the jesus sutras

This comes from a 7th Century Chinese text, as quoted by Martin Palmer, offering an insight into how 7th Century Chinese Christianity was evolving, incorporating elements of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism

+++


The Four Essential Laws of Christian Dharma


Now, what are the Four Essential Laws of the Dharma?
The first is no wanting. If your heart is obsessed with something,
It manifests in all kinds of distorted ways.
Distorted thoughts are the root of negative behavior . . .

The second is no doing. Don't put on a mask and pretend to be what you’re not . . .
The effort needed to hold a direction is abandoned,
And there is simply action and reaction.
So walk the Way of No Action.

The third is no piousness. And what that means
Is not wanting to have your good deeds broadcast to the nation.
Do what's right to bring people to the truth
But not for your own reputation’s sake.
So anyone who teaches the Triumphant Law,
Practicing the Way of Light to bring life to the truth,
Will know Peace and Happiness in company.
But don't talk it away. This is the Way of No Virtue.

The fourth is no absolute. Don't try to control everything,
Don't take sides in arguments about right and wrong.
Treat everyone equally, and live from day to day.
It’s like a clear mirror that reflects everything anyway:
Green or yellow or in any combination-
It shows everything, as well as the smallest of details.
What does the mirror do? It reflects without judgement.

+++

quoted from: http://www.sevenpillarshouse.org/article/the_jesus_sutras_an_ancient_message_for_a_post_modernist_future/

+++

west london tales 12 - egypt

Playing on my laptop, beside this screen, a woman with a blue scarf talks from Tahrir Square. The noise from the square slips down cables, slides through oceans, emerges through speakers, sings in my sitting room. Everything connects?

I took the lift this morning and saw my downstairs neighbours for the first time since I got back. More often than not the reason we talk to one another is because there's been a leak from my flat downstairs to theirs. (Generally arising from the Ethiopian couple who live upstairs.) In spite of this, I get on OK with my downstairs neighbours, an old man and his middle-aged daughter. But today, in the lift, they were distracted and made little attempt to communicate. The daughter was on the phone, talking in Arabic and her father, a hunched man with big specs who's always in slippers, looked concerned, trying to work out what the person on the other side of the phone line was saying.

Then I remembered. They are Egyptian Copts. They had bigger things on their mind.

+++

the arrow maker who gives birth to a new century

The most extraordinary festival of all those celebrated by the Indians of America was surely the Toxiuh molpilia (the binding of the years) which took place at the end of every century, at the end of a cycle of fifty-two solar years. This was the festival of the new fire... It was the most beautiful, the most tragic, and the most meaningful of festivals, since it took place at the time when, according to the Indians' counting of time, all the stars having completed their cycle, the entire cosmos would begin again the revolution which lead it from the year One Rabbit to another year One Rabbit.

...

There was something tragic and dreamlike in that terrifying wait for the end of the world which the Christian Sahagun could not accept, because for him it has the inevitable sense of a damnation: it was, he says, "an invention of the devil so they would renew the pact they had made with him... by plunging them into terror of the end of the world and by making them believe he was prolonging their time and was having mercy on them, by allowing the world to continue."

...

The priests then arrived, each one wearing the insignias of his god, and they began to walk slowly, silently, "and they were then called teonenemi, which means, they walk like gods".

Then, at a given moment, a man was sacrificed, enabling the entire universe to continue on its course. They chose a warrior, captured during combat, chosen from among the most courageos, who had to bear, by the date of his birth, the name of his destiny. Born on the first day of the year, he was called xiuhtlanin, he who arrowed the new year. The high priest placed a stick of wood upon his chest and quickly rubbed the tapered stick between his hands, thus producing a spark. When the fire caught "the captive's chest was immediately opened, his heart ripped out and thrown into the fire, which they kept fanning, and then the whole body was consumed in the flames". And all around the people who were waiting in anguish, seeing the fire rise up, "immediately cut their ears with knives, collected their blood and threw it in the direction where the light had appeared"; fire was taken to all parts of the province by runners carrying torches and, says Sahagun, "it was an admirable sight, that multitude of fire in all the villages, so such a degree it seemed to be daylight." The last ceremony of the new fire took place in 1507, according to Sahagun, "they did it in complete solemnity, for the Spanish had not yet come to that land".

+++


From The Mexican Dream, J.M.G. Le Clezio, p54.

+++

define your terms

You can't write about corruption in a corrupt society, because it doesn't want to know.

+++

cash flow

Money is just an opportunity cost.

+++

For what you gain from the having of it, you lose from those things you might have gained from the not having of it.

+++

interchange

It might be said that in order to truly experience the pathos and/ or beauty of living in a big city, you need to be single, and lonely. In which state, every touch of humanity counts at least double.

+++

Having just crossed the path of the man who works in the BBC courier department at Kings Cross Station, on the down escalator as he passed on the up, a man who I met briefly earlier today for the first and probably last time.

+++

feel the quality

We inhabit a conviction society. The more you convince yourself and others of your worth/ the worth of your idea/ the worth of your conviction, the more successful your integration within this society.

+++

the devil's in the detail

To be a true artist you need to be conscious of the complete insignificance of your work.

+++

And learn when you need to fight that insignificance.

+++

And when you need to accept it.

+++

angels walk backwards

Do you not believe that you can know everything there is to know about someone from what is depicted on their face the very first time you meet them? And everything that comes thereafter is merely an unfolding of that moment?

+++

winchester

It's a beautiful day and the sun brings warmth to the eleventh floor. The door is open and the Westway traffic resonates with an urban twang. Although it's still January, the day has a first hint of Spring to it. 

Whenever Spring peeks through the clouds, I find myself thinking of Winchester. Although I was never enamored of it, for reasons which are lengthy and fundamentally English, I find myself missing it. Winchester, the Winchester which I knew, was not the countryside, it was some corner of an old English provincial town, a kind of hinterland. My parents' house, at times my own, was on the edge of town. During the Winter, whole months would go by with low cloud, drizzle and damp. But, as the season turned, signalled by the appearance of daffodils on the banks of the Itchen, the mind would fast forward. To days when the walk up the hill would be balmy, to be undertaken towards dusk, the grass longer and docile under the final rays of the day. Or an evening in the garden of the Queen, pulling a jacket or sweater against the onset of chill as the Summer night faded. Or just the smell of the meadows as you ambled the seemingly over-familiar path down to St Cross, verdant, reassuring, nature's nurture pulling its underhand tricks.

+++

pitfalls of the consumer society (#274)

Thinking oneself - one's problems, peccadilloes and perfections - unique, is the first step on the road to ordinariness.

+++

west london tales 10

On a good day it takes 15 minutes on the 18 bus from my nearest stop to Warren Street. The buses are regular and this day was no exception. However, at the Paddington Green police station stop, which is the junction with Edgware Road, the bus hit heavy traffic. The driver opened the doors early, to let people out. The rear door wouldn't shut. The bus sat in traffic for five minutes. I offered to go out and give the doors a push for him, but he said they had to shut on their own or not at all.

I got out, as there was another bus behind, but almost as soon as I did, the driver got the doors to work, and the same bus pulled up, and I got back on. I wasn't in a hurry, merely heading to Tottenham Court Road for what turned out to be a doomed mission to buy Christmas presents.

The bus filled up. Just past Marylebone, I heard a thud. I looked up. There was someone on the floor. She was writhing around, her head under the seat, her legs stretched out. A stocky man, who looked Turkish, with a short, neat ponytail, looked at me, and we both called an ambulance. He got through first. The woman was still writhing on the floor. Several people had gathered round her. Finally someone told the bus driver to stop, and he did so, at the Harley Street stop. 

No-one was quite sure what was going on with the woman. She had her clothes - primarily her hijab - bundled over her face. Someone tried to pull them back. They spent what felt like an age trying to get the black cloth away from her face. For a moment I wondered if there was actually a head there at all. Perhaps this was a symptom of a new horror, the headless fit. Finally the clothes came away. The woman was a young African woman, bundled up against the cold.

Most of the passengers stood around for a bit, looking at the spectacle, and then got off. The woman still lay on the floor. Suddenly she began to fit and then appeared to pass out. This was the only occasion I found myself able to do anything useful, as I reached to undo the buttons of her coat which were constrictively tight, the top button throttling her.  A European man appeared and pressed on her chest. Suddenly the woman sat up. 

Besides myself there was the Turkish looking man, the European, a white English woman who seemed to have some idea of what she was doing, a frenetic Italian woman and a smiley black man with two protruding front teeth. The man with the teeth spoke the woman's language, Somali. The woman was concerned about her hijab. The Italian tutted at her for being so silly, telling her that god wouldn't mind how she was dressed. We waited for the ambulance to come. The African man explained he'd been born in the UK, and his Somali was rusty, but she was thanking us. The ambulance still didn't come. The driver was full of calm and good sense. 

Nothing much happened for five or maybe ten minutes. There was no value in most of us being there. But the longer we all stayed the clearer it became that the value was just in the choosing to be there. To ensure that whatever could be done - those things that society can provide - would be. This woman wouldn't be left to fend for herself. She would be looked after. Even though, by now, she seemed to be alright again, the crisis passed, sitting up and wrapping her hijab around her. She'd only arrived recently, the man explained. He'd go with her to the hospital. The ambulance arrived, and I left. The man with the protruding teeth waved goodbye. 

+++

on economics, love, war, etc

Crises are subject to the rules of drama, rather than the rules of logic.

+++

Which is another way of saying: Drama contains its own logic. Whose connection to the logic of physics or mathematics is tenuous, at best. And, in the world of humans, infinitely more powerful.

+++

destiny

The older you get the easier it becomes to believe in it.

+++

dealing with the inevitable

If you try too hard to achieve something, you are liable to fail at it.

+++

(And success is nothing more than another trick of the mind.)

+++

cautionary notice

Sentences, phrases and words: all of these things combine to over-simplify the world.

+++

Behind every sentence lurks a galaxy of meaning which can only be revealed through the use of further sentences.

+++

Never believe a word anyone says. Not because they lie, but because the truth is unspeakable.

+++

nature, nurture, and chinese meat-eating habits

A localised sense of decline can affect every corner of it's people's psyche. Likewise a sense of optimism.

This has been one of the reasons the USA has been, and has been seen to be, so successful in my lifetime. And might turn out to be the most significant ramification of the events of September 2001.

+++

betrayal

Betrayal is both an absolute and a relative art form.

+++

It can take many forms. Some less obvious than others. Sometimes the most obvious betrayals are the most minimal. And the worst betrayals are never even noticed.

+++

For betrayal does not take place in the outside world. In the boardrooms, bedrooms or corridors of power.

+++

Betrayal always takes place in the heart.

+++

bucket and spade

Almost inevitably those who feel themselves to have the least control over their lives are liable to be the biggest control freaks.

+++

opposite extremes

Extravagant shyness is the flip side of a powerful desire to be the centre of attention.

+++