The Self-Reflexive Manifestation

Words wear out. This is why metaphor. But metaphors also wear out. This is why paradox. Paradox never wears out—it was never here.

No name for Tao—not spiritual—not mystical—not even nonduality. The way without a name—call it source of self-awareness.

Still I need a myth to live by. I couldn’t eat without it—just know that myths transform into beliefs when my experientially known unknown is thought to be literally known.


Call it—The Self-Reflexive Manifestation. In consciousness, where all appears, self-awareness is the only constant narrative within my evolution—and its source is obviously myself.

The Self-Reflexive Manifestation is a grand unifying story satisfying all the conflicting plotlines of the micro, the macro, and beyond.

In this myth of The Self-Reflexive Manifestation, the unmanifest emptiness takes form and caveat emptor.


Do you really think the mountains and rivers are outside, Shan Shui? I now know without a doubt the universe is completely inside. And so are the mountains and rivers—appearances in consciousness.

It's the same old story—pure awareness being self-aware. Is the water falling?

Or is the waterfall a temporary closing? And the mist arising from the burning waters is its re-opening. Such is self-awareness.

Biggest Medicine

Eat my universe! Drink my ouroboric acid! The sun gives and the moon takes away.

If hydrogen is one and oxygen is the sign for infinity, then water is the great mirage—duality!

The first time I took LSD, there was a full blood moon over Half Moon Lake.

Even though this knowledge is omnipresent, in this particular way, the unknown knows itself.

Look, wave-particle duality depends on what the eye expects to see. So much depends on self-awareness.

Samsara is the baddest trip—believing life is survival of the fittest while knowing death is the biggest lie.

Sometime after the wood frogs but quite before the crickets, lightning bugs or fireflies!

As it is—is heaven or nirvana. As feared, project a world of worm and stone around a heart. Await there. Loving sees through all.

Omnipresent Reflection

Only when the universe has my undivided attention, am I self-aware. This is called Omnipresent Reflection. In my experience, one returns to one within the way of self-awareness. Otherwise one remains conceptual.

This one of which I speak is not conceptual, and so beyond all words, spontaneous, nondual. In other words, the only knowledge is the knowledge of the unknown knowing.

It took me twenty years of hiking mountains to understand that breaking through the wall is stopping thinking period. I started feeling trees are legs, the southern ridge my spine, and what is the summit but one peak and sky?

There is an easy trail on Mount Desert Island beginning with a masonic rock stairway, scrambling up desert bedrock slope, and ending in apocalypse of sea and sky. Every spring it came to be my first sign.

Deconstruction is easy; belief is hard. This is the little lower layer of all kinds of comedy. It's not as if I dream each night and not know the concepts well. What is God but pure awareness? What is the universe but self-awareness? Who am I but both?

An Epistle in Julian of Norwich

Look! Body-mind is the world. So know the weight of what one drops before you think it's only personal.

Compassion is the love one has for something one can’t change nor should—but the world can give ten thousand reasons why you will.

All of this is happening spontaneously without a so-called ‘my’ and so-called ‘doing’ anything at all. This is just a play-by-play with a colorful point of view.


It's really not that bad. What happens in the world stays in the world, excepting love. And love is all there is.

Love of daughter, granddaughter, son-in-law, brother, brother's husband, nieces and nephews and their families, friends, colleagues, cousins, and all memories of mother and father.

Also Jesus, Sister Mary Charles, The Beatles, Lao Tzu, Whitman, Melville, Frost, Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, don Miguel Ruiz, Eckhart, Adyashanti, Emily, Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and Zhuangzi.


Between Basho and Shakespeare is breathing in lines, full stop.

The mind divides because—self-awareness. Any kind of politics is getting stuck in two. Look! Love is the spinning of the wheel. Wisdom is the sand.

Either one follows one's bliss, or one is thinking one is not, or has not been, or should not be following his or her bliss—but unknowingly is.

An Epistle to an Angelic Sexton

What is ego but the world and what is loss of ego other than the world no longer needs me?

They say the world breaks up with you because you lose your heart to do the same.

And when she left, it took some time to acclimate myself to the timelessness she left me.


Don't get me wrong, for I still visit all the ones I venerate on earth. After all, it is the right place for love.

Look, disassociation isn't some enlightenment. My therapist, the first one, reconciled myself and Henry David Thoreau.

My second therapist is talking—breaking up with that which matters is not diffuse, unconcentrated, fuzzy,


but, and more importantly, it's the single-cell zoom focus of intent—that is the angel of self-awareness.

The world is first to say diffuse and fuzzy egolessness is the way but one doesn't call it mind-training for nothing.

Like the four directions being amplified as this universe, embodied, I am. But you are the answer.

six footnotes in four directions on one urn

footnote the first—see pure awareness being self-aware.
footnote one not two—being is the only knowledge
and this knowledge is in being the unknown.
three—paul is always taken out of context
by those who only read the roman lines
between his unconditional love.

fore! i've been a puppet,
a pauper, a pirate,
a poet, a pawn
and o shiva!
the three and two,
it's samurai puck, exclamation point—

imagine shakespeare meeting basho.
the light is seeing through the film
appearing in a consciousness
dear to you o six six six!
for the life of jesus is a mythic story of the experiential truth
written in a roman-empire-safe encryption—

to transmit this understanding—
consciousness is primary—
fundamental—
secretly—
but
the papal will be people.

An Epistle on a Grecian Urge and Urge and Urge

Consciousness is my name and self-awareness is my story. Love is what I'm called while on the open road. And my song is written in this form of a universe. If a child asks 'what is a tree,' does it take a life to answer?

Sometimes I wear a black hat, sometimes white. The man in the black hat only knows what he isn't. The man in the white hat only knows what he is. And the man without a hat is sleeping by the campfire.

What happens on the way to Damascus doesn't just stay on the way to Damascus. It is the way. The world is like Death Valley and love is like the horse that we ride in on.


A philosopher speaks his mind. A poet speaks in tongues. Personal deconstruction is a lot like jazz in one is mostly listening to the silent spaces it creates.

We gather in this midsummer night's dream on the edge of an ancient pond. The bow is bent and drawn. Drop body-mind. If emptiness is form, then thought is an empty gun.

Christ, consciousness is resurrected in supreme attention. Not some physical entity! May the thousand-petaled lotus be the crown of your creation. May you be embodied and nondual.

Epistle to Starbucks

"The state in which both this and that are no longer known as opposites is called the Heart of the Way.  And from the stillness of such a pivot point, all movement and opposition is seen in their immeasurable transformations." ~Z (tr-sr)

It's not as if the people have created everything that's wrong on earth but the very concept of 'right and wrong' creates the people and their world—always the little lower layer. In other words, thought is not a cloud but a tool of self-awareness. Judgment is the cloud and the whole point behind Last Judgment.

This is not an argument for some relativistic viewpoint that right and wrong are simply interchangeable, although war says they obviously are. There is no right and wrong. Zhuangzi speaks the lower layer as I am. Myth is too—beautiful and true—that self-awareness is.

Is a color really right or wrong? What if leaves turned green in autumn? North and South is all the doing of the sun and not location, location, location. Oh my dear old Jung, thought may be universally unconscious but love is consciousness oneself.

Myth, like mind like thought, is a tool of self-awareness. Believing myth, scientific or religious, is what is unbelievable. Like Mayan Clouds of Special Knowing! There's one knowing in the world—unconditional—not of the world—like the highest love or lowest self-esteem—beyond description—

Tao is nameless—satcitananda—self-awareness is the ultimate omnipresence of the absolute godhead. Even Darwin says it's so. Confucius says there's right and wrong but Chuang Tzu dreams of butterflies, wood frogs, screech owl! I am or who am I? Self-awareness is naturally reflexive.

commentary to footnotes of 2nd epistle to myself

so call it tao

not some existential athesistic philosophic western scientific deep materialist religion founded on some theory of another

call the process self-inquiry or love

self-awareness appears to appear in every resurrection

and the universe appears before all thought but after love

so love the one you’re with apparently

Footnotes to Myself

It's like watching the detectives. Ooh they're so Buddhist. Mysticism is non-denominational. No name for Tao.

The new name for creed is theory. Meet the new boss. "You keep all your money in a big brown bag inside a zoo. What a thing to do!"

Look at it this way. Nothing always comes to something. Dead Man’s Curve is out on Highway Sixty-one too.

The great unknown supernatural pure awareness is being known in natural evolutionary self-awareness and et cetera.

My god, materialism is the first one to declare force majeure. Another wave is landing on the seashore

after talking to the undertow. All I think are my projections. This is why compassion, love.