Dependent Co-Arising

@asitisnow

Meditation, lucid dreaming Awakening from calamity, some of it apparently real, most of it imagined What you are is prior to your idea of you. Adyashanti You are prior to the idea 'I am'. Camp yourself there, prior to the words 'I am'. Nisargadatta

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Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· 16d

"Let me take you down 'Cause I'm going to Sunflower Fields Nothing is real And nothing to get hung up about Sunflower fields forever"

A field of sunflowers under a partially cloudy summer sky.

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· 25d

A hazy white summer sky hangs low in tree tops tinged blue in suburban DC. Local pools have closed because of poor air quality due to wildfires thousands of miles away.

Photo of backyard with lawns and trees under a hazy, smoky sky.

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Jun 17

Nothing (no thing) exists even for an instant (which also does not exist "out there")—seemingly solid appearances come and go, arise and pass, rise and fall. Recognizing this is exhilarating, depressing, energizing, deflating, uplifting, confusing, sobering, mind-boggling . . . like life itself.

Golden Chinese lanterns floating into the night sky.

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Jun 16

Bob & Leo, two new housemates from the local shelter. They're already eating us out of the house, but are great company.

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Jun 14

We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see. ―Arthur Koestler (in Darkness at Noon)

Image of a partial solar eclipse on 8 April 2024.

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Jun 12

Since space is free from phenomenal appearances...its defining characteristic is of a single nature everywhere. Likewise, the ultimate is...of a single nature everywhere, within all phenomena whose defining characteristics are distinct from one another. ―Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra (trans. 84000)

A blue sky above a few distant mountains.

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· May 12

Met an ancient friend during a beach walk. One of several that had wandered a little too close to the water's edge. Luckily, this one could make it back.

Photo of a horseshoe crab found on a beach.

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Apr 24

The real modern crisis, the one few want to face and talk about:

The entire populations of the “developed” countries are in a way full of people of royal powers, used to consuming what they want, being flattered and waited upon by people from “underdeveloped” lands, used to having unpleasantly realistic things such as corpses, sicknesses, madnesses, the deformities of poverty, kept out of their sight. They do not want to hear that all is impermanent, that life is essentially painful and fundamentally impure. They do not want to acknowledge that all beings are equal to them and their dear ones, equally loveable and deserving. They do not want to hear that there is no real self and no absolute property and no absolute right. But that they do hear it, and hear it well, is quite the most crucial necessity of our times. The hundreds or millions of “kings” and “queens” living in the developed world must face their obligations to other people, to other species, to nature itself. This is the crisis of our times, the real one, not the supposedly important competitions among developed “big powers.”
― Robert Thurman (cited in Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland, by McClintock & Dunne)

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Mar 22

This is a deep history book, drawing on anthropology, economics, and biology. Its core argument is that collapse of "Goliaths" (political and economical systems of exploitation, such as the Roman and Aztec Empires, Cahokia, etc.) often led to periods of prosperity and peace for most inhabitants.

Book cover of Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Mar 22

A very well-researched argument for re-imagining democracy to avoid repeating the costly mistakes in humanity's near and far history that now threaten its very survival:

We need to introduce open democracy, with deliberative juries and assemblies [of citizens chosen by lottery] creating national policies for governments and providing oversights of corporations. If decision-makers are randomly selected from society, we will no longer be selecting for those who crave status and power or who rank higher in the dark triad. . . . We’re often told that open democracy is not practically possible, but that has always been an argument for hoarding political power.
― Luke Kemp (in Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse)

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Mar 19

Neither cessation nor origination, neither annihilation nor the eternal, neither singularity nor plurality, and neither the coming nor the going of any phenomenon. Seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, and thinking happening by themselves, for themselves, of themselves.

Painting of a red and a black fish swimming in yin and yang formation.

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Mar 5

A lot of what Michael Pollan says echoes an earlier (more philosophical) book by Thomas Metzinger. A "consciousness culture" is one of greater awareness and deliberate attention, encompassing both the personal and transpersonal domains of life (I've not yet read Pollan's book).

Book cover of Bewusstseinskultur: Towards a culture of consciousness: Spirituality, intellectual honesty, and the planetary crisis—how to protect your self-respect and fail gracefully, by Thomas Metzinger

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Feb 19

Ohmmm, French country bread

French country bread loaf scored with Tibetan Ohm

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Feb 17

Very important point re lucidity and non-lucidity in dreams (and waking life). It raises profound questions about what it means to be lucid (mindfully aware):

The danger in cultivating lucid dreaming is that we become attached to it as something intrinsically more valuable than nonlucid dreaming. We need to be able to let go of lucidity and release ourselves to the full presence of the dream. If we can’t, then we deprive ourselves of certain natural and valuable experiences. The point isn’t to make a forced choice between lucidity or nonlucidity according to some imposed standard; it’s to be able to move flexibly between them without attachment.
― Evan Thompson (in Waking, Dreaming, Being)

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Feb 12

🙏Monks walking for peace in D.C. today—several of them barefoot🙏

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Feb 9

From www.theguardian.com/environment/... Not a score card anyone wants to receive. What's troubling is that recovery of ozone levels—often held up as a collective success story—has been incomplete. By all measures, late-stage neoliberal capitalism creates nothing but disaster.

Table that summarizes the findings of the 2025 Planetary Health Check:

Atmospheric CO2 levels At a 15 million year high
Ecological diversity In major decline
Land area covered by forests Fallen below safe levels
Freshwater flows Unstable, raising drought & flood risk
Global nutrient cycles Disrupted, causing 'dead zones'
Chemicals & plastics Too much released without testing
Ocean acidification Marine organisms at risk
Aerosols in atmosphere Falling within safe zone
Ozone in stratopshere Safe but recovery incomplete

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Jan 4

Pain de campagne (French country bread), two-step sourdough fermented.

An image of a French country bread loaf.

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Dec 29

Curiously, the best analogy for money may be śūnyatā. Nāgārjuna warns that there is no such thing as śūnyatā. It is a heuristic device demonstrating the interdependence of things, that nothing self-exists, but if we misunderstand this, the cure is more dangerous than the disease. Although also nothing itself, also merely a symbol, money is indispensable because of its unique ability to convert anything into another; but woe to those who grab this snake too by the wrong end.
― David R. Loy (in Lack & Transcendence)

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Dec 12

Persons and things are not objects "in" time, they are what makes time possible, neither separate from it nor identical to it.

[A] delusive bifurcation occurs between time and the things in time, because time cannot be a container unless there is something for it to contain: objects. And in order for objects to be in time, they must be themselves nontemporal: that is, self-existing. As a result of this objectification, we experience time and things as separate from each other, and each gains a spurious reality of its own—spurious because the supposed self-existence of each is actually dependent on each other.
― David R. Loy (in Lack & Transcendence)

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Nov 7

Most of Western culture (including science) is based on an idea that's little more than a hunch:

One implicit assumption I have sometimes found in Western thought is that, in the story of evolution, human beings enjoy a unique existential status. This uniqueness is often understood in terms of some kind of “soul” or “self-consciousness,” which only humans are thought to possess. Many people appear to assume implicitly three incremental stages in the development of life: inanimate matter, living organisms, and human beings. Behind this view may lie an idea that human beings occupy a distinctly different category from animals and plants. Strictly speaking, this is not a scientific concept.
— The Dalai Lama (in The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality)

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Oct 19

To study the way of enlightenment is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.
― Dōgen (Actualizing the Fundamental Point, in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye)

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Oct 8

Shade-grown potatoes.

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Sep 2

A well-articulated plea that contemplative practice (done with care, purpose, and compassion) is a moral imperative, lest we find ourselves in a world like the one we're finding ourselves at this moment:

The inner way, the way of meditation is dangerous. Any practice which brings us into contact with forces from the spiritual world … puts us into the middle of a mighty struggle. To enter this arena for curiosity or diversion can be disastrous. Indeed there is only one thing more dangerous than entering upon this way, and that is not entering it …, for you then allow the destructive forces [of the subconscious] free play. If you do not go into the battle with yourself and try to stay in touch with the forces of the light, you become a blind target. You allow the forces of destructiveness to enter and eat away at your own soul, or else project them upon other colors or classes of persons, other races or nations. Whomever the darkness seizes in this way becomes an instrument of destruction and cruelty, sometimes even sucking a whole nation into cruel and bloody acts.
― Morton T. Kelsey (in The Other Side of Silence)

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Aug 25

It's difficult to know where to even begin when one is confronted with carelessness such as this, casually lumping morally credible political movements together with a known endpoint of unspeakable barbarity and tragedy. A book I won't be reading any time soon. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Text snippet, saying, "Politics, at its heart, is a competition between different stories about how things should be. That’s what liberalism, socialism, conservatism and fascism ultimately are: stories that give us different ways of looking at the world, different diagnoses of our problems, and different solutions, too."

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Aug 20

Just as dream images can be transformed in dream, so emotional states and conceptual limitations can be transformed in waking life. — Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche (in: The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep)

Schematic red lotus flower with Tibetan letter "a."

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Aug 4

Yes, it's a merger of social Darwinism w/ deluded neoliberal ideas of "free markets" and "rational consumers" and the outdated (especially today) belief in the exceptionalism of a single country. It's created nothing but hurt both locally and globally (as some have predicted some time ago):

The neo-conservative ascendancy has identified the free market with America's claim to be the exemplary modern nation. It has appropriated America's self-image as the model for a universal civilization in the service of a global free market. For a public nurtured on such illusions the coming years will be traumatic.
― John Gray (in False Dawn)

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Aug 4

Immorality often arises from unexamined and deeply flawed assumptions that are held up as "conventional knowledge" (or, worse, as "wisdom"):

There are moral dangers here. To take what might seem an “objective” economic approach to the origins of the world economy would be to treat the behavior of early European explorers, merchants, and conquerors as if they were simply rational responses to opportunities―as if this were just what anyone would have done in the same situation. This is what the use of equations [in economics] so often does: make it seem perfectly natural to assume that, if the price of silver in China is twice that of what it is in Seville, and inhabitants of Seville are capable of getting their hands on large quantities of silver and transporting it to China, then clearly they will, even if doing so requires the destruction of entire civilizations. . . . In fact, history makes it quite clear that this is not the case. Any number of civilizations have probably been in a position to wreak havoc on the scale that the European powers did in the 16th and 17th centuries, . . . but almost none actually did so.
― David Graeber (in Debt: The First 5,000 Years)

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Jul 9

I've been tempted to get one of these watches:

12-hour watch face that shows "now" for every hour.

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Jul 1

Boundaries between nations (and among peoples) are convenient fictions, but by making them appear very real, we end up fooling ourselves:

There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged. One day . . . surveyors appeared to draw a border. Some villagers approached them where they had set up their equipment.
“So where are we, Russia or Poland?”
“According to our calculations, your village now begins exactly 37 meters into Poland.”
The villagers immediately began dancing for joy.
“Why?” the surveyors asked. “What difference does it make?”
“Don’t you know what this means?” they replied. “It means we’ll never have to endure another one of those terrible Russian winters.”
― Cited in: Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Dependent Co-Arising@asitisnow· Jun 29

100% whole grain, 100% sourdough, 100% hydration, and 100% pop. Chuffed with the result.