W. B. Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Photo by Kenneth Allen

This week, thanks to the recommendation of Robert Craven, author of Get Lenin, we’ll be taking a poetic journey to “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” courtesy of William Butler Yeats. Yeats composed the poem in 1888, and it was first published in 1890 in the National Observer. Click here if you want to have your mind blown by an amazing audio recording.

As well, feel free to leave remarks about the poems at Bareback Alchemy. I love hearing what you think! Here’s last week’s posting, if you want to leave comments on Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer “: The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Nine. Also, if you’re new to the blog, please check out the first Mnemosyne Post. And please keep suggesting titles! I always learn the most from the ones I would have never thought to select myself.

Have a great week, everyone. May your hearts and minds find peace in the “bee-loud glade!”

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

“I know nothing,” I reminded myself, although not in Sgt. Schultz’s fake German accent. For those too young to remember, he played the foolish camp guard in Hogan’s Heroes. In Zen, spiritual aspirants are also known as fools, willing to encounter the next moment with neither fear nor anger, no matter what happens. In short, being a fool means not needing to be “right”.

Although it was quite possible that some of my assumptions and first impressions would turn out to be accurate, the reality of this person might also be quite different from my ideas. Could I drop my internal chatter and enter the moment, rather than analyze, anticipate and predict?

Before I started practicing Zen and meditation, I often believed that the portraits my high octane brain sketched, often from just a few visual cues, were real. I prided myself on being able to size people up, get an instantaneous “read” on them. Sometimes my intuitions and hunches were correct, other times they were breathtakingly off the mark. Now I’m aware that many of my thoughts, and the feelings they generate, are like reruns: unoriginal, frequently fictional and, even if entertaining, offer little substance or insight. It’s best to pay them peripheral attention, if any at all. Still, constant vigilance is required to avoid getting sucked into the soap operas they create.

This time, I redirected my attention to my breath, listened and responded. The conversation flowed. Hours passed. It was a relief to tune in, to be the fool.

The first definition of inspiration in Merriam-Webster is this: A divine influence or action on a person believed to qualify him or her to receive and communicate sacred revelation. And what poem, I mean what really good poem, is not a sacred revelation? Whether the poet is playing in the waves of the divine or diving into darker realms there is an inspired communication underway. There is that place where a string of words ignite and become a poem. That thrills me, but it may not thrill you and that doesn’t matter. What matters is what inspires you. In yoga class we are reminded to open to grace, to remember that we are all – to paraphrase Merriam-Webster – imminently qualified to receive sacred revelation. On good days I am open to that, I can see inspiration everywhere. I get a hit of the divine from a heart-opening back bend, a walk in the woods with my little dog, or from snuggling with a warm, sleepy little boy. On even better days I realize that I am that sacred revelation. And so are you.

god is not to be found in our temples, we find our temples in god. god is not in the liturgies by which we offer our worship to him, our worship-liturgies are in god. that is to say: the finding of the god we believe in, precedes the liturgies we utilize in order to worship him. only after we have chosen our god –be the means by which we came to adopt a given faith what they might– we ask of him to reveal to us the manner by which he wills to be worshiped. and since we believe this is the will of god, we feel engulfed in spiritual enthusiasm.

and it is for that reason that different religions teach different liturgies, and believers find their god in their own versions, but not in that of others.

worship-liturgies do not reveal god, the believer believes that god is revealed in them. once god has revealed his will, the belief that our liturgical worship is a direct response to our god’s own wishes and desires, imbues our practices with that incomparable sense of profound spiritual satisfaction. it is in the belief that this is the will of god that we find satisfaction, not in the liturgy itself. liturgies are neutral, and from history we know that often times they are also time, culture and space dependent.

the biblical injunction “na’ase v’nishma” (let us first do and then we will hear) adds a different dimension to the idea of worshiping in the manner proscribed by the will of god. it adds the dimension of reward for the fulfilling of god’s wishes. but the desire for rewards, be that in this life or in the world to come, is not the same as the love of god as actualized in the pure fulfillment of his wishes. love and rewards are two separate things, often at odds with each other.

it is only in zen-buddhism that the concept of “liturgy first” finds a true expression. it is the na’ase v’nishma of the bible but in a wholly different sense. in contrast to conventional religions, zen does not require an antecedent faith in the buddha. since the buddha himself is not an object of faith, there can be no antecedent faith in the teachings he taught, and therefore he cannot become an object of worship. the buddha must remain a “thou”, never an “it”. in zen the practice itself, the “liturgy”, is the entire content of the faith and therefore the practitioner must begin from what in conventional religions would be the back door. in zen, we first do, then we know. for that reason, zen does not proscribe a “compulsory” and universal worship-liturgy in the conventional sense.

we could stop at the thought that the assumption that the same practice (zazen, koans) will benefit equally all different individual personalities, is a bold assessment as to the essence of human nature. the mind is seen as one, as god is one, and all individual minds partake of the same one essence. this is indeed a bold predication as to the attributes of the mind, but that is a separate discussion.

to add a point of clarification, the idea that god allows us to chose our own forms of worship, and to the extent that it is done with a pure heart of love and devotion it will always be acceptable to god, it is also another form of accepting that revelation precedes worship. without our antecedent theological beliefs in god and his attributes, our worship-liturgies become like empty gestures, the kind we often identify as idolatry when practiced by members of other religions.

what this discussion is about, is the understanding that whatever other values we ascribe to our worship-liturgies, they ought not be considered binding in any religious or theological sense. they may have a psychological or sociological value, and certainly an institutional ecclesiastical value, but not a religious one. it is important that the distinction between god and religion be upheld. no doubt, we find many spiritual treasures in our own personal choices for devotional practices, but they ought to remain just that: personal choices, our own humble requests to god to accept our offerings. the moment we commit to the belief that our forms of liturgy-worship are the one offerings god herself wishes, proscribed or expects from us, god ceases to be the eternal-thou and becomes instead the it-of the moment.

in our relationships with god, we need to return time and again to those moments-of-inception in which we find his presence in us manifested as his presence between us. our dialogue with all beings is the deed by which god becomes present in our lives. it is like showing god we have found him by creating and sustaining our dialogical-between with all beings. but it is at that moment-of-inception that we chose the manner of our offerings, not before that. each person and each community, must find the way to actualize the dialogue with the god in the presence of whom we worship, and with whom we place our faiths. (please note: the god not “in” whom, but “with” whom we place our faiths).

i have seen the god of dialogue and i worship my god “with my feet” in the glorious sense that a. j. heschel taught while marching with martin luther king. or in the way liberation theologians speak of in terms of the sacrament-of the-neighbor. it is in the between of an i and a thou, with all that this entails in terms of personal and social engagement, that the presence of god manifests itself.

postscript note:

martin buber wrote: “actually there is no such thing as seeking god, for there is nothing in which he could not be found.” buber was reflecting on a basic hasidic teaching about the manner of god’s omni-presence. but we can’t stop there. we need to take the next step and accept that the moment we seek is the moment we miss. or in other words, that which we seek is that which we miss. and it is for that reason that we never stop seeking. there is nothing to seek, it is here already. the moment we turn to seek, we have failed to see that “that” is already in us and in-between us. fernando pessoa, the poet, had it right all along: it is all futility. (and so did the writer of that famous psalm). every seeking is not-finding. and this has nothing at all to do with seeking outside or within, or with finding the buddha on the road, or finding him on the image of the buddha on the image of the road on the image we hold of our own minds. every seeking is not-finding, and this is the foundation of the zen teaching of non-attainment, a concept which itself is based on the earlier understanding as to the unattainable, all-present and ineffable tao.

every seeking is not finding, and i suspect that we might find when we stop seeking. is there anything to find? i don’t know, i haven’t sought it yet. i’m holding back, because i want to find. and i suspect, yet again, that the firm understanding that the here and now is all that is, is exactly what enlightenment is, and nothing else.

© Hune Margulies / http://dialogicalecology.blogspot.com

Welshons is a prolific author as well as founder and president of Open Heart Seminars, an organization whose aim is to increase spiritual awareness and education. He is best known for his works One Soul, One Love, One Heart: The Sacred Path to Healing All Relationships (co-authored with Ram Dass) and When Prayers Arent Answered: Opening the Heart and Quieting the Mind in Challenging Times (co-authored with Richard Carlson). An active and accomplished writer, this is not an interview to miss!

If you have any questions you would like Melissa to ask John please write them in the comments below.

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.

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 realm of the spiritual. but materialism does not refer to objects, nor does spiritual to non-objects. materialism is not an ontological concept, it is a way of relationship with all other beings, it is the i-it, and that mode of relationships applies to both objects and non-objects. likewise, the spiritual does not refer to an ontological category of being, it is a way of entering into relationships with other beings, it is the i-thou, and it applies to our relationships with both objects and non-objects. both materialism and spirituality should be understood as ethical projects, and therefore the key for the spiritual life lies not in the within, nor in the without, but in the between of the i and the thou. the spiritual is the transformation of our modes of relationships from i-it to i-thou. it is that existential change that will in turn also bring about a fulfillment of the practice of meditation.

this conceptual identification of the material as referring to physical substance, has resulted in generations of erroneous spiritual practices. through our poetic expressions and mystical terminology, we have internalized a form of geographic-spiritual imagery with which we orient ourselves as we walk through our spiritual paths. terms such as inner and outer, higher and lower, deep or shallow, are all spatial images that bear no relevance to the spiritual way of life. but this spatial imagery has guided our understandings of the spiritial life through and through. so we close our eyes to go “deeper”, or we believe in “inner” transformation detached from the transformation of our social lives, or we ascribe transcendent meanings to what essentially is nothing more and nothing less than the here and now. but if we see that there is no depth to the spirit, that depth is a physical category and a poor semblance for a metaphor of the spirit, and especially, if we come to realize that the spirit will not be found somewhere floating inside our bodies, we will then be able to understand that spirit is a word to describe an ethical project. the spiritual life is the relationship with the neighbor, it is the sacrament of the neighbor that we celebrate with our here and now, concrete and ordinary daily efforts at i-thou relationships. it is to this that martin buber referred to as religious socialism.

it is as a result of that geo-spiritual error that we so often fail to see that there is nothing at all that is hidden inside, or behind and beyond the phenomenal world of the concrete, ordinary here and now existential reality. this world, as is, is magnificent in its immanence, not because of what lies “within” it. there is nothing within, and accepting that “this is it” is not only the path, but is the actual state of whole-being liberation.

Hune Margulies, Ph.D.

http://dialogicalecology.blogspot.com

© Hune Margulies

http://www.riffraf.typepad.com/

Sunday, May 20, 2012 | 1:00 to 5:00 PM

West Caldwell Public Library

30 Clinton Road, West Caldwell, NJ 07006

973–226-5441

Schedule

1:20–1:30—Welcome

1:30–1:40—Lips: Linda Cronin, Jim Gwyn

1:40–1:50—Tiferet: Mark Hillringhouse, Linda Radice

1:50–2:00—US 1 Worksheets: John McDermott, Sharon Olson

(20 minute break)

2:20–2:30—Raintown Review: Rachel Hadas, Rick Mullin

2:30–2:40—Schuylkill Valley Review: Grant Clauser, Sean Webb

2:40–2:50—Journal of NJ Poets: Tina Kelley, Charlotte Mandel

(20 minute break)

3:10–3:20—Edison Literary Review: Deborah LaVeglia, David Vincenti

3:20–3:30—Paterson Literary Review: Susan Balik, Francesca Maxime

3:30–3:40—Painted Bride Quarterly: Miriam Haier, Susanna Rich

(20 minute break)

4:00–4:10—Adanna: David Crews, Lynee McEniry

4:10–4:20—Exit 13: Jessica deKoninck, Adele Kenny

4:20–4:30—The Stillwater Review: Robert Carnevale, Madeline Tiger

Book Sales

Books will be available for purchase and signing

Full schedule and Directions available at: http://www.dianelockward.com/fest.html 

Be sure to visit our Tiferet table!