There is something about those that die in the service of seeking, in the process of wayfinding. I have always been a kid entranced by space, born as I was a month before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I am a child of the space age, and my eyes are often on the sky looking marvelling at the jewelbox of possibility and scale that enfolds us. And so the deaths of astronauts are always a little bit like the death of a small part of me, the part that always wanted to go to space. It’s not as if …
From my new read, gassho, Jack writes an elegant summary of the roots of six major religions: Lunch today with Koshin Ogui who heads Chicago’s Midwest Buddhist temple. He suggests that religion is at the root of our political and cultural worldviews and that there are two genres of religions — mountain-field religions (Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism) and desert religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity). The ethos of desert religions is survival by resisting and opposing nature — the dualistic perspective; the ethos of mountain-field religions is survival by being in harmony with nature — the oneness perspective. Maybe, maybe not, but it …
The Human Phenomenon, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Mega-synthesis in the tangential, and therefore and thereby a leap forward of the radial energies along the principal axis of evolution: ever more complexity and thus ever more consciousness. If that is what really happens, what more do we need to convince oursleves of the vital error hidden in the depths of any doctrine of isolation? The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of ‘everyone for himself’ is false and against nature. No element could move and grow except with and by all …
The Hiri Sutta Who in the world is a man constrained by conscience, who awakens to censure like a fine stallion to the whip? Those restrained by conscience are rare — those who go through life always mindful. Having reached the end of suffering & stress, they go through what is uneven evenly; go through what is out-of-tune in tune.
whiskey river stares into the abyss: I pace back and forth on the edge of the abyss, looking down into the dark. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. [Friedrich Nietzsche said that. But you knew that.] And now, feel it begin to sink. Here’s hoping everything’s okay down by the whiskey river.