Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage Update
April 2005

Theme: In/is/as --  What Yearns To Be Revealed

The face of the soul.

Some say a new reality emerges. It's called diaphaneity.

It means to show through, to be transparent. Like transparencies used on overhead projectors for lecture presentations, one transparency is laid over another and over others so that each one shows through with their particular imprint to reveal a whole for all to see.

Seeing the evolution of events,
Keep to the source.
Fixing the attention internally,
Understand calamity and fortune
In the context of unity.
Sit unconscious of doing anything,
Walk unconscious of going anywhere.
- Lao tzu

The source is light. The activity is attention.

What concerns us about death? There is, of course, the sense we are losing something, the familiar is disappearing, and we are uncertain -- we plain don't know -- what, if anything, follows. Even for those with faith, life after death is a dimensional leap of consciousness more easily speculated about than part and parcel of confident experiential facticity. There's just not much verifiable data. But then what's faith for if certainty presides?

You have been taught and you are firmly convinced that what looks and tastes like bread and wine is not bread and wine but the body and the blood of Christ. You know also how David referred to this long ago when he sang: Bread gives strength to man’s heart and makes his face shine with the oil of gladness. Strengthen your heart, then, by receiving this bread as spiritual bread, and bring joy to the face of your soul.
(From the Jerusalem Catecheses, Office of Readings, Easter Saturday)

This Easter Saturday a foggy chill rain in Maine. Even here, in the very sentence written, you can have the name of a feast (Easter) a day of the week (Saturday), an atmospheric condition (fog), a watery transfer from sky to ground (rain), and a geographical locale (Maine) where, signs proclaim, it is "The way life should be." Each of these distinct bits of information, description, or wishful thinking are in themselves distinct yet interconnected in portraying a picture of reality no one of them alone could convey.

THE INNOCENCE

Looking to the sea, it is a line
of unbroken mountains.

It is the sky.
It is the ground. There
we live, on it.

It is a mist
now tangent to another
quiet. Here the leaves
come, there
is the rock in evidence

or evidence.
What I come to do
is partial, partially kept.
(poem by Robert Creeley)

Bread is bread as wine is wine. Body is body as blood is blood. Jesus is Jesus as Christ is Christ. The seeing-through of each is and as brings diaphaneity and transparency revealing a picture no one could, isolated, convey.

The underlying reality of this existence might just be the conveyance of what-is-called Father, through the Spirit-field of Itself, revealing what-is-called Christ in-is-as each one of us, in-is-as each and every sentient being, elemental matter, and nascent aspect of becoming.

For the time/being/becoming within which we experience in/is/as let us wander through this curious new word as we wander to this Easter new reality.

This new reality dissolves the too much anger that hides, enclosed and incommunicado, behind walls of not-supposed-to-feel-what-you-feel. As this new reality the diaphanous feels its way through to the open. For too long stifled feeling has suffered stiff compacting critical time-bomb status with igniting fuse naked to both self or other spark.

6
All you say you want
to do to yourself you do
to someone else as yourself

and we sit between you
waiting for whatever will
be at last the real end of you.
(final stanzas from poem, ANGER, by Robert Creeley)

It is not certain that death is the real end of us. The "real end of you" might be what yearns to be revealed through such seasons as Easter.

In is as: What is within is transformed as revealing diaphaneity. Source is presence; Itself is field of conveyance; Light is evidence.

"Inisas" becomes a new meditation within a new reality. One could say it has always been this very reality in which we dwell, only absent our awareness. Throughout human history a rare few have seen and been enlightened with this conveyance of light; these have tried to teach and embody what they have received to pass on.

It is what we long to see. It is the joy that does not disperse.

For all who this day approach final breath in this dimension -- we pray -- as we do every day, for your conveyance to your source.

It is the face of your soul.

The context of unity.

Inisas.

With gratitude.

 , Sando , Cesco , Mu-ge ,
and all who grace Meetingbrook 

2April2005, Easter Saturday,
Day of John Paul II’s death.
Requiescat in Pace!