The Pants of My Murshid

Over three decades since he last wore these,

cloth black and simple, made by a fellow student,

a seamstress – made to order, cut for Yoga

and dispensing Dharma.

By the seat of his pants I now sit in ‘em,

since three decades I wear ‘em off and on,

worn as long since they are.

My Puja-kitty likes these best for burrowing

between my legs while sitting, taking her repose

by the seat of his pants.

Am I smarter or cleverer for wearing ‘em,

did they ever enlighten me –

or is it just sent-to-mental?

I dunno, but the cat sure does love ‘em.

Walking The Walk

(feeling Sheikh Hassan of Nablus)

Friends, I'll tell you –
there are days and there are moments
when I don't know who I am.
When on the intake and the outake
of one breath after another,
I hear distant cymbals and a drum –
and the vast space within me,
mad and sovereign, intones a heady chorus
of God is Alive, He is Everywhere Now.

Friends, let me confess –
there are days and there are moments
without a nickle in my pocket.
When one leg walks and the other leg walks,
and the left says allah-hayy, da'im-hu,
and the other leg likewise,
with a stride and a knowledge
of the truth and the reality of this,
with this mad love toward you and you and you
sharpening my glance:
and this heart – this heart abreast
with every heart which comes to mind,
beats with a power half my age.
There is fear toward no one, nor cold in winter,
only sovereign, only sovereign love and joy,
moving and beating with every step, peace
with every thought, with every breath -
there is no religion in it, only faith.

Friends, coursing through my arms and
into my hands and my fingertips
is this dhikr, this hadhrat, this focused adoration!
Neither do I own it nor am I entranced,
it is as natural as holding this cat purring
or driving to my patients or getting the groceries.
It's the balm addressed in my dream in the open field
that night nearly four decades hence, the balm
for suffering humankind.

It holds the atoms together and blesses,
it commands and it radiates the desire
for your well-being and anyone else's.
Friends!  Walking the Walk of the Beloved,
you pick up only the Beloved's scent.

The Cockatoo

(Mill Valley, 1985 - my daughter being six then)

In a house I know is a little bird
a yellow cockatoo -
it sings it chirps inside its cage
and mimics phrases too . . .
It stands up on its perch all day
or hops around and tweets;
such dear and happy notes it sings
and warbles words so sweet.
I wondered how it came to pass
that I should fall in love
with such a creature as this bird,
my ears so daily crave,
my palm to touch, my fingers stroke,
my lips to plant a kiss
upon that darling head so gently -
just one little kiss . . .
Then listening with different ear
I understood at once
the very 'semblance of this bird
to Rachael, at a glance.

Come, And Partake

He is risen,

the King of Love, yes he.
He is risen.

"Whom do you seek? He is not here.
The bread of the Pesach is unleavened,
whereas he, the bread of Life, his Body, is risen."

Why do you search for eggs in the grass,
your eyes full of marshmallow bunnies in baskets?
Look! The early morning sky is lavender, holding promise!
O look now, and behold with the real eyes of a child,
behold the Lamb!

Be still in that morning light, you stand alone with Magdalene
at the wonder of it all: the King of Love, yes he,
has left the sepulchre, he is standing now not one hair's breadth apart,
his light is sovereign and that sky, that Easter sky is its blush.
Closer is he now than your own breath, breathe him in, for
he is risen.

Come, and partake.

What Is Being Looked At Is What Is Looking (Assisi-Frank)

(mid- to late-'80s)
Heart of human being accomodates all longing
and all deviations from longing.
Put aside the literature of ages,
go and feel the pulsation of the heart
transcending all ages
transcending all places
spanning vast ranges of the sane and the grotesque.

Every self is born believing,
every belief a longing to know the Self.
I have tasted a mother's salty tears
watching her child being dragged to the auction block,
herself led helplessly away to be probed and raped.
And the man clutching gut and groin
from kicks administered by smiling guards
watched his wife and oft-held children ushered into
the extermination wagon
while his mother entered a barracks with a crude and leering officer –
I was that man
long ago shattered and alone.

For all this human heart has travailed
yet this mind is free;
like the unnamed unheard-of sisters of faith
who braved every terror and abuse to succor the will-broken
children in the maelstrom,
for the sake of the love they carried in their own wounded bodies.

I have been shown in dream "the balm to heal the suffering masses"...




The Names of God will clear of all fantasy
that mind which seeks refuge in the stillness of the Self
residing in all;
residing even in that one holding the whip and the goad,
even the pimp and the cocaine boss,
the magistrate and the power-broker,
the drinking wife-masher or the barb-tongued wife,
the abuse offender and those in positions who give him cover,
yes, even the landlord,
evenso the child in my arms, as they all once were, reflecting

my Original Innocence.

Free of lust – through hard work;
free of greed and of anger – through hard work;
free of all rambling judgement idiocy by dull self-conscious mind;
free of religious arrogance and the effort of manipulation –
through hard work and through
Surrender's grace-bestowing power.

The heart which harbors layered knots of pain, horror, cheapened existence,
and the heart which holds to childish naive optimism –
both house the Self without even knowing it.
The heart which cares for neither pleasure nor pain
just sings the Beloved Name
is the very temple of that Self.

 
There is no dignity like Original Innocence,
no persuasion so subtle, so sovereign,
no generosity so free, genuine, fair.
One who's found it has a clear and forgiving mind,
a mind which can span the ages
and touch hearts in all times in all worlds –
and clean up any life which has just enough glimmer left
to remember what it once knew.

Practice is remembrance.
Kindness is remembrance.
Sincerity and integrity are remembrance,
all this is certain.
Original Innocence is reborn by turning;
this turning is begun and completed
through an act of surrender.
And with us the Guru has left this Principle for all time.

What Actually Brought Me To Berlin

It wasn't to go "fight the Third Reich," but to meet their kids. The U.S. always had enough home-grown American Nazis and Aryan-wannabes and KKK, I didn't need to go to Doitch-Land for this. In 1980 I hand-typed some hundred letters to Jewish and to Christian individuals or Worthies or organizational entities, sharing the gist of my little epiphany and intention to one day make it over to Germany. While having no idea how I'd do this, the U.S. Military in its renowned wisdom, saw fit in August of '88 to send me as an Arabic-trained intel analyst to Berlin. And that was to be the horse I rode in on, just over 14 months before the Great Wall Fall.

As a Jewish teenager growing up in the U.S. I'd contemplated the Shoa often, frequently pondering all the usual run of questions and suppositions, ad infinitum. And then once, having entered my twenties, an entirely new question occured to me in a moment of extrapolation, challenging me with another perspective to examine: what would I do with myself, were I a post-war German of the same age and sensibilities, struggling with the haunting revelation of all that my own nation, the entire generation of my parents and grandparents – indeed totally including many of these, personally and directly or indirectly – had perpetrated upon their own entire Jewish citizenry and Europe's entire Jewish population (as well as those others likewise targeted) – upon defenseless men, women and children?  I had never heard this addressed in all those years in the States, and have still never to this day, so I guess I get to own it.

What would I do with myself, carrying not the guilt or accountability personally but the legacy and the onus of my thoroughly compromised family, my Waffen-SS grandfather, or SA uncle, my Wehrmacht father on campaign in the East …? Suppose, I reflected as this theoretical German counterpart, I became well-informed of it all, not merely satisfied with what attention was given the subject in school, and realized that the men and the women by whom I'd been raised, with whom I'd identified more or less as role models, had all been either willing perpetrators, willing accomplices, or simply spinelessly banal, unquestioning receivers of whatever pleasures or privileges and assurances of security they'd derived from being good little Aryan-approved Reichsbürger? And even if they had remained dangerously human and exercised any form of non-compliance, if not actually being in the homeland Resistance – and there were indeed those – still they remained under the onus of having been traitors in the eyes of their countrymen or collectively taken for ex-Nazis by outsiders, a terrible slap in the face either way.

So supposing as this next-generation German I'd really gotten it, and the horror was more than my conscience could bear – and I'd gotten absolutely nowhere asking, then confronting, family members of that generation – just stonewalling, cold silence, fierce denials, angry warnings to just drop it...? Suppose as this person I had worked it out on an emotional level almost as deep as the trauma of revelation itself, that I am myself not to be held accountable for any of what had happened, having been born after The War, - and after the war on the Jews – yet am carrying in my own immediate family history the full weight of repressed and denied accountability, such that I would gladly trade families with someone, anyone, somewhere else?

In other words, here was a non-Jewish German version of myself, thoroughly human, struggling very poignantly with the most recent ancestral karma of perhaps the heaviest degree one could imagine: it is just that question of search for conscience, of really encounterng and coming to terms with that – for both post-war generation members, and I, this Jewish American was uncomfortably aware of this. There was no room for smugness or condescension or contempt, if this shared encounter was to become realized.

This American Jew contemplated this hypothetical German counterpart: and imagined there could be quite a number of them. Maybe one in a thousand, maybe less. Such a one might contemplate suicide, this American Jew is thinking I certainly would; or such a one might come to hate "everything German" and hate being a German. Such a one might finally give up in exasperation even trying to come to terms with all this or escape the overwhelming cold trauma, finding no comfort in mentioning it to friends who are not also looking at it for themselves, or in searching out "things Jewish" to try to – to what, salvage or balance or compensate for something?

I, this American Jew, could see myself in this counterpart, could identify his/her need for some kind of leveling contact, his/her desire for the way out. I sensed that this counterpart was ready for spiritual amnesty. This means: amnesty from the onus of crimes of one's familial and native predecessors, amnesty from the psychic hold of their criminal record on one's own growth, amnesty from the very spirit of that generation and its legacy of shame. Ready means that one has gained the maturity to discern and avoid the pitfalls of either gross denial, self-pitying projection, or of hanging one's head as the guilty one, the self-hating German who is actually no more conscious or prepared reflectively to go within and bravely pull up roots in search of truth than are the other two cases. And I considered that this hypothetical German counterpart – however many s/he numbered – was ripe for contact.

And it turned out - I was right.

It would approach discovering for themselves what compassionate reconcilliation and redemption could really mean, as sought out strictly in the interest of achieving and expressing true sanity and healing. After some years I also became "ripe for contact" and wound up moving to Berlin, staying here and eventually settling down, living an ordinary life.

 I'm not one for clichées.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OMK1m8W65s&hl=es-419&gl=CO

(I'd waited 26 years in Berlin to give that moment, and before then, since 1980.)

Addendum:

Once, in nursing school here, while removing a tabloid from a hospital room to toss out, I came across an interview of a guy it turned out also had been interviewed for BBC previously, a former Auschwitz SS officer who loudly and unmistakeably stated toGermany and to the world: "Stop denying, it all happened, it was all true, I was there!" He described his position and duties (restricted to taking valuables and managing them) and with all candor described himself without self-pity, as a cog in the machine but with equal accountability! He authentically wished to meet any Jew of whom he could ask pardon and extend a hand.

I was so impressed, saying well that's a first - and sent off a letter to him via the tabloid, which concurred, and left it at that. I told him I'd never thought I'd be faced with forgiving a Nazi because to be forgiven you have to show remorse and as they are incapable of that down to the very marrow it would never come up -and that he was now the "Nazi I'd been waiting for 16 years to encounter" - I said as a non-victim and non-survivor myself and one who'd lost no family there anyway, I could not and had no right to "forgive" or even "pardon" him, but that I could on all moral principle, offer him my full understanding and acceptance, yes as a Jew, and as a former member of the Occupying U.S. forces here, I could offer him my hand in friendship and reconciliation, even redemption for us both. I left it at that and didn't even photocopy myletter which I normally would have done. I received in the mail a most exquisitely beautiful reply from him, for his own sake and that of his family.

It was typed out on a PC, four pages, and in the margin and at the end, some two or three places in there, he scribbled further in excited hand, his overwhelmed thanks and gratitude and heartfelt words. I had shown his letter to one of my brothers, to my parents, to survivors I've known, and to German friends here - all were as astounded as was I initially to read his letter, and all were bowled over by the action on my part which occasioned it.

Original Innocence

To assert a dogma of original sin is to deny our Divine birthright and heritage and foment endless generations of self-loathing which will condemn one to constantly either grovel at the feet or to lunge at the throat of the "Other" of our misinformed duality. To awaken to our original innocence – neither angel nor demon, but human – is to perceive anew what is old from the Beginning, through lovingkindness, through compassion, through sovereign empathy.

Innocence here isn't childish but childlike, not naive but open. It's giving and receiving both, willingly, it is without the cumbersome overlay of ego – either in communication or in act. Right, innocence in this is both receptive and active: and it is original and it is sovereign. It doesn't refer to being good or nice or better, as these are determined by ego – it refers to being in the original state, and therefore without agenda and demands on others. Neither hostage to one's own emotions nor to those of others, one allows oneself to be influenced or guided and moved rather by discriminating wisdom, or even by crazy wisdom.

In original innocence is no aggression and no fear, plenty breathing room to grow, to develop, to create, to evaluate and accept or discard, to trust and to build what is beautiful.

 It is an aspect of Love, it is in Buddhist jargon: one's basic nature.

A Critical Look (if one still may) at “LGBT“ as a Lobby & Movement

Speaking as one who has since the early '70s been awake to the dream of, desire to see, the civil and human rights of homosexuals, male or female, manifestly recognized and implemented once and for all – and an end to their ages old persecution; speaking as one who abhors the continuing status quo of persecution, torture and public execution of gays in any or all Muslim countries; and speaking as one who feels we've not only long achieved our ends in this matter in the West – in fact, that we have moreover over-achieved in the direction of an ideological extreme, I wish to address what I sadly and critically observe, with the hope that the following cogent points might somewhere strike a chord at this critical juncture.

As often happens:  an old conditioned conformity winds up being replaced, not by the freedom to think clearly - but by a new conformity-by-coercion, holding us un-conscious and captive.  This produces no gender-clarity but more confusion, pseudo-scientific in some  of its more militant claims and contemptuous in its demands for over-relativized, highly generalized "gender-mainstreaming" - a new catchword for the sheer superficiality of our time.  As with the increasingly questionable manipulation of "multi-culti" - and the agenda hiding behind it, to so much as question what is going on is to have oneself re-defined by its propaganda: as racist, or reactionary, or right-extreme, as the case may be.

John G. Bennett, in his Third Way School (as I recall – but google him), had quoted Gurdjieff in addressing homosexuals and their capacity for development in the Inner Work. This inner work comprised – and frankly would comprise in any School which ever has existed or does, for inner development of the Human Being – three aspects, namely: the exoteric, or outer; the mesoteric, or middle; and the esoteric, or inner. This having nothing to do with getting "elite" or "important" about anything, but about actual development, no one – and I repeat, no one – was or is saying that homosexuals do not or cannot develop in a spiritual training. Having said that, what Gurdjieff, according to Bennett, did address, was that while homosexuals would naturally advance like anyone else with right effort and intention, in the outer and the middle aspects, there were two things which alone hindered, if not prevented, them from attaining to the inner.

Minus these two things, there would be nothing barring the homosexual from advancing, so it has nothing to do with judgement but very astute observation: those two being 1) the sense of shame they carry, which of course one does after countless generations of being shamed for what one is – but it's an obstacle to development, a no-brainer; and 2) their sense of specialness.

Now this is interesting, I was struck by reading this some 35 years ago, struck and fascinated, and confronted and challenged to really look at that. The observation rang true as I'd always tried to plumb, as a heterosexual male, the personal-societal hitch in the psychological make-up of my gay brothers and sisters.

Folks, we have achieved the half: we have removed the first of the two, there is no more shame; but the second has still to be dealt with, and there lies the phenomenn I see all around me today.

We keep taking a good and noble idea and destroying it through the parody of ideology! We can no longer be fair without getting stupid, we can no longer be constructively critical without being called nazis or fascists or negativists of some sort or another!

Friends!  When Political Correctness supercedes any right to the expression of critical thinking, and "tolerance" is the new coin for coerced acceptance, and to question a lobbied direction is to be branded without consideration as "discrimination" - what then becomes of Discriminating Wisdom?  For example, racism is one thing - while lobbying for all races and skin colors to be null and become one race and one color is as abhorrent as it is absurd - I like all the races and skin tones and I am for mutual respectful appreciation of differences.  I want all the nations and cultures to remain nations and cultures, and to develop naturally and progressively, I don't want a One World Government!  The EU and NATO strive toward exactly this, and are getting it.

I frankly still embody the coming together of the most varied of religions to have them meet, listen, share, mutually appreciate and come away with something new and fresh - and I want my Catholics to be Catholics, Protestants Protestant, Buddhists to stay Buddhist, Jews Jews, Hindus Hindus - etc.!  Sexism can be confronted without killing the erotic in ourselves through PC - or take abortion:  as a liberal-thinking member of our culture, I'm not "for-abortions" as the oxymornic "pro-lifers" would call this, I am pro-choice, and therewith equally dismayed at the coerced abortions of China or like attitudes elsewhere, as in former East Germany.  Returning to LGBT as a lobby, by becoming ideologized and rigidly overweening, the issues have become the new coin of "where you stand on..." - and woe unto you as parents if you do not want your child sexualized with propaganda at an early grade school age, making homosexuality such an issue over and above your right to guide your child according to your timing, to your lights, and to your discriminating wisdom.  Or have we no more self-respect before every movement and every lobby which dictates how you orient ...!

I was also, since those early '70s, for the right to gender change of someone who with good reason could never relate to the gender he/she was born into, because I stand for the right of individuals to have access to lives full of grace and good-will, freedom and fulfillment, dignity and development, and the pursuit of happiness. The cult and culture of Political Correctness and mindless Relativism is not about that and never was. It is about the same ol' same ol' of power and domination, regardless of who's calling which shots. The relativism of being Politically Correct does not make something right.

Introducing sex-ed into early grade shool, even kindergarten, as is occurring today – at least in the EU-Regime's New Europe, and Canada, if not also the U.S. - and teaching, not merely acceptance toward (as if this also belongs to this age-group!) the new sacred-acronym, LGBT, but preference of and deference toward – mixing everything mindlessly up so that no discriminating power of the intellect may exist and everything becomes a gray sort of-kind of mentality with no compass, no reference point or orientation available or allowed to any individual's own moral perception – is not nor ever was my idea of a better future.

But that is the future we are having dictated to us, as lobbying ideologies only can do: dictate. It's the way of the world, as usual: power, control, domination.

This is not Love.

On the Occasion of Rama's Birthday

In the Lord's Names I take refuge,
through these above all am I sensitive
to the pains of Humankind and its suffering –
and the suffering it visits upon Nature;
and these alone are the balm to my pain,
these alone the balm for this suffering.
So I take refuge there, in the Lord's Names,
beloved friend, there I take refuge.

Denying Air

Denying not just the "existence" per se, but the creative, dynamic and actively real existence of God, or Divine presence, in this very world and coursing through our very lives and Being – never mind what you want to call it, God or Goddess, or by whatever name or form – but to deny at all, is really really just like denying the existence of oxygen, no kidding.

  I have no more gripe with an atheist than I do with a fundamentalist, so long as they don't start enforcing on others and scoring political points, a waste of everyone's precious time.

You don't have to make a religion out of your appreciation for O2, but if you require and find or formulate one that is suitable to your needs and temperament, to develop that capacity in you for more, well and good. If you make an agenda or an ideology about oxygen or claim to own it, the absurdity of this is pretty obvious.

To question what it's about, this O2, is scientific and valid as long as you really and sincerely want an answer, otherwise you're just playing around with lab-rats for shits'n'grins your whole life until it's time to close shop.

But to deny that there is oxygen, because you don't see it, and you call it at best, entirely theoretical (or theo-logical vs. "real"world-logical) is to miss out on the fact that you draw it in every second and send it out every other second, that it courses through your lungs and pipes, feeds your entire physical and mental system, and without it you would cease to function and expire.

  God is like that air, that air which is in us, in every cell and space between, in every fluid, in every breath we draw. Here. Now. And in reality. No shit.

Air. Space. Breath. So where do the space in which I am standing and the Space of the entire Cosmos and Realm of Possibility meet – or were they, are they, can they be, ever separate at all? Check it out, Friend, check it out.

And on this very breath we can draw into ourselves all the love that is there in the Space to draw from, and all the joy, and all the peace and presence. The very presence of our own original and true nature.

  And we can send that out the same way, out into our world, this world this Cosmos - and to any and every individual we might hold in the thought of our heart.

And that is Divine. I cannot deny it.

YouTube Clips

Sam-on-youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcOQY-n-EWs Highlights, Shabbos-Kiddush

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x43W4_Vi9LU Dhikr àla Sufi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=428lJH-ihts The Muslim World
http://youtu.be/8jk4ZB2SfPY REMEMBERING:  (Sufi) Murshid Hassan of Nablus - A Tribute
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo0LaUAR7QA&feature=youtu.be Singing Joe Miller:  A Tribute