(The Aphorism of the Point-of-View)

 In a recent meditation with my Guruji via Zoom I had the perception from non-dual awareness that our point-of-view is both a Power or Siddhi and a limitation or Samskara:

दृष्टिकोण सूत्र

Dṛṣṭikoṇa Sūtra

(The Aphorism of the Point-of-View)

विरोधः क्षुद्रमनसः भ्रमः; ज्ञानी द्वैतस्य नृत्यं पश्यति।

प्रत्येकं दृष्टिकोणं शक्तिः सीमा च ज्ञेयम्॥

Virodhaḥ kṣudramanasah bhramaḥ; jñānī dvaitasya nṛtyaṁ paśyati.

Pratyekaṁ dṛṣṭikoṇaṁ śaktiḥ sīmā ca jñeyam.

Contradiction is an illusion of our sense based limited mind; when one views the contradiction from non-dual awareness, one sees only the dance of duality and hence knows that every point-of-view is thus both a power and a limitation.

Every standpoint is both power (siddhi) and boundary (saṁskāra). The siddhi is precision and efficacy; the saṁskāra is tunnel vision and clinging.

As the Zen saying goes, "The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself." 

The dream of every planet is to become a star.

From stars we come, and to stars we shall return.  

Creation is not abstract; it is intimate. You are a fragment of Nature’s urge in the Land you were born to. You reflect the soil, the river, the sky of that place. Fractally flawed, yet perfectly whole, you are a bearer of the same impulse that sculpted mountains and lit the galaxies.  

Long ago, a voice in this land spoke: that new peoples would arrive, and it would take generations before the Land itself shaped them, molded them into caretakers. That time is now. Gathered from all colors of the Medicine Wheel, we are here as hybrid children of convergence, each carrying strands of history, each a bridge between past and future, each a seed of the Land’s dream.  

When I watch with my mind, I see difference — ancestry, story, geography. When I watch with my Heart, I see no division. I see each person fulfilling Nature’s purpose, whether or not aware of it. For Nature does not differentiate. She proliferates. She spins diversity with fierce joy, weaving worlds and forms, birthing blooms and beasts alike. Her garment is a gossamer web of interlaced lights — Love and Joy spiraling endlessly.  

Her primary urge is change. She delights in transformation, roiling with the impulse to sparkle in a new way and, for one moment, marvel at her own beauty, before moving on to make more. She births brief flowerings of beauty; she births monstrous energies to overthrow what is stagnant. She lingers in nothing. She evolves. Always, her compass points toward the star.  

Monoculture is a dead end. Homogeneity cannot endure. The pattern of life is fractal, recursive, infinitely varied. The goal of Nature is part Art, part Science, part Spirit. And we — we humans, thin organic layer on Earth’s skin — are chosen as her agents of transformation. Each of us a synaptic spark, transmuting cosmic fire into forms the Land can shape toward its dream.  

What does not dance with her pulse decays and returns to feed the newborn. But when we dance with her longing, when Heart and Mind converge in creative fire, we become her song, her ecstatic chorus of change.  

We are linked utterly to the Earth’s becoming. Even in death, our offerings are recycled into her womb. When she transcends, we transcend. When she ascends, so do we — dust reborn to light, Earth shining as Star.  

This is her dream — and it is ours. From stars we came, and to stars we shall return.  

The dream of every planet is to become a star.

 The dream of every planet
is to become a star.

From stars we come,
to stars we shall return.

You—fragment of Nature’s urge,
seeded in the Land you were born to—
you reflect that Land.
You are her flawed yet perfect vessel,
her fractal, luminous experiment.

An ancient voice whispers in this soil:
the Land will shape her peoples,
until they grow into her likeness.
The time is now.
The caretakers gather—
from every colour of the Medicine Wheel,
from every hybrid root of history.
You. And me.

Watch with the mind,
and you will see differences,
the threads of DNA,
the tangled heritages of tribe and migration.

Watch with the Heart,
and you will see no difference at all.
For Nature does not divide.
She proliferates.
She is Joy, roiling,
an organic garment of shimmering light,
a symphony of endless change.

Race, culture, nation—
these are temporary experiments.
Monoculture is a dead end.
Homogeneity is a prison.
But fractal diversity—
this is Her law.
This is how She evolves.
She sees Stars.

Sometimes She births creatures
of fleeting Beauty—
a sigh, an exhalation,
a single blossom of awe.
Sometimes She births Monsters—
to shatter complacency,
to clear the fields for new growth.

But always, She dances.
And She longs for us to dance with Her—
to vibrate in sympathetic joy
to Her organic song of longing.

We are Her agents of change,
Her thin living skin,
Her synaptic flashes,
Her dancers of transformation.
Each of us a bridge—
carrying cosmic fire
into the body of Earth.

What does not dance rots.
What does not change, withers.
But what joins the dance,
what burns with Heart and Mind in harmony,
erupts in creative fire—
Art, Love, Becoming.

Even in death,
we are not lost.
We are recycled, reborn,
our minerals and memories
recast in the next wave of form.
For as the Land aspires to Star,
we too rise in her radiance.
The Dream of Earth
is the Dream of us:
to transmute,
to blaze,
to shine.

Dust to dust,
minerals to furnace,
ashes to galaxies:

From stars we come.
To stars we shall return.

And in the light of Cosmic Time,
though both great and small are extinguished,
it matters—
oh, it matters—
that we create,
that we explore,
that we evolve
with the courage of a Loving Heart.

Descent & Radiance: the Catabasis Romance

 Suffering is not the gate barred—
it is the gate itself.
Confusion, despair—
not obstacles, but the steps of the stair.

Rāja Yoga whispers the same truth:
the stages of progress are veiled in shadow
before they flower into light.

Depression is no malady—
it is catabasis, the sacred descent.
The husk must split.
The self must fall.
Only then does the new soul rise.

The weight of the world—
that is the door.
Darkness—
that is the friend.
It calls us: Surrender.
Surrender to the great unknowing,
to the void’s wide silence,
and there—
be remade.

Yet the well is bottomless.
Some wander long in its depths.
Some tire, or falter.
In that night, a hand extended
is grace itself.
I was given such a hand.
And so, even in descent,
radiance found me.

three rivers. one ocean

I speak in three tongues,

from one heart,
a single fire.

The first is Poetry;
the lost art of interior design,
where the poem is a prayer, a plaint,
an echo of our deep calling for deep.
It is a catabasis romance with the soul,
catching reflections just right,
so a gleam of recognition
might fluoresce in another's eyes.

The second is Jyotisha;
the tongue of the Rishis,
where stars are the pulse of karma,
the breath of ancestors, the measure
of a soul's long vow.
Here I read the threads of fate,
not to bind, but to show the knot
that longs to loosen,
to turn the elegy of woe
into a place of exceptional Peace.

The third is Hellenistic;
where myths rise from forgotten seas
and planets are gods still speaking.
Here I restore the ancient stories,
so a seeker might remember
the hero's journey is their own—
to find the courage to change their world
from inside out.

Three rivers, one ocean.

This work is simple:
to reveal by symbol,
to heal by vision,
to show that the chart is not a prison,
but a mirror for the Great Work—
the sacred art of becoming
the meaning-maker of your own life.

Poems to the God that is you

🎤 (The performer steps forward, silence stretching. A long inhale. The first words drop soft, almost hesitant, like a secret confession.)


You used to scare me…
with your torrid schemes.
My mind—
a parcel for your unravelling.

(pauses, looks left, then right as if suspicious)

There was a time you played in its shadows…
and then you said,
"I never take sides.
Not in War.
Not in Love."

(leans closer to mic, voice cutting through)

I believed you then.
Now—
I know I was wrong.

(voice grows louder, more rhythmic, arms wide)

You are not to be believed—
but sung!
When my eyes drown in this turgid heart,
when my soul swells with you—
that day,
I know.

(Beat. Change of pace—voice shifts into awe, almost scientific chant.)

A mass is a Higgs/Boson equation…
Deifying your principle of attraction!
You keep the stars steady in their course,
while my mind is smoothed with your Peace,
while my heart swells with your Love—
and in this swelling,
I am created.

(sharp, staccato, pounding the chest)

This day mattered!
To one swayed by your hammer of fate!
I have hung from remorse too often—
but you beckoned me,
with tears,
with laughter,
with those twinkling eyes—
at the very moment of death.

(a whisper, sliding low, conspiratorial)

No human innuendo survives you.
No thought is free from the particles you’ve shattered.
And no tear—
not one—
is without your infinite,
recycled,
Love affair.

(slow chant, melodic)

My heart is an elixir of prayers.
OM…
OM I…
Oh my soul, humming you.

(pause. Then softly, tenderly, like a lover’s lullaby)

Waiting…
is a lover’s kiss—
just before the eyes close,
just before two hearts merge in crescendo.

(the rhythm picks up, words tumble, ecstatic)

In your presence, no differences.
No stubbornness.
No me, no you, no we—
only particles whispering…
You.

(voice thins, fragile, trembling)

Like an empty boat,
carried by your sea without end…
this heart forever voyages,
its compass always trembling,
always going home.

(gentle, reverent)

And You—
You are Home to me.

(long silence. Then, with rising strength, almost a chant the audience can echo.)

Love is the mirror!
Where two flames
see their source as One!

To kiss the Beloved—
with the same kiss the Beloved kisses me…
that kiss—
is eternity.

Love is the mirror!
Where two flames
see their source as One!

Oh… the heart knows this.
Love attracts Love.
This is the secret of the kiss.

(crescendo—hands rise as if planting a garden)

In the Garden of Hearts,
where Love grows—
you,
and I,
and we…
become unnecessary distinctions.

(slows, returns to whisper)

Let us be
this empty yearning together.
This ancient ache of longing.
This heart… a compass,
pointing to where.
Love is the goal.

(steps back, breath catches, voice drops to a final intimate murmur)

I’ll meet you there.

(Silence. Performer places hand on chest. Lights fade.)

Scouting the derp

(The poet steps to the mic, leans in, voice is a low, confidential whisper.)

We need a scout.
Someone with eyes for the derp.
Someone to run the arc of this rolling whirl’d,
looking hither and thither,
with eyes that switch-back from the blind spot…

(Leans in closer)

…you know the one.
The one that confabulates.
The looking-hole that our brain fills in with what we think we know.
It just… makes stuff up. Fills in the blanks.
So you have to send someone askew.
Someone off the beaten path who can simply-see
through that scotoma-hole we all call home.
Someone who can detect the glitch in the system.
The truth in the blind spot.

(Pulls back, voice becomes declarative, stronger.)

So. The Poet is a mutation.
A necessary one.
They pitter-patter between the bicameral,
in cyber-words both alive and clinging to irony,
because they see the binary conflict we’re in.

And the choice is this:
We are on the brink of falling-fatal to a heartless machine,
doing our duty as an ordinary-drone has-been…
OR…
we can be rising-raptured in an organic-mutation,
and in a few natural generations
we’d speak in a language of light,
of shadow sculpting time,
moving to a music only the heart can hear,
simply-sublime,
risen from the slime,
dancing without any fear.

(Tone becomes wondrous, almost reverent.)

Poets are imminently real-EYE-sed… and under-understood.
They look as if they remembered they’re partly surrounding Sky,
and partly the curvature of Sea,
and partly the silent, glittering tears of night in the stars that we see.
They’ve discovered the way of the whirl’d,
going ‘round and ‘round on the edge of space,
with the law of falling and the law of catching up,
outward-bound by an infinite-in grace.
They’re swelling in their hearts ‘til their eyes gleam
with new rays of possibility,
bent by their individuality.

A Poet is like a sphere…
his centre everywhere,
her circumference nowhere.

(Rhythm builds, becoming a cascade of images.)

The sound a poet makes is the frisson,
the viscereality where heart and mind meet,
where inner sonics and ironics burst into song,
where all her miseries and desires belong,
but incomplete.
It’s a rhyme beyond reason,
the master of absurdity,
while truth and beauty spontaneously run around him in nudity.

(Voice rises to a crescendo, powerful and clear.)

And when a Poet lifts the veil, revealing reality,
we are ALL made greater by this feat!
Nature always sends us Visionaries, Poets, Mystics!
Mutations!
They take us to the next evolutionary level!
They are our visionaries… headed in a back-words direction.

(The poet pauses. The energy shifts. The final lines are delivered softly, with intense intimacy and clarity.)

But a Poet writes-hard… with soft-eyes.
To swell from the cocoon of his words so they fly
as moths… to your flame.

Listen.
We don’t light the fire.
We lift up a mirror…
and show you the coals-glowing in your eyes.
Yes, Love is the mirror in which two flames 
see their source as One.

(Holds the silence. Steps back from the mic.)

"in a looking-glass that sees both ways"

 

*(The poet approaches the mic, leans in, voice is a low hum.)*

A poem is a mirror.
A **ɹoɹɹıɯ**.
A yes-I-can with crayons the color of Tachyons,
rushing out of whirl’ds where past-meets-future,
reaching **for-words**…
yet going **back-words** for some more.

It makes reflections, like a ripple,
but you’re at zero-point too,
where the puddle tessellates to a past in the future *you*,
and you reflect it back-words and for-words
'til it reverberates…
right there.
Now.
Here.
Like an invertendo-innuendo that’s an in-your-face…
**ɹoɹɹıɯ**.

*(Pace picks up, a hint of paranoia, a conspiratorial whisper.)*

And this mirror-Kah… it *rackles* with the spirit of the times.
This mirror… reciprocates.
And everything recorded is written everywhere for anyone to see—
a hit-list for the insurgents,
a collapse scenario for the empire,
as the top one-percent feed the roots of alien, alternative… cycles.

But listen.
‘I see you, you see me’
and maybe together we’re spied-upon in an irony
of what it’s like not to be truly free.
So we carry on.
In a more human innuendo,
a more momento-mori story,
mirroring each other… more merrily.

*(Rhythm becomes a slow, rolling, cyclical chant.)*

Another cycle of the Sun,
rollin’ ’round the earth ‘yer on,
then in cycles turned your way,
yes, another day…
where cycles in the Sun are glimmerings on the Sea,
making many reflections,
and sympathetic tessellations vibrate in our oceanic-brain,
where the orbits perigee,
where we learn the lessons of leaving behind
and faltering forward,
where we would-if-I-could be the king who would be a man,
riding these cycles of the Sun by the Sea,
going on this way…
over and over…
mirrorly.

*(Voice turns sharp, staccato, aggressive.)*

And we become these just-in-time
**poet-ninJa assassins,**
recycling those one-percenters who wannabe left alone
with all of the crayons.
We reflect their creme-de-la-creme in our extra hot latte,
and with every word we missed the mark with,
we feed the roots of further cycles
than ever they bloomed before.
Splash.
Of.
Color.

*(Tone shifts to gratitude, warmth, a big-hearted exhale.)*

So thank-you, Poets.
For the many reflections.
For the big-hearted yawp of freedom to be who you want to be.
Thank you for sharing your wrought-out ramblings
where my meaning-making takes a rest
and instead, with great exaltation, I surrender
to how you all ‘fess-up and down and around
and always… with a wry wit in it.

It’s bright.
It echoes the numinous in-us.
The euphoric-eunoia.
The bright language of connecting,
an authentic friending in a lightning look…
in intertextual-fugues,
invertendo-innuendos,
or mirrorly… by-the-book.

*(Voice drops to a final, intimate, questioning whisper.)*

So is that it then?
This eunoia-euphoria…
this urge-to-merge?
Is that it?
Expressed in longing waves,
swelling in each other as sister and brother?
Is that it?
When you’ve engaged both sides of the brain…
the scholar and the minstrel…
is that the euphoria we’re after?

*(Poet holds the silence for a beat, then steps back.)*

unfortunate heaven

(The stage is bare. The poet steps to the mic.)

(Begin calm, deliberate)

They tell you prayer is soft hands,
is waiting for a sign.
They tell you it’s a useless, romantic kind of whine
that only grows your doubt.
But I say prayer is a shout.
My prayer is a dare:
May love grow in the hearts of men,
and may believers learn to think again.

They show you quotes about commitment,
about how the moment you begin, Providence moves too.
How a whole stream of events you never knew
will rise up to meet you.
How boldness has magic.
Power.
Genius.
And they say, “Begin it now.”

(Pace quickens, voice fills with anxiety)

And that…
that scares the shit out of me.
You see?
It’s the finality. The end of the mystery.
It’s the sweeping swings of a promised Spring
withheld from my wild purpose.
It’s the dead forms, the placid rituals,
the mantra-mullah songs that kill the Truth in me
the moment I sink in.

One night, God came to me in a dream.
Said, "I’m taking you to the brighter-world, Jerry."
And that’s it.
Heaven.
Game. Over.

(Frantic, pleading)

WTF.
What if I want to take my body-of-cycles with me?
What if I want the sweat-of-passion and the blisters of unfulfillment?
What if everyone has to come?
The monsters of the night, the broken, the lost—
can it be so? No one left behind?
Isn’t a Bodhisattva a gem that keeps coming back for more?

So I choose this edge.
I choose to slice the night with the light I find on the dark side.
I choose this persistent imminence.
This place where death limns us all.

(Angry, hitting a rhythm, like fists on a table)

They give you the wish-fulfilling gem!
The power to change it all!
The holy fire! The timeless abode!
And you turn your back?
You turn your back on splendour
for the simple, sweet redolent smell of another human?
For the pain? For the failure? For the wounded misery?

YES.
Because without it, we’re not human.
We’d be like those fuKin’ Angels,
no pleasure, no pain,
just taking some sick satisfaction
in fuKin’ with people’s heads
because we’re so easily deceived by hope.

It’d be like being King of the Hill.
An alpha-grin, spitting down at the world,
“I’VE WON.”
And then you’re done.
Except for the fun of rolling a few Sisyphean rocks
down on all the other wanna-be’s.

(Shifts tone, becomes wondrous, philosophical)

There’s something wonderful in the cloud-of-unknowing
that heaven or hell cannot glean.
It’s the unfinished.
The undone.
It’s the potential that makes infinity trivial.
We are better at being the process, not the finished product.
Knowing is the end of curiosity.
So I’d rather be on a Sisyphean roll.
Really.

(Softer, finding the core truth)

Because if memory is a lie, then so am I.
A story I tell myself.
A fiction and a reality, hopelessly intertwined.
An act of remembering that changes me,
so I sing my songs as they come,
right now,
making myself in my own image…

(Voice drops, each word deliberate, a quiet anthem)

unbecoming,
unfettered,
unfinished,
undone…

(Building to a final, fierce climax)

Because when an inner situation is not made conscious,
it appears outside as FATE.
So I wrestle my demons. I like the contact.
I like the fire.
Like Prometheus, running from the perfection of the Gods,
ranting about the lack of darkness in their light.
He brought us these revelatory wings.
He brought us this truth:
That the burning of the Eagle’s Talons
is a misery required
when enamouring Fire.

(Silence.)