My Myth of Nonduality

If mountains are god the father and the sea is god the mother, then of course I’m god the child realizing earth is one.

In this particular myth, earth is inside what I am and the manifested universe is unmanifested, absolute.

And there's a stand of white birch trees growing where eastern white pines stood before the fire.

Thought is a tool of being. Thinking you're the tool in this equation requires deconstruction. Every picture of

a rose tells its story of a thorn. For in every antique mirror, thought is like the mercury and being is like glass.

In a true desert, there's breathtaking silence. Not merely of sound, but of silence. Call that self-awareness.

Ode

Here Comes The Sun King, The God Lugh, John Barleycorn, O Juliet and They Must Die. For It Is Lammas Eve, Looking to Lughnasadh, Beginning of The Harvest, August, A Certain Slant Of Light

O Psychological Thought is responsible for every War and every Murder and all Unspeakable Acts. If you choose a side, any side, this is what you ultimately choose. Thank god there's choiceless awareness

love is not a choice. Love is what there is before a choice. Always choose love. Render unto August the objects belonging to August but render to myself their life force. At last

a field of purple loosestrife, invasive weed, like deconstructive thoughts from Asia—August—late dawns, early sunsets—the apparent lessening of light—but these days taste concentrated as if boiled to an essence—

if July is the month of lightning bugs, August is the month of dragonflies—they don't just shine their light. They breathe fire! August 2007—I am climbing Yamadera—

the rest of my group is somewhere else around this temple being mountain—an ancient Chinese woman is translating the cicadas for me—ever since the First of August means No Crickets Yet.

Haiku Haiku Haiku

Speaking your mind is plagiarism. Speak love instead. In the world, silence is not a right. This love is silence speaking. Truest outlaw.

Now is the season of the butterfly. Its story is the nectar of the gods. Transformation is the nature of the beast.

Even science says that self-awareness is the only great intention and the fact of death is pointless and absurd.

But philosophy only thinks about it. Experiential being without thinking knows. Haiku haiku haiku.

The sun sets earlier tonight but I know it's only this and that. Space has no seasons. Contemplation is knowing a cigarette boat is

temporary. Open windows on a summer evening like the sea seen from an easternmost peak.

Evening breeze and leaves are dancing like translucent jade ninjas. Early July night. Not a sound in the valley. Not even a cricket.

An Epistle to the Person

The human body-mind is this wondrous instrument in and of consciousness developed in the process of evolutionary self-awareness.

But because of its metamorphic novelty, the body-mind misidentifies with itself, as a person, in a deficient sense of self-awareness,

and in effect usurps the absolute noumenon, which is a separate and most unnatural state, to say the least.

The resultant human condition of suffering is the natural balancing of forces in this process of self-awareness,

although to the mistaken identity of the person, it appears to be some kind of political imbalance within infinitesimal divisions,

and so it goes on and on. But “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” because consciousness.

2008 No Other Side

No division, no separation, no politics—there’s just purple loosestrife. If space is a metaphor for consciousness, then time is the darkest matter

of all anti-matter. A snake doesn't look like an illusion. A person lost at sea doesn't feel like self-awareness.

Li Po didn't drown in some watery reflection of the moon. He sees he is the moon and jumps right in! Look, being is not a social media—

it's more like an Emily Dickinson poem. Ten years ago, a coyote crossed the road to kill me. Somehow I still got to Santa Fe.

Georgia O'Keeffe. Ansel Adams. The Church of Saint Francis at Rancho de Taos 1929. The desert is form. Form is the desert.

At latest count, 140 bighorn sheep inhabit the alpine regions of Pikes Peak. By the time I got to Woodstock, who am I?

An Epistle to Nothing but Water

A person is like a fish out of water but call it brainwashing instead—there’s nothing but water in this divine analogy.

They call it selling water by the river but it’s really selling water in the river.

It takes a certain kind of sick infected suffering imagination to think that any phenomenon, no matter how personal it may appear to be, is not in consciousness.

Consciousness is the only manifestation of the unmanifest noumenon. The material world is as immaterial in consciousness as a dream is in mind—call it emptiness, impermanence, transformation, even vanity, but it’s not a real world.

Manifest consciousness is the unmanifest Absolute knowing it is the unmanifest Absolute. The dream state is how consciousness facilitates this knowing within consciousness. Call this evolutionary story the specter of self-awareness.

This fluid specter of self-awareness is called divine imagination when imagination is not sick infected suffering. Whether a butterfly or a Taoist wandering at ease, such a fish knows it’s in the wholly holey holy water.

Festival Manifestation

This weekend marks the height of New England summer heat—the sun is dropping body-mind. 

Everything appears in consciousness and it's abundantly apparent if one doesn't think about it.

Body-mind is like the dream machine of divine imagination getting lost within the nuts and bolts of its survival—but it's just my imagination running away with me. 

Next week the summer starts to fall. Nagarjuna's emptiness is Han Shan's transformation. Nothing not cold can stay.

Looking inside is called leaving the world. Dropping body-mind is called experiencing oneself.

Being is called self-awareness. This is called That.

Belief is about a single point of view but I contain multitudes!

Let my summers go; manifest one's current understanding.

Being is non-doing. Non-doing doesn't mean no choice. Choicelessness is choosing love.

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 22

In this seam of cliffs 

there’s enough of a crystalline breeze.

No fan needs rousing.

Cool air arises on its own.

A bright moon is shining.

White clouds are encircling.

He is sitting alone—

one ancient man.

304-red pine; 308-henricks; 145-tanahashi

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 21

I abide beneath Cold Cliff 

marveling at its manifest shelter. 

I carry a basket and gather greens and roots

using it to pluck some fruit as well.

Returning, I spread out a simple mat and eat

while chewing on some purple immortals.

I rinse my bowl in a clear pool.

I boil what’s remaining into a soup.

Sitting in sunshine, wrapped in a cloak,

I scan unhurriedly poems of the ancients.

290-red pine; 293-henricks; 255-tanahashi; 295-rouzer

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 20

Nowadays people search in the clouds for a path—

but the way of clouds is obscure and lacks a sign.

The mountains are high and the passes steep.

The streams are wide with little daylight.

Green mountains rise before and after.

White clouds stretch west and east.

But if one is truly looking for the way of clouds,

it’s here in the space of open sky.

255-red pine; 256-henricks; 69-watson; 244-tanahashi