7 x 8 x Y

Bodies are only looking to survive. Politics is the war of which body gets what. War is politics gone huge. Love is patient. Love is kind. Writing as a lapsed Roman Catholic who entertained the priesthood until 1968 happened, love is what the average Christian cannot believe. There's the rub. Or a mystic is one who can't believe. Six of one. A baker's dozen of the other. To let samsara be samsara is the gateless gate, "something there is that doesn't love a wall." Poetry is the art of letting love talk. It took me 50 years to write that sentence.

When love believes, actually attaches to a thought, all hell breaks loose. This is called e-motion. But love is not virtual. Love is furthur. Love is unbelievable! Love is basically what I'm willing to physically die for. Without the question of belief, that would be everyone I love. And yes. Love is always at first sight. (I sweat. Therefore I am.) Zhuangzi 2 is exactly this ad infinitum. Love is the genius of the early Christian message. But belief is empire. Love is Buddhism without the Buddha. Love is.

I’m at the point where watching fireworks on TV is the way I watch fireworks. But I’ve got the windows open and there's no western wind. I should hear the ones over Salisbury Beach in fifteen minutes. (I would bet money but not my life that I heard the fireworks in Boston a few years ago. Not the Pops though.) The 1812 cometh. Discernment minus judgment is love. My daughter taught me this. Finally. I come for the overture. Ah Tchaikovsky! He was an inspiration to me 45 years ago. Should revisit.

I do believe I saw the Pops once. With Randy Newman and Ry Cooder. Maybe the Pops weren't there. It was definitely Symphony Hall though. I saw Randy Newman at Paul's Mall. With Jim Croce. This is politically incorrect. But from my experience, it's mostly parents who really get unconditional love. But my experience is admittedly quite limited. I mean I only have the number one daughter. And a number one granddaughter by the way. God I can't begin to tell you how or why I am so blessed! Yesterday I saw a picture of me forty years ago and a granddaughtervideo.

I would be dead if not for love! Her mother and I separated. Twelve years later we divorced. Love does not mean compatibility. Belief is conflict Belief minus love is war! The problem with all mathematics is depending on observer and observed never changing places. Only getting old is when I saw the patriarchy as it is. I am a white male, yes in an empirical way, but I’m no longer in their demographics. I find a certain freedom in this forest stage. Because I’m white and male of course! But Bodhisattvas are pansexual.

I remember learning the meaning of sexy—from how I remember it, my mother disapproved but my father said it's natural but unwise! I've said enough tonight for any id. So simple. Love is love. The story is a love story unless believing something else. Like Santa Claus. Love is all there is. Thinking otherwise will be the death of me. Wait! Belief minus love is belief. Don't overthink it. Deconstruction ends in being. Not believing something darker. Science is the process. Not the story!  The basic ignorance of scientific materialism is the one of really believing theory.

Look religion is not about belief but belief is religion. Belief minus religion is love. Ananda, what is jnana minus bhakti? Nothing? As you were. Some find it difficult to disbelieve. Even though it's as easy as not thinking. From my point of view. It's not about eliminating thought. Unfortunately, that way is mostly madness. It's all about seeing through each thought. Simply seeing each belief is made from thought. Left or right depends on where you take your stand, yellow hair. I was brought up believing love-talking is not ambitious enough. Love!

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 5

I’ve lived for untold autumns here on Cold Mountain

alone and carefree, uttering songs to myself.

My makeshift door doesn’t shut yet there’s calm and quiet.

A spring is murmuring fresh ambrosia in its natural flow.

Within my chamber of rock, an earthen cauldron boils

pine pollen potions, cypress elixirs, and aromatic herbal brews.

When I’m feeling hungry, I merely snack on perennial weeds.

My point of view is so agreeable, I rest on precarious stone.

105-tanahashi; 193-red pine; 194-rouzer; 193-henricks; 21-snyder

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 4

Supremely independent in the clouds,

this mountain needs no landowner.

In descending to the pass, I use a walking stick.

Ascending to the peak, I climb the vines.

In the valley, the trees are evergreen.

In the gorge, the rocks are variously colored.

Although I’m cut off from companions,

when spring arrives, the birds sing dawn dawn.

219-red pine; 105-tanahashi; 64-henricks

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 3

Breathtaking and mind-boggling, the waters of the Yellow River,

on and on without end, its way is coursing eastward—

drifting drifting slowly, obscure and never clearing,

slipping by body after body, whose lives appear to pass instead.

But if you wish to ride majestic white clouds,

how can one develop wings?

While your hair is still jet-black, begin—

active or at rest, drop away completely.

from translations: 67-red pine; 100-tanahashi; 64-henricks

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 2

Wang, the Literary Master,

laughs at my unsophisticated poetry—

I know nothing of the 'wasp's waist'

and never incorporate a 'crane's bill'

and as for metric feet, I’m completely ignorant,

and my words are nothing special, and misused.

But I’m laughing at the poetry he writes—

a sightless man creating handiworks about the sun.

from translations: 283-red pine; 28-watson; 95-tanahashi; 286-henricks

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 1

Yesterday I saw these trees by the riverbank

injured and damaged so—unbelievable!

Only two or three were still left standing

scarred by ten thousand axe-blade wounds.

Their ragged leaves had been stripped by frost.

Countless swells had withered their festering roots.

And this is what it’s like to be born—

why would anyone blame eternity?

from translations: 198-red pine; 65-watson; 90-tanahashi; 191-henricks

Epistle to the Americans

Everyone in the world enjoys a paradigm. If it isn't lucid dreaming, it's believing someone else's. Maybe one is waiting for some nirvikalpa Sunday samadhi. Exactly that is someone else's dreaming. And most of you accept the scientific explanation that the mind will know the great unknown in time.

You cannot petition the lord with science! You cannot know the great unknown with mind. One can only be it, and in being, know it. The one that worships at the ordinary, but secretly believes the specialist, is just another religious crusader.

You will know them by the PhD they follow. Physician, know appearances in consciousness. Lucid dreaming is another name for embodiment. Not to drop a name on you.

The only respect an honest teacher expects from an earnest student is disbelief. It's the student's job to build an honest myth. S/he not fully manufacturing a meta-paradigm is busy as a parasite upon another body-mind.

There's nothing right nor wrong with rhyming. It happens. The interpretation of a happening is always after the fact and never without some bias from the interpretation of previous happenings.

Pure awareness being self-aware is the essence of my myth and I interpret every happening as such. Myth is how I stand. I'll sit when I'm dead. Love without myth is to be continued. Myth without love—see 20th century scientific materialism.

My Particular Myth—Epistle to One and All

Love says: 'I am everything'. Wisdom says: 'I am nothing' Between the two my life flows.

In and for my own understanding—there are two lines of spiritual inquiry establishing themselves along the lines of Indian jnana and bhakti, which I prefer to call personal deconstruction and mystic insight, but a well-known quote from Nisargadatta simply names them wisdom and love.

As to personal deconstruction, social conditioning is challenged on every conceivable front including that of the modern religion of scientific materialism.

Deconstruction without mystic insight leads to rational nihilistic perceptions with a futile search for scientific materialist confirmation.

Science by itself is a method of inquiry. But materialism is an unproven faith in the fundamental nature of material existence, a religious belief propagating theories as dogma without investigating the obvious experiential fact that this material is an appearance in consciousness.

For my own mythic arrangement—the beauty of Arthur M. Young's reflexive universe is the placement of this paradigm of material manifestation within its meta-paradigm of being—utilizing the scientific method to discover that the universe is an evolutionary process of self-awareness.

As to mystic insight, consciousness or being, known in the world as unconditional love, is embraced as primary or fundamental or all.

Mystic insight without a deconstructive approach leads to idealistic new age reverie without a mythic framework. See Apollo and Dionysus.

Pseudo-eastern trappings are just as much new age as Timothy Leary is dead—that's a lot of love to be without a ground to stand on. And there's nothing immanently wrong with this. It's being lost in the western material world looking for some overhanging myth to hang a head on.

Similarly the hopeful crowd announcing our collective consciousness is now preparing for a better day in some not distant newborn age is new age through and through, forgetting one’s not of the world, as well as last lines from every film in Chinatown—forget it friend, it’s samsara.

Beyond, one is being the unknown.

The way as I see it—the body-mind and its world is not to be renounced, but to be embodied as the supernode of my universal soft machine of self-awareness, and embraced for the revelatory dreamwork that it is.

This doesn’t imply involving oneself in the affairs of the world. In fact, as Ramana Maharshi says—non-resistance is the highest way. And the Diamond Sutra says the bodhisattva frees by knowing there’s no bondage.

There is no world other than my projection. When this simple fact is seen—there’s no one but myself—there may be fire on the movie screen but the world isn’t really burning—and no reason to extinguish artificial flames—embody the universal—being only is the way of self-awareness.

Self-awareness is a private showing.

In the west, self-effacement is somewhat easy, especially for one with an undeveloped ego. but world-effacement? How dare one?

Ego is not an individual construct. Ego IS the world and my conditioned place within it, of it.

Some find themselves in a dissociative state having lost the egoic sense of self while holding on to the egoic sense of the world—like the separation anxiety of a child who needs to hold on to a parent for dear life because the sense of self is undeveloped.

It’s not collective. It's not preparing for some future heaven. It's even not about my helping others although this love is in the world and dreaming does go on and some samsara tells nirvana do what your samsara says.

The false religious and progressive invention that the spiritual or humane height of achievement is an egolessness displayed in one’s social consciousness—is one of the most devious protectors of worldly egoic samsara—and the sly guarantor of no awakening from its sleep.

This isn’t saying the liberal view is wrong and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps in a free market world is right. Both are neither. Love is not of the world—and one’s not a body surviving in the world. Consciousness is fundamental. Just imagine the inference of that truth for self-awareness.

Of course there’s such a power as manifesting—look out my window—it’s already happening—great intent is always manifesting my projection—urging the self to self-awareness—the only question for one embodying the universe is—how do I collaborate—and the answer is—divine imagination.

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.

original

1.
In and for my own understanding—there are two lines of spiritual inquiry establishing themselves along the lines of Indian jnana and bhakti, which I prefer to call personal deconstruction and mystic insight, but a well-known quote from Nisargadatta simply names them wisdom and love.

Deconstruction without mystic insight leads to rational nihilistic perceptions with a futile search for scientific materialist confirmation, while mystic insight without a deconstructive approach leads to idealistic new age reverie without a mythic framework. See Apollo and Dionysus.

In other words, in my particular mythic arrangement, social conditioning is challenged on every conceivable front including that of the modern religion of scientific materialism, while consciousness or being, known in the world as unconditional love, is embraced as primary or fundamental or all.

2.
Science by itself is a method of inquiry. But materialism is an unproven faith in the fundamental nature of material existence, a religious belief propagating theories as dogma without investigating the obvious experiential fact that this material is an appearance in consciousness.

For my own mythic arrangement—the beauty of Arthur M. Young's reflexive universe is the placement of this paradigm of material manifestation within its meta-paradigm of being—utilizing the scientific method to discover that the universe is an evolutionary process of self-awareness.

3.
Pseudo-eastern trappings are just as much new age as Timothy Leary is dead—that's a lot of love to be without a ground to stand on And there's nothing immanently wrong with this. It's being lost in the western material world looking for some overhanging myth to hang a head on.

Similarly the hopeful crowd announcing our collective consciousness is now preparing for a better day in some not distant newborn age is new age through and through, forgetting one’s not of the world, as well as last lines from every film in Chinatown—forget it friend, it’s samsara.

One is being the unknown. It’s not collective. It's not preparing for some future heaven. It's even not about my helping others although this love is in the world and dreaming does go on and some samsara tells nirvana do what your samsara says. No. Self-awareness is a private showing.

4.
The way as I see it—the body-mind and its world is not to be renounced, but to be embodied as the supernode of my universal soft machine of self-awareness, and embraced for the revelatory dreamwork that it is.

This doesn’t imply involving oneself in the affairs of the world. In fact, as Ramana Maharshi says—non-resistance is the highest way. And the Diamond Sutra says the bodhisattva frees by knowing there’s no bondage.

5.
The false religious and progressive invention that the spiritual or humane height of achievement is an egolessness displayed in one’s social consciousness—is one of the most devious protectors of worldly egoic samsara—and the sly guarantor of no awakening from its sleep.

This isn’t saying the liberal view is wrong and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps in a free market world is right. Both are neither. Love is not of the world—and one’s not a body surviving in the world. Consciousness is fundamental. Just imagine the inference of that truth for self-awareness.

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.

The Second Epistle to Myself

Curiosity only kills the first life of a cat. The direct path is not of the dream and thus goes straight through it. This is called embodiment. Or being in the world.

I don't know why, but of all Beatles songs, 'Baby You're a Rich Man' is always feeling like the first time I am seeing her. Self-awareness requires that descending into material complacency,

the hard turning of interior imperative intent, and realizing that this dreamwork is my omnipresent actuality of being self-aware. Every year the spring is turning into June.

I imagine reincarnation to be likewise. Another night, another dream for my awakening. From Radio Cold Mountain in the River, this song is going out tonight to all my beautiful ones. Love is in the house!

An Epistle to Myself

The way as I see it—the body-mind and its world is not to be renounced, but to be embodied as the supernode of my universal soft machine of self-awareness, and embraced for the revelatory dreamwork that it is. This doesn’t imply involving oneself in the affairs of the world. In fact, as Ramana Maharshi says—non-resistance is the highest way. And the Diamond Sutra says the bodhisattva frees by knowing there’s no bondage.