truth and partisanship

We are all convinced that we desire the truth above all. Nothing strange about this. 

It is natural to man, an intelligent being, to desire the truth.

 (I still dare to speak of man as 'an intelligent being'!')

 But actually, what we desire is not 'the truth' so much as 'to be in the right.'

 To seek the pure truth for its own sake may be natural to us, but we are not able to act

 always in this respect according to our nature. What we seek is not the pure truth,

 but the partial truth that justifies our prejudices, our limitations, our selfishness. 

This is not 'the truth.' It is only an argument strong enough to prove us 'right.'

 And usually our desire to be right is correlative to our conviction that 

somebody else (perhaps everybody else) is wrong.

Why do we want to prove them wrong? Because we need them to be wrong.

 For if they are wrong, and we are right, then our untruth becomes truth: 

our selfishness becomes justice and virtue: our cruelty and lust cannot be fairly condemned.

 We can rest secure in the fiction we have determined to embrace as 'truth.' 

What we desire is not the truth, but rather that our lie should be proved 'right,' 

and our iniquity be vindicated as 'just.' 

This is what we have done to pervert our natural, instinctive appetite for truth.

No wonder we hate. No wonder we are violent.

 No wonder we exhaust ourselves in preparing for war! 

And in doing so, of course, we offer the enemy another reason to believe that he is right, 

that he must arm, that he must get ready to destroy us. Our own lie provides the foundation

 of truth on which he erects his own lie, and the two lies together react to produce hatred, murder, disaster.

~ Thomas Merton

from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
art by Picasso

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breaking open and letting go

 

 

 

 

 

We are always experiencing births and deaths. 

We feel the death of loved ones most acutely—there is something radical about the change in our reality.

 We are not given options, there is no room for negotiation, and the situation cannot be rationalized

 away or covered up by pretense. There is a total rupture in our who-I-am-ness, 

and we are forced to undergo a great and difficult transformation.

In bereavement, we come to appreciate at the deepest, most felt level exactly what it means to die

 while we are still alive.   These are moments when gaps appear, interrupting the continuity

 that we otherwise project onto our lives. In American culture, we sometimes refer to this

 as having the rug pulled out from under us, or feeling ungrounded. 

 

These interruptions in our normal sense of certainty 

are that state in which we have lost our old reality

 and it is no longer available to us.

Anyone who has experienced this kind of loss knows what it means to be disrupted, 

to be entombed between death and rebirth. We often label that a state of shock.

 In those moments, we lose our grip on the old reality and yet have no sense what a new one might be like.

 There is no ground, no certainty, and no reference point—there is, in a sense, no rest. 

This has always been the entry point in our lives for religion, because in that radical state of unreality

 we need profound reasoning—not just logic, but something beyond logic,

 something that speaks to us in a timeless, nonconceptual way.

 The more we learn to recognize this sense of disruption, the more willing and able we will be

 to let go of this notion of an inherent reality and allow that which is precious to slip out of our hands. 

Rupture is taking place all the time, day to day and moment to moment; in fact,

 as soon as we see our life in terms of these successive changes, we dissolve the very idea 

of a solid self grasping onto an inherently real life. We start to see how conditional who-I-am-ness

 really is, how even that does not provide reliable ground upon which to stand.

At times like this, if we can gain freedom from the eternal grasping onto who I am and how things are—

our default mode—then we can get to the business of being. Until now, we have been holding on

 to the idea of an inherent continuity in our lives, creating a false sense of comfort for ourselves

 on artificial ground. By doing so, we have been missing the very flavor of what we are.

The cause of all suffering can be boiled down to grasping onto a fictional, contrived existence. 

But what does that mean? If we really come to understand, then there is no longer even a container

 to hold together our normal concepts, to make them coherent. The precious pot shatters,

 and all our valuables roll away like marbles on a table. Reality as we thought we knew it

 is disrupted; the game of contriving an ideal self is suddenly irrelevant.

When we suffer disruption, we find we just can’t play that game anymore. 

The teachings are really about recognizing the value of giving up the game,

 which we play without even giving it a second thought. But when we are severely ill

 or in hospice, and we have to cede control over our own bodily functions to strangers, 

holding it all together is not an option.

There are times like these in our lives—such as facing death or even giving birth —

when we are no longer able to manage our outer image, no longer able to suspend ourselves

 in pursuit of the ideal self. It’s just how it is—we’re only human beings, and in these times

 of crisis we just don’t have the energy to hold it all together. When things fall apart,

 we can only be as we are. Pretense and striving fall away, and life becomes starkly simple.

 

 The value of such moments is this: we are shown that the game can be given up 

and that when it is, the emptiness that we feared, emptiness of the void, is not what is there.

 What is there is the bare fact of being. Simple presence remains—breathing in and out, 

waking up and going to sleep. The inevitability of the circumstances at hand is 

compelling enough that for the moment, our complexity ceases. Our compulsive manufacturing

 of contrived existence stops. Perhaps in that ungrounded space, we are not even comforting ourselves,

 not even telling ourselves everything is okay; we may be too tired to do even that. 

It’s just total capitulation—we’re forced into non-grasping of inherent reality. 

The contrived self has been emptied out along with contrived existence and the tiring treadmill

 of image maintenance that goes along with it. What remains is a new moment 

spontaneously meeting us again and again.

There is an incredible reality that opens up to us in those gaps 

if we just do not reject rupture. In fact, if we have some reliable idea of what is happening

 in that intermediate, groundless space, rupture can become rapture.

 

 

 

 

~  Pema Khandro Rinpoche

excerpts from Breaking Open in the Bardo

with thanks to Lion's Roar

 

tree

.

 

It is foolish

to let a young redwood 

grow next to a house.

 

Even in this 

one lifetime,

you will have to choose.

 

That great calm being,

this clutter of soup pots and books—

 

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. 

Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life...

 

 

 

 

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Given Sugar, Given Salt

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poetry and the mind of concentration

.

Every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections—language that hears itself and what is around it, sees itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows more perhaps even than we do about who are, what we are. It begins, that is, in the mind and body of concentration. 

By concentration, I mean a particular state of awareness: penetrating, unified, and focused, yet also permeable and open. This quality of consciousness, though not easily put into words, is instantly recognizable. Aldous Huxley described it as the moment the doors or perception open; James Joyce called in epiphany. The experience of concentration may be quietly physical—a simple, unexpected sense of deep accord between yourself and everything. It may come as the harvest of long looking and leave us, as it did Wordsworth, a mind thought "too deep for tears." Within action, it is felt as a grace state: time slows and extends, and a person's every movement and decision seem to partake of perfection. Concentration can also be place into things—it radiates undimmed from Vermeer's paintings, form the small marble figure of a lyre-player from ancient Greece, from a Chinese three-footed bowl—and into musical notes, words, ideas. In the whole-heartedness of concentration, world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done. 

A request for concentration isn't always answered, but people engaged in many disciplines have found ways to invite it in. A ninth-century Zen monk, Zuigan, could be heard talking to himself rather sternly each morning: "Master Zuigan!" he would call out. "Yes?" “Are you here?" “Yes!" Violinists practicing scales and dancers repeating the same movements over decades are not simply warming up or mechanically training their muscles. They are learning how to attend unswervingly, moment by moment, to themselves and their art; learning to come into steady presence, free from the distractions of interest and boredom. 

Writers, too, must find a path into concentration. Some keep a fixed time of day for writing, or engage in small rituals of preparation and invitation. One may lay out exactly six freshly sharpened pencils, another may darken the room, a third may develop as add a routine as Flaubert, who began each workday by sniffing a drawer of aging apples. Immersion in art itself can be the place of entry, as Adam Zagajewski points out in "A River": "Poems from poems, songs / from songs, paintings from paintings." Yet however it is brought into being, true concentration appears—paradoxically—at the moment willed effort drops away. It is then that a person enters what scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has described as "flow" and Zen calls "effortless effort." At such moments, there may be some strong emotion present—a feeling of joy, or even grief—but as often, in deep concentration, the self disappears. We seem to fall utterly into the object of our attention, or else vanish into attentiveness itself. 

This may explain why the creative is so often described as impersonal and beyond self, as if inspiration were literally what its etymology implies, something "breathed in." We refer, however metaphorically, to the Muse, and speak of profound artistic discovery as revelation. And however much we may come to believe that "the real" is subjective and constructed, we still feel art is a path not just to beauty, but to truth: if "truth" is a chosen narrative, then new stories, new aesthetics, are also new truths.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Nine Gates, Entering the Mind of Poetry

every step my home

Treading along in this dreamlike, illusory realm,

Without looking for the traces I may have left;

A cuckoo's song beckons me to return home,

Hearing this, I tilt my head to see

Who has told me to turn back;

But do not ask me where I am going,

As I travel in this limitless world,

Where every step I take is my home.

~ Dogen

from the Zen Poetry of Dogen

art by Vladimir Kostetsky

the myth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So the myth in our society is that people are competitive by nature

 and that they are individualistic and that they're selfish. 

 

The real reality is quite the opposite. We have certain human needs. 

The only way that you can talk about human nature concretely is by recognizing

 that there are certain human needs. We have a human need for companionship

 and for close contact, to be loved, to be attached to, to be accepted, 

to be seen, to be received for who we are. 

 

If those needs are met, we develop into people who are compassionate and cooperative

 and who have empathy for other people. So . . . the opposite,

that we often see in our society, is in fact, a distortion of human nature

 precisely because so few people have their needs met.

 

 

 
 ~ Gabor Maté

 with thanks to whiskey river

 

 

 

the sympathies of the long married

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh well, let's go on eating the grains of eternity.
What do we care about improvements in travel?
Angels sometimes cross the river on old turtles.

Shall we worry about who gets left behind?
That one bird flying through the clouds is enough.
Your sweet face at the door of the house is enough.

The two farm horses stubbornly pull the wagon.
The mad crows carry away the tablecloth.
Most of the time, we live through the night.

Let's not drive the wild angels from our door.
Maybe the mad fields of grain will move.
Maybe the troubled rocks will learn to walk.

It's all right if we're troubled by the night.
It's all right if we can't recall our own name.
It's all right if this rough music keeps on playing.

I've given up worrying about men living alone.
I do worry about the couple who live next door.
Some words heard through the screen door are enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 
 ~  Robert Bly

from Talking into the ear of a Donkey

with thanks to whiskey river

 

 

 

where the battle did not happen

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed—or were killed—on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

~  William Stafford

the inward world

Riding on the inner side of the blackbird's

Wings, I feel the long

Warm flight to the sea;

Dark, black in the trees at night.

Along the railroad tracks

In men's minds wild roses grow.

Lingering as ripe black olives

I go down the stairs of the little leaves,

To the floating continent

Where men forget their bodies,

Searching for the tiny

Grain of sand behind their eyes.

~ William Duffy

Introductory notes by Robert Bly 

to The Lion’s Tail and Eyes, Poems written out of laziness and silence.

“One purpose of poetry is to forget about what you know, 

and think about what you don’t know. 

There is an old idea that only by leaving the body can a man think.

 Such a leaving concerns the body of knowledge as well as the physical body.

 After all, as Montale says, if the purpose of poetry lay in making oneself understood, 

there would be no purpose in writing it.”……. 

“The fundamental world of poetry…..is the inward world. 

The poem expresses what we are just beginning to think,

 thoughts we have not yet thought. The poem must catch these thoughts alive,

 holding them in language that is also alive, flexible and animal-alike as they. 

The poem with images is therefore like a lion about to come into existence.

 A person meets the poem among trees at night. On the path in front of him,

 he sees a lion who does not know he is there. The lion is changing 

from his old ancient substance back into a visible body.

 So far the tip of the tail, the ears, the eyes,

 and perhaps a paw or two have come.”

poem in three parts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1.

 

Oh, on an early morning I think I shall live forever!

I am wrapped in my joyful flesh,

As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green.

 

 

2.

 

Rising from a bed, where I dreamt

Of long rides past castles and hot coals,

The sun lies happily on my knees;

I have suffered and survived the night,

Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass.

 

3.

 

The strong leaves of the box-elder tree,

Plunging in the wind, call us to disappear

Into the wilds of the universe,

Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant,

And live forever, like the dust.

 

 

 

 

~ Robert Bly

from  Silence in the Snowy Fields

 

 

 

 

 

a stricken deer that left the herd

I WAS a stricken deer, that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charg'd, when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.

There was I found by one who had himself
Been hurt by th' archers. In his side he bore,
And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.
With gentle force soliciting the darts,
He drew them forth, and heal'd, and bade me live. 

Since then, with few associates, in remote
And silent woods I wander, far from those
My former partners of the peopled scene;
With few associates, and not wishing more.

Here much I ruminate, as much I may,
With other views of men and manners now
Than once, and others of a life to come.
I see that all are wand'rers, gone astray
Each in his own delusions; they are lost
In chace of fancied happiness, still wooed
And never won. Dream after dream ensues,
And still they dream that they shall still succeed,
And still are disappointed; rings the world
With the vain stir. I sum up half mankind,
And add two-thirds of the remainder half,
And find the total of their hopes and fears
Dreams, empty dreams. The million flit as gay
As if created only like the fly
That spreads his motley wings in th' eye of noon
To sport their season and be seen no more.

~ William Cowper 

 art by Picasso

the people waiting

The ship, solid and black,

enters the clear blackness

of the great harbor.

Quiet and cold.

—The people waiting

are still asleep, dreaming,

and warm, far away and still stretched out in this 

dream, perhaps . . .

How real our watch is, beside the dream

of doubt the others had! How sure it is, compared

to their troubled dream about us!

Quiet. Silence.

Silence which in breaking up at dawn

will speak differently.

~ Juan Ramón Jiménez

 from Lorca and Jiménez: Selected Poems

translation by Robert Bly

art by picasso

half life

We walk through half of our life

as if it were a fever dream

barely touching the ground

our eyes half open

our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are 

we watch the ghost of us drift 

from room to room

through friends and lovers

never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean

or meaning half we say

we dream ourselves

from birth to birth

seeking the true self.

Until the fever breaks

and the heart can not abide

a moment longer

as the rest of us awakens,

summoned from the dream,

not half caring for anything but love.

~ Stephen Levine

from Breaking the Drought

art by Robert Frank Hunter

Bach cello Solo Nr.1, BWV 1007

enter singing

1.

The cloud is free only

to go with the wind.

The rain is free

only in falling.

The water is free only

in its gathering together,

in its downward courses,

in its rising into the air.

2.

In law is rest

if you love the law,

if you enter, singing, into it

as water in its descent.

3.

Or song is truest law,

and you must enter singing;

it has no other entrance.

It is the great chorus

of parts. The only outlawry

is in division.

4.

Whatever is singing

is found, awaiting the return

of whatever is lost.

5.

Meet us in the air

over the water,

sing the swallows.

Meet me, meet me,

the redbird sings,

here here here here.

~ Wendell Berry

photo by Beth Acherman