Death Practice Dreams 14.1
Further Into the Night - New podcasts & writings for Nov 2022
This one has a bunch of writing compilations, 3 new videos…
I will be doing another instagram livedream before the next Deathpractice Group which is Dec 14th. details for DPG registration here
super exclusive brand new writing still being edited, for now, here’s all my shorter writings from November
Part 2 conversation w/Bree Greenberg filmed on 11.14.22
11.18.22
excerpt from the internet wars:
y'know, it's as if you haven't heard of poetry, or, the playful nature of lila-based practice/devotion that precedes (some of) the more intellectual and complicated traditions like dzogchen.
it's not as if the entire universe is putting all its eggs in one basket. "self" can mean whatever tf the dreaming egg dreams up at any time.
so self (narcissism), self (individuated and interdependent), and no-self can all have a good laugh together while people freak out about attainment or "ultimate realization". just so silly.
let's do the silly on purpose. cut through all the constipation and dance with the myriad things that are non-things. nihilism and all the various mythologies are just stories that we tell ourselves to get a hit.
if getting a hit is so important, why do we need to waste so much energy with the stories? do we really need them? do we need to defend them even though we made them up two minutes ago? does the story really give us what we want? or do we just think it does?
there are moments we all have in which we don't need an identity (story) to exist or to enjoy existence or non-existence (death). we all know this, so why don't we act like it? maybe the realest thing in our lives is the force that reveals to us that real & un-real are the same, that our fictions are illusions that we cling to to keep from drowning, forgetting we are water.
11.19.22
Everyone longs to be more connected than they feel they are, but the cosmic joke is that we can’t be any more connected than we already always are. The prime state of “the universe” (consciousness, awareness, space) is a profound togetherness that is also a profound solitude.
We struggle to (have/achieve/gain) rest. Therefore, we cannot play rest.
Rest is resting regardless of the appearances, situations, and conditions. This is the rest beyond time, space and preference.
If we are merely searching for more fine-tuned preferential conditions, we will eventually discover that we find ourselves in a more complicated kind of struggle and exhaustion.
This is also the horrendous double-bind within the search for “healing”.
Acceptance is not merely a loss against some more dominating force.
Stepping out of or Finding yourself (your experience of self) outside of the constant narrative of competition, survival, dominance and loss.
“Healing” might be a kind of dualistic game (that we place heavy meaning, fear & importance on) that is the “universe” processing through some kind of inner projection/dream/conflict.
This apparent conflict (ease vs. dis-ease) reveals to us the nature-of-Nature (de of Dao), which contains a constant death and deathlessness (continuity, Qi changing shapes, playmind).
Playmind is the overarching “meta-mind” of “god”, a pluralistic non-self that is the substrate of reality. Space, Time and their inter-play. Nothing “doing” anything to anything else.
Our experiences of what we call pain, fear & hunger (desire, lust, longing, etc) are not merely barriers to the play of contentment and satisfaction; though many in the West would firmly disagree based on their subconscious worldview and its downstream behaviors.
A simple yet revealing game would be to shift from Playing to Win, towards Playing to Play.
In this way, pain, fear & hunger can be revealed as players in a play, rather than obstacles to overcome or problems to defeat. How much of our experience of suffering and domination is really a result of our perception of pain, fear & hunger as our relentless nemesis?
11.24.22
what is gratitude really.
is it a sentiment
based on false narratives we say are true?
like most things i go against the grain
culture is a drag
(and not the fun kind of drag either)
instead of constantly harping on genocide and murder
yeah, yeah, humans keep doing this dont they, killing and stealing
do we need to be reminded? maybe, maybe...
but i digress.
instead of pretending that a giant dinner means something
other than the natural generosity of eating food together
we are so far from normal that normal things seem extraordinary
i would instead say that gratitude
is simply a natural and sublime
celebration of what we really are.
not "who" we are, not some bullshit identity matrix
but what we are.
think about it and dont stop at your boring worldviews.
go beyond that shit.
find the gratitude of the universe allowing you to be a dishonest liar.
find the gratitude of reality allowing you to have bad opinions
about almost everything.
find the gratitude of consciousness that allows every single
ridiculous thought to exist in some wide open sacred space without exile
and without even the awareness of its own meaningless nonsense.
find the gratitude of the world that keeps on worlding,
regardless of our homicide.
11.25.22
the plight at the end of the road
human beings never, ever, feel appreciated "enough" regardless of their circumstances, relationships, or "wealth".
This is the underlying symptom and root of our anger, resentment, envy and desire.
because we never feel "appreciated" enough, we find it extremely difficult to maintain the experience of satisfaction and contentment, having erroneously married the two factors together in our neurology. call it love, call it co-regulation, call it resources, call it whatever nonsense you want, we must go deeper than our surface stories.
even in the best of times, our mind/hunger system seeks out some "new" novelty, some "different" need to fill. and when everyone is feeling under-appreciated, we may easily succumb to narrative fantasies of despair, depression, suicidality and other nihilistic fictions.
the tibetan practice makes a note that we must work the skill of feeling satisfied, unmooring it from the harbor of our material conditions.
even in "the west", inundated with riches beyond the reach of 90% of the human population, we find ways to "not have enough" of every resource, material and immaterial, physical and social.
i think it's best that we face the root of our dis-ease, notice how angry, resentful, jealous and desperate we are, and deal with it, come to a real reckoning.
11.27.22
one of the reasons i love nondual traditions so much is a bit like, they gamified liberation. they understood, proved and replicated the narrative that this world is a dream, and in this dream, we can visit "other dreams". in doing so, we can get to the root of our beliefs, behaviors and "problems".
regardless of the sheer complexity of some nondual maps, if you look at it as what it actually is, a living document of a dream journey, like a table top rpg or video game, you can see the forest for the trees. you can grok that it both matters and doesnt matter what the symbols are on the map, because eventually you will have to meet the symbol face to face, and then, all bets are off, so you better have real practice.
perhaps if you are like me, mixed race, non binary, then you realize that nondual traditions were trying to get at the heart of biology itself... that we are all hybrids, chimeras, and that the narratives of identity are also dreams that disintegrate upon close inspection.
when a person is still addicted to addiction (craving, poor impulse management) then nondual tradition appears as magical thinking, wheras nondual tradition says that all thinking is essentially magical! you cant trust it, so dont. use it instead for your own purposes instead of being used by it.
nonduality mixes quite well with everything once you get the hang of it, which is akin to being some kind of strange explorer in some mc escher funhouse realm. again, comic books, sci fi, rpgs, video games... nonduality is saying you dont have to relegate those concepts to just fiction, you have to recognize the overall fictional nature of our perception of reality. again, use it. not to "escape" but to "explore".
to me, nondual practice is the missing ingredient of so many other traditions that either got their nonduality lost, destroyed or repressed. if you dont have nondual praxis, then ancestral work, journeying, ayahuasca, kundalini, tantric sex, western ritual magick, etc... is all going to mess you right the fuck up and just amplify your already existing addictions.
nonduality as far as i know is the only philosophy/religion that says you have to look at your cravings (addictions, poor impulse management, fear, pain, desire/hunger). its not an option, but a necessity. most other traditions dont have this as the baseline. and not only does it say you have to look at your cravings, it gives you hundreds of options to psychedellically and surrealistically play with your bullshit, to play with perception, reality, dreams, etc. its sobriety without obsessive seriousness.
you really can have clarity, sobriety, and a looney tunes experience of reality, because thats what reality is.
being mixed race, i really got this inherently, but nonduality explained it. so then i could take what is natural into anything else. you dont have to not engage in reality, you can go to the party and get drunk if you want, but you experience the party and the drunkeness totally differently and you dont "lose control" because you stop pretending that "control" was really real in the first place. all u have is all u ever had, your behaviors and actions.
you have always just been a blob of creatures blobbing around, bouncing off of other blobs of creatures in a vast chemical pool called reality. and this doesnt stop once youre dead, so you should practice. and when you practice, you can play, and your play is coherent and choiceful, even if you dont know what anything means, because meaning is illusory anyway. all we have is the play and our awareness of the play.
now you can go snort some coke or do ayahusaca or even join a cult, but you have the cheat codes to the game and can change how you play it. duh. a thousand times duh. but you have to deal with that kind of responsibility and that kind of confusion forever. now maybe you see why so many people dont want to give real nonduality a real seat at the table.
because at a certain point, you have to kill your darlings, whatever they are. the name of your religion, the myriad identities you cling to, the in-group nonsense, the special specialness, your emotional stories about "the way things really are"... you have to see it all for what it really is: nothing at all, and coping mechanisms for the addictions you love to pretend are something else, that actually prevent you from play.
and no one is keeping score, except you. thats karma, baby. interdependence means no one escapes and no one wins over any one or any thing else. the game is really afoot, and it aint just human and its not just what we decide is "alive". are you ready to rock? or keep clinging to cultural baggage that makes you a boring playmate?
this is also why, at a certain point in practice, you see the fetishization of certain ideas as inherently stupid and non-liberatory. this is why you dont hear me ever saying words like "polyvagal" or "decolonization" anymore. theyve become new names for old addictions, misused and deceptive catchphrases for boring ass behaviors.
if you really get into this you will understand the quote "we are all mothers" as absolutely true and not dependent on ideas of gender, sexuality, ability, etc.
no being is "left out" of the mothers tribe.
all beings, all matter and "non matter" is mother. all particles are mothers. all things are mothers. all existence is mothers because all existence is mothering and has been mothered. mother replicates itself, which is mother. all diverse shapes and configurations of mother are therefore mothers.
when we decide to seperate reality into boxes, and label those boxes with narrative fictions, and say that some boxes are this and some boxes are that, we create the very hell we think we are plagued by.
we create the prisons that generate monsters. we create the hells that generate suffering. we behave as if we are the heroes when really we are fools.
and, if you dont know how to learn, you will be forever trapped in delusion after delusion, hell realm after hell realm. and no, im not speaking of a western centered education system, but a biologically based educational process. anthropocentric systems including political systems are mired in delusion, oppression and greed.
learning how to learn is the most fundamental skill that is both a foundation and a result of nondual practice.
11.28.22
two part Birthday Livedream
sharing and/or donating helps me help more ppl and keeps the free stuff free