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Gibberish...


The central myth in Shinshu is the Dharmakara-Amida story. In this teaching, Bodhisattva Dharmakara made a vow, or 48 versions of a vow, that he would not leave samsara until all beings left samsara.

Well, he did leave or transcend it. He now presides over the Pure Land as Amida Buddha (Buddha of infinite light and life).

Dharmakara’s primal vow—his/her primal aspiration—to “save” all beings has been fulfilled. In other words, it’s a done deal. It has occurred. Past tense. Thank you very much!

That’s the Shinshu punchline, or seminal koan.

What this story means to me:

Separation from the light and life of the Dharma is impossible. This Buddha-light is absolutely unimpeded. No boundaries block it because there are no true boundaries in reality. Everything is interdependent, dependently originated, and equally impermanent—gone!

However, due to natural fear-greed, we doubt and attempt to resist impermanence (to the ego it smells of death), and we want that light, and ourselves, to be permanent.

At this point I’d like to talk about another key concept: primal aspiration, hongan. I see this as a seeking person’s overwhelming desire to live freely—free of fear, greed, and doubt.

Our primal aspiration--hongan—is “inside” us, apparently locked inside our “separate” selves, which might be possible if there are separate selves. But separate selves must be fixed entities, in violation of the “law” of impermanence.

These separate selves, these fixed entities, are falsehoods. Insisting that the false is true takes constant maintenance, effort. Clearly seeing the futility of that effort drains it of fuel in the present, timeless moment. Suddenly, no gas, just fumes.

If impermanence is seen as “flow” (as opposed to non-flow, static permanence), and flow is the truth of reality, then the primary delusion is flow-doubt, impermanence-doubt. This is deluded or unconscious effort-against-flow, which cannot succeed because effort...is also flow!

It’s futile, and it hurts, like clenching a fist harder and harder in order to permanently possess the fist. Seeing this futility (self-power) relaxes the fist naturally, automatically.

My primary aspiration is to be free of this painful futility. This is a deep, longing aspiration to be one with the flow, despite the paradoxical fact that universal flow is always already the case.

Is this a “cosmic” awareness? Only indirectly. What I’m aware of is my doubt that all “spiritual” concerns have already been dealt with. This is a kind of accidental or negative insight into the positive reality that the Dharmakara-myth points to.

Dharmakara, the seeker, is Amida/Pure Land, the sought. This truth is bursting out of me; it cannot be constrained by the illusion of doubt once this doubt is seen. This Dharmakara-spirit is bodhicitta. Ineluctably.

Amida is not a god-savior outside of us. Pure Land is not a destination in a future place and time. Amida and Pure Land are symbols for the Dharma of impermanence, reality, life. Here and now.

Amida is also a symbol for all actually-existing Buddhas (awakened human beings) past and present, and their words. As such, Amida represents the external conditions of our awakening, while Dharmakara represents our “internal” (always already existing), out-flowing Buddha-nature, the cause and the very nature of our freedom.

In other words, enlightening words flow to us, but the fulfilled spirit flows from us. That’s called “Dharmakara-spirit.” It’s the “namu” in “namu-amida-butsu,” the primal and summarizing Shinshu expression that verbally unifies duality.

(How unexpected: our inconceivable light flows out.)

​*

Seeing self as no-self, the opposite of alone...

*

Completely unhinged by ordinary derangements.

Completely, insanely ordinary.

*

The attempt to pause, the effort to pause, is panic.

​*

When differentiator disappears difference disappears.

​Differentiator only disappears.

*

​Self is separate. Selfless is together. Self is selfless.

​*

Each impulse to achieve improvement over this-here-now is a variation on a theme.

When this multiplicity of variations is seen simply as fear-greed — one two-sided coin, one dense turbulence — it can be touched, examined, turned over, clutched.

It’s just one thing. The same thing again and again. From antiquity.

Exposed to open air, it’s spent.

*

Cursed with a gift?

Gifted with a curse: see it, say it, see it, say it...

The open secret never shuts (up).

*

Attachment + dependency = addiction.

​In other words, “self-power.”

*

Rampant self-power observed: confess it.

(It’s an “it.” It’s not you.)

*

Eons ago prior to human extinction a mining operation was set in motion, fully automated.

Fueled by the sun, its tenacious machinery digs for light.

*

I’m sorry but I’m at a loss. I don’t get it. I really don’t. And I desperately want to get it. That’s why I’m in so much pain.

By “get” I mean keep.

*

Contraction, release: empty addiction.

​*

​The greatest human power is unleashed in a flash through simple recognition of its undignified suppressor: fear-greed-doubt.

*

When you grasp the object called “the impossibility of objects” its structural laughter collapses bones.

*

“Not-two” means error is impossible.

No error, no regret.

Presumption of error is regretful?

Even the presumption of error is not error!

​Regret becomes boast.

*

Error-fear is death-fear. Blame an upbringing of conditional love.

​Perennial error is perennial teacher. Unconditionally.

*

Disclaimer: boldly affirmative statements here are really just escapees. They evaporate. When recaptured by thought we catch only their empty jumpsuits.

*

The effort toward knowing (getting/keeping ego-advantage) is no-ing: bodymind rejection of this.

This rejection is the second strongest human force.

*

The reason this is so hard is that it’s the opposite of everything the mind has learned, the opposite of all conditioning.

The reason this is so easy is that it’s the only real possibility.

Hard: here-now liberation (non-portable, without continuation) as the eye that’s straining to see itself.

Easy: an unearned pause in the straining.

*

Not catching on? Not finding it?

You’re telling me you can’t find your doubt?

Your self-inquiry is like a selfie and doubt is the camera’s toggle switch.

Touch doubt. You’ve got to look right at it. It’s a gift!

Take your eyes off your unkind mirror and touch that very specific toggle. Touch doubt earnestly and there’s a sudden inversion.

Look! The out-view is the real you.

Touch it again: there you are, little dreamer. Don’t worry! Not dead!

Now touch it again, selfless wonder...

*

I’m face-to-face with Mr. Confident. I’m uncomfortable.

In his light I’m exposed as Mr. Insecure. But I can see that I am not my name.

I thank Mr. Confident for that (jerk).

*

The face, mimicking the brain (the worry part), and the chest, tugging on the face, and the gut, suctioning the chest, are all compressed and ironed flat by the suffocating weight of weightless thought.

*

Liberation is our pre-existing condition but we fear that this emptiness is death; we treat it as we would a sickness with layers and layers of self-protection — layer after layer after layer after layer of space.

*

Zange is the last tool — the last anti-tool — always robust.

I fail, I confess.

​It gets me nowhere!

*

The doctor greets the dying patient in the morning and signs the death certificate in the afternoon.

The coroner chats with a friend hands-free while wielding a diamond-tooth saw.

The mortician belches bacon and eggs before entering the day’s plush business of wood and ashes.

Death’s custodians are grief-free. The deceased are too, but off the clock. That’s what they intend when they say, “I’ll be with you always.”

*

​The fundamental contradiction isn’t resolved, it’s dropped like ballast.

​*

The component parts of souls are souls. The component parts of soul-components are souls. This infinite dissection voids sacredness.

​But on the aggregate side, souls are hugged by souls and those clumps of souls are hugged by clumps of clumps of souls. This infinite conflation voids voidness.

*

When there’s an embarrassment of riches, where is the redundancy-threshold?

How soon, or at what age, do we cross it?

The threshold is any catastrophe we survive, even birth.

To us gluttons, redundancy is gravy.

*

He’s thinking there’s an obstruction but there isn’t one. The dam is just the river.

​*

Individual “evolution” is maturity.

We buy self-help techniques and methods. They take twenty, thirty, forty years to “work.”

It’s like paying to age.

We extract ourselves from this con game by catching on to it, seeing the huckster in action, in ourselves.

​Now, timeless moment, stop the check.

*

From the (blind) view of the herd this is prohibited knowledge.

Unconsciously self-prohibited: awareness that all “needs” are wants.

Self itself is linchpin. Imaginary.

*

Their insight is true and authentic but their words are false.

​Because they’re stupid.

*

​All temperaments are equal in and as emptiness.

​“Emptiness” is equal to all other words.

*

Doubt is curved space, the inevitable return of self-referencing and the fear-based belief in boundaries.

But this object, like all objects, is displayed in context.

*

A small stream of rainwater is obstructed by debris.

I rake the debris aside.

​Now the banks are heaped with shoulds and shouldn’ts, pluses, minuses, and thoughts.

*

“Awakeness” trends toward simplicity not complexity. Then from simplicity — like counting backwards — it slides all the way to zero.

​This is where calculating mind finds itself not in the front seat but in the back — of a car constructed of the other five senses, driving in the precise center of all space and time.

*

Top billing goes not to the ”inner guru” but to the inner student.

The inner guru/teacher is doubt, and it’s impressively erudite. I constantly learn from it.

The desire to learn is inexhaustible. It outlasts the teacher.

Desire to learn (to see) pours out of the obscuring doubt-shell uninterruptedly. This is primal and primary. This is life.

Doubt is death’s weakening grip.

*

“No” mind (fear) and “know” mind (greed) are no-mind.

​*

Trying to ride the wave we are

claiming to ride it

showing others how

​breaks.

*

A says this and B says that.

U think about what A says and what B says.

​These three things = zero.

*

I remain on the surface of thoughts, floating, usually face up (...to breathe, and meet the sky).

This is a free service. The only expense is that I have to relinquish paying anything to anyone.

*

I have achieved the thought-free, non-conceptual state. I embody it, as I embody sarcasm.

But seriously, all my thoughts and concepts are gone when I get there.

(Thought is the absence it reifies.)

*

Turn inward to discover there is no inward. You’ll break that addiction.

Self-referencing will become a private joke.

*

I’m talking to you in horizontal-speak, here in Horizontal Land, about Vertical Land, which has neither language nor location.

My message: All horizontal solutions to horizontal problems are time-bound horizontals. But the root problem is horizontality itself, which in reality is composed of timeless, problem-free, vertical slats. To peek through.

*

Fear and doubt are born dead.

​Error, unlike rule-breaking, is impossible.

*

Bodymind imposes No on itself in Yesland.

The compulsion is exposed.

*

The teacher is in a terrible predicament. So much better not to be one.

Learn. But don’t take notes.

*

Thought-tangents are mindless and infinitely tangential.

Like leukocytes, they attack the problem as directed by the directed...

Brainstem is boss, cortex is echo.

Calories are King: converting wafers in communion.

We huff brain-fumes and drink mirages.

Seeing this is hard but it’s how we expose our truth.

*

Conceptualizing mind in action is self-power in action, the illusory bonding agent. Simply seeing this as fact is the perfect simplicity of the negative way (where we discover that object-dependent happiness is a form of suffering.)

*

Set the trip odometer to zero...

Carry on...

​Set it back to zero...

*

Allegory:

​Looking down at smartphone. Looking up from smartphone.

​(Thought-tangent. Life.)

*

Lifehacks, sold by hacks, give a temporary burst of gumption to those of us who slog around in coats and clouds of malaise. But what I’m talking about is the lifehack patented by life itself.

Say you wake up after the party under a suffocating mound of coats. But somehow there’s a tickle of air and a tiny spark of light. That’s the hack of life.

It won’t infuse you and cure your hangover. Not at all. It can’t leak in at any level: skin-level, cell-level, mood-level, spirit-level. It doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t move in that direction. It’s not a drug.

It’s always just outside “the problem” (whichever one). It’s outside the mound of heavy coats.

Just beyond the problem, just past its reach, is that problem’s vast nonexistence.

You might say, “This is absurd, braindead. It’s my problem and I want to end my problem!”

That’s another hack, not this one. You’ll find that hack, and more, down at the hack market. This one is free and available, always. (Not a divinity. That’s a market hack.)

All you need is a single hack-glimpse, a flash, a whiff. To put it crudely.

From this perspective, your problems are not really yours. You can (will) claim them and they’ll be surrendered to you, you’ve got the tokens. But for one flash-like moment, you’re uncured yet unburdened.

We can’t, ourselves, effectively hack life (in Shinshu that’s called “self-power”). Life hacks us (“other-power”). When we do the hacking, the hacking hacker remains unhacked.

This hack of life is hardly known. Outside endorsements are rarely heard. If you’re thinking right now, “What if…?” then take a peek. Just one. Can’t hurt.

The inner “What if?” — the whiff— already knows.

*

Self-torture flares up so I can see it. So I can’t hate it.

Fear makes non-fear obvious. So I love it.

*

There is a thought-horizon.

​When you find it, look what else!

*

Shouldn’t I stop doing what I’m doing? Shouldn’t I stop sabotaging the present moment with thoughts?

​Yes. I mean, no.

*

The simplicity is that there’s only one category.

We’re hesitant to admit, and then share, the view that all items are found inside one single skull-box of corpses.

This view itself is in there too, wrapped in paper.

But there’s only one category, so it’s simple.

​Obviously not easy.

*

​Note the effort to know what can’t be known. That’s all.

*

No mirrors. Just look at your subjective face.

See how this inversion is instantly reversed by externalities ... as the door of your pressurized cabin blows out, taking all thoughts with it.

*

Zange is our superpower. It’s our Buddha-dharma confession, confessed in (and as!) this Buddha-dharma land of impermanence. This confession confesses that apparent self-power (fear-greed-doubt) has been caught, once again, in the act. And it’s a confession of self-power-failure. Therefore, it’s a super flash of insight!

Caught in the act? The doomed act, the effort to make the impermanent permanent so we can keep and reuse the dream-artifacts we like and trash the ones we hate.

The effort to make the impermanent permanent is a fool’s errand. When we lapse back into this foolishness (always) we confess it, wordlessly, instantly, spontaneously. “Spontaneously” because it happens of itself.

When clearly seen, “self” and its confession are revealed to be a unified moment of prior emptiness. In other words, observing (recognizing), as confession, is zange/gone.

*

On the road, this terrible sound:

“Yes, but, yes, but, yes, but, yes, but...”

I hollered out the window, “You’ve got a flat!”

Couldn’t hear me.

Duk-kha, duk-kha, duk-kha, duk-kha...

For miles and miles.

​Stopped when I stopped.

*

Zero? When I put that donut under a microscope I see that it’s sprinkled — with holes.

My apron looks like a lab coat but it’s a crusty bib. It says “I Heart Donuts.”

But I don’t. I consume them solely for eradication purposes.

*

They call us cheaters, short-cutters. And we see them as unconscious, militant enforcers of the cults of reason and superstition.

*

I see it, I recognize it, I know its name, but I’m no longer attached to the fantasy that attachment is possible.

*

Fear paints death ugly with its can of black mold, mold that’s whitewashed and fertilized by thought.

*

There’s a problem with the way they describe things.

It’s as if they are claiming an amazing state of mind or way of being, and if we follow along we might someday embody that awesome freedom too.

But they are reifying and don’t seem to know it, and because of that everything they say about freedom (when we bother with it) leads to mental bondage. They are clueless reifiers talking about things and selves that cannot exist.

If we postpone, just for a moment, turning this lens around self-critically, we can steal an outward glimpse and then assert that the rumored state of freedom is in fact our own unimpeded realm. Now.

And it should go without saying that this timelessness — this impermanence we claim, and that claims us — is an absolute equality.

(Equality’s problem with description is this: X is telling X that if X will only look at X, X will realize that it too is already X. But in truth, not seeing X, or not seeing X as X, is also X, where X = zero.)

*

No frown-lines are attributed to this view, stunned as we are by a revelation that unstuns.

*

When we find that all chains, all bonds, are themselves freedom-keys, what to do?

Confess them.

*

The eyes (or choose your favorite sense-organ) are mindless transparencies. They would not, even if they could, associate themselves with thoughts.

They are the ship’s bow. The captain is drunk.

*

All letters of the alphabet and all their endless combinations are continuously funneled into one ear, cerebrally gummed, then spat out the other in the form of an unshelled nut.

​Hammer-smashed by The Great Squirrel just prior to pronunciation.

*

Gratitude for everything that blocks. That’s the gist.

Death-and-resurrection: blocks...are...nothing.

​Nothing blocks. That’s the gist.

*

There are only coincidences. All live events timelessly coincide.

(Speaking of which: Who is mindful of what? When?)

​*

Desperate seekers finally find that “finding” and “not finding” are identical in this nothingness.

​*

We deconstruct everything, then deconstruct the parts, then deconstruct the parts’ parts, then recoil from what we see.

Fear twists these ropes into snakes. Hemp rattles its frayed tips. Follicles stiffen their tails as we back out backwards into superstition.

*

My zange: this purging confession of total failure. Making space for more.

​*

I’m being sued because my mail-order RealityGogglz (trademarked) are just eyeglass frames without lenses. And someone got hurt.

*

“Anxiety and depression because, you know, things are not going to work out.”

​My shrink. Always laughing. Dead now.

*

Awake to the ego as wake.

*

Tanabe points to “... the activity of absolute nothingness, which is neither life nor death.”

Which is misconstrued through conceptualizing — affirming and negating.

This instinctively constructed misconstruction is destroyed in a flash through a witnessing which is obliterated.

*

My real dream has come true.

I hadn’t noticed! ... due to my assumption that success and happiness always arrive together.

*

This (body-mind), these (thoughts) can’t be “good.”

They are the products of food.

And violence: tearing, crushing, burning, flushing.

As our calorie-charged amoral organ fumes under its tinfoil hat, it’s bad to think of ourselves as good.

*

When I say “you” I mean me. I don’t know you at all except in this way.

​What if I’m wrong?

Of course I’m wrong. That’s the point!

*

Birds settle on a sagging wire.

They startle and flap away.

They return.

​I am oppressed, but only by these birds.

*

I’m not talking about a bodymind state. I’m talking about the terminus of bodymind states within and without.

*

“Birth” in the “Pure Land” is a symbol for waking up here and now. Waking up to what? To false self and true self. This is called “twofold awakening” but it’s simultaneous. It’s like finding the inside boundary and thereby discovering that there’s an outside, something beyond the container. Until then, there can be no acknowledgement that the world beyond the inward-turning, conceptualizing mind exists as one’s true self, one’s larger reality.

When dualistic/dualizing ego-mind spontaneously bumps up against its own limit, it can’t help inferring that there’s a beyond-mind. This isn’t mysticism. Scales don’t fall from our eyes. Scales are seen to be imaginary. If we are meditators or chanters maybe our practice is an effort to cut through or leap over these scales. But when we see them as our own creations all effort stops, the projector sputters, the projection flickers… What was that between frames, between scales?... Our eyes are wide open.

Is the beyond-mind what we really are? Are we the omnipresence of impermanence? We have to listen to voices that tell us things we might not be prepared for. What if all of our self-improvement strategies are the doomed efforts of a false self?

What’s beyond our self-referencing mind? Is it really “other”? Does it need improvement? What if effort-making is a dead end? What if our dead end is near? (It’s within minutes, seconds, for some of us.) Are we really betting on a continuation-life after this one?

Effort-making conceptual mind is a mind of “leisure.” It assumes time is real and it takes its time. It presumes that timelines are real, that progress is real—and these things are “real” within the unreal container. It’s all self-referentially real inside the dream, this side of the mirrored scales. But there’s a tapping sound--tap, tap, tap—coming from just beyond our habitual narrowness. What is that?

There’s a “what if” out there signaling to us: What if what we’re wishing for has already been accomplished? Something inside us hears the tapping and knows this is the case. We’ve been imagining that it’s possible to improve the dream-self inside the dream. Then—tap, tap, tap—we're startled awake from this absurdity and are “born” into (and as) our prior, true selves. This is inconceivable (oh sorrow!) and ineluctable (oh joy!).

The cause of this awakening is always already within us. But conditions haven’t been quite right and without right conditions, no flowering. In this Dharma-view, the most important conditions are the words of the historical Buddhas (awakened ones) that come at us from angles we weren’t expecting.

“What if?” they ask. “What if your own truth, right now, is divorced from your thoughts?”

​*

I landed that day in No-Problem House.

“Problem” pricked up its ears. It was somehow quite far away.

It took two hours, but it arrived and crashed the party.

​It acted like it owned the place. It didn’t.

*

“Why?” doesn’t matter.

This question was hired to not let you go.

*

Street kids sniff glue and flash allegiance to the middle way. With a digit. Then pierce the holy fist.

Am I their scribe?

*

Went back again to the lunatic sage. He gave me the same two amulets, a zero and a one, snickering: ”This one is you, this zero is me.”

​But when he said “one” he pointed at the zero, and when he said “zero” he pointed at the one.

*

You put credibility on a pedestal. Why?

This liar is also awake to truth beyond temperament.

*

Shame is good. Deep shame is best: detachment nailed to a cross, with real nails.

You have become your faux pas, your crime.

Now, loser, look past yourself, through your blushing eyes, at the horizon, where trash-heap meets sky:

it’s still there!

*

Dharma-reality cannot be incompatible with your crazy, arbitrary, sensible thought-cloud — that imagistic, stunted noisecast of variations on a theme.

Your evidence-based wishful thinking emerges from this reality, fume-like, and disperses, but without the heft to pollute.

​(Insufficient yellow in the blue for green...but can you tell a joke?)

*

Do you revert to satisfaction or dissatisfaction?

​Dissatisfaction is alive within unimpeded non-dissatisfaction.

*

I’m the tip of the rhinoceros horn. Unpoached.

*

Walk outside and look down. Force yourself to keep looking down at the ground. Repress the urge to look up and around.

This little experiment mimics the blind greed that fuels conceptual mind.

*

Sages default — return — to oneness naturally.

Fools default to twoness and their conditioning.

I’m a fool. Twoness is my alarm clock.

*

The destination doubts it has arrived.

Its lost tour guide says “Pay me. I’ll take you home.”

*

Track the feeling of lack and longing. Locate it and it becomes the hollow center.

Everything else is you.

​*

Conceptual mind is breached by outflow.

*

Knowing is not-knowing and not-knowing is knowing, which means (he says for emphasis) they are identical.

​This only sounds absurd if you’re stuck on something.

*

The purpose of Dharma-words is their essence which is the space between them.

*

​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.

*

Do you hate imagination?

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

*

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

*

Miserable conditions are unmiserable micro-conditions clumped.

*

We all see this.

We’re taught we don’t:

“I see this.”

​“No you don’t.”

They teach what they’re taught.

It’s a pity.

*

Q: What are those of us at the bottom of the 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 reach 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 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.
​
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..

​*

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

​*

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

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

Imagine worried eyes pressed against glass. Now picture 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.

*

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.

But when I don’t do and don’t die, or when I do and die, the hallucination and its genetic propaganda taste freedom.

*

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

*

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

Then twitchy eyes pop their lids and laugh.

*

What you want is to feel your reality, the pure sensuality 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.”

​*

While the sage 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.

*

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

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 blade of mental grasping presses in and down.

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

This is 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.

*

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.

​*

Mind presses in as body flows out.

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

*

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 a 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. Its current is infinitely strong. Still the unconscious imperative is to dam it.

​*

​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.

It whispers: “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's 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.

*

When the grasping compulsion is seen, it expires:

“Ah? Ha!”

​This goes on all the time.

​*

​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.

*

Truth 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.

​*

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.”

Problems solved.

*

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

*

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

This a priori liberation from stagnation is absolute.

*

​Existence-as-appetite, this famished life.

​Blue sky.

​*

The freedom-flash is its own validation.

*

Note the simultaneity and goneness of our experience. That’s 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 shape 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 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 him against happiness. Not in so many words but somehow the lessons he retained were on the negative side.

The unspoken messages were the ones that really stuck. The only thing he 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 his fucked-up self he opened his fucked-up eyes

*

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

All that hair, 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 her furry tongue.

*

​Two hemispheres of clockwise and counterclockwise cerebral violence hover above a fuel-burning gut and exhaust-pipe spine.

Two hinged stilts wrapped in meat hobble forward with purpose. Fork-hands shove pie into a singing hole.

*