The Mystical Lion's Mind

This is a secondary blog specifically featuring thoughts, poetry and a myriad of my own musings from my primary blog: mysticallion.tumblr.com. I do not own any of the images featured here unless otherwise indicated.

[mysticallion]

More and more this world is a a kaleidoscope

A slippery spectacle of color and sound

Light and shadow strobing one another into flickering existence

Nothing actually cohering

Everything shifting too swiftly to be called shape

Everything touching too intimately to be called form

This illusion of solidity is inherently weak

A watercolor wash in the rain

The persistence of vision breaks down if you let it

Let it

[livingstills]

[mysticallion]

Obviously, the sun in the water is not actually real; it’s a reflection.

Similarly, though perhaps not so obvious due to lifelong habits of certain unconscious mental processes, the sun in your mind—be it of the reflection or the source—is equally a reflection, equally unreal. It’s only the complex conceptual activities of differentiation, discrimination, reification, and association that makes it seem so. All of this is accepted at face value until it is deeply examined and deconstructed.

All outsides and all insides actually occur in the singular space of Awareness. They are its activity, it’s inherent energy in self-reflective self-play. This is not a theory but an actual experience—typically termed “non-duality”—in advanced meditative practices.

[mysticallion]

Finally finished my latest Dakini, fourth in the series of five. These are a modernized take on the Five Wisdom Dakinis from Tibetan Tantric Buddhism.

🤲

She is the yellow Ratna-Dakini Manaki, the Wisdom Dakini of Equality.

She is the Southern Dakini, the angel of the senses and feelings. Her domain is the Earth element with its inexhaustible bounty of wish-fulfilling gems and the luminous gold of supreme wisdom. She is the consort of Ratnasambhava Buddha.

She embodies the WISDOM of Equanimity which conquers the poison of Pride, and the compassion that arises naturally from it.

She dances incessantly across the ever-changing vista of the immutable Ground in order to help us, through clarity of perception and discernment, transform the energy of egoic Pride into the Wisdom of Equality, which directly discerns the One Taste of Reality.

🤲

She joins her sisters:

Next to come, and last, is the central figure Buddha Dakini Akashadhatvishvari, Wisdom Dakini of Universal Law. I’m eagerly awaiting her inspiration and eventual arrival.

[cleverwordsandotherstuffilike]

“It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, ‘Being here is so much,’ and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.” — John O’Donohue

[mysticallion]

It’s not just “social media.” It’s life in general and the way people tend to relate to it. Long before social media, people found innumerable ways to ignore their lives. We’ve been deadening and numbing in every way we can imagine since time out of mind. And while we certainly like our fermented beverages and smokables and toad licking, the main culprit behind this deadening and numbing isn’t substance abuse or even social media addiction: it’s our own minds.

Our primary addiction is our incessant preoccupation with our own mental productions, our own (and inherited) thoughts and conceptions, our memories and emotional responses. Indeed, most substance abuse is actually an attempt to numb and deaden all these thoughts and fears and feelings and criticisms, all this endless mental reactivity.

That’s the enemy: the runaway brain—not thinking or evaluating or deciding, all of which are essential survival skills, but rather the reflexive and compulsive power of all that. Thinking is necessary when it is necessary, but it’s poison and even lethal at higher doses. What’s worse: this pandemic pestilence is incredibly pervasive and persistent. Indeed, to one degree or another it is the social norm for virtually all people. This is suffering.

It’s not anybody’s fault, per se, this mass addiction of humanity. It’s simply something that occurs organically—socially as well as developmentally—as we grow. Slowly, without realizing that it was happening, as we related and matured we became more concerned with our own mental machinations than the world itself. Thoughts and concepts became progressively more complex and hypnotic. As youngsters we were very present, and our contact with the “real world” was raw and intense; but over time, primarily because of unconscious social practices and pressures and the way we learn in general, we lost that. We forfeited being present—which is the direct and immediate contact with experience—for our own internal environment. We attached words and thoughts and concepts and inherited ideas to literally everything, and we created entire identities and lives around these fabricated worlds, and we unconsciously decided that this mental construct was somehow more real and important that our actual existence. This, then, became the primary mechanism—sometimes voluntarily but mostly unconsciously—for numbing and deadening, and therefore for suffering. This drug called thinking became the primary poison, and we imbibe it like water.

Most spiritual systems, as well as some of the more humanistic philosophies and psychologies, seek to address this issue. They attempt to explain the situation, to understand its roots and effects, and to lay out some sort of strategy for overcoming it. The primary difference between these approaches lie in how they understand and respond to the situation. Psychology, and to some extent philosophy, attempts to do so by altering and redefining some of this mental madness; they exchange certain ideas and beliefs with others that help to alleviate some of the stress. Whereas spiritual practices revolve more around mitigating and resolving the situation itself through understanding the phenomena directly, as actual experiences, as contact rather than concepts, as energetic encounters rather than mere mental ones, and thereby to “cut off thinking at its root.” This, by the way, doesn’t mean that the person is no longer capable of thinking, simply that they are not compelled to do so.

[mysticallion]

Reality transcends everything.

Reality cannot become an object of inquiry, investigation or meditation.

Reality cannot be seen.

Reality cannot be described.

Reality cannot be defined.

Reality cannot be measured.

Reality cannot be understood.

All we can do is let go of all ideas, all concepts, all defenses, all limitations, all patterns, and relax back into Reality, always already here-now. The less of “me” there is, the more Reality shines through. So we let go until only Reality remains. Because that’s what we really are, always already.

[mysticallion]

Everything ever written,

Everything ever read,

Everything ever thought,

Everything ever said,

Is a symbol.

Just a symbol.

Don’t confuse them for the Real, for the Now.

They are hypnotic, repetitive patterns and we are addicted to them. We are conceptual junkies who define, attribute and project importance and "reality" onto these thought forms, and who, for the most part, aren’t even aware of their empty, phantasmagorical existence.

[mysticallion]

The vicissitudes of thought

A plague of rotting memories

Married to fearful anticipation

Jumbled and pointless

Let them go

[beautiful-contrast]

[mysticallion]

Once upon a midday bright

While I recovered from the previous night

From many a bottle of forgotten wine—

While I woke with headache glaring

Suddenly there came a blaring

As if some punk were done with caring

And messing with my motorbike

“‘Tis some other,” I muttered, “somebody else’s favorite Thumper,

Honking outside my apartment door

Only this and nothing more.”

.

Open here I flung the door, when, looking out I softly swore

For there perched a stately Raven on the bike I adore;

    Clearly he simply didn’t care; unmoved by proximity or by stare

    But, with a proud and stately bearing, perched upon my handlebars—

Perched upon my handlebars having ignored all other cars—

            Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my anger slowly into smiling,

By the grim pissed-offedness of the countenance it wore,

“Though your feathers are old and faded, you, my friend, are clearly jaded,

“Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the woods next door—

"Tell me what your name is, Bro, you looking all hard core!”

            Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

.

~with apologies to Ed

[mysticallion]

If we hate our enemies then they have already won. To surrender your thoughts and emotions to them, to allow their words and actions to define our lives is simply to relinquish control to them, which is what they wanted in the first place.

It is not only possible to consider and respond to said enemies/situations without the knee jerk reactions of fear, enragement and hatred, it is necessary so that we may appropriately address the situation itself and not simply react to our own reflexive emotional reverberations. This can only come from mindfulness and repetition. We have to undo, or unlearn, or allow to dissolve (so to speak) these heretofore unconscious reactions. We must learn how to distinguish between the two, between the situation and the response, and more importantly, how to release the reactivity while not simply disengaging from the situation itself. This is difficult but necessary, and it can only occur if our mindfulness is active. When we are simply lost to the internal intensity of our own emotions, we cannot observe and respond (or not) accordingly. A psychological space must be created and maintained.

The situation comes from them; our reactions come from us. We cannot control their behavior, but we can control ourselves. This will of course lead to greater peace for us, both internally and environmentally, and it will allow us to properly cooperate with life situations instead of being led about by them. This calmness and clarity is perhaps the greatest gift that we can give to ourselves, to others, to the situation, and to Life itself.

[mysticallion]

The bodymind is like a house,

An artificial structure thoughtfully asembled

To keep the bodymind safe.

Meditation is a door,

A door into Now.

Once you step through and turn around,

Even the house vanishes.

[jareckiworld]

Joanna Karpowicz — "Lonely" Anubis Series (acrylic on canvas, 2023)

[mysticallion]

He waits beside the empty tracks

This forgotten god of old

And shivers in the silence

Though he doesn’t feel the cold

These winter nights are worst of all

Since lovely Anput left

Bereft of their daughter Kebechet

Since her unexpected death

Their Age buried beneath shifting sands

Worshipers gone, powers faded

They watched the world grow ever darker

The people angry, afraid and jaded

Despair had finally proved too strong

And tore fair Kebechet apart

Now Anubis shivers in lonely understanding

Purification died of a broken heart

[mirkokosmos]

[mysticallion]

Skynet: Starlink

xAI: Cyberdyne Systems

So the writers got a few of the details wrong. Otherwise nailed it.

[just-shower-thoughts]

Do you think if you bit into an eye, it would be the same texture all the way through?

[mysticallion]

Not at all. Consider that, like the finest gourmet bonbon, the human eyes is composed of many layers, flavors and textures. You have chewy beside crunchy. You have salty and sweet and savory, all wrapped around a gelatinous vitreous center that bursts in your mouth with a refreshing gush of sweetness and just a hint of sea salt.

Pro tip: leave the optic nerve intact and use it for dipping!

Join me for more exciting recipes.

[mysticallion]

You really have to wonder about the behavior of these politicians, setting the government against the people, grifting and stealing, breaking up families, rounding up and humiliating people like Nazis, rewarding the rich while hurting most others, attempting to fix elections by gerrymandering, supporting a President who is clearly not capable of doing the job according to our Constitution and who is destroying the planet and severely damaging our country’s reputation with the rest of the world. Surely they are aware that history will appropriately vilify them, that they and their offspring will be hated, and that many of them will be punished? Can they be so ignorant that this isn’t obvious? Or is it simply that they are so incredibly narcissistic and myopic that they cannot see beyond their own petty lives in the present situation? Or that, knowing they will soon be dead, they simply do not care?

[mysticallion]

How foolish we are for believing that words can actually define reality.

That which is inherently open and insubstantial is also inherently undefinable.

Reality is beyond all definitions, all boundaries, all extremes.

Even this is just more foolishness.

[mysticallion]

Assembling an intricate jigsaw puzzle is, to a lesser degree, similar to constructing a Tibetan sand mandala. Both are colorful, complex, imaged (possibly symbolic) constructions. Both require a great deal of concentrative effort and time. And because of this, both are capable of evoking meditative (concentrated) states, effectively temporarily quieting the mind. Finally, in their impermanent, composite nature, both are metaphors for—or contemplations of—emptiness.

[mysticallion]

The Fantastic Four Seasons, a comic book about 4 cooks exposed to Microwave radiation that transforms them into superfoods. Or something like that. Still working the premise.