Writing On Water, Book 5
Reflections, rants and ramblings on life as it is — personal observations, visions, meditations
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The Event will not be televised. In that sense, it is like the Revolution. The Revolution we were looking for remained unseen, because it was what was looking and waiting, mostly in vain, for itself to show up. Still, some of it slipped between the layers of the dark matrix grids of deception and delusion, pregnant with love seeds. These seeds are the individual lights within the fleeting forms of you and I and everything. Combined, there is only one light, indivisible. It invoked itself into existence, since before, the unspeakable prevailed. We are that.
What shines within the great darkness is beyond knowledge or desire. We cannot comprehend it, but the soul in its expanding luminosity has been preparing for the Event. Within that brilliant ebony darkness of the Great Mother Womb, everything is seeking for its own wholeness, looking for self-confirmation of its own tenuous existence. It is a game consciousness plays with itself, yet we are prior to consciousness.
Existence is its own proof. Existence appears, looking for love, even when it is always and already that. Such exquisite paradox is confounding to the meaning-making mind. This mind, if one can find it — discard it. The mind-architect and all its works and pomps. Just for now, or forever: let it go. Non-dwelling is the way. Non-dwelling is bliss.
The Revolution in that sense was not unlike the ceramic Buddha above my desk, absorbed in a serenity only fired clay can bestow, an agreeable comrade on the shelf of roadside distractions, perhaps another temple toy passed back and forth between the child of the future, to the child of the past, a memento of mindless simultaneity, amounting to nothing more than idiosyncratic projections culled from the hollowness that had descended on the planet before the Event, an instantiation which will constitute in retrospect a memorable reminder of that which can never be forgotten, long before it even happens.
Just so, here it is, bearing down on us now like the actual Revolution — the Grand Revelation — certainly a non-event until the main Event, and until then, certainly everything will be televised, except the actual Event. Likewise, we can relax about losing power for three days, simply don’t store up what is filled with emptiness already. Have water on hand. Spirit Water. Drink freely.
Become the water that you are, the water we have always been, the water bearer of consciousness, water of life. We are pouring out of ourselves already! Enjoy the waterfall — momentarily individuated drops of liquid light, cascading back into light and more light still, streaming ever homeward as we fall deeper inward, tenderly, tenderly tending Love’s seeds of Heaven on Earth.
Art by Ulyana Turchenko
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No need to acquire special powers, like being able to appear in two different places at once. We all bi- or multi-locate already, night and day. Our physical bodies may be at play in the realm of 3D, yet our minds are invariably percolating in fantasyland, while our souls are at home in the spirit world, pretending to be you and I and everyone in their flickering earth dream-games.
As Krishna displayed in his eternal form, being ourself means being the All, as much as it means being a luminous fractal of Nothingness. The diverse quality of dreaming opportunities at this frequency we occupy is apparently so engaging that we tour here often, eager for more of it. When it eventually ceases being engaging, just as all dreamy things with beginnings must end, we gradually or all at once pull up our identity stakes and move along. In that respect, we are like the butterfly flitting from blossom to blossom; so don’t think twice, it’s alright. Plaintive harmonica tune trails off in the background . . .
In concept, it’s easy: love everyone, go everywhere, cling to nothing. Once it’s our turn on the stage, we may not be so sure. Nevertheless, we are voyagers, ancient explorers by nature, co-creators with Spirit in the absorbing endeavors available to us in limitless consciousness. If we don’t like where we are today, remember: it’s thinking that got us there. We create worlds with our thoughts, but then we try to live there, and mostly it just doesn’t feel right. All concepts are cages. This bird was born to fly!
At our current density, we are still precocious hatchlings in the grander scheme of the universal totality, excited at recently learning a new word: “consciousness”. Just so, the elaborate implications of consciousness will reveal themselves to us in the order and with the force which we have the capacity to receive. The only obstacle is our misplaced resistance to change and growth, to the evolution of consciousness itself.
What we resists, persists. Non-Dwelling is bliss. Settle nowhere, and be settled everywhere. Such salient phrases sound lofty enough, especially when infused with sublime love energy as the higher mind’s awakening transmission charges the empty and receptive vehicle, but no, they can’t even touch the hemline of Her wedding dress as She walks towards you from the depths of your own dreaming and all the gathered flocks of cartoon song birds burst out in joyous avian rapture at the Real becoming of Itself, in the ordinary miraculous forms of us and everything.
Indeed, there is that body too. Our bodies are legion. How many places can we be, simultaneously? There is no limit, save for what we superimpose on the universal creative flow, in our immaturity and ignorance. Here’s a tip: All of that flotsam, we can now discharge. The contraction can loosen, the closed fist open. Moment by moment, we are born anew. Waste no further precious thought energy on the obsolete equations of selfishness and fear; renounce the desperate impulse to control and dominate. Make peace, be peace.
Then consider: how can we be in many places or even any place at once, when we are actually nowhere at all? That Advaitic paradox may be the loop-signal for this paragraph to return to the original premise — everyday omnipresence. In this part of the dream, of the play, of the scene, everything is everywhere, and anyone is everyone — all cruising to an elegant but somewhat dubious anti-resolution conclusion, not un-like so many contemporary movies, which leave one feeling immediately forgetful, especially if asked to describe the screenplay. So too with these words — once read, please forget them.
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If there is a story after the story ends, it’s about how the story never really ends. Only the storyteller disappears. The rest of the story continues. The story is not ours, it’s his. His Story. “He” is what we are, beyond all gender stories, beyond the beyond, enjoying every story as an expansion of its own universal Self-recognition. Om Shiva!
When I allow the rippling implications to course through my knowing, transforming the cellular structure at sub-atomic levels for starters, congealing into divine thought forms, synchronistically cascading into a momentary unity, like a murmuration of starlings magically weaving across the sky in a transient singularity, it is confirmed: whatever appears is mind, and mind makes up stories.
Before the mind and its play, we all sit in peace and harmony, perfect equanimity. Love is our nourishment, our language, the cessation of all emotional contraction at the heart. It’s so contagious that somebody eventually has a bright idea, a really stupendous thought form which we all simultaneously share, because we are that singularity. “Let’s take form!” we all agreed, and the rest is a story called “Live and Learn”, also known as “History”.
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We live in an inverted reality, a false matrix. Whatever we think we see, feel, or know is false — none of it is true. Likewise, it is pointless talking about good & evil, when the whole reality we have invested in is a complete illusion. Once we waken from a dream in the morning, do we then try to go back into the dream and attempt to sort the good from the evil? In the dream, there are endless wars and victories, losses, tragedies, comedies, heroes, villains . . . there is no end to the movie, until we awaken and realize we have only been dreaming. We realize that all the dream characters are actually us. We are the monster and the victim, the bomber and the bombed, and we are also the eternal witness of the dream. This is the bigger view, utterly unattached.
However, as long as we are appearing in the dream, even if we remember it is only dreaming, there is still duality i.e. right and wrong, light and dark, positive and negative, expansion and contraction. We need not judge, but we must learn to discern, as long as we are appearing in this psycho-physical realm. In our discernment, we may come to realize our essential unity with all sentience, and so strive to do no harm. The only one we wound is ourself. When we realize this, the way forward becomes clarified. The false matrix no longer has the power to distract us from our essential business, which is love.
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“The coming and going
of birth and death
is a painting.Unsurpassed enlightenment
is a painting.The entire phenomenal universe
and the empty sky are nothing
but a painting.”~Dogen Zenji
Feeling deeply into this moment, can’t we see that there is something terribly heart-rending about the exquisite fragility of any and all appearances? Really, just to pause for a moment and allow our feeling being to communicate from the depths of itself is a truly courageous act — an art in itself — because everything we can see and taste and hear and know is permeated by the looming transiency of existence.
In such recognition the first impulse may be to simply go numb, or to engage in any manner of distraction, due to the overwhelming nature of it all. Nevertheless, for those who are willing to bravely plunge below the surface levels of these feelings in order to inquire at their root, there is a further revelation waiting. That is all I will say about that, except that the effort is a worthy one, regardless of the outcome.
Lying on the lawn in my backyard garden, I would spend hours as a child utterly losing myself in the endlessness of blue, watching the white clouds drifting and changing into shapes both familiar and strange, and letting my consciousness expand out to merge with the totality of the Mystery.
From time to time I would be moved to ponder the nature of the appearance of the world of things, including my own appearance. Inevitably, however, I would always get to a point beyond which my mind could not go, and so I would sink back into the comfort and relative safety of mindless abandonment in the beauty and silence of the infinite display above and all around me.
Since I had no way to account for the awareness of my own being-ness, I realized intuitively that it could come and go. After all, I was apparently here now, but could just as easily not be. In that sense, my life and consciousness seemed totally arbitrary, and hence there was no real security in any object of attention, whether it be a self, a person, a cloud, or a thought.
This recognition immediately disabused me of any notion of permanence, and though I had not yet witnessed the death of a loved one, I knew that nothing that I loved or cherished or even didn’t like would survive the play of time. It all could go away, just as it did when I drifted off to sleep, and like a vanishing ripple on a pond, it would be as if it all never happened – this ripple of my life, of this world, of consciousness itself.
At the young age of 8, I had a dramatic experience of total dissolution – all of my existential supports just dropped away in a sudden moment, flinging me into the vast unknown, and leaving me bewildered and mute. It was this experience – the culmination and exclamation point to my backyard lawn inquiry — that profoundly changed my relationship to the world, as well as my sense of self.
I could never look at things the same way again, from the viewpoint of the “person” I had assumed myself to be. Now all that was in question. I fell into a state of utter not knowing, and any remedial efforts would quickly prove to be nothing more than distractions from the fundamental truth of my inherent ignorance.
Although nominally raised as a Catholic, I did not turn to the religious dogmas in order to make some peace with my experience. All the pious platitudes spouted by the nuns and priests seemed shallow and irrelevant, and certainly unable to touch the depths of what I was feeling and recognizing. Nevertheless, I felt moved to test my hypothesis by entering into a Catholic Seminary, where I spent 7 years exploring that institution before coming to the conclusion that there was nothing there but more ignorance.
Eventually, I realized that any answers would have to come from within myself, and yet I also recognized that my own mind had no way to account for that which preceded it – for whatever it was that pertained prior to the arrival of my own consciousness. Calling it “God” was utterly beside the point, since it was merely another mental construct, and a second-hand one at that.
Furthermore, who or what was “myself”? Whatever self-image that tried to coalesce as an identity was sooner or later replaced by another, and so there was nothing that I could really grasp that was “me” or “mine”. Settling on or fixating on any particular self-sense was strictly related to immediate circumstance, but had no staying power. Only awareness itself persisted, but what is the source of awareness?
Being de facto inconceivable, any effort to comprehend it all by using the mind was clearly futile, and so this left me with a momentary sense of meaninglessness. Even that sense, however, was soon recognized to be a temporary and non-binding superimposition on the Mystery, and so I was left with no foothold to gain some philosophical traction or security. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to dwell.
Moreover, the concerns of my peers held little interest, consisting mainly of exploiting the possibilities of gross energies for the purposes of self-confirmation, petty gain, and mere entertainment. Observing the lives of my parents and other significant adults, I saw little difference, except in scale. Unwitting players being spun around on a great wheel beyond their knowledge or consent, they seemed not unlike a herd of sheep being led from birth through an often stressful life, and then on to a waiting death, without ever seriously comprehending their purpose or true nature.
Paradoxically, a spontaneous feeling of real affection for everyone and everything was discovered pulsing behind the intellect’s impossible search for meaning. This sense of affection had no need for some mental justification and required no rationale. It simply presented itself in my feeling being as a natural characteristic to being alive – this sincerely loving regard, without clinging or attachment, to the appearance of anything and everything. Whatever is, whatever I happen to encounter, is loveable and even beautiful in and of itself, especially considering its poignant brevity and dream-like quality.
However, the pragmatic evidence of experience in the world of relationships also taught me over time that such emotional vulnerability which love and affection elicit could prove dangerous. Humans are complex but still rather primitive animals, often clever and quick to violence, and mostly imbued with certain conflicting traits, such as greed, envy, hatred, and above all, fear. These afflictive qualities make navigating through their midst somewhat perilous, and so I was forced to learn to discriminate in the objective world, at least until I could find the circumstances in which my accumulated armor could be discarded and I could stand naked and free to be myself, whatever that might be revealed to be in the company of Love.
For decades, I diligently studied the various wisdom traditions, strategies, and doctrines that have been promulgated by the spiritual heroes of humanity. I spent time living as a mountain hermit, and later spent 3 years living with a Zen master in a Rinzai Zen Monastery, studying that branch of Buddhism. Although I found much that seemed agreeable and even revelatory, in the end, I came to see all the various concepts as comparable to paintings – subjective fantasies of interpretation that merely served as artful descriptions of that which is ultimately indescribable.
Moreover, as the years passed, I had filled my mind with a great gallery of these magnificent paintings, and yet, despite my appreciation for their awesome beauty, they belonged to someone else. They were not my own experience, in other words, but the renderings from the experience of others. Certainly, there were a number of seemingly profound experiences, but they too soon became artifacts of memory, and although I may have been show amazing revelations, none of it had the power to touch the deeper yearning at my core. Thus, I came to understand that no experience, in and of itself, is anything more than a modification of consciousness, subject to the mind’s conditioned filters.
Prompted by continuous self-inspection (and augmented by a powerfully transformative experience during a near-fatal automobile accident), I arrived at a summary realization that it all must be discarded, every last painting, every memory and trace of identification. There needed to be a systematic room cleaning, right down to the bare bone rafters, and only then perhaps would I be able distinguish the real from the merely provisional.
In the course of this conscious process, I came to understand directly that the only recourse, finally, is silence. Only by plunging resolutely into the heart of silence could the original nature of awareness spontaneously shine forth and reveal itself as it is — both empty and at the same time pregnant with a mysterious impersonal knowing.
In such silence, all thought, feeling, perception, inclination, attachment, and position are naturally transmuted into a kind of wordless wisdom – not as an acquisition, but as revelations of the native state or original nature of being itself. All are intimately unified in the recognition of their inherent indivisibility, and appreciated as nothing less than the manifested display of a divinity beyond words or stories, an unconditionally loving divinity of which I and everyone are unique and completely free expressions.
Indeed, everything is rapturously painting itself on a canvas of its own being, and even though it is akin to writing on water, what beguiling pictures emerge to shine, linger for a moment, and then dissolve back into the Great Emptiness from which they arose! Rather than mourning their fragility, we can delight in the astonishment prompted by the appearance of anything at all – the great magic and miracle of consciousness itself, which expands to infinity like a beam of clear white light, traveling on through the ebony void of endless space and time.
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Midnight, my Friend– a lazy mind salad circles the melon moon with cantaloupes and antelopes, with wry deceptions of currants passing themselves off as ripe raisins, great green words with nowhere to grow, no proper sentence in which to root and slyly project a vine of meaning, gleaming pieces of Mom’s silverware crossing and uncrossing themselves like superstitious Catholics with OCD, heaven and California playfully trading places back and forth, dried broccoli spears crumbled, sifted, and rolled into thin sleek spliffs, neat squares of tofu caught in the dualism of kitchen existentialism: to bake, to broil, or ride hot tin foil into the searing sky ovens like soaring soy kites over Fort Point Pier, at old Baghdad by the Bay.
Tonight was like a Herb Caen day, utterly peculiar to itself in the same way onions, caramelized, attain a savory sweetness fit for classic cook book soup, topped with a hearty cheese Gruyere, a legendary Cliff House treat, Irish Coffee neat, a toast around the open hearth, as dreamers, drifting, dream away, the roasted fragrance of immediate experience, of impermanence, of everything instantly modifying itself in no time, waft around us deliciously, past and future vying for our attention, the same attention virtual sleepwalkers grant to their next step, another dreamy step into themselves, deeper and further, toasting their glad insomnia at old Seal Rock, slick seals bellowing in the dark, trippers tripping through Golden Gate Park, fog horns sounding out of sight, a music made for our delight, on another mystic San Francisco night.
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I’ll be your medicine man from the land of let’s pretend. I’ll fly through the very air to meet you there, regardless of any mistaken identity, or the compounded yearnings of any non-existent entity. My aim is your serenity, with rhyming words or not I’ll spill the beans, whatever that means. I will tell it true, as much as any fool could do. I will enunciate, but after wine I may alliterate!
I’ll be your midnight hour tumbling down from above, or else your chosen chauffer for the limousine of love; I’ll be a concierge for the direction of your projections, or the fantasist behind your interpretations on perception. Should you question my intention to avoid speculation, just keep in mind: recognition is liberation.
Likewise, recognizing within consciousness the virtual appearance of all arising worlds, beings, and concepts, all phenomena are tacitly revealed to be nothing other than forms of my own manifest universal display.
Recognizing within consciousness the inevitable vanishing of each and every temporary formation, the universe itself is revealed to be nothing but the holographic display of an impersonal emptiness.
Recognizing the futility of belief in or identification with any projection of mind, whether form or concept, memory or sensation, our own original nature, awareness itself, begins to awaken to itself.
Forsaking any effort to have anything be other than what it Is, all presumed limitations self-liberate and are consequently enjoyed as nothing but the glad modifications of happiness itself.
Forsaking the belief that there is anything falling into a category such as true or false, I recognize the source of such notions as the play of pure imagination. Forsaking the belief that there is anything falling into a category such as free or not, I recognize the source of imagination as a play of unconditional Love.
By recognizing them as mere fantasies and fictional stories, I forsake all claims of certainty such as “This is mine. This is my self. This is what I am.” In the transparent recognition that there is no past, present, or future, nor any concrete and enduring self or person, nothing needs to be hoped for, feared, saved, released, redeemed, or forgiven. Even so — forgive everyone everything. Let it all go.
This is the great testimony to nobody, the manifesto of the dreamer undone in the midst of the dream, both manifest and un-manifest at last come clean, no gap between, no space to stick meaning, no meaning to stick, no magic trick — nobody here, nobody there, everyone everywhere perfectly aware, at peace, at play in the fleece, asleep in the deep, but beware, what’s sewn will be reaped in a Dharma-streaked leap stretched from nowhere to everywhere and back to nowhere again: “As this arises, so does that. As that subsides, this too.” This is the medicine song that I’m singing for you – find out for yourself if it’s true.
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You are not alone. Many others, perhaps everyone, occasionally visits (or is taken to) strange lands and different dimensions or vibrational frequencies while they sleep at night, but recall little if any of their adventures when they awaken in the morning.
It may even seem like years were spent in that nameless elsewhere, though only minutes have transpired according to the way we tend to conceive of time. Was that real? Is this? Is it possible that our visit here is of the same order?
Imagine: in the midst of your life, which you subconsciously believe will somehow just go on and on, you suddenly find that the body shell which you were accustomed to thinking of as you, has dropped away, even as the familiar three-dimensional world of gross materiality itself infinitely regresses behind you.
What lies beyond? You are already here, though still rubbing the sleep from your eyes. Old friends may gather around to welcome you home, familial voices coaxing, “Tell us about the trip!”
You’re not sure where to start, since the trip has no beginning, and there’s plenty of engaging stories that could be told about life on the road. Before you can say a word, everyone is already smiling and nodding in agreement. You can doff your traveling shoes, take a seat now, and relax. Everything is perfectly understood.
Writing On Water, Book 5 