Overcoming Fear through a Koan of Dream

Stairwell Lighting at Night by Adolf von Menzel

Buddhist Hermit

"if you see through this world and let go of it...this is wisdom
if you see through this world and but don't let it go...that's just "talking Zen"

here, for you:

[the hermit hands a handwritten koan to the filmmaker]

'ten thousand things
all in this breath
grasping hold of emptiness

there's really nothing to say'

'ten thousand things, all in this breath...' why are people so busy?
just for one breath
they say, 'busy busy, mine mine...
busy a whole lifetime for 'Me'

when this breath is cut off...you let go of the whole universe...why not let go from the start?
'grasping hold of emptiness...' you want to talk about 'real'... show me one thing that is real...there's nothing real from the start

every day morning to night, gathering things...big and small, valuables...money, name and recognition...gathering it up into your lap...like you're holding the golden key...busy your whole life for nothing...acting like a thief...why not put this energy to liberation?

put this mind to the Path"

from the film "Among White Clouds"

__________

I’m in the middle of a desert wilderness outside of a concrete shack which seems to be fortified with wood in various parts. I am with my Dad’s family, specifically I can see my step-sister and my father. They seem very concerned with the time. My father asks us all to be aware of the time, yet he seems very confused and distracted. I ask why would we pay attention to the time, when we are here! I look over my shoulder, and the sun immediately dips down like a perfectly circular satchel of black tea into the boiling water of an endless Sahara horizon. Our surroundings turn to darkness, and suddenly I realize where I am. I can see the Sphynx, with its eyes aglow. Beside the Sphynx are other ruins, unseen in the light of day or at all in the modern ruins around the Great Pyramid. There are faces, of Pharaonic royalty and monuments indescribable. I don’t know how we got here, but I begin to become nervous as I see a local Egyptian, appearing to be a Bedouin trot down a nearby path on a camel. I asked them if they understood where we are and how this place seethes with forbidden territory. They don’t listen and wish to stay permanently, enamored and convinced this is the place they should be.

Together with my wife, we set off. On the road, we find ourselves boarding a mine cart and fleeing swiftly through a desert mountain landscape. As we near insurmountable cliffs, our cart somehow hovers blankly over the cliffs as if their steep inclines were lined with tracks. Upon a deserted hill, we come upon what appears as a Zen dojo or Buddhist shrine of some kind. I enter, leaving my wife behind to wait for me.

Inside the dojo shrine is a hermitage group in the presence of Allen Ginsberg. He is leading a hermitage in exercises of dreaming and fear; that is, how to overcome your fears through dreams. On the walls are psychedelic video art installations. There is an unspoken air of poetic thinking in the room, however subdued by a collective attitude of spiritual practice. When it is finally my chance to endeavor to see out the exercise before me, I am keen to try and overcome my fear through this dream. I am led, to enter myself in the other quarters of the dojo shrine. Its paper walls open at my approach, as I survey the empty quarters. A lightly carpeted staircase leads up to a dark upstairs room. I feel this will be my test. Inside the room, there is a table, upon which my fear resides. Adrenaline rushes. My scalp tingles uncontrollably. I look up, to see an alien figure, hairless and gray-skinned, shriveled and wrinkled, with inflated head. This figure seems relatively docile, however he holds a rope in his hand. Above his left shoulder, a smaller version of the same alien species lies hanged upon a noose. I look into this alien torture victim’s eyes and I see a piercing evil reverberating into every corner of my being with pure driving intensity from the only light in the room, emanating like diamonds from the pupils of the emaciated skull drooping with a deathly gaze, directly at me. I am overcome with fear and immediately exit, having failed at the exercise. I return to the room, the air is a polite majesty of compassion. I leave for my wife outside, who waits patiently.

What was Ginsberg trying to show me or trying to lead me towards; something old, withered with age or neglect, something so inhumane and non-human, yet so eerily resembling our human form, or something hidden deep within me, a part of myself that is all of those things and more, a thing I'm afraid only to confront?

________

Leaving nowhere

loopy adolescent
limping
and boasting

a raucous
and numb
pride
for nowhere
leaving

Tuesday, February 16 2010

3.18pm

Waiting for plane in ugly dim light of celebrity photograph restaurant in Calgary airport. 

Beer and soup.

Skeletal Percussion under an Insurmountable Cliff in a Cairo-Western

Moses Striking Water from the Rock by Francesco Bacchiacca

I fail in my attempts to scale a sheer cliff face. The convex shaft of rock rises with crumbling shale and patches of vegetation. About 12 stories high, there a small plateau can be seen, whereupon a sparse array of pines and a wild horse appear at the glinting corner of my eye against the vertical immensity.

With extreme patience, I wait so long at the bottom, contemplating my journey up to the top of this rocky upshot plateau that my surroundings turn to nightfall. I am somewhere, it seems on a street corner of an old Western town mixed with a particular street corner in Zamalek, Cairo, Egypt where an old-fashioned, abandoned colonial bar still exists as the sole edifice of its kind across from the Iraqi embassy. It is nightfall and the dirt road is damp. Eyeing a nearby cat atop small, ramshackle homes and halfheartedly constructed projects, I shoe away stray dogs. I am playing an odd percussion instrument. With vertebrae, it seems of dog, horse and cat, in different sizes strung up, and hanging down off a piece of wood, I knock against them with the skull of a dog. The bone-knocking sound is then accompanied with a metallic cymbal-like object that I also strike against the differently-sized vertebrae hanging down in various lengths, to produce specific tones upon striking them. The sounds are enlightening, yet as the dog nearly kills a cat, attempting to chase it into certain death around my roofless quarters, I still yearn to rise with break of day and scale the rocky outcrop. 

A String of Unforgettable Dreaming

Passage of the Iron Gates in Algeria, 18. October 1839 by Adrien Dauzats

Dream Memory 1

I see a map attached to what looks like a conference board display in a war room of sorts. The map has impressions which remind me of old wood stamp envelope seals, however they are marked in a fashion as to resemble blood forced into an array of impassioned fervor, an explosion of red paint or wax fixed on deliberate points on the map. I see the largest impression, which my eyes are drawn to first, is on Indonesia, next on Southeast Asia, there is an very large impression on Chile, on Japan, on Turkey, and then I realize these imprints represent shockwaves and their traces of carnage. Earthquakes and tsunamis are scaled with an imprint of blood on the map. I look closely at the geographic place where I am, in North America, and I see small traces of red. Is this a forecast I wonder?

Dream Memory 2

I am walking through a densely wooded road with my cousins and family friends. We find our way to a cliffside. One of my older cousins, about my age, decides to be risky. He begins walking alongside the cliff very close. I try to one up him, and so I slink on down the side of the cliff, letting myself hang on an overhanging root. I become quite frightened by the implausibility of survival if I were to slip and fall from such heights. My cousin then does me in by lowering himself to a rocky outcrop far beneath our feet at the cliff's edge. I am frightened for him. I can feel his vertigo. Then he falls. It is as if I fall with him. We all act as if he is now dead. After some time passes, I am a presence, with him, though he can not see me. He is lying on his side at the bottom of the cliff. A black man finds him. This man seems to resemble more of an African character than American. Soon, however, we are in what appears to be a gang-ridden neighborhood in Southern California. There is great risk, as people surround us with guns. The rest is clouded.

Dream Memory 3

I am in a Chinese grocery store. It reminds me somehow of the city of Vancouver. I find to my great delight a whole bunch of good items to purchase, however I don't leave the shop for two days. I am in their rummaging through all of the items, without much sense of purpose, and suddenly as I am working on the tile floor, trying to fix it, the owner of the shop points me out. She takes my to go box of orders and begins throwing them out, telling me they have gone bad. I plead with her while each piece of delicious food is bit into, prodded and thrown into the trash. She then kicks me out.