Union of Love and Wisdom

UNION OF LOVE AND WISDOM

Homage to the Wild Woman

There is a subtle nerve which streams electric
from the base of my spine up to my crown —
that is your divine playground, and I bow to you!

I never saw you, though you magically appear
as everyone and everything, and because
this is how you play, I bow down to you!

I say you are wild, though you are calm and bright;
I say you are serene, though you are truly wild.
Since you can’t be pinned down, I will bow to you!

I’ve heard there is a big difference between the idea
and the experience, but because you are far beyond
both, yet also most intimate, I bow down to you!

A blank state of mind, devoid of any thought —
that is simply the mansion of delusion, but because
you are a fire burning down the house, I bow to you!

Since you are always free from extremes, the peace
within peace, utterly awake as the fundamental state
of clear light and pure awareness, I bow down to you!

Because you clear away the blinding darkness of confusion,
pacifying the nadis and giving birth to uncontrived humor,
I will fashion poems for you as I bow down to you!

Some sages claim that whatever appears is mind, yet
mind itself is as empty as the vast expanse of sky, but if
the dead gurus never said a word, I still bow down to you!

I realize that everything and everyone is composed
of impersonal codes like any video game, and consist of
the same stuff as a virtual reality. Ha, I bow down to you!

In the lower levels of the dream are many types of entities,
some are fearsome and quite disturbing, but you show us how
to recognize their false claims and promises, so I bow to you!

Some beings are in a state which can only be described as
confused, lost, or beset by panic and fear. These are the ones
you comfort with your motherly affection, so I bow to you!

The higher astral worlds are very beautiful, with features which
are truly stunning, filled with wonders, and yet you descend
to this dense realm to answer our prayers, so I bow to you!

You yourself, as yourself, are heaven, you are truth, you are
the highest sacrament. You are Buddha, you are sangha, you —
the Perfection of Wisdom — so accordingly, I bow to you!

I see you as the Goddess, you see me as the God. By joining
in this ecstatic union, we make the holy sacrifice to each other.
Since there is no greater worship than this, I bow down to you!

You are identical to the forms of all women — there’s no sweeter
way to worship than by worshiping all women, the sacred feminine,
and because you’ve shown this way to me, I bow down to you!

You said: “Don’t torture yourself by asceticism! Seeing form,
look! Listen to sounds, inhale scents, taste flavors, feel textures.
Using the senses, you attain Buddhahood.” Thus, I bow to you!

You are the cosmic lover who bestows bliss on the passionate.
By abandoning all conceptual thought and uniting with you,
all brooding hopelessness vanishes, so I bow down to you!

Bob O’Hearn
November 23, 2017

Chapter 1

She was quieter than death, because even though we can’t hear it, death has a little sound. Perhaps we could say that it is like watching a video program with the sound off, and gradually we notice that there is an ambient noise coming from all around us that we don’t normally hear, mostly because our attention has been distracted by something else, something perhaps that we have been turning over in our mind like a miser with his coins.

Perhaps our particular coin is something from the past which we still feel a little ambivalent about. Since the past is also the present, it has not really died, has it? It lives on as a memory, but not as a real thing. What is memory? Isn’t it actually just a bit of neural happenstance which for a moment seems so vivid that the immediate sounds all around us — even though we might physically hear them — actually shrink in comparison to that memory-movie playing in our head?

See, we are always the main character in our cranial productions, the matrix of cognition, and in that sense it follows that the waking state and the dream state are not really two different things. Sometimes in the midst of a dream, we hear a sound and wake up, but we are not sure if it was a waking sound or a dream sound. Often, we must live with uncertainty in this realm of forgetting and remembering, even though we would generally prefer everything to be lawfully logical, like the presumed linearity of cause and effect.

She was quieter than death in that respect, because she didn’t appear as a memory, didn’t obliterate the ambient sounds, didn’t ask for any attention, but just seemed content to watch from the periphery as fabulous worlds silently collided and left colorful streaks of memories in their wake. Standing in the glare of it all, I raised my hand and she smiled, quietly.

There was nothing in need of being said, because the sound of the whole universe appearing in the form of that smile spontaneously achieved an elegant sufficiency. That is — in a way that we could never really imagine unless we were that silent ourselves, that utterly quiet — it was enough.

She was gazing at me but only saw herself. It’s not as if she looked and saw through me, or that I was merely her mirror. It was more like: there is only God, both viewer and view. God surveys itself through countless eyes. The smile is the way love forms itself out of silence.

Conceptual judgments are what we time-bound beings habitually contrive, but she had no judgment in her. Thus, she is the God who looks through time but only sees herself, the eternal triumph of sight, but still remains silent. In that silence, God dwells. When she finally exhales, all the universes appear, thrive for a time, and then fall silent. In that respect, her light was quieter than death.

Within that light, she sees us joining and separating, joining and separating, but never moving. In such immutable silence there is nothing solid to latch onto, nor favorite lines to recall from the old movies, the old memories of light, now slipping into the shade. We are waiting in the shadows with trays of silence, our offering to the fading light, the golden honey light of our late day silence.

Inside that silence there was still a little sound. It was like a slight ringing in the ears but there were no ears, no nose, no mouth. There was touch, as if we could combine ourselves in such a way that we could touch it — the tactile silence. We could touch it, and this is how we came to be two, even though we are indivisible from each other and the silence. If we could speak, we would say it, but despite all our words, the quiet still prevails. She is quieter than death, the death we won’t resist. Quietly, she’s smiling, even now.

Chapter 2

Yes, she had a name. It is so familiar that it need not be spoken. Some devotees claim she has a thousand names, and each one is holy. We also have had many names, but none of them stuck. Like her, we are nameless, even with our fictitious designations of whimsical transparency and nominal identities of chameleon charm. Under the steady moisture of relentless investigation, all identities eventually liquify, like cotton candy in the rain. All of them, except hers, and in our omni-versal indivisibility, we are not other than that.

We are what remains when the airy candy dissolves into its constituent parts and merges again with the earth in an un-nameable rapture of elemental bliss. Such bliss is the same state in which we now exist, yet without the name, how can it be known? It can’t. Everything is seen in the mirror, but the mirror can’t see itself. In that sense, it is much like her — quieter than death. It observes without interpretation. It doesn’t make a sound.

If there was going to be a sound, the first sound would be her name. Although it cannot be heard, all sounds emanate from it — all music, and everything is music. This is how she enters the story, like a dream of music that comes true when our eyes flutter open and the light pours in. Our energy field expands to receive more and more light. Light is supreme information. Information is nothing but music, her energetic resonance before the first sound, and so she is the Mother of Sound, but that is not her name.

So often we focus on the trivial detail and miss the revelation. Even so, fear not. What can’t be gained, can never be lost. In reality, nothing is revealed, nothing that is not already true of us. We can relax and exhale. Everything is known, just cling to none of it. That’s what she would do, but quietly.

To hear her music, a quiet mind is all we need. In the space between thoughts, she’s smiling until we can hear. Whether we hear or not, does not effect her smile. If we could hear what she hears, our ears would open like angel wings and carry us into the grand smiling hereafter. As it is, we’ve heard enough to be silent, yet we keep singing, each with their own perfect voice. We are the music she makes with her quiet mind. It is a bittersweet sound, because nothing stays the same, and yet it is triumphant in the midst of such vast emptiness, for that same reason.

When we open our mouths, various symmetrical frequencies congeal to create the semblance of some verbal meaning. When we open our hearts, verbal meanings lose their weight, and float off on angel wings into the grand smiling hereafter.

That grand smiling hereafter was the same before as it is after. The only thing that changes is our perception. When she looks out of our eyes, she can tell what changes, and what doesn’t. Just so, she loves us for our eyes, which are her eyes, and that is how we see. By her grace we slip blindly out of her womb, bereft of any meaning, and spend the rest of our lives trying to return to that same silence, of which we are fashioned, and yet from which we are desperately trying to flee. We are a mystery to all but her, and this is why she smiles, in this ecstatic quiet. So quiet now, it feels as if we can almost see.

She moves quietly, in waves of light and music, like the movement of a subtle comet concerto, burning through the timeless celestial silence, aflame with the love songs of existence, the songs she sings herself to sleep by, and when she awakens the ancestors rejoice, for now they can see at last, really see.

They look out through her eyes, and it is more magnificent than they had hoped. They are left speechless, and this silence is their bequeathal to us, a heart to heart transmission beyond mind and scriptures, beyond both light and its absence, though we are never absent from her. She is embracing us quietly right now, and what is there left to say? When we try to make a sound, she is gazing right at us. This makes us forget our words, and that is how the silence reclaims us.

Chapter 3

The futility of words does not dismay us, but only makes our music more poignant. It’s a fluid uncreated poignancy, since whatever appears will eventually fall away in its own perfect time, and just as soon be forgotten. Even so, the poignancy of its disappearance will simmer long after the cellular memory of it instantiation, like a warm glowing ember in a lifetime’s cold ashes which stubbornly refuses its destined extinction, dissolves and vanishes.

Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Bill Evans, Chet Baker, Brian Eno, Harold Budd . . . all devotees of the Poignancy Posse, and there are so many more — like the mystics who were shown too much for the human mind to bear, and yet somehow returned from that far abyss to share their grand vison. Standing up now from their seat at the table, they clear their throats to explain, but then find themselves mute. She is standing quietly behind them when they finally sit back down, speechless. She’s heard that song before, it’s so familiar. Can you hear it yet?

In the twilight background, behind the programed machine cheer and contrived passion of the usual fare, runs a small clear stream of feeling that is almost invisible to those who have yet to exhaust their options. When we finally drop down to our knees and drink of it, our ensuing tears will be added to it. It will be a fair exchange of water.

Water is the moisture of poignancy in these dry desert realms through which we roam. When we realize we’ve never left home, our quiet tears will renew those parched worlds, one tear at a time or all together, though they were never our tears. They are hers. None of her tears are ever wasted. One at a time or all together, those divine tears of supreme feeling become oceans on worlds for which we have no names or numbers. Within those galactic seas, magically adrift in the spaciousness of infinity, consciousness forms itself into poignant mirrors to perceive itself and become Self-Aware. We are those mirrors, her mirrors. We are her water babies.

Aren’t we spectacular in our brilliant poignancy! That anything exists at all is utterly beyond us, and yet we still pretend to be knowers, wielding the playful illusion of control over fields of molecules that know otherwise. Just so, it’s all in the angle of perception, but then come the myriad swarms of stories to interpret and confirm, co-creating new realities out of thin air, poignant realities because they are that and only that: our concocted stories.

Many a tall tale has echoed down this endless hall of mirrors where we graze and stumble, often like sleepwalkers, on our way back home to ourselves. Some exotic stories are shared around the campfire and even become beliefs. Beliefs are petrified stories. Like props in our self-exploration, they eventually end up in the corner. Quietly, she enters from the Upper Room and scoops up all the pieces back into the toy chest. Then she herself reclines in serene equanimity, as her water babies lean softly into her bosom and quietly, quietly, all fall asleep.

Chapter 4

To sleep, to dream, one must get very quiet. That’s when she opens her eyes and looks out through ours. She sees our dreams, every one, yet doesn’t turn away. She herself is there in the dream, playing each character, yet when the dream ends she remains. We are the dream she is dreaming, and we are all that persists when the dreaming ceases and we slide on the liminal light into morning.

Behind the dream, she reclines in her own tacit awareness. She doesn’t take notes. Everything is known already, nothing is remembered. Nothing is conceived, nothing received, except for itself, herself. She receives nothing but herself, and in the elegant sufficiency of her quietude, everything glows with original innocence, primordial peace. It is simple — she adds nothing, and takes nothing away. Who else is that quiet?

She inhabits her own non-existence with the majestic dignity of selfless humility. Quietly, she holds us up to that pure light, her light. From her angle of vision, we are revealed exactly as we are — everything and nothing. There is a quiet kiss to last a lifetime, then we are set down in her playground to amplify the light, to make it clear. It is here, in this mirroring radiance, that we find ourselves, at play in the fields of love’s blooming luminosity. Rays of infinite possibilities stream out in all directions before us, yet all we want is to rush back like a river to her oceanic embrace.

We want to melt back into her holy dream, surrender in her sacred sanctuary of silence, but she’s not there. She’s awake. Quietly, she sits amidst the raucous filth and rude splendor of this dreamy realm as a steady radiation station of unfathomable mercy. She is not elsewhere, nor does she come and go. In her stillness, she is the refuge of all moving things. When we find our center, she is already there, quietly welcoming us home.

No, we have never been separated. It is surely great bliss to realize this! To do so, we need not look far. Here she is now, quietly reading these words, recognizing herself in our myriad mirrors, watching us tenderly as we change and grow, transmuting our fears into a timeless love, expanding it, quietly, to infinity. She’s the light on the path, every step of the way. Heart softly pounding, she alone is walking it. Praise to you, Beloved One! In the everlasting victory of supreme equanimity, quietly, without moving, you walk on!

Chapter 5

Some say she is the Soul, and if we want her to be that, she will graciously mold herself into our vision of soulfulness for the duration of this waking dream, so that we can love ourselves without conditions and not be ashamed to exist. Her own brilliant non-existence makes it all possible, for if she were to appear, none else could be seen or heard, touched or tasted, for there is none other than her, and so she dreams.

We are what she dreams. We are particles of her own light, dancing in her mind. This is very good. Yes, she is smiling — we are how and why. Only by letting go can we fall into her cosmic heart and return as the light of her smile. When we see that same smile on every face, her heart is made flesh and dwells among us, as us.

Whatever appears in consciousness is grist for another chapter in the autobiography of the soul. When light is liberated from its density, the soul rejoices. Returned to what it has always been, she endures not the slightest interruption. Even though the foundation of the grand multi-versal conglomerate is like a rumor and a dream, her unalloyed simplicity clears away all abstruse philosophical speculation with a quiet smile and gentle nod.

There is no complication to her, she is guileless in that sense. It is only we who complicate, with our clumsy scaffolding of vanities and resentments, cravings and regrets, perpetually accumulating density, the low frequency weight of our self-created sorrows. Within that fraught scenario, the ego-sense resists, enveloped by fear and confusion, and the pure light itself appears as a dark mirror, reflecting our contraction back to us as boredom, doubt, and discomfort — our habitual condition and the inheritance we pass down.

If there is a term or phrase that means “to take a giant step back and slowly turn to face one’s own abyss”, it could be used here. Only the heart can cross that vast chasm. No pretense can carry us far. She is quietly waiting, smiling there on the other side. Likewise, she is the one who takes the first step off the cliff of the known, yet keeps on walking through the rainbow air, beyond the sway of gravity.

See, she’s walking on our own legs all the way back to herself, while remaining perfectly motionless. Light can do that. We are light — the one we come home to, and the one that never left, simultaneously. The contrast seems to agree with us. We’ve done it before, but choose to forget, for the love of her game, and the peace of her rest.

Earth and Heaven in each of her hands, a juggling act to no applause — we’re all too spellbound by her artistry to do anything but stare and stare. Somehow, from the indeterminate future, the unmistakable sound of one hand clap now cracks and echoes through the shimmering air, an unbearable joy that wounds the heart with an arrow launched when she took her first breath and the Totality flashed into being. We can only hear that one hand clap by becoming it right now. This is not difficult, just be still and listen. Behind the body and the mind, just listen.

Quietness is all we need to hear our own original sound. It is her sound, like one hand clapping for us all. We are given everything, because we dare to exist. There is a great nothingness which she calls home, and that is where we were spawned, like minnows in her bloodstream, traveling through her stellar arteries in the form of little songs which circle the heart, eliciting a one hand clap and shout out from the Source.

Source devised a way to forget itself, for the intense joy of remembering again, and so her game was created, and from her we all emerged, players with a bankroll of light and dark chips to wager in the playgrounds of duality, our home away from home.

Chapter 6

This sacred intimacy of blood, bone, and tissue made of light is soul-infused with the conscious intent to experience itself in the ecstatic form of everything, even its own absence. Whether from the silent depths of the ebony void, or out of the blue of the fresh dawn sky where the non-local consorts with the local, certain streaming notions in the swirl of love’s delight commence to twine and congeal into the form of a singular vibration, an energetic signature. Like an old familiar song suddenly brimming with vibrant new meaning, she quietly arrives on the tall ship of forgiveness. Unconditional mercy is her very nature, and she — its quiet avatar.

Some say forgiveness is the dues we all must pay at the gate before we can truly step up to the plate, but what if there is no gate, nor any plate to step up to in this dreamy hologram? As immortal sovereign beings of pure love and light, we have no dues to pay, nor anything to forgive. That’s all merely what a thought makes of another thought, but we are already there, which is here and now, so step right up — forgive everyone everything forever. Don’t hesitate. In the absolute innocence of this brief mortal game, step right up. By the light behind the mind which makes all vision possible, just step up. Nothing is fixed, there is no finality. In the marriage of awareness and experience there may seem to be choices, but only if we dare to first step up and forgive ourselves for the holy catastrophe of simply being human will those choices ever bear sweet fruit.

Likewise, how could we not forgive this dream? There’s a fearless bliss to being utterly lost in love’s fair matrix of euphoric discovery and heart recognition, of grim heartbreak and ultimate redemption. We love these stories, and want to hear them again and again. Tales of boundless grace and gratitude, of fabulous poem worlds, alight with the exquisite nectar of clear divine shine — all these she spreads before us, our own display to witness, to cherish and release. As above so below, as without so within, she playfully informs each cycling breath with novel inspiration, weaving a rich tapestry in and out of time, fashioning gleaming threads of ever-new play realms from the ashes of the old. All her wild worlds of wounds and wonders are transfixed and transmuted in the clear chrysalis of sudden self-remembrance — all now forgiven, blessed, relaxed, and surrendered . . . all let go.

Meanwhile, invisible creatures gather near, comforting beings of her largesse who brush the air around us with their luminous phantom hands. They lean closer and whisper softly in some ancient healing language which our ears cannot hear, but the heart can. When the night dissolves in light, we step up, stretch, and something we can’t explain with words or learned phrases ripples and shimmers through us, a subtle pulse of immediate presence pervading everything — it’s all conscious, we have never been alone, never separated from her.

Because we are so often like mad children, we tend to doubt our connection and frequently turn against each other in our anger and ignorance, our fear, and thus need to be reminded over and over again of this simple truth: that whatever appears is our own mirror, that whatever we do makes echoes, that we ourselves are an echo of an incomprehensible energy which travels quietly on through space and time like one steady beam of pure white light through those far distant worlds where our dreaming carries us — vast magical displays of our own radiant mind — where there is nothing that can truly harm us, and where we won’t be turned away.

Chapter 7

Fantasies of interpretation on perception are endless. The number of views one might entertain are likewise endless too. Perpetually striving to figure it all out with the intellect, we merely compound our own delusions by generating further confusion. She is patient. We still believe there is time, that there is “coming from” and “going to”. She knows that’s not true. We think it’s a line, she knows it’s a sphere.

Alternately, one can forsake any presumption of knowing, discard any strategy, method, or remedy to liberate what has never been bound. Completely abandon all programs seeking for something outside of oneself. Recognize directly that whatever appears is fashioned of mind, and that mind itself is like infinite space, with nothing to grasp hold of or call one’s own.

It is not a platform to construct identities. It’s empty of any qualities one can invoke to confirm a personal or collective story. This emptiness is nothing other than our own immediate presence. Moreover, within this immediate presence itself there is no such thing as immediate presence, thus the mind goes silent in contemplation of its own pristine non-existence.

She is already here, in such silence. She is motionless, yet everything gets done. When the mind goes quiet and falls into the heart, the corners of her mouth lift slightly. Sky people throw open their dream windows and gaze out in rapt astonishment. They’re startled at first, but then intrigued by the abundance of nothing drifting skyward, laden with ever-new bliss. Henceforth, some may find their dreams more realistic than their waking lives, which are also dreams.

To be clear: there is only dreaming. In our waking dreams, which are our lives, what we secretly fear may emerge from our own dream devices, take spectral form, and soon assume a life of its own. Really, that’s just an old dream wearing new garments, mind-woven in fear factories. Fear attracts more fear. Habitual afflictions of dense mentation coalesce around a matrix which has in truth no substance, as in dreams which dissolve when the big dog barks and our eyelids flutter open.

In whatever uniquely personal realm we’re meandering through in our fading sky dreams, perhaps reaching in vain for some receding glow like a hapless hand puppet of an armless man — now is the perfect moment. The mind may be a torn plastic bag swept up in the ambivalent breeze of some exotic chaos, but this is the perfect moment now to wake up.

Even within the sky of dreams, she is the one who is always awake. When the dream at last awakens to itself, it dissolves back into its constituent particles of light, in a soft receding glow. We are what remains. We haven’t changed. The dream changes, day turns to night, and we seem to go out to stranger worlds of blinding light and crushing dark, yet we have always been with her. One never really leaves home.

We’ve always been at rest in her arms, dreaming we’re somewhere, anywhere at all, simply for the perspective. Souls love the joy of contrast. Just as daylight needs the night to fully appreciate itself, so too are we here, awake in dark shadows, bringing heaven’s light to earth as conscious weavers of her living dream, the one which always comes true. All the ancestors rejoice when we do. All the multitude of descendants too! Celestials, Elementals, Star folk without number, all awaken with her from her long waking slumber.

Chapter 8

From out of the vast reservoir of unembellished emptiness, that great silent void which makes everything possible, an echoing bellow of subterranean long horns, windy flights of crystal charms and chiming cymbals, the hypnotic rhythmic hand drumming of the naked finger people — all invoke her sublime presence. Her devotees are legion, yet from her perspective, it is all self-worship. There is only one.

Although we exist within her, she graciously appears before, behind, and to our sides, simultaneously. She holds fresh spring water for us in her cupped hands. We won’t refuse. We drink. It is cool and sweet! The greatest miracle is freely bestowed, for which no gratitude is sufficient. We have no words. None are needed. There is only this wordless revelation, her open heart transmission. All we need do, is not resist.

In our dream, it seems we are travelling over dark water, but we are still — everything else is moving, everything else is dreaming. We are both subject and object, without which there is nothing, the same dreamy state in which we now exist, except for our chronic drunken indulgence in the trickster trance of thought. Within the very fabric of the glowing code which constitutes this living hologram, a vast repository of cumulative thoughts is constantly stirring, entangled in vibratory excitations of spontaneous rapture at the miraculous existence of anything at all. If there was a sound, it would be like a bonfire of thought melting away into blazing light, as she quietly tends the sacred fire of our holy immolation.

From our dream ashes new dreams will sprout, new stories to write home about. If there remains the slightest sense of separation between her and us, we can be assured we’re only dreaming. Consciousness itself is a dream — to be conscious is to be dreaming. Nobody can know what is prior to consciousness, while still dreaming. Likewise, to imagine oneself awake, is just another delusion of the dreamer.

All experience is dream-like. The three times — past, present, future — are a merry-go-round of illusion. Whatever happens or appears is purely a figment of dreaming. Dream characters are the imaginary creations with which we populate our dreams. They are extended mental projections of their source. When attention is withdrawn from the antics of the dream characters, and instead revolves around to the source of attention itself, a portal opens in the dream and we are pulled across its threshold into light.

Thoughts are movements in the dream, as well as the fabric of the dream itself. As thoughts arise, the dream is woven. Can the dream trace itself back to its own source? The dream character is not aware of the space between dream fragments. Like the vast empty space between galaxies, it seems to be nothing but a void. That void, however, is not some eternal nothingness, but the source of all dreaming itself. Some may say it is her, in her cosmic form, but she quietly leaves that empty room and walks on, heart softly pounding.

Chapter 9

Nearly simultaneous with the appearance of anything, mind fabricates an interpretation or view to superimpose on the experienced reality. It is an automaticity. Moreover, whatever the manifested phenomenon, it is invariably compounded of other compounded phenomena, and therefore empty of any independently enduring selfhood. For example, what we designate as “a tree” is actually composed of soil, seed, sun, and rain, which are themselves composed of other things, so there is no actual tree, except for the linguistic designation. Everything is like that.

The original cause for whatever appears may be traced back in a quantum regression of cause and effect, perhaps even prior to the inception of that energy of which consciousness is its nominal manifestation. Nevertheless, whatever appears is mind-made, and mind itself has no beginning, nor can it be used to transcend itself.

Fundamentally, there is no mind, except at the point of contact. Immediate presence. All else is mere abstraction. At the moment of contact, awareness and experience are inseparable. In essence, they are one thing, prior to any mental construct: primordial clear light, and if seen as it is, pure love without cause or condition . . . truly unspeakable.

Paradoxically, although it is our natural default fragrance, we rarely allow ourselves even a fleeting inhale of that supreme perfume. Mostly, we remain locked in fixed identification with a ceaseless parade of transient experiences, habitually superimposing our conditional and conflicted story of “me and mine” onto the innocent mystery of simple being.

Consequently, we don’t readily access and appreciate the multidimensional frequencies of vibration, of which our own living construct is capable, beyond the delirious frenzy of the mad collective dreamscape where we are presently engaged. To do so, we must awaken. Awakening is an act of love.

It is only the mercifully dear light of love which breaks the personal trance of morbid self-absorption. Nevertheless, she may carry us under her wing to the edge of the cliff, but we still must make the leap ourselves into the unknown and unconditioned, if we are to fulfill our soul’s true purpose and destiny in taking these human births.

Just so, if we are not magnifying our love light where we are here and now, then we’re only part of its dimming. With free will comes choices. Each choice made leads us closer to or further away from our own heart, the sanctuary where she is always waiting, quietly, for our arrival.

Meanwhile, a child’s soap bubble drifts lazily through the summer air, unaware of its brevity, of time at all, of any fence or boundary. Within the bubble, there are brilliant flashes of light as world upon world appears and vanishes, molecular realms of lush liquidity swarming with atomic characters not unlike us, all yearning to love and be loved, all seeking to be drowned at the heart in love’s benign extinction.

Our prayer is always granted. Call it her mercy, or tender loving kindness, when we vanish in mid-air, a love offering to the pristine sky from whence we came in a primal epiphany of gracious blessing, breathed out into these soap bubble forms of you and I and everything, every world, every star, every floating galaxy in the grand procession of filmy bubbles, of worlds upon worlds, all sublime transparencies of light mirroring light to eternity — all the luminous garments she wears as she quietly goes about her way.

Chapter 10

Human incarnation — the unbounded absolute contracts down into the relative. As if by magic, we pass through the portal of limitless unity consciousness and into a limiting psycho-physical realm of customized cognitive systems. Each system is enrobed with an individualized emotional-material body apparatus, perpetually modified by kaleidoscopic experience, genetic manipulations, holographic projections, celestial whispers and intimations of divinity. Having paid the cost of admission with the currency of our voluntary amnesia, what then do we find as we enter this virtual theater of flesh and forgetfulness?

An ambient arena for co-creative soul work, or a rude and painful contraction of the soul’s blissful prior state and identity? The perverse entertainment of certain would-be godly entities, or a clownish pantomime of desperate gestures and bland sociopathy? A no-expense paid tour of the denser dimensional potentials, or a rocky ride through fear-drenched landscapes, randomly punctuated by pin-point flashes of all-redeeming light?

Invariably, within each storyline, a vicious cycle of craving and aversion, grasping and avoiding, informs every move and motive. The resultant underlying mood is infected with a relentless dissatisfaction, regardless of one’s momentary victories and pleasures. At the core of our self-sense, there persists a chronic contraction, a gnawing sense of disconnection from home and happiness. It manifests as a tacit sense of suffering, ceaselessly compounding itself the more we resist the quiet invitation of her healing light that only wants us to relax, let go, and rest at last in absolute trust, like a babe in mother’s arms.

Resistance to life – wanting it to be different than it is — generates a sense of time that is first implied by the sense we’ve grown of a solid and continuous self, a fictional character which is subject then to the dream called time, a fickle fantasyland which the assumed self finds inescapable. The origin of this self-deception can be debated, though what may have begun as an innocent game, a creative fabrication and sly ruse, intended to playfully contrast and humorously confuse, will cease to amuse when the ensuing sense of suffering permeates the general operating system with the weight of its unbearable density.

At its extreme, the destiny of resistance is transmutation through surrender, yet how ferociously we cling instead to the feeble shadows of our self-inflicted darkness, imagining that’s all there is, and all we are within it. Consciousness takes temporary form, but then imagines it is that form, exclusively and forever. It resists all evidence to the contrary, evidence she quietly offers like cool water in the desert. Is this stubborn resistance most unfortunate, or an integral part of the game’s design?

Whatever has a beginning, will also have an end. The greater the resistance, the greater the ultimate release. When we’ve scrolled through all of distraction’s options and found them to be nothing more than weary clogs of cyclical reinforcement, resistance no longer has a place to anchor. Its purpose was to accentuate the separation until everything at its extreme is transformed into its opposite, but when there is only one thing that really matters, it’s pointless to resist. Just as the darkest night must give way to the light of day, love will have her way.

Chapter 11

Balancing on the top of a hundred-foot pole, eyes are closed, but thought formations seethe and interpenetrate, creating the sensation of virtual existence against a background of perfect non-existence. Somewhere inside the shell of an idea, a mute person is attempting to communicate with a deaf person. The effort results in these very words. They meander off the page in random directions — yesterday, today, tomorrow. Some flutter about like butterflies with amnesia, forgetting what they wanted to say, forgetting whatever point they were hoping to make — was there even a point, who can say?

Mad children race around a zero in ever-expanding circles, trying to capture one of those elusive word creatures. As if by some mischievous design, the words waver in the air, forming into tentative bits of awkward sentences which stubbornly refuse to congeal into the slightest facsimile of coherence. In other words, it’s not really about what we say. People say a lot of things, but she is always quiet. When we run out of words, she is the one who exhales. As she does, she lifts one finger. If we understand, all is well. If not, all is well.

Don’t let mere words obstruct clear seeing. Whatever she does or doesn’t do — it’s all her business, never ours. We’re just here to witness her passing parade of manifest consciousness, to observe but not interpret, and to refrain from any judgments. Our default position is pure awareness. If we keep a quiet mind, we can realize, more and more deeply, that we are never implicated by the vagaries of experience, or the perpetual modifications of consciousness. We are always cradled in her thousand arms, even when we go out to play and forget our way back home. The vast expanse of dynamic potentiality is her favorite magic playground, and we are her beloved playmates. “What game shall we play today?” she asks, laughing in her infectious way as we all gather round.

The game of relationships is always one of her favorite ways to show us more about who and what we really are. All of our relationships are essentially the same consciousness appearing and interacting in multiple forms. Nothing can happen without affecting everything else. Whatever appears is a modification of the same conscious light. Cause and effect, when experienced sequentially, create the illusion of time. Because the “other” is actually us in another form, whatever we do to them, we simultaneously do to ourselves. This has been called the “Law of Karma”, but it’s just one of the rules of her game, and the sooner we understand it, the better we will learn to play in all of our relationships.

In a fundamental sense, resistance is just an element of free will, or choice. Without resistance, without some form of friction, there could be no experience of free choice, because everyone would be choosing and experiencing the same thing, without any differentiation. In her engaging game of time, whatever we are resisting is eventually revealed to be part of us. When everything is one, we cannot be affected by anything which is not already ourselves. As much as we may resist the truth, nothing in our lives can happen without us choosing for it to occur in that reality. We are here enjoying the experience of choosing, and every one of our relationships reflect the choices we’ve been making, as well as those we’ve yet to make. In any case, choose love. Choose love — it’s all we need to remember.

Love is relationship. The conditioned presumption of separation from “others”, manifesting as the neurotic avoidance of relationship, is not our original nature, but rather a recoil from life and love in the form of a contraction at the heart. It is only by seeing through and discarding the insistent illusion of an independent and enduring self that love, the true nature of reality, can freely flow. When the tight fist opens, the heart softens, and all our relations celebrate. We have never been separated and divided from Source — from the love which we are — despite the noisy propaganda of the dense psycho-physical realm we currently inhabit.

Chapter 12

In a world of contrast where everything depends on everything else to experience its own beingness, she appears from non-being, from unalloyed nothingness, but so quietly that her silence has no boundary. She is sovereign unto herself. An open transparency, she grasps at nothing, yet is a gift to everything, granting it all the power to exist.

Truly, there is nothing which she does not imbue with the mysterious taste of existence. Each taste in turn is tasting itself, and all the tasted are tasting each other, and yet nothing exists in this eternal now, in this enchanted moment, which is not the thrilling taste of her ineluctable joy and wonder at the astonishing appearance of anything at all.

Throughout the three times and ten directions, wherever beings are afraid, she isn’t. Because they are afraid, she is here. There is no separation possible. She doesn’t really come and go. That is the job of consciousness, but in her immediate presence she is prior to consciousness. When beings fall in love, they become her thread and needle in the myriad interwoven threads of her divine labor. Love — really, it’s inconceivable, so I do the devil’s work of trying to say something that really can’t be said about that light which makes everything glow.

Whatever arises in consciousness has a perceived quality of space and time. In the midst of any experience of space/time, there is the awareness of the experience. They arise together — awareness and experience — though whatever seemed substantial at that moment of appearance almost immediately becomes a mere mental construct — a memory.

This is how we live in the past, and how the past lives on in us. She is not somewhere in the past, nor will we find her in the future. Immediate presence is peace. There is no conflict in her. We are always welcome to this moment. This moment now is all there is, and it’s enough. We are enough.

Our present immediate awareness is the moment itself, and this moment is also her guileless invitation. There is nothing before or after it, except that the deluded grasping mind dreams it so. She neither “was” nor “will be”. Love and Awareness are two words for the same thing. They point to our true identity. Regardless of what things may look like, our ordinary beingness itself is a supreme act of love.

There is power in love’s presence, just as there is in her apparent absence. True love triumphs beyond both. The mind can’t go there, nor can desire, but it is no secret to the heart. The heart is her abode. The heart remembers, even when we don’t. It’s the quiet furnace where all of our false identities and self-images go to be incinerated. Anything less than unconditional love is ready kindling for that holy bonfire.

As it is, we bear a simmering secret hidden even to ourselves. Neither inside nor outside of us, it’s imperceptible by intellect or sensation. Motionless, even as whole universes arise and dissolve, it abides. What is most intimate? Start there, stay there. Everything else takes care of itself in a series of everyday miracles inexplicable but true. If I were to say it, her secret is you. There is nothing outside of yourself, it’s all you.

Chapter 13

We sleep in one of the many motels the mind makes to conduct its nightly rituals of multidimensionality. It’s common to imagine that our waking self is who we are, yet who we are in dreams at night imagines the same thing. All of us with our revolving ID’s, our many selves, awake and asleep, are checking in, checking out, moment to moment. Each of us is the only customer. That’s why we talk to ourselves, why we’re confused about duality, yet find it enormously engaging. Is it just her sly humor, the eccentric appetite of the great one who eats this world, love-struck?

There was fine print on the door. It’s about what we were before we walked through it, before we even hit the road. For that matter, who is familiar enough with timeless nonlocality to have the sense of actually going nowhere, even while putting one foot in front of the other, and even as they’re walking out the door?

Blink an eye, inhale, exhale, soon enough we’re gone. Then another one or two of us will take the room for the night, for an age, for lifetimes spent sleepily dreaming. The dream is time, it is happening now, without “before” or “after” it keeps arriving and departing. If we say nothing really happens, we would be right too — there is no contradiction. Expansion and contraction, motion and rest — all thought bubbles on thought streams flowing through her garden of dreams. Merrily or not, that’s up to us.

With a heart of absolute trust, she feels the whole world, its history, its hurting, its aspiration, and its inevitable transparency in the empty mirror of space/time. Without exception, all are included in this ceremony of impermanence. All are held in her compassionate embrace. If we inhabited any other world, it would still be the same — evanescence. The ship we’ve boarded is destined to sail out to sea and sink.
Whatever begins must also end. If any imagine that they are merely casual tourists, here to amuse themselves with some nuanced display of dense duality — please, Dears, don’t fool yourselves — your secret name’s emblazoned on every log of stacked tinder. If we are quiet, we may see her face in the fire. It’s always our own face. We enliven numberless forms, imbibe the subtle knowingness of every being, spirit being, sexual being, ghostly beings who forget their old names when the light of awareness dawns on them and they raise their arms skywards, remembering again that they are Unborn.

All are leaving now — cooing child, doting parent, lovers in their passion, believer and doubter, saint and sinner, the happy, the wise, the mad, the sad — all are going up in light. Let them go! Let’s join the chorus of souls whose appreciation and gratitude for her precious gift of being knows no limit. With a heart of absolute trust, everybody can know her peace. Everybody can be it. We all can remember the thrill of universal joy in every cell of our bodies, if we turn our attention around to the heart — her temple of true remembrance.

To search each other’s eyes then would be a mere redundancy, for we would have fallen in love forever. Let’s be those ones whose happy tears spawn fresh new worlds, new rhapsodies of heart music. Let’s merge the transcendental with the imminent, coax the vastness to break out smiling, toss another story log on the fire, sit back, relax, let go, and disappear.

Chapter 14

She sets aside her universal knowledge and supreme identity, dims her light and her vibration, and gets a telemarketing job in Duluth. After work, she drives home in commuter traffic to microwave a meal and watch TV. Sometimes she falls asleep in her chair. Often.

One cold November morning, shivering outside in the snow on a quick smoke break, she sees a flock of white birds trailing majestically across the clearing blue sky. She feels a rush of sudden tears. Her gaze returns to the freeway traffic across from the company parking lot. Now, it all seems like a dream. As if the blinders she never realized she’d been wearing suddenly drop away, she begins to remember.

She was sitting in a room of windows, all of them wide open to the enormity of sky. Everything was mirroring itself. Pure awareness. Immediate presence. Many beings wandered by, a few curiously gazed inside. The light they saw in the mirror became them. They expanded fully into themselves, filling the vast empty space between galaxies, between universes — the same space in which everything begins and ends — with the limitless abundance of nothing.

From that cosmic womb, the whole grand totality of virtual manifestation is ecstatically created as a love offering from the living light to itself. It flashes into being, shines as itself, then merges back into that prior ineffable radiance — its source and destination — in a classic waltz of awareness and experience. The same energy that manifests the totality is appearing here in the form of you and I. Let’s start from there, with Thanks and Praise, for the One which brought us here.

I want to talk with you about that in a way these bodies will understand, a new way that will render them suddenly weightless. We are already transparent, except to ourselves, so let’s go all the way without further delay — let’s melt into the air! There’s a gap between our dreams at night. She will meet us there. It will seem as if we’ve never parted, for we never really have. We are light, and more light still. That light will never falter, though even the story of humanity must some day meet its end.

Ah, just to feel the dazzling brilliance of that dark immensity which makes everything shine! To feel in every direction to infinity. This mortal existence itself is bodily worship of the living light, the light in the window left burning for no one — self-luminous. That one impossible light makes everything real, as real as this emptiness with open windows for walls, clear portals to nowhere, the same space we occupy now, enraptured by the light in her eyes as they gaze lovingly back at us, filled with nothing but “Darling, Welcome Home!”.

Chapter 15

High and low, near or far — they won’t matter any more, nor will this and that. Wisdom and ignorance, better or worse, richer or poorer, black and white — that’s all movie language, and this mock documentary has just about exceeded its run time. In the movies, there was birth and death and everything in between, yet we persisted — unchanged by both, deranged by neither. Well, maybe a little. Still, where did the time go?

This is what we suspect: beyond ideas of heaven or hell, there is one touch no tongue can tell. That’s why we keep our lips zipped. We need them for that one kiss, the one that really matters. When we touch lips, light relaxes into itself and everything goes silent. She wants more of that for us, so space and time appeared. We didn’t hesitate, we jumped right in. The power of a kiss — we didn’t know yet. How could we have imagined? We needed the contrast, and Earth would do just fine! “Let’s consummate in form,” we sang, “and leave our cares behind!”

There is a dawning revelation welling up from our own heart. It’s filled with poignancy and terror, ecstasy and sublimity. A thousand, ten thousand, invisible lips from past and future are kissing us into her arms right now, even while we read the news, scrolling through that sorry litany of bewilderment and complaint, the threads which distinguish this current realm from the increasingly distant state of any actual sanity. What about this, what about that? Well, what about any of it? What is it?

What is it we really wanted, before the propaganda of this upside-down realm told us what their sponsors thought we ought to seek? Have we already forgotten? We shuffle things around, ship our latest trending notions back and forth across the oceans, but are we happy, are we at peace?

Look how the hands of the clock circle each other so faithfully. If they could kiss right now they would. We would. Time is her way of showing us what we are not now nor ever could be — a substantial, independent, and enduring person. By seeing all that we are not, what we actually are becomes clear and obvious: this simple ordinary awareness, the life and love that beats our heart.

But wait! Because everything happens simultaneously, we are already in love! We hold ourself in a deep embrace, so profound that everything has gone silent. We smile a little, then a little more, because now we remember that we are the light of love itself, and we can never be bound. Maybe now we remember the future? Here it is already, filled with kisses and intimate touches, so intimate that we are neither subject nor object. Who could have imagined it would come to this: that we would find ourselves at the edge of the cliff of remembering, of reunion with that from which we have never been separate or divided, and yet be unable to recall what we had come there to do. Leap?

Even with our amnesia, even with the incessant news, we must admit — this falling through space and time with arms spread wide is exhilarating! Whole epochs fly by in the blink of an eye! We approach each other with tremendous desire. Desire itself lights the fuse of creation. It spawns the true Age of Miracles! Just open and receive. Don’t resist. We’ve hoped and dreamed for just this.

While we’ve been busy dreaming, it has all perfectly synchronized itself: each step, each whirl, each glance communicates a mutual recognition and appreciation of Love’s exquisite choreography. We are remembering now with her. It is all coming back. We didn’t need to do a thing — no special prayers, no endless prostrations, no mantras or meditations, no pod-casting hucksters with their hands in our pockets.

Because everything happens simultaneously, we are already in love! We require no signs or cautions about what’s to come. We need no pulpit to air obsolete theories and sour regrets about the past. We don’t have to petition the deities du jour, they are locked already in this embrace. Heaven is now — her immediate presence. We can let go of everything which obscures that truth. Finally! Be happy, be free! There are no limits or boundaries in this vast expanse. Everything is coming true for us, that is how much we are loved. We are already happy, we are already free! That is her gift, to you and to me.

Chapter 16

Consciousness, this very mind, is like a spinning wheel, spinning itself into beings, worlds, star-clustered galaxies, whole universes of experience. Whether it is virtual or not begs the question, when whatever arises is not other than consciousness itself. Attention. Wherever attention temporarily alights it makes a “me”, a momentary mirror, like a snapshot memento, a “selfie”. Whatever we think we are, our appearance is no different than that image, and just as instantly obsolete in the light of immediate presence.

At Buddhist monasteries, the monks put out food offerings for the hungry ghosts, the sad ones who remain trapped in transient identities which have already spun away. Such is the inevitable destiny of clinging to that which never was: the stuporous state of ghost-hood. This realm is crowded with hungry phantoms, each a spectral mirror. There but for her grace go we.

If there be justification for our unlikely persistence as a species, despite our compounded arrogance and brutal affront to the innocent sense and even survival of other feeling beings, it may be because we can sometimes make that resonant sound which pierces the soft emotional membrane of divinity, reducing the upper gods themselves to that rare blissful state of weeping heartbreak. What kind of creator beings are we?

Tonight is a star field strewn with conscious debris. From our angle of vision, it’s a solitary light moving in a brilliant darkness, an all-pervading shade with a black lacquer shine that makes everything appearing within it bright. That dark radiance moves towards us now, closer and closer, breathing, matching our own life’s breath, making that sound, a resonant cry from our own breathing heart, her own heart-sound which makes everything shine.

No, she is like no other weeping god or grand celestial luminary. She is beyond the sky and its tears like rain, beyond any dark star or incandescent galactic orb — all lit matchsticks held up by a child to the sun. She is the impossible shine of a light in the dark, an enormous dark, so brilliantly dark that we’re moved to make that sound, that cell-thrilling cry. With no thought of before or after, we open our mouth.

What pours forth is filled with star-like singing beings, all sounding as one in the immaculate radiance of a moonless night, all so tenderly sorrowful that the gods themselves are weeping in bliss, with strange euphoric sensations circling through their sympathetic systems. Was this her plan? To break our hearts? What persists beyond all sorrow is just this echoing soul sound, the rippling emanation of her feeling light, so intimate, a sustained heart cry without words, spiraling on and on through an infinite dark, making everything bright on her way.

Chapter 17

We ourselves are here to be the peace in our own time. Even in the midst of no peace, it is there, peace is here, we are inherently peace itself. Even if all the evidence of experience in this or any world seems to indicate otherwise, and even in the midst of anything otherwise, peace is here. We are inherently peace. Anyone touring these earthly places can tell us to our faces all the reasons to doubt and fear, yet behind every doubt and fear, peace is here — like grace, we are drowning in it.

To navigate this world of flesh we wear a fleshy body. Like this fleshy world itself, our body’s made of light. We say “our body”, but it’s not really ours. We own nothing, we arrived with nothing, when we leave we depart with the same. There is only light. Take light from light, and what remains is nothing: the same state in which we now exist, but without any thought of existence, consciousness, or bliss.

For this, we conform ourselves to the perfect peace of ordinary evanescence, like incandescent smoke in the lit mirror of timeless bliss, the same one we cannot imagine, can’t conceive, can’t perceive but only be, light into light, forever and ever, world after world, infinite shine, her divine!

Through loving heart eyes, she regards the magnificent spectrum of cosmic light bathing all creation as her own natural display — perfect peace. She reclines at her leisure upon the yielding dragon of serene equanimity. Before her, all mirroring beings are nothing but her own creative modification — none are better or worse, higher or lower, closer or further away, in the light of her direct recognition.

A vast equality of beings prevails in her luminous universe. Yes, peace. How foolish to have once believed that dismal fraud of separation and conflict! And yet, everything has its place in the country of perfect peace — even delusion. Delusion is simply anything which has yet to remember itself as love.

The daunting search for liberation is no concern of hers. Always free, already free — she is peace. Peace permeates the immediate moment as her essential nature and condition. She is the Self of all, the fragrance of experience distilled into perfect peace. Peace before her, peace behind her. Peace above her. Peace below her. Our primitive conceptual distinctions matter not at all to her, she is the measure of infinite oneness. Utterly humble, she bows down to all, which is her own silent majesty at perfect ease with itself.

She is peace. Her time is eternity, her space is the multiverse. She regards the play of consciousness with the supreme love of one who gazes out through peace eyes, absorbed in her own, our own, immediate presence. In an absolute unity of form and emptiness, she reaches gently down and lifts us into the perfect posture of her silent peace, then bears us home to our reunion in light. The peace we leave behind in our passing is the same peace that welcomes us home.

Chapter 18

There’s a doorway between waking and sleeping where eager thoughts may come knocking, but they all scatter at the threshold, collapsing into minced shards of themselves, with little half-finished sentences and partial paragraphs all in a heap. What passes through that portal, we don’t know — the part that knows or thinks it does, gets left behind.

Could it be “us” as we really are, crossing through the portal of ourselves to once again inhabit the spirit version of ourselves, or are we more like the quirky tales at which the dearly departed chuckle and guffaw from their expanded perspective on the other side, stories in search of some satisfying meaning which never actually congeals?

Mind makes meaning, but what makes mind? Mind can’t be used to figure itself out, but we have her same creative power — we can make our world a heaven realm where every being is a valued citizen. Instead, we mostly fabricate free-floating anxieties borne of vague existential dread, which in turn sail along through our neural canals like a fleet of ships about to sink, searching in vain for safe harbor.

Their banners of identity are shredded, their captain absent, no crew on board, no place to drop an anchor when the rogue wave rolls over, no time for farewell letters home, no pen or writing paper, no stamp or envelope. When our mortal remains finally sleep in the deep, those on the far shore may welcome us back, but their angelic faces won’t quite hide the traces of laughter and tears at our nautical show.

We arrived as explorers, but soon lost our bearings. Perhaps that is really why we came. Sometimes we don’t appreciate what we had until it’s been lost. In any event, we accepted her invitation. Who could resist? We pretended to be two, then pretended to be many, just to enjoy the thrill of finally being one again. She is in all, just as all are in her. She is the union of love and wisdom, filled with divine power. One of her powers is duality, and we are her power players. She may dance through the vast void’s endless hall of mirrors, her multicolored scarves of galaxies fluttering around her neck in the cosmic wind, but here on Earth, to do it right, it takes two to Tango.

Some dancers keep busy searching for the fabled lost bearings of those original volunteers. Others seem to slip into a slushy stream of dream-like smithereens, entranced down on Oblivion Boulevard by the way the light changes all throughout the day. For the earnest explorer, to persist in the midst of delusion, and yet keep falling in love with everything and nothing, requires a rare sense of humor and keen devotion. For the sincere aspirant, intoxication with any ballooning sense of self can be punctured by a glance in her mirror. Except as a morphing assemblage of thoughts and memories, sensations and perceptions, no actual person can be found, just a ghost in Dinah’s kitchen, strumming on some old banjo.

Just so, if one can laugh at themselves as they stroll in love down that dream-lit street, lift their hands in praise and joy while balancing between rocks and hard places, then perhaps they can be said to be half-way there by those who are known to say such things, but as far as the rest of the way is concerned, no words we devise in our fanciful flights can go there.

Chapter 19

We watched a speck of dust in her stellar nursery become this planet. Intrigued by the possibilities, some of us morphed into materiality. Most came for just a taste, others went all in. Here were oceans, here was land. Blue sky, white clouds. Here was living, and with that dying. Here was a two-armed primate sheath. Yes — it will work!

The stage was set, we entered in, with a little touch of amnesia. The rest is the story of how we arrived at where we are now, on the brink of remembering again what we are — either that, or doing it over again until we at last remember.

Our intent may have been to do no harm, but real love requires more than good intentions. It’s more a verb than a noun. We came to play in the forms of the day, though after the clear light of day, it gets dark. Just so, we drank some darkness. A little at first, and then quite a lot — that’s when we eventually began to completely forget, and what followed next, as night follows day, is why we need to remember.

Distracted by our own internal noise, we’re walking absently through the twilight shade of ourselves, as if in a waking dream. With each step we take in space, it becomes increasingly obvious: we are making all of this up as we go — the whole thing is completely spontaneous. The totality of the universal functioning is humming right along with no script — we are it’s moving pen of light, writing our luminous stories across the psychic firmament.

While some may imagine now that they’re only doing time, serving out a sentence, others may believe they’re here on some special mission. All such idle speculation misses the point. In this swirling world of thickening mists and flashing light, affirmations and negations both are moot. The unknown deepens into the unknown. We’re all linked to each other, all holding hands with her as we quietly walk out of the night of our temporary forgetfulness, lit by shards of her guiding light, opening into full daylight.

Just so, as we do, we’re passing through her revolving turnstile. All that we believed we were gets left behind, like white plum blossoms set afloat on time’s breeze, carried off in the breeze across a deep blue sky, or scattered like spring confetti down rain-glistened streets.

Somehow, we will remember every immaculate petal then, each a perfect explanation for the existence of anything, though once through the turnstile, all explanations are moot.

Truly, only they know who have already passed through, although that’s just a way of saying things. If we imagine we have passed through anything, it is only delusion passing through delusion. There is no other side, no other world. There is only one. This is it. This immediate presence.

Even turnstiles are mere conceptual contrivances where neither birth nor death pertains, but now such weightless thoughts drift off like pale white plum blossoms, translucent letters from the day to the night. Love letters. She opens them and reads the next chapter.

Chapter 20

This body can be a pain machine, it comes with the ambient territory, the gross material domain where nothing endures, nothing survives the leap from one breath to the next for very long. Here, nothing really works out fine, like in a story where all of the loose threads get tied up at the end and everyone laughs, hugs, and lives happily ever after.

Just so, who is laughing now, here at the end of the story, which is nothing like we thought it would be — the end of the struggle to avoid the end, to escape the reckoning for being alive, for a moment, for a hundred years.

This human life can seem like a flickering memory of a furious dream, with eager beginnings and reluctant endings, of hopeful starts, stumbles, fumbles, and fictional falls. Though none of it is real, all of it is ripe with the inevitable consequences of our playful imagination, running up a piper’s tab that eventually must be paid.

Now here comes her light, laced with a pain caress. No, don’t turn away. Feel the kiss and go deeper, feel it until you’ve felt it enough, then feel what that is like — enough — the zero point of perfect balance. Love’s ecstatic expanse is infinite, her forgiveness ceaseless, and why expect otherwise?

Why expect anything rather than nothing — our present state and ultimate destiny, our origin and rapturous source, a rare incandescence afloat on the breeze of thought, the first thought before any thought, before it became this ghost body, a feeling phantasm in a pain machine.

So gather up all views and ambitions, beliefs and opinions, all knowings and confusions, all secret hopes and fearful delusions, glad wishes and sad regrets, memories, dreams, and imaginations, every sensation and perception, all that makes us believe we are human, believe we are anything or nothing — gather it up into bundles, it’s all fit to burn.

Whatever appears is flammable. Every sense of limitation, any sense of enduring self in opposition to another, is only more fuel for the impersonal blazes. Whatever arises in consciousness is destined by eternity for immolation, like seasoned bundles of kindling sticks, lovingly stacked on the pyre of our willfulness . . .

That all-consuming pyre is the liberator, returning all compounded things to their elemental source, all identities and claims rendered into scattered ash by the licking flames of the inexorable — her great bonfire, the devourer of gods — waiting outside of time for time’s arrival, staggering and breathless, to be purified in her cleansing furnace, to pass without resistance through that fiery portal, sifting at last like wisps of fragrant smoke into the cool healing atmosphere of her boundless mercy.

Chapter 21

We accepted her kind invitation to this engaging Carnival of Illusion. We were curious to sample the sweet and savory treats, pet the kindly animals, consort with goofy clowns, spin the wheel of no security, of not having a blessed clue how any of it will play out, much less what any of this adventure in dreamtime will finally amount to — maybe nothing, or maybe the final revelation.

In either case, how could we have known that nothing’s really final? There can be no end nor beginning when none of it is real — just holographic scenes from a tall tale we now barely remember, almost as if nothing really happened there, as if nothing actually happens anywhere at all.

Just so, why jump ahead to the end, when there is no end, only infinite self-modification? Don’t make it personal, she doesn’t. Emptiness Mother — she’s always here, shimmering behind the realistic props and painted backdrops, always making something out of nothing. It’s a creative sort of game she plays called Existence. Consciousness is her opening gift, to see if we can handle it. That may take a while, but we’re kindly given plenty of time. We may be enchanted with our toys, but the mother doesn’t watch the toys — she keeps her eyes on the children.

As silence expresses itself through music, children express themselves through play, and we are all her children, her lights ablaze in the eternal void. Likewise, the deep oceans express themselves in silence, with myriad light forms singing through the dark liquidity. They combine in natural choreography to co-create the rapturous music of the velvet void, lush lullabies echoing through her womb of limitless fertility. At the perfect moment, she pushes down through the densities in her labor to deliver us into this virtual fluid materiality we take to be our home and destination.

One thought births the next, all leading inexorably to luminous sprawling universes of forms, all appearing and vanishing as chords in the great music, which is silence itself, singing out loud, populating the oceanic depths and trenches with fluttering, glowing, neon creatures who will never see the sky, moon, or stars, yet who render us speechless in their sublime beauty, who know what they are without any thought, spasm of speculation, or artifice of belief.

As her children, we all share the same inheritance, woven in lyrical strands throughout space and time as a magical display of her creative imagination, a festival of brilliant illusion whose incandescent denizens glide silently through the depths and trenches, mindless in their oceanic bliss, food for each other in the cycle of their perfect lives, at home in her familiar void, the fluid darkness of existence, consciousness, bliss.

Chapter 22

With the inevitable light-bulb recognition that whatever we appear to be is generally compounded from everything everywhere, and thus from nothing in particular, we join the ranks of the immortals by assuming the default position of beginningless-ness. Like high floating cloud creatures, we can’t be pinned down, even by the cleverness of our human intellects.

The intellect of the human persona is immediately confounded by the proposition of no beginning, so skip that step. When asked where you are from, don’t speak, or be that gracious one who answers “I don’t know”. Straight talk is best. Be the answer to the unasked question, just as you are. There is no better time than no time at all, and now here it is. It wants to play.

Open the door which nothing known can pass through. In your humble and sincere not knowing, pass right through without hesitation — she is waiting there for you. Before this present universe was even imagined, everything was already in her placeless place, waiting patiently for you.

We are all waiting here for you, as if you were the only one, as if above heaven and below earth there has never been another. Not another word, not another dreamy location where all words fail — there’s no coming from or going to, when all there is, is you.

When we initially emerged from the fog of knowing and set out on the gleaming bridge of light between past and future, it seemed as if we weren’t even moving. Only the bridge passed before us in the form of a thought, a thought with no anchor in the known, a thought which carried us through the clouds and mist of its own inevitable dissolution.

At that zero point of perfect equanimity, which is now, there is nothing to hope for or regret, to seek or to resist. Nothing has enough substance to even justify a second thought, much less form the basis of another fictional identity. Imagine such relentless mercy!

The white-capped bay below the bridge glitters like an unformed idea that wants to remain that way. It beckons us even now, though we’re barely a fringe of the cloud we were when we first arrived. This is where all concepts go to rest, though tiny oars keep rowing. This is also why, when we follow our thoughts, what we hear is the sound of them attempting to solidify themselves by appearing to matter.

Don’t be misled. They don’t. They are not even our thoughts. None of whatever appears retains any empirical solidity, including the idea of a fixed and enduring self. It is an oceanic mirage churning below us, and what great and monstrous beasts luxuriate within its subconscious depths!

It’s easy to get lost at sea, so across the arching bridge we traveled, although there is no other side to get to, nor any before or after this dream journey itself. It’s that kind of passage, returning us to where we’ve always been, even as the part of ourself which we think of as “me” still wanders in circles in the dark of the night, whistling a fragment of some old tune, its full lyrics long forgotten.

Just so, one thought seeks another, but what we sought can’t be found by thought, nor can it be found by trying, even trying to stop thought. The bridge in its revelation is a serpent called “Endless”. It glides over primeval waters, bearing the oceanic dreams of we mere immortals across the once and future Golden Gate, through imagination’s portal to the palace of precious things which we in our play have brought forth into light for the joy of the game in our love without name.

From her amazing navel of such sheer illusion blooms an ever-fresh Lily, within whose luscious folds attention reclines at ease, radiant as the Heart Supreme, beguiled by the spontaneous poetry of euphoric luminosity emanating from the secret place. Serene in the background, her perfect silence is the sutra now. Here, even concepts like “sublime” or “divine” utterly miss the point, nor can any bridge deliver us. We must find it where we are — here, right now, in this immediate presence. Open your eyes now, but don’t speak. You already are this presence. You are the true Beloved, the Beloved is none other than you.

Chapter 23

In the interval following the cessation of one thought and prior to the arising of the next thought, she is here. We are with her. Since we are multidimensional beings, we live multiple lives, simultaneously. Since there is no time like the present, we are also living every past and future life, right now. We need not wonder, “Which is the true me?” We are all of them and none of them, simultaneously. What do freedom or bondage mean to us? Attachment or surrender? Out there or in here? Birth and death? Frequency or vibration? Form and emptiness?

Those carnival clowns are numberless — vow to liberate each one, immediately. Vow to be yourself, for you can be no other. Even in the midst of any appearance, you and I and everything are streaming out of nothing and returning there, moment to moment, simultaneously. What is happening? A thought. A non-appearance. A Love Supreme? All and nothing, simultaneously. If we follow the track of these words, we come to a great silence. We are both here and there, simultaneously. Let the breath settle. Let whatever there is exhale, relax, and rest.

Now, imagine a dark space of indefinite dimensions, a kind of room with no walls, ceiling, or floor. Time as we normally experience it ceases to exist here. Imagine that there is nothing before this moment, and nothing following it. In the warm immediacy of her presence, what is there to follow? If history never happened, what would that be to us in this timeless state? If we had previously thought of ourself as this or that, all of it is moot now. The human identity fades away like a brief restless daydream, and there are no such references now to frame, nor any frame to reference in this all-enveloping darkness without edges.

Next, imagine a single candle’s luminescence in the midst of the indeterminate darkness. It shines equally in every direction. Whatever is and was, whatever will be — all is fuel for this steady flame. Imagine now the flame expanding — the flame of her own, our own, natural radiance. We are that light, and that light is our expanding self-awareness. Whatever appears is a creative projection of our own light. It is our own elaboration and display. There is nothing outside of us, only this infinitely expanding light of self-awareness — I Am.

Then imagine the flame itself spontaneously self-extinguishes. No trace of it remains. Nevertheless, there is no mere absence now prevailing where the self-story ends. Whatever persists is beyond all identities and their qualities, even those of love, bliss, wisdom, joy or peace, though it is simultaneously inclusive of all of them. It is beyond any words or theories, beyond beliefs or any human intellectual or emotional comprehension. Imagine traveling to the horizon, and even then beyond it, but can the intellect with all of its marvelous power imagine what’s beyond the beyond?

Rather than an individuated point of light in the ebony vastness, imagine now only blossoming luminosity. By going beyond the beyond, paradoxically, we’ve gone nowhere. All obscurations, all layers of veils that we ourselves have woven around our primordial innocence, all dissolve back into the purity of their source light. It will seem as if nothing has happened. Only awareness remains. How can there be any departure or arrival then, when in reality we’ve never left home? Even so . . . Welcome Back!

Chapter 24

The conversation continues, but what is there to say? A subtle yet entrancing music emanates in seductive splendor as we circle on her carousel of the three imaginary times. Her sublimely sensory perfume permeates everywhere, its grace a balm of immediate presence as we glide along over big water on this immense journey through ourselves. She quietly turns the holographic pages. Sometimes, it all seems like a dream, but let’s not pull that thread here.

Alternately, it’s only when we step out of such a beguiling rotation that the true and timeless silence around things, their natural radiance, begins to reveal itself. It is a precious light, our own light, her gift to herself in the forms of all of us — we are all inherently connected. As our true voice emerges again from the stifling lower densities of conflict and fear, arrogance, ignorance, and greed, our new song begins with one perfect note. It’s the same one playing now. By her grace, it musically transmutes itself into whatever is. What is, simply is — that’s the way she plays. In the spontaneity of creation, AKA making it up as we go, she’s always showing us the way of non-dwelling on any of it. Observe and then let go.

If we get that clear and quiet, and if we listen with the ears of the heart, we may hear her broadcasting now from her celestial carousel, that majestically revolving luminosity spinning in the chasm of immense darkness, making everything glow with its own natural shine. So divinely alluring, we’re drawn closer and closer still. Emptiness and form exchange glances, wink, and get on with their euphoric dance in the mirror of manifestation. Everyone’s joining in. It’s a lovefest! We are the mirror, the dancers, the dance, yet none of it is what we truly are. Whatever appears will disappear, so praise and gratitude to that which doesn’t. It may be better to not speak at all, except perhaps to remember this deeper knowing we all share — the enormity of that silence in which our soul-light brightly flickers, like a spark in the dark of an infinite expanse, a finger snap in the Void.

There, a bell rings out in a spirit temple and the gathered ghosts look up from their ethereal pursuits, anticipating a new arrival. Each one passes from life to death like the hand of a sleeper reaching for the body of its lover, only to slip through the mattress of space/time and into dimensions that weren’t on the label. For now they’ll dwell in the house of the Lord, enjoying the views, while patiently pondering their next move.

There’s an endless menu of experiences from which to choose, depending on our level of access. Infinite possibilities ripple out to everywhere and nowhere. Some of us may return to previous haunts for another go-round, while others gravitate to grander realms of ravishing lyricism, or so say the exciting spirit tourist brochures. Just so, here’s a good hint: always take time to read their fine print! Many of us aren’t certain where we’ll go, others know only they want back here — there’s still business to attend. On the compass in our ghost hands, the needle keeps spinning around and around, never pointing in any decisive direction. Then a blink, a nod, a flick of the wrist and we’re back on earth for another brief turn on the carnival wheel of densities.

Empty into empty, only mind moves — observe, pay attention, but don’t linger anywhere. Soon, too soon, there’s another flick, a nod, a blink, and a finger snap, and just like that — we’re gone. There are some who claim “when you’re dead you’re dead”, which is not even true for the body. It compassionately dissolves into its constituent parts to seed new life, but in any case, once we’re out and done with this corpse, we sooner or later realize that we weren’t that. Riding in a car is not being the car, though sometimes it seems in the midst of these dreams that we’re all being taken for some kind of ride. Enjoy the passing scenery!

Whatever the case, and however we will, take plenty of time to stay still. Sit down, observe how the flood of her light is coming down in perfect harmony. From whence does it come, to where does it go? Empty into empty, only mind moves — don’t linger anywhere. Realize the irreducible essence of this very mind that creates its own worlds in which to wander. When you’ve seen enough, bow in thanks, relax, then let go. Wherever you roam, don’t be hobbled by fear — it will only spoil the play. When the last bell sounds in your own spirit temple, drop the worn costume and be on your way.

Chapter 25

We each possess a magic ability to convince ourselves of just about anything. Consequently, we create the psyche’s superstructure of a substantial and enduring self, its relations, its views and positions, and the world today as we have collectively projected it: a paradoxical realm of intense beauty and profound ignorance, all punctuated by every kind of love and every manner of cruelty, by brief flashes of redemptive light, and by ample portions of truly horrible suffering. In any case, whatever appears — it’s our reaction to it that mirrors precisely the extent of our own compounded confusion.

Perhaps with the equalizing realization that there is no actual difference between one’s own mind and the mind of Source, we might be more careful with the way we employ our imagination. That is, we can be more conscious of the process wherein we bestow a sense of reality to experiences through the machinations of our projections. Everyone and everything moves about by the prodigious power of mind, but if we turn our attention (which is habitually preoccupied daydreaming) from the so-called outer world to the so-called inner, attempting to get a good hold on this slippery critter called “mind”, it will instantly evaporate as if it was never there. Really, there’s nothing here to grasp, yet when we resort to concepts and images (in other words, using the mind to grasp the mind), we end up trapped in a bleak house of empty terms. However, if we say nothing, how are we any different from a rock or a log?

There’s no need to complicate. Mind moves simultaneous with appearances. Mind is inseparable from appearance. Whenever something appears, mind is moving. What knows that, is not the mind with which we are familiar. That mind is a jumble of thoughts and memories, sensations and perceptions, with no actual driver at the wheel. Nevertheless, we typically take the appearance of things as a cue to confirm our own tentative existence and, moreover, to add our own two cents of conditioned interpretation to the general clamor and confusion.

But what if we didn’t? What if we just let things be without claiming or naming, allow them to arise and vanish, without following the compulsion to interpret and react? Isn’t it our chronic meddling, always eager to modify consciousness so that it will provide us with the most comfortable illusion of self-satisfaction, the reason we keep our seat warm and toasty on her revolving carousel of birth and death?

Alternately, we need not be in conflict with our confusion. By letting things flow and settle of their own accord, and without the impediment of our anxious clinging, we might save ourselves some grief. After all, isn’t there grief enough in this harsh realm? why contribute more? When we take the time to observe how things really are, how we really are, we can notice that whatever appears has no special or inherent significance, other than what we might superimpose on it by the fantastic power of our imagination.

Whatever appears is mind, and mind is empty. Emptiness is also ripe with her sublime fullness, also known as love. Love is clear light, the impersonal absolute getting personal through the multitude of forms that flash across the screen of awareness. If we can actually see this, if we can be still long and deep enough to clearly see what we really are (and aren’t) in the midst of any and all experience, we can recognize our true and original nature as this aware space of immediate presence. Within this vast spaciousness, all the actors and their props are busily dancing across life’s stage, colorfully outfitted in the chameleon costumes of transient identity which comprise the illusion of being an individuated unit of consciousness — a separate self, or persona.

Just so, when the inevitable appearance of death arrives and the body commences to loosen and crumble into its constituent dust, that same spacious knowing or intelligence will persist, unaffected by the myriad flashes of comings and goings in her mirror. In the clarifying light of such recognition, we may ponder: What was ever in need of enlightenment or liberation? With that very thought, we confuse ourselves all over again!

Chapter 26

In this ritual there will be words which want to be spoken. Let them have their say. It’s pointless to dwell on what could have been, if life had maybe worked out in a more agreeable way. Regret and resentment — where’s the joy in that, when we have the power to roam as we wish through infinite realms of radiant joy, be a blessing to all we encounter, an encouragement of light, love’s ceaseless revelation to itself. In this state, each moment is a media station broadcasting signals of immediate presence through the mechanism of feeling, feeling to infinity, a limitless expansion of soul sensation, of reception and release beyond the reach of knowledge or desire.

Here at last, we may find ourselves in her temple of the heart. When the mind drops into the heart, it is a good death, as well as the price of admission there. We will wander freely there without schemes of “me & mine”, without any schedules, no subliminal commands, until we forget everything else — purpose, identity, mind’s poor contrivances, all prior experience, memory associations, all definitions. In the night sky of the heart there will come shooting stars, flaming arrows of love will soar through the great cardiac expanse with no target, simultaneously piercing everyone — saints and sinners equally. No one survives, just as everyone rejoices in their glad annihilation — the end of all wanting for things to be otherwise.

We will spontaneously release all cares. At heart, there are no other viable options. No one can remain here with closed fists. Our hands must be raised in the gesture of open-hearted humility — guileless, vulnerable, ready to receive. No explanations will be required, none offered. The perpetual revelation will be wordless, all unfolding naturally in and out of time, and what is given will be received without any bias or mortal judgment, but only as it is, was, and ever shall be.

Thin membranes which once seemed to separate us in the dreamtime from our own loving Source will not long persist in her temple of the heart. Her fire puja is always blazing there, burning up our pride, beliefs, anger, arrogance. All of that is kindling in the heart cave puja. Don’t enter here with willfulness, ambition, hope or fear. None of that can serve us then, nor does it serve us even now. In our dreamily conditional, mind-fashioned world, there are wise and foolish, rich and poor, friends and enemies, but in her temple of the heart, all heads are pressed to the floor before the altar of utter and sincere soul surrender.

There, even the great gods and goddesses who glide through the celestial firmaments in magic ships with rays of pure light flashing from their mind-made bodies as they feed on rapture and a wondrous banquet of grand ideas, must bow down in grateful acknowledgement to the source of their divinity, which they may worship, more than they could ever understand her. All her precious babies will rest in her arms in a bliss of true peace, cradled in the heart-mind of eternity, at home in her shining temple, and it will be as if we had never strayed, and indeed we truly never have.

Chapter 27

She is waiting for us. Perhaps we are still a bit sleepy and we cannot see her, but somehow we know she is there, waiting. Do we realize she is inside us? Maybe not yet. There are so many things we want her to be that we are not yet ready to simply let her be what she is. Maybe she is actually what we are, or perhaps what we are becoming, when we are finished waiting, and are ready at last to let her in and have her way with our heart.

We have already seen so much, welcomed so much to come in and sit down, to add their chapter to the story du jour. We are all entertained by the tales of experience being shared, perhaps even imagining we are one of the interesting characters. Maybe this time we are a new-born elephant. The mother looms over us and gently nudges us to stand up. All of the other elephants draw near and introduce themselves. It is almost overwhelming, all the love. Are we in some happy heaven, or on the great African plain which stretches out in all directions, steaming with the strange and inviting fragrances of the wild unknown?

Everywhere our vision lands is informed by a conscious light, illuminating even the smallest creatures weaving through the tall grasses, enjoying their life of creaturely possibilities granted to them by her great mystery. That mystery is waiting for us to relax, let go, and die into it, just so that it can come alive at last as us.

Not knowing anything about who or what is waiting, not waiting themselves, the multitudes of living animals just enjoy moving in the same pattern mysteriously reflected in those vast dynamic star systems, turning majestically, spiraling in space. The tiny creatures do not know about the stars, and how they are waiting. They do not need to, they just move. The stars go with them.

We have seen them — the lovely suns — and maybe some of us have felt their invitation. In some fertile stellar womb, we may have been waiting to be born, while all around us light was forming itself into what we would become, this one that we are now. When we are ready again we will return to that light, all delays forsaken.

Really, we have only been waiting for ourselves, but not because of any lack within us that needs to be fulfilled. We are so filled with her light already that great star systems are revolving in perfect harmony within us at this very moment, in the same way our slightest thoughts revolve in the pristine space of awareness.

When they are gone, we are not diminished. They are waiting for us to let them go, to liberate them by the magic of recognition — that they are the foundation of all the universes, and yet they are empty of any fixed and enduring quality or special transcendental significance.

The baby elephant is nudged gently to the mother’s breast, and so is able to gain nourishment by virtue of the ordinary miracle of life. It is good. It is “Yes!”. Why can’t we fall down in awe at that exquisite beauty, rather than devising ways to take the elephant tusks and sell them for money? Money is not waiting for us. The dead parts of life cannot wait for us. Why do we have to destroy everything that has been patiently waiting for us to simply open the aperture of peace and radiate light?

The more destructive we become — the more we entangle ourselves in the deathly motive — the more she waits for us to finally awaken to the toll our selfishness has taken, and collapse in tears of repentance. Those healing tears are waiting for us. Right now, there’s a flood of tears waiting to be shed.

Chapter 28

Perhaps this realm is a kind of gymnasium where souls come for a vigorous work-out. Regardless of how well-meaning, long litanies of fervent wishes still won’t render us weightless. No Pterodactyl ever took flight by standing still and occasionally flapping. An hour at church on Sunday won’t render the coming week sacred. Nor is any liberation true of us while we alternate between hope and fear, contracted around a false matrix of transient identity.

Something else must happen. Something mind can’t conceive. In this vale of ever shifting shadows, of drifting panoramic mists, what persists? Pay attention, don’t seek attention. In the midst of things, don’t speak. Without judgement or fixed position, the wise won’t break their tacit vow of silence. Words deceive, and humans are accomplished linguists. We talk ourselves right over the cliff with our fantastical stories.

Nevertheless, at the root of every personal tale is an innocent misunderstanding. The absolute tries on the costume of the relative, but then imagines that’s all it really is, forgetting its prior divine identity. Each successive theatrical persona is another ploy in Love’s pantomime. Like woven threads in her tapestry we’re a part of something larger. Whatever we want, we already are. Nothing’s in need of sorting. Every strategy is a mis-direction. For every remedy, an imaginary disease.

Believing there’s a certain space to claim or special state to gain, the mind dreams on. One might say it’s made for dreaming, but that’s just another story. The minds of fools and that of saints are not different. There is only one. This one sets an elaborate trap, and the same one then falls in. She is great, whose humor is endless. She is great, who is not in distress. She is great, before and after. She is gracious, she is this. She is us, but we don’t know it. Cling to nothing, such is bliss.

As the light returns to our eyes once more, the dream parade marches slowly off down the neural boulevards and into the mind’s oblivion file. We rise from our bed. We’ve done this before. We do it again. We clock in at the thought factory. She is near. With impersonal love she listens to our heart softly beating. She hears more about us than we suspect. Dare we peer that deeply through all the filmy layers of our often-conflicted designs to the essential core story? What would be revealed?

If there is any truly genuine mercy, she is all of that. Though there is nothing to forgive, forgiveness reigns. She does not judge innocence or guilt. There is no one to blame after all, when there is only love. At the core, it’s really that simple. Only love matters. From there, we complicate. This planet on which we arise each day revolves in elliptical orbit around a fiery star making non-stop light. Somehow, we can feel the whole stellar system gliding serenely through conscious space. Still, we rattle around, looking for love although that’s what we are, momentarily fused with these posturing skeletons, even as infinity envelopes us, and everything interpenetrates everything else. Breathing in, receive. Breathing out, release. Now walk on.

Chapter 29

Since we can choose to speak or to be silent, we remain silent. No further sound arises to be heard. Not a word. The previous words proceed to un-write themselves. They lightly lift up off the page with their new-grown wings. They become something else, something winging through the greater scheme, emerging from an inky trance, pausing for a moment in the midst of an airy nowhere, then assuming the natural disposition in the place of empty things — the same wondrous place to which time and space return when the urge that spawned them is at last supremely satisfied.

In this same incomprehensible place, everything exists in a blessed state of pure potential, even the next thought. There’s a vast space between this thought and the next. Consider the space between atoms. It’s a nameless place. I say “place”, but it’s not really a place, just as I am not a person (really). We all come from there, but it’s not as if we were there, and now we’re here. Within the grand immensity of that unfathomable space, the omniverse of phenomena — its history and mathematical foundation — is no more than a vanishing trace of some vaguely familiar fragrance idly perceived as we pass from room to room in her spirit mansion of many rooms.

In her rooms, darkness will never turn into light, nor could light abandon itself to darkness. They are always one thing, indivisible. Why is this present moment so precious? Time is not other than awareness. Awareness is never other than the immediate presence of this present moment. We are awareness. The sphere of time moves simultaneously in every direction. Thus, it is motionless. It is an unoccupied thought, a phantom, a ghost ship adrift in a museum painting, artfully displayed on a luminous wall in the mirrored halls of dreamland.

Now the picture on the glowing wall begins to expand. It reaches beyond the borders of the room and out into open space. It doesn’t stop. Soon the room itself is a small speck within it — how could this be? Almost immediately, it grows to encompass the earth itself, the whole blue-green marble, and then in swift succession: our spinning solar system, the majestic turning galaxy, and onward into that incomprehensible immensity in which countless legions of super-sized galaxies revolve serenely through space/time. Here, which is everywhere, only silence prevails. Here, which is nowhere within the known, the entire history of the totality of manifestation throughout the infinite dimensions of the omniverse could be likened to a mere eyeblink in time, with time itself another clever plaything of a precocious child’s imagination — ours — as the grand celestial display surrounds us with the compassionate graciousness of our own divine embrace.

There is a thrilling anticipation, as if tiny electric wires laced with a sinuous pleasure are coursing and vibrating just beneath our skin, up and down our spine, and we sense that something more wonderful than wonderful is just about to reveal itself with nothing in the least held back. Every life we have ever lived has been leading us to this, but we still do not know what this is. Slowly it dawns on us that it doesn’t matter, we no longer have a stake in the game of knowing, and so we relax and let go. Of everything.

We have no memory now of what we’ve left behind. We are at peace, afloat in that ineffable vastness, held by invisible arms that gently cradle us, just as they once did when they softened the shock of embodiment. Was it really so long ago, that perfect bliss? Has it ever really left, or is it more that we were returned to these denser classrooms to train until we could remember it still, that perfection of presence, even here in this fleeting festival of bewildering illusion?

From seemingly far away, a bright light is moving closer, even though there is, paradoxically, no longer any sense of distance between us and the exquisite panorama spreading out in waves before us. It’s as if it is all one enormous being, one stupendous living energy pulsing and swelling in intensity, connected by lit strands and glowing fibers of some living conscious ecstasy. Here, which is not a location on any map, her irresistible light is nearly upon us. Its supernal radiance is steadily expanding in elaborate geometric patterns and rippling circles, infusing our whole being with an indescribable music, pure joy, pure joy — and we know with every luminous thread of our being that we will not resist. Nothing remains of us with which to do it. Love is the truth that lives us now, and Love at last will have its way. It’s all that really matters.

Chapter 30

An embarrassment of riches — when everything seems like poetry, which lines will the poet commit to paper? Before the manifest display we call the universal totality, there was nothing — no name or form, no world, no galaxies, no grand ideas, no songbirds or breathing beasts with tails and teeth, no tricks or treats, no particle or wave, no suffering souls to save, no sense of self or not-self, no angel, demon, god, or goddess, no convenient recourse when the going got rough, no going, no arriving — just pure reality. Why wasn’t that enough? If you understand, no poetry will suffice. If you don’t, no poetry will suffice. Nothing imaginary will suffice but this immediate presence — pure reality.

A blind woman stands by a window, looking out to sea. Beneath the waves, in the uncharted depths, strange luminescent creatures which nobody has named or even known glide silently through a dark realm, unaware of the blind woman by the window, unaware of the deadly politics and cruel divisions spawned by fear which dominate life on land, unaware of these liquid words streaming across the page and falling like joyous tears into their own salty oblivion.

We want to swim with those glad creatures, smiling just behind and slightly to the left, as if we were another one of them, a nameless child of infinity, blissful in our water element, a subtle thread of movement in a measureless sea of perfect peace. Our lives and deaths will succeed each other in rhythmic cycles of elegant sufficiency. Free of all need or desire for attention and confirmation, we will revel in the interdependence of all creation — our inseparable connection to all life. Our gills and fins will be like prayers we spontaneously compose to bear us through the darkened hours of incoherent chaos, these fated times of the Great Turning, when even the poetry of prophecy is abandoned and all that persists is this — pure reality.

Her Heart — yes! In joyous surges, a new and open freedom pulses through our chest! Energy accelerates, rising from base to crown, spilling over in all directions. In the initiatory transmission to all receptive sentience, her white light pierces the top of the skull, Ah, it bursts forth in a billion brilliant shards of light, rains light down on multitudes of thirsty light beings, all creatively mind-fashioned to populate this infinite luminarium. Yes, she lifts us by their core codes and permeates our cellular memories with streaming rays of light upon waves of light. Deftly, she penetrates our ancient skins, our primal cages of thought, freeing up forgotten memories, sensations, reactions, and beliefs to be inspected, seen through, and released.

Beyond all sad wishing and wanting, she raises us up, octave by measured octave, higher and higher on a frequency spectrum which only ends where it begins: in her heart. Just so, now’s the perfect time to be happy. Shatter the dome of the blessed sky with this arrow of ecstasy, this electric shock of swift and steep ascension into the twining fullness of her self/our self. Be happy for no reason. If we were to attribute some purpose to consciousness, it may be to continually expand beyond itself, and perhaps even more urgently now, because we can almost taste it for ourselves: pure realty.

Chapter 31

Imagine everything so fresh and ever-new that there’s no time to form opinions or value judgments, no time to fixate a personal self in any of it, no way to grasp or manipulate any of it before it changes again and yet again, like flowing water, like life as it is. Life as it is — just wonder! Wonder is the opening door, the passport to revelation. Look at a flower in the sunlight. It is you, yet you are not it. You don’t know what it is, or even what you are, or where this miracle is even happening — the ordinary yet extraordinary miracle of perception, of vision, thought, sensation, of any experience, memory, cellular transformation, modification of consciousness, of any birth, death, earth, others . . . we don’t know. None of us. We are it, yet none of it is us.

Everyone here is a member of a cult of one — the “one” being that accumulated bundle of thoughts and feelings, memories and sensations, which seem to imply a distinct and continuously enduring unit of individuated consciousness, a person, a “me”, even if there is no such actual character in reality. Indeed, it is the notion of a distinct, solid, and enduring person which ends up being the source of complex suffering and illusion of separation which dominates the common human lifespan.

Nevertheless, nobody like that has ever existed, whether randomly, willfully, or deterministically. Nor has there ever been an actual value system, only endless conceptual superimpositions upon a transient self-concept, a fleeting idea which mind then employs to fabricate that phantom nucleus — “me” — around which numerous string-like energies rotate for the span of a flickering lifetime, only to at last dissolve playfully back to the indescribability from whence they once had emerged.

That open spaciousness in which instantaneous perception occurs has no center nor circumference. It’s actually limitless! Our own mind contains this body, contains every body we have ever worn, contains the grand universal totality, the whole magnificent expanse itself, which is nothing more than a brief thread of uncreated light flashing through unfathomable vastness. Seen as they are, the empty space and the flash of light are inseparable, like one sheer piece of her translucent fabric waving in a dark night sky, suddenly pierced by a silver sliver of moonshine — just enough to grant consciousness the opportunity to recognize and appreciate itself as this simple wordless happiness of being. This immediate presence.

We may spend our brief tours here or elsewhere forming and reforming the transient beliefs and identities by which we define and redefine ourselves — our unique stories and adventures on the virtual road between one thought and the next. Just so, at this very moment yet beyond time’s reach, a glad god stands silent before the blossoming flower. Two mirrors are reflecting each other, with nothing between them but dazzling light. That light is hers. It becomes us.

Colorful petals of perfect surrender and sheer delight are breezing through the scene in a whirlwind romance of dancing energies vibrating at the frequency of Yes. Happiness, yes, though there is no word for the happiness which prevails prior to creation’s inception. That is the happiness of potentiality, the very happiness we now feel, hovering here on the verge of Self-awareness. It’s the boon we promised ourselves in pre-existence, in exchange for our song of being human.

Now all the windows are open. Clear air. Inhaling. Exhaling. We stand before her portal, poised to enter, with a swelling song in our heart. That song, our own serenade of love and resistance, of yearning and dissatisfaction, of curiosity and humbling discovery — our song of the road — is trailing off behind us in the distance now. All of that is left at the threshold — both singer and song — as an offered gift from the beyond to the grand unknown beyond it. She is there, which is here, always waiting to welcome us home. This aware space of immediate presence, it’s here now — come on in!

Chapter 32

Like a child’s fleeting daydream of morphing sunset clouds, or like an alluring fragrance which appears out of nowhere and just as soon vanishes on a thin wispy rumor of a breeze, her atmospheric kiss quivers the withered oak leaf just enough to finally let go of its branch and spiral slowly downward: Ahh . . . it touches down so lightly on the welcoming crust of this warm waiting earth that only she can hear it.

You — the ecstatic resonance of her planetary invocation, its source and its recipient, whose true airy lightness attests to all that you’ve surrendered into your own quiet bonfire to be purified and consummated, arrive in radiant garments of light, speaking only the light language of your own heart words. Light beholds itself, recognizing itself as the immanent Divine. Inhaling and exhaling only light, your expanding consciousness itself is an ineffable playground of light for light’s own innocent satisfaction. In this natural way, light is bowing down to light. Light is bowing back.

And when you arrive on your knees it is as if nothing has changed, for it is only light which appears in light, and nothing else — no candle, only flame, no wax to mark its passage through no time, while in the mirror, in that shine, there is an undulating tunnel of light, traveling through itself to become what it has always been, and that is all, except for the stories we fabricate to console ourselves in the midst of light’s perfect consolation.

When we emerge, resplendent, from that luminous mirror, shining anew with every gladness and gracious mercy, we realize that our own darkness has its source in light, as does the light in darkness. Everything we know of ourselves relaxes at last into its own natural brightness, transmuting moment to moment into its own prior light. Whatever was cramped now becomes spacious, what was contracted expands, what was vague and obscure is mercifully rendered clear and transparent, whatever resisted becomes soft and inviting, then smoke-like, and then gone.

Our memories begin returning, we remember. We can say that the light remembers itself again, once roused from a darkened slumber to its own radiance once more, just as it has always done in its endless cycles of transformation. What has really happened? Light expands into more light still, like a luminous dream within a dream, and this is how it will be for us, when our own light returns to the welcoming Void — like a child’s fleeting daydream of sunset clouds, inexorably dissolving into night.

Maybe this is just what time is for — to see how everything becomes itself within the perpetual unfolding of now, to immerse ourselves completely in that, to get totally lost in it, and then to let it go. Consciousness is in love with itself, every part is in love with every other part, and all its parts are in love with itself as this immediate presence of itself, and the paradox is that we are all of this, and at the same time, none of it. In reality, this consciousness is not mine. It is not my self. It is not what I am. What I am is awareness alone — before, during, and after.

Chapter 33

Although it may seem to our senses as if we are in a solid material state, enmeshed in a particular 3-D time and place, we are also in the Spirit World, simultaneously. Where is the Spirit World? It’s the home from which we’ve never left, even as we’re off touring. If we understand how everything happens all at once, across all time and beyond time’s dimensional nooks and echoes, we will be riding with her across limitless frequencies of light. We’ll be amazed that we had forgotten the joy of such thrilling flight! From a certain perspective, paradoxically, it may even seem as if nothing is happening. We may pause there, but something else keeps going and flowing. Perhaps we are really just along for her ride after all? Now everything is happening, but all by itself, before we add our own modest energetic pulse to the emptiness of any transient experience. Love is love, and she is having her mysterious way.

The purpose of love is more love, and so love only magnifies itself upon self-recognition, which is why recognition is itself liberation. Love recognizes itself as us. There is a tacit recognition that it’s never been about some person that we need to become, or place we need to go. This is already the other place, and that is just as well. Truly, all is well. To play this game here, we are perpetually modifying and refining consciousness, or mind, even as mind is modifying us. If we imagine that we are prior to consciousness, it is only consciousness thinking that, so don’t bother giving it a second thought. The first was already something extra.

The ego — that much-maligned but simple navigational tool and flexible functional construct — is a kind of basic software package which we download, like a Consciousness App. Although it tends to be quirky and virus-prone in this version, with lots of emotional instability, it’s still a necessary one for engaging in the duality games embedded in these low density virtual reality structures. Here ideas have power, and ego is a powerful one — really a verb rather than a fixed noun — but always remember: we are before thought.

Ego enables us to walk, ride, or fly anywhere at all in these mortal forms, to stop on red, go on green, and here in the drama of our human games, it enables us to discriminate. In the objective world, we’re required to discriminate. We created plus and minus after all, and now we have to deal with the implications. Later, we may come to realize that’s all just a package of necessary nonsense. No praise or blame, there is only Source, masquerading to infinity. When all discrimination is outshone in the clear light of our exquisite equality, she will be very happy, because happiness is her nature and purpose, just as it is ours.

Discovering one’s purpose for being, for living, has been a fervent goal of profound and sometimes desperate human inquiry since we began the process of self-reflection. This fundamental endeavor has been the subject of countless testimonies and treatises, popular songs, humorous anecdotes, theatrical dramas, and plentiful theories throughout the ages. Nevertheless, most seem to fall short when it comes to seeing the forest through the trees, to borrow an apt metaphor from the collective wisdom store. Rather than belabor the obvious, simply put: our purpose is to be. Just that.

Your purpose first and foremost is to be you, just as you are. Mine is to be who and what I am. What I already am. To just be this, whatever it is, and however it may manifest in its momentarily individualized stream of beingness. Clearly, we are already doing a great job at fulfilling our purpose, regardless of any judgments we might subsequently project in our diminished capacity of mortal intellect. Indeed, failure to fulfill our purpose is de facto impossible. Just so, we need not spend innumerable lives attempting to elaborate, exploit, improve or sanctify our immediate beingness, gradually making that whatever-it-is a more suitable candidate for everlasting happiness. Happiness is already our primordial state. Our natural soul state. Happiness is love, and love is us — in rest or motion, there is only that.

As creator beings, there is something we imaginatively add to or superimpose on this timeless perfection: experience. Many stories follow. We are all here now just riffing on that, improvising on our own essential beingness, as divine creators in the infinitely unfolding nowness of now and now and now. Right now, before we have to think about it, we are. Mission accomplished. In our immediate presence, we tacitly fulfill our purpose. Already, before we ponder what it is, we are it, in its perfect is-ness. We can relax. Breathe. A long relaxing exhale, just letting go of what no longer serves us in simply being ourselves, surrendered of all stressful reluctance to trust in that innocent simplicity. Awareness, just this — before, during, and after.

Chapter 34

Everything molecular is in motion, but not one whiff of that is us, not one dreamy scintillation. It’s just what flashes into being like late summer lightning in the dark immensity of sky. It vibrates at its own ecstatic frequency, while simultaneously dissolving back into itself without remainder. That is, no trace is left to mark its journey. Was it even there?

Just so, as we perceive it from the 3D human’s angle of vision, time has some linear elaboration, allowing for the appearances and disappearances of objects, which are actually solidified thoughts. It all begins as a thought. Thoughts arise in the midst of deep aware space, with the ethereal fluidity of a wisp of incense smoke on a breezy afternoon in eternity. In the time it takes to turn one’s gaze from left to right, the dynamic vibration grows denser until everything down to its atomic structure seems pressed and packed together, creating the appearance of some concrete solidity — the “objective world” of pure illusion.

That virtual appearance by nature is a transitory and non-binding modification, or impersonal play, of light, verbally designated as energy, manifesting itself perpetually as consciousness, the same consciousness which is living us now, as this intelligence, this luminosity, this vitality, and of which everything is an infinitely morphing expression, imbued with inexhaustible radiance — an unconditional love beyond the human intellect’s comprehension. Only the heart knows, when it recognizes itself as that, as love itself.

Our surrender to that is our triumph, yet we have only surrendered to our own Self. The extent of our resistance to such divinity merely serves to demonstrate the range of flavors of our own suffering, compounded in perpetuity by the latent power of a reinforced ignorance which spawns and fosters the illusions of lack, dis-ease, doubt, and separation. The persistent delusions of “me and mine”, “here and there”, “now and then” align to form a momentary platform, a make-believe stage on which the improvised persona can bob and weave, smile and weep, in costumes beyond number.

For today’s dramatic configuration, we are seated on such a stage in the chair of the Host, all the while still imagining we are the Guest. The conversation proceeds at pace, though not a word is said. Instead, there is a pulsing sense of presence, so intimate that it is not even noticed at first, except perhaps as a subtle thread of feeling, the feeling of simple being itself. When attention becomes absorbed in this feeling, there may come an ignition. Host and Guest change places. Then the stage itself falls away. Was it even there?

When all of our dimensional selves are integrated into their prior unity, we have finally mastered how to play this game, her vital game of mortal beingness. As children of the Mystery, we can be with each other in grace, in peace, expanding the boundaries of our self-awareness into cosmic all-inclusiveness, becoming sky-like in our omni-directionality, healing in our glance and touch, alive with joy as this now moment, a blessing of unconditional love to all we meet — the embodied union of love and wisdom.

Chapter 35

The loud long horns are blaring, cymbals clashing, drums are beating faster, anticipation mounting. Ancient Ones are chanting deeply, weaving trances long forgotten, summoning the Shining Ones. They’re invoking the Protectors, and those yet to be tamed and turned into new Protectors, entangled with wild earth energies no human frame could long contain. Beyond any need or thought of protection, with the mountain trumpet echoes still ringing in the shattered air, we gamely rise and plunge directly into the familiar abyss — this hijacked life of mystery, anxiety, aching longing, humdrum boredom, dazed roboticism, stunning lyricism, sweet sunshine and quenching rain — all seasoned more or less with love and pain.

Some claim one must walk this road alone, but we are not going anywhere, nor are we ever alone. The feeling of being alone is merely one of her theatrical pretenses. She blows the mighty horns, beats the drums, chant to the Is-ness of herself till the night shrinks back and she anoints herself with dawn. Jai Ma! The laboring sun gives birth to planet upon planet. They revolve in joy around the massive luminous deity, all singing their own unique songs of praise and thanksgiving, all birthing their own exalted offspring: more dreamily perfect forms of you. The thought that anything else exists is preposterous exactly because nothing actually does — there is only you.

The great elephant is striding towards me. I am walking towards myself in the form of you. Those who contemplate this truth long enough are rarely heard from again on this side of the sea of delusion. Whatever the ignorant may say about you, you are not cruel, nor are you good. You are only dreaming. When you awaken, you will plunge directly into the familiar abyss. We will all be there — the sun, the moon, planets — waiting with smiling faces for the one and only you. When awareness awakens to itself, even Shiva, Shakti, and their Jasmine Garden evaporate in the singing air like moist mirages in the desert. Awareness awakens to itself in the exact form of you. Form itself is empty, emptiness is form, and all falls gratefully into the heart, in the union of love and wisdom.

Chapter 36

(Sky of Heart)

Across the dusky sky of mind, all my birds of thought are leaving, yet somehow now I can’t stop smiling – this late at night, one bird keeps singing. That bird is you, the one who dreams this whole thing up – this sky, these birds, this endlessly enchanting bird song on the cusp of quiescent extinction.

Yes, it must be you, since you’re the one who lives us! When our head bows down to touch the ground, you are that ground, the head, and the bowing. When the light across the sky is changing, it is only you that changes. You’re never the same light shining twice, even though you never change, but only become more you.

In a display of humor beyond compare, you are the one who gave us this mind — what a grand comedienne! Even though it has no endurance, we employ it to imagine some personal continuity. Even though it had no beginning, we want it to never end. Even though it cannot be grasped, we are always trying to get hold of it. Even though it cannot be tamed, we are always trying to control it. Even though it is immovable, it seems to wander all over the place. Even though it can’t be found, it leaves its trace in every face. Here, there, and everywhere — what could be more obvious!

A big waste of time would be trying to make some religion out of it. When it appears in saints, it does not become holy. When it appears in demons, it does not become evil. It is the same in both heaven and hell, in right thoughts and wrong, in temples as well as in saloons, in nirvana as well as samsara, in mosquitoes as well as Buddhas, in the ardent lover and vicious hater, in the barking dog and the opera diva, in the peaceful pilgrim and violent warrior, in cacophonies of words and deepest silence.

But let’s not bother with any of that — right now, I just want to talk about you! Your mercy is never in question, except for those still confused by any preference. Your silence is enough, though if anyone feels the sudden urge to scream, it’s safe to say: You’re the screamer, the screaming, the scream! Before a single thought arises, You are present and unaccounted for. Before the beginningless beginning, You are the foundation and function of pure consciousness — inconceivable — but we still like to make up names for you, like Source, Supreme Self, or Dharmakaya. Mind loves to play that game.

You are the projector, and you are the screen on which all is projected, so we may as well cook up some spirit popcorn, sit back, and enjoy your eternal show, since you are also mind’s main projection! When you meditate upon yourself, everything becomes open and perfectly transparent — a welcome breeze on a lazy summer afternoon, or fresh-fallen snow where dogs and children romp about, imitating you. Either way, you cast no vote – you’re busy with your mysterious way, and that’s the gist of this poem, this play. You are the featured film of the day, and the characters, props, and ingenious plot are nothing but your display!

You are the lover we leave to be with the lover you are. You are the Great Soul our souls are entwined within – You yourself are the twining. Those who imagine they are working on themselves are like children blowing bubbles that pop in mid-air. When the work is over you don’t rest. You are Rest. You are what works, even when it seems to not. Undeterred by the exquisite calamity appearing in the universal funhouse mirror, you flip the switch and nothing happens. In Reality, nothing happens! To actually be able to appreciate that is your rare and generous Gift.

You alone are the giver, the giving, the gifted, and the gift! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! The evidence that anything other than you might even exist becomes more difficult to fall for, the longer one contemplates you — the Light behind the mind that grants all these astonishing birds the miraculous power of flight. Body/Mind/Soul/Light – that’s all Your Idea, Your dreamy dream, as are all the brilliant birds, beings, and blessings you’ve dreamed up to populate your perfect Sky of Heart, your Mind of perfect Love.

I fly to you through the sky of mind, though it is really just you, being yourself, and flying without moving! When the mind flies into the heart, everyone lands back on the original tree where they began, though no one has really gone anywhere. You whirl in place and nothing happens: no creation, nor destruction, no departure or arrival, nothing to anticipate, so nothing to regret. The pure confusion this creates is the perfect play of your tender-hearted compassion. Some call it the wound of love. You opened Your hand and I flew out. I fly through the sky with your wound in my heart, trailing a ribbon of tears and laughter. You’re the open wound in every heart – and you, it’s perfect mending.

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