November 8, 2012
With what authority or earned conviction do you listen to your own thinking? Is your internal dialog and certainty concerning your present experience really that compelling and persuasive that you simply believe everything you are telling yourself? Is there any possibility that your unexamined presumptions and reality checks are completely misleading to the point of surreal absurdity?

If it turns out that the sense of I is nothing more than the presence of a dissociative disorder characterized by impersonal free association arising spontaneously out of nothing which appears to create a world in which you appear to be a discrete inhabitant then the story of yourself is nothing more than an instantly dissolving dream.

Since this discontinuous hallucination is not actually happening it is possible to wake up from the irritability of individuation and duration. And this recognition is what may be called liberation. Perhaps you'd like to explore it further?

November 1, 2012
No one would argue with the simply observable fact of being, the presence of sentient experiencing. The fun begins when you contemplate or observe within the whole damn family how many different explanations and stories and superstitions and holy books have been written to tell us what this is, how it began, who's responsible, and what we may expect from it during our so called lives or even after "we" die.

Once you have purchased (as in believe without careful examination) one or several of these superficial and nonsensical secular or religious rites of unmitigated fantasy - then you can begin your allotment of suffering and disappointment and presumption and control and denial and complete lack of intelligence - then repeat.

If you are lucky there is food, energy, indoor plumbing, and unbridled consumption / despair or there is chronic poverty, parasitic infestation from poor water supplies, and the indignity of over population - the basic short list.

You may be compelled to live a life framed by the unimaginably self-righteous and myopic crumbs (called opportunities) offered you by the generations of sheep that have lived before you - the suppressing and repressing thought control leaders of our political, financial, industrial, governmental, educational, familial, and religious universe.

You may, on the other hand, find yourself compelled to find a way of thinking and discovery that goes against the grain of the somnambulistic minions - and this is generally called spiritual seeking. Seeking is as seeking does, so we are going to walk the strange path right back to now - here - this, and play "Convince me, convince me not".

This is where we find some way of waking up to what's present as experiencing without overwhelming the naked streaming consciousness with metaphors, explanations, or the reflexive insistence that memory or mind has anything to do with anything; and simply pull the petals from our own miraculous lotus flower of awareness and inquiry to see what this is.

Serious and avid seekers usually have some thorough and far out ideas about the nature of realization or awakening that they have gleaned from so many adult comic books about accomplished personages from every conceivable religious background which line the shelves of their esteemed spiritual libraries accumulated over many years - and to a tee all of these expectations and carefully constructed notions are inaccurate, incomplete, over simplified and simply wrong.

In order to jump an electron orbit or several outside the primate perimeter you must refrain from filtering the miraculous through what you think you know, including the suspicious authority of your own consciousness and meaning making machine we refer to as thought.

Once we entertain, learn, and reinforce how to do this, it is possible to wake up at will, and tune your unencumbered nature to the mystery at hand rather than wallow within the all too familiar field of presumption and defensiveness called I - Me - Mine. Those silly non-dual (Advaita) snake oil salesperson's that tell you there is nothing you can do are full of shit, they just want to turn your authentic aspiration into a cash annuity for their upkeep.

As long as you keep coming to their workshops for the inoculation and repeated booster shots of spiritual powerlessness, they get the ka-ching and you get suckered into submission. Don't do it! Go to awake, go directly to awake, do not pass go and do not collect $200.

Once the storm clears, we'll schedule some firm meetings.

October 25, 2012
A few members of our informal group asked me recently, "Hey Jeff, we want some useful spiritual secrets, stuff other people don't know, we want something to do or believe in so we can get enlightened as soon as possible?" Really, no one asked me anything of the kind, but I need a lead in - even if it is a blatant lie.

So I picked up the phone, you know the one where you put your thumb by your ear and your pinky by your lips - and then simply make the call. And thankfully I was patched right through to Neale Donald Walsch; God and Oprah were busy.

So I said, "Hey Neale, I am seeking some secrets so me and my pals can make more certain and steady progress toward enlightenment, got any?" And without a moment's hesitation he says, "Yes, but I have three secrets for you, not just one - can you handle it?" And of course I reply, "Well shit yeah, I'd be an idiot to pass on these!"

And Neale proceeds to let me in on some pretty cool out-there God kind of stuff that only he would know since he has actually had conversations with God.

So without any delay because I know you're busy and you have a bunch of important matters to attend to before you perish from this earth without leaving a trace of ever having been here in the first place or having made any useful or lasting or worth reading contribution to humanity including your family or your job or your belongings or your friends or anything or anyone else for that matter simply because you don't matter and after you attend to your family of origin misgivings and insults and recovery issues maybe you come to see that you don't matter and that revelation is a benediction rather than a worrisome tragedy, so you finally give up trying to be something that someone else notices as being worthy or entitled, well then here are the secrets just as I promised without delay because they may change your life and you wouldn't want to put that off for another second let alone another lifetime or even several of those since the ultimate goal of your curious presence is to find out exactly what this is and who you are in the mysterious scheme of not-things so you can live more peacefully and joyfully with a major acts-of-compassion bank account balance that you can draw on in heaven to get more cosmic bling and not have to wait in line for the next iPhone and use the best apps to enhance the life you recently lost because now you're in heaven and you didn't even notice that you're phucking dead, but I digress...........

Note: these came directly from Neale as a most reliable mouthpiece for God, so read 'em and weep.

Secret # 1: There is no space and no between.
Secret # 2 (actually a bonus double secret, God enjoys Jeopardy!): At conception God whispers two indelible instructions into your pre-corporeal morphogenic fractal signature matrix.
      Secret #2a: Have the most fun possible; you never know when I will consume your planet with fire on a whim.
      Secret #2b: I will not let you rest until you find me.

Now I stop Neale right there and say, "Jesus Neale, I mean Neale Neale - those are some incredibly wonderful secrets - these can change everything, I don't know how to thank you!" And he pauses a moment, as any decent spiritual teacher might, and gives me the third secret.

Secret # 3: The first two secrets can be forgotten.

October 18, 2012
With your kind permission, please consider this fugue of introspections as rants to myself. I enjoy being able to accuse, prod, and challenge myself to spar with any gesture of awake-like gibberish that wants to take wing. So these considerations are not aimed at anyone living or deceased, they are purely for the entertainment and benefit of fictional characters. If you are indeed a fictional character, you may find something useful here. Otherwise you may discard what follows, but you already knew that.

Mood 1 -
Imagine for a moment that you don't know what this is. You’re not sure of the content of thought, the process of thinking, or who it is that appears to be conscious of either – including the very fact of your own presence.

Everything you've read or practiced to cultivate illumination are now artifacts of a dream you may have had in the past. So with nothing at all at your disposal, perhaps you can attend to what is present as experiencing, if I may call it that.

In each and every moment (though there are none) this suchness is breathing / dreaming itself into being out of nothing without a single supreme architect or author to take credit for it. Can you actually find or define any boundaries between what your senses are placing before your attention and the seat of attention itself? Are you doing this, are you responsible for sentience?

What is the presenting nature of experiencing? Is it the objects, the sense data, the movement of memory, the sense of "being" you feel yourself to be, the stories and complex associations that define your personality, or what you wish you were and what you wish you weren’t?

As long as you remain transfixed by bracing and aspiration you can only be a late-to-the-scene voyeuristic reporter about a life you aren't even living.

Perhaps you are lingering in the empty space where bracing and aspiration cease to capture your interest? You may find yourself suspended as it were without motive. We are not seeking; we are not refusing or refuting anything. The simple void efficacy of this presence is sufficiency itself; it is the self-evident texture of awake. Screw awakening; consider yourself hell bound for awake!

Mood 2 -
Congesting or occupying your hyper-mysterious and unexplainable meta-intelligence with rituals of any kind places you in psychological time and this occupation is the rooting of fantasy and durational empathy - sometimes referred to as suffering.

Think about it, once you aren’t befuddled by what this isn’t, you can then stop asserting a remedy or seeking a solution for what it’s not. Not knowing permits you to discover how motive-free and intimately infinite the basic space of inconceivability really is.

If this is immutably fluxing and beyond reach of explanation or capture or concept or self, do you have anything left? Do you still insist that you possess knowledge of worldly or extra-worldly information that is worth conveying by way of a book or a radio show with some non-dual interviewer who dispatches spiritual wisdom by having enlightened phuckers tell us all about their experience?

Mood 3-
Your life is a holy trinity of aimless despair, and you do everything in your “power” to pretend it isn't so.

You find yourself in the midst of unmanageable and uncontrollable circumstances defined by some combination of a) getting through the day, b) aspiring to a better condition in the future, and/or c) frantically applying useless remedies for every problem that is present or imagined.

So the equation is to get to as much (“a”) or slugging through as you can while maximizing (“b”) the gravy, hoping the (“c”) remedies will somehow work in your favor. Sooner or later this frustrating and seemingly unbreakable bubble of psycho-narcissistic consumption will finally give way.  But if you aren't in a pioneering mood to cross over the very delusional chasm of your own consciousness, then you remain in complaint and wanting.

Maybe at some point you just consent to this degrading condition and thus ignite your liberation. Making no effort for consciousness or experiencing to please you, you drop out of time. And what's there is what this is when all that's left of you is discovery itself.

Your permission and receptivity to transmute right here and right now must be present in your experience, and that is awake. Any effort to attain or measure this is complete madness. The collapse of the future sets you free to see what you already are. And what else could you be but this unobstructed and radiant in-your-face as-your-face reflection of your faceless-ness?

October 11, 2012
Waking up is a lot like Mission Impossible. You get a note in a cereal box to go to a phone booth under a train platform in a part of the world you've never been to and then you're instructed by a total stranger to break free of all conditioning and veritably assassinate yourself - and if you fail, well, we never knew you in the first place. Then the phone booth bursts into flames.

October 4, 2012
When we conclude or assert that we exist or things exist or circumstances exist, just what are we saying? Simple, "I am having an experience", or more accurately "it appears that experiencing is happening", but I can't say what exactly it is that's happening or to whom it is occurring. That's about it. Forrest Gump might say shit is happening and Mr. Natural might say it is some pretty weird shit.

The cellular biologists might say that the so-called five senses (themselves made of pure light) are in a stimulus / response loop and the incomprehensible neuronal matrix we call brain is having a field day organizing a cacophonous rush of sensorially and sensually raw data into a world in which I "exist" as a decision making entity enclosed in and by a bio-luminescent sheath called skin, but this is not what this is, is it? Unless you say so, then it is what you imagine it is for you, or not.

Everywhere you look, if you are looking that is, you will find sober and studied professionals (quite unlike myself) question every and all presumptions that science and religion have imposed on us, imposed on themselves since someone scratched some buffalo (or visiting extra-terrestrial) etchings on a cave wall. Time is at risk, space is at risk, subjects and objects are at risk, your cherished world views including your problems and your solutions to those problems are at risk - everything presently appearing (oops gone) in your consciousness as experiencing and interpretation is at risk.

The naked and simply observable fact of experiencing is that this has no duration, doesn't resolve to anything, is constantly leaving town at the same time it arrives, leaves no trace of itself, doesn't go away, has no author or building blocks, opens as infinity to infinity with inconceivable fractal precision, and can and will kick your ass from here to eternity with no emotion.

So if that's what you see from the mysterious and fuzzy vantage blur of your experiencing, you're not going to be a very well behaved member of the scientific or spiritual community - including the new age phukers who like to imagine that we are all one. And to them I say (and thankfully they are not listening), "Why not grill an ambidextrous Mayan at your next charcoal-free vegan barbecue for the Arcturians, or give the ascended masters a ladder and a rope so they can come down off their high unicorns and hang themselves at high (as in make hemp legal) noon!"  Or something like that.

We are so drunk with Is, I Am That I Am, Om Tat Sat, Gate Gate Para Gate, and the like that we seem to forget that This is as much Isn't as it seems to be Is. What if This Isn't, then where are you? What if all and every compulsive or poetic impulse you have to make sense of radiance appearing in consciousness (more gibberish of course) simply Isn't?

Can you get a glimpse that what you call your life and your plans and personal history and aspirations for sensual or spiritual refinement are not going to come true for you, ever? And if this unpopular blasphemy goes over your head or if you disagree vehemently, that's OK too - still This Isn't. You are not going to be successful at making this a reliable or creative or satisfying Is. And if you have the gift of seeing this (even just a little bit) then your liberation is no longer in your future, then what this Is or Isn't (and it may very well be beyond both/or/and) is simply This.

You see the suffering and the end of suffering? If this is no longer some personal durational existence, egg assistance, or exit stance - then there is no room for you to be hoodwinked by the imagination that you are a separate entity at risk. Thus ends suffering, at least that's the idea. Just ask that guy (below), he knows.

September 27, 2012
At some strange juncture in your personal spiritual adventure you see that Buddhism is not something to do, it is present realization. You may be well served to practice meditation and contemplative cultivations of many kinds to favor the odds of realization, but please remember that you are after realization; not ritual, not repetition, not encyclopedic command of a body of work or its defense. You want to realize now. Yes?

The beautiful floral arrangement represented by the foundational nature of the teaching is something to behold. Simply put, we only need contemplate three observable humors:

Anicca, which refers to the inconstancy or impermanence of all things including the non-reliability of your own consciousness and the non-lasting nature of experiencing itself.

Dukkha, which refers to dissatisfaction or the inability to apprehend tranquil peace while tethered to the imagination of an independently existing self.

Anatta, which refers to the absence of a separate Self, an independently arising and experiencing entity.

Merely contemplating the delicious freedom inherent in these three observations (or we could simply go to unobscured reality itself) it may be possible to simply awaken to the nature of creation/emptiness while just relaxing on the stoop. Or we can take (which is more common of course) a strange and circuitous route including years or lifetimes of metaphors and opinions from nowhere back to nowhere, which is right here.

Something inside your curious nature must be able to shift from projection (which is fulfillment in the future once any number of things are resolved) to present understanding with no more room for or insistence on delay or deferral or explanation or what if's or what about's. As I mentioned, Buddhism is not something to do, it is present realization.

Having recently attended a local Sangha to enjoy some meditation and sharing, I was dismayed (quite typical for my restless and presumptuous nature) to find that the quality of investigation was rather superficial and rushed and frequently referred to more and better compassion as some lame refrain of attainment or behavioral carrot-on-a-stick self-improvement as the necessary pre-enlightenment plateau.

In other words, no one seemed at all interested or prepared to shift from projection (a common ailment of primates and practicing Buddhists) to realization. And as if that wasn't heart breaking enough, they defended their view with all sorts of clever derailments and objections to the present fact of being espoused by the very religion that they practice. One guy said that the Buddha was one of the most accomplished meditators of his day, as if he was there or read the papers, or got a hold of the race card to bet on the Buddha perfecta in the ninth so he could reel in a big purse!

Contrary to popular misunderstanding, Buddhism has little to do with meditation and everything to do with realization. And then he went on to report that while other meditators (of the day) had had enviable accomplishments in their own right the Buddha himself derided their realizations because they had nothing or little to do with alleviating suffering - which reads as insufficient compassion. Now tell me something; some 2,000 years after the master meditator got the goodies under the tree - just how successful was he at alleviating suffering?

You can line them all up - all the big purveyors and gnostic genesis-istic revelators that spawned the world's major religions (we don't talk about "M" to avoid those nuisance fatwas) - how would you grade them if their single objective was to alleviate human suffering. How about a big "F" - no one graduates, back to study hall, take a summer refresher course and try again next year.

Now as much as I like to expose frivolous thinking (everyone else's of course) the real banana here is how about waking up now? How about we stop playing Buddhist Peek-a-Boo and go to the root of the realization which doesn't require a compassion deposit or any other credential whatsoever? That's the invitation, that's the inquiry, that's the awakening.

• It is true, he is a liar - he lies about the nature of delusion and nirvana to arouse my suspicion and tune my aspirations clearly.
• It is true, he is a cheat - he has cheated me out of my beleaguered certainty and unexamined world views to arouse in me an intimate encounter with radiant being itself.
• It is true, he is a thief - he has stolen my heart more deeply than I imagined was possible, and left me with the gift of no thing, no belief, and no resistance.

We may ask ourselves, "How did I get here?" (Courtesy of Talking Heads, a must see YouTube.)
And we may ask ourselves
What is that beautiful house?
And we may ask ourselves
Where does that highway go?
And we may ask ourselves
Am I right?...Am I wrong?
And we may tell ourselves
MY GOD!...WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Well here's the lesson, if we can appreciate life as lesson. Don't waste another moment imagining you know what this is, imagining that you know who or what you are, or insisting that there is an experiencer here - or you may find yourself at some dear and profound moment in your hallucinating life pleading out loud, MY GOD!...WHAT HAVE I DONE?