U, The Middle Way in AUM (Om)

Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva within an OM, in a Mahabharata manuscript from 1795 by Unknown

"Taijasa, whose field is the dream state, is the second
sound, U, because this is an excellence, and contains the
qualities of the other two. He who knows thus, exalts the flow
of knowledge and becomes equalised...

Internal to the waking consciousness, and pervading the waking consciousness, there is a subtler function of this very same consciousness, which is subjectively known as the dream-consciousness, or taijasa, and universally known as hiraṇyagarba, or the Cosmic Subtle Consciousness...

Neither can the waking experiences exhaust us, nor can the dream experiences completely comprehend our being. We seem to be something that is capable of being a witness of both the states. This witness is not a party either to the waking state or to the dreaming state. We are essentially, a third element altogether, something independent of waking and dream."

- excerpts from Swami Krishnananda's Mandukya Upanishad, pp. 12, 57, 59 [italics mine] 

________

The antique wood, a rocking chair, the once attributed tradition of upright relaxation, buried in the tourist fizz of los sapos market. Cobblestone streets mark the way for foreigners blending with hip-tied drum groups, Hare Krishna propagandists and the local elote vender. The Mexican wine of a Sunday Tianguis gropes at the neck, to smother the chosen speech in a howl of awakened want. 

I shudder behind a sunglass find, the inimitable Huichol hand, weaves a metaphysical mat of mystical enthusiasm, and so we play nonstop, enlightening the mouthed eyes with a music unheard. Nightfall, we are approached by a woman of colonial smiles. She breathes a home into our highest imagining, a place to live, among the cold stone steps of vanquished need and fulfilled sight. Her place is an ideal home, with a small bedroom tucked away into the corner of an empty room, full with the comforting hospitality of a traditional sunbaked Southern welcoming. We decide to continue on, despite the whipped lure of our eyes.

Returning north, I accept the invitation of a friend to ascend the mightiest tower in the world, newly built in our city. Hiking through a golf course, I reminisce on a similarly forged path through dense forest upwards toward the Rocky mountain peaks. Then, I see it. Eye’s nearly gouged by the immensity; I prick myself. 

The conical rise extends upward towards unknown alchemical engineering, and more, an unsupported bridge unites two lower towers from the bottom-center, and direct to the very top! My friend, always acting over-anxious, rushes us towards the bridge to the top. We enter the complex, prefaced by the usual commercial dives, a mall of unreasonable hacks festering like bottom feeders. 

With an upturned stomach, I hold on as we are shot out, gliding over a glass floor, as a rudderless, engineless boat would skim over placid waters. I dare not look down. In the building, the quick mindscape turns into a flood of waning mirth, and mindless havoc beams with unintelligible delight as people squander the golden drug of shameless technology, a great phallic middle finger, flipped by the entire Western world at once! To who? For what? It is directly skyward.

My friend and I quickly exit, having passed through the immense spire of cylindrical unreality, and we pour out onto an uptown street in mid-city. The concrete jungle returns us to the fading glory of a now obsolete infrastructure. 

Ghosts of the past fly like demonic insects through the gut-smattered concrete claustration. I notice a few as my friends, and meet them. On the outskirts of the unsubtle building, a beacon of terror, an insignia of waste, we burrow through an old tunnel system, climbing out into the abandoned system of underground pathways, leading to the base of the alien tower. 

Suddenly arrested by the horror of war, the sky blasts open with the shockwaves of a thousand bombs billowing like hot nails over the soft-fingered ground. As missiles breach the catastrophic abandonment of wires and tunnels ahead and behind, I loathe over remembered imagery from Iraq, Palestine, and endless claims to vengeance on our land, born of blood and built of sand.  

________

choking cry,
the rasping imperfection in ecstatic beauty,
momentous experience beyond human conflict
in the word and sound of a throat-muted music,
the play of life
final and resounding
in a tumult of white haze
around the English nape

croaking in the sharp whispered present,
fuming dry-eyed numberless fingerings
before a trickster’s Goddess tree,
pained to an ink-smeared fire on the blistering urban horizon

sleepless,
gone into aged reason
and the ethos of undreamt madness

- excerpt from "Assimilating America-Asia" 

Weathering Tornados from The Lover's Music

Vi An Music

"If we go somewhere on foot, we know the way perfectly, whereas if we go by car or airplane, we are hardly there at all. It becomes merely a dream." 

Excerpt from "Meditation in Action" by Chogyam Trungpa

_______

On my way to see my Love! She’s giving a presentation in a high tower, what a glorious teacher she is, a teacher in secret, with hidden wisdom and enlightening prophecy leaking clean out of a package of such humble eloquence.

The road is dry in the warm, new summer air. I see a woodwind shop to my left. A Xaphoon, hanging in the wall! Why, I do have one at home, but that one looks so beautiful today! I have been enjoying this instrument so very much, but I think I’ll have to buy another for the special occasion that is this day. In the shop, a saleswoman is short with me. No extra conversation ensues despite my attempts after I’ve decided on their only functioning Xaphoon. For the $30 I walk away with my new instrument, smiling quaintly in sweet visions for the day, gaily in love.

I arrive to the towering silver building. Strangely, I decide on the stairs. Massive windows bedeck the entirety of the walls, the low plains stretch as a mercilessly singular mural throughout. I find the room of my love’s presentation. There she is; a ghost of decadence, beauty, a word in her honor, is unready for its true name. In her presence I am light with the fresh gold of summer dreams. Her hair is bunched and flowing, the gargantuan black mass swells and streams down her side as a mythical waterfall of visceral lust, untouched and unrivaled by any substance beside. As I move in closer to her, weary as not to interrupt her occasion, a mirror image of her hair in the sky appears!

A black, icy fleece of cloud boils upside-down into the gleaming pasture, a wild tornado approaches! “This is a building of glass!” I scream weakly and run alone back into the stairwell to find sanctuary. The tornado crashes violently. A 9/11 of natural law brews gravely in the high destruction. The crude aftermath burns with electric ash as the ruins fume, awaiting the ever-darkening sky for yet another whiplash. Too afraid to return above, I journey onward outside of the city core, with instrument in hand, I dreamily invoke the unmoved trust of community in the survivalist reign of mounting fear from the shape-shifting sky above. Human vibrancy responds coolly in the aftermath of lost pain.

_________

Tornado

"If you dream that you are in a tornado, you will be filled with disappointment and perplexity over the miscarriage of studied plans for swift attainment of fortune...Tornadoes in dreams suggest you are very angry about a current situation and are afraid to express your feelings - which you need to do - for fear of hurting others."

________

Echoes from the polar wisdom of our earthly rotation
unraveling the truth in the thousand-worded letter
and pictographs of ethereal meaning
climbing through the bowels of a holy mountain
to the void of spiritual absence
in the land of prophets
unheard since ancient words lifted
to the ceiling of the temple built before time

On the sands of the strong & fuming,
leaving no one to posit an older order of belief

In sky temples & borders that signal friendship
enmity awaits in the selfish vine
a mark where the western mind strayed too far
to become its own enemy
in the reflexive mold of war
for basic rights.

- excerpt from "Royalty of the Weird"