• May 26, 2025

    Do you think you know where you are? Have you forgotten the impossible miracle of being here? That there is a universe of stars, an earth full of wonderful living creatures, the magical qualities of water, the limitless possibilities of sensing, the mystery of four cardinal directions, color and sound. To say this is the product of evolution and almost endless time is to say nothing, a concept trying to explain the extraordinary fact of existence.

    As impossible as it is to explain this existence, consider also that each of us sensing creatures passes from this world. To where? We know nothing of this. Do you assume there is nothing more outside this world? Or are you willing to find out?

    Our physical body was given to us when we entered this world as our way of being here. Are there other worlds to enter where we are given the means to be there?

    Can you prepare for your passing? Let go of attachments? Face the unknown with no assumptions? To find a world as strange as this one was when first we entered it.

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  • April 15, 2025

    I breathe in and out. Breathing brings the outside in and the inside out. Attending to this, outer merges with inner, one space, making the two, one.

    There is no division in this one space, an attention-space. No boundaries. The phenomena in the attention-space are not limited.

    I ask: where does attention come from? From my brain? Is it mine? This is a difficult but rewarding inquiry. I discover that there is attention mediated by my thinking. And there is attention that rests directly on sensation and feeling. Can attention attend to itself? I find that it can. This is a wordless state. It requires only that I allow it.

    The more I study attention, the more it seems to exist apart from me. I live within a field of attention. I can sense/feel the attention of others, animals, connected to me in this field. I am a participant in attention which moves me, informs me. It is a bridge to my experience, uniting me to my world. The medium of my being.

    In the one space, the attention-space, prayer is engagement.

    There is something else…the power of intending. The power to wish. Intention is thought. Intending is will. In the attention-space, intending is an act with consequence. In the attention-space, what I wish for exists as me. I am united with the action and the consequence.

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  • April 3, 2025

    My experience with sensation and the thinker.

    First, when I switch my attention to sensation, it’s like there’s a burst of sensations one after another. There are the pressures of my butt and my arm on the chair; the skin over my eyebrow might itch; there is a sound in my ears that I might refer to as a constant high frequency hiss; there are temperature variations to each different sensation, though not all of them. Sometimes there are scents, but rarely do I notice tastes. There are dozens of others that pop up to attract my attention, then disperse as others appear. All the sensations are “me and mine” …my body-centric sensations.

    Second, I notice sensations external to my body. These can be the sounds of motor cars, people walking and talking on the sidewalk, the furnace starting and stopping, the changes in the quality of light in one part of the room in which I’m sitting compared to another part of the room…and of course I can sense a temperature increase as the afternoon sun, right now, shines through the window.

    Third, I decide to stop naming all these sensations and rather than noticing each separate sensation as unique, there arises a lack of differentiation between the sensations of “myself” and sensations external to “me”. There are just all these sensations floating around with no attachment to “my ownership” of them. They are just different types of vibration, without the naming of each form.

    I might use the word orchestral to describe the developing reception of these sensations. There’s no longer the increase in frequency of these different sensations arising as at the very beginning of this experience. I might say that instead of all these popcorns popping, these polka dots of sensation arising, there is just a broad horizontal swath of sensation. More importantly, there is less and less of the “me” that’s giving attention to these sensations. There is less the observer and more the observed.

    There is still a centre point of sensing. However, it decreases in density and location as that horizontal band of sensation I previously experienced gets wider and more vertical or higher or northward…into space. It is a three dimensional band of sensation and once more there is less of me, the thinker, the observer.

    Then, there is a sensitivity to space…spaciousness… that is absent of sensations rooted in the physical world…,but it’s still something that can be experienced that is definitively different from the sensations produced by the body and the immediate environment to the body. My “me” …the thinker…is more thoroughly dispersed. rsed.

    And what happens when I recall my attention from sensation? From this dispersion of myself?
    “Me” again appears. The thinker…encaged and running on the mouse’s wheel.
    Again. Again. Again.

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  • March 22, 2025
    One of the outstanding observable characteristics of humans is how they assemble a thinker. Do you know this about yourself?

    Thoughts come and go. No matter. You observe something. A thought arises in response. This is not thinking. This is thought. When thought follows along after attention, like the pen follows the hand, recording the movements of the attention, this could be called mentation. No thinker is required. The best poetry is this.

    Thinking is a self-referential process. Your thinker is an assemblage held together by habit and a sense of identity. I am thinking easily becomes I am the thinker. Thinking has one thought following another, requiring limited or no input from the rest of the universe. It’s isolated within the mental sphere, coheres around an idea of an identity, proceeds by way of association and follows the well worn grooves of past thinking, sustained by specific muscular contractions..

    Sit comfortably. Relax the body, releasing all the muscular tensions not required for sitting. Take your time. This has many layers. Then bring attention into sensation, all the sensations of sitting and breathing. Observe if there is part of you that is withheld. Agree to fully engage in attending to sensations and breathing. Agree to have nothing else to consider or attend to. Thoughts come and go? No matter.

    Notice when you withdraw from engaging with sensation. Does this coincide with forming a thinker? Can you observe the assembling of the thinker as it occurs, the transfer of attention to a center in seeming control, becoming the thinker, a center that limits and screens engagement? When you have seen this many times, returning each time to simple attention on sensation, you have learned to engage in the real world.

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  • March 2, 2025

    Gravity pulls everything closer to itself
    what we build up it pulls down.
    Feelings of euphoria
    can trip on the sidewalk and fall.
    We leave footprints in the snow
    Christ looked to heaven and was crucified.

    Full of holes
    the ship Truth sinks to the ocean floor.
    What purity of being must try to resurrect its bouyant possibility
    a vessel which can float despite the weight it carries
    sea worthy and worthy to be seen.

    When we cease to fly we are easy prey
    truth lifts us up.

    The curse of lies screams its defense
    far and wide promoting.
    Truth does not compete with made up rules
    it is a vessel which floats
    inside the mysterious chambers of the heart.

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  • February 18, 2025

    Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.
    -Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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