Before Skin

Before (the origin of) Life, World was naked - not boundless, but unbound; undifferentiated, and it was neither bad nor good.

Fear No Emptiness

Truth is tribe-specific, mind-specific, moment-specific, fear-specific information.
You make a sound (whatever it is that your culture designated for a given fear)
And - bam! - everybody’s mind stops agog: “What? What?!”

I know one thing: there is no one thing, i.e. there is no one truth, i.e. there is no truth.
I left some blank space above and below for you to process this information
out of the singularity of your emptiness.

Fear no emptiness, certainly not your own!
"Boo!-ddha" is but an alarm call for: "beware of informational fullness."
Empty your mind of fear.

Your (and my) skull is a soup bowl full of alphabet; tip it over.
Fear no information.
Let mind spill.



notes:

Buddha: from Pali, lit. "awakened, enlightened," pp. of budh "to awake, know, perceive," related to Skt. bodhati "is awake, observes, understands" (etymonline.com)

Banking on Flow

On this planet I sit
A mountain of mind-rubble worth of no essence-money
A plane of freedom

Does it matter if, while at it, I am naked or dressed to the nines?
Does it matter if I call my consciousness “spirit” or “dao” or “consciousness”?
Of course not.

"What is this all about?" reader-writer's mind scratches its forehead from inside.
Sure, you can go chasing that question.
But I say: ask yourself instead this: “Who is asking?”
and, if that's not enough, ask: “Who is asking ‘Who is asking?’”

On this plane of consciousness I sit
Still a mountain of mind-rubble but no longer asking who sits, just sitting
A plane of freedom, just as before, just always, not a kopeck's worth of difference.

No money in this,
only freedom and love.

p.s.
but, of course, there is always more, and, of course, there’s always less to all "this" sitting-standing...
p.s.s.
which particular “of course” is, of course, a matter of mind not to be minded...
p.s.s.s.
as for Dao-Course, it is hissing silent on this non-matter of certainty, like a river snaking through a mind-jungle, stinging any and all who believe what they see...


pavel, banking on flow

Playing Programmer In Lotus Land

Here’s a stanza from a Rush song, called Freewill, and my interpretive projections.

They are those who think they were dealt a losing hand,

The cards were stacked against them:

they weren’t born in lotus-land.

Mind is conditional, i.e. un-free.  Consciousness isn’t conditional, it is the conditioner, thus, free, or, in the parlance of the East, consciousness is un-born or a-causal (in the sense that it is not pre-determined, but pre-determines).  Consciousness is the source of freedom.  Override determinism via mindfulness. 

Once again: how’s mind different from consciousness?  Same way as form is different from essence and the programmer is different from the program.  Brain – hardware.  Mind – software.  Consciousness – programmer.  Mindfulness – toggle switch.  Sit down to witness the difference.  Sit down to play programmer.

We are what we identify with.  Which do you identify with: mind (form) or consciousness (essence)?

Resources:

Lotus Effect: Shedding Suffering and Rediscovering Your Essential Self (release: Fall 2010)

Reflections in the Lotus Pond

Standing on Lotus Land

Reflections in the Lotus Pond

Poem (by Charlene Balcom, Reflections/Shadows on the Shoji/Hokuseido Press, 1936):

As you reached into the lotus pond,

I saw the reflection

Of a young willow

Trailing slender branches

In the water.

Poetic Interpretation:

Lotus pond is post-Narcissism, it reflects no ego: when you look into the lotus pond of your consciousness, no Narcissus looks back; when you look into the lotus pond of your consciousness, you see no mind or any informational "self," for that matter,  just the "trailing slender branches" of Reality nearby.

Any reflections in the lotus pond are mind-projections…

Resources:

Lotus Effect: Shedding Suffering and Rediscovering Your Essential Self (release: Fall 2010)

Tuareg Wind Consciousness Carries All Mind-Echoes

Tap, tap, triple-tap, not enough palms to clap, not enough heels to walk…
Neti-Neti Knee knows not where to walk, so it walks not-knowing…
In between the dunes of sand or snow, knowing Nothing but One thing-less thing:
Whatever walkabout is about, no matter how infinite the diameter, a dervish ain’t a dervish.
Thus, un-wind, Wind!
Sands of time witness you pass, zig-zag-ing between Form and Essence…

Been there-here, done/undone this-that.
Your turn: spin!
Your web of interpretation catches nothing but word-fish...
So is mine, so is mine...


pavel, the writer-reader, on a walkabout about what he ain't...

Pulling on Binary String of Mind's Gordian Knot

1. You open your fan I open my mind, a fan of yours. Gateless gate needs no knocking from either side. 1. Conch shell or not, echo is no signal, and memory is no now. Encode this communication in real-time, Not when the meaning catches up with your mind. 0. Human ecstasy is cliché. I have ruined whole poems trying to write about it. What tragedy! 1. I didn’t interview Sky but I know it’s got nothing to tell me, the Cosmologist of Nonduality, Sky is just a mirror, right, Sky? 0. A mind-naked ascetic, I once, in a begging conversation, unnecessarily obliged a sitar-maker to give me a string. It still vibrates in him… 0. My scull is a bio-box that regurgitates meaning and burps doubt: 1-1-0-1-0-0-0-1 Just like that, ad infinitum and ad nauseum… 0. A trillion-strong cluster of molecules I lead myself Into a biochemical nowhere (which is brain). Catch my "I" on an MRI if you can! 1. Bite already, mosquito of impatience! Has this so-called poem already begun? It hasn’t: it's a po:em*. *po:em - a pattern interruption poem, i.e. not a poem

DNA of Nonduality

I know you’ve been caught too long polishing a mirror you didn’t want to be reflected in.
Been in that mirror myself, the Polisher.
My slave-Slavic DNA of consciousness tells me:
neither I, the slave, nor my master are what the mirror of Nonduality reflects.
We both, I and my master, are free.
I know that much about not-knowing.



slave (n).
c.1290, "person who is the property of another," from O.Fr. esclave, from M.L. Sclavus "slave" (cf. It. schiavo, Fr. esclave, Sp. esclavo), originally "Slav" (see Slav), so called because of the many Slavs sold into slavery by conquering peoples. (source: etymonline)

Countdown to Same Dynamic Stillness That Always Is

In you
the essence of reality distorts its own form.
In you
the essence of reality corrects it.
Infinitely...

10...9...8...7... 6...
you know how it ends: either in 1 or 0.
Same digital oneness.
After all, essence is still dynamically form, and form is still always essence...

proof-reading is moot: I'll never read this as if I had never written it.
Reality is unedited...
and so are you... and so are you me...

Who am I? Who are you?
5 stanzas - one Un-punctuated space of consciousness in between

Ellipses is but a punctuation symbol that reminds us of the emptiness that eclipses us...

The Hunt for Red-Blue October

At a
sub-atomical level
of, course, I am matter.
But at a
sub-atomical level
of, course, I am consciousness.
Is the sub of your meaning diving or resurfacing right now?

Consciousness U-Rail

1.
Intimacy of reality increases 3-D and all-channel
as you get closer to your own origin.
2.
A train of thought runs on tracks, right?
Right.
3.
Question is: who laid these tracks?
To answer this question, un-ask!
4.
Go in reverse: ride the u-rail of metacognition
from thought back to thinker!
5.
Next stop: you.
Self isn't destiny but destination, mind-tourist!


pavel, a stowaway-mind

Testing Stanzas

1.
Like a key turning in a lock, an analogy twists words into meaning.
Like a used car salesman, I am selling you my Hinayana* vehicle.
It got me nowhere I wanted to go…
2.
Compassion is company.
You are the destination, without an address.
3.
Ganges-river welcomes me a-surface,
like a homeless Mongol to its prairie space…
What the heck, I come in through any gateless gate that's opened to me!
4.
But now, just as before, I discover: still no one's there...
Yet, as always, someone's testing stanzas...
Not me!



*Hinayana - Hînayâna (हीनयान) is a Sanskrit/Pâli term literally meaning: "the low vehicle", "the inferior vehicle", or "the deficient vehicle" - i.e. a vehicle of individual salvation (to be contrasted with Mahayana-type Buddhism - the big school-bus-size vehicle of "let's get enlightened together!"

Matter = Information = Mind?

Frank Wilczek (Nobel Prize in Physics 2004), in his book (The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces), in his introduction of quarks and gluons ("the littler bits" within protons and neutrons), concludes: "the its are the bits." The "its" here is not a misspelling. What Wilczek asserts is that the fundamental objects of matter are... information.  In other words, matter = information = mind. What do you think?