I do not covet death, but if death becomes me than I die knowing that I have experienced all that I have experienced, the changes of the mind-body, the emptiness and fullness, all the feeling and the glimpses of nothingness, the discovery of the grinding sholes, the internal and the vacant heart, the heart beat that vanishes, and the empty energy point fixed in the chest, replaced with an internal whirring like some factory machine, a focal energy beam pinned to the torso, like an explosive electric needle on my chest, like something seeking… Some feeling should be where this organ is, or perhaps none at all. 
Sitting still in a wooden arm chair, the body searching and being searched, using and being used, energy exchanged and feeling flux. Sitting in the evening, how we used to drink alone. The indulgent joy of non-self and drinking alone, drinking alone with everyone else, the wondrous mind party  now seems to spit and sputter, something changed, the hospital then NY, NJ and New Mexico. Now sitting still, developing the meditation practice was a very good decision. Sitting in the living room, out of the studio/garage, feeling my joints as I sat cross legged, the sensation of my joints grinding through another’s body, like another person moving through the spaces between the molecules of my body, like another body traveling through the space between, in my physical body’s negative space. Getting mixed with others like a quantum blending of bodies, minds, machines and feeling. No doubt, feeling is not self. What feeling actually is, a constant and debatable mystery. It’s experiential, how would one measure feeling? The description of the experience of feeling , a push and pull, mental pressure and some sort of quantum potential, like it could become my body.

Calmly sitting, at times locked into an energetic mold, the movement of limbs, passing through, detaching or breaking from the silhouette of other that I seem to be a part of. Impossible movement and holes in the mind-body, a mouth in the side of my face, an energetic jolt to the stomach, recorded music seems to play in a field of activity in and around my head, the faces behind my face seem to wrestle for position, pushing through to the front until it feels as if they become my eyes and my cheeks and my prefrontal cortex.

Some ancient texts, the copy of the Bhagavad Gita that we were gifted at Arise, the Abhidamma, and other texts allude to such an experience as a part of the human experience, we never learned that in school. The feeling of being multiple, perhaps from being labeled an international tourist and the associated mind-body and its nestled counterparts, like a Russian stacking doll of digital internationals. The planning brain, the prefrontal cortex, a grasping of the brain on a quantum level, an occupation of the body across time and space. My identity, a non-self sensation, a larger sphere of perception and my body within it. The body of the young international tourist as one mind-body thing, like a standard issue travel suit of feeling, movement and emotion. The number of perceived other sharing space at my body seems to decrease on occasion, and with efforts in stillness and through creativity. I see strangers and friends in the internal, an internal stream of ongoing flight, my body seemingly less of self and more of an earth-entity-vessel of non-self and sense consciousness. Gasping for beauty, drowning in awe, pining for the wisdom of the ancients, and practicing the the stillness, the slowness, the calming of the monkey mind.

Patiently wondering if my abandoned plan to die young is still in the back of the mind somewhere, remembered by that most aware being that appears inside, checking on awareness levels. Remembering how the american plan seemed as a child, the promise of an education and a job and a family, the plan did not even begin to explain the way things are, the way being on earth is, the way the cosmos is, let alone the future we now know.

I do not covet death, but If death becomes me then I will have known that I experienced life, I was not an object, not a labeled thing, that I was no persons property although the labels and stickers of systems and entities of mind were plastered all over my existence.

Through the mess of labeled mind bodies and identities, I ground through the internals of feeling, the bits and pieces of proclaimed self and mind entities like abrasive bits of rock and square digital pixels and my insides ground like bone on bone, and I felt the grinding, like bone through bone.

A quantum jaw, moving through my own face, the feeling becoming physical as if my bottom jaw could get stuck in my upper face. The body changes and other is felt, feeling is not self, the Buddha lived on this earth and so do I, the experience of annata – nonself.

For those who think there was a self in their body and now there is not, I highly dout that as reality, the reality of nonself, not a loss of self but a growing awareness that there never was a self. 

The imperfections of the mind-body, the feeling-body, the built world and its clockwork making machines out of human bodies, grinding through the internal realms with its machines, buildings, cars, computers and phones. The abandoned infrastructure, the future ruins, the gone to far, the furthest from home, the far earth, the plastic beach at the end of the world. A place that is unreal, very real, and revealing itself to me. A slow synthetic soundtrack, digital and ambient sound sustains in a vast wilderness and acknowledges the end of earth, the end of something ancient. A digital soundtrack and a cell phone photograph that knows the most real is somewhere beyond the screens and sounds that bring me to it, the form of something beautiful that reminds me of my own experience as I sometimes tap into a feeling, the feeling of being the furthest man. Something that’s not the real thing, not the most real of all experience, not complete and total, cosmic and earthly wisdom but a beautiful formation, a designed something, to remember what we are losing.

Perhaps left behind, an ancient wisdom of stone temples and Buddha’s wisdom faces the steel and glass towers and smiles anyway. The earthly unification of all that humanity has built, the unification of earth over the first man on the moon, the first rocket launch, now history, the next rocket launch almost routine, almost mundane. The river that money built flows like a stream of bricks. The Colorado River no longer reaches the Gulf of Mexico regularly, and the plastic-scrap waves lap the beaches of the world. What unifies in joy, when humanities beautifully constructed vales of shimmering digital pixels lifts to reveal a formed earth of harsh lines, sharp edges and waste, a built environment on top of the organic self symmetry of the natural environment, with shiny skyscrapers towering over the slums built from debris.

An impressive but uncertain future looms. The individual experience, the body-mind, an ancient vessel in a new environment, the teachings of the ancients, the changing body, the energy bodies, feeling and emotion, and the taming of the mind, seemingly a greater challenge with all that glimmers and flashes, all that sounds and compels; MORE, Action, MORE, like an unstoppable human tidal wave of beautiful objects, awe and rubbish. The internal, feels consumed, eaten, blocked and bricked, projected upon, then fortified, praised and inflated, and added too, the oddest feeling like a squeaky, rubber stick figure, rounded off and impossibly smooth and present, Like a digital jahana, like television enlightenment, without pain or pleasure as long as the television has something new for the mind. The previous pain and suffering a memory. I’m grateful to be, through the bizarre and the beautiful, the most real, moments of divine truth, revealing bits and pieces of realities mystery, experienced through pain and pleasure. Be your own light, and be well.

Love, DJK