I think mind/body dualism is an extremely pernicious philosophy. I don’t just mean that I find it metaphysically untenable (which I do), I mean that I find it leads to a way of being in the world that is terribly ineffective and perhaps even unethical in some situations.

With the separation of mind and body comes an implicit hierarchy. Usually this results in mind or soul being valued as pure, undefiled, and superior to the body, which is seen as corrupt, dirty, and overall inferior. The soul directs us toward heaven, but the body drags us down to hell. This is a very familiar trope in many religions, in which we are taught to identify ourselves with the soul and regard our bodies with loathing and suspicion. There is a war between the spirit and the flesh, and we must subjugate the latter.

But it’s actually not even the religious masochism this can lead to which I find truly objectionable. No, I’m talking about a division many of us probably take for granted. This could be variously described as the distinction between “theory” (what we know with our mind) and “practice” (what we do with our bodies), or the distinction between knowing and doing, and the attendant supposition that we can truly have knowledge without action.

This separation places “knowledge” solely in the realm of the intellect; we assume that to “know” something means to grasp it intellectually and this has nothing to do with our bodies. Everyone knows that theory is entirely distinct from practice in this way, and if you don’t believe me try getting a job a college graduate without any prior work experience.

But what if we reject the assumptions of dualism? What if we hold that we are both mind and body, and that knowledge is something that does not occur only in one “pole” of our being but must occur in both? What would that mean?

(Continued under the cut)

I rather suspect it would look something like the Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming’s injunction that “to know, and not to do, is not to know.“

To quote from Wang’s Instructions for Practical Living*:

Xu Ai did not understand the Master’s doctrine of the unity of knowing and acting and debated it back and forth with Huang Zongxian and Gu Weixian without coming to any conclusion. Therefore I took the matter to the Master. The Master said “Give me an example and let me see.” I said, “For example, there are people who know that parents should be served with filiality and elder brothers treated with respect, but they cannot put these things into practice. This shows that knowing and doing are two different things.”

The Teacher said, “The knowing and doing you refer to are already seperated by selfish desires and are no longer knowing and acting in their original state. There have never been people who know but do not act. Those who are supposed to know but do not act simply don’t know.”

This is a truly radical concept. It means, for one thing, that if we can’t cite a gap between theory and practice to cover our mistakes. It means that all knowledge is embodied knowledge, that we don’t truly know something until it is reflected in our actions.

If this seems counter-intuitive, it’s because we conceive of knowledge in a purely intellectual way, of consisting of a set of rules which we memorize and can then apply to a given situation by telling our bodies what to do. And perhaps for many of us living as we do in the 21st century, this the only kind of “knowledge” we really need to navigate through this world we find ourselves in.**

But consider a skilled artist or dancer or craftsman. When these people are “in the zone”, in the mental state psychologists call “flow“, they aren’t engaged in intellectual discursive activity. They aren’t mentally rooting through a set of concepts.  In that moment, there are no concepts or rules. Movements emerge naturally and spontaneously from the body. The mind is active here, but not in the sense that it is trying to “think through” the situation; your body either has an immediate grasp of the situation or it doesn’t. If it does, knowledge intuitively blossoms into action. If it doesn’t, you practice again and again until it does. Knowledge is not just stored in the mind, it’s stored in the body. And if information hasn’t made its way deep into your muscles and bones, then you don’t really know it in any meaningful way.

We can see a description of this sort of behavior by turning to another Chinese thinker, Chuang Tzu***:

“Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee-zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.

“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”

Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now-now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes, Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

“A good cook changes his knife once a year-because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month-because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as thought it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room-more than enough for the blade to play about in. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.”

This applies not just to activities like carving up an ox, but to our entire lives. All knowledge is embodied. It’s no good to say “I know it, but I can’t put into practice.” True knowledge is never divorced from action. We have no choice but to “be the change we want to see in the world”, which brings me to the topic of activism.

Liberal activists are always speaking of the need to “educate” the unwashed masses. “If only we could get them to understand,” they whine. “Then things would change!” And so they blog, publish articles, publish books, hold peace marches, etc, all hoping to educate people, to “get the message out”. As Ralph Nader recently put it in, “we’re in the golden age of muckraking.” And yet somehow nothing seems to get done when it comes to any of these worthy causes.

I would suggest the problem is that the reason nothing gets done is that we understand knowledge and action to be separate, and consequently we don’t really know even when we think we know. If that knowledge isn’t embodied by us, isn’t something that we breathe and eat and excrete and live on a cellular level — then can we really be said to ‘know’? How deep is our knowledge, if it only reaches the conceptual level of our minds, and doesn’t overflow into our actions?

So much of activism occurs in the realm of the symbolic: marches, demonstrations, candlelight vigils, etc. These all make for great photo ops, but what do they accomplish? A common response I hear is “they make people think”. Fair enough, but perhaps what we need is something that will make people act. People are afraid to act. And again, we come back to mind-body dualism, this time in the context of what is permissible: resistance is tolerated (for now) when it occurs in the mind, but it cannot be allowed to truly occur with our bodies. Our resistance is only articulated, but never actualized (suddenly, we’re back to abstractions again).

Perhaps we have so internalized the mind body distinction, and identify so strongly with our “minds”, that we no longer know how to embody resistance. And perhaps this is why protest “actions” are becoming increasingly digital (read: disembodied): sign this petition, email your congressperson, join this group on Facebook

Even light-hearted resistance against the monotony of a corporate monoculture, like voting a seventeen year old Rage Against the Machine song to No. 1 on the Christmas charts, seems somehow like a half-measure. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be a downer. I think it’s great that “Killing in the Name Of” beat out Joe McElderry (in these dreary times, we should appreciate every victory, no matter how small).  But what would be even more great is if we could collectively turn around to our bosses, to our governments, to multinational corporations, and embody Zack De La Rocha’s refrain: “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!“

Granted, given that my ass is here posting theoretical bullshit in cyberspace means that I clearly don’t know jack either.

Thanks for sticking with me this far. As a reward for reading such a downer, ranting post, here’s some Rage. Seventeen years**** later and to me the song hasn’t lost any of its intensity or relevance:

______

* Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yang-ming. Chan, Wing-tsit, trans. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.

** I say this because we are surrounded by computers (case in point, you’re reading a blog!), and this is precisely the way a computer “learns”: it is given “rules” by a programmer which it “consults” and follows to the letter. This is, I would argue, not how human beings really learn and it’s certainly not how our ancestors learned to survive in an entirely non-digital world. The fact that we are surrounded by machines which behave in this manner partially accounts for why we’re inclined to view knowledge in this way (although arguably it’s because we had this theory of knowledge in he first place that such machines were developed!)

*** Complete Works of Chuang-Tzu Watson, Burton (translator). New York: Columbia University Press 1968

****Wait. Seventeen years? I’m getting old.

As this year’s Hanukkah celebration draws to a close and we move towards Winter Solstice, Christmas, and an amazing array of women and goddess-related holy days, it is good to take a look at a second Torah/Old Testament writing that evokes the spirit of the thread of unity we have been following.

While the “I am who am,” of Exodus is a fairly straightforward narrative, this passage from Proverbs is poetic and sounds more Eastern than most of the Bible. Wisdom is personified as a strong woman who was present as the Master Craftsman created the oceans and speaks of the wonders of those times.

The book of Proverbs is considered part of the wisdom literature of the Jewish/Christian scriptures, along with Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon. Proverbs are sayings that use similes and comparisons to make a point.

Scholars disagree about exactly when the various parts of the Book of Proverbs were written, but place them somewhere between 900 and 350 BCE, partly overlapping the tail end of the Axial Age..

In Chapter 8 of Proverbs, Wisdom calls all to goodness and remembers her existence before even the oceans were formed. The chapter begins, “Is not Wisdom calling? Is not Understanding raising her voice? On the heights overlooking the road, at the crossways, she takes her stand.”

The chapter goes on to exhort “simpletons” to learn how to behave and “fools” to come to their senses in keeping with much of Proverbs, but then takes a mystical turn into our realm of unity-thinking that is breathtaking.

Proverbs 8:22-31

Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded before the oldest of his works.

From everlasting I was firmly set,
from the beginning, before the earth came into being.

The deep was not, when I was born,
there were no springs to gush with water.

Before the mountains were settled,
before the hills, I came to birth
before he made the earth, the countryside,
or the first grains of the world’s dust,

When he fixed the heavens firm, I was there,
when he drew a ring on the surface of the deep,
when he thickened the clouds above,
when he fixed fast the springs of the deep,
when he assigned the sea its boundaries
– and the waters will not invade the shore –
when he laid down the foundations of the Earth,

I was at his side, a master craftsman,
delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence
at play everywhere in the world,
delighting to be with the sons and daughters of humanity.

A strong argument can be made that this connection of Wisdom, the Creator and Creation speaks of unity. I have read other interpretations that put more emphasis on the separation between the Spirit creator and what was coming forth. While I respect that, I don’t think it is the only possibility. The lens of nonduality seems to sing through these verses as Wisdom recalls when One Spirit decided to explode and become the physical world we know.

Staying within this time period, one can also hear chords of unity in this writing by our old favorite, Chuang Tzu. Instead of Wisdom and the Master Craftsman, however, this writing use the image of The Great Clod belching out wind that causes the “ten thousand hollows” to begin crying wildly as a description of unity.

To me, with respect to Teilhard de Chardin, the Cosmic Christ can be seen just as clearly in Taoism’s description of the crying of the hollows as in the Judeo-Christian depiction of wisdom. The following is a conversation between two men, one”leaning on his armrest, staring up at the sky and breathing – vacant and far away,”  and the other “standing by his side in attendance.” Conversations are a typical technique in Chuang Tzu’s writings.

The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu.
Chapter Two

Tzu-ch’i said: “…You hear the piping of men, but you haven’t heard the piping of earth. Or if you have heard the piping of earth, you haven’t heard the piping of heaven.

Tzu-yu said, “May I venture to ask what this means?”

Tzu-ch’i said: “The Great Clod belches out breath and its name is wind. So long as it doesn’t come forth, nothing happens. But when it does, then ten thousand hollows begin crying wildly.

“Can’t you hear them, long drawn out? In the mountain forests that lash and sway, there are huge trees a hundred spans around with hollows and openings like noses, like mouths, like ears, like jugs, like cups, like mortars, like rifts, like ruts.

“They roar like waves, whistle like arrows, screech, gasp, cry, wail, moan and howl, those in the lead calling out yeeee!, those behind calling out yuuu!”

“In a gentle breeze they answer faintly, but in a full gale the chorus is gigantic. And when the fierce wind has passed on, then all the hollows are empty again. Have you never seen the tossing and trembling that goes on?”

Tzu-yu said, “By the piping of earth, then, you mean simply [the sound of] these hollows. And by the piping of man [the sound of] flutes and whistles. But may I ask about the piping of heaven?

Tzu-ch’i said: “Blowing on the ten thousand things in a different way, so that each can be itself – all take what they want for themselves, but who does the sounding?

Who, indeed, does the sounding? Who is Wisdom? What is the Tao? Whence cometh the Cosmic Christ?

In a footnote to this section, translator Burton Watson explains that “heaven” “is “not something distinct from earth and man, but a name applied to the natural and spontaneous functioning of the two.”

So the spiritual realm and the physical realm are intertwined and function as one.

Amen to that!

On the frosty road

horse dung lies—I accept it,

and everything else.

This immediately brings to my mind a passage from the Daoist sage Zhuangzi (translated here by Burton Watson):

Master Tung-kuo asked Chuang Tzu, “This thing called the Way—where does it exist?”
Chuang Tzu said, “There’s no place it doesn’t exist.”
“Come,” said Master Tung-kuo, “you must be more specific!”
“It is in the ant.”
“As low a thing as that?”
“It is in the panic grass.”
“But that’s lower still!”
“It is in the tiles and shards.”
“How can it be so low?”
“It is in the piss and shit.”

You can read more about Zhuangzi HERE.

~ ~ ~

Makoto Ueda (editor), Modern Japanese Haiku: An Anthology, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976, pg. 208.

One day Chuang Tzu and a friend were walking by a river. “Look at the fish swimming about,” said Chuang Tzu, “They are really enjoying themselves.”

“You are not a fish,” replied the friend, “So you can’t truly know that they are enjoying themselves.”

“You are not me,” said Chuang Tzu. “So how do you know that I do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?”

“Flight from the Shadow” is a story by Chuang, Tzu, a third-century B.C.E. Chinese sage of the Taoist tradition. Many of Chuang Tzu’s stories are extremely funny, but, at the same time point out profound insight into the human condition. The following tale is such an example.

“Once there was a man who was so troubled by the sight of his own shadow and so disturbed by his footsteps that he decided to get rid of both. His method of escape was to run away from them, so he got up and ran. But each time he put his foot down, there was another step, and his shadow had no difficulty at all keeping up. He blamed his failure on not running away fast enough. So he ran quicker and quicker until finally he dropped dead. The man did not realize that if only he found some shade, his shadow would vanish, and that if he sat down quietly, there would be no footsteps.”

This story illustrates with great humor the fact that all our strategies for finding peace by running away from things do not work. Meditation means finding that quiet, shady place where we no longer run away from shadows and footsteps.

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself,
(I am large. I contain multitudes.)”

-Walt Whitman

“I’m going to try speaking some reckless words,
and I want you to try to listen recklessly.”

-Chuang Tzu

Once the realization is accepted that
even between the closest human beings
infinite distances continue,
a wonderful living side by side can grow,
if they succeed in loving the distance between them
which makes it possible for each to see the other
whole against the sky.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Gate at Cotswold Cottage, Greenfield Village, Dearborn

“We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended upon it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.”

Chuang Tzu

A recent article in Forbes Magazine by Lee Gomes said that a more effective form of innovation than disruption is to do a Deep Dive. Since this also happens to be the title of my new book on strategic thinking (Deep Dive: The Proven Method for Building Strategy, Focusing Your Resources and Taking Smart Action), I decided to investigate further. Gomes’ perspective on a Deep Dive is that a company’s intense focus on addressing their key business issues “…ends up creating new and  unexpected opportunities.”

Many managers are struggling today with how to grow their business. Instead of taking time to think more deeply about the key issues, their anxiety tends to spin them off like bumper cars in dozens of different directions in hopes that their flurry of activity will run them into a solution. As Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu wrote, “When people wish to see their reflections, they do not look into running water; they look into still water. Only that which is still can hold other things still.”      

How still are you?

I love the poet, Muriel Rukeyser, because she understood that “the world is made of stories, not atoms”.You don’t have to be a poet to understand this, but it helps. Have a look around. Stories are a force of nature. We didn’t evolve from apes; we sprang into life, full-blooded and thoroughly anxious, embodied by “tales of the tribe”.

Story is our essence, the source and expression of every dream, dread, vision, death, birth and discovery. Our humanity and inhumanity is rooted in it, tangled in the mystery of “how come?” and the suspense of “what next?”

When James Joyce was asked where he came up with the stories that inhabited his books, he gestured round the pub: “from that couple over there, and those men by the door, and that woman washing up behind the bar…”

Story is Nature’s way of becoming conscious of itself, and as storytellers we work with it in order to become conscious of ourselves. One writes a story to find out why one is writing it, and in the process discovers that the story is writing us as much as we are writing it.

This issue of THE GROUP was meant to be an exploration of screen storytelling, but alas – it has taken on a life of its own. What is common to all the contributors in this issue is their willingness and ability to “enter the drama”, and through that courage to offer their audience a chance to enter it as well.

Many of the writers, artists, filmmakers and poets that appear in this issue work as “mediums”. To work as a medium is not so much a matter of what an artist does, as what he/she doesn’t do; it is akin to the Chinese idea of wu-wei (non-action), a concept that denotes effortlessness, spontaneity, or what Chuang Tzu refers to as “flowing”. It is the ability of getting out of the way and letting the event, emotion, experience express itself-as-itself.

Every well-told story and poem flows, as does the act of every artist when he/she operates “mediumistically”. The art of flowing, requires that the artist/writer get out of the way. A dramatist must become “empty”, unobtrusive, so that the characters can become whatever the characters are, so that that which is yet-to-be can come into being, allowed to birth itself through the agency of the storyteller-made-medium.

Indeed, one might say that unless a story – or any work of art – is birthed in this manner it can have no lasting raison d’être, and as such, cannot endure.

- Billy Marshall Stoneking. From “The Group Online Magazine”, to be found here.

Western society and its religions have traditionally fallen on the dualistic end of the philosophical spectrum. Good is good and bad is bad. Good is rewarded and bad is punished. God is all powerful and up in the heavens – transcendent. We are sinners way down here, and going to hell if we aren’t careful. Or if we don’t belong to the “right” religion.

Non Sequitur 10/29/09

Eastern religions have been more non-dualistic. There is yin in yang and good in bad. The spirit inside a person, Atman, and the spirit of the universe, Brahman, are the same. Spirit is immanent – in all things. The three religions of China – Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism – often meld the strengths of each and find a way to all get along.

For this and other reasons, there were few Western writings on the unity of Spirit and Creation until quite recently. Even the European mystics were trying to close the gap between themselves and God rather than believing there wasn’t a gap.

But then the tenor of late 1800s began opening some doors, in part because travel made contact between East and West easier. The first Hindu to set foot in the West came as a visitor to the Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893.

By the late 1930s, French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin was writing a stunningly non-dualistic vision of the Cosmic Christ, but on orders from the Vatican the controversial treatise wasn’t published until  the 1950s, when The Phenomenon of Man came out in French and English. It was discussed in some progressive Catholic colleges by the 1960s, although with the caveat that some Church officials felt his views bordered on pantheism, a no-no.

Since the mid-20th Century, Buddhism has taken root in the West; Hindus have grown to more than a million in the U.S. and practices such as yoga, tai chi and qi gong have introduced everyday people to Eastern concepts.

At the same time, changes in secular society in the West have created an atmosphere in which the unity of God and Creation could be seriously considered. Even the new physics and the interconnectiveness of the internet have given us a new way to look at reality.

In essence, if one’s entire philosophy and world view is built on dichotomy, a separate, remote God makes the most sense. When the focus is more on interconnections, the Vedic Upanishads’ sparks flying from the same fire can become part of our belief system again.

As I searched for writings for In the Same Breath, a few examples from the earliest times and today were particularly striking. In perhaps the most interconnected, a 20th century Catholic monk, Thomas Merton, studied the writings of one of the founders of Taoism, Chuang Tzu, and  wrote personal versions of his favorites. Merton was part of a group of Christian, Buddhist and Hindu monks who studied and prayed together as part of an ongoing inter-monastic dialogue.

Chuang Tzu lived between 370 and 301 BCE. His writing is mind-bending and often shot-through with surprising humor. One of his writings in The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu is responsible for the domain name of the blog – beginningless.  Merton’s version is in his 1965 book, The Way of Chuang Tzu. Merton died in 1968 while traveling in Asia.

Chuang Tzu

There is a beginning. There is not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing.

Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don’t know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn’t said something.

There is nothing in the world bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and Mount T’ai is tiny. No one has lived longer than a dead child, and P’eng-tsu died young.

Heaven and earth were born at the same time I was, and the ten thousand things are one with me.

Chuang’s words sound to modern ears almost like a Zen koan to tease the mind into reflecting on the mystery of this unity on a deeper level than rational thought. One has to let the words seep into one’s bones over several re-readings to begin to comprehend. That’s the fun of it. This brilliant gibberish, this impenetrable clarity, is early Taoism’s way of describing the unity of spirit and creation.

Thomas Merton

In the Beginning of Beginnings was Void of  Void, the Nameless.

© the Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

And in the Nameless was the One, without body, without form.
This One, this Being in whom all find power to exist  -
Is the Living.
From the Living, comes the Formless, the Undivided.
From the act of this Formless, come the Existents, each according
To its inner principle. This is Form. Here body embraces and cherishes spirit.
The two work together as one, blending and manifesting their Characters. And this is Nature.

But he who obeys Nature returns through Form and Formless to the Living.
And in the Living
Joins the unbegun Beginning.
The joining is Sameness. The sameness is Void. The Void is infinite.
The bird opens its beak and sings its note
And then the beak comes together again in Silence.
So Nature and the Living meet together in Void.
Like the closing of the bird’s beak
After its song.
Heaven and earth come together in the Unbegun,
And all is foolishness, all is unknown, all is like
The lights of an idiot, all is without mind!
To obey is to close the beak and fall into Unbeginning.

When next we meet: Taking a closer look at 600 to 300 BCE and all those beginningless beginnings!

gswimg at eartlhlink dot net

The ebb and flow of writings since ancient times on the unity of Spirit and Creation show remarkable patterns. The most interesting is the spiral that takes us from the beginning in 600 BCE, through ups and downs, fertile flowerings and bleak deserts, to the 20th and 21st Centuries, when the writings flourish again and are more like the earliest ones than any that came between.

Some say we are in the new “Axial Age” of spiritual discoveries, but this time with everyday people making those discoveries and tying them to everything from popular music to the new physics to the interconnectedness of the Internet.

We will spend time in future posts filling in the details of the ups and downs and the spiral that is still going strong, but first it’s helpful to pull some examples from each of the the five most fruitful periods of time. This is how I broke them up in writing In the Same Breath, with illustrations by Christine Tobias. If you have other historical categories or favorite writings, I’d love to hear about them.

- Christine Tobias

There are are 52 writings in Same Breath, one for each week; here are some from each of the five time periods.

Beginningless Beginnings – 600 to 300 BCE

There was something formless and perfect
before the universe was born.
It is serene. Empty.
Solitary. Unchanging.
It is the mother of the universe.
For lack of a better name,
I call it the Tao.

Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu, trans. Stephen Mitchell, about 500 BCE

Bread, Wine and a Billion Arms – 200 BCE to 200 CE

In the beginning was the Word,
And the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning,
Through him all things came to be,
Not one thing had its being but through him.

John 1:1–5, The Jerusalem Bible, about 100 CE

Mystical Aha! Moments – 850 to 1600

I gazed upon [al-Lah] with the eye of truth and said to Him: “Who is this?”
He said, “This is neither I nor other than I. There is no God but I.”
Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood…
Then I communed with Him with the tongue of His Face, saying:
“How fared it with me with Thee?” He said, “I am through Thee, there is no god but Thou.”

Abu Yazid Bistami, Sufi mystic, 804- 874

A Spiral Back to Flying Sparks – 1900 to 1999

When we enter the unknown
of our houses,
go inside the given up dark
and sheltering walls alone
and turn out the lamps
we fall bone to bone in bed.

Neighbors, the old woman who knows you
turns over in me
and I wake up
in another country. There’s no more
north and south.
Asleep, we pass through one another
like blowing snow,
all of us,
all.

“Our Houses,” from Seeing Through the Sun, 1985, by Linda Hogan,
Native American poet and author

There is no such thing as seeking God, for there is nothing in which He could not be found.

Martin Buber, Jewish philosopher, 1878 – 1965

Seeking Eden in the Chaos – 1999 – today

I believe that the Messiah is not a person, outside of us, but is a noble state of mind possible in each and every one of us, a state of mind which must be attained, too often through pain.

Storm of Terror, by June Leavitt, 2002

What was going on during all this time?

Here’s the capsule version – many more details to come in future posts.

First there was a flurry of juicy, prolific writing in all parts of the inhabited world, stretching almost nonstop for more than a millennium starting in 600 BCE.

Then wars and invasions in Europe made sheer survival take precedence over spiritual growth, at least in the West, for 600 years until the emergence of Christian, Jewish and Sufi mystics in the 9th Century. The thread was more subdued this time, especially among Christian mystics. Eden had been lost. Those in exile were now unable to completely embrace the unity that was once so natural. Even so, a few were determined to try to reach the God who had once walked by humanity’s side, but had now been exiled by the theologians to the heavens.

After a mere 600 years, however, the mysticism that flowered in Christianity was stopped in its tracks by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic counter-Reformation, neither of which had any tolerance for mystical experiences or talk of other than a transcendent, separate God. The Enlightenment, for all its wonderful exploration of science and

- Christine Tobias

rational behavior, was also inhospitable soil for mysticism.  Kabbalah, however, kept the mystical thread going in Judaism, as did Sufism in Islam.

Meanwhile, the Eastern religions of Taoism and Hinduism were well into their 26th century of seeing Spirit and Creation as One; Buddhism had held up a mirror to the illusion of reality and Eastern Orthodox Christianity had found a way to continue to accept and even nourish mysticism.

It wasn’t until the mid-19th to the 20th Century, however, that writing of this unity began to appear again broadly in the West, often influenced by Eastern thought, but also at times quite home-grown.

We’ll explore how this came to be and take a look at Thomas Merton’s 20th century rendition of the 300 BCE writings of Chuang Tzu, for whom this blog is named, when next we meet.

gswimg at earthlink dot net

Surrendering:

 If you persist in trying to attain what is never attained, if you persist in making effort to obtain what effort cannot get, if you persist in reasoning about what cannot be understood, you will be destroyed by the very thing you seek. To know when to stop, to know when you can get no further by your own action, this is the right beginning!

                                                                      by Chuang Tzu

Duke Hwan, seated above in his hall, was (once) reading a book, and the wheelwright Phien was making a wheel below it. Laying aside his hammer and chisel, Phien went up the steps, and said, ‘I venture to ask your Grace what words you are reading?’ The duke said, ‘The words of the sages.’ ‘Are those sages alive?’ Phien continued. ‘They are dead,’ was the reply. ‘Then,’ said the other, ‘what you, my Ruler, are reading are only the dregs and sediments of those old men.’ The duke said, ‘How should you, a wheelwright, have anything to say about the book which I am reading? If you can explain yourself, very well; if you cannot, you shall, die!’ The wheelwright said, ‘Your servant will look at the thing from the point of view of his own art. In making a wheel, if I proceed gently, that is pleasant enough, but the workmanship is not strong; if I proceed violently, that is toilsome and the joinings do not fit. If the movements of my hand are neither (too) gentle nor (too) violent, the idea in my mind is realised. But I cannot tell (how to do this) by word of mouth; there is a knack in it. I cannot teach the knack to my son, nor can my son learn it from me. Thus it is that I am in my seventieth year, and am (still) making wheels in my old age. But these ancients, and what it was not possible for them to convey, are dead and gone:– so then what you, my Ruler, are reading is but their dregs and sediments!’

- The Writings of Chuang Tzu, Book 13 The Way of Heaven

When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skill
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets -
He is out of his mind!

His skill has not changed. But the prize
Divides him. He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting -
And the need to win
Drains him of his power.

Chuang Tzu

See you on Monday.

Our life has a boundary but there is no boundary to knowledge.

to sustain your life, to care for your parents and to live for many years.

Chuang Tzu

Communication > Language

JACKAL - Mabuasehube Game Reserve, Botswana

My interpretation:
While language has its place, communication transcends it.

Quotes to consider:
“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” – T.S.Eliot
“The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.” – Stephen King
“The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of their meaning. Once you’ve got the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find someone who has forgotten words so I can talk with him or her?” – Chuang Tzu

What are your thoughts on this image and/or topic?

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“Ciò che il bruco chiama la fine del mondo,

per il resto del mondo è una farfalla.”

(Chuang Tzu)

Guardando questi filmati in time-lapse che ritraggono la decomposizione di differenti animali, è facile capire come la vita e la morte non siano due estremi opposti, ma siano in effetti lo stesso identico processo all’opera, yang e yin che si compenetrano e nascono l’uno dall’altro, in un movimento di danza. Ed è un fiorire, che vediamo in questi filmati, uno sbocciare di nuova vita, un mutare di forme che, se superiamo per un attimo il disgusto che il tabù della decomposizione esige da noi, non può che farci sorridere e alleggerire la nostra mente.

“To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.”
-Chuang-tzu

The Yellow River has flooded due to the autumn rains, and the god of the Yellow River believes he is the greatest, mightiest being in the world – until he flows into the North Ocean. Then he realizes that he is puny in comparison to the North Ocean.

Jo, the god of the North Ocean, replies to the god of the Yellow River, ‘A frog in a well cannot discuss the ocean, because he is limited by the size of his well. A summer insect cannot discuss ice, because it knows only its own season. A narrow-minded scholar cannot discuss the Tao because he is constrained by his teachings. Now you have come out of your banks and seen the Great Ocean. You now know your own inferiority, so it is now possible to discuss great principles with you.’

In other words, the god Jo of the North Ocean can now begin to teach the Lord of the Yellow River because the Lord has experienced the limits of his own knowledge.