bless

.

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in 

The birds they sang at the break of day “Start again”, 

I seem to hear them say 

Don’t dwell on what has passed away 

Or what is yet to be 

Ah, the wars, they will be fought again 

The holy dove, she will be caught again 

Bought and sold and bought again 

The dove is never free 

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in 

We asked for signs, and the signs were sent 

The birth betrayed, the marriage spent 

Yeah, the widowhood of every single government 

Signs for all to see 

I can’t run no more with that lawless crowd 

While the killers in high places say their prayers out loud 

But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up a thundercloud 

And they’re going to hear from me 

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in 

You can add up the parts

But you won't have the sum

You can strike up the march

On your little broken drum

Every heart, every heart

To love will come 

But like a refugee

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in 

That’s how the light gets in 

That’s how the light gets in  

—Leonard Cohen

.

 

When I met Leonard Cohen, I was a failed writer, and I acted like one. We were waiting to bow into the walking meditation line at the Rinzai-ji Zen Center in Los Angeles. I pretended I didn’t know who he was and asked him if my Ford Festiva was parked in the right place. “Sure,” he said. I feigned surprise: “‘Everybody Knows.’

I’d recognize that voice anywhere.”

His monk’s name, Jikan, means “noble silence,” and he manifested it then. I was mortified.

I gave up writing to become a Zen monk, and then, a decade after meeting Jikan, I wrote a book about being a monk. A helpful nun left chapters of the work-in-progress in his cabin during a retreat. I was the head monk at the monastery, and I approached him at the end of a long day to ask how his back was. He was short, thin and old, but he still sat like a rock in the zendo meditation hall.

“I don’t feel a thing,” he said. I nodded: “Your meditation must be really strong.” He shook his head and said, “OxyContin.” Then he looked into my eyes with a clear, almost startled expression and said: “Hey, I love your book. How can I help?” I refused all his generous offers but one, and he wrote the book’s foreword.

He had a decades-long relationship with our teacher, the Roshi, and it was my privilege to witness these two powerful men “make relationship,” as Roshi would say. I think Roshi liked having Jikan around because Jikan did not make any demands on him. They could just sip tea in silence. (Once people start talking, they inevitably start fighting, Roshi said.)

One afternoon, Roshi, 106 years old by then, diminished by both age and a sex scandal that devastated our community and his reputation, had an accident in his adult diapers. As I took Roshi to the bathroom, Jikan filled a basin with warm water, removed his suit coat and cuff links, and rolled up his crisp white sleeves. “Jikan, I can do that part,” I said. “I wouldn’t think of it,” he said. I helped Roshi stand while Jikan knelt behind him and gently wiped him clean. Watching Jikan serve our teacher, unobsequiously and with intelligence, care and respect, helped take the sting out of my own failures as a writer and as a man. You learn that there is something greater than artistic success when you see a great artist humbling himself. Jikan, like any good monk, was devoted to what his teacher was devoted to.

He and Roshi had a similar project, a shared vision: Roshi taught it, Leonard sang it. With none of Leonard’s eloquence or Roshi’s wisdom at my disposal, I would describe it as the union of contrary things — and then their separation again, and the struggle in between. In different ways, they each gave their lives to breaking and maintaining silence on what Buddhists call the Great Matter and what Roshi called True Love. Was Leonard an artist consumed by despair? No, his work was shot through with the opposite of despair. But in Leonard’s world, the opposite of despair was not hope — it was clarity. From this clarity came the vision of a prophet: “I’ve seen the future, brother/It is murder.”

The penultimate time I saw Jikan, I was getting lunch on Larchmont Street with an old friend from my Hollywood screenwriting days. I had given him a copy of my book. Only one thing about it impressed him: “Dude, I can’t believe you know Leonard Cohen!” We left the pizza parlor, turned the corner, and who should be sitting at a table outside a burger restaurant but Jikan Leonard Cohen himself. He had an office nearby, and we spent the afternoon brainstorming about how to revitalize the monastery now that our teacher was dead.

“What if you put in a rifle range and get a bunch of young guys up there?” Jikan said. “Man, if I were 15 minutes younger, I’d join you.” Yes, rifles. For all the self-satisfied liberals who want to claim him as one of their own, I’m sorry, but Leonard Cohen belongs to everyone. Once, when we were waiting in the lobby at the doctor’s office, he said: “My National Rifle Association hat came in the mail today. I looked at the tag. I couldn’t believe it: Made in China!” After I rearranged my jaw on my face from its descent to the floor, I said, “You’re an N.R.A. member?” He kept staring straight ahead. “Let’s keep that between us,” he said.

I think of that episode now, during our current historical moment. I have no idea how Jikan would have voted in the past election, but if there was anyone who could hold both extremes in his hand and heart, it was the man who, for the last words on his last album, chose these: “I wish there was a treaty we could sign/… I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine.” For an artist informed by a vision of True Love, opposite forces and peoples are just different kinds of love trying to meet. Jikan sang of and from the longing in this struggle.

The last time I saw him, he looked epiphanic and light, as if he were disappearing. There was great pain in his eyes, and his breath was heavy. He told me that during his stay in India after his years at our Zen monastery, something clicked and he found a peace inside that had never left him. “This stuff works,” he said. “Somehow everything I’ve been doing all these years comes down to the work I did with Roshi.” He played his new album for me. At the end, gorgeous, soft strings set the tone, lulling you into a drifting, pensive melancholy. Then his voice emerges with the wish for a treaty of love. He sat in silence before me, this aged, tiny, impeccably dressed poet, his black fedora tilted lightly on his head, his voice booming all around us.

—

—Shozan Jack Haubner

Ode to Leonard Cohen, From a Fellow Zen Monk, New York Times

Jack Haubner is a Zen Buddhist priest and writer. His second book, “Single White Monk: Tales of Death, Failure, and Bad Sex (Although Not Necessarily in That Order),” came out Oct. 10, 2017.

thank you, wait - what ?

.

 

deep beauty

 

.

What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. 

I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. 

I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. 

His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.


―Leonard Cohen
Beautiful Losers 

 

.

In a state of grace, one sometimes perceives the deep beauty, hitherto unattainable, of another person. And everything acquires a kind of halo which is not imaginary: it comes from the splendor of the almost mathematical light emanating from people and things. One starts to feel that everything in existence – whether people or things – breathes and exhales the subtle light of energy. The world’s truth is impalpable.


—Clarice Lispector


 

.

 

 

in gratitude

  

.

We kneel in gratitude
as the movements in love
disperse our sweet intentions
across the fictions
of Companionship-

two of the creatures
which You named Me


—Leonard Cohen

.

you are that

 

.

Brahman, the single binding unity of all that exists, 

is indivisible and pure.

Realize Brahman and go beyond all change.

Realize that there are no separate minds.

Waking, sleeping, dreaming, the Self is one.

The One appears many, just as the moon 
appears many, reflected in water.

But there is only one Self, present in all beings.


lessons from the Amritabindu Upanishad
Eknath Easwaren version

.

 

The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky.

Everything in the world is full of signs. 

All events are coordinated.

All things depend on each other; as has been said: Everything breathes together.

—Plotinus

ca CE 204/5–270

.

Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us 

so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. 

You and me are us and them, and it and sky.

—Ada Limon

 

.

 

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. —William Wordsworth

 

.

Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna -- a dish
aimed at stars -- and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear -- suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath --

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."


—William Stafford
A Message from Space
from The Worth of Local Things

.

The idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, which is to say that all of the different things in the world belong to one and the same field of potential. This very same underlying unity is what quantum theory is revealing to us.


—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation

.

Morning and afternoon are clasped together 

And North and South are an intrinsic couple 

And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers 

That walk away as one in the greenest body.


—Wallace Stevens
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

.

friend

 

 

.

Friend, we’re traveling together.
Throw off your tiredness. 

Let me show you one tiny spot of the beauty that cannot be spoken. 


—Rumi

 

.

 

 

generat(ions

.

If an idea is held in the mind and lighted up with sharpened attention, it will form a new magnetic field in which the results of connections unseen till that moment may gather and unite this idea with others of the same or even of an entirely different order.


—Henri Thomasson
The Pursuit of the Present
Rina Hands version

.

 

Forms within the universe, whether galaxies, human beings or trees, are generated as an expression of vast forces at work within a holistic framework. Separateness, fragmentation, and disconnection are all illusions. Wholeness is never lost, and the health within the human system, which is a manifestation of this unity, is also never lost.

—John Upledger

.

What are we?

A fleeting, intricate presence riding a tiny speck of water and rock, out here in the dark, sailing the ship of wonder ever more deeply into the void from which we came, that is our true home and mysterious destination.

—Whitley Strieber & Jeffrey J. Kripal

The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

.

 

how are the connections?

Skara Brae Buddo, human figure carved from whalebone, c. 2,900 – 2,400 BC. Discovered at Skara Brae, a Neolithic settlement located in the Bay of Skaill on the Mainland, an island in the Orkney archipelago of Scotland

.

The Native American notion of All My Relations views all of reality and life as related and interconnected. Every aspect of life is seen as part of one intrinsic family. 

In the Blackfoot tribe, when people meet, they don’t say 'How are you' but 'Tza Nee Da Bee Wah?' which means, 'How are the connections?' 

If the connections are in place, we must be all right. If the connections are not in place, then we need to tend them first. 


—Mark Nepo

.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody. 

We are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts. Yet we get to the whole by falling down into the messy parts—so many times, in fact, that we long and thirst for the wholeness and fullness of all things, including ourselves. I promise you this unified field is the only and lasting meaning of up. 


—Richard Rohr
Falling Upward, excerpt

.

Rather than to ask what is the meaning of this universe, we would have to say that the universe is its meaning. As this changes, the universe changes along with all that is in it. What I mean by ‘the universe’ is ‘the whole of reality’ and what is beyond. And of course, we are referring not just to the meaning of the universe for us, but its meaning ‘for itself’, or the meaning of the whole for itself.

Similarly there is no point in asking the meaning of life, as life too is its meaning, which is self-referential and capable of changing, basically, when this meaning changes through a creative perception of a new and more encompassing meaning.

You could also ask another question: What is the meaning of creativity itself? As with all other fundamental questions we cannot give a final answer, but we have to constantly see afresh. For the present we can say that creativity is not only the fresh perception of new meanings, and the ultimate unfoldment of this perception within the manifest and the somatic, but I would say that it is ultimately the action of the infinite in the sphere of the finite — that is, this meaning goes to infinite depths.


—David Bohm
Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm

 

.

 

this is a truth of our universe

  

.

What science has recently proven about the universe has already been known by mystics for millennia: that everything is fundamentally energy and we are all One. 

Science calls this interconnected web of energy “entanglement theory,” but for thousands of years Buddhists have called this “Dharmakaya,” Taoists have called it the “Tao” and Hindus have referred to this as “Brahman".


—Aletheia Luna

.

Each quantum event, each of the trillions of times reality’s particles interact with each other every instant, is like a note that rings and resonates throughout the great bell of creation. And the sound of the ringing propagates instantaneously, everywhere at once, interconnecting all things.

This is a truth of our universe. It is a mystical truth, that reality at its deepest level is an undivided wholeness.


—David Zindell 

.

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. 

Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. 

Buddhism answers this description.

—Albert Einstein

.

there is not a fragment in all of nature —John Muir, 1867

    

.

 

We are connected by the fundamental oneness of our consciousness; we are all individuated lumps within, as well as parts of, the same sheet. 

We are connected by the ability of one individual to vitally affect, and be affected by, another through the purposeful control of thought energy or the energy of consciousness. 

We are connected by the theoretical ability of one being to exchange energy or information with any other being simply by focusing intent. 


—Thomas Campbell, nuclear physicist
My Big Toe

.

This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle's eye, a turning night of stars.

Listen, if you can stand to.
Union with the friend
means not being who you have been,
being instead silence, a place,
a view where language is inside seeing.

From the wet source
someone cuts a reed to make a flute
The reed sips breath like wine,
sips more, practicing. Now drunk,
it starts the high clear notes.

There is a path from me to you
that I am constantly looking for,
so I try to keep clear and still
as water does with the moon.

We do not have to follow the pressure-flow of wanting.
We can be led by the guide.
Wishes may or may not come true
in this house of disappointment.
Let's push the door open together and leave.

My essence is like the essence of a red wine.
My body is a cup that grieves because it is inside time.
Glass after glass of wine go into my head.
Finally, my head goes into the wine.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version
The Big Red Book

.

 

It’s your solemn duty to learn how to enjoy this thing! —Alan Watts

  

.

All that you are attached to, all that you Love,
all that you know, someday will be gone.

Knowing this, and that the world is your mind
which you create, play in, and suffer from,
is known as discrimination.

Discriminate between the real and the unreal.

The known is unreal and will come and go
so stay with the Unknown, the Unchanging Truth.

All which appears and disappears is not real,
and no nectar will come from it so do not cling to it.


—Papaji

.

There are always moments when one feels empty, estranged and afraid. 

You are detaching, the old is over and the new has not yet come. The soul has cast its moorings and is sailing for distant places. 

Remember the instruction: whatever you come across 
- go beyond. 


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

.

 

 

 

 

each by 0ne

  

.

Stone by stone and step by step

And heart by heart and head by head

The beautiful days do pass

Thread by thread and leaf by leaf

And one by one and each by each

The days are beautiful and do not pass

Grain by grain and body by body

Side by side and hand by hand

Good will win the battle

Stone by grain and each by one

And hand by heart and head by heart

Love is as vast as the world.

—Robert Desnos

Todd Sanders version

.

A purpose of human life is to love whoever is around to be loved. —Kurt Vonnegut

 

Memorial to those lost at sea, Cardiff, Wales, UK

.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet. 

This explains many things, and among them the fact that everyone measures us with his own standard—generally about as long as a tailor’s tape, and we have to put up with it: as also that no one will allow us to be taller than himself—a supposition which is once for all taken for granted.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

.

  

As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. 

Nothing seems to me better adapted than this magnificent cosmological perspective to give us the proper standard and the broad outlook which we need in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us. 

It not only clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance, and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element... 

Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and taken up the correct cosmological perspective, can we hope to reach the solution of the riddles of the universe.

—Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919) 

The Riddle of the Universe

. 

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things and they come
toward me, to meet and be met.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, I-I

.

 

philosophy

 

.

I’ve lost my way…I need someone to take me by the hand and lead me out of the woods.

—Kurt Vonnegut

 

. 

I used to sit in the cafe of existentialism,
lost in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke,
contemplating the suicide a tiny Frenchman
might commit by leaping from the rim of my brandy glass.

I used to hunger to be engaged
as I walked the long shaded boulevards,
eyeing women of all nationalities,
a difficult paperback riding in my raincoat pocket.

But these days I like my ontology in an armchair,
a rope hammock, or better still, a warm bath
in a cork-lined room--disengaged, soaking
in the calm, restful waters of speculation.

Afternoons, when I leave the house
for the woods, I think of Aquinas at his desk,
fingers interlocked upon his stomach,
as he deduces another proof for God's existence,

intricate as the branches of these bare November trees.
And as I kick through the leaves and snap
the windfallen twigs, I consider Leibniz on his couch
reaching the astonishing conclusion that monads,

those windowless units of matter, must have souls.
But when I finally reach the top of the hill
and sit down on the flat tonnage of this boulder,
I think of Spinoza, most rarefied of them all.

I look beyond the treetops and the distant ridges
and see him sitting in a beam of Dutch sunlight
slowly stirring his milky tea with a spoon.
Since dawn he has been at his bench grinding lenses,

but now he is leaving behind the saucer and table,
the smokey chimneys and tile roofs of Amsterdam,
even the earth itself, pale blue, aqueous,
cloud-enshrined, tilted back on the stick of its axis.

He is rising into that high dome of thought
where loose pages of Shelley float on the air,
where all the formulas of calculus unravel,
tumbling in the radiance of a round Platonic sun--

that zone just below the one where angels accelerate
and the ampitheatrical rose of Dante unfolds.
And now I stand up on the ledge to salute you, Spinoza,
and when I whistle to the dog and start down the hill,

I can feel the thick glass of your eyes upon me
as I step from the rock to glacial rock, and on her
as she sniffs her way through the leaves,
her tail straight back, her body low to the ground.


—Billy Collins
The Art of Drowning

.

 

love is a verb

  

Captain January, 1924

.

love never exists 
as a fact 

it is a verb 
and you can do 
all things 
with or without it 

it is nature 
in action 
being true 
to itself 
without even 
a thought


—Benjamin Dean

.

It is earnestness that is indispensable, the crucial factor. 

Sadhana is only a vessel and it must be filled to the brim with earnestness, which is but love in action. 

For nothing can be done without love.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

Te l’ai dit en janvier
Te le dirai en août.

I told you in January
I will tell you in August.


—Félix Leclerc

.

note to self

  

.

 

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. 

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.

—Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything

. 

Let your mind and heart release all that disturbs you.

Let your body be still, and all the frettings of your body, and all that surrounds it.

Let the earth and sea and air be still, and heaven itself;
and then think of spirit as streaming, pouring, rushing, and shining into you, through you, and out from you in all directions while you sit quiet.

—Plotinus, 204/5 - 270 CE

.

needful things

 

.

When the world arises in me, 
It is just an illusion: 
Water shimmering in the sun, 
A vein of silver in mother-of-pearl, 
A serpent in a strand of rope. 

From me the world streams out 
And in me it dissolves, 
As a bracelet melts into gold,
A pot crumbles into clay,
A wave subsides into water.


—Ashtavakra Gita 2: 9-10

.

The very idea of going beyond the dream is illusory. Why go anywhere? 

Just realise that you are dreaming a dream you call the world, and stop looking for ways out.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

Things that rain, and things that grow. They are all that hold my interest. 

(Until the things that rain have grown, and the things that grow have poured.)


—Takashi Hiraide

.

note to self

   

.

What is called the world is only thought.

—Ramana Maharshi

.

A  “thing” is a “think”, a unit of thought; it is as much reality as you can catch hold of in one idea.

—Alan Watts

.

You are not what you think yourself to be, I assure you. 

The image you have of yourself is made up from memories and is purely accidental.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.