First Epistle to Pleasant Valley. Spring 2018.

As if the dream state is an evolutionary stage in absolute self-awareness and not some great mistake.

If consciousness is primarily conceptual, and the only known is consciousness, then to know the great unknown is

obviously conceptual. Thus imagination isn't wrong but the myth imagined may be wrongful.


I see the first forsythia, spaced-out yellow flowers projecting the inside knowledge of the sun. Lucid dreaming is embodying the universal.

I hear an oriole the other day but call it the golden-throated. It's song is loud and crystal-clear. Obviously one being.

And then there is the early crocus appearing purple in a patch of green. For self-awareness is an evolutionary metamorphosis—


my magical reality. Something happens out of nowhere like a wild imagination.

Oh my secondary characters, my beautiful projections, listen to my story of awareness being self-aware, now playing.

As every eastern poem loves to end in cherry blossoms, body calls for food, and mind, myth. Who holds the flowering imagination?

ps1 footnotes (after consciousness, the deluge)

Pure awareness is reflected in this consciousness. Postneoadvaita koan—in binary terms, the manifest is three.

Cynthia forsythia on the roadside with the sun! Empires fall. Knowledge rises like a phoenix.

Tripping on deoxyribonucleic acid over the square root of metaparadigm. In middle America, it’s either Emily or the white whale.

Evolution depends on my suspension of belief. Dreaming is the background music for this consciousness.

Dreaming that enlightenment is in the mind is what enlightenment is. This is the latest science. Don’t overthink it. This is penultimate.

In the name of the revelation of divine imagination in the manifestation of self-awarenesss. Inheal, exheal.

Postneoadvaita Sonnet 1

Material reflects. Being projects.
Choose one or three but not two.
The moon allows the wolves to howl until they get the point.
Black is the new wisdom. White is the new love.
The world is DNA divided by conditioning.
Go figure. It’s either ten thousand somethings or one big nothing.
Everything is as it is, no matter what I may believe.
My lucid dream is what I love but minus all belief.
Being is true knowledge, the immaculate conception.
Consciousness is intentional transformation. Do the math.
Her sweet transmission is to love as her almighty engine is to words.
What if this were line twelve of a spontaneously self-aware sonnet?
That there is no thirteenth floor is just the way of magical reality.
Dreaming is the time for love and disbelieving is the space.

footnotes to 2009

remember correctly baizhang!

every closing moment of this deconstruction is like the opening of silence.

as the mind deconstructs itself, there is being. and only being is known by the great unknown.

this is basic magic. one must know oneself as the only known before the great unknown shall know oneself.

Like 2009

No cat jumping, no cradle on the edge. Leave those action verbs behind. Better to be dropping, seeing through, unknowing. At best, being.

For example, Dogen doesn't say, as to body-mind, vault into the void, but merely, drop.

The former is disassociation and the latter, surrender. The former is a mental state and the latter, being.

The former is doing and the latter, non-doing. Woo-woo or Wu Wei. Thorn in, thorns out.

Nothing. Everything. Nothing. Everything. Nothing. Everything. My so-called life.

Footnote form. Endnote emptiness. Sitting on the dock of the Tao. It takes a thought to see through a thought.

This seeing through is called the game of thorns. Sidebar being. Is the immaculate conception.

Ride the tiger like an ensō, sweetheart. Consciousness is all about the quantum uncertainty.

Sitting in the heart of the Tao, watching the tide roll in and roll away, this koan is pointing to the moon.

Three Footnotes to The Autobiography

One footnote. I think it's significant that Nisargadatta says the mystical is most practical and not vice versa.

Second footnote. I first saw her on the night of the Nixon resignation party as she floated across the room while Van Morrison is singing Jackie Wilson Said I'm in heaven when you smile over the stereo. Look, I am not responsible for fate.

Footnote three. Third outbreak after California 1991 and I'm advised to take the harder stuff. For the next fifteen years or so I'm a mountain hiking fool.

The Autobiography of Me, Joni, and Henry

Disassociation is just a common symptom of duality. The second disassociation outbreak experienced here occurred in 1984 no lie.

Many personal issues concerning wife and work and child would be discussed but there was kind of a spiritual one which was foundational.

I just spent five minutes trying to remember the exact word I used thirty-four years ago: IMPRACTICAL.

We were talking about the things I liked ten years earlier, or more to the story’s point, before I met the woman I would have my child with.

Ah 1974 the year Joni Mitchell released 'Court and Spark' on New Years Day no less.

"Help me I think I'm falling In love too fast It's got me hoping for the future And worrying about the past

'Cause I've seen some hot hot blazes Come down to smoke and ash We love our lovin' But not like we love our freedom"

Writing poetry of course. Walt Whitman. Then there was my Russian period after reading Crime & Punishment.

I did all of Vonnegut after reading ‘Cat's Cradle” and gave my cousins copies for Christmas.

Then I told the shrink I even had a crush on Henry David Thoreau because impractical.

So why did I feel Thoreau was so impractical became a recurring theme over the next several weeks until I went to revisit Walden

every lunch by leaving work and driving to a lake at Harold Foster State Park and climbing up a hill with chair and nothing to eat but my book.

Henry would still be my guru if I hadn't spent an entire year reading his journals day by day

and editing a passage for a daily blog post from 2004 to 2005. Go and visit your hero for a week, never mind an ever-loving year.

"the mystical is most practical" ~Nisargadatta

Peak Bloom

As the mind is division, there's this and that, dependent origination. The that which sees through the this of this and that is Tao.

Revelation is right imagination. Self-awareness is the name of Buddha and the wish fulfilled.

Imagination without love is thinking. Imagining with love is revelation. Psychology is of the world and therefore doesn't know

the most important aspect of a dream is seeing one is dreaming. Consider the cherry blossoms of Washington DC.

"The more earnest you are at remembering what needs to be remembered, the sooner will you be aware of yourself as you are, for memory will become experience. Earnestness reveals being. What is imagined and willed becomes actuality—here lies the danger as well as the way out." ~N

Middle Samadhi. The Ninth.

You are pure awareness being self-aware. After thirteen billion years of evolution and this universe of space, you're almost there.

But here lies Zeno's Paradox. Imagine that!

As inspiration is the great surrender of the material, lucid dreaming is the revelation of all the prophets.

Science can lead you to the water, but it can't help you cross it.

Imagine there's no paradox. There's no doing otherwise. Look, this is direct koan.

Note one: a dream without love is like evolution without creation.

Note two: a dream not following Intent is like desire not following love

is like a piece of driftwood not drifting in the current is like a surfer with no perfect wave.

Note three: as this is essentially a tantric practice, compassion is the safe word.

Thirteen Revelations on Easter Sunday

Lights, camera, action, ego, deconstruction, lucid dreaming, no name for Tao. Genesis in pure awareness, apocalypse of self-awareness. Ginger root, willow bark, elderflower.

There are thirteen blackbirds but the mind only sees seven colors at a time. Inspiration takes you to an even dozen. Revelation says I make my own thirteen. The magic of one is not opposed to an absolute zero but it likes to play with nothing.

Self-awareness is the DNA of Tao. Understanding pure awareness as a concept is not the same as self-awareness. You will recognize them by their fruits. Live your myth and a world will appear to live it in.

Being Observing

Belief attracts a similar belief and so on, to form a simulated world to believe in.

It is the nature of believers in a simulated world to believe their world is the only real world—

thus the left believes the right is wrong and the right believes the right is right.

All belief is based upon the knowledge of a simulated world, but the only true knowledge is being—

and even being isn’t absolute.

I am divided into observer and observed, one and zero, right and wrong, peace and war—

yet there’s only this observing. Does the observer intuitively know it’s actually false,

and thus bolsters itself with other observers in a truce of collective observers observing, or believing?

So the observer-believing is the so-called known substitute—for being-observing the unknown?

#tbt Last Man Out of Parker Wildlife Refuge 1984

They say the island hermit is just afraid
to be outgoing, still living there, some nerve,
upon a ragged sandbar, domain of deer
and waterfowl, a government preserve.
He'd rather live alone, like a renegade.
But Lew, if asked, would gladly volunteer
a different point of view, remembering when
the island was a neighborhood, a place
for names and faces, not a forsaken den
for migratory birds, or solitaire.
The lilac bushes are all that fill the space
familiar with that far-off yesterday.
It's not that Lew has left the human race.
It's just that everyone has moved away.

2002

footnotes to autobiography ii

1. What do you call it when you're pro-life and pro-choice? I am that.

2. My culture has no rite of passage but for parenthood—and parenthood scares the bejesus into children—so that was my passage.

3. The golden rule—spread your leaves but remember your roots.

4. My great grandfather calls it breathing fire.

5. Believing there are others is the god of all conditioning. The knowledge that I am is in the knowing I'm unknown. Evolution is mutation but compassion is remembering my story. It takes the Tao to name it but there are no words for Tao.

The Ballad of My Autobiography II Blues

Believing there are others is the god of all conditioning.
The void of pure awareness, being consciousness
and the mirror of the mind
in the name of the parent, child, and spiritual projection.
All poetry is translating revelation into words—
the trick is knowing when and where to leave the silence be.

I like my body like I like my car—
blood red, efficient, and it's got a moon roof.
The knowledge that I am is in the knowing I'm unknown.
Awareness being self-aware. Like a mother and child reunion.
My number one daughter doesn't mean the world to me.
She's not of the world; she is love.

My mother would have been one-hundred in eight days.
See, she's always in my dream—self-awareness
is spontaneous and so it feels like
what I’ve always known—
evolution is mutation
but compassion is remembering my story.

There's a golden thread
that ties my childhood
to my parenthood
to now—it's not
completely nameless.
It takes the Tao to name it.

My Autobiography I

Beware of science in sheep's clothing. Koan is a subset of myth, sometimes called the anti-story. Dreams are light years and deep space beyond the world.

The primary interpretation of one's dreaming every night is to awaken to the little lower actuality that one is dreaming there's a day. So simply said, the world appears to be a paradox because it's actually a dream.

After deconstructing day, the universe turns lucid. Shakespeare writes a play. Basho pens haiku. Cold Mountain.* Old folks move to Florida to live with alligators. Old souls stay in Maine.

Theology is the language of all old religions. Science is the language of the new religion. Myth is still the spoken silence of the known unknown. Love is the heart, and imagination the matter, of lucidity.

Parenting is a practice. First comes unconditional love. Then comes seeing through new conditioning to that unconditional love. And now I’m like grandfather sun enjoying what the moon is doing to the earth.

Profound revelation: Gurdjieff's infamous image of the moon feeding on the earth is not so much horrific as sacrificial. Like mother and child. In other words, change your point of view! A koan.

But not a horror story. The classic fairy tale. Original nirvana. Pure awareness is projection. Projection is pure awareness. Between awareness and projection is this dream.



* A Cold Mountain Transcreation

When someone sees Cold Mountain
all declare he’s wild and crazy—
his face isn’t much to look at,
his body is wrapped in rags and fur,
they don’t understand his words
and he doesn’t speak their words.
His reply to all these passersby:
come and gaze on Cold Mountain.

A Myth to Live By

In duality, there's two beliefs: one and the other. Right and wrong is one belief and wrong and right, the other.

No belief is right or wrong but thought is caught in worshipping itself. And all devotion is beyond belief or judgment.

Devotion to devotion is direct path. Thought worshiping devotion, or love of being,

is the myth that deconstructs the old belief, so chopping wood can truly be just chopping wood.

There's a reason why Zen is Zen Buddhism. No matter how absolute or zenlike it is, every devotion loves a myth to live by.

Myth of Mind

The mind is a precious ring
forged in evolutionary
fires of fourteen billion years
with a singular intent:
The Apocalypse of Self-awareness.

But thought becomes enamored of itself
in shadow worships called belief,
abandoning its unborn birthright
for its greatest concept and conjecture:
death!

Yet in secret places,
well knowing it is lost,
thought worships being
instead of thought,
creating myths of Krishna,
Christ and Consciousness,
returning to this That I am—
pure awareness being self-aware.

footnotes to illuminating myth

1. although it preaches proof and experience, western scientific materialism is all about theories and assumptions.

2. being is the only known but the unknown is absolute.

3. intuition is to space-time as process is to spirit and intent.

4. neither naturalism, eternalism, existentialism nor nihilism, but spontaneous, open, unified, and absent. footnote: baizhang via ferguson. longchenpa via dowman.

5. the simple act of turning on a light is in itself a story of the gods and the lighting of a candle.

Illuminating Myth

To believe my myth is sacrilege. To envision it is sacred art. A myth believed is like religion; a myth assumed is like a paradigm.

But a myth illuminated is like lucid dreaming or the way of self-awareness, that is—being the unknown.

The mind is reading tea leaves. Energy and evolution. The power of three and seven. Pure awareness is spontaneously self-aware.

Yes, no mind is no belief, but no, no myth is not no view on views. Being natural, eternal, dreamlike, and empty is not a divided view.

Do red-winged blackbirds in bare trees bring back the spring or do falling leaves? Myth is mindfulness.

Being Myth and Not Belief

Unlike the mind, awareness is not passive. For the way of awareness is intending self-awareness.

But the mind just sits there like a razor's edge dividing all that passes through it.

Don't get me wrong, the mind will get unstuck. The mind is nothing but that long slow turn in awareness being self-aware.

It's like that point between sutra and tantra, history and myth, karmic conditioning and unconditional imagination.

Like a stuck mind is a believing mind, but a mind becoming unstuck is a mind in disbelief. No-mind is not no-thought but only no-belief.

For before belief was thought and after belief is imagination. As politics is the world of samsara and Jesus is the dream of nirvana,

love is the common language.

A Few Words from Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) Ch-2a

How can the Way be so concealed there’s any question of factual and fake? How can words be so unintelligible there’s any question of right and wrong?

How can the Way be somewhere else and not be here? How can words endure and not be genuine?

The Way is simply hidden in sudden insight and words are merely lost in wordplay. Thus there is debate between the Left and Right about what's right and wrong.

Each denies the other’s affirmations and affirms the other’s deep denials. But to right such wrongs and wrong such rights, nothing compares to seeing through it all with clarity, lucidity, illumination.


Look, there’s nothing that isn’t an object and there’s no one that isn’t the subject. But one never knows anyone from the point of view of that object.

One only knows everything from the point of view of this subject. Therefore I say that depends upon this, and this depends upon that.

In other words, subject and object give birth to each other. And birth leads to death and death leads to birth. Each affirmation is a refutation of something else, and vice versa.

So where there’s right for someone, there’s wrong for someone else, and vice versa. Thus, the wise one never takes a side but sees all in the light of Heaven.


Sure, she knows her this, but she also knows her this is that from another point of view, and thus her that is also this. Therefore, she knows that contains both right and wrong; and this contains both right and wrong.

So is there really any this and that or right and wrong? Or is there not a this and that at all?

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.

Therefore, right is boundless and wrong is boundless. Again, nothing compares to clarity, lucidity, illumination.


~Zhuangzi (tr-Son Rivers)

Notes from the Acid Queen

The good, the bad, and how the west began

—spontaneity, synchronicity, and serendipity: two tales of one coin—

in all the ancient arts of deconstruction, the actual turn is always understanding projection.

Yesterday’s unknown prophet is tomorrow’s white whale. All’s well.

Seeing belief is to imagination as two is to three in the morning is the meeting place of revelation and myth.

The Rule of Julian

You say meditation. I say being. Let's call the whole thing off. Memory is a whirlpool. Identity is a whirlpool. Fear and loathing is a whirlpool. And as the world turns, there's only a river.

The river is the way that washes out the road. Full moon, high tide, storm surge. Solid yellow lines are disappearing in reflections of a silver sky. Being is the only knowledge and the only knowledge is knowing that one is unknown.

Meanwhile there's division, separation, fear, security, trespassing, and war. "Al shal be wel, and al shal be wel, and al manner of thyng shal be wele." See through thought and be. There are 10000 waves of light in the absolute sun of self-awareness.

The Deoxyribonucleic Acid Queen

As if the judge is separate from the judged. As if the personal isn't worldly. Welcome to Samsara! Population one. I was raised on good and bad.

It's always three before the dawn. All conditioning is unique in its similitude. Let conditioning be conditioning are two ways of deconstruction. Monkey si. Monkey dos.

All normal speech is conditioning talking. But non-conditional speech is filtered through love and understanding: third word, best word. And inspired speech is silence talking to myself. Revelation is silence talking.

There are three true poets: the love poets, William Blake, satsang. There are no other words. All knowledge leads to being unknowable.

All roads lead to Nome, the call of the wild, the DNA of DNA being the absolute intent of self-awareness.

Seeing Through All Thought

Thought is best at chopping wood and carrying water, but reality, not so much. Accordingly, psychology is not so much a myth as monster. The only beauty is the goddess of being.

Fundamentalist religion is the old gate. Scientific materialism is the new gate. Politics is all about who gets to boss the latest gate. There is only one diagnostic disorder: the personal. Its statistics are all casualties of war, both great and small. Using thought to see through all denominations and departments, deconstruction ends in being.

Basically, imagination is thought worshiping Being; belief is thought worshiping Thought. Thus, both science and religion are beliefs. There is no difference between theories and theology. As myth falls to god, the science of deconstruction sinks to scientific materialism.

After the mist dissipates and all the dust settles, I am. It's not so much the stopping of thought as just not worshiping it, either as an idol or theory. This is called seeing through all thought. If a frog jumps in a pond, is it haiku?

The Final Turn

Self-awareness is natural selection. Experience is a most addictive drug. Imagination is lucid dreaming. Or evolution at the speed of light. Self-awareness is a divine dream. I can't believe I get to play this part!
It's the role of a lifetime. I literally live in Pleasant Valley. I can't really complain.

‘The valley spirit never dies—
call it the feminine
mystery.

Its gate is the root of the cosmos.’

The hinge of Tao. Being. Gateless gate of self-awareness. Soundtrack. Do You Know The Way To San Jose. Dionne Warwick. Self-awareness is the only life. All else is dreamtime. Imagination. God speaks to humanity after more than two thousand years of silence: you had one job to do. This is science and myth! Tao and Darwin.

The known knowing the known is how the unknown knows the unknown. Soundtrack. Tomorrow Never Knows. The Beatles. Mistaking the facts for knowing is samsara. The Marx Brothers and the hall of mirrors. Are we animals knowing death or being knowing Tao? Am I Christian or am I Christ? Kill the Buddha, Abraham!

The world is getting lost in the final turn of self-awareness. All is well. Soundtrack. House at Pooh Corner. Loggins & Messina. Old songs are memories of forgotten self-awareness. B.C. Before conditioning. Self-awareness is not a thought to be remembered as much as unawareness is a thought to be forgotten.

Proust. Basho. Or was Basho a government ninja spy? After hydrogen comes the deluge. From hydrogen to the H-Bomb chant the beatniks like Albert Einstein. Soundtrack. Christian Life. The Byrds. I like the nondual life. The law of three. Pure awareness. Unawareness. Self-awareness.

In between the law of three are two polarities with four directions: the big bang and the dark ages; the eyes open before awakening. Welcome to my myth. May I help you? Soundtrack. I Am the Walrus. The Beatles. There's a half moon glowing in the silver river fog through the shadows of high trees.