That Is All

To be, and then to know I am, is not the question or the answer, but the final turn in realizational intent of That

to know I'm That. It all begins with light the noise has named Big Bang, creating space in which molecular existence takes the turn

and makes the time to know it is. It's culmination comes with me in seeing I'm not me, but being only this, without conceptual conceit, I am.

Reflecting at that point, without a vestige of volitional illusion, That completes the sudden and immeasurable intent to know

That's That.

The Sign of Peepers in the Wetlands

Spring is not so much a memory as the sudden going further. Like writing is the freeing of a moment caught in memory.

When does happening become significant? The mind occurs—to understand relationship and that is all.

You see what you intend to see. If not for mystery, it's nothing. I'm intending to communicate but don't know why.

At first, one learns the signs. This is how you know you’re talking to yourself. You haven't learned the art of marketing for nothing.

Don't become infatuated with a sign. It’s where the yin will meet the sun. Behind the sign arrives the message—or another interruption.

One already knows exactly what one’s selling. I need enough belief to keep it all together. That’s how the child will keep its faith—

while navigating through an untrue guru, false disciple, and all other fractal tricks of mind.

The Bhagavan in Canyonlands

In Canyonlands, on a mesa called The Island in the Sky, above the confluence of Colorado and Green Rivers,

I watch the sky return to earth. It had been a long and sorrowful separation.

The years had seen the rise and fall of empires and wars too numerous and murderous to count.

Division was the only mathematics practiced and the personal its single sad solution.

Now, within this southwest panorama, clouds are reaching to the ground in one united hydrologic passionate embrace.

I see the truth of Ramana Maharshi in the shape of rain. The wind is sighing there is nothing but one Self.

The red and white rock pinnacles named Needles reach their fingers upwards shouting hallelujah

and the Maze is opening its hidden inaccessible canyon heart to unconditioned love.

Within that perfect view seen through the rainbow sandstone rock of Mesa Arch, I disappear.

There's no reason but park rangers still are looking.

Siri, Why Does God Allow Human Suffering?

Consciousness is quite an impressionable child. The forms I have it take are myriad and diverse.

And when it takes the shape of what I call a human being with a central nervous system

that is capable of amplifying resonance to points of self-awareness never seen before, although not guaranteed,

yet always in the universal evolution of my realizational intent to know myself, unknowable as subject only,

it is indeed a most objective child. The forms it takes are subtle like a mother’s or a father’s thought

but harden quickly to procured belief, the most original among them being certain of its separation

from the wonderful holistic entity of itself as universal knowledge. And this division is the war one calls the world.

No need to ask a god about such suffering; just ask the child you are, and know that's why, beyond belief, I am.

Of Shakespeare, Muddy Waters, and St. John

Wisdom unaligned with love will vector to belief and end in some apocalypse

religious in its uniform and holy in its weaponry and absolutely nihilistic in relationship to others.

Love that's unaligned with wisdom stagnates in desire and ends in tragedy Shakespearean or blue.

But some escape such fate in substances to end in personal catastrophe while others choose a narcissistic wreck as substitute.

While none of this is true except the binary array of love and wisdom, its fictitious fact will make a billion stories, if not two.

A Wise Love Poem

love unmoving

turns indifferent

and with provocation

dies—

unmoving wisdom

turns aggressive

and with habit

kills—

the way is always

moving in-between

the one of love

and wisdom's zero

as if two—

while knowing

there’s no me

and there’s no you

The Daring White Light on the Flying Trapeze

From early childhood, I was taught to see my world as this conceptual array and what is more, I'm taught to see myself in such a manner.

But who am I that's being taught this way?

One who has been thoroughly so trained to see oneself as storied and conceptual forgets—

and has identified with thought in such a way that I've become this me, a set of thoughts which seems so tentatively real,

methinks to think another thought a mile a minute to identify with each.

It's like I'm just this base of being or white light if you'll allow this metaphorical intrusion for a minute,

and each apparent thought is like a passing colored cloud which filters this white light creating such a laser show of raw emotion—

which is just our terminology for light, white light, now filtered into colors we call sadness, anger, envy, fear—

that I've become materially imbalanced and go from filtered light to filtered light in high dramatic fashion,

just a trapeze artist grabbing on to each emotion for dear life.

I haven't got the time to rediscover that the great unknown that can be known is just the known that can't be named—and I am That.

The Mystic Church of Hiking in Acadia

The first time hiking in Acadia, I took the Beachcroft trail, beginning with a set of granite steps for more than half a mile

until I reached an overlook above the valley pond that’s called the Tarn which lies beneath the steep expansive side of Dorr Mountain.

From there I scrambled up the face of Champlain Mountain's pink slick granite and low evergreens until I reached its naked dome.

There I was ascending when the barrier of summit disappeared and right before my eyes was nothing but the great blue sea of luminous Atlantic.

It hit me like a mystic ton of spectacle and infinite reflection, as if my body had just opened up revealing deeper breadth I never knew was there.

Long sighs came sweeping from the vast horizon where I glimpsed a cloud or two above ancestral shores of Nova Scotia, if not France itself.

My heart was sky, my feet were earth, and no-mind was my state of being. No wonder I'd return to walkabout for corresponding seeing.

Disbelief: That's the Ticket

Between my absolute zero and my universal one,

my way meanders and encircles and is sitting

at the junction of the Yin and Yang trains.

When you've ridden one as far as it can go,

then ride the other. This is called arriving at

your destination by the road you didn't take.

The Emptiness of Offices and Goldfinches

I had an insignificant small office with a window at the rearmost section of the building where I could see an undeveloped spruce tree

growing from a secret patch of grass protected from the eighteen-wheeler trucks arriving at the shipping dock just twenty feet away. 

Outside my door, an open lab, where quality assurance underneath my diligent direction happened.

Christmas, San Diego John, a quality inspector I had hired, just recently returned from California, who missed the West Coast desperately

and had returned east only for his wife's desire to be back home with family, had gifted me a thistle-feeder, which I hung upon that tree. 

As winter turned to spring I watched the goldfinch flocks begin to turn in color, from a drab and almost gray-like green to brilliant yellow.

I had never seen this spectacle before. It's almost twenty years from that occasion. John had left his family soon thereafter,

moving back to San Diego, and I heard he had a heart attack and died. In time I got a transfer to Materials

and then I was promoted to a bigger office with much more responsibility and then, in time, let go.

But it's the transformation of those small goldfinches that provide this story all its lovely

lack of any allocated quality of all material effect or meaning. I have to thank my great unknowable for that.