The Gravity of Consciousness

***

So the other night this image came into my head. I wrote the other day about a couple of dreams that I had, and how I had the unsettling experience of meeting another consciousness through the medium of dream time. Well, if you’ve been reading here long you know that I have been engaged in dream yoga practice, working towards gaining lucidity in my dream life, and at the same time I’ve been engaged pretty deeply in meditation and some other Buddhist practices which involve a lot of prayer and visualization work- so there’s been a lot of work going on in my mind over the past two or three years- a constant, daily practice of attention and mindfulness, an analysis of the state of mind, the content of mind, the nature of reality, etc. as well as a kind of conscious effort to see waking time as a dream and dream time as a conscious dream- to break down the barriers between various states of consciousness and to maintain the highest level of conscious awareness I’m capable of creating at all times- trying to maintain present moment awareness, a wide-awake and vivid, curious state of mind about what is happening and what’s going on in my awareness from moment to moment. It’s been very interesting, thrilling a lot of the time, and disconcerting as well.

Anyway, that’s the background for this strange state of mind that I’ve been in for several days now, maybe a week. Maybe it has to do with or is facilitated by my wife’s departure in some way- the time that I’d usually spend processing things with her, kind of running my own awareness through her filter and vice-versa, is now spent in a kind of reflexive, recursive self-analysis. The sensation is kind of like having a probing, curious, self-referential light of awareness that never shuts off. I’m always awake, in a way, and always checking my state of consciousness and the quality of mind and the contents of mind and the “outer” world- which is really the same thing as mind, or at least it’s seeming more and more to be the case to me.

Okay, so this is the state of mind and the other night I was in this post-dream state, on the edge of awakened awareness and yet still in the territory of the sub-conscious and unconscious mind in some way, and I had this image in my mind/dreamscape/imagination/visual field, of Indra’s net:

And how my own mind, not brain, not the physical entity, but my mind, the energetic aspect, the subtle body aspect, my nub of consciousness, was like one of the nodes of the net and every other consciousness was another node and we were all tangibly interconnected in a web that makes up the subtle fabric of reality in some way, not some physical way but also not some purely spiritual way, but in some way that is just out of reach of our normal way of seeing.

And this is a familiar image to me, a familiar experience, something that is part of my own internal spiritual model of how things are. But then, layered over this image of Indra’s net and my own individual, pulsing node, was that image above of how objects with mass distort the fabric of space time and cause what we experience as gravity, and I had this sudden insight or really just this vivid image as if I were watching it on the most limitless IMAX surround-sound movie screen- my own individual node of mind, of a kind of condensed conscious awareness, was distorting the fabric of Indra’s net, this kind of spiritual space time continuum, in the same way that a physical body such as the planet Earth or the Sun distorts the physical fabric of space time- and just as those distortions on the physical plane cause other bodies with mass to be attracted into the orbits of the sun and planets, or cause cannonballs to fall to earth rather than just floating around- in the spiritual/pure consciousness non-physical realm, then massed consciousness such as exists in the mind, which is clustered in the brain/body nexus, also attracts other bodies of condensed consciousness- that is, that mind itself distorts the spiritual space-time fabric in a way that attracts phenomenon to it- that it attracts the display of forms that continually manifests in conjunction with mind to create our experience of reality- phenomenon, actions, events, other people, our entire tapestry of experience.

For me, it was not just a concept or neat idea- it had a tangible aspect to it, it had the feel of something true, and since then I’ve got this feeling no matter what I’m doing that superimposed on my physical body and environment there’s my ethereal “mind” sort of sitting in this indentation of Indra’s net, tugging into this distorted kind of sink hole that is dragging the rest of the world, both the seen and unseen, into the black hole of my own consciousness.

So, that’s what it’s like in my head this week.

***

Just as I was born to love the woman on the verge, I was born to wrestle with mind and the deep questions on the nature of reality and what it is to be.

I could not be happier to have these two great unsolvable riddles to spend myself on.

***

May all beings be free from suffering and the cause of suffering.

Namaste.

***

two dreams and meeting someone new

*

I’m standing in front of this grocery store in some strip mall and there are some flimsy metal tables and too small chairs scattered around. It is hot and the sun is baking the black top and the air smells like paper and ammonia and in the parking lot the cars bask in the sun, immobile, suffering in silence.

I’m so thirsty I can’t think straight and I leave whoever I’m with and walk over to this kind of seven-eleven and I go in there, there’s an immediate blast of coldness and vivid color and I go to the soda machine as I ask the guy behind the counter “do you have plain soda water? Can I get that? A cup of ice and some soda water?”

Dude comes over to me in his red and green shift. He’s got greasy hair and a suspicious-looking mustache and he’s holding up two glorious Big Gulps full of crushed ice.

“You can have these, dude.” He starts to hand them to me, then pulls them back. “But there’s a catch.”

“What?”

“You have to take these twins with you.” And he motions over with his head towards these two kids I hadn’t noticed before. They were about eleven, red-headed and freckle-faced, dirty and barefoot. They looked like every kid does in the middle of summer.

“They’re pure evil.” The man says, and hands the cups to me. “They’re yours now.”

I look over at the twins and one of them looks up at me. His eyes are vivid green, the color of antifreeze, and they’re electrified. A terrible fear rises in me, a tornado of fear running right through the middle of my hollow body.

“Come on then,” I say, clutching the cups of ice. “Let’s go.”

And they follow me outside.

***

I’m standing on the beach with my back to the sea. It is night and the beach is crowded with my family members, everyone I know. They’re trying to talk to me, they’re moving forward and I’m backing away. I step into the surf, holding my hands up as if to stop them. I can’t hear what they are saying and I don’t understand why I’m backing away from them. I don’t know what’s going on at all.

I leap up into the air and I’m flying, but kind of doing acrobatics, too. I have no control, really, looping and swirling around. I come to a stop a few inches above the surface of the water and hover there for a long while as everyone on the beach stands there kind of motionless and gape-mouthed.

The night is pitch black but alive with stars and everything pulses. I can see undulating stars on the water, dancing in silence. I’m holding my breath.

I look up at the stars and shoot straight up into the sky, accelerating. In seconds I’m at the edge of the atmosphere and seconds later I’ve left the solar system behind and as I go faster and faster and farther and farther the stars coalesce into a single bright pulsing light and I shoot into that and everything gets white and very loud.

***

The thing about dreams is that they feel really important to us and they of course bore the living shit out of everyone else. There’s nothing in these two dreams to hold any interest to anyone. What was interesting to me was that each dream triggered the physical sensation of being touched by some outside intelligence- through the medium of dreamtime. I had the distinct, not impression, but direct experience, of another intelligence speaking to me through the dreams- in the green eyes of the boy, and in the white light of the flying dream- once the intelligence connected to me, to my mind, there was a transmission of experience from it to me. From mind to mind.

Like how when you meet someone for the first time, you don’t really wonder if you’ve actually met them, right? You did. It’s simple.

That’s what this felt like to me. I’m not saying it happened.

I mean, not in any real way.

I think it did, though.

***

Namaste.

***

Entangled

I was nineteen years old. I had just been asked to leave the college I was attending and was in Korea, visiting my mother and step-father, burning some time, teaching English to harder working students than myself and getting ready to go into the Coast Guard. I didn’t know shit about anything and I was pretty lost and confused and trying hard to act like everything was okay, like I had things figured out.

I remember standing in the living room of my mom’s apartment and I don’t remember the doorbell ringing or my mom opening the door or anything- all remember is when this woman walked into the apartment and the whole world came to a stop.

She wore blue jeans and a jean jacket and there was a red bandana wrapped around her dark hair. She was slender, slight, of medium height and her skin was the color of something warm and burnished. Not a color I could identify so much as a sensation- like late summer, just before dusk. And then I saw her eyes. Never in the history of the world have there been eyes like those. I know, I know, but that was the impact that they had on me. Dark. Wide. Brilliant. Deep, a depth that just kept going on down the farther I fell into them.

I’m sure that we said hello to each other briefly before she left with my mom or the two of them hung out there and I left, I don’t remember anything else that happened. But for me it was like walking into a familiar room and finding an enormous golden elephant glowing there, vast, ethereal, yet undeniably tangible, present.

I probably saw her a handful of times over the next few months. I got to go to her house where she lived with her husband (whom I loathed and despised for his great good luck and the ease with which he seemed to exist around her) and her two children. As far away from me as she was just in her own astounding beauty and power and grace and intelligence, any hope of winning her receded into the impossible mist of distance seeing her in her own home, with a husband and kids- shit, I was a kid. It was painful to witness what it looked like to be a grown up and to see clearly how far from that place I still was.

Ah, but I pined for her anyway. All the more, really, because she was impossible. And yet, and yet. I could talk to her. I could run into her at the market and give her a hug, breathe in the smell of her and hold her in my arms, even if it was just for a second.

And then I was off. Back to the states for boot camp and then two years on a cutter in Alaska. There was a girl there I wanted to stay with but she moved to New York, so when I got out of my six month tech school for Aviation Electronics, I picked the Coast Guard Air Station in Brooklyn to be my new home. Of course, before I could even get there the girl found herself someone interesting in the city and that was that.

So I found myself in the big city all alone.

One day I was talking to my mom on the phone, maybe singing the blues a little bit about my predicament, when she says to me, “Hey, remember my friend from Korea? She’s in the city, too, right now. She and her husband moved back there and I think they’re going through a divorce. You should call her up. You guys could have coffee and go to a museum or something. At least she’s a familiar face, and you won’t feel so alone.”

A couple of weeks later, we got together for dinner at a little Italian joint. We had a nice time. We walked around the city, had a couple of drinks after. I walked her to her door.

I went in.

And I never left.

***

It’s the most romantical thing that ever happened to me.

***

Now it’s twenty-seven years later and I still got it superbad for her. We have lived a whole bunch of lifetimes together in those years. Immolated in the fire of first love, wrecked on the rocks of despair and confusion, wrung out by poverty and hard work, subsumed by parenthood, adrift in the doldrums of daily routine, fights, making up, clinging, running away, we’ve had it all. We made a baby and she grew up and made babies of her own. We watched her burn down the world and emerge from the ashes like a phoenix. Over and over again we picked up our battered hearts, put them back into our torn-open chests, and beat on them till they started up again.

So here it is 2015 and she’s in Mexico with her Dolphin and a rag-tag bunch of full-time RV’ers, having a big adventure. And in a minute I’m off to India for my own adventure.

Somehow we have managed this great good thing. We have loved each other with this kind of whole-body fierceness, but without stunting each other, without demanding that the other comply with how we might want them to be. Not that we haven’t gone at each other hammer and tongs, because we have. And still do. (Mostly she has to go hammer and tongs at me. I have proven to be a slow and intransigent learner. But I keep trying.) But mostly we have treated each other with tenderness and kindness in the face of a world which can be cruel and indifferent to our needs.

I love her. I hope to breathe my last breath in her company. I see us growing older and it only gives me joy. I never feared getting old, I don’t know why. I look ahead at the long decline and I’m convinced that our happiest years are coming to meet us at last.

*

I don’t know what I’m up to here except that I wanted it on record somehow that I love this woman and that loving her has been and continues to be the practice of my life and the way I learn the language of my heart.

***

Namaste.

***

Listening to Nagarjuna’s Letter To A Friend

So on Sunday one of our teachers, Khenpo Tsering, continued his teaching on Nagarjuna’s Letter to a Friend. I’m not going to really go into the teaching he gave or anything, but I wanted to write a little bit about my own reaction to his teachings, to give a feel for what it is like for me to listen to him teach, if I can capture that at all.

Nagarjuna is a heavy-hitter in the Mahayana Buddhist world and Letter To A Friend is a classic, with many, many commentaries written for it. The short version is that the text was written by Nagarjuna for a king who wanted to be able to implement the teachings into his life but, because of his kingly duties, could not dedicate himself to monastic life. So there is a lot of interest in this text among lay practitioners who hope to gain some guidance about the same thing; namely, fitting meaningful, dedicated practice into a busy life full of worldly responsibilities.

One of the things about getting teachings from texts such as this one is that it takes a lot longer than you might think at first. At least in the teachings I’ve been exposed to, which isn’t a lot, there’s a very slow, deliberate, and in-depth examination of each word, phrase, sentence, and stanza. There’s discussion of each word’s meaning, connotation, and relationship with surrounding words- first in English, then usually in Tibetan, then Sanskrit, then back to English. With Khenpo, there’s also talk of other translations, related texts, possible other word choices in English, etc. There’s a discussion of the direct meaning, then the deeper meaning. The relative and absolute truths being discussed.

We typically cover one four line stanza in each hour-long session.

Some people, I know, find Khenpo to be very difficult to follow. I do, myself, to be honest. But I find the reward worth the difficulty. Because English isn’t his first language, he sometimes has to pause, think, back-track- that’s one aspect of the difficulty in listening to him. But also, there’s the very clear sense that each word in the text is like the tip of an iceberg that goes down for miles and miles, getting wider and more vast the deeper he follows it. He can frequently spend a lot of time just trying to touch very lightly on the major points of one term and yet still spend ten minutes or more going “down” as it were before he goes “forward” again- and this can be difficult to follow, too, it requires a single-pointed concentration to stay with him. What can look like confusion and distraction to some is really, at least, it seems to me, just a really brilliant mind with huge knowledge trying to give his listeners some sense of what is really being said in the text. Without his guidance, I’d really have no clue. It isn’t really available to us in the words alone. You could read the root text over and over and have no idea about what’s really in there.

So, all of this just to set up the conditions in my own mind when I’m listening to him. We begin with a half hour of meditation, so my mind is clear and focused and kind of prepared for the teachings. And he begins and I hang on, I know the stanza we’re covering in the root text and I have my own idea of what that means for the ground we’ll be covering- but very quickly I find myself in this state of rapt attention, trying to stay with Khenpo and fit what he’s saying in with what I think I know, into my existing model- of Buddhism, of meditation, of the nature of reality, of the workings of karma, of the nature of wisdom, confusion, spiritual progress, compassion- what’s happening is that Khenpo is holding a gigantic nesting Russian doll and he just keeps pulling another one out of the one he’s holding and it goes on forever and it seems to encompass all 84,000 of the Buddha’s teachings in one word.

And yesterday while he was teaching and I was listening to the words he was saying and watching him and at the same time watching what was happening to my own mental model of the whole path, I had these two feelings- one, that it was really as if Khenpo was physically manipulating my mind, prying it open, kind of purifying it and helping to remove errors of ignorance and mistakes of confusion- and then there was a corresponding sense of my own tiny light of awareness trying to perceive, directly, the nature of the reality he was describing. That’s not quite correct but it approximates. Maybe better to describe it as finding myself in a reality that was beginning to reveal itself to me, was beginning to coalesce as something, not new, but new to me- simple, natural mind.

Then it slipped away.

This path. It contains so many wonders, so much that can seem difficult or contradictory, arcane, esoteric- but it’s also utterly simple and direct- I guess that it, like everything else, contains everything. It’s challenging to try to apprehend everything at the same time.

Anyway, I love to hear him teach. I feel so lucky to be able to sit in front of him and receive the teachings directly. And he’s just one of our teachers- they are each of them quite remarkable. I find great value in all aspects of this path- it reminds me of what he said yesterday about wealth- that it has nothing, nothing at all, to do with money. “Wealth is an emotion,” he said. “When you say that you want to be wealthy, you’re after the emotional aspect of feeling wealthy, feeling that you are provided for, that you lack nothing, and that you’re able to meet the demands of life.”

This path has made me rich. I am a wealthy man.

***

May you be happy, may you be at peace, may you and everyone you love be free from suffering.

***

Namaste.

***

I’m gonna take it with me when I go

***

This is how it feels in my movie.

***

Namaste

the melancholy of echolalia

*

So.

This silence.

Yes.

***

That woman I love is in Mexico, on her grand adventure. I am proud of her. It makes me love her more, if such a thing were possible. Look at her go.

It make the soles of my own feet itch.

Wanna go somewheres.

And like her, I want it wild and silent and I want it to shake me, to put a voltage in my bones and an ocean in my heart and a stone in my mouth and windows thrown open in my soul.

***

Through my own affinity for error, I am embarked upon an interior journey, fraught with imaginary peril and real horror. Nor will I strike for shore or drop an anchor nor reef the sail.

Nor man the helm.

I seem compelled to grip the rail and feel the deck buck and slip beneath me, listen to the wind in the rigging and the whisper of the known world sliding against itself, as the craft does what it will of its own accord.

Bearing witness to my own soul is what it is, I suppose, without the metaphor. Just looking at my mind, watching what it does when I let it follow its own inclination. It seems to be intent on making me suffer. Time and again it makes the same bad decisions. I used to think it was surprised when it got the same result, but I’m beginning to realize that it likes the bad outcome.

I think there’s value in this dark approach. When I was practicing last year it was all about seeking the light, burning for it, yearning for it. I wanted to shed the darkness and be blissed out and joyful and I was. I really was for a while. And it’s not that I wanted to turn away from the light. Not intentionally.

But I did. I sought out the darkness again.

I’ve struggled with depression my whole life and I have what feels like an intimate knowledge of the darkness that can descend like weather on the soul. This is something different, though. I can’t call it depression. It seems more like going back to visit someplace you grew up in after you’ve been away a long time. You know the landscape, but things have shifted. You’ve changed, and it makes the place look and feel different. That’s how it is for me right now. I’m back in the darkness, but the darkness has lost its hold on me. I can be right in it, but I can’t take it real serious anymore.

But there’s something to be learned for me, I think. And that’s what I’m doing, what I’m trying to do. I don’t want to change anything any more. I don’t want to get enlightened. I don’t want to be a Bodhisattva. I’m going to do that- I’m still committed to that goal- but I am coming to the realization that I can’t simply will myself to that state. I can’t pretend that the darkness in me, the confusion and error and fearfulness, can be ignored or repressed or cleaned up- at least, not without more work on my part. So I’m sitting here in the dark. Just watching. Listening. Opening my heart to it, opening my eyes to it, and trying not to make any judgments about it at all. I want to see it. I want to let it speak to me if it has a mind to.

Maybe then I can let go of it. Or dig it into my own topsoil to act as fertilizer. Or uproot it. Transform it into wisdom.

Or see that it already is wisdom.

Watching.

***

If all goes as planned, I will be in Kathmandu in a little more than two weeks. Through the generosity of a benevolent sponsor, I will be going on pilgrimage with one of my teachers and a group of about twenty other practitioners to Nepal and India.

We’re going to hit all the Buddhist holy spots. Lumbini, Sravasti, Kushinagar, Rajgir, Bodhgaya, Varanasi.

Whirlwind tour, two weeks. Prayer, teachings, meditation, contemplation. Rubbing up against the world in a way I’ve never experienced. I’m frightened a little bit, astounded a bit, but thrilled, too.

When I doubt the astounding power and reality of this path, which I sometimes do, all I have to do is to look at what this path has wrought in my life since I committed to it with all my heart. I am going to go stand on the earth where the Buddha attained enlightenment, where he first taught the Dharma, where he died his human death. I will be in the company of my teacher, who holds a living connection to the teachings. And I have the support of a community of fellow seekers surrounding me and helping me. I have the teachings in my heart, I look out upon the world with eyes made clear by the teachings, I hear them whispered in my ears throughout the day and night.

I am living like a tiny little baby mystic. Hard and crusty on the outside, but bathed in light on the inside.

What’s wrong with me is but small, what’s right with me is vast, but neither of these are mine.

***

I am glad to bear these wounds of my deep confusion and to hold the warped and twisted knots in the grain of my wooden heart and to feel the living breath of God in my lungs as I turn my face, now to the glory of the light, now to the vastness of the dark, and to see that they are not two, nor am I, nor are we any of us.

***

Namaste.

***