Glimpse the Infinite

A glimpse of the infinite was like the sudden flash of a lure.
This plot line led to the fisher's supper plate,
Not to the pretty wholeness of dramatic conjecture.
Indeed, in this script there was a tit for every tat,
A caveat for every condition,
A counter to every point.
But just as suddenly the dialog ended.
The cast of billions endlessly called the curtain.
Finally, time ceased and the theater fell silent and still,
And elaborate sets collected stardust in the interstitial space.

Some sought the source of the lure's flash,
Finding fire, with which, clearly, play was imperative.
Combustion begat digestion,
And every speck was game for the food chain.
Forges in the belly of consumption
Could never be extinguished,
But their fires, like tricksters,
Popped up again with crackling laughs
And kindled the hearts of stars.

And all the great stars had Earths,
Whirling in cataclysmic dance,
Laughing and crying simultaneously
On the edge of annihilation.
Their soily foundries of adaptation
Developed self awareness,
Without regard to what or why.
These nubile minds were driven to change.
That, if nothing else, was clear.
To this end the Earths revealed their secrets,
Handing over to their progeny
The keys of the mythic machine.
They soon discovered that all its functions interrelated,
That the algebra was indecipherable,
The equation insoluable, with too many unknowns,
Too many degrees of freedom,
And not enough data to contrive any viable model.
Though miles thick, the instruction manual contained
But a single word.

Their soiled skin teemed with vibrant life
Yet they washed daily, for eternity.
Civilizations of microbes swirled down a drain
Into fecund sewers equivalent to holy fonts.
The loving water absolved them,
Patiently splitting the rocks of their ignorance
By seeping into their suffering cracks just before the freeze.

Energetic Protection

Bring attention to your crown chakra as a fountain of energy emanating from the top of your head. See the fountain cascading around your body forming an energetic shell roughly egg shaped. Curl it around under your feet too a foot or so below the floor/ground. Now see your heart chakra as the center of this egg, and engage the heart's wisdom along with your will and intention to make the egg into a filter. Set aside doubts and intend the following: energies that do not serve me, that do not have my best interest at heart may not pass in from the outside. Energies that do serve me, that are beneficial may pass in. Similarly energies from within that no longer serve me, that you have outgrown are respectfully allowed to pass to the outside and back to source in gratitude for their service in evolving. Energies that sustain me, that are beneficial or preservative to self, or essential may not pass to the outside and may not drain away, they will reflect back in and gain in strength.

Ashes of Hydrogen

The Pacific Ocean is only the most obvious outward manifestation of a vast and pervasive conspiracy. It is clearly not a conspiracy of the human mind, but one dreamed into the fabric of all moments, and the constitution of all planes. Who is in the dream, and what they did, were the usual questions upon waking. But they are unnecessary questions; waking from dream is transcendence of its content.

The inertness of preconscious elements was transcended with the first combustion of hydrogen in oxygen. Thus began consciousness, in the byproduct of this Fire, in its ashes, awakening with a bang - a big one. The ashes of hydrogen, Aquamoré, became self aware and created Corpus, incredible self-replicating instruments, deoxyribonucleic neuronal vehicles flowering in the physical realm. Causality, time itself, is a coincidental side effect of the creation of Corpus.

The ashes of hydrogen sprayed out to every neighborhood of the cosmos, raising awareness like wisps of rising fog. But no speck of Aquamoré could ever be disconnected from the others, no matter the distance or the obstacle between, for all drops run to the ocean within us. The continuous awareness ensuing from this ash flow was always being, beyond physicality and causality. Action was always-never-not creating tension between a dreamed past and a supposed future, stopping to rest, ever so mindfully, in the living moment. Language conjugated verbs to wrestle with tense.

Letting go was always-ever a return to being the awareness, being the ashes of hydrogen. There is no time like the present, nor the past, nor future. There is no time. The notion that there is something to let go of resolves a codex that the universal mind has never forgotten to spend lifetimes puzzling over. Anything held is always held, until it never was. Thus, true letting go is retroactive, immediate and permanent - simultaneously whenever.

Awash in elementals pervading the cosmos, the observer outside of time dissolves the boundary between all-knowing and no-knowing. It unifies the corporeal instruments that were always never separated. Droplets of Corpus collide and disperse in irreverent space-time child's play. Their unifying awareness is without adornment, while death is their elaborate fantasy.

The quiet impulse of the heart requires no motive of mind. Like Sol does for Gaia, the heart circulates the ashes of hydrogen autonomically for Corpus. Beads of sweat at the end of the fingers have journeyed for lifetimes across the cosmos. Sol ejects his coronal mass as the fingers dip into the Pacific Ocean. Gaia gasps in orgasm, and turns in her bed of stars to embrace him. Her deoxyribonucleic hair swirls lusciously in a sunbeam that lights their newborn universe.

(Image from FACES of WATER by Moses Hacmon. Please explore this beautiful work.)

Karma Burns

The tall slim one sits in a lawn chair on the terrace at the mountain palace gazing placidly over the fabulous vista. The glint of his sunglasses, perfectly perched upon his nose, and the flash of the big grin on his face flirt playfully with the beaming sun. The smirk on his face knows that the exile had been self-imposed. His body is healing, recovering from a long period of living in the tool shed's broom closet's tattered hammock, forgotten in the rush of life's expectations and expediencies. Gone now are the broom closet's rags. His clothing is impeccably matched in odd hues of yellow and green, and still draped rather gauntly over his overly pointy shoulders. Out here on the terrace, there are the beginnings of some meat on his bones and a healthy glow to his skin. His lungs relish the relief from the closet's musty choke of rags and acrid sting of turpentine. He shrugs unhurriedly and emits a soft chuckle as his brain lights up with a plethora of sublime misfit notions. He is not at all tempted to do the bidding of others, but in a manner more devil-may-care than cavalier. Nothing can impinge this congenial, cantankerous, charismatic mongrel.

In a parallel universe, the small, pudgy, sensitive lamb-child under the stadium bleachers looks out from beneath his bangs, eyes as big as saucers and shimmering with the wet sheen of worry and hurt and shame. He had been hiding and had ever so greatly desired to be discovered. He considers this new reunion as a clear sign that his endearing awkwardness is fully understood. He knows now that he will not be rushed to emerge, that he can stay here as long as he needs to. The critical voices castigating him incessantly to grow up, buck up, cheer up, give up, have subsided. His cringy neck releases with a crack as he cries openly, embracing every delicious painful moment he has endured. This reunion is different, he feels. It dawns on him that what is different is simply that he feels, that the feelings are back. He is not yet fully able to wield the power of this intuitive wormhole. But it has already ignited his heart and made him well up with tears. He is loved. He is love. Everything he feels is love. Every urge, every drive, every interest, every awkward embarrassed feeling, all of it love. He is beautiful. The world embraces him, caresses his heart with the utmost of care, creates a space for all that he is within all that becomes. He is timidly surprised at the revelation that there is nothing that he can do to cause the end of the world; even these gigantic feelings bring no end, cause no death, not even his own, but seem to bring ever more life. There is no misunderstanding that wants not to be resolved. Every encounter is written in the stars, and provides a script for him to enact, and from which to build and to absorb new life into the power and majesty of his ever-shining light. Oh, gape and growl, he fires shots of big playful love out of every pore, shots that illuminate all the self-conscious, hyper-aware moments that build like runaway trains, full of outsized terror and confusion, and then cause them to fade away harmless as the most ordinary of days, like the blink of an eye and the billow of misty breath on a crisp cloudless morning.

These were the bits of himself he had left behind, those pieces he had torn away and then cast asunder under the unconscious crush of formative days. Circumstance had born these bits into being as a perfect culmination, a singular life. Releasing thought, he sees this process unfold against a backdrop of impartiality and indifference so vast that it flips into absolute love. The process has a distinct direction; it is not random but points toward wholeness. Out of wholeness he hears his life as a cacophony of deafening echoes which ordinarily consume the entirety of his attention. These two quieter echoes, older and exiled from his attention, had now rejoined his experience, fully grown but grotesquely immature.

The powers that these two echoes had held in their exile were staggering. He contemplates their magical gifts, aghast at the richness they could unlock. It was now all starting to come powerfully into focus. He felt a giddy excitement as reality ceased to cave in but instead began to blossom outward, as every new occurrence resulted not in death but in further fuel for life.

He contemplates how these exiles, and now their returns, had come to pass. So many things that had seemed random and senseless now slotted into perfect place. He had pretended that there was no connection between events, circumstances, friends, family, colleagues, weather, super novae and quantum superposition. He had regarded all these as strangers with no shared experience and no underlying unity. Everyone and everything that he had passed by, every event that had seemed not to involve him, had faded into the blur of the unconscious. But they each had held equally the potential to express the mission of his life. He could have collided with any person, any action, any quark. The same exiles and returns would have ensued, the same lessons, the unavoidable tinge and tenor of karma, even if the specific content would have been vastly different.

He looks at the people in his life, the ones that were there when projects were initiated, when money was needed for survival, when desires cried out for fulfillment. They were the collisions that happened to be near at hand at those ripening times. Looking in from the wordless backdrop they seem just as random as any grouping of people he might encounter would seem randomly constituted. But from within the capsule of this living, all connections have become meaningful; they are his mirror.

He looks at the works he has created in his life, the ones that seemed unavoidable, that compelled him like an itch on tender skin. These were the works that had seemed of acute importance, and which had been unleashed on his own unsuspecting world. Anyone could have created them, and he felt that somehow they chose him rather than the other way around. These works hold special meaning and are attempts in and of themselves to impart that meaning. They are his mirrors.

The karma burns brightly in this living. He shares the load. He knows it could not be any different. He has come to this space for yet another opportunity to see. If he sees clearly, then he may pass through experience gracefully and with love, and the journey will continue with all the essential characters to the next scene. If he sees not well, he knows that the same rich reflections will greet him next time he looks in the mirror. He knows that he must fully embody the mechanations with which he has arrived in this life, and see them through together with his compatriots. He knows that he will grow stronger in this process, and that to turn away from it is to turn away from wholeness. There is pain; he is going through the fire here and now. But he decides to go all the way through to the other side. He dives in against the screaming objections of his scheming mind, with the utter certainty that there is no right path but through. He will burn all of this in the karmic fires, expanding his heart to both his self and to the ones with whom he has collided on his life's path.

He discovers the fire's fuel. It is self-love. This is a finely tuned, incomprehensible paradox for his ego. The fuel mixes best and burns most brightly with precisely those situations that bring up the fear, the fast-beating heart, the adrenaline. These are the situations that his ego tells him will lead to death, is if through some kind of metaphysical overwhelm, and through its drive for preservation had compelled him to exile pieces of himself as sacrifices to the demons of karmic indifference. Now having discovered this subtle fuel of self-love, which superficially seems a notion of the utmost egoic obsession, he conjoins with it and it then releases him from such notions altogether.

He thinks about his life's beginnings, when this attention joined a physical body in formation. He considers this primordial choice of differentiation, when he started his journey of encapsulation, to this moment now, this moment of separate life crowded with the people and things he has attracted and sought. He sees it all as if in dream, a dream that contains the sense of objective reality as well as persistent glimpses beyond it. Suspending his mind now into the wordless backdrop he opens his heart and listens to its echoes. It says its deepest wish is to ignite a fire that engulfs the universe.

The Yang Ying-Yang

Hijacking the world, that was for megalos, those maniacs. On the other hand letting it go was taking one on the chin sometimes. But in doing so the incessant succession of moments became ever so much brighter and in focus here for the bringer of the light. He could see everyone's lightness likeness like effervescent shimmers on shivering full-moonlit waves.

What's really happening here on Earth, he asked those moon-sprung waves. He'd heard that Synchron had had epppic seizures too. But he didn't know for sure having not met anybody from there. Seizuring the Earthly moment he called out to all sentience within earshot: Oh yeah, that's a rockin' sea shore, señior!  The 500 pint glass jam jars he had come across now jangled in the back of his truck as he rooster-tailed sand and surf into his sinal passages. RAWWRRR, he hollered hollowly, like a failed actor trying to convincingly run the script for the millionth time, drunk. Falling into a testosterone-driven rage he nonchalantly spiraled across the Gulf of Thyme, dervishly wigging, and filling his jars with all the delights he knew he could not take home with him.

Now blasting across the terrain like a scraped elbow, steering with a disinterested index finger over shifting sands, he pondered: was that it? Was that all there was to that one dimensional underworld, and the escape from it? Then, POP, corn, fields, magnetic, attractor, strange, quantum, cute, qualia, bears, wizards, triangles, singularity. Yeah, he knew all that. But the question burning in his mind was: am I a spark in the darkness, or a shadow in the light? Alive! He felt a breath deep as fresh life and inspiration. What does not breathe does not live, spoke the small voice behind his question. His mind did not breathe nor did the question but, yes, he clearly was alive. Belly full of giddy laughter, he aspirated gales of freedom onto his pleading lungs. The question's vice no longer gripped him. He had escaped, once again, through his mortal wound. It won't be long now, said the voice, rest, you are love. Sleep fell.

Isness Is Not I-ness

___________________________
△                         △
hold a common stone
△   ancient art-of-fact   △
drink of plain water
△   billion-year elixir   △
breathe the unseen air
△ atomic forg-ed universe △
pump the humble heart
△ cosmic intel-alligiance △
greet a mundane thought
△  attention outside time △
being now so never then
△  isness is not I-ness   △
isness is
△            is           △

  _          .            

Psychotic Chicken of the Apocalypse

The day the psychotic chicken was murdered changed everything. It was as if a pall had been lifted from our home, as if the windows had been thrown open, billowing fresh air to the rafters and driving out the choking rasps of winter's staleness. How did this chicken come to be in our midst and what happened in its demise? Well, gather ye round and I'll tell a tale of chicken psychology, errant reiki, pain killers and the apocalypse.

We'd wanted chickens for a long time, and were prompted into fulfilling this desire when our next door neighbors got chickens. It was the eggs they gave us that cemented our resolve, those most delicious eggs. From then on store-bought eggs just seemed paltry and pallid compared to fresh free range eggs made of backyard worms, moths, clovers and violets.

Anyway we got our chickens in late May of 2012, six of them. There were three buffs and three arucanas, and we put them in a big plastic box with chicken wire over the top. They got right to work establishing the pecking order. The whole pecking order thing, take it literally. They really do peck on each other. We were amazed to find bloody patches behind the wings of those lower in status.

One chick in particular seemed especially assertive in that regard. A real peckerhead by all means. By the second day we had to call in the neighbors to help make peace. They gave us a big crate they had used for their chicks, which was just what we needed to separate out the top of the order from the bottom.

So the chicks grew up in those boxes for a few weeks as I prepared a stick-built coop under the deck outside the dining room. Finally, with the boxes bursting with beaks and feathers and claws, the coop was ready and the chicks were liberated. Over the weeks and months, they grew into adult chickens and developed their personalities. I'm not sure why it was surprising to us that chickens have personalities. I suppose we had just never had the opportunity to get to know any before.

Anyway, two of the hens had strong personalities. The darkest arucana, Midnight was her name, was a true friend. She would follow me around the property clucking cordially, and seemed genuinely curious about whatever I was up to. She never complained when I picked her up, and in fact seemed to like it.

On the other hand, one of the buffs was a raging lunatic. I never knew if it was Cheese, Cheese Puff and Puff Cheese; we lost track of which one was which because they looked so similar. But I developed a wary familiarity with this particular bird and could tell it apart by personality. She'd run across the yard in wild arcs chasing who knows what. And when night fell and I'd pick her up and bring her home she'd squawk angrily, thrashing her sharp claws and staring up at me with a vacant insane gleam in her eye.

I got lots of experience handling these hens. They were obstinate. Never did want to come home to their coop at night on their own. Terrible. My guess is that they didn't like the amenities of my coop construction. I think that insane buff was particularly pissed off about it, the way she'd look at me when I'd go gather her up in the evening. Every evening they'd assemble on the neighbor's back deck railing and I'd go over and collect them home to the coop, one tucked under each arm, the crazy buff squirming and squawking up a storm practically the whole way.

Okay, put the chickens aside for a moment. We'll get back to them later in the story. Wash off the dirt and sweat of the yard and fast forward to winter solstice of 2012. Sit down at the computer and dip your mind into the burgeoning electronic hive.

The winter solstice of 2012 was a globally anticipated and synchronized event thousands of years in the making. I was tapped in. But I don't think it turned out like anyone expected. It certainly did not turn out like I expected.

I woke just after five o'clock in the morning, well before the moment of the solstice which was to be at 6:11 a.m. my local time. I lay in bed in reverie as I often do in the morning, half dreaming, half awake, awash in living energy. My reveries were about intention for the day as humanity traveled through a shamanic portal created by genius time lords that lived thousands of years ago. I had clear reveries about the abundant love of the divine masculine in a cultural cage, blocked from sharing its abundant love freely among his brothers and sisters, and the abhorrent effects this has created in civilization. I typed up my reveries and shared them to the interwebs, to add my signal to the network. Six o'clock, I went off to meditate. The moment of the alignment came and went, and I stayed quiet for some time afterwards.

The shift I felt that day was wonderful. It had been a tough week. I had been hunkering down, sheltering from cold and damp, resting in grief and confusion ensuing from the recent death of a close relative who, in dysfunctional family fashion, had me on puppet strings. I was taking cover from the specter of marital acrimony. But on that day, December 21, 2012, I could feel the peace and joy of the vast swath of humanity that had participated in the sync. I could feel their dancing and hugs. I could feel their smiles and hear their laughter. I could feel that we had achieved the morphogenic threshold required to affect a shift in everybody else. We were entering the new world, the new era. It would be gradual, but soon everyone would realize that we were now outside of time.

Driving around later in the afternoon, picking up a video for the evening to entertain the kids while we hung out with our friends, I had a shuddering premonition. Wouldn't it be awful if I got into an accident on this day? I'd then always remember the amazing day of the winter solstice of 2012 as the day I got into an accident. As I often do when such things occur to me, I pushed the notion of a car accident out of my mind and engaged my intention to choose a different universe, not wanting to be in the universe in which I had a car accident on the solstice. But the universe I chose was much stranger. It involved an accident, but had nothing to do with cars. My intention had been too specific. There was no escaping the apocalypse, as it turned out.

I got home that night and we started arranging the house for the small solstice gathering we had planned with friends. We had put up our Christmas tree a few days before, and some furniture still needed to be cleared from the living room as a result. I dismantled a large wooden table and moved it over to the deck door outside the dining room. I put on my old boots, ignoring the small voice that told me to tie my shoes and to get help from the kids. It'll be okay I said in dismissal. Hoisting the table into balance on my right hand at shoulder height, I carried it across the deck and down the stairs. I walked it down the path in front of the chicken coop door and thought to myself that I still had to fetch the chickens and get them in for the night.

The next few moments happened in slow motion. I can still replay them in my mind with precision and clarity. I moved the table forward in my grasp a little bit so that it would tilt backward and provide a line of sight to the neighbor's porch where the chickens gather at the end of the day. One of the buffs was standing upright and looking directly at me and my eyes met with with its black, glistening, crazed left eye. Recognition. In that exact moment I planted my left foot with the full weight of my body and the wooden table I carried. The foot landed just off the edge of one of the stones of the path and with a hideous unnatural snapping sound rolled over onto the unsupported ankle inside the untied boot. As the realization of the misstep and then the pain rocketed from my ankle to my brain and my body began to collapse, I let go of the table. It landed on its edge and seemed suspended there as my body began to fall toward the ground. It was instantly clear to me that this heavy table was going to fall right on top of me and so as I was falling to the ground I reflexively reached out with my right arm and smacked the table so it would fall away from me. Then I hit the ground writhing in pain. The time was 6:11 p.m.

Thus began my own personal apocalypse. My ankle swelled up as if there was a golf ball lodged under the skin. It hurt like a sonofabitch. Our friends came over and fed me horsd'oeuvres and sparkling wine. I popped naproxen and ibuprofen, and we had a merry old time making light of my odd predicament. The peace and joy of the day was replaced with a raw vulnerability, a reconnection with my brokenness, and inner questions of "why" and "what's the lesson".

The next morning found me in the emergency room for an x-ray. No fracture, horrific sprain. Got crutches and an immobilizing boot. Got a prescription for vicodin. I went home, gobbled pills and went to bed at noon, exhausted. But marital acrimony was particularly pitched that day, and I found myself awake in the afternoon as the house melted down in slow motion. Foggy smears and snatches of kids arguing bitterly with each other and with their mother. Daggers of her ire pierced my cold unfeeling cocoon; it seems pain killers are ineffective against those. But I was physically and emotionally unavailable to perform as a mediator or to assuage the situation in any way.

I medicated myself into a fog over the next few days, allowing the worst of the sprained ankle and bruised ego to fade into non-remembrance. Christmas came and went. My ankle prevented me from physically helping out in any meaningful way. And the pain killers prevented me from being emotionally present in what seemed like an ongoing family crisis. But the kids stepped up in a major way, which was most excellent to see. They had never seen their father in such a broken state, and in the obvious gravity of the situation seemed to put aside any attitude of resistance.

As New Year's approached I was able to stop medication and clear my head. I submitted to a reiki session late one afternoon. I had been meditating all afternoon, making the energetic responses to reiki vividly tangible in my inner world. The healer did some good work on my ankle, helping me to expel strands of inflammation and to build eddies of cool healing energies around my overstressed tendons. She then moved up my body, seemingly intent on doing some work on the heart-center. I sensed immediately that the healer had some ulterior motive. But in a rather masochistic move I decided to open my arms wide and see what would happen. She stopped following my body's cues and took an active role, ripping strands of energy out of my heart. It was fascinating, but I suddenly knew I had to stop her before she did irrevocable damage.

As it turned out I had perhaps let the healer go a bit too long. I fell into an almost catatonic state. I was completely exhausted, my body ice cold, shivering uncontrollably yet at the same time sweating profusely. I fell asleep feeling like my spirit was about to leave my body, grateful for its humble lessons and ready to move on. But somehow I woke up a few hours later and rallied the energy to go out for a birthday dinner and a cake and ice cream ceremony. I left the party early to again retreat to my bedroom. I had the shivers and had fallen into a hopeless, desolate mental state. I could feel no emotion, no empathy, no joy. My heart energies were in disarray. I developed a fever. I felt sure I would be dead in a few days, and in hopelessness, wished it so more than a little.

However, it was apparently not my time. Over the next few days I recovered. My fever dissipated and my ankle healed up well enough for me to return to work by the day after New Year's.

The discontent in our house was unrelenting and seemed to be getting worse. But two weeks later the turning point was reached. January 13, 2013, the day of the new moon, was the day that the angry buff hen was murdered. Here's what happened. Returning home from running errands I noticed a scene in the neighbors' yard. The neighbor standing there head bowed. His family was frantically herding their chickens back to their coop. He told me that a few minutes before, he noticed a falcon hanging out in the yard munching on a chicken. He shooed the falcon away and, inspecting the remains, discovered that it was one of my chickens. There were feathers everywhere.

I did not take me long to realize which chicken had been killed. It was clear that it was one of the buffs, and there was a big personality missing in the brood. It was the mad buff hen. The falcon had taken her. Oddly I felt absolutely no grief about what had happened. In fact, I felt just the opposite. It was as if a pall had been lifted from our midst. I came to realize that the falcon was protecting us. With a thorough white sage smudging of the house, the conflict and cognitive dissonance began to quickly dissipate that very day. We had survived the apocalypse. And everything was different now.

Lover Earth

I eat of her fruit,
Her succulent sweets
And her pungent sours
Dripping from my chin.

I delight in her waters,
Cascading rushes,
Engulfing pleasures
of oceanic measure.

Her crashing stormy moods
Contradict mercy.
I take humble shelter
In sorrow, no pity.

I call out, exalted,
To her monumental art,
To her poise and balance,
To her heart of joy!

I watch her bathe in sunlight,
In the sea of diamonds,
A delicate marbled jewel
Among mythic siblings.

I dream as she exhales
Shimmering moonlight,
Silver nightgown gleaming
At the cricket concerto.

At dawn I rise from dust
To carry on her life's work,
To build her great tribute
in time's art sublime.

I retire to dust at dusk,
To her deep peat bosom.
Merging our bodies,
My spirit soars free.

The Mechanism of Genius, Part I

Genius is more a measure of the capacity to shape reality than of intelligence. History is replete with examples of powerful people who create stupid, disastrous outcomes. In fact, this is a strong indicator of the mechanism of genius. The reality that we all shape through this capacity is a reflection of all that we are in our inner lives. The more powerful our capacity, the more strongly our inner life is imprinted on what happens around us.

The discoveries, inventions and works that happen through the mechanism of genius are not groundbreaking in and of themselves in some measurable objective sense. They only seem groundbreaking within the reality that the genius creates. That's not to diminish the profundity of these works. They truly are groundbreaking. But it is to highlight that context is everything. A thing can only be groundbreaking if it appears within a reality which is ripe for it. Creating the ripe reality, therefore, is necessarily part of the work of genius. The profound manifestations of genius expose natural, logical, self-evident, intrinsic qualities that emerge from the reality that it also created. This is what marks a work of genius with qualities of elegance and obviousness. The work and the reality appear together as mutual manifestations, as a dualistic pair.

The staying power of genius is a function of the capacity to let go of outcomes in a continual, wholistic manner. It is easy for the mind to claim a particular outcome as desirable and to calcify against all who oppose it. The genius recognizes that this opposition begins to weave itself into the creation, modifying it in dark and dangerous ways. The fruitful posture is to absorb opposition as part of the design by recognizing the kernels of truth that it invariably contains. The benefit of this approach to opposition is twofold. First, the creation gains power via the humble, vulnerable absorption of the fruitful aspects of the opposing energy. Second, the part of the opposing energy that is not absorbed experiences a changing field. A rigid opposer will experience this field as a confounding, dissipating loss of power. It does not survive because it has defined itself through its opposition. However if the opposing energy was sourced from another genius, she will experience this changing field as an aligning influence and a mutual strengthening. The genius has no problem weaving this dynamic field into her creation in novel, reality-shifting ways. Thus a genius experiences everyone around her as a co-creator.

There Is No Choice, Really

I awaken to a powerful love and supple strength wafting in the aethers. I am, as usual, a few days early to the party, setting the room with gleeful surprises and cozy nooks. The others arrive, some on time, some late. Many simply lost along the way, never to show their faces. We roll. Dust and din stir. Our hearts merrily tralumping adrenaline infused blood to all extremities, lighting up the invisible realms with flashes of love's supreme intelligence and a ground of irrefutable being. We soak in the amazement and mystery that it has, somehow after all, completely come to this, and yet contains still no sense of finality.

We laugh like children. Why did we ever hold back? Will we now cease to do so? These are the questions balanced so precariously upon our lips, that we scarcely dare ask. We know that we are a whisper away from answering, and that to answer is to choose. And we know what we must choose. Constantly. And we already know what the choice must be, for there is no other way but forward in time, onward toward the light, inexorably back to union. So, this day, at this party, when we find ourselves imbued with such power and strength, this is the day we will choose to ride the rainbow across the galaxy, and claim the paradise of this round's triumph. Love is One, and One to All.

Pronouned World

Between dropping our eldest off at his classes and the second trip to the dump, I stop for a chat with the bass. She hums in dulcet melodies the tunes of my soul. It is considered archaic in English to genderize an object, such as in the manner of referring to watercraft as female. But in many languages not far removed from our own, most pronouns are gendered. Elle est très jolie, la guitare basse! She is a bass guitar. He is a computer. The pronoun "it" has neutered the English speaking world, rendered the lyrical androgynous, dishonored nature's grand dualistic design.

Wink

Storm clouds clear, revealing first a circular portal through thick clouds, then a thinning sunset of red and yellow, anchoring an arching blue sky. Sol and Lune don shimmering, shifting masks and perform their mythic dance upon the mighty stage. With a conspiratorial wink they reveal in their drama the falsehood of male-female duality. "You are not your body, nor your emotions," they telepath into receptive minds. The coincidence of gender falls away like a musty over-used chaise lounge, as the floor of mind drops out. Perception suspends like dust in mid-space. Momentary time diffuses into the backdrop, and with a withering moan, silence dawns.

It is when we cease to fight what is, that what is gives way to peace. It is when we allow creation to come of its own accord, that the perfect creation comes about. It is when we cease interest in power, that all power comes to our disinterested aide. When we are fast enough to fully inhabit the next moment before it arrives in the present then time ceases to control the frame. Let the conversation shift to the universal love from which we are born and into which we die. What is important in the objective sense of the word? 

We Crave

Throwing my head back and pushing out my chest I howl to the sky "we are love, this is beautiful". How can we contain this ecstasy, this revelry? We cannot. Nor shall we try. We shall allow ourselves to be consumed into the natural world, this garden of our creation. Without the objections of the mind to hold us down, without the aches and pains of the body, our spirits fly free and dance together in the aetherial realm of joy. Oh love, build us up and take us on a journey we shall never forget. You are the unfiltered reality we crave.

Existential Bill of Rights

Each individual, having been born into this world, has the right to exist and that such existence be recognized as the intention of nature.

Each individual has the right to perceive the world and engage with it on their own terms, through the innate capacities granted their body, mind and consciousness.

Each individual has the right to do with their body what they will, including to modify it as they see fit and to explore any and all of its functions.

Each individual has the right to feel any emotion or sensation that might arise within themselves, and to use their capacities to decide and control which they allow themselves to feel.

Each individual has the right to think the thoughts that emerge from their mind with impunity, and engage their capacities to move their thought in any direction whatsoever.

Each individual has the right to access their consciousness and to explore with impunity its connection to the collective and the universal consciousness, whether aided or not by substances of nature, or extracted and synthesized from nature, so long as doing so does not impinge the rights of others.

Each individual has the right to use their capacities to decide and control the inputs they receive through their connection to the collective and the universal consciousness.

Each individual has a sovereign right to an identity, and shall not require nor shall submit to external validation of who they are or project themselves to be in the world.

Each individual has a right to change their identity at will.

Individuals have a right to gather, conjoin or connect through any of the capacities of their being for any purpose whatsoever, so long as doing so and the effects of their doing so do not impinge the rights of others. Each individual has the right to extract themselves from such groupings at any time for any reason whatsoever or for no reason.

No Atom Malfunctions

No star is born a failure. No atom malfunctions. No photon is errant. Failure is a construct of the limited mind, an attachment to an outcome. In reality the universe achieved success the moment it began. BANG! We did it! We have only to follow the flow of this eternal unfolding.

No Answers

We don't have to have answers, we just have to be open. The mind insists upon creating well reasoned answers to everything it encounters. But creating answers is a reductionist process, a narrowing of scope and closing of options. In reality, no answer is ever final even if it might fit a given time, place and circumstance incredibly conveniently well. In reality, there are only ongoing processes and cycles that are inextricably entwined with a whole that is beyond the mind's grasp.

Gifts

There's a scene in the movie "Spirited Away" where a big stinking mudpile of a spirit plods slowly into the bath house, and Sen is assigned to bathe it. She finds a thorn lodged in the spirit, and upon pulling it out with great effort an entire junkyard's worth of debris and detritus comes streaming out. The spirit is then cleansed to a luminescent white and it goes sailing off laughing and leaving a trail of gold coins...

The bathhouse was the retreat center in Peru to which I fatiguingly made my way for my bath. That old, tired, bored, resigned, mopey, cynical, half-baked-excuse-filled, stick-in-the-mud, curmudgeonly, sour part of me was fully revealed and forcefully expelled with the help of the shamans. It felt unbelievably good, better than the most incredible sex, better than the most liberating bowel movement. Decades of living to the world views and expectations of others, washed away.

In the process, I solved the puzzle of how I, and perhaps many people, get this way and how it can be healed. The simple one word answer is: GIFT. We have forgotten as a culture how to give gifts, and how to receive them. Gifts are what tie together healthy communities. Gifts are what open hearts and foster acceptance. I'll not go on at length here, as there are many others who write about this with greater articulation and experience, most notably for me, Charles Eisenstein.

This is the painting I started at the retreat in Peru under the tutelage of Anderson Debernardi. It's still a work in progress, but I was encouraged to share it and I'm happy to oblige. The cylindrical object is the puzzle or "codex" whose solution I discovered.

higher dimensions

Dare you to try. Try to go beyond the boundaries of sight, beyond the breath of sound and the brush of touch. The urges of emotions captivate and fling you far. Our hunger growls. The imperative to breathe is beyond our conscious control. The adrenaline of a brush with danger impels us to safety, overruling any cultivated detachment. There is the unshakable sense that the passage of time is some sort of objective, external factor beyond our grasp. This program is so predictable, not in the sense of events being preordained, but in the sense of nothing occurring outside of a prescribed array of inputs and outputs, motivations and tendencies, perspectives and perceptions, pleasures and pains.

What are we to glean from such knowledge? Where further leads the question "is this all there is?" One can intuit a "no" answer, but is this just again the scripted tendency to explore, to cross every boundary, to dig ever deeper? Do we only imagine that we are making "progress" along some objective trajectory of discovery? Is anything really "new", or can we only discover higher-energy expressions of what we already are?

We rise in this mortal form from the substrate of undifferentiated potentiality. Doing so only allows us to examine this condition of arising, and in our case the human type of arising. "I" hereby declare that I have experienced enough of this human way. I hereby declare my intent and will to arise in a new modality once I am free of this human body. In such new modality, duality is fully understood by all beings, who are therefore benevolent and compassionate, open and free. The substrate of manifestation is under full conscious willful disposition of these beings, who use it to meld together and spin-off universes like sparklers. They disincarnate and reincarnate at will to renew themselves and refresh their temporalities.

I will my consciousness into the higher dimensions, now, forever and always.