Nonduality Comic Thirteen: Zen Donut

~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

NC-12: Gita Seinfeld

~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

The Sunday Son Poem On the Return

Canticle On the Return of the Peepers

It begins just like the squeaking of a wheel
somewhere in the wetlands. Earth is turning
slowly on its rusty axis. Listen to
the innocence behind the worn cliché though—
this is particle collision in its essence.

Ice has melted after being in the shadow
of the earth for much too long. Twice hydrogen
and oxygen alone is giving little carbon-based
amphibians such holy voice and psalms are pouring
from their gentle bodies filling night with April

glories: Sun, they sing, has been here; Sun, they sing,
will be here in the morning; Sun, they sing, the sun!
And here I listen to their song, reflecting on
its meaning, lectio divina, so translating
what I can for you: the mystic coming then

to light again; the once becoming future now;
the always in your heart; the being in your blood;
the everlasting taste; its conscious sound;
this sight; our life;
new found.

~Son Rivers 2008

NC-11: Going My No Way

~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

NC-10: It's a Show About Nobody

~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

NC-9: The Bizarro Seinfeld Show

~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

NC-8: The Telltale Urge

~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

NC-7: Abundant Beings

~Joy to All and One,
Son Rivers

NC-6: The "Who Am I?" Trinity

~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

NC-5: Simulated Symposium

~Joy to All and One,
Son Rivers

NC-4: Instrument Clusterfolk

~Joy to All and One,
Son Rivers

NC-3: Comic of Myself

~Joy to All and One,
Son Rivers

Nonduality Comics #2

~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

Nonduality Comics #1

~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

reverse reality

A Sideways Eight

Disaster movies compensate
popcorn kernels with butter and blood.
Financial times are changing daylight
into apocalypse and mud. Hosannas
in the highest sell for less
than nineteen-eighty-three. The dream
becomes reverse reality:
something falls to nothing. See?

~Son Rivers 2009

Full Circle, Pt. 1

Two years ago I discovered the writings of Eckhart Tolle. Having just finished reading and re-reading Miguel Ruiz’s ‘The Voice of Knowledge,’ I found that Tolle’s ‘The New Earth’ occupied similar ground. When that book had been read and relished, I went on to ‘The Power of Now’ and thought it similar, if not a little more concerned with practices. Both books were not only revelatory but intriguing. I wanted to know their sources. As is this body-mind’s wont, I decided to do some research.

Therapy has taught me two things about the foundation of this particular body-mind complex: its father never introduced it to the world while its mother taught it to fear it. So my mind has tried to learn things on its own by observation and research. Beginning with the immediate world around me, I soon discovered things aren’t what they seem. In time, I pursued a graduate degree in history where not only did I learn that power and money hid behind the patriotic curtain of America, but I honed my research skills as well. Spirituality was just a continuation of this need to know the world, this time in an even larger, universal fashion. Now I would use those skills in that as well.


~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

Another Sunday Son Poem (# 19)

Rock Water Scissors

The consciousness of all
Creation isn’t
metaphysical, some
speculation,

philosophical
conceit or cirrus
cloud reflected in
my sweating glass

of lemonade, but rock
hard mineral
or vegetable
or animated water-

fall descending
in a galaxy of sentient
enlightened
splash.


~Son Rivers 2005

Slouching Towards Loserdom

Kathy Shaidle all 'Five Feet of Fury' churning in her poor mind gives compassion brand new meaning:

Today's "poor" are the rich Jesus warned you about: fat, slovenly, wasteful of their money and other people's.

Up is down. Poor is rich. 1984 is 2009.

God bless you Ms. Shaidle, and godspeed with your Truth.

It is easier for a bicycle to go through the eye of a sidewalk, than for a "poor" man with a cellphone eating risotto with brocolli (and, most likely, tattoos and drugs and booze and other crap) to enter into the kingdom of God.
~The Gospel According to Kathy, kind of

This is the disconnect we are dealing with in politics these days. Whether all of this is sincerely believed, or whether it's some kind of goof, doesn't really matter. It's the game of ends justifying the means. Actually, it may be worse than that. If the wisdom of Jesus and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Shankara and all and one point to the political truth of Gandhi and his means and only means action, then this kind of politics points to ends and only ends.

There's a reason why, to quote our last President, this sucker is going down, and Kathy and her ilk, be it Dems or GOP, are it. The Politics of the Ends. Means be damned, mocked, and ignored.


~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

On Means: Eckhart Tolle to Gandhi to Tolle

Coming full circle two years after reading 'The Power of Now.' Recently I've wondered about action in a world of surrender.

I thought Gandhi said it best in his commentaries on the Gita:

We should do no work with attachment. Attachment to good work is that too wrong? Yes, it is. If we are attached to our goal of winning liberty, we shall not hesitate to adopt bad means. If a person is particular that he would give coins to me personally, one day he might even steal them. Hence we should not be attached to even a good cause. Only then will our means remain pure and our actions too.

And then re-reading the first chapter of 'The Power of Now,' I came across this:

Instead of ''watching the thinker'' you can also create a gap in the mind stream by simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation. In your everyday life: you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention so that it becomes an end in itself.

Full circle. Two years. Means with no attachment. Means as an end in itself. Amen.

There are times in one's spiritual life when serendipitous moments occur. This is not only that, but a new beginning as well. Maybe more on that aspect tomorrow.

~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

Eckhart Tolle on Enlightenment

The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some super-human accomplishment and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible something that almost paradoxically is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and term. The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation from yourself and from the world around you. You then perceive yourself consciously or unconsciously as an isolated fragment. Fear arises and conflict within and without becomes the norm.

~Eckhart Tolle in 'The Power of Now'

The Songs of Consciousness

1. No Beginning

In the beginning
there was no beginning
and Unknowable
became the knowable.

The source of all
that’s knowable is neither particle
nor wave, but no uncertain
principle called consciousness.

Evolution amplifies
the mind and senses toward
the realization
I am consciousness

become aware
that I am That.


~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

seeing American politics clearly

On Saturday, Barack Obama redefined the battlefield of American politics. After giving a quick detail of his budget proposals, he said,

I know these steps won't sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they're gearing up for a fight as we speak. My message to them is this:

"'So am I.'

"The system we have now might work for the powerful and well-connected interests that have run Washington for far too long, but I don’t. I work for the American people.

Al Giordano lets us know succinctly what actually happened here:

Okay, here's what I think just happened: The President has reframed the narrative from the stale dysfunction of Democrats demonizing Republicans and Republicans demonizing Democrats and stepped over that puddle of slime to create a more authentic narrative: The American people vs. the special interests (and note that the ones he mentions are universally from the corporate sector).

Truthful (right) action involves clarity of the situation. That’s what the Bhagavad Gita, after all, is all about. Arjuna cannot take action because he does not see the situation clearly. Krishna tries in many ways to explain that situation to Arjuuna so that he can see it and take right action.

For too long, American politics has witnessed a charade of a battlefield between Democrats and Republicans. Both parties have been beneficiaries of the “special interests.”

As Giordano entertainingly sees it:

This is the real "us against them" fight to be waged, far more important than the eternal and often childish skirmishes between Democrats and Republicans. He's just pulled the curtain to reveal those who are the real obstructionists behind the puppets. This is exactly to what I had referred to back on February 7 when I noted that bipartisanship is not all carrots, but is also a big stick to be wielded on Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike.

Tread carefully, oh members of Congress.

Meanwhile, I'm firing up the popcorn.

This is fascinating stuff. Not only is it watching history begin to turn towards a new direction, but we’re also witnessing spiritual wisdom played out on the stage of the world and its consensual reality.

Good stuff indeed.


~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

I love the love of love

A Nineteen Line Tetrameter Poem Written For My True Love Beverly AKA That Skye Who Not So Coincidentally Was Born On The Nineteenth Day Of The Same Month As Me, And So A Seventy-Six Beat Poem Like The Seventy-Six Trombones Which Led The Big Parade, And Our Hearts Like Copper Bottom Tympani In Horse Platoons Thundering, Thundering All Along The Way And Loving A Full Octave Higher Than The Score

I love your cells, especially
the ones that dwell within your blood,
the white, the red, the never-ending
wine I taste each time I sip
the love within your lovely lips.
Its sweet bouquet, your DNA,
is similar to mine in oh
so many ways, but in those ways
that differ, oh they differ in
a way I know is different in
a way I’ve known before I knew
myself. I love the fact that you
are love itself—I love the love
we make when making love, I love
the you I love, I love the love
we love, I love the love of love,
and most of all, I love the way
we love to help each other love
to say: “I love I love I love.”

~Son Rivers 11/2006