Within Reasons

In the river small, unnamed fish gather in little shoals at either side of me. Maybe they’ve come to sup a little salt from my sweaty body, or to eat flecks of dead skin, or to enjoy some radiant heat emanating from me. Or perhaps it is for some unnamed reason that these unnamed fish assemble, some explanation far out and hard to imagine – the chemical compounds of my B.O. compose a euphoric fish drug – these fish are necromancers and have come to commune with the many ghost fish that have haunted me since their consumption – or perhaps the presence of a human being is utterly terrifying and they are forced to swim near me as punishment for previous misdeeds.

When the sun sets, bats begin aerial maneuvers over the water. Again and again they swoop down and fly around me in a hundred clockwise circles. No doubt they are feasting on the mosquitoes intent on feasting on me. The warm blood in my head is a homing beacon for the skeeters and the bats find them easily with echolocation, or so it would seem… on the other hand, perhaps human blood has healing properties according to mosquito legend, a cure for impotency or an aphrodisiac well worth the risk of bat death. Maybe the electro magnetic frequencies of my nervous system compose an attractive tune within the advanced range of bat hearing, and they circle round and round to enjoy the song, uninterested in the insects.

At nightfall I head to the Zendo for a Dharma talk attended by sixty people. We have come to hear “The Abiding Teacher” discuss things as far out and hard to imagine as: non-duality, non-attachment, and enlightenment – or perhaps it is for another reason… perhaps we gather just to gather, and acknowledge together that these lives are sometimes hard and also very simple, and that the world is both beautiful and strange.

A Bat In The Zendo

A bat in the Zendo

Flaps around in circles

And chants in inaudible frequencies

He takes his meditation on the wing

And I prefer mine afoot

On some trail, dusty or damp

By the river or on the ridge

So many sutras mention mountains

Countless metaphors have described their nature

But all the wisdom regarding The Dharma

Would fit so easily in any mountain's shadow

Blacking out the pages

With its teaching

"Mushroom Haiku" & "At the Middle" – John Cage

Listen, if you will, to the gentle voice of John Cage – Rinpoche of the west, Lllama to the avante guard.

"Ghost Culture" by Pete Huff

I am currently hovering Lakitu style in non-citizen space above the current nonsense of Australian climate change politics and find myself understanding the grievous loss that occurs when inspirational acts become codified into profession. I'm not so dull to believe that this is anything but the natural progression of most human minds given the hoarding tendencies predisposed by the prominent economic/social structure currently popular with Earth's current dominant species.

It has been demonstrated time and time again that the movement from the spiritual to the secular is hallmarked by the centralized and exclusionary movement into the golden temple, from which authenticity is banished for fear of the light revealing the deep fissures hidden in the darkness. When existence is defined by competition inspired by fear of loss rather than inspired by cooperation inspired by faith in communal security, the natural tendency is to develop the professional niches that feed like remoras on the detritus of authenticity left over by the systematic sharks.

Leadership, in my mind, started out as a natural occurrence of (relatively) altruistic and (relatively) selfless behavior for the greater good of ones own people. Call it a modified version of survival of the fittest or whatnot - altruistic leadership was a service performed beyond the realm of personal gain.

However, we exist in an age where the competition-based systems for human existence have picked up considerable speed on the tracks and the once noble pre-mass-civilization act of leadership is now a survival/accumulation mechanism that utilizes the mires of democracy to ensure job security.

We have fully accepted the human-production model so fully that altruistic acts have become akin to the once numerous American bison. Professional politicians no longer represent the good of the tribe and this is so readily accepted that it is admitted openly without public shock. Something intended to be a mechanism of inclusiveness has become bastardized to the point that the inspiration source is indistinguishable and, if stumbled upon it is often shot or disemboweled by the media/social blades that be.

It seems to me that the systems so vulnerable to destruction by their origin authenticity are often the best at convincing those it interacts with that they must pass through its systems to reach such authenticity – our own country, with its revolutionary Constitution and politico-media soma-induced social comas, serves as an excellent example. I take great interest in the events of Egypt and Libya as they dismantle the democracy-via-garbage-disposal systems in place of self-determination. Let’s hope that revolution-back-to-the-source cannot be trademarked and marketed by Coke.

So what of it all? It isn’t just politicians. Our mother culture is so connected that the loss of the spiritual in the secular is common, with efforts to shake up the system (art, music, environmental activism, etc) are quickly co-opted by competitive structures that they ironically turned into Borg without awareness. And in that transition, the flame burns lower and recognition of the authentic is more difficult. We have become a ghost culture that has eaten its soul to fill its belly. The taboos have been destroyed, the rituals have been marginalized, and the peace has become packaged.

But I believe the recognition of the authentic and the ancestral is undeniable. This story of existence is just that – a veil that holds no power beyond its ability to obscure and sow doubt. The power of an individual expressing authentically without hope for gain beyond personal fulfillment is bewildering to the system. The response comes in the form of ignoring the act in hope that its walls will withstand any losses. This quickly moves to the acquirement-model that attempts to trade such an individual shiny things for the power of their expression. If no ground is gained, social ostracism or annihilation assumes priority, as the survival of the system is paramount in light of penetrating authenticity.

It is the realization of what has been all along: a hollow dream induced by those who are so inextricably dependent upon a consumptive system. Power lies in the realization of the individual and the expression of the pure without hope for hoarder gain. Those shaking off the mantle and rejecting the need to pass through the system to reach the enlightenment, a fundamentally pure act, are mocked by those within the system. Such is the case with all that live outside of a system in which mockery and ostracism are the best ways for any individual in the system to avoid the pangs of introspection that come when an alternative sheds light on ones own choices. It is a lofty goal to slough-off and I hope that one day I can touch its edges.

(written & submitted by Pete Huff, 28/II/2011)

Surfing Crow

There was crow flying with a stick over the dunes. He held a piece of drift-wood with his left foot and cruised on the off-shore wind, dropping out of sight low behind the dunes, and then rising way up into the air. He flew from left to right, and right to left, but did not travel down the beach, nor did he land. What was up with this little bird-fellow and his stick?

Noël and I set about speculating. “It must be making a nest,” I said with ludicrous confidence. But he never put the stick down, nor did he make his way any-which-way, he simply danced in the air with the stick. “Maybe his leg is caught on it somehow?” Noël asked aloud. Instead of saying “nope, that's not it” the crow just grabbed the stick in his beak and then switched feet, holding it with his right foot instead. “How strange,” I thought, “he must be deranged, he’s lost his little bird brain.” Then he grabbed the stick with both feet, and cried out in apparent triumph, surfing with the driftwood above the sandy hills. And this thought struck my narrow mind: he is playing.

My first impulse is to think of animals (and by extension the wild) as practical, with all of their actions having “purposes.” Having ruled out the practical, we believed the crow to be in need, imagining him caught in some plastic soda-ring and drift-wood garbage trap… revealing my arrogance and guilt: seeing nature as fragile, and man (and myself) as careless and destructive. After ruling out a man-made danger I pronounced the crow insane for simply not adhering to the austere image that I had projected onto his ways.

Now however, I believe this crow was really marveling at his own crowness, as we sometimes delight in our humanness, or relative animalness. He was delighting in his grasping talons, his dexterous toes, his strong and able beak, and his magnificent wings. So too he seemed to give thanks and friendship to the wind, as they played together, crying out for joy as he surfed the stick with both legs; laughing like a child (or younger crow), surprised by each gust of wind, and his own marvelous game.

Have I seen this event clearly now? Certainly not, I am working with assumptions again, but to some extent I have seen my own thoughts more clearly, revealed a pattern of small-thinking that had essentially gone unchecked. Who am I to limit a crow, or conversely to proclaim its nature more complex? It is not my place to do so, but believing the wild to be at play is to see it with a wider view. Certainly it is a wider view than to consider the non-human world to be without play. Play is, after all, liberation… presence and movement without destination, action without wanting anything outside of the action itself… something a surfing crow can know without contemplation (I am assuming).

And there’s the final lesson from the Surfing Lama Crow, we don’t need to figure it all out, accepting the mystery is both humbling and illuminating. As Keats said: “The point of diving in the lake is not to immediately swim to the other shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of the water.” So it may be said that the point of a game is not to immediately complete it; nor is it most beneficial to deconstruct and examine the mysterious actions of a crow, perhaps better just to feel amazed… so now, I’ll shut up.

(image notes: a nice looking painting that I did not make but found somehow on the internet)

Mushroom Mirror

[a continuation from Autumn & the Death of the Buddha, which can be seen below]

Now we stumble into the territory of the mushroom and the mind. The universe, in Buddhist terms, is a series of mirrors… in Buddhist mind-science we investigate some things that are impossible to know (such as death) by investigating other aspects of being, which are a reflection of the same cycles… this is the origin of such theories as reincarnation.

The natural world is an endless cycle of spring, summer, autumn, winter, and spring again, and so it follows that the nature of consciousness, and of the human soul, would be a reflection of that cycle, now renamed: birth, life, death, void, and rebirth. Some of the cycle we can see directly (birth, life and death), and some of it we can only see reflected (void and rebirth). The mushroom’s ecological role, its historical significance in Buddhism, and its potential effects on the human mind also appear to be reflective.

Without the mushroom the world would become an impassable heap of detritus. Without various fungi, and like organisms, decomposition of dead plant and animal matter cannot occur fast enough to keep up with the cycle of death and birth. Waste is broken down, and refined by mushrooms as they build themselves of it; the chaotic clutter is clarified as a mushroom. This process is reflected in the human mind when our ways of seeing are clarified and refined by eating certain mushrooms (psilocybin).

The world of perception is similarly cluttered with debris, and waste, in this case: language, memory and associations… mind leaf-litter. Now we travel deeper into concepts like phenomenology and thusness, ideas that would fill this and many blogs if we were to start excavating thoroughly… should you be interested and uninitiated I recommend reading Heidegger for a western take, and Dogen for an eastern one. Here is my understanding…

Instead of seeing the fabric of the world as it is, we see it as it has been described. We do not usually see a tree when we look at a tree, we also do not see the complex and beautiful ecosystem in which it is woven (and of which it is also weaver), instead we identify that living object as tree because it fits a description, a memory, a string of words and thoughts. We also seldom see past the words and associations themselves, and it is even more seldom that we understand some part of the world not as a separate entity, cut-off and categorizable, but in fact as an inseparable aspect of the whole.

We cannot be fully present if these problems persist, we cannot perceive the true thusness of any one thing, nor can we perceive the Oneness of all things. Our mind needs a mushroom; whether it be a real mushroom (like a psilocybin), or a reflective practice (like meditation).

The mushroom helped the Gautama Buddha sew his cells back into the earth, to unbind his subtle-self from his body. His life was a life of symbols, a life of instruction, so I am inclined to consider why he pointed to the mushroom in his last moments… probably not to turn us all into psychedelic-trippers (although the people of Nepal were certainly aware of these mushrooms, which they used and called “Traveling Plants”)… The Gautama was, I think, pointing once again at the mirror, which reflects another mirror, and so on and so forth as we reflect each other, as the universe reflects us, as "the entire moon is seen reflected in a single dew drop"(quote from Dogen), as the path of self liberation is revealed in a single mushroom. The series of reflections, as in the “tunnel” made by two mirrors, is endless, as are the cycles themselves, as are the mysteries we contemplate.

Happy autumn to you!

photo notes: taken by Fletcher Tucker in 2009, on Orcas Island Washington

Autumn & the Death of the Buddha

Pumpkins and gourds, golden leaves, and Halloween decorations are the trappings of autumn in the west. In the east the mushroom (in its many forms) is the symbol of the season. Autumn is most simply a time of slow death. Plants and animals turn their attention inward to prepare for the impending dark. Deciduous shrubs and trees shed their leaves, their connection to the sunlit world; instead they sit and wait as sticks and bramble. Bears and mice dig graves in the earth, preparing to sleep as though dead for months. Snakes slither into caves, and toads slip under the mud, both plan to freeze. Birds and insects leave the sky. The living world rests between exhale and inhale… for the most part.

The mushroom spore thrives in the fall, however, absorbing old wet leaves, fallen trees, half-frozen corpses, and piles of shit, rematerializing them into focused beams of matter and energy (the mushroom itself).

It is no wonder that this marvelous organism has become synonymous with autumn (in Asia), as it is quite common to witness the mushroom’s appearance, as if by magic, in the shadows of the crumbling and retracting fall environment; arriving as everything leaves, being born as everything else appears to die.

There is much poetry contained in the tiny mushroom, even more so when we consider its place in the legends/histories of Buddhism. The Guatama Buddha’s last meal included a poorly identified poisonous mushroom, from which he fell ill and died soon after. His death, of course, was actually his liberation from the world, an event necessary on the path to Realization, Oneness, reunion with the Self.

So when we celebrate autumn, we celebrate the mushroom. But we must also consider greater symbolism in the fungus, because as we celebrate the mushroom we also celebrate the death of the Buddha, and so Oneness in and of itself. [to be continued…]

photo notes: taken by Fletcher Tucker in 2008, near Malmö Sweden. This mushroom is called Flugsvamp it is amazingly poisonous, but if prepared carefully (as it was by the Vikings) it can be very powerful in removing both fear and pain, which is why it was ingested by many warriors before battle... no doubt partly responsible for the Vikings' historical reputation of being unstoppable in battle.

Why I Stopped to Look

I began to investigate a murder as I got out of my car to photograph the corpse of an adolescent black-tail deer. She was struck down by a car or truck, possibly moments before Noël and I saw her in the road. Her body was cold, but the blood had not even begun to dry, nearly neon-red and shinny in my headlights.

There are those among us who would call this photo morbid; those who would see only the sad fact that our (human) systems brought about the untimely and unnatural end of this young being. They are both well meaning perspectives; they offer a framework for compassion, respect, and awareness in their own way. Certainly I do not wish to scandalize this animal with my photos, nor do I wish to ignore the relatively tragic impact of human intrusion (in this case roads and autos).

I stopped to investigate, searching not for the fingerprints of the killer, but in fact for the fingerprints of death itself. On this trail, laid afresh, I must contemplate absence more than presence, void instead of form. Subtle though they are, the dark, the cold, and silence are the tracks and leavings of eternity. So far, this appears more morbid than the photo. But I am actually speaking about a sense of wonder.

By this corpse I marveled at the completeness of death, and simultaneously at the magnificence of consciousness. When consciousness left that deer, so did the deer. I did not stand in the road by a doe; I stood rather in the absence of one, a void-doe, a no-deer. So much was clear upon seeing the strange, clouded forms that were once eyes, and upon hoisting it up (to place it off the road, to prevent further endangerment of drivers and scavengers, Noël’s good idea), touching the once-flesh, feeling its weight devoid of the warmth and grace that creates “deer.” Its body was always just a magnificent puppet made of grass and soil, rain and salt, electricity and movement. It is amazing how immediately and irrevocably someone (person or animal) simply becomes the land, deposited as a lump of earth at his or her moment of death. We rely only on ephemeral cell walls for boundaries, separating out bodies from silt, separation contingent upon the breath… when it leaves so do the boundaries, not over time, but in an immeasurable instant.

This is why I stopped to look. It is, I think, effortless to sense these aspects of being, life, death, and consciousness, if you take a little time in the presence of a dead animal; dead humans are, of course, less accessible (practically and emotionally), but could inspire the same awareness… some of what we are also leaves, and some too becomes earth. These are glimpses of lights almost imperceptibly subtle, ideas so huge I cannot get far enough away to take them in. Even so, there is clarity in the calm, cool space left by those who have left; though I have no final conclusions. This, like all, (murder) mysteries is left unsolved, but I investigate none-the-less, grateful simply for the chance to do so.

[A quote relating to the value of animal-corpse contemplation compared with the short-comings of human-corpse contemplation. In-other-words, why people don't see much beauty or value in dead people.] “Dead humans contain too much horror, I think the vision of eternity is muddled by horror.” - Matthew Wray Robison

photo notes: taken by Fletcher Tucker 2009, near Tomales Bay California

Subtle music surrounds us

"We and nature are companions, and although authoritative voices do not speak from clouds, a vast, subtle music surrounds us, accessible via clarity and serenity" - Gary Snyder (quotation from Energy from the Moon)

Try to read everything Gary Snyder has ever written, and I will try too. May he live 10,000 years... if he wants to.

photo notes: from a google image search, photographer unknown.

an Indie Sutra

“Concert at the Gateless Gate – Touring & Non-Attachment”

Surely this show, this song, must end. As soon as the thought of the concert forms its impermanence begins also, expanding and thinning out, in unstoppable entropy. A song, like a life, lasts only as long as the breath, and stretches only in our conceptions past the immediate present moment. It is in this moment that we encounter the most astonishing gift of song, a potentially absolute union of performer with listener, listener with performer, and all listeners with one another. This extends only as far as one’s will to surrender entirely to that moment. Should we be willing… here we are reprieved of boundaries, as musician and audience participate equally in the mind-manifesting that is song-birth.

Though they end, after this show there is another. Despite the frustration or elation experienced during any “gig” the musician must let it go, for it is fleeting and soon to be replaced. Although a generous audience, fine venue, and evening of excellent playing can sustain and up-lift an artist, it cannot actually be preserved. And though inattentive listeners, impolite sound engineers, and many false notes can diminish one’s confidence, the show is soon forgotten by all, and swallowed by the void instantly with no sentiment. There is nothing to be done, no pain to be avoided, no pleasure to be preserved… only what arises as it does.

Thus we find the touring road of music-makers to be actually the road of non-attachment and present-mindedness. So we sing as the gateless gate comes into view, perhaps far off, but always approaching.

- Fletcher M. Tucker, June 2009 (on tour)

photo notes: taken by Gyða Björg Sigurðardóttir 2009, in a cave in western Iceland