Remember: you can't forget.

Another knot for the mind:

In trying not to get lost in thought or day-dreams we create a frustration born of an enforced duality. Sitting in meditation we attempt to remain as a mere witness, passive yet detached, but this apparently 'more spiritual' state/experience is unfortunately lost every time we become unintentionally absorbed in thought/thinking. This absorption happens so easily and naturally that we cannot see it happen. Only afterwards when the thought has passed do we realise that we were absorbed in thinking and our detached witness state, lost.

Being lost in thought is the meditators bete-noir.

But what is actually happening here? What does it mean to be 'lost in thought'?

It seems obvious that in trying to maintain a detached witness state we are in fact enforcing a dualism onto experience. Actually becoming absorbed in thought and loosing that dichotomy between subject (witness) and thought (object) we are effortlessly lost in a real unity where the observing and separate I is 'lost' in thinking. The I becomes merged with thought. Subject and object flow effortlessly into one.

Thinking itself seems to happen spontaneously and yet so does the apparent act of 'seeing' or 'witnessing' a thought, and the act of being 'lost in thought'. One minute you are contemplating a thought/memory, the next you are 'lost' in a day-dream. This all seems to happen quite naturally and easily.

In attempting to maintain the witness state through practice we try to control our thinking as (we have been told), thoughts distract us and we loose ourselves in the realm of illusion. And yet the idea that the witness state is better than thought/thinking also lies within the realms of illusion.

What is thought but awareness/consciousness appearing as a fleeting mental form or ephemera. Thoughts themselves are awareness, just as the witness state is. Absorption in thought and forgetting the witness state - day-dreaming - is awareness too.

Now, how can awareness loose awareness? If both witness and thought are awareness appearing as witness and thought, then there can be no such thing as 'forgetting'.

The important point is that there is in fact no-one who can 'forget' the witness or become 'absorbed' in thought. The whole process is happening without reference to an 'I'. Only a separate individual could loose its awareness and become 'lost in thought', which is experienced as 'other', separate and troublesome: a distraction from the pure empty witness we have read so much about.

Only a separate 'I' can try to maintain this lofty witness state and it therefore takes on certain 'spiritual' practices and rituals/repetitions in order to do so.

The illusion of an 'I' attempts to extinguish the illusion of separate thoughts which block the experience of the true unpolluted witness. Take away the notion of an 'I' and all we have is awareness: awareness watching itself (as apparent subject and object)and awareness 'forgetting' itself by absorption into itself. There is only 'remembering' and 'forgetting' to an apparent individual. Really, there is no individual and therefore no-one who can control the movement of awareness and the forms it takes.

Awareness is easy. It is natural, effortless and spontaneous knowing. It is what you are. But whenever you 'remember' that you are apparently an individual separate ego you believe in your fragmentation and therefore experience a fragmented version of reality which is always pure, deep and whole.

Truth

Truth,
We have lost you
Because we have
Named you.

Tangerine,
Scratching its such-ness
Into my being.

The song of the senses
Is the sacred chant
of God.

When dreaming
Things are as they are,
When awake,
Things are as they are!!!

Old war elephant,
Slain, by the eyelash
of a gnat.

Headless, headless,
The universe pours in
Where my face used to be.

Too tired to explain,
What's written here
had to be here,

Fingers typing
by themselves.

Excavation

Dig dig dig,
Dig deeper;

A spade moving
By itself,

Finding nothing
But space.

Sometimes my head's chopped off,
Without even realising,
It was on the block.

Even mountains
- I'll swallow whole.

The moon
Fits nicely,
Inside your head.

Shiva statue,
Closer than
My own face.

Practice your whole life,
The tight-rope's
A million miles wide!

This world is smoke,
So move softly,
It’s all you have.

Night dream
Flows into
Day dream
- Whose dream?

Can’t grab it
And yet,
Mind still shows up
For work.

Spontaneous perceptions
Perceived by no-body,
Even these words,
Even this world,
Floating, in vast sky.

Cows,
Running down the hill,
They're real,
But gone.

Each moment blooms
Like infinite flowers,
Surging forth from the fertility
Of unknowable ground.

That tree,
Smiling,
- as if it knew me.

All these words,
thrown,
Into a black hole.

Prayer

You who are nothing
and yet everything,

You hide beyond my senses
and yet dance in front of them,

You are beyond me
and yet within me,

You stare into my face
yet remain behind my eyes,

Infinite unknowable you,
only you can expel the blasphemy
That I am not Yourself,

Please, I beg you,
Sweep this house clean of doubt,
And demolish its walls forever
So that I may be as full and empty as You.

Parable

A king born into royalty is surrounded by treasure and yet this wealth is something which he quickly becomes used to. His gold becomes like tin and, believing himself poor, begins looking for new riches in distant empires.

How quickly we become used to ourselves and discredit the obvious miracle of the senses in order to seek better magic.

When we cease comparing this to that, even the sodden autumn leaf is the face of God.

Angry, frustrated, depressed.
Where is my creativity?
Forgetting that even these feelings
Are but master-strokes of a hidden brush.

The minds attempt to understand life
Is like the scissors attempt to cut through water.

All of this heavy beauty
happening,
to no-body.

The pen hovers,
Unable to write.

It is inexpressible
And yet it expresses,

It cannot be shown through creativity
And yet it creates.

When the dog tires of chasing its tail
It falls into perfect rest.

This entire universe
balanced,
on the thread
of a new-born’s hair.

Sufi Spinning at the Shine of Baba Shah Jamal.

I found this footage on you Tube. I was here in 2005 and what I saw there was the inspiration behind the 'Dance of the Impossible'.

Enjoy!

The Dance of the Impossible

It’s evening in a foreign land. I’m sitting cross-legged amongst hundreds of men, tightly packed together in the courtyard of the white marble shrine. The pungent perfume of earthy charras hangs like a morning mist and the constant chirrup-buzz of a million hidden insects fills the hot sticky air. Around me the men are passing cheap cigarettes which they tear open and reconstruct as make-shift joints. Holy men and devotees – wiry fakirs and dirty dervishes – smoke with white-shirted IT executives and pot-bellied shop-keepers. Tight fitting peakless Sindh caps twinkle with sequins and towering Punjabi turbans sit snake-like on grizzled bearded heads. Garish fairy-lights illuminate the scene hanging from the gnarled branches of a prehistoric tree adorned with shimmering tinsel. The Urdu murmur of the crowd is barely audible over the piercing falsetto of the Qawwali music pumped from undisclosed speakers. I reach into my pocket take out my notebook and scrawl the words ‘religious discotechque’.

Suddenly – darkness. World has become void illuminated only by the glowing constellations of a hundred smouldering joints. “Allah Hoo!” cries a lone voice and is immediately echoed in unison by invisible people everywhere. “Hoo! Hoo!” bellow voices from oblivion. With the dull chug-splutter-whirl of a reluctant generator, pink red and green bulbs flare up scorching my eyes. The laughing face of my neighbour is a fierce sun-spot. The music slurs and warbles before continuing its high pitched harmonium drone. Green dervishes are draping gold scarves over the Saints tomb. I rub my eyes and try to make sense of the collage, the air scorches my skin. I have had fevers like this.

A stoned fakir, elderly and spectacled pulls at his lop-sided turban, touches his hands to the cool marble of the shrine in devotion and blows wheeze-breath into a huge rams horn bugle, his eyes shining fixed and glazed. More joints are passed and two young IT students lean into me, keen to practice their English. The thin one fires rapid questions at me without waiting for answers whilst his plump serene friend slides a tiger’s eye ring onto my finger, calling me ‘brother’.

There is a sudden commotion at the entrance. Heads are raised and turned, chins – many hidden by a fists worth of white beard – are jutted star-wards. Two men are being led through the squalid press of hot bodies; they each shoulder a huge barrel-like dhol, a double-sided drum with worn yellow-brown skins. Faces in the crowd light up with recognition of the famed drummers they have come to see. I look up, an old man in green robes is muttering toothless-mouthed, ushering us back and clearing a circle in the centre of the courtyard which revels a thick black geometry. We shuffle back and back, clashing and entwining against the precinct wall, forming an impenetrable seated phalanx.

The drummers step in, taking position beneath the dark fractal limbs of the python tree. Both men are young and I suggest to myself that they are brothers not because of any obvious resemblances but because they are complete opposites. The taller one is handsome with bright white teeth a thin manicured moustache and coconut oil in his short curly hair. He wears a twinkling red earring. His companion (or brother), on the other hand is small and scruffy, long faced and thick-lipped. His long greasy hair bleeds over his shoulders towards the ribs of his skeletal frame. Yet his eyes are deep pools; humble yet mysterious, like those of an idiot-savant.

The Qawwali music falls silent and the crowd break off conversations and smother laughter. The drummers are about to play. Standing opposite each other they let loose a volley of beats, slow then fast. They stop. Silence. A bead of perspiration falls from my cheek and is silently absorbed into the white folds of my salwar. They begin again, slow then fast. Again they stop. The sporadic, broken beats have already hypnotised the religious revellers. Again they begin, this time in earnest, slow then fast. The rhythm is daunting and unsettling and has a power which seems to be more than merely musical. There is something animal about it: a part of me wishes to hide in my mothers lap. Drumbeats fill the air, syrupy and thick. Something deep within me suddenly finds the palpitations familiar, a stir of remembrance in my ancient galaxy brain. It’s then I realise that I am not just listening to these insane rhythms but feeling them deep deep inside, closer than my own heartbeat.

A river of glistening perspiration (or are they tears?) cascades down their concentrated faces in the heat of the night, their arms flailing with thin-sticks at their burdensome dhols. An old man steps forward to wipe them dry with a huge keffiyah scarf. People begin shaking their heads from side to side like ‘60’s mop-tops or head-bang like thrash metallers, their neat conservative hairstyles exploding into dishevelment, eyes squeezed closed. I cannot understand whether it is pain or ecstasy which contorts their faces. People are loosing themselves to the music. Some break the ranks of the phalanx and rush forward to dance. It’s clownish and clumsy but the dancers are deadly serious and their eyes blaze with emotion. Clusters of Rupee notes bearing Jinnah’s erudite thin face flutter past the sweating drummers like worn autumn leaves and are soiled underfoot by shaking dervishes.

Bowls of chipped china are passed around overflowing with milk sweetened by strawberries and sugar and I drink a full draft, gasping with satisfaction, milk running down my chin. The bowls are pressed upon the guests first, devotees refusing to sip sweet milk until it has first passed the dry lips of a Scottish backpacker or a Brazilian student. A moon-faced Korean laughs deliriously as a group chubby shop-keepers force another bowl upon him.

Sweat flows and drips, heads shake thrash and wriggle, grown men stumble-dance like children. I suddenly realise that I too am rocking to the rhythm in forgetfulness of myself. A small dervish with long straggling hair rises and steps confidently into the circle with the drummers. People are already cheering him as he starts to stamp his tiny bare feet on the white marble floor. The slap-slap slap-slap they make is almost as loud as the drumming. He moves in his own small circle as if perambulating a mystical fire. He scurries towards the flames then scurries away. Scurries towards then scurries away. His gestures are wild yet controlled, frenzied yet disciplined. I realise that he is not merely dancing to music but approaching God.

The drumming accelerates, becoming faster and faster. Everything appears to be breaking apart but is in fact surrendering to a greater coherence. The small dervish thrusts his arms out wide and effortlessly beings to spin. He whirls in a precise circle his head and long hair flowing over his right shoulder. Spinning and spinning. No dizziness: perfect control. He spins and he does not spin, for he is no longer there.

As if caught up in the gravity of the spin, the drummers too begin to effortlessly turn, their barrel-like drums pulling away from their torsos and lifting horizontally into the air. The beats become a berserk rattle-clash as they spin-on-spot, countering the weight of their flying dhols. Everything is spinning. I think of the blood circling my veins, the turning of the earth and the orbit of planets around the sun. The atmosphere crackles with potential danger; it seems only natural that something or somebody will burst into flames. Anything could happen next, blood may be spilled: we might rip apart the marble tomb and tear at the bones of the resting Saint or cry tears of supernatural joy until we collapse beneath the dust-hot Lahore day. One thing is certain, whatever happens will be done out of love, a free and deadly love.

Somehow I feel at home, understanding everything being said to me. The sing-song of Urdu becomes the avant-garde soundtrack of myself. I shout with the devotees and shake my blonde head as if beaten by the drummer’s sticks. “Allah Hoo! Allah Hoo!” I cannot hear music anymore. “Allah Hoo! Allah Hoo!” My eyes have closed. “Allah Hoo! Allah Hoo!” Is this a dream? Drummers become devils, dervishes dance the impossible.

Through the stoned-dream-chaos of this shamanic Sufi scene I spy the Moon, full and white, through the twisting spear branches of the tree whose roots encase the Saints corpse like a fist. Far above in the midnight sky, stars shimmer, still, distant, serene.

Afterwards, I sit exhausted on the roadside opposite the Shrine under the dim drone of a flickering street lamp enveloped by a swirl of moths, watching the crowd depart with silent decorum. The market is still busy at this late hour and devotees stop in knots to buy popcorn and drink sweet chai. The smell of flatbreads and shawarma fills the air. The music has stopped, the drummers gone home, and yet somehow everything inside me is still turning, rotating, silently spinning. I yawn so hard that my face could split. In a few hours the sun will rise and the sluggish inky dream of night will recede into the colours of day; rose pinks fading into bright pale yellows and bleached whites in the grimy arid air of city diesel dust. Day will turn into night; night will roll into day, and all this as the muezzin lifts his face to the heavens and calls out to God.

This Floating World

It's not that there is an empty self to be found as opposed to a real self. Rather everything, every detail, is self-illuminating shining fresh within its own light. Every sensation is a new sun shining with its own rays.

There is no 'empty self' anchoring or rooting any of this, only a pure and empty space which can never be located for it is always outside of any location. This pure space is limitless and unknowable and from it all things arise spontaneously like passing clouds produced from vast sky.

All is spontaneous self-awareness. Everything is self-illuminating and drenched in awareness - in fact, everything is none other than awareness. Although it is not 'yours' or 'mine' but simply awareness or being. Perceived like this, all is light, all is being.

There is no witness to this because everything is the witness to itself. Self-knowing automatic awareness which happens freely without anyone having to do anything. The 'who' who would act or choose is merely conceptual - an imagined root of the experience of being - and an idea which none the less arises spontaneously and lovingly from the overflowing of pure space.

Its all in the details

One billion years of details:
Details within details within details
ad infinitum.

The glory of the mundane!

Every speck is a new universe
behind which is pure space,
Incomprehensible void.

Writers Block

The hardest thing to write is that there is nothing at all.

Blowing the amber creme
Over the pool
Of hot oily coffee
- a Million worlds.

From dark unknowable void,
Arises 'this'.

Excavation: The Sediment of Myself

Not out there,
but not in here.

There is no object
Without awareness,
There is no Moon
Without Sun.

Paradox

I am either nothing
or everything.

Or, I am the paradox
Which is both.

The Greatest Trick of Them All

I Know that I exist. I am the only measure for what I call 'existence'.

Yet everything arises within myself; my senses and perceptions happen not 'out there' but 'in here', these trees only appear on the back of my retina, nowhere else.

In this way all perception arises spontaneously within myself. Even the concept of 'myself' arises from a deeper silent presence which I will call awareness.

This means that you, dear reader, are but a dream arising from myself like the beautiful surreal images which arise from my deepest sleep.

And yet, for you this is true also. You know that you exist, undeniably so, for perceptions, thoughts, smells, ideas, feelings, emotions and memories arise automatically within you, instantly known by your innate immutable awareness.

In this way You are no dream at all, but the very eye of reality. Indeed for you, I am but a figment, a dream image conjured from your deepest self.

You are my dream
I am yours.

This is the greatest trick
of them all.

The emptiness
of emptiness
Is empty.

The Gift of Oneself (by Valery Larbaud 1881-1957)

I offer myself to each and everyone by way of reward;
It's yours even before you have come to deserve it.

There is something in me,
In the depths of me, at the centre of me,
Something infinitely arid
Like the summit of the highest mountains;
Something that could be likened to the blind spot on the retina,
And echoless,
Which none the less can see and hear;

A being who leads a decent life, who lives, however,
Everything I do, and listens impassively
To all the mutterings of my conscience.

A being made of nothing, if that's possible,
Who does not feel my aches and pains,
Who does not weep when I weep,
Who does not laugh when I laugh,
And who does not blush when I commit some shameful act,
And who does not whine when my heart is wounded;
Who stays still and keeps his own counsel
But who seems to eternally say:
"I am here, indifferent to all".

Perhaps it is made of void as is the void,
But so big that Good and Evil together
Do not fill it.
Hatred dies of suffocation there
And the greatest love can never find a way in.

So take all from me: the meaning of these poems,
Not what one reads, but what comes through in spite of myself:
Take it, take it, you have nothing.
And wherever I go, in the whole universe,
I always meet, outside me as in me,
The unfillable void,
The unconquerable Nothing.

The Guru

This Guru watches too much TV,
He spits when he talks,
Likes the Lambada.

This Guru might kick you in the balls,
He tells crude jokes,
Treats people as objects.

This Guru used to "body-build".

This Guru sits you in a comfortable chair,
Lets you pee in his toilet,
Then calls you a bloody fool.

This Guru does not act like a Guru
- He is not acting at all.

(for Ramesh).

18/10/09

The Creativity of Impermanence.

Impermanence is not merely the doctrine that all that arises must pass away. It is the profound realisation that both the emptiness from which the world arises and the world itself are both impermanent states.

The emptiness is as impermanent as the existence it creates.
In the midst of emptiness we find a thing; in the midst of things we find nothing.

Emptiness and fullness are the breaths of existence.
They are the rise and fall of reality, the Father and Mother of every moment.

Things are neither trapped in Samsara nor lost in Nirvana. They are impermanent which means that they are not one or the other, but both: ‘form as emptiness, emptiness as form’ as Nagarjuna wrote.

Both Nirvana and Samsara are impermanent.

Existence is non-dual.

Everything that arises passes away into……this, this, this.

24/10/09

Gravel

Waiting for the bus,
I watched the tarmac
And listened to the cars.

I saw how the road
Pushed itself into my being.

I felt the thrill
Of a piece of gravel
Scratch my core.

6/10/09

Hard Work

It all seemed like such hard work,

I'd have to learn Dzogchen meditation in lofty monasteries
Practice yoga with recluses in hidden caves
Learn to eat meat again and not mind
Be kind to strangers
Do the 'course in miracles'
Visit all my favourite gurus
Learn to lucid dream
Enjoy my gruel
Become wise, compassionate and sexless.

I didn't know that a single breeze,
Is enough to blow it all away.

16/6/09

Welcome to Life

Life cannot be written about.

Words cut and cleave, chop and kill.

Now, there is only the mist falling over trees, the music on the radio,
the tingle of my fingers, my dry coffee mouth...

This is Life.

Always here, always new, always free.

14/6/09

Time

I pass through time like a dark ship passing through fog. No landmarks hove into view, no horizon cuts the grey weather. The stars have closed their eyes and the wind has held its breath. I am propelled forward unknown and unknowable, a mystery fleck, a jot of flotsam, a fragment of mammalian flesh, leaving nothing but the insubstantial froth of a short lived wake that merges into the murky ocean, a single seascape, in which all evidence that I ever lived is sure to drown.

26/4/09

Grace

Reading those words
Something inside me snapped like a twig.

Suddenly the veil evaporated
Revealing radiant life,
Naked and raw.

I became a child in a garden paradise
A happy animal merged with the deep silent Now.

Time crumbled and the flowers kissed eternal.

In love with everything
I laughed at the obvious,

Which for 29 years
Had been so immaculately clear
That I was blind to it.

Momentum

Everything is.

Yet everything strives.

Perfection is inherent in toil.


5/14/08

Once,

Bed-ridden in a fiery land

I dreamt a sacred nightmare,

And learnt of a terrible paradox:


‘That which we trust to be most real

Is but a faint and momentary echo

of a mystery too deep to see.’

4/1/09

Reflections of Nothing

Reflections of nothing

Must look like something

If the law of opposites is to be believed.


In which case I am always nowhere,

Yet I clothe myself in mountains and stars,


I am a desolate drunk, stubborn in self-loathing,

I am a smiling child, waiting for the next hee-hee-hee.

4/1/09

Intimacy

Something is given;

A gull, the waves, the taste of Coffee

And it is given fully.

In that moment you are treasure-bound,


Because you said ‘yes’,

And what’s more,

Because you didn’t.

4/1/09