2-24-07 - Gotta get to work on the barn this morning but wanted to put something up here on the cuke like what occurred to me in this morning's meditation. Hmm - zazen epiphanies - could make this a section of cuke. Something like Jack Handy's Deep Thoughts although I could never ever come up with thoughts that deep, that wonderful.

So the German mystic Meister Eckhart came to mind and his admonition for the key to knowing god or getting enlightened or whatever. I wanted to check on the exact wording and thought maybe I could find it on the Internet which took me to the excellent Wikipedia entry on Meister Eckhart. I looked at The Man From Whom God Hid Nothing, An essay on Johannes Eckhart by Arthur Brown. There's a book of similar name by Ursula Fleming. There are many links and lots of info, of course, on the Wikipedia page and elsewhere on the Internet. I looked into quote sites to see if I could find what I was looking for. Here are twenty quotes from Meister Eckhart. There's so much on the Internet on him I'm getting distracted looking at it all or rather bits of it and so I now quit the search and paraphrase what I recollected of Eckhart this morning in zazen, his admonition for the key to knowing god or getting enlightened or whatever. It was something like:

Know nothing, want nothing, have nothing.

Is that all? Big deal. So what? one might say. Or, it might sound impossible huh? Not to me. I don't try to apply it in space and time - that always screws everything up. If one imagines oneself trying to know, want, and have nothing morning to night day after day it seems, to say the least, rather impractical and unattainable. So don't do that - just apply that suggestion to the exact present moment. See, it's easy. No need to think about tomorrow or what you're gonna do across town. That's his door to god. What are you waiting for?

I remember talking to a Catholic contemplative monk who said that he liked zazen for its purity, its lack of a focus on any symbol, but he wondered if it was right for him as a Christian to let go of everything. Well, there are plenty of Christian mystics, contemplatives who let go of everything. Meister Eckhart is one.

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Thanksgiving - 11-23-06

from the comic strip, MUTTS, November 20, 2006.

and then there's this:

"I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land." -- Jon Stewart

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