Zen and Birth

A caterpillar knows nothing of butterflies, yet in spite of lack of aspiration its transformation is assured. It is much the same with those for whom enlightenment is destined.

Zen does not have the market cornered on enlightenment. Zen is a wonderful technology for modern candidates, but there exist many other valid, well appointed, technologies of being. The central point is that animal intelligence is the soil from which a further leap in the evolution of being springs forth. Humanity is yet in the process of speciation, and those individuals genetically predisposed to Awakening will find it imposed upon them just as the butterfly to the caterpillar and the frog to the tadpole.

Zen is midwife. Birth is inevitable.

The Efficacy of Desire

If the energy of desire were a mist we would see it swirling around all creatures.The more psychic energy involved the more dense the display. Whether one wants a pony and a bicycle or something considerably more dense, the energy of desire sends its wavelength into the fabric of existence creating a sympathetic counter wave tracking back to its source.

Prayer would be seen as focus of such energy, but the normal situation is one where whims and animal needs of the dragon become the arbiter of desire.  Like water under the influence of gravity, the energy of attraction flows to mindless rivulets and ravines leading to the "normal" lives we see all around us.

With the awakening of Awareness that accompanies meditation we are able to recognize and husband the energy of desire in such a way that we no longer permit desire to flow in unnecessary and trivial ways. Instead of indulging a thousand "normal" attractions, we can bring desire to a focus that will affect the change we seek, as a broad mist might coalesce and gather its self into a forceful stream.

This can not happen as long as Transcendental Awareness is wholly identified with the dragon. The world in which we find ourselves is the one mankind has mindlessly desired into being. Meditation and the insueing enlightenment change everything.

Facts, Implications, and Conjecture: the meaning of life

What holds molecules together is shared electrons in the outer electron shield of individual atoms. The one thing that all life on Earth has in common is a complex double helix molecule: the DNA. Of course we have the RNA and the mitochondria and other cell organelles, but what I am looking for is the mechanical source of awareness (why should "life" emerge from matter) and I think it resides in field phenomenon generated by the behavior of electrons holding the DNA molecule together. We can imagine the complex patterns described by these electrons as they weave amongst the atoms that make up the molecule, and we can imagine field resonances established by these behaviors. It does not require a great leap of imagination to ask if awareness might be an awakening of space defined in such a field. Space wakes up.


Flatworms are the most primitive brain possessing creatures. They have eyes, and they have a central nervous system, and they hunt. Some years ago scientist trained these ganglia possessing flatworms to avoid an electrical shock. They then chopped up these trained planaria  and fed them to untrained worms. The untrained planaria exhibited the trained behavior. Slime molds are single cell organisms that travel to feed. In a recent experiment slime molds were similarly trained and chopped and fed back to slime molds. The fed slime molds exhibited the trained behavior.

The fact that these simple creatures are capable of learning is a clear demonstration of awareness. The fact that the training can be transferred by a simple feeding of tissue, indicates that the awarenesses that represent the training exist at some molecular level. It would seem that awareness is a field phenomenon peculiar to certain molecular configurations. This would imply awareness (not consciousness, but awareness) on the part of plants.


So from the simple ganglia of the planaria to the brain of the walking talking human being may take hundreds of millions of years of research and development, but the Universe has an eternity to play with.......what's a hundred million years more or less. What has changed in this evolution is the facility of Awareness to feed and reproduce by virtue of the consciousness made inevitable by increasingly sophisticated nervous systems, and by the corresponding refinement of a biological vehicle.

This implies that any consciousness delving to the core of its existence would find an awareness that was infinitely pure and receptive: a "Transcendental Awareness". And that this Transcendental Awareness exists beyond the ream of the physical restraints responsible for its existence, and that perhaps with sufficient integration could survive the dissolution of vehicle.

What is known as Buddha Nature is Transcendental Awareness, and awakening to its self, it will find the same view anywhere in the universe.

Outside of the existence of life, the universe is a giant pool table with things bouncing and combining in mathematically definable courses. The only new thing in the universe is the experience of Awareness, and I suspect that the experiences of Awareness throughout the universe is the Universe's way of accruing mass: of feeding.