Master Hsieh, as quoted in Road to Heaven by Bill Porter:

Lao-tzu said to cultivate tranquillity and detachment. To be natural. To be natural means not to force things. When you act natural, you get what you need. But to know what’s natural, you have to cultivate tranquillity. Huashan has long been famous as a center of Taoism because it’s quiet. There used to be a lot of hermits here But now the mountain has been developed for tourism. The tranquility is gone, and so are the hermits.

In a recent essay, Bob Turner (local Presbyterian pastor) quotes Gordon Hempton (acoustic ecologist) on the difference between silence and quiet:

Real quiet is not the absence of sound [which is the definition of silence] but the absence of noise.

Whew, this is good. So much here to think about.

I wrote a denunciation of apps.

Bill Porter, Road to Heaven (1993):

One of the mountains we visited was Tailaoshan just inside the northwest tip of Fukien Province. A Buddhist layman we met on the trail led us to a cave where an eighty-five-year-old monk had been living for the past fifty years. In the course of our conversation, the monk asked me who this Chairman Mao was whom I kept mentioning. He said he had moved into the cave in 1939 after the spirits of the mountain appeared to him in a dream and asked him to become the mountain’s protector. He hadn’t been down the mountain since then. Disciples and local villagers brought him the few things he needed. And he didn’t need much: flour, cooking oil, salt, and once every five years or so a new blanket or set of robes. His practice was the name of the Buddha: Amitabha, Buddha of the Infinite.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North:

Finally, I sold my house, moving to the cottage of Sampū for a temporary stay. Upon the threshold of my old home, however, I wrote a linked verse of eight pieces and hung it on a wooden pillar. The starting piece was:

Behind this door
Now buried in deep grass,
A different generation will celebrate
The Festival of Dolls.

What did the next homeowner do with the paper containing a handwritten verse of Bashō?

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less:

“This is the same fire that burned with the blast from Hiroshima,” Masanori Oe says to me, pointing to a small brass lantern on a table in front of us with a tiny flame burning inside.

“This very flame?” I ask, taken aback somewhat.

“Yes. It has been kept burning, passed on from person to person to help us each remember what happened that day, and how it must not happen again.” He explains that in August of 1945, a woman who lost her son in the bombing went to the city while it was still burning and, believing that the spirit of her son was inside that flame, captured a bit of fire and brought it to her home a hundred miles away. She kept it burning for more than twenty years, and then passed it on to a Buddhist priest, who decided to make it a symbol of peace, and took the flame on a walking pilgrimage across Japan, burning in a lantern, and passed it on to others, lighting new lanterns for those who would take the flame. “We have it here for some time before we pass it on,” Masanori says.

Five Remembrances (Thich Nhat Hanh version):

• I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
• I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.
• I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
• All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
• My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

I used to repeat these every day and I think it might be time to get back to that.

Anonymous discord user, speaking the truth:

A degree of stillness then a confrontation with the unconscious. A decent into the underworld. These aren’t much mentioned in your HR department’s mindfulness drive.

Three things that (synchronistically?) fell into my world this week:

1. Atsuko Watanabe, in The Abundance of Less by Andy Couturier:

“Most people spend their time relating entirely to things that are made solely for the purpose of keeping the economy spinning, of making money for someone, such as television and television shows, and eating food that’s not good for them. And to get that money, everyone throws away their own time that was free before, even if the work they do is not useful. Everyone around them thinks it’s natural and normal. Even though they’re incredibly busy on the physical, body level, moving around all the time, they are empty on the level of spirit.”

“So why do they do it, do you think?”

“Because they don’t stop to consider, Why is it that I as a human am alive?”

2. James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, explaining an idea in Plato’s Republic:

The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.

As explained by the greatest of later Platonists, Plotinus, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul’s own choice–and I do not understand this because I have forgotten.

So that we do not forget, Plato tells the myth and, in the very last passage, says that by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper. In other words, the myth has a redemptive psychological function, and a psychology derived from it can inspire a life founded on it.

3. Charles Eisenstein’s brief film, “The Fall”.

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.356

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything that happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.300

We cannot visualize another world ruled by quite other laws, the reason being that we live in a specific world which has helped to shape our minds and establish our basic psychic conditions. We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a “going beyond all that,” but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives experience a glamor which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any good reason why we should.