notes and thoughts...

----------CHAPTERS abstracts--------------
1. Dialogue as the practice of non-attachment-engagedeness:
Dialogical Ecology is the practice of engagement with the whole of existence with the whole of being. It is only through engagement that enlightenment can be found. There is no I without Thou and therefore the enlightened I needs the enlightened Thou. Dialogical ecology is the practice of non-attached-engagedness with the three realms of life: with other people, with nature and with the “spiritual”. That trilogy serves only as a functional aid, since in reality, the three are one and the same: life. Dialogue is the first principle for human existence because all real life is encounter. However, not all encounters are dialogical. To be dialogical, an encounter must be practiced on the basis of the principles of non-attachment as explained within the Zen tradition and as articulated by Martin Buber’s I-You. Dialogue is a way to engage the other, and it does not depend on the response that it generates from the other. Dialogue is engaging in encounter, not the engaged encounter. It is process and it creates through the process. Dialogue cannot be measured nor it is to be deemed successful on the basis of the quality of the response. To expect or demand a response is to automatically converts the “other” into an It, it is to freeze the process. By converting the other into an It, it is not the dialogical I the one who is engaging the other. From that we could argue that the purest form of dialogue is with the realm of nature.
2. The Relationship with God:
To the extent that the concept and/or the reality of a personal and communal relationship with a God is posited or needed or desired, the practice of dialogical ecology entails a god-engagement or religiosity without and instead of religion, (religiosity and Spinozean knowledge of the third kind.). Religion is an institutional system of practices and beliefs and we raise the question whether institutionalism and relationships can conjoin together happily ever after. What is the relationship between religious experiences and ritual practices?. Practices engender their own experiences and experiences engender their own practices. Neither is the same all the time. Neither is proprietary nor exclusive and neither is univocally limited by the other. A red flower is always red but not all flowers grow to be red and not all reds are limited to the form and content that is a flower. To argue that a religious experience engendered only this or that kind of practice or that a given practice alone is able to recreate and sustain the original experience, it is a sad attempt to narrow and confine our practices, it is to posit non-existent pairs of exclusivity. It is diminishing so considerably the expansion of spirituality in the world. In Hebrew the term for narrow (Tzar) is the same as that for sorrow and we have transformed our infinite universe into a narrow ridge. Proscribed religious practices are frozen remnants of an original religious experience. One common mistake: It does not matter how one feels about the practices themselves or what feeling they engender in the practitioner, for the measure of all things excellent is not the feeling they engender or the feeling brought into them. Enlightment is not a feeling, it is a whole being experience and practice, it is existence. Original experiences can be reenacted. What one cannot do is re-experienced original experiences through a pre-set and proscribed reenactment. Original experiences open up to us through the re-experience itself. Impossible to predict or plan, one is open to the experience in the everyday-every moment of quotidian mindful life. Proscribed reenactment practices have a good use: they confine experiences to memory, lest we forget, and to a storage place for communal use. And that is good. What we should never do is make this good into an idol. Idolatry is an error. Rituals have a social function, sometimes for good, often exploited for ill. What proscribed reenactments do not do, is springing back the original experiences, even when the original experiences sprung e practices. Our working assumption is that what we are seeking is the genuiness of the original experience itself, new original experiences, that is, the relationship is the goal. Without a true practice, the experience is a fleeting and passing cloud in the spiritual mind. But performances of pre-determined, everlasting and universally applicable practices confine seekers to the role of stage performers, whereas the real play is outside the doors, at the open field where one engages the world without the comfort of a script. In the practice of dialogue, the true practice, one is his/her own playwright. We practice pointing directly outside of rituals, texts and teachers. We hide our faces if we meet the buddha on the road and cover our ears when a messiah preaches. The messiah is he/she who is always in the process of coming, and it is this messiah who we love. Its always coming and is never here. Buddha is the process of I and Us becoming and is never out there.
3. Reverence/owe without worship or idolatry, (the poetry of the insentient)
No need to posit a hierarchy of moments but not all practices are equal. Positing difference is not necessarily a hierarchical statement. Each moment is perfect as is, but differently so. There are a multiplicity of perfections. Therefore not all is the same or means the same. We do break away from quotidian practices for special practices at special times and places. We recognize that it is indeed the quotidian that is the true practice but there are different types of practices for different types of persons or needs or experiences. Mindfulness is practiced in and as everything within the quotidian and therefore life is practice. Nonetheless we stop for special practice moments. Not all relationships are the same.
4. God As A Concept:
To the extend that a conceptual construct of a God is posited, needed or desired, dialogical ecology means faith without belief. The most fundamental religious beliefs are not rationally tenable. At the same time the universe devoid of the God-concept is not rationally tenable. We are left with faith but without belief. We should only believe in that which we can prove. That which remains unproven or un-provable by definition, should remain as an article of faith. The moment that belief is confirmed we no longer need faith, and world without faith is despair.
5. Celebration without rituals/sacraments.
Some subscribe to the idea of antinomianism. If they’re told that God is in heaven, they look for it on earth, if they’re told to stand, they sit, if to wear robes, they wear jeans or get naked. I understand the point. There is no reason why to accept the ritualistic practices proscribed by others. The pint may be well taken but it’s a futile one: the issue is not the changing of rituals, the issue is the rituals themselves. After all, if one believes that god is on earth, why couldn’t god be in heaven?, if one believes in robes, why not in suits then?. Let us channel the desire to break free from ritualistic constraints into the real search for a whole relationship with god. All we need to do is to find god as is, right here, present between us. God is between the You and the I.
6. Dialogue/encounter with the “divine” instead of sacramental prayer. Petitional prayer as I-It. Encounter with the whole.
7. Blessedness without or instead of sacredness/holiness,
8. Community without priesthood/institutions/temples

General notes…
What is dialogical ecology? why the ecology added to dialogue, why dialogue in ecology? (the poetry of the insentients) because this is the idea and principles of an engaged dialogism. taken from the concept of an engaged buddhism, dialogue is not just a theory of engagement with the world, but a practice and that is what dialogical ecology does.

the idea that detachment is manifested in dialogue. that meditation is a path to..dialogue..that dialogue serves as a method for detachment. that meditation prepares the i-thou self. that dialogue is the expression of the goal of meditation. the engagement with the world is done in a dialogical manner which is the zen principle of mindfulness, meditation and its goal, detachment.

Dialogue is a theory concerning engagement with the world. there are many theories about this. in buber, dialogue and engagement are one and the same thing or, if using engagement in the buddhist sense, they are one and the same thing.. dialogue is defined as engagement done on the basis of the principles that describe buddhist detachment. to apply the principles of buberian dialogue one must learn the principles of detachment, and to understand what detachment really is one must learn the principles if dialogical engagement. detachment is dialoguing, the principles that describe detachment are the same as those that describe dialogue and each helps the other in their need for specificity and concreteness..

1. The principles of Dialogue: I-Thou and I-It. The three realms of relationship: person-person, person to nature, person to the spiritual beings. In each of these spheres when we speak Thou we are lead to GOD. There is no direct path to God that "skips" the world (the three spheres). There is a personal god but god is not a person. There is no I and there is no We. I exists only within the relationship and is defined by the pair in which it finds itself.. Same with Zen's denial of the self. Parting from that point is the path to liberation. The importance of this denial is crucial in Zen and in Buber.
2. What does dialogue serve as an answer to?: mysticism, individualism, collectivism. Origin in Jewish mysticism: It is the relationship that breaks the vessels and that relationship is systematic. We try to bring the same kind of systematic behavior-relationship to the relationship with nature. The models of relationship between cosmos and god that inform our ecological ethics. . pantheism, panentheism, dichotomy totaliter aliter, partial presence-partial identity, (immanent transcendence or transcendental immanence). etc. There is godliness, god in everything, as everything, everything in it, multiple and single, but no creator god and no god that can have a "name", that is, a god that can be named and thus defined as a this or that. A God without a religion. A God that exists in the between, not inside of me or outside of me, not here or there in space or outside of nature, not above nor bellow. god is not a father or brother or anything else, God is just God and I related to "him" as an eternal Thou. To make God eternal Thou implies the paradoxical religion of the dialogue. In that sense Zen is genial and the koans are part of this process.
3. The manifesto of Buberian dialogical ecology. Buber the ecologist, because ecology is where all of Buber's strands tie together. Buber was the ecologist otherwise it's all "patch work", without the whole being. Ecology as the whole of existence with the whole being.
4. How does it connect to Zen? Zen is a direct pointing outside of text and outside of ritual. A special transmission outside the scriptures (religious rituals or institutions). No dependence on words or letters. Direct pointing to the mind and heart. To see one's True Nature is to experience awakening (enlightenment). it is a guided experiential practice. The "guidedness" is important because it is in that sense that it connects with Buber's guidedness. Buber is the same direct I-Thou but in both cases the encounter must follow a certain path.. Connect with Spinoza and scholarship to support and compare. Buber gives Zen the community pre-"imperative". Zen offers Buber the enlightened self pre-"imperative". Neither can reach its stated goal without what the other offers it, or put together it is a differently defined goal. Zen does not need the relationship and Buber does not need the enlightened I. Put together it creates a new dimension. The I cannot be prepared for speaking Thou but it must recognize the opportunity that each encounter brings. The mindfulness of Zen is a perpetual type of awareness that helps or prompts a Thou response. God as process of a community relationship, created through the relationship. Process means that the God is seeking not finding. Whatever you found, if you did, then it is not God, you must kill the Buddha. Do it as the Buddha did not as he taught. That is the directness of Zen. The world is perfect as is, the moment is the eternity, therefore there is nothing to improve in the world. the improvement must be in the understanding (Spinoza and Zen) and understanding of the third kind happens only in a relationship, a dialogue.

Buber: "The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings. Each thing and being has a twofold nature: passive, absorbable, usable, dissectible, comparable, combinable, rationalizable, and the other, the active, non-absorbable, unusable, undissectible, incomparable, non combinable, non rationalizable. This is the confronting, the shaping, the bestowing of things. He who truly experiences a thing so that it springs up to meet him and embraces him of itself has in that thing known the world..." the non-sentient beings of Dosho. The seeing with the hear and listening with the eye in Loorie. Martin Buber. to comprehend the depth of this analysis one must shed light to it through Zen, Judaism and dialogism. At the same time through this, light is shed on Judaism, Zen and dialogism. It is the merger or fusion. Buber spoke more out of a Zen tradition than Judaism, and that made for the intellectual confusion on the part of readers. Buber's fusion creates a new paradigm, one that is not only the sum total of both its parts. My contributions to it, will add to this in the content and practice sense as well. Zen is the essence of Buddhism. Buber saw hasidism as the essence of Judaism and Dialogue as the essence of hasidism. He wanted a direct pointing outside of conventional institutional tradition.
Dialogue is not only verbal, it is encounter with the whole being. Prayer is not just verbal, it is the same definition, I am a prayer. To do dialogical prayer means to dialogue instead of institutionalized prayer. There is no need to sacralize nature since that offers no protection and it is idolatric attachment. This is what we want to explore, describe, and live by in our daily lives. This is where Buberian Dialogism comes in: it gives us the path..
Add my defining synthesis: Buber's communitarian synthesis to Zen, and Zen quotidian spirituality to Buber's "mystical" dialogism..
The Dialogical Ecology can be defined as the path of speaking thou to nature. Thou without an I over there or over here. A non-reciprocal relationship still allows for Thou speaking even when the other does not respond. The other creates its own response its own language. To speak Thou without parting from or towards an I is the deep teaching of Zen. Zen prepares the I in a paradoxical way to be able to speak Thou.
What does that mean in terms of concrete relationship to nature. Is it the poetical or quasi mystical approach of Loori? is the Nahman, or Gordon approach? The pre-imperative that Buber offers Zen becomes the post-imperative of creating a community. I-Thou can only be implemented in the context of a dialogical community. Not a Sangha, but a kibbutz. Buber defined that as religious socialism, the dialogical community. In this community nature functions as Buber's vital center to which the members relate in order for them to relate to each other. Community here is not a choice or alternative or an added benefit. it is an imperative of the enlightened dialogical life. There is no way to live mindfully and to speak Thou unless the relationship within society is altered. This relationship is what Landauer meant when he spoke of revolution via a change in relationships. A true dialogue affirms nothing in terms of guidance, what it does instead is it preclude certain things from a genuine relationship. From that which is precluded there is a logical progression into an environmental policy. This the dialogical environmental policy is a corollary of the relationships between persons. If we preclude capitalism as Itness then the relationship to nature will preclude its exploitation for the purposes of capitalism. We need a society where capitalism is not practiced and its fruits not sought, therefore there will be "no market", no demand, no need or acceptance of capitalistic exploitation of nature.
compare with Zen. confluence of fields. tales and concepts about rituals (the vessel-halacha) and about approach to nature. (in Zuzuki's comparison of the poem about a flower)

added: 1/8/06
The mind of the past is ungraspable;
the mind of the future is ungraspable;
the mind of the present is ungraspable.

- Diamond Sutra
both the mind is ungraspable and the concept of time is ungraspable. the mind of the time means the essence of time. This open the doors to enlightenment


Everything 
 just as it is, 
 as it is, 
 as is. 
 Flowers in bloom. 
 Nothing to add. 

 - Robert Aitken, Roshi, As it Is
it is instead of fabrications. knowing this opens the door to peace and enlightenment.


Two come about because of One,
 but don't cling to the One either!
 So long as the mind does not stir,
 the ten thousand things stay blameless;
 no blame, no phenomena,
 no stirring, no mind.
The viewer disappears along with the scene,
 the scene follows the viewer into oblivion,
 for scene becomes scene only through the viewer,
 viewer becomes viewer because of the scene.
 
 - Seng-ts'an, 600
 Hsin-Hsin-Ming: Inscription on Trust in the Mind
 Translated by Burton Watson
 Found in Entering the Stream, p. 149
 Edited by Samuel Bercholz and Sherab Chodzin Kohn
dialogue and attachment.

Shame on you Shakyamuni for setting
 the precedent
 of leaving home.
 Did you think it was not there--
 in your wife's lovely face
 in your baby's laughter?
 Did you think you had to go elsewhere
 to find it?
 
 - Judyth Collin
 The Layman's Lament
 From What Book, 1998, p. 52
 Edited by Gary Gach
make sense buddhist wise, "as is"..
rituals, like commercials, are the manipulation of the spiritual, or mind-agenda by the ones in control.. the ones in control are not necessarily bad people, they are just in control.. they define what's important or worth bearing in mind, or how to do it or when.. etc, for the rest of us. they define the initial and the reenacting experience. but each has to have its own in dialogue. temples block the view, our religion is not one of temples it is one of the fields and fresh air. don't make nature a vessel of the temple, that confines our relationship to nature to the model of temple-type relationships. make temple part of nature and that way you can obviate its confines. Temple vesselness is an It. Buddha as messiah or christ and that's the source of happiness? if you meet the buddha on the road, dialogue with him, ask if you can help her.. does enlightenment bring to dialogue or dialogue to enlightenment. is dialogue a condition for enlightenment or is a result of the enlightenment? do enlightened people by virtue of being so, relate to the world in a dialogical manner? do the chapters first in a simpler manner and do the appendix in a scholarly manner... all teachings are about a basic and same religious experience but describe them on the baiss of what they know from their own cultures. except zen? trying to go to the basic after having recognized that fact?
think not only with the brain, even with the fingers, dialogue with the whole because not only dialogue with the brain, dialogue with the fingers. The definition of man is not the seeker of god but the one who aches for him, or because of his distance from him, and doesn't even know that he aches or if he does, what it is he aches for at all (buberian insights) (unamuno on spinoza). What is the IT?.. attachment, addiction, anchoring in the circumstantial self, manipulation, (through quantum biology we know the it makes me an IT), it narrows the scopes of relationship to a one narrow given area. analyze the Sabbath. the book, by themes and sub-themes like buber's, but the themes should be item by item to make up a coherent whole: temples, shabat, prayer, god, etc, etc.,, and in each deal with my analysis from my own perspective. all the topics that around them I will build my argument and that provide direct concrete existential answers and practical guidance to the reader.
the issue is not god without religion or religion without god (buddhism). the issue is the relationship or approach, (pursuit, advances, references and contextualized) to the other in the dialogical mode.
great literature is to situate a culture into created situations where the culture has to find a way to express or manifest itself. it is like: how do you love in japanese? the more one knows a culture the more one can be creative placing, bringing, staging the characters into more extreme, funny or unusual situations. the reader learns about the culture but in great literature it will extracts universal lessons as well.
whatever happens in the mind or the body is just one of those unconfortable or bummer things that happens and one can deal, handle, endure for a while, with pacience and whatever it is it should not bring it to a state of panic.



"Always do what you are afraid to do."

 Ralph Waldo Emerson



In every religion we face the issue of the often times conflicting demands between foundational theology and time and space dependent-interpretations. Since it is difficult to determine which interpretation is or is not authoritative, what is hoped for is that the founder of the religion, being by definition the source of authority, would have put in place a procedural system from which authority could be seamlessly derived. What that procedure may entail is an agreed upon system for the ordination of those entrusted with the interpretation of the original teaching, such as a priesthood, and a procedure the priesthood itself must follow for deriving amendments that could be considered "constitutional". From that perspective, sometimes authority is confirmed more by the procedure that was followed than by the derived content of the interpretation. This is the beginning of institutional religion, and, at least in my view, the compromising of any true religion. In Judaism for instance, the Halacha is a long process of interpretation by rabbis and it is often not clear how faithful it stands to the original source. For instance, when the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the site taken over, the rabbis moved the physical center elsewhere and when the temple rituals were no longer available for worship, the rabbis replaced them with the prayer book and other festivals. The changes were not a deviation of the original but a natural evolution in response to circumstances. The option would have been to close shop and adopt the religion of the conquerors. the key here is that the changes were done in accordance with the foundational procedure and in that sense they represent the original religion. same applies to the Sunnas in Islam and to Church councils in Catholicism. The disparity in ethical behaviors (not in ethical theories) between strands of Buddhism can either be a sign of a dynamic, living religion, or, conversely, a reflection on the weakness of the institutionalized factors of the religion.