Why not be an anar­chist for love? Explode as gen­tly as a rose. Can Krishna’s sky be scrawled on a wall? Does Mary appear in a frac­tal of shat­tered glass? The face of chaos, like the face of the Beloved, is too beau­ti­ful to name. Jesus burst the wine­skin of God’s law. Now it’s time to burst Jesus; he won’t mind. Burst Marx, Jef­fer­son, Obama; split open the left and right. Let them seep into each oth­ers vine­yards. Your wild heart could make this world dance naked, crush­ing every kind of grape in one bar­rel. But first, fer­ment your mar­row, dis­til your blood. Wake up beyond the mad­ness of two. Don’t be drunk or sober.

when we med­i­tate, or dur­ing some prayers, we will some­times close our eyes. the assump­tion is that lim­it­ing our men­tal and phys­i­cal expo­sure to the stim­u­la­tion of objects and other con­tents in our sur­round­ings, will aid in the often dif­fi­cult task of con­cen­tra­tion and mind­ful­ness. the idea is to priv­i­lege the within by pre­vent­ing the out­side from encroach­ing. but what­ever we have within, is the same as what is out­side. if the out­side wasn’t within us, it wouldn’t be in the out­side in the first place. we use our inside world in order to cre­ate the out­side world, and then we carry it deep within us wher­ever we go and what­ever we do. the out­side world is a reflec­tion of our inner world, and there­fore it can­not be med­i­tated away, it must be given away. the free­dom of the within utterly depends on the social trans­for­ma­tion of the with­out. to be able to free our within we must rad­i­cally trans­form our with­out. one of the con­se­quences of the dual­is­tic error of mak­ing a dis­tinc­tion between the inner and the outer is man­i­fested in the way we often inter­pret the con­cept of mate­ri­al­ism. we con­trast to mate­ri­al­ism the con­cept of the Read the Rest…

We’ve pub­lished Hal Sirowitz’s won­der­ful poetry in ear­lier issues of Tiferet. You’ll enjoy this recent inter­view with him on “Being Human.” Be sure to scroll down — there are two parts to the inter­view! http://www.riffraf.typepad.com/

[Excerpted and adapted from “The Three-Petalled Rose”, a work in progress, by Ronald Pies MD] The Rab­bis of the Tal­mud had plenty to worry about, and many rea­sons for sor­row. The Tal­mu­dic era, after all, fol­lowed the destruc­tion of Jerusalem and the Sec­ond Tem­ple by the Romans, in 70 CE. This cat­a­clysm fol­lowed a failed revolt by the Jews against their Roman oppres­sors. This was also a time in which the Jews were divided against them­selves, with a group known as the Zealots favor­ing rebel­lion against Rome, and many less rad­i­cal Jew­ish lead­ers oppos­ing it. Trag­i­cally, Zealot rebels often killed Jew­ish lead­ers who didn’t fully sup­port their revolt. Given this back­drop, it’s under-standable that the rab­bis had a some­what ambiva­lent atti­tude toward “wor­ry­ing”. On the one hand, the Tal­mud tells us, “Do not worry about tomorrow’s trou­ble, for you never know what the day will bring.” So far, so good! But the com­men­ta­tor then adds, “Maybe by the time tomor­row arrives you won’t be here any­more, and you wor­ried about a world that was not yours.” Per­haps this is not the most com­fort­ing thought for many of us! Nev­er­the­less, the rab­bis were well aware of the cor­ro­sive effect worry can have Read the Rest…

Here’s an inter­est­ing 2010 inter­view with Ram Dass on the process of let­ting go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LxB-4_MGbc   “Your soul wit­nesses your feel­ings, your desires, your fear­less­ness. Stay  in the wit­ness, not iden­ti­fy­ing with the desires or atti­tudes or those things. You can sit by and watch the show. Watch the show of your incar­na­tion and just sit back from your ego and your other thoughts. I like to sit back with my guru who is like a soul-friend. And I would sug­gest you have a soul friend, one that is going to be lov­ing and pas­sion­ate and peace­ful and wise.” instead of desire the car, maybe the car will go and instead of the car maybe desire a guru or a good spir­i­tual friend, some­one to keep you on line towards God.”

One of the tasks I set my advanced cre­ative writ­ing stu­dents is to have them, one stu­dent a week, find three poems to read and then unpack from what­ever anthol­ogy I hap­pen to be using. We do this not only for mean­ing but also for craft, the tech­ni­cal and strate­gic ele­ments that cre­ate the psy­cho­log­i­cal atmos­phere of the poem. Poetry, to me, is an act of atten­tion. And I think that the reader’s atten­tion to the poem, his or her engage­ment with the words of the poet, can allow access to the poet’s atten­tion to the Power of Things. The best poems—those that evoke what used to be called the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—can reward this atten­tion with some­thing akin to spir­i­tual com­mu­nion: a direct access to a deeper real­ity. Other poems, unfor­tu­nately, ren­der lit­tle more than access to a poet’s web­site. But that’s another story. This week, my stu­dent Phyli­cia brought this poem to our atten­tion:   The Bat­tle by Abra­ham Abu­lafia When Yaweh spoke to me, when I saw His name spelled out in blood, the pound­ing in my heart sep­a­rated blood from ink and ink from blood, and Yaweh said to me, “Know your soul’s Read the Rest…

  http://minddeep.blogspot.com/2012/03/there-is-no-problem.html   Ajahn Sumedho: My advice is not to make a prob­lem of your­self. Give up mak­ing a prob­lem about your­self, or how good or bad you are, or what you should or shouldn’t be.   via MARGUERITE MANTEAU-RAO’s won­der­ful blog Mind Deep

Here’s an arti­cle from today’s NY Times — sounds like they are talk­ing about “tiferet” — places where the spir­i­tual and mate­r­ial meet. Click here to read.  

In his upcom­ing book An Unknown World: Notes on the Mean­ing of the Earth, Jacob Needle­man dis­cusses “an entirely new kind of rela­tion­ship between con­scious­ness and nature, between con­scious­ness and the earth, between con­scious­ness and the human body here, now, in our lives. What Descartes is show­ing us is some­thing dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent from how he has been inter­preted: He is show­ing us that in the capac­ity of the mind to con­cen­trate its atten­tion toward itself in pure thought—in that capac­ity there is a cen­tral ele­ment of Man that is not merely sep­a­rate from nature, but beyond nature! Beyond earth! What Descartes is offer­ing is not more or less than the idea of the holy spirit expressed not in reli­gious lan­guage, but in the lan­guage of the inde­pen­dent human mind, the aspect of man that is, in incep­tion, in its embry­onic form, beyond the cre­ated world of nature, beyond the earth.” Read more at  http://jacobneedleman.com/blog/

http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/06/opinion/djalal-peace-abraham/index.html   “For more than 60 years, a just solu­tion to the Mid­dle East con­flict has eluded the great­est states­men of our time. Per­haps it is time for a dif­fer­ent strat­egy. Let’s call it an Abra­hamic peace strat­egy. In the field of con­flict res­o­lu­tion, medi­a­tors help dis­put­ing par­ties peel back lay­ers of dif­fer­ence until they reach com­mon ground on which both par­ties can agree. In the Mid­dle East, that com­mon ground is our com­mon ances­tor Abra­ham. Abra­ham did not build walls. He built wells to sus­tain all those around him with life-giving water. He did not exclude any­one from his home, open­ing all four flaps of his desert tent so that any way­farer, com­ing from any direc­tion, would feel wel­come and share in his hos­pi­tal­ity. That is why we are taught that the core char­ac­ter trait of any­one true to the Abra­hamic tra­di­tion is com­pas­sion.”  By Dino Patti Djalal and Sid Schwarz