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March 22, 2006 |
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By Norman Fischer | 3/22/2006 @ 11:25 am
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From Zen Abbot's Journal Vol 53
Feb 4, 2006
Charlotte's Way, Muir Beach
Reading and writing, speaking and listening as modes of absorption. Sitting practice: another mode. In all these cases the mind/heart is still, and there's great pleasure in the stillness, full engagement within it. There can be this sort of absorption in movement too, in physical work if you pay attention to it, in exercise, in exertion. Then, by contrast, there are the million picky details of post modern life. For example, on Sunday I left my umbrella at the Headlands after the sitting, which meant emails etc to find out where it was and the possibility of having to drive there to get it. And during the talk at sitting I forgot to turn on the mic, so my talk was not recorded (so that now must go online to research mics that do not need to be turned on). Today ordering business cards that had many mistakes in them so had to be redone several times, several faxes, emails, trips to the printer. Mailing a letter, postage went up and I didn't know it, letter come back, must go out again after I buy more stamps. One wants a flow and rhythm in life (like rhythm of breathing) and is unhappy insofar as the rhythm's too choppy (but, in time, all rhythms resolve into regularity of some sort, and choppy gets incorporated into that rhythm).
Feb 6. 06
Charlotte's Way, Muir Beach
Slowly reading George Lakoff's classic book "Metaphors We Live By." George's cheerful sense of "Well, it turns out that..." as if things could be just, well, figured out, and then that would be that. As he goes on building up his concept of metaphor it turns out that language is, well, almost always metaphorical, every noun, every verb, a metaphor. We're always, in thinking and in language, figuring out one thing in terms of another, which it isn't.
Wanted to read and think about metaphor for the Odyssey project, which I'm beginning again. Starting by re-writing the introduction, using Ruth's (Ozeki, novelist) suggestions and saying a lot more about the spiritual uses of metaphor in general, and about the Odyssey as spiritual metaphor, in particular.
Big strong wind in bright luminous sky today — also big wind last night. The windows rattle.
Feb 13. 06
Charlotte's Way, Muir Beach
I am enjoying these long lazy days of writing and not too many appointments — or anyway am trying to ignore the appointments, emails etc. The weather has been sunny and mild. Sitting out here in the study I feel lost in time. Yesterday I gave the talk at Green Gulch and had planned to come home and exercise and work on writing but was too tired out so I loafed reading and then watching a documentary on TV on Martin Luther King. One remembers his courage and his great triumphs, but the documentary reminded me how he'd floundered in the last years of his life, when the clarity of the moral issues in the South was no longer in play, and he was dealing with the more subtle and complex issues of racism in the North, where he wasn't known, wasn't necessarily welcomed by the black community, wasn't familiar with the people and the attitudes. Most extraordinary was his final speech, given the evening he was shot in Memphis, in which he says, with tremendous passion, "Longevity has its place; but I don't care about that anymore. For I have been to the Promised Land. I have climbed to the top of the Mountain and I have seen the other side. And I may not get there with you but I know we will get there one day," The sense, in the footage, of the tremendous power of these words, to him as he uttered them, and to his listeners. It was as if the words had liberated him from the frustration and exhaustion of his struggles. And in fact his friends reported that he'd been for the first time in a long while light-hearted and happy after the speech, fooling around, they'd even had a silly pillow fight just moments before he'd gone out onto the motel balcony to be killed. Struck me that the metaphor of the mountain, of the promised land, etc, and the evoking through those metaphors of the biblical reality, which was an imaginative fact for King as well as his listeners (the speech had been given in a church), might have effected a spiritual transformation in King. The power of metaphor to effect an inner change beyond what we think is rationally or psychologically possible. "It is as though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense, like seeing, or touching, or hearing..." Lakoff, p 239.
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March 8, 2006 |
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By Norman Fischer | 3/09/2006 @ 8:58 am
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From Zen Abbot's Journal Vol 53
Feb 3, 2006
Charlotte's Way, Muir Beach
At the January 29 All Day Sit at the Headlands I spoke on Dogen's "The Point of Zazen." After the talk I asked people to get into groups, and to pretend that they were explaining to someone who was possibly in need, or at least seriously wanted to know, what was, from their personal point of view, the point of zazen. Why do zazen? What did it mean to them? And after the explanation had been given, the listeners responded: did what they were told make sense to them? Did it impress them or matter to them in any way? Then the roles were reversed, the listener became the speaker and vice versa. So it was a sort of off the cuff role playing exercise, and people seemed to enjoy it. Find it useful. While role playing is common in training programs of all sorts, it is never done in Zen. So, good, I am being experimental (while maintaining "quality control" of the tradition, at least I hope so) but wonder whether going this way eventually leads to too much fun and games, too much superficial Dharma. This is always the challenge: to be flexible, to work with people's actual lives, their actual needs, to empower them in what they feel, and at the same time not indulge or pander.
In seminar the previous Wednesday night, we read a passage in Buber on "feelings and institutions," in which he says that institutions afford no community when they are cut off from our own deepest personal feelings and needs — when we are asked to leave out what matters most to us at the door when we enter — and that personal life, when it is merely a matter of the indulgence of our private feelings is no personal life at all. Within institutions and in our personal lives we find ourselves estranged from the true persons that we actually are. We become soulless cogs in the institutional wheel, raw and wounded egos.
In small group discussions I asked people to talk about "feelings," how they view them and work with them in the institutions they participate in, and also in their personal relationships. People in the seminar seem to understand that feelings are not just "mine," not just phenomena to be repressed or indulged, and that they don't always come from "inside." Feelings need to be invited and acknowledged, fully and completely, and then allowed to flow on — so that we're living within a stream of feelings we're free to act on and not act on, express or not express, and that all our efforts to meet the world as fully as possible have our feelings as background: but that it's the meetings, the being constantly opened and changed through the meetings, that is what leads our lives on. The feelings are the atmosphere of that. And I notice so often that it's never exactly clear what "I'm" "feeling." That is, feeling may be going on, but it may not be my feeling. And the feeling is quite various and is changeable as quicksilver: maybe I'm feeling something someone else is feeling; or feeling currents of feeling floating on the air; or feeling something from another lifetime; or feeling my own feeling but I'm having that feeling come in response to what someone else is feeling, that on my own in that moment I'd never otherwise be feeling this feeling. Our notion of what a person is, how we think of and experience that, changes from culture to culture and from generation to generation, but no doubt to whatever extent they have been conscious or not, feelings have always been a part of human life, we've always been awash in a sea of feelings (and all efforts, including Buber's, to define how that has been in the past or in another culture, are mere speculations, because we can never know. We find out and understand how we feel based on our fantasies about how others feel elsewhere and otherwise. No accident that the age of hyper self-consciousness is also the age of anthropology and cultural history).
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March 8, 2006 |
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By Norman Fischer | 3/09/2006 @ 8:58 am
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From Zen Abbot's Journal Vol 53
Feb 3, 2006
Charlotte's Way, Muir Beach
At the January 29 All Day Sit at the Headlands I spoke on Dogen's "The Point of Zazen." After the talk I asked people to get into groups, and to pretend that they were explaining to someone who was possibly in need, or at least seriously wanted to know, what was, from their personal point of view, the point of zazen. Why do zazen? What did it mean to them? And after the explanation had been given, the listeners responded: did what they were told make sense to them? Did it impress them or matter to them in any way? Then the roles were reversed, the listener became the speaker and vice versa. So it was a sort of off the cuff role playing exercise, and people seemed to enjoy it. Find it useful. While role playing is common in training programs of all sorts, it is never done in Zen. So, good, I am being experimental (while maintaining "quality control" of the tradition, at least I hope so) but wonder whether going this way eventually leads to too much fun and games, too much superficial Dharma. This is always the challenge: to be flexible, to work with people's actual lives, their actual needs, to empower them in what they feel, and at the same time not indulge or pander.
In seminar the previous Wednesday night, we read a passage in Buber on "feelings and institutions," in which he says that institutions afford no community when they are cut off from our own deepest personal feelings and needs — when we are asked to leave out what matters most to us at the door when we enter — and that personal life, when it is merely a matter of the indulgence of our private feelings is no personal life at all. Within institutions and in our personal lives we find ourselves estranged from the true persons that we actually are. We become soulless cogs in the institutional wheel, raw and wounded egos.
In small group discussions I asked people to talk about "feelings," how they view them and work with them in the institutions they participate in, and also in their personal relationships. People in the seminar seem to understand that feelings are not just "mine," not just phenomena to be repressed or indulged, and that they don't always come from "inside." Feelings need to be invited and acknowledged, fully and completely, and then allowed to flow on — so that we're living within a stream of feelings we're free to act on and not act on, express or not express, and that all our efforts to meet the world as fully as possible have our feelings as background: but that it's the meetings, the being constantly opened and changed through the meetings, that is what leads our lives on. The feelings are the atmosphere of that. And I notice so often that it's never exactly clear what "I'm" "feeling." That is, feeling may be going on, but it may not be my feeling. And the feeling is quite various and is changeable as quicksilver: maybe I'm feeling something someone else is feeling; or feeling currents of feeling floating on the air; or feeling something from another lifetime; or feeling my own feeling but I'm having that feeling come in response to what someone else is feeling, that on my own in that moment I'd never otherwise be feeling this feeling. Our notion of what a person is, how we think of and experience that, changes from culture to culture and from generation to generation, but no doubt to whatever extent they have been conscious or not, feelings have always been a part of human life, we've always been awash in a sea of feelings (and all efforts, including Buber's, to define how that has been in the past or in another culture, are mere speculations, because we can never know. We find out and understand how we feel based on our fantasies about how others feel elsewhere and otherwise. No accident that the age of hyper self-consciousness is also the age of anthropology and cultural history).
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