A poem by a SAND 11 Conference attendee Newcomb Greenleaf
I Time
Absolute lack of resistance to the now,
isn’t that happiness?
Is time perhaps the mind of God?
Yet time itself is never experienced.
Light travels outside of time;
to be timeless, just think like a photon.
The eleven-year cycle of solar activity
impacts hearts and brains.
You can go outside of time with ayahuasca,
or be driven outside by sound,
by the steady beat of a drum.
Rumi: Step out of the circle of time,
into the circle of love.
There are not really altered states of time,
but there is a continuum of times,
with tick-tock time at one extreme,
and timeless time at the other.
The time of monotheism is linear,
from creation to fall to redemption.
Progress is the secular version of Christian eschatology.
Terence McKenna: our history is just shockwaves
from our encounters with death.
Clocks turn time into a limited precious resource.
Clock time is dull and black;
you can let your subjective time, your consciousness,
be brightly colored.
Quantum mechanics allows time to flow backward;
research shows that our actions can influence
not just the future but also the past.
II. Space
Space is NOW.
We are organized to be dual,
to get energy and information from the outside.
Fear of solipsism drives scientists to believe in matter.
The Hubble deep space probe found 10,000 new galaxies
in a fingernail of the sky.
The big bang: now there was radical nonduality!
We find no this here to be different from that over there.
Relax, everything is still intact,
no thing is going away.
A dimension is a potential for sensory information:
mass and acceleration are 5th and 6th dimensions
that we can feel, but can’t see.
When I look inside and see that I am no thing, that’s wisdom;
when I look outside and see no things, that’s love.
Two approaches to the self:
Buddhism shrinks the self to nothing;
in Vedanta, the self expands to everything.
Nonduality is not in opposition to duality.
We cannot “return to nature”,
but can realize we have always been part of it.
III. Knowledge
Every perspective illuminates some things,
and fuzzes others.
Knower and known arise together.
One certainty: we know that we know.
But we do not see truth and thus become convinced;
rather, when we are totally convinced,
we say, “It is true.”
Consciousness is not a thing.
Asking “What is consciousness?” is like asking
“Where does light come from?”,
while watching a movie.
Yet perhaps we will come to identify consciousness
with the physicists’ unified field.
Evolution is fourfold:
cosmic, biological, cultural, and personal.
Share, aware, care, fair:
belong, agree, give, wait.
Manifest your intention:
pay it forward.
Those who do not believe in free will tend to cheat.
Buddha’s Three Poisons: greed, aggression, and delusion,
manifest socially as
capitalism, the military-industrial complex, and the media.
Why is more always better, if it can never be enough?
First we grope, then we cope, then we hope.
Psychedelics are therapy for normality.
The point is not the experience,
but rather the state-specific knowledge you bring back.
A common LSD side effect:
it upsets people who haven’t used it.
We can influence dreams but not control them, as
the sailor does not control the sea.
Stories were the first technique used to
alter states of reality, consciousness, time.
A story creates a morphogenetic field.
“I hear you” is the expression of love,
but your experience can only be yours.
Out of the worst places,
there can be an opening of the heart.
Tell the truth about what changes,
and what stays the same.
It’s not about time or words,
it’s all about love.
God is a verb.
Jesus never intended us
to be other than good Jews.
Compiled/composed/created on Sunday, October 30, 2011, in St. Johnsbury, VT, from memories, notes, and imaginings of the Science and Nonduality conference that took place in San Rafael, California a week ago.
