Verses for contemplation on 6-10-06

Here is God's purpose -
for God to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law,
not academic dogma, nor ecclesiastic canon.

R. Buckminster Fuller, No More Secondhand God


Let thy soul be de-spirited of
all spirit; let it be spiritless.
Love God as he is: a not-God, a
not-spirit, a not-Person, a not-image,
as sheer, pure, limpid unity, alien
from all duality."

Meister Eckhart, Sermon XCIX


Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!

Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.

(CONTINUE...)

Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.

Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.

Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
blown off into emptiness.

These words I'm saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:

Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.

Rumi, Discourses of Rumi