Most celebrate joy and wealth
though for pain and death,
will wade into the Lethe.
The depth and breadth of experience
is breath by breath,
not to hope against the inevitability
of decay and heat death.
Tag: awareness.
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ger.
Condors and cinereous vultures circled overhead, surely an auspicious omen he thought to himself. The walk had taken two, trying days, though this valley was where his people had found wisdom since time immemorial—an axis mundi of the world, centre of all. As he stood on a ridge overlooking the glacier-scarred topography, he spied a good campsite, spotlighted by a sunbeam.
After another two hours of walking, he reached where the sun’s wise rays touched down and began to unload the camel that had been just half-a-step behind since he left. As it began to sink beyond the mountains framing the valley, the sun recalled its light and warmth. Just in time, the ger was up. The circular tent was constructed from warm felt, with an opening in the centre of the roof to let smoke out. This one was much smaller than those usually seen in the area—this was a shamanic ger, utilised for isolation, deprivation, and vision quests; all the reasons he found himself in this particular spot at this particular time.
He unfurled the flap entrance then sealed it. It would not open again for another week.
In silence and darkness he sat; solely being, not doing. As the days meandered, merged with the one prior, his stomach sang out for sustenance; the only thing having passed his lips being water from the water buffalo skin bladder lying next to him. Boundaries dissolved as his thoughts slowed and the sensations from within the body—and the deep informational base of awareness—became more prominent; though he recognised it was probably always there, the acknowledgement of it was, apparently, not. His mind’s eye constructed (or revealed?) an immense column that stretched from his forehead to the godhead—constructed of symbols, sigils, and signs which he now recognised as nothing but different sides of the same coin. All that was, was information. I within I, 0 > 1. Time, merely emergent from consciousness, revealed its ruse to him. From his belly, he felt a cool sensation spreading to his limbs, before passing out.
He awoke—minutes or months later, he was unsure. Though he was sure that this part of the journey was over, and gathered himself and his thoughts. After a quiet morning of meditation, he began packing up the ger—all was deathly still, apart from the occasional squawk of a vulture or bellow of a camel.
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bodhisattv-her.
She knows.
See the way she ebbs and flows,
through the now // osmose
awareness deathblows.
Circled by crows,
the corpse of tomorrows.
And though she chose
the austerities it bestows,
it’s the path to dispose
of the scarecrows in the meadows
of delusion, which ego does impose.
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breath.
Prayer flags fluttered in the breeze, from wooden roof to rock cairn to mountainous ridge. Stretched taut, they sung; carrying their message on the wind. He stood atop the stone walls of the monastery, surveying the valley below—once a path for a glacier, the valley had been hewn from the monotonous motion of the river of ice.
Despite never having left the confines of the valley’s metamorphic crenellations, he felt he had no need to. With the sharpness of a yanyuedao and the serenity of a reclining moon, he stepped through life one step at a time—his waraji straw sandals anchored in the past, present, and future, all at once. Experience only exists in the now; lamentations of the past and anxieties of the future are mere experiences of the present.
Inhale—past, present, future.
Exhale—past, present, future.
Breath, like the prayer flags, carries its message on the breeze too. Awareness born upon the exhale, sentience sent to the far corners of the horizon.
Careening down from the mountaintops, the frigid air cut into his exposed skin as daggers. His long hair, unkempt and uncouth, was caught by the breath of the mountains too. Everything seemed to breath, to heave in existence, a universal inhale in acknowledgement of awareness.
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inversion.
The mind upended,
by real reality wended.
Experience as intended,
with awareness extended—only presence to contend with.
Ought to be nought thought.
Information creation
via division of attention.
Perspective-plagued pelham,
cerebellum para bellum.
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delusion.
Delusional about the personal,
perception is apocryphal not foundational.
Weaving the liminal and temporal,
into a fallacy of the continual.
Doubt in deduction of the dual,
awareness is a single jewel.
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opinions.
The complaints and constraints of mates,
and bothers of others’ mothers,
are something over no thing.
Fusses and cusses about perceptual parses.
Ideation evolving from information,
we become militia mulling over minutia.
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there.
The bright ruby sunrise made the horizon hard to identify, the red sky smudged with the red earth below. Several of the senior resident monks huddled together just outside the monastery’s entrance—a thick whitewashed gatehouse, framing heavy, ornately carved, impregnable wooden doors—before bowing in unison in gratitude and bidding him farewell. The heavy doors sealed shut behind them. He picked up the woven rattan basket at his feet, then adjusted the tumpline on his head. The contents of the basket were invaluable—manuscripts and scrolls, wisdom and teachings from a past long gone. Despite the early morning hours, the air already sizzled, the baked landscape preparing for another hot day. Enveloped and wrapped solely in a long length of white cotton cloth to ward off the elements, he pulled a hem down over his forehead, shielding his eyes from the scorching sun.
He took a first step, then another. The first of many. The road—more of an unpaved track—stretched is a straight line all the way to the sky, a rarely travelled line bisecting the undisturbed crimson. Almost immediately his waraji straw sandals became covered in sprinklings of ochre earth. Due to the sparse population in the area—a few camel herders and nomadic families—there would be no inns or caravanserai on his way; so the rattan basket also contained parcels of cooked rice and a gourd of water. Whether it was to be enough for the journey remained to be seen, but it would have to be.
Each day blended into the prior, as one breath into another—a concertina of chronology, the elasticity of experience, the illusions of the linear. The resident monks had informed him the journey to the next monastery would take five or six days; so he was in no hurry. Things would unfold as they will. Above he saw a formation of cranes, and smiled—he empathised with their hunger, having probably not eaten for weeks as they complete their annual migratory mission. He also noticed a new found nimbleness to his steps; buoyed by witnessing the resilience of the crane, he found a new reservoir of endurance to plumb.
His stomach growled—primarily in hunger, but also in anger—demanding more than the meagre rice rations he had been providing it once a day. Sitting in the discomfort, his well-attuned awareness acknowledged these grumblings and growlings were only temporary sensations, and would not be fatal; at least during this journey.
The next day—sometime before noon, based on where the Sun was hanging overhead—he saw a shimmering in the distance. The distinctive sparkling of the whitewashed walls of a monastery.
Knowing there were only a handful of humble monks cloistered at the isolated monastery—not the one thousand or so housed at the one he had journeyed from—and knowing they might be preoccupied, he sat. And waited. He meditated and absorbed the here and now. Though, in the now, ‘here’ ceases to have much meaning–there is no ‘there’ for it to contrast with; in the present, ‘there’ can only ever be ‘here’. A crane called far above.
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perception.
She flopped her hand into the water—the outrigger canoe was moving at a quick clip, urged on by the Trade Winds. She had made this passage many times before, and this explained her languid posture, slumped casually near the stern, the canoe barely wider than her hips. The wind pushed relentlessly on the sail; hand-hewn trunks arranged in a crab claw rig suspending a woven sail, as her ancestors had made since time immemorial. The outrigger counterweight, the ama—little more than a coconut tree trunk—raised up and took flight, further increasing the canoe’s velocity. It sliced over the small, smooth waves like a machete through a tuna. While one hand dragged in the water—the crisp Pacific combed by her fingers—the other loosely held a fibrous rope, which adjusted and trimmed the sails, maximising the little boat’s speed across the limitless tranquil turquoise that was spread out before her.
Clouds travelled above, running their own errands, and she used them—along with the ocean currents and bird life around her—to chart her course to her destination, a nearby atoll. At this pace, she would make landfall at dusk; just as many of the seabirds she was currently watching would begin returning to shore before the fall of darkness.
With the whooshing of water and the whistling of wind, she couldn’t help but be immediately present. Time dissolved; just her, a speck in the cerulean expanse. Her hand dissolved in the water; the separation between her and the watery depths seemed increasingly arbitrary. There was movement—a wave occasionally washed over the side, birds divebombed in the distance for lunch, a flying fish flew alongside—but nothing changed. How could it? All that has existed, and all that will exist, is as it is.
The horizon became inverted. Actually, or allegorically? Or perhaps it doesn’t matter? Sea overhead, the sky submerged; whales soared, birds swam. Blue stacked on blue. And yet, nothing had changed; except perhaps perception. To perceive—to attempt to understand—is to experience the illusion of change, the myth of separation and distinction. Ocean oscillating, cosmos churning; movement, and yet changeless. Awareness, the now—outside of thought, circumventing the thinking mind—oblivious to time, the measure of change. All that is, just has it has always been, still just is as it is.
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river.
Helix of awareness,
conduit of consciousness.
From the original,
via fontanelle.
Astral source to mental river,
sentience a fractal mirror.
False belief in two,
deduction askew.
Illusion of separation,
errors in perception.
