Opus 17 is a rhapsody from the implicit. It's fairly long, 10ish pages, but if you read the first 2 or 3 pages, I think you will finish it. This is silly to talk about, but it has some naughty 4 letter words. I started to edit them out but it killed the soul of the piece. You have my word that there's nothing racist sexist, or stupidly vulgar in these words. They're just seasoning in the song of Opus 17 . . .

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landscapes tumbling, tumbling, just out of reach, forever out of reach, sighings and touchings too. over here! over here! who's calling? who's asking? patterns unpattern, too confused to be confused. mutterings not utterings rule. wait, wait, did you see that! no, now it's gone. slug memory catches only recognizable fish. anguishing mysteries too close to be seen, universes blind siding democracy perspectives.

beyond proof, beyond dictionaries, beyond birth. if we could unsay a lifetime, we could eat black holes. the permutation universe of language can be left. wanting to leave it is being it. something else is happening that's not language. simultaneous ecstacy isn't a verb. we've swum into conceptual fish traps and now we're screwed. fortunately, there isn't any we, but the tension and sorrow is real. less real, however, than what I can never quite get into my cross hairs of focus.

isn't there some abstract ass into which we can stick all these clauses, phrases, and parts of speech? lions rush in, white bread comes out. nothing is communicated but labyrinth static. even hell is a word. what's not a word? it's not a word. but, wait, wait. over there, in here. close, close, close! it doesn't have to be found. walk away from syntax. don't use the door, go through the wall, go into n-space. go.

slogging through language is fucking exhausting. we're wearing our brains out with language/thinking. everything's marked out, circumscribed, defined. life is a well defined function. that's a definition of death. tepid knee jerks of conditioning. the point is to leave without knowing where we're going, not to go in different directions, but to leave directionality. can that be done? bad question. no answer. no doer. just leave, before inhalation. before thought. this isn't talking to a driver's license self-image.

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some state/conditions you can be in only if you're already in them.

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the matrix of expectedness is a coffin. it's not reliability. it's psychosis. conditioning is craziness. closed systems of terror, of stupidity. there's momentum in memory, the thrust of intentionality. rectilinear living. making love to the simulated, cyberspace sex. the stupor of stupidity, not tiredness. the stupor of desire, of living for the future. the stupor of predictability. wait! wait! another flash, another scent. closer than close. never elsewhere. elsewhere is stupor. breathing is nowing.

forms of communication are gods of vacuity. no matter. talk backwards, talk sideways. inhale color, exhale music. do you hear it! it's inside our fingers. explosions of softness we meet on the street. memory lives in us, not visa versa. forget goals. forget forgetting. come home. unsneeze tomorrow back into possibility.

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the outline of form is the inline of voidness. relativity to the max.

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ISing trees don't speak. why should we? who are you? Ramana Maharishi? who am i? words. the grace of intelligence rains on what? questing, questing questions. words. pull the arrow back and let the bow shoot you. personal pronouns are blips of language. tails, not dogs, and dogs are words.

we have more options than we think. literally. there's an infinity of radii from the center of a sphere. lim thought = thought, as thought approaches infinity, merely. symbol billionaires die like dogs. it's ok to fart in church. it's ok not to fart in church. the what should be is outer darkness. nobody climaxes there.

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cybertime, supper time, and lime colas.

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aren't you sick of memory breathing over your shoulder, crowding into every interstice of freedom? maybe if we held our noses and created enough pressure in our bellys, we could blow conditioning out our asses. the skeleton at the banquet that never shuts up! Alice in Wonderland is a grape in this orchard and its wine makes us drunk with stupidity. or is it fear? it certainly isn't freedom. it's being trapped even before we've stepped into a snare. artificial intelligence indeed!

there's no algorithm to God, no pill to truth. there is, however, the Duhville of advice taking. the advice machine of the past keep bouncing around like a cut power line, wasting wisdom and short circuiting the world. who needs it? simply leave. back out of things. don't commit to structure. whales don't live in cans. structure is practicality, yes, of course, to be sure, but it's also the magnet of death inhaling mystery out of nowness. bones inviting bodies to shed their flesh. the world of form is the Euclidian end of the polarity stick whose other end is voidness. words again. words, words, words. what's not a word isn't a word.

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is the doing of thinking the causing of thinking or the thinking itself?

?flesti gnikniht eht ro gnikniht fo gnisuac eht gnikniht fo gniod eht si

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an equation is a relation among variables. it's not a law, it's a relationship. they don't capture or control anything. they're patterns of formality, signatures of interaction, sinews of predictability. going to the bathroom transcends mathematics. mathematics alleges to be the structure gold which underwrites paper formality. the Fort Knox of theoretical truth. theoretical truth is a contradiction is terms. do we die theoretically? do we love our children theoretically? do we climax theoretically? the effulgence of immediacy is an infinity of potentiality. theory, here, is the null set.

so thought can't wield the sword of mathematics to justify it's ad nauseam pontificating. mathematics too, can, and must, be left. why drink pictures of ourselves when we have wings of beingness? trees aren't ISing because of calculus. they aren't approaching limits, they ARE the limits. as are we all.

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intelligence doesn't think about. it's the self-experiencing of that which thought thinks about and doesn't think about. full stop.

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there's delicacy in the call. meta language whispers, reverenced by poets. hey, let's leave the room! don't look back. isn't this salty ocean air fabulous? put out that fucking cigarette, and drink the n-dimensional. it's bathing and caressing us constantly. don't be couch potatoes of the familiar, as in family, as in stupefaction city. now, now, now or never, my friends. who's saying this? I don't have a clue. who cares? it's not some driver's license self-image, I can tell you that. nothing is being added or subtracted.

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science isn't the outside in study of anything.

let's leave like we were never here in the first place.

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there's a flood of structure in talking within which we bob and roil. these currents of formality and expectedness swallow us whole, so let's exit through the liver or kidney. let's take the river and fold it into a cushion and give it to a cat. what the hell do I want with this, says the cat. whoa! a talking cat. I didn't know you were an I, says us to the cat. gag me with a spoon, why am I not surprised, says the cat. of course I'm an I, did you think I was some fucking Cartesian machine, says the cat. well, I guess we thought we were the only I's around, says us. well, think again, says the cat. can't you Homo sapiens get out of your heads about ANYTHING, says the cat.

but are we Homo sapiens? we're bodies, of course, plausibly, morphologically, and biologically classified as Homo sapiens, but it's beyond infantile to stop with that. a reality lion is thought/form transcending realness, not a member of a set. formality again, thingifying, as is its wont. things are what we notice, have notation for. cats are what they are because they're not what they're not, and they're not what they're not because they are what they are. the current's what's real, not the terminals. but it's better to talk from confusion, than pursue answers.

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if you read the mind of an allegator, I don't think you'd say much about it.

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predictability is knowing 7 paths through a forest instead of a million. a million - 7 = a lot of alternatives. most of these alternatives slip into non forest dimensions and all of them begin with where we already are. where the forest is darkest is usually the best place to begin. there's no path into newness and obedience to the known is running in place. when the iron hits the flint, let's follow the sparks. let's go into the pre thought about. the origin of laughter. ice age oblivions. not the constipations of certainty.

let's talk out the back of our heads and breathe through our elbows. the alternative is talking anuses on political platforms. or is it anusi? no matter. they reap what they shit. but subtlety isn't interested in condemnation. too much direction. going in opposite directions is still goose stepping. reacting is structure stupor, a line of least resistance. it's not rocking the boat, it's completing all our trains of thought. do it right. speak the common denominator language. to hell with that. blow up the mailboxes and eat the stamps. read my hips.

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the price of freedom is realism. no refunds.

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Jesus Christ, haven't you shut up yet, says the cat. hey, look at this. a smartass cat, says us. ok, ok, I'll go back to being your image of me, since my articulateness seems to unnerve you, says the cat. who says we're unnerved, says us. you're just a little four legged shit looking for some litter, says us. well, at least I'm not murdering the planet, like you fucking bipedals, says the cat. man, there isn't another life form in the local group that sucks on that greed tit like your species does, says the cat. when you're right, you're right, says us. cat, one. Homo sapiens, zero.

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a permutation a day keeps randomness away.

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let's go back to reading the mind of the allegator. reading the mind. interesting turn of phrase, don't you think? what's supposed to be in there -- chalk boards covered with alligatoresse? if you read this mind, this writing mind, you're not going to see a bunch of words. you won't see a bunch of what's either. no words, no what's, nothing, no things. you'll probably see your own desire. realness isn't marbles rattling around in the skull of God. beatific bb's. or is it god? who cares? capitalize thyself. a reality allegator isn't the possessor of it's beingness. that's hubris, the terror of language and thought. a reality allegator is local realitying and it's noumenal otherness only to memory. intelligence knows otherwise.

wait, wait, says the cat. I can't believe my furry ears. are you Homo sapiens FINALLY catching on that ISness isn't a property, says the cat. explicate, says us. I thought you'd never ask, says the cat. water is a symbol, merely, for what keeps us alive in the desert and human beingness is what you ARE, not what's in your sock drawer, says the cat. hmmmm, says us. look, it's like the ISing tree, says the cat. whatever your memory says that ISing is, it isn't. it's not a name or a what. but if you don't think it's real, try to walk through it. reality alligators, reality trees, AND reality Homo sapiens are thought/form transcending, self-acting, already the case, realnesses, uncapturable by your species simulations, says the cat. Jesus Christ, that's a lot of words from a life form with a tail, says us. I didn't think you'd like it, says the cat.

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reshuffling the deck is good. leaving the game is better. not completing thoughts is . . .

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it's good to tell a story, let the bottom break out, change the water into integration by parts in f#. who says we can't do this? we can breathe, can't we? it's a little harder to unthink our thinking, but, what the hell, there isn't any thinker anyway. softly, softly, catchee monkey. the monkey of Absolute Thisness. our jumping off place. our ordinariness place. our let's get the fuck out of here and do something INTERESTING, place. let's get this show on the road! but saying that, desiring that, IS the show. you don't have to go there to get here. regions of the unrecognizable beckon. abandon all formulas, ye who enter here. intellectualizing chews its cud, but intelligence feeds only on the raw meat of directionlessness.

don't follow the arrows, that's a good rule of thumb, and burn all the maps. maps are projections, speculations. they're not and never floodlights into newness. memory never extrapolates its own matrix. this is obvious. it's difficult to see only because it sticks pins into consensus smugness. deep space is where we already are and astronomy doesn't have the last word about anything. and neither does any other ology. ologyology self-destructs. mystery is ecstacy, surrender of certainty. sanity is where certainty isn't.

over and over and over again there's the dropping of the reins of teleology. versus, a lifetime of knee jerks, seeking the better, slumming in ISness. the music of communicating from UNcertainty from this ocean of confusion in which I have long since drowned. but this is realness, however patronized by logic and labels. I'm on my own and death will remember me in due course. however, where I am now is the breath of things, the heartbeat of time and space. why fantasize about what's out there in the big, wide world, when I'm stumbling over things in my own house? memory is always goosing me to attack its cardboard devils and chase its cartoon gods, and the music of transcendence is ignored. we don't hear it by paying attention to it. realizing there isn't any way to hear it, is releasing.

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the good news and bad news is that risk isn't procrastinatable.

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vulnerability is the guardian of truth. vulnerability and confusion but this isn't despair. I don't know what it is, but it's not despair. it's disembarking from our trains of thought and hoping for the best. diving into currents without knowing how to swim. it's telling the truth, not pontificating it. and the truth thus told is never pretentious or strident. it's speaking from humanness to humanness. the alchemy of sincerity.

talking is surrendering to form, to chains and lines and trains of thought. this is process city and we robot around in it like rats in a maze. Jung used to talk about archetypes as the river beds of millennia. big deal. who needs them? let's mutate into butterflies and fly out of time. the bottom line is that form hurts us far more than it helps us. but it's so seductive. it seems so appropriate. and what's the alternative?

now you're talking, says the cat. those woo! woo! those big brains of yours are masturbating your lives away, says the cat. hey, fur ball, how much do you know about quantum mechanics, says us. look Jack, says the cat, the best you can say about theory is that it gets you to where the rest of us have never left. I'm so goddamn buried in ISness, I don't need to think about it, like you pitiful, bipedal abstraction junkies, says the cat. hmmm, says us. you don't know it, but to other life forms, you Homo sapiens tick tock around like zombies, says the cat. yeah, well we've worked out how to minimize the surface for a fixed amount of volume in those disgusting cans of cat food of yours, says us. what do you have to say about that, says us. thus, says the cat, and eats a bug. ugh, says us. you never like my answers, says the cat.

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the naturing of nature is nature.

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once upon a time a pregnant but ill tigress attacked a flock of sheep, but the effort was too much and she died while giving birth to a cub. the tiger cub was adopted by the sheep and lived with the sheep and believed itself to be a sheep. sometime later an adult, male tiger similarly attacked the flock, but stopped when seeing the cub in its midst. realizing the cub had a sheep self-image, he took it by the scruff of the neck to a pool of water which revealed the cub's reflection. look, you look like me, you're a tiger for Christ's sake, not a sheep, said the disgusted adult tiger. the cub said, oh.

what's wrong with this story?

everything. here's another way to say it. let's say you've spent most of your life thinking you're Napoleon and then one day you snap out of it, and realize, oh, oh, I'm not Napoleon. here's the question. is this moment of truth equivalent to obtaining something which was formerly missing? did the would be guru, intervening adult tiger catalyze the being myselfing of the tiger cub. no tigering necessarily goes with tigerness. sheep self-image living is just a variation of tigering. thinking you're Napoleon is simply an odd way of being yourself. nothing is missing. nothing is ever missing. we already are what we are, and we aren't what's. nowing is tigering.

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we don't view views. the view is the viewing, and orange sherbet tastes better than a noun.

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I know you don't think I hear anything, says the allegator, since I don't swim around with those disgusting little conch shells on the side of my head, but I've got to put in my two cents. I've never eaten any hominid self-images, I can tell you that. and all that hairless ape shit, you know, for us that's kind of like lunch meat. a tasty river treat. in fact the self-image hominids, are cake to catch. they're always glassy eyed about something, says the allegator, who disappears back into the soup.

the thing is to not give up. to make a pest of yourself. to keep at it until you're not talking spam. but it's so goddamn hard to hack through forests of formality and expectedness without coming out the other side like a stick of gum. and it's not just the tools of communication, it's also the targets. we're always dancing to spots on the floor. Bach wasn't improvising from manuals. the instant we commit to formal communication, we start discharging. there's just so much density to get through.

there's also some kind of unholy marriage between form and goals. the inertia currents of language possesses us. we commit to momentum, but momentum is anathema to intelligence and possession is a shoe that fits. once we walk into the communication room, we're immediately off on a trajectory and however much we bitch and moan we practically always traverse the entire parabola. but during the cd's of intentionality we're brain dead. it's ultimate stupidity to sell our intelligence souls to the goosings of the past. this is living our lives not only with someone else's mind, but with the mind of instinct. this is voluntarily turning into an insect. this isn't hyperbole. turning intelligence off until I complete this train of thought is our favorite form of suicide.

we have to be willing to be boorish, to be rude. to be constantly kicking over the game tables. to say, no, this isn't going anyplace, this is memory chasing its tail ad nauseam with conceptual bullshit. I don't have to play this game, this mind game. my intuitions know what the hell is going on and so do my feelings. I know when I'm talking bullshit. God forbid I start accumulating thought incompletes. we need to go where the energy is, where the beauty is, where the REALNESS is, even if we have to interrupt ourselves 17 times before giving a voice to realness.

and we will never do this so long as the envelope is more important than the letter and the arrival is more important than the journey. the perfume of immediacy is ignored when we're futureized. it's a little embarrassing to acknowledge, over and over and over again, how much we miss the mark (root meaning of sin), when we're plugged into intentionality and form. these compromises with intuition turn us into dutiful corpses, but life never stops giving us second chances. I know I'm not saying any of this perfectly, far, far from it, but by God I'm going to keep barking at this emperor with no clothes. I'll be happy if I can just stop betraying a few more of the pearls which life keeps so graciously throwing to me. these immaculate potentialities to which there are no paths with hand rails leading.

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asymptotes or artichokes. take your pick.

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the past is all well and good, it's useful and practical surely. we have to keep our telephone numbers somewhere, but the conceptual net it throws over the effulgence of immediacy is a straight jacket of delusion. subtlety is God here, and vulnerability, but also freedom beyond imagining. nothing is what we think it is. it's beyond thought, beyond fantasy. this is not a movie.

we never want to begin at the beginning. we want to snuggle into structure and enjoy the ride. we should have more confidence in these winking gremlins who keep encouraging us to drop everything and go oblique. not randomly, not pell mell, but having the integrity to turn off the shoulds. whatever compulsiveness is turning a deaf ear to is generally an open window, a worm hole out of the future back to where our hearts are. the sanity of confusion. it's not hard to find, unless you're never confused. that's not my problem. it's ok to breathe, if it's ok to be confused.

thus, beginning at the beginning is never beginning with certainty. unless, of course, you've disappeared into theoretical truth. immediacy is always frayed at the edges, no floodlights of omniscience. so what? this is great. this is the way it is. when I was a young man I once walked down a street in New York, plunged, as they say, into despair. it had to do with a failed romance. ah, to be 20 something!. but this was serious, it felt like I was losing my will to live. I was drowning in certaintylessness. but then, fortunately and suddenly, I had the cosmic good sense to realize certainty is a synonym of arrogance. not knowing bottom lines isn't a symptom of failure, it's the breath of intelligence! who the hell did I think I was, to think if I didn't have truth by the balls, I should curl up and die. thus, humility saved my ass, and I returned to the human condition and found another girl friend. guess what? life went on. it always does.

it's ok to grope. not having should/goals the size of watermelons means we're not nuts. all this delicate, messy stuff is where all the gold is. it's where we already are, not where we're obliged to get to. life is nonstop today, everything else is white noise. it's such a relief to speak from what we don't know, than from what most of us are pretending is common knowledge. common knowledge is common terror, common bullshit. enough already. let's keep it simple. let's stop trashing intelligence with brain dead smugness. and science does this EVERY BIT as much as religion. let's stuff socks into the mouths of all these certainty machines. true believer thyself.

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whales have an awful lot of body to keep track of.

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well, I don't know what to think about this, says the cat to the allegator. Homo sapien humility, I thought that was a contradiction in terms. yeah, but some naked apes taste better than others, you know what I mean, says the allegator to the cat. no, I guess I can't really say that I do, says the cat, taking a step backward. hey dude, don't worry about me, says the allegator. to me, you don't have a hairball, you are a hairball. much ado about nothing, you know what I mean, says the allegator. I'll take that as a complement, says the cat. the thing is, says the allegator, I ponder a lot more than you mammals think I do when I'm in submarine mode and I just can't shake the impression that these lunch meat hominids don't think any other life form is REAL! yeah, I know what you mean, says the cat. they always act like they're just visiting here. no wonder they can't swim worth a shit, says the allegator.

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self acceptance has nothing to do with self acceptability.

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I've spent most of my life thinking if I didn't know where I was going, I was drifting or falling all over myself. but, April Fool, that place turned out to be where all the raw material is. the more my targets faded and my strategies unravelled, the more I came home. in short, the more conditioning SHUTS UP, is the more we come to life and deal with what's always been beyond the reach of conditioning anyway. challenge isn't to complete some macho mystical journey, but to deal with that which trivializes journeys. when I'm off chasing shoulds, with tried and true methodologies, I'm a rat in a memory maze. what's the alternative?

yes, what's the alternative indeed? it isn't a formula, I can tell you that. and communication is a special case of this challenge. a unique one perhaps, but one we can deal with "as we speak". a test bed, a truth stone of release. talking real isn't so different from living real. but truth talking isn't grasping after goals or kow towing to structure. it's more modest and subtle. it's sensing where to cut the meat so not to hit the bone. it's creativity in action, creativity in communication. we have to jump before second thoughts grab us by the back of the neck, telling us to think this through some more. we have to be VERY fast on our feet. hesitation is impotence.

it's trusting our glimpses more than our rituals. this is a non strategizable alchemy, but we can do it, by God, we can do it. and we MUST do it, because the alternative is the shit on our plate that never goes away because we don't have the fulcrum in the right place. we're plodding toward and hammering at things we need to be flying through like fairies. hubris is killing us, literally. not just our individual hubris, but the hubris of our families and civilizations of origin. Jesus Christ, if all this advice was worth a shit, then why are we all dying like dogs? and if you don't think you are, that's your business. maybe you're a great cage decorator or maybe you're rich and maybe you even think you deserve to be rich, but there's core rottenness somewhere in the Denmark of the human condition.

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roses are red, violets are blue. the rest of this poem is up to you.

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science is something I can take or leave, but, at best, it's an inflection of intelligence. it's intelligence addressing a dimension of realness and in that sense it should be taken seriously, since intelligence is an alternative to the past. as is what we're talking about now, since this too is intelligence and it's grounded in life, and conditioning can keep up or not. that's not the issue. the issue is we're dealing with challenges which CAN'T be met by the past. and the promise, or at least possibility, is that rising to this challenge may do something about our dying like dogs. Jesus Christ, nothing else has! including science. religion is another matter. statistically, of course, it's mostly been loony tunes, but epiphanies of immensity also shine there. the dogma/theology aspect is ho hum memory at work again.

let's go back to the alchemy of honesty, the alchemy of subtlety and the truth that's it's always now or never, because this isn't some controlled experiment we can set up for three days from now. that's part of the problem with that methodology. everything (i.e., life!) gets put on hold, until all the experimental ducks are in a row. hell, by that time, we could all be dead. the challenge of honesty is NOW. everything else is bullshit. how can we plan in advance what the realness is going to be from which we speak. again, this is the dog and the tail, and we don't get to decide when or how the dog's going to bark. but, actually the dog's always barking and the impulses are always impulsing. it's something like we can get there from here, but there's no way to get there from here. but only the past tells us we must have a way. algorithms never take chances.

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intelligence is doing what you don't know how to do.

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this alchemy is different from science, but not from intelligence. it's an alternative to science, if you like. or visa versa. the point is, there's no hocus pocus, no weirdness. this is truth talking and walking, and it challenges us utterly. it challenges us to see and say what's real. talking from the past is inadequate. ultimately, it's stupid. we have to intervene and make sure the post office of conditioning doesn't screw everything up. we have to take responsibility for dealing with confusion.

I really don't know what the hell I'm doing as I proceed into this. I get whiffs and scents, glimpses and flashes, and then I regress back into the tried and true, but then suddenly I'm out of those grooves and awake again, and flying with wings coming out of my back, or going from here to there with pure seeing.

tenacity has always been my brother, my lover, and my breath. it's the floor of my life. I once had a little Boston bull dog named Corky. he was my soul mate when I was a boy and I loved him dearly. I still do. and, God, was he tenacious! he'd get into fights with dogs 3 times his size and win half the time and, in a certain sense, practically never lose because he would glom on to some piece of his opponent with those stubborn bulldog teeth of his and NEVER let go. eventually, my beloved little friend died, but as the years went by I began to sense he had infused his tenacious soul into the little boy who loved him so. his gift to me, perhaps. in any case, tenacity and stubbornness, for the adventure we are now sharing, is of the essence, because it's so easy, so tempting, just to give up and fall asleep (again) in the all too familiar snowdrifts of intentionality and form. plug in and target talk. connect the dots.

but we don't have to do that. we don't even have to be we's. let's all stop being personal pronouns and see what happens. were we personal pronouns in the womb? and what about that box in box city that's got your name on it? both personal pronounless, I dare say. groping doesn't have agendas. it never makes mistakes because it doesn't know what to do in the first place. it's living without a past, relative to which the what IS is perpetually compared to the what should be. but there ISN'T any what should be for groping, for the alchemy of dealing with the unclassified and unanticipated, because going into the unknown is, goddamit, going into the unknown.

and, again, this isn't a controlled experiment. we're not holding our breath on the way to the lab, we're immersed in the moment to momentness of the going. and who the hell cares WHERE we're going anyway? the intentionality context and framework of the fullness of the moment is a waking dream. it's not controlling or directing anything. spontaneity is nondualistic self directedness.

yeah, I was wondering if you were ever going to get around to that, says the cat. you Homo sapiens are obsessed with self control. me, I've never thought there was a separate from myself self. for me, being myself means just that. not something at the end of recovery. hey, I'm not a recovering cat, I'm a cat, says the cat. you know, I've always wondered about that too, says the allegator. who/what the hell do these bipedials think they're being when they're NOT being themselves? answer me that, says the long, green one. beats me, says the cat, and s t r e t c h e s. the tree doesn't comment, but knows it's not a tree.

waiting for Godot is being a jackass, but so is compulsing after results. hmmm. where does this leave us? no waiting, no seeking. is this resignation? no, that's the past again, because these are the only things the past knows how to do. wait for a miracle (the grace race), or grab what you crave with self activity. basically, faith or force. but this present challenge is neither. it's absolutely neither. both waiting and seeking are stupefying. this isn't complicated. making it complicated is avoidance. they're both stupefying because they're both variations living for the future. for example, the famous controlled experiment is either itself in the future or its payoff is in the future, but the meantime is the face of God. nowing is realitying. ALL the challenge is here. racing off after goals, scientific or otherwise, is selling our souls to singlemindedness. as opposed to what?

yes, over and over again, as opposed to what? as opposed to dealing with pre intentionalilty realness. language is always after the fact. it doesn't take us to where we already are. and where we already are always blows the fuses of memory. we've got to stop being carried away by our trains and chains of thought. we've got to stop jumping to conclusions. and these conclusions, in turn, keep shooting us off after targets in the future, sought with strategies from the past. everything is all past/future. there's no present. but nowing is autonomous ISness. it's the being myselfing of that which is already the case. SPONTANEOUS IMMEDIACY is what's real. it's what we're already "occupied with".

we allow ourselves to be boggled by memory/conditioning and its worldly projections. science, for example, is more delusion than truth, because it's too structured by the old and driven by desire. when it works, it's great. it's virtually the mind of our species investigating nature. but the problem isn't science at its best, it's science at its most typical, which is science so focused on empirical fields and, say, mathematics, that all the other dimensions of our n-dimensional symphony are ignored or discounted. the givenness of immediacy isn't restricted to eyeballs and equations. plus, and worse, the achilles heel of science is "the scientist".

delusional identities of separate selfness aren't transcended by getting Ph.D.'s in chemistry and wearing white lab coats. the venality of operational science, the down and dirty antics of ego/power games is gagging. and how seriously can you take any institution mostly run by personalities not worse, perhaps, than any random sample from the human condition, but certainly no better?

but even minus the jerks and neurotics, the concentrated, specialized focus of science is a piccolo, merely, in a vaster symphony. the raw material of intelligence is confusion, vulnerability, darkness, and ordinariness. in other words, all of that stuff which is patronized out of existence by knee jerk intellectualizing. let's sit down and reason together (translation: let's be cicadas). to hell with intellectual togetherness! go with the flow of what you don't know. gurus are assholes, there aren't any gurus. we are each of us absolutely, absolutely on our own.

now wait a minute, says the sheep. this is going too far. we all need a certain amount of help from time to time and why should we keep reinventing the wheel? leaders, after all, are leaders because they've learned from experience, and shepherds, to us, are gods, says the sheep, smiling knowingly to his flocky friends. hey, sheepy, sheepy, I've got a shepherd right here in the back of my throat, says the allegator, and I think he wants to give you a salvation experience. humph, says the sheep. humph, says the flock.

we can respect the past without being enslaved to it and the surest symptom of being a past worshipper is being more focused on what's at the end of a chain of thought, than what's before it. And what's before it isn't capturable by formality or improvable with intentionality. it's the origin of sincerity and the origin, not object, of pseudo separateness. here, there's no talking bullshit or castles of expectedness. this is the fountain of newness from which only intelligence can drink, and it flies by intellectualizing like convoluted physics to unmotivated students.

doing our homework, means demoting conditioning from being on top, to being on tap. it means trusting the fierceness of ISness to tell its own story and in this sense we truly are on our own. statisticians prefer the data to speak for itself, to be minimally intruded into with assumptions and preconceptions. the sheep thing is being terrified of data. God forbid we open to newness, to that which even annihilates the opener.

it's like standing up in the middle of a marriage or political convention and saying, and now for something completely different. not arbitrarily different or reactingly different, but simply leaving a particular direction of deadness. momentum is a critical variable in this, these habit killings of delicacy. but we really AREN'T slaves to habit, and it's sloth and cowardice to think that. we slur our way through life because it's so kick ass to live otherwise. slurring is doing what we should. it's being a dutiful ego/personality. it's not going into the hall of mirrors with a sledgehammer.

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however lost we may be in a musical performance, none of us would die because we didn't smell the smoke from a fire in the basement.

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and again that's where stubbornness comes into this, because the challenge to live differently from the shoulds of conditioning is CONSTANT. constantly, constantly, constantly, we must remind ourselves not to fall asleep in the should drifts. the world may tell us to coast, but realness is a continuous function. no discontinuities. realness isn't what we're between. realness is where we ARE and this, of course, is it. fundamentalists and true believers can't cope with this is it, but there's always some static in the music. in any case, explaining away ISness is its own punishment.

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subtraction commutes if you really want it to.

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we assume you're talking about us, says the flock, with all these pejorative references to true believers. hey, there's no pulling the wool over your eyes, says the cat. all RIGHT!, says the allegator, and smacks its tail approvingly. that's right, pick on us, we're used to it, says the flock, but our shepherd knows what's best for us. unshepherd thyself, says the cat. cat, sometimes I don't know about you, says the allegator. the tree trees.

the bottom line doesn't exist. neither does the time line. Cronos is a scam, he doesn't eat anything. talking from realness is closer to talking from questions than talking from answers. better still, it's talking from confusion. the more we deal with confusion, the freer we are from the past, but this isn't the liberation of certainty, it's the liberation of being real and acknowledging the mystery of the unclassified. we're confused not because we're stupid, but because we're dealing with members without sets. we're confused because life never cooperates with thinking. and hooray for that! any truth derivable from memory is cud chewing.

of course, cud chewing is basically the world. it's our collective, species, mental, video game. it's the soup each of us is being a human bean in. human beans, green beans, supreme beans, rooms of legumes. the soup of absolute thisness. abandon all certainty ye who are already here. where the hell else could we be? what's on our plate? candyass theory is what's NOT on our plate. what's on our plate, to give it some flavor, is challenge. the challenge to deal with givenness. the challenge to begin where we are not with some coma of conditioning.

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when the hypnotist says, try to move your arm, and you obey, you never move your arm.

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talking is a form of dealing with, but the heart of dealing with is the dealt with, never some wished for result. it's just so hard to realize realness belongs to itself. it's unextrapolatable. there's no dead time in the kingdom of the point blank. we may kick back from time to time because we're exhausted or feeling overwhelmed, but that's challenge too. that's where we are, that's what's real. challenge is thisness, not thatness, nowness, not thenness. then's and that's are what memory knows (or thinks it knows) how to react to, but vulnerability is always swimming in uncharted oceans. this isn't a jumping off place, this is what's really happening.

and here, we're on our own. sink or swim. this challenge isn't to complete anything. we don't have that luxury. confusion isn't nihilism, it's not blank mindedness. it's no tricks, no formulas, no magic, and no money talks. it helps to know there's no way to screw up here, because there aren't any blueprints relative to which we can compare ourselves. failing isn't the issue. dealing with, is the issue. the pearl of great price is what we're playing marbles with.

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this is a real as it gets.

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but how awesomely strong is the pull to finally do it right, to find and do the technology of salvation. but there isn't any technology. something in the center of everything is saying, read my hips, THERE ISN'T ANY TECHNOLOGY. not prayer, not mediation, not money, not science, not drugs, not scholarship, not surrender, and not gold chained, late nite motivational psychologists. snake oil all. whistling in the dark is whistling in the dark. memory has many Hydra heads and methodology is always too little and too late. by the time we haul up those cannons the castle is dimensionally elsewhere. we're supposed to swim in oceans, not coordinatize them. we shouldn't forget that Descartes did most of his thinking in bed.

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beginning where we are is dealing with the pre thought about and dealing with challenges and realness that cut beneath shoulds. being real isn't a strategy. it's learning how to swim and there aren't any lifeguards. no matter. dive in. there's no place to get to and no way to get there.

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W. Christopher Epler (Bill)

Authors Bio:
A liberal American, PhD mathematician, bipedal Earthling.