Zakaria-eus

Finished reading Fareed Zakaria's book on Illiberal Democracy. Really eye-opening. Interiors, how can we go on neglecting the reality of interiors? Zakaria without knowing it is very Spiral. Using the Anglo-American experience as a model, he says: 1. Have a landed aristocracy (blue) liberalize the economy and grants political freedoms. 2. Wait for a strong enough percentage of the population to reach a certain economic stature (middle class--who are going to be orange), then open the political system to more democractic processes. Democracy without liberalism is a big problem. So in my earlier piece I meant to say "Liberalism" or "Liberal democracy" is under threat, not democracy which exists all around us.

Politics, education, sustainability, economics, ecology--I think those are where integral can make the biggest splash, hopefully sooner rather than later. Liberalism really has to be saved both from without and worse from within, from itself even.

----
Leaving Canada in a few weeks. Going to the monastery in South Carolina for some period of time. Anywhere from a week to 3 months. Having gone through the integral thing, I have my spiritual seeking left, but in a lot of ways I feel nothing from the waking state. I still have an "I", still have an ego--it is very much centrated in the subtle, dreamy realm (early or low subtle anyway). Still relative. Still this and that. Better and worse. The book, the monastery, the girl, the ministry, the friendships, the future--all pretty much gone. I can now reinhabit them with renewed energy (though I haven't really yet) in a more clean manner. With little to no attachment.

Right now I feel more like floating. Integral judgments and thoughts come as needed, but more than that mostly just compassion, love, presence. Seems frontally like absent-mindedness or apathy--at least that is how others have sometimes read it.

Remember the clarity is connection, not just spaciousness but fulfillment.

Heal The Spiral. Heal The Spiral. Follow your Prime Directive.

Watery Grave Scenarios

The mist is slowly cascading across the mountains outside my window. Very quiet, very serene. 117,000 they have calculated to date with many many more missing. Those waves those killer crests flowed straight from my heart. I sit as The only Spectator in town, The Nothingness that feels the immense sorrow of their misery.

Our world spins on and on. Why the overcrowding, why the poor warning system, why the shoddy construction of houses and building? No matter.

I wonder if any stood their ground and let go into the ecstasy of being obliterated? Would I have done similarly?

Ashes ashes we all fall down.

"In-here" and/vs. In-side

The year comes to an end--as we enter the half-year of the first decade of the 21st century and 3rd millenium (CE that is).

Had a strange experience at the aquarium today--what I can only describe as nature mysticism or psychic consciousness. Felt a powerful yet fairly subdued energetic pulse, running through my body, the water, the walls, the fish, the chattering, toiling, hurried families and masses. Felt really clear through my chest and down into my thighs and feet.

It is precisely in these moments that I feel healthiest in relation to the gross realm and yet also feeling the pull to transcendence. Not despising or repressing the waking dream, just not as profoundly moved as once was.

Deep compassion in this place. For the victims of the flood. For wanting a world that unites nature and nation naturally--in mutually enhancing, realistic, ethical, integral ways.

Spent the holidays in a much more pluralistic, secular setting than my previous more religious holiday observances. Found both good, but lacking in the one thing that really pulls me anymore...spiritual training, consciousness exploration. But not to wear that stuff like a badge either. After this experience here, really less and less interested in trying to impress people with "spiritual-ese" or talk about how one is dedicated to depth and yet bears ambiguous fruit.

I can feel the attention, the focus, the contraction. It becomes more and more painful to actually feel it happening, moment by aching moment.

It is a great blessing--death. It is a great blessing that the body is programmed to self-destruct, as is the ego. If I just follow its development, its terminus is annihilation. It would be nice at some point, to be rid of myself. Not out of hatred, but almost purely out of curiosity. More importantly though working from a sane interior disposition--since there is no interior (no exterior) at that point. Nothing to hide because there is no inside wherein to hide.

Why be profound or profound imitating. It, which is no "it" but rather "iting", watery not water as Plato once said, heading along waiting for these humans (or human-ings) to build with intuition, to evolve (somewhat?) consciously.

Green Shoot

My eyes are soft-wet,
Vulnerable as my heart.
I want to love you more,
but I do not.
Apparently only part, (or maybe none)
wants to give this gift.
I'm leaving you.
I don't know if we will be together again.
Why now, why like this?

I will miss so much.
The way my arm always slung the wrong way,
You gently nudging it back around your chest
away from your delicate, creamy white neck.
Your smile, your charm,
Your ridiculous, non-sensical retorts to my logical world.
Some days I feel I am running from you,
Scared of failure, scared of being the fool.
I worry about our soon-to-be broken hearts.

Nothing meshes perfectly in this hamstrung world,
We are no exception.
Yet everyday I wake up and somehow you show up,
And somehow, even more remarkably, I don't send you away.
Or you wake up and we reverse roles,
With the same result.

I have never loved as I have loved you.
I could never express the depths of my sorrow
for all that I have done (and not done) to hurt you.
Please forgive me.
My love has been weak and inconsistent.

A lot of this is coming crashing down,
When I thought it behind me.
There is no argument, no blame
no despair.
I am wide-open,
You a suicide bomber blowing your love-sharpnel
through my very core.
Your ball bearings of chids, looks, and coyness
Tearing my resistance and mental formality.

Like a character in a novel,
You distracted my best laid plans,
While you shrieked from the mice, and I from men
and their wicked, brutal ways.

The sprite of my heart, the wood nymph fairy of my dreams,
A mermaid who rescued me from drowning
In a sea of a untapped emotions.

At times, I pushed when I should have embraced
Poked where massaging was required.
But you In-CLINED to my too often "patsy" attitude,
'Cause after all I am just a man.

I love you
My beloved Lover.
Sign of LOVE itself
and her ununderstandable ways.
My Shakti-Kali Ma.
Flow into my being once more,
Lightening and destroying everything you encounter.
Melt me in the furnance of your body,
Liquefy whatever dross remains.

There is nothing left for you to steal,
For I give it to you freely.

H.D.

The Birth of Christ nears. I won't even bother with some self-justifying tirade about how the true spirit of the holiday has been warped--leave that for the cranks at the pulpit this week.

Went to the bookstore and read some Da for like 3 hours. Left the store, the sun was shinning right in my eye as I walked down the street in the cold, crisp afternoon air. Felt like I was floating. I don't even remember how I drove the car home.

Watched The Elegant Universe last night on PBS. Kinda weird from to take some perspective calculations on this whole thing. So we basically exist on a three-dimensional membrane, that is a "slice" on a much larger, loaf of higher-dimensionality. Our brother slices may have in the past (or in the future) collided with this brane causing The Big Bang. The universe consists of tiny looped or unlooped strings vibrating at different pitches which produce the entire array of atomic and subatomic particles (and sparticles--supersymmetric partner particles), along with the hidden 7 dimensions.

At the other end, only Love Bliss, only Real God. Only the floating feeling and the pressure at the top of my head. Conditional existence outshinned, all as a modification of this, of the Source Itself. Divine distraction--the relationship. A criticism of unhappiness. Ultimate Freedom can never be attained. Gratitude for the Divine. From the ascended Matrix through the right heart down to the toes.

And somewhere meshed in between all that--Iraq, starvation, integral theory and its proper place, sexual abuse and gay rights issues in the Church, blah blah blah blah blah. In my puny life, trying to weave together a existence quilt for myself from all these tattered threads (lost job, will lose home, girlfriend).

These vehicles are very resitant, even in those who are quite awake to the Isness of all manifestation. It is going to take a long time to start to build the momentum headed the other way. There is no end point now, and I'm sure our bodies and our egos our not pleased by that fact. We have to find a way to do yoga--even physical yoga involves a push and release dyad. The Boddhisattvas must become Politicians as Ken says. Big unbelievable task.

We have no idea what causes transformation. We have no idea what the potentials of the body are. We have very little idea how to integrate high levels of consciousness outside the traditional monastic-guru setting (as needed as those were and continue to be). We have little in the way of examples of really balancing absolute and relative--continuing to develop (or at least maintain) relatively while holding Being. And then that stablization thrown into the more cutting edge world, with conscious evolution, in higher integrated forms of communion ethically sound. Tall order.

A lot of days I want to give up. I have glimpses of the future and I have no idea how to get there, how to help co-enact the thing. Then I go to sleep and there are no dying tortured masses, no questions about my life, no struggles to figure things out.

I too much view life in the Humpty Dumpty Model. The world (Humpty Dumpty) has fallen apart and I have to put it back together again. But all the king's horses and all the king's men...and so on. In those moments of my psychic-frenticism, I simply remember that I can (and do) maintain presence and feel deeply YET BE UNMOVED in another aspect of myself.

All of those concerns and challenges still apply but no longer from a needy place. A joyous inquiry into the love-wound, into this Vow.

9 Letters of Slavery

Distracted thoughts in the lucid field,
Typing blind.
Confused emotions whirling in the heart,
writing unseen or unheard.
A blankness where motivation should be,
My mind wore out by its monkeying,
climbing, in its own way, to higher and higher lowlimbs.
Concentration and temporary experience no matter.
Always returning, like from a drunken respite,
To this clawing contraction,
This cold-sore, painful, willful snake of a self,
Slithering through my blood and biology,
mind and memory.
Death to it. Death to the frozen parts of my being,
Encased in rigor mortis.
Like Frodo at Mt. Doom,
Unwilling to let go of the Ring of Power-self,
Where is the Gollum who will bite off my digit
And spare me the choice I must make?
To dive into the lava-life,
Evsicerating anything,
Any place for God or grace or love or mercy
Or freedom, or attainment or valor or courage
Or S-E-P-A-R-A-T-I-O-N.

Right--Glory (Ortho-doxa)

Re-reading Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses. Too bad that people don't know, Christian or not, the Mystical Tradition of the Orthodox Church. So profound. Gregory talks about how when Moses ascended the moutain that he heard trumpets and that they got louder the higher he climbed. Now who in this day and age would comprehend that he is talking about the SHABD--the Cosmic Hum described by the Indian Yogis and Saints? Who is going to remember these things?

Or that the tabernacle seen by Moses had four partitions: the breath, body, emotion, and mind (as descried by Da). That which is to be always surrendered to God.

From the right hand quadrants, everything is matter--that is energy, that is vibration. All is simply a modification of light-energy. The subtler forms are potential fields of future evolutionary--right now they only hum as the involutionary arc descends moment by moment.

Moses after having the vision of the burning bush and seeing God in light (Subtle Mysticism) ascends the mountain and experiences God in the Darkness. Causal Mysticism. What else could it be? The Void, The Deep Sleep of Brahman.

Reptition of the name of Jesus. Jesus always on my lips, heart, and mind. There are two great laws in the spiritual traditions. Whatever you put your attention on you become. And inversely, whatever you cease to feed energetically dies out from non-use.

Remember Christ always, therefore, and you will become a god. A partaker of the divine nature. Cease to place attention on the ego and false self and it will be crucified from neglect, crying out to its chooser (The Soul): Why have you abandoned me?

One of my main wishes in life would be to finally help unravel the theological knot between Eastern and Western Christianity.

Without mysticism, Christianity is nothing.

The Midnight Sun of Terrorism

Just this. Just this immensity.

An exhalation, a throw, a cosmic cough. Only ecstasy in this immortal frame. Sex, laughter, and God Realization as Da says. True intimacy. Friends, lovers, creativity, the biological world, children. The eroticization and humorization and divinization of all activity.

Without this remembrance...separations, thoughts, emotions, ideologies.

------------------------------
A quick tour of the relative world.

America has clearly announced itself as an empire. A neo-imperialist agenda doomed to failure. The neocons wrote their paper in the 90s on The New American Century. All they needed, they said, was a cataclysmic attack on American soil to initiate their plan for unipolar world dominance. Be wary what you wish for. Strange, harrowing alliances. Evangelicals supporting Israeli expansion in the West Bank to help bring about the Apocalypse. I wonder if the Ultra Orthodox Jews who accept aid from the Christian Right know that they are fodder in the Christian theological agenda. They are supporting them to bring down Christ who will then destroy all of these unbelievers. The American Empire with the Moral Majority, and its theocratic worldview.

On the other hand, it is so much worse than the liberal criticism. They assume--wrongly--that the problem is the US Empire. It's all they talk about. It's so much more frightening. No one is doing it right. The US is just the most powerful and most ambitious do-badder at the moment. If the US were off the scene, who would save democracy from terrorism? The French? The Germans? The UN?

An neo-imperalist war that has legitimized the one group that must be destroyed--the terrorists. The Iraq War has destroyed the possibility of future humanitarian incursions, like in Bosnia or Somalia.

Nuclear secrets up for sale in Pakistan, HEU (Highly Enriched Uranium) unprotected in Russia.

And China. The US must be doing three things: eliminating the terrorist threat through policing actions; eradicating the source of 3rd World Anger by reducing foreign debt, curing disease, providing healthy water and food, etc.; and establishing a worldcentric networked alliance that has the power to dangle economic and material prosperity to China while having the ability to force it recognize human rights and democracy.

All three of which require networked post-post conventional thinking. Instead we have George Bush.

More scary still--Iran. Who would love better than to learn the Chinese secret of economic expansion and ideological governmental control? Think the mullahs and not the Politburo. We can't invade; they can fire on Israel and Europe. Our armies are streched too thinly now. They are going to have nuclear capabilities, if they don't already. We gave no support to the reform movement, and now they are sunk. The populace is sullen and apathetic. And what if Iraq becomes an Shia Theocracy--who better to join up with than Shia neighbor Iran?

Democracy may fail. The Modern Project might not succeed. Only Blair, Clinton, and The King of Jordan seem to understand what is at stake. The Europeans are closed in on themselves and continually more and more lost in their deconstructive, mind-losing agenda.

Nuclear threat. Terrorism. The coming global catastrophes from geoclimatic changes, which the press won't mention scares The Pentagon more than al-Qaeda. A population swell of young unemployed men, particularly in the Middle East. But then, and perhaps more frightening, by the middle of next century, the major population decline. The coming of gerontological age. Families having only one child in China/India--preferring of course boys. AIDS hitting women in Africa harder than men.

In the 19th century it is said, humans mastered chemistry. In the 20th, physics. In the 21st, it will be biology. What kind of ethics do we have to handle such dangerous and potentially life-giving as well as life-ending knowledge? With a flatland philosophy dominating the globe--with the choice between religious fundamentalism, market absolutism, and postmodern deconstructionism/nihilism, the outlook is bleak. Will these rising threats only further entrench us in our perspectives and lead to further and further annihilation? Or will they be the catalyst for integral change?

AND YET...
In the Great Perfection none of this matters. When contemplating Christ, The Holy Immortal One, all of this subsides. Only love, only burning, aching bliss. From the space of the God-Man I feel Pervez Musharraf. Osama bin Landen. Donald Rumsfield. They are terrestial specks. Blips of consciousness on the radar of awareness. There is only the terrorism of my blissful Heart. As Christ extends the limbs of his mystical body, there is only this groaning of all creation. Everything else is just a wave, a rolling forth from this One. Nothing can destroy this One. AMEN.

Nicholas of Cusa and Dzogchen

In things which are or live or understand, nothing can be seen other than Posse (Possibility) Itself, whose manifestations are posse to be, posse to live, and posse to understand.
--Nicholas of Cusa Christian Mystic 15th century

With respect to this pure presence (rigpa), the three aspects of the state of Samantabhadra are truly complete: being devoid of any karmic traces, its Essence which is the Dharmakaya is emptiness; being devoid of thoughts and concepts, its Nature which is the Sambhogakaya is clarity; being devoid of any desires or attachments (its Energy) which is the Nirmanakaya is unobstructed and uninterrupted.
--Namkhai Norbu, Tibetan Master 20th c.

posse to be=Dharmakaya
posse to understand=Sambhogakaya
posse to live=Nirmanakaya
Posse=Ripga

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This presence continues almost unabatedly daily. In the waking state anyway. I don't know why I blank out in the dream state. So it is. I feel its close to happening, but not entirely sure. Remembering a great amount of detail in the dreams--just not quite lucid.

There was so much tension and emotiionality around the dissolving of the community and the loss of my job. So many different actors and events. Perspectives abounding. Mine towards others. Others towards me. Mine about the events, others about the events, each other about each other's perspectives on the events. Mine about others on others. I must write as if the events were different from the perspectives themselves or their union different from the Posse of perspectives as such. A criss-crossing network, overlaid and built on internality, shared (and not so shared in some cases) meaning. Deduction, induction, abduction, reduction, injunction, conjunction.

Those contractions were somehow loosed a few days back. Since that dropping, this presence. This Witness and Spectator. But it is that only--The Witness. Turiya, not turiyatita. I can feel that last cord, constricted at the upper back half of my head. I know subjectively this presence. And I know objectively that all objective, 3rd person perspectives, are nothing other than this presence. Still the latter is too cognitive it feels. But even that perspectives arises (self-liberated) out of this awareness, this background.

I watched Hero the other night with a buddy. The whole movie has this incredibly contemplative current on which the rest of the movie floats. All the fighting, plotting, romancing, arises out of this silent empty ground. J called it a groundwire. White burns the hottest. The flame is so hot it is peaceful and no longer felt as hot. The All and all manifests as sparks of red, orange, green brilliant embers of relationality, neither obstructing nor dirtying this white light heat.

If John Belushi Met Douglas Harding

My head is a pneumatic zit,
Filled with psychic whitehead-like pressure.
Some days "it" pops,
Oozing in solitude.
And then I have no head.

All 3

Dzogchen brings me into this one.
Adi Da makes me recognize this one.
Poonja alerts me to the fact of this one.

Three in one. One in Three.

Father, Son, and Spirit (Godhead)
Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva (Brahman)
Keter, Hochmah, Binah (Ayn Sof)
Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, Nirmanakaya (Svahbvikakaya)
Absolute, Relative, and Middle Path (Tien T'ai, Truth)

Will, Love/Wisdom, Energy

Relatively speaking I must learn to concentrate. To sit and wait for the presence of God. To actualize more strongly my subtle and causal bodies. Causal by Centering Prayer, Subtle by Tonglen-Petitionary Prayer.

By in moments such as these, none of that is of necessity.

The back of my mind is a sheet of consciousness, a wall of awareness looking out onto this world freely. It arises, a body known as CJ arises. Just so...Beatles (i.e. Let it Be).

My eyes blink, my lungs rise and fall, a heart beats. There are no thoughts here. There is nothing--nothin...no-thing. No.......................

Where have I gone? Where is there to go? I am lost in this Love, eviscerated by injustice and hatred. Why the kingdom of God? Why (eternally) now?

I die and rise as Christ in this moment, in this moment and this moment. Like all, like everything. Before the foundation of the world (i.e. this moment) he-we-I is the Lamb Slain. The great involutionary sacrifice. Only to rise as this glorification of The Face. This doxa. This Shekinah. This radiance.

Come with me, Come and see, here that is nowhere, with me who is no one.