This Nondual Mythology

this nondual mythology utilizes abstract nouns, 

instead of names, 

to point to inner states of being, 

rather than external forms, 

be they physical or otherwise conceptual, 

in order to give emphasis to the concrete moon it is, 

and to which it points, 

and not the notional finger by which it points.

instead of god the father,

there’s Awareness,

that unknown unknowable potentiating pure subjective,

and source of all.

it’s like the empty mirror of oneself,

crystal pure,

without a speck of dust upon it ever.

the only language that it speaks is silence.

instead of god the holy spirit,

there’s Intent,

that unknown Awareness

intending to know 

its unknowable existence.

instead of god the son,

there’s Consciousness,

as if Intent becomes a life within itself,

reflection of Awareness,

an evolutionary being that forgets itself

in what it comes to call material,

as its memory in its great objectifying tool of mind remembers:

first, it’s not material nor conceptual,

neither body nor a person,

but being only,

pure ‘i am’
full stop;

and second, that this being is existent

only in Intent of absolute Awareness

knowing self-awareness;

and then third, there never is a first or second or this third

but only I Am That,

unborn, undying,

non-transformative
unbound—

no myth, no moon, no noun.

One Sees

As one sees it’s all a dream,

there’s nothing left to dream;

what’s a sunrise to the sun?

The mind desires things

to fill its bottomless abyss

but being is the space

of everything and nothing.

Living in the mind

is always looking for

another mind to live in,

born to always run.

But living in the heart

is dying to the thought

that one was ever born—

I’d never recommend

that to a single person.

The First Monday in September

The world is always past 

appearing in the present—

it’s as if we stop 

a river with our names. 

It’s Labor Day and leaves 

already begin to turn 

in trees with lesser makeup. 

Over at Half Moon Lake, 

say forty-seven years ago, 

the summer of our love 

is pulled in from the water 

left to sit upon 

the shore and slowly dry. 

The school of pointless knowledge 

waited for our fall. 

But look! A butterfly 

is playing like a crazy 

leaf right now. Oh, time 

is nothing of the essence 

but an emptiness 

divided by imagi-

nation. When this body 

dies, its universe 

of space and time goes with it.

But. Not. I.

god story

my headless tale: 

i'm like deep sleep, 

that nothingness 

which isn’t even nothing, 

a pure subjective stateless state 

without an object to be known 

i’m absolutely pure awareness 

that unknowably unknown—

and out of nowhere is this

great spontaneous intent

to know i am, to know
i am that i unknown.

there is no madeleine of a cause,

no almond to begin some cracking of a nut,

no lemon tree so pretty to invoke this avocation,

nor a bowl of cherries to banana some absurdist apricot of plot.

there’s just this casablanca of the absolute

and its original intent

to know itself,

myself,

i.

what follows is a universal
consciousness of such 
complete imagination

conjuring the where,
when, what and who—

interspatial and

omnichronous,

transmanifesting and

panincarnational,

powered by a shot
of total love.

nuclear magicians
make an object out of nothing—

the rockbound salt of earth appears.

a genesis of wizards
sparks an evolutionary
process out of timelessness—

the central nervous system amplifies itself.

psychedelic sorcerers
convince the sharpest objects
to appropriate the subject—

people cut themselves to pieces.

knowing shamans show the mending way—

i am

this ‘i am’

that is absolutely i—

nothing but the known unknown,
nothing but pure natural awareness now...

Moptop Meditation

I close my eyes and feel an energy 

incommensurate with last night’s pizza 

or this morning’s English muffin. 

It’s like nineteen sixty-four is listening 

to real top forty radio and number one 

and two and three are Beatles tunes,

‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’

‘She Loves You,’ ‘Please Please Me,’

and nothing that one knew before

consisted of such power and such glory

or such nuclear explosion

like those mushroom clouds in photographs

explaining why we practice duck and cover

in event of catastrophic war

but this is rock and roll,

this Shiva Shakti consciousness.

One knows no radio can generate

that burst of pure uncensurable radiance

but yes it’s all incoming waves instead.

They saturate the space around me

and this little lime-green plastic box

is just receiving them and amplifying

all-encompassing collective bliss itself:

“it's such a feeling that my love

I can't hide, I can't hide, I can't hide.”

Call it spirit, being, presence,

Krishna, Christ, this universal love

that makes the body and receives the song

it’s always singing you yourself are love,

"yeah, yeah, yeah!"

The River, a Road, and I

Every day I walk the road along the river, 

I want to walk the road along the river every day. 

Twenty years I’ve lived along this spacious river, 

in a less than thousand dollar rental 

in the middle of half-million dollar properties 

amid this precious priceless panorama.

Walking on this road I see a luminous mile of river,

and a mile of river is like ten thousand miles of heaven.

Ten thousand miles of heaven is something

no one ever knows and I see it every day.

What hand inserted me within this jeweled setting?

Across the river is an eastern white pine wilderness,

and in my heart is similar wilderness. Spirit talks to spirit.

There’s not a useless word within that conversation.

Here’s a road and there’s the river, and I’m the source of both,

although I’m never either. Not two, we say. Not two.

An Emotional Poem

Never fight a riptide;

heedfully observe it.

Then swim across and away,

returning to the ground.

Being isn’t rocket science.

Filtered by assorted lenses

of conditioned perpetuating

always transforming thought,

a spectrum of emotions

irradiates like a neon sign—

the heartbreak hotel.

Hence emotions are the light

of being, disturbed.

Accordingly emotions are existent

and undeniable.

Thus it’s just the thoughts

before emotions which are false.

In conceptual conceit,

it could be said

the absolute unknowable subjective

spontaneously intends

to know it is—

and this is that.

Don’t think about it.

This unfiltered energetic

raw existence is that knowing

and the only knowledge there is,

therapeutic, loving, wise or likewise.

This pure intensity 

'i am' is ground—

be

S6 — Calvin on an Island

Island people have a saying: “Nowhere is an island.” Visitors are puzzled when they hear this spoken. After all, they’ve spent much time and money just to reach this paradise in the middle of an ocean.

Calvin was such a one. He went without for fifty weeks just to have his two upon that isle. So when he breathlessly disembarked only to be greeted by an islander conveying this saying, he strongly begged to differ.

The islander just smiled and said, “It makes no difference,” and danced lightly off to greet another. A recent transplant to the island seeing Calvin’s being at variance stopped to offer a more comprehensive reception: “No matter how you slice it, there never is division.”

S5 — Isle of Eyes: A Myth of the Scientific

In the eye of a hurricane, there’s an eye of a needle. In the eye of a needle, there’s an eye of an eye. The island people call this eye a third eye and take their own eyes out whenever it goes seeing. For what it sees is visible to no one.

There was a visitor who called himself an optical magician, prescribing telescopes to those he diagnosed as near-sighted, and microscopes to those he saw as far-sighted. But the island folk, as far as he could see, were neither.

He plucked his own eyes out in a pique of speculation but it left him only sightless. The island people divined no notion why he’d make a scene like that. And so they led him in a starry-eyed procession to a long reflective beach and cast him out to sea.

S4 — Breaking Up Is Hard Nondoing Too

It was early in the process of discovery

I knew the two of us would lose each other.

Paradox is not unknown in love.

At first our paths continued, one upon the other,

but soon we found ourselves in the yellow wood.

It didn’t happen overnight and all our efforts

to maintain separating ways together met

with personal effects like alcohol on my behalf

and a drier kind of melancholy in yours.

You finally had the nerve to call it quits

but even that was met with one more year of trying.

It’s over now; surrendering to that which is

can really be a bitch. But that’s the price.

You said that day you liked the middle class

and I was always making light of it.

That’s forever been the case with me.

It’s just my form of self-assessment.

Even though I’m living now without

the greater luxuries I once afforded,

I’m not exactly third-world poor—

thank my daughter and her Major.

This is the present empire after all.

So I know these fears about security,

but I’ve seen you lately follow them

and then convince yourself you hadn’t.

That’s the way of people though, divided.

The path I’ve taken teaches seeing this,

to recognize such separation for what it is,

to know the false as false. That leaves pure being,

not being this or that. And being tells one all that is—

and That which absolutely isn’t takes one back.

Song-stream 3 — Incident on Sky Mountain

There’s a mountain lofty enough

it takes two days to make the peak.

It rises in the heart of a desert

where nomads pray to any passing mirage.

They’re satisfied to dine on scorpions

while downing barrel cactus juice.

They hallucinate of cubicles

floating in a glass of cabbages and ginger

looking at the rain streak the skylight

hoping they’ve secured the windows

in their newly-leased Honda Civics.

One of them flies out the door to check

but strikes the mountain there instead.

Soon she’s in a globe of berries.

The air is fragrant with exacting freshness.

She sees above the ripples of heat;

there’s not an office in her eye.

Half-way up she finds a halfway house.

It’s an edifice she’s yet to dream.

She’s genially greeted at the door

and welcomed with the latest reality

of living rooms and large flat screens

with twenty-four hour interruptions.

Exhausted with the climb, she wants to stay.

Twenty years later, she’s out to catch a breather

and meets a mad man coming down the mountain.

Maybe it’s a mad woman. He raves or she raves,

“You’ve stopped believing in a personal god,

but you’re still believing in the personal!”

and then turns to return to the sky.

Song-stream 2 — Compassionist Manifesto

Mind apparently divides 

that nonduality 

and wonders why its world is one 

of separation, violence, want, and war.

Even when this unity appears

in shapes love takes—

like justice, hope, equality—

the mind will take control

with judgment and conviction

and an execution of its end

justifying any of its means.

And so it goes…

There’s no arguing

the utmost advocates of civil rights

within the infamous twentieth century:

Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Nonviolence was their word,

but more importantly the sacrifice of ego

—this identity with mind—

to universal consciousness;

call it Krishna, call it Christ.

You know it when you feel it,

some holistic intuition

that division is completely inauthentic,

that existence is lovingly impersonal,

that love is unconditional

and the personal is conditioned by division

and that’s the way it is.

And even this spontaneous understanding

is usurped by mind

and formed into religion

and fashioned into dogma, rules, belief

and fought in endless wars where

holy ends are justified

by all apocalyptic means.

Stop! There is no end—

there’s only means,

there’s always only here and now

and every action is reflection

of the clarity within.

Our only call is clear our self—

an empty sky
breezes through and does the rest.

Song-stream 1 — Braids of Glass

Consciousness is the sea

and eyes are like the rays of light

looking deep into itself.

Nothing in this universe is like

this universe of yours—

even this blade of grass is different

than this blade of grass you grasp;

only the name remains the same.

Beneath the summer sky, some huckleberry boy is

gliding high above his freshly-cut idyllic turf

as sonic booms of nineteen-fifties’ fear are coloring

his clarity with contrails of his elder’s ghastly white beliefs.

Nothing that we know is ever knowable

but only viruses received from dreams

infected with ancestral viruses.

The mind divides

this universal consciousness to pieces

claiming only one particular to be itself.

Sword-play of war is what must happen next—

until one finally sees that one is absolutely not

this sharp reflection in the mirror.

It’s as if that pure awareness subjectivity of crystalline glass

intends to know itself, and within that big intent, the whole intent

objectifies itself in galaxies of this molecular imagination

evolving in time and space by calling keenly to itself to see—

it always is and is

never not the mirror.

Now knows itself and a blade of grass

isn’t really a blade of grass—

a blade of grass is only

a blade of grass.