Grateful

     I am grateful for discriminating awareness, the ability to see this and that and discern the difference.
     I am grateful for the heavy weight of the  human condition, for without which we would not exist in this or other realms.
    I am grateful for recognizing that these thoughts are as illusory and mistaken as any and all others; that transcendence of discrimination itself – being, with and without, as well as not with and not without, is the gift of this existence, timeless and without end, still and complete in emptiness.

Path

     When we are truly on the path we are on it fully. There is no part time path. We don’t step on it and off it as it suits us, here and there, now and again during convenient points in the day, or the week or the month. When we are fully on the path, we realize that we didn’t make that decision, as we find that we’ve never make a decision to remain on it but have.
     We come to it on our own difficult journey and tip-toe around for a while to see if some satisfaction might be unearthed there.
     We stick our toes in the soil, plant seeds, smile, leave, come back and look for results. We sit for a while and smile some more or frown a bit and we leave and come back and leave again.
     Our off-the-path beliefs assume some satisfaction. The words bliss, nirvana, peace, are deceptive, improperly conceived as defined from a vantage that lacks clarity.
     Even the expression “on the path” incorporates the mistaken duality inherent in our language.
     The reason that “once we are truly on the path we are fully on it”, is that the path itself simultaneously expands into everything, everywhere and dissolves into nothingness. This of course means that we become the path itself and the path becomes us. This is true even for the parts of us that still cling to inherent self, the discursive mind and the suffering that is born from it.

Signlessness

     You can’t get there from here, cause if you believe in “here”, you also believe in “there”, and the only way to actually get there is by understanding that there has been here all the time.

     The Three Marks of Existence as expressed in the Dharma are: impermanence, egolessness, suffering/nirvana.
     The transformative aspects of the Three Marks are known as The Three Doors of Liberation: aimlessness, emptiness, and signlesness.

     All of these words are expansive, and the ideas and meanings roll into and over one another depending on context.

     Signlessness, in on sense, is the transcendence of language and concepts as we commonly understand them. But without language and concept we have no basis for communication and must use these tools to forge new tools that can get the job done. This is why so much of the Dharma sounds like nonsense to those who first approach it as cynics or semantics to those of us who want to understand but haven’t had any training.
     It takes daring to make a trip that clearly puts you back where you started, or put another way, takes you absolutely nowhere. But that’s exactly the only way to get somewhere!

Weights and Measures

     Behind. Too far behind. Not forward enough... not left enough, not right enough - mostly wrong enough…
     This chatter is discursive mind. Dropping it, one thought at a time, leaves gaps for unconditional awareness to blossom and spread.
     Each time a discursive thought is dropped, there is that much strength behind the next effort. In this manner unconditional awareness grows exponentially.
     This is the difference between suffering experience and becoming experience.

Practice

     Reading dharma without practicing and then claiming it hasn’t done a thing for you is like reading a book about working out, without actually working out, and wondering why your still out of shape.

Smelly Dharma

     Sleepiness is dharma.
     The guy over there farting is Dharma. Smelly dharma.
     Suffering and joy – nothing but the same stuff sometimes inside out, sometimes outside in.
     Knowing it, intellectually, doesn’t seem to make the suffering go away. Think and think and think and pray and chant and sit and try (I’ve been told that trying is thinking, unless your not thinking in which case your simply doing)  and maybe your changing the texture of the suffering, the shape of it – squeezing it down or wrapping it up or dipping it in something sweet; it doesn’t go away.
     Feeling it deeply, without the words dragging all those big ideas that are tied to all the days you’ve managed to knot together with trip-wire booby-traps tangled  up with every emotion and ham-fisted story we’ve ever dreamed up along the way…
     That’s just suffering, straight up and real. It’s perfect and colorful and if you can hang on long enough to feel it deeply the universe is in there - all the things you know and all the things you don’t know are in there, including joy and happiness and absolutely nothing and absolutely everything.

One

How close do you have to get to something before there is here?