Awareness, Memory, Epiphany, Contemplation

Science has created marvelous windows into the workings of the brain, but looking into the brain has yet to show us anything about the nature of awareness. We can see that problems in the tissue of the brain limit the potential of awareness just as flat tires limit the options of one driving a car. The behavior of a car with a flat tire tells us nothing about the driver.

We know that the experience of the moment is brought to awareness through the mediacy of electrical impulse in the brain. In memory it appears that awareness is reconfiguring a familiar pattern of electrical firing, as in revisiting a familiar place. Epiphanies occur when an alignment of familiar patterns reveals unexpected , yet obvious, previously unperceived patterns of existence. Epiphanies are true original thought.

Contemplation is not study, but study enriches contemplation. In contemplation such bits of knowing as we possess are tossed into the maelstrom of the mind to see what the magnetism of pattern recognition will configure. Epiphanies often occur at odd moments, for if the mind is seized upon something it is not available for exploration of the unknown or for the revelation of the unseen. Contemplation is a discipline which encourages the action of epiphany, and epiphany is the factual enlargement of consciousness.

Meditation is the mirror that awareness holds to its self that it might become self aware; and in becoming self aware, know the universe.

The Untrained Animal Within

Something odd happened about 400 BC. Plato, Chuang Tzu, and the Buddha all emerge in the same era. For what ever reason Awareness awakened on planet Earth. This awakening has yet to become a dominant element in the course of human events, but the cosmic egg has been breached from within. Those who know, know what they know. Those who don't know, don't know they don't know. There is no other way for things to be.

The Buddha

We are just what we are
But just what are we

The Buddha is the iconic truth of universal consciousness
This being discovered and then tried to make known to us
The awareness which is our substrate

Do not let the ornaments of history blind you

To the facts of your existence

The Gravity of the Situatiion

One of the perils of meditation is that there is an off chance one may undergo Satori. There is no return from the dropping of the veil, and for a person not intellectually prepared this can be devastating. The brutality, the greed, the stupidity, and the mendacity of the human animal is staggering in it's breadth and depth. It is not a pretty sight. By and large those in positions of authority are placed there by the cumulative naivete and cupidity of the less ambitious, and the pearls of culture are strung on a thread of violence. There is good and there is love, but we use such "good" and "love" as we find in ourselves to perfume the stench of death hanging over the planet.

We need a politic of enlightenment: outside of that its just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Ancient Austerities

We are born animal. The sway of inner imperatives can be traced back to the first replicating molecule: an inner narrative in all cases determines our inclinations, and in most cases determines our behaviour. The austerities indicated by ancient monastic traditions are not about self denial: they are about self discovery.

There is nothing wrong or undignified with our animal inclinations. The issue is that though animal inclinations can be the chrysalis of awakened awareness, animal inclinations are sufficiently hypnotic to totally absorb the energies of the natal spirit. There is great value in observing ones animal nature from a respectful distance. One does not have a choice about the nature of genetic inclination, but one does have a choice about manifestation. If we can sit on the sidelines and observe our inner process it becomes immediately apparent that much of what we give our life to is the impersonal imperative of instinct. Imagine the clay of a figurine awakening. The ultimate truth of our being is clothed in human nature.

The most important austerity is the practice of meditation. It is not for everyone and it is certainly not for the spiritual dilettante, but even the casual practice of time tested austerities will produce valuable insights concerning the what that is the who. Within the chrysalis that is the creature which was born, spirit can mature as the articulator of the soul. The simplest noddings to our creature hood can be infused with light.

Ancient austerities are not an end in themselves: they are the substance of the chrysalis from which the children of the earth emerge as the children of the Universe.

Sociopaths and the End of the World AWKI

Science has determined that plus or minus 3% of the general population are genetic sociopaths. Sociopath is a condition, not a term of disparagement; and just because you are born a sociopath does not make you a bad person. However, it does mean that you are uniquely vulnerable to plying self advantage at the expense of others.

Any hierarchical system is ripe for exploitation by intelligent sociopaths, and the cyclical collapse of civilizations is in large measure due to the cumulative predations of this class of beings. They are charming, ruthless, and intelligent. Their destructive sway needs no conspiracies, for they form a natural confederation of petty evil. An inherited absence of care for anything but themselves gives them a peculiar advantage in politics and commerce, for their intelligence is not inhibited by moral concerns. The fabric of culture has it's moth and mildew; the body politick has it's cancer.

God help us.

Precocious Ancient Gods

The gods of the ancient Greeks, the gods of the Egyptians, the gods of the lost and forgotten cultures of whom we know nothing, were not the random fictions of human imagination. Study indicates that the Cro-Magnons had the same intellectual capacities as Moderns. With their limited knowledge of the way the universe is put together what were they to make of those aspects of reality that were utterly beyond the limits of knowledge. What were they to make of fire, for instance? Of love? Of good? Of evil?

In the religious structures of ancient cultures we find a catalogue of forces, psychic and physical, that are utterly resistant to the simple powers of person hood. What is the creature which is man to make of overpowering emotion, or of the rising sun, of death, of life? These things exist and therefore must have cause: ergo, ipso facto....the gods. In every case the ancient gods are a poetic intellectualization of the real which lies beyond human understanding, and the ancient gods have a remarkable congruence to the prosaic real when considered in this way.

If, as I suspect, awareness is somehow the stuff of which the universe is woven (why should a mere stack of atoms possess conscious awareness?) then the antique religious formulations were not naive, or wrong, or misguided: they were precocious.

Knowledge and Being

Everyone knows a little something about something-or-other. Some people know a great deal about very little. Knowledge is relative and specific: knowledge is "about" something, and occurs in quantities. Knowledge can be measured. Knowledge is something we have, not something we are.

Being is not about something: being is what we are. And being, too, is quantifiable.

Mindfulness and Mood

One of the things that characterizes the legendary spiritual savants is an immunity to mood. They are reported to have retained their equanimity in spite of formidable obstacles to a sense of wellbeing.

Our moods are a complex soup of instinct, self assessment, and habit which result in an emotional cognition that overlays our sense of being. One of the many benefits of meditation is the emergence of mindfulness. It does not happen over-night, but as our meditation soaks into our process of being we find ourselves awake in the moment. This "Mindfulness" or "being awake in the moment" provides an opportunity to notice and to refuse to indulge instinctual prods to mood formation.

Mindfulness then makes possible the cultivation of that rare flower of being: enlightened equanimity.

Self: Process or Entity?

What we nominally regard as "Self " is colloquially considered to be an entity: this is a natural unconsidered animistic misconception.

One of the most significant benefits of meditation is the emergence of a being awakened to the pit-falls of pre-considered existence. Existence exist whether we consider it or not, and though our considerations are always after the fact, we tend to lead with our considerations. Considerations are the product of mind, and in particular the mind's thirst for certainty. The value of consideration is as it serves the path opened by intuition. Perceptions are the undiluted products of being. It is a quite remarkable experience when the awakened being notices that the "Self" is not an entity: self is a process; a process in which the conscious mind will be discovered to be merely the voice of the intellect. When our mind is still, our being is more wholly awake, and our intelligence is unchained because being's attention is not absorbed in self's projections. And when being is not absorbed in self's projections it becomes obvious that self is being and that being is a process.

The being of the universe is a process, and self is an ephemeral jewel in the luminous lotus flower of eternal being.

Our joy and our suffering is that of simple a human creature.

The Tallest Building in the World

Do we imagine that the tallest building in the world will outlive the oldest tree?

Soul, Spirit, and the Corn Meal Grinder

A friend who has a booth in an antique mall often wants me to fix some old broken thing he has found lying around somewhere. I used to do a lot of metal work: everything from art work to truck frame rebuild, and I'll still do some metal work now and then. A few days ago this friend showed up with a cast iron hand-crank grain mill. The thing was probably made in the mid 1800s and it was obvious that it had been left out in the rain for the last 80 years or so. He opened the trunk. I took one look at it and I said "It can't be fixed". The front casting with its adjuster nut was just gone, and the cast iron case and the mill-burrs had so rusted together as to be visually indistinguishable.  It was obvious to me that this abandoned and abused mill was gone beyond repair. He asked me to give it a go anyway, so I said "Well, let's see what we can do".

The rear casing was rusted fast to the crankshaft so I put the rosebud tip on the acetylene torch and slowly heated the rear case red hot. This expanded the size of the shaft fitting and granulated the rust. The shaft and the inner burr tapped out of the casing.

Cast iron is brittle and large pieces heated to high temperature must be heated slowly and evenly or the metal will crack because of expansion differential in the iron. I took the rosebud and slowly heated up the mill case. At high temperature iron separates from heavy caked rust because the rust is even more brittle than the iron. After heating the case to just shy of red-hot I tapped the stationary inner burr with a two-pound hammer and a heavy steel punch and it popped right out.

We chipped out the flake rust and wire-brushed all the parts. Reinventing the missing adjustable front case was much simpler than I had thought it would be, and to my amazement the thing was usable.

Thinking about this project (which I had scorned on my own) it occurred to me that human souls damaged beyond repair can awaken in spirit: that our humanity is not the limit of our being; and however damaged our soul may be, the spirit which is the essence of our being can be brought to the fore and redeem our existence.

Wisdom, Knowledge, Information

Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not enlightenment.

The Timelessness of the Temporal

Culture writ large is a Rorschach blot. We see the face of the new in the timeless splotches of the human psyche. Many years ago when my children were in grammar school they would recount to me some "naughty" joke they had heard, and I realized that some sexual material lives in the fourth grade. A continual parade of young people move through the period of life that represents "the fourth grade". Young people enter this period and they leave it behind, but the joke lives in the fourth grade, and without the fourth grade it would cease to exist. These "jokes" are an expression of the sexual quickening inevitable in the human animal. There is no new way to be.

Positions of power, celebrity, opprobrium, continually reinvent themselves. It is a practical exercise in the principle of reincarnation, and if one were to wish for machine of perpetual motion one need look no further. At the moment of birth we are swallowed by the cultural anaconda, and though we evolve in place in our moment of being the anaconda keeps moving. Eventually it will leave us behind. Which begs the question, does the Ouroboris really ever leave anything behind.

History

History is a new thing. My grandparents were born in the horse-and-buggy days, and their grandparents were born in the age of kings. It hasn't been that long since wars were fought by sticking each other with sharp things, and by banging each other with cudgels. We've come a long way in a very short time when it comes to manipulating the world to our material whim. It is unfortunate when an emotionally and spiritually un-evolved creature is so clever.

The tribal structure that emerged from the prehistoric family bond seamlessly morphed into hierarchical tyranny; and it seems that hierarchical tyranny is the best we can do, because the modern tribalism which is democracy appears to immediately devolve into some primordial soup of spheres of influence worthy of the most sophisticated medieval fiefdom.

For all its occasional glitter, the history of humanity is the tale of the darkness of the human soul devouring its self and the world.

Conscious awareness: awareness that is aware that it is aware: awareness that is the seat of its own identity: awareness that is not in thrall of the creature that engendered it, has an existence like that of a butterfly to a caterpillar. If there is an ultimate history for mankind it will be that enlightenment supplanted our glorious savagery, and like a being awakened from some destructive seizure we put our shattered house in order.

Impulse, Intuition, and Discipline

It is useful to think of the experience of being as a hydraulic process. The fluid in the hydraulics of being is awareness, and the central issue is "is the fluid aware, or is it not". In the more primitive organisms impulse rules the flow of awareness. Intuition requires an associative awareness function. A fly intuits the jeopardy of a coming swat and impulse does the rest. Discipline is that situation where awareness is capable of resisting the flow of impulse and intuition in order to perform some self imposed behavior.

The supreme value of meditation is the potential of meditation to awaken awareness from the darkness of animal fascination. Animal fascinations do not lose their efficacy when the fluid of awareness becomes self aware: on the contrary; the simple pleasures of animal fascinations are the foundation of art and science. Intuition, on the other hand, is remarkably quickened in the awakened awareness. The awareness that is not identified with its path it is more sensitive to the gravitas of its flow, and therefore awake in the moment of intuited perception. Discipline is negative or positive according to its ability to better the life of the disciplined. Neurosis is an example of the mis-application of discipline.

The what that is the who of what we are is simple awareness. All of the problems of the world are at this point directly related to the categories of awareness at flow in humanity. The only thing that can save the world from the unleashed libido of the human race is enlightenment, and meditation is the discipline capable of redirecting the flow of human awareness.

Suicide

This is a note to all those contemplating suicide. Amongst the Eskimos of old those who had become old and in the way would on some storm driven night just walk off into the snow. If you are young and contemplating suicide you have a great gift to give to the world. Obviously your world has become a burden: it seems to you that there is nothing to live for and it makes a certain kind of sense to just put an end to it all. If you have come to that point of futility in self effort then you are the perfect candidate to help make the world a better place. Your very loss of self interest means that you are in a position to devote yourself to helping those who can not help themselves. You have lost what you think you have to lose so why not do what you can for those for whom a little help is a lot. It cost you nothing (except the burden of existence), and the weight of the good you can do significantly out weighs the weight of self destruction.

Your loss of hope can make of you an emissary of hope for others by the very fact that you have nothing to lose and yourself to give.

Give it some thought.

Awareness, Thought, Instinct, Brain

Any successful meditator will discover for themselves that we are not our thoughts. Well then, what is the the who to whom thoughts occur. It appears to me that the awareness which possesses the imprimatur of "I" is a field phenomenon: probably one made inevitable by the behavior of electrons in the outer electron shields of complex molecules. I haven't heard a more convincing or logical theory, so mine will do as well as any I've encountered.

It is known that electrically stimulating specific sites in the brain will excite specific categories of experience. The fact that with practice we can control our thoughts is an indication that awareness navigates the brain and draws electrical attention to the patterns of configuration that will produce the desired thought.

Instinct must project into experience if it is to effect behavior, and instinct is woven into the physical structure of the brain. If we imagine the brain as a vast interconnected waterway with flow patterns and tides, we will detect preexisting canals and rivers that direct the flow of electrical activity. This is instinct.

Awareness is all, and everything else is fluff. The good that brings happiness is like a chess game between awareness and instinct. A game in which the supreme outcome is win-win.

There are many meditation forms with variously described efficacy. I suggest "The Contemplation of the Void". The contemplation of the void is the contemplation of awareness, and can result in what one might call "The Awakening of the Intelligence". When the field phenomenon known as "awareness" becomes self aware, a little bit of the universe has met its maker.

Emotion

Wasps sting because they are afraid or because they are angry. It goes unremarked that in the opening scene of the famous "Romeo and Juliet" Romeo is groaning with love for some unnamed female that is clearly not Juliet. Emotions move creatures in ways that overawe the meager powers of reason. Rage and love are prods to action with value vested in survival and propagation. The violence and the "other vulnerabilities" made inevitable in creatures subject to emotion have Darwinian implications that seem to be completely invisible to humanity at large. Every song is a love song (with the exception of ballads that tell the tale of some emotion charged escapade). We don't know it, but we tend to love our emotions. We feel that our emotions are the essential truth of our being.

Our emotions are as mechanical as a wristwatch. Wristwatches have purpose and that's why we have them. We don't worship our wristwatch. Emotion has a survival purpose that humanity must come to recognize as "not-self" in the same way as an artist appreciates the brush as "not-self". Emotion tells us a truth about ourselves and not much else about what is real.

Truth, Beauty, and Good are emotional values, and the difference between good and evil is in that which truth beauty and good are found. If we are the pawn rather than the conservator of our emotions we will never be able to know the difference.

Political Statement: a modest outlay of fact

Rape and pillage have advanced beyond the cold simple brutal physical realities: rape and pillage have become metaphor. However unfashionable old-school rape and pillage may be in the community of advance nations, hygienic rape and pillage retain their fascination for an amoral class of world wealth. The basic principle is the use of the power of social advantage to extract from the vulnerable their modest possessions and their powers of resistance.

Well-educated nice-people in expensive suits provide the guns and the bullets for the less sophisticated to murder each other over antique stereotypes and mineral rights. Well-educated nice-people in expensive suits provide the contractual paraphernalia for the emergence of the new-slavery in its latest incarnation: debt. Debt of individuals, and debt of nations.

The "newness" of old fashioned Darwinian exploitation is not only predictable: it is inevitable. Innovation is evil's way of keeping everything the same. And for the purpose of this tirade let's define "Evil" as the exploitation of others to their disadvantage.

The canonization of "Growth" as the mantra of progress is simply ridiculous. Growth is the mantra of cancer.

Human enlightenment is the inevitable progress of the awareness which is the substrate of all existence. Enlightenment has no agenda. But the agendas spontaneously rising from enlightenment are humanity's only hope for a decent future, and only the innovations emerging from enlightenment can seize the imagination of humanity in such a way as to make rape and pillage a mere shocking artifact of our savage rise from dumb matter.

Teach your children

Sock Puppet World: a Story

Let us imagine a world peopled by sock puppets. Sock puppets of every imaginable configuration. Sock puppets of every shape and size. The hand inside every sock puppet is the same hand: the hand of the universe. Every puppet usually goes about its business as dictated by its form completely oblivious to its true self nature. But then one day . . . .

You can make up the rest of this story your self.

The Silent Stars: Caring

Most of my adult life has been lived in relative solitude in the second-growth forest of the Missouri Ozark. I have seen my share of city life, and done some time in abject wilderness. In a true wilderness in the absence of light pollution on a clear moonless night the sky is an unbelievable blaze of stars and it is so dark that you can not see your hand in front of your face. For all it's blazing glory nothing that requires the use of one's eyes can be done by the light of the stars.

Twice in wilderness I have found myself in difficult situations. I've had run-ins with bears, and been on iffy cliff faces: I don't mean that kind of thing. Twice I have in the course of an otherwise ordinary day slowly come to realize that I had gotten myself in jeopardy and things could go either way, and if I couldn't sort it out by my self no one would know or care. The silence of the stars is absolute.

All creatures care about something if only hunger. The thing that most separates one kind of creature from another is the development of the capacity for caring. The human capacity for caring is limited and infinite. We have natural limits such as our perceptions, and we have artificial limits such as personal and cultural prejudice. Caring is life's most precious gift.

The silence of the stars is majestic, eternal, and mechanical. The only thing that will save humanity from its own darkness is the light of caring.




Little Blond Girl on a Leash


little blond girl
huddled on the curb arms around your legs and head upon your knees

your well-being is now the beach ball of external forces
and no parlor trick of sentence structure will restore you to your senses

the gay bright lights don't care
nor the shills before the rowdy open doors

and the noisy throng of dissipation seeking revelers knows
that you
you insignificant and fallen city bird
are on your own



your single ally's name is
Time

for though unconcerned with your well being
Time alone can tether Hazard

and most certainly
Hazard has you on a leash

Four Noble Truths: a perception of narrative

One of the difficulties with existing forms is their formal existence. Language has evolved, and with the evolution of language a more succinct expression of fact is inevitable. The "Four-Fold Noble Truths" of Buddhist fame tell the story of self and narrative. We are not born a blank slate. We are born with an instinctual narrative upon which we build a personal narrative. All that is promulgated and all that is advised in the "Noble Truths" is awareness of and subsequent freedom from narrative. If we entertain no narrative we are found in a world of simple perception.

Of course most individuals and populations are not going to apply common sense to much of anything at all, but consider petty strife or wars between nations in the absence of narrative.

The Koan Exercise

Many years ago (in human terms) when I was voraciously hunting down every thing that could be found with my limited resources concerning the meaning of life and the core of consciousness, I encountered the koan exercise. I had been a meditator since my early teens (Self Realization Fellowship) and had been initiated into the Nichiren Sect while living in Japan in my early 20's. By my mid 20's I knew enough to know that I knew nothing about the ultimate nature of my own consciousness, and I got serious. I looked into every system I could find without regard to race, color, or creed; in those researches I discovered Zen Buddhism, and in discovering Zen I met the Koan Exercise.

The Koan borrows its name from jurisprudence and refers to established case law. It shows up in the enigmatic questions and answers between master and acolyte found in the historical records of Buddhist monasteries. The most famous koan is doubtlessly "The Sound of One Hand Clapping", but there is a veritable rainbow of koans; all of which are hopelessly opaque from one angle and and open to brilliant white light from another.

What captured my youthful imagination was the anecdotal evidence of human beings awakening to the very thing that had thus far eluded me: to encounter the root of ones consciousness. In these gleanings from the historical records we find a person who has practiced meditation and austerity: an intelligence that has practiced self cultivation, but that has not yet "awakened" (just the right word). The koan emerged as the pin prick to induce such awakening, and again and again we see an earnest human intelligence on one side of the koan and an enlightened being on the other. My favorite will always be Huang Po's slapping of Lin Chi. I took up the koan exercise in my clumsy way. It was maddening. What was it (always there from the Beginning) that they had so suddenly seen? What was the nature of this dramatic transformation that occurred in nanoseconds?

There are many koans and the literature concerning the efficacy of the koan exercise is often quite charming. D T Suzuki's "Essays in Zen Buddhism, second series" is devoted to the study of the koan exercise, and it is a hugely rewarding piece of work if you like that sort of thing. Chang Chung-Yuan's "Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism" is also second to none.

The light came on for me as the result of a phrase casually cast in conversation: casually cast, but cast into a mind harrowed by study of the koan exercise. I was stunned. A primal darkness was seen to be woven of light. I was looking into a mirror that was looking into a mirror that was looking into a mirror, and I then understood the timeless beauty of the koans: each an illuminated open book with nothing to hide: each a different key that opens the self-same door. Or better yet: dispells all doors. I have lived something of an ungoverned life, but stubbing your toe in the dark and stubbing your toe when you can see around are two entirely different events.

Oh, and by the way: what is the sound of one hand clapping?




The Water


the sky warm tarnished silver
ground awash with crisp brown leaves
air so still sounds dilate behind the clatter of a single falling leaf

there is magic


it is not
not

it is not any amount of yes


seething explanation cannot contain it
annihilation cannot circumvent it
it is not circumscribed by time
nor confined in space

it is not known by knowledge
nor is it not known
it is that from which all certainty is contrived


it does not resist naming
yet is that most resistant to being named
it is the wellspring of all names light and dark

pattern within paradigm
paradigm within pattern
endless simple repetitions from which we weave complexity

the pattern children
look for the pattern in all things
for subtleties of connectedness and repetition

pull one thread and a thousand can not but follow



the waves are indeed

the water

Affirmation, Negation, Higher Order of Certainty

Affirmation, negation: the mind wants things nailed down. Certainty is a necessary nutriment for the mind, and so it wants to set a seal upon that which it considers to be real. The problem is that affirmation and negation are concoctions: mental confections to assuage the animal sweet-tooth for certainty.

Meditation is not an end in its self. Meditation is an exercise that builds resources of self discovery. Much of what we identify with as "self" is the animating structure of the mind. We say "I" to the impersonal inclinations of instinct. My certainty is mine in the same way as my hand is mine. Barring cases of deformation all hands are structurally identical, and differ only in detail; and like the fruit-in-the-bottle monkey trap we must relax our grasp on ordinary "certainty" if we are to become truly aware.

The knowing that coincides with being can not be reified. When we entertain affirmation and negation we give up awareness as a hostage to mind. The finest fruit of meditation is the awakening of the pure awareness that is the fullest fact of our being. The intelligence which is the natural faculty of this awareness manifests a degree of facticity that quite satisfies the mind's appetite for certainty,

Sectarian isms of every stripe, dogmas, and madness; are mental accretions: they are diseases of affirmation and negation. The supple flow of awareness in the unfolding moment has made a knot, a tumor; has created an eddy circling its own creation. There is another way of being, and meditation is the key that opens the way.





Ego Pin, Imaginary Tail, Inconceivable Donkey




how is it that your hand

is so like that of the Buddha

The Spirit of Play

In many esoteric texts we find references to the spirit of play amongst celestial forces. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that human existence is the result of the gods at play. This seems to me not the anthropocentric musings of an antique mind, but rather an awareness that play is an essential element of the universe becoming conscious. It is certainly not difficult to see that much grief in the world is the direct result of people taking themselves way too seriously.

We find ourselves at a moment in planetary evolution where humanity has tied itself in a knot. Untying the knot which is our self is the necessary step to untying the Gordian Knot of human opacity. Without the celestial spirit of play this is impossible.

Good will and playfulness . . . bring it on.

Singularity and the Many: Animal Proliferation

Ideas that capture the popular imagination are not written on a blank slate. Every personality is a reservoir of instinct populated by a menagerie of habits, and the potential for differing world views is limited only by the imagination.

Historically speaking our survival has required that we look outward and shape the world to our outer needs. Science and industry are the natural extension of the outward press of natural life. The proliferation of ideas (the many answers to life's urgent questions) is the inevitable result of human cleverness. We live in a fog of cleverness, and humanity may well end up drown in a sea of mindless cleverness.

The central aspects of our existence are non-idealogical, and remarkably uncomplicated. The fact of being that we share with all living creatures has mass compared to which all ideas are fluff, yet by and large we unconsciously live in ideas and never engage the fact of being.

It has been said: "there is no insight....there is only out-sight". The out-sight that is insight happens when, for whatever reason, the the hold of the many on our consciousness slips; and we experience that moment of singularity which is the fact of existence. The ideas that come from this place result in a different kind of animal.