Bleeding out our Reflections

Often, it is only when I am alone, when my thoughts fall into a slow rhythm, when the world takes on a newfound sense of quiet, that my spirit becomes apparent to me. Only when my mind is poised in the light touch of a awareness wrapped in the most gentle of curiosity does it make the first of its movements.

It is then teased out slowly with my subtle breaths, its ethereal body unfurling with a slight gesture in front of me. Deep down, I am excited though now I can make no motions as I have to be absolutely still. I hold my mind as if it were this vision I was fighting to sustain. I hold my body to contain the rapture welling underneath my skin. I have no time to take size up my awe as it reveals to me its other-worldly appearance, unfolding a sparkling brilliance overwhelming to worldly eyes. Its beauty is unrecognizable as either feminine or masculine, possessing a strange kind of alien grace which serves as an irritating entrancement (that could make an unprepared person go mad.) I cannot describe to you in any detail what this miraculous vision looked like, or whether it had any appearance at all. My ecstasy might have been all the texture and image of my experience. What I can say is that the witnessing was only allowed after a sense of deep trust was assured, the devotion I afforded it was a small price to pay for the deliverance it wreaked upon me. I could not thank it, lest I be in danger of misperceiving or undervaluing it.

It reminds of the time I once saw great white egret dipping out of a fountain in the golden glow of the early morning. It was a moment of coming upon an ancient, fragile beauty rarely seen by humans. The egret had almost an absurd elegance: with its iridescent white feathers, its long legs and S shaped neck, it was a creature of the holy stillness of the dawn. A bit after my arrival, it turned its head to gaze at me with dark staring eyes, (a ghostly, holy apparition). After which, as if in one motion, it thrust out its broad wings and flew off into the sunrise, leaving me with an almost disturbing sense of sanctity and wonderment.

A wave of self consciousness and loneliness came upon this realization of a beauty that cannot be communicated. I felt dull and listless, though eternally grateful, a human humbled before nature divine body.

(Nature is capable of displaying a power and grace that will impel even the most scientific of men to take her offering as an omen of what is an alive and conscious alternative to the human consciousness for which we have long found embodied in certain symbols present in the world that we have since incorporated into our thought and ritual structures. To think we are alone in our consciousness is a false tendency towards separation.)

It is moments like these when your life is revealed as something else entirely. They are moments when you realize you are capable of meanings that you were not previously capable of imagining.

Some people say life is like a movie starring ourselves. Some people might say our life is a narrative about ourselves. But consider the possibility that your life is not about œyou at all but that there is another much larger story going on, a story that is deep in your bones and the floor you are sitting on and the Earth underneath that. Every atom has a story, every particle has a story, every gust of wind has a story. Every ant has a story, how about the story of this ant crawling across the carpet holding another dead ant in its clutches? Here is a life who has the power to make as profound as statement as any other. It makes my heart sink.

I like my story. It’s probably not a screen play that will rivet the crowds in any way, but maybe that depends on how you tell it. You could tell my story in a way that will make every man weep because it is his story as well. If that happens, perhaps you aren’t telling œmy story at all. Anyways, I like the freedom gained when I don’t have to live my story. If my life is a movie, I like it when I see the inner workings of this movie. When the projector becomes jammed and my movie is locked in a freeze frame, and the thought or action I was going to take have never happens and I am free to step outside of my body and my story and wander around at will. At these moments my body just lies there like a dummy, while the big picture emerges and it becomes realized that all time is one moment that just hangs there in an eternity. That every moment in which we live is an ever-changing but still- life wide- angle non-dual fully -aware glorious -moment. I took four years of photography and I realized later that I didn’t care about photographing people, or my friends, or events; all I wanted to capture was this one, pure moment.

    There exists a man without a face. Look into his face and you will only see stars and blackness. There is one like him living in this time, there is one like him who lived hundreds of years ago. Owning nothing but his simple features, he is carried through the world on the wings of a huge, ancient bird, whose wings muffle the world with a vast spacious silence. With this power, he moves about time and place as if they are only backdrops¦..

He speaks nothing because language can rarely add to what he sees in this world-dimension with the inner eye. One eye, wide and blue, it is turned back towards him, far flung, a heart amid darkness .

You could talk with him, but he is difficult to find. If you do find him, don’t worry; he won’t know anything about you. But he doesn’t need to. His mind will move through you, seeing everything that has led up to you, back to the most common ancestor. If you appeal to him right, and if he finds it useful to speak, he will tell this story to you, and his voice will unlock a tale that will expand and unfold, creating miraculous visions inside of you. This is the story of existence. It is who we are and how we got here, from the pre-Earth ancients, and it is where we are going, from our modern day.

Soon after, you will leave your body standing and your soul will rise into a meditation where your thoughts meander and essences mingle like rivers in the wide valley of your awareness. You will be guided by the caress of gentle hands of angels. You will receive faint impressions from other souls who are drifting in the divine current. You will come onto memories of your childhood before childhood, your life before life. Rejoice. You are being led to an ancient source.

On friday night:

Dancing with a small group with a DJ spinning electronic music. The opportunity is golden. The runway is clear, all lights are checked. I feel anticipation, though it’s not as if I have taken a drug that I’m waiting to take effect. When the right conditions are met, it’s not like I then have to make the choice to act upon them. The conditions are met and the action is just a spark emitted, fleeing towards the sky.

At this point I’m just plugged in. I don’t have to fight for a signal, the current is flowing strong. I know how to trouble shoot, and I know how to see that it’s good and then not touch it. Now I’m that I’m in the flow, the background music is on, it’s time for me to solo, it’s time for me to become the deity, to become the creator. I have everything at my disposal, it’s my time to live the world that I create. Every move I make through my experience utterly expesses something intimate to my soul. I am surprised and amazed and exhilirated with what I can express. I am so utterly surprised and amazed at how absorbed I am in what I am expressing! With every movement I can paint and live in that emotion for what seems like an eternity. Effortlessly I can switch gears and express something completely different. I become heart broken or joyful to the story I am telling with my dance. I am awed at where this story is coming from and who told me to tell this, but I do not think too much. I am enveloped in the story and am surprised at the diversity of images that are being channeled through me. They create forms that become living presences, enveloping around my body, permeating my awareness. They are brush strokes painted with an ethereal ink that dazzles and slowly fades back into the emptiness. In gazing into myself, my eyes meet the eye of the very center of creation. I never take my gaze off of him (her). In our locked gazes flows a psychic stream composed of pure image. He is relating to me the story of the creation of the universe. I gaze, transfixed on her beauty, desiring to fulfill her every wish through my dance. Her body is made of the very substance of fascination. It is like no object that shines on the earth, colorless and formless, a mere glance offers immense joy. In contact with the infinite, the images pour out of me. I am the mystical story teller, I hold the resevoir of all the images of life. Each movement I make is the product of a powerful exchange with the Godhead. Each movement an image that has been relayed to me through the divine. The music makes waves within me, it exhausts me of emotion after emotion. I am diving deep into the pool of my subconscious, I am unearthing lost connections to all the different faces of who I am. I am uncovering old identities, I am exploring new powers of loving kindness. I am commissioned by God to dance all the dances of life. Through me He narrates all he has seen, shining his love of the world through me. Every moment I offer my dance to the divine, every moment he sends me the inspiration to do so. I am fully enveloped, saturated, satiated, drenched in the awareness of Her. It feels as if I am moving through multiple dimensions, as the world becomes a full blown mandala, a vision of the ineffable sacredness. I offer blessings to all the Buddha’s, praise and thanks for the awareness, I chant and recite prayers for the liberation of all beings. And I really mean it. I explore movement, cringing and caressing and turning all in the agony of bliss. I penetrate into the heart of darkness, I see the ineffable mystery. I see everything as drapery, clothing, mirage, image, dream. I take a rest, sitting in the ego less state, no possessor while sacred creation is in a divine play around me, everything merely happening, like a movie, no possessor, no I, a magic show, from where did it come, what does it all mean? Who is dreaming all of this? What has set all of this in motion, what sustains this, how did it get here and when will it end? I am in my little slice of time, my little time upon this earth. Nothingness, radiance, luminosity, emptiness dancing for nobody, sanctity, sacredness of life. I rest, my mind basking in the light of the divine, attached (for now) to no other object or whim.

right now, my world view is just one slice of the loaf, a cross-section that contains semblances of the whole. It is like the story of the five blind men feeling an elephant: one is feeling the trunk and thinks the world is shaped like a trunk, the other is feeling the foot and thinks similarly. In the same way, as human beings, as terrestrial organisms we all see the world as similar inhabitants. Trees are taller than us, tables are smaller than us. Buildings give us commerce, and therefore are more important than trees. Instead of this kind of relative vision, this text encourages to develop is cosmic vision. This is the kind of vision the astronauts gained when they first went into outer space and saw the pearly blue Earth. When I look outside my window right now, I see a huge, looming eucalyptus tree. How incredible, so incredible that I could almost call it alien, otherworldly. I mean, how did it get so big? I guess I know, since I’ve seen other big things, other trees and tall buildings. But at the same time I have no idea. Certainly it’s very big next to a small blade of grass. Does that make it more amazing than the grass? Or maybe growing that tall is just what it does, nothing special. Perhaps the blade of grass took an equal amount of effort to grow 2 inches as the Eucalyptus took to grow 100 feet. Certainly the Earth contains so many uncategorizable things, one could call the it alien. It is an anomaly among all other planets. An alien who came here would be probably as surprised to see us we them.

If I angle my vision a little, the Eucalyptus tree seems so odd, so inhuman, so abstract and incommunicable, and that’s not just because Eucalpytus are nonnative to Santa Cruz. I don’t mean to say that there is something about subjective consciousness that œotherizes, that we humans are doomed to live on a planet that is alien to us, that nature is perpetual stranger that is only distantly or not at all in relation to us. I think there is something more connecting than the idea that we are thrown into the world, torn from our mothers and their comfortable wombs to be forever self-conscious beings who are constantly struggling to maintain our subjective sense of self. There is the idea that any sense of internal comfort and identity is illusory, that we spend most of our lives in a constant struggle whereby we are constantly tempted and forced to define our sense of œI in the terms of a world that is harsh and alien to us, when actually all we want to do is have full domain over our subjectivity which is impossible given that other people are always impinging us because they desire the same thing. I’m holding out for the fact that there is no œI and therefore really nothing to protect in the first place.

At the same time, perceiving a tree as alien is a more inspired perception than simply not thinking to look twice because of an unconscious assumption that the Earth is our home, and therefore ours to take. We are terrestrial beings, but we are also cosmic beings, and we live on a cosmic Earth that is revolving in a cosmic expanse. Seeing a tree as alien leads me to not just see a tree as one tree but the tree as being knitted into a whole fabric of space time. Anytime you get up into a plane or have the opportunity to see a great view, there is the opportunity to see a more primal Earth, as it once was before becoming divided into nations and cities. In being literally closer to the stars, you might receive the vision that comes when the mind is allowed to rise above the disillusionment of the cities and earthly concepts and mingle with the great energy above.

For a true master of this Buddhist stuff, there is no separation between philosophy and practice. For a master, the very process of his thoughts, words, perceptions, and actions, the whole process of his being embodies the meanings found in the written word. His mind is a process, wrought out of the empty nature that is all things, that is in constant dialogue with truth. There are no stray perceptions: each perception arises from within truth and causes him to reflect on truth. Artists take notice: here is a continual state of inspiration, each moment revealing a completely new and unique facet of truth. Sometimes a new perception will lead him to formulate a new dialogue in which he can use to help liberate all sentient beings. At other times, no words will be associated, but his perception still acts as a communication. Taking place within the Big Mind, every formulation radiates across the universe.

¦He is continually aware of the mind’s real time meaning making process in which he has learned to not interfere. His body speech and mind rise in the milieu of the forming of his continual unordinary and unconventional perceptions. While his speech, actions, and perceptions are formed instantaneously and effortlessly, there is no article of action or speech whose chain of causation he cannot trace. Though there are innumerable facets to his awareness which can be deconstructed, revealed, and taught to others, his mind is an incalculable unknown. The experience of this awareness arrives as a unified purity of inspiration and emptiness; the world becomes an ineffable, incomprehensible, ecstatic mystery.

If you were about to die, think of how beautiful the world could be.

You would see the entire world in terms of your impending end. Every thing you would see would be seen through the knowledge of your impending death, but this is not necessarily a morbid thing. You would see people in the peak of their life, and you know death would be coming for them eventually and you would cherish them from afar knowing they know nothing of you and will still be living their joys, happinesses, and sorrows, they will still be figuring out life and trying to find meaning for themselves, still in the heat of life with no thought of death, after you have since moved on it. You will see life in society as this delicate, beautiful, tenuous search for happiness on everyone’s part.

Written to Schumann: reprise:

Who am I right now? I feel like I am so many things, so I rein all the parts of in. I’m nothing right now.. but I COULD be: haggard, saintly, wicked, sacred, sentimental. These are different costumes in my closet.

I have enough ideas already, so I want to put on a play¦ for myself! I will be the le sole acteur. I will face the wall and bare myself to myself, making the fool, the jester, the lunatic. In my play, I go crazy, flailing my arms and legs. I entertain, scare, fascinate myself with my own shadows. I blow myself up, a bubble that I pop. Catching my breath, I look around, and knowing no one is there I giggle with pleasure at my own self consciousness.

It’s not that I don’t like myself but what I really want to become someone else! I look through my wardrobe, though I am alone with no one to impress.

Our production surely recognizes that fact. So, I the producer, give myself all the room in the world. I hire my imagination as creative director, giving him full license to fantasize my audience, (those high class ladies in the front row) to fantasize my characters, (a swashbuckler! A fallen angel, romance, tragedy) I am a fawn; I dance I leap, I faint over the stage. I run the gamut until I am tired, perhaps a little lonely, but undoubtedly satisfied.

At this point I trade seats with the audience and laugh, laugh, laugh at myself.

When beauty flowers within me it takes me and changes me. Though beauty is timid at first, I am careful to keep my coarseness at bay. Then I bring out beauty with a delicate hand, teasing it, winding it it stronger stronger until it is a golden thread whose connection is assured.

Beauty is not something that is just seen. To truly see beauty your whole mind must become beautiful. I am filled with love and movement and full of the poised dignity of love.

I am so easily swayed from love to beauty. I fall to my knees in freedom, weak with joy. I treasure those moments when inside, I give myself room to be graceful and delicate. I am alone, yet I present myself to the world wearing my finest clothing.

My head rests on my hand, and I am poised in a quiet glory only known to myself. My mind is the medium through which this song tells its story. I open my mind out of compassion, allowing the notes to live their full life. The music resonates in my mind’s chamber and lives its life in the soundscape within in my head.

Contemplating such beautiful pure music how can I be skeptical, how can there be any trace of cynicism within my being? Then let it purify me. I cry for release. I am vulnerable as of now, you could destroy me. I am changing, I am fragile during metamorphosis, please do not interrupt me.

A new song begins and my mind redirects its dance. One train of thought ends and another begins. I am picking at my nails, slowly, but the act is a big act, it means more than that.

Leave beauty alone, don’t ask of it anything. The best things are not seen, but felt. Do not try to understand or else you will silence its voice, and it will not take its clothes off for you.

There is no where to insert your personality or opinion. You have a beautiful mind, but don’t try to understand what that means too quickly.

There’s no gap between music and mind. You will not find the music in your mind, you will not find your mind in the music. Music and mind arise in the same moment. You don’t hear with your ears, you hear with your brain, you feel with your soul.

The music is not trying to tell you something. It is living its own life, independent of you. It is not there to be heard, it is not being heard, no one is hearing it. It is living out its meaning in real time space. The music is a production within the theater of your mind. Who is the audience?

The music is your soul singing its song back to itself. When the music enters your ears, it becomes your possession. Maybe it is your soul singing out to the world. I sit and listen and the music expresses myself to myself. I don’t need to tell my story, the music is speaking my heart perfectly; nothing more is needed. Recognize good as good and then leave it alone.

My writing is a way to celebrate the good within myself. I will never wear it as a badge. I will possess beauty without knowing I have anything, yet I will protect and care for its place in my heart as if it were my own child.

When I struggle with my mind, sometimes it’s enough to know that I’m struggling with my mind, and other times it’s not enough.

When I lose who I am it’s as if I’ve always lost who I am, as if I’ve always been confused. Doesn’t matter how long I’ve had it for, those memories of when I knew who I was seem far behind all of a sudden.

When I lose who I am I’m not only afraid because I lost who I am, but I’m afraid that I will never find it again and that’s the fear that gets me. Nervousness only shuts me down when I become fearful that nervousness will shut me down. How’s that for ironic. There is nothing to be afraid of, everything is just passing through.

Don’t do something for awhile, and you will experience how quickly you lose that part of you. Don’t write for awhile and you will lose the voice you use when you converse intimately with yourself. Lose respect for life for a minute and you will find that minute turning into 2 and 3 and 10 and a thousand. This is why modern life is like living in the middle of a dust storm: I’m always having to clear away shit!

Knowledge you don’t use deteriorates, so why accumulate knowledge you are not intent on using? (using I guess using could also refer to the sheer joy inherent in accumulating knowledge.) The accumulation of knowledge for me is merely reserving space in my mind for the accumulation of virtue. All knowledge is merely placeholders so evil doesn’t come in and take up room.

People come in all varieties of forms. Put one person in a room and he’ll feel most at home writing a book, put another person in a room and he’ll garden. We do what magnetizes us. There is a honey for each of us out there that we can land in and just stay in bliss forever…

The best knowledge is the knowledge of your own ever present indestructible spirit. Any other kind of knowledge is just footnotes.

Mystical Meditations:

Lately I’ve been thinking about time and space. After all it’s the first thing I see when I open my eyes in the morning. When I close my eyes I feel my mind to have no boundaries, except for the very boundary that there is even an experience at all. I’m not sure you could call this a boundary. What is this experiencing? I experience myself as a point of consciousness. It’s hard to say whether this point is big or small. Is this point something on top of the ocean of time and space or is it the same thing?

Something is experiencing, there is an experience happening here, or is there? Yes there is. But it is hard to pinpoint any of its qualities. It is a presence, with the feeling of activity or luminosity. It feels like a broad slow musical piece painted with subtle movements. It’s a sense of presence, of wakefulness. It’s like a clear pool that never ends. Looking into it, it only becomes more and more clear and never ends. I think this is called insight meditation. There’s nothing really to single out in it, just keep looking, keep looking.

Feel that sense of oneness that contains everything, including all past moments and all future moments. Perhaps past moments and future moments are accessible, perhaps not. You are looking at your mind, a mirror held up to the universe. If it is clear, it will hold everything in it. There will be nothing that is outside your vision, metaphorically at least since it’s dark because you are meditating and your eyes are closed.

This experience is your purpose in life and all you will ever need if you trust it to be enough. If you don’t trust it and spend your meditation looking for more fanciful, fascinating things then you will search always in vain.

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Today I sat in meditation, on a hillside over at the arboretum. Walking, I felt a pang of significance, a delicate moment arising in me that had to be addressed. I was aware of coming to a vista point. I was aware of my story taking a turn… something in me was culminating and who was I not to let it take its course, to take me where it will.

At that, a feeling of significance and reverence came over me. I was prepared for something beautiful in the sense that I had the absolute confidence the world was beautiful. I was ready not just to admire the beauty, but to merge with the beauty. Somewhere in my heart a bud was bursting. So I climbed up, and up. Atop that hill, love blossomed and a divine fragrance enfolded the land.

It was one of those rare experiences where nothing got in the way of love. Love is the culminating point of any journey, of any story. Love is a celebration at the end of the story where all loose tends are tied up. (Hollywood has since abused this storyline). Love reinterprets our struggles. It reveals any difficulties along the way as hardships, giving necessary lessons.

Coming into love is like coming home to a surprise party after a few weeks of not knowing who you are. All your friends are there, you realize you’re not alone, you realize that you actually had people rooting for you the whole time.

The Avatamsaka sutra frames it like this: when you come into love, attending the party there are a thousand devas, with banners and parasols in the sky celebrating your enlightenment. Congratulations, you have made it! But they aren’t celebrating for you exactly, because the reason this party is so fun is that you get to (must?) leave your old “ego’ self at the door.

Maybe the celebration has always been going on and you just didn’t think you were part of the party. And the celebration never stops because every moment a new being leaves his ego behind and enters into awakened awareness. When we have an ego we are separate, and when we don’t, we are joined to a reality that is a completely vast interconnected web of enlightened awareness.

This is the vision of the Avatamsaka sutra:

Every moment or phenomenon in this absolute realm is completely saturated, completely arises from the ground of this awakened awareness and for this reason every phenomena conveys the whole of the Buddhist teaching because the whole of the enlightened awareness can be recognized within it.

Every phenomena can be an opportunity to perceive enlightened awareness, and when this is done the coarse “perceived” nature of the phenomena, that which we usually perceive, is discarded, and the phenomena is seen as for its true nature, which is experienced as neither coming nor going. Every phenomena glitters with emptiness, radiates its true nature behind appearances, this is why the text says phenomena are like a “dream, or an illusion”. The appearance is something that can be seen only in that it is a recepticle for enlightened awareness to show forth from. To recognize an appearance but to misperceive its basis as enlightened awareness is to exist in a world of delusion.

The text mentions: “the equality of beings, phenomena, and buddhas”. Everything is equally a manifestation of enlightened awareness. Phenomena to the regular eye are seen to be coming and going, being born and dying, arising and not-arising, morphing, mutating, evolving, transvolving etc. In the phenomenal world, there is form which is constantly seen to be changing, never staying the same. Within the phenomenal world, worlds are created and destroyed. Within form there is an endless amount of forms, within an endless amount of forms. There is a lot of “stuff”, and all this stuff is produced from causes and conditions. A reflection of the moon on the water has nothing in of itself, its appearance is dependent on the moon and the water.

But underneath it all is the non-coming or going awakened awareness. In the light of this awareness, phenomena is just a fireworks display over a vast ocean. Phenomena are an optical illusion that only appear in the range of perception and exist inherently nowhere.

The sutra mentions “those who appear in all worlds without moving from one spot”. When I enter into the reality realm, my small mind becomes my big mind. The reality realm is my mind, the reality realm is my body. I lose one small identity and gain one great identity. My body is the body of Vairocana Buddha, whose body is the pure reality body. (can you even conceptualize pure reality into a body?). Vairocana is the Buddha personification of the reality realm. His body is the cosmological structure of the universe itself, the totality body. Buddhas appear to appear within him, and groups of Buddhas appear within those groups of Buddhas in infinite regression.

The sutra says: “here they dwell, in knowledge of all the different patterns of existence everywhere”. A Buddha, seeing from this ultimate standpoint, sees no difference in the nature of sentient beings. Everything in the totality realm is Buddha, yet all beings do not see this, and every being does not see this in his or her own unique way, according to each being’s constitution and capacity.

The Buddha recognizes that each of us sees the world in an entirely different way because each of us has a different mind. The world is seen differently by animals and humans, by men and women. There are countless different embodiments of the same enlightened material. Life has evolved to an incredible complexity.

Because we all take in different appearances, so we all have different attachments these different appearances. Often, existing in the world, it’s hard for two people to come to any similar agreements about anything, since we are all on our own trips so much. There are a whole array of different approaches to the world. Two people bring their truths to the table. Misunderstandings arise in the transmission of truths that are corrupting. The role of the facilitator is to make sure the terms being used mean the same thing.

Buddhism is universal, but it accommodates all forms and practices. Everybody has the responsibility to get past their own obstacles and see the truth. The Buddha’s role in this is he understands and teaches to each person and his or her mind. He has “knowledge of all the different patterns of existence everywhere”.

The sutra is constantly switching back and forth between conventional views and ultimate views. It values multi-angular thinking. It is a barrage of different approaches, techniques, and metaphors. The text itself is designed to read to different aspects of your awareness and intelligence. It leaves itself incredibly open to interpretation.

The ultimate truth can be communicated almost an infinite variety of ways. A Buddha is always coming to new conceptualizations about his experience to benefit all sentient beings. He is constantly seeing new shades of meaning, new formulations, new juxtapositions that he can use in his teaching. Anecdotes of truth are constantly being revealed to him. The sutra illustrates the realm of reality as something that is constantly refreshing itself in its vision. The Buddha’s vision is always illustrating truisms, everything that arises points back to his understanding.

There is a genre of literature called magical realism that incorporates the supernatural into its human story lines. Magical realism is about human places and human times but there will be magical or supernatural occurrences that guide the shape of the story. Magical realist stories hint at the idea that there are otherworldly forces that shape and guide our lives. It hints at this divide between the human realm, our material place of objects, conceptions and earthly motivations, and a supernatural realm composed of different energies, essences, and forces of nature whose machinations are beyond our usual grasp. Occasionally humans stumble into or are given peeks into this supernatural realm, and they’ll run into forces beyond their control that sometimes help them and sometimes hurt them.

I “believe” in this world. I don’t know if it’s super-natural because nature is usually where I encounter it the most. Though it’s equally present among buildings as it is among trees, yet I find people around buildings don’t pick it up as much as those who prefer to dwell in forests. Fortunately, it’s is the most ever present thing there is. Unfortunately, it’s the most easily forgotten thing there is. It envelops us everywhere. Those magic pennies you find are a token, a clue, a residue left by it on its way somewhere else.

Look around, and just for you it will take the shape of trees, buildings, cars! Most people don’t appreciate this effort because for them trees and buildings and cars are just that and they have always been there and always will be there.

Sadly, though it shapes our movement in the world, we rarely give it credit for everything it does for us. When beauty strikes us on impulse, sparkling light cutting through redwood stands, its light escapes a little bit from our usually closed lids. When we smile after a joke we had with a friend, it laughs with us in a thousand different ways: the little fairy up in the tree is laughing, the little gremlin at our feet is laughing. Occasionally it will sparkle in our eyes or another’s. Remember: it was on the earth before us. Now it is something that we have since forgotten.

This force around us has no form, no name, no substance and that is why it can take on any form. There is a quote “when the world is laughing, it is your mind that is laughing. when the world is crying, it is your mind that is crying”. This force helps us and sometimes hurts, yet to judge it is to misrepresent it. It has no character in itself, it is like water, it can fill any shape. It is like a quantum field: in nature it is all possibility, yet when it comes in contact with an observer, the mind, then essence is decided. A neutral force in nature, our minds turn it into a trickster. It can be a trickster in the same way Satan is a trickster: it has enough power to provide you with your wildest fantasies. But if the bargain goes awry (something bound to happen), it will deliver you the worst nightmares. It can be a tricky shadowy force because it’s like water. Whatever shape your mind is in at that moment, even if its an ugly, negative shape, the force won’t hesitate to fill it. (wow I just realized Star Wars is talking about the Tao). If we keep seeing reality as a nightmare, we will come to know reality as a nightmare. That impression is hard to wipe away from our minds. Satan is the magician, the projectionist, the conjurer who bombards us with all these forms, visions, and fantasies. Satan only has power if you buy into him (I think this is what the Christians think too!)

“In the abode of Concentration, Buddhas see past present and future”.

Phenomena seem to have an element of time to them, and an element of causality. This causes this, this happens after that, that causes this. We sit and observe changing form and we perceive what seems to be an evolution. We watch an animal be born, grow up, and die. However, if we understand that everything arises from the ground of awareness, each moment of the phenomena arises independently from emptiness. It is only in the appearance of things that there seems to be an evolution. The buddha understands this fact and sees that past present and future are only designations observing the change of phenomena over time and that enlightened awareness never changes, and that it never has a past, future, or even a present. Every phenomena seems to have a birth and a death, but, taken from an ultimate standpoint, ending and beginning are pointless to designate in the face of something that is timeless. Every moment points to eternity, completely separate from the last moment in a reality that is constantly dying and being reborn every moment. It only seems to not change too much because we see a certain continuity in the appearance of things. Thankfully, few things change TOO fast, but then again you might be hit by a car and die any moment!

I do my walks like an old man combing a deserted beach with a metal detector. He walks slowly and pensively ever so often looking up to scan the horizon with a squinted gaze. He sweeps the detector with an easy flick of the wrist, cautious and careful. Occasionally in the sand something will catch his eye, a discovery, a diamond among a desert. The world then comes alive for him. It’s as if the treasure lying in the sand had been waiting for him all this time, that it was placed there by some outward force knowing he would find it. He picks it up excitedly, wallows in his own sense of personal, private discovery. At this quiet moment the world affirms him, and he affirms the world. He leaves the beach. Another stone unturned, he rests in that feeling, a hint of future magic is fresh in his mind but this excitement doesn’t stop his slow pensive momvene

I’m a vibrating emotional string that constantly needs to be maintained. Not too tight, not too loose. As a string, I resonate with supplementary frequencies in my environment.

When I get too loose, I miss a whole spectrum of vibrations, I miss those finer, subtler vibes that really ring true. When I get too tight, I tend to pick up these high pitches that I’m not built to handle, and I get jarred and jangled.

But when my emotional string is in tune, I vibrate with those frequencies that hit me at my groove. For instance, the beautiful ocean view outside my window and I are two notes ringing love in unison. When I’m in tune, at that delicate tension, I walk through my day humming at a sweet spot. Or I’m just ringing out, all the time, at every turn, daa daa daadaa!

Though I also love silence because I love slowing it down and picking up those sweet subtle vibrations that are hard to capture in lots of business. In silence I look at things more closely and see those delicate stitches that keep the space time fabric together. Every patch of the world has a twinkle, a magic that is easy to look over in the way our minds sweep from one object, one person to another.

And sometimes I like noise. When I hear something that’s really sounding off in the world, like a Mozart symphony, if I’m in tune I’m ready to sound off with it. Then is when I dance, if you can call my frenzied animation dancing. This is when I give the control of myself over to a more primal, intuitive part of my mind. It is as if I become possessed, as if some force, wry, mischevious and grotesque (but not necessarily malevolent) is holding an effigy of me from afar and is poking needles in me, cackling, and all I can do is obey. Perhaps he has all the pleasure and the only thing I get is an out-of-body experience which is very pleasurable in that it’s beyond pleasure.

And sometimes I’m the one creating the noise. The music I play is always a running improvised narrative of what I feel as in important in the moment that I’m playing it. This is usually the story of my life, which is really the story of the universe, in its utterly heartbreakingly meaningful and ecstatic manifestation. It’s a big story to tackle, I know, but really it’s also the easiest story to tackle because it’s so in my face all the time and hard to ignore. I deal with lesser themes such as the spiritual evolution of man, or the birth of technology or whatever.

I’m really not that dramatic of a person, but sometimes my mind becomes taken over with an insane (genius? malady?) that propels me into new and gripping ways of perceiving reality. To be a bit more specific, this feeling is a sense of being aghast that reality even exists, that your kitchen (that’s where I was at the moment) even exists. It is the perception that some terrible and incredible story underlies everything. Or it’s a perception that I live my life in an unreal bizarro reality of absolutely absurd manifestation. Or it’s a perception that the world I see is just this funky creation, this funky unreal whim, this virtual playbox, this virtual video game slow motion sequence, this movie that I’m in that I can’t break out of and do I even want to? The way the world seems to be structured is not the way it is really structured, nor is it any other way. Things are not as they appear, yet everything is appearances and there is nothing beyond appearances. It’s as if suddenly the “what the fuck is all of this” question comes into terrifying focus. What the fuck? How could I have ever perceived this as boring? How could I have ever missed this stark reality so blatant so pure, constantly throwing myself in my face? We don’t even ask questions a lot of the times. We don’t even think stop and look at the fact that everything is utterly unfathomable.

One of these unfathomables is the question of asking how any of this (mind, body, universe everything!) got here, which is such a complex and unfathomable question that it causes my mind to undergo a complete hard-drive crash and all I’m left with are bits and pieces of my mind that are scattered throughout the universe. Try asking that question sometime, and you will notice that your mind does not know where to start in the face of all the possibilities and perhaps your mind doesn’t start and you then learn something about yourself.

I believe altering our perception, out of any transformation you can make, is the one that brings us and others the most immediate benefits. Change your perspective on yourself, and everything changes and the world is now a different world.

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Our subconscious mind contains a pool of emotions bound with images and archetypes that lie latent in most of our daily interactions, yet arise to the fore during extraordinary interactions. These archetypes, symbols, or moods represent forces, drives, desires in the universe and ourselves. They are states of consciousness that are found similarly among the vast variety of people, this is why I think of these states as the “collective unconscious” (So it’s Jung, but I haven’t read any of him so bear with me). They are modes of being that underly the “ego” or who we usually think we are. Accessing these modes of being that lie latent within us is a transformative experience: they take us out of the control of the ego and into a mode where we are confident and creative in being connected with a deeper part of ourselves. Any activity in which we are allowed to metamorphose ourselves, such as in theater or music, puts us closer to reaching these states of mind.

These states of consciousness connect us with states of mind that have been since deemphasized in modern human society. Rituals, theater, play, music as activities naturally encourage these states of mind. These emotions find their origination in older portions of our brains. They were more active when humans were living closer to nature and the animal realms. As modern truth workers, we are aware of the possibility of these experiences through contemporary spirituality. Our ancestors were as well, though for them they were more bound in their cosmology, in the world at large. Living closer to nature naturally affords these transformative experiences and cultivates a deeper spirituality. However, as humans living in cities, these emotions still lie within us and it is in our own settings that we must tap into them. Tapping into these emotions allows us to appreciate the breadth of human experience and the variety of forms life takes. They allow us to reconnect to feelings of transcendence since lost to us, living in cities and towns. They revitalize our world view, giving us an appreciation and a personal connection to the journey human life has taken upon this planet

Perhaps the collective consciousness is the pool of time, mind, and space that we all tap into when having these experiences. This pool is also within us; each of us is a vessel which contains the whole of possible human memory and experience.

How is our brain wired to the universe? Our brain is a neural network that from the offset possesses the seed for all future growth. The brain is born ready for potential connections to be made through our experience. The brain is born with a trajectory programmed into it of growth, the brain is born with all the tools it needs for growth.

If the collective unconscious is real, that means that all possible human experiences are available to us. Every moment contains the potential of infinite states of being, whether its grief, reverie, betrayal, communion, lust, rage anger.

There is some kind of collective memory to the collective unconscious. I think we are not constrained by cultural boundaries. Can I experience what it is like to be in an African tribe 3000 years ago? We have available to us every human experience in every cultural setting, if we have the power to imagine it. For example, I could do a guided meditation around the theme that I was in a war, and if I got far enough into it, I might actually feel like I was in that war. I might come out of the episode a bit shaken up, but it also might have given me a chance to gather a great sense of courage and thus I would leave the meditation feeling empowered. You could call this “travelling back in time”. We have the power to connect to every mythology ever created by humans because every human shares a universal experience of emotion and spirituality that transcends cultural and psychological boundaries.

During our daily experience, these emotions come up rarely and hence we don’t have the opportunity to learn and grow for them. When they do they can be life changing, some for the better, some for the worse. The goal, however, for us as humans is to have full emotional freedom, to not have to wait for what we think our the right circumstances to perceive life’s joys.

Meditation gives us a samadhi that allows new emotions and experiences to take full hold of us and actually change us. Meditation is the gateway to the subconscious in the same way Freud said dreams are gateways to the unconscious. Dreams are much more emotionally rich, varied, and vibrant than the average scene in daily life. In dreams our emotional timelapse is sped up. Dreams are rich with transformative experiences, because during sleep the external world is cut off, and since no new sensations or images are entering our brain, our mind taps into our deeper pool of emotions and memories through meaningful and rich episodes. “Mythologies are collective dreams, dreams are personal mythologies” – Joseph Campbell.

The goal of meditation is to make daily experience as richly meaningful as a dream experience. Dharma asks, what is the difference between daily life and dream life? Meditation and psychoactive drugs allow the doors of perception to open. Psychedelics chemically alter our minds, and for some reason, give us an incredibly emotion and insight packed experience, hence the term “psyche”. Psychedelics force us to really “feel” life, intuitively and experientially. We cannot just sit back and observe the experience intellectually. We become incredibly introspective and we start to look our lives nakedly and honestly. We ask ourselves “how am I really doing?” Any suffering that we have been ignoring, any emotion we have been holding inside, comes back at us and asks us to face it. Psychedelics have the capability to unearth past negative experiences allowing us come to new understandings, reintegrating those understandings into our lives.

On psychedelics, we feel a great love for those things that we are doing well in our lives, and we become hyper aware of those parts of our lives that need work. We see the absolute role that other people play in our lives. We see how important they really are to us, and we become sometimes painfully aware of times when we have overlooked their love. The moment a person pops into our mind, we cannot help but feel love for them and all they have done for us. We value others place in our own happiness, and we cherish our place in others’ happiness and feel the love they have for us.

Psychedelics, dreams, and meditation all bring our lives into focus once again, and when our lives are truly in focus we can find joy in our clarity. Have you ever walked down the street and felt a great joy in your own happiness? They help us see all the many meanings we can extract from a single moment, and they help us continue that awareness. They make it (sometimes frightfully) clear to us that the world we perceive is so colored by our emotions and state of mind. They help us realize that the world we see in the external is actually just a projection of our inner world. They help us realize that life is a dream that is as nightmarish or tranquil as we are prepared to dream it.

When the world is revealed as a dream, it then contains all the possibilities, all the things you would look for in a dream. A dream you realize isn’t quite what it appears to be, a dream isn’t quite real, it is a moving projection. My reality is a mind fluctation. It is an illusion that is formed at every turn of your head, you can’t beat it. Sometimes you can beat it, and see it in the act of forming, but you still can’t beat it. Reality being in a dream is something you accept but never take for granted. Just as when you realize you are dreaming, reality becomes your friend because you know it is harmless. You have the power to control your projections. Reality being a dream, I know I am dreaming, and the world creates itself in my mind and around my mind without me telling it do to so. So who is the operator of my dreaming? Whose controlling the lights, the stage and the backdrop? Reality being a dream I walk through, fearlessly, courageously, bolstered by the secret knowledge of the nature of things. Reality being a dream I witness my dream body being dreamt, created. And I accept the fact that the dream ends, and my dream body is destroyed. Reality being a dream I watch the manifestations, I take joy in their miraculousness, but knowing their nature, I know them to end.

Reality is a dream, it exists neither internally or externally. It is a wonderful facade, an extraordinary void! It is a beautiful illusion, a sublime fantasy. In life I feel a constant otherworldly presence, as if this world I see is just layered upon something deeper.

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So what do I look for in new experiences? Different shades of the dream.

There are still strange transmutations to take, metamorphoses to undergo, deep archetypes lying within our psyche that we still have yet to fulfill, to make explicit, to live out and complete. There are deep archives of forgotten memories that can still be unearthed. There are past lives to relive, there is the pain, inherited with our humanness that we need to confront and explore. There is the mourning of our possible pains, the celebration of possible joys. There is the question of self and mind which may never be figured out, but must be looked into with a great vengeance. Although we have a form body, we have a formless mind; the amount of shapes we can take on is endless. If you are patient during hard times and practice well to constantly purify your mind, then at moments you will find great ecstasies during which you will see new doors open revealing new and glittering horizons.

The point of philosophy is not to come to any clear answers about anything but merely come to the feeling and asking of the most poignant questions in life and you will discover this is enough.

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The goal of our personal development is the broadening and deepening of our emotional lifelines. Growing up, we realize we are born into a world full of a history of glory and heartbreak. Lives have been led for us, lessons have been learned, humans have tried to understand their minds and succeeded or failed. We come into the world ignorant of such a large range of experience. We don’t know the “story of the world”. We have no idea where to place ourselves in the world, we don’t even try to place ourselves within the world yet. We come into the world a new generation, at the tail end of history, in the midst of a vast progression. We cannot yet place ourselves within any greater evolutions.

As we grow up we become wiser to the story of the world. We have a sense of the range of human experience. We live our lives aware of the magic and sanctity of life. We have an eye for important themes in the world. We understand the heartbreak that was required to build world we live in today. To find purpose in our lives, we need to know the stories of how we got here, why the things are the way they are. Becoming an adult means knowing these “collective human understandings”, the histories the mythologies of our lives. These histories tell us where humans went wrong and right, and dictate how we should treat each other. This is the recognition of the holocaust as a nightmare, this is the pledge of the human race to make more humanistic decisions, to end greed, war, and hatred. These understandings shape our sense of purpose and guide our action in the world. They are the basis of our thinking about other people and society. For a society to function, everyone in the society needs to have accumulated these understandings.

Society is healthy when people are healthy and making the right decisions for themselves and others. Society is healthy when we are all on the same page with our values. When more and more people are recognizing their true spiritual needs, society will more and more be something that caters to these needs.

In my practice, I attempt at all times to carry with me a self -respect and a respect for others, an appreciation of my environment and an appreciation of the things in it. This respect I carry is just a way of being for me, it is part of who I am, it is a result of the growth I have done thus far as a person.

How one to know, and continues to know and act on these values is an important question for the study of education. Education is about supporting growth in children, giving them the tools to allow them to value right action in their own lives.

How do we come cherish certain values and want to act in accord with them?

I find that a person’s sense of reverence for life is not an accident, it is an energy that she is constantly maintaining with intention.

When everyone in a society is focused on personal development, treating each other respectfully should be effortless. By this I mean that these attitudes, after a certain amount of practice, are ingrained in a person to the point where a lot of thinking isn’t required.

Ask yourself, do I know my values?

Oftentimes we do something long enough that it’s just the way we do things. Sometimes it is only when someone else comes along and does things differently that we get a chance to reflect.We either open up to a new possibility of doing something, or we decide to stick with what we know. If we live in a society, we may bring our certain values to the table and be shocked that not everyone shares our values. We can approach society with our good, pure ideals and quickly become discouraged if we are not introspective enough. Our ideals have to have to be as strong in the face of confusion as they were on their own.

An an important insight a person comes to is that there is no one in the world that you can go to to make things right all the time. In the world you’ll find people who don’t value human life in the way you do. This might be a time when you question your views, when you awaken to the fact that there are radically different standpoints. Have you had the experience of feeling like your views around you are right but no one wants to listen? This is quite a destabilizing experience.

When we think about who we are today, we can usually find a pretty good answer by looking at our past actions and goals. We may nod to ourselves and know that who we are today is not an accident, but the result of a series of conscious i

ntentions. Things are good when we know our values, and we know whether the things we do are in accordance with our values.

So “know thyself”. But sometimes this isn’t possible. Life contains mysteries which appear and transform us, but remain mysteries.

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Epistemology is the study of how we know ourselves, or how we know God.

I’m interested in revelations. Sometimes we come onto a situation which we don’t have a value for. Yet still, we may intuitively know what is the right thing to do, what most supports life. In these moments its as if a divine grace comes down and gives you strength or courage. I introspect later where I may have learned to do that. This question doesn’t always have an answer. Sometimes with our powers of creativity, we come up with something that we had no idea we could do. An inspired jazz line for instance.

I’m interested in the question of what we can really know about the world and about ourselves. I’m interested in the question of how we apply that knowledge to change the world and ourselves. I think there’s a lot that we can’t know about the world or ourselves, and what we don’t know is just as important. I think saying we can’t know something is an opportunity to investigate different modes of knowing, leading in transcendent, intuitive modes of knowing.

I am so greedy, how can I take so much for myself when all I really long for is to give myself to those elemental forces which destroy and animate us at our core?

I am on this earth as long as I can be taken away. I thirst for the transformation which will uncover my ugliness and expose the putrid beginnings of life. I long to shed my human skin. Will I find anything in myself beyond this ugly pretty humanity? Searching deep I find nothing divine except for a meager human baby little bastard child spitting and thirsting for his mother’s breast.

What is there that is transcendent? Humanness is all I have. Humanness is my lot, there is nothing outside the human experience for me. Life burst out of nothingness, fragile yet robust, life was deemed mortal, to live meant to die. The fact of death is what makes living

so courageous so tender. God brought himself to tears over his own creation. God, in creating us, himself learned to love. All his compassion was brought forth on the human in creating us, because God foresaw our struggle, and saw it as beautiful.

The nothingness of nature is timeless, like time itself, is wise pure and does not move. A human moves within the nothingness of nature mortal and fragile. A human is delicate, opposed to his unfeeling timeless universe. He searches for a comfortable corner of the universe, finds warmth in his own kin and they shelter each other, simultaneously worshipping and fearing the cosmos in its austere perfection.

Man takes refuge in woman the womb out of which his life comes. The universe, cold and distant does not provide for him, it is only his mother who gives him her breast.

Should have my life even happened? Perhaps it shouldn’t have. My humanness is old, three million years old, young in geologic time.

I contemplate myself, search for the rawest truth inside of myself, however ugly I will face it, will behold it. Life is alternately fascinating, terrifying and beautiful. It depends on what day you ask me.

Inside of me somewhere is that primal struggle for life that squirming worm. Inside of me somewhere is life bursting flowery joyfulness for the sake of nothing but its own beauty. Life is dark life is light, life is for you, life is not for you, life is for all, life is not for all. Life is dark and mysterious, light and harmless, explosively beautiful explosively raw.