Good Morning!!

from Teilhard de Chardin - The Divine Milieu -

    “God must, in some way or other, make room for Himself, hollowing us out and emptying us, if he is finally to penetrate into us. And in order to assimilate us in Him, He must break the molecules of our being so as to re-cast and re-model us. The function of death is to provide the necessary entrance into our inmost selves.”

Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,

          Invisible?  Isn’t your dream

To be wholly invisible someday?  O Earth: invisible!

What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?

          Earth, my dearest, I will.

                   Rilke

The bell doesn’t ring,

Nor does the stick;

The “between” is ringing.

Bell’s ringing,

Stick’s ringing,

The bell-and-stick is ringing.

                        from:  A Zen Forest

                                    translated by Soiku Shigematsu

 from Play to Live 

    by Alan Watts

"Differences, borders, lines, surfaces, and boundaries do not really divide things from each other at all; they join them together.  All boundaries are held in common.  When you understand this, you see that the sense of being "me" is exactly the same sensation of being one with the whole cosmos.  You do not need to go through some other weird, different, or odd kind of experience to feel in total connection with everything.  Once you get the clue, you see that the sense of unity is inseparable from the sense of difference.  The secret is that what is "other" eventually turns out to be you.  That is the element of surprise in life - to find the thing that is most alien to you.   If you go out at night and look at the stars you will realize that they are millions and millions and billions of miles away - vast configurations out in space!  You can lie back and look at that and say, "Whew!  Surely I hardly matter.  I am just a tiny little peek-a-boo on this weird spot of dust called Earth, and all that out there was going on billions of years before I was born, and will still go on billions of years after I die."  Nothing may seem stranger to you than that - more different than you.  But there comes a point when you will say, "Why, that's me!"  And when you know that, you never die."