Houses of words

We build houses out of the words we believe so that we made hide inside them safe from the unknown, safe from the uncomfortable, safe from the threatening, safe from the questioning, safe from exposing our utter nakedness and want of coherence in the presence of a universe so vast that we cannot encompass it or comprehend it. “God” you utter and yet another brick is forced into place shielding you from all that you would keep outside. You offer me this brick and I have no idea what to do with it.

Have some regard

Have some regard for anyone who has loved you in this life, for each has loved you as best they may within the limits of who they are; and you, within your limits, have loved them too, each and every one - at least for a while, at least for a season.

Just maybe you might feel the same too?

Why I am a unitarian*:

Because of the connectedness that underlies all things.

Because of the inseparability of the material and the divine.

Because seeking and not knowing is the path.

Because all paths are as one path.

Because of the partiality of any understanding.

Because of the inexpressibility of the truth.

Because of the life-light that burns through all people.

Because of the understanding that goes beyond words.

Because of the peace that passes all understanding.

Because of the temporarily of the self.

Because of the temporarily of humanity.

"We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically" Carl Sagan

http://bit.ly/cDZhrY

 * unitarian with a small capital, not Unitarian with large one, because the word denotes a way of seeing our place in the universe and not the membership of a particular faith group - as admirable, or otherwise, as their beliefs may be.

From your first breath to your last

From your first breath to your last you will vie with the complexities of living; the multi-role-playing, many faceted torrent of each day pouring through you, like it or not. Staring blankly at a wall will not free you from this, nor from the obligations that it will trust upon you. But it was this torrent of meaning suffused life that brought you to the threshold of Zen, even for those born into traditional Buddhist societies.

It is in the dynamic tension between intelligent engagement with the everyday and meditative detachment that the path of growth lies. Each should inform the other; a dialogue between meaning and silence in which neither has the last word. Empty headed wall-staring is, ultimately, nothing more than self-indulgence - I would take a stick to anybody so obsessed.

Now get dressed again!

Although, in Western terms, ultimately Heraclitan, the no-self of Buddhism points to the impermanence and transience of all that may be experienced - even the qualia of your sense experience can vary depending on your state of health, or as an effect of taking psycho-active substances; or, for that matter, the impermanence of conciousness it self, which can be turned on or off by accident, as in coma, or by the use of anaesthesia; or can be fractured into the unintelligible kaleidoscope and meaninglessness of dementia.

But it may also get you to dig deeper, to see the whole “you” package as no more than a temporary phase that is to be passed through, perhaps to be replaced by another “you” at some other time or place. This is in part a mind-trick that in Buddhism lends plausibility to the doctrine of re-incarnation - but beware, it is a mind trick. 

So, strip away everything until your Buddha-nature stands naked – but then know that Buddha-nature is also an illusion.

No-mind is in itself just as phantasmal as mind.

Now, having totally undressed yourself and discovered that you are not your cloths, get dressed again.

Some Buddhist Scatterings

How can we be compassionate if we have never known suffering?
How can we help others if we have not known joy?

If we do not radiate joy others do not take light. We are the light in their darkness as they are the light in ours.

Your time is meditation is not an end in itself. Nor is it there just to enrich you.

The tranquillity of detachment is only meaningful in the context of passionate engagement. Passionate engagement is only meaningful against the background of the tranquillity of detachment. Each feeds the other in a virtuous spiral.

Realms of rebirth? Reincarnations? Who's fantasies are these?

Are Prayer and Meditation the same?

Mostly we are caught in the web of the now, neither looking inwards nor outwards, but only at our everyday, our nexus of survival and coping that we take to be the all that there is. However, there are two vast traditions both of which call us away from our addiction with being us, from being obsessed  with being ourselves, being obsessed with our locus operandi, with the stuff of our day-to-day. 

Prayer looks outwards. It is address to something incomprehensibility greater, stronger and more permanent than the frail, mortal, leaf in the wind that we are.To pray is to submit to that oceanic vastness and its forces that encompasses everything we shall ever know and everything that lies beyond what we can ever know. To pray is to know that you are but the smallest dot on the smallest sheet of paper blown across a dessert of unimaginable vastness. To pray it to yield to the all. 

Prayer is often more easy for those who have been broken by life, who, being full of wishes to open their heart and wounds to that ineffableness, to that vastness, find its all encompassing embrace a powerful source to draw what succour they can from; or who, seeking no remission, abandon themselves within it or, at times, seek no more than to know their insignificance and frailty by contrast to its implacableness. 

Meditation looks inwards. It address nothing. It is the turning down of the volume of the self until a point of no-motion is reached and the self and its cares and worries dissolve. There, in the peace that passes all understanding, refuge is found.

Zen in the art of feeling

Emotions are strong, powerful beings; they are bigger than us; they extend out beyond us and fold us into the world; they are the ropes that hold us in place, the glues that bond us together, the thermostats and gauges by which we experience our well-being, or lack of it. Without them we would only be half alive soliptical zombies, or even automatons. What point would there be in life if you never wished to dance with joy? Never knew excitement, anticipation, longing, love, grief, loss or any and all of the other pantheon of emotions? They very much are just such a stuff as life is made out of.

The point is to know them for what they are. To let them be an honest part of your life. To let them flow through you like the natural streams that they are, not to dam them up, divert them, trap them or let them become foetid and stagnant. It is the psycho-dramas that we play that diverts them and which can make them so destructive. (At this point think of R D Lang or of CBT, and such like.)

Imagine your emotions as a wild horse upon which you must ride. You can just cling on, suffer and be carried where they will take you, or master the horse, tame it, make a friend of it, harness its energies and develop a harmonious relationship with it. You care for and nurture your emotions much as you would any other animal which you have. It is a life long companion that will carry you well, even through the heat of battle or on long and perilous journeys. Your emotions are your allies - let them not be your masters.

The point of much meditation is to observe yourself as a rider. This you can only do when you learn to quieten the incessant head chatter, the fleeting psychodramas, the pseudo images of self. Then you can let go of all of that and simply be. Only when you can sit, purposeless and quiet, that can you begin to learn. It is like developing a good seat in ridding so that you sit naturally and balanced and in a harmonious way with your horse. In this case the horse happens to be yourself.

A good rider is a good companion to ride with. A poor rider is a liability, or even a danger, to themselves and to others. They are not fun to ride with. They would be disastrous to undertake a journey with.

Zazen, or Zen style meditation, sometime call whole-hearted sitting, is a counterbalance to action. It is where one learns to sit well on one's own being, so that when faced with action you do not become unseated. It is the schooling ring where you master the seat that will enable you to ride through anything.

Traditionally many Samurai warriors would practice Zen because it gave them the supper clear mind with which they could face whatever their bonds of duty demanded of them. Likewise the taiko drummers practice zazen to give them the clarity of mind needed to perform. Good zazen lead to clear minded, and therefore more effective, living. It is no accident that great art, music, drama, sporting achievement or intellectual attainment all require a clear mind.

More about Penal Substitution

The doctrinal emphasis on the idea of penal substitution that so typifies Western Christianity may date from about 1100 – 1200 CE, that is following the Great Schism of 1054 CE. That schism allowed Western Christianity to develop along different theological lines to the Eastern traditions. The idea of penal substitution does occur before, but is is not doctrinally central. In the Eastern traditions it has never gained much adherence. The schism provided extra impetus for an overhaul of the Western traditions, an impetus that may have started with the Cluniac reforms. Church beliefs and practices were de-Paganised (the period 500 – 1000 CE can be thought as one of Paganistic-Christianity in Western Europe), Marianism was fostered and a much more penitential, lapsarian doctrine espoused.

The Reformation developed the emphasis on penal substitution further, especially in the light of 'original sin' and its lapsarian consequences. This is particularly clear in the works of John Calvin. Modern fundamentalist beliefs seem to be more in tune with Calvin's developments than with the beliefs of the early church or of the traditions of Eastern Christianity.

Traditionally Unitarian thinking (both post-Reformation and Early Christian) denied the divinity of Jesus, seeing him as fully human. The resurrection often being seen as metaphorical and spiritual, not physical. The story of Jesus being seen as a metaphor for all human suffering and its spiritual transcendence, something only fully possible if Jesus was purely human. For Unitarians it was Jesus's humanity, not his substitution, that gave the Passion its special relevance.

Is Unitarianism a somewhat Islamic view of Jesus? Why not? It would not alter one word of the Gospels, simply the way in which you see them. Perhaps it is no accident that modern Unitarianism arose first in Transylvania, an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire and subject to considerable Islamic influence and thought.

Messiahs, canons, penal substitution & the formation of orthodoxies.

Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of the Gospels, may have lived and died sometime during the period 10 BCE to 20 or 30 CE. It was not until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, three centuries later, that an agreed creed confirming the triune interpretation was established, and not until the Synod of Hippo in 393 CE that the biblical cannon of the New Testament was agreed - some three and a half centuries after the events that they purport to record. (Not exactly contemporaneous recording!) During the intervening period many differing interpretations and versions of “the life of Jesus” and its significance competed with each other, ranging from those that identified Jesus as fully divine to those that identified him as fully human, from those who saw the teachings in the light of lapsarian and eschatological thought and those who took them to be more immanentist or gnostic.

It should also be born in mind that the loosing sides in the many disagreements and debates during this formative age would run the risk of being declared 'heretical' and would be in considerable danger. A fact which may have lead to the destruction of many alternative gospels and other writings. In these theological battles of the early church the winner took all and and all evidence of the loser's thought was expurgated.

The writers and subsequent editors and translators of the competing gospels and other writings went to some lengths to tie in the stories they were telling with the Jewish belief in a messiah. There was a need in marrying the two halves of the evolving bible, the Jewish written Old Testament and the new writings of the New Testament – to make the new mesh in with the old. The messiah was the bridge that allowed that linkage to be made.

With regard to the doctrine of penal substitution, it might be interesting and informative to consider the influence of both Zoroastrian and of Pagan belief on its development; Zoroastrian belief being millennial and dualistic and Pagan being sacrificial and resurrectional (the enactment of death to create re-birth and regeneration, often the death and subsequent resurrection of a god or demi-god, or of their human incarnations or substitutes).

Judaism may well be the father of Christianity, but Paganism is the mother and Zoroastrianism its great uncle.

The challenge of polarity

Polarity has always been a theological challenge to monotheism. In attempting to make the deity universal, that is to be all encompassing, the deity becomes just as strongly identified with all that is harmful, destructive, negative, "evil", or repulsive as with all that is constructive, positive, healing, "good" or attractive. An omnipotent and omnipresent god is equally good and bad, equally loving and hating, equally constructive and destructive. If not, then they are not omnipotent and omnipresent.

Watching the apologists for monotheism attempting to salvage a “loving” god from that paradox is interesting. 

The Zoroastrians did so by having two opposed deities and life as a battle ground between the two. It is likely that the Jews incorporated this into their theology during their exile in Babylon, only in a lop sided way, with their “God” on the side of goodness and, as a result of the fall, “Satan” leading the opposing team. In time the resultant lapsarian theology has become much more pronounced in many forms of Christianity than in Judaism or Islam, but is implicit in them all.

That is the problem with calling things “God” - they inflate into monsters who run eternal concentration camps called “hell”.

But why go down the route of using a noun? Why not a verb? Why not “godness” rather than “god”? Why not a quality that things can possess, a bit like a static electric charge, but which can not exist independent? That is the approach taken by Shinto. Kami are a quality possessed by things, not something that exists independently. They are not universal, nor are claims made about their being omnipotent nor omnipresent, but we all know the tangibleness of special places that fill us with senses of wonder, or of peace, or of calm, places that move us. They do indeed seem charged with something indefinable.

The Impenetrable Wall

The unanswerables due to ineffability:

1. Whether god exists or not
2. Whether god is one or many
3. Whether god is permanent, impermanent or intermittent
4. Whether god is universal or local
5. Whether god is male or female, or neither, or both
6. Whether god is concious or unconscious, sentient or insentient, cognisant or uncognisant
7. Whether god is anthropomorphic or alien
8. Whether god has any intentions or what those intentions are
9. What god may or may not think or believe, want or wish
10. Whether you can or cannot communicate with god
11. Whether your beliefs about god are true or untrue

Ineffability implies incomprehensibility: that is the impenetrable wall.

There are experiences that we can have when confronting that wall, and, yes, I feel it is important to confront that wall.Those experiences can sometimes be given names like “god”, like “the peace that passes all understanding”, like “touching the divine”, like “being in the presence”, like “being touched by god”, like “seeing the light” …; these experiences are very real and can be important to our spiritual growth, but they can lead to many delusions.

Interestingly, people tend to interpret such experiences in terms of their culture, Christians in a Christian way, Muslims in an Islamic way, Hindu in a Hindu way, Buddhists in a Buddhist way, and so on. Such experiences are taken as a confirmation of the ontology of their respective weltanschauung. Thus in monotheistic cultures they are often taken as confirmation of the existence of a deity.

"Our intense need to understand will always be a powerful stumbling block to our attempts to reach God in simple love [...] and must always be overcome. For if you do not overcome this need to understand, it will undermine your quest. It will replace the darkness which you have pierced to reach God with clear images of something which, however good, however beautiful, however Godlike, is not God." 

The Cloud of Unknowing

And I would suggest that even the word “god” can be one such stumbling block, one such attempt to explain experiences in terms of a familiar culture. 

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_unanswerable_questions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffability

If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.

So you have dealt with the illusion of the everyday self and have created the "ghost in the machine", your escape pod, discovered the Buddha within, found your real nature. Now you need to destroy that illusion, that Buddha Nature, and wake up.

The Twin Illusions

Some speak of “absolute or divine consciousness” as opposed to “everyday consciousness”, or some such terms, suggesting that our routine states of mind are not fully real, that the state of consciousness we experience in meditation is somehow more so, that our everyday is no more than an illusion. This thinking is so much a part of the ways of seeing our human predicament intrinsic of in the traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism, amongst others faiths, and now absorbed into the New Age and other “think” of our Western mind.

However, I wonder, in the light of our modern scientific insights into the brain, whether it is these traditionally described states of mind that are not the real illusion, the real misconception, the real misunderstanding. The distinction between the “illusionary” nature of everyday life and the deeper “reality” of the meditative mind being no more than that between “background consciousness” and “foreground consciousness”; the trick of meditation being no more than learning to avoid higher level excitation of the brain whilst allowing, or even boosting, lower level excitation, thus experiencing the “background” state without its being masked by the foreground “noise” of higher level activity. A state that may we be very pleasurable and may lead to increased levels in the brain of those chemicals that lead to feeling of well-being, happiness, confidence, euphoria or even ecstasy, and which may therefore be taken as being more “real” in some sense.

In such brain states one may well believe that one is experiencing “oneness with everything”, or “unity with the divine”, or “being in the presence of God” or … ; well, that will depend on which discourse tradition you subscribe to as to how you will describe it. But, I am sorry to report, the meditative state may be no more “real” than the everyday state, just as much an “illusion”, but a grand illusion as opposed to a collection of petty illusions of the everyday.

Being carried away by the power of the experience of the meditative state can lead being deceived into believing in that grand-illusion every bit as much as you were originally deceived into believing in the petty-illusions. I suspect that part of understanding the “middle-way” is to learn that both polls, clinging to the petty-illusions of the the everyday state or clinging to the grand-illusion of the the meditative state are mistaken. In the end you are reduced to the ground of just being, no more, no less

Perhaps that is why so many Zen masters have resorted to hitting their pupils in order to force them to recognise their ground-state, to liberate them from the twin illusions.

An Ultimately Heraclitan Buddha

Although ultimately a Heraclitan answer, no-self points to the impermanence and transience of all that may be experienced; even the qualia of your sense experience can vary depending on your state of health, or as an effect of taking psycho-active substances; or, for that matter, the impermanence of conciousness itself, which can be turned on or off by accident, as in coma, or by the use of anaesthesia; or can be fractured into the unintelligible kaleidoscope and meaninglessness of dementia.

But it may also get you to dig deeper, to see the whole “you” package as no more than a temporary phase that is to be passed through, perhaps to be replaced by another “you” at some other time or place. It is in part a mind-trick to lend plausibility to the doctrine of re-incarnation; but then, re-incarnation is a doctrine that lends plausibility to the belief in a "self".

Strip away everything until your "Buddha-nature" stands naked – but then know that Buddha-nature is also an illusion and strip that way too. 

No-mind is in itself just as phantasmal as mind: the ultimate deconstruction. 

Self, no-self, no no-self, no "self" at all, no "no-self" at all, just words being stretched over the moment like a very inadequate pair of underpants. Do us all a favour and take them off, or, on second thoughts, keep them on. 

Now, having totally undressed yourself and discovered that you are not your cloths, get dressed again in your being, in your meanings, in your culture.

Random notes on sitting practice

How can we be compassionate if we have never known suffering?
How can we help others if we have not known joy?

If we do not radiate joy others are not warmed by us: we are the light in their darkness as they are the light in ours.

Your time sitting is not an end in itself, nor is it there just to enrich you.

The tranquillity of detachment is only meaningful in the context of passionate engagement. Passionate engagement is only meaningful against the background of the tranquillity of detachment. Each feeds the other in a virtuous spiral.

Realms of rebirth? Reincarnations? Who's fantasies are these?

"if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me?"

... 及吾無身 ，吾有何患？
(Tao Te Ching - 13)

It is an odd trick of language and of logic to separate the "mind" from the "body". It is the body that is alive, that feels, that experiences; the nervous system and the central nervous system are simply parts of the means by which it does so - and the "mind" is an "illusion" created by the functioning of those systems. Our intelligence and our meaning gymnastics should recognise their visceral roots - the body is indeed precious for that is what we are, a conscious, feeling, sentient body.

No body => no being. 

So, yes, "if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me?" - or joy or anything, come to that!

Let life flow through you moment by moment, breath by breath, heart beat by heart beat.

“The ghost in the Machine”

A body and a mind? Two entireties? Or equally, a body and a spirit? No amount of dissection will reveal the beating of a heart separated from that organ, nor the flight of a bird separated from its wings, nor the song separated from the thrush. The one is an object, the other its performance. You can have the dancer without the dance, but not the dance without a dancer, or a singer without the song, but not the song without a singer. Minds, spirits, souls, consciousness, et al – these are all but performances. The confusion of entireties with performances, whilst understandable, is an ontological error - a case of cloudy and somewhat wistful thinking.
 

And the mind? It is a performance, or more exactly, an orchestra of performances, an entire suite of symphonies, an immense repertoire.

When the dancer dies we may say "their spirit has left", but in truth there was nothing that left, only a performance that ended.  

Discovery

A certain sensitivity, a certain ability to live in fantasy games, a softness and gentleness, but beyond those, nothing marked me out than being anything other than the boy I appeared to be. Not very forceful or aggressive and good at picking up social clues and being loving and caring, but, no, pretty much a boy. Mud and dirt covered endlessly playing war games, playing cowboys and Indians, playing chase and tag, playing football and cricket, damning streams to make waterfall, seeing how conquers could be made stronger (vinegar was a help there, or so I think we believed).

It was at the beginning of my teenage years that something must have been detectably different, perhaps some mannerisms, some way of being, something that was not quite male. Then began a time of periods of exclusion, of occasional ridicule for the way I stood or moved, of times of isolation. Not man-becoming enough to be included, but not emerging-gay enough to be shunned, or be be find solace in the company of those who were. Just a little odd, just a puzzle, as if no-one quite knew what box to put me in.

As a young man I was very knotted up and unhappy, socially incompetent, shy , introverted. I did have a few friends, both male and female, and felt very strongly attracted to the female ones, endlessly wanting romance, but, but, far too locked up in my shell to be brave enough to connect – and it was romance, not sex that I wanted most. 

Of course I wanted sex, desperately at times – the hormone drive was full on – and it was girls that I craved, but to be bowled over by some young woman who would make me hers, not merely to be laid. Not that I knew that clearly at the time – just confusions, uncertainties, longings. I wanted, more than anything else, to fall in love and to be loved. I wanted endless hours of holding hands under stars, of gazing into eyes, of giggling and chatting and wishing upon the moon.

As some of the more discerning of you may have realised, that pattern is so much more typical of the female than of the male; but as a young man I did not realise that I was a young woman as well, that these longings were hers, that she was shaping how I was as a person as much as the man in me was. That shock of discovery lay not long ahead.

It came in the first weeks of marriage. Oh yes, marriage. An older woman found me and did make me hers. I fell gratefully into her arms and into her life, well, into her life – she was not so interested in my falling into her arms. There was love, and that was what was important to me - to be loved. And there were already children, a ready-made family, and that felt good too. I took to being a parent and a family man quite naturally,as if it had always been meant to be so. I found a very naturally nurturing side in me.

Just with all of this new beginning, came the shock of discovery. In the very first weeks of marriage. My wife was older, experienced - she'd had many lovers. She noted that her new husband was responsive in ways that all of those other men were not. And there were many other men, so she knew that this was odd.

She was curious to know what it was that made her new husband sensitive to being touched in ways that the other man were not. My extreme sensitivity where breasts would be if I were a woman. My ways to being so softly responsive, yieldingly so, and, even more perplexing, my sensitivity to being touched over the pubic mound. When she investigated she found what looked like a small, but real, dip where a virginal entry would be on a woman. This she explored and found it to be an entrance, thickly covered with skin, not like the thin skin of a hyman, thicker, but an entrance none the less. One with those oh so familiar muscles around that she knew so well from herself. One that responded by opening and closing in just the same ways. Her suspicions aroused she set to and touched me as one would touch a woman, letting her fingers play on me just as she let them play on herself. My responses were extreme and exactly those of a woman touched in that way, even to the point of orgasm.

My cries frightened and confused her, so very clearly female - but the reasons for them frightened and confused her even more. Her husband, her man, who was quite clearly a man, and who was soon to be the father of her next child, was also a woman. It made no sense. It was too shocking.

I was absolutely and completely disorientated. My body had for a time become another body, mine, but not as I had ever known it. Responding, feeling, moving, breathing, wanting, experiencing quite differently. My identity was shattered. It lay in pieces and with it lay the illusion that I was normal.

I was not one person, a man as I had thought, as I had been brought up to be, as everyone, even doctors, had counted me as being, but two, interwoven in the same body, sharing the same consciousness, sharing the same flesh and bone. One, the man I thought I was, the other, a woman, hidden, secret, almost undetectable, almost unobservable, but there physically, so very much there.

So why?

So why? Why the naming of what I am? Why the “coming out”? 

 

So much easier to keep your head down and pretend; pretend what you have been encouraged to pretend, to perpetuate the myth, to pretend that it is just not so! After all, it made other people comfortable with their version of reality to pretend a complete normality; a version that did not contain such inconveniences as having to accept someone as being different. 

 

If I really reach down inside, the answer must lie in part in wanting some self-respect - to be known as who and what I am - and in part in wanting others caught in this in-between world to know that they are not alone. That it is the prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance of other's that is the problem, not what we are, as we are born, as we are made. That is not something we can be held responsible for. It is not something we have chosen. It is not something we do, it is simply as we are.

I am happy to be held to account for my actions. I am not happy to be held to account for the way nature made my body.

It is bad enough facing all of that prejudice without facing your own inward doubts and worse, the shame that you may come to feel because of it. That really does poison, the shame, it is quite toxic. It makes you not want to be you; but none of us, none one of us, have the choice of not being what we are. In the end you do have to come to terms with that, to accept, to be what you are. 

 

Note – I do say, “What you are” not “What you have become”. This is not about accepting what you have become because of your actions. It is not like standing up as saying “I am D and I am an alcoholic” as a step to changing to not being one any longer. This is simply about your biology, about that which is you right to your core. 

 

So, what is it that I am? Simple. I am a chimera.

First, take two foetuses in the very earliest stages of conception, twins, but when they are no more than the smallest bundle of cells. Then allow them to come into contact with each other. Something strange can happen to those two bundles of what are as yet stem cells – so adaptable and changeable at that stage – so able to become anything – they become entangled, they merge into one being. But one being with two distinct cell lines made from what were, for a time, two separate lives.

It may be that they are both males. It may be that they are both females. Chances are, if that is the case, they will pass through life never knowing that they are a twin being. But what if one is male and the other female? Think – as they grow, as they weave one in and out of the other, so some parts of the body will want to become male, others female. Some cells have the chromosomes that will carry male genes, Y chromosomes. Some cells will not. When that critical time comes when “maleness” is switched on – about 12 weeks – those cells, those with the Y, can respond to the call, can become “man” cells, can set out to build a boy. But the other cells, those that are XX cells, they are deaf to that signal. They carry on doing what they are programmed to do. They set out to build a girl. 

 

The result? A body that is both. A dual purpose, dual function body - well, sort of, at least in terms of structures. That is where the hormones come in. If there are enough XY cells then there may be just enough hormone produced to make them dominant, so the result is apparently male. It may even be functionally male. It may even grow up believing that it is male. It may even look like one - well, reasonably so. It may grow like one. Yes, it may even passes through puberty at the right time and become what appears to be a man. It may even function as a man – biologically.

So far so good. But – ah the “BUT” had to come. Those girl cells, those XX cells, they had not been idle. They had followed their instructions and build all the right bits to make a female, and even wired them up in the right way, only the hormones kept them quite about it. Too much testosterone – or androgen as it is sometimes called – not sure what the difference is if any, not that it matters – and too little oestrogen. Poor girl cells. Not triggered into full action. Not allowed to blossom. But what they have built, what they have become, is still there, is still alive and responsive.

What have we got? A heterosexual male who is also a female. Bazaar? Exotic? Confused and confusing? Try living it!

Falling through time

I am no more than a bundle of absurdities falling though time and laughing.

Something almost tangible

Priestie, well, that is the nickname we have given him, he is an x-catholic priest, now married, divorced, and, who knows, maybe in a relationship again, but all of that is not the point. The point was a conversation we had. He pops in now and again, just for a chat. On this particular occasion the subject turned to death, which as a catholic priest he had to witness quite a number of times - part of the duties of the job, administering the last rites and similar stuff. He did say there was a strange beauty in the moments of death. First the light going out of the eyes, then something slipping downward across the face and on, as if some force was leaving the body, something almost tangible, almost a thing in itself that was shedding the body. He said it gave him hope.

Thought I would share that with you.

Each breath

Drink each breath for they are all that we have.

One click at a time

The shift from the silent majority to the grumbling majority - the power of the internet giving voice to people. A few clicks and anther protest email sent, another protest app launched - view expressed – approval of this, disapproval of that, request for action on this, requests to stop doing that. There is no longer any need to feel disconnected – you may well be ignored, you may well be despised or disregarded by those in power - but you need no longer be silent. So easy, so simple, so immediate, so consumer friendly, maybe so in tune with gen-y, the echo-boomers, coming politically of age.

The silent majority is no longer silent: there is a revolution coming, one click at a time.

Meanwhile next door

Meanwhile, next door, the Sport of Priest Frightening
http://dee2lockyer.blogspot.com/2011/04/sport-of-priest-frightening.html
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Comments:
Read the full satanic horror story - well, it would be a story if it were not true!

What are we?

What are we but a bag of skin and bone burning with the fire of life for a while as it passes its way through us from the beginning of time to who knows where.

Layers

We build our lives out of layer after layer of meaning, each piled chaotically one on top of the other, each weaving in and out of the rest, each binding us into place, each binding us into believing that those meanings are what we are, that those meanings are the sum and total of us - but they are not. They are only some of the possibilities of what we could be. They are only some of the paths we could walk. Even if we walked every pathway, even if we realised every possibility, they are still not what we are but only what we do, or could do, and, at the last, what we have done.

Snowflakes and rainbows

Snowflakes are important because they are, each and every one, the result of a causal process, and are, each and every one, different. You can predict exactly when snow will form, but it is impossible to predict the shape of any one snowflake. Understand this and you understand the interplay between strictly deterministic causality and chaos theory. The fine grained variability that limits what can be predicted. The fine balance between order and disorder as each flows into the other. It is the fundamental entropic flow of all existence.

And rainbow - well, they are curved because light travels in straight lines. There, in front of our eyes, the visible evidence of quantum theory - the paradox of light being both a wave and a particle. Which, of cause, results in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - that if you know the speed of a particle, you must be uncertain about its position, or if you know the position you must be uncertain about its speed - you cannot know both about the one and the same particle.

Now throw in Godel's incompleteness theorem - not even numbers work, they are not provably consistent - and Turing's halting problem - that you cannot know if a program will stop or not in advance of running it; and the result -

now why should I do the thinking for you?

Embrace the uncertainty, love the chaos, wonder at the creativity that results.

Which way?

The realisation that there is no internal world, only the external world internalised.
The realisation that there is no external world, only the internal world externalised.
Both are truths,
Both are untruths.

Descartes's "cogito" sees the world from the inside looking out and attempts to construct the outside from within.
Zen's "one-hand" sees the world pouring in from the outside and collapsing the self.

Beware the naming

Beware the naming of "God" for in that lies much danger and the building of temples. Soon fatwas and schisms, hight priests and sacraments, and "is the wine really turned to blood or do we spill blood so that we can say that it is?". Beware the naming, for in that there is so much prescription and hatred and communities split asunder. Do not go there, but rather place your fingers on your lips and say not a word. So, what is the name of - shoos, not a word, not a word!

The Foo Dogs Know

The first breath, the birth breath, that in-breath with which we join the world, us hung between that and the last breath, the out-breath, the death-breath with which we leave the world, and between, the mad dance.

The Foo-dogs know. She, mouth closed, is the in-breath, made through the nose in Buddhist practice. He, mouth open, is the out-breath, made through the mouth in Buddhist practice. They, the first and last, the alpha and omega, the guardians standing at our entrance and our exit and all life and fortune lying between.
She protecting those who enter in past her. He protecting those who exit out past him. Either side they stand of many doors. She, foot on their child, mindful of family and home - those things for which we enter in. He, foot on the world, mindful of work and voyaging - those things for which we exit out.

She, mindful and accepting all that enters in, is the inward practice of meditation, of finding the peace, the love and the divine laughter within.

He, mindful and accepting of all that exits out, is the outward practice of embracing each moment of life and what falls in our path, and of giving out love and care for the world.

Creating monsters

Listening to the truth within,
Observing the wonder without.
Unbinding from the shackles of words:
Name it God and you create a monster,
Name it not and you close your heart.

Reckless abandon

If we understand anything at all about the process of creation it is its reckless abandon, it joy, its uninhibited playfulness. It froths with excitement and possibility. It has no purpose, just a mad explosive force. It does not know what comes next because it hasn't got there yet and will not know until after.

Words fall like raindrops

Words fall like raindrops on the surface of a pool, each making their disturbance for a while, making patterns of ripples that soon die away; patterns that are soon replaced by other patterns and overlaid by yet more, each supper-imposing, each cancelling out what was there before, each building in apparent complexity - but none of them , not one, is the pool.

Stop the words falling and, as it calms, the depths of the pool begin to be seen.

words

Word, constructs, ideas, ways of seeing, explanations, concepts, theories, discourses, scripts - piles and piles of words on words; each their own patterns weaving and painting; each persuasive to a point; each drawing you in to believe that they have caught some essence of reality; each valid within their own framework - like the patterns of a tapestry when on the loom: but the pictures that is trapped in there is no more the reality than than a child's drawing of the sun is the sun.

What use? Sometimes, like a workman's tools, they do a job, tightening this, loosening that, helping to unblock a blockage, mending a break: but if life is flowing freely, then they are of little use.

Good to fix things, but best seen through as a tissue: the word ''sugar'' will sweeten no tea, the word "fire" will burn no wood.

Distrusting words

You are right to distrust words, the warp and weft of their connotations are too persuasive.
Our minds flow along those far too easily, far too much without challenge, like a stream following a water course.

Each leaf

"Each leaf has its own way to fall to the ground"

Don't know where this comes from, but it says so much that I had to post it here.

Sort of tantric

Thubten Yeshe:

..each one of us is a union of all universal energy. Everything that we need in order to be complete is within us right at this very moment. It is simply a matter of being able to recognize it. This is the tantric approach

David Gordon White:

... the universe we experience is nothing other than the concrete manifestation of the divine energy of the Godhead that creates and maintains that universe, seeks to ritually appropriate and channel that energy, within the human microcosm, in creative and emancipatory ways.

Only take away the intentionality of "the Godhead", or its existence as something other than the energy that flows through time, that was and is everything. Our wonder to be open to it, to be the witnesses of this dance of the divine, to feel its spark, its heat flowing through us. To know that we are no more than the dust given shape and form by it. For a while to be its eyes and ears, to be its body and senses, to dance its joys and to shed its tears.

Something more?

There is only this moment, this instant, this now -
what did you expect?
Something more than this everything?

The pas de deux of shame

Shame is a destructive force, especially when it is re-enforced by someone you love, even more if they are your life partner. If you are uncomfortable and disconcerted by what you are, uncertain about what it makes you, fearful of how others may react, you are made vulnerable. It makes you doubt yourself. It erodes your self-confidence and your self-esteem.

If your partner's reaction is to be ashamed about that within you which they find difficulty in accepting, then they are caught in a double bind: they love you, but they do not love what you are. They want to have the one without having the other, but it cannot be like that. They will not face or embrace what it is they find distasteful within you, but you need it to be faced and embraced, very much need that to be so, to help overcome your own fears because of it - to know that you can be loved as you are. They love you, but reject that in you which they feel is shameful. Because you love them and value their opinion of you, you take on that shame that they feel and it drives you further into a more permanent and damaging shame. Such a poisonous dance for two.

But what if that which is being denied is what your core being is? What if it is about how you were born, how you are made?

Imagine being biologically both male and female in the same body, the one hidden within the other, but no-the-less there, very much there. Now imagine your life partner denies the existence of this and makes any reference to it, any illusion, any sign or mention completely and utterly taboo. Think how that might drive you into feeling shunned. Making you feel that so much as the least mention and you will be completely and totally rejected as an abhorrent object of unmitigated shame.

They have found some form of accommodation with it by exporting their difficulties, by denying that it is there. This puts the onus on you join their game of pretending that it does not exist - or facing being shunned.

That is the pas de deux of shame.

Take no thought

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day [is] the evil thereof.

I was stuck much by this as I sat in the silence last Sunday, it seemed to speak so clearly to my current situation, for I have been much vexed by fears of the future and what might become of me; but uncertainty must be embraced as part of so many lives in these times, and compared to the uncertainties of earlier so much less reasonably so - earlier times of war, times of famine and times of plague. We here in the West have been blessed with almost a lifetime without these. We have come to expect peace and prosperity as being the norm. Yet every time has its uncertainty, even the most stable, for every apparently stable time has within it the potential to collapse into chaos and disorder, which in turn will see a new stability arise from it, but it may be a long time before that emergence is seen, and there may be much suffering before it is achieved.

Joy

Joy lurks hidden in shadow waiting to pounce unexpectedly upon you; frantically you search for her, but the more you seek the less she can be seen, the more allusive she becomes.
Abandoning your quest, she sneaks up on tiptoe and wraps you in the folds of her embrace, the warmth of her soft skin pulsing life into you. She whispers "now" and you are soul lost on the breath of her words, unaware that there is a you any more.

The duty of Truth

Truth, sometime an overvalued and overworked term, is however, fundamental, at least as far as letting what flows naturally through you is concerned.

These notes to myself are some sort of attempt at reminding myself that there is a duty of truth in what one feels, in how one is, in how one lives even - or at least an honesty to know that one does not know.