Unrelenting Compassion

"Vajrapani is a means of accomplishing fierce determination and symbolizes unrelenting effectiveness in the conquest of negativity. His taut posture is the active warrior pose (pratayalidha), based on an archer's stance but resembling the en garde position in Western fencing. His outstretched right hand brandishes a vajra and his left hand deftly holds a lasso - with which he binds demons. He wears a skull crown with his hair standing on end. His expression is wrathful and he has a third eye. Around his neck is a serpent necklace and his loin cloth is made up of the skin of a tiger, whose head can be seen on his right knee." (Wikipedia)

Charter for Compassion

There is an urgent need for a new focus on compassion. Bringing together voices from all religions, all nations, all backgrounds, the Charter seeks to remind the world that we already share the core principles of compassion.

Charter for Compassion

bare bones

How clever I am!
I decorate my skeleton
and walk around
as if I am someone.

Festooning it with a persona,
draping it with will and intention,
going out there to be some body.

off the air

Off the air for a while until I become
something more than old news to myself.

morning muse

In the game of Cosmic Horseshoes, what is at Stake?
And where is it placed?
In the Vamp of the Heart?

my little pen i have built for myself and must not be violated ever

All doctrine is scaffolding
that must drop away.

This includes the doctrines of
Who You Think You Are
and
What You Think You Are Not.

You've set yourself up
with WYTYA
and get really pissed
when others don't go along.

You've mutilated yourself
with WYTYAN
chopping off whole arms and legs
even ripping out your heart.

All doctrine is scaffolding
that must drop away

letting that cosmic rocket
that is you

TAKE OFF!

freak show

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen!
I've got nothing up my sleeves but arms!
You there, in the back. Come in closer.
That's it! Now if you notice over here,
we have three rings. In the first ring
is Passion riding the red horse of Attachment.
And a splendid sight they are with their
flaring nostrils & fast beating hearts!
In the second ring is Dispassion allowing
the fox of Detachment to eat his guts.
Don't look away! Show a little dispassion!
And in the third ring we have the Hermaphrodite,
dispassionate passion become Compassion!
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the joining of the opposites,
which I see makes your lips snurl
and your regurgitory organs leap into play.
You ask could God have ordained such a creature?
It's your call, folks. Ring one, two, or three!
For one thin dime, you can enter the ring of your choice.
What's that, boy? Everyone is in a ring already
and why pay a dime? Somebody claim this kid!
Now . . . .

old man

I hear that I am an old man.
I don't know what that means.

Yes, I've ridden the earth around our sun 71 times.
Sure, at some point I might be drooling and shitting my pants.
But I'm doing just fine, thank you!

Yep, there are some body aches from years of ju-jutsu slams to mat,
but I gave as good as I got, and we all ended up laughing and going for a beer.

And there are some soul aches from a tortured and broken heart,
but everyone walks around with those kind of wounds.

It takes me longer to walk from here to there,
but I have no hurry.

I hear that I am an old man and for the life of me,
I don't know what that means.

Oh, yeh! According to the actuarial tables,
I am securely within the realm of bucket kickers.
But death has been my ally all my life. No new news.

I feel as if I am in first grade in my understanding of the universe.
I have my seat assignment and the teacher seems pretty interesting.

My spirit is as clear and bright as ever
and I am grateful to the graciousness of my Maker.

I am just beginning to learn how to learn something.

shaman

If we do not have the concepts, we cannot grasp reality.
Vast realms lie around us and within us, unknown.
The fewer the concepts, the more meager our world.

Concepts are a way of seeing.
The greater the diversity and richness of concepts,
the more vast one's vision.

The inability or unwillingness to tolerate a wide diversity of concepts creates psychic plaque, effectively closing off the richness of the energetic field surrounding one and calling one into being.

Opening to and embodying the full range of concepts both available and emerging into being allows us to know as we are known, two-way streets of comprehension.

Concepts are living gateways, passages, entrances, wormholes to realities of supra-ordinate splendor.

Conceptual galaxies spin within our inner world linking with and cousins to the external galaxies we all admit and admire -- no separation, the spin within and the spin without are the same spin.

If you do not know what I mean, you do not know what I mean.

ego

We speak of getting rid of our ego, but no one knows what the ego really is, other than our center of consciousness.

I think what we mean is riddance of a sense of separate self. We keep our center of consciousness -- and we cannot even keep it since it is what is doing the keeping.

I will no longer honor the phrase "getting rid of ego." Instead I will use "no clinging to your reflection" since a sense of separate self is an identification with second-order reflection in the mirror of phantasy.

humus

As humans, we have a strong need for approval.
We make others gods and ourselves their servants.

Humility means we make the servant role the god role.
Now we are the god and others serve our need.

The greatest servant of all is the greatest god.
This can start a servant competition.

radiance of being

No hope
No fear

Joy

evolution of delusions

When any of us says something is true, we are saying we believe it.
"It is part of my belief system, therefore true."

Some aspects of one's belief system are held as true by the majority,
hence form a popular delusion that works for the moment
within a certain context, i.e., the current worldview or
generic thought domain.

The next realm's thought domain, as evidenced by
the copernican, newtonian, einsteinian, quarkian progression,
might and probably will reveal our current meta-view as
old-fashioned, ignore-ant, even primitive.

I don't know that there is anything to do about this,
except to acknowledge it, and to possibly step outside
our belief system, our thought domain.

Of course, for many, this is unthinkable and will not be thought.
For others, it is understood but seen as far too much trouble
and that attention is best directed elsewhere.

For some, however, the possibility / probability of existing
outside thought, without reflection, is attractive and viewed
as a worthy endeavor.

story

We can move into a Story of our choice,
feel powerful and good.

We can stand in our own being (which is not our own)
and say there is no Story that is real,
thus spinning our Story of No Story,
and feel powerful and good.

One single thought and a story exists.
Even those who say they do not think,
as soon as the mouth flops open,
are caught within the web of a story.

We live in story. We are creatures of Story.
We beget and are begotten by Story.

I choose a Story of Cosmic Adventure,
which goes something like this:

Each of us a sphere of influence
radiating outward in all directions our moods and attitudes.
We transform the world around us
through the wavelengths of the energy we are.

Shitty wavelengths, shitty world.
Joyous wavelengths, joyous world.
Mediocre wavelengths, mediocre world.

When two or more spheres
are in radiance together,
a tremendous force is born.

the known universe

Joe Night sent this. Thanks, Joe!

balance beam

Forget my paltry post.
I mourn the Haitian people.

capacity

"I saw him in such a form as I was able to take in."
--Peter commenting on the Transfiguration, Acts of Peter

Peter's comment is an exquisite statement of our situation.

We are like pencil points in varying degrees of sharpness
on the page of life, pencil points pressed firmly to the page
of everyday, writing out our lives with little awareness of
the entire pencil that we are, much less who or what is
holding the pencil.

We scribble, get dull, stop and sharpen ourselves
with various activities and concoctions,
awareness staying focused on minutiae,
perhaps lifting our heads, our eyes for brief moments
to stare at far horizons, to contemplate something larger,
more vast than our scribble on the page.
We live in the prosaic,
uncomprehending of the poetry of it all.

We cling firmly to our lode limit.

And then Bingo!

We fall in love with a person, with an idea, with a quest,
with the simple fascination of being alive.

Capaciousness, Exuberance, Enthusiasm, Energy!

Boundless.

Circle with no circumference
whose center is everywhere.

We hum, we sing, we dance.

Life holds no mystery.

Hearts wide open!

"I saw him in such a form as I was able to take in."

nominate the BadassSattva of the Week

I, this very morning, through the grace and power of The Muse Upon Awakening, was a conduit for the addition of BadassSattva to the Noirior Pantheon. See here.

Now I am inspired to add a nomination for the BadassSattva of the Week: Reverend Billy & The Church Of Life After Shopping.

If you have a nomination, please enter here in a comment.

The BaddestassSattva will be decided this Friday.

becoming a badass sattva

Let's take a look at two popular sayings. In this dualistic-duelistic world of ours, of course they have contradictory meanings. Ahhh, a 2 X 2 table, one of my favorite scientific devices! Two sayings, each with two meanings.

The first conventional wisdom: "It's all in your imagination."

The prosaic meaning lays negative emphasis on imagination. "It's all in your IMAGINATION." Meaning: You are just making it up. It is not real. Implication: Wake up, you dreamer! Make yourself useful.

The poesaic meaning lays positive emphasis on all. "It's ALL in your imagination." Meaning: We are creative beings, making all this up as we go. Implication: Be careful of your thoughts, your images, your icons. They bear fruit.

The second conventional wisdom: "You can't do it to save your ass."

The prosiac meaning lays emphasis on incapability. "YOU CAN'T DO IT to save your ass." Meaning: You are so screwed up and such a wuss you can't even do what you need to do. Even if your ass is in a sling. (Now there's an image.) Implication: Be fearful and timid. Yield to the almighty powerful one telling you that you can't do it.

The poesaic meaning lays emphasis on meaningful wisdom. "You can't do it TO SAVE YOUR ASS." Meaning: If saving your ass is your motivation, it won't work. You can't do it in order to save your ass. Implication: If you are "laying up your treasures in heaven" to save your ass, you are just going to live in assdom. This is where the badass sattva comes into play. All badass sattvas vow to not go to heaven until all go. This is what makes them such badasses.

The badass sattva knows deeply that: It is ALL in the imagination and you can't do it TO SAVE YOUR ASS.

fun

Christopher Walken dances and flies to Fatboy Slim --

bear claw

I leave behind a trail of writings
like a skunk leaves scent,
like a mouse leaves droppings.
I breathe in heaven's blessings and exhale words.
In cyberspace they form and stand alone.
Black scratchings floating in infinite whiteout sea.
Brief formings in the fog.
I reach as high as I can, claw the bark of the tree.
That tree standing there. In the middle of the garden.
I wander away, satisfied. Scratched that itch
with all the alphabet I could find.

entering the monkastery

At some point the sun will flare then die,
ending this chapter of
The Ongoing Embodying of Conscious Existence.

Meanwhile

we monkeys prance around
doing our part, eating and drinking and mating,
taking ourselves seriously, oh so seriously,
while screwing around and having a ball,

trying not to regress to the mean,
each new crop of monkeys arising,
rediscovering angst and alienation,
self-medicating and looking for the eternal bailout

Transcendent monkeys aware of the cosmic heartbeat
Orderly monkeys putting toothpastes back in tubes
Scared monkeys shitting their metaphysical pants
Redeemed monkeys singing hallelujah

Shopping monkeys hunting and gathering
Sex monkeys finding salubrication
War monkeys wanting one domi - nation
Coffee monkeys plotting evolution

Monkeying around while the cosmos has its way
but, by Hanuman!, exploring around out there
seeking some salvational crevice
in which to hide the monkey tribe

God has a great sense of humor
She rolls her eyes and shakes her head
and loves her monkey children

the story of jesus: theology 101

So God said, "I'm gonna shoot right in there and try that out myself." Like all of us circling around out there in the archetypal void, desiring and waiting for our opportunity to become a little more firm in our matter, he chose his mama and his birth family. Bingo! He was born as Jesus in a little dinky town from nowhere. He went through the whole of existence, from being squeezed through the birth canal to pain and suffering to joy and laughter to getting whacked by the government after being told to shut up but he wouldn't do it. He could build a one-match fire, hiked around a lot, took a boat here and there, slept out of doors, visited friends, said a bunch of things that folk are still trying to understand, was kind of an outlaw, ate food, drank wine, pooped and peed, and "was like as we are, yet without sin." And what is this sin thing but separation from God? And God embodying could not and would not be separate from God. He jumped right in here along with the rest of us and gave it a whirl. Now that kind of God I really really like! And then he took off, zoom into the skies, saying I'm gonna go fix up a place for you, for the capacious, for all who have the capacity, the room for lovingkindness and openness and generosity, all of which come from nowhere but the Big Dude himself. And that's the way it went and that's the way it goes.

quest ions

quest, a wisdom-seeking journey
ion, a particle that is either positively or negatively charged
quest ion, a particle on a wisdom-seeking journey

Of what are you aware?
This is the extent of your spiritual domain.

What occupies your awareness the most?
This is the center of your spiritual domain.

When you allow your cognitive machinations
and your emotional turbulence to subside,
what is at the core of your spiritual domain?

Who or what have you made your Lord, your Example,
the one whose actions you follow and embody?

Of whom, of what are you aware
beyond the realm of surface appearance?

Do you constantly encase yourself in the flesh?
In social roles? In your own image?

Can you sense the Beginning and the Flow of it all?

Are you as large as the universe?
As small as the subatomic?

Are compassion, generosity, and lovingkindness
the energies that sustain you?

Does your heart laugh?

the shining of the absolute

Think of it as a light shining out into the unknown.

What is shining the light? We do not know.
Even our vaunted science-priests can't pierce that veil.

All we can do is love the light
and praise the mystery that shines it.

You want to stick a name on it?
Next thing you know you'll be asking me for union dues!

We can think of it as a stepping down.
(I paraphrase Ibn 'Arabi's framework here.)

First the Absolute beyond all comprehension.
Since nothing can be said, the less said the better.

Then the Absolute manifesting as God
tickling that God-spot in our heart-brain.

Next the Absolute manifesting as Lord.
As Bob Dylan says you gotta serve somebody.
This is that somebody.

Now comes the Absolute manifesting
as half-spiritual and half-material things.
That would be us hue-mans.

And finally, the Absolute manifesting itself
as the sensible world, symbols of the Absolute.

A light shining out into the unknown.
And we are the light bearers.

Don't rant and rail at me about it!
Welcome to the universe.

aftermath

tomorrow they'll all be herded back into
their institutional pens
leaving the streets to us geezers and bums
the psychologists will have plenty of work
salving family abrasions
debt counselors will spring into action
the local library will announce
it doesn't supply tax forms
kids and teachers will count the days
until spring break
stores will replace the ghost of santa
with a flood of valentines
those zonies who don't live in the snow of this mountain
will slide off it like melting ice cream to their desert homes
the foxes will come back
out of hiding
the ravens will circle around as always
playing and rasping at peculiar human ways

be attitude

Blessed are those whose sanctified butts sit on righteous pews of holiness. For long moments, they forget they are urine and shit-filled bags of mucous and puss.

Blessed are those who arise in the morning and go on anyway. For they are the salt of the earth, sprinkled on the bland flat food of corporate America.

Blessed are those who have found a niche of companionship and love. For they refute the arrogant bastards of the supremacy of war.

Blessed are those who refuse to paint their face with decorum. For they wear the paint of the spirit of Crazy Horse, Jesus and Hafiz.

Blessed are the spiritual marines of all religions and no religion. For they shall inherit the wind, the holy wind that breathes and sustains the cosmos.

Amen.

new year's re-solutions

Can we solve ourselves once again?
Become re-solute in our solutions?

We have hope in this 1/1/2010,
in this semi-arbitrary demarcation of time,
of the past dropping away and a beginning new and fresh.

All past sins of omission and commission,
all we failed to do and all we did we wish we didn't,
dropping away and a brand new child standing here.

A child looking to live a saner, more sanctified life,
looking to no longer do this and begin doing that,
looking for a re-solution of the problems of existence:

hatreds dissolved in love, angers replaced by understandings,
one's own separate soul opening to union with the Divine,
grit supplemented by grace.

Re-solution: opening as a clear solution,
as a free and loving heart.