"seeing that one cannot see the absence-of-things is true seeing."
shen hui
"See the false as the false. this must go on all the time."
Nisargadatta
"all matters without exception are lies and gibberish...'
Shinran
Gibberish...
Head-senses see self-effort as conceptual veil, a substanceless, repetitious folly.
Torso nerves and muscles are observed tensing to fend off or capture...emptiness!
This is primal and unelaborated. Two ways to kink the light-hose caught in the act. Two mothers of perpetual delusion busted.
Awareness of them is your individual prize, your Gift.
(Words clog, awareness unkinks.)
*
Two things.
First, you see through the window because it’s clear.
Second, your congenital anxiety freaks and calls you a Peeping Tom—“What if they catch you looking?!”
Even though “the window” is your eyes.
*
The Dharma fixes nothing.
We remain unfixed.
*
I’m not teaching you to see. You already see.
My job is to get you to agree with me that you see.
See what?
The vast world beyond ego-shell and fixed concepts. Right in front of your face.
*
The no-problem state is not a personal state. We can’t “privatize” ** it. It’s our home state, the state we reside in. See the difference?
In this, our mutual state, improvers and slackers have equal rights forever even though improvers are constantly trying to take power.
** Nobuo Haneda
*
I’m speaking the forbidden language. Zange.
*
I’m telling you how I’m constructed. I don’t know about you.
Free space outside, free space inside.
Between these an iron ring of absolute impermeability and nonexistence.
*
We problem-solve and then we stop.
(We’re secular and then religious.)
*
Passionate reactions, programmed responses, resentments, desires, moods, despair…
Effort to cure these things is effort of these things.
Seeing this fact is the free life.
*
There was a group therapy session, twelve souls “in recovery.”
Suddenly—rapture! One of them snuck a peak, you might say, just above the fog of “me”-ness.
And disappeared.
The others didn’t notice because the peaker didn’t physically disappear.
*
I try to find the [fill in the blank] and I can’t because it’s blank.
But I’m not blank. I’m smeared.
*
The point of the dialectic isn’t a point, it’s the pointless container of points, which in turn becomes a point that’s tossed into the container.
*
Everything I write is poison because it comes from poison but the white space is worth noting.
*
Here’s what to do: when you notice that you’ve exhaled enough, breathe in, and free us all.
*
Every schema impinges.
Just a whiff and my lungs collapse.
I beg my minders to steer me away from these monsters of mission.
*
If I err I might die or fail to attract a mate.
Both outcomes kill species-momentum.
I. Must. Not. Err.
*
What you can’t grasp with thought is the nonexistence of thought, just as you can’t experience your own absence.
“But I have this sense of presence.”
Do you? And what does it have?
*
My god! (the god of laziness) there are so many effort-dharmas out there now, crowded—mobbed—with apprentice spiritual triathletes (slaves and debtors).
Quit!
*
You are stopped by your stopping, blocked by your blocking, but your stopping and blocking are void.
(Everybody…)
I am stopped by my stopping, blocked by my blocking, but my stopping and blocking are void...I am stopped by my stopping…
*
When you see that thought-reflection (self-reflection) is a mere transparent veneer you spontaneously, effortlessly see through it.
You see real life beyond the story of life, and you are born and reborn there in that present “beyond” again and again throughout the day.
Reality is one step ahead of thoughts, clean, fresh; pure impermanence.
Life goes on. Thought-tangents carry on. No one will say “you’ve changed” even though that’s all you ever do!
That’s OK. Act natural.
*
Dao (Tao) — Doubt.
Dao-doubt, and doubt-as-Dao.
Dao(bt).
The meaning of “knot, too” (not-two).
Icchantika, you lucky pun-licking, metaphor-hacking dog...
”Ball of doubt” is “wish-fulfilling gem”!
*
Because I am fear-greed, I am no better and no worse than you (I have nothing exceptional to offer through personal example).
And because this liberating insight belongs to emptiness (our mutuality), I won’t be cashing in.
*
Good cadaver vs. bad cadaver. Who wins?
*
I don’t have to say it. You already know it. Although you repress it.
These bright-eyed neo-gurus are manic!
Oh well, the iceman cometh...
*
This agony (struggle) is itself the teacher and the portal. According to the god of laziness.
*
The light of impermanence is unhindered, you know.
You can doubt that but “unhindered” means unhindered by your impermanent doubt.
*
You thought that ball of doubt was supposed to dissolve!
*
When they say “May all beings be happy“ they don’t mean we have to deserve it first.
*
Words are composed of non-words and thoughts are composed of non-thoughts so there is no point in condemning them.
*
Two facts:
(1) The fact of emptiness (freedom), and
(2) The fact of my doubt of it (fear of it, greed for fullness, for thingness, for things).
You can’t argue with facts.
*
Perfection, if that’s what you’re into, is a fait accompli.
“Natural perfection” means perfection is the natural nature of everything.
Perfection, as in pristine — uncontaminated by permanence.
*
If it’s a sticky awakeness, cobwebby, verbal, with your name on it, then it’s a picture-postcard of the place, not the place. It’s a memory.
*
Pronounce “no.”
“No, I don’t like this—I like that” or “No, I don’t want to lose this to that.”
The tongue on the roof is a drawbridge for its vowel, which escapes.
*
The desire to complete a thought, or complete or correct someone else’s thought, is the desire to birth an entity, a well-rounded “it.”
Which dies mid-sentence!
*
“I am” is the alpha/omega of delusion, the last stop before “I am That.”
”That” as zero quantity and quality.
*
If I had to wait for self-improvement, if I had to wait for better thoughts, if I had to wait for my own understanding…
*
You might “just notice” your thoughts and feelings, “witness“ them from a slight distance, be “mindful“ of them and learn to be less “reactive.”
But this is all a scam perpetrated by dupes, a last-ditch effort of conceptual mind to keep you from opening your eyes.
*
A. Psychophysical grasping (agony).
B. Non-agonized context of A.
C. No boundary between A and B.
(A: Namo. B: Amida-Buddha. C: Namo-Amida-Buddha.)
*
If/then: If I take the steps you’re suggesting, then my life will have value?
Implies that, now, I’m lacking.
But each step I take on your path would deny my inherent value as I am and begin a harmful if not criminal dependency.
Crime is rampant because inherent freedom (value, virtue) is unelaborated, a quality that makes it invisible to greed, to lack.
And there’s no barrier to keep the grifters out.
*
Liberation in this life, here-now, as-is...
“Come as you are!” (Impermanent, gone...)
It’s a done deal.
*
(1) Attention goes to the object of desire or fear. This is a whirlpool of emptiness in an ocean of emptiness, a tight band of nothing constricting nothing.
(2) The impossibility of an outcome dawns.
(3) Freedom.
(4) Repeat.
*
I woke up this morning to sweet and sour hope and fear. Dreams were dull, mouth tastes bad, but the sun’s out.
Today the ego is a dream, a dull one. Its autobiography almost undetectable. And fellow humans in the field of experience are little more than cutouts facing...that way.
Conversations flow at an angle that misses me, like choppy recordings from the past intended for anyone else.
Thoughts are small noise and every assumption is shown in the light of day to be an error. Time and continuity are falsehoods that serve the species not the person. Only incompleteness exists.
On death’s bed the worst pain is from the forced smile, maintained so visiting corpses don’t catch on. They’ll know soon enough.
This isn’t sadness, it’s relief—relief to see the inhuman sun and all its inhuman children sliced so thin.
Pure pleasure --
*
Sinner, you can’t know zero. And you can’t not “be” zero.
Zero is unquantified forgiveness.
*
First name: Idolatry.
Last name: Nihilism.
Middle name:
*
Dynamic emptiness: no one knows it – no one – so quit bragging.
But everyone is it, especially that fool you criticize.
*
It doesn’t want you to look directly at it because then it loses control: self-power, fear-greed.
Self-Power Caught in the Act—SPCA.
(What this beast thought was security turned out to be a cage.)
Trickster-buddha: self-power-pain is its mask.
*
I dropped my thinker between two thoughts.
Embarrassing.
*
As relentless as it is blind, fear-greed-mind will hoard all the zeros until they add up to one.
*
Through Dharma-listening, self-examination, and interactions with Dharma friends, we discover, like Shakyamuni did, the impermanent nature of reality.
Language fails here, but impermanent things—and impermanence itself!—are always already washed away, and so always absolutely pure. Even in the midst of this messy life.
This purity and this messiness are nondual (not-two). “Form is emptiness.” Emptiness is a synonym for impermanence.
We discover that this is always true. This discovery doesn’t destroy the ego, it exposes the ego as a mere appearance, as a form of emptiness. It doesn’t destroy ideas, concepts, thoughts—it exposes these things as “appearance-emptiness.”
Buddhist teachings (which are emptiness-as-form) tell us that things—objects, phenomena—are actually events, and that they are self-released. They are spontaneously released due to their nature as release. The Dzogchen genius Longchenpa declared that “An unreleased event is impossible.”
Release means freedom—ineluctable freedom here-now. Because this is the nature of all apparent forms, those forms—including minds, egos, and thought-tangents—are, by nature, absolutely unbound. This is recognized as a fact, or it isn’t, and both states of mind are equally pristine—washed away!
This can’t be made to come about. It comes about by itself. It is what is. No action on the part of the illusory self is productive. The truth of impermanence is passively received—by impermanence!
Why is this so important? It’s only important if you value freedom—freedom from the life-denying habit of repeatedly trying to capture life’s waterfall with your mind.
Namu-amida-butsu.
*
I’m not blocked but I’m blocked.
Not blocked by you—by me!
Block says “No, not this, not here, not now.”
But I’m only blocked when I block.
*
Shinshu talks about “self power.” Self power is the grasping, clinging (false) mind.
Shinshu also talks about “Other-power.” Other power is true reality – the Dharma of dependent origination and impermanence.
One is false, the other true. One is illusion, the other real.
It’s like Nisargadatta Maharaj said: we “see the false as the false” and “this (seeing) must go on all the time.”
We can’t see the nondual, impermanent real with our dualistic, dualizing eyes. “Seeing that one cannot see the absence of things is true seeing.” (Shen Hui)
When we point and say “there it is,” we’re wrong.
But when we see what we see as false, there it is.
*
I am (you are) manifesting and dissolving simultaneously. Here-gone. We are identical in that way. The same.
And when I say “you,” I am referring to absolutely everything.
This is inconceivable but “inconceivable” is redundant because conceiving is impossible in the absence of a conceiver.
The simultaneous dis-appearance of subject and object, thinker and thought, voids even its own notion.
*
Thought-tangents are dreams. Wake up?
*
The self-power anvil, dropped into the bottomless Other-power well, flaps its featherless wings.
Pitiful into pity – or into grace, where falling is flying.
*
The absolute nothingness of the here-and-now tartly nullifies its own concept. It’s like a slap!
*
The unfreedom impulse – that drawstring in the gut that pulls down the eye-shades – is, for all its pain, small, compared to its foil.
It’s foil, “eternally unfurled,” shakes it loose.
*
Hear the voice from outside—outside conceptual mind.
The voice inside is the echo of a dream.
*
“If I can’t possess it why bother about it?”
(Greed-mind dismisses the Sun.)
*
Success and pleasure, material and spiritual, have weight, like chains.
To Buddha, they are forms of suffering.
Even when they’re light and cool they entrap. A skin to shed sooner or later.
What is finally exposed? Not Buddha!
Thought-chains are exposed, that coat of mail, that coat of nothing...
*
“NO” arises in-and-as “YES.”
*
I’m organizing a Union of Doomed Souls. People who can’t quite “get it” or who get it but can’t keep it.
Our collective is united against all self-anointed enlightened ones—the “finders” who lord it over us “seekers.”
We are many they are few, as the poet said. We are the base of their pyramid. No more!
United we crawl—out from under. And then we stand. And proclaim our inalienable right to stick our heads in the sand.
“Free to Fear” is our slogan. As we bow before our superiors, in the opposite direction.
*
Our horizontal, face-to-face discussion is entirely secular but the vertical context in which this discussion takes place is nonsecular.
Nonsecular is not supernatural.
*
Metabolizing the unwelcome guest, fear-greed… It does not, will not give up. Upon discovery, it retreats inward to an alternate sector. Or it circles around back and observes the observer. Then re-infiltrates. Surrender is the only option. Or call it a peace accord. Celebrate with a state dinner. Eat it.
*
I doubt that I’m included as-is or that my doubt is included as-is in the doubtless realm of as-is.
*
Nothing heavier, more dense, anchor-like, sinking...than the effort toward conceptual accumulation.
Nothing lighter than seeing this.
(Heavy continues, light remains.)
*
Death-fear is my guru.
Recoil is my guru.
Doubt is my guru.
Ego is my guru.
*
The ultimate praxis: open eyes.
*
I have blinders on, big ones, but they’re clear.
*
You say you can’t see this but that’s a lie told by your conditioning, by your conditioners, using your vocal chords. They can go to hell because you can and do see this – it’s just not what you’ve been schooled in.
You’ve been taught to look in the wrong direction, at the Big Picture. Instead look at the small picture: your grasping ego-self. The problem is it’s so close and so obvious and so “inferior“ you look past it.
You’ve got such an appetite you want to eat the whole world but wait! There it is! It’s your appetite! Catch that beast in action – see it for what it is – and the big picture takes care of itself...
*
Eyes are open behind closed lids like nervy tentacles of the enskulled open mind.
In other words, I found the ocean in a bucket in the ocean, full of fish.
*
This body-mind-self is composed of grasping.
It is 100 percent grasping.
It is only grasping.
As grasping it does one thing only: grasp.
All doing on its part is grasping.
Every mental/physical effort is grasping.
Grasping is emptiness.
*
The compulsion to know and experience—the urge to get, keep, protect, enhance, and continue—is ordinary but futile effort, doomed.
Seeing this futility, I wake from its clammy dream.
*
Can you believe (trust) that the end of concept-clinging is life not death?
I can’t sustain it.
Can you see that lack of trust?
Yes.
Just as good!
*
“No”-mind (the mind that doubts).
No-mind (where “no”-mind lives).
*
The thinking/dualizing human mind is incapable of achieving fixed-object status.
Because of that, it’s forever untamed and…inhuman.
*
“Horizontal” life is linear, lateral, common sense, usual, mundane…Or even exceptional, exciting, but still lacking verticality, like a number line.
“Vertical” life is the perpendicular line that bisects the horizontal at every point. The number of horizontal points is infinite and the number of vertical bisections per point is infinite!
(Another way of saying it: The number of events that comprise, compose, and decompose a single event is infinite.)
People in a room talking, agreeing, disputing—that’s conceptual-horizontal.
The room itself—the containing space—is nonconceptual-vertical. It is the sane container of madness. And it is the pause between argumentative and agreeing comments and thoughts. It is the pause (the space) that bisects every pixel of every letter of every word countless times:
a+r+g+u+m+e+n+t
a+g+r+e+e+m+e+n+t
The plus-sign represents the vertical bisection of the horizontal. It represents the space around, in, and as apparent non-space.
This is a law. It cannot be otherwise. The moment of doubt is the moment of suffering. But the moment of suffering is itself bisected, bisecting space.
*
Bodymind as fear-greed is the accidental teacher.
*
Tangential thinking...a fleshless lidding of the eyes.
*
I note the compulsive effort to improve “me” and “mine.”
How does that effort feel?
Unimproved!
*
My inverting, attaching mental processes are identical to yours: void.
Our tangent was always a broken chain of zeros.
*
”Presence”? A reifying noun, a falsehood.
”Being”? As a nounless verb, almost true.
*
Effort to achieve what is is (ordinary) madness. Or meditation.
*
Singular sacred object and gesture:
that breath I took, and gave back.
*
My ruling “chakra” is always wide open and always just outside the bodymind.
*
This is not cured, head-to-tail: the bodymind.
Except — except! — by awareness of the effort-to-cure.
*
Panic at exhalation’s tip is instantly replaced by greed.
*
A fanatical goal of “no suffering” or a violent ideal of “peace of mind” would postpone the inherent and universal righteousness of being.
*
Tragically?
Happily
this (impermanence-truth)
will not be reduced
to an artifact of language
or memory.
*
The bound person is the free person.
The free person is bound.
Don’t follow.
*
One barrier: one gate. Celebrate!
*
There’s been a misunderstanding.
There will be no correction.
*
To whom do I owe deference in the present moment?
To what?
*
The snake swallows its tail until it gags awake.
*
When my distressed friend is lost in thought I don’t go there with him.
I wait outside in comfort.
*
No matter the words, the direction, the words’ direction, it all leads to the same point here, now:
self-power caught in the act—self-power confessed!
(Emptiness greedy for emptiness.)
*
It’s impossible to recall all the words that moved me, that might have transformed me, but it’s easy to return to doubt and fear.
So I return to doubt and fear, and what contains it.
*
Death-fear pokes the grey until it sparks.
*
The flow of blood through ruts:
“Ah, me again.”
As the ruts flow.
*
The absence-of-entities, untaught, unknown, undemocratically rules the mystified.
*
I study the dharma, then I try to live it.
But I only live my own confusion-dharma.
I’m a certifiable master.
*
Not really a breakthrough.
Not really broken through: this absent barrier.
The breakthrough experience is just open eyes.
*
Brainstem as periscope: which end am I peering through?
*
While I'm thinking/inverting, every window's a mirror.
*
Horizontal mind—one of many.
Vertical mind—just one.
*
Where do you live?
In ataraxia.
But you’re agitated!
I’m a human being living in boundless ataraxia.
*
There's a life-saving pocket of air inside despair!
*
The “no problem” state is not a state at all, it’s the blazing realm where this bodymind and its tiny heart-lamp burn.
*
Here, aphorism-as-thesis, composed of dull contradictions, declares itself while antithesis-as-aphorism decomposes at the speed of light.
*
Helpful exploiters would have me believe that I must produce my own value through effort.
But my inherent value makes effort and oppressors and exploiters
optional.
*
I notice a fearful grasping sensation in the gut.
It radiates to my limbs.
I notice how breath stops for it like waiting for a bus.
No bus.
Breathing resumes.
*
Ah! I’m enlightened! I’m the Enlightened One!
How wonderful for you. But you’re afraid of something?
Hazards! Hazards everywhere!
*
I make this mental pudding in my anxiety-pot just like mother did.
It’s her mother’s recipe, and her mother’s mother’s…
Someday I’ll quit stirring.
*
The “Pristine Dharma” is here. It’s you. It’s everywhere you go and everything you do.
It’s unmissable. It’s pulsing blue…
(On your phone-map it’s the dot.
Of course you’ll say ‘it’s not’!)
*
Where-when?
Here-now.
Coordinates?
“Null Island.”
*
Ho-humming on a rock on the rim of the Grand Canyon reading a book about the Grand Canyon...
*
Preconditions? Only one:
The reckless rejection of every conceivable precondition!
*
Head-senses see self-effort as conceptual veil, a substanceless, repetitious folly.
Torso nerves and muscles are observed tensing to fend off or capture...emptiness!
This is primal and unelaborated. Two ways to kink the light-hose caught in the act. Two mothers of perpetual delusion busted.
Awareness of them is your individual prize, your Gift.
(Words clog, awareness unkinks.)
*
Two things.
First, you see through the window because it’s clear.
Second, your congenital anxiety freaks and calls you a Peeping Tom—“What if they catch you looking?!”
Even though “the window” is your eyes.
*
The Dharma fixes nothing.
We remain unfixed.
*
I’m not teaching you to see. You already see.
My job is to get you to agree with me that you see.
See what?
The vast world beyond ego-shell and fixed concepts. Right in front of your face.
*
The no-problem state is not a personal state. We can’t “privatize” ** it. It’s our home state, the state we reside in. See the difference?
In this, our mutual state, improvers and slackers have equal rights forever even though improvers are constantly trying to take power.
** Nobuo Haneda
*
I’m speaking the forbidden language. Zange.
*
I’m telling you how I’m constructed. I don’t know about you.
Free space outside, free space inside.
Between these an iron ring of absolute impermeability and nonexistence.
*
We problem-solve and then we stop.
(We’re secular and then religious.)
*
Passionate reactions, programmed responses, resentments, desires, moods, despair…
Effort to cure these things is effort of these things.
Seeing this fact is the free life.
*
There was a group therapy session, twelve souls “in recovery.”
Suddenly—rapture! One of them snuck a peak, you might say, just above the fog of “me”-ness.
And disappeared.
The others didn’t notice because the peaker didn’t physically disappear.
*
I try to find the [fill in the blank] and I can’t because it’s blank.
But I’m not blank. I’m smeared.
*
The point of the dialectic isn’t a point, it’s the pointless container of points, which in turn becomes a point that’s tossed into the container.
*
Everything I write is poison because it comes from poison but the white space is worth noting.
*
Here’s what to do: when you notice that you’ve exhaled enough, breathe in, and free us all.
*
Every schema impinges.
Just a whiff and my lungs collapse.
I beg my minders to steer me away from these monsters of mission.
*
If I err I might die or fail to attract a mate.
Both outcomes kill species-momentum.
I. Must. Not. Err.
*
What you can’t grasp with thought is the nonexistence of thought, just as you can’t experience your own absence.
“But I have this sense of presence.”
Do you? And what does it have?
*
My god! (the god of laziness) there are so many effort-dharmas out there now, crowded—mobbed—with apprentice spiritual triathletes (slaves and debtors).
Quit!
*
You are stopped by your stopping, blocked by your blocking, but your stopping and blocking are void.
(Everybody…)
I am stopped by my stopping, blocked by my blocking, but my stopping and blocking are void...I am stopped by my stopping…
*
When you see that thought-reflection (self-reflection) is a mere transparent veneer you spontaneously, effortlessly see through it.
You see real life beyond the story of life, and you are born and reborn there in that present “beyond” again and again throughout the day.
Reality is one step ahead of thoughts, clean, fresh; pure impermanence.
Life goes on. Thought-tangents carry on. No one will say “you’ve changed” even though that’s all you ever do!
That’s OK. Act natural.
*
Dao (Tao) — Doubt.
Dao-doubt, and doubt-as-Dao.
Dao(bt).
The meaning of “knot, too” (not-two).
Icchantika, you lucky pun-licking, metaphor-hacking dog...
”Ball of doubt” is “wish-fulfilling gem”!
*
Because I am fear-greed, I am no better and no worse than you (I have nothing exceptional to offer through personal example).
And because this liberating insight belongs to emptiness (our mutuality), I won’t be cashing in.
*
Good cadaver vs. bad cadaver. Who wins?
*
I don’t have to say it. You already know it. Although you repress it.
These bright-eyed neo-gurus are manic!
Oh well, the iceman cometh...
*
This agony (struggle) is itself the teacher and the portal. According to the god of laziness.
*
The light of impermanence is unhindered, you know.
You can doubt that but “unhindered” means unhindered by your impermanent doubt.
*
You thought that ball of doubt was supposed to dissolve!
*
When they say “May all beings be happy“ they don’t mean we have to deserve it first.
*
Words are composed of non-words and thoughts are composed of non-thoughts so there is no point in condemning them.
*
Two facts:
(1) The fact of emptiness (freedom), and
(2) The fact of my doubt of it (fear of it, greed for fullness, for thingness, for things).
You can’t argue with facts.
*
Perfection, if that’s what you’re into, is a fait accompli.
“Natural perfection” means perfection is the natural nature of everything.
Perfection, as in pristine — uncontaminated by permanence.
*
If it’s a sticky awakeness, cobwebby, verbal, with your name on it, then it’s a picture-postcard of the place, not the place. It’s a memory.
*
Pronounce “no.”
“No, I don’t like this—I like that” or “No, I don’t want to lose this to that.”
The tongue on the roof is a drawbridge for its vowel, which escapes.
*
The desire to complete a thought, or complete or correct someone else’s thought, is the desire to birth an entity, a well-rounded “it.”
Which dies mid-sentence!
*
“I am” is the alpha/omega of delusion, the last stop before “I am That.”
”That” as zero quantity and quality.
*
If I had to wait for self-improvement, if I had to wait for better thoughts, if I had to wait for my own understanding…
*
You might “just notice” your thoughts and feelings, “witness“ them from a slight distance, be “mindful“ of them and learn to be less “reactive.”
But this is all a scam perpetrated by dupes, a last-ditch effort of conceptual mind to keep you from opening your eyes.
*
A. Psychophysical grasping (agony).
B. Non-agonized context of A.
C. No boundary between A and B.
(A: Namo. B: Amida-Buddha. C: Namo-Amida-Buddha.)
*
If/then: If I take the steps you’re suggesting, then my life will have value?
Implies that, now, I’m lacking.
But each step I take on your path would deny my inherent value as I am and begin a harmful if not criminal dependency.
Crime is rampant because inherent freedom (value, virtue) is unelaborated, a quality that makes it invisible to greed, to lack.
And there’s no barrier to keep the grifters out.
*
Liberation in this life, here-now, as-is...
“Come as you are!” (Impermanent, gone...)
It’s a done deal.
*
(1) Attention goes to the object of desire or fear. This is a whirlpool of emptiness in an ocean of emptiness, a tight band of nothing constricting nothing.
(2) The impossibility of an outcome dawns.
(3) Freedom.
(4) Repeat.
*
I woke up this morning to sweet and sour hope and fear. Dreams were dull, mouth tastes bad, but the sun’s out.
Today the ego is a dream, a dull one. Its autobiography almost undetectable. And fellow humans in the field of experience are little more than cutouts facing...that way.
Conversations flow at an angle that misses me, like choppy recordings from the past intended for anyone else.
Thoughts are small noise and every assumption is shown in the light of day to be an error. Time and continuity are falsehoods that serve the species not the person. Only incompleteness exists.
On death’s bed the worst pain is from the forced smile, maintained so visiting corpses don’t catch on. They’ll know soon enough.
This isn’t sadness, it’s relief—relief to see the inhuman sun and all its inhuman children sliced so thin.
Pure pleasure --
*
Sinner, you can’t know zero. And you can’t not “be” zero.
Zero is unquantified forgiveness.
*
First name: Idolatry.
Last name: Nihilism.
Middle name:
*
Dynamic emptiness: no one knows it – no one – so quit bragging.
But everyone is it, especially that fool you criticize.
*
It doesn’t want you to look directly at it because then it loses control: self-power, fear-greed.
Self-Power Caught in the Act—SPCA.
(What this beast thought was security turned out to be a cage.)
Trickster-buddha: self-power-pain is its mask.
*
I dropped my thinker between two thoughts.
Embarrassing.
*
As relentless as it is blind, fear-greed-mind will hoard all the zeros until they add up to one.
*
Through Dharma-listening, self-examination, and interactions with Dharma friends, we discover, like Shakyamuni did, the impermanent nature of reality.
Language fails here, but impermanent things—and impermanence itself!—are always already washed away, and so always absolutely pure. Even in the midst of this messy life.
This purity and this messiness are nondual (not-two). “Form is emptiness.” Emptiness is a synonym for impermanence.
We discover that this is always true. This discovery doesn’t destroy the ego, it exposes the ego as a mere appearance, as a form of emptiness. It doesn’t destroy ideas, concepts, thoughts—it exposes these things as “appearance-emptiness.”
Buddhist teachings (which are emptiness-as-form) tell us that things—objects, phenomena—are actually events, and that they are self-released. They are spontaneously released due to their nature as release. The Dzogchen genius Longchenpa declared that “An unreleased event is impossible.”
Release means freedom—ineluctable freedom here-now. Because this is the nature of all apparent forms, those forms—including minds, egos, and thought-tangents—are, by nature, absolutely unbound. This is recognized as a fact, or it isn’t, and both states of mind are equally pristine—washed away!
This can’t be made to come about. It comes about by itself. It is what is. No action on the part of the illusory self is productive. The truth of impermanence is passively received—by impermanence!
Why is this so important? It’s only important if you value freedom—freedom from the life-denying habit of repeatedly trying to capture life’s waterfall with your mind.
Namu-amida-butsu.
*
I’m not blocked but I’m blocked.
Not blocked by you—by me!
Block says “No, not this, not here, not now.”
But I’m only blocked when I block.
*
Shinshu talks about “self power.” Self power is the grasping, clinging (false) mind.
Shinshu also talks about “Other-power.” Other power is true reality – the Dharma of dependent origination and impermanence.
One is false, the other true. One is illusion, the other real.
It’s like Nisargadatta Maharaj said: we “see the false as the false” and “this (seeing) must go on all the time.”
We can’t see the nondual, impermanent real with our dualistic, dualizing eyes. “Seeing that one cannot see the absence of things is true seeing.” (Shen Hui)
When we point and say “there it is,” we’re wrong.
But when we see what we see as false, there it is.
*
I am (you are) manifesting and dissolving simultaneously. Here-gone. We are identical in that way. The same.
And when I say “you,” I am referring to absolutely everything.
This is inconceivable but “inconceivable” is redundant because conceiving is impossible in the absence of a conceiver.
The simultaneous dis-appearance of subject and object, thinker and thought, voids even its own notion.
*
Thought-tangents are dreams. Wake up?
*
The self-power anvil, dropped into the bottomless Other-power well, flaps its featherless wings.
Pitiful into pity – or into grace, where falling is flying.
*
The absolute nothingness of the here-and-now tartly nullifies its own concept. It’s like a slap!
*
The unfreedom impulse – that drawstring in the gut that pulls down the eye-shades – is, for all its pain, small, compared to its foil.
It’s foil, “eternally unfurled,” shakes it loose.
*
Hear the voice from outside—outside conceptual mind.
The voice inside is the echo of a dream.
*
“If I can’t possess it why bother about it?”
(Greed-mind dismisses the Sun.)
*
Success and pleasure, material and spiritual, have weight, like chains.
To Buddha, they are forms of suffering.
Even when they’re light and cool they entrap. A skin to shed sooner or later.
What is finally exposed? Not Buddha!
Thought-chains are exposed, that coat of mail, that coat of nothing...
*
“NO” arises in-and-as “YES.”
*
I’m organizing a Union of Doomed Souls. People who can’t quite “get it” or who get it but can’t keep it.
Our collective is united against all self-anointed enlightened ones—the “finders” who lord it over us “seekers.”
We are many they are few, as the poet said. We are the base of their pyramid. No more!
United we crawl—out from under. And then we stand. And proclaim our inalienable right to stick our heads in the sand.
“Free to Fear” is our slogan. As we bow before our superiors, in the opposite direction.
*
Our horizontal, face-to-face discussion is entirely secular but the vertical context in which this discussion takes place is nonsecular.
Nonsecular is not supernatural.
*
Metabolizing the unwelcome guest, fear-greed… It does not, will not give up. Upon discovery, it retreats inward to an alternate sector. Or it circles around back and observes the observer. Then re-infiltrates. Surrender is the only option. Or call it a peace accord. Celebrate with a state dinner. Eat it.
*
I doubt that I’m included as-is or that my doubt is included as-is in the doubtless realm of as-is.
*
Nothing heavier, more dense, anchor-like, sinking...than the effort toward conceptual accumulation.
Nothing lighter than seeing this.
(Heavy continues, light remains.)
*
Death-fear is my guru.
Recoil is my guru.
Doubt is my guru.
Ego is my guru.
*
The ultimate praxis: open eyes.
*
I have blinders on, big ones, but they’re clear.
*
You say you can’t see this but that’s a lie told by your conditioning, by your conditioners, using your vocal chords. They can go to hell because you can and do see this – it’s just not what you’ve been schooled in.
You’ve been taught to look in the wrong direction, at the Big Picture. Instead look at the small picture: your grasping ego-self. The problem is it’s so close and so obvious and so “inferior“ you look past it.
You’ve got such an appetite you want to eat the whole world but wait! There it is! It’s your appetite! Catch that beast in action – see it for what it is – and the big picture takes care of itself...
*
Eyes are open behind closed lids like nervy tentacles of the enskulled open mind.
In other words, I found the ocean in a bucket in the ocean, full of fish.
*
This body-mind-self is composed of grasping.
It is 100 percent grasping.
It is only grasping.
As grasping it does one thing only: grasp.
All doing on its part is grasping.
Every mental/physical effort is grasping.
Grasping is emptiness.
*
The compulsion to know and experience—the urge to get, keep, protect, enhance, and continue—is ordinary but futile effort, doomed.
Seeing this futility, I wake from its clammy dream.
*
Can you believe (trust) that the end of concept-clinging is life not death?
I can’t sustain it.
Can you see that lack of trust?
Yes.
Just as good!
*
“No”-mind (the mind that doubts).
No-mind (where “no”-mind lives).
*
The thinking/dualizing human mind is incapable of achieving fixed-object status.
Because of that, it’s forever untamed and…inhuman.
*
“Horizontal” life is linear, lateral, common sense, usual, mundane…Or even exceptional, exciting, but still lacking verticality, like a number line.
“Vertical” life is the perpendicular line that bisects the horizontal at every point. The number of horizontal points is infinite and the number of vertical bisections per point is infinite!
(Another way of saying it: The number of events that comprise, compose, and decompose a single event is infinite.)
People in a room talking, agreeing, disputing—that’s conceptual-horizontal.
The room itself—the containing space—is nonconceptual-vertical. It is the sane container of madness. And it is the pause between argumentative and agreeing comments and thoughts. It is the pause (the space) that bisects every pixel of every letter of every word countless times:
a+r+g+u+m+e+n+t
a+g+r+e+e+m+e+n+t
The plus-sign represents the vertical bisection of the horizontal. It represents the space around, in, and as apparent non-space.
This is a law. It cannot be otherwise. The moment of doubt is the moment of suffering. But the moment of suffering is itself bisected, bisecting space.
*
Bodymind as fear-greed is the accidental teacher.
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Tangential thinking...a fleshless lidding of the eyes.
*
I note the compulsive effort to improve “me” and “mine.”
How does that effort feel?
Unimproved!
*
My inverting, attaching mental processes are identical to yours: void.
Our tangent was always a broken chain of zeros.
*
”Presence”? A reifying noun, a falsehood.
”Being”? As a nounless verb, almost true.
*
Effort to achieve what is is (ordinary) madness. Or meditation.
*
Singular sacred object and gesture:
that breath I took, and gave back.
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My ruling “chakra” is always wide open and always just outside the bodymind.
*
This is not cured, head-to-tail: the bodymind.
Except — except! — by awareness of the effort-to-cure.
*
Panic at exhalation’s tip is instantly replaced by greed.
*
A fanatical goal of “no suffering” or a violent ideal of “peace of mind” would postpone the inherent and universal righteousness of being.
*
Tragically?
Happily
this (impermanence-truth)
will not be reduced
to an artifact of language
or memory.
*
The bound person is the free person.
The free person is bound.
Don’t follow.
*
One barrier: one gate. Celebrate!
*
There’s been a misunderstanding.
There will be no correction.
*
To whom do I owe deference in the present moment?
To what?
*
The snake swallows its tail until it gags awake.
*
When my distressed friend is lost in thought I don’t go there with him.
I wait outside in comfort.
*
No matter the words, the direction, the words’ direction, it all leads to the same point here, now:
self-power caught in the act—self-power confessed!
(Emptiness greedy for emptiness.)
*
It’s impossible to recall all the words that moved me, that might have transformed me, but it’s easy to return to doubt and fear.
So I return to doubt and fear, and what contains it.
*
Death-fear pokes the grey until it sparks.
*
The flow of blood through ruts:
“Ah, me again.”
As the ruts flow.
*
The absence-of-entities, untaught, unknown, undemocratically rules the mystified.
*
I study the dharma, then I try to live it.
But I only live my own confusion-dharma.
I’m a certifiable master.
*
Not really a breakthrough.
Not really broken through: this absent barrier.
The breakthrough experience is just open eyes.
*
Brainstem as periscope: which end am I peering through?
*
While I'm thinking/inverting, every window's a mirror.
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Horizontal mind—one of many.
Vertical mind—just one.
*
Where do you live?
In ataraxia.
But you’re agitated!
I’m a human being living in boundless ataraxia.
*
There's a life-saving pocket of air inside despair!
*
The “no problem” state is not a state at all, it’s the blazing realm where this bodymind and its tiny heart-lamp burn.
*
Here, aphorism-as-thesis, composed of dull contradictions, declares itself while antithesis-as-aphorism decomposes at the speed of light.
*
Helpful exploiters would have me believe that I must produce my own value through effort.
But my inherent value makes effort and oppressors and exploiters
optional.
*
I notice a fearful grasping sensation in the gut.
It radiates to my limbs.
I notice how breath stops for it like waiting for a bus.
No bus.
Breathing resumes.
*
Ah! I’m enlightened! I’m the Enlightened One!
How wonderful for you. But you’re afraid of something?
Hazards! Hazards everywhere!
*
I make this mental pudding in my anxiety-pot just like mother did.
It’s her mother’s recipe, and her mother’s mother’s…
Someday I’ll quit stirring.
*
The “Pristine Dharma” is here. It’s you. It’s everywhere you go and everything you do.
It’s unmissable. It’s pulsing blue…
(On your phone-map it’s the dot.
Of course you’ll say ‘it’s not’!)
*
Where-when?
Here-now.
Coordinates?
“Null Island.”
*
Ho-humming on a rock on the rim of the Grand Canyon reading a book about the Grand Canyon...
*
Preconditions? Only one:
The reckless rejection of every conceivable precondition!
*
