"Our  Revels  Now  Are  Ended"

Alan Hammond   August 3, 2014

 

In its present condition the human consciousness has lost all true perspective on virtually everything. It can be very useful for us to begin to let some of our perspective on Being change.

I’m going to quote from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. These words were spoken by Prospero, who was an ancient seer in the play.

       Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
       As I foretold you, were all spirits and
       Are melted into air, into thin air:
       And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
       The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
       The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
       Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
       And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
       Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
       As dreams are made on, and our little life
       Is rounded with a sleep.

There are some useful observations we may glean from this quotation. The words might well describe the human consciousness today as it gradually awakens to the future of the human world—namely, dust.

In the play, this speech marks a pivotal point where the characters turn away from the artificial illusory state in which they have been living, and return to their true characters to play their roles in reality. The speech sums up the experience in all fields of human endeavor—be they religion, science, sociology, economics, art, or any others. Shakespeare’s words are brilliant in describing the human state. What is lacking, are those who can describe something of the true state.

One aspect of the current problem is that human beings think their achievement in all fields is just great—whereas the truth of the matter is, they are abominably terrible. For us, when our revels end, we may begin to experience something new in consciousness, something that accurately reveals our true Identity and Character. The expression of that creates the experience of heaven on Earth.

We no longer speculate, as most people do, about some lateral, distant future. Such speculation is all fantasy—rather, we find fulfillment in our spiritual expression in the vertical moment. That little phrase in the speech—our little life is rounded with a sleep—that’s true, isn’t it? We can’t remember what went before this little life and we can’t imagine what comes after it. To be able to do so would be a distraction from what we should be involved with here and now. Also, as Shakespeare says, our lives are such stuff as dreams are made on. This experience on Earth is a dream, and we shall reawaken in the real world and state.

Everything in the temporal world does turn to dust, whereas the spiritual level of Being is ongoing, eternal. We can gradually awaken to this level by giving expression to the Spirit of that level, and we can, if we will, gradually loosen our grip on current human theories and paradigms. As we know, this isn’t easy to do because the mass consciousness and therefore virtually everyone around us has their consciousness embedded in this almost transfixed state. Nevertheless, this is the direction of our movement in the Current of Life.

In any case, remember that all things turn to dust—even the wonderful things—only in that case, they dissolve in order to make way for the beautiful, new forms emerging out of heaven.

To imagine that the human mind could even begin to comprehend all of Being or truly understand what even a small part plays in the Whole is actually ludicrous. It’s not even logical to imagine that it’s possible. Why is this? Well, merely consider the fact that already there is the suspicion that over ninety percent of the matter and energy operating in the Cosmos is beyond human perception.

We might be reminded of the Hindu parable here, where a number of men were in the dark and told to touch an elephant and describe what the elephant looked like. So one man grasped a leg and said, “The elephant is like a pillar.” Another grasped the tail and said, “The elephant is like a rope.” Another felt the trunk and said, “The elephant is like a tree.” Another caught hold of a tusk and said, “No, it’s like a pipe.” Another caught hold of an ear and said, “Well, no, it’s like a great fan.” Another pushed on the stomach and said, “It’s obviously like a wall.” Just so is the perception of Being way beyond the human mind’s capacity to comprehend!

I was recently in a high building at about the fifteenth floor, looked out of the window onto the street below, and there I saw these little dots scurrying around. Just fifteen stories up, human beings look like little dots. The human form and its consciousness are both very tiny, and the proportion of a human physical form to the size of our planet is a good analogy for the human consciousness relative to the consciousness of the planet. Similarly, man’s emotional and spiritual-expression capacities are also very tiny compared with the emotional and spiritual capacities of just this small planet.

The purely intellectual, self-centered approach utilized by the human mind is not the way to understand how to function in this vast Whole. For one thing, the intellect is only a small part of mind, of consciousness. Emotion is a realm of perception and expression of vibrational currents. In our present state, we are emotionally infantile and tend to mistranslate so many of our feelings. Therefore our consciousness is not receiving accurate information from that level.

For a long time now, we have been suggesting the importance of spiritual expression as a foundation for conscious understanding. Can the validity of this suggestion be intellectually proven? No. But I would suggest that everyone try it and observe the results in their own personal life! Then there’s no need to believe anything. We know the truth of this from experience. Also, we may observe the power and effect of spiritual expression in all the fields of human endeavor—be it religion, philosophy, psychology, healing, economics, ecology, and all relationships. And, if we took time to examine the matter, we would see the power and influence of spiritual expression in the field of science—creative science.

Bearing in mind the tininess of the human consciousness, we can see that the so-called towers (as Shakespeare called them)—the towers of human achievement, are not as lofty as humans think they are. People think they observe much and that they have much knowledge but, in fact, they are seeing very little of the actual processes operating. Human knowledge has affected virtually no creative change in the essential human state or life experience. Human beings are still ignorant of their Identity, of their context and role in the Design of Life. They are still as self-centered and self-serving as they can possibly be. Their towers of achievement, being separate from the organic nature of the Whole and the Design are, in fact, ultimately destructive—in transportation, the means of generating power, weaponry, medicine, and indeed all others. Now, of course many people would disagree and wish to debate such points, but there’s no need to argue. Vibrationally, we say, “Carry on, then.” It seems human beings wish to learn the hard way.

What is animating all this dust? Obviously, it is something that is more tangible, with a far greater IQ and consciousness than the dusty forms themselves. This “Something” is animating human forms, and it is the clear expression of this “Something” that is the true art and science that we can discern behind all the manifest forms of dust.

As previously mentioned, the Tone would be the basis of all true fields of human endeavor, because the Tone has within it all the essences of these creative fields. The Tone is actually at the very core of all human activities, but they have become distorted.

For example, in the arts, the current of Life, the Tone, would move through people’s pure emotions to produce power and beauty. That would contrast with what we have today, where art is permeated with destructive emotions that only intensify the unhappy human experience.

In all other fields too, the true Tone would guide consciousness in spiritual matters—in philosophy, psychology, ecology, and in our relationships with everyone and everything else.

Scientific considerations would still relate to how things work—that’s what science considers. Such inquiry would be motivated by a deep love of the Whole, and a deep desire to enhance, not only the human experience, but the experience of the Whole. For example, there is a vast field of natural science related to the use of the natural Current of Life. Much so-called “energy work” is now virtually an unconscious process. True science, in part, would be concerned with this organic energy and the effect of the qualities of its radiation into the organic Design. There would gradually become an awareness of the nuances inherent in the Current—the nuances inherent in the current of Spiritual expression, also describable as Love. These studies would apply to every field of human activity.

In the field of human health, what little dis-ease there would be (the natural state would be ease), could and would be alleviated with a slight realignment with the natural design. And also, in true medical science there would be a far greater awareness of the value of all the vegetation on Earth. Virtually nothing is known now about its properties, and all the minerals therein.

Also, the effects of subtle changes in consciousness that can have dramatic effect in both the individual’s life and in the greater scene of which he/she is a part would be understood. In such levels and qualities of function, human beings would be integrated with the organic, Archangelic Planetary Consciousness, and out of that would also emerge skills and function now unimaginable.
 

Here’s another piece of poetic prose that may help to gradually change our perspective:

The Eternal Presence

This planet’s life I am,

Speaking through this little form into the realm of humankind.

Ho, little people who read these words,

Know ye not the One with whom ye speak?

I am He larger than any man,

Larger than all parts and capacities of everything upon this world,

For I am the One whose body this earth is,

This planet’s life I am.

Before man was, I am.

In every moment, everyplace,

Through the days and settlements of man,

I was.

Present was I in human form,

Witness of every event, both so-called mighty

And those completely unrecorded, unremembered, now unknown.

No human thought, or feeling, aspiration, sorrow,

No plan or action, whether large or small, was made outside My presence,

For I experienced all.

Before man was, I am.

When man is gone, I am.

This word, now uttered through this form,

Will pass anon.

Posterity does not need immortal words

Fori shall speak what's necessary then.

But in this present moment of My experience

I utter words of love and life and joy.

This is a wondrous time, a wondrous place;

But on time move, all outer clothing changes —And I shall be present loving, living, thrilling

Then, as now.

If any read these words I spake,

Remember you wrote them then

As now you read!

For we are one, eternally.

This planet's life, I am.

Here we are now in this moment of eternity. We are modeling everything in dust. Let us consciously fashion every moment as Divinely and as artistically as we may.

© archangelicbody.org

In  Line  With  The  Big  Flow

excerpts  from

The East-West Interview  with  Gary Snyder

I never started sitting [in meditation] like that [ten hours a day] until I went to Japan and was forced to. I still wouldn't sit ten hours a day unless somebody forced me, because there's too much other work in the world to be done. Somebody's got to grow the tomatoes. There's not going to be that much meditation in the world if we're going to have a democratic world that isn't fueled with nuclear energy, because there isn't that much spare energy. We damn well better learn that our meditation is primarily going to be our work with our hands. We can't have twenty-five percent of the population going off and becoming monks at the expense of the rest, like in Tibet; that's a class structure thing, a by-product of exploitation—sitting an hour a day is not. Sitting ten hours a day means that somebody else is growing your food for you; for special shots, okay, but people can't do it for a whole lifetime without somebody else having to give up their meditation so that you can meditate.

I had a pretty fair grasp of what the basic value of meditation is—an intellectual grasp, at least—even then. It wasn't alien to my respect for primitive people and animals, all of whom/which are capable of simply being for long hours at a time. I saw it in that light as a completely natural act. To the contrary, it's odd that we don't do it more, that we don't, simply, like a cat, be there for a while, experiencing ourselves as whatever we are, without any extra thing added to that. I approached meditation on that level; I wasn't expecting anything to happen. I wasn't expecting instantaneous satori to hit me just because I got my legs right. I found it a good way to be. There are other ways to be taught about that state of mind than reading philosophical texts: the underlying tone in good Chinese poetry, or what is glimmering behind the surface in a Chinese Sung Dynasty landscape painting, or what's behind a haiku, is that same message about a way to be, that is not explicable by philosophy. Zen meditation—zazen—is simply, literally, a way to be, and when you get up, you see if you can't be that way even when you're not sitting: just be, while you're doing other things. I got that much sense of sitting to make me feel that it was right and natural even though it seemed unnatural for a while.

I still think a lot about Oda Sesso Roshi. Oda Roshi was an especially gentle and quiet man—an extremely subtle man, by far the subtlest mind I’ve ever been in contact with, and a marvelous teacher whose teaching capacity I would never have recognized if I hadn’t stayed with it, because it was only after five or six years that I began to realize that he had been teaching me all along. I guess that’s what all the roshis are doing: teaching even when they’re not “teaching.” One of the reasons that you have to be very patient and very committed is that the way the transmission works is that you don’t see how it works for a long time. It begins to come clear later. Oda Roshi delivered teisho lectures in so soft a voice nobody could hear him. Year after year, we would sit at lectures—lectures that only roshis can give, spontaneous commentaries on classical texts—and not hear what he was saying. Several years later after Oda Roshi had died, one of the head monks, with whom I became very close, said to me, “You know those lectures that Oda Roshi gave that we couldn’t hear? I’m beginning to hear them now.”

Unenlightened consciousness is very complicated—it’s not simple. It’s already overlaid with many washes of conditioning and opinion, likes and dislikes. In that sense, enlightened, original mind is just simpler, like the old image of the mirror without any dust on it, which in some ways is useful. My own personal discovery in the Zen monastery in Kyoto was that even with the extraordinary uniformity of behavior, practice, dress, gesture, every movement from dawn till dark, in a Zen monastery everybody was really quite different. The dialectic of Rinzai Zen practice is that you live a totally ruled life, but when you go into the sanzen room, you have absolute freedom. The roshi wouldn’t say this, but if you forced him to, he might say, “You think your life is too rigid? You have complete freedom here. Express yourself. What have you got to show me? Show me your freedom!” This really puts you on the line—“Okay, I’ve got my freedom; what do I want to do with it?” That’s part of how koan practice works.

The truth in Buddhism is not dependent in any sense on Indian or Chinese culture… What I felt at the time and what I think all of us feel is that we’re talking about the Dharma without any particular cultural trapping. If a teaching comes from a given place, it’s a matter of courtesy and also necessity to accept it in the form that it’s brought. Things take forms of their own; we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. The Buddhadharma, which is the Dharma taught by a line of enlightened human beings (rather than the Dharma as received from deities via trance, revelation, or bhakta, which is what Hinduism is) is nirmanakaya-oriented—it goes by changeable bodies. Right now it goes primarily through human bodies. Already it is all over the globe, and it has no name and needs no name.

Beware of anything that promises freedom or enlightenment—traps for eager and clever fools—three-quarters of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage that they were tricked into entering.

There is a very fine spiritual line that has to be walked between being unquestioning, passive on the one hand and obnoxiously individualistic, ultimately-trusting-no-one’s-ideas-but-your-own on the other. I don’t think it’s uniquely American; I think that all people have these problems on one level or another. Maybe that’s one meaning of the Middle Way: to walk right down the center of that. In one of the Theravada scriptures the Buddha says, "Be a light unto yourself. In this six-foot-long body is birth and death and the key to the liberation from birth and death.” There is one side of Buddhism that clearly throws it back on the individual—each person’s own work, practice, and life. Nobody else can do it for you; the Buddha is only the teacher.

Americans have a supermarket of adulterated ideas available to them, thinned out and sweetened just like their food. They don’t have the aparatus for critical discernment either. So that term “infantilization” [used by Robert Bly, who spoke of the infantilization of humanity—each generation following the Industrial Revolution is more infantile than the previous, thus, for example, needing many more supportive devices merely to survive] is something I can relate to. I think there’s a lot of truth in it. The primary quality of that truth is the lack of self-reliance, personal hardiness—self-sufficiency. This lack can also be described as the alienation people experience in their lives and work. If there is any one thing that’s unhealthy in America, it’s that it is a whole civilization trying to get out of work—the young, especially, get caught in that. There is a triple alienation when you try to avoid work: first, you’re trying to get outside energy sources/resources to do it for you; second, you no longer know what your own body can do, where your food or water come from; third, you lose the capacity to discover the unity of mind and body via your work.

The overwhelming problem of Americans following the spiritual path is that they are doing it with their heads and not with their bodies. Even if they’re doing it with their heads and bodies, their heads and bodies are in a nice supportive situation where the food is brought in on a tray. The next step, doing their own janitorial work and growing their own food, is missing, except in a few places… This is one of the legacies of Zen, Soto or Rinzai—to steadily pursue the unity of daily life and spiritual practice.

One of the things I learned from being in Japan and have come to understand with age is the importance of a healthy family. The family is the Practice Hall. I have a certain resistance to artificially created territories to do practice in, when we don’t realize how much territory for practice we have right at hand always.

[In your essay ”Buddhist Anarchism” you added the qualifier “gentle” to the “violance” you felt was occasionally permissible in dealing with the system.] If I were to write it now, I would use far greater caution. I probably wouldn’t use the word “violence” at all. I would say now that the time comes when you set yourself against something, rather than flow with it; that’s also called for. The very use of the word “violence” has implications—we know what they are. I was trying to say that, to be true to Mahayana, you have to act in the world. To act responsibly in the world doesn’t mean that you always stand back and let things happen: you play an active part, which means making choices, running risks, and karmically dirtying your hands to some extent. That’s what the Bodhisattva ideal is all about.

The danger and hope politically is that Western civilization has reached the end of its ecological rope. Right now there is the potential for the growth of a real people’s consciousness—the nub of the problem [is] how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth-energy of modern civilization into a non-acquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature—the revolution of consciousness [can] be won not by guns but by seizing key images, myths, archetypes … so that life won’t seem worth living unless one is on the transforming energy’s side.

It cannot even be begun without the first of the steps on the Eightfold Path, namely Right View. I’ll tell you how I came to hold Right View in this regard, in a really useful way. I’m a fairly practical and handy person; I was brought up on a farm where we learned how to figure things out and fix them. During the first year or two I was at Daitoku-ji Sodo, out back working in the garden, helping put in a little firewood, or firing up the bath, I noticed a number of times little improvements that could be made. Ultimately I ventured to suggest to the head monks some labor- and time-saving techniques. They were tolerant of me for a while. Finally, one day one of them took me aside and said, “We don’t want to do things any better or any faster, because that’s not the point—the point is that you live the whole life. If we speed up the work in the garden, you’ll just have to spend that much more time sitting in the zendo, and your legs will hurt more.” It’s all one meditation. The importance is in the right balance, and not how to save time in one place or another. I’ve turned that insight over and over ever since.

What it comes down to is simply this: If what the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Shoshone, the Hopi, the Christians are suggesting is true, then all of industrial/technological civilization is really on the wrong track, because it’s drive and energy are purely mechanical and self-serving—real values are someplace else. The real values are within nature, family, mind and into liberation. Implicit are the possibilities of a way of living and being which is dialectically harmonious and complexly simple, because that’s the Way. Right Practice, then, is doing the details. And how do we make the choices in our national economic policy that take into account that kind of cost accounting—that ask, “What is the natural/spiritual price we pay for this particular piece of affluence, comfort, pleasure, or labor-saving?” “Spiritual price” means the time at home, time with your family, time that you can meditate, the difference between what comes to your body and mind by walking a mile as against driving (plus the cost of the gas). There’s an accounting that no one has figured out how to do.

The only hope for a society ultimately hell-bent on self-destructive growth is not to deny growth as a mode of being, but to translate it to another level, another dimension. The literalness of that other dimension is indeed going to have to be taught to us by some of these other ways… The change can be hastened, but there are preconditions to doing that which I recognize more clearly now. Nobody can move from Right View to Right Occupation in a vacuum as a solitary individual with any ease at all. The three treasures are Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. In a way the one that we pay least attention to and have the least understanding of is Sangha—community. What have to be built are community networks—not necessarily communes or anything fancy. When people, in a very modest way, are able to define a certain unity of being together, a commitment to staying together for a while, they can begin to correct their use of energy and find a way to be mutually employed. And this, of course, brings commitment to the place, which means right relation to nature.

In actual fact, I’ve lived more in the flux of society on more levels that practically anybody I know. I’ve held employment on all levels of society. I can pride myself on the fact that I worked nine months on a tanker at sea and nobody once ever guessed I had been to college.

I grew up with a sense of identification with the working class. I have lots of experience with this society—always have had and still do. I realize the danger of getting locked into self-justifying groups, which we see all around us. Since I’ve come back to the U.S.—and for the last seven years I’ve lived in rural California—I’ve been able to live and move with all kinds of people, which has been very good for me. A lot of my friends are doing the same. The whole “back to the land” movement, at least in California, at first had the quality of people going off into little enclaves. But the enclaves broke down rapidly as people discovered not only that they would have to but that they would enjoy interacting with their backwoods neighbors. A wonderful exchange of information and pleasure came out of what originally was hostile; each side discovered that they had something to learn from the other. Certain things that at first were taboo have become understood and acceptable.

[“Snyder does not face problems of modern life… His poetry doesn’t answer to the tensions of modern life and depends on a life no longer accessible or even desirable for man.”— Thomas Parkinson, Southern Review] The interesting point is the criticism of my poetry as evoking essentially outmoded values or situations that are not relevant or desirable. It’s complicated to try to defend that. The answer lies in a critique of contemporary society and the clarification of lots of misunderstandings people have about what “primitive” constitutes, and even simpler clarifications about what your grandmother’s life was like. It isn’t really a main thrust in my argument or anyone else’s I know that we should go backward. Whenever you get into this kind of discussion, one of the first things you are charged with from some corner is that, “Well, you want to go backwards.” So you have to answer it over and over again, but still people keep raising it… Jerry Brown asked me the same question in a discussion about three weeks ago; he said, “You’re going against the grain of things all the time, aren’t you?” I said, “It’s only a temporary turbulence I’m setting myself against. I’m in line with the big flow.”

When we talk about a “norm” or a “Dharma,” we’re talking about the grain of things in the larger picture. Living close to the earth, living more simply, living more responsibly, are all quite literally in the grain of things. It’s coming back to us one way or another, like it or not—when the excessive energy supplies are gone. I will stress, and keep stressing, these things, because one of the messages I feel I have to convey—not as a preaching but as a demonstration hidden within poetry—is of deeper harmonies and deeper simplicities, which are essentially sanities, even though they appear irrelevant, impossible, behind us, ahead of us, or right now.

[“The peculiar strength of the technological culture is to be able to make tame commodities out of potentially revolutionary states of consciousness”—Marcuse]. The point by Marcuse that you raised is a real danger. I’m conscious enough of it, but I’m not sure about how one handles it except by being really careful and wary; that’s one of the reasons why I stay out of the media pretty much—maybe a simpleminded way of keeping myself from being prempted or made into a commodity.

I think it’s inevitable that American society move farther and farther away from certain kinds of extreme individualism… The negative side of the spirit of individualism—the “everybody get their own” exploitive side—certainly is no longer appropriate. It can be said to have been in some ways productive when there were enormous quantities of resources available; but it’s counterproductive in a post-frontier society. It’s counterproductive when the important insight for everyone is how to interact appropriately and understand the reciprocity of things, which is the actual model of life on earth—a reciprocal, rather than a competitive, network… We are moving away from Darwinism. As the evolutionary model dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking, henceforth the ecological model will dominate our model of how the world is—reciprocal and interacting rather than competitive.

You’re asking me what is my Buddhist practice? I’ll ask you, “What do you mean by ‘practice’?” — So you’re defining “practice” essentially as a concrete, periodic activity… Periodic, repetitive behavior, to create, re-create, enforce, reinforce certain tendencies, certain potentialities, in the biopsyche. There is another kind of practice, which also is habitual and periodic, but not necessarily as easily or clearly directed by the will: that’s the practice of necessity. We are six-foot-long vertebrates, standing on our hind legs, who have to breathe so many breaths per minute, eat so many BTUs of plant-transformed solar energy per hour, et cetera. I wouldn’t like to separate our mindfulness into two separate categories, one of which is your forty-minute daily ritual, which is “practice,” and the other not practice. Practice simply is one intensification of what is natural and around us all of the time. Practice is to life as poetry is to spoken language. So as poetry is the practice of language, “practice” is the practice of life. But from the enlightened standpoint, all of language is poetry, and all of life is practice. At any time when the attention is there fully, then all of the Bodhisattva’s acts are being done.

I’ve had many teachers who have taught me good practices, good habits. One of the first practices I learned is that when you’re working with another person on a two-person crosscut saw, you never push, you only pull; my father taught me that when I was eight. Another practice I learned early was safety, where to put your feet when you split wood so that the axe won’t glance off and hurt your feet. We all have to learn to change oil on time or we burn out our engines. We have to learn how to cook. By trial and error, but also by attention, it gets better. Another great teaching that I had came from some older men, all of whom were practitioners of a little-known esoteric indigenous Occidental school of mystical practice called mountaineering. It has its own rituals and initiations, which can be very severe. The intention of mountaineering is very detached—it’s not necessarily to get to the top of a mountain or to be a solitary star. Mountaineering is done with teamwork. Part of its joy and delight is in working with two other people on a rope, maybe several ropes together, in great harmony and with great care for each other, your motions related to what everyone else has to do and can do to the point of ascending. The real mysticism of mountaineering is the body/mind practice of moving on a vertical plane in a realm that is totally inhospitable to human beings.

From many people I learned the practice of how to handle your tools, clean them, put them back, how to work together with other men and women; how to work as hard as you can when it’s time for you to work, and how to play together afterwards. I learned this from the people to whom I dedicated my first book, Riprap. I came also to a specific spiritual practice, Buddhism, which has some extraordinary teachings within it. The whole world is practicing together; it is not rare or uncommon for people who are living their lives in the world, doing the things they must do, if they have not been degraded or oppressed, to be fully conscious of the dignity and pride of their life and work. It’s largely the fellaheen oppression and alienation that is laid down on people by certain civilized societies throughout history that breaks up people’s original mind, original wisdom, the sense and sanity of their work and life. From that standpoint, Buddhism, like Christianity, is responding to the alienation of a fragmented society. In doing this, Buddhism developed a sangha [community] which is celibate as a strategy to maintain a certain kind of teaching that in a sense goes against the grain of contemporary civilization, but will not go too much against the grain because it’s a survival matter.

The larger picture is the possibility that humanity has more original mind from the beginning than we think. Part of our practice is not just sitting down and forming useful little groups within the society but, in a real Mahayana way, expanding our sense of what has happened to us all into a realization that natural societies are in themselves communities of practice.

To me, the natural unit of practice is the family. The natural unit of the play of practice is the community. A sangha should mean the community, just as the real Mahayana includes all living beings. There is cause and consequence. On one level, Theravadin Buddhism says, “Life is suffering, and we must get out of the Wheel”—that’s position of cause. But from position of consequence we can say, “The life cycle of creation is endless. We watch the seasons come and go, life into life forever. The child becomes the parent, who then becomes our respected elder. Life, so sacred; it is good to be a part of it all.” That’s an American Indian statement that also happens to be the most illuminated statement from the far end of Buddhism, which does not see an alienated world that we must strive to get out of, but a realized world, in which we know that all plays a part.

Some people don’t have to do a hundred thousand prostrations, because they do them day by day in work with their hands and bodies. All over the world there are people who are doing their sitting while they fix the machinery, while they plant the grain, or while they tend the horses. And they know it; it’s not unconscious. Everybody is equally smart and equally alive.

Where I am, we love occasions to come together. We have a little more time now that we’ve gotten some of our main water system, fence building, and house building done; we now have the chance to sit together, dance together, and sing together more often.

from  The Gary Snyder Reader

Counterpoint   Washington, D.C.   2000 

Dan  Bern

I  Am  the  Messiah

When I tell you that I love you don't test my love
Accept my love, don't test my love
'Cause maybe I don't love you all that much
Don't ask what kind of music I'm gonna play tonight
Just stay a while, hear for yourself a while

And if you must put me in a box, make sure it's a big box
With lots of windows and a door to walk through
And a nice high chimney so we can burn, burn, burn
Everything that we don't like
And watch the ashes fly up to Heaven
Maybe all the way to India, I'd like that

All the ancient kings came to my door
They said, "Do you want to be an ancient king too?"
I said, "Oh yes, very much, but I think my timing's wrong"
They said, "Time is relative or did you misread Einstein?"
I said, "Do you really mean it?"
They said, "What do you think we come here for
Our goddamn health or something?"

Everybody's waiting for the Messiah, the Jews are waiting
Christians are waiting, also the Muslims
It's like everybody's waiting, they've been waiting a long time
I know how I hate to wait like even for a bus or something
An important phone call so I can just imagine
How darned impatient everybody must be getting

So I think it's time now, time to reveal myself
I am the Messiah, I am the Messiah
Yes, I think you heard me right, I am the Messiah

I was gonna wait till next year, build up the suspense a little
Make it a really big surprise but I could not resist
It's like when you got a really big secret
You're just bursting to tell someone
It was sort like that with this
And now that I've told you, I feel this great weight lifted

Dr. Nusbaum was right, he's my therapist

He said get it out in the open

I spent ten whole days in Jerusalem, mmm Jerusalem
Sweet Jerusalem and all I ate was olives, nothing but olives
Mountains of olives, it was a good ten days
I like olives, I like you too

So when I tell you that I love you don't test my love
Accept my love, don't test my love
'Cause maybe I don't love you all that much

danbern.com