Satori in Franconia Notch

The mind is like murk in the lake of being. In crystal mountain water, the ground is all there is.

There’s a deep basin in the Pemi of the White Mountains that forms a pool called The Pool.

It’s forty feet deep and you can see the bottom as clear as the earth around it.

Cold Mountain writes: "this is such a still restful place; the sun is slant and shadows of trees

grow enhanced; I can see the bottom ground of mind—a lotus is emerging from the sediment."

At seven I saw it in the state park called The Flume. Like looking through the eye of nature!

On that day, I first became, in the language of New England transcendentalism, a transparent eyeball.

A 13th century Christian mystic said, “the eye with which I see god is the same with which god sees me.

My eye and god’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.”

But look silence says it best.

Code Name Trinity

There is no right or wrong including right or wrong and so on. There is no binary system in this holy trinity. Non-duality is not two. Three is not two too. Self-awareness is the power of three.

There’s the self. Then there’s the mirror. Let’s call it duality. Or body-mind. This royal dreamstate, these images on cave walls, this silver screen, this war and peace, this gita.

So there’s the self and there’s the mirror. Love is the hand that holds the mirror. Meet the Beatles, meet the self. Self-awareness, meet the universe. Cherry blossoms meet Grand Canyon.

The Greatest Commandment

You are, you know you are - this is the great Lord, the sudden, explosive effulgence. Surrender to it, and you will know all. ~Nisargadatta

I am is the lord thy god. Thou shalt have no other gods before this immaculate conception.

Since i-am is the primary concept, all other concepts are secondary gods at best.

Since i-am is the primary concept, no word, image, nor object can describe it. Thus, thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

Since i-am is the primary concept, do not mistake it for the secondary concept of personal ego. Thus thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

I-am is witnessed only in interior silence. Thus remember this silence and keep it holy.

The preceding basically refers to what Jesus called the first and great commandment.

I-am is One, universal being, thou shalt love thy Lord, thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

Power Trio Ballad Sutra

I’m old enough to remember when air was free. I’m young enough to know belief is always paid in being.

“As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small, by giving you no time instead of it all.”

The empire needs you to believe. Religion is old-time politics. Politics is the new religion sold to materialists.

Mindfulness is the new word for talking to myself. Amfulness is my imaginary word for being myself.

I’m feeling like a power ballad by some famous power trio now. The first word is an art. Its repetition is a tragedy.

But third time is a powerful charm. Stairway to Heaven. Sunshine Of Your Love. Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate.

Solar Being

Solar winter passed this week. Here comes the sun. Sunlight is the heart of consciousness. Can you feel it? Knowledge absolutely burns.

All facts are based on some conspiracy. Being is the knowledge of self-awareness. Emotion is the white hot knowledge of being filtered by cold thought.

On one side, there’s creation. On the other hand, there’s genocide. In-between is desperation. Thought makes judgment. Paradox breaks thought. Love wakes paradox. Thought fakes love.

Self-awareness is the force. The force is consciousness. Consciousness is pure feeling. Experience is this before sentience. Not a sentient being, I am being. In other words, welcome to solar spring.

footnotes

1. as for heaven and earth, black holes are like heaven and the sun is earth.

2. the world is occluded sun measured by the depths of night. this is why our ancestors keep the stars alive!

2a. the scientific method at its best is astronomy.

2b. the scientific method at its worst is string theory.

2c. astronomy is the highest deconstruction of the old boss. theoretical science is the new boss.

3. there is no genesis. there are no revelations.

3a. no old. no new.

3b. "But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."

3c. love and paradox are two sides of one coin. like yang and yin.

3d. thus all belief is one-sided.

4. sentience is the body. cognition is the mind. memory and recognition is early fractal consciousness. drop body-mind.

4a. self and self-awareness is the great duality behind nonduality.

4b. self-awareness is the Self.

Calvin Does Candlemas

February feels too much like October but it appears to be midwinter. I shoveled 18 inches of thought today. I think I might have struck bare ground or conscious pavement.

I was saying to my neighbor anything but self-awareness is the snow. Some days I’m the glass, some days I’m the mercury, Calvin replied.

Spontaneity is slow motion. Transformation is sudden. I like to guess at time. So I’ve divided my picture window into degrees of altitude and azimuth.

It's just like a vision I once had while on a vision quest at Grand Canyon. Actually the vision is the sun is always rising. It’s five o’clock somewhere, he said.

Life is making use of uselessness. Love is self-awareness. Nothing is malfunctioning. Calvin is dedicating this Candlemas to Longchenpa, Zhuangzi, Traherne, and Hafiz.

Almost Saint Brigid's Day

Act One

Thoughts will run away if love is not the hand that holds the tool.

Hermits know that love is the hand of being before being hermits.

On the other hand, forced solitude drives most people crazy, as is being witnessed these days.

Look, I know what forced solitude feels like. More than one girl has broken up with me.

Healing takes time though. Think back on times of love and know that love is you. Simply being.

Let me try another translation. When someone falls in love, the love they fall in– is oneself.

Love does not take two.

Act Two

Long ago I did not love myself. Materialism calls this narcissism. I call it materialism.

There is a turning in this dreaming as being suddenly is seeing through the fog of dreaming.

For being is the heart of self-awareness. And self-awareness is the heart of evolution.

And I am not my thoughts as I am not this pen writing love loves love.

That is the essence of sufi, bhakti, and the desert fathers. And mothers.

In the meantime, try reading some Hafiz, Mirabai, or Anthony and Amma.

Friends, get out of your head and let your thoughts rest in peace within you.

Electric Nonduality

Feeling my potentiality tonight. True knowledge is energetic. Intuition is a feeling. That I am is at first a thought but then it catches being.

For being is the manifestation of potentiality like Electric Ladyland by The Experience. Like the lightning of love in the middle of a dark belief.

Big science has it all wrong. A black hole is light. Self-awareness is a feature of absolute awareness and not some great duality.

Notes on Sanai, Attar, and Rumi

looked for a translation of manṭiq-uṭ-tayr (conference of birds) by attar of nishapur. dick davis has a rhymed version. sholeh wolpe has the newest contemporary version. but then i discovered c.s. nott, gurdjieffian who did one in the 50s. had to go with that one obvs.

rumi is said to have said that "attar has roamed through the seven cities of love while we have barely turned down the first street"

rumi also said "attar is the soul and sanai its two eyes, i came after sanai and attar." as to sanai, his hadiqat al haqiqa forms a triumverate of masnavi/mathnawa (spiritual couplets) with attar and rumi

basically there's one english translation of hadiqat al haqiqa done by stephenson long ago but recently modernized by kieron moore which looks promising.

as to rumi's masnavi, there's the old prose version of stephenson and the newer rhymed version by jawid mojaddedi. will probably get both, but that's a six volume project (each) for some other day.

this has been a presentation of talking translations. had to work that out in tweets for myself. i've been researching various sufi works and their translations and needed to clarify some things about sanai, attar and rumi. and that's that.

note Mathnawi (Arabic) or masnavi (Persian) is a kind of poem written in rhyming couplets, or more specifically "a poem based on independent, internally rhyming lines". Most mathnawī poems follow a meter of eleven, or occasionally ten, syllables, but had no limit in their length.

note from this quick research, i consider these masnavis to be the sufi equivalent of sutra or tantra, and sanai, attar, and rumi to be their highest practioners.

divine imagination naturally

Mind is the mirror of self-awareness. Love is the hand that holds the mirror. Being is the hand of love and the heart of self-awareness.

If it doesn’t sound like a paradox in process, it’s probably the empire speaking.

Sometimes I write. Sometimes I’m written.

Either way, it’s all writing.

Self-awareness is nothing if not divine imagination.

Awareness is divine imagination naturally.

It’s said that writing is a state of divine imagination.

Coincidence is where two paradoxes cross in any universe.

The ninth line is often something fearless arising from the great unknown.

In natural perfection, all manner of things shall be well.