Merton points out, individualism should never be confused to "personalism". True, life giving personality is to be found in the “true Self”, in the unity of subject and object.

Merton again:-

 Hence the highest good is the self’s fusion with the highest reality. Human personality is regarded as the force which effects this fusion. The hopes and desires of the external, individual self are all, in fact, opposed to this higher unity. They are centered on the affirmation of the individual. It is only at the point where the hopes and fears of the individual self are done away with and forgotten that the true human personality appears. In a word, realization of the human personality in this highest spiritual sense is for us the good toward which all life is to be oriented. It is even the absolute good, in so far as the human personality intimately and probably even essentially related to the personality of God.

Well, maybe enough. I waffle to find my own clarity. My time here in McDonalds with a white coffee is precious to me, helping me deal with my own problems and mental health issues. I'm "on call" for others in many ways, times which I also treasure, yet I value a certain solitude.

Amazing Grace Revisted

 

Moving on, relating to posts here from @Crazywaterspring and @PrincessOfHell, I find that the origins of all our World's Faith Traditions are shrouded in mist and cloud. Difficult to truly know just who or what copied from who else. What I would say is that the presumed power of Satan has grown and grown in many christian imaginations until he has become virtually as powerful as God Himself!

Those same imaginations are those who speak more of fear, guilt and damnation than of love, even sometimes appearing to relish thinking of the fate of the damned. Such Good News! For such "good news" to have substance they must first proclaim the Bad, their game given away in the words of the famous hymn, "Amazing Grace":-

Twas grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears removed.

First the bad, then the good. Yet what is changing here?

The Old Testament speaks of a God whose "mercy endures forever" and more, the Bible reports God as proclaiming :- "For I the Lord do not change".

This all points to an understanding and a knowledge of God (or Reality-as-is) as the one constant. Acknowledged in the East and the West:-

My eyes being hindered by blind passions,
I cannot perceive the light that grasps me;
Yet the great compassion, without tiring,
Illumines me always

(Shinran, from "Hymns of the Pure Land Masters")

And Julian of Norwich, who wrote her "Revelations of Divine Love", speaking here on the same theme......

If there be anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.

In zen the 13th century zen guy Dogen, in his "Genjokoan" , comes down to the mechanics, with his allusions of shore and boat, in his usual poetic style. That it is the boat we are in that moves, creating the illusion that it is the shore. To become still and receptive is the key:-

Be still and know that I Am God

Whatever, as Dogen says, "we are what we understand", which is quite profound, encompassing many things including karma..."we ARE our karma".

As I see it, becoming still is paradoxically to move forward, but in the sense of allowing the "myriad things" to reflect in us, for us to then reflect them back upon our fragile world. True freedom is only to be found in God, Reality-as-is, not in our own petty choices. In unity, in reflecting, we find our freedom. In a constant advance unto novelty. Truly moving at last.

Yet as Dogen - again - says, whatever our understanding, shallow of profound, nevertheless flowers fade even though we love them, weeds grow even though we dislike them.

"There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in"

May true Dharma continue.
Be kind. No blame. Love everything.