1. 07 March 2008

    On Reinventing the Sacred

    183 days ago

    In my own life, I am finding that the symbol “God” used to mean the very creativity in the universe, and membership with all of life that we all share, and the planet we share, does in fact, bring a sweet and enlarging sense of joy, responsibility, and humility. How graced we are, not by a Creator Agent God, but by the staggering emergence of the universe, life, and human civilization, so much of it, it begins to appear, partially beyond natural law. So, since we do no t and cannot kinow, we live into Mystery. We need a sense larger of ourselves and too much of our current society where we are consumers, not citizens of the world. Stuart Kauffman, On Reinventing the Sacred

    Here’s exactly my stance on “religion/spirituality/belief/faith/whatever.” This is the stuff I think about in the shower. The other day I decided that the next time someone asks me about god, I’ll tell them to go out and look at a tree—honest to god look at the thing—then to come back and tell me about him/her/it.

    I’ve come to empathize with the idea of faith. I can’t really say understand, or comprehend, but I do know how feels. I don’t know whether its been gleaned from things I’ve read, done, heard, seen or dreamt. But there’s a part of me that resonates when I think of whatever it is that’s bigger than the world as we know it. It lies in the complexity of it all—just to try and think about it—in that I can understand the feeling that’s led so many to postulate the existence of an immaterial soul. Certain thoughts—dealing with the arching, distilled beauty of things—well up in a particular part of my chest, giving a breathless feeling, something palpable, between my sternum and heart—usually followed by me closing my eyes and taking a deep breath, letting it out with the all joy the world causes me.

    The people out there that aren’t religious don’t bother me the same as the people who are blindly religious. I find both tremendously lacking. I question following some “god” based upon what’s written about him in some 2000 year old, cobbled together work of fiction, having undergone translation and transcription millions of times. Not to say I don’t value the bible, or any other ancient and wonderful text—for that’s all it is. No different from the canon of Mythology formulated by nearly every culture, literate or no.

    And for those opposed to religion—just because none of the religions (yet?) known to man haven’t failed to fuck some things up en majuscule doesn’t mean that all similar notions should be expunged from our cultural arena. Ok, science is a belief system based on testable hypotheses, which can then be vindicated and ratified by experiments designed and executed. Of course there’s value in this, but I fail to see it leading us anywhere truly meaningful, other than down a rabbit–hole of empty technological innovation.

    Organized religion has given us plenty that’s beautiful, which to me is one great paradox: How can religion be deemed good or bad, glorified or villainized, when it’s done such meriting both? In some kind of revisionist tit-for-tat, would humanity as a whole give up Bach along with Christianity to prevent the crusades and the stagnation of materialistic investigation precipitated by its meteoric rise to dominion over the whole of Europe? And the same for science, would I give up the internet for the reclamation of the Dodo or the carrier pigeon?

    I could of course name off differences between religion and science, but when I step back I can’t help but see both as symmetrical, mirrored structures. The gap that exists between them arises from, as much as anything, each encampment’s respective incredulous disbelief in the other. I can’t wholeheartedly believe in either, but at the same time I agree with both. And what little I’ve found from this Stuart Kauffman incites that wonderful feeling when someone expressed something you swear you’d have said yourself if you possessed the equivalent amount of literacy; when the ideas that bounce around in one’s head at odd moments—never quite manifesting themselves into anything expressible, but supporting and reassuring other thoughts… Kauffman incites that wonderful feeling when these ideas are formulated and codified in the thoughts of somebody else, solidifying and rewarding my own beliefs.

  2. 24 May 2005

    1200 days ago

    Genjo Koan

    The Genjokoan was written in the autumn of 1233 by Eihei Dogen, founder of the Soto Zen tradition.

    To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.

    Birth is an expression complete this moment. Death is an expression complete this moment. They are like winter and spring. You do not call winter the beginning of spring, nor summer the end of spring.

    When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing.

    Now if a bird or a fish tries to reach the end of its element before moving in it, this bird or this fish will not find its way or its place. When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. When you find you way at this moment, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point; for the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others’. The place, the way, has not carried over from the past and it is not merely arising now.

    Kjell Olsen1200 days ago

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