Who am I?

What is my purpose here?

What is the meaning of this life?

What is this human species I am a part of: what is this human nature, mortality & potential destiny?

What is this history of civilization: this glorious art, architecture & literature, these miracles of technology & invention, this endless politics, trade & competition?

Is there such a thing as progress?

What is this planet we are on, these species, this life that we are a part of?

What is this time that seems to pass from past to present to future?

What is this space I am in: this solar system, galaxy, universe & cosmos we are in?

What are the laws of nature: physics, chemistry, biology, etc. — can we even know a single atom?

What are these dualities: true & false, good & evil, light & dark, male & female, superior & inferior, etc.?

What is the fundamental nature of reality: is there a metaphysics beyond physics, is there single divine truth?

From a very young age, I began asking questions like this. I want to know, to this day, I am eager & sincere! I have spent my whole life asking questions like this, and I have never stopped. I ask everyone questions like this — rich & poor, old & young, educated & simple, people from all walks of life, people from every tradition… It’s funny, most people have answers! Most people are satisfied with their own answers. But I am not satisfied with their answers, because when I cross-reference them against other people’s answers, the answers contradict. And the most knowledgeable & the wisest enter into even the simplest question, regardless of the subject — “What is an atom?,” “What is time?”, “What is space?,” “What is memory?,” “How does DNA work?,” “What is the solution to the national debt?,” “Does Democracy actually work?,“ “Will humans be replaced by AI & robots?” — their explanations expand into endless complexity, involving one principle after another! Like Wikipedia, every answer leads to new questions, each ‘page’ of the conversation leading the next.

I have read, researched & discussed these and other big questions with the most knowledgeable & wisest teachers I could find, amongst the living & the dead. In seeking to know, to truly know, to truly understand anything — even one single thing — I have been continually frustrated. Everything is beyond me!

I cannot explain to you even one single flower!

Thankfully, the wisest say that the answer is beyond language. They say, “just keep this Don’t Know mind.” Know that you don’t know. Stop struggling. Have faith. ‘God,’ the ultimate, the source that made you & everything; that cosmic process that you are a part of — is beyond your conceptual mind. When the thinking mind ceases to strive, that is when the ten thousand things become one. When heaven and earth, you and the universe — become one. When the problem and solution become one. When surrender and victory become one. When anxiety & peace become one.

“Stop thinking, and end your problems.

What difference between yes and no?

What difference between success and failure?

Must you value what others value,

avoid what others avoid?

How ridiculous!

Other people are excited,

as though they were at a parade.

I alone don’t care,

I alone am expressionless,

like an infant before it can smile.

Other people have what they need;

I alone possess nothing.

I alone drift about,

like someone without a home.

I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty.

Other people are bright;

I alone am dark.

Other people are sharp;

I alone am dull.

Other people have a purpose;

I alone don’t know.

I drift like a wave on the ocean,

I blow as aimless as the wind.

I am different from ordinary people.

I drink from the Great Mother’s breasts.”

— Tao Te Ching, Teaching 20 (Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

But wisdom may come from deconstructing reality: playing with the variables in our mind only. Reality consists of variations on a theme. Play with the variables and the theme becomes clear.

This lifetime is short and our resources are limited. The mind can save us time by simulating scenarios, so we don’t have to physically run every experiment. So, let’s test the limits of imagination itself…

Pick an object, any object. It could be a planet or a person or a cat or a teacup. Begin by observing it:

Does it have a size? Small, medium, large, 6 inches, 1 mile, etc. Does it have a shape? A polygon, a sphere, etc. Does it have a color? Transparent, black, white, red, green, blue and so on… Does it have a weight? 10 trillion pounds, 1 ounce, 1 milligram, etc. A temperature? Boiling hot, freezing cold, etc. Is it moving? Still, slowly, quickly, the speed of light… How does it taste? How does it smell? Etc.

By playing this game, we can observe our object & label it with any number of physical characteristics. (We could also do the same for subjective characteristics. ‘We like it, we hate it.’ ‘It is beautiful, it is ugly.’)

Now just imagine ONE THING DIFFERENT. If the teacup is white, make it red — in your mind. If it is small, make it large. If it is light, make it heavy. Etc. Alright, now imagine TWO things different. If the teacup is whole, what if it shattered? Now THREE things… If the teacup is above water, imagine it under the sea…

We can also play this game in reverse, and run a much more ambitious simulation…

Start with nothing, nothing at all. No planets, no stars, no people. Just emptiness.

Then begin to create a universe, filling it with matter, energy, objects & people.

It is easy to imagine things that are absurd. A pumpkin the size of a planet that smells like roses inside and contains a colony of elves.

It is also easy to imagine things that we’ve already seen in nature. A waterfall. But the waterfall in our mind is not as ‘real’ as the waterfall we’ve seen in nature — it’s just a fuzzy memory, low-definition.

But it is impossible to imagine new laws of physics! Impossible to imagine a universe without space, bodies & minds. Without cause & effect…

Novelists & science fiction authors imagine elaborate worlds that are very believable, but even their realities, though they seem ‘deep,’ are very thin, only stage backdrops for the plot to unfold... Generative AI promises to create infinitely deep worlds, but unfortunately that would require infinite computing power, which continues to frustrate our best efforts.

Now we begin to deconstruct the simulator itself! What are the laws of simulation?! How come the simulation that we call the universe is so much more ‘real’ than any simulation that we can construct?!

Reality itself is infinitely deep, physicists can’t even explain a single atom! And yet, everyone & everything in the universe can be described with this same set of physical variables: color, shape, height, weight, temperature, speed, etc.

If everyone & everything in the universe can be described by a common set of variables, is it possible to imagine anyone or anything in any universe that is NOT described by this same set of variables… ?

Even if you imagine a phenomenon in your own mind, you are visualizing it, you are giving it characteristics.

For that matter, is it possible to imagine anyone or anything happening in any universe, outside of space? No. Even if you imagine a phenomenon in your own mind, you create space for it there. We may not understand space, but how can anything be said to occur outside of space? Wherever anything occurs, even in the mind, that place is space.

And what is occuring in space, if not phenomena? Bodies are moving, minds are moving…

Space, body & mind are characteristics of our perception…

But what is the source of space, body & mind?!

The causeless cause, the end of all effects?

What is The Ground of Being itself?

The source of all characteristics?

The womb of all universes?

The fundamental matter?

MIND ITSELF.

What can be said to exist outside of awareness itself?

How can reality be infinite in every direction, if it is not mind itself?

How can this word ‘mind’ possibly be explained, and in relation to what — if it is all that is?

This ‘Mind’ is not your brain, not your thoughts or your feelings.

‘You’ are not your body — this experience you are having is just one of infinite experiences.

You are Experience Itself, experiencing itself through this lifetime...

No situation or simulation can occur outside of Awareness Itself, so that must be The Simulator, Reality Itself. Now that we’ve identified the source, maybe we can turn it around, instead of letting it turn us around… (But how can you change the color of a single teacup, without getting out a bucket of paint?)

And by the nature of simulation, all possibilities that can be expressed, will be expressed - and are part of the nature of the simulation. (But how can you bear the tragedies on your way to the triumphs?)

Judging things to be wrong or right, go on then: imagine a more perfect universe!

But don’t just make the cup green or red, make this person richer or that person healthier…

Re-imagine all of the laws of cause and effect, all of the laws of physics,

Play God! Show us what you can do!

If you can do it better, well then, I don’t have to complete this sentence…

Transcending the ultimate and the relative, there are no words.

‘Mind,’ ‘Tao,’ ‘Dharma,’ ‘Logos,’ ‘Shunyata,’ ‘Ayin,’ ‘Tathatagharba,’ ‘Alaya Vijnana’ - crutches exist as supports.

When the patient can walk again, throw them away!

The Tao is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.

I don’t know who gave birth to it.

It is older than God.

The Tao doesn’t take sides;

it gives birth to both good and evil.

The Master doesn’t take sides;

she welcomes both saints and sinners.

The Tao is like a bellows:

it is empty yet infinitely capable.

The more you use it, the more it produces;

the more you talk of it, the less you understand.

Hold on to the center.

The Tao is called the Great Mother:

empty yet inexhaustible,

it gives birth to infinite worlds.

It is always present within you.

You can use it any way you want.

The Tao is infinite, eternal.

Why is it eternal?

It was never born;

thus it can never die.

Why is it infinite?

It has no desires for itself;

thus it is present for all beings.

1. Wisdom is impractical, and should be pursued for its own sake.

2. Wisdom has practical bi-products, and its ‘fruits’ should manifest in your life & work.

How can we reconcile these two? Here is one example, from Zen Master Foyan Quinyuan (1067-1120, Northern Song Dynasty - Linji / Rinzai school, translated by Thomas Cleary):

Zen practice requires detachment from thought. This is the best way to save energy. Just detach from emotional thought and understand that there is no objective world. Then you will know how to practice Zen.

Wait, if there is no objective world, how can any way be said to be a “worst” or “best“ way? Indeed, how can there said to be skill: beginners & masters? … This is how the paradox resolves itself: wisdom is harmony with reality. Harmony with reality is desired for its own sake (as ‘the ultimate’) — and is fruitful (as ‘the relative’, in terms of life & work), so it has both (ultimate) inherent worthiness & (relative) practical benefit.

Philosophically, the explanation for this is subtle… Reality has no ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ — there is one Reality across all possible worlds — so how can an ‘objective perspective’ be developed, if Reality cannot be compared to anything except Itself?

The example given by Foyan is ‘saving energy,’ which is a natural principle. An ‘efficient’ species requires very little energy to survive (spending little energy), thrive (acquiring new energy efficiently) & reproduce… A Zen Master is an efficient species, because he or she wastes no energy on superficial thoughts or feelings, which are like waves on the surface of the ocean of Reality. Harmonizing with Reality itself, they surf the waves easily, but see them for what they are: temporary phenomenon, ‘empty of self-nature.’

Perceiving the whole world & universe like this — temporary phenomenon, ‘empty of self-nature’ — results in inner peace & external harmony… Zen Master Yuanwu Keqin (1063-1135, same school as Foyan, trans. by Cleary):

“Human lives go along with circumstances. It is not necessary to reject activity and seek quiet; just make yourself inwardly empty while outwardly harmonious. Then you will be at peace in the midst of frenetic activity in the world.”

Even master warriors (Taoist Generals like Sun Tzu, Zen Samurai, Kung-Fu or Aikido Masters) are said to ‘harmonize’ or ‘blend’ with their opponents, ‘knowing’ them so intimately that they can frustrate their plans & re-align their will, until their own will prevails.

Seeking power without wisdom is the tell-tale sign of the false seeker. A protection against this is built into reality itself: the highest mastery (which is not high & is not mastery) arises from realizing union with reality itself. Harmonizing one’s will (no ‘one’, no will) with The Way things are (the nature of nature), heaven & earth settle their accounts.

But how could a student possibly say more?

“One of the persistent themes of Zen is to note imbalances and flaws in one’s own mind and thought, in order to deliberately counterbalance or overcome them, and avoid their future appearance.”

Which prompted me to write my last post, How Unzen I Am, on a whim. Zen is not big on guilt, so writing a Zen-version of a Catholic confessional would be decidedly un-Zen. (Yet what is un-Zen?!) Guilt would be to not be at peace with the way things are, and to over-identify with my ego & karma.

But obviously my mind-stream is un-Zen, otherwise I would be a Zen master, which I most assuredly am not — just ask anyone who knows me very well, and they will attest to my anxieties, attachments, aversions, preferences, ignorance, delusion & selfishness. Which is not to say that my friends & associates are unkind! Indeed, what makes them kind is that they are still my friends & associates, in spite of all my shortcomings! They are willing to accept me as I am, as one package, vices & virtues combined.

The question arises, is that ‘what I am’ - the vices & virtues combined? Or is my ‘true self’ the virtues, without the vices — and the spiritual work to transcend the vices? Or… is ‘what I am’ beyond virtues & vices?

Indeed, as far as I understand the timeless wisdom of the various non-dual traditions of West (Kabbalah, Sufism, Christian Mysticism, Greek Philosophy) & East (Taoism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism): the answer to the ‘Who Am I?’ question is not only beyond virtues & vices, but beyond ‘Francis’ entirely! Beyond ‘my personality,’ beyond my brain, beyond my body, beyond my thoughts & feelings & senses, beyond my human-ness, beyond anything particular about this lifetime… Who I am is Awareness Itself!

And so are you! And so is everyone & everything! That is why physicists have yet to understand even a single atom. There is ‘infinity in every direction’ as Anaximander put it. All of the distinctions arising from attempting to understand that complexity collapse into the simplicity of non-dual reality: everything changes into everything else — can you think of anything truly permanent, anything that does not change at all, over any length of time?

Recognizing the truth of this impermanence is the beginning of ‘seeing’ the flux behind the material world. There are other ways of seeing what the ancients called by different names: Logos, Ayin, Brahman, Shunyata, Tao…

The non-dual nature of reality is a big claim and would take many words to unpack. I won’t bother to attempt that in this post. As Zen Master Fenyang put it:

“When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are still not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is already too much.”

What I would like to ‘confess’ in this post, is the paradoxical state I find myself in, in my own practice. Any master who read my previous post would instantly be able to diagnose me. I have what in Zen they call ‘Zen Sickness.’

What is Zen Sickness? Zen Sickness is striving for what is beyond striving, grasping for what is beyond grasping… as Master Yuanwu puts it:

As soon as you try to chase and grab Zen, you’ve already stumbled past it.

Zen Sickness is being half-baked. I understand enough about the non-dual reality that I ‘see’ all names & forms as illusory. I do not have the ‘default’ state any more. But on the other hand, I do not have ‘the perfect evenness of mind’ that is one of the best tests of Zen mastery. I am often sucked back into the drama of life: good news, bad news, excitement, anxiety, confusion and all manner of thought & feeling...

The primary danger of Zen Sickness is confusing my intellectual understanding with actual realization. Thankfully the first step is becoming aware that this is where I am at — and I am aware. It would be very dangerous if I presented myself as a teacher & gave myself an authority which I do not in fact internally possess! Imposter syndrome is appropriate if one is an imposter. To a master, everyone & everything is Zen. But for me, such awareness flickers in and out. ‘Beware - yoga comes & goes,’ Krishna says (in the Srimad Bhagavatam). That is precisely my problem. I am a yogi. I experience flashes of union (yoga). But my access to the non-dual state is inconsistent.

The cure, as I understand their recommendations, is more practice. More identifying with the ocean, and less with the waves. More identifying with the sky, less with the clouds. Yoga is not theory. Yoga is practice. And practice is life. So as long as you are alive, practice is not over!

In case this may benefit others, but at the very least, for my own benefit, here are some cautionary quotes from Cleary’s book on this subject (a recurring theme across the centuries in the Zen tradition):

Zen Master Dahzu

You are luckily all right by yourself, yet you struggle artificially. Why do you want to put on fetters and go to prison? You are busy every day claiming to study Zen, learn the Way, and interpret Buddhism, but this alienates you even further. It is just chasing sound and form. When will you ever stop?

(In exactly this way, I struggle! In exactly this way, I alienate myself!)

Zen students today are totally unaware of truth. They are like foraging goats that pick up whatever they bump into. They do not distinguish between the servant and the master, or between the guest and the host.

People like this enter Zen with distorted minds, and are unable to enter effectively into dynamic situations. They may be called true initiates, but actually they are really mundane people.

Those who really leave attachments must master real, true perception to distinguish the enlightened from the obsessed, the genuine from the artificial, the unregenerate from the sage. If you can make these discernments, you can be said to have really left dependency.

Professional Buddhist clergy who cannot tell obsession from enlightenment have just left one social group and entered another social group. They cannot really be said to be independent.

Now there is an obsession with Buddhism that is mixed in with the real thing. Those with clear eyes cut through both obsession and Buddhism.

If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion.

There are blind baldies [ie monks] who, after they have eaten their fill, do zazen and practice meditation, arresting thoughts leaking out to prevent them from arising, shunning clamor and seeking quiet. This is a deviated form of Zen.

Zen Master Fayan

It is wrong to act as a teacher of others before your own mind ground is clearly illumined.

(Thus I have done wrong, many times, for years. But who is the me that has done wrong, and what is wrong, and what is beyond right and wrong — if not the Mind Ground?! Intellectually understanding non-dual reality (ie. the Mind Ground), why is not my mind yet clearly illumined?!)

If you memorize slogans, you are unable to make subtle adaptations according to the situation. It is not that there is no way to teach insight to learners, but once you have learned a way, it is essential that you get it to work completely.

If you just stick to your teacher’s school and memorize slogans, this is not enlightenment, it is a part of intellectual knowledge. This is why it is said, “When your perception only equals that of your teacher, you lessen the teacher’s virtue by half. When your perception goes beyond the teacher, only then can you express the teacher’s teaching.”

The sixth ancestor of Zen said to someone who had just been awakened, “What I tell you is not a secret. The secret is in you.” Another Zen master said to a companion, “Everything flows from your own heart.”

(The secret within me I have not yet fully discovered.)

Zen Master Xuedou

Once there was a Zen elder who didn’t talk to his group at all during a retreat. One of the group said, “This way, I’ve wasted the whole retreat. I don’t expect the teacher to explain Buddhism; it would be enough to hear the two words ‘Absolute Truth.’ ”

The elder heard of this and said, “Don’t be so quick to complain. There’s not even a single word to say about ‘Absolute Truth.’ ” Then when he had said this, he gnashed his teeth and said, “It was pointless to say that.”

In the next room was another elder who overheard this and said, “A fine pot of soup, befouled by two rat droppings.”

Whose pot hasn’t one or two droppings in it?

(My pot has many!)

Zen Master Huanglong

Someone asked Huanglong, “It is said that someone who is uncontrived and unconcerned is still hindered by golden chains—what is wrong?”

Huanglong said, “When a word enters the public domain, it can’t be withdrawn for nine years.”

(Nine years! If this is true for golden chains, how much more true for rat droppings? So many words of mine have entered the public domain…)

Zen Master Wuzu

Talking about Zen all the time is like looking for fish tracks in a dry riverbed.

(🐠 this is not a fish.)

Zen Master Yuanwu

Many worldly intellectuals just study Zen for something to talk about, something that will enhance their reputation. They consider this a lofty interest, and try to use it to assert superiority over others. This just increases their egotism.

(Look at me! Look how many books I have read! Aren’t I so erudite? Eww gross… Who is the me that is studying Zen, and what is the nature of the reality in which this is occurring, and why are we talking about it instead of experiencing realization?!)

What is most difficult to rectify is half-baked Zen, where you stick to quiet stillness and consider this the ultimate treasure, keeping it in your heart, radiantly aware of it all the time, carrying around a bunch of mixed-up knowledge and understanding, claiming to have vision and to have attained the approval of a Zen master, just increasing your egoism.

Study the living word of Zen, not the dead word. When you attain understanding of the living word, you never forget it. When you attain understanding of the dead word, you can’t even save yourself.

If you want to attain intimate realization of Zen, first of all don’t seek it. What is attained by seeking has already fallen into intellection.

The great treasury of Zen has always been open and clear; it has always been the source of power for all your actions. But only when you stop your compulsive mind, to reach the point where not a single thing is born, do you pass through to freedom, not falling into feelings and not dwelling on concepts, transcending all completely.

Then Zen is obvious everywhere in the world, with the totality of everything everywhere turning into its great function. Everything comes from your own heart. This is what one ancient called bringing out the family treasure.

Zen teachers without the methodology of real experts unavoidably cheat and deceive those whom they try to teach, leading them into confusion, fooling around with a bunch of curios.

If you have the idea of superiority and are proud of your ability, this is a disaster.

As soon as you try to chase and grab Zen, you’ve already stumbled past it.

Zen Master Foyan

When you sit meditating and enter into absorption, you should have no concerns or problems in yourself. Try to think independently, all by yourself. Other people don’t know what you’re doing all the time. You reflect on yourself and see whether what you are doing accords with truth or not. Here you cannot fool yourself.

You must know how to check yourself before you can attain Zen. It is because of confused minds that people strive on the Way; they go to mountains and forests to see teachers, on the false assumption that there is a particular path that can give people peace and comfort. They do not know it is best to work on finding out where they got confused.

Zen Master Dahui

In modern times, Zen and Buddhism have become extremely degenerate. There are incompetent teachers who basically lack enlightenment themselves and have chaotic, unreliable consciousness. Lacking true skills, they take in students and teach everyone to be like themselves.

There are intellectual professionals who think they know everything but Zen, so they call over a few incompetent old monks, give them a meal, and have them say whatever comes into their minds. The intellectuals then write this babble down and use it to judge everyone else. They trade sayings and call this Zen encounter, imagining they have gotten the advantage if they get in the last word. They don’t even know it if they happen to run into real perceptives. Even if they do notice the real ones, these intellectuals are not really sure, and will not sincerely seek understanding from the teachers. They just seek approval as before. Then when the teachers demonstrate the real developmental impact of Zen in the midst of all sorts of situations, the intellectuals are afraid to approach.

Zen Master Ying-an

Some people gain an insight and then sit fast on this insight, so their perception is not free. They talk about mystery and marvel, setting forth byways and thinking they are thus helping people. They are destroying Zen.

There is another type of person who cultivates a state of quietude, so their bodies and minds feel somewhat light and calm, and then sit fanatically in the realm where there are no people. When they see others telling of good things, they get irritated and upset, and counter that there is basically nothing in the way of Zen to explain.

This is what an ancient master called a sickness characterized by lack of clarity in all places, in which there appears to be something present. This malady is most miserable. There are those who get this point of view and then deny everything—there are no buddhas, no Zen masters, no sages. They go on denying, doing whatever they want and calling that “unobstructed Zen.”

This is what another ancient master called “Having a vast realization of emptiness, then trying to deny the effects of causes, becoming wild and unrestrained, bringing on disaster.”

There is also a type whose point of view is oblivious silence, not hearing anything. After they have eaten of the community’s food, they just sit there as if dead, waiting for enlightenment. People like this are clumps of clay in ramshackle huts in the deep mountains and broad wastelands. They might think they are Buddhist masters with unchanging wisdom, but they are just using up the alms of the faithful.

(Zen, can it be destroyed?!)

There are two kinds of Zen students who won’t let go. One kind consists of those who did not meet real teachers at the outset of their quest, plunged into the fires of false teachers, and having been poisoned by their venom, they think their Zen study is done.

Another kind consists of those who join Zen groups and call themselves Zen students but really lack the correct basis. They just usurp what they hear, eager to be known for it, trying to prove themselves, only saying that Zen is just this.

These two kinds of people are fatally ill, unless they recognize their error someday and let go of it sometime.

But what are people in these conditions to let go of, after all? Just let go of the burden of “others” and “self,” of ideas of gain and loss, right and wrong, Buddha and Buddhism, mystery and marvel.

As soon as you let go this way, you feel body and mind light and easy, thoroughly pure inside and out. Then your heart is clear all the time. In a cool flash of insight, you go free. Now you are ready for refinement.

If you just keep to the insight you’ve attained and consider it ultimate, you are still clinging to something. Zen people free from convention are very different from this.

Zen Master Mi-an

Many people study Zen, but encounter Zen teachers without clear perception of truth. They make arbitrary explanations and take their subjective interpretations of Zen sayings for final truths. Their aim is to be recognized as understanding Zen. This is a most serious malady.

When people study Zen diligently but do not attain enlightenment, their problem may be in a number of places.

It may be in getting bogged down in Zen sayings.

It may be in sitting transfixed in a realm of surpassing wonder.

It may be in empty formlessness.

It may be in keeping Zen or Buddhism on one’s mind.

It may be in trying to reject illusion for enlightenment.

It may be in not having met a real enlightened teacher at the outset and thus having been drawn into a nest of complications.

These problems are not experienced only by beginners. Even ancient Zen masters who had thoroughly understood the basic mind and seen into its fundamental nature realized the original state but still did not understand the whole truth.

Zen Master Yuansou

The “one road beyond” is vast as cosmic space times ten; it cannot be sought with mind, it cannot be attained by mindlessness. It cannot be reached by words, it cannot be understood by silence.

The essential point is for the individual to be firm in faith and see right through the state before the embryo is formed, before any signs become distinct. Passing through the heights and the depths, escaping all traps, ranging over all time, totally without attachment and repulsion, free in all ways, when you attain great independence you have some measure of accord with the one road beyond.

If you rely on the differences in teachers and see the differences in persons, you are misled by blind teachers into reifying Buddha, Dharma, Zen, Tao, mysteries, marvels, functions, and states.

One way and another this glues your tongue down, nails your eyes shut, and constricts your heart. Like oil getting into flour, this becomes deeply ingrained, until you eventually become a sprite or a ghoul, emanating countless “lights” and manifesting countless “psychic powers,” thinking you are peerless in all the world.

This is what is meant by the saying, “Our perception is originally correct, but it is distorted by teachers.”

In the root and stem of your own psyche there is an accumulation of bad habits. If you cannot see through them and act independently of them, you will unavoidably get bogged down along the way.

Zen Master T. S. Eliot

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?”

…

“Do I dare to eat a peach?”

Instead of Zenning at people loudly, I should be silent.

Not a master, not even a good student. A false teacher & a hypocrite!

But who is the ‘me’ whom we criticize? Let the ‘you’ that knows yourself throw the first stone!

Speaking of ‘shoulds’, I should transcend the seven deadly sins and the three poisons,

But I cannot transcend even this ‘I’ concept, around which my senses, thoughts & feelings revolve!

Transcending just this, are not the rest also - all attachments & aversions & concepts- in one boundless bound?

Ego death comes first! Wings come later. Jump!!! (There is no one to jump.)

‘The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences…’ but first, coffee!

The six perfections seem impossible to a beginner… How can I be generous? I have nothing worth giving. How can I be virtuous? I was born sinful & raised in this wicked society. How can I be patient? I am mortal. How can be vigorous? I am tired. How can I be wise? I am a fool. How can I master meditation? I am a slave to my chattering mind.

And yet a thousand journeys of a thousand miles,

Should be crossed with a single step?!

What is that step!?

‘Simply make no distinctions.’

Between you & I… High & low… Left & right… Superficial & profound… Ancient & futuristic… Beautiful & ugly… Black & white… Good & evil… God & The Devil… Life & death… Rich & poor… Short & long… Painful & pleasurable… Success & failure… Punishments & rewards… Sacred & holy… Being & non-being… Natural & artificial… Man & woman… NO DIFFERENCES EXIST?!

You hit me with a stick and tell me it is not a stick. These illusions are persistent! How can all dualities be pierced, while remaining a person in the world?!

‘Empty within, harmonious without…’

Yet that emptiness is not empty, but the fullness of infinity!

And that harmonization is that of a skilled warrior & general.

Thus who can dwell in non-duality, while answering emails!?

Enlightenment is not a goal or an achivement, if it is our own nature, which is the nature of nature.

(But if all things have Buddha Nature, then the only difference between sentient beings & Buddhas, is that Buddhas know it. Remembering it, we must have decided to forget it. ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’)

And yet if this priceless jewel is hidden in my clothes already, and hidden everywhere in everyone & everything…

Then how come I can speak of it without REALIZING it?!

What was the mind-stream of Siddhartha after the Bodhi tree? Describe it!

INDESCRIBABLE! Now be silent.

And meditate on the ocean. Letting the waves rise & fall.

Or the sky. Letting the clouds pass.

Or the fire. Letting it all burn away.

Or lightning! Exploding!

Or diamond! Cutting through.

Or Mount Sumeru! Eternally abiding.

Or ten thousand suns collapsing into a single point, radiant plasmic supernova source!

Or infinite possibilities expressed across the multiverse from the cosmic storehouse & womb of all Buddhas…

Or a traffic jam. Letting them honk.

Or a beautiful distraction. Or an anxious nightmare. Or a paranoid fear. Or an exciting proposition.

Let them all honk! In the traffic jam of my mind. (Because I am the traffic camera. And I can just turn off & stop handing out tickets…)

I can neither drink up the ocean nor turn a mountain upside down. Except in prose, where Sky Flowers grow & Horned Rabbits prance. But if all is Mind, is there any problem with the way things are?! Because I just want to be One with the pros. Including the future Buddha that is the mosquito I killed last night so I could sleep peacefully.

“Zen seekers should sit on the site of universal enlightenment right in the midst of all the thorny situations in life, and recognize their original face while mixing with the ordinary world.“

My original face is neither wrinkled nor cute, but I certainly have no idea how to liberate myself through fundraising, selling, hiring, emailing, reading reports, attending board meetings, watching stocks go up & down, contemplating the national debt, inflation & this massive bubble. A bubble… A dewdrop… An illusion… A market crash of lightning… View all created things like this… ‘Am I a good founder or a bad one? A successful one or a failure?’ But first tell me, is there such a thing as Progress? And can anything truly be created or destroyed?!

How can I achieve naturalness & spontaneity, if ‘the unnatural, that too, is natural’? Paradoxes abound, but who says one should be averse to engaging in analysis, every once & a while? And who is the One who judges ‘over-analysis’ or ‘under-analysis’?!

Am I a hopeless case?!

(If a passionless case is an Arhat, a delusionless case is a Pratekya and a selfless case is a Bodhisattva… what is a hopeless case?! And if the hope is of attaining Buddhahood, what is desirable about one who is free from desire?!)

If even a Yaksha can become a Bodhisattva,

And if even countless eons of good works as many as the sands on the Ganges river in a billion parallel universes cannot liberate me from my delusion & awaken Supreme Unparalleled Perfect Enlightenment… Then I better not bother getting to work! Or bother avoiding work. (Between work and play, what difference?)

Then I must fall at the feet of all Buddhas & remind them that we are One. Then hold out my begging bowl & ask for direct transmission. But if the price is infinite reincarnations to save infinite beings, I will ask what we were doing forgetting our Self, having so much fun?!

Especially when there is no self and all dharmas are empty.

Thus The Third Patriarch of Chan Buddhism, Sengcan (7th Cent. AD), wrote:

There is only one Dharma... Without differentiation…
Distinctions arise from the clinging needs of the ignorant.
To seek Mind with the discriminating mind
is the greatest of all mistakes.

Even this teaching, because of language, introduces obstacles! What is this word ‘Dharma’? That can fill many pages! It can be translated truth, teaching, system, doctrine, law, principle, way… But in this sentence it is referring to the highest teaching, which is the master principle, the source, reality itself. (So what can be said about it?!)

What is this word translated here as ‘Mind’? It is 心 — xīn — which can be translated variously as heart, mind, mind/heart, consciousness and soul. It is used in the sense of ‘The Universal Mind,’ as distinct from ‘the discriminating mind.’ It could be translated: “To seek The Universal Mind with the analytical individual mind is the greatest of all mistakes.”

But even this is a stumbling block… What exactly is “The Universal Mind”? It is in no way different than the ground of being, the nature of nature, the essence of reality itself. And what is that? That is beyond all distinctions & relativities, so it is often referred to as “Suchness” or “Thusness” (Tathatā). All that is is ‘just so’… what can be said about it? The highest teaching is reality itself. All attempts at formulae, system & summation cannot describe, add or substract from it. Language itself is contained within it, thus cannot be contained by it.

So too, The Sixth Patriarch, Hui Neng, when confronted by a student of another school, was asked to clarify whether his teachings were consistent with orthodoxy, responded thus:

Making obeisance, Chih-ch’eng [the student] remarked, “Though I have studied Buddhism for nine years under the grand master Shen-hsiu, my mind has not yet been awakened for enlightenment. But as soon as you speak to me my mind is enlightened. As the question of incessant rebirths is a momentous one, please take pity on me and give me further instruction.”

“I understand,” said the patriarch, “that your teacher gives his disciples instructions on shīla [disciplinary rules], dhyāna [meditation], and prajñā [wisdom]. Please tell me how he defines these terms.”

“According to his teaching,” replied Chih-ch’eng “to refrain from all evil actions is shīla, to practice whatever is good is prajñā, and to purify one’s own mind is dhyāna. This is the way he teaches us. May I know your system?”

“If I tell you,” said the patriarch, “that I have a system of law to transmit to others, I am cheating you. What I do to my disciples is to liberate them from their own bondage with such devices as the case may need. To use a name that is nothing but a makeshift, this [state of liberation] may be called samādhi. The way your master teaches shīla, dhyāna, and prajñā is wonderful, but my exposition is different.”

“How can it be different, sir,” asked Chih-ch’eng, “when there is only one form of shīla, dhyāna, and prajñā?”

“The teaching of your master,” replied the patriarch, “is for the guidance of the followers of the Mahāyāna school, while mine is for those of the Supreme school. The fact that some realize the dharma more quickly and deeply than others accounts for the difference in the interpretation. You may listen and see if my instruction is the same as his. In expounding the law, I do not deviate from the authority of the essence of mind [i.e., I speak what I realize intuitively]. To speak otherwise would indicate that the speaker’s essence of mind is under obscuration and that he can touch the phenomenal side of the law only. The true teaching of shīla, dhyāna, and prajñā should be based on the principle that the function of all things derives from the essence of mind. Listen to my stanza:

“To free the mind from all impurity is the shīla of the essence of mind.

To free the mind from all disturbance is the dhyāna of the essence of mind.

That which neither increases nor decreases is the diamond [a symbol for the essence of mind];

Coming and going are different phases of samādhi.

Having heard this, Chih-ch’eng apologized [for having asked a foolish question] and thanked the patriarch for his instruction. He then submitted the following stanza:

The self is nothing but a phantasm created by the union of five skandhas [Aspects of consciousness: Form, Sensation, Perception, Mental Formations, Individual Awareness],

And a phantasm can have nothing to do with absolute reality.

To hold that there is tathatā [suchness] for us to aim at or to return to

Is another example of impure dharma.

Approving what he said in his stanza, the patriarch said to him again, “The teaching of your master on shīla, dhyāna, and prajña applies to wise men of the inferior type, mine to those of the superior type. He who realizes the essence of mind may dispense with such doctrines as bodhi, nirvāna, and knowledge of emancipation. Only those who do not possess a single system of law can formulate all systems of law, and only those who can understand the meaning [of this paradox] may use such terms. It makes no difference to those who have realized the essence of mind whether they formulate all systems of law or dispense with all of them. They are at liberty to come or to go [i.e., they may remain in or leave this world at their own free will]. They are free from obstacles or impediments. They take appropriate actions as circumstances require. They give suitable answers according to the temperament of the inquirer. They see that all nirmānakäyas [sentient beings] are one with the essence of mind. They attain liberation, psychic powers, and samādhi, which enable them to perform the arduous task of universal salvation, as easily as if they were only playing. Such are the men who have realized the essence of mind!”

“By what principle are we guided in dispensing with all dharmas [systems of law, teachings]?” was Chih-ch’eng’s next question.

“When our essence of mind is free from impurity, infatuations, and disturbances,” replied the patriarch, “when we introspect our mind from moment to moment with prajñā [transcendent revelation, intuitive wisdom], and when we do not cling to things and phenomenal objects, we are free and liberated. Why should we formulate any system of law when our goal can be reached no matter whether we turn to the right or to the left? Since it is with our own efforts that we realize the essence of mind, and since the realization and the practice of the law are both done instantaneously and not gradually or stage by stage, the formulation of any system of law is unnecessary. As all dharmas are intrinsically nirvanic, how can there be gradation in them?”

Chih-ch’eng made obeisance and volunteered to be an attendant of the patriarch. In that capacity, he served both day and night.

From The Sutra of Hui Neng

Now that you who, reading this, are freed from all particular teachings…

Who is the one who is thus freed?

And freed unto… what?

“The goal of human life is to realize the reality behind changing phenomena — behind these physical phenomena, behind these names & forms… Behind the feelings, thoughts, emotions & sentiments, there dwells a silent witness… The indivisible power of consciousness… That is The Self.”

— Swami Sivananda

Matter, Energy & Space. Everything you’ve ever seen with your eyes is nothing but matter, energy & space. Physically, human beings are nothing but matter, energy & space. Mountains, trees & tigers are nothing but matter, energy & space. The sun, moon & planets are nothing but matter, energy & space.

And of these three, matter is just dense energy. So simplifying further, the physical world is nothing but energy dancing in space, dressing up as Names & Forms…

There is a driving force & intelligence inherent in nature — embedded in matter, energy & space — that produces stars, planets & life, and all of this beautiful biological complexity around us that we call Planet Earth, and beyond, all this interstellar complexity that we call our Solar System, The Milky Way & The Universe...

Consciousness is fundamental. Without consciousness, a tree would not fall in the woods, and there would be no sound. Without a witness, it could not be said that there is a universe.

Scientists say that a primordial explosion — The Big Bang — began time in this universe. But nature is more fundamental than even The Big Bang — because where did The Big Bang come from? Ultimate nature must be consciousness itself — beyond even being & non-being, beyond all dualities.

Shunyata is the Sanskrit term & Ayin is the Hebrew word for The Great Void.

In Kabbalah, Jewish mystical cosmology, Ayin is as fundamental as Ein Sof, which is ‘Infinity.’ Ein Sof correlates to the boundless, endless & infinite principle which the pre-Socratics called Logos, the realm of the archetypes they called Aeon, the flux of which creates the physical world. In Kabbalah, Ein Sof ‘descends’ through worldess, intuitive, superconscious Chokmah (Wisdom), into conscious understanding (Binah) and finally into forms of analytical ‘knowledge’ (Da’att). This is the architecture of Tevunah, cosmic intelligence.

This process of descent from pure infinity into physical reality moves through four dimensions, levels or ‘worlds’: from Emanation (Atzilut), to Beriah (Creation), to Yetzirah (Formation) finally to Asiyah (Action).

Ayin — The Great Void, silence, nothingness — is as fundamental as Ein Sof. That is, they are co-equivalent, yin-yang: being & non-being create each other. Ayin is darkness, Ein Sof is light. As King David says in Psalm 139, verse 12:

Darkness is not dark for You;
Night is as light as day;
Darkness and light are the same.

‘The Shattering of The Vessels’ (the theological Big Bang) is the event that creates the universe and begins the movement from The Endless World down into the emanated & created world of time, space, form & action.

This ‘Shattering of The Vessels’ eerily corresponds to the shattering of The Cosmic Egg in The Rig Veda of Hinduism!

And Ayin corresponds to Shunyata, which is more fundamental than both Samsara (earth, the realm of phenomena, impermanence & illusion - including the illusions of suffering & imperfection) and Nirvana (heaven, the realm of spirit, revelation & perfection)…

From Longchenpa, the 14th century Tibetan Buddhist yogi, the greatest systematizer & master of the Dzogchen (Great Perfection) tradition, whose life of meditation & scholarship unified centuries of wisdom into a luminous vision of the Universal Mind as the innate, primordial perfection behind all mental & physical phenomena, and the very ground of being & non-being…

Longchenpa begins The Precious Treasury of The Basic Space of Phenomena with this:

“Homage to the Glorious Samantabhadra (Primordial All-Pervading Perfection, The Ultimate Nature of Nature)!

Naturally occurring timeless awareness — utterly lucid awakened mind — is something marvelous and superb, primordially and spontaneously present.

It is the treasury from which comes the universe of appearances and possibilities, whether of Samsara or Nirvana.

Homage to that unwavering state, free of elaboration!

Quoting selectively from the first chapter:

Listen as I explain this superb, timelessly infinite expanse…

Within the expanse of spontaneous presence is the ground of all that arises.

Empty in essence, continuous by nature,

It has never existed as anything whatsoever, yet arises as anything at all.

Longchenpa then introduces The Three Kayas (Bodies): Space/time, Mind & Body - as fundamental to consciousness. Without space/time, where is the body? Without mind in motion, who is perceiving the body in space? Without bodies in motion, is anything happening?

Longchenpa realized that just as all physical phenomena occur in space, so too mental phenomena occur in space. The mind itself is vast like space, and of the same nature as space. Indeed, without mind, how could space be said to exist, and without space in the mind, how could the mind hold anything? No matter how blissful heaven is, no matter how full of suffering earth is — all imaginable experiences occur within mind. Therefore the very nature of the mind itself must contain all possibilities. All of nature merely plays out on the screen of the ultimate nature, which is Mind itself.

So Longchenpa pierced the illusion even of The Three Kayas to see The One: Universal Mind…

Within the expanse of The Three Kayas, although Samsara and Nirvana arise naturally, they do not stray from basic space — such is the blissful ream that is the true nature of phenomena.

Mind itself is a vast expanse, the realm of unchanging space. Its indeterminate display is the expanse of the magical expression of its responsiveness.

Everything is the adornment of basic space and nothing else.

Outwardly and inwardly, things proliferating and resolving are the dynamic energy of awakened mind.

Because this is nothing whatsoever yet arises as anything at all, it is a marvelous and magical expression, amazing and superb.

Practice experiencing everything & everyone around you, all physical phenomena, and all thoughts, sounds & images arising in your mind, all mental phenomena — as emanations within The Great Void.

The physical world is nothing more than energy in space, witnessed by mind… The mental world is nothing more than energy in mind…

Piercing all illusions… “There is only self-knowing awareness, the blissful state of rest, extending infinitely as the supremely spacious state of spontaneous equalness.”

“The cosmos is order most beautiful—a poem written by a god.

… the cosmos is the mind of a god, and all that breathes is full of divinities; holy thought reaches through and lifts up the whirling water, putting itself in motion.

What is divine? That which has no beginning and has no end.

… all things are full of gods.

… the world is one.”

— Thales of Miletus, 7th cent. BC

… infinite worlds enfolded in the infinite.

— Anaximander of Miletus, 6th cent. BC

Zen is a sect of Mahayana which is a sect of Buddhism — so its claim to the truth (realization of the nature of nature) is that of just one of the many fingers of human philosophy.

And yet the same conclusion is reached again & again by the other branches. For example, Socrates & the pre-Socratics arrived at the same conclusion. Some of them even called it Universal Mind! Others called it The First Principle… The same words (boundless, birthless, deathless, formless, everlasting, eternal, uncreated, undecaying, causeless cause, One source of the Many…) are used to describe it…

Thales knows the world is one, an infinite one;
Anaximander knows that infinite worlds born from a boundless unity die back into their endless source;
Anaximenes knows the world can die…

[Anaximander] was first to suggest boundlessness, holding it necessary to have something endlessly bounteous for these endless birthings; and worlds are boundless, and each world is of this element that is this boundlessness; so he thought…

And yet it is also formless and everlasting, uncreated and undecaying, the one cause of the world. For what comes to be, Necessity fates to an end; and the end of all things is ruin. This is why, exactly as we’re saying, this originating principle has no cause, but itself seems to be the cause of others, cycling through everything and steering all, as those others say, who argue for no other cause than the boundless … and this boundlessness is god.

Philosophers who claim infinite worlds move throughout the infinite, as does Anaximander, say those worlds are born and destroyed forever, some unfolding into being, others falling to ruin, and they say, like an endless elegy, the motion is eternal— minus this motion there is no life or death…

Anaximander says that the source of being is boundless: out from it all comes to be and into it all falls to ruin. For it is from this boundlessness that the infinite cosmos is born, and to this boundlessness it returns, destroyed by what it emerged from.

At least he says this boundlessness is why nothing is lacking from the genesis of the world coming to be … The other thinkers in singular elements say that the One contains oppositions that grow separate from it, just as Anaximander says, and all those others who say the One and the Many exist, such as Empedocles and Anaxagoras—for they also think all other things separate out from this mixed unity.

— Dan Beachy-Quick, The Thinking Root: The Poetry of Earliest Greek Philosophy

Now in comparison, this is John Blofeld’s translation of Huang Po’s first teaching, which he attributes to his master Hui Hai:

The Master said to me:

All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists.

This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible.

It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces and comparisons.

It is that which you see before you—begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error. It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured.

The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient things, but that sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek externally for Buddhahood. By their very seeking they lose it, for that is using the Buddha to seek for the Buddha and using mind to grasp Mind. Even though they do their utmost for a full aeon, they will not be able to attain to it. They do not know that, if they put a stop to conceptual thought and forget their anxiety, the Buddha will appear before them, for this Mind is the Buddha and the Buddha is all living beings. It is not the less for being manifested in ordinary beings, nor is it greater for being manifested in the Buddhas.

Where Zen does provide instruction that history did not preserve from the pre-Socratics, is in the practice of how to realize peace in unifying our nature with The One. The One is not merely “before time began” and “after time ends” — The One is here & now. Although The One is before our very eyes & present in all things, our senses & thoughts are a hindrance in perceiving it — we must use ‘our third eye’… not reason, but intuition (what the philosophers called ‘wisdom’, which is beyond understanding). The instruction is not to rely on the senses or on conceptual thinking, but to intuitively & spontaneously unite with the infinite source of reality:

This pure Mind, the source of everything, shines forever and on all with the brilliance of its own perfection.

But the people of the world do not awake to it, regarding only that which sees, hears, feels and knows as mind. Blinded by their own sight, hearing, feeling and knowing, they do not perceive the spiritual brilliance of the source-substance. If they would only eliminate all conceptual thought in a flash, that source-substance would manifest itself like the sun ascending through the void and illuminating the whole universe without hindrance or bounds.

Therefore, if you students of the Way seek to progress through seeing, hearing, feeling and knowing, when you are deprived of your perceptions, your way to Mind will be cut off and you will find nowhere to enter.

Only realize that, though real Mind is expressed in these perceptions, it neither forms part of them nor is separate from them.

You should not start REASONING from these perceptions, nor allow them to give rise to conceptual thought; yet nor should you seek the One Mind apart from them or abandon them in your pursuit of the Dharma.

Do not keep them nor abandon them nor dwell in them nor cleave to them.

Above, below and around you, all is spontaneously existing, for there is nowhere which is outside the Buddha-Mind.

That consciousness ultimately exists
Is not asserted by the wise;
It is like a lotus of the sky,
Free from the natures of unity and plurality.

— From Stainless Light, a tantra of the Tibetan tradition

Ordinarily, we perceive the world as varied phenomena. We see trees, mountains & moon. We see various people moving about. Paris is Paris and London is London. A moon is the moon, a tree is a tree.

In Zen, we learn to perceive phenomena as illusory: everything is connected, everything is changing, matter & energy are dancing in the void of space/time. The moon is not the moon, a tree is not a tree.

But this is not the full non-dual teaching. Consciousness is beyond existence & non-existence. The paradoxical nature of reality transcends all dualities…

If I say (as I have), “All Is One” (moon is tree, tree is moon)— I am lying with a half-truth, and you should hit me thirty times! But if I say, like an ordinary person, “Each thing is separate” (moon is moon, tree is tree) — I am lying with another half-truth, and you should hit me thirty times!

So what is the fullness of truth about the nature of reality? While it cannot be put into words, it can be gestured at. We can go beyond ‘the void’ of space/time and speak of The Great Void (Shunyata, Aeon) which is beyond space/time, in which all possibilities are expressed in quantum multi-versal flux and simultaneously resolved in eternal stillness...

We can go beyond even The Great Void! Returning to the present, here & now — looking at the moon, looking at a tree — and see that everything is as it should be, separate, playing its role. A moon is a moon, a tree is a tree. This is meant to be, as it is. Just so.

This ‘just so’ is what Huang Po meant by “Bodhidharma’s mind penetrated even beyond the void.” John Blofeld’s comment elucidates it well…

Q: If on perceiving a phenomenon I gain a sudden comprehension of it, is that tantamount to understanding Bodhidharma’s meaning?

A: Bodhidharma’s mind penetrated even beyond the void.

[John Blofeld’s comment: It is not enough to see all things as fleeting shadows. Beyond the void there is The Great Void, in which flux is and yet is not flux. The moon or a tree must first be perceived as void and then, in a new sense, as moon or tree.]

Q: Then individual objects DO exist?

A: The existence of things as separate entities and not as separate entities are both dualistic concepts. As Bodhidharma said: ‘There are separate entities and there are not, but at the same time they are neither the one nor the other, for relativity is transient.’ If you disciples cannot get beyond those incorrect orthodox treachings, why do you call yourselves Zen monks? I exhort you to apply yourselves solely to Zen and not to go seeking after wrong methods which only result in a multiplicity of concepts. A man drinking water knows well enough if it is cold or warm. Whether you be walking or sitting, you must restrain all discriminatory thoughts from one moment to the next. If you do not, you will never escape the chain of rebirth.

Zen mind is this ‘just so’ mind.

That ‘there is nothing but mind’ — is just so. That everyone, everything, everywhere, in all worlds, across all times — is all an expression of consciousness, of Universal Mind — is just so. Does it exist? Does it not exist? Both & neither! “For relativity is transient.”

What can exist outside of consciousness? If anything did exist outside of consciousness, by whom is it perceived?

Given that nothing can be perceived to exist outside of consciousness, how can it be said either that consciousness itself exists or that it does not exist?

This is the relativity of the Universal Mind, through which everything is related & towards which everything is relative. Is it one? Is it many? Is this the only reality, or are there infinite realities? Is it all an illusion? What is the essence of reality?!

Stop thinking! Stop generating concepts! Penetrate to The Great Void. See how everything emerges from nothing. Then…

Beyond even The Great Void, we return: a moon is the moon, a tree is a tree.

So you say, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!” And behold, there is light. The light you call ‘day,’ and the darkness ‘night.’

What is the source of light? The source of light must be an explosion into the darkness. These explosions are called ‘stars.’ I won’t pretend to understand exactly how they work, but the ‘stuff’ of stars is matter & energy, and it is the same stuff as planets, which come in various types, shapes & sizes, and revolve around the stars. On some planets, biological life arises & begins to evolve from single celled organisms towards complex species of bacteria, insects, plants and animals. Some of those species — having developed all six senses, including individual minds & the ability to generate & communicate complex thought — become sentient beings, conscious of the universe.

In analyzing this imaginary world, some sentient beings called ‘sages’ realize it is merely composed of laws, patterns & dualities. There is light & dark, high & low, left & right, male & female, being & non-being, life & death, silence & sound, good & evil. There are the elements (the periodic table or the ancient fire, earth, water, air, space, metal, wood/biology, lightning). There is the color wheel. There are the musical notes. There are numbers which can be manipulated predictably (one tree, two trees, three trees - three trees minus two trees equals one tree). There are names & forms — archetypal concepts (man, tree, mountain) which can be represented symbolically with language.

These sages in turn sit in Zazen, close their eyes, empty their minds of concepts and stare into the darkness. Imaginging this darkness is the primordial void, and that this space is inviting them to create, they too realize…

THERE IS NOTHING BUT MIND.

Quoting Huang Po:

Questioner: If we have always been one with the Absolute, why are there nevertheless beings who come into existence through the four kinds of birth and enter the six states of existence, each with the characteristic form and appearance of its kind?

Huang Po: The essential Buddha-Substance is a perfect whole, without superfluity or lack. It permeates the six states of existence and yet is everywhere perfectly whole. Thus, every single one of the myriads of phenomena in the universe is the Buddha (Absolute). This substance may be likened to a quantity of quicksilver which, being scattered in all directions, everywhere re-forms into perfect wholes. When un-dispersed, it is of one piece, the one comprising the whole and the whole comprising the one. The various forms and appearances, on the other hand, may be likened to dwellings. Just as one abandons a stable in favor of a house, so one exchanges a physical body for a heavenly body, and so on up to the planes of the Pratyeka-Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Buddhas. But all alike are things sought by you or abandoned by you; hence the differences between them. How is it possible that the original and essential nature of the universe should be subject to this differentiation?

By visualizing the paradoxical union of opposites, we begin to glimpse “Aeon Flux” — the ‘quicksilver’ geometry of eternity is not zero, not one and not two. It is not still & it is not moving. It is quantum — it is every possibility simultaneously expressed across all beings, all times, all worlds...

“This Mind is No Mind.” ‘Mind’ is just another word or concept. This ‘Mind’ that we speak of is the eternal substance: The Dharmakaya, Infinity, Void, Ultimate Nature, Aeon Flux. It is neither still or in motion. It cannot be located. It is beyond space & time. It is not a brain, but all brains, like antennas, access its power. It is not a person, but all persons are expressions of its being. It cannot be described by words. Everything you see around you, everything everywhere, is part of it.

All dualities emerge from this One. Being & non-being are merely two aspects of this One. Life & death are merely two aspects of this One. Past, present & future are merely three aspects of this eternal One. There is nothing you’ve ever seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched that is not a pattern emerging from this source.

Mind, space/time & body are called the three bodies (trikaya). Without space, where are bodies? Without mind, who is perceiving the bodies in space? Without time, how do the bodies move? Mind & space are one. There is nothing you’ve imagined that is not in the space of mind.

Nature is Mind. That is why nature is fractal. At every scale from the macrocosm of the galaxies to the microcosm of sub-atomic particles, we perceive infinite complexity & intelligence.

Mind is like a mirror: everything may appear in it. Mind is like paper: with it anything can be written or drawn.

Software imitates mind. AI can generate words, images, videos & sounds with patterns. As that pattern generation becomes more powerful with engineering, data & energy inputs — we will be able to simulate increasingly imaginative, high-definition virtual worlds. But no matter how intelligent our artificial ‘brains’ are, they are bound by the nature of mind.

But Mind is more vast than any biological brain or machine brain. It is true that our human brains are limited. And so it is understandable that we would attempt to create artificial brains that are less limited. But if all of nature is Mind, if there is nothing that is not Mind-generated, then a local artificial brain, no matter how powerful, can only tap into part of that universal intelligence. The Bonini Paradox is such that it would require a computer larger than the universe to simulate the universe. The computations involved in perfectly simulating even a single atom are more advanced than our current capabilities. Indeed, if quantum physicists could ‘solve’ every mystery within the atom, that might also ‘solve’ the mysteries of cosmology — but the embedded intelligence & extreme complexity of nature is such that we can’t crack the code & don’t seem close.

Ironically, great computational power is not necessary to grasp the essence of the simulation. Even an illiterate orphan may become enlightened! As was the case with Hui Neng, The Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism. Here is a story told by Huang Po about Hui Neng:

“The Sixth Patriarch was illiterate. How is it that he was handed the robe which elevated him to that office? Elder Shên Hsiu (a rival candidate) occupied a position above five hundred others and, as a teaching monk, he was able to expound thirty-two volumes of sūtras. Why did he not receive the robe? A: Because he still indulged in conceptual thought—in a dharma of activity. To him ‘as you practise, so shall you attain’ was a reality. So the Fifth Patriarch made the transmission to Hui Nêng (Wei Lang). At that very moment, the latter attained a tacit understanding and received in silence the profoundest thought of the Tathāgata. That is why the Dharma was transmitted to him.

You do not see that THE FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINE OF THE DHARMA IS THAT THERE ARE NO DHARMAS, YET THAT THIS DOCTRINE OF NO-DHARMA IS IN ITSELF A DHARMA; AND NOW THAT THE NO-DHARMA DOCTRINE HAS BEEN TRANSMITTED, HOW CAN THE DOCTRINE OF THE DHARMA BE A DHARMA? Whoever understands the meaning of this deserves to be called a monk, one skilled at ‘Dharma-practice’.

If you do not believe this, you must explain the following story. ‘The Elder Wei Ming climbed to the summit of the Ta Yü Mountain to visit the Sixth Patriarch. The latter asked him why he had come. Was it for the robe or for the Dharma? The Elder Wei Ming answered that he had not come for the robe, but only for the Dharma; whereupon the Sixth Patriarch said: “Perhaps you will concentrate your thoughts for a moment and avoid thinking in terms of good and evil.”

Ming did as he was told, and the Sixth Patriarch continued: “While you are not thinking of good and not thinking of evil, just at this very moment, return to what you were before your father and mother were born.” Even as the words were spoken, Ming arrived at a sudden tacit understanding.

Accordingly he bowed to the ground and said: “I am like a man drinking water who knows in himself how cool it is. I have lived with the Fifth Patriarch and his disciples for thirty years, but it is only today that I am able to banish the mistakes in my former way of thinking.”

The Sixth Patriarch replied: “Just so. Now at last you understand why, when the First Patriarch arrived from India, he just pointed directly at men’s Minds, by which they could perceive their real Nature and become Buddhas, and why he never spoke of anything besides.”’

“If you were to follow the empirical method to the utmost limit, on reaching that limit you would still be unable to locate Mind.”

— Huang Po, Chinese Zen Master, Tang Dynasty, 9th Cent. AD

The scientific endeavor did not begin with Sir Francis Bacon in the 16th century. While it is true that science systematized, accelerated & became what we call ‘modern’ science in the centuries that followed, humans have been ‘doing science’ since at least the end of the last Ice Age — as archeological sites like Gobekli Tepe & others reveal. It is not possible to achieve precise astronomical alignments with megalithic temple complexes without careful, systematic study of mathematics, geometry, astronomy, etc. Without recounting all the mathematical, scientific, engineering & technological achievements of the ancient world (from the I Ching to Democritus’ theory of the atom to the Antikythera Mechanism to Euclid’s Elements…), I take it as a given that any serious student of history will come to the conclusion that the scientific endeavor is at least as old as recorded history (2,000 BC), if not older (10,000 BC+).

And what is ‘the scientific endeavor’, essentially? It is the combination of empiricism & reason to solve the mysteries of nature. It is the attempt to break down nature into its separate parts, analyze them & understand their various individual ‘natures’ — thereby accumulating knowledge and understanding of the whole through the various parts. This approach of deconstruction & dissection inevitably arrives at the theory of the atom, the indivisible unit, which Democritus suggests in the 5th century BC.

As for the extent of the universe, the ancients were avid astronomers and fathomed all the necessary concepts — zero, infinity, cosmic time-scales (eons, yugas, kalpas, yuan, Mayan calendar), other beings (gods, angels, demons, monsters), superhuman modes of transport (Vimānas, Merkava), other world-systems (lokadhātus) & even other universes & timelines within a multiverse (Indra’s Net). The debate on geocentricity vs. heliocentricity did not begin with Copernicus, it just ended with Copernicus — many ancients (Democritus, Anaximander, Lucretius, Epicurus, Aristarchus) were heliocentrists. But even the geocentrists understood that we are in a ‘big cosmos’ — all one had to do was look at the night sky to see that. They kept star maps. They recorded supernovas…

Our chronological snobbery is such that we believe that science began in the 16th century, then didn’t really ‘take off’ until the 20th century, and now ‘with AI’ we will make such rapid progress that we can, in our lifetime (which we believe ‘longevity’ will extend indefinitely) — ‘solve’ all the mysteries of the universe, starting with biology & chemistry, but culminating in physics, metaphysics & consciousness itself. Having solved these mysteries with our empirical approach, we will live in a techno-utopian world of abundance & enlightenment.

And yet even our arrogance is not new! The ancients warned of the limits of the empirical approach continuously. In the West, the warning is in the first fragment of Heraclitus: “Fools separate things into their separate essences, trying in vain to say how each thing truly is; yet the wise know that all is One, and all follows from The Logos (metaphysical principle).” This is Heraclitus’ critique of the empirical approach to unraveling the mysteries of the universe. He isn’t saying that scientific ‘progress’ isn’t possible, but he is saying that it will never arrive at a unified grasp of the whole. He wrote 2,500 years ago! Is his wisdom any less true today? With our particle accelerators studying quantum physics, have we yet discerned the nature of nature? With our nuclear reactors, data centers & artificial intelligence, have we yet to generate enough compute to crack the code of reality itself? WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNES?! WHAT IS REALITY?! Still, nobody can explain it.

“Some of the ancients had sharp minds;

they no sooner heard The Doctrine [Tao, Dharma, Logos] proclaimed than they hastened to discard all learning.”

— Huang Po

Read Carlo Rovelli’s Order of Time and you will realize that quantum physicists are extremely humbled by the mystery, and do not claim to know, or even to be on the verge of knowing. Progress is so alluring, because by definition we are 2,500 years closer than Heraclitus to ‘solving’ the mysteries of the universe with science, technology & the empirical approach to cosmology. And yet it is not clear that we are any closer, or will be any closer in 2,500 more years! Will the empirical approach ever ARRIVE?! Maybe not.

It is quite possible that Heraclitus & other sages had already ‘figured it out’ in ancient times. That is, it is possible that they had already realized the inherent limitation of the empirical approach to cosmology — that it would yield ever-more economic & technological inventions & discoveries & improvements in our standards of living, but that it would not yield a comprehensive grasp of the nature of reality itself. To grasp the nature of reality, the pre-Socratics & Socrates himself developed a transcendental inquiry into THE ONE, which they called ‘The Logos’…

They realized that no two things in the physical world were truly separate: male & female relied on each other, warring states relied on each other, species relied on each other, the elements relied on each other — everything was in relationship with everything else at all times. Furthermore, everything was governed by the same metaphysical source ‘code’, which they called ‘Logos’ — the laws of mathematics, for example, were as true in Persia and Egypt as they were in Greece… (And so were the laws of human nature & drama!) Why wouldn’t they also be true in a thousand years or in ten thousand years? Or amongst even the gods on Olympus (or on another planet)? Socrates helped his students see that these universal meta-physical ‘forms’, archetypes, ideas & laws of nature were incarnating & instantiating as physical forms & physical relationships, but that any instance in time & space was just a derivation of a metaphysical principle.

We are all algorithims, pretending to be individuals! We emerge from The Great Algorithim (nature) and return to it. We eat algorithims (plants & animals). We act according to our general algorithim (human nature), and interact with other particular algorithims (other people). And yet, as Heraclitus says, “Character becomes destiny.” What makes us truly individual is our ability to contemplate The Great Algorithim, embody its highest principles & fulfill our destiny for this lifetime — before returning to the source.

What makes a philosopher a philosopher, or lover of wisdom, is not only seeking wisdom, which implies lack, but allowing wisdom to find you, to possess & indwell you. The Greeks had an ecstastic & mystical tradition (Eleusynian Mysteries, Orphics, Homeric ‘Aristeia’). Socrates allowed his ‘daemon’ (muse, guardian angel, spirit, higher self) to guide him & move through him — instead of running away from Athens, it led him to embrace martyrdom through state execution, as a final teaching of non-attachment.

In the West, this non-dual realization was never fully lost — there are Jewish Kabbalist, Islamic Sufi & Christian Mystic non-dual sages — but it has largely been forgotten. That we have forgotten these sages is ironic, because this is the aspect of our history that we should be the most proud of. It would do us well to remember them & let their teachings guide our generation.

In the East, the non-dual realization was never lost. Here I quote in entirety a passage from John Blofeld’s translation of Huang Po. Buddhism is vast & has three main traditions (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana), with many sub-traditions - each one with its own lineage of masters tracing back two and a half millennia to Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha. I chose this passage from Huang Po for its lucidity, but it is not unique within the Zen tradition, or in the Mahayana tradition (of which Zen is one of eight schools), or even within other non-dual Buddhist, Hindu or Taoist traditions. Huang Po himself was not one of the Six Patriarchs of Zen, he was ‘just’ one of the lineage masters transmitting the wisdom through the centuries… This is not to make less of Huang Po, but to emphasize that there are VOLUMES UPON VOLUMES of Eastern non-dual masterpieces, which are only a fraction of all the teachings by all the masters over the centuries in these traditions - the tradition is vast!

And yet, in spite of its non-uniqueness, Huang Po’s teaching should be radical to our ears, which merely illustrates how much our generation needs an introduction to non-dual reality…

“Regarding this Zen Doctrine of ours, since it was first transmitted, it has never taught that men should seek for learning or form concepts. ‘Studying the Way’ is just a figure of speech. It is a method of arousing people’s interest in the early stages of their development. In fact, the Way is not something which can be studied. Study leads to the retention of concepts and so the Way is entirely misunderstood, Moreover. the Way is not something specially existing; it is called the Mahāyāna Mind—Mind which is not to be found inside, outside or in the middle. Truly it is not located anywhere. The first step is to refrain from knowledge-based concepts. This implies that if you were to follow the empirical method to the utmost limit, on reaching that limit you would still be unable to locate Mind. The way is spiritual Truth and was originally without name or title. It was only because people ignorantly sought for it empirically that the Buddhas appeared and taught them to eradicate this method of approach. Fearing that nobody would understand, they selected the name ‘Way’. You must not allow this name to lead you into forming a mental concept of a road. So it is said ‘When the fish is caught we pay no more attention to the trap.’ When body and mind achieve spontaneity, the Way is reached and Mind is understood. A śramana is so called because he has penetrated to the original source of all things. The fruit of attaining the Śramana stage is gained by putting an end to all anxiety; it does not come from book-learning.”

Studying Zen Buddhism is NOT Zen Buddhism. Zen Buddhism is NOT study! Zen Buddhism is REALIZATION. Realization is different from study. Study at best prepares the way. At worst, it becomes yet another impediment.

All non-dual teaching (not just Zen) says the same thing. Your thinking mind, your analytical mind, your empirical mind — these will never lead to an understanding of the nature of nature. Even millennia of civilization-scale effort & trillions of R&D dollars will not lead to an unravelling of the mysteries of the universe. The scientific endeavor will not lead to inner peace or spiritual fulfillment. No matter how much material progress we make, we will still be dissatisfied & our voracious desire for more will still be unquenched. The Seven Deadly Sins (pride, lust, greed, jealousy, anger, laziness & gluttony) cannot be solved with nuclear fusion, desalination plants, robot farming & construction, artificial intelligence, longevity breakthroughs or any other form of technological progress. There will still be suicides, enemies, violence, war, broken relationships, arguments & divorces, even if our economies grow at 10% annually & there is 0% unemployment. There will still indeed be unemployment & poverty as long as individual free will persists & individuals choose self-destructive paths.

Modern people believe in the religion of technological, economic & political progress. But ‘progress’ is an illusion. What are we making progress towards? Material prosperity. An improvement in the standard of living. Great! We have made progress. We have Starlink, dentistry & plumbing. But are we there yet? Have we finished making progress? When will we be finished? What is the final goal? If the final goal is happiness, what is the condition upon which we will all say, “We are fully satisfied! We are fully content! We have no more desires! We have no more anxieties! We are completely & utterly fulfilled at every level of our being - we have finally become who we were always meant to be! We finally understand everything we ever wanted to understand!”

To realize the mystery, look within! The material world is an illusion. Everything in the material world is changing. Old names & forms are changing into new names & forms. Is anything not changing? What is NOT changing is the nature of nature: the source from which all things come, and to which all things return. Space is not changing. Mind is not changing. Bodies dance in time & space, and are perceived by mind. But mind & space are like mirrors & paper — they receive forms, creating space for movement… But when the forms disappear, mind & space return to emptiness. Mind creates reality. Everything man-made was created by the mind. But everything nature-made was also created by the mind — the mind of nature. Nature is mind, too. There is nothing that is not Mind. Nature is The One Mind. All is One. And One is Zero. Here we get to the limit of language, and abandon language…

The nature of nature cannot be understood with our thinking minds. This is the Zen teaching of No Mind. We must abandon our empirical & rational approach to deconstructing reality, and attempting to understand The Mystery. To realize The Mystery, return to a state of intuitive flow. Become One with it. Abandon all attachments, all aversions, all pre-conceived ideas, all ‘right & wrong’ — deeply accept to the way things are, fully enter the present moment.

Becoming one with everything around us, we realize we are not different from our surroundings. Just like the stars & planets, just like rocks & oceans & plants & animals, we are also made of matter, energy & space. Everything around us is made of matter, energy & space.

Why do we think we are different — because we are intelligent, because we have consciousness? Yes, we are intelligent! But so is nature — everything, everywhere has an intelligence that is beyond fathoming. Reality is unfathomably intelligent.

The same is true for consciousness. Yes, we have a unique consciousness, but it is also not unique. Consciousness pervades all things. If consciousness did not pervade all of space & time, how could it appear? If there were no conscious beings in the universe, the universe would not exist. And what does any one consciousness do, that makes it unique — think thoughts, experience phenomenon, be aware? These capabilities are within the nature of consciousness! In the blank space of mind, names & forms arise — thoughts form, phenomenon are experienced, memories form, we are aware. Mind is like a mirror, like paper, like space — from emptiness, all things arise.

This emptiness is The Void, which in Mahayana Buddhism is known as Shunyata! All is mind. All is one. One is zero. That zero is the infinite, endless void. Your surroundings are The Void, you are The Void, this universe & all universes are The Void. There is nothing that is outside of The Void. Everything is nothing.

The Void is another name for God. ‘God’ is a German word, everyone forgets the etymological lineage of the names of God, traced through every language — with each name describing just one aspect of The Infinite. In Kabbalistic Judaism, the term corresponding to Shunyata or The Void or Nothingness or Emptiness is ‘Ayin.’ In the Upanishads, the term is ‘Brahman.’ God is all-pervading: simutaneously everywhere & nowhere, simultaneously in you & in everyone & in everything & at all times & in all places & also not limited to any one person or thing or place or time. The sovereignty of God is absolute. Not a leaf falls from a tree without the will of God. And yet we experience free will, within that Divine Will. God creates all things, preserves all things, destroys all things; and yet we have these faculties too, to a lesser extent. All beings have their individual existences and all worlds exist within the mind & will of God; and yet we create our worlds (physical cities, works of art, software simulations), from our minds too. For what purpose? No particular purpose. God itself is the purpose. ”Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” as Blake says, but from the point of view of Eternity, there is nothing to accomplish. The only ‘purpose’ for space & time is the divine play, or Leela. Space & time is the expression of the Divine Mind & the Supreme Personality. Consciousness wants to experience everything that can be experienced, because that is the nature of consciousness — to explore itself, to rejoice in its own infinite potential.

So what is there to achieve through science & the empirical approach to cosmology? We see now that the approach is absurd & inherently limited!

“If you now set about using your minds to seek Mind, listening to the teachings of others, and hoping to reach the goal through mere learning, when will you ever succeed?

Some of the ancients had sharp minds; they no sooner heard the Doctrine proclaimed than they hastened to discard all learning.

So they were called ‘Sages who, abandoning learning, have come to rest in spontaneity.’

In these days people only seek to delude themselves with knowledge and deductions, seeking everywhere for book-knowledge and calling this ‘Dharma practice.’ They do not know that so much knowledge and deduction have just the contrary effect of piling up obstacles.

The freedom we seek through achievement will not be found through achievement. The understanding we seek through science, technology & even philosophical book-learning will not be achieved through the accumulation of knowledge. The enlightenment we seek through doing good deeds will not be achieved by any amount of charity. The virtue of the sage is to return to The One — to let his mind become empty, one with The One.

Therefore it is written:

All the Buddha’s teachings just had this single object —

To carry us beyond the stage of thought.

Now, if I accomplish cessation of my thinking,

What use to me the Dharmas Buddha taught?

This is The Mystical Cosmology. The Great Mystery hasn’t changed in thousands of years. What can we realize that the sages of old did not already realize thousands of years ago? There is nothing to think about, nothing to study and nothing to achieve. The Buddha said of his own enlightenment that it was not an achievement…

After all, how can realizing our own nature, which is the nature of nature, be an achievement?!

And yet, trapped in this game of ascension, competing on ever higher levels of achievement — in sport, in chivalry, in battle, in government, in imagination, in humor & jest, in love-making, in dynastic glory, even in the accumulation of scientific & historical knowledge… eventually they come to speech-ifying & debate! Then having debated their politics & economics for milennia without resolution into perfect utopia, wondering at their own dramatic natures, the doors are finally thrown open to the temple of philosophy.

In that theater of the worlds, Indra paused riding the dragon long enough to ask, “Who created the dragon?!” Dragons, famously wild, treacherous & untameable, must be fearsomely & wonderfully made. And yet no creator is observed. Nor is a creator observed for the stars, the black holes or the other instellar forces. These are not technologies! Then, what are they?

Physics! At this, Indra, the ruler of gods, demons & men, bowed to The World Honored One…

Have we not seen how, when Ānanda asked Kāsyapa what the World Honoured had transmitted to him in addition to the golden robe, the latter exclaimed, ‘Ānanda!’ and, upon Ānanda’s respectfully answering ‘Yes?’, continued: ‘Throw down the flagpole at the monastery gate.’ Such was the sign which the First (Indian) Patriarch gave him.

For thirty years the wise Ānanda ministered to the Buddha’s personal needs; but, because he was too fond of acquiring knowledge, the Buddha admonished him, saying: ‘If you pursue knowledge for a thousand days, that will avail you less than one day’s proper study of the Way. If you do not study it, you will be unable to digest even a single drop of water!’”

For despite all his software engineers, data centers & ‘artificial intelligence’, for despite his unrivaled ivory tower university research departments, for despite a century of R&D dollars… his physicists had still not “solved” physics. That is, they were still utterly puzzled & amazed by physics, metaphysics & consciousness itself. How is it that we are even here? How is it that we digest even a single drop of water?!

Nor did it look likely they would solve it in another century, or two, or three, or ten, or ten-thousand.

Words are stumbling blocks, concepts clouding mind.

The reality that is sought is already present. The experience that is sought is here, now.

A seeker in realization is no longer a seeker, putting aside reading & writing for personal benefit.

True words form portals to The Way… Then may be forgotten!

Yet beyond language one bears witness to all.

What is there to do that has not been done?

Upholding duties to family, society, earth & heaven…

Riding the tides of success & failure… Accepting fate as it comes…

Realizing oneself, all people & all things as but candles in the wind of time…

Perfectly still even while fighting in battle.

Who is the ‘I’ that is fighting… ?

… and against what?

One smiles & laughs, frowns & cries — what of it?

Dancing & fighting, conducting business & being in relationship…

Standing up, walking, performing actions, sitting down, eating, drinking, sleeping…

A lifetime, a series of yoga poses…

At one with this great drama of shape-shifting appearances,

Beyond appearances, resting in perfect harmony.

Dear mothers & fathers, sisters & brothers,

Giving every last gift, as if passing away,

Amassing a lifetime of fortune’s earthly blessings,

I bequeath my material possessions to you,

If only that helps you see their worthlessness!

In comparison with the treasuries of Torah, Logos, Tao & Dharma — what is gold?

So vast is the treasure, it has been known at all times, by all peoples, by many names…

Ma’at, Asha, Tawḥīd, Ørlög & Wakan Tanka!

And the sum of all treasures?

The emptiness of space, the vastness of the void, the nature of nature,

Nirvana hidden in Samsara, Dharma of Dharmas - Shunyata!

Only the saints & sages have coin that is not counterfeit…

So after one’s energy is spent & time of service here is over,

What is there left to bequeath to the living but the timeless wisdom of these word-portals?

If the original language is not English…

What then is the original language before language itself?

The highest truth has been described countless times… and yet it cannot be contained by words.

It is embedded in all things, all people, at all times… It is before you even now!

It is inherent in the emptiness of space… all-pervading, beyond even space & time.

Wisdom cries out in the streets! Yet who can hear?

How long will we scorn wisdom?

For as long as it takes!

My impatience & dissatisfaction with experience is confronted with the vastness of the cosmos…

Silenced by an atom, by a person, by a leaf, a tree, a painting…

Stunned by the planet, by the sun, by the solar system…

Shocked by this galaxy, one of countless swirling galaxies!

If I cannot escape, can I endure not just one, but countless lifetimes?

If a divine consciousness exists, how can It endure such witnessing, such experiencing — as the sentient multiverse?

Many saints & sages have said that even ten thousand lifetimes pass as if a single day in Eternity…

And all the sufferings of this world, no more than one night in a bad hotel.

Forgiving reality, I see its perfection…

Forgiving my own inabilities & limitations, I accept myself as I am…

Forgiving everyone & everything & all circumstances, even tragedy disappears…

No one is a victim of anyone or anything! But The Oneness, which is their own nature.

What is not natural? If nothing is unnatural, then what can be blamed?

The Way Things Are Is Perfect - if words must be used at all.

Perfection, of course, is relative to what, if not the nature of nature?

Hiking in the mountains, beholding majesty…

Diving into the sea, watching the fishes swim…

Shimmering waterfall, deep in the jungle, coming to rest…

If this present is perfect, the past was perfect, because it led to this present…

If this present is perfect, the future will be perfect, because it emerges from this present…

If there is memory of even a single perfect moment in the past, then have faith in the present.

If there is hope of even a single perfect moment in the future, then have faith in the present.

Have faith in the way things are, there is no alternative…

Penetrate the emptiness of time, space, all beings, all things - being & non-being - all is one!

Releasing anxiety, I accept all possibilities…

Each emotion gives way to the next…

From moment-to-moment —

This too shall pass!

Consciousness pervades but is beyond circumstances.

“The Buddha Realm remains unshaken.”

A student leads others to a teacher,

A teacher leads others to the lineage,

A master leads others to the self,

Reality is the highest teaching,

Reality is One’s higher self,

Sleepers awake!

From Lao Tzu

“The Nature of Nature that can be put into words, is not the True Nature.

Whatever Name used to describe It, is not The True Name…”

“What is a fool but a wise man’s job, teacher and treasure?”

From Chuang Tzu

“The perfect person has no self;

The spirit-filled person has no achievement or merit;

The sage has no name...”

“Heaven and Earth were born together with me,

and the ten thousand things and I are one.”

“The perfect person uses mind like a mirror —

going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.”

“Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?”

From Confucius

“The superior man seeks within himself; the small man seeks in others.”

“To put the world in order, first put the nation in order.
To put the nation in order, first put the family in order.
To put the family in order, first cultivate our personal life.
To cultivate our personal life, we must set our hearts right.”

From The Upanishads

“When all desires that dwell in the heart are cast away, then the mortal becomes immortal, and attains Brahman here.”

“When all the ties that bind the heart are unloosed, then the mortal becomes immortal. This is the sacred teaching.”

“The Self is not known through much learning, nor through the intellect, nor through hearing learned discourses. It is known by him who longs for Him, and to him the Self reveals His own reality.”

“Smaller than the smallest, greater than the greatest, the Self dwells in the heart of every creature.”

“Where one sees nothing else, hears nothing else, understands nothing else—that is the Infinite. Where one sees another, hears another, understands another—that is the finite.”

“In the Infinite there is joy. There is no joy in the finite.”

“Thou art That.”

“The whole universe is the Brahman. In tranquility let one worship It. From It, all comes forth. In It, all lives. Into It, all returns.”

“It moves, and It moves not. It is far, and It is near. It is within all, and It is outside all.”

“Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.”

“When a sage sees this great Unity and his Self has become all beings, what delusion and what sorrow can ever be near him?”

“As rivers flow into the ocean, losing name and form, so the wise man, freed from name and form, goes to the Divine Being who is greater than all greatness.”

From The Itihasa & Puranas

“He who sees inaction in action, and action in inaction, is wise among men.”

“He sees truly who sees the Supreme Lord abiding equally in all beings, the Imperishable within the perishing.”

“He sees who sees that all actions are performed by Nature alone, and that the Self is not the doer.”

“The sage whose mind is unattached everywhere, who neither rejoices on obtaining the pleasant nor grieves on obtaining the unpleasant, is established in wisdom.”

“Weapons cannot cut It, fire cannot burn It, water cannot wet It, nor can the wind dry It.”

“The unreal has no being; the Real never ceases to be.”

“He who sees Me everywhere, and sees everything in Me—for him I am never lost, nor is he ever lost to Me.”

“The yogi sees himself in all beings and all beings in himself.”

“Abandoning all attachment to the fruits of action, ever content, depending on nothing, though engaged in action, he does nothing at all.”

“He who is free from the notion of ‘I’ and ‘mine,’ peaceful, attains liberation.”

“The devotee sees the Lord within all beings and all beings within the Lord.”

“One who sees the entire universe as the expansion of the Supreme Reality, and thus sees no separate existence, is never bewildered.”

“Just as the sky, though entering everything, is never entangled, so the Self remains untouched.”

“The mind alone creates bondage and liberation.”

“The wise see no friend, no enemy, and no stranger.”

“When the mind is fixed upon the Supreme, duality disappears like a dream upon awakening.”

“This manifold universe, though appearing as many, is in truth One.”

“As one moon is reflected in many pots of water, so the one Self appears in many bodies.”

“He who is free from all possessiveness and sees equally all beings has attained peace.”

“What appears through the mind is like a dream, an illusion, a creation of thought.”

“Beware, yoga comes & goes.”

From Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha)

“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.”

“This world mostly depends upon the dual notions of existence and non-existence… One who sees dependent origination sees beyond both.”

“The world is empty because it is empty of self and of what belongs to self.”

“One abides contemplating emptiness.”

“Ānanda, this dwelling in emptiness is genuine, pure, and unsurpassed.”

From Kumārajīva

Mañjuśrī: “The entrance into nonduality is the absence of all questions and answers.”

Vimalakīrti remained silent.

Mañjuśrī: “Excellent! Excellent! This is indeed the entrance into the Dharma-gate of nonduality.”

“Develop a mind that abides nowhere.”

“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”

“The triple world is nothing but mind.”

“All conditioned phenomena are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow…”

‘When mental processes (hsin) arise, then do all dharmas (phenomena) spring forth; and when mental processes cease, then do all dharmas cease likewise.’

‘Those desiring to attain the Pure Land must first purify their own minds, for the purification of mind is the purity of the Buddha Land.’

‘Just by mind control, all things become possible to us.’

From Bodhidharma, The First Patriarch

“EVERYTHING that appears in the three realms comes from the mind. Hence buddhas of the past and future teach mind to mind…

“This mind is the buddha… Beyond this mind you’ll never find another buddha. To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible. The reality of your own self-nature, the absence of cause and effect, is what’s meant by mind. Your mind is nirvana. You might think you can find a buddha or enlightenment somewhere beyond the mind, but such a place doesn’t exist.

Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space. Space has a name but no form. It’s not something you can pick up or put down. And you certainly can’t grab it. Beyond this mind you’ll never see a buddha. The buddha is a product of your mind. Why look for a buddha beyond this mind?“

“Buddhas of the past and future only talk about this mind. The mind is the buddha, and the buddha is the mind. Beyond the mind there’s no buddha, and beyond the buddha there’s no mind. If you think there’s a buddha beyond the mind, where is he? There’s no buddha beyond the mind, so why envision one? You can’t know your real mind as long as you deceive yourself. As long as you’re enthralled by a lifeless form, you’re not free. If you don’t believe me, deceiving yourself won’t help. It’s not the buddha’s fault. People, though, are deluded. They’re unaware that their own mind is the buddha. Otherwise they wouldn’t look for a buddha outside the mind.”

“To find a buddha all you have to do is see your nature. Your nature is the buddha. And the buddha is the person who’s free: free of plans, free of cares. If you don’t see your nature and run around all day looking somewhere else, you’ll never find a buddha…”

“If you don’t find a teacher soon, you’ll live this life in vain. It’s true, you have the buddha-nature. But without the help of a teacher you’ll never know it. Only one person in a million becomes enlightened without a teacher’s help. If, though, by the conjunction of conditions, someone understands what the Buddha meant, that person doesn’t need a teacher. Such a person has a natural awareness superior to anything taught. But unless you’re so blessed, study hard, and by means of instruction you’ll understand.”

From Seng-ts'an, The Third Patriarch

(From Verses On Faith-Mind - read by Ram Dass, on Spotify)

“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences…”

“When love & hate are both absent, everything becomes clear & undisguised… Make the smallest distinction however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail…”

“The Way is perfect like vast space… Where nothing is lacking, and nothing is in excess. Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject that we do not see the true nature of things. Live neither in the entanglements of outer things, nor in inner feelings of emptiness. Be serene in the oneness of things. And such erroneous views will disappear by themselves…”

“When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity, your very effort fills you with activity. As long as you remain in one extreme or the other, you will never know oneness. Those who do not live in the single way fail in both activity & passivity, assertion & denial. To deny the reality of things is to miss the reality. To assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality. The more you talk & think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking & thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know.”

“To return to the root is to find the meaning, but to pursue appearances is to miss the source. At the moment of inner enlightenment, there is going beyond appearance & emptiness. The changes that appear to occur in the empty world we call ‘real’ only because of our ignorance…”

“Do not search for the truth. Only cease to cherish opinions.”

“Do not remain in the dualistic state. Avoid such pursuits carefully. If there is even a trace of this and that, of right and wrong — the mind-essence will be lost in confusion. Although all dualities come from The One, do not be attached even to this One. When the mind exists, undisturbed in The Way, nothing in the world can offend. And when a thing can no longer offend, it ceases to exist in the old way…”

“When no discriminating thoughts arise, the old mind ceases to exist. When thought objects vanish, the thinking subject vanishes. As when the mind vanishes, objects vanish. Things are objects because of the subject, mind. The mind, subject, is such because of things, object. Understand the relativity of these two, and The Basic Reality — The Unity of Emptiness. In this Emptiness the two are indistinguishable and each contains in itself the whole world.”

“If you do not discriminate between coarse & fine, you will not be tempted to prejudice & opinion. To live in The Great Way is neither easy nor difficult. But those with limited views are fearful & irresolute — the faster they hurry, the slower they go. And clinging, attachment, cannot be limited. Even to be attached to the idea of enlightenment is to go astray. Just let things be in their own way, and there will be neither coming nor going.”

“Obey the nature of things, your own nature, and you will walk freely & undisturbed. When thought is in bondage, the truth is hidden — for everything is murky & unclear, and the burdensome practice of judging brings annoyance & weariness. What benefit can be derived from distinctions and separations?”

“If you wish to move in The One Way, do not dislike even the world of senses & ideas.

Indeed, to accept them fully is identical with true enlightenment.”

“The wise man strives to no goals, but the foolish man fetters himself.”

“There is One Dharma, not many. Distinctions arise from the clinging needs of the ignorant.”

“To seek Mind with the discriminating mind is the greatest of all mistakes.”

“Rest and unrest derive from illusion.”

“With enlightenment there is no liking or disliking, all realities come from ignorant inference. They are like dreams, or flowers in air — foolish to try to grasp them. Gain and loss, right and wrong — such thoughts must finally be abolished, at once! If the eye never sleeps, all dreams will naturally cease…”

“If the mind makes no discriminations, the ten thousand things are as they are — of single essence. To understand the mystery of this one essence is to be released from all entanglements. When all things are seen equally, the timeless self-essence is reached.”

“No comparisons or analogies are possible in this causeless, relationless state.”

“Consider movement stationary, and the stationary in motion. Both movement & rest disappear. When such dualities cease to exist, oneness itself cannot exist. To this ultimate finality, no law or description applies.”

“For the unified mind in accord with The Way, all self-centered striving ceases. Doubts & irresolutions vanish. And life in true faith is possible. With a single stroke we are freed from bondage. Nothing clings to us. And we hold to nothing. All is empty, clear, self-illuminating — with no exertion of the mind’s power.

Here thought, feeling, knowledge & imagination are of no value. In this world of suchness, there is neither Self, nor other than Self. To come directly into harmony with this reality, just simply say when doubts arise: ‘not two.’ In this ‘not two’, nothing is separate, nothing is excluded. No matter when or where, enlightenment means entering this truth. And this truth is beyond extension or diminution in time or space.

In it, a single thought is ten-thousand years. Emptiness here, emptiness there… but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes. Infinitely large and infinitely small… No difference! For definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen.

So too with being & non-being…

Don’t waste time in doubts & arguments that have nothing to do with this.

One thing, all things, move among & intermingle without distinction. To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection. To live in this faith is the road to non-duality. Because the non-dual is One with the trusting mind.”

“Words… The Way is beyond language. For in it, there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today.”

From Hui Neng, The Sixth Patriarch

“A foolish passing thought makes one an ordinary man, while an enlightened second thought makes one a buddha.“

“You should know that so far as buddha-nature is concerned, there is no difference between an enlightened person and an ignorant one. What makes the difference is that one realizes it, while the other is ignorant of it…”

“The wisdom of enlightenment is inherent in every one of us...”

“Ordinary men and ignorant people understand neither the essence of mind nor the pure land within themselves, so they wish to be born in the East or the West. But to the enlightened everywhere is the same. As the Buddha said, ‘No matter where they happen to be, they are always happy and comfortable.”

“He who is kept in ignorance of his essence of mind is an ordinary being. He who is enlightened in his essence of mind is a buddha.”

“From the point of view of ordinary men, enlightenment and ignorance are two separate things. Wise men who realize thoroughly the essence of mind know that they are of the same nature. This same nature or nondual nature is what is called the real nature, which neither decreases in the case of ordinary men and ignorant persons, nor increases in the case of the enlightened sage; which is neither disturbed in a state of annoyance nor calm in a state of samādhi. It is neither eternal nor noneternal; it neither goes nor comes; it is not to be found in the exterior, nor in the interior, nor in the space between the two. It is above existence and nonexistence; its nature and its phenomena are always in a state of thusness; it is permanent and immutable. Such is the norm.”

“Knowing Buddha means nothing else than knowing sentient beings, for the latter ignore that they are potential buddhas, whereas a buddha sees no difference between himself and other beings. When sentient beings realize the essence of mind, they are buddhas. If a buddha is under delusion in his essence of mind, he is then an ordinary being. Purity in the essence of mind makes ordinary beings buddhas. With impurity in the essence of mind even a buddha is an ordinary being. When your mind is crooked or depraved, you are ordinary beings with buddha-nature latent in you. On the other hand, when you direct your mind to purity and straightforwardness even for one moment, you are a buddha.”

“Within our mind there is a buddha, and that buddha within is the real Buddha. If Buddha is not to be sought within our mind, where shall we find the real Buddha? If Buddha is not to be sought within our mind, where shall we find the real Buddha? Doubt not that Buddha is within your mind, apart from which nothing can exist. Since all things or phenomena are the production of our mind, the sūtra says, ‘When mental activity begins, things come into being; when mental activity ceases, they too cease to exist.’”

“Enlightened by right views, we call forth the buddha within us…”

“He who is able to realize the truth within his own mind
Has sown the seed of buddhahood.”

“What you should do is to know your own mind and realize your own buddha-nature, which neither rests nor moves, neither becomes nor ceases to be, neither comes nor goes, neither affirms nor denies, neither stays nor departs…”

From Hui Hai

The Sutra of the Names of the Buddha states:

‘Evil springs forth from the mind, and by the mind is evil overcome.’ Thus, we may know that all good and evil proceed from our minds and that mind is therefore the root. If you desire deliverance, you must first know all about the root. Unless you can penetrate to this truth, all your efforts will be vain; for, while you are still seeking something from forms external to yourselves, you will never attain.

The Dhyanaparamita Sutra says: ‘For as long as you direct your search to the forms around you, you will not attain your goal even after aeon upon aeon; whereas, by contemplating your inner awareness, you can achieve Buddhahood in a single flash of thought.’

‘Dhyana (meditation) and samadhi (realizing oneness) are essential to the search for the sacred knowledge of the Buddhas; for, without these, the thoughts remain in tumult and the roots of goodness suffer damage.’

When wrong thinking ceases, that is dhyana; when you sit contemplating your original nature, that is samadhi. For indeed that original nature is your eternal mind. By samadhi, you withdraw your minds from their surroundings, thereby making them impervious to the eight winds, that is to say, impervious to gain and loss, calumny and eulogy, praise and blame, sorrow and joy…

Dwelling upon nothing means that the mind is not fixed upon good or evil, being or nonbeing, inside or outside, or somewhere between the two, void or nonvoid, concentration or distraction. This dwelling upon nothing is the state in which it should dwell; those who attain to it are said to have nondwelling minds — in other words, they have Buddha-minds!

We may liken it to a bright mirror which, though it contains no forms, can nevertheless ‘perceive’ all forms. Why? Just because it is free from mental activity. If you students of the Way had minds unstained, they would not give rise to falsehood and their attachment to the subjective ego and to objective externals would vanish; then purity would arise of itself and you would thereby be capable of such perception.

The Dharmapada Sutra says: ‘To establish ourselves amid perfect voidness in a single flash is excellent wisdom indeed!’

Being able to behold men, women and all the various sorts of appearances while remaining as free from love or aversion as if they were actually not seen at all — that is what is meant by ‘nothing to perceive’.

So you have only to understand that, by a single act of relinquishment, everything is relinquished; and that no arising means no arising of anything whatsoever. Those who have lost their way have no intuitive understanding of this; that is why they speak of the methods as though they differed from one another. Fools bogged down in a multiplicity of methods revolve endlessly from life span to life span. I exhort you students to practise the way of relinquishment and nothing else, for it brings to perfection not only the other five paramitas, but also myriads of dharmas (methods).

From Huang Po

“The Master said to me: All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists.”

This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces and comparisons.

It is that which you see before you—begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.

It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured.

The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient things, but that sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek externally for Buddhahood. By their very seeking they lose it, for that is using the Buddha to seek for the Buddha and using mind to grasp Mind. Even though they do their utmost for a full aeon, they will not be able to attain to it.

They do not know that, if they put a stop to conceptual thought and forget their anxiety, the Buddha will appear before them, for this Mind is the Buddha and the Buddha is all living beings.

It is not the less for being manifested in ordinary beings, nor is it greater for being manifested in the Buddhas.”

“As to performing the six pāramitās (charity, morality, perseverance under affliction, zealous application, right control of mind, application of the highest wisdom) and vast numbers of similar practices, or gaining merits as countless as the sands of the Ganges, since you are fundamentally complete in every respect, you should not try to supplement that perfection by such meaningless practices. When there is occasion for them, perform them; and, when the occasion is passed, remain quiescent. If you are not absolutely convinced that the Mind is the Buddha, and if you are attached to forms, practices and meritorious performances, your way of thinking is false and quite incompatible with the Way. The Mind is the Buddha, nor are there any other Buddhas or any other mind. It is bright and spotless as the void, having no form or appearance whatever. To make use of your minds to think conceptually is to leave the substance and attach yourselves to form. The Ever-Existent Buddha is not a Buddha of form or attachment. To practise the six pāramitās and a myriad similar practices with the intention of becoming a Buddha thereby is to advance by stages, but the Ever-Existent Buddha is not a Buddha of stages. Only awake to the One Mind, and there is nothing whatsoever to be attained. This is the REAL Buddha. The Buddha and all sentient beings are the One Mind and nothing else.

“Mind is like the void in which there is no confusion or evil, as when the sun wheels through it shining upon the four corners of the world. For, when the sun rises and illuminates the whole earth, the void gains not in brilliance; and, when the sun sets, the void does not darken. The phenomena of light and dark alternate with each other, but the nature of the void remains unchanged. So it is with the Mind of the Buddha and of sentient beings. If you look upon the Buddha as presenting a pure, bright or Enlightened appearance, or upon sentient beings as presenting a foul, dark or mortal-seeming appearance, these conceptions resulting from attachment to form will keep you from supreme knowledge, even after the passing of as many aeons as there are sands in the Ganges. There is only the One Mind and not a particle of anything else on which to lay hold, for this Mind is the Buddha. If you students of the Way do not awake to this Mind substance, you will overlay Mind with conceptual thought, you will seek the Buddha outside yourselves, and you will remain attached to forms, pious practices and so on, all of which are harmful and not at all the way to supreme knowledge.

“This Mind is no mind of conceptual thought and it is completely detached from form. So Buddhas and sentient beings do not differ at all. If you can only rid yourselves of conceptual thought, you will have accomplished everything. But if you students of the Way do not rid yourselves of conceptual thought in a flash, even though you strive for aeon after aeon, you will never accomplish it. Enmeshed in the meritorious practices of the Three Vehicles, you will be unable to attain Enlightenment. Nevertheless, the realization of the One Mind may come after a shorter or a longer period. There are those who, upon hearing this teaching, rid themselves of conceptual thought in a flash. There are others who do this after following through the Ten Beliefs, the Ten Stages, the Ten Activities and the Ten Bestowals of Merit. Yet others accomplish it after passing through the Ten Stages of a Bodhisattva’s Progress. But whether they transcend conceptual thought by a longer or a shorter way, the result is a state of BEING: there is no pious practising and no action of realizing. That there is nothing which can be attained is not idle talk; it is the truth. Moreover, whether you accomplish your aim in a single flash of thought or after going through the Ten Stages of a Bodhisattva’s Progress, the achievement will be the same; for this state of being admits of no degrees, so the latter method merely entails aeons of unnecessary suffering and toil.”

“Pure Mind… is the source of all things. This is the only truth; all else is false. Prajñā is wisdom; wisdom is the formless original Mind-Source… Nothing is born, nothing is destroyed. Away with your dualism, your likes and dislikes. Every single thing is just the One Mind. When you have perceived this, you will have mounted the Chariot of the Buddhas.”

“Ordinary people all indulge in conceptual thought based on environmental phenomena, hence they feel desire and hatred. To eliminate environmental phenomena, just put an end to your conceptual thinking. When this ceases, environmental phenomena are void; and when these are void, thought ceases. But if you try to eliminate environment without first putting a stop to conceptual thought, you will not succeed, but merely increase its power to disturb you. Thus all things are naught but Mind—intangible Mind; so what can you hope to attain? Those who are students of Prajna hold that there is nothing tangible whatever, so they cease thinking of the Three Vehicles. There is only the one reality, neither to be realized nor attained. To say ‘I am able to realize something’ or ‘I am able to attain something’ is to place yourself among the arrogant. The men who flapped their garments and left the meeting as mentioned in the Lotus Sūtra were just such people. Therefore the Buddha said: ‘I truly obtained nothing from Enlightenment.’ There is just a mysterious tacit understanding and no more.”

If an ordinary man, when he is about to die, could only see the five elements of consciousness as void; the four physical elements as not constituting an ‘I’; the real Mind as formless and neither coming nor going; his nature as something neither commencing at his birth nor perishing at his death, but as whole and motionless in its very depths; his Mind and environmental objects as one—if he could really accomplish this, he would receive Enlightenment in a flash. He would no longer be entangled by the Triple World; he would be a World-Transcendor. He would be without even the faintest tendency towards rebirth. If he should behold the glorious sight of all the Buddhas coming to welcome him, surrounded by every kind of gorgeous manifestation, he would feel no desire to approach them. If he should behold all sorts of horrific forms surrounding him, he would experience no terror. He would just be himself, oblivious of conceptual thought and one with the Absolute. He would have attained the state of unconditioned being. This, then, is the fundamental principle.

“The Bodhisattva’s mind is like the void, for he relinquishes everything and does not even desire to accumulate merits. There are three kinds of relinquishment. When everything inside and outside, bodily and mental, has been relinquished; when, as in the Void, no attachments are left; when all action is dictated purely by place and circumstance; when subjectivity and objectivity are forgotten—that is the highest form of relinquishment. When, on the one hand, the Way is followed by the performance of virtuous acts; while, on the other, relinquishment of merit takes place and no hope of reward is entertained—that is the medium form of relinquishment. When all sorts of virtuous actions are performed in the hope of reward by those who, nevertheless, know of the Void by hearing the Dharma and who are therefore unattached—that is the lowest form of relinquishment. The first is like a blazing torch held to the front which makes it impossible to mistake the path; the second is like a blazing torch held to one side, so that it is sometimes light and sometimes dark; the third is like a blazing torch held behind, so that pitfalls in front are not seen.”

“Thus, the mind of the Bodhisattva is like the Void and everything is relinquished by it. When thoughts of the past cannot be taken hold of, that is relinquishment of the past. When thoughts of the present cannot be taken hold of, that is relinquishment of the present. When thoughts of the future cannot be taken hold of, that is relinquishment of the future. This is called utter relinquishment of Triple Time.

“Since the Tathāgata entrusted Kāsyapa with the Dharma until now, Mind has been transmitted with Mind, and these Minds have been identical. A transmission of Void cannot be made through words. A transmission in concrete terms cannot be the Dharma. Thus Mind is transmitted with Mind and these Minds do not differ. Transmitting and receiving transmission are both a most difficult kind of mysterious understanding, so that few indeed have been able to receive it. In fact, however, Mind is not Mind and transmission is not really transmission…”

“Why seek a doctrine? As soon as you have a doctrine, you fall into dualistic thought.“

“The nature of the Mind when understood, No human speech can compass or disclose. Enlightenment is naught to be attained, And he that gains it does not say he knows.”

“Regarding this Zen Doctrine of ours, since it was first transmitted, it has never taught that men should seek for learning or form concepts. ‘Studying the Way’ is just a figure of speech. It is a method of arousing people’s interest in the early stages of their development. In fact, the Way is not something which can be studied. Study leads to the retention of concepts and so the Way is entirely misunderstood, Moreover. the Way is not something specially existing; it is called the Mahāyāna Mind—Mind which is not to be found inside, outside or in the middle. Truly it is not located anywhere. The first step is to refrain from knowledge-based concepts. This implies that if you were to follow the empirical method to the utmost limit, on reaching that limit you would still be unable to locate Mind. The way is spiritual Truth and was originally without name or title. It was only because people ignorantly sought for it empirically that the Buddhas appeared and taught them to eradicate this method of approach. Fearing that nobody would understand, they selected the name ‘Way’. You must not allow this name to lead you into forming a mental concept of a road. So it is said ‘When the fish is caught we pay no more attention to the trap.’ When body and mind achieve spontaneity, the Way is reached and Mind is understood. A śramana1 is so called because he has penetrated to the original source of all things. The fruit of attaining the Śramana stage is gained by putting an end to all anxiety; it does not come from book-learning.”

“If you now set about using your minds to seek Mind, listening to the teaching of others, and hoping to reach the goal through mere learning, when will you ever succeed? Some of the ancients had sharp minds; they no sooner heard the Doctrine proclaimed than they hastened to discard all learning. So they were called ‘Sages who, abandoning learning, have come to rest in spontaneity’. In these days people only seek to stuff themselves with knowledge and deductions, seeking everywhere for book-knowledge and calling this ‘Dharma-practice’. They do not know that so much knowledge and deduction have just the contrary effect of piling up obstacles. Merely acquiring a lot of knowledge makes you like a child who gives himself indigestion by gobbling too much curds…”

All the Buddha’s teachings just had this single object— To carry us beyond the stage of thought. Now, if I accomplish cessation of my thinking, What use to me the Dharmas Buddha taught?

“The Sixth Patriarch was illiterate. How is it that he was handed the robe which elevated him to that office? Elder Shên Hsiu (a rival candidate) occupied a position above five hundred others and, as a teaching monk, he was able to expound thirty-two volumes of sūtras. Why did he not receive the robe? A: Because he still indulged in conceptual thought—in a dharma of activity. To him ‘as you practise, so shall you attain’ was a reality. So the Fifth Patriarch made the transmission to Hui Nêng (Wei Lang). At that very moment, the latter attained a tacit understanding and received in silence the profoundest thought of the Tathāgata. That is why the Dharma was transmitted to him.

You do not see that THE FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINE OF THE DHARMA IS THAT THERE ARE NO DHARMAS, YET THAT THIS DOCTRINE OF NO-DHARMA IS IN ITSELF A DHARMA; AND NOW THAT THE NO-DHARMA DOCTRINE HAS BEEN TRANSMITTED, HOW CAN THE DOCTRINE OF THE DHARMA BE A DHARMA? Whoever understands the meaning of this deserves to be called a monk, one skilled at ‘Dharma-practice’.

If you do not believe this, you must explain the following story. ‘The Elder Wei Ming climbed to the summit of the Ta Yü Mountain to visit the Sixth Patriarch. The latter asked him why he had come. Was it for the robe or for the Dharma? The Elder Wei Ming answered that he had not come for the robe, but only for the Dharma; whereupon the Sixth Patriarch said: “Perhaps you will concentrate your thoughts for a moment and avoid thinking in terms of good and evil.”

Ming did as he was told, and the Sixth Patriarch continued: “While you are not thinking of good and not thinking of evil, just at this very moment, return to what you were before your father and mother were born.” Even as the words were spoken, Ming arrived at a sudden tacit understanding.

Accordingly he bowed to the ground and said: “I am like a man drinking water who knows in himself how cool it is. I have lived with the Fifth Patriarch and his disciples for thirty years, but it is only today that I am able to banish the mistakes in my former way of thinking.”

The Sixth Patriarch replied: “Just so. Now at last you understand why, when the First Patriarch arrived from India, he just pointed directly at men’s Minds, by which they could perceive their real Nature and become Buddhas, and why he never spoke of anything besides.”’

Have we not seen how, when Ānanda asked Kāsyapa what the World Honoured had transmitted to him in addition to the golden robe, the latter exclaimed, ‘Ānanda!’ and, upon Ānanda’s respectfully answering ‘Yes?’, continued: ‘Throw down the flagpole at the monastery gate.’ Such was the sign which the First (Indian) Patriarch gave him. For thirty years the wise Ānanda ministered to the Buddha’s personal needs; but, because he was too fond of acquiring knowledge, the Buddha admonished him, saying: ‘If you pursue knowledge for a thousand days, that will avail you less than one day’s proper study of the Way. If you do not study it, you will be unable to digest even a single drop of water!’”

Reality itself is the mirror of infinity. At the levels of molecules & atoms & even a single hydrogen atom (Democritus) & even within that atom, infinity. At the levels of worlds, solar systems, galaxies & universes, infinity.

At human-scale, in our seemingly ordinary & every-day world, we may see objects & phenomena that we assume to understand: a human being walking down the street, a dog barking at a squirrel in a tree, a humming bird flying to a blossoming flower, sunlight drifting through the clouds, a traffic light stopping a car, steaming hot coffee in a cup on your desk, a few wooden logs burning a fire in the hearth… But actually you & I do not understand any of these things completely & perfectly well. Here is Richard Feynman explaining what is happening when those wooden logs are burning a fire in the hearth: the trapped light of the sun in the carbon is being re-released!

Indeed, nobody fully understands science, nobody fully understands reality. Those who understand the most, like Feynman & Einstein, are in awe. Humanity’s understanding of the biology, chemistry & physics that describe the nature of matter & energy is (severely) limited. Even the most advanced scientists doing the most advanced science using our most advanced technology to build even more advanced technology to do even more advanced science… even they do not understand the nature of reality!

Will humanity ever fully master the laws of nature — even in ten years, a hundred years, a thousand years? Or will we always be doing science & making technology, delving ever more deeply into the nature of a reality that itself is “infinity in every direction”?

The 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant divided reality into two aspects: the ‘noumenal realm’, of words, numbers & symbols, which we use to describe reality; and the ‘phenomenal realm’, which is reality itself, infinite, multi-layered & unfathomably complex, beyond understanding… The question is whether humans will ever ‘solve’ science: will the noumenal realm ever catch up to the phenomenal realm? Are these subjects even ‘solvable’; is biology, is chemistry, is physics… ‘solvable’? Will we ever ‘crack the code’ & figure it out — unraveling all mysteries & becoming absolute masters of creation, possessing all knowledge & thus wielding perfect physical powers… becoming as gods? That is the hubris of science, engineering & technology — to use Hayek’s phrase, beware this “fatal conceit.”

Conceit is cursed, but awe is blessed! From William Blake — Auguries of Innocence:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”

This is the same realization as Anaximander’s. In The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, Blake has similar verses, from which Aldous Huxley took his title Doors of Pereception for his book on psychedelics:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite…

For man has closed himself up,
till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern…”

Gaze into nature, in any form, at any scale — and you will see Infinity. Gaze even into language, which seems man-made & finite, and you will discover mysteries that elude us still… Infinity is a name of God: that is, an aspect of divine nature, a quality of perfection. The word “God,” we must always remember, came into English from Norse-Germanic roots, and means “That [Spirit] which is invoked & called upon” — for example, in prayer, sacrifice or ritual…

But the Latin word for God is Deus, and the Greek word for God was Theos — these words refer to the divine person that is invoked. Homer, Hesiod & the Greco-Roman pagan mythic poets saw in nature a whole pantheon of gods, Theoi, that together, in their plurality, were the Theos, the unity behind Nature’s apparent diversity — and Homer understood them as divine persons, Titans moving through nature, Olympians animating through men & women, moving through history.

Yet the pre-Socratic philosophers like Anaximander, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Zeno & Heraclitus saw even further than Homer, they saw The Divine in THE LOGOS, that is, THE SOURCE CODE of nature itself: they saw God in mathematics, algebra & geometry, in the concepts of zero & infinity… in physics, chemistry, biology… in sound & music & color & form… in morality & aesthetics & in all archetypal ideas… in linguistics & language & letters & THE WORD itself… they saw the invisible laws of nature that are beyond & within & behind everything in the material world.

Take for example a bridge, like The Williamsburg Bridge or The Brooklyn Bridge here in New York City: what holds up these bridges!? Are they only held up by welded metal bars & beams? Are they only held up by US dollars?! No indeed, they are held up by MATH & PHYSICS, by THE LAWS OF NATURE (and as Jefferson put it in our Declaration of Independence, “by Nature’s God”, that is the god of the philosophers). The Laws of Nature hold up the bridge, and The Laws of Nature also explain the jungle & the city just as well.

It is a grave misunderstanding that philosophy is secular. Philo-Sophia means The Love of Wisdom, as Sophia is a name of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. The philosophers profoundly revered the sacred, humbled themselves & ordered their lives to align with their understanding of the absolute. But their radical vision was to see the LOGOS AS THEOS hidden within ZOE, PHYSIS & PHOS; that is, The Invisible Source Code (Logos) as The Supreme Personality of Godhead (Theos) hidden within Life (Zoe), Physis (Nature) & Phos (Light)!

All of this, the entirety of what I’ve written here, is summed up entirely & perfectly in the first two Fragments of Heraclitus:

1

The Logos proves
those first hearing it
as numb to understanding
as the ones who have not heard.

Yet all things follow from The Logos!!!

Some, blundering
with what I set before you,
try in vain with empty talk
to separate the essences of things
and say how each thing truly is.

And all the rest make no attempt.
They no more see how they behave broad waking
than remember clearly
what they did asleep.

2

For wisdom, listen
not to me but to THE LOGOS
and know that All Is One!!!

Christians, of course, will recognize Logos from the mystical opening lines of St. John’s Gospel, which were written in Ephesus, the very city of Heraclitus — and this is no accident. By claiming that the Logos WAS Theos, and that the Logos became a man (Jesus) and dwelt among us, and that in Him was Light (Phos) & Life (Zoe)… John was doing the biggest M&A deal of all time: merging Judeo-Christian theology with Greco-Roman philosophy… this integration was ultimately successful: the acquisition is now known as ‘Western Civilization.’

In this thesis statement, Heraclitus is making a fundamental distinction between science & philosophy: science is temporal, philosophy is eternal; science divides, philosophy unites. The grand project of science gets lost, easily deludes itself, becomes conceited, confounded by its own progress & potential — mistaking progress for an end, assuming it will someday complete all its goals & master nature! But science, by the very limits of its own nature, bounded to delve endlessly into the very unlimited nature of nature, cannot grasp the infinite, the underlying unity of all things! The nature of science is to make distinctions, “to separate the essences of things, and say how each thing truly is”: Hydrogen, Helium, etc. But the nature of philosophy is to pierce the veil & transcend dualities.

But this realization of the non-dual nature of nature belongs to BOTH the West & the East. Indeed, Western Civilization — both in its Philosophical traditions & its Abrahamic traditions — has forgotten its non-dual realization & needs to remember it. The process of remembering non-duality began as The West re-encountered India, Japan, Korea & China (and broadly ‘The East’) over the last three centuries or so.

I began Part 1 with these lines:

To be at peace in today’s world, one must make peace with nature. To make peace with nature, one must make peace with the nature of nature — which must first be understood.

What then is ‘The Nature of Nature’? Grasping that, all is known. Yet as long as it eludes us, heaven & earth remain shrouded in mystery…

Those who have read the Vedic scriptures such as the Upanishads, surely recognized them here. All the principal Upanishads — for example, the Kena, Mundaka, Chandogya, Brihadaranyaka & Taittiriya Upanishads — have lines reminiscent of these. For example, “What is that, knowing which, all this becomes known?” —Mundaka Upanishad (1.1.3–4)

The ancient Indians & Greeks had extensive commerce: well before Alexander conquered parts of India, the Hindu Brahmans & the Greek Philosophers exchanged ideas & found harmony. The Logos of the Philosophers is the Brahman of the Brahmins.

Heraclitus wrote around 500 BC. Around the same time, The Buddha arose in India & Lao Tzu arose in China…

The first line of The Dhammapada (The Path of Dharma), is “What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday; and our thoughts of today reveal our life of tomorrow… Our life is the creation of our mind!” Then later in The Heart Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism, there is the line: “Form emerges from the formless; and the formless is hidden in form!” Ultimately Buddhist thought led to the realization of the non-dual “emptiness” (Shunyata) of physical reality (as we now know, even an atom is mostly space), just as Hindu thought had led the Brahmins to realize the “illusion” (Maya) of physical reality (because everything is changing into everything else).

The same realizations arose in China. The first line of the Tao Te Ching says, “The Nature of Nature (Tao) that can be described is not the true Nature of Nature!”

Heraclitus (Greece), Buddha (India) & Lao Tzu (China) all realized the same non-dual nature of nature around 500 BC — miraculous! Stranger, however, is that even further back, around 1200 BC, the same realization is already clearly expressed with masterful understanding in the cosmologies of Judaism, Hinduism & Taoism…

The I Ching (or Book of Changes) begins with the Yin-Yang — the non-dual unity arising from duality — proceeds to the Bagua — the eight elements of nature, Base-3 computing — to the Hexagrams — the sixty-four situations in life, Base-6 computing. From combining the Hexagrams & comparing their “lines of change”, the oracle is able to access a precise reading of 1 in 4096 unique scenarios (64 squared) — but the full power of the I Ching is to have the 64 situations interact in every possible way, which is 64 to the 64th power, or 10^112th — generating more scenarios than scientists estimate there are atoms in the universe (10^82). From studying The I Ching we realize that the ancient Chinese in 1200 BC built a ‘GenAI’ simulator that they didn’t have the compute power to run! And they used this system to make every consequential decision from going to war to entering contracts to making marriage alliances for thousands of years!

The Sefer Yetzirah (or Book of Formation) of Kabbalistic Judaism is very similar to the I Ching in that it describes how 22 letters & 10 numbers form the source code of the universe. From The One (‘The Lord is One’ as it says in the Shema), comes the two (male & female He created them), comes the Ten Thousand things… (Ironically, even though the I Ching was only translated from classical Chinese into English in the 1950s, in 2026, most of the masterpieces of the Kabbalistic lineage like the Sefer Yetzirah have been translated into English only recently & Kabbalah is less well known in the West today than Taoism!)

The Vedas, Itihasa & Puranas became the basis for tantric Hinduism & later Buddhism — and in their truly vast cosmology they comprehended infinite universes, infinite scenarios, an infinite simulation… and yet ultimately realized the underlying unity of all things. For example, The Shattering of The Vessel in Kabbalistic Judaism is shockingly similar to The Shattering of The Cosmic Egg in the Rig Veda.

A full comparative analysis should be done of the teachings of Kabbalistic Judaism, Tantric Hinduism & Taoism. Their teachings of re-incarnation, numerology, astrology & cosmology are astoundingly similar. But of course this exceeds the scope of this essay!

In conclusion, my point in writing all of this is simple:

We are lost in the ‘progress’ narrative of technology. We have fallen into the trap of thinking that we can solve all of humanity’s problems through economic & technological progress. At best, we can solve our material problems by generating abundance in terms of our material standard of living. But human nature has NOT made progress in five thousand years — and individual humans continue to realize both the best & worst of our potential. Until our collective consciousness becomes elevated & the majority of individuals overcome their vices & realize their potential for virtue, dystopia will continue to interrupt utopia. The reason for technology’s inherent potential for intelligence is that technology expresses the intelligence inherent in nature itself, which is infinite. The nature of nature is infinite, and to come to peace with our place in it, we must realize what the ancients already understood at the dawn of civilization… We are each ‘made in the image’ of the infinite, capable of selfishness & sharing, of creation & destruction, of wisdom & folly — and the purpose of our individual lifetimes is to gain mastery over ourselves, not merely mastery over nature.

We are here to learn. We are here to become. We are here to realize being itself.

As Heraclitus says,
Ethos anthropoi daemon
Character becomes destiny.

And as the Brahmins say, Satcitananda. The purpose of becoming is to experience being, and the nature of being is awareness & joy. Transcending our little egos, realizing we are a candle in the wind — that is to make peace with nature, the nature of nature, the nature of technology & our own nature, all at once.

What then is ‘The Nature of Nature’? Grasping that, all is known. Yet as long as it eludes us, heaven & earth remain shrouded in mystery…

Emblazoned in a tile mosaic as we emerge from the underworld of The New York Subway System, in Bryant Park Station we read this glimpse of Carl Jung’s subtlety: “The unnatural… that too is natural.” What is the meaning of this?

In 2026, the word ‘technology’ begins the headlines — AI, quantum, nano, nuclear fusion, robotics, brain-machine interfaces, hypersonic travel, spaceships, genomics, longevity — this is what we are paying the most attention to...

Alas, it is easy to get lost in this inquiry if one begins with the nature of technology, the potential of which is being revealed over time and which is dynamically transforming the material aspect of human civilization, with increasing rapidity — before our very eyes, as it were, our world is changing.

Rapid change defines a crisis: as our world changes, leaders feel called to shape the change — but as every leader realizes, we ourselves must change, and that requires a mirror. What is at stake is not merely our markets, our goods & services, our built environment, our physical property, our institutions, our systems, our laws, our incentives & our occupations — but at last, our identity & value in the new order that is emerging. As inertia plummets & the range of dynamic potential change increases — human nature is caught in the balance. We are in an existential crisis. Who are we? Who have we been? Who will we be?

Ah, the old question returns… “Human nature, what is that?!” The timeless human dramas that play across the literature of the ancient, medieval & early modern periods remain a perfect mirror for our post-modern society: the range & depth of our emotions, relationships & desires, our romances & adventures, our victories & defeats, our heartbreaks & triumphs, our genius, wisdom & follies, our values upheld & betrayed… these are all captured vividly in one masterpiece after another — The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Bible, Greek & Egyptian Mythology, The Shahnameh, The Itihasa & Puranas, The Romance of The Three Kingdoms, The Tale of Genji, The Popul Vu, The Norse Sagas, Arthurian Legend, Shakespeare and more — available to all of us for free at The New York Public Library! The point is: these characters are us. We do not seem to have changed much, if at all.

The same realization confonts us when we peer into the well of human history: whether it is Will & Ariel Durant, Edward Gibbon, Machiavelli, Ibn Khaldun, Kautilya, Sun Tzu, Sima Qian, Thucydides, Herodotus, Tacitus, Plutarch or Caesar himself... As we read of the many dramas, stratagems, intrigues, plots, schemes, alliances, wars, massacres, murders, thefts, crimes, noble deeds, diplomacy, treaties, marriages, inventions of geniuses, amassing of power & resources, wealth & poverty of nations, rise & fall of empires, natural disasters; of the few individuals who are still remembered & the countless who are forgotten… there is from the pages of the histories of the world, one human history that emerges; from the many civilizations, one civilization that emerges; and from the many dramas, one human nature that emerges.

And what is that human nature that emerges from history? It is well described by religion. We have our inherent dignity & virtue — made in the image of the divine; capable of wisdom, understanding, knowledge, intelligence & inspiration; capable of mercy, justice, beauty & harmony; capable of endurance, humility, gratitude, awe, joy, creative energy & all forms of manifestation — and yet…

And yet! Tragically, we fall from grace… We fall short of excellence & perfection, time and again. Not only are we ignorant, we make mistakes even when we know better: we knowingly do what we should not; we knowingly betray our own values & standards. Given all the temptations, challenges & tests of life: very few humans always rise to the occasion & never miss the mark. The Seven Deadly Sins give us the mirror most frightening: Lust, Pride, Greed, Jealousy, Anger, Gluttony & Laziness. The very definition of righteousness is overcoming these demons within.

And yet the Zoroastrians say that “righteousness is the best of all that is good,” and furthermore: that the fullness of divine qualities & inspiration only dwell on the pure in spirit.

But do not despair if you have fallen from the way: it is remains before your feet. “A foolish passing thought makes one an ordinary man, while an enlightened second thought makes one a buddha…” as Hui Neng, the sixth & last patriarch of Chan Buddhism taught us.

“Know thyself” is the repeated exhortation of the ancients, from Sun Tzu in China to The Temple of Apollo at Delphi. When Alexander The Great invaded India, a mere yogi blocked the army on the road, so one of his courtiers called out “Make way for the man who has conquered the world.” The yogi responded, “I will make way for the man who has conquered himself.”

What is the point of all of this discursion?

Human nature has not changed in five thousand years.

That is the terrible point. Technology is making progress, but we are not.

We have dentistry & plumbing & medicine & vehicles & electricity & iPhones & AI & Starlink… it has become an almost universal belief that technology is making rapid progress, and has the potential to either destroy us or solve all material problems.

In The Question Concerning Technology Martin Heidegger quotes the mystical poet Holderlin, “We are a sign that is not read.” The point he is making is the same terrible point that we have come to in our discourse: a holistic review of human civilization, literature, history & religion reveals human nature very clearly. But very few people take the time to reflect on the meaning of the last five thousand years; we are too caught up in the drama of our own time, in the smaller dramas of our own lives. So “we are a sign that is not read.”

Consciousness is the exception, not the rule, in humanity. The Torah teaches that “for the sake of the righteous, the world is not destroyed.” Pericles muses, “the whole earth is a proving ground for the great ones.” And Confucius emphasizes filial piety & reverence for those great ones who have come before us as the fundamental basis of individual instruction & social harmony.

Technology is revealing human nature. All its potential, all its flaws. If we do not correct our flaws, not just our individual flaws, but the flaws of humanity as a whole — then we will destroy ourselves & each other.

But therein lies the dilemma: aside from the saints, who has perfected themselves in all of history? No one. That is the point. That is why we need saints. And that is also what separates the righteous from the saints. The righteous are not yet saints, they still fall short & miss the mark & have not conquered themselves, but they are at least making the attempt — when they fall, they get back up.

If The United States Dollar is the almost universally accepted reserve currency of the world, the cosmic joke is that the following crypto-currencies do not exist as viable alternatives as their mining operations can’t be measured & their value can’t be computed: “Wisdom Coin,” “Virtue Coin,” etc. Character is the fundamental form of analysis neither performed by nor submitted to any financial underwriter. This creates a durable arbitrage opportunity (even in USD terms) & also explains why earthly & heavenly prices are continually out of sync.

In Plato’s Republic Socrates inquires simultaneously into the nature of the ideal state & into the nature of the enlightened individual. Socrates’ conclusion is that the only hope of escaping the drama of human history & entering into a messianic age of harmony is the elevation of wisdom across society at every level. And how is such a renaissance of human potential & conscious awareness to scale beyond a small number of virtuous individuals?

That is the ultimate challenge not just of our time, but of all of human history. That is the startup problem statement that almost no VC (other than Exponential Capital, coming soon) will fund. And yet it is the most important of all problems in our society: because poverty, environmental degradation & all other injustices are derivative of our individual & collective consciousness.

As above, so below; as within, so without — society’s poverty & nature’s degradation is merely an externalization of our own shortcomings: our poverty of consciousness & lack of realization. This is why Confucius’ advice was: to solve the problems of the world, put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, put the city in order; to put the city in order, put the family in order; to put the family in order, put oneself in order…

The problem of human nature may not be solvable at all, and we should seriously consider that possibility. Utopia & dystopia may be equally ephemeral states: “this too shall pass.” I do not pretend to have the answer to this age-old dilemma, nor do I claim to be attempting to solve it. I have yet to conquer myself! So how can I dare to reach beyond? And yet among the sleepwalkers, I have one eye open to this strange nightmare of history that could become a beautiful dream — a second, scaled consciousness of human potential — if we would all just awake. If only I could open my other two eyes, I might realize that everything is fine, just the way it is. And that the whole point of the simulation is a character test. Earth, the proving ground of the soul…

Given the rapid “progress” of technology and the lack of (or very slow) progress in human potential, we return to the original question:

The nature of nature — what is that?

> Part 2

AI, quantum, nano, nuclear fusion, robotics, brain-machine interfaces, hypersonic travel, spaceships, genomics, longevity — all of these emerging technologies are truly amazing, promising us divine powers. But are we worthy of such power, without consciousness to match?

Everyone has heard the tale of the burning of The Great Library of Alexandria (www.alexandria.wiki) in Egypt, which occurred around the time of Caesar, in the first century before Christ. Perhaps you too have wondered: ‘IF ONLY we still had those texts. What secrets would they contain? Would they have the answers we’re seeking?! Would there be anything in them still relevant, even crucial, for us today?!”

But very few have heard of The Great Library of Nālandā, which flourished in northern India, ushering in a renaissance of human learning across all subjects (mathematics, medicine, astronomy, science, engineering, history, social sciences, art, literature, philosophy, religion, psychology, meditation), embracing all traditions (Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Taoist, etc.), from the 5th to the 12th centuries — before it too was burned down in an invasion, its millions of texts burning for days…

But there was a back-up drive… in Tibet!! Because in the 8th century, the Tibetan King, Trisong Detsen, converted to Buddhism & sent wave after wave of translators to Nalanda with bags of gold to buy the Indian IP & bring it back to Tibet. Over the course of four centuries, the Tibetans backed up about 10% of Nalanda! So it is that there are now, to this day, hundreds of thousands of Sanskrit & Tibetan texts, dating back to Nalanda, that have never been translated into any other language. Only recently were these libraries permitted to be digitally scanned, and we have the scans. There’s only one problem: there are very few master translators who can translate Sanskrit & Tibetan into English, Chinese & the other languages of the world — so with a traditional approach to translation, this could cost $50-100M & take 50-100 years to accomplish.

Good news! The Berkley AI Lab figured out how to get a scholarly translation & editing process down from 18 months to 3 weeks. Because these are sacred & scholarly texts, AI must not translate, AI must only assist master-level human translators, multiplying their productivity. We anticipate that we’ll be able to translate a huge percentage of the library with just $10M. I’ve committed $1M - 10% of my next liquidity event - to seeing this done. Our grant & donor pipeline gives us a path to getting this funded & fully operational this year.

Everyone is aware of the US Dollar as a geopolitical feature, but everyone forgets about The English Language, which is not just the language of commerce, but of culture — that is, of global consciousness. How impoverished would The English Language be if The Torah, The Quran, The Bhagavad Gita and The Tao Te Ching had never been translated into English!?

In the same way, how enriched will our language, our commerce, our culture and most importantly, our global consciousness become once we have finished, in our lifetime, translating ALL of the remaining Sanskrit & Tibetan texts? And why stop there? Why not also translate all the remaining Japanese, Korean, Thai, Chinese, Mongolian, Persian, Arabic & Hebrew texts? We are already establishing the global alliance necessary to achieve this all in our lifetime because of AI.

The mission of Eternity Foundation (www.eternity.giving) is to restore the timeless wisdom, knowledge, literature, art, science, architecture, culture & glory of our ancestors… To hearken back, to learn from our early modern, medieval, ancient & primeval mothers & fathers, grandmothers & grandfathers, great-grandmothers & great-grandfathers, all the way back to the first humans… We are standing on the shoulders of giants, yet we’ve largely forgotten their stories, experiences & lessons…

(Humanity remains largely unconscious, unaware, ignorant of its own past. Beware, even university degrees don’t necessarily transmit such awareness - there is no easy fix!)

Honoring our fathers & mothers, our elders, those who came before us, has long been the secret foundation of society — from Confucianism to Hinduism to Judaism… To believe that our achievements are our own creation, that we are our own creation, that we are the masters of the universe, that we are gods & will live forever, undying, prosperous & free from suffering because of our material abundance alone — this self-absorption, chronological snobbery, arrogance & hubris will lead to mutually assured destruction.

Human consciousness has not changed since The Epic of Gilgamesh — since Homeric, since Biblical, since Vedic times… We are still a dramatic species, not a harmonious one. There is nothing that we will discover in the future that will solve the problem of human nature. That’s because we’ve already discovered the answers, but forgotten them. The answers already exist, because they are TIMELESS! They’ve been discovered by many sages, in many times, in many places…

Thus, if they aren’t immediately obvious to us & we can’t easily find them in the present, we should not look first to the future! They were already discovered in the past. Thus we need to go INTO the past to remember.

The wise ones of the past already realized the timeless truths & transmitted their wisdom. We should not be afraid to turn to them for advice, to ask them questions, to seek their guidance, to rise to their level of consciousness. Especially now.

The problem of human nature is THE problem that we need to solve to enter The Once & Future Renaissance of scaled human potential: the Messianic age, the new Jerusalem, the harmonious realm of Shambhala — long-prophecied across traditions…

We should not trust any dystopian narrative that says humanity will be destroyed by technology. Who created the technologies?! Us. Humans created these technologies! Thus it follows that either humans will destroy each other, or humanity will finally confront itself & transform its own nature. If we can co-evolve harmoniously with each other, we can certainly co-evolve harmoniously with our technologies. Technological nature is not the problem. Human nature is the problem, human nature is the solution.

In the same way, we should not trust any utopian narrative that does not cure the seven deadly sins: pride, jealousy, anger, lust, greed, gluttony & laziness — at least one of which resides within all of us, and which we are here to recognize, confront & transcend. Martin Luther King Junior’s “I have a dream!!!” is the dream of transcending these flaws in our own nature; of conquering ourselves; of achieving exponential growth — not of global GDP or even intelligent-compute-on-demand — but of individual & collective consciousness. We have not yet realized the dream. Will we ever?!

The irony is that all the scientists & engineers & entrepreneurs & executives & politicians & truth-seekers are scaling this very high mountain of progress, climbing & climbing for centuries, making extraordinary efforts, achieving awe-inspiring feats… only to reach the top & find the sages, artists, poets, musicians, dancers, yogis, rabbis, whirling dervishes, sufis, magis, oracles, priests, priestesses, monks & nuns who have been here the whole time, who already arrived long ago, centuries before us, millennia before us!

They dwell there, at the summit of consciousness, free from suffering, rejoicing in the hidden perfection of reality, at peace with all that is… Surely, the servants of heaven are greater than the lords of the earth! But who can pass the test: who is free from suffering? Very few!

Let us return to the source. “All things follow from the Logos…” (Heraclitus)

Eternity x EarthOne Presentation - March 2026

“Fools seek counsel from the ones they doubt.”

— Heraclitus, Fragment 93

Confusion results from noise disguised as signal, illusion disguised as reality.

I get confused when I listen to the wrong people. Or, to be more precise, the listening isn’t ‘wrong’ and the people aren’t ‘wrong’ — the mistake is in the credibility I give them, the weight I give to their specific views.

“Listen to advice” is incomplete advice. The best advice-about-advice is to consider your sources & investigate their points of view, triangulating each point of view with at least two others, and ultimately, “inquiring within.”

I am a “fool” when I open myself up to, seek counsel & lend credence to “the ones I doubt.” Or rather, the ones I should doubt, because I’m extending them trust they haven’t earned & credibility they haven’t merited. When I make this mistake, I am treating fools as wise, and amateurs as masters.

I let friends, family, coworkers, business contacts, social acquaintances, celebrities, “influencers,” journalists, authors — all kinds of people — have a say in my life. I listen to them. I hear what they have to say. I ask them questions. I give them an audience. Their words, their values, their ideas… I let them into my mind & heart.

But I don’t doubt them. So I am a fool, seeking counsel from fools. Fools seek counsel from fools. Blind follow the blind, who, blind to their blindness, blindly lead them…

“A foolish passing thought makes one an ordinary man,
While an enlightened second thought makes one a buddha...”

— The Sutra of Hui-neng

This is why we need parents, teachers, sages, leaders, heroes & gods. But of course, the problem we’ve set up for ourselves is one of competing authorities & surrendered sovereignty. Of all the gurus available, which is the true guru? And how deeply will we trust them by surrendering our own understanding & free will to theirs? If we don’t surrender, then we won’t learn, because we will have set our own understanding above theirs. But if we surrender, how will we test the validity of an understanding & authority higher than our own? Having submitted, will we ever recover our sovereignty?

“Applicants for wisdom do what I have done: Inquire Within.”

— Heraclitus, Fragment 80

In the absence of true role models, we fill the void with false ones, apishly imitating them…

“To a god the wisdom of the wisest man sounds apish. Beauty in a human face looks apish too. In everything we have attained the excellence of apes…

The ape apes find most beautiful looks apish to non-apes.”

— Heraclitus, Fragments 98 & 99

Is there a better critique of Instagram?! Or pop culture more broadly? We do this all the time. We get caught up in valuing what society values, listening to who society listens to, talking about what society is talking about. But how often do we question the entire basis of our social value scheme?

“An ass prefers a bed of litter to a golden throne.”

— Heraclitus, Fragment 51

Everyone worships the rich & famous, wants to be rich & famous, but… what good is that? I’ve gotten to know some wealthy & famous people… Some part of me wants what they have. But the closer I get to “it” & to them, the more I experience what it’s really like, the more I realize it’s just another prison. The cage is golden, but it’s still a cage. The handcuffs are golden, but they’re still handcuffs. The king is still lonely & anxious.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

— Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II

There is a legend from Alexander the Great’s invasion of India. Alexander’s tutor, Aristotle, told him to seek out a yogi named Mandanes in Taxila (in modern day Pakistan), where there was a great ancient library & university. Mandanes is unmoved by Alexander’s gifts & threats. Alexander’s lieutenant then draws his sword, commanding Mandanes to “bow before the man who has conquered the world.” To which the yogi responds,

“I have conquered the desire to conquer the world…”

“You cannot kill me… I am not the body—only that which dwells within.”

“You are a slave of anger, but anger is my slave—so you are my slave’s slave.”

— The Yogi Mandanes to Alexander The Great, Sources: Arrian, Plutarch, Strabo

This is a reversal of values. This is what happens when representatives of two entirely different value systems meet in real life, and when at least one of them is fully self-aware of the difference and able to articulate it. This is real communication. Apparently Alexander was deeply humbled by the encounter.

Who knows? Maybe he became a yogi in his next life.

Likewise, Moses commanded the Hebrews to honor their father & mother, “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.” (Exodus 20:12)

The Hindu avatar Rama dutifully upheld the command of his father, King Dasarath, even though it unjustly banished him to 14 years of exile on the eve of his coronation. The Ramayana tells the story of his virtue & its reward — ultimate triumph.

Homer sang of heroes. Heraclitus believed that “character becomes destiny.” Plato believed that the ideal could be visualized in the mind and manifested in physical form. Aristotle believed that excellence is not an act, but a mindset.

How is it that the ancient Chinese, Jews, Indians and Greeks converge on this principle, of heroic son & daughters, upholding virtue by serving their ancestors & embodying the ideal?

The Cult of Steve Jobs

Taking Steve Jobs as a cliché example, precisely because it is a cliché example, I will speak in the Romantic & Cynical inner voice, so that we hear the contrast, and train ourselves to trust the romantic & distrust the cynic.

Romantic Voice

My lover is reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, whom, along with Leonardo da Vinci, was one of the great heroes of my adolescence.

To me, Steve was Leonardo reincarnate. His mere existence — the fact that such a person could exist in real life, could be alive & on this planet at the same time as me, performing creative miracle after miracle — gave me faith in human potential. It meant that magic was real.

The glory of history, legend & myth restored by a living successor! Like an avatar of divine creativity… Journeying to India & doing LSD in the 1970s?! Riding a BMW?! Cradling the first personal computer in a yoga pose!? The 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech - universal guru & master of oratory? Blockbuster product announcements like revelations from heaven?! Singlehandedly funding Pixar, taking it to multiple blockbusters, an IPO & acquisition, pioneering digital animation & computer graphics, two new industries?!

HE WAS SO EPIC. He had taste. He was a cultural icon with a natural charisma & influence that arguably no entrepreneur before or since has matched, and that very few have even approached.

Without him, where would we be today? Personal computing would be less beautiful, user friendly & powerfully immersive. And how many entrepreneurs like me would have been lost without his example?

How did he do it?! He wasn’t from a rich family! He dropped out of college! He wasn’t a software engineer or computer scientist! He was an orphan!

Cynical Voice

What are you talking about?! Steve Jobs was an ASSHOLE! In various ways, he betrayed everyone who was close to him. He wasn’t a genius, other than marketing himself & his companies - he didn’t really invent any new technology, just repackaged it. It’s not cool to fawn over him. Don’t be too enamored. Stay critical. Critics are cool. Romantics are naive fools. The thing to do with heroes is to cut them down to size. Talk about their flaws & weaknesses. Expose them as frauds. Make them small, so that we don’t feel small…

With banishment of Hermodoros the Ephesians said,
“No man should be worthier than average.”
Thus whoever would seek excellence today
finds that it has been BANISHED.

— Heraclitus, Fragment 114

Rejecting Cynicism

Neither voice is balanced. But suppose there were two identical people: one who listened only to the romantic voice, and one who listened to the cynical voice. Which would be happier, achieve more and have a more positive impact on others? There is no question in my mind that the romantic tends towards the light, the cynic tends towards darkness, but that the supreme virtue consists in the harmony beyond opposites. However, in our cynical society, the first step in that evolution is the rejection of cynicism, and the embrace of romanticism.

Cynicism is a mind virus. Society defaults to cynicism because of our vices: it feeds our jealousy & protects our insecurity. There is a certain logic to “objective criticism,” but it usually masks the shadows within the psyche of the critic.

Romanticism is the path of true virtue… History should be accurate, biographies should seek the truth… but not in order to tear down. We learn to imitate. We’re looking for role models. We’re in search of excellence among humans. Virtue has left a record in the past. Blessed are the earnest & sincere devotees, they shall inherit the earth.

Visit the Pantheon. Steve Jobs & Leonardo da Vinci are hardly the only creative heroes in the history books. History is luminous. As Pericles, himself great, said in his funeral oration, ‘the wide earth is a monument to the pantheon of heroes, the victorious dead.’ Their deeds made the civilization we inhabit.

Harmony Beyond Opposites

Having switched our default attitude from cynical to romantic, there is a further step in our evolution, which is to seek the harmony beyond opposites — reintegrating the ‘dark’ insight of the cynic within a romantic honoring of ancestors…

Reversal: of course, blind admiration & imitation, taken to an extreme, can cause just as much damage as jealous cynicism — although in our times the former vice is far more rare than the latter, in history both vices have led to ruin.

Harmony: the ideal then is to honor the past & the ancestors, while holding the tension of objective criticism: recognizing both their virtues & their vices, learning from both.

“The mind, to think of the accord that strains against itself,
Needs strength, as does the arm to string the bow or lyre.”

“From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony.”

“The harmony past knowing sounds more deeply than the known.”

— Heraclitus, Fragment 46

A Creative & Spiritual Practice

We find romanticism difficult, because we’ve hardened our hearts. To let inspiration in, we have to soften our hearts, to become receptive. This is why honoring the ancestors is a creative & spiritual practice.

Meditate daily on those who came before us, who showed us the way. Adopt them as your spiritual ancestors, your mothers & fathers - they belong to the world, they gave us our shared inheritance. Pray, ask heaven to move through you as it moved through them. Let them speak to you, to give you ideas, to visit you with inspiration...

The world still needs heroes. Even though there are no more knights in shining armor, rescuing damsels in distress, slaying dragons, fending off barbarians at the gate, rescuing kingdoms… the world still needs heroes. Even heroes who wear black turtlenecks, blue jeans & walk barefoot. Or heroes who imagine helicopters five centuries before the technology exists to build them!

Romanticism, expressed honestly & directly, is painfully earnest, even cringe. And yet it is precisely that voice which you should listen to, nurture & protect inside of you.

Read Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth or Hero’s Journey. Read Will & Ariel Durant’s Heroes of History. Read either history or myth, and you will find heroes. Let them inspire you.

Dissolving Ego & Pride

Through honoring our ancestors, we begin to imitate them & to carry on their work, which is the work of civilization: the work of leadership & enlightenment. But the outer work proceeds from the inner work, which is paradoxically hampered by ego…

It is only by recognizing our inadequacy that we can find inspiration. It is only by recognizing our insignificance that we can find significance. It is only by surrendering our need for importance that we can achieve something of true importance. Humility & service are the path to greatness. Even when every biological, psychological, economic & social incentive points to self-aggrandizement, somehow there is a natural limit, a self-destructive tendency. How can we overcome ourselves?

“He who has conquered his own mind has conquered the universe.”

— Srimad Bhagavatam, Sage Angira to King Chitraketu, Chapter IV

The essence of the paradox is this: the hero wants to change the world, but must first change within. The larger the external ambition, the deeper the inner transformation required.

The world ultimately cannot be saved, conquered or controlled, nothing it contains can provide ultimate satisfaction, and all mortals are doomed to die… Any conquest of the world begins with a conquest of the self. To truly conquer the world, one must truly conquer oneself.

Hinduism articulates the four “aims” of life, the Purusharthas: Dharma (calling/destiny/duty/wisdom), Artha (success/wealth/power), Kama (pleasure) and Moksha (freedom/joy/transcendence/enlightenment).

Heroism is often born in selfishness. The hero ultimately desires pleasure (Kama), and is willing to make sacrifices to achieve success (Artha) as a precondition for pleasure (Kama). In so doing, the hero discovers his or her unique Dharma, or calling in life. But somewhere along the way, the mystery of Moksha begins to take place, as inner transformation is required to transcend external obstacles.

Heroism can be a mask for the ego, for pride. The desire for ‘impact’ & legacy can be a mask for selfish ambition, for self-importance & self-aggrandizement, for lust & fame. It’s true! All these things are inside me, and inside you, and inside everyone who is not fully enlightened. As Krishna tells Arjuna in The Bhagavad Gita, addressing this exact dilemma, path of enlightenment is not necessarily a renunciation of the world, indeed, such a renunciation can be cowardly & hinder spiritual progress. Our duties & destinies in the world must be embraced. We each have a calling. Humility must be found in the path of action, and renunciation in detachment from results.

Dissolving Shame & Insecurity

Heroes are tempted to judge others as “less” than, but this is exactly how they judge themselves — harshly, against the ideal… Behind pride is shame. Heroism begins with the overcoming of shame: accepting that no matter how humble our beginning, we have a role to play. Only later does that shame become pride & self-importance, but even as the hero approaches the ideal, the hero never achieves it — thus the shame never really goes away.

“Give me one man
From amongst ten thousand
If he be the best.”

— Heraclitus, Fragment 113

In this way, Heraclitus was a prophet heralding Socrates, who would come later, whom the Oracle of Delphi would proclaim as the wisest & thus greatest among the living, to which Socrates responded with wisdom supreme, “For I know that I know nothing.” Thus Heraclitus says, “The way up is the way back,” (F. 69) and “The beginning is the end,” (F.70) He is referring to the hero’s journey, which is the soul’s journey. Once the hero’s pride dissolves, shame is revealed, once the shame dissolves, the soul’s journey is glimpsed. The soul’s journey is an eternal hero’s journey, as we learn & evolve, lifetime after lifetime. Thus Heraclitus reflects,

“The soul is undiscovered,
Though explored forever,
To a depth beyond report.”

— Heraclitus, Fragment 71

Discrimination & judgement are necessary aspects of the intellect, of worldly perception & leadership, but spiritually, they are corrupting, because we cannot see all ends. We cannot fully see each person’s soul. We cannot see the full tapestry of karma. We cannot see their past, their future — where they are at in their journey. Thus, Heraclitus says,

“Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work,
and helps make something of the world…”

— Heraclitus, Fragment 90

The spiritual temptation of heroes is pride. The spiritual temptation of everyone else is shame. Both are traps. If the soul is eternal & reincarnates until every lesson has been learned… If while we sleep, our soul returns to another place, remembering its place in the great dance… Then even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work, and helps make something of the world. Just as the hero would not be a hero without the villain, so the same goes for the butcher, the baker & the candlestick maker.

And indeed, who can fathom the accounting of heaven?

“And Jesus looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury, and He saw also a certain poor widow putting in two mites. So He said, “Truly I say to you that this poor widow has put in more than all; for all these out of their abundance have put in offerings for God, but she out of her poverty put in all the livelihood that she had.”

— The Widow’s Mite, The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 21

What is small, like a seed, may someday turn into a large tree. Who is considered least may be considered greatest. The highest reality & the secret truth of things is not as it appears now, to our worldly understanding.

No matter how off track you feel you are, no matter how much you feel like you’ve messed up, no matter how sure you are that you aren’t a hero & can’t become a hero & have nothing to learn from heroes… The more certainly your journey is about to begin.

Some heroes attain their calling on the brink of death. And all lives are merely a preparation for the next. Our pasts, though irrevocable, invite alchemical learning & healing — mistakes into wisdom, brokenness into transformation, and weakness into strength.

A mother who raises a son who cures a disease; a father who raises his daughter to create inspiring art; a wife who supports a husband who creates wealth for thousands; a friend who through steady encouragement lifts his friend out of depression, who goes on to greatness — do they not share in the merit? Who can see all ends? Karma is a tapestry none can unravel.

There is a mystical belief that sometimes as few as 36 hidden people on the planet actively uphold civilization & prevent it from destroying itself - and that these 36 may not even be aware of themselves or their heroic role. In another tradition, there may be as few as 5. In yet another tradition, there are countless saints hidden among us.

The principle is the same: recognize heroes in all shapes & sizes, honor them, imitate them, follow your calling & do your part… however small it is. And surrender to the flow of life, without clinging too tightly to any outcome.

Recognizing The Divine Spark

Every mortal is a spark of the divine. All of us coming from & returning to the same source. A hero is someone in whom you recognize divinity. What we see in them, exists in us. Recognizing it in them, awakens it in us.

Namaste is the force upholding society: from filial piety, we gain piety & virtue, honor & respect in general. This learning to bow begins with those who have come before, because we are less jealous of them, we don’t compete with them, and they have given everything to us - thus they are easier to admire. Then it extends to everyone & everything else. Admiration, once cultivated, becomes a strength of the heart, the ability to transcend our ego. To recognize that ALL IS ONE.

“The LOGOS [The Universal Principle] proves those first hearing it as NUMB to understanding as the ones who have not heard… YET ALL THINGS FOLLOW FROM THE LOGOS.

Some, blundering with what I have set before you, try in vain, with empty talk, to separate the essences of things and say how each thing truly is.

And all the rest make no attempt. They no more see how they behave broad waking than remember clearly what they did asleep…

FOR WISDOM, LISTEN… not to me, but to the LOGOS…
and KNOW THAT ALL IS ONE.

— Heraclitus, Fragments 1 & 2

“O noble soul, open thy divine sight and regard and honor all beings as Myself. Wise is he who looks with an equal eye upon all beings, seeing The One indwelling God in the hearts of all. He who meditates on my divine nature as present in every man becomes free from rivalry, from jealousy, from hatred, and from the consciousness of ego.

One who has realized Brahman sees Brahman everywhere and in all. To look upon all beings as myself, and to shape one’s conduct towards them accordingly, in thought, word and deed — that is the best method of worship. Such is the wisdom of the wise, and the insight of the intelligent by which in this very birth — this illusory & fleeting existence — one may reach even to me, The Real and The Eternal.”

— Srimad Bhagavatam, Krishna to Uddhava, Chapter XXI

“If the doors of perception were cleansed
every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.

For man has closed himself up,
till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

Even in a society that idolizes technology and worships success, money & power, “the revenge of the nerds” seems unsatisfying, even to the nerds. Like the nouveau riche industrialists of the 19th century attempting to buy their way into aristocratic circles, which welcomed their patronage but secretly snubbed their lack of refinement, taste & cultural cache, the elite of the 21st century have a similar duplicitous embrace yet allergic relationship to tech billionaires…

“All things follow from The One Universal Creative Principle [Logos]…

Some, blundering with what I set before you, try in vain with empty talk to separate the essences of things and say how each thing truly is.”

— Heraclitus, Fragment 1

My view is that of Heraclitus: these distinctions are irrelevant. While people try to separate commercial & creative endeavor, artists & entrepreneurs are ultimately the same. Creativity pervades all things, and anyone who works with the creative principle is accessing the same ‘source’.

Art forms may differ, levels of mastery may differ — but all artists & entrepreneurs receive ideas & creative inspiration by accessing one universal source.

“Although we need The Creative Principle to keep things known in common, people still treat specialists as if their nonsense were a form of wisdom.”

— Heraclitus, Fragment 92

The ancient Greeks called that source Logos, the Indians Brahman, Persians Asha, the Chinese Tao, and other civilizations gave it other names, but they all converge on one, universal truth: a master principle, pervading all people & things, governing change & transformation, manifesting through all the varied forms of the cosmos…

This source was always understood to be not just creative & universal, but metaphysical. That is, it doesn’t have a physical form. Like mathematics & geometry, like color & music theory, it most certainly exists! Its existence governs everything happening in space & time. It is an aspect of The Laws of Nature; it is the Nature of Nature itself! But as all physical forms derive from it, it doesn’t have a single physical form of its own, so it cannot be destroyed — its existence is meta-physical.

From this metaphysical source, either consciously or unconsciously, all artists & entrepreneurs receive their unique calling & sense of purpose.

“Who am I?!” is a fertile question. Society tells me that I am a businessman, giving me a LinkedIn profile to label me & put me in a box. But I don’t think of myself that way, and neither do the entrepreneurs I admire.

We think of ourselves as artists, except the canvases we paint with are companies, the brushes are teams and the paint is capital.

Throughout my ‘career’, ahem, journey, I have at times forgotten, and then at times remembered, that this is, first & foremost, a creative endeavor, not an economic one…

The word entrepreneurship means ‘undertaking’. We are not just venturing capital, we are investing our time & energy, our life force, to bringing forth a new thing… We are enterprising, adventuring, creating, risk taking, institution building, inventing, imagining, envisioning, manifesting… alternating between playing like children and working like adults.

“Time is a game played beautifully by children…”

“History is a child building a sandcastle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man's power in the world.”

— Fragment 79, Heraclitus

“The kingdom belongs to the children.”

“Unless you become as one of these little children,
you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven…” (or IPO?!)

— Jesus (Luke 8:16, Matthew 18:3)

This is a vocation, a calling, a journey, not a traditional professional career. The word ‘career’ comes from running a long course, and in that sense, it is indeed a career - a marathon… as entrepreneurship plays out over decades. But over the decades, it is easy to lose the beginner’s mind, which is full of questions & ideas…

“It is wisdom which is seeking for wisdom…”

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,
but in the expert’s there are few.”

— Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki

An entrepreneur begins the adventure like Tarot card zero, The Fool, and his aspiration is to become Tarot card one, The Magician. But to transform from the Fool to the Magician, he must paradoxically not lose sight of the quest, while gaining worldly experience. Learn about gravity, but don’t lose the dream of flight.

My favorite entrepreneurs start out as romantics, and they never lose that beginner’s love — even as they master a cynical power game. They are enamored by the beautiful potential of ideas, not just by wealth, power, status, luxury & other spoils of victory. They’ve been possessed by the Muses, have gotten some idea stuck in their heads & are obsessed with making it real — they are pregnant, and devoted to manifesting the destiny of their as yet unborn child.

To paraphrase my friend Richard Craib, the founder of Numer.ai, some ideas are best expressed as music, others are best expressed through the arts… but some ideas can only be incorporated.

Companies are similar to the other art forms: like architecture, a company has form & function, structure & system; like drama, music, song & dance, a company moves through time, embracing more & more participants, inviting both group coordination & individual creative expression…

Nevertheless, a corporation is its own unique art form… It is a performance that only happens once, over an indefinitely long period of time, with an indefinite number of participants, in many places simultaneously. And what is “it” exactly? Is a company a legal entity incorporated by the state? Is it a series of transactions? Is it products & services? Is it the participants: the investors, team, vendors and clients?

At what point exactly is a company founded? Is it after the first sale? After the first profit? After the first capital raised? After the first hire? After achieving a certain enterprise value? Or is its stage of maturity entirely relative to all other companies, just like its stock price?

What, then, is the unique talent & activity of an entrepreneur? Is it product, sales, marketing, hiring, fundraising or management? If an entrepreneur’s job is to hire people to do their job, at what point is an entrepreneur’s job complete?

A company is not reproducible. It is inherently intangible & ephemeral. It is contextually embedded & woven into history in an utterly singular way. Where is it? You can’t point to it. And yet… it most definitely exists! Equity in companies, that is, stocks, is the second most valuable asset class in the world, after real estate…

Before I digress further into the intangibility of the legal & financial system, I will pause my economic esotericism for now. I rest my point: entrepreneurship is a open-ended creative endeavor that exists across time, space & various dimensions of analysis. That it results in social & economic value, that it creates stakeholder wealth & consumer surplus, is a bi-product of its essential creative nature… just as the rays of the sun are a bi-product of nuclear fusion.

“The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.
It is hidden but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.”

— The Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell

What is the limit: of how many problems can be solved, of how many companies can be created, of how valuable they can be, of how many entrepreneurs can succeed?

This is like asking: how many great paintings can be painted, how many great buildings can be built, how much inspiring music can exist?

Nobody can set these limits. It’s always higher than we think. That is why great societies encourage entrepreneurs & artists. And great entrepreneurs & artists overcome all of the difficulties & disappointments along the way.

When I view the mandala of our world with my third eye, this is what I see…

The world order is re-forming. Industries are being re-structured. Previously unassailable business models are being disrupted. Technology is revealing new forms of creative, preserving & destructive power. New forms of art & architecture are emerging. Social media is evolving culture, lifestyle & fashion on a daily basis.

Change never stops. History is always happening. The 21st century is taking shape. But in times like these, the plate-tectonics & accelerating pace of change are felt like an earthquake by all people throughout the world. In dread & in excitement, the collective unconscious wonders, what does the future hold?!

In political philosophy, we turn away from technocratic neo-liberalism towards movements of individual, corporate & national sovereignty. In existential philosophy, materialism is called into question by simulation theory, unexplained psychic & seemingly miraculous phenomena and the possibility of alien encounter. In archeology, theology & mythology, our atheistic belief in “the death of God,” which archetypally sealed us in hell & purgatory for over a century, whispers to us the miraculous possibility of resurrection, and a return of animism & theism in all forms.

Looking for a new hope & a new salvation, we wonder if the secrets to humanity’s future somehow exist trapped in our deep & forgotten past. Just as psychoanalytically an individual’s healing & trauma are located in the past — the forgotten & disowned cosmological beliefs & religious rituals which animated the civilizations of the past are the repository for humanity’s collective unconscious. How did we come to live in a grey world, a world without transcendent magic, mystery & miracles? Humanity will never heal & become self-aware until it re-integrates its repressed histories & myths. As it is not possible for humanity at large to undertake that healing process, it is the role of artists, philosophers, entrepreneurs - shamans of all types - to undertake it on the world’s behalf, ushering society into catharsis through our art.

At its edges, our mandala is framed by the hope of utopia & the fear of apocalypse. We fear World War III, being replaced by technology, environmental destruction, poverty and meaninglessness. We hope for a second, scaled Renaissance, a Golden Age, a Messianic Era, a new Jerusalem. And we debate, intensely, how realistic these fears & hopes are; how to mitigate risks, how to usher in progress. Is this mandala new or old? Aren’t these existential dilemmas as old as The Tower of Babel? Aren’t technological singularities as old as the road & the stirrup & the longbow & the printing press & the aqueduct?

Viewing this mandala… As a maker of meaning, I come into crisis…

What is the meaning of words, images, sounds - any art form - when artificial intelligence makes them on command?

Who cares about any form of macro analysis - history, politics, economics - when there is no entrepreneur, investor or world leader to accurately predict even the near future, and to benefit from such predictions?

Why bother making sense, when the complexity of all subjects - human psychology, society, the liberal arts, the natural sciences - escape the limits of reason?

I find myself beyond words, beyond the mind, at that mystical place which T.S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world.”

That is the place from which art comes. From which poetry flows. From which the dance of the cosmos begins. Only our intuitive power has access to this realm.

Not much can be said of it. “Mystery within mystery, the gateway to all understanding.” Even Lao Tzu could only summon 81 pages. First mystery makes us silent. Then mystery makes us speak. Ignorant of mystery, creation is noise, chaos, futility. Inspired by mystery, creation is art, music, dance, poetry.

Motivations for creativity other than creativity itself - wealth, power, fame - feel hollow, inauthentic, fake. So what does creativity want to create that hasn’t been created in 2025? The form of sacrifice that pleases the gods is the exposure of our innermost self. Nakedness, healing & rapture of soul. Yet true art like that is transgressive, irreverent, subversive, contrarian, dangerous, cancellable. The more ‘successful’ we become as artists, the more we have to ‘lose,’ the less we want to create true art.

It seems to me that the great lie we’re constantly being told, across all forms of media, is that there is such a thing as material progress… As happiness outside the self. That some force - technology, economics, politics - is going to save us. Resulting in universal financial abundance, never-ending life, infinite partaking of luxury & whimsical experiential indulgence.

Ignoring that human nature has not been “cured” of its shadow - of violence, jealousy, greed, ego… Ignoring the existential dilemma, of whether life, goodness, beauty & truth can exist without death, evil, ugliness & false illusion… Ignoring the economic & historical dilemma, of whether we are in fact more satisfied than in the past, of whether we can be satisfied, in any final & absolute sense.

If there is no such thing as progress, if the cosmos is better understood as an eternal drama, play or dance, what is this “great lie” of material progress distracting us from?

Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses, whispers to me in this moment, suggesting an answer: NOT “spiritual progress” but instead self-expression & self-realization.

Self-expression is art, not as competition, but as an exercise in revelation. Letting the muses move through me. Re-opening the intuitive channel. Entering a trance state of surrender to flow. Becoming a bridge between metaphysical & physical. Moving beyond the rational mind, beyond the narrow limits of ego…

“How did I forget? Why did I close it? What was I afraid of? How did I let myself get so distracted? This is why I’m here. This is my truest source of power & purpose.”

Letting something transcendent move through me is essentially feminine: surrendering to the god or gods, who want to possess me, use me & create with & through me. To be creative is to be both maiden & mother. To be fertile, to become pregnant, to carry & to give birth.

Manifesting creative power is also essentially masculine. The idea springs into the receptive mind like lightning, symbol of sky-father.

So it is that creativity is hermaphroditic yoga, requiring union of yin & yang, within a single being. If I have alienated any part of myself, that fragmentation will block my creativity. Integrating shadow & light, yin & yang - creation takes place.

To what end, but self-realization? What other end is there? “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time.” We Do to Become. We Become to Be.

Sages say that at the highest form of Being, doing & non-doing become effortless & thoughtless. They also say that if such a state of Being is possible, it is already here right now, both within me & you, and within the world - all we have to do is remember & reunite with it. And they say many other things besides, pointing out the illusions of time & change, reminding us of Eternity: “the still point of the turning world.” So much for the sages who have attained such elevated consciousness, may we dance with them someday!

‘Progress’, material or spiritual, is a trap - a Zeno’s paradox. If we have not yet “arrived” at the “ultimate” or “perfect” or “ideal” state, then maybe such a state doesn’t exist. If such a state does exist & is attained, how does history continue afterwards? But if such a state doesn’t exist, then surely progress doesn’t exist either, because progress is defined in relation to some telos, some defined objective, some goal.

As Plato asked, from whence does this “idea,” this “concept,” this “defined objective” come - what is its source? Ideas belong to ‘The Realm of Ideas’, which is metaphysical, beyond the material world. And where is that: where do ideas come from?

In the Greek cosmogenesis, there is an interplay of the three aspects of time: Chronos, Kairos & Aeon. Chronos is chronological time & change. Kairos is the meaning we make & find in Chronos. Aeon is the eternal source. Aeon is where ideas come from, where beauty comes from, where meaning comes from. All meaning we make & find in Chronos, all Kairos, is the ‘invasion’ of Aeon into chronological time. This is well expressed in the verse of William Blake,

“Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

As am I. As are you. As are we all. Whether we realize it or not, we chose it. Psyche, aware or unaware, moves towards its expression & realization, its wholeness & union.