in this way

It is not that the world around me is not real.

It is not the world I think it is.

I think there is a world of objects surrounding me, the subject. But both object and subject are my own creation, made by the tools of senses and mind. Neither is real.

The world is neither object nor subject; it is quantum spirit, the manifestation of Spirit.

In this way, the world is real.

In this way, I am real.

In this way, there is only this way.


~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

the secret is being spilled

I’ve been watching The Secret, the Rhonda Byrne movie about The Law of Attraction. It’s an amalgam of “The Lord of the Rings,” “Trump—The Art of the Deal,” and “The Upanishads.” Given that ancestry, there’s some good and some bad and some special effects.

You can hear the ring whispering in the artwork, and although it’s a little overdone, it doesn’t get in the way of the interviews where the secret is being spilled. On the other hand, too much is given to the desires of the ego, as if that is something real and valuable. Still, I have no doubt that The Law of Attraction works.

It says that your thoughts attract a physical manifestation of themselves. If you think bad thoughts, you will attract bad things. On the other hand, if you ask for what you want, if you control your thoughts in so doing, and not only think good things, but also believe those good thoughts faithfully and persistently, you will manifest your requests in your life.

This is tricky stuff. There’s some truth in this revelation, no doubt. But it’s truth told from the perspective of the dream-state. So there is never any questioning that your life is absolutely real, and that your thoughts are essentially meaningful.

But thought is the actual stuff of our illusion. In that way, we do dream what we think, if we believe it. But the more you are aware of your thoughts and their illusory nature, the less you believe in them. As this happens, as you surrender belief in thought, as you begin to understand the nature of the dream-state and the nature of reality, you begin to understand that you are more a conduit than a creator. Spirit is working through you, manifesting bliss. All you do is pay attention and go with the flow.

Call one 'The Law of Attraction' and the other 'The Writ of the Current.' In some ways, it’s a variation of the Bhakti/Jnana, devotion/knowledge split all over again. In one, you worship good thoughts. In the other, you don’t believe thought. Both will lead to bliss.


Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

it’s all about the bliss

Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. But something is left unsaid in this aphorism. Before, these actions were believed to be real in and of itself. After, it is the Consciousness, or Spirit, we bring to these “actions” which is the true reality.

We are conduits of the unmanifest. We are tools of the unmanifest. We are hands of the unmanifest. We are the unmanifest. In the ever-lasting act of making manifest.

And yes, our life is indeed a dream, but we are not dreaming it. We are being dreamt. What matters is not the dream itself; that we know to be illusion. What matters is the Spirit with which the dream is made.

Do not deny the dream, because you know it to be illusion. But dream on. Dream on in Consciousness. Dream on in Spirit. Dream on in love and bliss.

The unmanifest is made manifest not for the presence of the manifest itself. That is the great lie of materialism. It is in order for Spirit to know itself. And in that knowing is bliss.

The dream is being dreamt not for the dream itself. It is the dreaming which is everything.

In this life, look for any situation that requires an act of love, and do so. And know that the unmanifest is making itself manifest. What is being made manifest though is irrelevant; it’s all about the bliss.

This is something you can’t think through. This is something where you need to follow your true bliss (and not the satisfaction of ego), and trust that where there is bliss, there is Spirit.

This is true transubstantiation.

Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

Seeing Sees the Seen

Again, it was a fleeting recognition. An understanding that this thought called “I” was not what’s seeing. What sees?

It was as if the river was looking at itself. It was as if that tree was looking at itself. And yes, it was as if this body was also looking at itself. But it wasn’t what was seeing.

Let’s talk dreamtalk. When I look at my hand, I know it’s not the essence of myself, but just part of an emanation of myself. I see my hand, but I don’t see myself. Even when I see as much of myself as I can see, I don’t see myself. So when the river sees itself, it only sees an emanation of itself.

The unmanifest sees the manifest. Seeing sees the seen.

Reflecting on this World

1.16 “The world you see is nothing but a reflection of reality. Reflection cannot be true.”

...Reality is absolute awareness, but it cannot perceive itself because it is One. In order for the absolute knowledge even to know that it exists, it must manifest itself and become two. The world is the mirror that the Absolute holds up in order to see Itself. The reflection has no existence in itself. This act of manifestation is the creation of duality, and in duality, the whole world appears.

~Andrew Vernon from 'You are He: Commentaries on the Teaching of Sri Ranjit'

A Parker River Wildlife Story

I watched two harrier hawks reacting over territory. It was like two chemicals exploding in a froth of flight. There was nothing personal within their actions other than the story my mind wanted to create. But I have learned not to believe such thoughts and so I watched two harrier hawks simply reacting over territory. Even that is story. We call them hawks. We call it territory.

Yesterday I saw a rabbit bounding across the road before me as I was driving through the wildlife refuge. My first reaction was to smile and laugh. Such a cute animal running in that signature style. But that’s some story I’ve learned from the Disneyesque interpretations of nature. The rabbit is reacting to open territory and an instinctual biological understanding of hazards to its current manifestation.

Of course, beyond this personality, I am that hawk, I am that rabbit. American Indians understood these truths very well. In their tribal races, the Hopi do not run in competition with another. They run because they are one with the wind and they are returning to its nature.

Oh, they tell stories too. Their stories lend personality traits to coyotes and ravens and eagles as well. But it’s not a matter of personification in their tales. It’s not the animal that has the human trait. Rather it’s the human that has the animal trait. It’s all about a point of view.

We see similarities between ourselves and nature because we are more than similar in essence. Today I was those hawks; yesterday I was that rabbit. Although both were and continue to be now. Flying is happening in Consciousness. Running is happening. Wind is.

And it’s an amazing manifestation of variety and creativity. One just can’t help to tell its, our, story.

New England Sutra 2: Rivers and Ice

The river is covered
in ice and snow.

Beneath it though, the tide still rises
and falls.

While beneath the tide, the current flows.

But all I see is ice
and snow,

the material world within which
we think we know.

Beneath it, particles and waves of the quantum
universe show.

Beneath that is unmanifest though.

Some day the ice will melt and go; I'll see again
the tide rise and fall.

But only when I submerge myself will I know
the current.

Surrender, surrender, surrender, O!

Alan Watts Sutra: Expressions of Nature

We suffer from a hallucination,

from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms.

Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body--a center which "confronts an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.


Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature."

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences.


We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.


As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

from Alan Watts ‘The Book: On the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are’ xtremely formatted for this posting

First There Is An Island Then There Is

No Island

As the tide decreases in Bar Harbor
twice a day, Bar Island, situated
opposite the town, across the harbor,
soon becomes no island, and the water
in-between the island and the village
soon becomes a narrow kind of isthmus
there instead, connecting town and headland.
Cars begin to cross the drying sandbar.
People walk their dogs along new shorelines.
Seagulls search for shellfish in the shallows.
Some nights, like tonight, the sun will lower
as the tide grows back into its fullness,
and the land transforms back into island
as the day returns into the darkness.

~Son Rivers 2002

Jed McKenna's Damndest Law of Attraction 3

erasing the line between dreamer and dream

It's not so much that someone ... can have what they want, but that their wants and needs are in natural harmony with their dreamstate circumstances. In other words. it's not that I can have anything I want, ...it's also that I wouldn't want anything I couldn't have. ...The difference between authentic and inauthentic desire is central to all this, but most people are completely cut off from their authentic desires.

(snip)

The way it really works is more of a seamless unfolding. It's not something you can improve, only impede. The only way you can make it work better is to remove ego from the equation.

(snip)

As soon as you start imposing your beliefs on the process, it necessarily begins to degrade. Even to impose your beliefs about time and space on the process, or your beliefs about causality and duality, is to diminish it. As soon as you start asserting your beliefs, you start closing it down to your level instead of opening yourself up.

(snip)

And since. furthermore, this process is really about conscious being, about who and what and where we are, developing a progressively deeper understanding of the process is synonymous with actual progress and growth.

(snip)

What we're talking about when we say manifestation is the true creative process wherein authentic desires become reality. Once you understand the desire part, then the becoming part takes care of itself.

(snip)

It's about taking control of your life and that means one thing: releasing it. Unconditional surrender. That's something to be done consciously and with clear intent, ...losing your life to find it.

(snip)

Unlike prayer, manifestation is a first and only resort. Once we understand what it really is and how it really works, it naturally becomes our sole mode of operating in the world: not just in getting what we want, but in knowing how to want and what to want: in knowing what to do and why to do it. Instead of a desperate plea for something we want, manifestation becomes our way of moving through life, of interfacing with the universe.

(snip)

But manifestation isn't specific. Its not just about getting what you want, it's about everything you do and how you do it and who you are and how you move through the world. It's about shaping the dreamstate and moving within it in this seamless confluence of self and not-self. Its the erasing of the line between dreamer and dream. You're not just manifesting a car or new shoes, you're manifesting yourself, and all the rest follows naturally and effortlessly from that.

Jed McKenna's Damndest Law of Attraction 2

trust the universe, not my little brain

We think miracles happen and prayers are answered only when it's something good: when it's in line with our hopes and desires which... are always fear-based. We don't acknowledge the same forces equally at work when the results are not in line with our hopes and desires. We're very selective in our perceptions. Good luck, bad luck, it's all the same: the ebb and flow of tides, it just gets interpreted differently.

(snip)

An ego-clad, fear-based being might use prayer or divination or manifestation to get the things they want... Once freed from egoic constraints. however. all such fear-driven wanting disappears and desire becomes very organic and non-specific. My prayer. if I were to utter one, might be for whatever's best, or that I should proceed without error, something like that.

(snip)

The Integrated State is seamless: it's without all these artificial boundaries and distinctions. such as one entity asking for something and another granting it. I want what's best and I trust the universe, not my little brain, to be the judge of what's best and how best to make it happen.

(snip)

When your eyes are open, you see everything and belief becomes irrelevant and forgotten... My point is that what people see in these occasional glimpses, by all these various names and explanations, is this ocean of being working in tireless, errorless perfection. That's what the dreamstate is, that's what we are, that's what consciousness is. You are nothing but consciousness, everything that tells you more than that is like a built-up crust of hard-packed emotional energy that has formed around you like a shell.

All true growth and development is first and foremost a process of chopping away this crust. Ego sends us searching in the direction of learning, of becoming more and adding on to ourselves, but everything we claim to seek lies in the opposite direction: of unlearning, of letting go, of reducing. We think the goal is to become someone. but the universe can only be ours when we become no one.

~Jed McKenna from 'Spiritual Warfare' xtremely edited for this posting

Jed McKenna's Damndest Law of Attraction 1

an imperceptible tendency toward rightness

Central ... is the element of trust, of patience, of non-meddling(,)... no ego making demands and insisting on ways and means, so events unfold in ways ego could never imagine or achieve.

(snip)

That's what the whole thing really is—life...—a free-flowing. dynamic, creative process.... Your whole life becomes a creative process, a nuanced allowing, an imperceptible tendency toward rightness and away from not-rightness, as refined and subtle as your mechanism of balance.

(snip)

(T)here are a bunch of books (that) promise ways of manifesting your desires, getting everything you want, but that's really the least of it, more like a pleasant side-effect.

(snip)

Everyone has some direct experience..., where they sense that there's more to life than meets the eye, that there's something going on that they don't see.

(snip)

Manifestation is the visible part ... (L)ittle successes ... aren't the exception, they're the rule, and when they don't come as requested. it just means you didn't understand the rule. But you can.

(snip)

Understanding it conceptually doesn't matter much.... Practical application is what matters.... The rest takes care of itself through natural processes of experimentation and observation and play, just like you developed your balance as a toddler. You weren't born with a finely-tuned balance mechanism: it developed over time as you got up and started using it.

(snip)

Your thoughts and emotions determine your dreamstate reality. That's where you start. From there it's just a matter of simplifying the equation and eventually seeing that your thoughts and emotions are your dreamstate. It's all just consciousness, you are just consciousness. There is nothing else. Once that goes from thought-level concept to full-immersion awareness, you naturally merge with the currents instead of being tossed about by them.

~Jed McKenna from 'Spiritual Warfare' xtremely edited for this posting