Walking briskly down a Portland, Oregon, street I see a man in a wheelchair, facing a most confused direction in the middle of a crosswalk. I spring into action and as I grab the chair and start pushing, I quickly gauge this man's cognitive abilities.

He is in his late 50's and a bit muddy of mind. Immediately I analogize his condition to that of my now-deceased father's toward the end. Multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's or some such thing I unconsciously decide as I try to figure which direction to take this man and when to stop caring.

We get to a safe location on the sidewalk and he starts talking to me with a purpose. I lean in and he says in an all-too familiar tone and cadence, "cheeseburger,... cheeseburger."

I recognize this kind of shameful demand as the world constricts and crushes my chest. My emotional attachments discontinue and I say in a friendly tone, "You are safe now. I've got to go. Be careful," and slowly walk away.

At some point, some (perhaps all) of these cases, the people with the degenerative neurological type of disease, lose the strength not to use others as a means to their ends. They use those around them to enable their cravings, enable their many masks and delusions, and most tragically to enable their now-inevitable rapid decline. I had seen it before.

It's not that I didn't wish to help the man. I wanted to help him. I just knew that I couldn't.

My Musk

All the ladies can smell my sweet testosterone
It ripples outward from my furrowed brow
Having seeped down from my glorious bare forehead

Bitches beware
You are going to love it
But you won't like that you love it

Such is the potency of my musk

Written for another

Love me world for I am a flower
I swear that I have tried to grow in the right direction

On cloudy days I crumble
Sometimes enjoy the fall

I get lazy and grow with the wind
I save energy and make myself tired
I apologize in spite of my lack of beliefs
I imagine myself wandering in spite of myself

Pull me through
I wish to go through
Enough with this going around the eye of the needle on all sides
Feeling the slice of my past

Enough with feelings that I can wish away but don't
I'm saving my energy and making myself tired

Love me Because
I still try to go in the right direction

Blink in the eye of Brahma

I had a realization the other night about phrase I'd heard along the lines of "it's all a blink in the eye of Brahma," referring to the time line of our entire universe being a relatively contained and perhaps even controlled event from the perspective of the "God" that created it. Whatever you may think about what ancient astronomer/astrologers had figured out about the time lines of our universe, I believe the concept that I arrived at has inherent appeal. Sure, I tend to think that The Mayans and "Hindu" writers of the Upanishads tended to have a good grasp on the time-patterns our our universe but such blind faith is not required to understand or appreciate the concepts below.

What led to the realization was a conversation with a friend in which i was trying to explain what an evolution within consciousness would be like. I explained that our universe had already had evolutions within consciousness like the development of life-consciousness, parent-offspring consciousness, family identity, national identity, understanding power and dominion, and interaction with technology, etc. The point is that while not everything is alive, has a familial identity, has a national identity, or has become aware in other ways, the result of these evolutions within consciousness are all around us. These evolutions are occurring and will continue to occur.

I was putting forth the idea that we are approaching an evolution within consciousness that will take us to the level of the God-consciousness that created this world. That is when I had the realization...

Think about a blink. A blink is the closing off of the eye from the light of the outside world. Surely even those of you who couldn't follow the first part of this post can understand light as the perfect metaphor (reality?) for (of) truth and the absence of hidden truth. And so, Imagine that our whole universe is what occurs when the creator God, call it Brahma, consciously or perhaps even unconsciously, closes itself off from... well the truth about itself?... and plunges into darkness. The darkness tries to figure itself out, it is made of God but it has forgotten that.

I would imagine being made of God is a good start but certain leaps must take longer than others. Imagine how science tells us that our world has evolved. Matter turns to more complex matter, suns then planets form, organic materials and then life, and then of course evolution (only then, OF COURSE!). All of this time has been a period of remembering and trial and error and intuition.

I personally believe that everything has some form of consciousness and some form of intuition. Such a belief is not necessary, though, to understand what follows. Think of it as an allegory. If the only type of consciousness around is matter, who is going to figure out the need for organic matter? Inorganic material has no need for organic material, you see? There make have been some intuition (or call it what you will) to become more complex and so matter got together and the massive pressure and fiery oven of stars surely fulfilled some of that intuition. Anyway, I think you get the point, that it would take a while to get from point A to point B if all you had was a bunch of A.

As you can imagine, these evolutions get quicker as they go. This is why things have been speeding up. Having human beings with our complex brains and creative tendencies has allowed for these intuitive steps (the same steps that the first atom "wanted" to make but couldn't figure out) to occur more rapidly. Humans realized that communication is important--> the internet.

So, in closing, I don't mean to just berate you with cumulative arguments but I realized that we are in the moment in history right before the lid separates and Brahma's eye is open once more. This universe will rejoin the God-consciousness that created it by shutting itself off from the truth about itself. So far, though I have not decided the fastidiousness of the blink metaphor, I prefer to think of it as a conscious blink, similar to the Toltec god Quetzalcoatl jumping into the fire, that God knew or had faith it would emerge from. Perhaps God has done this before.

A Twinge of Pure Fear

I had been thinking of picking up my old blog for the past few weeks. I was inspired to do this by an old acquaintance, Rachael, who had recently started one up. I was lying in bed tonight and browsing the web when I stumbled upon a youtube video about a certain drug of a certain psychedelic type...

For some reason I had a premonition that this generically titled video about the drug would have some scary truth about it, the kind of scary truth that I might explain later but some of us deep meditators are all too familiar with (essentially the illusion of life). I have no idea whether this video would have scared me or not but I do know that the combination of me having that mind-frame and the music starting out loudly did in fact terrify me for a moment. Add on to that the picture of an alien head on a thumbnail for a related video and, presto, I am now blogging instead of freaking myself out late at night. I decide to start a new blog because my old one was rather childish, late-adolescent/young-adultish to be exact.

So this post is about pure fear. I have had certain experiences that have added depth to my understanding of things, mostly through meditation. I do believe that those experiences have, for better or worse, opened up (down?) certain depths in my consciousness. I will never know if these depths are well-placed or beneficial. This is fine with me. Without dwelling on this set-up, I mean to say that I do think my personal depth-journeys have led me to some truth and insight about this particular subject.

What is pure fear? I think that I know. I must confess. Pure fear is fear that one has no control, that life as one knows it is a lie, that from this moment forward one will know for sure that nothing one called important before will ever seem even slightly meaningful ever again.

Pure fear can be described differently. Pure fear is not an approaching death where death is believed to be nothingness. Pure fear is realizing that one is already dead or rather the reaction to that realization. When I say "dead" here I mean that a realization takes all meaning out of all things one thought would continue with meaning. Pure fear is the instantaneous, pre-conscious reaction to that realization which itself might be unconscious.

And now, for those of you who have hung in there with me this long, I offer you a warm repose. Fear is only ego-deep and you are not your ego. Fear is limited in degree to the level of control your ego has on you. The ego must first convince itself of important, meaningful things before it can convince you of them. The ego wants to be needed and so invents. Before we go too hard on the little one we must remember that it is not malicious in intent. It wishes to serve, wishes to help us survive, wishes to give us something to think about. We let it do everything that it does but then... we forget that we have let it. So when an outside event or an intuitive realization occurs which pulls the rug out from under all of those white lies, the emptiness of the ego is revealed and for us the reaction is fear. If it truly was all of those white lies which were destroyed, then the fear will be great indeed. For a split second our self is without a blanket, without a room, without a story to be constantly listening to (whether it be a close listen like to a lover's heartbeat or as an old woman listens to the TV in the other room while she does her chores). Our self thinks that it is without itself. In truth, it has just taken a big leap toward self-realization.

I hope that if you have followed this far you have also understood that this post begs and may answer the question: Is death the end?