Madzubial Mutterings

Namaste

2011-11-05T07:27:00.001-07:00

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Moving speech by Charlie Chaplin. when silent actors speak.

2011-10-16T06:35:00.001-07:00

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Shadow. Play

2011-10-01T08:41:00.001-07:00

Shadow. Play, a photo by mutteringmadzub on Flickr.

ShadowPlay

Flower perspective

2011-10-01T08:30:00.001-07:00

Flower perspective, a photo by mutteringmadzub on Flickr.

Flower perspective

Why Israel can't be a 'Jewish State' - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

2011-10-01T08:06:00.000-07:00

Why Israel can't be a 'Jewish State' - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Occupy Wall Street: Its Objects, Issues, and Political Meaning

2011-09-27T05:26:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street: Its Objects, Issues, and Political Meaning

Class Warfare My Ass | Truthout

2011-09-24T15:39:00.000-07:00

Class Warfare My Ass | Truthout

Water Veil

2011-09-23T07:37:00.001-07:00

See what a cool photo effect I made!

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We are the Zube second transmission

2011-03-06T18:51:00.000-07:00

We are the Zube

2011-02-06T16:32:00.000-07:00

Global Information Network

2011-01-07T19:13:00.000-07:00

Global Information Network

Allah Rocks

2010-12-22T22:46:00.000-07:00

A short Story

2010-12-07T19:52:00.003-07:00

Once upon a time, subject looked in the mirror and saw object.
The mirror, subject and object all laughed together as one.
Then, in the twinkle of an eye, they all suddenly vanished without a trace happily ever after.

The end.

The moral of the story:
Laugh with yourself and the world vanishes with you.

Sri Ram Andante

2010-10-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

Cross of Iron, by Muttering Madzub

2010-08-18T11:21:00.000-07:00

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed”.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Cross of Iron

Humanity suspended in perpetual war

as the cross of iron stands

blood and treasure spilt for profit

our children’s blood on our hands

Scarified hearts and twisted minds

hurl obscenities of hate

the world dies hungry all around us

we are the enemy in the gate

Hanging on the cross of iron

humanity agonizes in pain

wounded souls littered lives

from pogroms of the insane

Tortured on the cross of iron

our souls hang naked in the balance

human lives just cheap commodities

the war drums beat their cold cadence

The cross of iron is the gun sight used

to find targets of opportunity says the adage

humanity that hangs bleeding thereupon

is nothing more than collateral damage

Weapons are aimed and warships launched

the cross of iron fulfills its purpose

red rockets’ glare, the bombs burst midair

humans lost in war, without moral compass

The cross of iron erected for all to see

humanity fixed in its own crosshairs

engines of war conjured from darkened visions

hollowed eyes, yielding hollow stares

The hidden message from the cross of iron whispers

if we listen we will hear

that human darkness can be healed

loving-kindness conquers hate and fear

Other Words

2010-08-09T11:27:00.001-07:00

I was moved by an article from Truth-Digg: The Tears of Gaza Must Be Our Tears: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_tears_of_gaza_must_be_our_tears_20100809/ by Chris Hedges.

Chris Hedges said" Let me call things by their proper names. Let me cut through the jargon, the euphemisms we use to mask human suffering and war crimes" Thought provoking article.

Chris Hedges also quoted a poem by the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali “Revenge”:
"At times ... I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!
*
But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.
*
Likewise ... I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.
*
But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge."

The Jewish/Palestinian “middle east” problem, the racist immigration battles currently raging in Arizona and the US, are all indicative of an endemic human problem. Not an illegal problem, a terrorist problem, or an alien problem, a human problem.
We dehumanize our enemies du jour, so that we can create fear to control and perpetuate our own malignant narcissistic agendas – whether as individuals, religions, or nations. Until we put a human face on all our fears, fear will always be our portion.

Here is my poem:

Other Words

Other words we use to excuse
to justify horrific views
to dehumanize and immorally abuse
from aggressive oppressors to the morning news

collateral damage, or a war on terror
not murder or genocide from predatory standard-bearers
shock and awe the cluster-bomb scare-ers
disguised as moral compass bearers

anti-Semitism an oft turned phrase
to hide the genocidal oppression from those that raze
bloodlust justified from the psychopathic crazed
fomenting mindless fury to hasten the end of days

legals, illegals, aliens, wetbacks, terrorists, dropped babies a few
humans treated as dogs foaming with rabies vile rhetoric spews
no longer human not even maybes human refuse
racism disguised by contorted, malignant views

concrete fences that multiply fears
Berlin-istic paranoid oppressive smears
the humans walled out suffer bloodstained tears
humans walled within with hate their conscience sears

pyres of lies stoked with human remains
spin is spun tightly, truth in chains
no mercy, no compassion, just holocaustic flames
oppressed given no quarter, just suffering and pain

clashes that rain ashes we all fall down
ringed state fortresses with boots on the ground
constant aggression make hate propaganda abound
malignant militaristic narcissism enthroned and crowned

euphemisms, cynical syllogisms – words of mass destruction
peace process, closures, walled settlements, border (of)fences – concrete construction
forgotten are the voiceless entombed in silenced obstruction
hate, fear and death a human seduction

peace is not a word, nor truth nor love
they are qualities of being that fear knows not of
hate, greed, genocide, oppression – words humans conceive of
love expects nothing, there is nothing without love

Causal Illusion

2010-07-25T13:05:00.000-07:00

The causal illusion has led us to believe instead of live. Contrary to popular opinion, beliefs are the main causes of blindness and death. We all tell ourselves that we are lacking, incomplete, and flawed. We have conjured up thousands of years of traditions of gods, goddesses, prophets, rabbis, mullahs, martyrs, gurus, sages, mages and mystics to hammer the point that we are separate and if we follow this or that path, pray this prayer, move this move and chant these words, that God will then accept us, make us whole, save us from hell and take us to heaven. Because we are convinced that God is separate from us.

We believe that we have soiled God’s plan and have separated ourselves from the great and powerful OZ that scares children and smokes and thunders behind the curtain. This angry, vengeful deity is a projection of our own accepted guilt. This is representational of the folly that we follow without question, because we have not questioned the questions. We are blind, not because we do not have eyes, but because we have covered our eyes with our own lies that we believe to be true. We have bought into the causal world and have been fatally affected by our own hubris.

We do not have to do anything special — pray, meditate, contort our bodies and deceive our deception through affirmations and proclamations. Doing just leads to more doing.

However, sing, chant, meditate, pose and retreat. But knowing that the outcome of all these activities will not be for what you are searching. For example, as a dear friend once said, “silent retreats do not involve silence and they do not involve retreat”. The object of your search is the first clue that searching for objects is truly objectionable and a waste of time.

The Holy Grail — the object of our highest aspirations and noble search for truth, justice, freedom, love, compassion — whatever, are merely phantom images that cannot incorporate or resolve. The idea or form of the Divine is idolatry at its very core. The idols that dull our eyes and obscure our perception are what we have formed as barriers that are intricately designed to distract us from “tat tvam asi” thou art that. What we truly are cannot change. Everything else is not worth mentioning.

So why write, blog, or slog about such matters if they do not matter? Sometimes the most absurd and obscure reflections in life’s mirror, remind us of our true Self, the Mind-less-mind, the Me-less-me. We are all reminders of What that has never forgotten about us. All of us are one of us and none of us exist. So, I mutter and pray that we remember.

Life as it is now…

2010-07-13T13:03:00.001-07:00

Lost in the self centered dream...
I have been looking at all the human contrived disasters, corporate and governmental crimes that plague humanity, foul our environment, not to mention the religious hypocrisy of militant dominionist right-winged fanatics – just to name a few.

Only suffering.
I come to a realization that this suffering is not about Me and it is all just another egoic intrusion to waylay and subvert Me from the Center, the Void – whatever I want to call it.

Holding to self centered thoughts...
my suffering psyche or self – that does not exist, should be in enough pain to reMind Me to pay attention and just watch this illusive delusion without getting drawn into the malaise and malignant, narcissistic mind fuck .

Exactly the dream.
Wow, i am amazed at how much effluent i am willing to endure to keep the egoic life support tubes, wires and machines cranking out the artificial respiration and intravenous poisons inserted into every orifice of my self-centered dream.

Life as it is...
The ego self wants to feel guilty about all this shit, yet that is what the ego always wants. The ultimate deception is self deception, and how the hell does one do that when the self by its very nature is deception? Deceive the deceiver?

The only teacher.
Well, i can’t mind fuck my way out of this one so I guess I will allow the smoke to clear and the mirrors to turn into windows.

Being just this moment...
I only know that anger, self-righteousness, pointing the finger and blaming everyone and myself for the suffering of humanity is just more suffering and perpetuates samsara.

Compassion’s way.
The cycle of endless suffering, birth and death only disappears when compassionate being becomes My dynamic guiding force in momentary lapses of surrender.

--------

The following verse is written by Charlotte Joko Beck, a Zen Roshi.
Lost in the self-centered dream, only suffering.
Holding to self centered thoughts, exactly the dream.
Life as it is, the only teacher.
Being just this moment, compassion’s way.

The Grateful Dead, Muttering Madzub

2010-06-17T07:15:00.002-07:00

looking from behind the screen
through eyes that don’t belong
the flickering spectral lights that form
ghosts I live among

strange the specters their dance perform
with movements that are not what they seem
the skeletal forms that rattle and contort
on empty movie screens

what is the flick the flickering glow
that dances in my head
theatrical voices the actors and stage
are all among the dead

we are the grateful dead they cry
as they chortle their muffled cries
those who live, live again
and those who are dead just die

the marionettes with strings attached
like on Día de los Muertos dance
where ancestral forms appear to return
from their shadowed world entranced

the candle’s flame the fire that lights
the lamps that casts their shadows long
the day is night and the night is dark
the specters dance alone

samsara’s cinema with all its charm
with upholstered velvet chairs
the golden banisters and gilded forms
that align the descending stairs

am i a player or patron the actor cries
the deadened echoes across empty theaters hurl
the formless act, the scene is staged
the art that imitates life and death is unfurled

the grateful dead with panned expression
mocks the living form
the masquerade ball that reveals the hidden
where deception cannot perform

the scene has come where hubris sobers
the puppet master is left to ponder
as strings are cut, the voices still
empty minds no longer wander

the bard has declared the world's a stage,
“And all the men and women merely players”.
the masks behind the stage come off
and reveal their hidden layers

the eyes that see and the ears that hear
are not focused on shadow’s dance
the light that shines through the obscured mind
awakens through lights piercing glance

the dead are grateful, the living too
they no longer aimlessly wander
the light is on, the word is true
and I waken from my slumber.

compassionate completion

2010-06-09T13:26:00.003-07:00

Lost in the self centered dream
yet sometimes the dream fades
the voices still and colors return
darkness no longer looms
on cold dead concrete walls
filled with ghostly graffiti
music fills the shadowed void
and creates quiet spaces
where voice is heard
and words are unspoken
melodies ebb and flow
from the tongues of angel's breath

feeling trapped in-between worlds
where duality duels with itself
mutually assured destruction
collaterally damaged lives
gripped by mortgage
sold souls pandering in pandemonium
pondering thoughts of peace
is death the only quiet?
is the end of life the only end to samsara?
yet it begins and ends again and again…

the voices scream inside my head
and my tired ego harmonizes with
cacophonous calumny
ego rages
the pointlessness of birth and death
the dream is looped in eternal suffering
where is the light
to breach the darkness
of the delusion
that separates us from our true self?

where do I really exist?
does existence exist?
existential angst and endless mutterings
of madness that sweep me away
down the path of pointless return
when I see the path is not me
when my ego
through sheer exhaustion
has slipped into a coma
and awakened dreams
with no strings attached
are plucked by the hands of god
and music fills my soul

no longer alone
the voice sings to me
sweetly in the cool of the morning
where I run to meet the beloved
with whom I am eternally bound
embraced by the arms of angel's breath
kissing my forehead
caressing my imagined wounds
no longer many
no longer alone
filled with compassionate being
as the moment lingers eternally

kindness, compassionate remembrance
that dissolves the veil
of living and dieing.
the bubble lie
with rainbow reflections that pops
when attention softly blows
the bubble in still wind.
the breathless breath of insane sanity
that keeps us artificially resuscitated
until the plug is finally severed
by compassionate gaze

what I am cannot die
I have never been born
the justice and injustices that are perpetrated
that penetrate the psychic strands of illusive delusion
cannot exist
angels that comfort my soul
are who gathers to remind me
and whisper softly
that heaven and hell are no longer needed
the god that I have conjured has melted away
slipped back into the forgetfulness from whence it came
no longer telling me
reminding me that I am separate
no more self
compassionate completion

Asking the Wrong Questions by Dogo Barry Graham

2010-05-25T15:36:00.000-07:00

Many of us want someone else to help us, to save us, to take away our suffering, our fear and uncertainty. No one can do that. Many of us realize that, and so we think we need to help ourselves. No one can do that, either.

So, if no one else can help us, and we can't help ourselves, what can we do? Are we doomed to suffer?

Our suffering cannot end until we stop fixating on the wrong questions. Who can help me? How can I help myself? These are questions that don't even begin to address the problem (or what we think is a problem).

Questions that might be more useful:

Who is this that wants to be helped?

Who is this that wants to help himself?

Who is this that thinks she has a problem?

Who am I without the belief that I have a problem?

Oneness Implies Separation...

2010-04-29T08:21:00.002-07:00

Oneness implies separation. No separate you or me to be one with. No separate God, Buddha or Christ. Oneness is a finite numerical construct or equation for the ego to describe indescribable, immeasurable, unquantifiable, infinite Being.

Form and Formlessness are both illusory.
Constructing Formlessness is form.
Deconstructing form or formlessness is illusion, form and Samsara.

How can the form that has no form,
form the un-formable Formless
by informing the uninformed form of its formlessness?

Being.

The formed and the formless can’t be formed, informed, performed, uniformed, trance-formed, conformed or de-formed. Form and formlessnes simply don't exist.

No form to form.
No formlessness to form.
No formlessness to unform the form
No formlessness to unform
No formlessness.

The unavoidable Void,
unavoidably voids the voids,
that were never voids
and cannot exist in the Unavoidable Void, unavoidably.

Being just this moment, compassion's way.

Hate... the condition of the non-existent self

2010-04-15T06:47:00.002-07:00

Hate... the condition of the non-existent self
loathing its ubiquitous non-existence
in the mirror prison of its own holographic hallucinations
screaming suicidal imploding invectives
at apparitions of its own conjuring
to drown-out shrieking silent voices
of its vacuous vitriolic vicissitudes.

Lost in the self-centered dream only suffering
Holding to self centered thoughts, exactly the dream
Life as it is, the only teacher
being just this moment, compassion’s way

Compassion is the only cure.

Who are you? Existential Alice

2010-03-23T08:53:00.000-07:00

“Who are you? ” said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I--I hardly know, sir, just at present--at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

Louis Carroll http://www.hoboes.com/html/FireBlade/Carroll/Alice/Wonder/alice5.html

sleep and waking, birth and death
changes appear to appear and disappear
in ego-smoke of mindless carnival mirrors
as the embers ebb and glow from breathless
smoldering ashes of pipedreams

caterpillars, butterflies and small humans
converse in cryptic conversations
resisting inevitable dissolution
into the breath that draws them back
before pupae and pipe

caterpillar’s query
quickens inevitable quandaries
non-quintessential quirks of identifying nomenclature
signatory separation
of dualistic duels of dangled participles and unnamed nouns

phenomenal phony phonemes
flitting from languishing lingual lies
lingering in vacuous vapory vehemence
mouthing nonsense
of etheric effigies of formless fancy

ravens are like writing desks
slithy toves did gyre and gimbal
walruses weep, and oysters run
in the dream we have become what seemed to be
therefore become nothing at all

Who are you?

“The Economic Bill of Rights” Franklin D. Roosevelt

2010-03-16T17:24:00.000-07:00

What an amazing man to have put the needs of people before corporations!

Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The Economic Bill of Rights”

Excerpt from 11 January 1944 message to Congress on the State of the Union

________________________________________

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

Tyranny or Liberty?

2010-03-08T13:21:00.001-07:00

Tyranny or Liberty?

This is a scathing pessimistic assessment of the state of our country and the world. I have employed histrionic literary license and apocalyptic imagery as a vehicle to illustrate the delusion that has overtaken us in this country and the world at large. The human economic state of affairs, along with our overall state of health still appears to be spun “positive” through the corporate media. Although complete economic collapse has not economically eradicated all humanity, the decimation of human economic stability and the quality of healthcare for our citizenry has occurred through political game playing in concert with corporate maneuverings.

Collusion between our elected governmental officials and big-business has created a corporatist oligarchy that is becoming more and more visible, profitable and sinister with every passing law financed by the corporate death dealers. For lack of basic human considerations such as healthcare, financial protections from legalized predatory financial practices, and right livelihood, we have all been deceived by our own greed and self-delusion.

Some Americans can still buy cars, Blu-Ray players and flat screen TVs, and rack-up huge debt, but neighbors on all sides of me have lost or are losing their homes; they are unable to have meaningful stable employment; and cannot purchase healthcare. One can be sure that the ones that are enslaved from our economic gluttony in third world countries where corporations exploit and enslave the peasantry could not purchase the merchandise that is exacted from their labors. The whole world is eating from the corporate crumb bank.

What may appear to be histrionic hyperbolic ravings in this short discourse, may in turn reveal prophetic omens, indicators that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark (Macrone, Michael. "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." Brush Up Your Shakespeare. Cader Company, 1990. eNotes.com. 2007. 1 Mar, 2010 http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/something-rotten-state-denmark).

Ask any of the victims of our healthcare system, or of the American workforce who have been tragically affected by the denizens of the corporatist elite. The proof is on the battlefields and villages across the planet; lying in the bedrooms of our sick family members who can’t afford healthcare, left on the slabs in the morgues and dying on our streets. The financial and physical executioners of the American people and subsequently, the people of the world:

1. are the politicians; the pushers and preachers of the opium of positive thinking that turns a blind eye to human suffering and rejects all personal and corporate responsibility to compassionately act.

2. the immoral, and, at best, amoral corporate zombies that infect and prey upon humanity at large through lack of healthcare, corporate downsizing, and warmongering.

We are still the killers of our own brothers and sisters instead of the keepers.

It is abundantly clear that healthcare reform is not in the hearts or the minds of the corporate political oligarchy. The impotent political leadership of our nation, which has long been spayed and neutered by their corporate masters, has preemptively attacked the very core of our humanity as American citizens. We the people are mere decimal place holders on corporate and government spreadsheets that through the gross computations of profit mongering corporations. The share and stake holders have demeaned, dehumanized, and relegated us to insignificance — impersonal, economic collateral damage — “its not personal it’s just business” as the mantra goes.

The study from the American Journal of Medicine in its abstract stated “Illness and medical bills contribute to a large and increasing share of US bankruptcies (© 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. • The American Journal of Medicine (2009) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/american_journal_of_medicine_09.pdf).

The Washington Post who quoted from the American Journal of Medicine report wrote “Sixty-two percent of all bankruptcies filed in 2007 were linked to medical expenses, according to a nationwide study released today by the American Journal of Medicine. That's nearly 20 percentage points higher than that pool of respondents reported were connected to medical costs in 2001. Of those who filed for bankruptcy in 2007, nearly 80 percent had health insurance. Respondents who reported having insurance indicated average expenses of just under $18,000. Respondents who filed and lacked insurance had average medical bills of nearly $27,000 (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/health-carereform/2009/06/new_study_shows_medical_bills.html?hpid=moreheadlines ).

It is clear that people are the anti-profit of corporate interests and corporate expansion. Stakeholders with their stakes in hand are staking the hearts of their victims and are bleeding the people dry. The healthcare debate is lost in the un-hallowed sanctuaries of divine corporatism, whose scripture is little more than spreadsheets and cost benefit analyses, with a little six sigma thrown in for computational effect. We the people have been reduced to rows of faceless, dehumanized numbers on corporate and government ledgers.

Corporations, with governments on their leashes, have continued their imperialistic pogroms of expansion —corporate manifest destiny— and have declared the right to conquer all that lies before them as their god given right to unfettered profits. Unending war, bankruptcy, foreclosures, lack of healthcare, all fueled by mercenary forces of impersonal faceless storm troopers —lobbyists; propaganda ministers —i.e. Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, punitive pundits pounding effluent down the throats of the masses telling them that our suffering derived from corporate profiteering is trickling down to the latrine of their choice. All we have to do is stand under corporate urinals —“they're pissing on us and not even giving us the courtesy of calling it rain” (http://www.reelmovienews.com/quotes/movies/avatar/page_2.html ).

The government lackeys — our elected officials, senators and congress people, presidents and vice presidents and their secretaries, in league with the economic overlords perpetuate this wholesale economic rape and genocide of the American people and should be held responsible for the demise — the slow death and torture of our people and the people of the world — that, by all indications, will lead to the eventual extinction of the middle class and heavily diluted individual rights. The corporations are sending us the Bill for our rights and we have already put the check in the mail.

Our individual rights have again recently been overtly assaulted, for example, by the Supreme Court’s decision to grant corporations the rights of individuals, by sheer financial means to commandeer elections. “In a 5-4 decision, the court decided corporations should be allowed under the First Amendment to draw from their own treasuries to fund campaigns. The ruling also effectively overturns part of the McCain-Feingold Act restricting corporate-funded issue ads” (http://www.dailycardinal.com/news/u-s-supreme-court-overturns-campaign-funding-restrictions-1.1081144 ). Money, the influence peddled, is being extracted from the suffering and death of our citizenry. We the people have chosen 7 and 8 figure earning CEOs, CFOs, and COOs (COO-COOs), to decide our fate of who is worthy to receive healthcare, right livelihood, and financial justice. The democratic façade is fading away.

Yet we have been told through artful propaganda that corporations, capitalism and the so-called “free market” are preferable to “The People” and their government; while the “The People” at large have no say or participatory representation within the boardrooms that rule society at large. The voice of the people is silenced in vacuous boardrooms and political backrooms. Sound cannot exist in a vacuum and neither does life.

This movement to privatize and divest control from the people seems more fascist than democratic. “Fascism …comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology developed in Italy. Fascists believe that nations and/or races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in conflict against the weak.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism).

I thought that we defeated fascism with Hitler and Mussolini. Yet the corporate imperialistic interests that run our government perpetuate war and escalate conflict over resources with ideological smokescreens. The corporate and government spin doctors, and PR propagandists lie and distort, while they knowingly and freely decide the demise of millions of people without a twinge of conscience.

Recently, empathy has become an undesirable attribute in our socio-political system, because it requires feeling, compassion and mercy, equanimity, and loving-kindness — human emotions and feelings. The undead, un-alive corporate entity —quasi-dead— do not have human concerns or emotions to be shackled by morality or ethics; they just depersonalize, justify and perpetuate their agendas. The crusades, jihads, inquisitions, pogroms of genocide, fratricide, and matricide — the Manifest Destiny of depraved corporatist self-interest — have continued in pursuit of oil, natural resources, market share, corporate enslavement, cheap labor, low prices with high human costs, profit share — the American way.

The government officials that we have elected tell us that big government is bad and that small government with large corporations at the helm —big business is good. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help” (Ronald Reagan, http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/33742.html ). We outsource war, intelligence gathering, and torture, to corporate mercenaries to keep the military industrial complex in business. We let the corporate corpses profit and drain the people from their dignity, and inalienable rights “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” (http://www.halexandria.org/dward245.htm ). Our corporate rulers have depersonalized, objectified, minimized, and written-off and deducted all human considerations that stand in the way of profit and their contractual survival from all checks and balance sheets.

Corporations only exist on paper, soulless and without affect. Yet corporations and the super rich behind them control the vast majority of humans and human activity, including the Fed, and the rest of the US Government. Flesh and blood human beings have their existence appraised, quantified, objectified, and trivialized by inanimate delusions of human machinations that only exist on paper — “whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean” (http://bible.cc/matthew/23-27.htm). The Trojan Horse has nothing on the well lubed insertion of the corporatist phallus that has penetrated every human orifice.

Oh no, not another tired corporate conspiracy theory conjured by the oppressed and disgruntled. Secret societies, the Illuminati and fanatical religious zealots may be conspiring in shadows behind closed doors with secret handshakes and arcane symbology. However, the most egregious predators are those that conspire in the boardrooms and political backrooms to defraud and dis-empower the American people legally and by our vote.

However, those that don’t buy into the positive thinking “keep on the sunny side” opium, that promotes social blindness and refuses to acknowledge and take responsibility for the gross misconduct that perpetuates abject poverty and human suffering, are tossed aside as naysayers and wackos by pathological spin doctors that spread a deadly viral corporate pathology (http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/obrotherwhereartthou/keeponthesunnyside.htm ).

Our government should not be feared, but rather be the very tool of the people to improve our quality of life and keep us safe from the corporatist predatory practices. In theory, if we elect our government, we can change our government. How is that working for us anyway? We have abdicated our authority as citizens to govern our great nation to puppets of corporations who are little more than soulless zombies that prey upon and exploit human weakness. The boardrooms and the places where stock and stake holders gather are little more than marble mausoleums where personally engraved slabs are provided for the corporate undead to decide the fate of the masses.

The corporatist government that has enslaved its own people needs to be rectified. The government “of the people, by the people and for the people, [that] shall not perish from the earth” has been ripped from our cold dying hands and has been delivered into the hands of our keepers — those that decide who lives and dies emotionally, physically, and financially (http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm ). The pundants, the political supplicants that grovel at the feet of economic idolatry in the corporate pantheons of profit, have lulled the eyes, hearts and minds of the American people into a lethargic trance through economic shock and awe campaigns that rewards the masses with mindless entertainment and consumer trinkets that both endears and enslaves us to our own demise — economic Stockholm Syndrome meets the Corporate Gladiatorial Games.

Since the Declaration of Independence, we have abdicated democracy and allowed another kind of dictator to rule over us. The corporate oligarchy that has enslaved the world enslaved us. The USA has become the greatest proponent and defender of corporatist oligarchic dogma and propaganda. Our religions, our schools, the very fabric of how we as Americans see ourselves and our place in history has been gradually supplanted by the empty promises and the tempter’s words of death that are sweet to the ear yet deadly to the touch for all who happen in it’s wake.

The Declaration of Independence is a poignant document that we as Americans should know and live by. Of course if one were to post the Declaration of Independence on the walls and doors of our government offices, Homeland Security would definitely have you on their terrorist watch list. These words are seditious and treasonous to the corporatist regime that has no moral or ethical center. Thomas Jefferson wrote: “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty (Thomas Jefferson, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/thomasjeff169586.html).
I leave you with these thoughts…

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men [and Women], deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security” (http://www.halexandria.org/dward245.htm).

State of Disunion

2010-02-05T14:20:00.001-07:00

This is a letter that I thought of sending to President Obama. I still might...

Dear President Obama:

I realize you receive thousands of letters everyday. I have no delusions that you will even see this. But, as the American myth proclaims, individuals still have a voice in the Government — “of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth”. Tens of millions of the voiceless people are perishing under the guise of freedom, liberty and the pursuit of corporate gluttony.

I think I would be better heard if I were a giant corporation or a lobbyist that is pouring thousands of dollars down the political rat hole, fueling the greed and degradation that is foisted upon the American people, and, by direct result, the people of the world, in the name of free enterprise.

Free enterprise is a mirage that is perceived by delirious people dying of thirst in a wasteland that was created by the devastation of human beings left to die after the corporations have ravaged our existence. People are dying from the predatory practices of corporations that have deposed government and the people for which the government represents. The government in turn has condoned, empowered and protected the very institutions that are destroying the fabric of humanity. Corporate apocalypse.

You may think that this letter is overly emotional or distorted by hysterical perceptions of feelings of powerlessness. The reality is, predators have taken over human affairs, government, the marketplace and the sanctuaries of human existence. We are bought and sold each day for the highest — or in government contracting speak — the lowest bidder, to perpetuate human suffering.

When a family loses a job, a child loses their parent to death from lack of healthcare, or people are forced into bankruptcies every minute because of the predatory nature of our ill-gotten free enterprise system we are all affected. When people lose their houses and financial security because the promise of education that promotes student loans has failed due to a predatory economy that is based on greed and the exploitation of workers, blue collar or white collar we are all affected. Is this not suffering?

Families out in the streets, entire communities ravaged by the beast that has destroyed the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans left to the fates of suited professionals who have no regard for the pitiful condition of men and women. Again, is this not suffering? The death grip — mortgage — of the free-market has not empowered us or freed us, but enslaved us to the fates of powerful predatory practices that have shackled us to the engines that lead us to our destruction.

President Eisenhower said in his Military-Industrial Complex Speech: “As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow” (Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961, http://www.h-.net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html).

We have not only mortgaged our material assets for all generations to come, and have discarded our political and spiritual heritage, and have effectively seared or fouled the collective human conscience. As a direct result, we have become insolvent and impotent against the machinations of our own demise.

We the people have entered a new area of slavery visited upon all peoples and races without discrimination. We are now slaves of corporations and government influence peddlers that ignore the dying cries of the people. Bankruptcies, burdens of debt and financial hopelessness, overpriced or denied healthcare, disease and lies, have become the whips and chains of our masters to keep us bent over in the fields feeling the sting of the lashes on our bleeding and sweaty backs. While our masters profit from our delirium and suffering.

President Lincoln wrote this about slavery: "The monstrous injustice of slavery... deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world- enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites- causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty" (http://civilwar.bluegrass.net/SlaveryAndEmancipation/lincolnonslavery.html). Lincoln was against slavery on moral grounds and would have rather “[freed] all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land” (Abraham Lincoln, http://civilwar.bluegrass.net/SlaveryAndEmancipation/lincolnonslavery.html).

However, the words Lincoln used to describe slavery are again dead-on for the state of union today. The monstrous injustice of slavery that has shackled the American people today through institutions — both private and public — have abdicated to the enemies of justice and the very fundamental principles of civil liberties and human decency. The men and women, through golems of human machinations, have visited this aberration of immorality upon the American people and have infected the world with its crippling and deadly disease.

President Lincoln prophetically wrote: “the world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names liberty and tyranny” (http://quotationsbook.com/quote/44419/) .

I propose that liberty can only be expressed when humans transcend the self and the selfish preoccupation with their own labors and profiteering and reject the egocentric tyrannical practices that have shattered humanity, and look to freeing our brothers and sisters by becoming our brother’s and sister’s keepers — co-liberation, co-liberators. Humans need to repurpose and rescue the “Golden Rule” from whoever has the gold rules, to its original meaning of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Humans must be sadomasochists at heart, since we literally can’t do something unto someone else without doing it unto ourselves. It is time to realize when one is oppressed and constrained by fear and injustice, we all are. Liberty is freedom from our self-centeredness, the self-centered dream.

The new decade does not offer much promise for change or reform. The banks and insurance companies, not to mention the mega-corporations and our non-representative representatives and senators, have hijacked any real hope for significant change. The bondsmen that have arrested the goodwill and decency of our citizens and the citizens of the world, are deaf to our cries and loathe the repair of our condition. Persons incapable of seeing the condition and plight of our people have convinced us that our suffering is well deserved and we should be thankful for the crumbs that we find as we lay bleeding on the floor under our masters’ table.

The engines of war have scarred our existence and have defined us as people. Great civilizations that have conquered their way through history, have marshaled the economies of their subjects and focused bloodshed and destruction in the guise of Manifest Destiny sanctioned by hubris and lust for power and control. President Eisenhower stated: “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist” (Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961, http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html).

Along side the military-industrial complex, banks, corporations, politicians, religions, and despotic individuals and organizations, have expanded the practice of overt war fought with bombs and bullets and now use mortgages, debt instruments, loans, credit reports, stocks and bonds as deadly ordinance. Instead of hospitals and medicine, jobs and a productive livelihood, the wounded left dying on the battlefields are rotting fetid corpses to remind and warn all that would dare oppose the harbingers of death of who wields the power of money. To see the devastation brought by governments, religions, corporations, and despotic alliances, follow the money.

We as individuals have to resist the impulse to become victims of our own treachery that has enslaved us and our planet. We are the enslavers and the enslaved. Our narcissism and arrogance have deluded us to follow a lifeless specter of human existence. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo in Tricycle stated that “we’re gods acting like monkeys. We are standing in our own light; we don’t see who we really are” (http://www.tricycle.com/feature/no-excuses).

Our prisons are in our little minds and our little minds are very powerful and have distracted us from who we really are. We have settled for our delusion and have lost our way. The Mind that we all possess and perhaps are, transcends the self-centeredness of our little mind that is fixated on the little me.

I would like to end this post with the Gettysburg Address. I hope the irony is not lost upon you.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm.

Ego, self and other non-existent considerations

2010-01-17T20:13:00.007-07:00

The words that I am posting are a response to a discussion of wisdom from a dear friends's blog: The Alberero Teacings, http://albereo.com/melanie/. To get the full context of my response, you may want to read the article and the responses on the blog. Good stuff.

The first major mistake that seekers make is that they are seeking, usually for some thing or idea — God, enlightenment, transcendence, joy, salvation, redemption… the Holy Grail. The second mistake that seekers make is that they think that they will know what “it” is when they find it. The third mistake that seekers make is that in their arrogance, hubris and folly they tell others what to search for even though they themselves are still searching for that thing that cannot be attained.

The self or ego perceives everything as a dichotomy, because the self is the baseline or point of reference — me and you, us and them, good and evil, temporal and eternal. From the standpoint of the ego no matter what “spiritual” concepts or dogma of a comprehension of oneness, transcendence, or unified consciousness that we hold to will always leaves us longing and wanting. The ego or self has no existence except in its own mind. Humans live from this egocentric existence much like “the church” held to a geocentric rather than a heliocentric POV (point of view) — I hope the irony is apparent.

The church, along with all other human religious endeavors, is essentially egocentric in the misguided attempt to objectify, identify and own that which defies any Egoic reference point.

The Buddha spoke in the Diamond Sutra: “’…These arbitrary concepts and ideas about spiritual things need to be explained to us as we seek to attain Enlightenment. However, ultimately these arbitrary conceptions can be discarded. Think Subhuti, isn't it even more obvious that we should also give up our conceptions of non-existent things’”( Diamond Sutra chapter 6, http://www.diamond-sutra.com/diamond_sutra_text/page6.html).

Our conceptualizations and beliefs around our existence and non-existence do not enlighten us nor do they indicate enlightenment. The Buddha’s concepts and ideas are little more than breadcrumbs along a path that leads us away from our selves, to Being, where we never left in the first place. Once we have truly partaken from the Buddha’s bread, we must allow the inner transformation or digestion of the bread to nourish and enliven us. After digestion, the crumbs are no longer important, nor do they bear any resemblance of what they were. Let us ruminate rather than regurgitate and eliminate the waste of mental attachment.

The psychological dilemma that we face as humans is all wrapped up in the incongruous perception of the ever present numinous itch that we can’t quite scratch. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo in Tricycle stated that “we’re gods acting like monkeys. We are standing in our own light; we don’t see who we really are” (http://www.tricycle.com/feature/no-excuses).

Our psychology is a reflection of our own preoccupation that we exist as egos and that our ego is separate from other egos. We suffer as a direct result of our identification with nonexistence and the void or longing that is created in this vacuous state.

A spiritual teacher, Wei Wu Wei, was once asked “Why do we suffer?” "Because 99.9% of everything you think and everything you do is about yourself and there isn’t one.” Wei Wu Wei in the book Open Secret wrote:

“’Are you still thinking, looking, living, as from an imaginary phenomenal centre?
As long as you do that you can never recognize [sic] your freedom." Wherever there are others there is a self,Wherever there are no others there can be no self,Wherever there is no self there are no others,Because in the absence of self I am all others’”

The ego is always longing, the seeker is always seeking, the mind is always thinking and the result is that there is no resolution from an egocentric POV. Wei Wu Wei writes: “There seem to [be] two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish (as though you could make a fish unfish [sic]), and those who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation and play-acting, that there is only one thing that can be done, which is to disidentify [sic] themselves with the ego, by realizing [sic] its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure being” (http://www.weiwuwei.8k.com/bits.html). Therein lies the rub, as the Bard once wrote. “There is no spoon” (http://www.voidspace.org.uk/cyberpunk/matrix_quotes.shtml).

Our ideas or conceptualization of transcendence don’t actually make us transcendent. We are only limited by our attachment to our egocentric world and our psychological morass. The longing from which Rumi and other enlightened bards have expressed in their ardor and yearning from Divine connection, does not come from a place of comprehension of the nature of the one existence or the lack thereof, because the very nature of the one existence draws us away from our mental assertions and conceptualizations and brings us to Being.

Rumi says it best, therefore I will I end with one of my favorite Rumi poems.

Love Dogs
Rumi

One night a man was crying Allah! Allah!

His lips grew sweet with praising,until a cynic said, “So!I’ve heard you calling out, but have you evergotten any response?”

The man had no answer to that.He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?”

“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing you expressis the return message.”

The grief you cry out fromdraws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants helpis the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.

Dialog with Pain and Suffering

2009-12-14T11:42:00.007-07:00

Interview with Muttering Madzub(MM) , Pain(P) and Suffering(S)

Interviewer:

Hello P I see that since MM's knee has been injured you have become a very dominant influence for MM.

P:

That is correct MM. The torn ACL has released me like a vengeance on MM's psyche. Even with suppressing medication, I have brought MM a punctuated awareness of his injury and how the injury brings another dimension to life. I have reminded MM that I have relevant lessons to share. I am teaching MM awareness of his actions, his demeanor, his gratitude and how he physically lives in his body.

S interrupts:

I just wanted to interject that I have imposed myself as a narcissistic bastard to remind MM of how careless, how un-mindful, and how difficult the whole injury is for MM. I have increased MM's pain exponentially by focusing on how his pain is affecting his life, his loved ones, his coworkers and I have made it all about me and his self.

MM:

I have noticed the increased desire to go unconscious in all of this drama and trauma. The desire to get lost in suffering's scenarios is quite enticing. I have had so many excuses to space out in front of the TV and not play music, write, draw or meditate. Not just because of my pain and trying to guard my injury, but because of my attention to my suffering. I have noticed that all my issues, personality/prison-ality -- ego have magnified and I just want to go numb. All the guilt and regret of not doing my practices, not being as spiritual as I think I am or should be, has exhausted me more than the pain. The pain is only punctuated in acuity by my attention to suffering and my self-centered dream.

S interrupts again:

Oh yes, I have made a great impression of myself on MM. I have certainly distracted him from life. The compounding of pain and mental anxiety has been supremely effective a great deal of the time. He does become lucid and notices my antics, but I keep niggling and I have been relatively successful. The self-centered dream (SCD) is very much in place. Misery loves company and I enjoy sharing my misery with MM.

P:

Yes, suffering is many times associated with me, but actually it is a misperception. All pain does is let a person know that attention is required for certain situation. Attention to pain is not suffering. Attention to pain is attending to pain and the source of the pain. Suffering is identifying with the pain, personalizing the pain and focusing away from pain, making the pain all about "me? thus inflicting and compounding suffering exponentially.

MM:

I definitely see the effects of suffering to unconsciously eat empty foods --candy, carbs, larger portions, comfort foods--to "derive comfort" from pain or calm suffering? WTF is that about!

All I see is that this behavior does nothing more to increase suffering and focus my SCD on myself. The dream feeds the suffering and the suffering feeds the SCD. Yet the rational explanation and critique of all suffering doesn't lessen, change or bring relief from the pain or the suffering. Perhaps the clinical observation is just another part of the SCD. I think when I personalize and attach my self to the situation and make it all about me, it becomes self-centered. When I just observe the behavior apart from self and it's preoccupation with suffering, I don't suffer.

I am also aware at how civil suffering seems to be. The increased agitation is not as apparent in its outward demeanor or its inner delivery. The slow increase of suffering to stun and distract from life is insidious. The feelings and judgments that seem so logical and understandable, are the most difficult to stay un-mingled and objective. The more the suffering increases, the easier it becomes to justify and identify with its machinations.

S:

Oh yes! I live to bombard you with bullshit that is so convincing that you are mired in the mental and physical morass of my machinations. I can paralyze you to forget about everything else. I love the attention that you give to me. I love to wear the trappings of your thoughts and actions to show everyone how prominent and central I am to your-self. I am your own personal paparazzi!

P:

Suffering has certainly compounded things for MM. I have brought an opportunity to bring acuity and focus in to relieve his suffering. It is suffering that has distracted MM from life and suffering that has inflicted painful suffering into MM's psyche and body. I have the solution for suffering, that to pay attention to life as it is in all its pain or pleasure is the only relief from suffering. Pain is unavoidable, suffering is optional.

MM:

I see the value of pain every time I open my eyes and my heart. I see the needless suffering to which I am attached. The pain is manageable, the suffering becomes unmanageable when I am holding on to the SCD and self-centered thoughts. I am humbled by the grace that life has shown me "being just this moment compassion's way".

I feel compassion for suffering beings when I am not lost in my SCD. Lucidity comes moment by moment from compassion. Pain is a part of my life right now. Suffering is optional.

Interviewer: Thank you Muttering Madzub, Pain and Suffering for sharing with me. We will speak again soon.

Maa-asaba mim museebatin illa bi-izni'Llah;
Wa man yu'min bi'Llahi yahdi qalbah;
Wa Allahu bikulli shay-in AAaleem.

- The Quran, 64:11

No affliction befalls except by the Permission of God;
And guided are the hearts (qalb) that have true conviction (iman) to Divine, And God is Cognizant of all things.

The Still Small Voice in my Heart, by Muttering Madzub, aka John Hinton

2009-12-10T07:09:00.005-07:00

Samsara, samsara, you look for tomorrow
you can’t find your hara
you’re lost in your way
Samsara samsara, birth and death just brings sorrow
your dream is self-centered
compassion awaits

I looked for God in all the wrong places
I couldn’t see the beauty in all of her faces
God was not in the wind that destroyed the high mountains
nor the voice in the earthquake that shook earth’s foundations
God was not in the fire that burned with desire
but the still small voice in my heart

Samsara, samsara, you look for tomorrow
you can’t find your hara
you’re lost in your way
Samsara, samsara, birth and death just brings sorrow
your dream is self-centered
compassion awaits

I searched for peace and found mostly chaos
brief moments of bliss that withered in my loss
Peace was not in Demon-strations, forgiveness of sins nor in my confessions
nor the dogmatic certainties that bit me in the ass
Peace was not in religion an immoral morass
but the still small voice in my heart

Samsara, samsara, you look for tomorrow
you can’t find your hara
you’re lost in your way
Samsara samsara, birth and death just brings sorrow
your dream is self-centered
compassion awaits

I looked for love in the heavens above
In nature’s sweet splendor and in sweet woman’s love
Love was not in the books nor the bards nor believers
nor the voices of truth, the pious deceivers
Love was not in the miracles nor myths
but the still small voice in my heart

Samsara samsara, you look for tomorrow
you can’t find your hara
you’re lost in your way
Samsara samsara, birth and death just brings sorrow
your dream is self-centered
compassion awaits

Birth and Death by Muttering Madzub aka John Hinton

2009-12-10T06:18:00.002-07:00

Birth and death – simultaneous realization
Pain and bliss, with or without attachment, one and the same
Living, suffering, dieing – samsara
Being – compassion’s way
Gate, gate, paragate…

No Separate Moments

2009-11-30T09:25:00.002-07:00

No past, no future, no life, no death
Moments are not separate pearls on a string
Consider the oyster’s excretion – attention to the irritating sand grain
Suffering transformed from attention
You are the oyster and the pearl!

'Peace, Peace,' But there is no peace…

2009-11-30T09:18:00.005-07:00

Looking for peace in the ocean of suffering?
Searching for The Way? Samsara!
Peace, another illusion to support the self centered dream
Peace is sitting in the midst of chaos covered in shit without self-identification
You are perfect as you are!

"They have healed the brokenness of My people superficially, Saying, 'Peace, peace,' But there is no peace. Jeremiah 6:1

Tanka-Verse

2009-11-19T03:42:00.004-07:00

Oblivious to all
the self-centered dream
dreams of peace
being blows the runny nose
while the cat plays

Tanka-Verse

2009-11-18T03:50:00.005-07:00

Playing on the shore
along side the self
the imaginary friend
the self cented dream
flowing by unaware

Tanka-Verse

2009-11-18T03:45:00.004-07:00

Cat purring in my arms
jumps down
in the moment
not attached to me
meows to play

Tanka-Verse

2009-11-17T04:10:00.002-07:00

Purring cat
on the back of my chair
waits patiently for me
to wake up
and pay attention

The Wall, by Muttering Madzub

2009-11-09T14:54:00.003-07:00

The Wall

I remembered my time in West Berlin and the impression of the Wall that has subsequently been taken down. I am not so sure that the real divisions of human beings are so easily removed. The wall was an idea -- self-centered dream that is the self.

The wall stands and falls each day
The slow death of human arrogance raised
Blighted skyline of grey lifeless matter
scrawled with garish graffiti to hide dark thoughts inscribed with suffering

Cries for freedom muffled in concretions of effluvia
Children played as guard towers loomed
Protecting malignant ideals from malevolent excess
Only to punctuate the obvious departure of reason and compassion

East and West in divisive struggle
battle for supremacy over shadows
Memorials of long past wars
encased in old temples of blood and stone

Battle scars of human ruins that chronicle defeat and victory
Does victory exist without defeat?
Do victors that stand with feet on the throats of their defeated
only live to die another day with their foes looking down upon their overthrow?

Victory and defeat, death and life, oppressors and oppressed, liberators and the liberated,
all subjected to endless toil
Serpentine divisions slither through barren streets
that coil and recoil in the horrors of their own minds

The wall that came down
is forever inscribed on the landscape of human consciousness
The wall only exists in human minds
until freed from self-centered delusion

Where grey pall once dominated the night sky
The daylight illumines vestige horrific memory
New generations carry forward the ancestral genes
That are rooted in ancient battle cries.

Will we ever forget? Should we ever forget?
Being with horror and delight –life as it is
teaching liberating us from our selves
Compassion and loving kindness remains.

Sag mir wo die Blumen sind….
Where have all the flowers gone….

Sacred (and Secret) Marriage of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene

2009-11-06T07:15:00.003-07:00

By, Sadiq Alam--Guest Madzub--

http://mysticsaint.blogspot.com/2008/08/sacred-marriage-of-jesus-christ-and.html

1. Cana, Galilee, 23 A. D.'They have no wine', said Mary to Jesus. And on the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there. And both Jesus and his disciples were called to the marriage.And when they wanted wine, Mary, the mother of Jesus said to him, 'They have no wine.'Mary immediately ordered the servants to do whatever Jesus instructed. And Jesus told them to fill the pots with water up to the brim. He then asked them to draw wine from them and to serve the governor of the feast.

The servants served the wine. When the ruler of the feast tasted the water that had been made into wine, the governor called the bridegroom and said to him that most people serve the good wine first the lower grade wine later. The bridegroom, on the other hand, had done the reverse.His mother, Mary, had clearly been in charge. She was the hostess without doubt. And the bridegroom had been Jesus.- The Christ Conspiracy: The Marriage of Jesus by Rhawn Joseph.

2. Mary anointed Jesus twice with Nard. She once anointed his head. Another time she anointed his feet, later wiping them with her long hair. Nard was a fragrant ointment more commonly called Spikernard and was part of a sacred marriage ritual practiced by Hebrew, Sumerian and Egyptian priestesses.

In the Old Testament's Song of Solomon, this act of anointing was carried out as an element of the marriage ceremony. Lynn Picknett, a researcher of religious mysteries, would later write: 'In their time was a sublimely pagan rite that involved a woman anointing a chosen man both on head and feet - and also on the genitals - for a very special destiny. This was the anointing of the sacred king, in which the priestess singled out the chosen man and anointed him, before bestowing his destiny upon him in a sexual rite known as the Hieros Gamos.'

3. Bethany, Judea, 27 A.D.She was making Jesus go through an ancient fertility ritual called Hiero Gamos, or 'the Sacred Marriage'. In 1993, a book entitled 'The Woman with With the Albastar Jar' by Margaret Starbird reveals: 'Jesus had a secret dynastic marriage with Mary of Bethany.

She was a daughter of the tribe of Benjamin, whose ancestral heritage was the land surrounding the Holy City of David, the city of Jerusalem.
A dynastic marriage between Jesus and a royal daughter of the Benjamites would have been perceived as a source of healing for the people of Israel.Perhaps the earliest verbal references attaching the epithet Magdala to Mary of Bethany's name had nothing to do with an obscure town in Galilee in Hebrew.

The epithet Magdala literally means tower or elevated, great, magnificent ... This meaning had particular relevance if the Mary so named was in fact the wife of the Messiah. It would have been the Hebrew equivalent of calling her Mary the Great (or, Mary the Magnificent).
In older sacred marriage rituals, a woman who represented the goddess and the land was wedded to the king. Their union symbolized many things, depending on the time and place such a ritual was practiced ...' .: Credit: via The Rozabal Line by Shawn Haigins

4. Then Mary stood up and greeted all of them and said to her brethren, "Do not mourn or grieve or be irresolute, for his grace will be with you all and will defend you. Let us rather praise his greatness, for he prepared us and made us into men (perfected beings)." When Mary said this, their hearts changed for the better, and they began to discuss the words of the [Savior]. Peter said to Mary, "Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than other women [John 11:5, Luke 10:38-42].

Tell us the words of the Savior which you have in mind since you know them; and we do not, nor have we heard of them."Mary answered and said, "What is hidden from you I will impart to you." And she began to say the following words to them. "I," she said, "I saw the Lord in a vision and I said to him, 'Lord, I saw you today in a vision.' He answered and said to me, 'Blessed are you, since you did not waver at the sight of me. For where the mind is, there is your countenance'...

Levi answered and said to Peter, "Peter, you are always irate. Now I see that you are contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you to reject her? Surely the Savior knew her very well [Luke 10:38- 42]. For this reason he loved her more than us [John 11:5]. - Gospel of Mary Magdalene

5. Mary's presence at the Crucifixion and Jesus' tomb is consonant with a role as grieving wife and widow. After the Crucifixion she watched by his tomb, and was the first to whom he appeared after the resurrection; her unfaltering faith, mingled as it was with the intensest grief and love, obtained for her this peculiar mark of favour.
It is assumed by several commentators that Jesus appeared first to Mary Magdalene, because she, of all those whom he had left on earth, was his beloved and in most need of consolation: 'The disciples went away unto their own; but Mary stayed without the sepulcher and wept.'

6. Mary Magdalene was chosen by our Lord as a type of the Church and would be one of the first fruits taken to be with her Lord. She was the constant companion of Jesus' Ministry, to him she ministered of her substance, she anointed him for his Ministry, and for his Burial, She was the last at the Cross, and the first at the Tomb, and to her alone He gave the commission*, "Go tell Peter," and wheresoever the Gospel was to be preached, her love and devotion to her Master were to be declared. - Gospel of the Holy Twelve

Further Reads. Who was Mary Magdalene?. Mary Magdalene via Wikipedia. Gospel according to Mary Magdalene. The Life of Mary Magdalene. Magdalene.org. Jesus and Mary Magdalene: The Sacred Marriage in Gnosticism. Early Christian Writings. Women are not worthy of Life - Simon Peter. Archetype of a Feminine Seeker Labels: http://mysticsaint.blogspot.com/2008/08/sacred-marriage-of-jesus-christ-and.html

Tanka

2009-11-05T07:08:00.003-07:00

Mother and son
sharing breath
Waiting together
until they part
breath remains

Tanka - Verse

2009-11-05T04:46:00.006-07:00

Sitting, being
the monk
in the middle of rush hour
bows prostrate
before the rushing Buddhas

Resistance is Futile?by Muttering Madzub

2009-10-20T10:25:00.006-07:00

Resistance is Futile? by Muttering Madzub

My human self resisting, insisting
Yammers on and on and on,
Perpetually relentless, pointless, noise
feeding on, holding on to its own nonexistence
Thoughts of self and self-centered delusion
Clutter the environment of Being

The Borg of chaotic humming mind voices
recite the futility mantra with finality and certainty
obscuring attention, distracting, attracting,
detracting from Being and compassion,
propagating, cloning thought zombies
suck life-force and disseminate suffering.

The battle for Mind is elusive and illusive
Narcissistic self, loves to engage in pointless battles
to achieve imagined victories
from image-nations, and hoards of inner demons
Attention is the vorpal blade
That slays the “Jabberwock”* “with eyes of flame”.*

Fear used by imagined self
creates a milieu of morass
Fetters of phantasms dissolve
when attention’s light
pierces darkened enslavement
to self that does not exist

The “Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself”?**
fear has no self to fear
self has no self to fear
self has no fear to fear
no existence to protect or project
no dots to connect

Can’t figure it out
Deduce, produce, induce…perhaps seduce?
Machinations of meanings meted out ad nauseum
Puking out explanations of self infatuation
No out to figure, no figure to out
Just attention to moment being

“Being just this moment, compassion’s way.”***

* JABBERWOCKY, Lewis Carroll
(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

**“Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself”: FDR’s First Inaugural Address
*** Joko Beck

ANGELS © 1992 Adam C. Burke (12/17/92): Listen to some tunes

2009-10-14T06:21:00.003-07:00

jamwave.com/EarlyAdam

ANGELS © 1992 Adam C. Burke (12/17/92)

"WELCOME, FRIENDS," THE CHILDREN SINGALONG THE ROAD THEY'RE GATHERING TO SAY
THEY'RE REALLY HAPPY TO SEE US THERE
WE'VE BROUGHT AN OFFERING TO LEND A HAND AT RESTORATION
IT'S ABOUT TIME SOMEONE'S GOING THERE TO

(chorus:) OFFER HOPE TO EVERYONE (FEED THE PEOPLE) WITNESS THE ANGELS OF THE WORLD

MARCHING IN WITH WEAPONS DOWN
THESE SAINTS GO FORTH TO FEED THE HUNGRY
THEY'RE REALLY GLAD TO SEE US THERE
MERCY'S HANDS WE HAVE TO GIVE: AMAZING GRACEFUL RESTITUTION
IT'S ABOUT TIME SOMEONE'S GOING THERE TO

(chorus:) OFFER LOVE TO EVERYONE (FEED THE PEOPLE) WITNESS THE ANGELS OF THE WORLD THEY OFFER HOPE TO EVERYONE

(chorus:) OFFER HOPE TO EVERYONE (FEED THE PEOPLE) WITNESS THE ANGELS OF

THE WORLD OFFER LOVE TO EVERYONE
MILITARY MIGHT TO TAKE THE GUNS AWAY AND STOP THE FIGHTING
I'M REALLY GLAD TO SEE US THERE
THIS IS A NUMBER I'D LIKE TO BE IN
THIS IS A KIND OF WAR I COULD BE IN!
WHO COULD BELIEVE WE'RE REALLY GOING THERE TO

(chorus:) OFFER LOVE TO EVERYONE (FEED THE PEOPLE) WITNESS THE ANGELS OF THE WORLD OFFER HOPE TO EVERYONE WITNESS THE ANGELS OF THE WORLD

Ephphatha | Healing of Christ and Sufi Invocation, by Sadiq Alam

2009-10-12T06:15:00.005-07:00

1. Then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis. There some people brought to him a man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged him to place his hand on the man.

After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his fingers into the man's ears. Then he spit and touched the man's tongue. He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said: "Ephphatha!". At this, the man's ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly.

Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone. But the more he did so, the more they kept talking about it. People were overwhelmed with amazement. "He has done everything well," they said. "He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak."
- Gospel of Mark, 7

2. One of the episode of Christ's life is preserved in the New Testament where he heals a deaf and almost mute person. The invocation that Christ invokes, interestingly is preserved in ancient Aramaic language even though the New Testament was written in Greek.

What Christ invoked in Aramaic is still invoked by the Sufis, specially Sufi Healers who heals in the footsteps of the message bearers of God. Ephphatha (ef'-a-tha, ef-a'-tha) is equivalent in arabic as Ya Fattah which essentially is an invocation of God by one of God's attribute, El-Fattah, the Opener. Fattah is pronounced with soft t). The interpreter of the bible generally translate it as "Be opened" (by the help of Heavenly Father).

Among the revealed Beautiful Names of God, Al-Fattah is one of them. It points to the Divine identity of The One Who opens what is closed. The One Who opens the door to success. The One by Whose guidance that which was closed is opened and the unclear is made clear. The One Who lifts veils and Who opens the heart. The One Who holds the keys to victory and success. The One Who reveals the solution to all problems.

Both Aramaic and Arabic has the same Semitic root, thus the similar words share the same source. The word Fatah (written Phatha in New Testament) comes from the three word root f-t-h which has the following classical Arabic connotations:. to open, unlock, unfold. to reveal, inform, explain, make clear. to grant, permit. to make victorious. to judge, decide

The Arabic word miftah, translated as key, meaning that which opens or unlocks, is also based on this same root.

3. While living in Los Angeles, I was blessed to be in the company of a saintly sufi, may God bless her, from the lineage of Hazrat Inayat Khan. I will never forget her gift of two Blessed Name of God which she recommend to me (which she also received from her own teacher in the path) to invoke in the face of difficulty which were al-Fattah and al-Jami. The Opener and the Gatherer.

Not many days apart from when she advised me to recite these two names, I was confronting a situation where these two Names of God were invoked earnestly, Ya Fattha, Ya Jami (O the Opener, O the Gatherer) only to witness to my surprise how an apparently impossible passage was made open with ease. Since then I have used al-Fattah and al-Jami as two talismanic Name. All praise is due to Allah for all His generous gifts.

Just like Christ, particularly that of sufi healers, al-Fattah, holds great mystery through which Invisible Doors are Opened, Doors of cure are unlocked for difficulties and for physical diseases alike. The spirit of the word Fatah is embedded in the Name of the Opening chapter of the Quran, thus Sufis often time begin or end their supplication by the call, "Al-Fatiha!" to be followed by the recitation of the opening chapter of the Quran. The chapter according to Islamic tradition is also called ash-Shifaa or the Cure. This chapter by the name al-Fatiha is so powerful and filled with baraka that the Prophet said, "Whoever does not recite Fatiha in his prayer, that prayer is incomplete."

4.

Nasrum mina Llahi,wa Fathun Qarib.
Help is from God,and Opening (is always) Near.- The Quran 61:13

Inna Fatahna laka Fathan Mubina.
Truly We have opened out to you a manifest opening.- The Quran 48:1

5.
In speaking about the Invocation or Commemoration of the Name of God, in the book Irfan (gnosis) Faqir Nur Muhammad writes with example from the healing of Christ:
God the Most High shines towards a slave with the same name with which the slave remembers Him. The symptom of it is that the very name of God the Most High gets impressed with bright letters of nature inside the commemorator and at the time of absorption that commemorator sees it shining on the invisible sky like a brilliant star.

Esoterically the lights of the Names appear in the form of stars, that of the attributes like the full moon and that of the Essence appears in the form of the sun. So that when any name of God the Most High gets written in brilliant words inside the commemorator, the commemorator gets filled up with the light and electric power of that name and exercises his influence, in both the worlds through the light and power of that name.

It can then be said that so and so is the operator of such and such a name or prayer. For example, when his holiness Jesus, salutations be on him, wanted to cure some leper or lunatic possessed by an evil spirit, he used to commemorate in his heart or concentrate on God the Most High's name Quddus (Holy) and he supplicated and attended God the Most High's attribute of Pure Holiness. At that moment, in accordance with the promise, "Remember Me and I'll Remember thee" God the Most High cast the light of His name holy and the light of attribute of holy on Jesus .. At moments he used to be filled up with the light of the name Holy, i.e. the holy ghost.

Since an evil spirit enters the leper and lunatic which distorts their exoteric and esoteric nature, the name Quddus (Perfectly Holy) is the opposite of all esoteric and exoteric evil - as the one is light and the other is darkness and the one is truth, the other is false. Therefore when full of the light of the holy ghost his holiness Jesus touched a leper or lunatic, the evil spirit used to fly from the leper and lunatic due to his power of the light of holiness. The darkness always flies from the light of truth, Says Allah: "The truth has come and the falsehood has vanished, verily falsehood is vanishable."

6.
Captivates my soul and my heart
The beauty of the Name of God
Quenches my spiritual thirst
The Majesty of the Name of God.

If you seek intimacy (wisal) with the Real,
Be one of them who sit together in His Name
Look! Intimacy with God is
In the intimacy with the Name of God.

Between the Name and the Named
When there is no difference (farq nist)
Look you! Only in the self disclosure (tajalli) of the Names lies
The perfection (kamal) of the Name of God.

- From the Ghazals of Hazrat Muinuddin,translated by Irshad Alam

Sitting with Samsara

2009-09-27T06:01:00.003-07:00

By Muttering Madzub

Sitting with Samsarawatching waves go by.
Illusion and fantasy follow rivulets and eddies
that disappear as the current
carries the dream remnants
to the great ocean of forgetting

Samsara beckons me to join her babbling waters
voices calling me to leave
the pool where I sit.
The journey of the stream is so enticing
But when I bow to quench my thirst
My mouth is dry and wanting.

Samsara, maiden of mist and smoke
You promise your heart
yet spurn your lovers
as they fawn over you.
Your cruel intentions are veiled
with sweet lies.

Love is not in you Samsara,
Your capacity for intimacy
is shadowed by your ego.
No place for any other in your bed
Yet you bed all
with your siren call.

Samsara, you rise to slip into your element
And motion me to follow
Your desires drip like honey
Sweet without sustenance.
I am enticed, yet,
My desire is elsewhere.

Samsara my heart has found the Other
The One that sits quietly inside me
waiting for my attention.
I feel the Presence of ancient arms
Embracing and holding me
Enfolding me in crystal luminescence.

No attachment
No thought
No path
No dream
No suffering
No Samsara

EVERY BELIEF IS WRONG by Dogo Barry Graham

2009-09-24T06:27:00.004-07:00

(transcript of a talk given to The Sitting Frog Zen Sangha on Sunday, August 16, 2009)

Most of us not only believe that there’s such a thing as free will, but we believe we actually have it. I want to talk a bit about what Joko calls core beliefs. I just call them beliefs. Beliefs of any kind are false. There’s no true beliefs and false beliefs. Any belief, by definition, is false. It’s only a story.

The problem for so many of us though, is that we think we’re running our lives. And you get people who’ve been at this for a while who still think, deep down, they’re running their lives. That we actually have some control. To understand what is running you, you’ve got to do an awful lot of letting go.

As I’ve been saying the last few weeks, nobody wants to do that. You really have to hit rock bottom to be willing to do that. And even then, what happens when you hit rock bottom? You let go enough to get just a couple of inches up off of rock bottom and then you’re right back into your beliefs, you’re right back into your attachments, right back into your story about yourself.

I have a friend who I was working with recently who has an incredibly abusive -- not on her part, on her mother’s part -- an incredibly abusive relationship with her mother; was treated horribly as a child, beaten horribly by her mother, is in post traumatic shock. Recently she was taking care of her grandmother who has Alzheimer’s and her mother and one of her other family members are basically wanting to have control of her grandmother, to get her money. And they’ve squeezed her out. She has no access to her grandmother. They gave away her dog just to spite her. I mean really, really horrible, really pathological behavior.

So she decided to, understandably, cut off contact with her mother, just to walk. I asked her how she felt, what was going on there. First she said, “angry.” And then narrowing it down a bit she said, “resentful.” She thought she didn’t have any real investment in her mother anymore. I asked her, “Is what’s going on, do you want her to still be your mother?” She never really actually had been her mother. “Is that what’s running you? Is that what’s hurting you? Is that why you’re angry?” And she said, “No. Absolutely not. I don’t want her to be my mother. She never was. I never had that.”

So this core belief that she had was that she understood that her mother was sick, a really pathological person, but that she wasn’t attached to her anymore. She certainly didn’t want her to be her mom. She wasn’t still clinging to that. That had become a core belief. It became something that by this point in her life — she’s in her early 30’s — she blindly accepted, the same as we accept tap water. We have a core belief: We turn on the faucet, water’s going to come out. She was certain that she didn’t have any kind of sentimental attachment to her mother. There wasn’t this longing to have a mom. I said, "I think you need to look at what you’re holding on to. You need to see what your core belief is."

Actually, the way I put it is, I asked her if she knew about how Bill Clinton once let a mentally retarded guy be executed when he was governor of Arkansas so he would seem to be tough on crime. So I said, “Would you like to do something about that?” Of course she said, “Yeah.”

I said, "What you would like to do is fix the law so that can’t happen, right?"

She said, “Right.”

I said, “Okay, how much of a desire did you have to confront Bill Clinton and get him to admit it, get him to cop to the fact that he did that?"

“None at all.”

I said, “Yes. You don’t have any personal investment in Bill Clinton. You don’t care about him. You just don’t want these things to happen. But what is it that you want from your mother?"

And she said, “Well, yeah, I want her to acknowledge what she did. She always denies what she did."

Then she examined it — because I asked her to. I told her, “Just keep looking at that. What is it you want? What is it you’re attaching to? What are you holding on to?" She told me the next day. She realized that even while walking away, even while saying “I want nothing to do with this person. This is it. I’m done,” she still wanted to be wrong, wanted her mother to suddenly become a mom. And that’s what she meant by wanting acknowledgment. Acknowledgment of what? “That she had beaten me. That she did this. She did that.” Yeah, but what does that mean? Acknowledgment of what? Is it you still want something from her? There’s an attachment there.

For as long as we have these attachments we’re not free. And we’re not running our own lives. We think we are, but we’re not. This is why, painful though it is, and frightening though it is for anyone, I keep emphasizing this need to let go, to let go of everything. For as long as you can’t do that, your conditioning is running you. You don’t have any free will at all. I’m not being hyperbolic. I don’t mean it diminishes your free will. I mean you have none. For as long as you’re holding on to anything, the decision to go to the grocery store is not a decision you’re making. You think you’re making that decision, but you’re not. It’s a reaction. It’s arising from your conditioning, like everything else.

Does that mean that you become nihilistic? Have an attitude of, "Well, nothing matters?" No, it’s the opposite. Nihilism in itself is an attempt to make sense of our own pain. We’re holding on to our own pain. “I might as well do whatever I want. Live in a really self destructive way because nothing matters.” It’s one more avoidance. You see that?

The reason I’m always profoundly moved when I see people pursuing Zen practice is because it really is the hardest thing that anyone can do. Now by that I don’t just mean putting on a Japanese outfit and sitting on a cushion and doing some chanting. I’ve said this before, something that I say about Zen practice is something that a couple of different friends of mine who're in 12 step have said about 12 step. 12 Step has an incredibly low - when you look at it, the rate of success seems really low. It’s something like 2%. Sprite, is it 2% or something like that? But that’s 2% of the people who just go to the meetings [but don't do the practice]. A couple of different friends of mine who have been in it for a while said to me, “If you do it, it always works.” The success rate is 100%.

Everyone who does a Zen practice becomes enlightened. Everybody. There has never, never been anyone who did a Zen practice that didn’t become enlightened. It’s not possible. How many enlightened people do you run across in Zen centers or otherwise? In fact, if you want to meet some really unenlightened people, go to Zen centers. If you want to see some of the least enlightened people you will ever encounter anywhere, go to a Zen monastery and find somebody who’s been there 30 years. These are the poster boys for delusion, for samsara. Although I am laughing, I am not making fun of those people. We all hurt terribly.

Most of us when we come to Zen practice, actually, all of us when we come to Zen practice, we don’t really want to do it. We don’t want to let go. We think we want to do some of it. Some of us really like the robes. Some of us really like the chanting. Most of us really like the books.

Yeah, reading about it is great. Reading about Suzuki Roshi, well, that’s great because if you read about how Suzuki Roshi -- when he thought he had hepatitis, and there was one of his students that he used to eat chocolate ice cream with. The doctor said, “Now look, you’ve got hepatitis, you can’t eat chocolate.” And then he finds out he’s actually got liver cancer and it’s spread and there’s no hope. So he says to his student, “I just got great news. I don’t have hepatitis. I’ve got liver cancer. I’m going to die.”

And she says, “How is that great news?”

“Oh, because we can eat chocolate ice cream again. I don’t have hepatitis.”

Now, we like that. We like reading about that, huh? “That’s really inspiring. This guy’s not suffering. He’s not even bothered by the fact that everyone says he’s going to die.” What we don’t like — reading about it is fun, lying in bed, drinking a cup of tea, warm and cozy, reading, that’s fun, that’s pleasant — what we don’t want to do is what Suzuki Roshi, what Joko, what anyone who attains that state has to do which is let go of any attachment to not being in pain. Let go of any attachment to not being sad. That’s why the best gifts that we are given are humiliation, disappointment, heartbreak, fear - and the very worse thing that can happen to anybody is getting what we want.

The friend I just talked about is obviously a Zen practitioner working with this in her practice. As much as it really pained me to see in her such pain what would’ve been much worse, what I would’ve hated to have seen — think about it, in the situation I just described, what is the very worst thing that could’ve happened to her?

STUDENT: The mother acknowledges.
DOGO: Exactly. Getting what she wanted. The worst thing that could’ve happened is her mother saying, “Okay, okay, okay, I admit it. I’ve been lying all those years. I’m sorry I did all those things to you. I’m sorry I lied about it. I admit it. I did it. Okay, you’ve got your acknowledgment."

Why would that be such a bad thing? Because, what now? Think she’ll be any happier? She got what she wanted, what she’s clinging to. "If I get this, then I’ll be happy. Things’ll be okay then." You get what you want and what changes? Nothing. You get that acknowledgment and how do you respond to it? Not, “Okay mom, my pain’s all gone now." It's, "Okay, now fix it. And what about this and what about that? And what if? And give me this and give me that.” As soon as we get what we want we either want more or of it or we want to make sure we don’t lose what we just got. That’s why life denying you want you want is the kindest thing that life does to you.

Even when we understand that — and some of you have been at this for a while now and you know it’s more than a theory — but come on, can any of you, can any of you honestly say, that when you think about that — not just when you think about that — when you realize the truth of that, do any of you feel your bodies relaxing? “Okay, not getting what I want. Ahhhhhh. Being in awful pain. My worst fears always coming true. Ahhh, that’s great.” Of course not. There’s still that resistance. “I want. I want. I want. Me. Me. Me.”

The Zen teacher Wei Wu Wei was once asked “Why do we suffer?”

"Because 99.9% of everything you think and everything you do is about yourself and there isn’t one.” That’s why I keep telling you that you are your own imaginary friends. We create this fiction and we live for it. And we wonder why we suffer.

So, core beliefs really are what runs us. The most deluded people that I meet are people whose — Well, okay, take a guess, what would you guys say the most deluded core belief is?

That you don’t have any core beliefs!

You have got to do an awful lot of this for a long time, unraveling, unraveling, unraveling, letting go, letting go, letting go, to be without core beliefs. And does that mean that these thoughts don’t come up anymore? I mean honestly, if you really want to be without negative, addictive, compulsive thought, then shoot yourself in the head, destroy your brain. I’m really not sure that would stop it. But nothing else is going to. For as long as you’ve got that piece of meat floating in your skull it’s going to think, it’s going to have those thoughts. That’s what it does. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s how you know how to get to your house from where you work. It’s how you know how to put your shoes on. There’s nothing wrong with it. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the most negative thoughts you can have.

So if core beliefs that you’re worthless aren’t bad, then what is bad? There’s no problem with having thoughts that you’re worthless. What is the problem? What is the problem that arises from that thought? So, you have a thought that you’re worthless. That thought is harmless. So what’s the problem with it?

STUDENT: Acting on it.
DOGO: What makes you act on it?

STUDENT: Believing it.

DOGO: The problem is not with the thoughts. The problem is with believing the thoughts.

We get addicted to those thoughts. They’re really comforting. Our most negative thoughts are incredibly comforting because with those thoughts we can blame other people and, better yet, the most comforting core beliefs we have, the ones that destroy us, are: we blame ourselves. Best cop out imaginable: “It’s not my fault. I’m a jerk. I’m a bad person, so therefore, it’s not my fault, right? I’m a bad person.”

If you really want to chase your tail, and if you want to drive yourself as deep into delusion as you can possibly get — I actually like to accommodate everyone, so here’s a recipe for a really catastrophic life — if you want to be really miserable, I can help you. Here’s how you do it. Here’s how you absolutely destroy your life. It’s the most effective way you can mess up your own life: Try not to have negative thoughts. Try not to have core beliefs. Push them down. Put a smile on your face. Be happy. Be positive. Don’t think negatively. You’ll either end up in a locked ward or on death row after you go postal and shoot a bunch of people if you think that way. Best way to make yourself angry is try not to be angry.

How do any of you feel — I’ve talked about this with some of you — how do you feel when someone says, “Hey, don’t be angry. Calm down.” Absolutely furious, right? “Don’t tell me not to be angry. Who the hell are you to tell me not to be angry. I’m not angry. I’m sick of you saying I’m angry. Dammit.”

So, if you don’t want to react that way, what do you do? A negative, blaming, judgmental, angry thought arises. “okay, just having a negative, blaming, judgmental, angry thought.” Now, what does that thought say? “No, but I’m right. This is true.” You say, “No, you’re just a thought.” The thought says, “No, but I’m a true thought. I’m a true belief.“ You say, "No, sorry, hate to break it to you, you’re not a true belief. There are no true beliefs.“ The thought says, “No, really, all the other beliefs are wrong. I’m right. I’m for real.” Which, when you’re angry, is what you feel. You’re always totally justified in the moment. It really is like a drunk who says he’s okay to drive. “Yeah, but you’ve had 5 DUI’s.”

“Yeah, but I was drunk those times, but I’m not now.”

Same with anger. “Well, I regretted it all those other times, but this time I’m right. I’m not over-reacting this time. No, this time I’m justified.” That’s a core belief. When you try to banish core beliefs you strengthen them. You replace them with other core beliefs.

The most common core belief you get in centers of spiritual practice is that you shouldn’t be angry, you shouldn’t be negative, you should be nice. I don’t want anyone in this sangha to ever be nice. And I promise I will never be nice to you. I’ll be kind, always. But I’m not going to be nice to you. Nice people are the angriest, most vindictive, hateful people you’ll ever meet. I mean really, think about it. Have you ever met — can you think of one nice person that you actually trust? That you really wouldn’t worry about if they were behind you with a knife in their hand? That’s what being nice does to you. We have these core beliefs, “I should be nice. I shouldn’t have negative reactions. I’ll just paste a beatific smile on my face, put the robes on and walk around bowing to everybody.” Yes, see how that works for you.

The way you let go of beliefs is not by having a belief that you shouldn’t have beliefs. But by acknowledging the beliefs as what they are. Simple as that. A negative story arises. “Just a story. Just a belief.” A positive story arises. “It’s just a story. It’s just a belief.” Acknowledge it. Don’t welcome it. Don’t fight it either. If you want to understand what’s running you, what actually runs your life — anything at all that upsets you, anything — ask yourself, “What is this? What is it? What am I holding on to?”

My wife actually said to me one time — actually, I quote this a lot because it’s really funny, but what makes it funny is she’s absolutely right — I said to her one time, “Why are you being such a bitch?” And she said, “Why are you attaching to your belief that I shouldn’t be a bitch?” Sure, she was taking a dig back at me, but I thought, “Actually, yeah. Yeah, she’s right. What’s giving me a bad day is not how she’s behaving. It’s my belief that she should behave differently."

See, core beliefs? “Things shouldn’t be the way they are. They should be the way I want them to be.” Has there ever been a time for any of you, maybe one minute in your life, when you looked at the world and decided how you wanted it to be and the world saluted and did what you wanted? I didn’t think so.

So when you react negatively, angrily, whatever, to what’s going on, when you’re suffering, however you name it, let go of the name you’ve given it and ask yourself “What is this? What’s my core belief here? What do I want? What is it I’m clinging to?”

It’s like my friend, when she said, “I don’t really care about my mother, but I’m really resentful.” Okay, well, what do you want? What do you resent you’re not getting?

“I want her to acknowledge what she did.”

Why? What is that? See, that’s not really what you want. That’s a manifestation of it - "‘I want you to acknowledge..." What is that? Why do you want your mother to acknowledge what she did and you don’t want Bill Clinton to acknowledge what he did? You don’t care about getting that acknowledgment. Because there is something you want from this person. What is it?”

”I want her to be my mother. I want to feel that I’m loved by her.”

When you understand what the core belief is, it doesn’t go away, but it stops running you. You’re not chasing your tail anymore. You’re actually living your life. When you make a decision, you’re making that decision from the awakened heart, not just one more reaction to the conditioning that you never even realized you had.

We’re running a bit late so anyone got any questions on that? I’ll say for the benefit of one person I think hasn’t heard me speak before, what I say at the end of every talk: if what I said didn’t make sense, question it. If it did make sense, question it even harder because what makes sense to you leads you right into belief and right into delusion.

I don’t believe anything I’ve told you. I don’t need to believe it. If I believed it, I’d be separate from it. If I believed what I had told you, I would be lying to you. I’m not lying to you. And the reason I’m not lying to you is because I don’t believe what I just said. So, if it didn’t make sense, question it. And if it did make sense, question it even harder.

Questions?

STUDENT: Dogo, is one of the problems with beliefs that it makes something seem permanent too. One of the things I say — I do a lot of conflict resolution in my job and of course it’s easier to see in other people than myself — I just get this sense initially when all that emotion is there, and two people are mad at each other, or one’s mad at the other, there’s such a sense of permanence. I have plenty of that too, but watching it in other people it seems like you notice it. A little bit later, the next day, or two days later, it’s not such a big deal, but right at that moment not only is that person mean, but they’ve always been mean and always will be mean, you know that attachment to that? Is that a core belief?

DOGO: Exactly. That’s a perfect definition of a core belief. If we don’t have beliefs, then what you’re likely to say — if we’re not caught up in belief — if we get in a conflict and I’m caught up in belief — suppose I think you’re behaving in a self-centered, inconsiderate way, if I’m not caught up in belief, then even though I don’t like what’s going on, my reaction — not my reaction because it’s not a reaction — my response is going to be, “I think you’re being inconsiderate. You’re not thinking there’s other people involved here. I think you’re really caught in a self-centered view.”

If I’m caught up in belief, then we’re completely polarized. There’s no room for dialogue there.

“Why is John doing that?"

"Because he’s self-centered."

"Why is he self-centered?"

"Because he is."

"So, he always is?"

"Yeah."

"So, you don’t like him?"

"Well, he is my friend, but..."

And that actually ends friendships. We decide that what’s happening right now, “I don’t like this. I don’t like what you’re doing. Therefore you’re a jerk and you always have been.” That’s what belief is. Belief is entirely about reaction, not response.

We put a label on someone. “He’s a liar.”

“Does he always lie? Like he never says anything true? Like if I ask him the time, he’ll lie? Well, he told me the truth. I checked my watch.”

“Yeah, but he’s a liar.”

So, he’s not a human being. He’s not a person. He’s a liar. Or he’s selfish. Or she’s really flaky and unreliable. We take something we don’t like. We react badly to it and we make it a belief. And so that’s who the person is. They’re not a person anymore. They’re a piece of behavior, one piece of behavior. And that’s belief. Perfect definition. That’s what belief does.

That’s why every belief is wrong. You can’t have a belief that’s true. If I think that a person is unreliable in some ways, they say they’ll do things they don’t follow through with, well, okay. But if I say, “That person’s a flake.” What about when they actually get to work on time? What about when they do what they said they were going to do? Even if what I think about the behavior is factually accurate, the belief can’t be true. Because no one is just that. Nothing is just the one thing.

Anyone else?

To summarize, whether in your relationships or at work, when “someone makes you mad,” pause. No one else can make you mad. And no one else can make you happy. You respond angrily to what happens. You make you mad. So, when you react badly to something that’s happening, whether it’s just another driver, “They shouldn’t drive like that.” Shouldn’t drive like what? Drive in the way that I don’t like and inconveniences me. No matter what’s happening, whether it’s something as trivial as the way other people are driving on a busy freeway, whether it’s how our colleague is behaving, whether it’s how our family member is behaving, as soon as you find yourself reacting angrily or with upset of any kind, just pause. Turn back towards the self. “What is this? What is the belief here?” And you’ll realize it’s entirely about yourself. It comes down to one thing: “I’m not getting my way. Therefore he or she is, insert pejorative here______.” That’s the belief.

You’ll see other people doing it to you, doing it towards you. When you pay attention to this, when you just see it for what it is — not trying to change it, not trying to make it go away — just see it for what it is, it doesn’t have that power over you anymore. And you also realize that someone else’s anger towards you isn’t about you. It’s about their core beliefs. It’s about their core reaction to what they think the world is doing to them. And in that moment, maybe, realized you’re the representative of this world that just won’t do what they want. But it’s not about you.

And so, when somebody is taking it out on you, when someone’s made you the enemy, someone is demonizing you in that way, you don’t need to defend anything. You don’t need to take it personally. That doesn’t mean you become this doormat, that you roll over and let yourself be abused. Actually, quite the opposite. When you don’t react to things in an egoic or self -protective way, then you tend to do whatever needs to be done.

By and large, someone who’s being a doormat wants something from the other person. Somebody who’s being aggressive and fighting wants something from the other person. When you’re not making it about yourself, when you’re not defending, and you’re not attacking, you see things just as they are. It’s just this. Just this. Just this. Over and over again. It’s just this. This is what’s going on. You might still decide to be someone’s opponent, but not their enemy.

Deconstructing God: Guest Madzub Sister Melanie

2009-09-16T06:47:00.004-07:00

There comes a time in our spiritual adolescence when it will dawn on us that everything we think we know about God is just someone else's ideas, which was someone else's dogma, which was someone else's doctrine, which was someone else's agenda, which maybe, at one distant time, may have been someone's brief and incomplete meeting with a face of God. The trail of influence seems to go something like that.

Suffice to say, our most complex and nuanced notions of God - spiritual or religious -- are so ridiculously removed from a direct experience of God, that the rational skepticism of atheism begins to look reasonable. The God of our churches and books is a convoluted personality: wrathful but unconditionally loving, here but not there, eternal and infinite yet fully comprehensible to the finite mind of a preacher, a God above all gods who curiously possesses more than just a few traits of human ego-psychology.

The churches and holy books are giving God a bad name and don't even know it. Is it any wonder that atheists, agnostics and other non-believers have turned their back on God? Disavowed him? Thrown him out, laughing or sneering?

I too threw God out, but not for good. I knew that these sorry human portraits of God were not evidence of his inexistence. They are just the artifacts of religionists who are too lazy to go looking for God themselves and therefore remain content to worship the dead, fossilized remains of a God notion that was shaped and promulgated far more for political and economic ends than a sincere longing to know God as God, through direct experience.

I threw God out of my mind and then found God in my heart. What a glorious discovery, that the silent, still expanse of my heart is the meeting place for God and I. When I leave the concrete pavement of my thinking mind and roam the infinite space of my heart, I can touch God and know God and befriend God. On God's terms, not mine or anyone else's. Every cherished, foolish, borrowed idea of God is dissolved there and instead God is made real in my experience.

So, I dare you. Throw God out. Let go the ideas. Roam your heart. You will find endless wonders there. - Sister Melanie

Two Towers Falling

2009-09-11T10:18:00.005-07:00

Two towers falling
Violence from the sky destroys illusion
Shiva and Kali dance
People, papers and ash
falling like leaves
from exalted dreams of surety

Planes of existence shatter megalithic gods,
Iconoclastic engines of mass destruction strike
to remind us of our preoccupations and presuppositions
Smoke and fire bellow from our bellies
combustion chambers filled with karmic excrement
that we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves

Impermanence burns in the nostrils
of all who breathe the fetid vapors.
We who witness our destruction
find explanations of terrorism plots
hollow and demeaning
without tenor or comfort

We are the fires of our own destruction
The murderers, the sheikhs and the robber barons
There are no victims,
no perpetrators of horrific acts…
Except when we choose to turn away
From the reflection that burns away Samsara

We the children of the bomb, offspring of destruction
We have unleashed unfathomable and uncontrollable forces in ourselves.
Justification of righteous vengeance focused outward, striking inward,
leaving us blind and toothless, unable to take in sustenance
The enemy that we seek we are.
The friend that we seek we are.

Only compassion can fill the void,
the crater left from our arrogance.
Violence and destruction melts
every moment we choose equanimity
Widows and orphans reunite in love
Sympathetic joy flowers in barren wombs.

Meta
Karuna
Mudita
Upekkha

The Pools teisho by Charlotte Joko Beck, Roshi

2009-09-09T06:36:00.008-07:00

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.

[The text of "The Pools" has been reprinted from February & March 1989 issues of the Newsletter of the Zen Center of San Diego.
Beck Joko Charlotte, Zen teacher, head of the San Diego Zen Center. In the 1960s she trained under Hakuun Yasutani Roshi and Soen Nakagawa Roshi. In 1978 she became the 3rd Dharma heir of Taizen Maezumi Roshi of the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Currently she teaches in San Diego, USA and Australia (mainly at the Brisbane Zen Group). She is an author of a book Everyday Zen: Love and Work. 1989. Harper and Row. A chapter discussing her work can be found in the L. Friedman's book Meetings with Remarkable Women: Buddhist Teachers in America. 1987. Boston & London: Shambhala.]

TITLE OF WORK: "The Pools" FILENAME: BECKPOOL.ZIP (Internet: beck-on-pools.txt) AUTHOR: Charlotte Joko Beck, Sensei AUTHOR'S ADDRESS: Zen Center of San Diego, San Diego CA PUBLISHER'S ADDRESS: Zen Center of San Diego, San Diego CA DATE OF PUBLICATION: 1989 ORIGIN SITE: coombs.anu.edu.au

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Lie-brary Story

2009-09-09T06:27:00.001-07:00

Lie-brary Story

Sitting in the lie-brary
I sit entranced with the pages of my life
Talking books with talking sticks that beat me
Yammer on and on

Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers,
all characters plotting my story
Do I cling to my story a little longer
hoping for a new chapter, a new verse, turn of phrase?
Hoping to turn the page on my life?

My life? My story? Attached?
Time to burn the book or, step back and take a look
and put the book back up on the shelf?
The story is always there

The story gets complicated
As the plot thickens
Guns, murder, life and death
Love, hate, lust.. dreamy dramas
That captivate and incarcerate

"Shhh, no talking in the lie-brary"
The librarian whispers
Shelves of stories that clamor to be read aloud
Yet the sepulcher of silence bodes ill for those that dare speak out truth

Attached to the musty, moldy stories that run through my head,
Endless streaming data, recording, revising and revealing
Book reviews and endless commentary persist
As my preferences order my stories so I can find them again and again

Words fade with time
"The library is closing in 5 minutes"
Do I scramble and check out my story now,
so I can read and re-read it over and over?
Or, do I just let them go until they disintegrate on the shelves…

When I leave my story on the shelf
my stories fade and crumble to dust and ash.
I leave the lie-brary as my eyes open slowly
and I begin to adjust to the light filled room
"I must have fallen asleep", I mutter to myself
I once was blind but now I am seeing…

---

Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: You've never used them before.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/quotes

Religion

2009-09-04T06:04:00.003-07:00

A contemporary Shadhili sufi guide, Sidi Muhammad al-Jamal says,

"Every religion says, it is complete. But know that if any religion makes a difference between anyone, then it is not complete. This is not religion of the Prophets, this is the religion of dark forces. In the religion of the Prophets, you find the love, and peace and mercy."

Tanka of Yosano Akiko

2009-09-02T06:57:00.006-07:00

Here is a beautiful translation of a tanka
of Yosano Akiko, by Dogo Barry Graham.

You've never known
this hot blood,
this wet flesh -
are you not lonely,
explainer of the Way?

No words of Dharma,
no thought of afterwards,
no thought of fame or gain -
love beyond love,
looking at each other.

End of Autumn.
Everything changes.
No free will.
Squeeze my tits
in your strong hands.

I envied her beauty.
Now the incense smoke
curls around the hair
of my friend whom
we will now bury.

http://dogobarrygraham.blogspot.com/2009/09/yosano-translations.html
----------------------
----------------------
I was moved by these phrases

looking at each other
are you not lonely?
my friend
love beyond love
free will
we will now bury

Is there “freedom”?

2009-08-31T12:57:00.003-07:00

Questions from:
http://wilderness123voice.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/platos-cave-knowledge-and-freedom/#comment-192

I am asking, “Is there “that” which is in-dependent?”
Is there “that” which does not depend?

Is there “freedom”?
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Muttering Madzub

Freedom is not “there” or “that”
Freedom is completely independent – non-attached
Now, “there” and “that” are completely dependent on “there” and “that”
Freedom is not “there” or here spatially or chronologically
Freedom is free. Completely. Absolutely.
Freedom has no reference point human or otherwise.
No thought, form, no place, no sound.
Freedom is all thought, all form, omnipresent
Has no causality, duality, modality or separate reality
Not sensually perceived, believed, received or deceived.
Freedom is no-where... But… now-here
Lastly, freedom is free from my definitions, assumptions and presumptions
Observations, contemplations, oblations and constipations
Reactions, distractions, contractions, and detractions
And free from me.
At last, free.

Whimsy Who

2009-08-29T23:24:00.001-07:00

Whimsy Who
Originally uploaded by mutteringmadzub

Whimsy Who
Who are you?
You are a curious creature of spiral definition

You appear impossible and inane to clouded minds,
You are unique, one of a kind without homogenous humor

You are the clown, the jester
Pointing out the pointless
Mocking accepted norms and conventions
Revealing truth shrouded in your laughter and cunning wit

Draw me into you spiral depths
that I may get the cosmic joke
and laugh with you unrestrained

Reptilian Too on Stone

2009-08-27T18:36:00.001-07:00

Reptilian Too on Stone
Originally uploaded by mutteringmadzub

Forgotten artisans
carved your image in stone face
Tribal totem of immeasurable import
to all who follow the coiled path of being
Your spiral third eye
draws me deep into unchartered dimensions of arcane wisdom
I am awed by your ancient visage.

DImensionalZub Black and White

2009-08-26T18:58:00.001-07:00

DImensionalZub Black and White
Originally uploaded by mutteringmadzub

Primordial blueprint of dimensional portals
Faces reflecting unknown spheres of sound and light
Sheer, stark, obsidian, solitude
I see the mirrors of ego shattered by your gaze
Let me see through the worlds that are your eyes

Dinner Poem by Shivadam

2009-08-25T04:36:00.001-07:00

Dinner Poem

New guests pass by my table, and above the din of diners' voices, I hear one ask, "That is his name?" and the sound of that resonates in my heart.

I listen to the background wash of intermittently distinguishable human sounds and wonder: What if every tiny, sudden utterance were precious, like a flower... ephemeral, yet full in its glory as a manifestation of the One? Who but I would delight in each? Who would play a jukebox overfull with this song?

This room is a studio, each dinner conversation a jam-session for a CD to be released as a perfect creative expression of "The Voice of Allah Over A Meal." Every human sound, every utterance, each smack of lips, each sigh from that table-of-one, every too-loud laugh... all recorded here, immediately and permanently embedded in the molecular structure of the stone walls of this open room. Tonight, I alone have the stethoscope, won as if a prize for merely showing up.

Each sound is a cricket, and insect, a blossom...perhaps seen or smelled...maybe heard, maybe not, but a track in the mix, essential to the Master, just the same.

Yet, where, who will be the audience? It is pure creation. As producer, I bristle with anticipation of the potential! I envision it going out over the airwaves, now captured and then broadcast as precious wave patterns, each bearing the promise of the profit of joy. I see it arrive and dance the speaker of the radio in a noisy home, the pattern-beaten air barely cutting through and mixing into the din of a family's lively dinner-time banter... Oh, for the love of it all!

And, where it enters the home of the quiet, the sounds of distant, familiar voices soothe, because they resonate in the hearts of those who can hear above themselves the sounds of their other selves. Repeating again and again, yet never the same where they arrive - where they issue forth to reflect and enliven the chambers of the lonely, the alone who have gathered together to break their breads - these sounds do not perish where they find purchase in the ear of the soul.

Oh, Allah, dost Thou give Thy voice so freely, and with no desire that
each sound be cherished, that this cacophony may pass on as so much water over a fall? What abundant beauty dost Thou give so selflessly!

I sit, rapt, attentive and stunned to gratitude by Thy glorious symphony of the everyday, the under-rated, the inconsequential, the exquisite sound of Thy early evening voice.

- Shivadam

Reptilian Madzub

2009-08-22T15:13:00.001-07:00

Reptilian Madzub
Originally uploaded by mutteringmadzub

Ancient ancestor
your form elicits fear and trembling
to my mammalian sensibilities.
Your scales of ancient wisdom
Reveal your arcane mythic mind
You are the primitive continuum
that has transformed the night terrors
Thou art that, that underlies and transcends permutation
You are the ancient earth presence
Let me look deeply into your soul
so that I embrace my power.

Sanity and Insanity

2009-08-20T06:56:00.005-07:00

Sanity and insanity
different sides to the same coin.
Awareness-mindfulness the coins edge?
One human’s sanity is another’s insanity.
Flip the coin and it all disappears.

There is No Spoon

2009-08-17T10:01:00.009-07:00

There is No Spoon*

There is no Spoon.

Looking to bend perceived reality
Light and darkness ebbs and flows.
Knowing, unknowing.
Shadows revealed and light concealed.

What hides in the shadows of self?
What will light reveal?
Is darkness the womb of potential un-manifest?

What do I fear from the mirror?
Do I bend or am I bent?

As I sit and observe the morphing and meandering
The still point, dynamic stillness reveals
There is no spoon.

The question that haunts me is…
How do I eat the ice cream…?
Perhaps there is no ice cream.
Just my luck.

So what’s the point?
No spoon. No ice cream…
They told me there would be ice cream!!!

It can’t beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!
(It never is.)

What’s the point?

The point is the point.
The key is the key.
The me is you and the you me.

Reflections and refractions
from the myriad faceted jewel in the lotus.
Glinting and gleaming
Light streaming.
Darkness revealing the hidden gems
as light pours upon the mountains in dawn's radiance.

The water from the deep well
Springing forth in the oasis between time and space.

Juxtaposition-al concurrent consciousness
Caressing, kissing the wounds of living and dying.
Breaking the alabaster jar so the fragrant balm can be wasted soothing the master’s feet.

Love dogs howling longing for the return of the master.**
Come, come whoever you are,
Wanderers, worshippers lovers of leaving…**

I come as I am for there is no spoon.
Darkness – light, good – evil. Death – Birth – Rebirth.

Perhaps what we see is not what we see at all?
The seeing is in being, not the seeking or the sought.

Minding.

What do I fear in the mirror?
What do I want to see?
What do I expect to see?
What is me?

Am I the monster, the tyrant the tormentor?
Am I the darkness, the evil, obscurer and bringer of death?
Am I the demon, the devil, the enemy?
Am I the light, the truth, peace, love, harmony and beauty?
I am?

I AM!

There is no spoon.

Shadows longing for luminance.
Lies and truths revealed.
Shame and shadow?
Light and love?
Longing and leaving?
Dying and grieving?
No spoon.

Until I invite my demons to dinner,
I can’t begin the feast.
The angels are already there,
and there is no spoon.

"Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself."*

*from The Matrix http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/quotes
** Rumi

Masks and Mirrors

2009-08-11T09:51:00.009-07:00

Masks and mirrors.

Smoke and smears.

Facts and fears.

Friends and fakirs.

Triumphs and tears.

Angels and demons.

Gods and Demigods.

Clowns and jesters juggling jangling jaundiced junk that festers.
Capes and captions mirrored reactions… distractions… fractions... Additions and subtractions, refractions, contradictions and contractions. Caricatures and creatures of fetid fuming foulness... and fluttering fairies, formless phantasms.

Tricked or treated?

Mimes and marionettes murmuring, muttering voiceless verbiage.
Burning questions emblazoned on visages of visceral vicissitudes.
Molten meaning of meandering mindless minglings.
Friendly fauxs fawning furiously for featureless findings… forgetting???

Masks reveal more than conceal, congeal consciously unconscious considerations, self mutilations, shadows tattooed, piercings from pounding skin, tits and tats, dicks and dats…

"I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat"*

Visions, provisions, perversions, aversions, conversions, immersions, diversions…
Masks delicately dangling from filaments of featureless floss, flinging flailing insults, seeking results, co-opting consults, clinging to cults of prisonalities of unaltered he-goes, she-goes…

until…

Punctuated by powerful potentiality, enfolding light, luminescent immersion, bathed in balming beautiful brightness. Eliminating night-ness and daze. Mending ways, clearing the haze, navigating the maze.

Amazing Grace.

Masking mirrors and mirroring masks. Are we up to the tasks that the hidden One asks?

“ Cause there's a monster living under my bed
Whispering in my ear
There's an angel, with a hand on my head
She say's I've got nothing to fear”**

* Lyrics written by Alan Livingston.
** Lyrics By Erik Schrody (Everlast) performed with Santana

2009-08-06T18:03:00.002-07:00

The Friend is the means. There is no end. Always beginning. The Friend is the beauty in all of us. That’s why we are friends.

2009-08-06T07:10:00.001-07:00

That that defines us often maligns us.

2009-08-06T07:08:00.000-07:00

Being is seeing.

Is GOD just the distortion and subsequent projection of our EGO?

2009-08-02T12:24:00.004-07:00

Is GOD just the distortion and subsequent projection of our EGO?

Is GOD the abstraction and contraction and detraction of our inaction?

Is GOD little more than deified, anthropomorphized, and amplified desires and attributes of our better natures?

Is GOD the fulfillment of our human wish list?

GOD is all good because we are bad?

GOD is all-powerful because we feel powerless?

GOD is great because we feel small and miniscule in a massive universe?

GOD provides purpose — intelligent design — because we lack purpose and can’t fathom CHAOS.

GOD is omnipresent because we are not present?

God knows because we don’t?

Is GOD the reason that we do good because we are originally bad?

How sad!!!

If sin is original and we originally come from GOD, is GOD sin too?

Is GOD a spirit because we can’t see or hear HIM or HER or IT…?

Holy Spirit or holy spear-it, kill it, cra-shit ba-shit , ma-shit, sta-shit and fla-shit?

GOD fills our lack, fills in the blanks, grants our wishes and woes, and provides heroes for our foes.

In the Name of GOD people have condoned genocide, fratricide, matricide, homicide, suicide…

In the Name of GOD people commit acts of war, torture, mutilation, conflagration…

Has GOD become the excuse humans use to abuse, confuse, use, contuse and refuse…?

Does GOD displace and replace our responsibility for our actions?

Has HOLY writ become the canon that has made humanity its fodder…?

HOLY WRIT — HOLY SHIT!

HOLY FODDER — HOLY MUTTER!

Why has sowing the GOD word reaped rape, abjection, abasement, de-face-ment?

Does the Holy Mother malign and mangle and mutilate her Holy Daughters, Holy Sisters?

Are we depraved because we misbehaved, sentenced to the grave and needed to be saved?

Are we saved if we agree to the dogmatic decree and pay our fee to the Holy See?

What has twisted the minds of humanity into a state of self loathing — GOD?

Or are the various GODS humans worship distortions of us?

Better, faster, smarter, stronger, more loving, more compassionate…

More deadly, more jealous, more righteous…

Light, truth, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, near, far, yada yada yada…

Or is…

Compassion — God? Love — God? Peace — God? Truth — God?

Anger — God? Righteousness — God? Life — God? Death — God?

Existence — God? Nonexistence — God?

Is Being not a Being?

How freeing!

“La ilaha il Allah
We all shine like stars
Then we fade away…
So put your Light on.” *

* by Everlast and Santana

More Mazubial Mutterings and Twitterings From Shivadam

2009-07-28T06:16:00.002-07:00

"The Utopia of the heart is slightly less difficult to find than any utopia in the world, because the latter doesn't exist, while the former most certainly does."

==

"If something seems true to the mind, it may or may not be; if it feels true to the heart, then it is. "

==

"Great minds think alike; good hearts feel alike."

==

"You don't have to live perfectly in order to be one with the love of God. A good heart is what matters. The purity is in the goodness."

==

"I affect everything and everything affects me; this is living in the Sacred."

==

Now + here = nowhere

Be here now!

:-)

--Shivadam--

I am the Universe

2009-07-27T15:40:00.002-07:00

Hoping to learn
About the Universe,
I discover
I am the Universe
Hoping to learn.

-- Shivadam

Heaven and Hell

2009-07-27T05:09:00.000-07:00

Heaven is hell depending upon one's expectations and attachments. A Psalmist once said “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there” Psalm 138:8. Hell then is Heaven.

Where is heaven and hell? Up above? or Down below? Heaven and hell is wherever we make our bed and perhaps who we share our bed with. Presence is always Present which is our Present. Tat Tvam Asi — Thou art that!

2009-07-27T03:19:00.001-07:00

"The difference between a snail and a loved-one is only that you don't love the snail." - Shivadam

To say there is something other than God...

2009-07-27T03:17:00.001-07:00

To say there is something other than God, especially something like "evil" or "satan," is simply to blaspheme.

How could there be any other than One omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Being? Whatever is beautiful is He, and whatever seems ugly, frightening, nightmarish, that is just as surely He, too, for if God is everywhere and all-powerful, then there can be no other.

It is possible to consciously merge with this awareness, whereby this condition becomes clear. In this state, it can be seen that even "falsehoods" are true, because Truth is the only Reality. To say, "This is true, but that is false" is simply to fail to observe that all is a manifestation of the One Reality, in which the illusions of truth and falsehood merely seem to take on apparent meaning.

When seen clearly, such dichotomies reveal only the workings of a human brain, its left and right, its dark and light. But, though it also is a manifestation of the One indivisible Reality, it too easily thinks itself its own reality. When that arises, it is as a red flag hoisted on the flagpole of the ego that wants to think it is navigating the waters of this life, solely.

Awareness, healing, consciousness, and genuine love arise when even the apparently horrific can be seen as the perfect outflowing of an infallible grace of Supreme Wisdom - a wisdom that provideth as need ariseth. The leaves falling from trees in the Fall, with all their colorful splendor, are no different than soldiers and civilians who perish in apparently purposeless war."

Life does not exist between birth and death. Rather, we are wise when we do not distinguish between these, because these distinctions appear to the mind - to our minds - but are no more different than "before" and "after" in a vast ocean of ever-present Now.

Shivadam 7.21.09

POSTING COMMENTS (aka Muttering)

2009-07-25T22:49:00.004-07:00

I have received feedback that posting comments is difficult on this blog. I honor this feedback. At the bottom of every post you will see:

"Posted by John Hinton at 7:00 AM 0 comments Links to this post".

The word "comments" is a link that will take you to a comment box where you can mutter.

Madzubial Mutterings is an opportunity for the inner madzub to emerge. Even stone boys who dance to silent music played on a flute without holes can mutter. Set the madzub free!!!

NOW?

2009-07-24T07:00:00.007-07:00

Has NOW become a thing, like any-old-thing? Another idea misconstrued and misappropriated into form and function?

If not NOW, when?

When is NOW?

Was NOW then?

NOW and then?

NOW is the time for all good men…

The power of NOW?

How NOW brown cow? How NOW indeed!!!

Power of k-NOW-ing.

The steeds of time blazing across the expanse of cosmic flux, fleeing, fidgeting and fighting our way to where we begin again and again…

NOWness, k-NOW-ing-ness appears locked on the treadmill treading and milling about in endless circles of conformity, deformity, the enormity… do we get off or stay NOW?

What if NOW were a verb? Action -- NOW, condition or state of Being -- NOW. Not stasis of being, believing, conniving, convincing, contriving… But imbibing, alive-ing, not striving, resting, fest-ing, nesting yet soaring into star fields of galaxies of k-NOW-ing, without going anywhere but NOWhere…

Living, moving, being, seeing, freeing, un-believing, untangling the umbilical cord of birth and rebirth.

Navel or novel?

New, old, timid, bold, cold?

Once molten gold poured in molds of hardening castes of lesser stones and metals.

Dynamic flux–uating, precious undulating ore coagulating, petrifying and putrefying into commodes of contemptuous commodities. Universal oddities, curiosities stacked on shelves that are covered with the dust and crust of time. A voiceless mime, no rhyme no tenor, no basis no exit?

Until…

NOW rushes in remakes, unmolds, liberates, pollinates and aerates, un-creates, un-delineates, k-NOW-ing!

All together NOW.

NOWing together.

WOW!

NOW!

madzubial in-definition subject to change: Now. (verb) the unabated, unconstrained continuum of yin-less, yang-less being that has no reference point in time or space. the ever knowing, all pervading condition of unconditional nonexistence that flows through and permeates being and non-being freely. oneness, none-ness, zero-ness, sum-ness.

2009-07-23T14:28:00.001-07:00

By chanting the names of the lord and youll be free
The lord is awaiting on you all to awaken and see
--George Harrison--
...mutter, mutter, mutter...

2009-07-23T13:27:00.008-07:00

"God is a concept, by which we can measure, our pain".
John Lennon
...mutter, mutter, mutter...

What is GOD?

2009-07-22T11:13:00.003-07:00

What is God that thou art mindful of Him or and the son of God, that thou visitest him? Dangling deities dutifully detracting from Presence. Delirious dogmas directing indirection. Heresy? hearsay? Religion is for those of us that have lost our way with – dare I say It – GOD.

Toward the One** – perhaps toward the None. The Tao bows and wows: “The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. Unnamed is the beginning of heaven and earth. With a name, the mother of all creation”* Perhaps, Names are mothers of bastard children who have lost their heritage, their kin, their ken. Name It and claim It, He, She, We, You or They? The felonious, erroneous flatulence of human hubris hurling and heaving indigestible food that we know not of.

Flags have impaled the mountains of molehills of meaningless maneuverings, positioning to claim the un-claimable, un-scalable. Eternal bloody wars waged by unprofitable, non-prophets, prophesying, promising, proposing, supposing and disposing of all opposing the disclosing of that which is unspeakable. Maiming and proclaiming divine authority. Canonical cannons of cascading calumny bombarding billions with treacherous truth that lie as bodies of the victims lay cold upon the earth.

…Yet the melodious madzubial mutterings from the inner well of being that nullifies the poisoned penned words that are scribed by inkless quills from featherless birds. The crazy talk that heals the sick and fills the poor in spirit. The lingering longing for merging with the emergence of the still, sweetness of Presence.

The sound of silence.

The voice of the turtle is heard, as flowers blossom in fullness of times. In the Garden, the sweet fragrances, the unutterable beauty where no words are needed while the Voice of supernal sweetness that saturates the sensual stillness. Love, harmony, beauty the only Being**… perhaps not a Being, just Being? No God -- only God? …undifferentiated, illimitable, un-nameable, un-man-agible, untamable, unrelenting, un-repenting, un-consenting, concealed yet un-concealable. Everywhere, no-where, no-how, no-why, no-when, no-who. Just no-thing, yet everything. To feel is for real***.

*http://sedulia.blogs.com/sedulias_translations/2006/02/the_name_that_c.html
**From the mysterious madzub Hazrat Inayat Khan’s invocation.
***From the marvelous madzub, Joe Miller.

Madzubial Mutterings

2009-07-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

Beginnings of the mad mutterings in the continuum life and death as defined by the indefinite delusions of this existence. Laying to rest the notion of certainty, solidity, and solemnity in the swirl of passionate musings out from absurdity of surety and correctness. Thoughts move and bend and restructure, to reconstitute into more pointless points of view. Lights like lightning flashing, divine flashbulbs of primordial wisdom that has no beginning no end...ill defined, and much maligned by the darkness that knows it not. We sons and daughters, yin and yang, blown through karmic craziness, dust, cosmic dust in the great desert within the oasis of timeless, motionless, crystalline joy. No sorrow, no happiness, no today, no tomorrow. No now.