Distillations from Meditations

Pain and suffering doesn't prove

the reality of the material world—

it disproves any concept one holds

that the body-mind is permanent or real.

One understands the illusionary aspect

of the material only by being burnt.

In other words, suffering is a valid

instruction in the awakening process.

One was once a two-year-old

asking others why

and never got an answer.

There are no others. Ask your self.

Being is the only action

necessary for self-awareness.

And self-awareness is

the only reason for being.

Self is the source of all.

Needing nothing and beyond all measure—

I give water to the river of space

and light to the earth of time.

Meditations on the End of Nisargadatta 55:On Helping the World

Q1. How can I find peace when the world suffers?

1. The world suffers for very valid reasons.

The suffering of the world is valid and not an issue of right and wrong. There is no political solution.

Politics are divisional and division is the cause of suffering.

In the spirit of the Reflexive Awareness Mythology, within the universal process of Absolute Self-Awareness,

consciousness appears to have descended into the material,

and the human being, the last procedure of this process, is consciousness fully ascending from the material.

Within the process, this appears as suffering.

In other words, suffering is a valid work instruction of the awakening process.

2. If you want to help the world, you must be beyond the need of help.

Helping the world is not of the world. The usual suspects of all the world’s attempts to help itself end in more suffering.

In every story in history, there are few exceptions to this rule. Even the great avatars

who have helped many discover their true nature: their teachings become beliefs, become sectarian, religions, war!

And science is not an exception to this rule. The scientific process is a valid deconstructive procedure,

but the blind belief in scientific theory is just another religion, world belief, war.

The only way to help the world is to be beyond the world. Being beyond the world begins

by asking what I truly am, not blindly accepting the social conditioning of the world.

In other words, who am I?

3. Then all your doing as well as not doing will help the world most effectively.

Knowing what I truly am, its non-doing as well as doing, helps the world most effectively.

For doing is no longer personal action of the world. And non-doing is no longer personal inaction or avoidance,

but absolute action in the world. Silent self-awareness, the pure potentiality of affectionate awareness, is

the wise dominion and the loving power and the real glory.

Q2. How can non-action be of use where action is needed?

1. Where action is needed, action happens. Man is not the actor. His is to be aware of what is going on. His very presence is action.

Action is universal. The butterfly effect is like a law of nature. Thought is only a tool of universal consciousness.

The person is a misconception, the material misuse of that tool. The human being is the evolutionary apex

of absolute self-awareness and looking at this science through the lens of that Reflexive Awareness Mythology,

being is the only action necessary for self-awareness. And self-awareness is the only reason for being.

2. The window is the absence of the wall and it gives air and light because it is empty. Be empty of all mental content, of all imagination and effort, and the very absence of obstacles will cause reality to rush in.

Thought in its guise of belief and doing is the origin of the personal dream. The personal dream is like a wall

in the sea of reality. And although the wall isn’t real, it’s thought to be so. But the wall becomes a window

when it’s seen through. Therefore, without the mental content of the wall, the sea of reality rushes in to where it always is.

3. If you really want to help a person, keep away. If you are emotionally committed to helping, you will fail to help.

A person wants to help, but it’s that personal desire which is the seed of failure.

Again, the world cannot help the world. The best thing a person can do to help is stay away.

One doesn’t bring a match into a burning building.

4. You may be very busy and be very pleased with your charitable nature, but not much will be done.

Personal acts of charity stroke the ego more than truly help another. The same can be said for environmental action.

Hybrids and paper bags are just status symbols in any earnest game of climate change.

Such busy-ness keeps one away from the real business at hand. As poetry is not about selling truth to others.

It’s the documentation of an inner dialogue. One was once a two-year-old asking others why and never got an answer.

There are no others. Ask your self.

5. A man is really helped when he is no longer in need of help. All else is just futility.

A person is only helped when the personal is seen through. Personal deconstruction is not the job of another person.

In fact, it is not personal at all. Deconstruction is actually the work of being—using the tool of thought upon belief.

All else is just mere vanity, absurdity, futility.

Q3. There is not enough time to sit and wait for help to happen. One must do something.

1. By all means—do. But what you can do is limited; the self alone is unlimited. Give limitlessly—of your self. All else you can give in small measures only. You alone are immeasurable.

The person is a limited concept and thus is limited in its doing. Its nature is division and division is its action.

Even the universality of love becomes limited and measurable to friends, lovers, and family,

or distorted in its allegiances to such beliefs as associations, nations, and religions.

But the absolute self is pure potentiality: undivided, universal, and real.

2. To help is your very nature. Even when you eat and drink you help your body. For yourself you need nothing. You are pure giving, beginningless, endless, inexhaustible.

Love is the nature of being. One takes care of the body. If injured, one attends to the injury.

A mother loves the child. The self is the source of all. Needing nothing and beyond all time,

I give water to the river of space and light to the earth of time.

3. When you see sorrow and suffering, be with it. Do not rush into activity. Neither learning nor action can really help.

Suffering and its sorrow requires nothing but being. Personal action arrives from the place of desire

and wants immediate action. Unconditional love is patient. Neither specialized knowledge nor targeted striving can help.

4. Be with sorrow and lay bare its roots—helping to understand is real help.

Only being silent with sorrow as compassionate love deconstructs the roots of an occluding belief

revealing an understanding light, true medicine of wisdom.

My Practice

It's come to this. The world is mind, and being in the world is like a dream, its forces being memory, transformation, love, and karma.

Everyone is just a secondary character, most of whom exhibit great divisional peculiarities, the worst of which is selfishness,

a manipulative attempt to manifest their personal desires. It is, in essence, what black magic really is. I know this to be true because

each one is just a mirror of myself, and though I know the mathematics of division, when I interact with people in this play,

I feel those age-old forces tugging at me too. And so I stay in Pleasant Valley like a recluse Chinese poet drinking wine or playing with myself

like Ikkyu of Kyoto does, writing what becomes revealed while going further in this forest toward the sky. I try to leave most everyone alone

but love them like the living pieces of my great mosaic mirror when I allow myself to play within this dream of me and you.

The Diamond Sutra says a bodhisattva saves the world by knowing there's no world to save. So that intention is my latest practice on the way.

Door Way

One is

afraid

to be one

and so

there's people.

It doesn't matter

what you think

the world to be—

the world is what

you think.

Being

isn't part

of any poly-

nomial equation.

Astonishing

alliances are

formed in all-

embracing

consciousness.

Personal memory

demands payment of

legal tender

in the form of

being

to keep one

safe and secure.

Sadness is

like feeling

all is one

but thinking

one's all alone.

Fear is feeling

all is love

but thinking

another wants

to finish me.

The world is what

we think

but I feel like

a whole

lotta

love.

If one is

being

and being is

absolute—

there is no then.

Thought is always one-sided.

It's either

do or

s
a
m
a
d
h
i

Mountain.

No mountain.

Way.

Releasing the Birds of Mythology

Words describe experience as translated thru one's localized mythology. No mythology is alike and much is lost in translating a translation. Nisargadatta in I Am That is actually dozens of Nisargadattas in translation thru dialogues. When one gets close to 'yours,' others open. As various translations are seen through, consciousness speaks to consciousness.

Localized mythologies gets one through the long day's journey thru the night. Seeing thru one's mythology is the work of personal deconstruction. Transforming one's mythology is the work of clarification. Not knowing one keeps a localized mythology is as good a definition of delusion as there is.

Experiential mythologies utilizing names such as awareness and consciousness are still mythologies. If this is unseen, it's just another belief. And one holding to the myth of scientific materialism as if it's not a myth: what a tangled web one is weaving. Don't even get me started on the dangerous lunacies of religion.

Scientific theories of theoretical physicists are inconspicuous mythologies and evident swindles. Here’s another. Every person, every conditioned localized aspect of universal consciousness, is a universe to oneself, and the black hole connecting each one is love. Such a transformation of mythology is named Opening the Window.

Experiencing: Being and Unknowness

Being is the river and only the river knows the source. When the dream jumps in, splash!

Leave belief behind and feel experiential. Thinking is the memory of light but feeling is still the light, although diminished.

In experience, the dandelions are exploding on the southern slope above the exponential sunlight in the wide expanse of river.

I am the experiential and the experiential is what I am. This is not a special knowledge. This is the only knowledge.


The world is an image in memory, mistaken to be, alive, but it's not my fault I caught this virus. Forgive yourself and see.

Knowledge must return and learn to be before being the unknown. Consciousness is like a baby.

In being, what appears to be appears to be an appearance. A beautiful plan is just a piece of paper to the fire of experience.

Life is a testament to being self-aware. Consciousness speaking to consciousness is like experience speaking to inexperience.

This is about the experiential and not the existential—that's not that. Love is the exception that always proves the rule.

One can only remember the door. One never remembers walking through it—so sudden!

This is Called Nine Names

Mistaking the current definition of a word for its usage in another spacetime rendering is another way of getting lost in translation. Definitions also transform. Obviously.


A wave becomes a frog becomes a wolf becomes an owl becomes a stormy Monday.

Yesterday is false. Tomorrow is a fantasy. Today is just the smoke of potentiality.

Note the two unstressed syllables in 'smoke of potentiality.' For prior to that, it's all iambic. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.


A broken arrow once meant peace but now means accidental nuclear detonation. Thus all definitions pass.

Light of being is filtered by belief—or transformation frozen in the memory of mind—i.e. attachment—becoming an emotion—i.e. moving action.

This lack of self-awareness is an evolutionary step between the active known inanimate and non-doing of the great unknown.


Dragons only breathe out fire. Sages breathe it in. This is Tao of Thrones. Revisited.

It's not the nothing of atheism nor the something of religion, but this being that unknown which knocks me out in out in out in...

Suspending disbelief is practice for the seeing through belief as comedy is deconstruction. The popular is smoke. Esoteric is the fire.


I’d begin at the beginning, but there’s no beginning.

Instead, let me begin now.

By the way, every change in meter is a change in voice.


Remember, for every metaphor, there’s a vehicle and tenor.

In every Travis Bickle, there’s a Luciano Pavarotti.

Singing the song of self-awareness. Walt Whitman style or Emily Dickinson.


The grass reflects time. The recluse reflects space. The mirror is always Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva.

This is almost the end of the preface.

Now begins the apocalypse of Son Rivers.


John Lennon said war is over if you want it. This is dedicated to that spirit.

The world is what you think, believe, it is. So war is over when you think it is.

This is called Learning to Eat an Apple.


Remember death is just a concept and being is the only truth one knows.

This is called Utilizing Memory Efficiently.

It also makes an acronym.


Irony aside. Dying is easy. Deconstruction is hard.

This is called Primal Sutra.

Knowing when to stop deconstruction is not knowable. This is called Grace, Faith, or Trust. Depending what you call your self.


Dreaming lucidly is creating your own mythology. This experience is called Naming the Nameless.

In the Name of Only I Make Mountains Move.

That fine line between deconstruction and being that unknown is called Spontaneity or Sudden.


Only something knows how to believe in nothing. This is called Last House on the Left.

The world is either mirror or mystery. Clarity or mist. Subject or object. I or me. This is called It Is What It Is.

This is called This Is Called.


Number Nine

Signs of the Revelation

At Dunkin Donuts,

I was saying to a friend

I finally accepted what I am

within this dream of nature.

I'm a songbird

and songbirds sing.

Later, driving home,

listening to Open Source

on public radio,

I heard an interview

with John Luther Adams,

not John Coolidge Adams,

who is saying birdsong is

his primal inspiration.

Synchronicity is music

of this universal consciousness

and that goes deeper

than primordial baptism.

Such a sign is confirmation

I am singing what I am.

The Self-Awareness Game

Practice paying mindful attention. Dream lucidly and creatively. Only self-awareness shall spontaneously evolve!

This is the self-awareness game: dreaming what the world shall be. And it is written that shall is such a timeless word.

Now is the time for some beauty. Imagine spring. The daffodils bow to the winter and then. They say nothing gold can stay. But quicksilver shall.

I was raised in the church of fear and loathing. Only thought is deconstructed. Being is immortal space.

To take things personally is the original misdeed of universal consciousness appearing localized. Being is where potentiality is.

We were conditioned to be mountains. And then you saw the mountain is conditioned. I am the mountain. I am the sky.

Belief is magic. Desire is enchantment. I am in the world. My prayer: may they all see that I am not what we believed us to be.

Like kissing every thought before it becomes belief. Like balancing deep sleep and the ordinary mystic. Self-awareness! What else is there?

Alone and Drinking Under a New Moon

Lately a week feels like seven days.

And April has a tendency to freeze frame.

So I wouldn't say this is enlightenment

but I've deconstructed so much bullshit

I can see it in another almost instantly.

This makes it difficult for new relationships

and all the old ones have gone South

to die or be with loving grandchildren.

I like the Chinese poets and their way with wine.

I choose a stout instead seeking moderation

only because I value benefits of deep sleep.

This is where the poem will take a turn.

The absolute unknown is what I am

and every night I like to circle back

to pure awareness, black as Tao,

completely lost to memory or moon.

This is why Li Po jumped in the pond.