---

Notes to self...


I’m compelled to blind myself with thoughts.

Why?

​There is no “why,” only compulsion with unknowable roots.

*

Free liberation with free liberation. Free liberation from its chains by putting your useless chains down. Don’t use them. Don’t practice.

That which frees is unbound and unbounded. We are inescapably bound by freedom. There’s no way out!

...Doubt says: no.

There’s no need to counter that no with a yes. Simply note the no.

Seeing the no destroys it without replacing it with anything.

*

My “innermost aspiration” is freedom’s outflow (impermanence).

My second-to-innermost aspiration is fear-greed (the aspiration toward permanence).

The context for both is impermanence, where context is essence.

*

The place where words come from, and the place where that place comes from, are empty.

​This emptiness is identical to the emptiness of words.

*

Do you hate imagination?

​No, but unlike you, I forgive its nonexistence. My love and grief are almost simultaneous.

*

No core. No self. No core self.

What dies?

​The wanting.

*

You’re reading again. Because sometimes there’s a payoff. Meditating again: sometimes there’s a benefit.

Prior insights, flashes of wisdom, are gone but the hunger stays. The desire for re-liberation.

The thing you read that ”changed your life” is a passage in a book. You’re reaching for it...

Leave it. ”Freedom is within.”

You close your eyes, paging through your mind and its illuminated manuscripts.

Spiritual nourishment: you find it, eat it, toss the wrapper, burn the calories. Now what?

This is conceptual mind as self-power. It reaches, grabs, consumes, voids.

But “inward“ is a dead end. Repeatedly.

Now skip that step.

*

> Turn inward to discover the dead-endedness of turning inward. <

*

Miserable conditions are unmiserable micro-conditions clumped.

​Visit them down there. Pet them. You’ll see.

*

You’re a poem not a poet. A product not a producer. Effect not cause.

Your will is (un)willed. Your “agency” is disease. Symptoms: fear and confusion. Of and about error. Wrongness.

You freeze up. Second guess. Trip. The shame you feel is victim-blaming.

You’ve got to laugh. You’re made to.

*

When we observe something in ourselves it becomes other than ourselves.

We can claim that “the observer is the observed” but that’s someone’s pet idea on a leash.

The observed is not me. I am not that.

I am not me!

(This disassociation is not me.)

*

Prior to everything that led up to the Big Bang?

​...Everything prior to everything.

The genesis of that timeless genealogy is now. You’re it!

​Stop selling yourself short.

​(This isn’t ancient, it’s new. Not special, just new.)

*

We all see this.

We’re taught we don’t:

“I see this.”

​“No you don’t.”

They teach what they were taught.

It’s a pity.

*

We have, innately, the ability to defeat the problem-membrane that constrains us:

​Tug on it. It stretches down and in (or feels that way) until conceptual effort snaps and concave suddenly convexes! Flinging us out into the no-problem space that owns us.

*

​The purpose of the Dharma-dialectic is to expose the contradictions in both pros and cons.

These contradictions are escape-fissures. We don’t propel ourselves through them, we’re kicked.

*

​Some people say or imply that what we really are is one with the pristine, boundless, nondual reality that contains us. (That’s what I say!)

And some people tell us that all we have to do to cure ourselves of delusion and suffering is drop the idea/feeling that we’re not one with this pristine, boundless, nondual reality; they tell us that we should actively, consciously drop it.

(Bankei said we should stop “exchanging our unborn buddha-mind for thoughts.” Sailor Bob Adamson asks: “What’s wrong with right now unless we think about it?”)

But it’s the Shinshu (and really, the Mahayana) view that this error-making in our heads and hearts continues as long as we live. There’s no actual cure for it despite what some people promote and sell.

Shinshu in this sense is for the earth-inheriting meek; failures, broke/broken people, people without mental/physical/spiritual wealth and power.

Q: What are those of us at the bottom of the spiritual and existential totem pole to do? What liberation resource do we have access to that doesn’t cost anything? We don’t have the material or the cognitive-emotional wherewithal to climb some ladder or even grab our own bootstraps. Where’s our free freedom?

A: Here it is. It's right here, pouring freely from our cornucopia of skepticism, self-doubt, dark moods, despair; paradoxically, it's our perennial sense of being frauds, failures, inferiors…

I’ll call all that, collectively, the diamond-hard No: a congenital refusal-impulse that remains uneroded by the diaphanous, rainbow-lit, brilliant mist that (we are told) carries and embraces us.

This No, this refusal, is, counterintuitively, the only resource available to us and, serendipitously, the key to “spiritual” liberty!

(Caveat: it has no continuity or portability. It’s here-gone in a flash. It can’t become a technique or dogma or chore or burden.)

How strange that this No represents a bottomless opportunity to transcend itself, here-now, again and again and again.

Yes!

In short, what we are trying to get cured of is itself the medicine.

In this “ineffable and ineluctable” nondual Yes-reality, the ever-present (non-secret, unencrypted) access code is the word (the thought, the feeling): No.

To paraphrase Shinran: The No is the ice of delusion. The seeing of this No within ourselves is the warm water of wisdom-compassion that melts it. But ice is water, and the more ice, the more water!

Talk about living in abundance! This doubt, this refusal, this No is inexhaustible.

I can’t rid myself of it. Good thing it’s just my liberation.

Namu-amida-butsu.

​*

Troubles aren’t troubled. Problems themselves are problem-free. Otherwise it would make sense to engage with them.

​*

Imagine a particular phrase, the flip-side of which is the end of words.

Imagine a particular consternation, the flip-side of which is the end of frowning.

Imagine worried eyes pressed against glass. Now imagine this glass flipping behind the eyes, taking worry with it.

*

As machines, we continually produce and replicate expired concepts. They are heavy, thick, sticky, persuasive, and — gone.

*

I, personally, do not influence the general humanosphere.

My efforts, if I made them, could not influence or change another person’s life. Not meaningfully, beyond causing momentary dissonance. Dissonance resolved by forgetting me.

I have, however, found an influence that changes me. Or changes my perspective of me.

I can’t share what I’ve found because it’s like air. Can I say, “I’ve found air. Let me share it with you”? You would immediately think I’m asking to resuscitate you! I would more likely suggest: resuscitate yourself. But why would I promote revitalizing a thing like that?

What influences me is the breath that breathes me, without knowing me.

I am born and borne commonly, with you. All effort is ignored.

*

Any compelling task is a clone of the “vital” task.

Every little item on the to-do list carries “do-or-die” DNA.

When we don’t do and don’t die, or when we do and die, we dilute the hallucination and its genetic propaganda with clear water.

Tea?

*

We burden ourselves with burdens. Then we burden ourselves with non-burdens? Neither one is possible in nothingness.

(With hands too weak to support our weight, we grip —tenacious fools — a bottomless rope.)

*

Did Dante dream this creature up? A cluster of infinities cursed with an appetite for the finite.

A stomach without a mouth.

*

Brains are trippy tangential tangents.

Are we changed?

​Only.

*

​​Awareness of the “zero-dimensional” now doesn’t shrink emotions and passions, it enlarges them. To a looser fit.

*

Willfully blind but that will is not mine.
This free me that’s true is just like you.

Species: thy will, not mine, be damned.
And you, thought-spelunker: scammed.

Strip the mind with a pickax in time?
Scratch the head until it’s dead?

Just pop the lid (already did).

*

The unconscious demand to end all neuroses causes second-level misery, self-commiseration.

Until twitchy eyelids open their mouths and laugh.

*

What you want is to feel your reality, the pure pleasure you are.

​But this supreme pleasure is purified of experience.

*

Not secular. Not religious. In this poetic reality where conception is combustion, only change “is.”

But it can’t “be.”

The true irreducible is endless reducibility.

*

Words, sentences, get heavier and heavier and then lighter and lighter.

Without heavy first you’re a lightweight, an airhead. But later heavy is dogma, identity. Things we shed.

Accumulate first, then good riddance.

(As Dharma-BMI bloats, your own visibility blocks your view.)

*

We find that thoughts have no objective existence. We look for it. We strive to catch it. But timelessness has inoculated us. Against our will.

(We might be anti-vaxers but we are in fact the dose.)

*

While the neo-teacher blathers, sneak a peek.

As they harness your attention, look up from it.

What contains their focal point? What surrounds that serious speck?

A vast unserious you.

*

Everyone has the Dharma. Everyone. But we wear its pot on our head.

Until buddha unscrews the thing and sits on it.

*

​The “outflowing” body has moods or “humours.” Brainy part resists: “Moods suck. Stuff it.”

​Kleshas...

But they flow around the edges making them plain.

Inward goes the cork, for stagnancy, for self, toward its potted world. Mirrored.

Which confesses its forgetting thus remembering confession.

(“Resistance is futile” but functions as person.)

Resistance, confessed, flashes Mona Lisa. Is flashed upon, dashed upon her rim.

*
​
This is the ecstasy of mystics and insects.

On mud-flowers in lotus water.

*

The mad poetry of the joyful moment pokes holes in the mask but leaves it.

​*

​The “trance” is self, reflected on mirrored windows.

​No glass!

​*

The ax-blade of mental grasping presses in and down.

It deep-furrows the brow and splits the inner eye into thoughts and metas.

This is a kind of Frankenstein mitosis, a self-propagating, bursting bag of (lost) gooey marbles......

*

An attention deficit, a big one, surrounds the object of attention.

*

So we take the uncountable and count it: “uncountable.”

This is a scam of biblical proportions.

*

“Yes”: boundless context.

”No”: contextualized boundary.

(”No” is the doomed compulsion to know.)

​*

We don’t wake up to the boundless oneness we are. We wake up to our active doubt.

Doubting our true selves is a formless, instructive form of greed.

​*

I have buttons, you have buttons.

Some people think they are their buttons.

*

Religions are mental. Buddha-dharma is physical.

*

Mind presses in as body flows out.

Mind rides body despite itself, an ocean-surfing wave.

*

We see it, our delusion. We see through it. All of us do.

We then say, “Yes, but...” and fall into one of two categories:

1. The “Yes, but...” is our mind; we are dreaming.

2. The “Yes, but...” is our mind; we (know we) are dreaming.

*

I’m on the down-elevator.

Or it feels like I’m always going down even though I’m on the bottom. Maybe because the other elevators are going up.

Hand-crank elevators full of fine people cranking for higher floors. They wave me in. I don’t wave back.

I can’t lift them.

*

Self/entity/object: “A.”

Boundary separating it from others: “B.”

​Others: “C.”

A + B + C = ABC.

Now ABC is “A.”

*

​A circle is drawn and then erased.

​That’s the entire ceremony.

*

Wake

Buddhism’s truth, here-now, is life itself.

Reality is the Dharma. Truth is the Dharma.

This is the opposite of magical thinking and mysticism. It’s the opposite of sectarianism. It has nothing to say about self-improvement (ego-improvement, me-improvement, situation-improvement).

Buddhism’s truth precedes Buddhism, discovered not created by Shakyamuni, his predecessors and successors (us).

It’s called Dharma, impermanence, nonduality, spaciousness, emptiness…

It’s the self-releasing nature of all apparent objects and thoughts.

It’s inherent and unavoidable. It’s inconceivable as the essence of concepts and unbelievable as the voidness of fixed beliefs.

We discover that we can’t discover it.

Then we acutely feel the agony caused by the blind compulsion to do the impossible—to find it!

(Like trying to move an immovable object—an object that turns out to be pure motion and not an object at all.)

Feeling, here, is crucial. Feeling agony, suffering, stress, fear, greed.

Pain becomes teacher. Not a lecturer! It’s the instant, paradoxical messenger of here-now freedom and joy—a flash, a slap—not to be drawn out, captured, restrained, contained, or anaesthetized.

Just observed, listened-to.

This trickster-teacher inhabits our chronic angst, wears it like a skull-mask of paper or sugar.

It cuts a wake through the ocean, powered by its dissolution.

A wake through the Dharma-ocean of our true self.

(The wake is a hint that we should turn around. Now. Without waiting, without "healing.")

*

Instead of looking the right way you look the wrong way.

​Perfect.

​Just look at your wrong-way-looking.

*

Shinshu is not a practice, with a goal. Shinshu, meaning true Buddhism or Buddhism’s truth, points to here-now nondual reality (Dharma as impermanence).

Any practice must exist within truth alongside nonpractice. (Where else is there?) In that sense, effortful, progressive practices are equal to “nonpractices” within universal Dharma.

No-thingness is no-thingness as every apparent thing. This world isn’t one of fixed objects; fixedness can’t happen in this world. Because it can’t happen it has never happened except in our imaginings which are themselves unfixed.

Our fixations are fluid and this fluid is always gone. Practice is gone. Practicer is gone. Goals are gone. This will be as true later as it is now with or without practice.

This isn’t an idea or a dualistic personal experience (i.e. experiencer-plus-experience). It’s life, even as this lifeform curls into a ball of doubt or practice.

...This squeeze-ball is the fluid form we take in this doubtless realm where “is” never was!

*

I do two things: I see the truth and I write about my truth-seeing.

By truth I mean error and by truth-seeing I mean error-seeing.

*

Inward-turning mind rows its boat against the Dharma-current. Uses a crowbar for an oar.

All our upstream goals are siren songs.

*

We receive wisdom in the form of outside-words about our own out-flowing nature.

These boomerangs enter our heads and exit our hearts.

*

The river is infinitely wide. The current is infinitely strong. Still the unconscious imperative is to dam it.

​*

Dharma-happiness never waits. It is nondependent, noncontingent.

Bodymind’s inward-turning efforts to achieve happiness are futile. Discovering this futility is the discovery of prior Dharma-happiness.

​Happiness within? No. Within happiness.

*

​When I see that I’m dreaming — that’s awakeness. It has occurred.

*

The words that lead up to our wordlessness are different but our wordlessness is the same.

​*

My karmic distress has infinite roots. I can’t beat it.

​So I float on the surface of my defeat.

*

The world doesn’t receive my ideas, it produces them.

I flavor them as a flavoring produced by the world.

*

​I low-crawl face down through muck.

I hear it whisper: “Sun.”

*

My selfone battery is drained by the constant, roaming effort to connect with the Holy Tower of self-enhancement...

​*

I capture life by cupping my hands and then my entire bodymind around it.

Splashing and spilling enrage me.

*

My mental tangent is an automaticity of the body of the world.

​(“Mental tangent” is a redundancy, a stutter.)

*

The “pure pleasure” Dharma-crazies sing about is purified of experience.

There is no experience of it.

It’s like the fulsome ecstasy of extreme terror: if you’re unlucky, there’s a memory of it.

*

As early as the first cry we’re given way too much, when our singular greed is for one breast, one pill, one death.

*

I recoil from the notion and intuition of impermanence because, to this ego-self, it represents nonexistence, death. Even as, to my inner, out-flowing, “spiritual” aspiration for freedom, it represents life.

I call the recoil from impermanence “fear-greed” or “the primal No,” as in “No, not this, not here, not now” (which is also desire for “that, there, then, else”). It’s the habitual rejection of what “is.”

This “No”—this present-moment rejection of the reality of impermanence—is called self-power. In the Shinshu phrase “namu-amida-butsu,” it’s namu. It’s the error embedded in the (amida-butsu) truth. Amida-butsu symbolizes True Reality, the Dharma of impermanence.

Namu-amida-butsu is the awakening, here and now, to self-power-in-action—delusion-in-action, falsity-in-action—as it tries to resist its own ceaseless out-flowing in-and-as impermanence.

“In-and-as impermanence” refers to the nonduality, the “one taste,” of error and truth; in other words, to the actual impermanence of apparent permanence and apparently fixed objects like concepts and other delusions.

The concepts (dreams) that boil up as a result of the fear-greed bodymind contraction (grasping and attachment sustain these hallucinations) are relinquished when the pain of grasping and attaching to them is clearly seen, felt, and spontaneously confessed.

Self-power, when caught in the act, itself becomes in a flash or “one thought-moment” the sudden, silent suspension of self-binding, of contraction, of coil and recoil. I can see what I'm chronically, painfully doing, and so this bodymind, habitually grasping, loses the compulsion-inspiration to contain (retain, possess, hoard) the out-flow.

When the grasping compulsion is seen, it expires: “Ah? Ha!” This goes on all the time.

Freedom is discovered here-and-now negatively through the unmasking of the active binding agent: self-power. Self-power is the in-pulling “No” (unreality) that’s erased by its own ultimate nature as out-flowing, impermanent “Yes” (reality).

​*

​In zangedo (confession praxis) I don’t dwell on it, I just blurt it out: “This is me, three poisons.”

Or it blurts me out.

*

I wash up onto the shore. I’m beached.

Then I’m drug back into the depths of thought, mood, libido, mortido...

Then I wash back up again, blinking, blurry, breathless:

This primeval career.

*

I have a tally clicker. I click it every time I note that I’m recoiling from what is into fear-greed, or I’m recoiling from fear-greed itself.

Click.
Click.
Click.

A running tally of my successes.

*

This is so subtle and so immediate it precedes you.

You can’t grasp it but you can easily grasp your grasping.

​When you do you’ve accomplished everything.

*

​I’m so jealous of the peace that contains me. I’m so deranged and it’s so arranged or vice versa.

*

Locate and isolate the doubt — the No — and you find its boundless context.

Boundless, as in, unhindered by doubt.

*

​You find the contradiction by accident.

You hear the preacher. You wait for the inconsistency. But you won’t find it on purpose. So you surrender to the sermon, let it wash over you.

Then, like a pricked nerve or a foot-cramp on the cusp of a nap — there! The false note. Ouch!

There’s a noiseless crack and the whole structure crumbles.

The contradiction is the exploding key. And the exit.

*

Peace of mind?

Peace of beyond-mind.

*

Temperament is not a factor when it comes to waking up.

For example, take my polluted temperament: despite it, I’m awake to it.

*

My personality is differentiated.

Our reality is undifferentiated.

Or so I’ve heard!

​*

Doubt and hesitation, like thoughts in general, have no extension in spacetime.

We construct them ongoingly from raw emptiness.

*

I wake up to, not from, the crazy presumption of permanence.

*

​Attention (consciousness) is appetite.

*

“No not this not here not now not me” revealed as “Yes. This. Here. Now. Me.”

Not through acceptance but through simple recognition of nonacceptance.

*

The H-line (horizontal) is intersected at every point by the V-line (vertical). Somethingness intersected by nothingness here.

The intersection point — the point where H and V are the same — is their mutual zero point. It’s their identity.

*

Fear-greed — f & g — in effigy:

Every iffy effing thing nailed to an aching flame.

One crux to rep the rest.

*

All my constant problems are “within.”

Not mundane problems. I’m talking about spiritual problems: psychological, emotional, philosophical — the Spawn of Angst.

But “within” is a verbal construct. Without words, there is no “within.”

*

The automatic default to problem-consciousness is fear-mind’s love of gravity.

​Gravity is weightless.

*

Untouched by the tyranny of concepts due to their inherent voidness...

This a priori liberation from stagnation is absolute.

*

There’s the recoil, and then the recoil from recoiling.

Rejection of what is, and then rejection of rejection.

Fear, and then fear of fear.

​All of which are gone.

*

​Existence-as-appetite, this famished life.

​Blue sky.

​*

The freedom-flash is its own validation. No second, or first, opinion.

*

Note the simultaneity and goneness of our experience. That is our oneness.

*

Freedom is reduced to a simple recognition that’s erased as it erases.

​*

Society’s fears (family fears) are your fears, and they are countless. But when you condense them all into one, society fears you.

*

The chatterbox doesn’t disappear. It moves from front to back.

​*

Ask “who am I?” and you’re stuck in destructive continuation.

Ask “what am I?” and you creatively end it.

*

Factually, it’s impossible to create a fixed object.

​But people can’t care about that because “care” applies only to things.

*

Does the brain squeeze the guts or do the guts squeeze the brain?

It’s the squeezing that hurts, and its production of spiritual bile.

*

Head-stories, turned edgewise, are like radio static with banjos in a wood chipper.

Until the gravity of the fleshy ear molds them back into shapes and places them “right-side up” between mirrors.

In the infantile hope that death is afraid of shiny wafers.

*

​Look up from your device at least once.

​By “device” I mean thought-stream.

*

True Dharma words evict.

*

This universe is anthropomorphic: without content.

*

The entire Dharma of the Real Me is hidden in plain sight: it occupies its own denial.

*

This karmic self, composed of Non-Karmic Self, lives within Non-Karmic Self.

*

Nisargadatta Maharaj’s pronounced view “I Am That” is nonduality; it’s a boiled-down expression of ineluctable oneness. His “natural yoga” is a non-path path of instant recognition of Advaita-reality, not-twoness, or dynamic no-thing-ness.

The Ch’an (Zen) insight expressed in the well-known and variously translated “hsin hsin ming” is also “not-two,” an instant recognition of the impossibility of duality and boundaries.

The sudden Dzogchen shout “PHAT!” startles and instantly shatters the apparent formation of mind-objects; it’s a flash/recognition of the falseness of duality and thingness.

The nondual Shin Buddhist phrase namu-amida-butsu is also a recognition—a recognition of the impossibility of permanence, of fixed objects, of a true separate self in reality.

The formation of the illusory or limited self is like a whirlpool of water in the ocean; the whirlpool (aka, ocean water) is not cured or eliminated; it is, itself, recognized as impermanence!

These apparently disparate teachings tell us essentially the same thing. They all point to the living Dharma in (as) us, and they work to bust it out of the dungeons our minds have created—in our heads, our hearts, our guts, our tenseness. No, they expose the dungeons as void.

The jail-bars are mirages created by our own well-trained (ill-trained) bodyminds, but they only sustain the appearance of solidity for the duration of our active insistence that the bars exist. Upon recognition, that insistence loses its fuel, its force. The bars are gone. They were always gone.

Nisargadatta’s nothingness is Zen’s emptiness is Dzogchen’s spaciousness is Shin’s impermanence. All of which are the living Dharma, the “Pure [flowing] Land” that (metaphorically) pours from, not to, our hearts through recognition of the error of the presumption of permanence.

Through the error? This is, in a sense, a negative view: we recognize, in a flash, our chronic coil and recoil in the face of this flowing reality. We doubt that this ungraspability is safe. We fear it because we are trained to see the death of the separate (illusory) self as a real death—but it’s life!

With the honorable exception of Nisargadatta, this is the Mahayana Buddhist view (if labels are necessary). Shakyamuni didn’t talk about God, he talked about self-examination and the recognition of self-caused suffering.

Impermanence (nothingness, emptiness, spaciousness…reifications all) is inescapable reality. We doubt that and suffer. We fear it instead of trust it. But recognition of that doubt and fear, and the fist-like constriction it forms in our bodyminds (that forms our bodyminds into constriction) is itself “true entrusting.” In other words, recognition (confession) of failure is success! Initially this is hard to accept, but sooner or later our ingrained view shows itself to be absurd and painful. In that sense, the error is the teacher and we wake up — to error.

When the perfect freedom of impermanence confronts us—in a flash—we chill out; it's as if we exhale all the falsehoods we’ve been clinging to.

AH? HA!

And, as Nisargadatta said, “this must go on all the time.”

* * *

Many people counseled me against happiness. Not in so many words but somehow the lessons I retained were on the negative side.

The unspoken messages were the ones that really stuck. The only thing I did was criticize and self-criticize 24/7.

Then a really odd thing happened. Or it happened, in a way, without happening.

Without any actual changes to my fucked-up self I opened my fucked-up eyes

*

My top-knot opened like a bud. Follicles exhaled mile-long strands.

All that hair, in a reverse sunlit waterfall, sucked back into a cliff above the clouds!

Straight from this klieg light crown, died-dead neurons, plucked out like roots, popped in a seltzer-rush of sudden ecstatic baldness.

All but my furry tongue.

*

​