footnotes to 2009

remember correctly baizhang!

every closing moment of this deconstruction is like the opening of silence.

as the mind deconstructs itself, there is being. and only being is known by the great unknown.

this is basic magic. one must know oneself as the only known before the great unknown shall know oneself.

Like 2009

No cat jumping, no cradle on the edge. Leave those action verbs behind. Better to be dropping, seeing through, unknowing. At best, being.

For example, Dogen doesn't say, as to body-mind, vault into the void, but merely, drop.

The former is disassociation and the latter, surrender. The former is a mental state and the latter, being.

The former is doing and the latter, non-doing. Woo-woo or Wu Wei. Thorn in, thorns out.

Nothing. Everything. Nothing. Everything. Nothing. Everything. My so-called life.

Footnote form. Endnote emptiness. Sitting on the dock of the Tao. It takes a thought to see through a thought.

This seeing through is called the game of thorns. Sidebar being. Is the immaculate conception.

Ride the tiger like an ensō, sweetheart. Consciousness is all about the quantum uncertainty.

Sitting in the heart of the Tao, watching the tide roll in and roll away, this koan is pointing to the moon.

Three Footnotes to The Autobiography

One footnote. I think it's significant that Nisargadatta says the mystical is most practical and not vice versa.

Second footnote. I first saw her on the night of the Nixon resignation party as she floated across the room while Van Morrison is singing Jackie Wilson Said I'm in heaven when you smile over the stereo. Look, I am not responsible for fate.

Footnote three. Third outbreak after California 1991 and I'm advised to take the harder stuff. For the next fifteen years or so I'm a mountain hiking fool.

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.