Praise

Praise to the Avatar of this waning earth. 

Who sees all through a sun-woven eye.  

Who lives for each in deathless rebirth.

Who loves the single one without remove. 

Who stands indifferent to all, in noble silence.

Who IS all.

Praise, I say! With my many friends in this river. 

Praise to that Giver of the Law that unbinds.

Compassionate. Merciful. Merciless in Love.   

Praise to the Maker of the conscious Heart. 

Praise. 

                               Adoration. 

                                                                  Praise. 

*******

But... why praise?, say man and woman. 

Is what IS a thing that can be praised? Or should be? 

Oh no. No, said the river stones: 

Praise only if you're dying,

like all of us. 

Praise only if you've slapped away like a fatuous housefly 

your great fool's burden of effort. 

Praise only if your debt runs so deep 

that to pay it you must go even deeper. 

Praise only if the one who lives you

lives on.

Or, good human—

if praise is yet beyond you, 

remember what it was He said

to pass on to yourselves, one ear to the next,

as though it were the mother of all secrets

on that languid afternoon:   

"All of this is nothing

but the One True Water of Consciousness Itself." 

Art As Undercurrent

Apart from all spiritual virtue, my Guru was a consummate artist and intellectual who elevated the sacred tradition of ego-threatening inquiry to magnificent new heights, much to the dismay of those around Him who were unprepared, and I count myself one among those constantly. He called himself a "subversive", and any serious study of His art and writing proves that amply. Hardly a week passed in His lifetime in which He did not level some manner of powerful critique at what He called "our little cult". And into His last days of life, He never stopped undermining our own arrogance when it came to matters of human liberty. You could regard His entire life as a struggle against non-liberty, against suppression of His lighted person, and against the subtle aggression we, as egos, threw in His direction with almost every move He made in order to free us from ourselves. Such is the drama of an Avatar in the human domain. 

This section of my work is a direct response to my Guru's request for "derivative art and critical writing" to be made by devotees out of His Orpheum Trilogy and other works. The Trilogy itself stands as one of the most depthful and trenchant critiques of cultism penned in the history of literature. Carrying on this tradition of internal critique is a matter of love, and it must never die out in succeeding generations. To bring awareness is to stand in judgment of no one. 

I see my sangha in its birthing process, something like what Buddhism was going through around the year 487 B.C. As we move toward incarnating a culture free of exoteric faults, we will also have to move away from patterns of the world in its modes of superficiality, control, and presumption of knowledge. This is necessary growth. 

With a feeling of humor and generosity of heart, I offer these words as baroque wood thrown into the Holy Fire. May they provoke reflection, more sensitive attendance to the Source of wisdom, and may they help to create a freer air in which we may openly consider Reality, while the days are still light and calm. 

The worst day of your life will be

the day you can no longer hear My Shout.

— Adi Da Samraj, Verbal Notes, March 2007

The True Devi

The Community of those who become Devotees is the true Devi, the Divine Consort. It is also true that the world is the Avatar, the totality of human beings is the Avatar. It is humanity as a whole that is the Avatar in human form, not some specific human individual. No apparent or exclusive manifestation is in itself the Avatar.

Only the whole is the Divine manifestation without exclusion. Therefore, the Guru is not the Avatar in that exclusive sense. Mankind is the Avatar. I am his Heart. When the Avatar realizes his true Nature and Condition, when he realizes me, he will cease to be hidden. He and this Community of which I speak will become one and the same at last. Then his sadhana is fulfilled, and he will manifest his Beauty in the world for the sake of all beings. Only then will he live freely and do his Divine work.

But people want the Guru to be the Avatar. They want that exclusive God image, whereas God doesn't exist in the exclusive sense. God is absolute. And the Guru lives as the Present Divine, not because he has attained anything, but because he has been undone. So he doesn't represent himself as the Divine in the exclusive sense. In his ecstatic speech he claims identity with the Divine, but he is not making a statement about himself, about his ego or his personal qualities in some exclusive sense.

He is making a statement about all beings and worlds, about the Nature of Reality, the Condition that is God. Of course, until there are others who realize that same happiness, that same enjoyment, he seems unique, and he functions for them as the Source of the operation of the Divine Siddhi in order to generate the life of Understanding in them. But in fact he doesn't exist as God in any exclusive sense whatsoever. So there is no Avatar except the whole, if it makes any sense to use such words at all.

— Adi Da Samraj, Garbage and the Goddess

(Copyright © 2015 The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved.)
 

Respect

"I Am not a pattern. And I Have no pattern."

— Adi Da Samraj, Verbal Notes, February 2007 

Respect to the women in black, 

the gentle moon and the noble sun

who gave hands and eyes 

to the one true god

and did not ask for them back. 

Respect to the women in saffron, 

the unchanging fire and ever-changing water, 

daughters of the noble swan, 

who hammer a bridge from there to here 

to take us into the dawn. 

Respect to the women in white, 

the hardly known, the rarely seen, 

the silent and outspoken queens, 

who travel deep in the scorn of night  

to plough a new land in Light. 

Why Throats Closed

Cultures of internal violence— cultures of judgment, hiddenness, and retribution— find the prospect of open conversation, or free consideration, and the open throat (vishuddha) to be daunting.  

Open conversation, free consideration, and the open throat allow for organic changes in human feeling and attitude, and changes in feeling and attitude often change culture itself. 

Those who see themselves as the true servants of a culture, but who truly are “in control” of culture (or ideology, behavior, and narrative), tend to fear organic change caused by the open throat. And more than that, they may also have come to fear the consequences of seeming to be “wrong”, or self-mislead, in the very same 'violent' cultural milieu they themselves have helped create. They may close their own throats as a result. You can see this circular pattern of egoic self-protection everywhere you look these days. 

A violent cultural milieu may not yet be physically violent (or excommunicating), but still may indulge in gross patterns of psychic and emotional violence — projections of shame, blame, judgment, and the idea that others in the culture may be “bad” or “wrong” by virtue of not being in alignment, either with prevailing thought patterns or with the closed narrative already made by cultural elites. 

When you see a leadership living in fear of change, or in fear of open conversation that may lead to organic change, or in fear of the simple declaration that things may not merely be “OK”, then you may be operating in a culture of some internal violence, in which members engage the art of self-censorship, holding to the cultural norm so as not to be socially targeted. A simple test of this is whether or not free conversation can actually be had among a general population without repressive consequence.  

Overall, wherever we see this pattern, we see a profoundly unhealthy situation. The labor it takes to heal out of it—by person, by group, by community—can't be underestimated. 

I have a few friends left in the Western ivory tower, and they are saying: “Don't you see. We’ve already lost our ability to speak freely. We've already lost our civil society. And now we are in a great struggle to get it back.” 

Put another way: is there anywhere on this earth where—if I do harm to no one—I can be guaranteed the right to remain alive, and yes to speak or write freely, without fear of reprisal?

It's the free expression part that's hard for many to tolerate. 

2015, year of the Green Wood Sheep.  A time of mystery and worry around every corner, but with resolution for those who choose well. 

As the yarrow sticks spoke this morning: 

    It is only when we have the courage 

    to face things as they are, 

    without any self-deception or illusion, 

    that a light will develop out of events

    by which the path to Unity may be recognized.

   —   I-Ching 

Or as the great Master often said: 

What do you not want to talk about? 

Primal Circumstance

A devotee of Neem Keroli Baba recently said that, almost equal to the vision of his guru, which was beyond all human words, came another vision: of all his friends clumped together at his guru’s feet, and more, what they became there — loving, unguarded, happy, and transformed beyond any power of their own — in so ample a Light. That scene is mostly what this Baba-devotee remembers of those incomparable days when his guru lived and walked the earth, and with an odd kind of clairvoyance, he knows he must move to bring that scene to life again, among all his gurubhais, and then, in seva, to the whole of the waiting world. 

Subversive

1. Overheard

I’m no longer a danger to anyone in this menagerie. 

I’ve been cornered into a submissive position, 

to be sold in the common market among you. 

But you've forgotten I’m a subversive. 

I did not join; and I’m not a member. 

My presence can't be allowed, even in my own culture, 

because what I would tend to undercut here

is the very thing that is trying to control me

and keep me invisible to the world. 

Yes, this force can keep on repressing me. 

It is, after all, in charge. 

So it can cancel my appearance and my influence. 

And see: all of this isn’t happening only in your society

out there, but it’s happening right here.

Your institutional culture is false —  

but it has me under it’s thumb. 

My subversiveness has been eradicated

from the culture itself. 

And clearly it’s not allowed in the world either. 

Everyone’s posing. 

But I’m saying: You've got no clothes on. 

You’re naked. 

You don’t have a subversive voice among you anymore. 

But my own culture must be a subversive voice. 

Because I am.

You can either repress me and make me palatable, 

or you can understand me as a subversive 

who is challenging your own ego-cult 

and the total construct of your existence. 

That is who I am, Evelyn.

I will always be relevant here,  

so long as I am not repressed by my own. 

I will be relevant in all generations to come.

    — Overheard Speech before Raymond Darling’s Departure from the Asylum

2. Epitaph

Who among our saints was not a subversive? 

A troublemaker, an incendiary— 

reclaiming our land barefoot 

in the fold, but not of the fold.  

Luring us in with an all-familiar face

only to prove not a friend at all, 

but an enemy of our state. 

That our Lord spoke mutinous words 

should not confuse our “little cult.” 

That we might slay Him quietly for it

is what He saw and wrote about,

so don’t scapegoat the poets for citing Him. 

He foretold the rise of bureaucrats

who weigh acts over presence, 

who speak in stolen words,

posturing at the foot of an edifice

that lives only to be melted like sand—  

not by one, or even by the many, 

but by the command of sunlight

which bears down warm and even

like the smile of fate. 

Do we say: “Finally now, He’s free.” 

A ruling class often strikes 

as somber or heavy-handed

in defense of its hard-won territory

which so often is a gravesite. And still:

a column of blind light pierces

the lone black cube on all six sides. 

3. Warning

And, for the “Great Reward” they seek, expect, and, soon, demand, the “followers”, like humorless accountants, always think they only need to be — or, even, only seem — “quite good”, according to the “Lifetime-Rules”, parentally prescribed! And truly neat, of course! As sticking-pins are “to-the-point”! And, so — on “pins-and-needles”, “snug-as-bugs”, and “good” as two white shoes — they merely wait, for payment, in their counting-rooms! Therefore, the “good followers” of ego-“I’s” religion only think — and talk— and wait. Waiting for the future to pay, and Prove, and flatter all the past accounts!

But, false religion’s self-indulgent “good”-timers, of clever waiting’s deceitful Mummery of ego-“I”, never — to their satisfaction — fully, really, ever get the “Goods” they want from “The All” they have enslaved. Therefore, the childish collective disappointment of the “followers” of Evelyn, at Saint-and-Ear, was Hard! expressed — at Raymond’s “unacceptable behavior”. After they had been so “good” — and had, so nicely, Worshipped him! Indeed, their collective judgment of Raymond’s “crime”, was equally as darkly signed as Evelyn’s! And everyone, at Saint-and-Ear, was Glad! to sign the fateful document, of Raymond’s terminal confinement!

— The Mummery Book, Adi Da Samraj

4. Lyric

my theater is clean as i want it to be

my ritual orders & tidies the room 

if you so much as whisper i’ll give you the broom 

my puppet sits mutely here perched on my knee 

listening — since the womb 

The Deeper Revision

He thought by doing all things “right”

this corpse would obediently come around. 

He thought by worshipping a photo 

he served the living source. 

He thought he was being religious. 

He thought if he followed the words of truth 

he’d drink truth’s fire-origin. 

He thought it was simpler than it was. 

He thought he had 1479 concerns; 

he had one. 

He thought to ignore the clench within his ribs

and the even harder labor it spoke of. 

He thought techniques were not techniques,

and he engaged them with devotion.

He thought sacrifice was cutting, 

not forgetting. 

He thought he understood what is prior 

to what he thought. 

He thought the body's pleasure 

a hydra-headed witch. 

He thought celibacy was a discipline,  

not divine enchantment in an absorptive state.

He thought he’d given up the world, 

but the outer world lived on inside. 

He thought his friends walked only   

in the shadow of their common flag. 

He thought the man didn’t mean 

literally what he shouted. 

He thought that flame couldn't touch 

his skin. 

He thought the return he made and remade 

was not the great path of return. 

He thought— like most things—

this too could be slept off. 

He thought the loss was

surmountable.  

He thought he was among the chosen. 

He thought he was getting away with it. 

He thought many things, 

and many things thought him. 

He thought wrong. 

And he made a mockery,

          if only for now, 

he thought. 

Circle of Protection

A renunciate's primary responsibility is to refuse to support all illusions in others. And to renounce and refuse all speech that is illusion, and to speak truth to power in all circumstances. They stand in a set apart position, even in relation to their own traditions. 

— Adi Da Samraj, Verbal Notes from February, 2008

One summer in California, I was initiated into what my Guru called His “Sarvadhikari Circle of Protection”. I believe it was eleven devotees, men and women, who He invited to a ceremony on the lawn of His home, the Manner of Flowers. It was a solemn occasion attended by a couple hundred devotees. Each of the eleven came to His chair and received a wooden bowl of Fijian kava from His hands to drink. In that initiation, we vowed to protect our Guru from all possible intrusion and to never allow Him to be “subordinated to the cult of Adidam.” Those were His somewhat caustic words about it. 

At the time, the initiation seemed somewhat mysterious to us. A friend of mine now deceased — Donald Webley — was among the men in that circle. He felt that our Guru was getting ill to the point of death from battling without result against our passivity and sleep, and that it was necessary for us to take up that “sarvadhikari”, or interventionist role, in order to relieve our Guru from having to do so. Adi Da confirmed this was the right understanding. 

I can confess that, at the time, I did not fully grasp what my Guru meant by “speaking truth to power” in the context of our sangha. 

What power? 

And what truth? 

I did not at all see the Mummery we perform around our Guru clearly enough at that time. I did not see how our own religion of Adidam — to whatever degree it had become self-made and programmed, and this was true most of the time — inherently and even constantly scapegoated our Guru with real psychic violence and a force of control He was never able to fully undermine. “Devotees are trying to kill me”, He once said during that time. These are strong words. What do they mean? 

When Adi Da spoke of “your boring and repetitive programs”, I thought, “but we’re just doing what you’ve written and said to do.” 

When He said “you’ve made a religion that has literally nothing to do with Me; it is mere religious entertainment”, I thought, “but we’re following Your own instruction exactly, all of ‘right life’ and 'devotion'.” 

When He said “I am meditating millions. Why are you preventing them from coming to me?”, I thought, “well… everything in its own time.” 

When He said "All I have done on the human scale has been stopped by the culture of Adidam", I thought, "oh that is quite impossible." 

When He said, “I need people around Me who don’t take shit and are willing to call a spade a spade”, I thought, “but who can say it more clearly or forcefully than You?” 

When He said, “why are you not making sure every single devotee hears and responds to My shout?”, I thought, “every devotee can’t handle Your shout.” 

These were among my arrogant and mistaken views. 

At that time and ever since, all the way into His final days on earth, my Guru was calling for a profound intervention on His behalf against what He pointed to as “an insider cult that is controlling, repressing, and stopping My work from going out to the entire world.” 

What is this “insider cult?” 

In my experience, I think the ‘insider cult’ is the ego's cult of loyalty and its constant effort to control the Divine, or that which is authentic Mystery. It is not at all unique to our sangha, and it's a force within everyone. And it seems to be the root phenomenon that appears after a Realizer dies, and it is what turns an esoteric Way into an exoteric religion typically inside of a mere five years, and often much sooner. It is a tremendous and powerful force, not to be underestimated, even by the most discriminating people or groups. 

The "insider cult" may be our own unconscious machine of propaganda that tries to indicate after a Realizer's death that ‘everything is just fine’, that we need only fall in line with prescribed behaviors and rules, and that the only Mummery left among us is ‘disobedience’ to the mutually serving loyalty cult we make in our Guru's absence. 

Esoteric traditions all make the right movement toward putting true spiritual renunciates in the position of guidance. Problems arise when our larger body of renunciates is not yet fully awakened themselves, or when they are themselves bound by ego-patterns that they extend outward in the modes of common religion — toward efforts of power, self-protection, and generalized control of life, thought, energy, and spiritual vitality — or control of the very organic motions of Light . We see this often in the evolution of religious traditions who once had a Realizer at their core. 

But, of course, no authentic renunciates need to make a loyalty cult around them. A true renunciate, as Adi Da suggests, values truth over power, because while power protects the ego, truth undermines it. A renunciate interested in sadhana and growth beyond the early stages of the yoga always wants that company that undermines his or her ego, that company that is most useful and real. One antidote to our own patterns in this kind of exotericism may simply be: vulnerability of confession. When we speak more vulnerably about where we are at and what is happening, this allows for Divine energy and power, or Grace, to move freely, without obstruction by the ego's own more protective gestures of control.     

Adi Da often described our Mummery cult as one in which the “wolves” put out patterns of control and subordination, feeding on religious self-imagery and perceived status. While the “sheep” quietly go along without a contrary word, to maintain their “access” and social acceptance, while no longer being vocal about what they truly feel, think, and see. You can see this pattern in literally every exoteric religious group that exists on earth today. 

To “speak truth to power” may be little more than speaking consciousness to pattern, discrimination to repetition, or vulnerability to invulnerability.
 
Who must take on this “primary responsibility” of voice that all of our authentic Masters so urgently require? 

I feel fairly certain these days that in my sangha it’s not me, nor is it even that small group of “sarvadhikari” initiates my Master called to this vocation. But it is everybody in our sangha now, serving one another and the whole, all at once. 

“Such a profound degree of change cannot be brought about by the virtuous voice alone. Rather, such a profound degree of change can only be brought about by the force of humankind as a collective whole, or the ‘everybody force’. The inherent collective of ‘everybody-all-at-once’ actually is always the only true power."  

— Adi Da Samraj, Not-Two-IS-Peace

I am Doing THAT

I am always Viewing the cosmic domain,

always Exercising My Native Siddhi of Self-Abiding Divine Self-Recognition. 

Where is That? 

It is in My Divine Domain. 

It is Making the entire cosmic domain into My Kiln—Magnifying My "Brightness", to the point of Divinely Translating the entire cosmic domain into Myself, without differentiation. 

I am Doing That. 

— Adi Da Samraj, My "Bright" Sight

Pattern-Breaker

An artist friend who spent the last two years of our Master’s life working hand-to-hand in the same small studio with Him — and who was with Him when His body dropped — told me the other evening over a thimble of bourbon that above all else, beyond all else, before all else: our Guru was a pattern-breaker. 

He said: first thing, when our Master stepped through the doorway every morning, He’d size up the room in a glance, and then start kicking out the psychic door jambs, unsubordinating Himself on all fronts, cleaving patterns, unlocking foreheads, until wind and sunlight were flowing freely again, permitting Him to Work. 

“That’s what I look for these days," said my friend. "That’s what makes me growl inside. When I don’t see it. That’s what I miss.” 

My friend shuffled his young hands, his gifts of life around the tabletop. Then took another sip of plenty poison, polling the amber glass. 

Histories We Avoid

The white-hot history of felt emotion. 

The arctic history of divorce from human sympathy. 

The everyone history of betrayal. 

The royal history of cannabis. 

The humdrum history of erotic encounter. 

The chortling history of the skeleton closet. 

The bullshit history of bullshit-shoveling media. 

The lesson-giving history of less than human culture. 

The lifeboat history of true humor. 

The narrow-minding history of exclusion. 

The unspeakable history of divine-human intimacy. 

The cyclone history of God's own ecstasy. 

The solar-flared history of literary genius. 

The moonlit history of failed prophecies. 

The skyscraping history of monumental art. 

The draw-a-blank history of murder by neglect. 

The unsung history of bona fide devotion. 

The right now history of total metamorphosis. 

The undying history of imperishable love. 

We need to integrate our histories rather than deny them. When we do this, we become whole and compelling again. Before that, we're like mannequins who wonder why, at the end of so long a day, we failed to make the connection. 

        Be not afraid 

        of mistakes 

        and thus make them crimes.

           — Confucious (c. 551 - c. 479 BC) 

Post-Lifetime

1. Overheard

This culture exists now only in the Saint and Ear form.

Look at my own island — it's become an organizational club.

I'm allowed to be only as I fit the icon 

of an ego-made and tribalized religion. 

I'm imprisoned here, for the purposes of the cult. 

This is a business now, and you must see it. 

I'm talking about this because it’s incarnating now,

right before my eyes, in my own lifetime. 

And you'll continue in this foolishness

even after I'm physically gone 

because you're enacting it right now 

while I am standing here. 

So this is my "post-lifetime" in this culture. 

You’re making my culture the exact replica 

of what's already out there 

in the likeness of your endless church institutions, 

or in the image of common human institutions altogether. 

The truth?

Nobody at all even listens 

                     to Me 

                                   anymore

                                                     about

                                                                                                          this. 

      — Overheard Speech before Raymond Darling’s Departure from the Asylum

2. Epitaph

His exit went well, so we’re told. 

A completion, a perfection.  

And this may be so. Or Is.

So celebrate perfection if you’re inclined, 

but it may be worth remembering that

“I’m OK” is the heartless mood, 

the Teflon of religious peoples, 

the all-deflecting hand mirror

that makes our faces look fine

to one another, if not to Him. 

And Evelyn’s joy rises not from wound, 

but from triumph over death:  

“Praise Him! He Is here!” 

is the first declaration of the killers, 

which is why it is exclaimed and not whispered.

After the death of God

all tribes find their native place. 

We all believe we have it. 

We too say we’re the chosen. 

We too have a final word,

and we too make a universe of hierarchy

armed with powers and principalities 

by which we slice and package reality

with the ease of a whistling butcher. 

As if hearing and seeing

were hardly more than what we’d always, 

into life, hoped true. 

3. Warning

Raymond's True Heart-Secret must be understood — by loving him! Indeed, by truly loving him! To truly love him, Is the Way to his True Heart! And true love Is the Way of his True Heart! But, the Saint-and-Ear religion is a “business” — not a Way!

The kiss-the-client Raymond-religion of Evelyn Disk is a seek-forever work of the little, struggling hearts of ego-“I”. The religious life of Saint-and-Ear is a Mummery, of egoic ignorance — that never knows What Is, but always thinks It can be known! Their striving-path of self-indulgent seeking is a merely social enterprise — an egocentric industry of merely-human hands. It is the True religion! Yes! But, made to be un-True! It is the True religion — falsified by the ego-mind of nature’s “Everyman”.

The ego-“I” takes Truth in hand, and makes It die, there — as a Captive Thing! And, by that ever-tightening grasp of talking-mind’s own hand, the Truth becomes, not the Living Light of Is — but the Captive Slave! The Divine Slave — purchased by the mongering ego-“I”! The Imprisoned Slave — forever confined, to do all that is required by Everyman!

Raymond, in his Way of doing love, says every man and woman must, by an ego-transcending life of mindless love, be the servant — not the keeper — of the Real. And Truth, Itself, must be, by every hand, set Free to Be — before any man or woman can, by cash-free gifts of service, be set Free from all the wage-earner’s bondage of Everyman’s bonding, here.

— The Mummery Book, Adi Da Samraj

4. Lyric

my future is my present is my past 

observe my novel deeds to see my face 

i move at such accelerated pace 

my intentions are so mercilessly vast 

that no one saw the sleeve within my ace 

Metaphysical Irony

Only when we don’t admit the Mummery, does it become our fate. 

Only when we fail to notice it, does it sidle up friendly to our Master’s Chair. 

But like all things particulate, like all quantum matter 

        — as our younger physicists now prove — 

                it dissolves, rather handily, 

                            on sight. 

9 Great Laws

1.  Subordinate and Surrender 

As with sunrise, the way all things waken, in sympathy, as if pressed open by unseen fingers. Light wanders through a spinning lens, causing transit, and an unearned peace. No motion to be otherwise. The sound of a newborn thrush. Then only the sound, as the day stands up with an arcade crown, untouched. 

2. Relinquish Familiarity 

Not merely with everything believed, said, or acted on, but with the tempting colors in front of my eyes. I thought I was involved in something grand. But as it turns out, this too is pure imagination. And the thousand god-manly photographs I’ve encircled myself with, like a superstitious housewife, just never stop laughing. 

3. Practice Recognition-Relationship

Silence in any moment when this occurs, and noticing such quiet is beyond rare, but so much like the challenge of love, which, like the love we’ve been Given, must also never cease. 

4. Set Him Apart 

Cannot be done by religious means. 

Never was done by any means. 

By all means should not be on this list. 

But means the earth itself has trembled, when It Happens. 

5. Maintain a Right Circumstance 

'a holy place for holy work'

hermitage is not a camp 

to self-apply a holy stamp 

or yet another island perk 

6. Serve 

The secret of the servant may be akin to the the secret of our form of meditation, in that those who approach the cushion industriously, with other motives than to merely attend, may find themselves burdened with a profitless labor. Whereas the servant, having no position, no authority, no intent, and even no determinate future, often finds herself smiling to herself, or giggling while making the only effort she truly does make, which is to try to contain the upwelling of her amusement, lest other see it, and wonder if she were ever really serving anything, or anyone, at all. 

7. Relate by Means of Gifts Alone 

I once found myself in a line of penitents in my Master’s own kitchen, en route with much haste to His chair. I was, not atypically, giftless, in every sense of that word, also literally. To the amazement of my friends, I redeemed this failure by plucking a deep red, blemish-less apple from my Master’s own tray of fruit, not three feet from the final open door to the living room where He sat. I polished this apple on my wrinkled shirt and entered the room proudly as though it were my own. The apple, that is. That I had the balls to look Him in the Eye and offer it may cast doubt on my grasp of this divine law, but at the very least it is to say that even an apple, prepared by others as if for God Himself, may be poisonous. By some miracle, the Lord held my eyes like a dandelion, with every tug a ‘loves me’. Nothing or everything depends upon the heart of the courier it seems, and what tidings he brings in those much calloused hands. 

8. Turn, Invoke, Commune 

Much more attractive than it looks on paper. 

And not necessarily done in that order, or any. 

Do they amount to three different things? 

And who is it, in the end, who can do any of them? 

If I’m asking all this, I’m probably already doomed. 

Take it from a man who has given up all hope. 

Whatever you do, in the mornings, don’t vow to do it. 

9. Maximize Life-Time in His Sphere of Regard 

A half-blind man sings to himself 

in a bus with seats of molded steel, 

sputtering up the jungle road.

We don’t speak, but have given way to something

in this meadow of newfound life. 

Out an open window the land blurs, sharpens, 

seems scrubbed in never-seen pigments. 

We creak to the edge of a bluff

overlooking flat sea, then step down, 

each alone, to the white iron gates, 

to a hill where the Prince of Daybreak 

lays buried. Quiet here  

as when He lived, and as cavernous. 

A man briskly fans a life-size image — 

the least of His existence on this earth.

I remember a hundred times past beholding Him, 

now no less that time. Overhead, the clouds 

blow out geometries in the perfect pattern 

of an eye, with a blue hole etched center. 

It occurs this may be physically impossible. 

A black-winged bat flees a mango tree. 

A gull cries out as if also to be known.

The feeling is of a dying within, 

like hearing the black news of betrayal. 

This is why I came here — 

for the doors swing open, and one by one, 

we come to the chair, uplift our hands, 

exalt a flower upwards, the flower 

carrying all of what we are, 

and when our foreheads kiss the grass 

it’s not at all a lie,

nor has it ever been, pilgrim,  

that we are here.  

A Measure of Religious Man

Few downturned smiles are more soul-whittling than those made by unearned gravitas. And humor may always be a senior principle to obedience — as pleasurable as self-discipline may be to a certain kind of hermit, this brother at least knows only far too well. We may examine more closely this citation, in light of cultural evidence, and a waning interest in dance:  

“Love-Bliss 
                                                                   is the Inherent Mood 

        of whole-bodily, 

                                   ego-forgetting, 
                        

                                                        devotional, 
                            

                                                                      recognition-response 
                                                                       

                                                                                     to 

                                                                                    Me.” 

Grace

What you'll turn to for good,

without sadness or joy, with not a word,

like the last riven man on earth,

who, indeed, did everything 

else. 

End of Pretense

Anciently it was foretold that the Age of Ignorance and Darkness — our age — would be marked with a word: deceit. 

Deceit tends to flourish when people who know better start acting as if they don’t. When, for myriad reasons, they deny their own eyesight.  

Deceit often grows in a community when we grant each other permission to believe in the creative illusions of a dominant body, which is also our own.   

The figure of Evelyn Disc is nothing but the figure of the Great Pretender. Disc struts heavy on the stage, rattling off and on, in what seems in language to be true — while his every internal motion vibrates with trickery and self-flattery. 

Evelyn Disc kills the Beloved with his mere, yet epoch-making, power of pretense, a power that siphons its fuel from the well of self-deceit in his followers. 

Pretense can infect a community like a microscopic virus, distorting its public personality, and making it contemptuous even to its own. 

Pretense often carries a great feeling of truth. It begins with a closed eye and ends with an open mouth. More a mime of death than a speech-maker on a stage.  

Pretense is the all-annihilating human indulgence, the colossus of our world, straddling nations and minds.

In my community, maybe in yours too, we pride ourselves in being absorbed only in what is true. 

Peoples with integrity will swear off pretense. 

                    They’ll sip, with some temperance, 

                        the lucid waters of life. 

6th Stage Talk

so many words about it

the only language is you don’t open your lips 

— Ikkyu 

When I was a Zen monastic acolyte I used to indulge the habit of dharma talk. Not so much out of arrogance, but more because I actually thought the word — the idea in my own too fluent mind — was equal to the thing. I had convinced myself that I, at least, knew what I was talking about when I opened my mouth and made pious sounds come out.  

When I incanted such words as “radical” and “consciousness” and “dharma” and “right,” I was like a man in the grip of febrile hallucinations, believing these high-sounding words of mine referred to real things I knew about. And I juggled my fancy words around making sense of reality — not only to myself — but to others too. In ashrams, this is how we stay certain we're in control of our faculties. 

One of my favorite Zen masters in early days was a man named Ikkyu. I think it’s fair to say that, were he my own master while alive, I would have been one of those hyper, well-meaning types — newly bald and enterprising — who he would have dragged off to a Kyoto brothel in the evenings, there to drink and consort, but truly, and mostly, to laugh. Likely until his ribs ached at the sight of this baffled, yet hopeful novice, who knew not what to do in such a deftly invented scene. “Is this a test? And how to pass it! Oh, Lord Buddha!” (And, of course, the women…) 

When I hear community members in our various colonies branding themselves or others renunciates, I'm often reminded of Ikkyu. I like to entertain, in my own mind, such renunciates robed in their traditional black and brown cloths, sitting cross-legged at a low lacquer table piled high with empty porcelain sake bottles in a 14th century Kyoto brothel, arms enclasped tight with a half-in-the-bag and cackling Ikkyu. Part of the reason Ikkyu took his monks to brothels was to hammer the iron of their practice and test its strength. The high-spoken words (“radical,” “consciousness,” “dharma,” “right”) of false renunciates may be best tested against Reality in the hands of an erotic smith. For almost nothing unveils the true body of an aspiring priest than a witnessed grappling with sexual desire and all the intricacies of love. 

I encountered this terrible fact myself — something like a bucket of ice water thrown in my face — when I first came into the company of my Guru, fresh from Korean temple encampments. That bucket of ice water left me with an unflagging skepticism about religious big talk to this day. I’ve found big talk, in my own case, to be mostly a way of navigating my own worldly purposes, in the way a neon jungle frog will balloon his vocal sack to avoid sex, to get sex, to evade unwanted attention, or to appear too big to eat. 

It is well known that Ikkyu was a mostly noiseless man. He hummed most of his sounds into rice-paper poems that now mock his long lost body, having stood the test of time. I wonder sometimes if Ikkyu fell into his deeper silence as a demonstration against the clamor of the Daitoku-ji monastery itself. Those novice bodies. Those silver-tongued wits. Those words. 

**************

flowers are silent silence is silent the mind

is a silent flower the silent flower of the world opens 

— Ikkyu 

Archipelago

1. Overheard  

You did not provide Me a holy sanctuary.

You've used my Island to entrap Me

and make me a puppet for the cult. 

I’m either taken advantage of or completely dismissed. 

 When I’m on My Island, that is how I am pushed away, repressed. 

Nothing at all is happening out there, 

and on My Island, I’m under house arrest. 

You’ve turned My Own Island into a home for the cult. 

You’ve turned My Own Island into the State Mental Facility 

for 

Saint 

&

Ear. 

     — Overheard Speech before Raymond Darling’s Departure from the Asylum

2. Epitaph

The air may circulate Him. 

The earth may stand up for Him. 

The water may bear Him. 

The fire may gladden Him. 

Elements known to refuse corruption 

forever gain the favor of epochal magicians. 

If we stand on this far equatorial rock

He may be more closely felt. 

Although in earliest days He wondered —  

Will a hum beneath the earth 

be my only witness? 

Fire ants do crowd the beaches here, 

excavating their tunnels on top soil, 

tapping feelers to avouch one another. 

Suspension bridges hang lightly

from one round beach to the next,

erecting prisons with walls of leaves. 

If we start with a religious summer camp, 

we may end in a wintered papacy. 

So perhaps it’s wisdom to moderate our hopes 

for our holy life to imitate a perfect art.  

Here where the canvas towers above all. 

So monumentally alive. 

3. Warning

Of course, once Raymond was “safely” confined, Saint-and-Ear quickly recovered from the “Incident”. And all its “religious” doings continued, thereafter. Just as they had before Raymond’s unexpected — and deeply unwanted — arrival, among the “faithful”. And the “Incident” was never much mentioned, again — except to dismiss it, by a brief and caustic mention of that one word. “Oh, yes—the ‘Incident’. That was so long — ago.” And, always, the “Incident” was casually dismissed and discounted — as if it were a foreign substance. Or, at most, a freakish occurrence, due to fakery. Or, some kind of aberration, caused by an insane person — inadvertently allowed in, from the “outside”!

After Raymond was “safely confined” — and, altogether, discredited and defamed — Evelyn Disk continued, as ever before, to Pretend the Raymond-role, in all the Raymond-rites of the Raymondite “religion”. The “real” Raymond was — with certainty, as an article and act of “religious” faith — presumed dead, and “safely” absent. And everything was accounted for — by means of Evelyn’s famous Story of the “Ape-in-the-lake”.

Evelyn, himself, continued to provide all the explanations sought — and all the myths “required” — by everyone at Saint-and-Ear. And, quite simply — and easily, too, it seems — everyone forgot about Raymond. Himself! And As he Is! And where he had been sent to never Be, at all!

— The Mummery Book, Adi Da Samraj

4. Lyric 

spirit me off to my island home 

where elders fill my ears with lore 

they say they’ve heard a lion’s roar 

they say it’s mane cannot be combed 

as we sweep an eggshell from an open door