All things must pass

"Sunrise doesn't last all morning
A cloudburst doesn't last all day
Seems my love is up
And has left you with no warning
But it's not always going
To be this grey
All things must pass
All things must pass away
Sunset doesn't last all evening
A mind can blow those clouds away
After all this my love is up
And must be leaving
But it's not always going
To be this grey
All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass
None of life's strings can last
So I must be on my way
And face another day
Now the darkness only stays at night time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good
At arriving at the right time
But it's not always going
To be this grey
All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass
All things must pass away"


-- George Harrison
"In 1997, Harrison was diagnosed with throat cancer; he was treated with radiotherapy, which was thought at the time to be successful. He publicly blamed years of smoking for the illness.
On 30 December 1999, Harrison and his wife were attacked at their home, Friar Park. Michael Abram, a 36-year-old man, broke in and attacked Harrison with a kitchen knife, puncturing a lung and causing head injuries before Olivia Harrison incapacitated the assailant by striking him repeatedly with a fireplace poker and a lamp. Abram suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, believing that Harrison was an extraterrestrial and that the Beatles were witches from Hell who rode broomsticks. During the attack, Harrison repeatedly shouted "Hare Krishna" at Abram. During the trial, a psychiatrist testified that Abram told him he would have stopped the attack if Harrison had talked normally to him. Following the attack, Harrison was hospitalised with more than 40 stab wounds. He released a statement soon afterwards regarding his assailant: "[he] wasn't a burglar, and he certainly wasn't auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys."
In May 2001, it was revealed that Harrison had undergone an operation to remove a cancerous growth from one of his lungs, and in July, it was reported that he was being treated for a brain tumour at a clinic in Switzerland. While in Switzerland, Starr visited him but had to cut short his stay in order to travel to Boston, where his daughter was undergoing emergency brain surgery, prompting Harrison to quip: "Do you want me to come with you?" In November 2001, he began radiotherapy at Staten Island University Hospital in New York City for non-small cell lung cancer which had spread to his brain.
When the news was made public, Harrison bemoaned his physician's breach of privacy, and his estate later claimed damages.
On 12 November 2001 in New York, Harrison, Starr and McCartney came together for the last time. Less than three weeks later, on 29 November 2001, Harrison died at a friend's home in Los Angeles, aged 58. He was cremated at Hollywood Forever Cemetery and his funeral was held at the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, California. His close family scattered his ashes according to Hindu tradition in a private ceremony in the Ganges and Yamuna rivers near Varanasi, India. He left almost £100 million in his will.
Harrison's final album, Brainwashed (2002), was released posthumously after it was completed by his son Dhani and Jeff Lynne. A quotation from the Bhagavad Gita is included in the album's liner notes: "There never was a time when you or I did not exist. Nor will there be any future when we shall cease to be."
-- Wikipedia

All things must pass

Nothing happens

" Even though he had a serious form of cancer, ‘His Holiness (16th Karmapa) remained extremely cheerful. His spontaneous activity of benefiting beings never ceased.’

With a slight smile on his face, he said to his weeping disciple, ‘Nothing happens.’ These words thrust the profound truth of impermanence once again into the disciple’s being.

Birth and death are expressions of life. Whether you are young or old, you should learn the lesson of impermanence from my death....
Death is nothing but a gateway to birth. Nothing that lives ever dies, it only changes form. When a man’s body is weary the soul leaves the body to receive newer and fresher garments. And so on goes the great play of God– from eternity to eternity. (Guru Nanak)

When I drop my body, I will remain in all who love me. I can never die.
The body belonged to the five elements of nature [earth, air, water, sky, and sun] and once its use was over, it had to be returned to the elements.
Once one knows one’s true nature, the death of the physical body becomes irrelevant– death is no longer real.
By entering into a state of deep meditation at death, you have an awareness of what is happening and are free of fear.
Generally speaking, when anyone is at the point of going, he has no use for noise and commotion.
As many hospice workers today can attest, dying does not occur at a precise moment in time: it is not a clear-cut event but rather a process."


-- Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die, Sushila Blackman

 

matter of life and death

"In 1989 I had a heart attack. As I was leaving the hospital, I stepped out into the sunshine, and I had this sudden realization. “Wow! I’m alive. I could be dead. Wow, the rest of my life is just a gift.” And then I thought, “Oh, it always has been, from the very beginning. Nobody owed me this life. It was just given to me. Wow!” And in that moment of waking up, I found what a wonderful, rich feeling it is to be grateful to be alive. Just right now, right here, all the time. I don’t have to have anything more special than knowing that just to be alive is enough.
The great poet Emily Dickinson said, “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” And Brother David Steindl-Rast says, “The greatest surprise is that there is anything at all, that we are here.” And from Omraam Mikhäel Aïvanhov, “The day I acquired the habit of consciously pronouncing the words thank you, I felt I had gained possession of a magic wand capable of transforming everything.” So living this life of gratitude has really changed my life. I used to be both quite opinionated and quite ready to criticize anyone who didn’t agree with me. Now I recognize that my life depends on all the lives around me. We all support each other. None of us could take care of ourselves in a world all alone. We’re so completely interwoven and interdependent.
Our life depends on one another. And as you begin to realize that, you can’t help but be grateful.
Along with this gift of life comes some responsibility for supporting life, participating in taking care of this fabulous gift of life on this earth that we’ve been given. And this is a particularly important point now in our history, as we find that the way we are living is endangering the continuity of life. We see that we have to make some changes in the way we use fossil fuels, because we are in danger of poisoning ourselves and changing the climate of this earth sufficiently to make it uninhabitable, at least by creatures such as we are. There is a responsibility to having received this gift of life, and that is to take care of it in whatever way we can. I heard this quote some time ago: “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” So we find out where we can make whatever contribution we can to the care of the earth and the other beings with whom we share it.
The Dalai Lama’s bodhisattva vow is “Every day, think as you wake up: Today I am fortunate to have woken up. I am alive. I have a precious human life. I am not going to waste it. I’m going to use my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts toward others. I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.” This is our essential vow as bodhisattvas. And of course, you are all bodhisattvas. Suzuki Roshi always used to begin his talks with “Good evening, bodhisattvas.” That’s what we’re here for, to be awake beings. And awake beings are awake to the deep connection we have with everything, with all living beings. We are all of one life, and we need to take care of that life so that it continues generation after generation.
I got a call that a dear friend of mine, who received precepts from me years ago when I lived at Green Gulch, was dying. I arranged with her husband to go and see her and give her the precepts again. One of the things that have been very helpful to me around this matter of birth and death—around this matter of my death, anyhow—is meeting death with great curiosity. What is it? We don’t know. We can’t know ahead of time. Can we be there for it and find out what this great mystery of birth and death is? When I went to visit my friend Jenny, I said to her, “Well, Jenny, it looks like you’re going to find out about the great mystery before Pete and I do.” She was on a hospital bed in her room, but she jumped up and threw her arms around my neck and said, “Blanche! It’s all about love and joy!” This was less than a week before she died. And so I thank you, Jenny, for that teaching. It’s all about love and joy. Can we allow that as a possibility in our heart as we study this great mystery? I know that I find myself, the older I get, imagining whether I could say such a thing on my own deathbed, but it certainly is what I’ve been talking about as I’m approaching my deathbed. That love and joy are really right here and available for us if we will open up to them. And I think familiarizing ourselves with the Buddhist teachings and especially the teaching on loving-kindness will help.
I received an e-mail letter from Jenny’s husband when she died. When they said good night, she said, “I’m going to meet the mystery.” Those were her last words to him. So, I offer you this line, “I want to be full of curiosity,” because it’s been a great sustainer to me over the years.
I came to practice because I discovered that I was going to die—me, personally. I just had never considered it before, but then my best friend, who was my age and had kids the age of my kids, had a headache one night when we were together. It was such a bad headache that she went to the doctor the next morning. She was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, went into a coma, and died. Whoosh! Maybe a month altogether from the first headache.
Well, that could have been me as readily as Pat. Oh, my god! I’m going to die! But the next thought was, “How do you live if you know you’re going to die?” It has been such a gift to me that that question came up. And so I started looking for who could tell me how to live if I know I’m going to die. And I do know I’m going to die. So I’ll just share with you these Five Daily Recollections from the Upajjhatthana Sutra of the Buddha:
I’m of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everything I have and everything I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape from losing them.
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.
These Five Daily Recollections seemed to be, for me, some clue to how to live if you know you’re going to die. Pay attention to how you live. Pay attention to your actions. Are your actions kind? Are your actions honest? Are your actions supported by the desire to help beings, to benefit beings? Are your actions selfish or generous? How are you living this life?
I chant every morning a sutra to the bodhisattva of compassion for the well-being of people in the sangha who are sick or people I know who are sick, and also for, as I say, the calm crossing over and peaceful repose of those who have recently died. Yet I found that when I was chanting just for Lou, my late husband, I was torn about calm crossing over and peaceful repose or many rebirths in which to continue your life, your bodhisattva vow. I wasn’t sure of such things. But his death caused me to pay more attention to those words.
When I’m chanting for him, that’s what comes up for me: the questions of calm, peaceful repose and rebirth. He was quite sincere in his bodhisattva vow to practice for the benefit of all beings, so I imagine that he may experience calm, peaceful repose and rebirth.
Lou and I once rode together with a Tibetan teacher who was giving a workshop on dreams. Lou was very aware of his dreams and felt there was great significance in them. And in the course of driving down to the workshop and back, somewhere in the conversation Lou said something about himself, and Tarab Tulku Rinpoche said, “Oh, well, that’s because you were a monk in a previous life.” Now, Lou was so focused on being a monk—not a teacher, not a scholar, not a priest—just a monk. Perhaps he wanted to go on having many lives being a monk until the bodhisattva vow, of ending the suffering of all beings, was no longer necessary. Anyhow, I really appreciate Shohaku Okumura’s comments on death in his book Realizing Genjokoan:
Firewood becomes ash. Ash cannot become firewood again. However, we should not view ash as after and firewood as before. We should know that firewood dwells in the dharma position of firewood and has its own before and after. Although before and after exist, past and future are cut off. Ash stays in the position of ash with its own before and after. As firewood never becomes firewood again after it has burned to ash, there is no return to living after a person dies. However, in buddha dharma, it is an unchanged tradition not to say that life becomes death. Therefore, we call it “no arising.” It is the established way of Buddha’s turning the dharma wheel not to say that death becomes life. Therefore, we call it “no perishing.” Life is a position in time. Death is also a position in time. This is like winter and spring. We don’t think that winter becomes spring. And we don’t say that spring becomes summer.
Throughout Dogen Zenji’s teachings, the question of birth and death, or life and death, is called “the great matter.” On the han [a wooden board struck with a mallet] that calls us to the zendo, we have this quotation that’s often chanted every night in a monastery in Japan: “Great is the matter of birth and death. All is impermanent, quickly passing. Wake up! Wake up, each one! Don’t waste this life.” There’s a sense of urgency to understand about life and death, and that’s what Dogen Zenji is speaking to. Common parting words to someone who’s leaving is to say, “Odaiji ni”—please take care of the great matter. It’s very central in Buddhist teachings.
“Life and death” is an English translation of the Japanese expression shoji. As a verb, the Japanese word sho (that is, the character that’s pronounced “sho”) means “to live” or “to be born.” And the second character, ji, is “to die” or “to be dead.” Thus, the expression can be translated into English as “birth and death” or “life and death.” Shoji is the process of life in which we are born, live, and die. It is equivalent to the Sanskrit word samsara.
Practice is a matter of life and death. This life is our practice. This practice is our life—because it’s all about birth and death. And we’ve all been born, and we’re all going to die."


-- Blanche Hartman, Lion's Roar

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Meditation is a dress rehearsal for death

"Meditation is a dress rehearsal for death." ~ Adyashanti

Love

foot in the front door

"As my teacher used to say, it’s like getting your foot in the front door. Just because you’ve gotten your foot in the front door doesn’t mean you have turned the lights on; it doesn’t mean you have learned to navigate in that different world that you’ve awakened to."




-- Adyashanti, The End of your World

never put them out of your heart

“Recently I was at a conference, and one of the men at the conference was very powerful, and very preoccupied with power, much like a teenager might be occupied with power, except that he was considerably older.


I experienced this as he was introduced to me and he said, “How ya doing Ram?” I spent time with him and saw that he had decided in his mind that I was irrelevant. Everything I stood for was irrelevant, and I felt my irrelevance in his presence, and I watched that pour through me. I watched myself get caught in it at first, so that I started to crunch up into irrelevance and get slightly deviant. Those are the ways I responded to irrelevancy in his mind about me.

Then I saw my predicament, saved by my meditation bell, and I saw what I was doing. I saw my mind buy his model of myself, and just the noticing of that started to loosen its hold over me. He had brought me into the dimension of power, and found me wanting. He found that I was not powerful enough to be important in his eyes, and I just sat with it, and I felt what it felt like to be irrelevant and somewhat litigious. I just noticed all this, and slowly as I noticed it, and just allowed it. I didn’t push it away, I didn’t make believe that it didn’t exist, I just noticed and allowed it.

Very subtly, just like the way clouds sometimes just break up, it just started to sort of dissolve, and as it dissolved I started to be more quiet and see the way things are, and see the way I had given my power over to him.

I had given him the power to define who I am. I had looked in his eyes literally and said, “Am I enough?” and he said, “No.” I worked with it. It caught me during that day and we were together all weekend, so it wasn’t easy. That first day, he really had me, and I noticed myself edging away from him, and when I’d look at him, I’d get tight. I’d watch him and I found myself with other people showing that “I was somebody.” I mean the poignancy of our predicament is incredibly bittersweet.

Now, I have practices I have developed over the years of taking people who get to me and working with them. I take them into my meditation practice, Metta meditation. I imagined him sitting across from me, and me saying over and over, “May you be free from danger, may you be free from physical suffering, may you be free from mental suffering, may you know ease of well-being.” By the time I had finished the meditation, I could bring him to mind, and I felt that my heart didn’t close down, but could stay open.

There’s a beautiful quote from Kabir, that says, “Do what you do with another human being but never put them out of your heart.” But it’s not always that easy. I saw that my heart had closed down and engaged with my mind. The next day, there he was again, and I felt a flicker in my heart, but I went up to him and said, “Good morning,” looking directly at him. I was right there with it, and there was enough quietness in me so that even though the reactions or the tightening and the bravado were happening, I was right there with it.

I just looked at him and was just with him and suddenly, it was as if the thing you’re so afraid of just dissolves in front of you. It just went away, and I was just there with another being, who had his stuff, but his stuff no longer engaged my mind. I didn’t enjoy him, but I saw he was a good person, trying to do good."

~ Ram Dass, Posted March 12, 2018 ramdass dot org

as if it had never happened

"Years back I’d heard a tale of horror, which happened to a young French girl traveling through India. She’d been fascinated by Aghori sadhus, who have a reputation for being way out on the fringes of the sadhu world. She’d gone to Gujarat to seek them out and had come in contact with some black magic babas. They drugged her with datura (Jimsom weed) which produces a long-lasting zombie-like state in its victims. She was kept drugged and used by the band of sadhus for sex and... often left for hours in the blinding heat by the side of the road with a begging bowl and made to beg for rupees from passerby.

They kept her captive for several years and one day, thinking she was too passive and docile and without a will of her own, they lost track of her, and she managed to walk away and contact the police. She was transported to the French Embassy then back to Paris where her family took her on rounds to all the best specialists in the city. Eventually they all concurred that she’d suffered permanent brain damage and no cure was available. She was aware enough of her situation and allowed her family to institutionalize her so that her needs could be met as best as possible and to prevent her from committing suicide.


Two years after hearing this terrible story I ran into a woman sadhu, who I had often encountered while traveling around India. That morning, I was wearing my Maharaji locket, which I only wear intermittently. I was sitting in a cafe in Paharganj having breakfast with this woman, who had come from France more than thirty years ago. She was a devotee of Ram and a chela of a very famous sadhu from Ayodhya and now lived as a permanent resident of India. All of a sudden she reached across the breakfast table and began to finger the locket around my neck with Maharaji’s picture, “Oh oh!” she cried. “This is the Baba! He saved my little girl’s life!” When I asked her what she was talking about, she proceeded to tell me the whole story about her daughter with the Aghoris that I’d heard before.


She told me that her daughter had been in and out of hospitals for about a year and that when the doctors had finally exhausted every blood test and cat scan process they could think of – they gave up and institutionalized her permanently. About a month later her daughter woke up in the middle of the night and Maharaji was sitting on the edge of her bed. He said, “Daughter, sleep well tonight. Tomorrow, you go home.” When she woke the next morning all the damage and the pain from the drugging and the abuse had melted away as if it had never happened."


~ Barefoot in the Heart: Remembering Neem Karoli Baba edited by Keshav Das

 

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Meister Eckhart’s use of ‘Unborn’

“When asked about the way forward in life, Meister Eckhart said that a person who has a ‘breakthrough’ should return to work in the stable. This is very significant and important advice. It suggests the immediacy of what is often referred to as the divine in everyday life.
Immediacy is a way of saying that the divine cannot be attained, it is always available; it is not something ‘other’ that must be earned through religious or virtuous endeavour; nothing is required, nothing can be added to life, which is perfect just as it is. Our true nature is the ‘divine’.
This is not at all clear to us because it is a ‘hid divinity’; hidden by our collective and individual consciousness, which by its very nature must objectify the world and look out on it from the position of an observer. In other words, out of the many interlocking ‘worlds’ that are before us - the interbeing of the tangle of substantial and insubstantial realms we are part of – we create a reality that is reinforced by usage and habit, and is projected on to the universe as ‘real’. Conditioned to see only one level of reality at a time, we select our familiar one, and the rest recedes. Every entity creates its ‘world’ in the same way.
Yet this is just the way it is. In all that complex interplay, no realm of reality impedes another, everything being an expression of divinity at that ‘level’. The only ‘reality’ is divinity, which is uninterrupted Wholeness, nevertheless characterized by diversity. Ordinary relative life then, is revelation; an expression and unfolding of divinity presenting at every moment. This is not obvious to us because of the operation of that impressive human quality intellect, and the power of thought. It is thought that has created the world we experience, has given it birth. We might also refer to divinity then, as uncreated, as Unborn.
The Unborn is open to us before thought. In the midst of some activity, or conversation, or whatever, an unexpected sound might arise such as a dog barking, or bird-song. The moment of awareness of these sounds is the Unborn, which becomes the created world when we identify them using thoughts and words. At such a ‘point’ the bird and our consciousness co- create; they co-arise together. Our conceptual world is exactly the Unborn obscured by words.
The experience of the moment of awareness arises unbidden. It can occur at any time; when in the midst of mundane activity, or in a location we find awe inspiring, holding a child’s hand, anything really. It is the ‘Aha’ experience, which often brings with it a feeling of at-one-ness where a sense of self momentarily disappears. If we can be open to this we can live in tune with the divine, the Unborn, and we do not need to be scholars, or other than ordinary folk to do so. In this passage in Sermon Two (Walshe translation) Meister Eckhart makes no mention of the need for or benefit of religious practice or intensive study.
“But I say more (do not be afraid, for this joy is close to you and is in you): there is not one of you who is so coarse-grained, so feeble of understanding, or so far off but that he can find this joy within himself, in truth, as it is with joy and understanding, before you leave this church today, indeed before I have finished preaching. He can find this as truly within him, live it and possess it, as that God is God and I am a man.”
In Sermon Six Eckhart is likening Jesus chasing the merchants out of the temple to the need for us to make our hearts receptive to ‘the Word’ by avoiding speculation, or trying to get God by deserving him by special behaviour. We might infer from this that what we seek is already a feature of our human nature, and that we can only open to it, for it is not a ‘something’ that we can attain.
His Sermon Eighty-Seven thoroughly, deeply, systematically and very clearly goes into the matter of how being naked of any form of effort and speculation is the only condition to be utterly receptive. This is a state of spiritual poverty where even a sense of a separate self might be said to disappear. It is in this sermon that he makes a distinction between mundane reality and divinity which Eckhart says is his ‘first cause’. In his first cause, before thought we could say, he:
“…had no God and was my own cause: then I wanted nothing and desired nothing, for I was bare being and the knower of myself in the enjoyment of truth…what I was I wanted, and thus I was free of God and all things. But when I left my free will behind and received my created being, then I had a God. For before there were creatures, God was not ‘God’: He was That which He was.”
The Buddhist might say that ‘That which He was’ is the Unborn. ‘That which He was’ is not everyday experience, and to move beyond that, Eckhart prays that he can be rid of God, by which he means any thought of God. In effect he is moving away from a dualistic characterisation of an exclusively transcendental god. He would be beyond having any connotation for God, even be beyond regarding God as ground of being, or a superior implicate order or intelligence that everything depends on. This would require that he lets all conceptions go, even that God is unknowable, including a concept of God as beyond delimitation. He would have no concept at all or any attempt at a concept; not even of Essence.
It is at this point he brings in the Unborn:
“…I am my own cause according to my essence, which is eternal, and not according to my becoming, which is temporal. Therefore I am unborn, and according to my unborn mode I can never die. According to my unborn mode I have eternally been, am now and shall eternally remain. That which I am by virtue of birth must die and perish, for it is mortal, and so must perish with time. In my birth all things were born, and I was the cause of myself and all things; and if I had so willed it, I would not have been, and all things would not have been. If I were not, God would not be either…if I were not, then God would not be God. But you do not need to know this.”
I think that Eckhart knows that two ‘modes’ are operating simultaneously, his unborn mode and his creaturely mode. In his birth all things were born and he was the cause of himself and all things; which means that once his consciousness knows his birth, all relative reality arises also. The ‘created’ world co-arises in his birth; that is in his consciousness. He makes a related point about the ‘oneness’ of perception and its object in sermon six with his example of ‘eye-wood’.
The ‘creaturely mode’ opens out from self-image. The Unborn, the unconditioned, is distorted through the filter of self-image, so that what is encountered is qualified by our opinion, experience and bias; by our conditioning. The elements of the conditioning of all of us results in relationships being a complex negotiation of positive and negative forces; of power-play. In any human encounter our state of mind at that moment influences how we regard the other and how they make us feel. We enter the negotiation with a sense of identity which has been built up from learned and reinforced patterns and habits of behaviour and reaction. It is the sort of conditioning that forms the image we have of the outside world. If we have learned that appeasing is the way we will safeguard our identity, then we will behave in a placatory manner, even if at a deeper level we might feel uncomfortable in doing so. Similarly, if we have learned that to get in first and dominate works best for our identity, then confrontation will be our response, although that too might cause discomfort. Sometimes we might feel insignificant and behave in ways in which we think we can be impressive; or we might not feel we fit in and in discomfort, act in bizarre and irritating ways. Negotiating the power-play in such behavioural patterns, which in the examples given here are gross, condensed versions of typical responses to others, simply reinforces earlier conditioning. However, if we can develop strong enough awareness of just what is happening, emotionally and conceptually, which will include the ability to see how feelings come and go according to conditions, with no ‘reality’ of their own, and will arise and vanish independently if left alone, we can become free from conditioning.
Such complexity is a construction of human consciousness which has taken the presentation of divinity and created a story of its own; it has seen the universe opening before it and projected its own story on to its fabric. The major cause of human suffering is that we believe the stories we create, so divinity is lost to us.
In Buddhist terms the divinity we are talking about is the Unborn and Unconditioned true mind which is always our original mind. When we obscure this by conditioning what arises in true mind by thought and words, and by holding too great store by them, we imprint habitual behaviours that true mind simply repeats time and again.
If we can be mindful of how thoughts create our daily life, and meet whatever comes to us with awareness before thoughts and words kick in, we can learn to deal with what life is, not what we want it to be. Eckhart would say perhaps that this is living God’s will, not our own.”
~ George Wilson, A Buddhist muses briefly on Meister Eckhart’s use of ‘Unborn’ (Eckhart Society)

this one walking beside me

"I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,...
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die."

-- JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ
"In 1956, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature; two days later, his wife died of ovarian cancer. Jiménez never recovered from the emotional devastation, and he died two years afterwards, on 29 May 1958, in the same clinic where his wife had died. Both are buried in his hometown of Moguer, Spain." -- Wikipedia

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 "In the early days of the conflict, Juan Ramón and Zenobia collaborated with the protection of minors in the care and accommodation of children orphaned by the war: they welcomed twelve children from 4 to 8 years of age, in a flat at Velazquez Street.

On August the 22th 1936, they left Spain. Four days later they boarded in Cher-village in the 'Aquitaine' liner bound for New York and de couple began a journey in which they visited Cuba, United States, Buenos Aires and Puerto Rico, where Zenobia worked as a teacher at the University of Puerto Rico.

In 1937 and 1938 the Jiménez marriage was located in Cuba and lived in the Hotel Vedado from the Havana. They developed a series of social and cultural activities, as well as, taking part in a political act of support on the Spanish Republican side. They continued taking care of Spanish’s orphan’s children and fundraising through subscriptions in the press of New York newspapers and other publication. Zenobia also worked as a volunteer in women's prisons and donated her clothes.

In January 1939, they moved to New York to settle in Coral Gables, Miami (Florida). At the end of the Civil War, the flat that Zenobia and Juan Ramón had in Madrid that survived during all the conflict had been robbed: books, documents and other personal items.

In January of the following year, when Juan Ramón taught his first formal lecture at the University of Miami, Zenobia simultaneously read an English version translated by her. In 1942 her older brother died of a heart attack, José Camprubí.

In 1943 Zenobia and Juan Ramón moved to Washington and, in January of the next year, the University in Maryland wanted Zenobia to teach Spanish to a group of soldiers. After that, they decided to hire her as a teacher in the Department of history and European culture too.

In 1945 they moved to live in Riverdale because she was given a permanent job. Two years later, they bought a house where she and Juan Ramón Jiménez taught classes. In 1948 the couple travelled around Argentina and Uruguay. The trip was extended more than three months so the poet could give 12 more lectures. Neither Juan Ramón nor Zenobia imagined the massive and warm reception they received there.

In 1950, they travelled during November and December to Puerto Rico due to the nervous breakdowns of Juan Ramón.

In 1951, he had to get a cancer operation in Boston. In 1954, he had to have another operation in Puerto Rico, because he didn’t want to live in the United States. Zenobia not only left behind an interesting life, but also the possibility of receiving a good treatment for her own health problem. Zenobia signed a contract with the University of Puerto Rico to translate scientific brochures for a year. She started her classes at the University of Río Piedras. At the end of the year, she got operated from cervical cancer in the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

In February 1952 she recovered and returned to Puerto Rico. She continued her work at the University. On 18 August, Zenobia performed in the Puerto Rico oath as an American citizen, thus she got dual citizenship.

At the beginning of 1953, her brother Augusto suffered a cancer and he spent a season with her and Juan Ramón in Puerto Rico before returning to the United States where he would die at the end of March. Zenobia completed her cancer treatment.

In 1954, Zenobia stopped working at the University because she was given high medical advice. The American magazine published an autobiographical entitled Juan Ramón and I.

In 1955, the University of Puerto Rico gave the couple a room that will be renamed Zenobia and Juan Ramón Jiménez. The House of culture Zenobia and Juan Ramón was created in Moguer.

In 1956, the cancer reappeared and in April and Zenobia started a treatment that would give her great burns. In the month of June, Zenobia flow to Boston for the purpose of being operated again, but the doctors told her not to have the operation and gave her only a few months to live...

Zenobia died on 28 October 1956, in Puerto Rico, three days after her spouse received the Nobel Prize for literature.

Juan Ramón Jiménez survived two more years, and today, they remain in Moguer, in the cemetery of Jesus." ~ Wikipedia

Juan Ramón Jiménez, hacia 1957, en una escuela de Puerto RicoManage

"How can I possibly be happy cleaning the toilet?”

"Nhất Hạnh goes on to explain that, when he was a novice monk in Vietnam, he and those around him did not have toilets at all. In fact, they were lucky to find a few dead leaves to use after their walk up the hill to use the bathroom, in fact! Now, he feels that having a toilet to clean at all is a reason for joy. We can be happy when we realize that we already have what we need for a good life.

In another tale, Nhất Hạnh delves into a bit of Western psychology by telling a story from his childhood. Looking into a large, water-filled clay jar, he found a beautiful leaf of many colors. It rested at the bottom of the water, out of reach of his arm.

He found a stick, but no matter how he swirled the water, he could not make the leaf rise to the surface. Giving up, he walked away. When he returned, a few moments later, the leaf lay upon the surface of the water, and he picked it up. The water had continued to swirl while he was away, bringing the leaf to the surface.


Nhất Hạnh continues the story by saying that this is how our unconscious minds work. When we have a problem to solve, struggling with our conscious mind becomes futile at a certain point. We must be able to stir the water and step away for a moment.
You might wonder: why not simply teach these lessons directly? Why not simply tell others that they already have the conditions for happiness? Why not tell them to plant question-seeds in their minds and let them be for a while, engaging our unconscious minds to aid in finding the answer?


Because people aren’t good at internalizing facts. They are, however, good at internalizing stories. They’ll remember the story of the toilet when next they feel their lives lack the conditions for happiness before they’ll remember a platitude."~ Belief net


Photo ~ Founded on 19 November 2001, World Toilet Organization (WTO) is a global non-profit committed to improving toilet and sanitation conditions worldwide. WTO empowers individuals through education, training and building local marketplace opportunities to advocate for clean and safe sanitation facilities in their communities.

 

Haha

Lotus and the Cross

“At first glance, Buddhism seems vastly different from Christianity. Christianity is a religion about God, while the Absolute in Buddhism is never personalized, and seldom described, except as being beyond description. Most Christian denominations see the Bible as being of paramount importance (particularly in conservative Protestantism), while the vastly larger collection of Buddhist scriptures are seldom considered as an infallible authority except for a handful of smaller sects.


But delving deeper, the differences become much smaller. For instance, many of the early Church Fathers taught that in his true essence, God is unknowable and unfathomable, beyond all words and all descriptions. This inability to speak of the divine nature is known as apophatic (unspeakable) mysticism, which recognizes God is beyond all words and concepts, and anything we use to say what God is falls short. God's essence (ousia), is within all things, but ever beyond all. Similarly, the Buddhist scriptures refer to the ultimate reality as "the Uncreated," or "the Unmanifest," an absolute Reality which is everywhere present, but beyond this perceived world, resulting from no cause, and limited by no conditions.


The teachings of the Buddha and the Christ go beyond the basic morality which is common to all religions. They both taught selfless love, a love that goes beyond family, friends, and countrymen, but even includes our enemies as well, no matter how difficult the circumstances.


“He was angry with me, he attacked me, he defeated me, he robbed me”—those who dwell on such thoughts will never be free from hatred.
He was angry with me, he attacked me, he defeated me, he robbed me”—those who do not dwell on such thoughts will surely be free from hatred.
For hatred can never put an end to hatred. Love alone can. This is an unalterable law.” —Dhammapada 1:3-5


“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly. . . . If you love those who love you, what thanks can you expect? Even sinners love those who love them. . . . Instead, love your enemies and do good, and lend without any hope of return. . . . You will be sons of the Most High, for he himself is kind to hate ungrateful and the wicked.” —Luke 6:27-28, 32, 35


They taught that selfless love conquers the fear of death
Him I call a brahmin who fears neither prison nor death. He has the power of love no army can conquer. ~ Dhammapada 26:399


A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends. —John 15:13


They taught that selflessness entails a profound shift in the mind
Avoid all wrong,
Cultivate the good,
Purify the mind,
This is the teaching of all the Buddhas [awakened ones]. —Dhammapada 14:183

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength. . . —Mark 12:30


[Note: Jesus is quoting the Jewish Shema (Dt. 4:5) as the greatest commandment, but the words “all your mind” are his own addition.]


Entire books can be written on the similarity (and differences) between the recorded teachings of the Christ and the Buddha; it's beyond the scope of this modest page. But if you've been interested enough to read this far, you might well want to explore it yourself.


Many Christians find Buddhism appealing because its mystical tradition is much better-known, and therefore more accessible. Indeed, in the 21st century, we have reached the point where the majority of Christians have no concept of Christian mysticism per se, as the union of the soul with God. However, since the overwhelming majority of Buddhist clergy lives in religious community (some exceptions in Japan and the United States), living religious life immersed in spiritual practices such as meditation, the mystical tradition of Buddhism is more visible to both Buddhists and Christians than the Christian contemplative tradition is. However, it is wrong to assume from this that all Buddhists are mystics or that even a majority are.


Far from it. Just as a typical Christian life is to go to church on Sunday, pray, worship God, and try to live a more loving life, so the typical Buddhist pays homage to the Buddha, renews his bodhisattva vows, donates support for the sangha or temple, and tries to be a better person. Most lay Buddhists in Asia are not very deeply involved in spiritual practices like meditation anymore than most Christians. The difference is in the clergy’s practice. In modern Christianity, communal religious life and the contemplative tradition have been declining for centuries, and are virtually unknown in most Protestant denominations, while in most Buddhist cultures, it still thrives.


Another difference is that instruction in meditation often seems to be clearer in Buddhism than in Christianity. Although there is now a resurgence of interest in Christian meditation, from the Centering Prayer movement in the United States to the World Community for Christian Meditation, to Quaker methods and the practices of other Christian denominations, there is still far less on the Christian shelves compared to the Eastern shelves for the 21st-century American shopping at Borders. Buddhist instruction tends to be more explicit, whether it's the "just sitting" of shikantaza, the conscious observing of Vipassana, the koan practice of Rinzai Zen, the compassion meditation of metta, etc. I've found that my experience at a ten-day Vipassana intensive was extremely helpful in my Christian contemplative practice. Beyond that, scores of meditation centers and retreats advertise in the variety of magazines in which Buddhist spirituality is addressed, such as Tricycle and Shambhala Sun.


Finally, the goal is often more clearly presented in Buddhism: the serious practitioner knows that he ultimately hopes for Awakening (Enlightenment); even when Christians are able to receive instruction in meditation, the ultimate goal—theosis—is seldom expressed in Christian circles outside of Orthodoxy.”


~ Jon Zuck, The Lotus and the Cross

Love

Wild Wise Man

"John the Baptist is the prophet who rejects the system without apology, eats the harsh food of that choice and wears the clothes of rejection. Like our native peoples here in New Mexico, he goes on his vision quest into the desert where he faces his aloneness, boredom and naked self. He returns with a message, a clarity, a surety of heart that reveals a totally surrendered man. First he listens long and self-forgetfully; then he speaks, acts and accepts the consequences. ... Surely he is the ultimate wild man! Or is it wise man? He is both. 

 

Always pointing beyond himself, ready to get out of the way, finally beheaded by the powers that be, John represents the kind of liberation and the kind of prophecy that we need in our affluent culture. He is not just free from the system, he is amazingly free from himself. These are the only prophets God can use, the only prophets we can trust.
John is seen by his contemporaries and by Jesus himself as a return and image of Elijah the Prophet. Elijah, of course, is the contemplative on Mount Horeb who met the Holy One “not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but in the sound of a gentle breeze” (1 Kings 19:11-13.) He has fled to the prayer of the mountain from the hostility of king and queen, who see him as “the troubler of Israel" (1 Kings 18:17), who makes clear their idolatries.
 
Who wants to be a troubler? Who would dare to think of himself as a prophet? What did we come out to the desert to see? John the Baptist seems to tell us that it is the only place bare enough, empty enough to mirror our own motives and disguises. The desert is the prophet to the prophet. We had to come here, we had to come to the quiet, and we have to trust men like John to begin to trust our own action and contemplation. Trouble us, John! You are our pointing-patron-prophet. We’re not wild yet."


~ Richard Rohr, John the Baptist: Wild Wise Man, Radical Grace

Photo ~ PORTRAITS OF THE HOMELESS by Lee Jeffries

 

Mind's Empty Nature

"Some people spend all their energy, and even risk their lives to achieve fame. Fame and notoriety are both no more than an empty echo. Your reputation is an alluring mirage that can easily lead you astray. Discard it without a second thought, like the snot you blow from your nose.

When you have truly attained the realization of emptiness, you will be like Milarepa or Guru Rinpoche, who were unaffected by the heat of summer or the cold of winter, and who could not be burned by... fire or drowned in water. In emptiness there is neither pain nor suffering. We, on the other hand, have not understood the empty nature of the mind and so, when bitten by even a small insect, we think, 'Ouch! I've been bitten. It hurts!' or, when someone says something unkind, we get angry. That is a sign that we have not realized the mind's empty nature."

~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

 

Love

Presence in that Knowledge

                                                                                                                                           "In general, people say, ‘We are following Dharma”, and speak of it as a kind of religion created by Buddha Shakyamuni. That is not a correct point of view. Buddha never created any kind of school or religion. Buddha was a totally enlightened being, someone beyond our limited point of view. The teaching of the Buddha is to have presence in that knowledge."

~ Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche