Nihilism actually means that nothing has intrinsic meaning, which is not out of line with Buddhist thought. It was a response to the Christian idea, which developed further during the Renaissance, where everything is infused with the mind of God, so that some things have intrinsic meanings. Then the nihilists came along and said that there is no intrinsic meaning. If you attach that in the direction of Buddhist thought, then the meaning that we create and assign to things is based on our conditioning.

Nihilism has of course drifted in our culture of fastness, where nothing is very deep, into an idea that nothing has meaning. But “nothing has meaning” as a concept is very different from the concept of “nothing has intrinsic meaning”. So in some sense, the nihilism of “nothing has meaning” would have you justify detachment from things – it doesn’t matter what you do because nothing matters. It’s very different from the way in which we make up meaning that we assign to things. Because each of us assigns different meanings to the same thing, there is no single meaning to something.

We know that we live in a body that will grow old, we know that we live in a body that is subject to sickness, and we know that we live in a body that will die. On that side of things, where nothing ultimately matters, it can be paralyzing, in terms of our willingness to explore what it’s possible to find out about this human life. So I do not mind the nihilism of things not having intrinsic meaning, where each person’s sense of meaning has value in it. I am not for the Renaissance evaluation of things that are holy and things that are not holy.

I have never resonated with the idea that there is a cosmic meaning to things which is fixed. I did not really have much of the experience of sacredness, until I started to do the Six Lamps practice, a Tibetan Bon practice, which opened up the experience of sacredness for me. But one of the things I know from practice is that you tend to have the kind of insight that is related to the kind of practice that you do, that if you engage in practices that typically produce a sense of sacredness, it’s unremarkable that you would have experiences of sacredness doing those practices.

For Gil Fronsdal

The distance between the brightness
at the top of the spine
and the darkness below it

is not far
but when you shrink your mind
it is enormous

the whole length
of human history
can be fit inside it

One way to reduce it a little
is with practice and preparation

(the latter takes minutes each morning
the former has taken me years)

to gather the sensations in our belly
into our in-breath

(do this slowly and with enjoyment
the darkness deep inside us
should be like the jungle in Thailand

where we may acknowledge the presence
of unseen pythons and kraits

but our actual sensations
as we search the deep canopy
for crimson sunbirds

are of lazy butterflies
and flowering lianas)

and then by a skilled relaxing
of both muscle and nerve
guide our breathing

slowly up the back of our spine
so that it breaks over the top
like a wave breaking over a quiet beach

to drench the scattered thoughts
spread out to no purpose
and then draw them slowly back down

in the descent of the out-breath
to the dark easy rhythm

of the untiring diaphragm
where the in-breath began

Relax the spaces in between
each vertebra
let each space slightly expand

until in each out-breath
you can exhale metta loving-kindness

commingling the cool light
and warm darkness

to those whom you usually consider
enemies and friends

A smile from a Thai person
is worth more to me
than every sarcastic British twirl

A bow by a Thai monk
is worth more to me
than the logic of Dawkins

“if you truly knew what a single bow meant,
there wouldn’t be a time when you bowed
without bursting into tears of gratitude and devotion” – Ajahn Chah

Balmy nights in Chiang Rai
Dusty alleyways
fade into sandy huts and houses

Thai heat sinks into flesh and bone
This valley, between orange cliffs, is a warm bath

The heat is a ‘container’
A ‘container’ I could not find in London
A buffer against the bounce, the rip, the fray

The sun has seen it all before

Though I am not sure mothers in Palestine agree

The sun which calms me
Shines down upon destroyed Rafah

War has no heart
It kills you in the sunshine
Or happily in the dark

People in Thai villages with nothing
Supple in spirit and body
Cleansed

At Doi Inthanon are sakura
Cherry blossoms
Explosions of pink

Waterfall’s roar
Breaks me out of prapancha
Snaps me back into what matters

The richness of where the water flows up around, down, through, the world

The world is water

A blessing on our heads, in our veins, in the soil, in the luck, in the stories
In the fear of a storm

Sitting by the pool
Two French men, father and grandad
And the younger man’s daughter

Splashing
Exuberant with life

The French girl, all play and dream
A flash of thought refracts through her father’s sunglasses
Past his daughter’s splashes

Massage bends my back to a place beyond knowledge
A lizard hisses the kundalini hiss

I drank black milk all autumn
I was a grief astronomer
I played cactus well into winter

A dislocating angel
flies between appearance and change
The spirit’s here. Listen and enter

Stillness flowing
It’s flowing now

The heart thaws

Meditation is not bare attention
It is finding the salient feature in awareness,
The salient calm

In a Mandelbrot Set, the same recurring pattern deepens
a fractal process
opening, opening, opening

The salient calm can deepen too

Body revitalized by the heat
By the golden glow

Is this why Thai children have beaming smiles
As they prance by me on country paths?

The open road

Time to recover and be still
I did not realize how hurt I was

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who knew a thing about maps,
by which life moves somewhere or other,
used to tell this story from the war,
through which history moves somewhere or other.

From a small Hungarian unit in the Alps a young lieutenant
sent out a scouting party into the icy wastes.
At once
it began to snow, it snowed for two days and the party
did not return. The lieutenant was in distress: he had sent
his men to their deaths.

On the third day, however, the scouting party was back.
Where had they been? How had they managed to find their way?
Yes, the men explained, we certainly thought we were
lost and awaited our end. When suddenly one of our lot
found a map in his pocket. We felt reassured.
We made a bivouac, waited for the snow to stop, and then
with the map
found the right direction.
And here we are.

The lieutenant asked to see that remarkable map in order to
study it. It wasn’t a map of the Alps
but the Pyranees.

Goodbye.

From my Buddhist teachers I learned about Pratitya Samutpada
It’s all causes and conditions, they said
Not merely my life, or the lives of all sentient beings, or physical objects:
all the forces and events and entities in reality as such 
A thousand causes and conditions per second
changing quicker than the cells in my body
Conflicts, collisions, coincidences
In deep time, our universe collided with another one
the bubble collision
life’s fabric is made of colliding conditions and traumatic encounters
the unhappy plants and animals suffering

in which there is no possibility of purity or salvation
though there is also no possibility of hell (an eternal prison)
Freud’s object cathexis – even at birth we are attached/wounded, bound by a libidinal charge

examples of things which transcend fascistic ideas of purity:
mathematics
supernovas
light shining through ice

There is a crack in reality – ontologically – structurally
between appearance and substance
phenomena and noumena
form and emptiness

Gödel’s Incompletion Theorem

Athos repeated the teaching of causes and conditions to me

But he reminded me of a very important point: within the mesh of causes and conditions, I have a shaping influence 

I have agency

We need, more than ever, in the mess of postmodernity, to realize that we have agency

Thannisaro emphasizes free will in the Buddha’s teachings, warns against the dangers of passivity (the near enemy of equanimity) 

Allie’s advice:
“As much as the world is important, you are important. Give yourself an oxygen mask first – then you’ll be able to help others”
Where do self and world divide/overlap?
Where do relative level and ultimate level divide/overlap?

a moon in the sky
five pools of water
five moons reflected back
but only one moon

Enough insecurity!
Enough striving!

No need to fall any longer for the allure of suffering
No need to fetishize the death drive

Ajahn Chah does not think much of the phrase original sin
Instead, he opts for original purity
I like neither the words “purity” nor “sin”
For me, original goodness will do

I do not need to push Herzog’s ship over a mountain
I do not need to emulate Sisyphus
I do not need to sacrifice myself on a cross
If thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame
— I’m out

Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves

Like all Protestants, I sublimated my pain into concepts,
squeezed vulnerability into a box
Now the demonic Id has fused with the superego,
making me a good candidate to be a Lutheran minister,
raging from the pulpit

Why not sit like the Buddha under the Bodhi tree
and forge a middle way between pleasure and will?

Let memories of youth permeate my present:
the dreaming days of adolescence
playing Tracker in Bunker’s Hill Wood
trekking in the Dolomites
where the way was easier to navigate,
even if the terrain was wilder

Harness transcendence
by tethering it to river, rock, tree and sky

Underneath shifting experience is joy
dig deep and uncover groundwater
Quench thirst

Stillness within movement
a hidden pool
metta opens
an elastic band held tightly, let go

As the taut band loosens, so does dualism between subject and object
When I feel into the spine – from neck to sacrum –
the object, which seems fixed and out there, is not
nor is there a fixed subject observing from in here, no transcendental observer

it’s all one reality

body energies (subtle body energies) are a guide

Sanghadarin tells a story of
his reactive altercation with a woman on retreat
Amidst the confusion, they make eye contact:
a moment of human connection

the dharma is about recognizing what we have in common
It is not a tool for division or distancing
It is a tool for empathy and connection

Learn to trust people
My very ego “Chris” is a form of distrust

Hustle and bustle in the world
People darting here and there
buses with throngs of figures careering by

Primordial restlessness
The city of London is not present

Can I notice the space beyond the traffic
beyond the crowds of people
in the cracks of conversatio

Can I notice the silences in the intervals in conversations,
in the gaps between the screams of underground trains
from the compressed air between tunnel and train

In May 2024, I woke up early in the morning in Steven’s house in Bruge. Light gleamed through the window. The Belgian landscape formed before my eyes. But my attention was drawn to the window frame. I realized, firstly, that my view was framed by the window frame, and secondly, that my view would not be the view that it was without that frame. In my meandering reflections, I jumped to the notions that a story, too, is a kind of perceptual frame, that our lives are stories, and that, in these postmodern, fragmented times, it is necessary to make the case for stories with clearer frames, with more integrated lucidities. Not that I need to make a case for them; consciousness is structured through the perceptual frame of a story.

The Buddhist teachings on dependent origination and anatta do not undermine this feature of consciousness. The reality that we perceive through consciousness – as a story – is not reality as such, only one limited view onto it (our own). How to take our stories seriously, to test them out, to feel out their emotional implications, while holding onto the knowledge that they are models of reality, not reality itself: maps, not the territory.

But I made a pledge in Steven’s house in Bruge that morning to inhabit my story more fully, to dedicate myself to it, to feel the intensity and misery and joy of it fully, to realize that any meaning and substance in my life, any ballast that I build my life upon, will emerge out of this story, even as I maintain an awareness of the ultimate emptiness (in the Buddhist sense) of this story at the same time.

I have one story. There are some important chapters left to write. Make them count.

Crow has been on the stump since April.
Ended by a car and left in the gutter.
Its life, symbolic force and spirit have been honoured whilst its body surrendered slowly to decomposition.
All is thermodynamics.
The changed state of its form has created life from this death, earth has accumulated beneath its bug-cleaned body and death yields to life as life yields to death.
The magicks charged by this thermodynamic miracle will also change states.
I’ve been meditating on crow frequently, crooning to the egragoric function that crow has accumulated that’s at least 80,000 years deep.
Crow does not give a fuck.
Crow breaks spells, shatters illusions, spits truth and shats petty deceit out.
Crow taught us to sing, taught us where the easy pickings were when lion and bear were sated.
Crow has laughed with us, loved with us and whispered secrets.
She’s presided over the folly of our conflicts, a tear in her eye sure but her belly filled with our meat none the less.
Crow tells us to give up civilization’s carcass so it can peck at its eyes.
If we don’t then crow will take the eyes of our children.
She’d rather not but she’s not picky that way.
Stories say that crow became entranced by her own shadow, pecking and pecking, scratching and clawing until finally the shadow came alive.
Then it ate her.
Crow is dead crow now.
Crow is the left handed guardian, the keeper of sacred laws, thermodynamics being amongst them.
Crow is the omen of change and change is coming whether we like it or not.
Crow asks us to shapeshift ourselves, our way of life.
To bend reality as it is to what it could be, we’d be best off listening to crow.
Crow sits in the void and has no sense of time, doesn’t mind waiting the millions of long years that it will take for life to come back again if we don’t listen.
She’ll miss the eyeballs but there’s plenty down the line.
The times they are a changing and crow blinks.

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.”
– T.S. Eliot

I stalk through Battersea Power Station
like a cat in all-too-human space
it is now a shopping mall
a screen onto which consumer craving is projected

An astro turf lawn lines the floor
a lady stands on it selling perfume
The University of Virginia is nicknamed The Lawn;
its lawn hid Thomas Jefferson’s slaves

With Abhayanandi and Ratnaprabha,
we make our way onto charter’d streets
besides the charter’d Thames

The character of Strider resonates
Unlike in Middle Earth,
kings and ideals are distrusted nowadays

Stalker a modern Soviet version of Strider?
prowling through a postindustrial Zone,
seeking grounds for faith

Stalker, the writer, and the professor:
none of them know what they truly want
At the very least their conscious desires are at odds with their unconscious desires
Does anyone know what they truly want or yearn for?
One response to the uncertainty and ambiguity regarding desire is faith
The other? Beckett’s resignation
Alan Watts: “why don’t you know what you want? Two reasons: 1) you’ve already got it. 2) you don’t know yourself.”

My mind is charter’d too of late
The dynamics of transaction
Stasis and distraction
estrangement from myself and others

Return the mind to its original nature

London lacks presence

It is too alive
A metastasizing cancer
Cells reproduce too quickly for no reason
The fractal dimensionality is too high

capitalist growth has a cancerous aliveness too

everyone is pushing too hard
the systems are under strain
You can feel it in the atmosphere
Ominous weight, the wear and tear
Something’s going to snap

Temptation is to return to one’s bunker

Within me is a stalled dialectic 
between the local and the global

I am rootlessly global and brittly cosmopolitan
yet I desire roots and firm ground:
a mountain hide-out
pull the drawbridge up from my surrounding moat

There is too much emphasis on becoming
I need more being

More continuity , less change
The radicals these days are conservatives

(the real ones, not the neoliberal ones)

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

What am I seeking? A centre
Ajahn Sucitto: “don’t lose your centre”

Kerianna: stay embodied wherever you go

With a friend : a day’s walk
on the path above Bazalgette’s sewage system
It feels very psychogeography

Admiring of Bazalgette’s accomplishment
Admiring that a sewage system that large can be engineered

in awe of industrial civilization

in awe of the sheer population of people it sustains

Any admiration is tainted by an ominous ecological awareness
Which hangs in the background like an unwelcome guest

I’ve been off the rails since Covid
the ship veered off course in 2019

I’ve got CPTSD (and I’m a walking cliché)

Thanks to those who kept me going
thanks to the sustainers of life

Triratna: a port in the storm

sraddha– sukkha – jaya
but jaya (victory) of the subtle kind, not the Trumpian kind
victory of the subtle kind is what matters

Positive mental states
include those which face difficulty

Health may no longer be possible
but living with illness in dignity is

The Matthew Principle means 
decline builds up exponential momentum
and so does rising up
so take small steps towards rising up

Hold onto goodness
A parachute of hope takes air into its sail
String together days of progress into a vast wave

London swallowed me up and it’s about to spit me out
(again)