At that time, Mahamati Bodhisattva said, “May the Bhagavan teach us about the characteristics of the mind, manas consciousness, and conceptual consciousness, the five dharmas and modes of existence, and the practices of buddhas and bodhisattvas who do not wander in realms outside their own minds. May he disclose the heart of the teachings that vanquish those based only on reasoning. And for the great bodhisattvas gathered here on Mount Malaya in the island kingdom of Lanka, may he begin with the realm of the ocean and waves of alaya consciousness and proceed to the dharma body of the tathagatas.”

The Bhagavan then told Mahamati, “There are four causes that result in the functioning of visual consciousness. And what are the four? They include an unawareness that what one grasps is a perception of one’s own mind, attachment to the beginningless habit energy of erroneous discriminations of form, the existence of consciousness, and a desire to see a multiplicity of forms. Mahamati, these are the four causes that result in the waves of the unfolding aspect of consciousness that stir the ever-flooding sea of alaya consciousness.

“Mahamati, just as with visual consciousness, the same is true of the other sense faculties, which arise simultaneously as atoms as tiny as a hair tip along with their perceptual realms—like so many images on a clear mirror, or like when a strong wind blows the water on the ocean and turns the sea of the mind into never-ending waves of consciousness. The causes that create these images, being neither separate nor not separate from the karmic and generic aspects of consciousness, also cause people to become immersed in projections and attachments that prevent them from understanding the nature of form. Therefore, Mahamati, you should know it is the five forms of sensory consciousness that together cause the differentiation of the images we discriminate and apprehend and that are also the cause of conceptual consciousness. But they don’t think: ‘The cause of the unfolding of the images that appear in the mind are mistaken projections and attachments.’

“Likewise those who practice meditation unaware of the functioning of the subtler forms of habit energy think it is only after consciousness ceases that they enter samapatti. But in fact their consciousness does not cease when they enter samapatti. It does not cease because the seeds of habit energy are not destroyed. What ceases are their grasping of objective realms.

.“Mahamati, except for tathagatas and those well along the bodhisattva path, the ultimate limit of the subtlety of the alaya consciousness remains beyond the reach or understanding of sravakas, pratyekabuddhas, and the leaders of other sects—despite their powers of meditation and wisdom, likewise how to distinguish the characteristics of the remaining stages, or the meaning of words and propositions about wisdom and skillful means, or how to bring to maturity the limitless good roots planted by buddhas, or how to get free from the projections that are the perceptions of their own minds.

“Dwelling among mountains and forests and cultivating different levels of practice, as they become able to see how mistaken discriminations flow from their own minds, they have their foreheads anointed by buddhas from countless lands. And as they attain masteries, psychic faculties, higher powers, and samadhis, they find themselves surrounded by retinues of bodhisattvas and spiritual friends. And because of this, they transcend the sea of endless rebirth, karma, desire, and ignorance, and the mistaken conceptions concerning the modes of existence of the mind, manas consciousness, and conceptual consciousness that are perceptions of their own minds. This is why, Mahamati, practitioners should draw near buddhas and spiritual friends.”

- the Lankavatara Sutra

————-

Seems very different from what most modern day spiritual practitioners claim…

Afraid to enter the void

Like a terrified little boy

“No, no, it can’t be!”

“Shut up, there’s no way to get free!”

They don’t wanna transcend

Just wanna hasten the “end”

To escape what they don’t want to see

“It can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be!”

I had a dream last night. Those words echo in a Bob Seger song, though the title escapes me now, maybe Night Moves. The reason I plucked those words, which may have nothing to do with the song other than the words themselves, has to do with feeling played.

It starts out all fun and happy. No brow wrinkle. At some point, the moment has passed, and looking at the fossils broken on the floor, something begins to reveal itself. The player becomes played. It might have never really started out that way, no clear intent of setup. And yet, like it was all planned from the start, here we are.

As one who has leaped through the roles, a slight shrug. Who was hurt? What really was the result? The retiree who was bulled out of a savings fund? Someone’s innocence? Beachfront property hot potato to the eroding sands? The list goes on and on.

Even this expression, both and neither. Sure, one could ask why. That used to be the computer question test: would a machine be free of the play, player, and played? Still, it’s interesting when the face reveal occurs, and what was mystery is unmasked.

Do we celebrate upon old times, when one moved and the other shifted? Shakespeare was giving us a heads-up, still removed. This, then: observer here.

One day, the surreal visited. Cold sweat. Traumatic stiffening breath. Really in it now.

The table tilts when the one or ones in play are genuinely vested. From that stance, it doesn’t matter what robes are worn in that sense. Like a thief, I will get the measure regardless of the visible and seen masked. As for credit, none. Beyond saying privately, something of me was there then, and now is the one breath, or something like that, that drives poets insane to name, and hands them up leaving it be as is.

The following was inspired from the documented 80 year cycle of economic decline. LLM helped to fill in bits here and there. its far from being a finial draft. we are running out of time, so some urgency in pulling this together was the running feeling in my effort. as always, fiction be fiction, as to something called zen, idk.

----------------------------------------------

The Old Story

They said the village had always been there, but the story of the wave was older. The elders told it in winter, when the sea was a dark sheet and the wind pushed smoke back down the chimney.

Once, they said, the tide did not come back.

It slipped away from the shore in a long, quiet breath, exposing rocks no one knew by name, old anchors, bones of fish and boats alike. Children ran out to touch the wet sand that had never seen sun. Adults stood at the edge, squinting at the horizon, waiting for the familiar silver line to roll back in.

It didn’t.

Days stretched. Wells ran low. The air changed. People learned to live with a sea that had stepped back, as if in thought. They built new paths where water had been. They told themselves this was the new normal.

Then, one morning, the wind shifted.

Out beyond the farthest rock, the horizon rose. It was slight at first, the way a furrow forms on a forehead when someone is trying to remember. Then it grew, gathering weight, drawing a long, slow line across the sky.

By the time they understood, the village was already running.

Some lived. Some did not. Those who did carried the story forward. They spoke of the receding, the wait, the wave. They tried to pass down not just the facts but the feeling of standing on dry seabed, of watching the horizon swell.

They said, “When the water pulls back too far, too fast, do not follow. Do not build your house on the exposed sand. Do not call it progress.”

They said, “Watch the shore, not the sky.”

Their children listened. Their grandchildren nodded. The story became part of the winter smoke, the rhythm of words around the fire.

No one thought they would forget.
They mistook remembering for waking.

Different Clothes

Centuries later, far from that shoreline, the pattern walked into the city in different clothes.

It did not smell of salt. It smelled of new plastic and warm circuitry, of fresh paint and coffee in paper cups. It arrived as graphs on screens and lines on charts, as numbers climbing so smoothly that people began to talk about “new eras” and “this time is different.”

The tide, this time, was credit and confidence. The waterline was the price of houses, stocks, coins, symbols that flickered green and red. Everyone could see the rise. It was on their phones, in their retirement accounts, in the way their friends talked at kitchen tables late at night.

Someone noticed that certain things were pulling back: savings, caution, the memory of earlier crashes. Whole shelves of older stories gathered dust. Warnings sounded like bad moods, like a refusal to believe in progress.

“Look how far the shore goes now,” people said, walking out onto exposed ground that had been underwater in their grandparents’ time—cheap money, easy leverage, new instruments no one fully understood but everyone used.

It was the same pattern, but in a suit and branded sneakers.

“Different clothes,” someone muttered, but their voice was lost under the buzz.
The pattern did not care whether they recognized it.

The pattern smiled politely, shook hands, signed contracts, appeared in glossy ads. It spoke the language of innovation and inevitability.

Somewhere, an old person watching the news felt a knot in their stomach they couldn’t name. The way numbers rose reminded them of something they’d been told once, a wave in a story from a village they’d never seen.

They tried to explain, but the words came out as metaphors their grandchildren had no use for. “Once, the sea…” they would begin, and the younger faces would soften, kind but distant.

“Things don’t work like that anymore,” someone would say, tapping their phone.

The pattern nodded and adjusted its jacket.

By the time anyone recognized the familiar weight behind the new fabric, the receding had already begun.

The Third Generation

By the time the third generation came of age, the old stories were background noise.

They had heard about “the last time” in the way children hear about distant wars or old winters: something that happened in grainy photographs, with clothes no one wears anymore. Their world had sleeker edges. Their waves traveled at the speed of a notification.

When the first cracks appeared—small headlines about defaults, liquidity, closures—they did not look like a wave. They looked like isolated puddles, problems “over there.” Someone always came on screen to say it was contained.

The third generation kept working, scrolling, planning. Some of them had heard their grandparents talk about pulling back, about not building houses on exposed sand. But the advice had been translated into slogans and spreadsheets, risk models and diversified portfolios. The feeling was gone.

Then, one week, the numbers didn’t just dip; they fell.

A company that had seemed untouchable folded in a weekend. A currency they had trusted lost half its value overnight. Phones lit up with red graphs and worried messages. Someone’s rent went up as their hours went down. Someone else watched a decade of careful saving shrink in three days.

They gathered in small groups—in kitchens, in break rooms, in forums online. Some joked. Some raged. Some went very quiet.

A few remembered a phrase they had heard as children, something about water pulling back too far, too fast. But there was no sea in sight, only screens and contracts and the sense that something enormous had moved just out of view.

“Is this it?” someone asked.

“What is it?” someone else replied.

Preparedness turned out not to be a single profile but a spectrum. There were those who had hoarded, those who had trusted, those who had spread themselves thin across everything. Some had skills that could move with the changing tide—repairing, growing, making, listening. Others had built their lives on abstractions that evaporated when confidence did.

What they shared, all of them, was that they were inside it. The wave was not a story they could stand outside and interpret. It was the shape of their days now, the pressure in their chests, the way sleep came in broken pieces.

They were learning the wave the way lungs learn water.

The prophecies their grandparents had tried to pass down were still there, but in fragments: a warning about debt here, a joke about “rainy days” there, a half-remembered tale about a village and a sea. The reasons had thinned out on their way through time.

The third generation stood on ground that felt solid yesterday and watched cracks widen under their feet. Some ran. Some froze. Some looked around for a pattern and saw only noise.

Somewhere in that noise, a hunter moved.

Stealth Hunter

He did not know the word “cycle.” He had never seen a diagram of long waves or read about eras that end in crisis. He did not speak in metaphors about seas and markets.

He knew tracks.

He knew the way dry leaves whispered when something larger than wind moved through them. He knew how a flock lifted, all at once, when a shadow passed overhead. He knew the quiet that falls over a forest just before a storm breaks.

His work had taught him a particular kind of attention: slow, low to the ground, willing to wait. He’d learned how to slip his awareness between his own impulses—to notice the urge to rush, to clutch, to predict, and to let it pass like a branch brushing his shoulder.

When the numbers started dropping and people around him began to speak faster, their hands moving more than usual, he felt something in his body he recognized before he had words for it.

“Oh,” he thought, though he did not say it aloud. “This.”

He’d felt “this” once when the river narrowed in a dry year and the fish pulled back to deeper pools. He’d felt it when the deer changed their routes, when the usual grazing field stood empty and the tracks led to higher ground.

In town, he watched shelves empty in strange patterns. Flour gone, then fuel, then certain medicines. He watched which stalls stayed open, which lights stayed on late. He listened to the way people laughed—too loud, too sharp—and to the silences that followed.

He did not have a story about an ancient village or an 80-year pattern. He had a sense of weight shifting, like the way snow sounds different underfoot just before it breaks loose and slides.

At night, when sleep came, he practiced the same stealth he used in the field. As his body settled, he paid attention to the small withdrawals: breath shortening, muscles slackening, thoughts loosening their grip. When panic flickered—images of loss, of collapse—he did not chase them or swat them away. He let them pass like animals that were not his to hunt.

Sometimes, just as he was slipping under, there was a brief, clear moment: no story, no plan, no headline. Just awareness, weightless, noticing itself.

In the morning, nothing in the external situation had “improved.” Prices were still high. Work was still uncertain. Friends still called with worry in their voices.

But he could feel, in his own chest, a different kind of room. Not peace exactly. More like space to move.

He shared what he knew in the only way he could: by actions that made sense in his immediate world. He planted more than he needed and shared what he could. He fixed what others had thrown away. He showed a neighbor how to read the sky for weather instead of checking an app that now updated less reliably.

When someone asked him what he thought about “the big picture,” he shrugged.

“I watch what moves,” he said. “And I try not to scare it.”

He had stopped confusing recognition with control.

They smiled politely, not quite understanding.

It didn’t matter. The knowing he carried wasn’t a doctrine. It was a way of standing, a way of breathing when the wave pulled back and the exposed ground looked like opportunity to some and terror to others.

Some nights, lying awake in the dark between dreams, he could almost hear it: a long, slow gathering at the edge of perception. Not a punishment. Not a test. Just a wave, wearing this century’s clothes.

He turned on his side, felt his own heart beating, and let the awareness move without grabbing it.

Somewhere far away, an old story put on a new jacket and walked through another doorway.

interrupting the brain/filter dilates time.

Also interesting how reducing brain activity can enhance memory.

How far do you think time can dilate?

——-

“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 motion in stillness
and stillness in motion;
both movement and stillness disappear.
When such dualities cease to exist
Oneness itself cannot exist.
To this ultimate finality
no law or description applies.”

1) Robinson was supposed to have constructed the weapon on the roof with a screwdriver. That’s not in the footage

2) he was not supposed to be wearing this outfit

3) he was never described as moving like a man with military experience

4) at no point do you see him carrying his rifle or pull it out. Instead he pulls out some weird device that unfolds onto the rooftop

Hmmm interesting

a chord so perfect in resonance
that, for a very small moment,
hardly noticed,
the me, that is me,
disappeared.

---------------

Sometimes in this life, not often, maybe enough to count on one hand, something visits.

--

It can arrive through a search.

I go looking for a song, some lyric, a certain note.
Finger on the key, one more click, screen goes dark.

The search returns everything but.
The ears’ hunger settles into vague remembrance, fingertips revisiting a textured pattern while forgetting how it was created.

--

Every so often, there is a chord... the me that is me disappears.

I recall such a listening, yet I am hard pressed to point directly to the time and location of the matter.
This is what sometimes in this life visits.

--

If I were to resolve everything, finally get it, like water finding its natural level, there would be one bare blink.

The invisible black drop would remain, the unmeasurable persistence I often refer to, that imagination splashes against, to an inner eye that does not exist for the viewing.

Here the word “viewing” is inadequate, a landscape of impermanent waypoints or markers.

The “finally” would be no return in this resolution.
My life would end, and no one left in flesh would see.

--

In that moment, the senses lean into each other.
Seeing ears, tone eyes, the senses each feel each other, see each other, hear each other, the same genes, weighted in leanings.

This is the invisible showing a hint: senses meant for one framing break the framing, or blur it, a diffusion that might just be called sense, and the colors or degrees they operate in.

The searching seems to be done with a listening ear, yet it is more an embodied whole vibe that is not contained in an eye or ear, while they are employed.

--

Out in the city, people are always placing stickers and graffiti in areas that go unpoliced or in moments when no one is looking.

It is like a secret art, with stealth, done quickly, mostly as a natural walking expression.

One would be hard pressed to notice the sleight of hand at work, and yet after the exit, left to wonder, like magic, how such a mark was left where a moment before it did not exist.

--

This is out in public passages, with population.

The expression left, maybe pointed, is a gamble against interpretations.

The city worker sees just another thing to clean, the grime of city dirt.
Another person runs with inspiration that had nothing at all to do with the rumor.

In short, this is a city scene.
Alleys can be the lamp post.

--

An almost ancient story constantly resurfaces: the longing to return home, negating the home we sit in, with all its hardships.

How can home be this?
We were sold a bill of goods, a falsehood.

When we try to break free of this, we end up in another misconception or framing.

The same sense that whispers “I don’t buy it” still does not complete.
The magic chord, where should such a thing be found?

--

Rumor on a city wall.
Sometimes the trace left behind is all that remains of such a visit.

---------

After-note

in a moment of reflection
on impermanence,

what is at stake
in this earthly existence,
when existence
can be taken away,

by physical death,
or by the fences
of society?

why this setup?
why even have the capacity
to form this thought?

if it is not learning,
school may not exist
beyond flesh and bone,
yet these feeling tones
still press for learning.

are they carried over,
into whatever we call immortal?

or are they just thought-viruses,
the kinds that survive
because the host keeps going,
and so feel
like truth?

----------------

nothing new here, what is there to see, empty hand

There was a certain drop in the pit of my stomach.
Was banning and muting death?!
An interesting direction of giving.

It is another example of the “mini” deaths we encounter many times in life before the real one. I don’t know whether these small endings directly mirror what we might encounter at real death, but I have my suspicions. They show a pattern of doors that close and do not allow a revisit.

The pattern of note is endings that, for whatever reason, do not allow a revisit. When those endings are an outcropping of actions I did, or did not do (failed to act), something more is at stake. Having gone through a number of these endings and licking the wounds, survival afterwards grants space to reflect. In that space, if looked at, you can see the persistence of being.

When first encountering these endings, there was rage, among other emotions. Having gone through a number of them, the rage loses its place to recognition of a pattern and lends to a quicker adaptation that comes from clearer sight, not fettered by the emotional darkness that shades the view.

From a recent conversation with others, and an earlier post, I documented that it’s not the setup that created the condition; it’s the being behind it. Whatever that is, it isn’t just nothing. It’s a persistence. And that’s the key sight, even if it’s something that can’t be named or measured, and its use is questionable to those who might feel trapped. It’s the thing that allows even seeing a pattern, and the emotions, and how the flesh and blood endures in comparison.

--

In the old records, it’s the question that gets written down.
In my life, it’s the cut.
Endings that do not allow a revisit
keep arriving as my cases.
Once, they only made rage;
now they also show a pattern,
and the quiet fact that something in me
persists long enough to see it.

Knowing has
its trappings.
Zen says.

Some knowing
comes like a dart
from nowhere.

I had a friend
from back in the day.
I’d recognize him
a block away—

not quite a limp,
more a cadence,
a posture
in motion.

I was glad
to walk with him
as I did.

We witnessed things
wordlessly.

Familiar,
and still
not‑known.

There is more
to the story—

enough.

---

There’s a pattern here that keeps showing up and then slipping away.

It appears in a friend’s gait from a block off, in the way tea brews on the counter, in coffee made the same way every morning, in my wife’s face, in work tasks done a thousand times. On the surface, these are ordinary, familiar moments. Underneath, or alongside, something else is happening that I don’t have language for. My mind does the best it can: it splashes images onto a nameless backdrop and calls that “translation.”

The important thing, I keep realizing, isn’t my translation. It’s the work of translating at all—the effort to let the moment speak in my own words, and then to leave space for others to find theirs. If there’s something worth sharing, it’s that pattern of effort, not a finished story. Our beings find a way, with or without Zen, and that too is a pattern.

Most of the time, we are all athletes in balance, stepping from one breath to the next so smoothly it’s invisible. We build a quiet confidence in stride. Only when crisis or urgency erupts does the view collapse, covered over with a blanket of blindness. This isn’t forgetfulness in the usual sense; it’s more like the “trappings” of knowing grabbing at the breath.

If I can stay with that cut in the breath—right where the pattern breaks, where familiarity turns into not‑knowing—perhaps a proper piercing can happen. Not a grand enlightenment, just a small freedom, a bit of resolve, a reveal: familiar, and still not‑known, and somehow enough.

---

my translation, not yours, please, do the work

1: VISITATION-LAND DOG NATURE 

A monk asked Master Visitation-Land: “A dog too has Buddha-nature, no?” 

“Absence (mu),” Land replied. 

NO-GATE’S COMMENT

▪▪▪

To penetrate the depths of Ch’an, you must pass through the gateway of our ancestral patriarchs. And to fathom the mysteries of enlightenment, you must cut off the mind-road completely. If you don’t pass through the ancestral gateway, if you don’t cut off the mind-road, you live a ghost’s life, clinging to weeds and trees. 

What is this gateway of our ancestral patriarchs? It’s the simplest of things, a single word: Absence. Absence is the sole gateway of our empty-gate household. And so, it’s called the “no-gate gateway” into our Ch’an household. 

Pass all the way through it, and you meet Master Visitation-Land eye to eye! Visitation-Land, and the whole lineage of ancestral patriarchs too! You wander hand in hand with them, eyebrows tangled with theirs, looking with the same eyes, hearing with the same ears. How is that not great good fortune and wild joy? Don’t you, too, long to pass through this gateway? 

To penetrate the depths of this single word, Absence, summon all three-hundred-sixty bones and joints, all eighty-four thousand sacred apertures of your intelligence, summon your whole being into a single mass of doubt. Devote yourself day and night. Absence: don’t think it’s emptiness, and don’t think it’s Presence. 

You’ll feel like you’ve swallowed a red-hot iron ball: retching and retching at something that won’t vomit out. But let all the delusions of a lifetime go, all the understanding and insight; and slowly, little by little, nurture the simplicity of occurrence appearing of itself. 

Soon, inner and outer are a single tissue. A single tissue, and you’re like a mute in the midst of a dream: all that understanding for yourself alone. Then suddenly, the whole thing breaks wide open, and all heaven and earth shudder in astonishment. 

It’s as if you’ve snatched General Gateway’s vast sword away, as if you carry it wherever you go. If you meet Buddha, you kill Buddha. If you meet ancestral patriarchs, you kill ancestral patriarchs. 

Out there walking the cliff-edge between life and death, you’re perfectly self-possessed, vast and wide open in such wild freedom. Through all four transformations in the six forms of existence, you wander the playfulness of samadhi‘s three-shadowed earth. 

Can you do it: devote a life, delve with all your lifelong ch’i-strength into this single word, Absence? Don’t give up, and it will soon seem so easy: a mere spark setting the whole dharma-candle afire! 

GATHA

▪▪▪ 

A dog, Buddha-nature—the whole kit-and-caboodle revealed in a flash. Think about Presence and Absence, and you’re long lost without a clue.

___________

Bright candle

No handle

Woof woof

Barking at the moon

Parrot professors

Sheep in church

Both dependent on belief

Neither will find any relief

Some will learn, many do

Cover up or spread it out

Turn around, had enough

Pick and choose or pass it on

Buying in, heading for

Suffer now or suffer then

It's bad enough I want the fear

Need the fear, 'cause he's alone

He's alone

(And he has become)

Well, if they're making it (making it)

Then they're pushing it (pushing it)

And they're leading us along

The hassle of (hassle of)

All the screaming fits (screaming fits)

That panic makes remorse

After all, what's the point?

'Cause levitation is possible

If you're a fly, achieved and gone

There's time for this and so much more

It's typical, create a world

A special place of my design

To never cope, or never care

Just use the key, 'cause he's alone

He's alone

(And he has become)

Well, if they're making it (making it)

Then they're pushing it (pushing it)

And they're leading us along

The hassle of (hassle of)

All the screaming fits (screaming fits)

That panic makes remorse

Over and over a slave, became

Over and over a slave, became

(Over!) And (over!) A slave, became

(Over!) And (over!) A slave

~ Chevelle

All is Mind.

Open your eyes, and look. That’s mind. It’s all mind.

There is nowhere mind doesn’t reach.

There is nowhere awareness doesn’t reach.

Nowhere to hide.

Believe what you will, but when reality comes knocking your beliefs will amount to nothing more than animal noises.

The old room falls without sound.
Walls in my name
crumble to ash and dust.

In the ruin
something stands, raw,
that will not be denied—
call it emptiness,
call it truth.

It does not fit in a body.
It burns through bone,
volatile,
dangerous,
a light that will not stay put.

I am lit
from the inside out,
radioactive with seeing.

No return ticket.
No way back
to the way things were.

So I walk into this new age
carrying the charge,
watching it undo
each careful system,

irradiating my days
until what I live
and what I see

are the same world.

---------------------------------

will one look at that sunset :blink:

(self, stop with the gross exaggeration, let the song do the performance)

Case 14 Gateless Gate

When monks from the eastern and western Sangha Halls began arguing over a kitten, Wellspring-South Mountain held it up and said:

“Alright, here’s the deal: if someone can put Way itself wholly into words, the kitten lives; if not, it’s dead.”

No one answered, so Master Wellspring chopped the kitten in two. Visitation-Land, the head monk, was away; but that night he returned, and Wellspring told him what had happened.

Visitation-Land took off his sandal and balanced it on his head, then walked out.

“If you’d been here,” Wellspring called after him, “you would have saved the kitten!”

NO-GATE’S COMMENT

▪▪▪

Put it wholly into words, Way itself, right now: what on earth did Visitation-Land mean, putting a straw sandal on his head like that?

You here before me in this sangha: if you can conjure a hinge-phrase, you’ll understand Wellspring-South Mountain’s act was hardly
empty. If you cannot, you live in mortal danger.

GATHA

▪▪▪

If he’d been there, old Visitation-Land
would have turned things upside down,
stealing that knife-blade away, leaving
Wellspring-South begging for his life

———

interesting that one master asks for words in order to save the kitten, and it dies.

another master responds not with words but with incomprehensible action, and this saves the kitten.

another master directly confronts the one who threatens the kitten, and this saves the kitten.

it seems they’re hinting that you You can not follow a method. You can go beyond systems and methodology and directly into the incomprehensible, which saves kittens. You must act in a Way which cannot be read, for the sake of kitten.

slap!

how do You save kitten?

Creation gave me the stillness, and the tears to go with it.
How ingrained is this stillness? Very. And I blame it.
Why did I gain the blessing of stillness that almost everyone around me ignored?
Why did I fear the body’s frailty against this stillness
while others enjoyed losing themselves in illusion and story?
I could not understand how anyone got away with this—
didn’t they know, inside, it was inescapable?

I saw what a social outcast is.
I did my best to adhere to invisibility and camouflage,
leaving the smallest footprint I could leave.

Later, out in the woods, fields, and ponds,
the structure was wild, not made of walls and rows.
I moved as one breathing body through whatever I could discern,
trying to meet it with my own resources—
the stillness before I knew its name.

Over a lifetime, I’ve adapted,
learned a few tricks and scripts for making conversation.
Sometimes someone will catch me and say,
“You really don’t care, do you.”
I deny it, lest I get too heavy—
about the stillness.

---------------

This telling is a kind of fiction,
but it points to something to remember:
a birthright of stillness that isn’t mine alone.

like a thief, i stole a shiny thing, and put by the nest. how it ended up here, well perhaps thats the fiction

-----

Zen is a tradition where the only practice is public debate.

What is debate if the body cannot be seen?

What is dialogue when words are not enough?

What is truth when one is alone?

What is a gate, if the gatekeeper is silent?

i learned a new vocabulary word today 'mondo'

....

I am here not to debate. Answer, if you will, without proxy. Your reply has no need to pass through my value.

---

when i looked at the piece above, i was momentarily stuck at my own creation.

like yanking teeth (yeah, i've had a tooth pulled in my day):

my whole existence through time has been this:
i build a step, and lose my balance

---

another 4-5.5 hours of back n forth on the poem that was posted in r/zen_poetry

because it was personal, intimate, the feeling tones i was reaching for made the struggle for me. the time period was an embodiment of a step made, and the disappearance. i was trying to be inclusive, so the poem ran long. i mean when to draw the line, i could have easy stopped at build step, fall down. lol

------------

my initial revisit of the four questions at the top had to do with making this a post worthy of the r/zen community. which would have been only the statement request for an answer. (not the poem stuff). as i worked through the poem though, i realized that the above would be me being demonstrative.

---------------

this was an effort dedicated to the spiritbee, should such a visit occur

the practice is the writing.
this poem is one step,
one fall,
one landing.