yesterday morning i had a dream

Today I went to a museum. There, I saw a vajra and vajra bell, separated from me by glass. When we left it snowed lightly. No cars dropped out of the sky, of course... but still.

I dreamt this morning. After waking up at 4am, and falling back to sleep shortly after 5am. I don't remember much, but I remember the feeling of spontaneous magic, serendipitous coincidences, and cosmic energy. It was a feeling I had been longing for and asked for before drifting off to sleep again....

It was snowing. LMc and I were in an antique shop. In a display case by the register there was a large vajra or vajra bell. I held my hand over it and felt an incredibly strong current of energy passing into my hand through the glass. That caught the shop owner's eye and she and I spoke for a while about energies. I took a job application and she introduced me to her other employees. Then, as I was drinking something, the shop owner, a middle-aged woman with long light brown hair put a pill in her mouth and remarked that she and her employees had to go to their AA meeting. So LMc and I went up to a roof deck and watched the snow falling. But after a while, we got in a car. I was sitting alone in the back seat. The snow was falling in blankets, and the wind was whipping the giant flakes through the air. We drove down a road well lit by the moon. Suddenly the gusts of wind picked up, and cars literally were dropping out of the air onto the road, six or seven of them. One was your car, but it was empty of passengers. Then a ferrari or lamborghini the same color as your car stopped directly opposite my window. I looked out and there you were, sitting in the passenger seat beside some friend. I was so stunned to see you there I immediately jumped out of the car, as did you. You introduced me to your friend, in his car. I shook his hand, then he put my hand in yours. I woke up shortly thereafter.

Dream Life

I feel your lips on mine as I lay alone in bed. A feeling I've never felt yet remember intimately. Good night, I miss you. Yet I hold my tongue while you are in retreat. Good night, see you sometime soon. See you tonight.

One Time, All Time, One Moment, This Moment

One time, I dropped acid that bathed me in light. I have no doubt about the visions that subsequently I was invited to have. My hand discovered its natural ability to reveal truth. My pen is my sword is my magic wand. Its fire is purple and green. Its air is orange and red. Its earth is brown and black. And its water is blue and gold. It embodies the irreversible rotation of the mandala of earth around the sun. A straight line is just a circle viewed from zero degrees. I see things, beautiful things, everywhere, and they only belong to me through the transitoriness of the succession of moments. There is nothing to fear because there is nothing to lose. My identity only exists through a shattered mirror, reflected in the pieces of other consciousnesses looking outward. Practice looking through the mirror inside one self. It is called clear light, and it is undifferentiated. The unity of one is the unity of all. I have siddhi, but I don't know how to use it. Oh, but I do. Through my pen. The pen that is held in a hand that begrudgingly rests. It is bursting with creative energy. It wants nothing more for ever than to be put to use. When my brain stops working at what to say and gives the hand freedom to say whatever the paper reveals, that is my pwer. My magical power of pen and ink to reveal what is already always present and ever obvious.

***

I spend too much time unsuccessfully telling my thoughts what to think. They don't decide what they do, they just do it. By attempting to ignore a thought, it only becomes all the more obvious. I'm listening to my thoughts and feelings and expressing them, and I feel incredibly calm, and content, and energetic. Sometimes the weight of cosmic responsibility collapses on me. I must turn that collapse into expansiveness. I am trying to, from within to without, the opposition of macro- and microcosms is increasingly meaningless from day to day. The transition from day to day has become increasingly arbitrary as I train my mind to be present in the singularity of momentariness. Words are just approximations of what feelings sound like. Art is just approximately what the experience of feeling and the feeling of experience look like. My mind has been shackled, but now my writing hand remembers how to be honest and channel all that dark energy into illuminating words, symbols on the paper. The last few years I forgot how to write for myself. I was writing with suspicion, and always the secrets and doubt remained, keeping the truth from myself for fear of discovery by others. It remained, pent up inside, piling up until there was no room left for new feelings. It's about time I cleared things out, internally and externally. Not being secure enough to even express myself in the one way that has always come most naturally... that would make anyone depressed. This feels amazing. I can quite literally feel pent up energy in my neck unknotting through the practice of writing these words. It is a warming, relaxing of tension around my ears where my skull meets my neck. It is an unusual sensation, but it feels good since the discomfort is just the tension draining out of my muscles. Now it is passing through my shoulders, unknotting the tangles between my shoulder blades. I never would have put together that not writing was cause the physical embodiment of my stress. I always assumed it was not exercising. But if I think about it metaphorically, I haven't been exercising my mind or my heart because I haven't been writing. I feel more balanced and relaxed in this moment than I have in years, and as I write this another knot of energy in my right shoulder unwinds itself and passes down my arm into my hand. I'm quite pleased to feel the tension in my back relaxing but I feel that it is happening slowly, and there is a lot of built up tension in there. About two years worth of pent up energy and emotional strain. Why do I always deny myself the pleasure of writing from my heart? In writing and art even pain becomes beautiful through creative expression. Pain is constructive, positive through its capacity to reveal beauty. That is the utility of art, to present ways of seeing beauty that are not always apparent. I had somehow narrowed my expressiveness to such a small portion of how I experience this reality that I forgot how real all those other feelings and experiences are. I am positive that I will sleep restfully tonight, and will dream easily. It is so much easier to just write what I'm thinking instead of thinking in circles about what I am thinking. Better to get all the thoughts out so there will be room for new ones to come in. I feel as thought a drain has finally been unclogged and I am no longer sitting in a tub of tepid, filthy water. All the unclean particles have been washed off, so I can drain and wash the tub so it will be clean for the next time I need to wash my brain out. All of these unexpressed thoughts have been obscuring my vision so much I could hardly distinguish what all the words on all the papers I wrote were supposed to mean. I'm saying what I mean now. My heart is in someone else's care. I am terrified by being out of control of it, and at the same time it is liberating to not have to mind it myself. I know it is safe; I just don't know how much attention, how much love is being shared with it. I sometimes feel that its caregiver resents his responsibility and neglects it, but that he also realizes its vulnerability, paying it enough tenderness so as not to inadvertently injure it. It's simply too vulnerable to be transported around. I suppose the place where my heart is right now is its true home, in the place and with the person that facilitated its coming into being, its reincarnation, when its wounds were filled with gold and closed with golden stitches, and forever watched over by my third eye, a wide-open sparkling green iris... and finally sealed with a reverse S, the mirror image of my Self. I can't bear to ask for it back, because it isn't worth the risk of harm. But I know he feels its beat. My magic is real to those who know how to recognize it, and I feel he does even when my thoughts doubt him. And I must ultimately obey my feelings, because they are true no matter how I might rationalize them. My heart is out of my hands, and I must obey them, obey his touch.

Uncertainty = Possibility

Potential and very approximate course of action after graduation

Move home for 2-3 months, save money, spend time with ailing grandparents.

Move to Dharamsala for 3-4 months, study Buddhism, Tibetan language, and volunteer as and English teacher.

Apply to Peace Corp.

Get in to Peace Corp, spend two years helping people

Apply to graduate school

Probably Naropa Univ for MDiv in Buddhist Studies

Graduate after 3 years.

Help people.

Reflection on Beauty

I grant myself the conceit that although I do not need external validation of my appearance, nonetheless, it is a good feeling when I pass a man on the street in my neighborhood and he takes it as his personal responsibility to tell me, "Oh my god, you're beautiful. You really are gorgeous," and continue to shout similar comments at me as I walk on. I don't consider myself to have show-stopping good looks, but I realize that it really just depends who is in the audience.

Why this Monday sucked

I misplaced my camera sometime around noon and didn't even realize it until 5pm. Luckily, I lost it at school and someone turned it in. Also, I forgot to unplug my charger in the reading room because I was in such a hurry to get out at 10pm. I had just paid $86 for it less than two weeks ago. As of 11:20, it was inconclusive whether it was lost or found, because the security guard at the desk couldn't be bothered to walk 20 feet to see if it was still plugged into the wall. I am banking on the fact that there were so few people in there when I left that no one took it and one of the librarians found it and turned it in. Please let this be true. I can't afford another stupid $86 charger. I'm not speaking figuratively either, in the sense that it would be a financial pain in the ass to replace it. I literally do not have enough money in my bank account, which was another wonderful discovery I enjoyed today.

Love

I am hopelessly in love with everyone.

Some weeks ago I entrusted a magical clay model of my heart which I had crafted to a dear friend. But now, I feel that my heart is beyond my control, being in the care of someone else. There are times when the feeling of vulnerability that inevitably arises from such a scenario becomes such a source of anxiety that I wish for my heart back. But it is so fragile, so soft and easily bruised and scarred, that I don't trust myself to take it back into my possession. To keep it in one place, where I can't injure it, seems more secure. For the sake of my heart, I leave it in his care. And at night when I drift to sleep, I feel it beating in the same room as his heart, and I know it is in gentle hands.

Duality

All concepts, good/bad, right/wrong, exist only in opposition together and only through the conceptual faculty of the mind.

Walking On a Sprained Ankle Yet Feeling No Pain

Here I stand, waiting for the subway again. I'm going to the place where my things (why things?) are. But you are all I can think/feel of. You are mine, you are me, which makes a "we". I try, how I try, not to long for you. But I miss you. Every moment we're apart. Every moment when I'm not in the presence of your warmth. Every moment, every present moment, you're with me. My love, all my love, comes from and goes to you.

The loneliness you feel, say no more. Mi amor. I feel every acute emotion you feel. "I" feel "you". My darling, my dearest, I know how essential this distance is. I know why I am why you pull away and pull me near. The distance is what keeps you dear. Never have I ever known a feeling much truer than this. I am with you and without you now. My darling, my dearest. My baby, my most cherished soul. All the things I think to say are true to only you. My darling, my dearest, myself.

Man-made Mountains of Mass Construction

The folly of thinking the future will ever be found.

Free Associations of Body/Speech/Mind

Phase 1

Day in, day out. Dayan, day off. Off sides offline off the map; the map of Imperial China. Made in China. Made in the 80s. Eight teas, please. Please do not lean on doors. Doors of perception. Rejection. Conception. Conceptualization. Imitation. Fascination. Fascist regimes. Diet regimen. Rudimentary. Commentary. Common place. Place of business. Mind your own. Mind your I. I am no eye. Eyes on the prize. Prized peach. Peach cobbler. Cobblestones. Stone-cold fox. Fox-fur collar. Collard greens. Green Peace. Piece of me. Me and you. You and I. I don't know what to say, when you give me that look. Look at me looking at you. You see fire in its elementary form. Igniting feelings. Knowing for certain without reference to concepts. What is said cannot drown out what is not. Say it because you really mean it. Be mean to me if need be. Need me because you love me, don't love me because you need me.

Phase 2

Inspired by a sire who arouses my desire.

Phase 3

He who doesn't even have to touch me to stoke my fire. It is entirely not up to me to just be me. I can find no "me" without your "me" beside me. I love the love that grows from love. You're thawing the frost that so many dark winters had formed on my heart.

Phase 4

Selfless love is the greatest accomplishment one could ever aspire to achieve.

Phase 5

Once you decenter your self, the center arises naturally everywhere.

Phase 6

There is no space between us, even when we're apart.

Phase 7

"Swing on the spiral of our divinity," the prophet says. I've swung back to earth and brought divinity with me.

Phase 8

Pieces are falling into place just in time for the veil to completely unravel.

Phase 9

Sometimes I hear you say things with your heart and mind

"There's no love in fear," the prophet says. Without a self, there is nothing to fear, so all becomes love.

directly to my heart and mind, because the space between us is as empty as a mirage.

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The temple at Tashi Jong Monastery

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Originally uploaded by Vulgar Wheats

Child monks learning to read and spell at the Tashi Jong Monastery

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Originally uploaded by Vulgar Wheats

A lone elephant on the road to Bir

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Originally uploaded by Vulgar Wheats

On the road to Bir

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Originally uploaded by Vulgar Wheats

Old meets new

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Originally uploaded by Vulgar Wheats

Early morning on Jogiwara Road

Reaction paper #3, Mandala: Tantric Visions

I have been attempting to cultivate an awareness of mandala into my daily experience. It is my way of informally participating in the mandala experience. There are two dimensions to cultivating such awareness: mental and physical. Both of these can be internally or externally manifested, and they are all closely linked to one another.

Internally, mental awareness of the mandala involves literally keeping the idea of mandala in mind. That could mean visualizing it to the best of one’s ability, or as I have been doing, visualizing the circumference of my mind as a mandala, locating the five Buddha families in the different directions, and attempting to assign dimensions of my psychological faculties in accordance with the characteristics of the five families. I oriented the mandala in such a way as to place Akshobya at the back of my mind, Ratnasambhava in the south, or above my left ear, Amitabha in the west, or at my third eye, and Amoghasiddhi at the north, or above my right ear, and of course, Vairocana in the center of my mind, radiating white light. It is a meditative exercise I engage in usually while unoccupied on the subway. Also there is a clearly physical dimension to this mental exercise, transposing the cosmic model of the mandala onto the microcosm of thought space. Another mental exercise I practice is visualizing mandala on surfaces around me. This likewise synthesizes the mental and the physical, and helps me in realizing the no-ground of emptiness, and the everywhereness of the cosmic architecture of mandala, in external phenomena and the internal fabric of thought.

The more explicitly physical or external ways of realizing mandala have been occurring as I explore possibilities for my creative project. I have been seeing mandalas everywhere in mundane physical objects, such as bowls, mirrors, plates, spiderwebs, fireworks, water ripples, and in more esoteric physical phenomena such as crop circles and megalithic structures such as Stonehenge. Some of these things are mysterious, their esoteric meaning having been closed by the doors of time, while others were never constructed with the intent to be read esoterically. Still, attempting to read these structures reveals the pervasiveness of circular imagery in the mundane as well as the exotic. It speaks to a collective experience of spatial harmony that not only supports the Vajrayana understanding of the essence of mind, tathagatagarba, but modern psychological understandings as well. I think that through these exercises in attempting to experience mandala in my everyday life, to perform mandala in an informally routine way, both internally and externally, has cultivated a new way of experiencing conventional reality that was not so readily accessible to me prior to this course. It has become so natural to me that I draw fundamental mandalas on my notes, create them out of clay, and even notice that my multi-colored pen is arranged almost perfectly according to the five family configuration, the one exception being that in place of yellow, there is black. And sometimes I even visualize myself as always standing at the summit of a mountain (Mt. Meru, perhaps?), regardless of my actual physical surroundings. I find externalizing the internal and internalizing the external is blurring the boundaries of both, creating a more fluid ground (or is it no-ground?) upon which I experience reality/emptiness/Dharma. And the vocabulary of mandala and Vajrayana lends me the language through which to express that experience, to the extent that it can be conveyed conceptually.

Secret Lines

As I sat in class today, the overwhelming urge to weave a map of the universe arose. I had no choice but to retrieve my loom and thread it with the fibers of flaming feathers. The fundamental nature of my heart has been awakening, a love of all things, an appreciation of the beauty of all phenomena. From that awakening has spawned a drive towards selflessness, a need to give to others; a need to give love, all my love, unconditionally. Whenever I weave this fabric, I stretch the limits of my self. Mapping the universe, I map the route to my heart. In forgetting myself, I remember all those without whom "I" am nothing. All I hope is to teach all those I love how to read my map, so they can likewise follow the secret lines to the hidden treasures of their hearts.