the first rule

the first rule of fight club, the last thing you see before you die, the secret of a brief but authentic existence, all lie within reach, all escape our velocity to embrace what is and let go of what isn't. by the time I get started someone else has done and gone, the trails are made before you get there. to find the truth you cannot follow, you cannot rely or compare because truth doesn't work like that. its all you, up to you depending on your fortitude, to stick with the feeling, the undeniable nature of the heart to love and seek love and to not stop because love fails. it isn't love that gives up, its the weakness of resolve, the million and one other things that attract and repulse the senses. you are not the reaction, just the single point of being that cannot be a part of anything but is the thing it seeks itself. for the wholeness that is sought is always within, to be complete is not to be made up of things but to be free of anything that isn't truly natural to be. you are your natural self. when the light touches the eyes, you see, you don't have any sight in the darkness, that is where the true vision occurs, without external light. because it is not the senses that brings the truth into your heart, its the non-senses, the internal awareness of the unknowable insights. one truly exists apart from all the external noise and intrusion. only the self at peace has any chance of knowing what that is. to rely on the senses is to be caught upon the reflections of light and the reflections of the mind as it parses and interprets the recording of the senses. its past and reexamined by the time your awareness touches the recording. here now without pause or reflection is the truth. that's all there is, everything else is a projected reflected conflicted rehash of the mind. be truthful and there is no pause. what is exists regardless, persists beyond the denial or embrace. you have no other to compare or share or inform or describe. what is, has no name, is everywhere, never decays or changes. acceptance and surrender ease the struggle, but you are the point of convergence.

dawn like a sleeping portrait

dawn like a sleeping portrait of my own face in repose lies across a night so still and fragrant with living decay that even the windows filled with the slow liquid of fire hardened sand become doorways for the glimmering second coming of the living gods of earth. day has no surface and the emptiness of time has no grasp on the awakened heart. I whisper and listen to the replies of the insects and night feeding mammals, all in a kind of wounded dance to the darkness for a protection that never comes. once the light reveals itself all pretense fails and what has forced its way into the consciousness of man becomes the hardened truth and nothing until sleep once more overtakes can slay that rueful dragon of baleful existence. my knees like  hammer blows quake and slide with the tightening of the ligaments and the belly full of poisons dances up and down with the actions of the brain. reality is the king of new clothes and underneath the desire of the killing machine unwinds and flows like a spigot of wine to the bacchanalian frenzy of mindless hope that can never be filled. I have no time but the instant of perception that carries no pattern but the light falling in a deluge upon the emptiness and from the waters of that seething sea of light comes the impatience of existence struggling to create its own creator and thus end its own need to exist and become the toy of children bent on self improvement. what play of erector sets and fun straws filled with sugar eat away at the beast and his mindless rage at living. cast no shadow upon the world of pain for everyday is endless destruction and every night a cool retreat from death. alive in the unconsciousness the dreams of the dying cast a spell upon those yet to come. one moment in the womb and all else is left behind to become one where none before existed. even as the sac bursts its way into the hard oxygen of the lungs there is uncertainty and then the fear freezing everything into pain but one moment of the heartfelt touch of love and the ice melts in a gladdening river of desire. take what you want and die another time to the life that is given to each and every dreamer that is born. desire flows like the blood in the mothers body that once was the same blood in yours but now is the blood of demons and angels fighting to control a world of changelings and deception, where every object reflects the reflection of your own fear and desire and has no inner nature but the touch of its hardened case and its imposition on the thoughts and senses of what you are. and that impossibility crushes the past and future into some recycled garbage that ends up in a landfill for the sake of convenience and lays dormant waiting for another century to leach into a field so filled with poisoned dreams that even night cannot protect you.

weeks pass

weeks pass and the body still pales with the reconstitution that perhaps will not take place completely as in the past. it seems the strength of good will alone is not sufficient to create a passage from sickness back to the robustness of the body before. the dazed sleepiness and exhaustion of the late afternoons, the weak stomach for appetite or spices. it is as if the body has decided its taken a step down from being alive and is descending into that tunnel that inevitably leads to the eternal slumber of times reward. to sleep perchance to dream, aye there is the rub. for in the end all is the dream of existence and life itself is an opera of indeterminate origin and species. and whether the audience is in the cheap seats or all part of the play there is only the recognition that one tires of the endless caterwauling and cacophony and longs for the simple whisper of the air in motion from the movement of the inexplicable wind driven spirits that live in the motion of trees. I do not wait for sunrise but begin my own day with the waking of the senses and allow some small victory to come from the ritual of breathing rubbing my eyes and breaking my caffeine fast so that I might feel if only briefly alive and in the grasp of faculties still working and actually performing small though dexterous tasks of the living persona creating a web of self deceit in the first few moments before the light of day dispels the illusion of inner and outer synchronicity. for the body its the elimination of yesterdays spent fuel and the intake of more and for the mind its some kind of alertness to the functioning of a higher order of consciousness than just the lower lizard brain awareness of the coolness of the rocks before the big light in the sky comes up. I lack any strength except to sit and work my digits in a slow frenzy of hope that something evolves every day that is not lost but awakens within like the planets continue their spinning around the big light in the sky. I gather before the stones of last nights offering and gaze upon the ashes and remnants of todays predilections and possible outcomes scattering the small bones and charred remains into unrecognizable patterns that free the day and let go the empty minded recognition of natural decay and destruction. let the coming dawn loose itself of the movement that creates its illusion of rising and falling and traveling lengthwise across a world that sees only itself as the fixed point and all others as the attracted followers of eternal beauty never ending always motionless and surrounded by the adoring and undying gods of time.

the bubble of life

the bubble of life expands continuously, pushing against the ambient pressure of the outside atmosphere. of course this begs the question, what is outside? inside we know is a self generating desire seeking more and as the bubble expands, it feels to the inner desirer that it is growing and amassing more in its circumference. Is the outside lessened from the growth of this bubble, is there less outside because of this. not discernably, perhaps with billions of bubbles there might be a slight undetectable change in the volume of what lies beyond the edges of the existing universe, but unlikely. and what is the makeup of the internal bubble atmosphere, a self generating machine creating electricity and waste products giving off gasses and liquids, but also a self generating feedback loop of sensations that create the expectation of an external environment that it then conforms to. is there an actual outside to the bubble, beyond the senses and the experiences and the dreams and the uncataloged encounters of the insensate being within? what remains to be expanded into, to create more of what is where there is nothing. a discernible ridge of existence that beyond lies the void, the emptiness the unpartitioned. the bubble grows until it can no longer hold its own weight against the backpressure, and surely a lot of that pressure is from the billions of other bubbles competing for the same space, the likelihood of scarcity driving the unregulated desire machines all around. then the bubbles fade and implode, otherwise they expand until the desire of the generator becomes so powerful, it pushes past the tenuous membrane of the bubble and it leaks itself into the gap and collapses. the external void fills the empty bubbles and there remains nothing and the universe shrinks in accordance, leaving only a vacuum where before a bubbly substance once existed. I live not in the hard cornered streets and furniture of the world but in the formless energy that allows structure to manifest. what is comes not from an outside force imposing itself upon us, but from the sense of ownership and entitlement that partitions off the unalloyed being into parts and pieces. where is the end of the bridge to nowhere? or is there just a gap and a prayer and a collapse that never ends.

I have an old electric toothbrush

I have an old electric toothbrush, one of those fancy ones, sonicare, that's been sitting in a box in the garage for more than a year and probably hadn't been used for more than a year before that. I think I bought it at Costco about 6 years ago as a free replacement for the one I had for 12 years before that. it looks funky and I hooked it up to the charger just for an experiment, to see if I could coax this thing back to the real world. well for two days it sat like a dead brick, then a small green light started to flash and for 3 days the light expanded to more and more bars until finally today, after 5 days of charging, it has a solid row of green bars and it works. I would have never expected this in the past and just thrown the thing out, but because I have no expectations, I just left it go at its own pace not regulating what the outcome might be, and it found its own way to recharge. I know this is a stretch but it illustrates how we create the world around us through our expectations, everything becomes an extension of our thoughts and actions, everything is connected to everything we experience. there are no six degrees of separation, there's not even one degree, we are the interface to the universe, the user interface, the real question is, who is the user? who is interfacing with the universe? as in the operating system for the computer, there's an interface to the bios as well as an interface to the application that is its own interface to a area of interest. the web browser is the interface to the internet, which is an interface to a billion possible sites and subjects. likewise the human body, mind, spirit is the device that connects to the internal parts as well as all external parts, and there are trillions of possibilities as well as orders of magnitude of organization of the parts. the body,mind,spirit decodes the layers and planes of organization and collection and allows the experience directly of the totalities of the collections rather than just looking at the individual components, much like the computer allows the viewing of text and pictures sound and videos, etc, rather than just the lines of code and assembly instructions that make up the functioning parts of the application. so with the human body, made up of billions of bits of component structures that individually make sense but give no hint of the working of the total structure that when decoded through the user interface is experienced as living. where does the sense of ownership and connection reside in this structure, who is the experiencer of the life that is totally regulated by the application layer of the user. life 1.0 is pretty basic , life 9.0 has a lot more ability to reach out into the various layers of the possibilities of the universe, but the upgrade requires many changes to the operating system in order to run the code. if even one portion of the operating system is not in sync with the upgraded code then the whole thing fails and the experience becomes unstable and possibly dangerous to the system. evolution is the standard upgrade path, slow ponderous and basically a trial and error using the beta testers as guinea pigs. there are self programming systems, ones that have gone into the inner workings and started applying patches and upgrades using references and textbooks of past attempts and the results, and have become a cult of the interface engineers. however its done the possibilities seem endless as the system evolves one way or another and the experiences grow. eventually the organization of the components all around, begins to change as the system is upgraded and sees the new layers of interrelated patterns in everything..