corpo e anima del Tao

Lo incontrai per la prima volta al Pireo, dove aspettavo di imbarcarmi per Creta. Il giorno stava declinando e pioveva, soffiava un forte scirocco.

In Oriente la gente ha condannato il corpo, biasimato la materia, definendola “illusoria”, maya - affermando che di fatto non esiste, sembra solo esistere; è fatta della stessa sostanza dei sogni. Hanno negato il mondo, ed è per questo che l'Oriente è rimasto povero, malato, denutrito. Metà dell'umanità ha accettato il mondo interiore, ma ha negato il mondo esteriore. L'altra metà del genere umano ha accettato il mondo materiale e ha negato il mondo interiore. Entrambe sono parziali, e nessun uomo che sia parziale potrà essere appagato. Devi essere totale, integro: ricco nel corpo, ricco per ciò che riguarda la scienza; e ricco in meditazione, in consapevolezza. Solo una persona globale è santa, per ciò che mi riguarda. Io voglio che Zorba e Buddha s'incontrino. Da solo, Zorba è vacuo, vuoto: la sua danza non ha un valore eterno, è un piacere del momento. Ben presto se ne stancherà. Solo se possiedi fonti inesauribili, solo se puoi attingere alle fonti stesse del cosmo... Se non diventi esistenziale, non potrai diventare integro. Questo è il mio contributo all'umanità: l'uomo integro, globale.

Buddha di Smeraldo, Grande Palazzo Reale, Wat Phra Kaew, Bangkok, Thailand

Zorba non è intero
e nemmeno Buddha lo è.
Amo Zorba e amo Buddha,
ma quando guardo nel profondo di Zorba,
qualcosa manca...
Non c'è un'anima !
Anche quando guardo Buddha,
qualcosa manca.
Non c'è il corpo !
Un incontro è necessario.
Il grande incontro tra
Zorba e il Buddha.

“My Concept of the new man is that he will be Zorba the Greek and he will also be Gautam the Buddha: the new man will be sensuous and spiritual, physical, utterly physical, in the body, in the senses, enjoying the body and all that the body makes possible and still a great consciousness, a great witnessing will be there. He will be Christ and Epicurus together.”

Agra, India

"Zorba è un simbolo: rappresenta l’essere umano naturale e spontaneo che abita in un angolo oscuro della cantina, e che ogni tanto fa capolino alla coscienza beffandosi delle precauzioni che questa ha preso per emarginarlo. Egli è il ribelle che rifiuta di giudicarsi per i suoi istinti, che non si conforma ai modelli comuni, che non si accontenta di stare nel recinto della morale. (...)"

"(...) Buddha è un simbolo: rappresenta l’essere umano che rinasce da se stesso, che abita in un angolo troppo luminoso per essere guardato, lassù, sotto il lucernario della soffitta, dove non abbiamo mai messo piede. Egli è l’essere che è andato oltre il dualismo, che ha trasceso il giudizio; esprime la propria unica individualità, stravolgendo modelli e morale."

"Zorba il Buddha è la risposta. E' la sintesi di anima e materia.
E' una dichiarazione che non c'è conflitto tra la materia e la coscienza, che possiamo essere ricchi da tutte e due le parti. Possiamo avere tutto quello che il mondo può fornire, che la scienza e la tecnologia possono produrre, e possiamo inoltre avere tutto quello che un Buddha (...) trova nel suo essere interiore: i fiori dell'estasi, la fragranza della religiosità, le ali della libertà suprema."

"Zorba il Buddha è un nuovo simbolo; raccoglie le opportunità del nostro tempo, riunisce l’eremita che vive in soffitta e l’errabondo che sta in cantina davanti al banchetto imbastito in soggiorno.
Egli lascia andare la superficialità dello Zorba per accogliere la profondità del Buddha, allo stesso modo in cui abbandona la serietà ascetica del Buddha a favore della giocosità vitale di Zorba. E’ il possibile Sapiens 3.0, scientifico e mistico, terreno e celeste, materiale e spirituale, sensuale e meditativo, sociale e silente.
Si occupa di realtà di dentro ma non tralascia quella di fuori. Guarda in se stesso, senza perdere di vista l’altro e quanto ha intorno.
E’ un rivoluzionario interiore, che comprende la consequenzialità di una rivoluzione esteriore.
Trasforma sé e le sue abitudini, fa sentire la sua voce se la nave va contro gli scogli. Zorba il Buddha tesse relazioni significative che vanno al di là di schemi e consuetudini, crea realtà associative, esplora l’amicizia e la verità, offre a sé e agli altri opportunità che stanno oltre i recinti comuni."

Martinego Bastion, Heraklion, Regional unit of Heraklion, Crete, Greece

il Te del Tao: LXXIX - OTTEMPERARE AI PATTI

LXXIX - OTTEMPERARE AI PATTI

Se cancelli un'offesa, ma un po' offeso
rimani ancora, credi che sia un bene?
Se, per contratto, il saggio è creditore,
dal debitore non esige nulla.
Adempie al proprio impegno chi è virtuoso;
bada agli impegni altrui chi non è virtuoso.
La Via del cielo non fa parentele,
ma sta costantemente con il buono.

in your Tao

Love I get so lost, sometimes
Days pass and this emptiness fills my heart
When I want to run away
I drive off in my car
But whichever way I go
I come back to the place you are

All my instincts, they return
And the grand facade, so soon will burn
Without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

In your eyes
The light the heat
In your eyes
I am complete
In your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
In your eyes
The resolution of all the fruitless searches
In your eyes
I see the light and the heat
In your eyes
Oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light
The heat I see in your eyes

Love, I don't like to see so much pain
So much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away
I get so tired of working so hard for our survival
I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive

And all my instincts, they return
And the grand facade, so soon will burn
Without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

In your eyes
The light the heat
In your eyes
I am complete
In your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
In your eyes
The resolution of all the fruitless searches
In your eyes
I see the light and the heat
In your eyes
Oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light,
The heat I see in your eyes
In your eyes, in your eyes
In your eyes, in your eyes
In your eyes, in your eyes

Volgersi all'Interno (4 di Coppe)

La donna di questa figura ha sul volto un sorriso evanescente. Di fatto, sta semplicemente osservando le sciocchezze della mente - senza giudicare, senza cercare di arrestarle, senza identificarsi, le osserva come fossero il traffico di una strada, o le increspature sulla superficie di uno stagno. E le sciocchezze della mente sono alquanto divertenti, balzano di qui e di là, piroettano in un senso e nell'altro, nel tentativo di attrarre la tua attenzione e di sedurti perché giochi con loro. Sviluppare la maestria di prendere distanza dalla mente è una delle benedizioni più grandi. In realtà, la meditazione sta tutta in questa abilità - non si tratta di cantare un mantra, di ripetere affermazioni positive, ma di semplice osservare, come se la mente appartenesse a qualcun altro. Adesso sei pronto a prendere questa distanza, e a osservare lo spettacolo senza venir intrappolato nella tragedia. Concediti la semplice libertà di 'Volgerti all'interno' ogni volta che puoi, e la maestria della meditazione crescerà e diventerà sempre più profonda dentro di te.

---

Volgersi all'interno non è affatto un rivolgimento. Andare dentro di sé, non è affatto un andare. Volgersi all'interno significa semplicemente questo: hai inseguito questo o quel desiderio, hai corso e ti sei affannato per giungere sempre e comunque a una frustrazione. Ogni desiderio arreca infelicità; tramite il desiderio non esiste appagamento. Non sei mai arrivato da nessuna parte, quell'appagamento è impossibile. Vedendo questa verità, vedendo che questa corsa all'inseguimento dei desideri non ti porta da nessuna parte, ti fermi. Non è che fai uno sforzo per fermarti. Se facessi un qualsiasi sforzo per fermarti, sarebbe di nuovo un correre, in maniera sottile. Ancora stai desiderando - forse ora desideri l'assenza di desideri. Se fai un qualsiasi sforzo per entrare dentro di te, stai ancora muovendoti all'esterno. Qualsiasi sforzo ti può solo portare all'esterno, è estroverso. Qualsiasi viaggio è un viaggio all'esterno, non esiste alcun viaggio interiore. Come puoi viaggiare all'interno? Sei già lì, non c'è ragione di arrivarci! Allorché ogni moto si arresta, il viaggiare scompare; allorché il desiderare non oscura più la tua mente, sei dentro di te. Questo è detto “Volgersi all'interno”: ma non è affatto un volgersi, si tratta semplicemente di non andare più all'esterno.

ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ TAO ΕΑΥΤΟΥ

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes
Again

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need
Of some stranger's hand
In a desperate land

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain

There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the king's highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby
Ride the snake
Ride the snake, to the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long seven miles
Ride the snake
He is old and his skin is cold

The West is the best
The West is the best
Get here and we'll do the rest
The blue bus is calling us
The blue bus is calling us
Driver, where you taking us

The killer awoke before dawn
He put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went to into the room where his sister lived
And then he paid a visit to his brother
And then he, he walked on down the hall
And he came to a door, and he looked inside
"Father?"-"Yes, son?"-"I want to kill you,
Mother, I want to..."

Come on, baby, take a chance with us
Come on, baby, take a chance with us
Come on, baby, take a chance with us
And meet me at the back of the blue bus

Still now
Blue bus
Oh now
Blue bus
Still now
Uuh yeah

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free

But you'll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of night we tried to die
This is the end

Père-Lachaise, Paris

ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ
κατα τον δαιμονα εαυτου
Fedele al suo Spirito

MeTa(o)logo: un Tao insistente

Metalogue: Persistent Shade (MCB)

FATHER: Still awake and working?
DAUGHTER: How about you? You‘re a remarkably persistent shade, you know. Sometimes I wish you were properly dead.
FATHER: As well you might. Certainly I always argued that the civilization is in trouble unless we can accept the fact of our dying. But such immortality as we have is in our ideas, which is why I left you the chore of finishing this book.
DAUGHTER: And a nasty, manipulative trick it was, too. A kind of huge lever to pry me away from other kinds of work. But you know what really bothers me as I work on this? It‘s the mediocrity of what gets attributed to ghosts ad séances, as if vivid and splendid people went into a mode of being that thins them out to banality. That‘s what I want to avoid. Incidentally, an excess of piety doesn‘t help. And the I‘m going to close up shop. At least among the New Guinea Manus the Sir Ghost dwindles away and finally floats out to sea, after running everyone‘s life for a generation or so.
FATHER: I told you about that psychic that turned up at Esalen, didn‘t I, who would go into a trance and paint and sign mediocre Monets?
DAUGHTER: Quite. A friend of mine has a room in her house where Margaret used to stay, where people still report dreams of Margaret. They dream that she comes and tells them to get on with the job, finish the research, take up some responsibility. She bullies them, as, of course, she would have, but they don‘t dream the other side of it, the way she would have coaxed them into clarity and awareness of the next step.
FATHER: Hmm. Ever sleep there?
DAUGHTER: Yes, but I had other things on my mind and she didn‘t turn up in my dreams. Anyhow, she has lost her otherness for me, so I no longer think of her as a vis-à-vis. But you have always had a quality of otherness. Strange.
FATHER: Yes, well, you can‘t get around the unconscious. I never quite managed to lay my father‘s ghost, but, of course, it made me rethink the nature of evolution.
DAUGHTER: That‘s a pretty one, because you picked up the new dialogue with your father with the paper about beetle teratology. W.B. had discovered that when a beetle has a freak extra leg, what it has is two legs in place of one, one a right leg and one a left leg, "Bateson‘s rule." And what you discovered was that this represented not the addition of an extra degree of bilateral symmetry, but a loss, the loss at some stage of epigenesis of the information needed to determine the asymmetry of right or left in the instruction to grow a leg in that particular position. And that was critical for you in the whole move to thinking about Creatura, the biological world, as the world of information.
FATHER: Cap, I don‘t think I ever told you about –
DAUGHTER: No, but that you cannot do. You cannot provide new pieces to the puzzle. I can pull some out of tapes of yours that I never heard or writing I haven‘t read, or I can get pieces from my experience, often experience that has nothing at all to do with you. But maybe you can remind me of pats of the argument that I have heard somewhere along the line, and I can do what I have done before pulling them together and making connections that were never made. A lot of that happened at the Wenner-Gren conference, where I made a book

by drawing the connections between pieces of thinking that the participants had perceived as disparate, even as dissonant. I had an image once, of the "angel" of Angels Fear, as a nude male figure (because, after all, the unconscious is always up to all sort of other business) marked with points of light, like the diagram of a constellation. That‘s what you can do with this whole body of ideas I‘m trying to work with – you can point to a symmetry here, an asymmetry there, a gracefulness in the predestined curve of the spine, even though your own spine was all squunched over in the effort to conceal your height in your youth.
FATHER: Yes, well. It‘s all in the connections. It is, after all, a tautology that we are trying to map out.
DAUGHTER: So it will all in the end seem as simple as "If P, then P"?
FATHER: There are the basic ideas, which are probably mathematical in form and which are necessarily true but need to be discovered, and there are the connections between them. And there are the bits of data that allow you to see the connections when you try to map them onto the necessary truths. A beetle, perhaps. I wish you had gone on in maths instead of getting distracted by all that nonsense about the Middle East and academic administration.
DAUGHTER: Mmm. You‘re a bit of a bully in your own way, you know. And sometimes I have this image of, say, Euclid – not the real Euclid, who probably existed but built on the work of others, but a sort of mythical Euclid, who might have worked out the whole of the Books – and one of his disciples comes up to him and says, very proudly, "Look, I‘ve worked out three new theorems." And Euclid says, "Yes, that’s all in there. You have recognized something that was there, in the axioms, all along." And then the theorems are just stitched into the whole. Well, you see, they aren‘t new theorems, the theorems are immanent in the axioms. That‘s how the whole business grows.
FATHER: NO, no, that‘s exactly the point. Growing is precisely what a tautology doesn‘t do. Theorems may get added but there is nothing new in them. They are only the same old axioms and definitions blown up bigger and recombined. The Pythagoras theorem is all there in the axioms. Mathematicians spend their lives trying to show that there is nothing new – trying to "prove" the four-color theorem – trying to reduce it to fit the axioms. No "self-evident" propositions – but self-evident links. The essential requirement of tautology is that the links between the propositions shall be empty – i.e. shall contain no information about the subject of discourse.
DAUGHTER: I tell you it grows.
FATHER: No! The hole idea that the axioms shall not grow!
DAUGHTER: All right. Don‘t shout at me. So the axioms and stuff don‘t grow. But in that sense a seed does not grow. It only gets blown up, as you call it; and its DNA consists of commands or "injunctions" that tell the embryo – the seedling – how to grow. Isn‘t it the same with the tautology? The axioms telling the tautology how to grow?
FATHER: All right. In that sense, yes. The seedling doesn‘t add anything new as it grows – or not much …
DAUGHTER: So now I start thinking of myself as a gardener. A gardener with a word processor. You know what your problem is? You may not believe in the existence of ghosts, but you do believe in the existence of ideas. Bloody hovering.
FATHER: Hmm,
DAUGHTER: You know, you never gave me the good lines when you were writing the metalogues.
FATHER: There‘s still the other problem for Angels Fear, the problem of the misuse of ideas. The engineers get hold of them. Look at the whole god-awful business of family therapy, therapists making "paradoxical interventions" in order to change people or families, or counting "double binds." You can‘t count double binds.
DAUGHTER: No, I know, because double binds have to do with the social contextual structure, so that a given instance of double binding that you might notice in a therapy session is one tip of an iceberg whose basic structure is the whole life of the family. But you can‘t stop people from trying to count double binds. This business of breaking up process into entities is pretty fundamental to human perception. Maybe correcting for it will turn out to be part of what religion is all about. But you became so grumpy about it, and rather nasty to people who admired you immensely.
FATHER: I kept trying to get people to think straight, Cap, to clean up their premises.
DAUGHTER: It looks like possessiveness. And just as you can‘t count double binds, you really can‘t own ideas. Look, I just saw a connection, I think. You know how you were always asking audiences to look at their hands – how many fingers do you have? Or, perhaps you have not five fingers but four relations between fingers?
FATHER: And then I suggested that might make them think rather differently about possessiveness. How do you won an idea, a relationship?
DAUGHTER: See, what I think is going on is the same process that produces the monstrous beetles with extra limbs, the same thing is creating a monstrousness in the family-therapy industry, and other places too. Some of the information has been lost, an essential part of the idea. Now that‘s useful. Instead of scolding those who have to work out their epigenesis with essential ideas or connections missing, we can try to identify the missing pieces. At least leave them with the right questions. Maybe Angels can help on that.
FATHER: When you start talking abut being useful, you sound like your mother. I‘m going to take a nape and let you get back to work. Good oatmeal they have here in Hades, but the coffee is pretty dreadful.

Jacques-Louis David, Madame Recamier, 1800. Oil on canvas, 173×243 cm. Paris, Louvre

René Magritte, Perspective I: David’s Madame Recamier, 1950. Oil on canvas, 60×80 cm. Private collection

tutti hanno bisogno di un Tao da amare

We're so glad to see so many of you lovely people here tonight, and we would especially like to welcome all the representatives of Illinois' Law Enforcement Community who have chosen to join us here in the Palace Hotel Ballroom at this time. We do sincerely hope you'll all enjoy the show, and please remember people, that no matter who you are, and what you do to live, thrive and survive, there are still some things that make us all the same. You, me them, everybody, everybody.

Everybody needs somebody
Everybody needs somebody to love (someone to love)
Sweetheart to miss (sweetheart to miss)
Sugar to kiss (sugar to kiss)
I need you you you
I need you you you
I need you you you In the morning
I need you you you When my soul's on fire

Sometimes I feel
I feel a little sad inside
When my baby mistreats me
I never never never have a place to hide
I need you

Sometimes I feel
I feel a little sad inside
When my baby mistreats me
I never never never have a place to hide
I need you you you
I need you you you
I need you you you
I need you you you
I need you

You know people when you do find that somebody
Hold that woman, hold that man
Love him, hold him, squeeze her, please her, hold her
Squeeze and please that person, give 'em all your love
Signify your feelings with every gentle caress
Because it's so important to have that special somebody
to hold, kiss, miss, squeeze and please

Everybody needs somebody
Everybody needs somebody to love
Someone to love
Sweetheart to miss
Sugar to kiss
I need you you you
I need you you you
I need you you you...