Lots going on

One last look at the farm, which is showing signs of neglect already after only a few weeks. 

Bees, rodents and reptiles appreciate the sudden quiet and shady growth. 

Here's a photo retrospective, if you like. 

I'm camping out here this week, using Tessa the Teardrop, while trying to knock back the jungle a bit, mostly to make a firebreak for the neighbors. 

 

There are already serious fires nearby, and it's not even June yet, so getting some vegetation dropped before it dries out standing is an appropriate activity.

All the old people we knew have died off and we were the last of our generation along this road. The lot will be sold as is, hopefully to someone who would be willing to raze the hazardous house and start over. A number of homes in the area have gone that route; others have been patiently reconstructed. 

At our new (urban) location, there are some twenty very young fruit trees and three garden beds.

Fencing on the east side of beds to keep out deer and admit watering, shades above and to the west to prevent sunburn to the plants.

 

I'm not sure if I'll hang on to my canning jars; the spirit being willing but the flesh weakening at a pretty good clip. I may just harvest fruit, choose some for eating fresh, and set the rest out by the street as free boxes. It's a kindly neighborhood and has a tradition of doing such.

The new hut is not as pretty as the old hut:

 

However, it has the basics. I can eat and nap there, and also start garden seeds in flats.

Yesterday, from the hut window, I spotted a Cooper's hawk diving into the alley. It reappeared, settling on a power line, holding a stunned garter snake. A scrub jay flew over, parked within a couple of feet of the hawk, and clearly was talking to it, bobbing obsequiously, as much as to say, "you gonna eat all of that?" The hawk lifted its wings and made off to a distant walnut tree to eat in peace.

Sometimes we are the hawk; sometimes we are the scrub jay, and sometimes we are the snake.  Sometimes we are the suddenly snakeless grass.

Oh, yes, lots going on.

Over the mountain hut
winds blow off
the yellow-tinted leaves. 

 

-- Zen Forest tr. Soiku Shigematsu

Time flies free

 This is a post by Rev. Jundo Cohen from the Treeleaf bulletin board, republished here by permission. It is about the interpenetration of mortality and eternity, and interprets Dogen's fascicle on Being/Time.

What time is it?

Looking in the mirror, my grandfather's face stares back at me. My hair is whiter with each day, my cheeks are rough and sunken. I cannot run as fast as I did just awhile ago. The children, come to us late in life, are now grown, or nearly so. Calculating in my head (no longer as sharp), my remaining years are few at best. "Time waits for no one, flies like an arrow, sands through the hour-glass, passes with a candle flicker," and all that. Even the Buddha grew old, grew feeble, became cold ashes. He found no way to halt his own body's aging.

The Buddha could not halt aging. However, fortunately, the Buddha found the trick to halt time.

Not only halt it, but also (as later Zen masters like Master Dogen further elucidated) slow it, reverse it, make it speed up and twirl around, cause it to flow backwards, ultimately to vanish. The Buddha and Masters found something beyond aging and illness too, even death itself.

Hard to believe? And how did Buddha and Dogen grow old and die, yet were free of time, of dying too ... all at the same time?

What I claim might sound like some mystical power, a violation of the laws of physics, of common sense, impossible to achieve.

I assure you that it is all quite real.

Oh, I am not speaking of sorcery, nor a magic incantation to make the world spin backwards, wishes to a genie, secret military tech to travel faster than light. I do not mean a time machine from an H.G. Wells tale, nor have I gone mad.

Rather, it is just a matter of fresh attitudes, of changed perspectives, of new ways to count the minutes and seconds, to divide life (or, better, to stop dividing life), creative ways to see. These abilities derive from changes of heart, mind-altering insights, very literally from quieting the temporal regions of the brain so that we experience time differently, leading to our mentally substituting new inner models of time's flowing (and lack thereof) for the old. Zen practice, the stillness and silence of Zazen, opens these doors.

I think that most people have had moments when they have experienced such states to greater or lesser degree: How time grows slow when we are children waiting for the recess bell, then fast as the end of summer vacation draws near. Looking at a sunrise, or a new baby's smile, we might sense something truly infinite, timeless. Remembering our roots, our ancestors, we may feel intimately connected to the past, as if the past is still present in some way. Holding our children and grandchildren, we know our part in the future.

But I am speaking of something stronger than any of that, longer lasting abilities we can train to summon at will, to taste whenever we wish. It is a skill like any skill, learned talents that are among the fruits of this "goalless, nothing to attain" Zen practice. We can be emancipated from time, also from time's goals and push to attain. No, not from the wrinkles, the nights and days, the grave which calls ... but from concern for time, from seeing it as only slipping away.

It is hard to describe, but I will do my best. Words fail miserably in such things. Nor is this about just a single way of knowing. Rather, I would indicate a collection of ways of knowing time, some quite contradictory when described, any or all of which can be reached for as needed, like tools in a clockmaker's toolbox.

Master Dogen, our Soto Zen non-clockmaker, wrote of such time(s) ... and timeless suchness too ... in his old-time masterpiece, entitled "Being-Time." He spoke there of everybody, every thing, being in its own time, of all our times blending together yet being their own precious individual thing-moment too, of there being something timeless which encompasses it all. Hundreds of years before Einstein made “relative time” a household world, Dogen spoke of each of us, and all things, existing in our own vibrant being-time, connected to the being-time of all other beings and things in this vast, fluid universe. Why is this important? Because it allows us to see the amazing, syncopated, backward-forward, moving-still, timeless-time of this whole life-world where we temporarily find ourselves alive. It also frees us from simply witnessing time as an unstoppable flood in which our youth turns to old age, time passes quickly, life becomes death, and all is nothing but change. The Buddha taught that all composite things are impermanent and ever changing, but he also taught a way beyond all things and change. If I may quote from my own book, "The Zen Master's Dance" (please read it when you have time ), Dogen declared:

For the time being this staff or whisk here held, being-time.
For the time being a pillar or lantern, being-time.
For the time being the children of common families ... being-time.
For the time being the earth and sky, being-time.
In this word “being-time,” time is already just being, and all being is time.

We have our "common sense" measures of time, taking time for granted. However, it need not be only so:

We should come to know in this way that there are myriads
of forms of things, hundreds of blades of grasses
through the earth, and that each blade of grass and each
single appearance is not apart from the entire earth. ... And when
we arrive in the field of the ineffable, there is not but one
blade of grass and one appearance here and now. Whether
there is understanding of this phenomenon or no understanding
of this phenomenon, whether there is understanding
of things or no understanding of things, all is
only this exact moment. Since there is nothing but just
this moment, the time-being is all the time there is. All
moments of being-time are just the whole of time, as all
existent things are time too. The whole universe exists in
individual moments of time, and each moment contains
all existences and all worlds. Reflect now whether any
being or any world or the whole universe is left out of the
present moment of time.

He continues, speaking to us from so long ago:

So, we should not understand only that time flies by.
We should not feel that “flying” is time’s only ability. For if we
just let time fly away, separations from and in it might appear.
Those who fail to experience and grasp the truth of
being-time do so because they only understand time as something that passes.
Ultimately all existences are linked and become time.
Everything that exists throughout the whole universe is
lined up in a series of all individual moments, and at the
same time is each and all time. Because all moments are
being-time [and you are being-time], they are your being-time.
And because time has the nature of flowing, today flows
into tomorrow while today flows into yesterday, all as yesterday
flows into today, today flows into today, and tomorrow
flows into tomorrow.

Finally:

We should not just feel that the passage of time from one
moment to the next is like the movement from east to west
of the wind or a rainstorm. The whole universe is not
unmoving, for all is moving and changing, and the universe
is flowing from one moment to the next. An example
of such a moment-by-moment passing of time is the spring.
The spring has countless aspects arrayed as what we call
“the passage of time.” ... [Yet] because spring
embodies the momentary passing of time, passing time is
being realized and actualized in each present moment of
springtime here and now. The flowing of time occurs by
spring, thus the flowing is completed and brought to fruition
in just this moment of spring.

Dogen's poetic images may be hard to fathom. Let me summarize and bring them down to earth, hopefully not to waste your time:

One can feel, for example, that each moment is whole and complete, as if it holds all time, as if it is timeless with no before or after. It is a wonderful experience, good to know when we worry that this moment will slip away. Nothing slips away, even as time keeps passing, for this moment with no before or after, becomes this next moment with no before or after, then the next and next, each with no before or after ... and not a drop lacking from any one. There is no other moment, nor better moment, than this.

That is so even as, in our ordinary experiencing, time passes, and sometimes brings along so many moments we do wish were otherwise. Though we wish sometimes that they were otherwise, moments of sickness are just moments of sickness, times of loss just times of loss, days of sadness are simply days of sadness ... and all of life is fully life. Our heart flows with acceptance even as, in another chamber of our heart, beating as one, we wish it were not so, and that the times of suffering would never come or quickly pass. Each instant is, in its own way, a shining jewel on the bracelet of life. And, no less, so are the times of health, winning and happiness that we naturally welcome more. Our Zen practice teaches us to welcome all of it, letting each day be that day, welcoming even the hard and terribly ugly parts we do not welcome at all.

And though we might regret the past, feeling still the scars of long ago pain, or we may long for the past and something or somebody now lost, we learn to bow to the past, letting the past just be the past. We honor the past, then let it go, living on from now and here.

Likewise, though we may fear for the future, plan for the future, hold some dream for the future, we learn to grip things lightly and let the future be too. Oh, we take our medicine, work our plan, pursue practical steps to stay healthy and safe. Even so, deep down, we let what will happen happen too. If our health does not return, our project collapses, the whole world comes to an end ... the wisdom within us will flow with it all somehow.

We also sense that the whole world is connected, all things are connected, all times are really one, and all times are each other too. Much as the bird above is merely the fish flying in the sky, while the fish is but the bird in other guise swimming in the sea, tomorrow is yesterday become tomorrow, and right now is tomorrow right here. In fact, it is all now now now ... for yesterday is now as it was then, and Friday is yesterday-now as it will be on Friday. But all is also yesterday yesterday yesterday ... for now is just yesterday posing as now, and Friday is Friday on Friday too. And all is tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow no less, for they are all the same. Realizing so is powerful medicine for our usual sense that all things are separate, conflicting, broken in the world. Nothing is broken when known as the flowing whole. In the flowing, there is this which is wholly stillness yet flowing.

For time flows from today to tomorrow, but also (felt Dogen and those who share his visions) tomorrow flows into today and today into yesterday. In fact, each moment fully holds within all the future and all the past, plus embodies every other moment ... and is just flowing flowing flowing. There is also a face beyond measures of time, beyond all coming and going (thus free even of birth and death), and such is also fully present in each and every twist and change. Thus, to the wise, even moments of passing and death are also free of passing and death. Dogen said that when death comes, let it come, dive right in. He's now gone, but has he truly gone at all?

The famous Zen challenge, inscribed on the wooden Han clock in the temple, alerts us:

Life and Death are the Great Matter;
Time swiftly passes by like an arrow;
Thus, we should strive to awaken;
Do not squander this life.

It is timely advice.

How many of us waste this life, chasing unhealthy desires, caught by anger and revenge, pursuing false treasures and temporary pleasures, all to realize too quickly that the years have gone. Instead, learn to appreciate this moment and the next, all that life brings. Live gently, be kind. Learn to appreciate what is in your life, without running heedless in search of another. Oh, sometimes we must run from fire, from tigers, from wars ... but even in running, see if you can sense the stillness within.

For you see: What we awaken to, the resolution of this Great Matter, is the rediscovery that time is both flowing and still all at once, free of passing even as the clock ticks and the calendar pages are turned. The arrow is always flying and hitting the target at once. There is nothing in need of striving for, no swift or slow. Not a moment, not one drop, is ever squandered ... nor are we confined even within borders of life and death. That being so, live well, live wisely ... keep moving.

It is hard to express.

Better, please sit Zazen, and taste all these time(s) and timeless in each sitting moment.

Gassho, J

 

A droplet amid the rain

"The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly." -- Wikipedia

 You know the commons when you see it. 

Rain is falling on "your" garden, where it becomes "your" water, and from the corner of your eye, you see a hummingbird zip in and snatch a droplet from the air. Secure in the knowledge that there is enough, this rain that you share, you admire the hummingbird and feel no grudge arising in your gullet. Rather, you feel at one with the hummingbird.

It's a little tougher to acknowledge this when you discover that a pocket gopher has shared in the commons of the beets at your feet. Perhaps you think of ways, some violent, some less so, of preventing more such sharing. 😅 To hoard is human; we're not the only species that does that, but we're certainly special in a way that's nothing to be proud of, I think.

Use of force, whether warfare or simple privatization, is enclosure. Usually it can be described as class warfare over the commons, wherein those who have styled themselves as an "upper" class forcibly exclude others from resources. Disinformation is the barbed wire with which the few fence off knowledge from the many, in order to commodify resources once held in common or in equitable distribution.

Much of what we think of as religion is enclosure; some of us have a god or gods to whom we offer prayers in the form of special pleading for the fruits of a prosperity gospel. "Give to me grapes, milk and honey, to show these Canaanites they worship false gods," we say, and feel justified in displacing the Canaanites from the lands they have cultivated. Prosperity epistemology, prosperity ontology, above all prosperity teleology, with big box stores to provide us with ever more fencing and locked gates. 

Centralization/industrialization is enclosure; where once villages of weavers stood, utilizing local wool, a wagon came to carry away baled wool to a mill on a river, and the very gravity (a commons) that made the river sing is enclosed in the wheel to drive enclosed looms attended by enclosed workers to create enclosed clothing for sale in enclosed shops.

And there is, seemingly, never an end to the complexification that ensues. The crofter's looms were but a livelihood, whereas the mill on the river is a profit to an encloser, but not enough (never enough), so that then the wool must go overseas to a windowless enclosed room with enclosed humming machines attended by other machines with enclosed (prorietary) software, to make products to be shipped back overseas and sold (enclosed).

And so it goes. 

For now.

Meanwhile some of us rediscover some irreducible commons in various places. 

It's cheap to sit staring at a wall.

Bodhidharma is said to have said:

Those who turn from delusion back to reality, who meditate on walls, the absence of self and other, the oneness of mortal and sage, and who remain unmoved even by scriptures are in complete and unspoken agreement with reason. -- Two Entrances and Four Practices

I've mentioned my difficulty in sitting facing a wall. Well, I can sit "reclined." My current practice wall is the ceiling.

Sometimes this sitting provides an opportunity for attentive chanting, or for visualizing taking and sending of suffering. This is because practice is not enclosed; it's for the benefit of all. Otherwise why bother? I can calm myself down or lower my blood pressure by artificial means which are probably more efficient than "practice."

But the air I breathe is a commons, as is the light entering the room. Everywhere there are ceilings; those of us who are lying down at home may study them. Those who are lying in ambulances may regard them. Those who lie in hospital beds or return home to hospice may take note of them. At last, there may be a ceiling within a grave; the body resting there does not, perhaps, take note of such a ceiling, but there is a sense in which it is indeed a commons.

The enclosers will charge for the beds, the doctors, and the grave, and certainly for all the ceilings, but for them the view of the ceiling is an intangible; its value has eluded them. It will always elude them, I think.

So, it's there for you to harvest. 

 

Take it as your fair share, as you might take a droplet amid the rain.

Little sips can be very tasty

I'm surprised by the number of my friends and acquaintances who have not encountered the term "Occam's Razor," which to me is like the base from which we should conduct our explorations. It's often used in science, but often also warned against in science discourse, partly because the whole principle includes an escape clause which is sometimes forgotten.

Duns Scotus formulated it thus: Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate. "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." It's the "beyond necessity" that disappears from detractors' versions of the formulation, a bit of a "straw man" dodge. 

I think it's a strong principle.

Aristotle sought to find the lowest common denominator in his search for first principles from which to build arguments: "We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses." Galileo found it so, as did Newton. 

"Necessity" does arise in physics from time to time, as when Einstein outperforms Newton on gravity calculations, something useful to know about when doing orbital mechanics. But the differences between their results are so small that as a rule of thumb we may continue to use Newton in daily life, even the daily life of construction engineers and airline pilots.

In popular culture, our Occam par excellence is Sherlock Holmes. In pursuit of his quarry, Holmes gleefully abandons complex explanations in favor of simple ones, not because the simple is always true, but because the complex is apt to be loaded up with irrelevancies, thereby likely wasting effort: "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Stripping away specious explanatory principles improves his chances of arriving at an explanation that correctly describes what actually happened.

Society is struggling right now with a cornucopia of misinformation and disinformation. In fact, we're losing, and are most likely entering a period of unprecedented suffering brought on by a will to power, the primary weapon of which might be called a will to ignorance. 

Buddhism says we are subject to three poisons in our social setting (for our purpose they pretty much require the presence of others to be venemous): greed, anger and ignorance. Anger and ignorance are regularly fomented in service of greed.

Complex, or rather falsified, explanations are mustered to overcome knowledge in service of greed. Where someone has been duped by the greedy with such explanations, we have misinformation. The misinformed more easily harbor racism, sexism, anti-semitism, trans- "phobia," science denial, and the like, and can be recruited, wholeheartedly and with the belief that they are doing good, into campaigns against the commons, in the form of democratic elections, public health, public education, libraries and more, all of which may tend to equip us to resist the greedy.

Disinformation is the misinformation which is knowingly propagated by the greedy to foment ignorance and anger, so as to create and direct mobs -- armies that can serve as the shock troops -- in informal warfare to serve a will to power, the will of the greedy whose aim is rule in service of their greed.

Even those who recognize the caveat of "beyond necessity" may attack the razor for its imprecision. Such may have thoughts along these lines: "Occam has an out and therefore cannot be entirely trusted as it stands, hence it is misinformation and therefore its choice of theory is ultimately no better than the alternatives." This can be a reason why disinformers remain entirely within their comfort zones while laying waste to whole realms of the commons.

But it's not the micro-scale accuracy of our tools of inquiry that concerns humanity here. It's the motivation behind the uses to which they are put. We don't simply seek to know; we seek to know for benefit, and the majority (rightly, I submit) seek to benefit the many rather than the few.

When Buddha intuited that there is no permanent soul of the individual, he was applying something like Occam's razor. Dependent origination is for him the simple ontological explanation of existence, as opposed to a more complex and less demonstrable dualism, and gives rise to his four truths.

Buddhism does have an ethical position, but it's maybe hard to describe because we are used to prescriptives. The default Buddhist ethic is non-prescriptive. 

Buddha said "come, monk" to anyone who showed up. And then there was a knowledge commons. But whenever anyone took an action that was outside that bubble of right action arising from right view, he found it necessary to proscribe such actions in future, and from this arose the precepts.

Well and good; the precepts are a magnificent set of "skillful means." But Buddha and Occam both appreciate simple adherence to first principles, and at the center of first principles, I think, there is something like a still point.

When I sit zazen I don't shop. 

If I'm not shopping, I'm not under the influence of advertising. Therefore the ontological parsimony of sitting zazen resists the illusions promoted by the greedy, and by extension may be said to be resistance to fascism.

 

Here is my current zazen, in progress.

This is zero-gravity-chair-zazen, practically-reclining-in-bed zazen, very-intermittent zazen. 😁

Some might object that this cannot be zazen on the grounds that I'm not sitting up straight. Some might also object to it on the grounds that I'm probably only really doing it for a few moments at a time, rather than the full half hour of most of the Zoom zazen periods I attend. I'm just not up to much, as I've been deteriorating for some time. 

The doctors tell me they've finally located the problem, which is leukemia. I'm not in much pain, but I'm definitely sort of weak and woozy as a regular thing, so I've adapted my zazen accordingly. In like case, such as Long Covid, others may do the same. The important thing, as any Zen teacher will tell you, is not to be doing much.

The goalless goal, I think, for anyone interested in ontology at least, is to not be fooled. I admire those who aren't fooled for a whole half-hour at a time. I like to think I've been there and done that. If such practice is in the rear view mirror, though, I can at least, for the time being, be not fooled in little sips. 

Do you know the story of the tigers and the strawberry? Little sips can be very tasty.