Lean Against the Mountain - Me & Blue Cliff - A Zennish Sesshin

Blue Cliff Record - click here to read:

https://dmzencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Blue-Ciff-Record.pdf

[All photos by Warren Falcon.  All rights reserved]

Today I am the Buddha who quits. - Jack Kerouac

Every revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory light. - Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Blue Cliff Record — my equivalent: 

Gray Chasm Stammers

once pretending toward zen
Blue Ridge Mountain records years, late now in hand - 

who was this person?

D'just arrived from Lookout Mountain shadow, 

Calvin's grim stain aka my first middle and last name - 

I only knew then that I would no longer write it or any 

name until I had gained a sense of who, what, how, why:

"At yet another Lookout,

escaped the first one to

Mountain Retreat, more
fog rolls in, not seeing

my hand, can only feel 

a face, know at last how 

blind I really am."

"Blue Cliff master asks,

What is this I?

Not that again? I complain.
How dull. How boring.
How unanswerable.

BC - Turn then to shapely thought
turned by shapely mind.

A mandrill's ass, I answer.

An easy point, says he, be free of self hatred.
It is all too easy to negate. Ease is the gate of hell
thus the problem of American pragmatism and 

positive thinking.

Wha'? Tell me more, BC.

Easy to negate - easy to affirm. One squirms between the two,
either/or - reifying one or the other is idolatry.

OK? (me leaning in to hear more).

Pragmatism crept into American spiritual movements early on...

easier to think "as if" but soon's a whiff of sulphur and brimstone at the end. 

The ends do not necessarily lead to the intended means aka redemption.

Me -Then I lean against the mountain.


BC - Too much effort yet not enough stride, 

ride clouds over mountain, 

settle over a glen. 

Stillness is there. 

Or can be.

Come hot sun it all ends.
Was it ever there?
Rest your thoughts...

Angelus Silesius observes

"the rose lives without why"

Sigh

I lean against the mountain,
I have come from a far away place, BC.

As have we a.. Rest awhile. 

Your feet know what to do even if you don't. 

I lean against the mountain.

I have wasted so much time and still young.

So am I, says BC, quality of mind is everything.
Don't believe me because I say it. One attains it in the 

strangest of ways. Cannot tell you what that might be 

but if 3 times 3 equals 9 all is lost, but who is counting

or getting lost, for that matter.

I lean against the mountain.

Do not lean, BC advises - Attain.

I give up, I say.

BC - Now you are on the way - 

trials and travails.

Happy trails.

Hail and well met, Traveler.

Loose tongues, their slips - allowed.

Loose lips on the other hand...

why many a zen master counsels

"Go drink tea" - give your lips 

something to do besides flap.

KATZ! - Japanese word for

BITCH SLAP

from Scripts for the Pageant by James Merrill

March 28, 2925 Post Scripts Lips Still Flappin'

"Still at zen-hish-ness-nest - as I've said elsewhere (go here)

my zen I call "cheating zen" since it, zen, depends on cheating

in the word game, fair trade, fingers crossed behind of the back.

But now, too, my zen is summed accordingly:

FAT CHANCE!

For best results in zen of zen and other spiritual solutions 

the grit hits the road when one arrives at a mystical yet very

real X on the map in the transformation game, town called

ROPE'S END.

When arriving there, the welcome sign reads:

ABANDON ALL HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

Old Possum, T. S. Ersatz writes it clearly:

"For hope would be hope for the wrong thing."

I once shared T. S. Four Quartets with BC late 1970's and explained, from Christian mystics perspective, the meaning of the word "kenosis" aka emptying.  When I repeated the word he looked at me, shouted -

GESUNDHEIT!!