Contemplative poetry | Contemplative Inquiry

April 13, 2016

HEADLESS TAO

In my last post I said that I was exploring a modern tradition known as the Headless Way. I’ll be mentioning it from time to time in future posts as I go on. So I have looked around for a congenial explanation of what it stands for, written by an experienced practitioner.

Jim Clatfelter’s Headless Dao is a version of the Tao Te Ching modified by a ‘headless’ lens. Each chapter is reinforced by a commentary. It is written in a breezy, jingling verse in some contrast with my favourite free-form version by Ursula K. Le Guin. Yet it is very successful in making its point, and I value it for that – especially appreciating the commentary to the extract from Chapter 42 below. The overall view is one which I essentially share. It makes sense to me and fits my experience.

I’ve chosen extracts from two chapters and their commentaries to offer a taste of Clatfelter’s work. I’ve kept the chapter headings so that readers can compare it with other versions. Ursula Le Guin’s is still the one that I would take to a desert island.

25: BEFORE THE FIRST BEGINNING

Before the first beginning

An emptiness is here

Alone forever and at peace

This side of what appears,

Eternally unchanging

And lacking any limit

The void of all potential

The present ultimate.

It enters all appearance

And then returns to source

It’s ever at your center

Your only true recourse

For here begin the heavens

The earth and humankind

Following this greatest way

You cannot be confined.

“Here Laozi gives us an outline of his view of existence. What appears to us as a void or an absence or emptiness is truly a mystery. It’s the ultimate. The absolute. It’s the source of existence in its infinite potential.

“It’s also a presence, pure and unchanging awareness, the always-so. This presence contains all that comes and goes in the here and now moment. It is your true, unchanging and eternal identity. It is beyond time because it contains time.

“Can you see this Dao first in all things? You are the Dao, the one awareness, the only awareness. This awareness is very close at hand. It’s at your very center, and it’s always available. It’s who you really are, and it’s always at peace and beyond upset.”

42: DAO ENFOLDS A ONENESS

Dao enfolds a oneness

Holds yin and yang as two

Within a single presence

As two sides of the view

With yin upon my shoulders

And yang in my embrace

I live the presence of the Dao

Where all is in its place.

When the two appear as one

It’s wholeness that I see

And balance has to follow

As well as harmony.

“In Laozi’s original, this verse begins: from one comes two, and this makes three, and thus 10,000 come to be. What do these numbers refer to? …. One is Dao, the single presence. Two are yin and yang, the complementary opposites of Dao. Three is the sum, the whole.

“Laozi goes on to locate yin and yang in our direct experience. Just what is Dao? It is yin on my shoulders and yang in my arms. The three terms Dao, yin and yang are not metaphysical terms. They are not mere words and names. They are concrete, physical and visible. You can literally point to them with a finger. To look at the yin, point to your own faceless awareness. To look at the yang, point your finger to the world of appearances (the 10,000 things) directly in front of you. See that nothing separates this yin and yang. They are two views of your presence, your life in the moment, two views of Dao. Can you see both ways and harmonize and balance the two views? It’s the Way to wholeness.”

Jim Clatfelter Headless Dao London: Shollond Trust, 2015. The Sholland Trust acts as the administrative arm of the Headless Way, which can be found at www.headless.org

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April 11, 2016

WISDOM OF SOPHIA

“I think I’ll go and meet her,” said Alice…
“You can’t possibly do that,” said the Rose, “I should advise you to walk the other way.”
This sounded nonsense to Alice, so she said nothing, but set off at once towards the Red Queen. To her surprise, she lost sight of her in a moment.

Lewis Carrol Through the Looking Glass

A significant thread within ancient Wisdom claims that we are not simply human. Outwardly we are human, but inwardly we are divine. According to this wisdom, the purpose of life is to awaken our divine inner self. If we awaken to who we really are, our lives will be blessed. This wisdom is sometimes known as the Sophia perennis, the eternal wisdom, and the cultural history of Sophia – whether as Goddess or Mother of Angels – is interwoven with it.

This wisdom is not confined to the Western Way or to a theistic use of language. Prajnaparamita (= Great Wisdom) is the Mother of Buddhas in Mahayana Buddhism, and the influential Lankavatara Sutra says: “Pure in its own nature and free from the category of finite and infinite, Universal Mind is the undefiled Buddha womb, which is wrongly apprehended by sentient beings”. Similar ideas, expressed a little differently, are to be found in Taoism.

Perennialism came to wide public notice when Aldous Huxley published The Perennial Philosophy in 1945, and has had a significant influence ever since. At the present time, terms like ‘nondual’ – as at www.scienceandnonduality.com – and ‘integral’ – https://www.integrallife.com – are used for the current versions. In these, we find a partial shift from finding a common thread in ancient traditions to developing new ones, in some cases backed up by an ‘evolutionary’ narrative. My own active interest has been piqued by the Headless Way developed by Douglas Harding – www.headless.org – and I will be attending their residential workshop in Salisbury (Wiltshire, England) in July.

Colin Oliver is a poet of the Headless Way, and his poem Sea Shell appears on their website.

What secret lies
in the heart of a sea shell
you cannot tell.

But if one day
a shell on a rock should crack
and break its back

your gaze may fall
to find in its secret heart
nothing at all.

Then turning round
to the sea you may wonder
that the waves’ sound
can come from an empty heart.

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April 7, 2016

POEM: BUMBLE BEE

Crawling

among blackthorn stars,

the bumble bee is drunk.

Petals float

from her blunders.

Her wings

move in and out of humming.

On her body is the glory

of the sun’s

wet shine.

From Colin Oliver High River Sudbury, Suffolk: Downstream Press, 2006.

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February 4, 2016

POEM: A WITHERED TREE

Not a twig or leaf on the old tree,

Wind and frost harm it no more.

A man could pas through a hole in its belly,

Ants crawl searching under its peeling bark.

Its only lodger, the toadstool which dies in a morning,

The birds no longer visit in the twilight.

But its wood can still spark tinder.

It does not care yet to be only the void at its heart.

By Han Yü (768-824)

From: Poems of the Late T’ang translated from the Chinese with an introduction by A.C. Graham Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965

Han Yü was primarily an essayist and polemicist, and initiated an ultimately successful Confucian revival at a time of Buddhist cultural dominance. When writing verse, he adopted devices traditionally confined to prose and to fu (prose poems) and sought to attend to the social and human content of poetry.

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December 11, 2015

ST. LUCY’S DAY

“LUCIA PROCESSION” BY FREDRICK MAGNUSSON – ST. LUCY’S DAY, SWEDEN, 2007.

Saint Lucy’s Day is on December 13, part of Advent in the Christian year. I’m posting early because I will be spending the next week or so off the internet.

This feast once coincided with the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year before calendar reforms. Her feast day has become a festival of light, something that modern Pagans would perhaps more readily associate with Imbolc. St. Lucy’s Day is celebrated as a major feast day in Scandinavia with its long dark winters.

Lucy is called Lucia and is represented as a woman in a white dress and red sash with a crown or wreath of candles on her head. In both Norway and Sweden, girls dressed as Lucy carry rolls and cookies in procession as songs are sung. Even boys take part in the procession as well, playing different roles associated with Christmas. It is said that to vividly celebrate St. Lucy’s Day will help one live the long winter days with enough light.

I have tended more to link the day to a very different response to the day – John Donne’s poem A Nocturnall Upon St. Lucies Day, Being the Shortest Day. This was composed in the 1590’s, well before calendar reform in England.

The poem is linked to a personal bereavement as well as the season. I share the first two verses. They are very much about the young poet’s own experience, rather than the season or the one who has been lost – though in a sense both the poet’s feelings and the poem itself are a service to her. The words themselves give the dark its voice, capturing the moment of desolation fully, and holding it. They do not move on to any culturally expected renewal, but rather to an alchemical anti-renewal instead. If there is any redemption it is in the writing itself, the expression. Donne was a good English writer in a time of good English writing.

Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,

Lucies, who scare seaven houres herself unmaskes,

The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks

Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;

The worlds whole sap is sunke;

The general balme th’hydroptique earth hath drunk,

Whither as to the beds-feete, life is shrunke,

Dead and enterr’d; yet all these seeme to laugh.

Compared to mee, who am their Epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee

At the next world, that is, at the next Spring;

For I am every dead thing.

In whom love wrought new Alchimie.

For his art did expresse

A quintessence even from nothingnesse,

From dull privations, and leane emptinesse:

He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkenesse, death; things which are not.

John Hayward (editor) John Donne Dean of St, Paul’s Complete Poetry and Prose London: The Nonesuch Press, 1967 (Donne became Dean of St, Paul’s in London a long time after he wrote this poem).

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December 9, 2015

POEM: WATER AND WAVE

I’m sharing this song of Kabir because I enjoyed it and felt cheered by it. I liked its devotional and ecstatic note – not my usual one.. I have harmonised it with my way of Sophia by changing a ‘his’ to a ‘her’.

I have been thinking of the difference

Between water

And the waves on it. Rising,

Water’s still water, falling back,

It is water, will you give me a hint

How to tell them apart?

Because someone has made up the word

“Wave”, do I have to distinguish it

From water?

There is a Secret One inside us;

The planets in all the galaxies

Pass through her hands like beads.

That is a string of beads one should look at with

Luminous eyes.

A weaver by trade but a poet-singer by calling, Kabir lived in fifteenth century India. His philosophy incorporated various beliefs of both Muslims and Hindus and later became one of the major influences behind Sikhism. Like Rumi, further to the west and generations earlier, his generously devotional and ecstatic path made him a natural bridge builder between traditions.

Kabir Ecstatic poems Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992 The English translations are free enough for Robert Bly to call them ‘versions by Robert Bly’. Given Bly’s freedom I have changed a ‘his’ to a ‘her’ above to support the poetry of my own gnosis. There is an earlier set of translations published by MacMillan in New York in 1915 by Rabindranath Tagore assisted by Evelyn Underhill under the title Songs of Kabir. Whilst I don’t follow Bly in calling the English of the earlier work “useless”, I do find that Bly’s interpretation has more passion and power. The Bly work includes an insightful afterword Kabir and the transcendental Bly by John Stratton Hawley.

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December 3, 2015

POEM: THE MOON IN DEWDROPS

Simplicity and complexity, elegance and wisdom combined in the poetry of Japanese Zen. I notice that I respond more strongly to such poetry than I do to didactic texts about meditation and philosophy.

To what shall

I liken the world?

Moonlight, reflected

In dewdrops,

Shaken from a crane’s bill.

I particularly love this poem. The apparent naturalism of the imagery makes it powerful and accessible to anyone. Yet for me, this poem also brings up wider issues about reading and interpretation. The poet’s location in place, time and culture do make a difference. Ehei Dogen (1200-1253) was one of the first to transmit Zen Buddhism from China to Japan and was founder of the Soto School. His poem is a waka – a 31 syllable form predating the invention of haiku. Dogen is a key figure in both Japanese Buddhism and Japanese literature.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddhism of all Japanese schools including Zen, the moon stands for Buddha-nature. So the poem teaches a familiar Mahayana truth that the moon (Buddha-nature) is completely reflected in every one of the countless dew drops (all things) without discrimination, namely one in all, all in one. This understanding is accompanied by a sense of fragility and impermanence within nature – strongly present in Japanese culture independently of Buddhism and reinforced by Buddhist teaching. Dogen gives us elegance and complexity in a 31 syllable form.

Hee-Jin Kim*, a modern Zen scholar, takes this further, bringing out Dogen’s sensitivity to history as well as to nature. He draws attention to the word ‘shaken’: each dew drop holds a full yet shaken reflection of the moon. Dogen lived in what was seen as a dark and ill-starred time in Japanese history. Many Buddhists thought that even their path was compromised and talked of degenerate dharma (mappo). Kim understands Dogen as resisting this ideology of despair whilst fully aware of the collective turmoil. On this reading, the poem asserts that timelessness is experienced within, and only within, momentariness, even when the times are stressed.

To what shall

I liken the world?

Moonlight, reflected

In dewdrops,

Shaken from a crane’s bill.

* Hee-Jin Kim Dogen on meditation and thinking: a reflection on his view of Zen Albany, New York: State University, 2007 (At the time of publication Hee-Jin Kim was Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon. He is also the author of Dogen-Kigen: Mystical Realist).

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November 12, 2015

POEM: A PILLOW BOOK

The wisdom of diffident humanism. Spontaneity, immersion-in-the-moment and dissolved boundaries aren’t everything. Our narrative natures may be present, self-conscious and hyper-sensitive as we negotiate connection between self and other. In my world this too has integrity, beauty, and tenderness.

I lie in bed, watching you

Dress yourself in nudity

For your part in a story

You are about to tell me.

Once upon a time, you seem to say,

There was a woman who took off all her clothes

And stood for a moment

With one hand on her hip.

You have my full attention

As you pile your hair on top of your head

And let it fall down again.

Up to this point I am familiar with the story.

Your movements suggest a possible outline,

But nothing is certain yet.

You lift your arms above your head

In a gesture of boredom or surrender.

Your hands touch in mid-air

And you turn them palm-side out

In a kind of question mark,

As you ask for help with the ending.

Hugo Williams, West End Final London: Faber & Faber, 2009. The publisher’s blurb describes this collection as a set of “sardonic investigations into the fault line between voice and projection”.

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November 5, 2015

POEM: OLDER

I was recently introduced to this poem, about being older, by my friend Rosa Davis. I’m grateful for the discovery.

It’s not quite god

Pocketed deep inside you now

This wording of your inner voice

No longer needing an answer

This chest-centred warmth

Stillness of snow

Sheltering every branch and twig

Not god, only a sense

That this is enough.

From Caroline Natzler, Only Grenadine Press, Catford: 2015

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October 10, 2015

POEM: RELIGION

There are times, moods really, where the Druid path feels a bit rugged and aspirational. For such occasions the poet Hugo Williams offers another option.

If it were up to me

I would make use of sleep.

Going to church

Would involve a flight of stairs

To a familiar bedroom,

Where a broken alarm clock told the time.

The spreading of sheets,

The turning down of blankets,

Would be followed by the drawing of curtains in broad daylight,

The ritual of undressing.

Members of my religion

Would be encouraged to sleep in

On Monday mornings

And any other morning they felt like it, with no questions asked.

Sleep notes would be provided.

Couples would be authorised

To pull the covers over their heads

And spend their days tucked up

In cosy confessionals,

Where all their sins would be forgiven.

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Tag: Contemplative poetry