terry

I'd have to be crabby to disagree.

Don't even know how to read. Three years old. Tell me a story...

Consulting it is the best way, I think. The collected confucian material, the wings, in the wilhelm edition can be studied. There are many different translations, I have a couple dozen. The tao te ching is a good companion and antidote. Consult the oracle long enough and you don't need to read anything, you know all the lines and all the hexagrams. The hexagrams and trigrams have names but the names refer to essences, and the essences are categories much like plato's forms. Heaven and earth are the mother of the ten thousand things. The two trigrams of heaven and earth combine to form roughly ten thousand possible combinations. These combinations represent every possible circumstance under heaven on earth. By studying actual situations and seeing how they conform to the archetypes, we can walk the ten thousand things back to their 64 x 64 matrix. That is, we can see how everything that happens is one of 64 situations changing into another. The incredible mind-numbing profusion of detail in the world is reduced to repetitions of 64. And within each of these individual situations there is an internal dynamic of trigrams, inner and outer. So the essential dynamics involve only eight possible essences. And the eight are composed of three line combinations of yang and yin, strong and weak, light and dark, positive and negative. What this amounts to is a method of seeing any situation as permutations of one essential essence and its dark side. Gnosis. Don't take anything literally. The name that can be named is not the true name. The yi jing leads beyond words to essences. Forget the words. I don't use yarrow stalks, preferring the coin method as being more even odds. Though I often use a deck of cards with red for 3 and black for 2, which also alters the odds, because if I draw ten red cards in a row my odds of drawing more red cards drop. Let your intuition be your guide. terry

ain't this a bucket o' crabs?

from the gospel of thomas (49) Jesus said: Blessed are the solitary and the elect, for you will find the kingdom, for you came forth from it, (and) you will return to it again.

God lets you go free. This freedom is a burden. This is what the whole of the spiritual life is about. Think about it. (lol)

Well it is definitely erotic. Sexual desire is the sublimated source energy of all spiritual striving. "Families" are the product of sex, are totally involved in individual sexual desire. They told the buddha that happiness was having a wife, and sons. The buddha told them that suffering was having a wife, and sons. Especially "tough love' which generally isn't love at all. When sufis speak of the beloved, it is recognized that all feeling is within oneself, all love is experienced within one's self. One's own desire for love, which sufis call "longing" is the very love that we seek.

If you say so. (lol)

It is famous quote from a zen master. You probably wouldn't like: "Eat when hungry, sleep when tired. Fools will laugh at me, but the wise will understand." Every time you realize your spiritual pretensions are all bullshit and that you are really just like everyone else, you go back to square one, and start over. Eventually you go back to square one and recognize it for the first time. Home. No need for progress, nowhere to go. Then beginner's mind can operate. We become three years old again. We laugh a lot, and dream of animals.

Your :facts" are all bullshit. The numbers obviously absurd. But I really don't care, you obviously want to divide people. There is nothing spiritual to be found in submission to the will of god, you say. I have defined "god's will" as what is, that is, what actually occurs in real life. Submitting to necessity. Studying the nature of reality to better serve "god's will." The garden of eden is the world, god is the will of life to thrive. Adam is humanity, the servant of god whose task is to cultivate and care for the garden in accordance with god's will that life collectively thrive. What you in essence are saying is that the individual ego, the individual's personal desire to thrive at the expense of any of the rest of life and the environment, should be substituted for the individual's best efforts to do the best they can to further all of life, so that sentience might thrive in harmony and community. I could cast aspersions on your favorite religions and on you personally as easily as you do. But I hate hatred.

lol... The lover seeks no escape, no freedom, seeks only to be the slave of the beloved. Service is perfect freedom. Beats being a slave to conditioning, to the "they" whose conventionality provides us with normality and the security of numbers. And habituates us to unsustainable living for the benefit of an oligarchic ruling class of complete idiots.

Eventually, it will still be now.

In nonduality there is no other. The "solitary" is the one. Microcosm, macrocosm, both microcosm and macrocosm, neither microcosm or macrocosm. Wanting to be a mystic engages us in the paradox of the desirability of non-desire. Anything can be justified as a stage to something better. If there are no stages, and no progress, then it isn't about desire but about recognition, waking up. It is not wrong to want to be free, it is just stupid. Realize your freedom. Exercise it.

beginner's mind is the way

Some responses... I don't think being a mystic is optional. The more mystical you are, the less optional it is. As rumi says, God is The Only Real Agent. Being a mystic involves accepting that you are a slave of an overwhelmingly powerful master, and not a very good slave at that. To the mystic, seeing, feeling and consciousness are a meshwork, indra's net of jewels. There is no progress and no doing for mystics. Jesus said, "Become passersby" and "The kingdom is within you and without you." lao tzu: "The way that can be called a way is not the true way." (tao tao not tao) To the one who wants to be a mystic: ypu need to escape your conditioning. Seeking more conditioning will only enmesh you deeper. Anyone who wants you as a student is someone you don't want as a teacher. Ultimately the path is for the solitary. The spiritual way is a bucket o' crabs. The crabs in a bucket can't escape because they climb over each other and pull each other down, while the solitary crab crawls right out. Chuang tzu spoke of the fishes in the shallows drying out and moistening each other with slime and spittle, while the deep sea fish swims freely wherever it wants. john prine: blow up your tv throw away your paper move to the country build you a home plant a little garden grow a lot of peaches try and find jesus on your own

I was selling my jewelry at the wednesday market at keauhou the other day and one group of people shopping was from india. I told them my daughter in law was from india and they were all excited and asked me where. I told them she was from gujarat, and the woman said oh yes, so am I. I told her my daughter in law was a graduate of gujarat university and she got even more excited, so am I! I told her, she's a muslim and the excitement immediately died and they had no further interest in my family, my son who became a muslim and went on the haj, and my granddaughter who is muslim. All your hate speech about islam hatred killing and fundamentalism applies much more so to xtianity. Religions are organized to control people and are always misused. Xtianity in america is practically a hate religion. Whereas most muslims are genuinely moral. Arguing that one religion is better than another is mere opinion in any case. God will judge between the quick and the dead. A discussion not worthy of a mystic. But the ugliness should be deplored. God is great.

In the yi jing we frequently encounter “the superior man” and occasionally “the great man.” Regarding the key fifth nine in hexagram one, legge says: “In the fifth line, undivided, we see the dragon on the wing in the sky. It will be advantageous to meet with the great man.” Of this line confucius says, “Thus the sage arises, and all creatures follow him with their eyes.“ The superior man is the object of the yi jing, the person whom the oracle is advising. The great man is all of society, all of sentient being. So we are dealing with the microcosm and the macrocosm. The superior man is invited to contemplate the great man, and so become perfect. Each hexagram illustrates this as each represents a human being. The first line is the toes, the second the calves, the third the thighs and groin, the fourth the belly and liver, the fifth the lungs and heart and the sixth the senses and brain. The toes are our aspirations, the head our inhibitions. The second line indicates passion, the fifth action. the third is controlling, the sixth is letting go. The upper trigram is the field of virtue. The lower trigram is the world. The superior man, through contemplating the great man, actualizes the will of heaven. In this the superior man is the line, the great man is the hexagram. While the individual may be inferior or superior, the great man is always great.

It seems to me, friend cobie, that these terms are traditionally pretty flexible. When confucius was editing the spring and autumn annals he engaged in a process called "the rectification of the names." Where the original text would say something like "the ruler compelled the sage to appear at court" confucius would write, "the prince went to visit the tyrant." And so on. Unless I have that wrong. In the lower exoteric world the "masters" make the rules. In the upper esoteric world, the (true) masters make the rules. t

aloha cobie, Thanks for the translations. terry from the way of chuang tzu, trans merton: MEANS AND ENDS The gatekeeper in the capital city of Sung became such an expert mourner after his father's death, and so emaciated himself with fasts and austerities, that he was promoted to high rank in order that he might serve as a model of ritual observance. As a result of this, his imitators so deprived themselves that half of them died. The others were not promoted. The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten. The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten. The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to.

“Idolatry consists in immobilizing oneself before an idol because one sees it as opaque, because one is incapable of discerning in it the hidden invitation that it offers to go beyond it. Hence, the opposite of idolatry would not consist in breaking idols, in practicing a fierce iconoclasm aimed against every inner or external Image; it would rather consist in rendering the idol transparent to the light invested in it. In short, it means transmuting the idol into an icon.” henry corbin

Excerpt From: Tom Cheetham. “All the World an Icon.” Opposing all reductionisms that attempt to explain texts, or persons or things by accounting for their material, social, and historical causes, Corbin places the person at the center of his ontology. Events in the world are the attributes, and express the modes of being, of the persons who enact them. Our understanding of purportedly “objective facts” expresses a mode of our being. His claim is uncompromising: the individual is the first and final reality. And persons are “linguistic beings” through and through—we are our Voices. This is why hermeneutics provides the primary metaphor for Understanding. Events, or acts of understanding, are the actions of a subject expressed as a verb, the reality of which derives from the person who conjugates it. For Corbin the person “can neither be deduced nor explained.” He writes, For us, the first and last fact, the initial and final event, are precisely these persons, without whom there could never be anything that we call “event.” Hence we must reverse the perspectives of the usual optics, substitute the hermeneutics of the human individual for the pseudodialectic of facts, which today is accepted, everywhere and by every one, as objective evidence.… Hermeneutics as science of the individual stands in opposition to historical dialectics as alienation of the person. This reversal of perspective has its exact analogue in the difference between a picture and an icon. In the space of a Renaissance painting the lines of perspective disappear into infinity. This is the infinite public space in which external, objective reality “takes place.” A drama with a meaning common to all can appear. An icon is an object of a different order altogether. It is not a “picture,” and the “space” is not behind the plane of the panel. It is a dialogical reality, and the lines of perspective converge on the person engaged in dialogue with the reality of the symbol displayed. By granting “all reality to facts” we have “let ourselves be trapped in the system of unrealities that we have ourselves constructed and whose weight in turn falls on us in the form of history.” If we can reclaim the idea of the “real subject,” then we cannot be seduced by the nihilism of a determinism that reduces us to nothing but the effect of causes that have “passed away.” Such a nihilism makes of us the transient, ephemeral “results of events that are gone forever, and were themselves just as transient and ephemeral. But Corbin’s hermeneutics of personal language reminds us that past and future are always expressed by verbs conjugated by a subject for whom the only time is the present. They are therefore dimensions of that person: “for it depends upon him, on the scope of his intelligence and the largeness of his heart, to embrace the whole of life … [and] totalize in himself all worlds” in the dimension of his present.

rumi, op cit Think of how PHENOMENA come trooping out of the desert of non-existence into this materiality. Morning and night, they arrive in a long line and take over from each other, “It’s my turn now. Get out!” A son comes of age, and the father packs up. This place of phenomena is a wide exchange of highways, with everything going all sorts of different ways. We seem to be sitting still, but we’re actually moving, and the fantasies of phenomena are sliding through us like ideas through curtains. They go to the well of deep love inside each of us. They fill their jars there, and they leave. There is a source they come from, and a fountain inside here. Be generous. Be grateful. Confess when you’re not. We can’t know what the divine intelligence has in mind! Who am I, standing in the midst of this thought-traffic?

Excerpt From: Coleman Barks. “The Essential Rumi.” WEAN YOURSELF Little by little, wean yourself. This is the gist of what I have to say. From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood, move to an infant drinking milk, to a child on solid food, to a searcher after wisdom, to a hunter of more invisible game. Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo. You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate. There are wheatfields and mountain passes, and orchards in bloom. At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.” You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up in the dark with eyes closed. Listen to the answer. There is no “other world.” I only know what I’ve experienced. You must be hallucinating.

Our journey had advanced; Our feet were almost come To that odd fork in Being's road, Eternity by term. Our pace took sudden awe, Our feet reluctant led. Before were cities, but between, The forest of the dead. Retreat was out of hope,— Behind, a sealed route, Eternity's white flag before, And God at every gate. Emily Dickinson