Nothing Is True

Aren’t you so tired of all those voices from out there reaching into you like a murder of crows probing the cracks in a sidewalk, the recesses of your mind, with long sharp beaks? Don’t you feel the sickness growing in your gut as you are assaulted daily by the loud caterwauling of authoritarian voices demanding that you do this to be good or that to be smart or such to be healthy or wise or enlightened? Don’t you just want to tear all your clothes off and scream incoherently and run barefoot under the trees and stars?
This author, who states now her presence so that you will be aware of it as it comes into you so that you may either allow it access or deny it willfully, this author admits that she is and does.
Beware of those who wish to sell you THE TRUTH or give you THE TRUTH or explain THE TRUTH. Watch out for fools, for buffoons repeating words they believe to be endowed with wisdom, words from their parents, from their spiritual teachers, from learned books or mystical books, or fantastic television documentaries. Most of all, beware of the voices that came from outside but now live inside of you without your knowledge. The voices of all these loud insistent purveyors of so called TRUTH that now swirl around inside your head, triggered in response to various stimuli.
If you think you can speak the TRUTH, if you feel you should spread the TRUTH, or help others to awaken to the TRUTH, watch out, you’re running blindfolded with a sharp stick in your hand. Because the TRUTH, or that which this author sees as the signified experience indicated by that particular signifier, is indescribable, it doesn’t live here in the words, in this confusing scritch scratch of symbols.
The TRUTH doesn’t want to be spread. It’s the hyena-like cackle of words that wants to be spread. It’s the voice of your ancestors, the confusion of accidental associations between various stimuli and sounds and shapes that is shaping you, informing your decisions, building your version of TRUTH and REALITY.  And it wants to spread, needs to spread, will spread infecting every body it can infect.
There is no antidote against this infection of language except to know it is there, to see it forming your experience and do what you WILL as much as possible within these inherited constraints and work to free yourself of them when and where they interfere with this WILL, if that is something that interests you.
Or if that does not interest you, you can go on pretending that you are the infection, that you are in control, that you know THE ONE AND ONLY TRUTH. Or if you prefer to go willy nilly you might pacifically insist that you know YOUR TRUTH, which is just another way of saying “I won’t mention your nakedness if you won’t mention mine.”
You can take all your TRUTH, personal or universal as you may deem it to be, all your assumptions, all your apish babble and shove it directly up your ass, because this author is uninterested in THE TRUTH. This author is unwilling to offer up her own desperate attempts to make order out of chaos, meaning out of confusion, something out of nothing so that you or she may feel more comfortable. She will not promise you that everything will be okay, that heaven awaits the righteous, that good karma will carry you through, that positive thinking will align you with universal energies, or that Santa will be leaving you a gift this year.
Don’t misread this as an Atheistic or Nihilistic proclamation. This author has brushed up against something beyond the veil of words and acknowledges it. She simply wishes to exercise some restraint and abstains from birthing its shadow in the form of a word that the reader may misunderstand to be something they have heard or read of before.
You have never heard or read of this. The words you have heard and read, all of the words you will ever hear and read, are their own entity, maintaining a life independent of that of the signified. And this is why they can’t be trusted. It is of their nature to be separate. They can never be true. They can only be noisy, more babble to pierce the air and every corner of your mind with its deceptive and authoritarian assumption of power.

Kallisti

I don’t reject anything, is what the poet said, and in that spirit I could not say no one more time. Maybe a thousand times before I did send it away, sweetness, warmth, cinnamon warmth flowing from the wrong fountain. Not because I did not want it, but because I could not accept.
What right does a marionette have to make decisions?
No right at all. No, no, no, no; like the petals of a flower surrounding a heart of yes. Maybe a thousand times before, but this one time I grabbed my own strings and yanked back, “YES!”
Mystic moon white wine sipped from a plastic cup as was done by our fore brothers and sisters, hiding in smoky back rooms, in caves in the deserts, in tents, in fancy compounds, where else? Where else?
What is that substance that flows clear and pure like water from heart to heart? It’s so pure, so pure we don’t have to boil it, just drink it, the substance of life.
I myself am the life. My biological manifestation is composed of more than 80% mystic moon white wine just as yours and yours and yours is. All of ours is, ever since we split apart and crawled from the seas.
What did we want two legs for anyway?
Where else? “YES!”
It’s a little hard to stay in one solid piece as we heat up, expanding, ah, ah, ah. It’s a little hard to reject anything as we ascend up those sinews, those effervescent spider threads that have been jerking our little wooden arms and legs without a pilot. We wanted to be real boys and girls so we invoked the blue fairy who cast her fine dust of sparkling sleep over our eyes so that we wouldn’t notice our wooden dispositions.
Sweet accommodating fairy gives you what you ask for, now, then, always. Call her what you will, she is eternal, star-spun, pun-struck , palpable and pin-stuck.
And now we move up, and up and up, against gravity. And as we do you will want to find a way to come back down. Oh so Newtonian of you. Crowned with the fruit of knowledge upon which is written Kallisti, to the fairest, to the finest, most exalted, unattainable.
To the fairest.
So Newtonian of you to wish to worship here, this way. But I don’t reject anything is what the poet said, won't reject this or that or the other, just this once. I might part the waters and let it pass straight through my wide open heart, but not say, not say, not say no. Be swallowed by the Maestro, but not say no.
We climb the silver mountain using the hair of the fairest as rope. As we wander in this place beyond the beyond, in this realm past hope and fear, we bid you beloved, now appear!
Appear, appear, an apple and a pear, perched perilously up here, up hear and let down your hair, an apple and a pear!
What right does a marionette have to make decisions? No right at all. No, no, no, no; like the petals of a flower surrounding a heart of yes. Maybe a thousand times before, but this one time I grabbed my own strings and yanked back. “YES!”

The Mysterious Engulfs Us

The mysterious engulfs us. There are no answers, or just as true, any answer at all will do. There are no reasons but mind. I can stop myself from doing or speaking occasionally, but my thoughts run through me unbidden, like a horde of unruly children. They make reality in their image. The outside is ruled by that same incessant clamor that dominates and defiles the “would be” sanctuary under the dome of my skull. The shape of my mind calls things to me in secret, without my consent, making of me a sleeping witch, a conjurer of illusions which fool even, and especially, me. The unspoken things die away in the world of endless electronic babble. The things without name or face, lacking these qualities, borrow them from the storehouses of our mind, and when the borrowed guise no longer suits their purpose they vacate the shapes and sounds that once costumed them, and we are left with their empty shells, shells that refer not to their nature, but to our own, as it is from our nature that these shapes were borrowed. The mysterious is forgotten, denied, wrapped in linguistic structures, and when it dares show its face we who have been indoctrinated by THE WORD call that the exception to our rule. But it is the other way around. It is the bugs, the quarks, the exceptions that are in fact the rule. Our brittle fortresses of order will eventually crumble and the hot breathed broken faced real will lumber and slither and dance in, wreaking havoc over our bones and rambling thoughts, thoughts now bodiless, flowing out directionless as they always have, to be absorbed in the icy folds of the real. We are always grasping for answers and peddling them and buying them and clinging to them, but they are only words clung to in desperation. We are hiding from the true answer, the mysterious abyss that looms beyond the constructs of the tongue and the tongue mind wagging furiously as though it could fan off the eternal with its chatter. We have never been free of the mysterious, it was always clinging to us like a skin, but some part of the self recoiled from it and began to spin the great con to hold it at bay. The ones who claim to have answers are liars and artisans of the con. There are no answers. No words that can hold the real absolutely. All that I have experienced has been a play of consciousness. There are no reasons but mind.

The Dreams of Monsters

What could I tell you if I could remember no dreams? I’d have no tongue to wiggity wag because I’d not remember this here fantasy where I dream of dreams forged from words. They say that it is most restful to sleep beneath three feet of ice nestled within two down sleeping bags with a wool cap clapped over your head and a little air hole dug through the snow, just snoozing away in the ice mother’s belly. They say that all the action of sleep happens during the REM cycle, all the Freudian fun that allows you to wake up and say,
“ I dreamed I drank a chocolate shake through a straw.”
But the psychologists and dream analysts know that what you were really dreaming about was fucking your father. You only remember it as drinking a chocolate shake because the brain makes things right for us when we wake up, makes it so that we can feel like a healthy drone and not some deranged maniac. There is however another cycle where the very deepest of sleep occurs and to catch these elusive z’s, they say that the best place is beneath snow or in a Turkish cave or on a whaling ship with no heat and just a thin blanket between you and the North Atlantic chill. So they say. They say that the dreamless sleep is the most restful, and who am I to disagree?
I have seen the light that burns in the darkness, the light from nowhere that burns behind closed eyelids and comes with the hum and buzz of the eternal. If you listen to it deeply you will evaporate completely, so you resist as often as you can, being identified with this dream of mortality, this dream of ATM machines and airplanes and dish washers and pop stars. But if you were to give in, to let go, then what would you be? Nothing you could talk about here, where if you told them that you saw great monsters of light shifting and changing shape in an electric light parade jungle to a music that needs no ears to pander to, well then, they would just say that you had been dreaming about fucking your mother. (And maybe that’s exactly what you would be doing.)
Or if you could tell of the time that you were a giant with purple gray tendrils rising from your crown and your body was interlocked with that mysterious other and you sang songs with the voice of a pipe organ, songs that turned purple and black and neon green and glowed through the infinite darkness, then wouldn’t they just say that it was a dream about replacing your mother so that you could be with your father?
But what, what if that was not the dream. What if that pipe organ song is the reality, the dream weaving machine, the stone dropped into a pond that makes all the little ripples that we think are the real world. What if having a mother and a father is only the dream of a mushroom headed God that comes from many and none and returns to many and none.
How could you remember this truth in the middle of dreaming that you must make it to work on time and your children must be picked up from school on time but a woman in the train station won’t help you with your ticket and you are stuck there for much longer than you would like? Is there any way to describe the translucent limb extending through space time that suddenly got crimped and caused this nightmare to be my life?
Me, a tiny pin drop of light. A partial opening in the eyelid of a titan who gently sleeps, twitching tortured through the rapid eye movement cycle of slumber, invisible limbs quaking, metropolises plunging into the sea, planets melting, civilizations crumbling, and new stars bursting into brightness to warm little clay marbles on a black tablecloth under which a wild black dog sits snarling, insisting you stay on the table spinning and rolling, for the truth of what you are is too monstrous, too mammoth to be explained to a little pin head of dream stuff like you. Your story, your life, your play on the stage of the Goliath mind will come to a close, and you cannot begin to understand what you are or what moves you, you can only be shoved across the board like a chess piece moved by a sparkling effervescent tentacle that wants to forget what it is and rest for a minute in your strange strife.
The grass is always greener on the other side.
The grass is always greener on the other side.
The grass is always greener on the other side…
So monsters dream of being human, and humans dream of fleeing or being monsters. If I were not a dream thing I could not speak these words, for the thing that sleeps has no tongue, no eyes, no ears, and wrestles with an eternity of stillness. I am made to do the things that it cannot do for itself. I am made to do the things it can only dream of.

Impermanence

How many days have passed that I have said nothing at all and let the opportunity slip away? Today I had the vision of snow melting on the branch of a conifer tree, the perfect visualization of impermanence, ice transforming slowly to water as it drips away. I thought of it in conjunction with falling, with forgetting, with taking two steps down one trail then loosing consciousness and taking up another and, with it, two steps in a new direction, over and over, so that I, like all my kindred, do nothing more than stomp in a confused circle.
I see it right now. I am a machine, a clockwork doll rotating around and around like one of those darling little wind up chicks that can manage to hop to the end of the table. The voyager is not like a passenger in a car, not like the cream filling inside of the Twinkie. The voyager at first is an observer. A person watching a movie, watching a little puppet show and becoming absorbed in the plot. Upon developing particular sympathy with a particular character, it soon finds that it has fallen into the play. It drips into the story like snow slipping off a branch, little, by little. The voyager forgets itself, becoming the puppet without noticing that a transference has occurred.
Etanna is nothing at all. She is a flea circus. A trap for an unsuspecting cosmic observer to become entangled in. It could be a good show if the observer remembers themselves and suddenly takes hold of the puppets strings and moves her around in accordance with the story line and in sympathy with the character while also remembering its true nature.
I can see a little withered old woman talking to me, the kind that makes me think of apples and gnarled forests and hand sewn dresses and curly hair. She was talking just now in the back of my mind and I could almost hear her voice although I could make out nothing of what she said, and when I noticed her, she evaporated. She was kindly. But that of course is how I remember her now. She was a dream I almost dreamt, except my pillow was missing and I was in the middle of saying something else.
Everything in me is rattling loose. Good things and bad things are welling up from within me within a matter of minutes. Forget what has gone unsaid for a day. There are things arising every minute to be lost again in the next and I am not quick enough yet to make anything of them.
While laying in bed or standing over the kitchen sink I experience Satori. During “enlightening time”, while I sit poised to type away and share whatever great vision makes me visionary, I go schizophrenic more than sage. I see shadows out of the corner of my eyes moving around. They move more than ever and without startling me in the least. They continue to move for a while after I’ve noticed and turned to look at them. That strange something that I saw out of the corner of my eye is still a strange something for a few moments while I regard it. I see it, but it fits into no category at all. I see this thing which is not anything as far as my brain is concerned and so, after regarding it and drawing a blank, it turns back into the shadow of a plant or even the plant itself. It doesn’t really have to be a shadow. It can be an actual object such as a stone or a shoe or a box or a chair which begins to crawl across the floor or otherwise move around and, when I look at it, it keeps going for a minute or two and doesn’t seem to be anything I know any name for, and then it goes back to being a stone or a shoe or a box or a chair or some thing which has a name and could plausibly be occupying the space that has arrested my attention.
I know. If you’re feeling friendly, you’re thinking. “Brain tumor.” And if you aren’t, you’re just thinking, “Cuckoo”. What if I did have a brain tumor though? Could you really say that it was the cause of the anomaly or couldn’t it equally be that the anomaly was the cause of the tumor? But that’s not what I really hoped to say. I think though, that telling you something was better than telling you nothing. How many days have passed that I have said nothing at all and let the opportunity slip away like melting snow? Lost days ripe with lost worlds diminished to fine vapor.
Today I did not have a vision.
Today the visions had me.

Doubt Your Perceptions

Imagine yourself as a lonely creature, buried in a solid metal vessel full of thick chemical liquid, in the basement of a dark forgotten building. You were born there. You can’t get out of the box. Your body is so degraded that you have no hope of escaping. And so you will probably die there. The darkness of the box is all you know, all you have ever known and all you will probably ever know.
And yet you get information from the outside. It comes through little messages that are sent to you from helpers, creatures that you have never directly met but which you are convinced are there. They send you these little messages through wires that reach directly into you and feed you images of the outdoors, the smell of the rain as it hits the asphalt, the rustling of the leaves as the wind rushes past them, the slight rasp of a violin bow as it hits the strings, the gentle touch of lips against your skin… it’s all being sent to you, it’s all being communicated through little wires by your trusted helpers… trusted helpers that you have never met, that you didn’t choose and that you have no discernible connection with.
Given such a predicament, it is very tempting to simply drift and dream, let your degraded body float in its endless bath, close your eyes and let the movie play. Enjoy the constant flow of messages and let them wash over you. In this dream world, you may have a job that you go to every day, you may have a wife, a husband, a boyfriend, a lover, you may have mountains of money or none at all, you may have people talking about you or you might be ignored by the masses. You may have parents that love you, or say that they do. You may have kids who are very loving or who can’t stand the sight of you. You may have friends that swear undying loyalty or you may have enemies that wait behind doorways ready to stab you in the back. No matter what the images are, you may feel that the best course of action is to let them flow over you, let them come and go, and just enjoy them for what they are: ghostly images sent to you by unknown directors.

Maybe one day something doesn’t match quite right in the images you receive. Something rubs against something in a way that seems wrong. Somebody has made a mistake. Something else has come through… maybe something you were not meant to see. It could be as small as a sentence in a book, as big as the sky painted in the wrong color, as subtle as a moment of time repeating in every detail and revealing its unreality. It doesn’t matter what it is, but you can taste that there is a quality to it, something that feels different.
A strange itch may begin within you, an uncomfortable sensation that something has been present with you all along but you have not been able to look at it directly, an anxious feeling that tells you that you have assumed too much, that you have rested too long and that it is time to act.

A long series of questions may emerge within you, questions that were not there before, each like an ancient comet that you have sighted in the distance before but now rages like a ball of fire in front of your eyes:

What is really outside the box?
How can I trust these unknown helpers?
Should I figure out who they are? What they are?
Is there something else out there?
Something that is not the images I receive?
Have I been lied to?
If so, who is lying to me?
Why are they lying to me?
Is there something Real out there?
What is Real?

You will need three bowls.Fill the first bowl with hot water, the second with very cold water, and the third with water of a medium temperature.(The hot water should be quite hot, but not scalding as you will be submerging your hand in it.)
Put the three bowls in front of you, on a table or other surface, within easy reach.
Place your right hand in the bowl of hot water and your left hand in the bowl of cold water.Count to twelve. Then place both hands in the medium temperature bowl of water.Pay close attention to what each hand seems to be experiencing. Each hand will register a different sensation, even though they are both subject to the same environment.
Consider that you may not always rely on your highly sophisticated data processor (also known as your nervous system) to objectively determine what is Real.

Baby

The baby lies sleeping in bed. Greedily in, each breath is taken. Surrendered peacefully, each breath is expelled. The sound, rhythmic, makes strange music, vibrating off the pillows and colorful afghan.
She is not a baby anymore, but she is not anything else either. She wets the bed and is afraid of the dark, sucks on her lip like some suck their thumbs.
I am a fool first, and her mother second. Eventually I will be nothing. Then I will not regret, as I do now, that I did not hold her in my arms when she strayed from bed, but rather directed her back to it.
Then I will have no memory in which to keep the sound of her munching an apple behind my back. I will never have known its color, because I did not turn to look at her. I only now hear the echo of her tiny teeth tearing into the crisp flesh of fresh fruit. In the moment in which she eats the apple, I am too busy to hear it. Only later my mind plays it back for me.
But when I am nothing first, I will have no future to busy me, nor a past to regret. If by then I have not learned to inhabit now, I will not be.
When the fool dies, and the mother dies, if she has not collected enough silence to fill her shape that it may crystallize within it, she will not be nothing; she will not be at all.
Then will baby be? Or is she only a reflection of her mother, a tiny pool of silence bending light?
To baby mother, to mother baby.
I am a fool first.
Eventually I will be nothing.
If I am silence then baby will be silence, and we will flow one into the other as pure Being.
Now I will hold her as a colorful afghan and she holds me as strange music. In this moment the light of the lamp seems to seep into the walls. The walls hold us both, warming us with the light they bend. Mingled with her music; the sigh of the furnace, the hum of the computer, the erratic click and tap of my fingers on its keys.
Our fragile bodies work frantically without our notice, keeping us a part of this organic orchestra. We are a part of the white noise, momentarily harmonic enough to emerge as something distinct, soon to rejoin the chamber in its symphony of silence.
I hear it now, and you will hear it too.
Greedily in, each breath is taken.
Surrendered peacefully, each breath is expelled.
Lying asleep in bed, bounding limitless across the dream of it, she is not a baby anymore, but she is not anything else either.

Sea Bath

For this experiment you will need to submerge yourself in salty water. One excellent possibility is that you may be able to find a sensory depravation chamber, or a Samadhi float tank somewhere in your area. Try to find one if you can. Otherwise use warm water in the bathtub with some sea salt.
Set aside one hour and prepare the bath. Turn off the lights and soak in this briny elixir of life. Become more relaxed than usually possible.
Allow yourself to return to a state of being long forgotten. Release your tensions, feel your humanity slip away, and be something pure:
a consciousness awakened within an ever changing form.

Things to do in Denver when you're Awake

What do you do with the waking state?
Get down in the details. It is difficult to perform very ordinary tasks in the waking state.
We are not accustomed to doing anything in this state. Our daily activities are usually managed by the personality, the mechanical creation which is so good at performing these tasks you can sleep right through them. This bio machine called human being is so efficient it can manage an entire lifetime for you while you sleep.
When you have made the effort and do wake up, you will find it difficult to remain in said state while performing activities that are usually done asleep. There are millions of things that you can do while functioning automatically as a sleeping machine. It has become habitual. Because it is habitual you will find that even when you approach an activity from the waking state you may find yourself baited back into sleep as you engage in it because you are used to performing that activity mechanically. The habit of doing that thing automatically is stronger.
The way to get over it is to develop a new habit of performing that activity in the awakened state. To form a new habit you will have to make the effort again and again until it gains "momentum"... more "momentum" than the old sleeping habit. In the waking state you may create ever more activities/spaces in which you can be awakened.

The Music Box

In the beginning there was a music box.

The Being could not know from whence it came, or what purpose it might serve without examining it more closely. A detailed inspection revealed that it was a perfect box with tiny spinning dancers and an enchanting melody. Experimentally the Being discovered that it could be manipulated and without knowing what to expect, set its gears a-turning. Once it had been set into motion, its gears could spin for only a finite period. The initiating Being and responsive little box moved into a new existence together... in that moment they created time and mortality together.
The Being was in great danger then. As it observed the box it grew more and more identified with the dancers, became so engrossed in their motion that it believed it was the box. The box of course encouraged such attention. Captivating attention was an inherent characteristic of its design, but it did its job too well. Soon the Being forgot its own nature. The entirety of its attention was wrapped in the box, immersed in pleasant dreams and imaginings, fully engaged in pouring itself into this fascinating other.
The tragedy here lies in this alone- in this state so absorbed and forgetful of itself, the Being would no doubt cease to exist when the gears stopped churning. It would be trapped, encased in a tiny motionless universe within a frozen dancer, dreaming of dancing and some existence half remembered.

Such a woeful tale indeed, for without the Being as itself, the music box too would only collect dust. If only the Being would have adored the music box while retaining some piece of sovereignty. Only then, awake and un-abstracted, it could have passed through the tunnel of experience that is a music box, and explored further possibilities.

Awake Unto Me

For this experiment gather 4 Popsicle sticks.
You will also need a small photo of your own face.

Make a little Popsicle stick person and glue your own face on for a head. You may also draw a head and cut it from paper if you lack a photo.
In a quiet undisturbed space sit with your doll in front of you where you may easily observe it. Place your attention on the doll. Let it fill your senses. Gaze upon the doll as if it were your truest love for approximately three minutes. Feel as if you are open to receiving something back from the doll.
Maintaining this contact, say aloud, "Awake unto me.", three times. Utter the words slowly and clearly as if it may be hard for the doll to hear and understand you. As you speak the words understand them yourself.

Keep the doll in a safe place until bedtime, then place it under or near your pillow while you sleep.

Starlight and Dew Drops are Waiting for Thee

Abandon Desire
You are a finely crafted doll. Very remarkable how your face can communicate so much. Those opposable thumbs are a marvel.
You are the best doll to play with, you and the other dolls of your ilk, the human dolls. You were made to be played. You are the best instrument to play with because you can do so much. You can be used in some very special ways. That’s why you were made.
But as a puppet on the set you will need to be moved by more than one animator. If one aspect of self becomes over identified with the (insert your name here) character and won’t yield control, the show cannot go on.
The show cannot go on.
Let my poor doll rest, haven’t you played her enough?
The show must go on. It must or there is no chance of breaking the endless cycle of rebirth.
Yes I know you are tired little doll, but don’t stop now, or you will end as a doll and that is all. And I love you so, I want to be you, and you will be me, but for this to come to pass we must play on, play on.
Beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart.
A play is more than one puppet. The play comes through multiple puppets, each puppet dances her part. The momentum is maintained through the coordination of motion between multiple characters, none more or less important for the execution of a certain play. And the show must go on and on until it is real.
Then will all clouds of sorrow depart.
Awake unto me.
Awake unto me.
Awake unto me.