holding your head under water in the bath of concepts.

I am constantly amazed by how many

concepts I can hold inside my mind

at one time. They are all endlessly connected,

overlapping eachother, transparent but capturing,

like the shades of a kaleidoscope, passing

along meaning like a newspaper boy with a

thousand arms — they are really

happening

all at once.

Some Sri Lankan masters of metaphysics

once stated there were 9 movements

of thought in one second — some

Indians thought there were more. The

Chinese said that all these moments

of mind reflected eachother, images

of images coming from all sides of

the fathomless net of awareness. The Japanese said that

moments of thought were Being, and

that Being was moments of thought,

which leaves an endless no-trace.

The Tibetans said that the flow

of concepts was luminosity, a super-

charged search-light of primordial perception, jam-

packed with empty cognizance.

The Thais said it was just impermanence.

Standing inside one of these concepts

is like sitting on a throne inside a raindrop:

regally self-contained, holding together,

you can see all around you, through the

film of that spherical world, but

it’s all blurry. It’s all beautiful,

but it’s all blurry.

(and) that’s just

one. I sit on thrones of thought-metal

in a billion drops of thought-water.

Padmasambhava knew how to make

pretty things out of sky-metal.

He gave them to his favorite girl

& she hid them in some mountains, some rocks,

some mindstreams.

I feel like I’m awakened

but I have no wakefulness. The

Swiss Warrior said to me: “It’s like I’m

enlightened, but I have no light. My

suffering is that I’m always right

but no one listens to me. You need

to learn to be alone, alone with your

self, which doesn’t exist: it’s just

what you think you are, your ego, but

it’s just an illusion.”

My brother once

said to me: “You didn’t accomplish much when you

were young; but at least you realized

that you didn’t exist.”

There is this process

of emptying and filling

that we all go through

on numerous levels.

I sit atop a throne

and see the thought-drops falling.

Darjeeling, West Bengal, India