The Autobiography of Me, Joni, and Henry

Disassociation is just a common symptom of duality. The second disassociation outbreak experienced here occurred in 1984 no lie.

Many personal issues concerning wife and work and child would be discussed but there was kind of a spiritual one which was foundational.

I just spent five minutes trying to remember the exact word I used thirty-four years ago: IMPRACTICAL.

We were talking about the things I liked ten years earlier, or more to the story’s point, before I met the woman I would have my child with.

Ah 1974 the year Joni Mitchell released 'Court and Spark' on New Years Day no less.

"Help me I think I'm falling In love too fast It's got me hoping for the future And worrying about the past

'Cause I've seen some hot hot blazes Come down to smoke and ash We love our lovin' But not like we love our freedom"

Writing poetry of course. Walt Whitman. Then there was my Russian period after reading Crime & Punishment.

I did all of Vonnegut after reading ‘Cat's Cradle” and gave my cousins copies for Christmas.

Then I told the shrink I even had a crush on Henry David Thoreau because impractical.

So why did I feel Thoreau was so impractical became a recurring theme over the next several weeks until I went to revisit Walden

every lunch by leaving work and driving to a lake at Harold Foster State Park and climbing up a hill with chair and nothing to eat but my book.

Henry would still be my guru if I hadn't spent an entire year reading his journals day by day

and editing a passage for a daily blog post from 2004 to 2005. Go and visit your hero for a week, never mind an ever-loving year.

"the mystical is most practical" ~Nisargadatta

Peak Bloom

As the mind is division, there's this and that, dependent origination. The that which sees through the this of this and that is Tao.

Revelation is right imagination. Self-awareness is the name of Buddha and the wish fulfilled.

Imagination without love is thinking. Imagining with love is revelation. Psychology is of the world and therefore doesn't know

the most important aspect of a dream is seeing one is dreaming. Consider the cherry blossoms of Washington DC.

"The more earnest you are at remembering what needs to be remembered, the sooner will you be aware of yourself as you are, for memory will become experience. Earnestness reveals being. What is imagined and willed becomes actuality—here lies the danger as well as the way out." ~N

Middle Samadhi. The Ninth.

You are pure awareness being self-aware. After thirteen billion years of evolution and this universe of space, you're almost there.

But here lies Zeno's Paradox. Imagine that!

As inspiration is the great surrender of the material, lucid dreaming is the revelation of all the prophets.

Science can lead you to the water, but it can't help you cross it.

Imagine there's no paradox. There's no doing otherwise. Look, this is direct koan.

Note one: a dream without love is like evolution without creation.

Note two: a dream not following Intent is like desire not following love

is like a piece of driftwood not drifting in the current is like a surfer with no perfect wave.

Note three: as this is essentially a tantric practice, compassion is the safe word.

Thirteen Revelations on Easter Sunday

Lights, camera, action, ego, deconstruction, lucid dreaming, no name for Tao. Genesis in pure awareness, apocalypse of self-awareness. Ginger root, willow bark, elderflower.

There are thirteen blackbirds but the mind only sees seven colors at a time. Inspiration takes you to an even dozen. Revelation says I make my own thirteen. The magic of one is not opposed to an absolute zero but it likes to play with nothing.

Self-awareness is the DNA of Tao. Understanding pure awareness as a concept is not the same as self-awareness. You will recognize them by their fruits. Live your myth and a world will appear to live it in.

Being Observing

Belief attracts a similar belief and so on, to form a simulated world to believe in.

It is the nature of believers in a simulated world to believe their world is the only real world—

thus the left believes the right is wrong and the right believes the right is right.

All belief is based upon the knowledge of a simulated world, but the only true knowledge is being—

and even being isn’t absolute.

I am divided into observer and observed, one and zero, right and wrong, peace and war—

yet there’s only this observing. Does the observer intuitively know it’s actually false,

and thus bolsters itself with other observers in a truce of collective observers observing, or believing?

So the observer-believing is the so-called known substitute—for being-observing the unknown?

#tbt Last Man Out of Parker Wildlife Refuge 1984

They say the island hermit is just afraid
to be outgoing, still living there, some nerve,
upon a ragged sandbar, domain of deer
and waterfowl, a government preserve.
He'd rather live alone, like a renegade.
But Lew, if asked, would gladly volunteer
a different point of view, remembering when
the island was a neighborhood, a place
for names and faces, not a forsaken den
for migratory birds, or solitaire.
The lilac bushes are all that fill the space
familiar with that far-off yesterday.
It's not that Lew has left the human race.
It's just that everyone has moved away.

2002

footnotes to autobiography ii

1. What do you call it when you're pro-life and pro-choice? I am that.

2. My culture has no rite of passage but for parenthood—and parenthood scares the bejesus into children—so that was my passage.

3. The golden rule—spread your leaves but remember your roots.

4. My great grandfather calls it breathing fire.

5. Believing there are others is the god of all conditioning. The knowledge that I am is in the knowing I'm unknown. Evolution is mutation but compassion is remembering my story. It takes the Tao to name it but there are no words for Tao.

The Ballad of My Autobiography II Blues

Believing there are others is the god of all conditioning.
The void of pure awareness, being consciousness
and the mirror of the mind
in the name of the parent, child, and spiritual projection.
All poetry is translating revelation into words—
the trick is knowing when and where to leave the silence be.

I like my body like I like my car—
blood red, efficient, and it's got a moon roof.
The knowledge that I am is in the knowing I'm unknown.
Awareness being self-aware. Like a mother and child reunion.
My number one daughter doesn't mean the world to me.
She's not of the world; she is love.

My mother would have been one-hundred in eight days.
See, she's always in my dream—self-awareness
is spontaneous and so it feels like
what I’ve always known—
evolution is mutation
but compassion is remembering my story.

There's a golden thread
that ties my childhood
to my parenthood
to now—it's not
completely nameless.
It takes the Tao to name it.

My Autobiography I

Beware of science in sheep's clothing. Koan is a subset of myth, sometimes called the anti-story. Dreams are light years and deep space beyond the world.

The primary interpretation of one's dreaming every night is to awaken to the little lower actuality that one is dreaming there's a day. So simply said, the world appears to be a paradox because it's actually a dream.

After deconstructing day, the universe turns lucid. Shakespeare writes a play. Basho pens haiku. Cold Mountain.* Old folks move to Florida to live with alligators. Old souls stay in Maine.

Theology is the language of all old religions. Science is the language of the new religion. Myth is still the spoken silence of the known unknown. Love is the heart, and imagination the matter, of lucidity.

Parenting is a practice. First comes unconditional love. Then comes seeing through new conditioning to that unconditional love. And now I’m like grandfather sun enjoying what the moon is doing to the earth.

Profound revelation: Gurdjieff's infamous image of the moon feeding on the earth is not so much horrific as sacrificial. Like mother and child. In other words, change your point of view! A koan.

But not a horror story. The classic fairy tale. Original nirvana. Pure awareness is projection. Projection is pure awareness. Between awareness and projection is this dream.



* A Cold Mountain Transcreation

When someone sees Cold Mountain
all declare he’s wild and crazy—
his face isn’t much to look at,
his body is wrapped in rags and fur,
they don’t understand his words
and he doesn’t speak their words.
His reply to all these passersby:
come and gaze on Cold Mountain.

A Myth to Live By

In duality, there's two beliefs: one and the other. Right and wrong is one belief and wrong and right, the other.

No belief is right or wrong but thought is caught in worshipping itself. And all devotion is beyond belief or judgment.

Devotion to devotion is direct path. Thought worshiping devotion, or love of being,

is the myth that deconstructs the old belief, so chopping wood can truly be just chopping wood.

There's a reason why Zen is Zen Buddhism. No matter how absolute or zenlike it is, every devotion loves a myth to live by.