---

Notes to self...


Self-torture flares up so I can see it. So I can’t hate 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 king pouts, the crown shines (the crown, the robe, the throne, the palace, the land...)

This means the all-important mood-creature will always do what it does, trying and failing to con heaven.

*

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 this single category, this skull-box of corpses.

This view itself is in there! Sometimes wrapped in paper.

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

​Not easy.

*

Paraphrasing Shen hui:

​You can’t know it, this goneness.

​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 your eyes with it.

*

Apparent mental effort (the bodymind’s apparent effort) apparently creates apparent objects to love or loathe.

But only in the timeless now, which allots this creation-effort no time.

​Factually, attachment and revulsion can’t survive their apparency.

*

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.

*

Horizontal-verbal severed by vertical-nonverbal. All day long, unspeakable.

“Carry-on, carry-on, nothing to hear here...”

​(Hear it?)

*

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.

*

But this membrane is so thin.

How thin is it?

Thinner than thin. And I have to say something.

Go ahead.

It’ll sound crazy.

Good.

​Both sides are me.

*

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.

*

A heavy cloak of No would smother the Yes-flame, but it catches fire.

*

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

*

Poetry is spirit-talk, the language of spirit. It can only be free, but when it swims in the belly of thought it longs to be bound.

*

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 religion.

*

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.)

*

Not only is “form emptiness,” but “emptiness is form”!

It spirals on: thing, no-thing, both, neither...ultimately (instantly) departing the thought-stream.

This thing-no-thingness escapes conceivability and we can only know it by not knowing it.

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

*

Life says at some point: Enough.

Because life is death.

... Death is non-existence. And, it’s nonexistent.

(Is that better or worse?)

*

When you find that all chains, all bonds, are themselves freedom-keys, what should you 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 a giant squirrel just prior to pronunciation.

*

The miracle of miracles is waiting for a bountiful miracle. Praying for it. “Earning” it. Doing practices!

... Despite this circular flow of uncountable quantities of rewards.

​(I am that ouroboros.)

*

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?)

​*

That which launches thoughts wants to keep them but they’re launched. So it keeps launching out of greed.

That which launches the launcher is passing gas in its sleep.

*

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.

*

The process, for process people, is to follow process.

The process, for ex-process people, is “their” problem.

When ranking, these two are given equal rank.

​But only when ranking.

*

Incognito in a suit and dark glasses, interloping at inspirational retreats, I sit at a lobby table between shitters with a sign: “Your ticket to here-now.”

The “ticket” is a rubber stamp that prints a random shape with a foreign word. I’ll stamp anything.

Ink: disappearing.

Interloper: bounced.

*

See the effort-to-see.

See the clinging, the clinging-to-the-effort-to-see.

See the hope that seeing means seeing something.

See the hope that this something lasts.

(See the clinging to the hope that this something will “see me,” will “cling to me.”)

...We are “embraced, never to be abandoned” by the absolute absence we “are.” This is the one, and only, (timeless) permanence. Trust it, doubt it, fear it — you can’t not be it. You can’t be!

​*

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 blinding assumption that success and happiness always arrive together.

*

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

They are “food products,” 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.

*

Zange is the superpower. Through it we discover and confess our absolute lack of power (and the absolute corruption of the lingering hope that this “lack” is a lie).

*

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.

​The same terminus 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 huff 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.

*

Here, now, post-Singularity, the TV watches itself, and consciousness is a fabrication of consciousness.

*

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

You have become your faux pas, your crime.

Now, terminal 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?)

*

I’m driven by an unconscious compulsion to do the impossible: stop the flow.

The flow must be stopped! because my self (protection) is washing away.

This disowned fear is a mindless it within the free (flowing) field of vision.

I’m dreaming I’m conscious of this unconscious thing.

*

Do you revert to satisfaction or dissatisfaction?

​Dissatisfaction is alive within unimpeded non-dissatisfaction.

*

Study muddies. Reading is greeding. Seeing frees.

​*

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.

*

Dharma is what we “are.” Impermanence. It’s what objects “are.”

“To be” is to be gone. Absolute equality of absence.

Sun equals moon equals space.

Every level of density is zero to the nth.

Plus chafing.

*

Sages default — return — to oneness naturally.

Fools default to twoness and their conditioning.

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

*

Fight or flight at high boil or low. It’s never off.

Hot hands or cold, around the throat or gripping the hands that choke, that pray...

Human serenity is agitation compared to the boundless stillness that contains and washes through it.

But freedom is here, now, beyond states of mind.

*

Shinshu (buddha-truth) points to what is.

“What is” includes doubt that “what is” (ordinary life) is “it” (i.e., the extraordinary destination).

Doubt that “this is it” (this person, this place, this thing as is) is a defining human characteristic and the main barrier between us and relief.

Yet this doubt, when located, is revealed to be the inescapable nondual reality of impermanence: relief itself.

​Which is the kind of paradox that pushes the grasping mind aside, or over the edge.

​*

The destination doubts it has arrived.

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

*

The expression namu-amidabutsu acknowledges the “No,” acknowledges the “Yes,” and acknowledges their sameness.

It cuts through as it leaps over.
​
*

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

Everything else is you.

​*

Insight:

This nondual Dharma-reality (impermanence) is inconceivable. Effort to conceive of it — grasp it with the mind — is futile self-power.

But seeing our habitual effort to mentally grasp it and hold it is transcending it, transcending in one flash — one thought-moment — the hell of attachment.

This liberating insight into our inward-turning, grasping mind is always fresh and new. It’s timeless (no continuation). It’s ineffable (no portability).

This is the creativity of ordinary life. It’s free, in-and-as zero-dimensional samsara.

​This freedom is absolutely ineluctable.

​Outsight:

​This isn’t gained, you know, this flash (not of insight but of outsight). It’s not achieved.

​Standing on the beach we look up from our bare feet to the great bare ocean. Is the ocean achieved?

Conceptual mind is breached by outflow.

*

Hunger for (addiction to) visibility is what drives our “influencers,” the “sages” who make themselves known.

We don’t see the good ones because they don’t think they’re necessary.

*

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.

*

All concepts and this one are gone. Disappeared in their midst.

​*

The purpose of Dharma-words is their essence and their essence 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.

*

No core. No self. No core self.

What dies?

​The wanting.

*

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

*

Miserable conditions are unmiserable micro-conditions clumped.

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

*

Prior to everything that led to the Big Bang?

​...Everything prior to everything.

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

​Stop selling yourself short.

*

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.

*

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

​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..

​*

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.

*

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 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, the hallucination and its genetic propaganda taste freedom.

*

Did Dante dream this creature up?

​A cluster of infinities cursed with an appetite for the finite.

*

Are we changed?

​Only.

*

​​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.”

​*

The true irreducible is endless reducibility.

*

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.”

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," on mirrored windows.

​No glass!

​*

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.

*

“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 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.

​*

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.

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.

*

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 “Hell 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.

*

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.

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’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 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 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.

During brief periods of satiation, two mirroring retinas look back at the observer, detached. The song becomes less predatory, less coaxing, but this could be a ruse.

*