he who stretches

Procrustes was a host who adjusted his guests to their bed.
Procrustes, whose name means "he who stretches."


He kept a house by the side of the road where he offered hospitality to passing strangers, who were invited in for a pleasant meal and a night's rest in his very special bed. Procrustes described it as having the unique property that its length exactly matched whomsoever lay down upon it. What Procrustes didn't volunteer was the method by which this "one-size-fits-all" was achieved, namely as soon as the guest lay down Procrustes went to work upon him, stretching him on the rack if he was too short for the bed and chopping off his legs if he was too long. Theseus turned the tables on Procrustes, fatally adjusting him to fit his own bed.


We are no sooner out of the womb than we must begin this precarious unfolding and shaping of who we are. If we have bad or destructive times in childhood, we begin to fix on a survival identity to cover over and to compensate for what happens to us. If we are never encouraged to be ourselves we begin to construct an identity that will gain us either attention or approval. When we set out to construct our lives according to a fixed image, we damage ourselves. The image becomes the desperate focus of all our longing. There are no frames for the soul. In truth, we are called, in so far as we can, to live without an image of ourselves, or at least to keep images we have free and open. When you sense the immensity of the unknown within you, any image you have built of yourself gradually loses its promise. Your name, your face, your address only suggest the threshold of your identity. Somehow you are always secretly aware of this. Sometimes. you find yourself listening to someone telling you what you should do or describing what is going on inside you, and you whisper to yourself that they have not the foggiest idea who you actually are.




~ John O'Donohue
from Eternal Echoes

the pools

(March 27, 1917 - June 15, 2011)

Let's picture if we can two landscapes. The first has a deep clear quiet pool, and the second also has a deep clear quiet pool. The first one is surrounded by garbage. The second one, also surrounded by garbage, has an odd characteristic - everyone who jumps into the pool takes a little pile of garbage in with him -- and there is something in the pool that eats it up, so it remains quiet and clear.

Which kind of practice are you doing ? Most of us long for deep, blissful sitting and, even if our pool of peace is ringed around with garbage, we attempt not notice it; if the garbage can disturb us, we want to ignore it. We don't like difficulties; we prefer to sit in our peace and not be intruded upon. That's one type of sitting.

The other kind of pool eats up the garbage; as fast as it appears, it is consumed as the person entering the pool carries it in with him. Still in a short time the pool is clear and undisturbed. It may churn more at first. The major difference is that the first pool ends up with more and more garbage around it; the second has none or very little.

As has been said, most of us long for the first kind of practice (life). But the second, facing life as it is, is more genuine; we keep churning up our drama -- seeing it, experiencing it, swallowing it -- throwing the garbage into ourselves, the deep pool that we are.

A practice exclusively devoted to concentration (shutting out all but the object of concentration) is the first pool. Very peaceful, very seductive. But when you climb out of the pool, the garbage of life remains -- our dualistic dealings with our work and relationships. You haven't handled them. Or you may resort to the well-intentioned but inaccurate devices of positive thinking or affirmations; the gas in the garbage increases and in time explodes.

The second pool (being each moment of life, pleasant or unpleasant) is at times a slow and frustrating practice, but in the long run, fruitful and satisfying. With all that as a background, let's look at what can be called the turning point in our life and practice. From what are we turning? Let's look at some sentences: "I feel irritated. I feel annoyed. I feel happy." What we omit is: "I feel I am hurt by you. I feel I have been made happy by you."

Actually, the fact is not that you irritate me, it's that i have a desire to be irritated. You may loudly protest, "oh, never, I certainly don't want to feel irritated or hurt..." Well, just for a few years (intelligently, in the second pool). The first and uncomfortable years of sitting make it clearer and clearer that my desire is to be irritated or angry (separate). That's almost all I have known as a means to preserve and protect what I think is my identity. With continued awareness, it dawns that there is only one person who can irritate me or make me feel lonely and depressed, and it is myself -- myself as a false identity.

We begin to see a strange and lethal truth: contrary to our beliefs, our basic drive and all our life fore goes into a struggle to perpetuate our separateness, our touchiness, or self-righteousness.

Lao Tzu said, "He who feels punctured, must be a balloon.", the balloon of irritability, anger, self-centered opinions. If we can be punctured (hurt), we can be sure we are still a balloon. We want to be a balloon; otherwise we could not be punctured. But our greatest desire is to keep the balloon inflated. After all, it's me!

So what would turning be? What is the turning point? It begins when we observe and feel our anger, our manipulation, our anxiety - and know in our hearts a deep determination to be in another mode.

Than the real transformation can begin. Instead of ignoring garbage, pushing it away, or wallowing in it, we take our garbage into ourselves and let it digest. We take ourselves with us into the pool of life. This begins the turning. After it, life is never the same.

The turning is at first feeble and intermittent. Over time, it becomes stronger and more insistent (in Christian terms, the 'hound of haven' chases us). As it strengthens, more and more we know who our Master is. Of course, the Master is not a thing or a person but our awakening knowledge of Who We Are. The difficult years of practice (and life) come before the turning. The patience and skill of both teacher and student are called on to the utmost. Some but not all will make it through the difficulties.

Gurdjieff said: man is a machine. We know how machines work: when the blender's button is pushed, it goes WHOOSSSH; when we turn our car's ignition key, the motor roars. Man is a machine. Why? As long as a man's primary drive is to keep his balloon unpunctured, to avoid having his buttons pushed, he is an automatic machine which has no choice.

Even moving from passive dependence to an active and angry independence -- "Don't tell me what to do!" -- is still the activity of a machine with buttons. I feel ruled and compelled by 'something else'; I have no choice. Like the blender, if pushed, I turn on.

Suppose you do something to me that I view as punishing (it's mean, it's unfair, I don't deserve it). How do I react when this button is pushed? With anger? (And I may not reveal my anger, or I may turn it against myself). Then I am a machine. In this instance, what would the tuning point be?

The turning point is my ability, developed slowly by practice, to be aware of the thoughts and bodily sensations which comprise anger. In the observing of thoughts and sensations, anger will swallow itself and its energy can open life instead of destroying it. Then I (the angry one) can act out of this clarity in a manner that benefits me and you. This is the way of the second pool, the one that takes the garbage, digests it, letting it feed and renew life as compost does a garden.

Let us not have some naive notion that this ability is won overnight. A lifetime is more like it. Nevertheless, faithful and determined practice makes a difference and fairly soon at that.

We come to view the unpleasant aspects of life as learning opportunities. If my balloon is deflated a little -- great!. As an opportunity to be welcomed, not avoided or dramatized. each round of such practice renders us a little less machine-like, gives us more appreciation of ourselves and others.

Let's live in the second pool.

~ Charlotte Joko Beck

from the Newsletter of the Zen Center of San Diego, (Feb-Mar, 1989)

for citizenship

In these times when anger

Is turned into anxiety

And someone has stolen

The horizons and mountains,

Our small emperors on parade

Never expect our indifference

To disturb their nakedness.

They keep their heads down

And their eyes gleam with reflection

From aluminum economic ground,

The media wraps everything

In a cellophane of sound,

And the ghost surface of the virtual

Overlays the breathing earth.

The industry of distraction 

Makes us forget

That we live in a universe.

We have become converts 

To the religion of stress

And its deity of progress;

That we may have courage 

To turn aside from it all

And come to kneel down before the poor,

To discover what we must do,

How to turn anxiety

Back into anger,

How to find our way home.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us
photo by Robert Frank

poverty of the lover

The true lover gazes toward the reality of things:

My eyes so fix

upon your image

that whatever I gaze at

I imagine you.

Wherever he looks he finds that Face and therefore needs everything he sees. 

 "Poverty is intrinsic need; it has nothing to do with this or that."

And why does nothing need the lover? One can only need something which exists.  But the lover, outwardly detached and inwardly disengaged, has returned the robe of existence and all its trappings- which he only held in trust - ... Again he has donned the patched cloak of his own nothingness.  "He is ... as he was in eternity-without-beginning," and in such a state, who needs him?

But...in poverty there comes a state wherein the poor man himself needs nothing.  As one of them said, "The poor man is not is not in need of God Himself!"  Need, after all, is an attribute of the existent; but he who dives into the sea of nothingness needs no more.  His poverty is complete.

You are nothing 
when you wed the One;
but you are everything 
when you become nothing.




~ Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
from Divine Flashes

a stream I go a-fishing in

In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime.

 But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.  

God himself culminates in the present moment 

and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages.  

Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in.  

I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.  

Its thin current slides away but eternity remains.

~ Henry David Thoreau 

from: Walden, "Where I lived and what I lived for," 1854

in love that long

I am here, this moment, inside the beauty,

the gift God has given,

our love:

This gold and circular sign

means we are free of any duty:

out of eternity I turn my face to you, and into

eternity:

we have been in

love that long.

~ Rumi

from The Glance - Songs of Soul-Meeting

translation by Coleman Barks

soul unfolds itself

And a man said, Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.

And he answered saying:

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.

But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.

You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.

You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.

The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;

And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.

But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;

And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.

For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”

Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.
” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”

For the soul walks upon all paths.

The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.

The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

~ Kahlil Gibran

all paths

And he who defines his conduct by ethics

imprisons his song-bird in a cage.

The freest song comes not through bars

and wires.

And he to whom worshiping is a window,

to open but also to shut,

has not yet visited the house of his soul

whose windows are from dawn to dawn.

...

And if you would know God be not

therefore a solver of riddles.

Rather look about you and you shall see

Him playing with your children.

And look into space; you shall see Him 

walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms

in the lightning and descending in rain.

You shall see Him smiling in flowers,

then rising and waving His hands in trees.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Prophet

I loved what I could love

I had a natural passion for fine clothes, excellent food, and

lively conversation about all matters that concern the heart

still alive. And a passion about my own looks.

Vanities: they do not exist.

Have you ever walked across a stream stepping on

rocks so not to spoil a pair of shoes?

All we can touch, swallow, or say

aids in our crossing to God

and helps unveil the soul.

Life smooths us, rounds, perfects, as does the river the stone,

and there is no place our Beloved is not flowing

through the current's force you

may not always like.

Our passions help to lift us.

I loved what I could love until I held Him,

for then - all things - every world

disappeared.

~Saint Teresa of Avila

 art from the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam

 

a poem for Giambattist Vico written by the Pacific

A rephrasing of Vico;

All cultures go through three stages, Culture moves from the

Sacred World to the Aristocratic Realm to the Democratic Place,

and back again.

1.

We were sitting there, badly blessed, and brooding

On aristocracies near the trouserless ocean.

We knew we were pure prose; the ocean stretched

Out, blown by wind, but we remained where we were.

The sand shifted; all of us walked on flat boards.

We were no one in particular, in our messy lives.

We tended to stay who we were. Our minds stay in this

Particular room with Nils and Judy and Tom.

If death is the mother of fashion, we don't mind.

I am myself; I am what is around me.

Pine cones fall and stick where they fall.

That is what it's like when we are born

Not from wind or spirit, but from things. 

2.

Spirit moves where it moves; that is what 

People are like who are born of the Spirit. 

For in high air there burns a furious spirit.

It rises out of ground like Milton's mind

That meets all furies high above the sea.

It wants to rise. "If music be the food of love,

Play on." So notes, inspired not by our toes

But by th'inspired intellect, take us

Out of the dark soul-house, upward through turns

And spiral stairs, fighting the darken'd air.

The Spirit carries us, and in our minds

We know if we are high or not. It is 

Something like this for those still in the Spirit.

3.

 The wind blows where it likes: that is what

Everyone is like who is born from the wind.

Oh now it's getting serious. We want to be those

Born from the wind that blows along the plains

And over the sea where no one has a home.

And that Upsetting Rabbi, didn't he say;

"Take nothing with you, no blanket, no bread.

When evening comes, sleep wherever you are.

And it the owners say no, shake out the dust

From your sandals; leave the dust on their doorstep."

Don't hope for what will never come. Give up hope,

Dear friends, the joists of life are laid on the winds.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

 

no way or path

There's a moment there in Arthur's banquet hall when all the knights are assembled around the Round Table.  Arthur would not let anyone start to eat until an adventure had occurred.  Well, in those days adventures were rather normal, so people didn't go hungry for long.

They were waiting for this day's adventure, and it did indeed occur.  The Holy Grail itself showed itself to the assembled knights - not in its full glory but covered with a great, radiant cloth.  Then it withdrew.  All were left ravished, sitting there in awe.

Finally, Gawain, Arthur's nephew, stood up and said,  "I propose a vow to this company, that we should all go in quest of that Grail to behold it unveiled."

Now we come to the part that interested me.  The text reads, 

"They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group.  
Each entered the Forest Adventurous at that point which he himself had chosen, 
where it was darkest and there was no way or path."

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.  Where there's a way or path, it is someone else's path;  each human being is a unique phenomenon. 

The idea is to find your own way.

~ Joseph Campbell

referring to:  La Queste del Saint Graal,

taken here from Pathways to Bliss

how it feels to be free

~ Nina Simone

 

it's probubly me

~ Gregory Porter

starry starry night

~ Vincent Van Gogh and Don McLean

one source of bad information

There's a boy in you about three

Years old who hasn't learned a thing for thirty

Thousand years.  Sometimes it's a girl.

This child had to make up its mind

How to save you from death.  He said things like:

"Stay home.  Avoid elevators.  Eat only elk."

You live with this child, but you don't know it.

You're in the office, yes, but live with this boy

At night.  He's uninformed, but he does want

To save your life.  And he has.  Because of this boy

You survived a lot.  He's got six big ideas.

Five don't work.  Right now he's repeating them to you.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems