Hello my friends,
Firstly, I must apologise for my lack of content in the last few weeks. I, of all people, should understand by now and live by the principle that one should always underpromise and overdeliver. Indeed, this particularly applies to a content creator of my lowly station - perhaps less so to those who have made it or are particularly good at it anyway.
If you will indulge me, November was an intense month in terms of what reality was offering up to be lived. Lived rather severely at times, according to my post hoc analysis.
Combined with a debilitating schedule for my money-live work, including the outwardly loathsome modern practice of "work-travel", there hasn't been much time to spare for what I have rather arrogantly determined as mattering more.
This will come into play in the divulgences below. In short: for what reason did the miraculous offerings of existence deserve to be shoddily and disprespectfully excluded by me during this busy period?
So, I have moved houses and am currently setting up a studio that should raise the bar regarding my content production for you.
Inspiring this introspection is my return from a sesshin, my second for the year. This will be the subject threaded through this newsletter. As is typical of my time in such an oasis, certain truths one cannot run from tend to present themselves rather aggressively. Better said, perhaps - undeniably.
These universal truths are indeed so; they equally apply to all the so-called humanoids on this monkey-infested mudball floating listlessly through space. As much as some may dislike this notion. If you have a simian brain, it applies to you.
Come to think of it, I would also posit that such truths, traditionally termed the dharma, are equally valid to other self-conscious life forms, should we ever find them.
4 brain-quadrasphered cephalopod-like entities, with complex neural networks encompassing their various limbs. Multiple limbs, I contend, handy for complex insterstellar travel and mathematical calculations. Inhabiting various gas giants as a galactic apex species. The shrouding gases hide them from the dangers of the predatory dark forest of the galactic ecosystem. This is my contention.
Through such beings, and whatever we end up as, these universal dharmic sentiments will give rise to a tremendous inter-special galactic dharmic empire in the distant future. One of high culture. An expansive empire seeking dominion of the galactic dark forest. Long-housed aliens with parochial planetary habits, always seeking through a tremendous cosmic tussle to have their species' food choices and their ways' recognised as galactically valid, too. And if you don't, we'll try to end it all.
This coming great drama, I strongly suspect, will be heralded by the inevitable arising of a future historical Galactic Buddha and pushed throughout the cosmos by a future interstellar Galactic Solar Emperor of the Universal Dharma. UY Scuti or the BD-12 5055 solar mass as its referenced nuclear symbology would be appropriate.
And the depths of Sagittarius A should serve well as its destructive anti-thesis. The demoness, Kali, in her consuming blackness, the all-consuming force that, while giving rise to what can be in its voracious and destructive appetites, nonetheless offers a force against which the spark of dharmic Galactic life strives to overcome, against all odds and to reach its fullest expression.
So, if I still have you and my excuses out of the way, let's continue.
Exciting Announcement…
I am pleased to announce a recent book release with my friend Wayward Cloud. You can find his most excellent and tastefully curated palate cleansing account on the distraction algorithm hellsite, X, here - @awaywardcloud
In short, despite my smack-talking those fated to be bookcels regularly, I do still like good books believe it or not. Wayward mentioned this idea one time, and we decided to bring back an excellent edition, formerly out of print, called "The Message of the Tibetans" by the traditionalist-school adjacent author Arnaud Desjardins.
This book was recommended to me some years ago by my friend Harry Oldmeadow. The problem; it was out of print and had been for a damn long time; thus, managing to acquire it after some time and costing a not insignificant chunk of change for a smallish book, I was nevertheless duly impressed by the author's frank and vividly described accounts.
This excellent little book documents the author's various personal interactions with many famed Tibetan Llamas of the past. This was before the scourge of California-type Western influences imposed themselves on that enigmatic country's various traditions and schools.
Of those who received the tradition before the destruction that occurred due to "Chinese Imperialism" - a silly term for sure, such forces are better surmised by the term "Bio-Leninism", I believe.
I have been to Tibet, and like most places in this world of a formally mysterious charm, much of what you read about in these texts is dead or utterly inaccessible as the traditions and lineages have died out or been transferred to some stinky hippie in California. Traceable lineages are extremely important in Tibetan Mahayana, arguably more so than most other schools of Buddhism, so the tradition of many lineages is now held as so woefully incomplete that it is more or less "brown bread," as we say in Australia.
I am reminded of Dzogchen as one example. A lineage and school of particular interest to me. It is one good example of traditional lineages and their breadth of knowledge having died out due to such forces, and as a result, it's almost impossible to find a Tibetan teacher who is cognizant of the entire breadth of the tradition. For better or worse, we're now left with Ham Sarris, and while debatably, he and others like him have done a reasonable job of making the core message available to Westerners, much of it is missed. So, it is something altogether different.
According to my readings, Westerners authorised to teach often carry only a tiny and politically correct portion (as is typical of Westerners attracted to Buddhism) of the totality of that tradition - generally speaking, of course. That's okay, I suppose; that's the nature of the Western mind, and there are advantages to it.
Yet, it's also true that much of value is lost according to the personal whims or tastes of the typically insufferable effete liberal. As one commenter has so succinctly described, the type with the lilting feminine inflection in the voice. The valley girl accent, as Zappa tells us.
And so we are grateful to have access to these books that show us a lost world. And clarify some things for us. It is true that while reading this text, we should not despair at what is lost, for if there is any teaching of Buddhism that we should heed, it is that everything is genuinely impermanent and in a state of flux. Where this should lead and what reality and awareness will reveal to practitioners in time is anyone's guess. But the feeling of loss will not endure.
So it is with a profound sense of gratitude I report that our friend Wayward has put so much effort into the edit and done a really excellent job of fixing the many errors of the original. Although these errors lend the original text an irrefutable Gallic charm, we concluded it made the text awkwardly clunky, more often than not. So he's done an excellent job cleaning up the excesses while maintaining this charm. So I'd like to thank him for his efforts.
The link for the edit is here, and with more volumes to come, I hope you can support our small effort to make critical out-of-print books available to the masses again:
Message of Tibetans on Amazog
This is the convict link; I'm sure those in more refined parts of the world can search it accordingly.
The retaining of the same retro cover as mine was deliberate - I really like it.
A Sesshin “Exhortation”
I want to leave you with some hopefully inspiring words. Words that point to no-thing.
References to what I have been forced to see again.
An experience of the quality of clarity about our condition that is not obvious, but is the answer to it all.
I am subject to excesses of feelings of contempt, a shortcoming of my personality. Sometimes I try to transmute this unpleasant tendency using it to make my writing funny or engaging.
I think I do okay with this but it seems many disagree. On some level, I understand that if someone isn't of the same sardonic Australian tater' coon convict lineage…that they may and often do, as evidenced by the constant stream of X-unfollows from all myriad of types…come away with hurt feelings.
Even now having said this, I am forced to acknowledge the strong temptation to use the demeaning term fee-fees instead of the somewhat lesser demeaning reference to feelings, but I resist this now. Can you understand how hard this is for me?
indulgences like this are arguably self-defeating, this is true. When I take pleasure in laying siege to the average human's most cherished beliefs, like that of the self as one example that never ceases to deliver a payoff of an ever renewing global flood of tears.
I just did it again…
I also hate explaining myself - but here it goes - this is done to illicit shock. I actually get on well with almost everyone in my day to day life, whatever lurks underneath.
I do use it because in my own life, I most appreciate the teachers that spared me the insulting method of kid-gloves, and who instead shocked me out of this or that delusion. mercifully. You see what you don’t understand is that I’m subjecting you to mercy. I’m being merciful when I confront you with the terrible truth.
I don’t know about you, but I hate dawdling around like an imbecile for years and years while someone gently convinces me. Being respectful of my feelings as a valid and just a decent f#cking person. What a waste of time that is.
However, as I get older, I realise increasingly that I am a lunatic, and there's basically not that many people like me. I've barely met any. Maybe one. Is this for the best? I don’t think so. But as we will see, reality seems to have other ideas.
Understandably, in the emotional reaction elicited, the valid message of such immutable truths may be lost to some readers, because in general they never asked to be clobbered in the face with their own misunderstandings about life and reality. And definitely this seems like an inherently arrogant perspective. It kind of is, I acknowledge this.
This has a definite effect of steering individuals away from testing things for themselves, achieving the exact opposite of what I intended.
As I say, my justification is that this is primarily a device to sort the wheat from the chaff - and it works for sure. There’s barely any wheat though, but I suspect that is simply the nature of these kinds of things. They’re not meant for the herd man, in his various “I’m not a part of the herd” Groucho Marx-type disguises.
Those who have enough of "the stuff" and see through it will gain fruitfully I believe, and the feedback from such types is not only do they get my sense of humour, but the practices and contexts I present are benefiting them greatly - and that they’re getting from whence the frustrations and drive to mocking humour stems.
These are the special types who have enough of the guts required to undergo the methods. And those who are "just hanging around" get thrown into the dust bin of onethingist seekerism after a while.
On this occasion, I shall refrain however, understanding that there are many sensitive young men out there who seem to be very sensitive.
So please take me at my word here, at least, as I refrain from this quintessentially Australian and thus highly questionable habit.
Sesshin & Non-Dual Kundalini
During Zen retreats or sesshin, powerful kundalini experiences often arise in awareness. Particular sensory emergences set these off. The arising stimuli and the sensation are unified; there is no subject and object, which is exceptionally apparent in the moment.
On this occasion, the call of the words invited vital emergence:
"Let me respectfully remind you life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken. Take heed. This night your days are diminished by one. Do not squander your life."
This is a version of what is known in the Zen tradition as the "evening gatha". It is called this because an ordained practitioner reads it out loudly and clearly on completion of the last Zazen of the evening.
Outwardly, it is a stark and depressive-sounding reminder of our impermanence and unstoppably rapid finitude.
Yet, it is true experientially and, in truth, projects a positive heed and call to live in a manner that is as present as possible.
It presents the practitioner with a call to an opportunity to live life fully and vitally in the truest sense, something that is not on offer to most human beings. Who waste away in one or other form of idleness ironically in pursuit of means to stave off the dread that such a statement invokes.
Now more so than ever, in a culture that cultivates peak delusion and distraction. The era of the great lies unmatched.
To those outside, Zen, more so than most traditions, remains, above all, practical and empirical. It seems alien to us because it transcends the extremely restrictive confines of Western philosophical definitional traditions that are almost entirely word and concept-based. Even in their "non-word" prescriptions, they deeply lack any method to understand beyond words reality as it is.
The words here are entirely different, referencing genuine and "haveable" experiences. They are not the abstract words of a snake oil salesman, although the descriptions here often sound like it; instead, they are a clear expression of an immutable perceptual and empirical experience of truth that shapes our experience.
What is being referred to is anti-conceptual.
In Zen, the practice is not about obtaining intellectual knowledge; it presents an often painful, physiological process of ruthlessly tearing such indulgences away. Above all else, the tradition considers thoughts and their derivations to be the main thing getting in the way of living well. Most intellectual knowledge falls into this category if it falls outside of applicable utility. More appropriately stated, thoughts are not of us strictly speaking, and our attachment to them is ridiculous and quite literally the cause of our inability to be present, of our "suffering". Another misunderstood term - because, again, the usual understanding comes from words rather than experience. From experience, there's no way to refute it - whatever you choose to do with it after acknowledgement is another matter.
In a broader sense, it is true it's not just "thoughts", as is generally explained by meditation purveyors, that ails us. Reactive attachment to any emergent sensory phenomenon is the same thing. Imagine a baby crying on an aircraft and how, although this is simply another emergence into experience, it can easily cause another emergent sensory property: extreme stress and even the downstream conceptualisation of misanthropy in some cases, like my own.
But when all is said and done, in the words of one master, it is simply another drop of experience on offer during a rich rainstorm.
The Buddha's genius was to show that there is another way: presence. In radical presence, experience takes on entirely different qualities. In the mind of one so trained, true misanthropy becomes an absurdity, just another empty and m miraculous emergence from selfless, energetic flux. This is the crux of practice - it is from here that life is truly vibrant.
However you choose to employ the outcome of this training, as an ascetic or not, doesn't change this essential truth. The radical outcome of practice is what it is. This is inescapable. I confirm to you now that life becomes of cosmic import, every little thing is entirely inconceivable, and yet, there is not even a shred of fear or anxiety to be had - because, yes, they too are just another emergence within awareness.
Does this make sense?
Thus, it is said Zazen is perfect. There is no need for anything else. Or so they tell me. You will need to try it out for yourself.
Thoughts as a human species of co-dependent emergence exist as a blockade to what intellectualism as a solution seeks to find. It is a great irony. It is all then akin to a dog chasing its tail.
Again, I don't make these statements because they sound good - I make them because they are true. Testably true.
The Masters Advice
The master I practice with related to the group attending some stories of the masters in his lineage. Their various expressions and views, and what being present is all about. What this apparent enigma of Zazen is all about.
His direct master, from whom he received the so-called "dharma transmission", once explained it in a speech when asked what Zen is and how to practice Zazen properly. This is the question that comes up for every practitioner starting out. "What am I seeking here?"
"Just this. Only this."
This is a non-mysterious, non-abstract statement. He explained that there is only this; this is already perfect, and nothing more can be obtained. When the all-encompassing "ten-pointed" vision had been properly realised, and all arising in the "field of awareness" noticed - and note that I say noticed, not realised or obtained - that is all there is.
Of course, this is not the only question we rightly ask ourselves. "Am I being lied to?" "When will something happen?" "what do I need to do to make something happen?". "This god damned f#cking hurts; what the f#ck is the point of this endless torture".
Maddeningly, different Zazen sessions will have entirely different qualities and what you notice is you’ve pretty well got no chance. You have no ability to control this other than to keep practicing a method.
Just when you self-assuredly think, "woah I'm sooooo spiritual" and enter you California trust fund kid phase, and things are going jolly well, another block not 1 minutes later will come along and bend you over a barrel, well and truly.
Entire sesshins can be spent dealing with our reactions to all manner of unpleasantries, while prior sesshins went amazingly.
This answer to all this is simple.
Experience is inherently selfless, and like it or not, we're not doing much of anything at all.
Thus, the one and only take required:
"Just this. Only this."
In this way, all emergent properties, including "ourselves", or the experience of seeing a rock or ant or "hearing" a sound, the call of a bird arising in awareness, can instead be seen as they are. Reflected in awareness like a mirror, we can instead abide in perfect relaxation without grasping (this is the true meaning of grasping, by the way).
When they say if you see the buddha - kill him - this is what they mean. Because even in a transcendent or pleasurable experience, you’re more likely to totally miss the point.
Not grasping sensory emergences and letting isness simply occur in the field of awareness; awareness is seen for what it is - this is the akshual jewel that gives rise to all phenomena and a place where we can rest.
In this place, the unsatisfactory and typically unpleasant contraction selfdom dissipates.
The sense of self is the very thing that inhibits us from noticing simply as things are and the ability to abide in momentary awareness, even in the process of a supposed objectively temporal task - another perceptual misnomer of the deluded mind.
What stems from the self cannot be liberating because it is not only a mirage, but because it is a mirage-collage of impersonal emergent phenomena, it is impermanent - and with out contractive, grasping tendency, beyond an understanding of its adaptive utility, a belief in the means and methods of a self can only lead to the scourge of non-presence. And ultimately, a great and shitful dissatisfaction.
For the overmen amongst you, this is not asceticism. It can’t be ascetic because it is no-thing. It just is.
Look at it this way - this practice could entail a mastery of a drive, or set of drives primarily responsible for bending you over a barrel, ruining even our potentially best, most life-affirming moments. Which are so often tainted by our inability to embrace the offerings of reality to their fullest extent.
Our potential for affirming life as it is, and having the courage to face it head-on, with no sneaky monkey tricks to try to escape it, that’s what is at stake here. So in the realest sense, this is a turning into reality.
Any stated project of self-overcoming must acknowledge the self as it is commonly understood as a debilitating physiological and sensory contraction - but a potentially flexible and powerful adaption.
It's the kind of thing one would imagine the overman will require on his inevitable and much-lauded emergence.
Test it for yourself. You don't need to believe me.
Is Everything in its Right Place? Is This Okay?
Many think I'm insane for doing sesshin. My last-man friends who I genuinely like despite their handicap, when their jaws are not agape in the disbelief that right now I’d prefer not to grill and sit instead, exhibit faces contracted in sneering cynical laughter. I couldn’t care to judge however.
I'm asked how sitting in pain for 11 hours a day, washing dishes and cleaning toilets as Samu, sitting enjoying a cup of Tea mindfully and slowly, could bring me as much pleasure, more so than moments of absolute hedonistic excess in my life. how this serves as viable leave to the means to and end known as a job.
I simply tell them what my teacher told me - this, my dunder-headed friends, is the end to a means.
While I can see ample space for humorous comments at me enjoying cleaning toilets in the same way I like a Campari on a hot summer afternoon, please hear me out.
Understandably, some respected frens would critique all this apparently 60’s bozwellox on intellectual grounds and as a prime example of the ascetic ideal. That of turning the will inward. An inversion. "Turning against" life they say.
Logically speaking therefore, the right action in dealing with existence is the opposite - a radical turning in to the "powers" inherent in what I’ve been calling the mirage of the self. This to them, is “life-affirming” which is a set of words used to describe a generally not very well defined, or thought about, physiological state.
I understand the sentiment and agree that many religious traditions are tainted by such attitudes and posturing. As I’ve argued ad infinitum on here, it’s harsh on religion to be a sole inheritor of this tendency. It is my contention that we all suffer from this almost all of the time.
The human being has a wiring problem. That’s why it needs to go to such extreme lengths to undo many of these neurophysiological short-comings.
I will disagree with you, though - won't I - because even though it seems one way or the other, there is no space for paradox in this world.
In my reasonably in-depth experience, my moments of what most would see as "life-affirming excess" are still undeniably tainted by unsatisfactoriness. No matter how small this taint, as an honest man I must acknowledge it is always there. I cannot deny that, as a result, no matter how hard I try, this outcome falls short of the stated ideal of affirmation.
(Youth is often sighted as having the require degree of perceptual naivety to allow a non-self-conscious discharge of strength in its prime. I agree there is a potential for this, but I can only speak for myself when I say I’ve never seen it in reality. Even in the most bourgeoise of lucked out genetically fit jocks, those who will deliver us from our modern dysgenic morass, this tendency towards life denial still exists. That’s because the idea of a perfect human being is a false one. Even at its genetic best, the essential wiring problem and its consequences remains. I’m not saying any of these things are bad, I think they’re good, I’m simply pointing out that the human animal, even at it’s best, is extremely limited given it’s theoretical potential)
Anyone honest with themselves should understand this; this niggling feeling that despite our best efforts, the libertine hedonism and even the innocent experience of our own powers in our flowering just doesn't quite work.
But you must understand that this dissatisfaction ultimately comes from what we've been discussing - no more and no less than an inability to be present.
Just this.
In physiological terms, as I've written about in depth here, if you're static and in a daze, you're not really here.
If you're somewhere else and not here, you're static. Stuck.
Not dynamic. Not vital. Not vibrating. Not energetic. Anything such as this is fleeting and of pure accident, a feature of impersonal will or emergence.
But I tell you here - no matter how insignificant it seems, all emergence is incomprehensible cosmic importance.
Life is vital by default.
But we're just not here.
How ironic the means to such a mastery lies in the radical confrontation of sitting still!
During my meditation, in the cultivation of simplicity in this oasis of sesshin, of momentary living, we are allowed to taste the vitality of the cosmos; every non-dual meeting of perception is a creative and cosmically significant act.
Regardless of all the theory, all the threads, all the blabber - all the outward precipitates or words and sounds people make on such matters (whatever peoples is) - remember it is just sounds - and all the intellectual talk, all the arguments - this experience of isness is undeniably the experience of life-affirming presence. How could it not be?
Staying with life as it is and rejecting all fantasy, all notions of what it should be instead.
That's not what's on offer - the conceit to deny what’s so generously presented to you!
We Are Snorted
We realise that we don't breathe in air - we breathe awareness. What is air? What is gaseous exchange? These are precipitates.
What is underneath air that gives it a quality of airness that satiates our breathing? What are gases? What quality gives rise to gases?
What is breathing in what?
Are we breathing in?
Or are we being breathed in?
We breathe awareness.
We are inhaled by awareness.
This is the truth of the matter. If you want to understand the importance of breathwork, its true transcendent quality, beyond mechanism, you must see this truth.
The recognition of awareness as the jewel, the totality, all there is, as an incomprehensible wonderment that is also no-thing - being in this place where all efforts and discursive thoughts fall away and are seen as empty. We are left only with awareness. And vibrant phenomena. And nothing else.
This can be known only by the practice and wisdom of being present. In presence, awareness can be known.
It cannot be sought after since it is already there. It cannot be sought after since any reference to a future-seeking or past-having is already wrong - this cannot be present.
What is pain? What externality ungirds pain that makes it pain?
When I take note of pain during Zazen and investigate it, it often disappears. What does this mean? Something else takes it’s place.
It is the same as thought - in the flux of impermanence, there is no stability whatsoever to be found. Thus, connecting thought to reality as an art becomes of prime importance, a prime concern.
All there can be is awareness; all there is now - time is not an accurate concept. It is useful, but another typically debilitating device in which the contraction that is the self contracts into momentary imagination and delusion. You have rejected the great offering - you are somewhere else. You are preferring to be somewhere other than in the vital present.
The true meaning of "otherworldliness". Literally refusing to be present, to prefer to be somewhere else.
And all the time, the things that we seek - all our strivings and efforts that will lead us somewhere in the future, and that at this time, it will all finally be okay. This is not real.
The self that whispers to you such tantalising things is not real.
It is a mirage of convenience.
And in our recognition of the totality of awareness, in our practice of radical presence, the self-dissipates. It is seen, not simply reasoned, but seen for what it is. Another small, insignificant slither of emergent phenomena fluxing in the infinite totality of awareness and experience.
We recognise that presence and timelessness allow this deeply acculturated and reinforced evolutionary adaption to be hardened beyond its worth.
It becomes brittle as we physiologically brace against reality as it is, and this is represented in our bodies.
Instead, it should become a convenience, a flexible and pliable feature of the great cosmic flux.
1 To 10…
In this way, however short our glimpses of the truth, in Zazen, which is perfect and complete as a practice, we are allowed to develop wisdom that takes root in our lives.
It frees up space to live meaningfully and with access to a deep wellspring of joy in whatever deliberately chosen field we wish to pursue.
The joy to create and live is inconceivably powerful when it comes from a place of immediacy. When the cosmos is noticed and allowed to unfold as it wishes.
You don't have to live in a cave - living in a cave is a choice.
All the great stories and art we all admire come from a place of this immediate and light, vital freeness.
Remember - vitality is a natural state of what is; vitality is, in some way, the flux of emergent phenomena that arise in the infinite field of our awareness.
When I am aligned as much as possible, my flesh feels lighter, vibrating with energy. My brain feels like it's on fire. Even in the most minor things, I feel joy in the interaction.
This is turning away from life?
Remember this, and consider allowing yourself access to this jewel through practice.
You will recognise in your efforts over time, that your practice is of cosmic significance. Truthfully, it is not even you who undergoes this great work. This is the cosmos practising, a part of the cosmos expressing its wish to evolve - to wake up!
The secret of breath counting meditation lies in this - this is no beginner's practice. They all have it wrong because they cannot see. Even though there seems to be a sequence, 1-10, this practice is not sequential!
Just this. Just this breath.
It is not you counting!
It is the cosmos counting, and every time you lose track, this is just "you" getting in the damned way! Let it unfold as it will.
Breath counting is an advanced practice. One of a few advanced methods.
The ability to live genuinely presently emerges to us.
Please repeat this to yourselves every evening as a critical matter, as I have started to do:
"Let me respectfully remind you life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken. Take heed. This night your days are diminished by one. Do not squander your life."
With supreme respect and goodwill to you all,
~A
There are stories of enlightened humans who had to consciously keep at least one vice in order to stay grounded with the normies (one foot here and another in hebben, so to speak). Yours might be contempt haha