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.