Hallowed Lives

To possess something of depth, there must be a relevant soul-searching ream of pain, as what has built up and calcified is scooped out, cleared out, cut out. Leaving the space for the blueprint of something new. In the erection of new life structures, you think of the manner in which windows will capture light, the space needed to sustain love. Policies are put into place, expectations are clearly set. From out of the hollows of your aching heart are formed crystals, that when dug up form the diamond terrace of your realized dreams.

The people in our lives are designed to mold us into who we want to be. To support, construct, motivate. If we are not here to enact something better, than what would be the point? Together, pressing the clay of our vision into higher planes.

All that exists is a matter of process, timing, development. We must wait, patiently, for the universe to unfold into itself, riding the waves of our suffering as we hollow our lives in preparation for the future.

The Race of the Waterfall

Us humans, we short-sightedly cling to each other like life rafts as we hurtle towards precipitous falls, as if we would be the ones to save each other. In the frenzy of the lip of the unseen, everything comes apart, and we find our fingers empty, our eyes filled with spray. It would have been better to have been beholden to the void before we fell. It would have been better to have been still, drowned already in the inevitable, serene in the knowing that there is no saving grace beyond the embrace of emptiness.

Who can blame us, in our cataclysmic euphoria of need? In our poverty of vision, we claim what is given to us as desirable. Whatever can make us feel good, temporarily, whatever can numb our feeling, temporarily, day by day until one day we find that we are nostalgic monsters, a distant alien force that must be fought tooth and nail by the oncoming generation. We wake up perhaps at the vertiginous pinnacle of that final descent into nothingness to find that we have become parasites, aging attachés of complacency, selfishly clinging to mythological ideals that w0uld label us heroes, label us entitled, label us good and whole and pure.

What matters, at that point, our pride? When our whole life flashes before our mind’s eye, it is the things we did when no one else was looking that is replayed. How did we comport ourselves then? Were we free? Were we ashamed? Were we utilitarian, were we idle? What has defined our integrity in our lives? Who are we? What is it that we have done to the world, to ourselves, to each other?

How do we carry ourselves as our world falls about us, and our hands grasp out into emptiness, and we find that there is nothing to support us but the quantifiable pull of gravity?

The Power of Prayer

It was September, 1975. Gunhild prayed every morning and every night, and often throughout the day as well. She would pray for all those that she knew, starting with her immediate loved ones, extending onward to personages known only through the news whom she considered to be “good”, such as the President. All of her known world, essentially, was included in her daily prayers. She was living alone at the time, having moved out of her sister Helga’s apartment in Los Angeles after the earthquake in 1971. Gunhild was terrified of earthquakes, and would often warn my parents about the impending “Big One,” much in the same way she was always warning us of the coming of the apocalyptic end of days, for which she was joyously awaiting the advent of The Rapture.

At this time she was probably living in Tuscon, although she may have been in Albuquerque, St Petersburg, Dallas, or Chicago. Helga referred to her sister as a “gypsy”, and true to this title, Gunhild seemed to have an aversion to settling for too long in any one place. Fiercely independent, and also terrified of airplanes, Gunhild traveled by train or Greyhound wherever she went. She eventually settled mostly in Tuscon, as her allergies seemed the least affected by the climate there, and there weren’t any earthquakes.

Anyway, to get back to the story, to that September day, wherever she was. She was in her apartment alone, and she had just got back from running an errand. She was walking from one room to another when she heard a voice tell her to “pray for the President.” She walked around looking for the source of the voice, but the radio was off, and no one was there. She thought to herself, “but I’ve already prayed for the President today.” But she shrugged and decided that it certainly couldn’t hurt. So she kneeled down right then and there and prayed for the President, for his safety, for his health, for his wellbeing.

Later she turned on the radio, and heard that an assassination attempt had just been made on President Ford in Sacramento. The would-be assassin, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, had pulled out a Colt .45 on Ford, but strangely, though the weapon’s magazine had rounds in it, there were none in the firing chamber. Almost as if one part of her wanted to kill the President, but another side of her didn’t really want to shoot him. She later told The Sacramento Bee that she had deliberately ejected the bullet that morning from the chamber, and the police found the .45 bullet laying on her bathroom floor. She didn’t plead in her own defense and was sentenced to life.

My grandmother was not one to lie, by the way. If she says that she heard a voice say “pray for the President,” then she heard it. She also was not one prone to any sort of silliness or flights of fancy, at least not until the onset of Parkinson’s in her late 90s, at which point such flights were quite understandable.

There is no doubt in my mind that the “voice” that my grandmother heard so audibly and forcibly came from within. It was a warning of intuition so sharp and immediate that she heard it as sourced outside of herself. This story makes me wonder about the power of prayer; it has been fairly well established by medical science that at the very least, prayer can heal simply through the placebo effect of calming the patient and providing a community of support. But what about the power of prayer to directly influence, psychically, the actions of another, even that of a complete stranger?

Stay tuned for more of my grandmother’s tales of the paranormal.

The Dream Boy

My grandmother and her sister—Gunhild and Helga—were what were once known as ‘witches’, and now known more aptly as psychics. However, they would have both had a conniption fit if they were referred to with either of those phrases, for they were both devoutly religious. My grandmother was a strong influence on my life, and I’m surprised I haven’t written much about her here before—perhaps because she is so close to my heart and upbringing that I don’t even think to speak in a detached manner about her. She left behind a lot of materials, both written and spoken, that I want to sift through when I finally get my stuff out of storage, and I will then write in detail about her amazing life and stories, as I think it’s about time.

But right now I wanted to introduce you to a story that she loved to tell, because it is all about me, and after all, that’s what this blog is mostly about, right?

When my father excitedly called his mother with the good news that another baby was on the way–two girls had already been born–my grandmother said, “Oh, I already knew about that.”
“And how did you know that?” my father inquired, bewildered.
“Helga has seen it in a dream, and she’s not sure, but she thinks that it is going to be a little boy.”

Yes, indeed, a full year before I was born, my great-aunt Helga had had a dream in which she foresaw my birth. She had not seen it fit to announce this dream to my parents, but she obviously believed enough in its veracity that she called and shared it with her sister Gunhild.

Sure enough, soon along came little Manderson, his peepee a-flapping in the florescent hospital lighting, popped out on the exact day, as a matter of fact, that his sister had come out two years prior.

So I was henceforth referred to by my grandmother as “the dream boy,” and she was so impressed with her sister Helga’s prescience that she felt the need to share this story about me to complete strangers. She would wrap up the story by pointing her finger at me and dramatically stating, “And there he is!” I was an extremely shy child and this always made me feel mortified, though perhaps vaguely proud, as if I’d somehow done anything other than just be birthed. She even felt the need to reiterate this story at Helga’s memorial, and as she wrapped up the story with her standard climactic finale, leveling her wobbly finger at me, all the random nursing home folk that had come by for cookies and gossip at the advent of another death turned around in their seats to get a peep of this mystery “dream boy.” I smiled weakly and hesitantly waved my hand at them, feeling that perhaps I was a disappointing sort of child to have been predicted. This trauma, perhaps, may explain my prior hesitancy in bringing up the story on these pages.

Gunhild’s sister Helga was a quiet lady who lived on her own in Los Angeles, and she tended to speak to my grandmother in Swedish and keep to herself, so I don’t know what other psychic events may have transpired in her life. But my grandmother had bucketloads of stories that could either be termed psychic events, or manifestations of God, depending on your inclination. I will re-tell some of these stories as time goes on, as they are simply too priceless to not be shared.

My grandmother has been on my mind some lately, so I had been remembering some of these stories, and I figured that I might as well share my little “dream boy” snippet. As you can perhaps imagine, having this story told about me constantly tainted me for some time with a slight insecure messianic complex, as I felt the need to somehow live up to that sense of promise and prophecy. I felt that I had to have some kind of purpose, that I should have been announced telepathically before even forming within my mama’s fallopian tubes. Now, however, the story is simply one of humor to me, in remembrance of my grandmother and her sister’s playful psychic abilities.

Confidence To Intuition

How do we descend into the thick of it, the thickened, coagulated density of emotion necessary to destroy illusions like a bird descendant upon its prey? By what authority, by what necessary quality, trait, experience do we find the strength to proceed intact through the cutting throng of desire and anger? How can we sever through doubt and despair, conveying truth and beauty to their highest destination point of divinity, through vehicles so dumb, so shredded by toxic interference, as our bodies?

There would seem to be two fundamental points of answer: possession of the confidence (point 1) to proceed beyond the superficial and into intuition (point 2). There are many other outlying tenets, no doubt, such as focus, humility, devastating life experiences and/or the ability to attune oneself so finely to pain that it becomes akin to bliss. But if we allow the complexities of circumstance and personality to fall to the side for the moment, these two points become apparent. Point one, confidence, being the conveyor, the arrow through the surface worlds, penetrating within. Without confidence, belief, conviction, knowledge, there is no means of fulfillment, no facility to proceed progressively to inner sanctums beyond surface tangents of perversion. Point two, intuition, being the explosive fruit onto the scene, the fecund address of the potential needs of future and present. The voice that speaks beyond oneself within oneself that knows exactly what must be done to preserve the delicate balance of life and death, of space and form.

How difficult to possess these jewels in tact, in full, in every moment of everyday, to reach across the void of ourselves true to form eternity. Our world crumbles out of balance all around us, within and without, flying apart at the handle that we hold so blithely, so close to our hearts. Do we possess the strength to listen? Do we have the faith for empathy? Do we have the knowledge to learn?

Clarify Butter

 

There’s a certain fear that resides in clarity. It is easier, perhaps, to allow things to slide by in undefined, habitual complacency. It takes hard work and effort, concentration and integrity of thought and character, applied skill and artful intelligence, to root down to the sources of a comprehensive and connective vision. To examine beyond the defined object encapsulated by the word “tree”, for example, to see it for what it is: everything, itself, an infinite god descendant in form, ascending towards the sky, forging networks across subterranean subconscient intuition.

There is a part of us that wishes to avoid confrontation, a groundless hope that atrocity will end simply through inattention and withdrawal. Until that moment when the terror of our darkest indifference makes itself heard, seen, and known forcefully and immediately enough to shatter our somnolent mediocrity. All things hidden, all things suppressed, all things buried become manifest in a thousand different tragedies until you unearth them with shuddering laughter, you expel them with suffering love, you exorcise them with whatever conscious, unforced form of acceptance and embrace that can make them yours. Words, music, dance, images, rituals. There is no escape from the invasive and totalitarian ardor of the universe. It must be channeled, it must be ridden, it must be sown.

The forms that the unknown will take already lie at the end and the beginning of our awareness—we just have to live our lives according to our inherent shape, allow our trajectories to occur, willfully, selfless, and hungry. The road to mastery mirrors the diminution of self-importance. The seeking path to god mimics the descent of science’s studies to the smallest of particles. Outward down, inward up, all roads lead to home. Clearly, the concern here lies with clarifying the weakest link within ourselves.

Stillness in the Eye of the Beheld

At every stage in the evolution of the human species, when we develop tools with greater and greater capabilities of empowerment, we also gain the capability of greater destruction, and vice versa. Every sword is double-sided, every tool a weapon. An airplane as the most accurate of guided missiles. Misguided youth and passion strapped with shrapnel, the stealthiest of dirty bombs. Every versatile development of intelligence bends alternately to creation or destruction—the greater the power, the greater the atrocity.

Yet in order to develop, we must chance our ultimate demise. There is no advancement without struggle. There is no progress upward without the danger of falling. This applies to all of mankind, as well as to the individual existence. The alternate threat and promise of extinction is what drives us to create. To distinguish ourselves from inconscient matter, to approach the flame of divinity, to grasp at it with groveling, greedy fingers of competing awarenesses, until we discover, the hard way, that we are all of each other, all of the light that we seek, all of the matter that we shed.

So on the way to this discovery we slaughter, we suffer, we sear our desperate imperfections across the face of the earth, spreading the disease of despair and hollow complacency with a missionary zeal that results only in complementary rage and anger, in blind lashing-outs by voices bound by their own inarticulate tongues of selfishness. This sickening beauty of humanity, the terrible power of our destiny. Killing ourselves to know of ourselves, so that we may better live alongside of our silences. The way Miles Davis kills everything around him for that solid punch of harmony in the midst of chaos. Creating the space for momentary beauty to shine out of its darkened backdrop of everything.

Not every flower will find the outward sun. But every form of life, whether fallen to the earth for sustenance to the hunger of the future, or rooted into the highest of heights, holds within the seed of bliss, the joyful dance of incomplete perfection. For not any one thing could ever exist without the other.

Evil as Good

In my brief encounter with San Pedro in Cuzco 2 years ago, one of the insights I gained from that little glimpse into the hallucinogenic beyond was that there is nothing to fear in all of the vast, seemingly demonic forces arrayed beyond our understanding in the cosmos. That all is of the light, a part of the entire. I’ve been kind of sleeping on that window of intuition, but I re-remembered it the other day as I was reading a section in The Life Divine, wherein Aurobindo is grappling with the question of the existence of evil and suffering in the world. And I then realized that this little insight I had was perhaps deeper in significance than I had originally thought. For me, personally, the recognition that everything in existence is a part of a greater whole, including the “bad” and evil things, was a stepping beyond my upbringing. I was raised as a Protestant Christian, and as everyone knows, the Christian theology, in a nutshell, is arranged around the concepts of good and evil as represented by God and Satan. The presence of evil and suffering is explained as the meddlings of the fallen angel in our material world, allowed by a distant God to challenge and torture us in our den of sin. But there is, of course, a strange paradox in such an explanation of evil, for it renders a supposedly omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God as suddenly reticent and detached from humanity and their suffering. This means either that this God is cruel, or that he is not in fact all-powerful, or both.

I’m quite certain that Christian scholars and mystics have grappled with this question throughout the ages, and have more than likely come up with some insightful answers based within the Christian dogma. As I no longer adhere to any religion myself, I am not all that interested in theological answers, but rather in a unitary spiritual, metaphysical vision. The deeper mystic, in any religion, recognizes the unity of all existences as an extension of God. For if God is omni-everything, if it is Brahman, if it is all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, then it must necessarily include all of what we perceive as bad, in addition to all of the good.

This has led me to the idea that the very concept of “evil” is a necessarily human construct. After all, animals and plants do not create religions, laws, and codes of ethics for their behavior. If you agree with the principle of evolution, then you necessarily regard human life as an evolved form of life with a level of consciousness which goes beyond that which it has evolved from. As such, we have evolved into this perception of suffering and evil, and it is thus a mental construct, a product of our evolved mentality. And therefore, our conceptions of evil, though formed from fear and ignorance, are in fact an essential recognition of that which we must defend ourselves against, and ultimately transcend, in the effort to evolve. What we perceive and regard as evil are in fact powers beyond ourselves that threaten to overwhelm or lead us astray in our aspiration towards divinity. But in the bigger picture, these forces, so seemingly arrayed against us, are in fact a form of cosmic devil’s advocates that push us and nudge us and batter us towards perfection, honing us, challenging us. And when we recognize this greater truth, when we overcome our fear and ignorance, we get that much closer to transcending the existence and persistence of evil in our lives. In the light of this greater awareness, what was once perceived as evil and in opposition to ourselves transmutes into something with broader implication and potential, even a deeper good. All of this suffering, all of this evil, could be seen as teachers, bearers of painful lessons that we must learn. We must answer and overcome their challenges, and realize them as a part of the whole of existence. Both negative and positive, united, represent the entire picture. There is, therefore, nothing to fear. All is of the light, for all comes from the light and returns to the light, and has always been and will always be the light within itself, and of itself, and beyond itself. This is not to explain away your suffering. This is to say that perhaps you suffer because how else will you recognize delight? And this is not to explain away evil, and give it reason to perpetuate, but instead to say, for what other cause and purpose will we battle for what is right, and thus find our eventual, stumbling way into higher modes of existence, where evil is no longer what it was to our fractured, self-embattled minds?

Pure Essential Joy of Being

“The malady of the world is that the individual cannot find his real soul, and the root-cause of this malady is again that he cannot meet in his embrace of things outward the real soul of the world in which he lives. He seeks to find there the essence of being . . . but receives instead a crowd of contradictory touches and impressions. If he could find that essence, he would find also the one universal being, power, conscious existence and delight even in this throng of touches and impressions; the contradictions of what seems would be reconciled in the unity and harmony of the Truth that reaches out to us in these contacts. At the same time he would find his own true soul and through it his Self, because . . . his self and the self of the world are one. But this he cannot do because of the egoistic ignorance in the mind of thought, the heart of emotion, the sense which responds to the touch of things not by a courageous and whole-hearted embrace of the world, but by a flux of reachings and shrinkings, cautious approaches or eager rushes and sullen or discontented or panic or angry recoils according as the touch pleases or displeases, comforts or alarms, satisfies or dissatisfies. It is the desire-soul that by its wrong reception of life becomes the cause of a triple misinterpretation of the rasa, the delight in things, so that, instead of figuring the pure essential joy of being, it comes rendered unequally into the three terms of pleasure, pain and indifference.”

—Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Death as Subservient to Life

“. . . the natural opposition we make between death and life is an error of our mentality, one of those false oppositions—false to inner truth though valid in surface practical experience—which, deceived by appearances, it is constantly bringing into universal unity. Death has no reality except as a process of life. Disintegration of substance and renewal of substance, maintenance of form and change of form are the constant process of life; death is merely a rapid disinitegration subservient to life’s necessity of change and variation of formal experience. Even in the death of the body there is no cessation of Life, only the material of one form of life is broken up to serve as material for other forms of life. Similarly we may be sure, in the uniform law of Nature, that if there is in the bodily form a mental or psychic energy, that also is not destroyed but only breaks out from one form to assume others by some process of metempsychosis or new ensouling of  body. All renews itself, nothing perishes.”

—Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

A Whole in the Whole

 

“The divine soul will be aware of all variation of being, consciousness, will and delight as the outflowing, the extension, the diffusion of that self-concentrated Unity developing itself, not into difference and division, but into another, an extended form of infinite oneness. It will itself always be concentrated in oneness of its being, always manifested in variation in the extension of its being. All that takes form in itself will be the manifested potentialities of the One, the Word or Name vibrating out of the nameless Silence, the Form realising the formless essence, the active Will or Power proceeding out of the tranquil Force, the ray of self-cognition gleaming out from the sun of timeless self-awareness, the wave of becoming rising up into shape of self-conscious existence out of the eternally self-conscious Being, the joy and love welling for ever out of the eternal still Delight. It will be the Absolute biune in its self-unfolding, and each relativity in it will be absolute to itself because aware of itself as the Absolute manifested but without that ignorance which excludes other relativities as alien to its being or less complete than itself. . . . It will be able divinely to conceive, perceive and sense all things as the Self, its own self, one self of all, one Self-being and Self-becoming, but not divided in its becomings which have no existence apart from its own self-consciousness . . . It will be able divinely to conceive, perceive and sense all these existences in their individuality, in their separate standpoint living as the individual Divine, each with the One and Supreme dwelling in it and each therefore not altogether a form or eidolon, not really an illusory part of a real whole, a mere foaming wave on the surface of an immobile Ocean,—for these are after all no more than inadequate mental images,—but a whole in the whole, a truth that repeats the infinite Truth, a wave that is all the sea, a relative that proves to be the Absolute itself when we look behind form and see it in its completeness.”

—Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Reclaiming Christianity

Some watered down, politicized form of Christianity has swept across the nation, and it’s about time that real Christians began reclaiming it from the fundamentalist conservative “Evangelicals” who are tainting its name.

There is a basic and fundamental insecurity behind the so-called faith of these Christians, these hypocrites who dare to label themselves as believers without any attempt at understanding the bible for themselves, or any real faith in god. The only way that such people can pretend that they are good Christians is by surrounding themselves with other people who will pretend along with them. It’s a big collective fantasy, wrought with hysteria and fanaticism. They have created some idea of Christianity, filled with politicized propaganda and half-baked idealogies, that has little to do with any teachings to be found in the bible, and even less to do with any practical application of thought. These people are shallow, and dangerously susceptible to pointing fingers at anyone who might threaten their fragile illusions.

It’s pretty easy to tell a real Christian from these fake ones. When you discuss theology, God, etc with any real Christian, they are open to having their beliefs challenged, because they seek to find a way to deeper communicate these beliefs. They have a faith and deep-seated seeking for spirituality that will not be unsettled by such discussion, and they have an ability to articulate what they believe. When you talk to a fake Christian, they will not tolerate any challenges. They will either be attempting to “convert” you to their way of thinking, or they will simply not want to talk to you at all, except to label you as an enemy and shut their hearts and minds to you. This is because they do not truly know what they believe, because they have been told by their “group” what kind of beliefs they should hold, and have not gained these beliefs through their own seeking.

There is a reason that Church and State have been separated in the United States, and it’s a good one. But Republicans and the Christian Coalition, with their onslaught of Evangelical cheerleaders, have been attempting to render this separation null, claiming that the United States is a “Christian” nation. It is irrelevant what religion the majority of the people of the United States adheres to. Religion and politics are a dangerous and volatile mix, and the only reason that Republicans and any one else might attempt to harness it is for the simple, greedy cause of increased and absolute power. These power hungry “Christians”, voiced so loudly and crassly through firebrands and hypocrites such as Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Ted Haggard, have colonized the name and image of Christianity in the United States, and tainted it, bitterly, with blood, bigotry, and money.

When you watch the news in the United States, all you see in the world are the latest doings of Islamic extremists, and the media has built up this distorted image of Islam as defined by terrorists and fringe groups. Similarly, you can imagine how the rest of the world must be viewing the United States and its brand of Christianity. It has become defined by bullies, blasphemers, and intolerant unilateralism. Is this really what Christianity is about? Money, power, and absolute greed? Absolute intolerance? Of course not. And it’s about time that real Christians began speaking up for themselves, instead of allowing their faith to be dominated and distorted by political propaganda and a militant small-mindedness.

The Eye in the Middle of the Storm

In seconds of self-awareness, Janet felt bliss in the middle of all of the noise. It was as if all this anxiety, madness, fear was designed just so as to enhance and demarcate clarity in the moments when it came, crystalline, dew-dropped, silent before the storm. There was no denying that even in her weakest, most insecure of times, Janet still knew that she was beyond all of it, beyond the stifling imposition of other’s jealousy or indifference, beyond her own vanity and ever-shifting self-image; she was somewhere already still, sitting neatly next to the stream, taking it all in, letting it all wash away of its own accord. Like a sieve, like a net of the heart, a purity that dirt could run through untouched. All that would be left of herself in the end were these treasured moments of beauty, when the light focused through her and everything she was and everything that she touched was perfect, in tune with everything that is. Then the light faded and she became human again, petty, insignificant. But the diamonds were there, hidden, nestled into the back of her heart, and she waited inside of herself quietly for the moment when the treasures would become illuminated into the outer world again.

Janet knew that these moments could be sustained, lengthened, and increased in frequency. But she also knew that she could not produce them herself out of thin air. She had to learn patience, and learn how to open herself to the light when it came showering down into her face. It seemed that the more that she relaxed and allowed herself to be herself, the more frequently that she felt ecstasy.

All of the noise, the fear, the anger, the gossip, the taking for granted, the holding onto things, the materialism, the fake spiritualism, the pseudo-intellectualism, the superficial, the one-dimensional, the apathy . . . all of it added up to barriers between herself and her own heart. She was already free, if only she listened correctly. The knowledge was there, flagrant, demure, unappealing direct and simple and baby-soft and harder than steel.

Janet slipped out of her seat on the bus and stood swaying calmly in the stuffy heat of a Phoenix afternoon. The double doors pulled apart, hissing, and she dropped down the steps with gravity like water, centered, moving with music and light. A man stared wonderingly after her, his hand looped in a supportive strap, craning to look through the graffiti strewn window. She had something that he could not see.

Women as What They Are, Not as What You Want

Men, why is it that you must limit your view of women to that of solely sex organs, as symbols of your need? Why is it that the level of desire that you feel for a woman has no relation to your heart?

What a waste of time it is just to use women for sex, when they can offer so much more. Women are more than bodies—they are minds, they are voices, they are perceptions. They are more than anything that could be defined by your understanding, or by your desire, or by what you see.

Any father who loves his daughter knows this; any brother who loves his sister knows this; any son who loves his mother knows this: women are the bearers of the light. Respect this source and you may come to know true wealth.

Just to be around beautiful women is a delight, like breathing in rainforest air. Just to talk with them, to sit near to them, to be with them, to watch the way they draw in the currents of the unseen like magnetic birds in the sky.

You are infatuated with untouchable whores when goddesses walk beside you. You are fed porn airbrushed Hollywood dreams and blinded to the reality of beauty in your everyday life, all around you.

While you are wasting your time idolizing sexuality, the sensuous numinous world exists right here beside you. You don’t need to reach out for her. Breathe. Look within. Beyond need there is knowledge, and beyond knowledge there is love.

To love a woman, to love women, to love yourself. Honestly, I really don’t see why there is anything much more important than this.

Vanity is in Holding Yourself Apart

I’ve been an elitist in the past, and I often still consider the majority of the populace to be stupid. But my fundamental belief is that within every living entity there is the potential—most often unrealized—of beauty and power, of divinity. We attempt to express this inner potential in a variety of ways, and we often fail to do much more than fumble ourselves blindly into misunderstood gestures. But given the right environment, given a certain amount of respect and love and leeway, we bloom inner light into the world like flowers.

It bothers me when I go out dancing, and most people are standing along the sidelines, just watching, as if they are waiting for some perfect place, some perfect person, some perfect music, some perfect substance to open them up and make them free to dance. All these factors are important, of course, to having a good time. But it’s never going to be perfect. Sometimes you just have to go out onto the dance floor and enjoy yourself even if there’s no hot chicks there, even if the music is just the typical top 40 songs from the last 10 years, even if the drinks are too expensive and watered down. All that we need is simple: a steady beat and a few simple melodic hooks. Your ass can shake in a variety of ways that won’t be defined by the music. Your hips can move in a variety of ways that don’t have to be uninhibited by alcohol. You know what I’m sayin? Your degree of openness and freedom and creativity are ultimately only determined by yourself.

Again, continuing with the metaphor of the dance floor, all it takes is one person letting themselves loose to get the party started. Then others begin to respond to the call of your challenge. And soon its just one big fiesta competition.

All the limitations that can be found in society can be found in yourself. If you are too good, if you are better than everyone else, if you are better looking, got more money, got bigger cars, got a bigger ego, than all you do is perpetuate the walls that make you petty. If you are not good enough, not pretty enough, not talented enough, too insecure, than all you do is perpetuate the walls that make you needy. Everyone else is held back because you are held back. All the world is bad because you are bad. All the world is vain and petty and desirous and hungry because you are holding yourself apart from it, because you are holding your divinity apart, because you are separating yourself from something that cannot be divided.

You are god, and if you can’t realize that, then who else will? And if no one else will, then how can you realize it? It takes humility. It takes confidence. It takes getting beyond yourself in order to know yourself in order to share yourself.

Reminder

When my focus slips from within me, I exist temporarily solely on the outside, a representative of what I do not know, a physical force with nothing behind it. My daily existence, my mundane tasks define everything that I am.

It is hard to keep the focus inward, when the world outside demands your constant attention. Sometimes you have to shut it out, stopple your mind, and just breathe.

We have developed a world that battles with us constantly for our energy, attention, and time. All of our spare moments spent watching something, doing something, playing something, smoking something. To turn off all of this extraneous noise takes the self-discipline of a monk at times.

Often I just sit and stare into this empty computer screen, waiting for the need to write to grow strong enough for something to explode out of me like it was meant to be. But then I close the window and play a game or watch a movie instead. Because I did not have the patience to sit and listen and wait for the words to come.

It takes struggle to transcend. It takes patience to get beyond the surface. It takes discipline to chisel out the god within.

How I need to be reminded of this, every single day.

Zealotry and Fiction: Not So Distant, It Seems

If extremist fanatics wish to make their religious zeal look any more despicable and ridiculous to the rest of the world, I really do not know how they could do it: the continued fatwa on Salman Rushdie’s head, and the renewed furor against him caused by his recent knighting, serves only to make these religious zealots look like murderous retards. Have any of them read and understood The Satanic Verses? It has little to do with blasphemy, and much more to do with understanding (and damn good storytelling). But of course, such people can only read all things completely literally, and are unable to fathom depth, complexity, nor challenging themselves with differing perspectives. And they read the Qoran in just such a manner as well, and are thus able to find justification for blatantly murderous and bigoted responses to everything. Just as Christian religious extremists dig through the Bible to hunt for random verses that will support their prejudice and hatred of all perceived evils.

What I continually fail to comprehend is how people who claim to believe so strongly in something could have their faith shaken so easily by such misperceived and unimportant slights as contained within a book of fiction. While this may attest to the power of the written word and of ideas, it also attests to the fear and insecurity lying so close to the heart of fanaticism. If these people truly believe in their God and in his prophet, then they would know that this God is untouchable by insults from nonbelievers, or blasphemy by outsiders. What is important is the knowledge and faith that they have in their own hearts. But quite obviously, many of them do not have knowledge and faith in their hearts. They only have a slinking overprotective fear that turns quickly to bristling anger and direct attack in the face of any challenge.

What these so-called religious zealots fail to realize is just how apparent their own inner blasphemy is made to the rest of the world when they react in such a manner. These are not men of God. These are hypocrites and blasphemers of the worst sort, who proclaim and beat their chest about their beliefs to the world while all along they do not actually believe them in their own hearts. These are idolaters, murderers, and bigots, who have created a desperate farce of a show to demonstrate that they are righteous, that they are faithful, that they will get into heaven.

Such people earn nothing but disdain from the world, and if there is a God, then they are undoubtedly plowing themselves a direct path to Hell. This is what I think of the people who would uphold a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and of those unsavory and hypocritical businessmen who have posted bounties on his head. This is my sentence on you.

Self Perpetuating Fear

Just so as in a field in which the soil has been upturned, baring subterranean life to the cruel face of another world, so too in society we unearth, endlessly, the depths of what we cannot consciously understand. We look at these strange unintelligible truths we have unearthed in our cultivation, these creatures of a world before sight, and we are afraid. Because what we are destroying through our shallow misconceptions are the roots of our survival. We are wholly dependent upon the most simple and basic aspects of the earth, and we are destroying these structures like a man kicking at the essential pillars holding up his roof. And then we evince shock when we see our illusions crumbling? Shock that this civilization based on the myth that the earth is ours, that our minds are ours, that our bodies are ours, is falling all around us, leaving us as mere blind destroyers, simpletons sitting in the ravaged dirt?

(But perhaps this is our very function as a part of Nature, to serve as murderous wardens of restrictive mentalities. The dark to counterbalance the light. This is not for us to determine, either way.)

Again, go back to the field, the plot of land that has been blindly cultivated following tradition and convention. Weeds spring up at every turn, like viruses in a weakened immune system, and manufactured chemicals must be sprayed relentlessly, as weeds attack viciously like barbarian hordes. All along when in reality weeds are simple seeds attempting to capitalize on an open market, a market opened wide by methodical devastation. Insects infect the crops, capable of instantaneous destruction if not immediately ridden with poison. Poison leveling beneficial and invasive alike, like carpet cluster bombs in a city, like radiation in a cancer patient.

By creating environments that are based on the illusion that human life is the pinnacle and cream of all creation, we have set ourselves directly on the path of addiction and self-destruction. And we watch with confusion the nightly news repeats of murder, war, famine, suicide, refusing to draw the connections that would render ourselves complicit in all of this madness. The line that would link us to perversion, terrorism, and murder. The line that connects the dots of the individual and the masses. The line that swaths a path direct from innocence to guilt. From hunger to power. From resources to capital.

There is a reason why we fear certain things. These certain things are what we have created through our ignorance, by our deliberate ignoring of all other life that we are wholly dependent upon to survive. It is ok to be afraid. But it is better to be at peace with death. To accept that life is not the central meaning of the universe. That we are in fact nothing in the face of what we are a part of.

Once this fact has been faced, then we can get on with the tasks of enjoying dancing, enjoying breathing, enjoying eating, enjoying shitting, enjoying being alive, and fuck all of this stupid shit like fear.

Dreaming of Dreaming

What dream do you choose? The dream of success, of money, of multiple abodes across the globe? The dream of idealism, of righteousness, of home always within your heart? The dream of bitterness and self-vengeance, drinking and wasting away all hope? The dream of union with your beloved, the dream of searching always for fleeting pleasures, the dream of yourself as beautiful, the dream of yourself as nada?

All dreams are dreamed by the dreamer plugged into a subterannean extraterrestrial world of subconscious desires. The pulls and tugs of what could only be understood as destiny and happenstance, one and the same. Everything moving according to the inner weight of necessary becoming. All players in a play determined by respective positioning in the spatial field of time, the temporal plane of existance. Even the rocks and trees stand dreaming, so rooted in essential is-ness that their dream is inseparable from reality. Mankind branches out far into the dark unknown, leaping across collective synapses, gene pooled neurons formed of generations of conscious suffering. So far into the emptiness that their dreams can become seemingly severed from what is. Conscious tears in the fabric of self, riven of the struggle to know itself. It Self as ultimately everything that is and could be. The stars and the stuff of legends, the matter of fear, the synthesis and culmination of evolution.

Leading us musicmakers to here, this point of knowing and not knowing, this movement into future. Into death of what we thought we have known and birth of what we will know, can know, because we have known it all before. Because spring comes after winter, and there is no philosophy that could deny that life is recurring, continuously—so life is recycled after death into life anew. The dream was a dream conceived to move yourself into yourself. The Dreamer at the end of the worlds dreams of itself in the trizillions of forms. The play of moonlight upon the water. The play of emotion across your face. The play of prayers playing at pray.

Consciousness Beyond and Before Mind

“It is becoming always clearer that not only does the capacity of our total consciousness far exceed that of our organs, the senses, the nerves, the brain, but that even for our ordinary thought and consciousness these organs are only their habitual instruments and not their generators. Consciousness uses the brain which its upward strivings have produced, brain has not produced nor does it use the consciousness. . . Our physical organism no more causes or explains thought and consciousness than the construction of an engine causes or explains the motive-power of steam or electricity. The force is anterior, not the physical instrument.”

—Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Late Night Ponfiticate

I’m tired. But I can’t sleep, which necessitates, of course, a blog post. Something to do with the lingering scents of cigarette and bleach. Funny because I stopped a Harry Potter flick midway to go to bed, but here am I, fingering the little keys of my laptop like herein I might find the meaning of life. I write generally because I am in need, need of expression, need of compassion. Call and response of the heart and mind. It would seem that everything in life is causation, simple cause and effect, spark of synapse and subsequent baby manifestation, but we know this ain’t the complete picture. That there is something still, calm, centered, beyond the action, beyond the forces, some ultimate blissful unknown. Not god, necessarily. Like a you within yourself that is not yourself but everything which includes you and moves beyond you to include the cosmos. You glimpse this glimmering place within yourself when you breach that line between ego and insecurity, and find something more that connects you to everything else. Like you could die and this would still be there. Contexts shift and ebb and flow. Your heart flutters like an aspen leaf in divine current. But there is within yourself still this stillness. Unspeakable, unshakable. Closest thing you could do would be to sing unprotected. Producing fairy children out of thin air with the sheer volume of living magic exhumed from your lungs. Too often we are fearful and layered, buffered in sadness and joy. Unable to breakthrough to anything beyond what we would tell ourselves and each other we are. When in reality we are so much less, so much more insignificant than anything we would ever imagine. Ourselves, as we know it, are nothing. The sheerest, thinnest stretch of connection between galaxies. Rolled endlessly between infinitude and a single pointed finger. What seems at first glance like utter madness is in fact the most logical of steps descending into knowledge. Beyond appearance and self castigation lies this lakebed realm of playful alien forms defined only by our own seeing. What do you see? There it is! Simple, powerful, devastating. The world flattens, bends, shifts to our limitations. We can ruin everything, but it wouldn’t really matter. Because what matters is beyond matter. The sparrows flit from bug to bug over the water, wings bathed momentarily in sunlight as you eat your spaghetti. Everything would seem to center on the sauce, on the light. All is everything. Not just this, not just that, but every single minute thing collects itself into a picture which cannot possibly be deconstructed. So you fly, you sing, you move from point A to point B and in between the weather changes and you comment on it and people say “how are you doing” and you nod and say “good.” and the world explodes all around you to fall at your feet as you craft fantasy after fantasy after TV shows and spam filtered half lives, but nothing will ever quite approach what is there in the movement of the image of light to fall into your eyes backwards to right itself into your retinal after perception firing into thought, into perception, into meaning.

You take a breath. The whole universe quivers. What will be created? What will be destroyed? What will be understood?

Ever More

This moment is you. Standing hopeless on the brink of your desires, your washed up dreams. All the fantasies that you cultivated in solitary stimulation. The world moves on, distant, primal, alien. You listen to your mind striving to form some narration that would fit you in, lock you into a perfection and beauty undeniable, eternal, broadcast across time and space to shine into understanding and love and sex and money. But you know, of course, that your spirit is undefinable. Incapturable. That the only things that come out of you that are beautiful are not your own. That this darkness, this doubt, this everyday struggle simply to look in the mirror and walk out the door into the unseeing crowd is the keystone to this very moment.

When you stand face to face with your death, you understand then that such moments are everything. That all the times of wasteful heedlessness—spent suckered into some suit’s notion of what you are supposed to want, given your date of birth, sexual orientation, and geographical location—were exactly that, a waste. That most of your life has been wasted. That even despite all of this waste, all it takes is one moment of truth, purity, and honesty to clear it all away. The tally is tipped every time by one simple look into despair. You could never be good enough. The world could never be enough. And yet, it moves, it breathes, it feels, it floods. Death and movement are one and the same. Periods are a pause in the formation of thought, like the pulling back of the sea before it moves to crash itself into the shore. Again and again. There is no stop. No end. No final dark night that has no meaning.

What do we call this thing within us that fears and hides and spits at the world? It has been called ego, it has been called self, it has been called humanity. It is our suppressed divinity showing forth as demonic manifestation. Let it shine. Let it out. You know everything that there is to know about yourself. You were born crying, helpless, misunderstood in your inability to articulate. You learned to buffer yourself by silence, conformity, and following the drawn lines of tradition. You found moments of freedom when you rediscovered connection, empathy, intuition. These are the tools that take us into the future.

Draconian regressive clutchings at domination and anger, addiction and blame, have defined our history. These egos. This humanity. These childlike gods, terrible in their bitterness. We all must grow up eventually, one way or another. To face our extinction or our transmutation. Both which appears the same to the uncritical eye.

The alchemist leaves behind his learning, leaves behind his doubt, leaves behind his fear. To make magic. To believe in what has been taught to us as impossible. To find in one moment the key that would unlock all of sleeping eternity. To move beyond himself, his attachment, and his desire.

Because beyond death there is a greater power. It has nothing to do with the transformation of lead into gold, or of water into wine. Nor the movement of mountains, or of the stars, or of your heart. What stupidity! It is the power and binding strength of communion. The severing of self to find union in your Beloved. The letting go of what holds you back and pins you down to find that you can fly, that you have been flying all along, that the world flies and holds you and cradles you and pushes you beyond yourself at every turn to look down into what seems inevitable and certain impossiblity. Can you handle it? Can you handle what you were given? Can you handle what you were made to become?

It is not one or the other. It is not you or them. It is not life or death. It is love, or it is Love. It is death, or it is Death. Nothing less. Ever more.

Behind and Beneath and Behold

Here’s an exercise in possibility. Take a look at the picture of the sky between the branches and needles of a pine tree. Look at how the lit sky in the space between the nebulous branches of the trees resembles constellations, milkyways, galaxies sprawled across the cosmic distance. Then think of this: scientists know that there is something dark and invisible (dark matter) that constitutes the unseen mass of the universe, exerting force and direction.

We can see the lights of the stars. Everything else appears as empty vacuum, empty space. But we know, indirectly, that this space is not empty.

Perhaps this space that we cannot see is in fact the majority of what is. What is seen is in fact the slim space in between. See what I mean? That what we know and can directly envision is in fact only the tip of the iceberg. That the trees, the formations that connect and form and breathe the universe, is constituted by what we do not understand, and can only sense indirectly by the undertow and impulses that guide our existence.

That in fact this visible world that we have investigated so thoroughly is in fact only a petty and slight extension of what is, of what truly forms our lives. And that to get into connection with this unseen mass of the cosmos is to get to know the truth. That most everything else is somewhat of a distraction. Fool’s gold. Glimmers and glints of surface residuals from the dark cavernous depths that lie voluminously beneath and behind everything.

Sea

It isn’t there, if you have to look for it, see. It’s already envisioned, already happening. It’s moving. You’re on it. You’re in it. You are it, every step of the way, every hurt, awakening, joy. The godhead, this beautiful presence. That’s what you’re looking at. Don’t look for it. It’s there. It’s here. It is, it be, it now. This has all been said before, but it has never, ever been seen quite the same way, through quite the same eyes, in quite the same form. Quietly, the world revolves into wholly new arrangements of recycled material. Spiraling coils that stretch into any space given. A beauty that is everpresent, evergreen, all inside everything that exists, as long as you can see it. Look at yourself. You really believe that you are anything else? Anything but you? Who you been listening to?

Because it sure as hell can’t be said. This is just kind of a reminder, you know what I’m saying? This is a memo between me and you so that we remember. Remember that nothing in the world is as important as what is manifestly occurring right now within us. Here. Beholden only to our own sacred knowledge of what we feel. No one can tell us that, not even ourselves. We’ve just got to be listening real close to the world which is ourselves in different times speaking in different voices through different movements that we are one, that we are many, that we are all in this shit together and that it really don’t matter what anyone holds onto—because everything has already been made into a picture that moves and defines and clutches at hungry bittersweet beauty when we all know, all we know, we already know quite well that we are this, peace, whole, center focus of all understanding and polyrhythm and harmonious atonal interconnectivity that thrusts and crawls and flies into love, into love. Into what we can only call love, belatedly and in sad departure because we are full, as the apple is full when it falls to the earth, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of everything, falling out of fullness and inevitability into the future. Because it must be. Because it is. Because this wind has blown in this current out of the circulation of this sea from this sun in this exploding set of dust and stars and energy.

Each Thing Is All Itself

“When we withdraw our gaze from its egoistic preoccupation with limited and fleeting interests and look upon the world with dispassionate and curious eyes that search only for the Truth, our first result is the perception of a boundless energy of infinite existence . . . an existence that surpasses infinitely our ego or any ego or any collectivity of egos . . . We instinctively act and feel and weave our life thoughts as if this stupendous world movement were at work around us as centre and for our benefit . . . When we begin to see, we perceive that it exists for itself, not for us . . . And yet let us not swing over to the other extreme and form too positive an idea of our own insignificance. . . Science reveals to us how minute is the care, how cunning the device, how intense the absorption it bestows upon the smallest of its works even as on the largest. . . To Brahman there are no whole and parts, but each thing is all itself and benefits by the whole of Brahman. . . The form and manner and result of the force of action vary infinitely, but the eternal, primal, infinite energy is the same in all. The force of strength that goes to make the strong man is no whit greater than the force of weakness that goes to make the weak. The energy spent is as great in repression as in expression, in negation as in affirmation, in silence as in sound.”

—Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

The Divine to Man as the Sun to Earth

“For the senses the sun goes round the earth; that was for them the centre of existence and the motions of life are arranged on the basis of a misconception. The truth is the very opposite, but its discovery would have been of little use if there were not a science that makes the new conception the centre of a reasoned and ordered knowledge putting their right values on the perceptions of the senses. So also for the mental consciousness: God moves round the personal ego and all His works and ways are brought to the judgment of our egoistic sensations, emotions, and conceptions and there are given values and interpretations which, through a perversion and inversion of the truth of things, are yet useful and practically sufficient in a certain development of human life and progress. They are a rough practical systematisation of our experience of things valid so long as we dwell in a certain order of ideas and activities. But they do not represent the last and highest state of human life and knowledge . . . The truth is not that God moves round the ego as the centre of existence and can be judged by the ego and its view of the dualities, but that the Divine is itself the centre and that the experience of the individual only finds its own true truth when it is known in the terms of the universal and the transcendent.”

–Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Lullaby

Flip sides o’ the same coin, ecstasy and suffering–like in the way when you cook a pancake and the first side is cooked deeply til it bubbles through, and then when you flip it, the second side cooks swiftly and lightly: a dark, covered burning and grappled scrambling, and a fleeting, golden cumulative few moments of divinity. The ecstasy comes in the throes of union, in the dissipation of boundaries accompanied by a visceral sense of unity, fulfillment, and flying light exploding bliss. Suffering comes when habitual patterns and perceptions fall back into place like confining walls, and separation, individual isolation, and anxious insecurity again take their status as the norm of daily existence. But the renewal of distinct, opposing forms is the essence of life and love. It is essentially impossible to maintain a blissful sense of unity and infinite harmony with all the Kosmos or simply with your beloved. Simply put, without the valleys there would be no peaks. The peaks are pushed into the stratosphere from the deep inner workings of years of slow burning flames, of frictive forces pushing against each other until the victorious simultaneous movement upward, far beyond the territory so painfully fought for.

What is commonly known as “suffering” is what paves the path to a deeper and lasting inner experience of love. Suffering is to work, traverse the pointed rock strewn wildernesses of the heart and mind, to be alone within yourself, to come close to the silence, the stillness of a concentrated listening and observation, when all the sounds and shapes form together slowly like jigsawed pieces of each other, to know the outward signs of mundanity as intimately as inner hidden wellsprings of divine light, to know humanity beyond words, to know love beyond touch, to know god beyond faith, to know everyday as struggle, to know every night as searching, to scrape the lowest dirty depths of the earth to know the wildest dances of lunar madness.

There is no having one without the other. There is no faith without an accompanying contact of skin, no peace without a tumultuous, bloody birth, no healing without protective, irritating scabs, no light reflectant beauty without brooding darkness.

We fight each other to know ourselves. The universe is cut up into words and diagrams to chart its unity into understanding. The heart is pockmarked with despair to know divinity. The moon is deadened rock reflecting the sun exerting its silent night pull on seedlings struggling to uplift their tendrils to the future. The pull is there in everything, up and down, earth and sky, light and dark–all one wave of one voice making its song to itself to sing itself into awareness of its beauty.

Evil as a Part of a Whole

“An omnipresent reality is the Brahman, not an omnipresent cause of persistent illusions . . . And if this Self, God, or Brahman is no helpless state, no bounded power, no limited personality, but the self-conscient All, there must be some good and inherent reason in it for the manifestation, . . . [there must be] some truth of being in all that is manifested. The discord and apparent evil of the world must in their sphere be admitted, but not accepted as our conquerors. The deepest instinct of humanity seeks always and seeks wisely wisdom as the last word of the universal manifestation, not an eternal mockery and illusion, . . . an ultimate victory and fulfillment, not the disappointed recoil of the soul from its great adventure . . . Brahman is indivisible in all things and whatever is willed in the world has been ultimately willed by the Brahman. It is only our relative consciousness, alarmed or baffled by the phenomena of evil, ignorance and pain in the cosmos, that seeks to deliver the Brahman from responsibility for Itself and its workings by erecting some opposite principle, Maya or Mara, conscious Devil or self-existent principle of evil. There is one Lord and Self and the many are only His representations and becomings.”

–Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

To Be Here

The Zen Buddhists are oft quoted curtly stating, “Here. Now.” Attempting always to snap attention to where it is most needed, the present moment. Because the world is sinuously, continuously shifting. Because enlightment is not some perfect pinnacle to be reached and planted a flag into. Because the only way to be effective, relevant, and alive is to be consistently adaptive, morphic, rooting, exchanging. Boundaries must be extended until they are simply memories, snapshots of shedded patterns of the past. Trails as an imprinted arrow to the impromptu point of now, where we stand attempting to surf the unknown stimuli that floods every moment into our hungry receptors.

So many of us are terrified of what is to come, this dark mass of potentialities. We cringe to look at our breathing selves, at the very raw animal divine life that we are, existing, extruding so many things that we don’t even know where to begin to prune. But what is to come is just as frankly irrelevant as what has already occurred. What of course always takes precedence over anything, every time, is the everpresent here and now. To be omnipresent does not mean to exist outside of time. It means to exist so firmly embedded in this very present, now, now, NOW, that in tunnelling through this eternal presence you come to exist everywhere all at once, through the simultaneous intuitive deep superconscious connectives that link you through to all life that exists in the same moment in other forms, to see through their eyes as your eyes, to know the universe through yourself through the universe.

Such moments are hard to come by. Such concentration is required simply to relax. Such study and discipline and luck and love are required to allow and to accept and to embrace each fleeting moment to its fullest.

The first step is just to acknowledge the utter critical importance of awareness of your present existence. To meditate is not to sit. To enact yoga is not to exercise. These are matters of life or death. This is the purpose for which you are here. To be here.

Affirmation of Divinity Within Mundanity

“The affirmation of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal existence can have no base unless we recognize not only eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of this mutable robe, but accept Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions.”

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Vision Logic

Every event and thought and action in my life points to realization of the helix of life and death as one and the same, the helix of pain and pleasure as one and the same. Differing faces of the same coin, spiralling through time and space. All pointing inward to the interdimensional connectivity of our hearts. The boundless core of emptiness that is everything and nothing all in one breath. Twisting, turning, we dance about this flame that expels us and devours us every moment. We play games, we push away our deaths, we push away our lives, we put on masks and pretend to be something singular, one-dimensional, and dissociated from all the world. All songs and stories and myths of humanity. All maps of guidebooks to the spirit.

Looking into ourselves, we see a beauty so terrible, so hungry, so powerful, we flutter away into conventionality, we label away our own infinitude, we box up our horizons and hide behind simulations behind simulations behind simulations of this reality.

This world is mine. It is at my very fingertips, it is inseparable from my heart and my vision. This world is yours. We are gods. We are terrible, hungry, powerful divine beings–and you would be so selfish, so small-minded, so vain, as to say that there is some distinction between yourself and God? That you could ever be separated? That this umbilical cord of words and sight and touch is not God? That the emptiness, and the form, and the heart, and the mouth, and the death, and the life, and the pain, and the ecstasy, could ever be anything but God?

The only thing that divides us is our hesitation to accept, to submit to our own ability to see.

To Suffer, To Heal

Something I thought of while feeling my heart cracking open and tears streaming out–I could feel how in some strange way, pain is the only way in which to heal, grow, and expand. It is the numbing of emotion that is the greatest of danger. Human beings numb themselves with alcohol, drugs, TV, dead-end jobs, abusive relationships, destructive gossip, religion–you name it. The only way for us to keep moving is by opening ourselves to what we know will cause us suffering.

When you are addicted to something, then you seek to alleviate the suffering of withdrawal by continuously getting more and more of what you are addicted to. You seek to numb yourself into normality, just so you can get by. This is not a disease or abnormal behavior. Everyone in this society is addicted to something, whether it is money or weed or sex or wanting other people to think of you as good looking. We look down on those who shoot up heroin or smoke crack, and then we turn around and purchase the latest video game system, or we pretend to laugh at someone else’s stupid joke just because we want them to like us.

The point being that all of us, in some way, seek to numb ourselves so that we don’t have to suffer. To suffer is to lay open your heart, surrender your illusions, and look fully at reality. And once you do that, then you have to change, you have to evolve, you have to accept responsibility for your life.

There is no more pain then when you see someone you know and respect and love destroy themselves. There is no denying suffering in the face of that. It overwhelms you, it overcomes you, it plows you into the emptiness beyond yourself, it rips your soul out of your body. And in this storm of emotion, you begin to see the light of love. How you are not only yourself–you are everyone connected to you. Because you can feel the hole torn from you where that person once was. There is no denying, in the face of such pain, that for someone to tear themself from life prematurely is like pulling a full grown tree from the earth. All of the roots extend into the same soil that nurtures you. All of the limbs and leaves reached out into the same light that bathes your days. That tree was you, is you, and will always be you. There is no isolated, separated, detached individual here in this world.

So to know of this man’s suffering . . . this is to know of my own suffering.

No End

Like a tree embedded in the soil, nurtured by the sky, there is no true separation between you and I. All appearance is a veil, like the atmosphere over earth, protecting us from incinerating instantly. You could say that everyone and everything in this universe is really one and the same, existing solely in different space-time, morphic units scattered in morphic fields all stemming from one heart. This is the root of understanding, the empathic placement of yourself into another’s life, seeing the world through an other’s eyes. Like a sonnet structure, like a symphony, all life is on the surface but an empty form. But it is what moves through these forms that gives us meaning.

Does any of this make sense to you? What I am saying is that you–you, exactly as you are–are capable of understanding everything in this universe. Look inward to your heart. Look outward to your friends, family, and community. Feel all the world with your senses. All as one interlocked embrace, all eyes looking inward to the one, all one looking outward to the all.

On Atheism

I have somehow gotten myself involved in some on-line debates revolving around the existence or non-existence of a god. Rather than continue bickering with people who already have a set viewpoint, I thought I should just post a summation of my thoughts here instead.

To call yourself an atheist means that you do not believe in the existence of any god or deity, and that to believe in a god is to believe in a myth. Problem is, most atheists apparently have taken this position not because they have gone to the fullest extent of the logic required to get to this position (which I’ll get into in a minute) but simply because they don’t like institutionalized religion and the mind-numbing effect it has on the masses. Meaning that they associate “god” with the Pope, or as a construct of the Bible. They would be more suited by calling themselves anti-religionists.

The outcome of the viewpoint of atheism is that all of human existence can be reduced to objectivity and materialism. That is, all life and love is simply the happenstance interaction of chemicals and particles or what have you. Because to deny the existence of god is more than simply saying, “I do not believe in God.” It is saying that you also do not believe in the existence of ANY spirituality. You believe that all of life is simply what it appears to be, and nothing more. There is no magic, no love, no poetry, no spirits, no collective soul, no reason for seemingly random things to occur at just the right time. There is no unknown mystery to life. Hey, if that’s what you really believe, good for you. You’re officially hopeless.

But if you’ve got a problem with institutionalized religions, and their negative impacts on society and politics world-wide, then you’re in the same boat as most intelligent human beings. Nobody likes seeing neo-cons capitalizing off of a naive Christian populace to wage war for resources and increase the disparity between rich and poor. Nobody likes seeing desperate Muslims equating mindless bloodshed with soulful righteousness. Nobody likes seeing Zionists wrap selected history and vengeance around a slow suffocation of Palestinean life. Religions account for probably at least 75% of the world’s bloodshed. Oh, yes, I can understand why someone would despise religion and the bitter division it causes in the minds of the uneducated and downtrodden.

But to disagree with institutionalized religion is one thing. To deny all spiritual existence is quite another. Because you can believe in a god, and not believe in a religion, as I do. I think what it comes down to, oftentimes, is simply what your definition of “god” happens to be. Is it a white bearded dude sitting on a golden throne somewhere in the golden paved suburbs of heaven? If so, then you probably don’t know much of anything about the religion that you’ve subscribed to and have just been spoonfed a load of horseshit. But if you know god as an active, present force in your life, inside of your heart, inside of every little mundane part of your day, then you’ve gotten a little closer. As Rumi said, the water the thirsty man seeks is “nearer than his jugular vein.”

When Zen masters seek to jolt their students into enlightenment, they give them mind-fuck games (“koans”), they tell them stories or give them experiences that are designed to take their mind beyond logic. Logic and reason can only get you so far before you begin to realize that you could argue all day about anything from any viewpoint. Ultimately, reason and logic only gain you a shallow perspective, and in order to go deeper and gain a broader understanding, you must move inward. It is a common spiritual insight that one must, in a sense, die before one can open up one’s senses to spiritual dimensions. Die in the sense that you have to let go of attachment to your individual self and all the mental constructs you’ve built up to support that illusion.

To deny a god and spiritual existence is easy. To despise all religion and its effect on humanity is easy. To go deeper in search of the source is difficult. To admit that all things are beyond the safety and comfort of appearance is difficult. To live according to your heart, and not your mind . . .

Priests and the Power of Corruption

It seems like there is nothing the Catholic Church can do to rectify its public image. There is a constant stream through the media headlines of either some Dan Brownesque conspiracy, or some priest sodomy scandal. The public is thoroughly disillusioned now–not only with God, who’s been passé for some time now (excluding certain landlocked areas of the country)–but with God’s servants, who seem to have a disturbing affinity for young boys.

It gives one pause to think that perhaps those men who enter into priesthood, dedicating themselves for life to spiritual ideals, are not necessarily all godly seekers–that perhaps rather than entering priesthood to find God, they are entering priesthood to escape themselves. They want to escape their desire, their flesh, their past, and be retempered in some conception of purity. But the fact is that they are lonely creatures, and they are still humans, however well-versed in Biblical lore they may be.

To me, it becomes evident that priesthood itself, and its saintly demands, is simply an unrealistic role to assign to most people. These men are placed in positions of trust and power as empty vessels of God–so when their own desires and weaknesses become evident, as of course they inevitably will, given that they are mere mortals, it thus becomes magnified in its effect. The problem, then, is not simply that there are men who become priests that are perverts–it is that the very role of priesthood lends itself to perversity.

This is not to say that there are not priests who are indeed spiritual and godly men. It is rather to acknowledge that any and every priest is a human being, and that all human beings, placed into an idealized role and given power, are subject to corruption. We already know that all too well in regards to politicians. We already know that with policemen (or at least a certain segment of the populace knows it all too well). It applies just as well to priests, and just as well to the Church itself.

Mere outward trappings of justice, truth, or spirituality are not a guarantee of anything.

Ancient Connections

I went on my first real hike of the year (finally) today, and watched as a forest fire sprung up on the other side of the ridge. I ate thimbleberries and right now I am drinking pennyroyal tea from leaves that I collected. I’m an idiot for not hiking more often. I hiked at least once a week last summer, but a number of things such as the World Cup and mosquitoes have prevented me from going thus far this year.
Anyway, I was thinking about some things as I hiked, and one of the threads regarded our civilization’s conceptions of “primitive” or ancient humans. We regard them inherently as simpleminded and lacking in sophistication. Even when there is ample evidence as to the contrary. We seem to have a hard time accepting that people who lived thousands of years ago could possibly have understood things on a deep level. And so when we come across irrefutable examples of their ingenuity, creativity, and intelligence, we inevitably attribute them to space aliens, or simply relegate them to yet another of the past’s “mysteries.”

Localized ancient wisdom, such as the understanding of herbs, plants, roots and how to make healing medicines from them, is swiftly passing away in the face of globalization and homogenization. But even as it is passing, something makes me think that this wisdom isn’t something that will just be lost forever. The only thing which can be lost is our ability to listen.

Shamans almost universally make the claim that their knowledge of plants comes directly from the plants themselves. I think that this is a claim that should be taken more seriously. Take the example of the Amazonian concoction of ayahuasca. It’s an amazing phenomenon to modern botanists and chemists, because the mixture of different plants which constitutes the hallucinogenic beverage is extremely advanced–on the surface, requiring a knowledge of chemical botanical interaction with the human brain that only modern science could provide. Yet ancient shamans have been crafting the brew for centuries, without science and without “proofs”. To say that they discovered the concoction through trial and error is akin to saying that we invented computer chips by banging rocks together. So unless you subscribe to the cop-out space alien theory, you have to accept the conclusion that there is a different system of acquiring knowledge than what we commonly accept. This system of acquiring knowledge does not rely on logical explanations and research. It relies, I would argue, on creative empathy and sensitive and attuned intuition–the ability to make associations between seemingly non-related and disparate things.

I think that we have a lot to learn from the earth and life itself, and that we have forgotten what it is to listen. We are so full of ourselves and our accomplishments as a species that we assume that we innately possess more wisdom than, say, a chipmunk or a tree. Yet the fact is that the earth breathes. Life is vast and delicately interconnected like the system of nerves and veins in your body. If a shaman says that he learned how to make ayahuasca from the plants themselves, than I would be inclined to accept his statement. I don’t think that plants talk. But I do think that if someone is in touch with themselves, than through the use of their creative empathic abilities, they can hear the call of things related to themselves, and the fact is that we are deeply interconnected with plants.

Humans are an extension of the earth. If you subscribe to the idea of evolution, which is supported quite firmly by scientific evidence, than you should know this. Which is to say that deeply embedded within our own minds lies the roots which connect us to all the world. The connection which we have temporarily forgotton, due to all the blinding surface lights of our modern conveniences, is to ourselves.

I Will Watch The Heart

It is strange how quickly I can change. I watch myself through a veil of colors falling like tassellated stars, comets of fear and insight between the thing and the soul. The only thing I have become certain of is that my strength is found in permeability and steady state shifting. An armor of waves, a wall of movement. A warrior will tell you to watch the eyes; eyes as a window to the soul. Forget the eyes. I will watch the heart.

Experential Divinity

In order to know divinity, you must know your self, beyond all that previously defined you. You must look within, stripped of all pretension. And there you will find a terrifying unity, terrifying because every little butterfly flutter of your heart has universal implication.

Which is to say that to know of God is an entirely personal affair. I learned this the hard way growing up. I grew up a Presbytarian Christian, went to church and youth group every week. The driving spiritual force in my life, however, was my grandmother, an immigrant from Sweden who prayed multiple times a day and read constantly from her bible. When she prayed, she went into a kind of trance and spoke in tongues. She would tell stories, of which she had many, of prayers answered and miracles in her life. She was intensely spiritual, and I always respected that, and I wanted to believe the way she believed. I tried. For years I tried to pray and to know god the way that she did. And it took me longer than that to finally understand that I could never know god the way that she did. I could only know god in my own way.

And this is where institutionalized, fundamentalist religion goes astray. Religious indoctrination would tell you what the word of god is. It would tell you how to think, how to feel, how to pray to their god. It would tell you of all the mysteries. But you would never experience these things directly. God has to be translated for the masses, according to institutionalized religion. And all of these things may be a good introduction. But they will never take the place of personal realization, a direct relationship and communication with the source.

Bruce Lee concocted his own martial art, a martial art which took him beyond tradition, close-minded indoctrination, and habits, and through which he learned to attack directly and quickly without waste of time and effort. But he admonishes those who would blindly follow his martial art. He tells them that Jeet Kun Do is only his own personal way, not anyone else’s way. That you can learn from it and take what you will from it, but never to follow it as a complete and universal form. Which, of course, people did anyway, and continue to do.

A more enlightened view of any form or school of thought is to think of it in terms of Ken Wilber’s concept of holons. A holon is something complete within its own parameters, yet which still opens and connects into something beyond. In which everything is a holon, a whole unto itself and yet a part of something greater. A cell in your body is a holon. Christianity is a holon. The earth is a holon. To ever say that something has no connection with anything else or that something has no relation or ability to evolve and change with the rest of the universe is fundamentalism of the sort that leads to warfare, anger, and close-mindedness.

People who think that they are completely separate and isolated from all the rest of the world end up killing themselves. People who can never understand themselves and can only relate to themselves in terms of external indoctrination end up killing others. And all the little gradations in between that lead you daily to prejudice your mind against the world.

Within my own lifetime, I simply want to try to make myself better than who I am. I want to carry a light inside me that can not be touched by the wind of another human being’s insecurity. I don’t want to be a human being who just takes, and takes, and takes. I want to give, and take, and give. And give. And the only one who can help me do that is myself–a self that is connected with all the world.

Dark Matters

Dark matter has been basically proven to exist; click here for a clear and detailed exposition of the evidence.

Cosmology and quantum cosmology have always been fascinating to me, even though I am decidedly of an un-scientific mind and have no interest in equations, proofs, and Klingon speak. What fascinates me about quantum physics applied to cosmology is that it is on such a theoretical edge that it often sounds like science fiction. It speaks of such things as black holes, parallel universes, and dark matter and energy.

I always like to consider the latest findings of quantum cosmology in a philosophical sense. What does this dark matter imply, for instance, in our daily lives? To think that there are forces, gravitational and otherwise, which are invisible and can barely be detected, yet which determine the direction and outcome of all events . . . That in fact these forces constitute the majority of pull and energy in our universe, even though we aren’t aware of them. We sense, sometimes, that there is some underlying power in the trajectory of our lives. That there are connections and fields and magnetic currents far beyond our understanding. This dark matter seems, perhaps, not so outlandish after all. The visible world, the way things appear, we all know on some level is only the tip of the iceberg. What invisible currents flow beneath all, and where does it take us?

Know Yourself

The Prophet said: ‘Whoever knows themself knows their God.’ And he said: ‘I know my Lord by my Lord.’ The Prophet points out by that, that you are not you: you are God, without you; not God entering into you, nor you entering into God. And it is not meant by that, that you are of that which exists . . . but it is meant by it that you never were nor will be, whether by yourself or through God or in God or along with God. You are neither ceasing to be nor still existing. You are God, without one of these limitations. Then if you know your existence thus, then you know God; and if not, then not.

–Ibn ‘Arabi “The Treatise On Being”

The Battle Between I and Them

The battle, it would seem, is between inner and outer realms. Those forces representing literality and appearances are constantly attempting to destroy the representatives of the heart of matters, the inner essences of things. Because the outer world is based upon order and structure. Whereas the inner can be explosive, creative chaos. The two worlds, of course, should not be and are not really at all diametrically opposed. The tricky matter of language and the way things appear is what leads to the warfare.

I once wrote to explore the beauty of language, the flow of words, the way a sentence could be so perfectly breathed, spaced, punctuated. I don’t write that way so much anymore, because at one point the sound and form of the words overcame their meaning.

I once was so self-conscious that I could never be myself before any stranger, let alone breathe properly in public spaces. I felt as though everything within me could be visibly seen, as though every pair of eyes was a judgment of my imperfect humanity.

Now, I don’t think so much of the ways other people look at me. I think of the way I look at them, if I am going to think about it at all. It is my mind itself which is the veil to understanding. Becoming, as a Zen Buddhist might say, of No Mind is the quickest path to joy. No mind, no judgment, no fear. Things are never simply the way they appear–they become the way in which they are received. I want to be the best Host to all good things in life–selfless, serving, supportive.

Self-help books these days all talk about boosting your self-esteem, building your self-image, assuaging your battered ego. I’m talking about throwing it all away. I’m talking about getting beyond yourself, because there’s something much greater. I’m talking about bridging the inner and outer worlds completely, such that the lie that there has ever been a Them and an I can be denied. We are all of one flame, and the ashes that fall in differing shades on the earth are nothing but something to contemplate, to say a few words over, and then to mix into a mulch from which living things will grow.

To Seek What Can’t Be Defined

A prevalent view of many spiritual seekers, it would seem, is that one who is truly enamoured with God must shed all worldly things–the monastic and ascetic tradition is one of self-flagellation and abstinence from physical pleasure and the love of another human being. I understand self-discipline and denial of desires and pleasures is indeed an instructive and, indeed, necessary practice in life. But to withold oneself completely from such things seems to me fanaticism that leads not to God but to masochism, which is simply another base pleasure, which was supposed to have been avoided in the first place. To accept and return the love of another human being is not a denial of God. It is a reaffirmation and mirror of divine love. To partake in worldly pleasures can surely be a distraction–but if the intention of the one who acts is pure, than the actions too are pure.

I am reminded here of the Zen tale of a master and his student who are crossing a river. The master sees a woman who is struggling to get across, and he takes her onto his back and carries her, even though a monk was not supposed to touch women, and sets her down on the other bank. The two monks continue on their way. After a while, troubled, the student finally says to his master as a rebuke, “You carried a woman!” The master chuckles and responds, “I set her down a long time ago. Yet you are the one who has been carrying her all this time!” Or something to that effect, that was my memory of the story. The meaning being that sins of the body are only sins when they are a distraction on the path to God. And they only become distractions when your intentions, the things you hold within your mind, are wrong.

The Sufi mystics of Islam discuss the purpose behind the act of prayer, where to stand, and then kneel, and then prostrate oneself completely is not simply a physical act–that in fact the physical act itself is but a hollow form–it is in the intention and focus of the person praying that the actions take on meaning. The form is but a vehicle for the inner purpose.

You can take that concept further, and see that even all religions and belief systems of the world are simply hollow forms. That all of the manifestations of this world are hollow forms, termed maya by Hindus. To be distracted by the forms, like the shadows on the wall in Plato’s cave, is to miss the whole point, the inner flame that gives all the outer forms life. People get so caught up in the game, in the nationalities and jihads and this side against that side, when really all it is is one flame, burning through all. All of the pain and suffering, simply to get to know yourself, which is everyone else. How many paths are there to the Path?

I’ve never understood how Christians, for example, can get so caught up in a name. They point to a passage in the Bible, and say that it is only through Jesus, and Jesus alone, that one can be saved. Yet what is the name Jesus to a God who is beyond name, beyond human understanding, beyond our feeble, petty, selfish definitions? What, really, is a name to any of us except as a means to understanding what is beyond names? God could be called anything and it wouldn’t mean anything because God cannot be named. The very attempt to name God is to create a separation from God, a duality that does not exist. Your very existence, as a separate entity, is a lie. All outer forms are meaningless without remembrance of the inner reality that gives them shape. These very words, attempting even to distance these ideas enough to make them words and ideas, are lies. The reality is beyond everything.

Positive Potentiality In Peops

I talk often in my writings of the need for openness in perception, the lack of expectations, such that another human being can exist more fully in their potential, which is ultimately infinite. I write of this often because it is one of my frequent, daily shortcomings in my interaction with strangers. By the way, if you ever feel that my writing is preachy, take it with a grain of salt, because I am not preaching necessarily to anyone but myself. Writing is a way for me to discuss issues and provide myself with advice that normally I can’t distance enough in daily life to see.

Anyway, so in the professional sphere, dealing with rich, complacent assholes is a frequent occurrence. Actually, a lot of them aren’t assholes. They are just weak minded and kind of pitiful in their ignorance of reality. They make a lot of money but they don’t have such basic social skills as courtesy or the ability to hold a conversation with someone outside of their limited social sphere. They drive an SUV mindlessly, without any idea of what cost such a thing might have to anyone else. They have spoiled, obnoxious children who will most likely grow up to be just as dumb and sheltered as they are. They like to power-trip over people who are only courteous to them because it is their job.

I can’t stand these kind of people, and unfortunately I have to deal with them frequently. But the truly unfortunate thing is that out of the numbers of people that I see every day, it is really only a few who are like that. But that few taints my perception of all the rest. And so I end up classifying a whole group of people and writing them off, such that I really don’t give any of them a chance to be anything more than just another moronic, well-off American.

It’s hard, incredibly hard, to shake off negativity once some stranger has been rude to you. I worked as a ticket seller for a gigantic ski resort one winter, and I dealt with a lot of rich to pretending-to-be-rich people who only knew how to be demeaning and dehumanizing to me once they couldn’t get their way. It got to be after a while that I wouldn’t be truly nice or open with anyone at my window, because every individual turned in my mind into a stream of idiots, bitches, and assholes. And everyday, every hour, there would be some idiot to reconfirm that. So I would just be indifferent and cold to all of them.

It’s like that receptionist, you know the one, at the doctor’s office, or that person who you talked about your refund with at the customer service window–that employee who was just outright rude to you, and seemed to derive no pleasure in life except to be rude to you for no reason. We’ve all dealt, way too often, with such a person, and they ruin our day. They are unhappy, bitter people. You know that all they do is go home and then talk shit about people from work.

I’ve been that person from time to time. All it takes is one rude motherfucker, and I close up and try to limit my interactions with guests as much as possible. And I thus effectively close off any potential in any of these people to be anything but what I view them to be. Every now and then there is that one person or family who is truly, genuinely nice and warm, and it is a shame if I can’t allow them to be that in my mind or in my interactions with them. And the fact is, further, that even the worst asshole, even the most representative complacent, close-minded sheltered bigot, has a side of warm intelligence and creativity, in which they can be viewed and understood within their own unique, personal context. It is simply that I must get beyond my own ego, I have to learn to see the bigger picture–such that if someone is being rude to me, that I should not take it personally. Such that even if someone has been sheltered and suckled on ignorance and wealth all their life, they still have that boundless potential as God. To allow myself to be mired in bitterness against them is a waste of my heart and mind.

It is, of course, much easier to say this than to manifest it in my life. But I’m hoping that if I say it enough, it will work its charm. Because I believe quite firmly that it is in the everyday that the world is changed, and if I or anyone else can’t get beyond appearances than we are just allowing the bullshit to perpetuate. It is not just Gandhis who change the world–it is the nurse you dealt with at the hospital, it is the guy who took your change at the Taco Bell, it is the person crossing the street at the stop sign, it is every person in your day, every person in your life, every little positive interaction. You know that warm feeling you get, when you smile at a complete stranger who is only interacting with you because it is business, and you get a smile back, and it is real? And you’ve actually connected to this person, and you’ve made their day, and they’ve made yours? That is what it is to cross boundaries and change the world. Positivity. Every day. Every moment. The potential in every person for love is boundless.

Free Dome

The greatest fear we have is of each other. How others will judge us, dependent on what we have or do not have. How wonderful it is when we see someone who is without shame in the face of the world. See, freedom isn’t just some political achievement. Freedom is that individual who dances without care, that one who speaks of the spirits, that one who is always only themself, beautiful, no matter what people may think.
The eyes of other people constitutes a powerful force. It drags down stars. It drives skilled musicians to mundanity. All of these closed, locked down perceptions. What we allow, what we perceive. This is what determines the world.

and god help you if you are a pheonix
and you dare to rise up from the ash
a thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy
while you are just flying back

–ani difranco

Don’t Slip

Things slip away from you if you let them: the world, your life ebbing through a shortened breath, too many things taking away your attention–your essence fades, who you are is see-through, a facade, stilted on borrowed imagery and mediocrity. Don’t let yourself go so easily, maintain your integrity–this is life or death–every moment that you waste–that is your life! The paths of your stream diverge from where they might otherwise go dependent on your mind, dependent upon your openness to the direction of everything else.

The obstacles before you are not the pains and hardships that we must all endure–no, the biggest obstacle you face is yourself, your own cunning laziness and greed, your own dramatic lies that you create to avoid reality.

Reality has been called many things–but for sure it ain’t that shit on TV. Reality may be what you make of it, but the ultimate reality can only be one thing–love. All of the suffering in the world, all of the murder and war and hunger–it all leads to love, though it may take the destruction of the whole world to know this. Don’t wait for this. Destroy yourself first–destroy your selfishness, destroy your bitterness, destroy all of the things you hold within yourself against the world. That you may flow. That the world may flow through you.

Horus Call For Aquarius

The age of male-dominated involuted asceticism, masochism, and sadism is over. There will be no more Miles Davises, Pablo Picassos, shamans, and other prophets of loneliness. No more art drawn from the degradation of domestic life. No more science or magic used for warfare. The path forward can only be found in the laying down of weapons, magic darts, proofs, sorcery, separations and distinctions of self, power over those who are ignorant of loneliness.

Healing lies in balance, in sharing, in sacrificing yourself for others. Woman is different than man because they need each other in order to survive. Difference arises naturally from sustainable living.

Union of woman and man, union of two sides of the brain, union of past and future, union of indigenous and global, union of binaries and many dimensions.
We are global creatures, capable of understanding compromise, capable of compassion for things we can’t immediately understand.

We have been taught from birth to compete to take everything we can and keep it from others. But this is archaic teaching, bred in bloodshed and men’s struggles for power and money.

True power is to relinquish selfishness. True wealth is to share yourself with others. Who doubts these truths? It is time to put them into action. Here. Before you, around you. Not downtown, not Namibia, not in the church. In your everyday life.

Thoughts Regarding the Nature of God

I’ve been reading a book on Shamanism, as told from the evolving point of view of white westerners through history, beginning with horrified, racist missionaries, all the way to experimental anthropologists who try their hallucinogens and allow the shamans to speak (somewhat) for themselves.
For the shamans and their societies, spirits were a fact of life–spirits determined the interplay of day to day life, the success of hunts, the rains, even the inter-personal relations with one’s neighbors. Shamans were the link and guide to these spirits, influencing and bargaining with these spirits to change the everyday world.
During the 50s and 60s, westerners came to shamans to find God. But it was never the purpose of shamans to explore pearly gates and golden streets. They explored themselves, the space inside themselves to the point of death. What is God in such a place? You come close to death and there is much more than just one being there. There are many beings in other worlds beyond our own, and they don’t necessarily care about us and our fears. Although to say that they are not connected to us in any way is a lie. Their existence might be dependent, I would venture to say, as much on us as we are on them. Because time in that place isn’t the way we understand it–some of these beings are in fact us, parts of us in the future, in the past, somewhere unrelatable to anything we ever have been or will be yet crucially, painfully interconnected in some fabric of our world that we can barely even glimpse except when we die.

In my fleeting experience with a modern day shaman and an alternate universe, I gained at least the understanding that in this other, spiritual universe, inhabited by beings beyond my current understanding (even by a version of myself I couldn’t recognize), that these visions were beyond anything my conceptions of God and spirituality had been. God is not something you gain, is not a person who becomes your guardian. God is in fact a somewhat terrifying synthesis of everything that exists that extends ultimately beyond. Meaning that in God there is death, death of self, death of ethnocentrism, death of everything that is safe and contained and pure in your current conceptions. And yet wholly welcoming and beautiful at the same time.
It is really the loss of self that is terrifying. That everything which currently defines you and your world is really somewhat of a petty myth. That’s a pretty hard thing to come to terms with.
I remember back in college, I took a class on comparative religions, and in our discussion section, different representatives of different religions would present and answer questions. We had a tantra lady who came in and discussed the wonderful power we had within, the god within, in flowery new age terms. Yet she did have a quite powerful spiritual presence, and she seemed to have some wisdom. And I asked her, if we really do have this power, what if there are those of us who choose to abuse this power to hurt others? She didn’t know how to answer this question.The fact is that we do have this power, and we often do choose to hurt others. We do it by talking down others. In our minds. To our friends. By not allowing them to exist as the gods they are. By not allowing ourselves to exist as the gods we are. We destroy whole worlds.

On the road to non-being, there are many beings, and we are way out on the surface crust edge of that wheel. We talk of finding aliens on some planet out there somewhere. Aliens exist within our very minds. What is it to be a human being? We consist of parts, of pieces, cells, plasma, blood, organs, interrelationships, factions, groups, parts, all working haphazardly to create every moment this thing we call ourselves. At what point do we stop being ourselves, and at what point does the outer world begin?

At what point are we alone, and at what point are we everything?

Where is a boundary, when you can breathe?

On Trees

“The root fungi intercede with water, soil, and atmosphere to manufacture cell nutrients for the tree, while myriad insects carry out summer pruning, decompose the surplus leaves, and activate essential soil bacteria for the tree to use for nutrient flow. The rain of insect faeces may be crucial to forest and prarie health.

What part of this assembly is the tree? Which is the body or entity of the system, and which the part? . . .[Such] separation is for simple minds; the tree can be understood only as its total entity–which, like ours, reaches out into all things . . . Life depends upon life. All forces, all elements, all life forms are the biomass of the tree.”

I finished the chapter on trees in my Permaculture book, and have picked up some new understanding. I had never really quite known just how powerful and affecting trees are on all living things around them. They create precipitation, they recycle water, they protect and nurture the soil, they break and redirect the wind–they harness the light–they cool the heat–they warm the cool–they take life into themselves with the least amount of destruction–they give back more than they take.

This brings my memory back to a time when I visited Sequoia National Park and went on a hike in its forest, and in the midst of this density of trees, far from the road where tourists would drive past the Sherman tree and eat candy bars and take pictures with their kids, stood the most immense living thing I had ever seen–an ancient grandaddy giant Sequoia tree, rising like a god above the surrounding forest. I fought an irresistable urge to prostrate myself before the tree and worship it. Because such trees deserve respect, bearing wisdom far beyond the scope of mankind’s feeble attempts at playing god. All trees are wise, and they can teach you things just by looking at them–where the most light is gathered, from where the hardest wind blows.

Studying this book on Permaculture brings me back to the wonder and mysterious pleasure I felt as a child when I would play in the wild, dense trees and bushes that I was privileged to have growing in my yard. I would lay on the branch of an oak tree directly outside of my bedroom. I would hollow out secret headquarters in thickets that still bear the shape of my childhood to this day. There is a mystery and power and beauty in growing things that is easy to forget in the midst of a city designed for convenience; this can be remembered when you venture back out into the wilderness, when you climb up mountains, walk on swaths of boulders through green trees, listen to a silence punctuated only by animals and wind and an occasional airliner. This sounds like a Sierra Club advertisement, but it is surely criminal to cut down any old growth forests. I don’t believe in religion, but I think if there is such a thing as sin, then it would be to cut down a tree needlessly. You go to the movies and watch dramas that turn morality into black and white, dioramas of good and bad. But there is no simpler and more direct drama of good and evil being played out than the real-life story of the Amazon jungle, and of how every day it’s thriving, truly wild, mysterious, beautiful life is being destroyed by gold diggers, oil drillers, drug traffickers, and short gain agriculture. Here is a story of the wickedness of shortsighted men raping and pillaging something far beyond their understanding–something powerful and wild and dangerous and so full of life in its density that you can’t hear silence, you can’t see the sun, you can’t find your way where you are going or from where you came except by sound and pattern–maps or GPS systems are rendered useless.

Human life is so interdependent on trees as to make our destinies indistinguishable. Disease, drought, and famine follow naturally from deforestation. The promise of replanting trees by loggers is useless in consideration that the trees they are cutting down are irreplaceable–for old growth forest can not simply be “replaced.” The soil will be changed. The climate will be changed. Trees are sacred, and we don’t need to revert to animism to recognize this. The evidence is there, before your eyes, in the science, in the mystery, in the living entity that breathes and dances in the wind, that fosters all creation, beauty, and life.

Searching for Life

Something I was thinking about the other night was mankind’s endless search for alien lifeforms. And it suddenly seemed kind of silly to me. What exactly will other lifeforms in the universe do for us? Save us from ourselves? Teach us how to not devastate our biosphere? Give us cool new weapons?
Chances are that if we ever did encounter new lifeforms, given our track record, we would kill them and take their resources and destroy their history.
I understand the curiosity, of how life might be on another planet. But my generation is that of the Challenger, not of the man on the moon. And it seems a waste of human time, ingenuity, and effort on dead space, when there is so much to explore here, on our earth, in our own homes, in our very hearts and minds. I understand the quest for the Final Frontier. But I think it is misguided. Look at what our government wants to do with the space program now–make lasers, make weapons. Good old boys, always excited to get some new overly expensive useless guns.
Chances are, even if there is life out there somewhere, that it will be completely different than anything we would ever expect. It won’t be ETs with giant heads and eyes and fingers. It will be some tiny amoebas that thrive in adverse conditions.
Isn’t the sun alive? Isn’t the moon and all the planets alive? The comets and the stars? Aren’t these alive? They may not breathe, but they have a beginning, a movement, and an end, a pattern and harmony in the cosmos. We are looking for something to surprise us, something new, to entertain us, to feed us the wisdom that we’ve been ignoring all around us. Like a saviour. If I ever met an alien, I’d tell him to run for it while it has still got a chance.

Water Motion

Water runs in the path of least resistance, drawn simply by the unjealousy of gravity–it will find it’s source. So, too, like water runs your life. It is your mind and your fear of suffering that hinder your way, diverting your stream from that which is most easy and least apparent. Have you ever watched a mountain goat move seamlessly down a treacherous cliffside? There is no thought involved. The goat is not an enlightened being, necessarily. But there is much to learn from his movement from rock to rock. For you, too, can move in such a manner, if you were unafraid and supremely confident in each placement of your foot. The goat moves in the manner of water. Each step is part of a motion towards sublimity, some ultimate tonic key that will never be reached but that hovers soundlessly through each approaching note. He slips, he misplaces his hooves, yes, but easily corrects himself–like in jazz, there is no such thing as a wrong note while immersed within context. The love supreme, the keystone, the source guides the flow. In such a context, everything is stumbling, and everything is right. There is no fear, no retribution, no hesitation. There is death and love and struggle, yes, but these are the path, these are the wandering stones that guide your motion onwards, the hillside distinctions that will mark your passing. The sun is a sparkle in your eye. Your spine gushes with music, and gravity calls you over the lip of the unseen and it is easy, easy, easy to fall so beautifully forward into yourself.

Heat

Within you, like the center of the earth,like the center of anything, lies heat, a burning core of energy, solidified distantly by your outward form. It is funny that beauty is categorized often by what is dead. Because really what is beautiful is the manner by which movement is made, the flow of states, the unseen that is hinted at in between. All things move into one another, sharing the same core, that essential heat which is life–and yet they burn separately, forgetting themselves, thinking that when they sit alone and are lonely that there are none who may see them, who may know them and the things which may pass through their hearts. It passes through all of us, and in our struggle to know ourselves sometimes we destroy ourselves or each other, we pick apart the walls only to see that in another lays the same heat that is the burning of life to see itself, to know at last that life and death are one. To know that beauty is ours. To know that there is nothing that we can do to escape ourselves.

Embracework

I can be as lazy as the next motherfucker when there ain’t shit to do or if what I do don’t matter, but I’ve discovered the satisfaction in working hard when other people rely on me. The work itself is almost secondary, although physical labor does seem to be more fulfilling. Having evidence–a trail of effort viewed–is fulfilling–to see the fruit of toil, a growth from cultivated soil. Shoveling snow, screwing anchors into drywall, moving heavy things, organizing scattered objects into a functional shape, all things tending towards purpose.
Given a clear and achievable goal, I will work towards forging a bigger picture. The bigger picture is more important than excuses and conceits for the withholdance of myself. Beyond myself is the other, and the other is myself, only understood when served selflessly. If oneself is the other, than what lies in between? What is between is work. Work to lose one self to gain oneself.
Who is to say what one does is not good enough, or not doing anything for humanity, for the good of the world? If you can give yourself to your work, than it is good work.
The samurai of ancient Japan studied the art of serving selflessly. They gave all of themselves, all of their life, to the art and philosophy of war. One slice of an enlightened sword could unite heaven and earth. What bigger picture is there than this very moment? Complete dedication, utter devotion, to the now.
The life of a soldier is a destitute reality of the destruction of the natural world for the greed of shortsighted, manipulative men. But what is not seen by the outsider is the inner light carried by the soldier working selflessly to fulfill his given purpose. He has a function, a place in the bosom of the world. People want only to hear of war as terrible fear, senseless destruction. What civilians cannot understand is the sense of heightened clarity in the midst of battle, the purpose that carries him through terror and into tomorrow. He cannot go back home. He is a vehicle for forces well beyond control, yet these forces reside within his gut. It is not his function to question. He is empty for that which he serves.
Who am I to question his purpose and resolve? It is sad to be used for purposes that are not honorable. But the men who fulfill their tasks selflessly are blessed, even if it were to destroy whole worlds. They are blessed because they have found peace within themselves.
Whether you are an assassin or a gardener, an accountant or a nurse, you have a function, a purpose in the world. If all you do is work to make money, than you will never know what it is to live.
Living centered in the universe is to do what one must do. To act selflessly is to act beyond concepts of good and evil, right and wrong. It is simply to give all of oneself to one’s actions, completely. Because who knows if the drill will slip and the picture will be crooked? Who knows if the arrow will land in its target? We shit because we eat, and we eat because we desire to live. Every path re-affirms what has already come, and destroys a part of what could be, and creates a newness never before seen. Embrace it.

Thoughts in a Small Humid Hotel Room

Contained within our minds lies the key that would unveil all mysteries. But to open this door would be akin to opening the pressurized door of a flying airplane–all of what we are would be sucked out into the vacuum and there would be nothing left but space, another mystery to those who came later. Which is as much to say that we are made as much of what we don’t know as of what we know–that in fact it is not a matter of knowing at all, but a matter of accepting that one must look in a certain direction in order to see, and that what will be seen will be what lies before the path of vision. How many worlds there are beyond where you may happen to look! Can you sense these worlds without looking? Learn to listen. You can hear much more than the sound of your breathing when you are alone in your room, much more than the sounds of the outside world filtering through. You can hear the sound of something inside of you that does not belong to you. It is not important what this force is or even why it is there–what matters is that it is there at all, and that you can feel it. The feeling–what could be more important then this? This is a knowledge much deeper than whatever straightforward paths your logic can define.

Sacrifice Yourself for Your Life

Because you know that everything good that comes to you comes because there was something before that you gave away, or that you will need to give away in the future. Blessings never come without pain. And so every benediction of love that comes your way is edged with the awareness of suffering, because you know that behind every joy lies an incredible sadness, behind every connection lays emptiness. Without the oscillation of emotions, you can look out of a spaceship into the night of a half of the globe’s cities and view the connective star hustled patterns of human life and know of it’s beauty, and know the distance which gave to it form.
You can stand in the night of your particular backyard and look up at the indifferently humming stars and know of their intimate relation to you and all of your mundane personal intricacies.
Because you can not transcend, let’s set the romantics straight. But you can grasp the totality of what you are in any given moment. So strength, you see, is not achieving some climactic pinnacle of divinity in your life from which all other points thereafter and before will refer. Strength is the steady patient nurturing of every moment in your life, the bending, flowing, expanding strength of roots, the strength you find in plants when you can bend them endlessly but never break them. Sacrifice your desires, your expectations, every dream and ambition that you ever had for this person that you thought you knew so intimately. Sacrifice yourself so that you may live.

Rompiendo

Illusions built within the mind swaying, lulling ourselves into an incurable belief in infinity. There is within us an amazing capacity for suffering, for love. Intricately linked, there is no excluding either Huascarán or las pampas. It is not either one or the other. It is not life or death. It is all, every little thing carved from the void, separately pieced into a spiral necklace of the earth.
In our shame we are naked before the judgment of a god, the dreams covering our eyes lifted to reveal solely vulnerable soft skin, nothing more, nothing less. We are pathetically beautiful. When the illusions inevitably crumple the world sweeps within to pick apart the ruins of our hearts. We follow our inner narratives to the end, until we fall from beyond the edges of what we allow ourselves to imagine and inevitably hit the ground to return to the earth. Each time that we are broken a piece of light shines out from the space where we once were. How many times must we be broken before there is nothing left to break? You must be broken from your blindness to see. Broken again, again and again until there is nothing left of yourself to be taken or to be held. The world will carry away your pieces to build other dreams no longer yours.
What is it to dream? What is it to be awoken to another world in which the dream has no application?
What is it to love with one’s eyes wide open?
To live is to suffer. Anything else would be an illusion.

Inner Outward

There is a place within our souls untainted by the touch of external things. Find this place and expose it to the light of the moon, sun, stars or any source of flame you can see. It is here that gravity unknown exerts its dark force upon all the universe. It is here that you find that you have been alive and awake for as long as you remember, and as long as you remember goes far past your birthday. You extend far into the future, here. Here there is wisdom never to be unearthed by any archeologist but it is writ in the annals of shamans and schizos and MCs. It is everywhere. It is nowhere but in the deepest heart of every person. All of these things, all of these things flow past like the wind on your surface, and you are balled up at the bottom, holding your breath, watching the dream of shadows moving somewhere almost beyond comprehension. Let them go. You know what you know, and no one can tell it to you. Everything in your life exists to awaken you to yourself. Listen to the silence in the deep, surrounding you, encompassing you. Release your breath. You flail, you struggle, but there is only one thing that can reach you here. It is nothing that can hold you, but it embodies you.

Believe me, I know of this loneliness. And I believe that it is something that can be shared.

someday somewhere the sun

Not alone, never alone, consciousness penetrates everywhere. Even in despair you can sense the eyes of the world there. Yes, you stand on the edge by yourself, but you are a particle captured in the flash, a wave brushing out against the sky, a piece of something beyond so deeply interwoven throughout your own senses that most of the time you don’t even understand your own feelings. What is this force that waits behind your eyes, that crouches within your body, unseen and unacknowledged by most of the transient surface world? Everyone knows without knowing, waiting for the swell to break, for the image to be framed, the silent eyes sucking all of the world into one stomach that is forever hungry, and when an individual stands up against the crowd they see what they want and it is never enough. But every sacrifice is a piece of a heart thrown into the flame. Higher and higher the awareness of light is spread. To know itself, life must tear itself into pieces. We look into each other’s eyes and know ourselves somewhere already lost and we move and we move and we need each other desperately and we are alone and we are hungry and we are standing and we are shadows and we are mountains and valleys and we are all together in this together, we are all horribly, terribly, beautifully tied to each other like a puzzle without a purpose and when my heart is empty of everything
then maybe I will be ready to meet you.

Nero’s Enlightenment

In this moment of conception the essence rings hollow. There is only what appears, and what appears is reflective of how much time you have put into losing yourself. So here you are forsaken of yourself, and here you are birthed, bloody, bathed in shadow light that falls from another begetting. For every life that lives there is another world that is shut out from the sun. So when you go forth, brother, to reclaim your beliefs, understand that there is no turning back from the wreckage of your misconceptions. There is only balance, and flow, and the knowledge of your capabilities. I don’t care how drunk you are. You can be whatever you imagine. The lines that are drawn in time trace our insecurities. The eternal everlasting infinite touch of intangibility will finger us all, and if we be given the grace to dance with it, than so shall we move, watched and written and never grasped. I hope for a time when nothing will move me except my love for everything.

You Should Be Riding The Waves

Who would you be with no friends, no lovers, no daily positive feedback? What is it within you that sustains your mind through fasting?

Leaves are a manifestation of the sun. With or without the tree, the light would continue to fall.

The source of all beauty lies beyond visibility. The water drawn through roots cannot be touched for its flame. All of these objects are roadsigns on the path. Look ahead, sister, and remember where you are going. You are going far beyond understanding.

If you took your heart and coated it in amber, you could put it under glass and study it and calculate the amount of love it holds. But what would be the point? You already know without thinking that this extends back to forever from nothing. Your essence is meaningless without the constant flow of blood bearing the outside world within. There is no in with no out. Embedded in each and every moment, your union with God is closer than you are to yourself. Stop trying to catch a fish with questions.

Who cares about lines drawn in the sand? You should be riding the waves.

On the Continuum of Creation

Think of your spirit

as a fish in the sea.

When caught

and eaten,

it will taste of every moment

of it’s life left behind.

Seen in this light,

one recognizes

there is no good,

no bad,

only balance.

Every living entity is judged according to its capability to represent itself completely. A rock is undeniably a rock, because it’s history is made apparent to anyone who cares to study it’s markings. The things that show, of course, are the places where one has been broken. Broken and broken and broken again, the essence of temporal infinity is evidenced. Who are you, and do you really think that what you think reflects the world upon you?

Look into the face of one who is drunk, and you will see them completely, all of the emptiness and connectedness transposed on the same surface, an endless well of nothing and sprouted root of everything.

The spirit does not get drunk of poison. It is intoxicated by what is poured into the world at every breath, by each demanding pore of skin, each eye and stomach of every thing which serves as a cup formed to savor each moment. The spiralling ooze of time over constantly shifting surfaces. There is a direction to the wind as it blows. Bound by nothing.

Complacency is the Enemy of All that Lives

I am seated in my room, a candle lit on the table, the scent of nag champa settled into the furniture, my books stacked about like replicas of ancient rubble. I have been reading all afternoon, all evening, my concentration enwrapped within imaginary vistas of a soul’s spiraling journey. There is a quiet in the room, edged with loneliness. A good book brings back the moment of despair rooted in my life’s greatest depths. It is out of insecurity that I create. It is out of fear that I clutch carefully to the rock as I climb. It is out of hunger that I throw myself into the wind to live.

The mind is a delicate reed, easily obstructed, easily obscured, rarely honed to the purity of perception it was evolved to produce. This occasional glimmer of deeper darkness within, this seemingly unanswerable pain, seems to be the only way to sustain development. Such as in the way a muscle is strengthened–torn apart so that it will restructure itself in a manner more adaptable to the stress which tore it apart in the first place.

It reminds me of my teenage years, the length and scope of depression that I felt then–surely this was part of “growing pains,” the rush of body and mind reeling with the birth of awareness of individuality? After college, I have never again felt what I can rightly term “depressed.” But I have reminders of emptiness, lapses of loneliness. And I now almost welcome the feeling, that gift of knowledge of myself. Even as I feel like a child, raw and helpless against the void, unsure if the shadows of futurity looming are ghosts or demons or angels, or nothing but my desires and fears projected into emptiness. Because this loneliness, this despair, this acknowledgment that there is no one I can rely on but myself to pull me out–this strengthens me to continue.

I observe myself and others flailing in the waters and clutching to things and people to stay breathing. But in the emptiness right now in this moment of thought, I know that anything I grasp onto I will only take down with me, and it will take me down farther. I must be calm, I must allow myself to slip under the dark waters gracefully, even as the shock of cold numbs the heart, and give myself to the indifferent forces beyond me, even savor it as it becomes me, even rejoice as it spits me back out into the light trembling with suffering.

Complacency is the enemy of all that lives.

Economics of the Corazon

True riches, in any sense, are not a gift of happenstance. They are the accumulation that comes from the denial of waste. Gaining age is a lesson in economy. As youths we waste our energy, spitting it out like radiation, seeking immediate gratification. If we learn anything at all as we grow older and less prone to outbursts of hormonal activity, it is the conservation of our energy, putting our time and love into that which we know is worth the investment. We learn to act in interest of self-preservation, rather than self-destruction; in light of longevity, rather than fleeting release. We learn that the highest reward comes with patience, concentration, and a consistent, diligent trimming of personal desire. When we want nothing, only then are we ready to receive.

Me In A Lonesome Mode

The world revolves around the space from which it was created, the word of the godhead a formless first sound breathing into the horribly beautiful noise of the many worlds crashing together in escape of themselves; the gravity of the unknown bends all of this mess of thought somehow, gathering the light back inward. Hunter S Thompson shot himself on the phone to his wife. Such is love, perhaps. A giving of the final, terrible glimpse of emptiness that huddles within all to another. Displaying naked the inhuman terror that is truly love: everything, everything, everything. There is irony in all of our efforts to communicate ourselves to the world. Our words are petty, defined by a tradition of linguistic patterns, barely capable of offering more than a momentary commentary of our incapability to look beyond ourselves. Our gestures are habitual, we grope at each other as if in the dark, desperate to reassure our minds that the world beyond will feel as what we have been taught. There is horror in the night; we lie awake looking at the blue shadows cast by the moon, meaningless without us, but all meaning lying far past comprehension. Our animal selves long dormant within us tremble into adrenaline, awoken yet unseeing. It is all right, it is all right, it is all right, you tell yourself, sensing an incredible danger but unable to locate its source. It is not all right. All of creation sparks within your mind. And there is no one to wrap their arms around you and cradle you into oblivion, not here, not within yourself, not so deep that no words could penetrate, no mind know. Not in the incredible vastness that takes the light back even before it has left. Shining into nothing, the moon, the sun, the reflectance of nothing. The naked spark of a beauty too powerful to be seen. Love shows you the way into this place where no one can enter. You leave yourself behind. You leave it all behind. Everything. Everything. Everything.