song of the day: lay your hands on me / thompson twins
word of the day: gymnosophy / deep contemplation performed while naked (i think i may have used this as a word of the day before, but come on, it's awesome...)

diane hamilton came over for dinner last night, she is Genpo Roshi's right hand person in the Big Mind lineage. and i guess also the traditional lineage. Genpo has a traditional Zen lineage and a Big Mind Zen lineage. i think they're gonna settle it once and for all in a softball tournie later this year. anyway, Diane came and hung out with the Davis' last night, and it was a hoot, as i knew it would be. i met her initially up at Ken Wilber's house, then again at the Big Mind retreat i went to recently in Santa Fe (she, Tripp, Genpo, me, and Ottmar Leibert also gabbed away one night after day two of the retreat was done). last night we started off talking about drugs (hallucinagenics, x, and so on) then we switched over to sex, then of course we landed squarely on psychic phenomena. i'm not going to go into any of the racy, secret, rich gossipy, totally SHOCKING, revelatory things that were shared among friends, but i will say that talking of all the psychic phenomena reminded me of my favorite psychic experience i've ever had, which was with my nephew Justin, who some of you may know of, or have met. he's a practitioner as well.

anyway, this was back years ago, i was dating woman at the time (not my wife), and one day she, justin, and i all went to the 20th Century Zen Masters exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. it was amazing, calligraphy work and line paintings from 20th century zen masters (as the name indicates). we wandered around in there for an hour or two, checking it all out, and justin and i were blown away for sure. as we were walking out of the building, justin and i were walking side by side, and my girlfriend at the time was walking behind us. that is relevent because she was able to report her perspective of the event afterward, and it was hilarious to her. justin and i were silent, ruminating as we walked, still feeling the glow from the amazing exhibit. as we approached the wall of glass doors that were the exit, (according to my girlfriend at the time) our body movement became synchronized, and our arms, legs, and torsos were suddenly moving in perfect unison, then, as we got to the doors, we each looked at the little circular shaped sign next to the handle on our respective doors, which read "PUSH", grabbed our handle (of the two adjacent doors), and PULLED (in perfect unison). then, when the door wouldn't open, we were snapped out of our contemplative glaze, and we both started laughing.

here's the wild part: i was laughing because, as i had reached for the handle of the door, i saw the little circular sign that read "PUSH" and i saw it as an ENSO. and enso is a circular symbol in japanese art that generally means infinity, or the sum, unbroken totality of all manifest and unmanifest reality. we had seen many ensos that day at the exhibit, and the little sign on the door had appeared to me as another one. when i saw it, i was so engrossed by it, that i instinctively PULLED on the door handle instead of pushing on it. when i realized this, it made me laugh very hard, because, obviously, it's a ZEN joke. to look at a circular (enso) sign on a door that says push, and then pull on it, there are several layers of humor there. first, the "push" and "pull" forces are opposite forces within the enso, they are complimentary aspects (duality) of what is One Reality (Non-duality). much of what is called upon a Zen practioner to do is counter-intuitive or beyond rationality. second, i was so engrossed in this symbol of Zen (a practice of bare, direct awareness) that i wasn't aware of what was right in front of my face. i had become so engrossed in the symbol that i was blinded to the direct, immediate experience of what it stood for in the first place, and i displayed my idiocy in public.

but of course i didn't tell everyone why i was laughing so hard, no did i know why Justin was laughing so hard either, i just knew we had both burst into laughter at the same moment, doing the same thing. my girlfriend was laughing her ass off too, as she told us how hilarious it looked from behind to watch two bald guys walking in perfect unison approach parallel doors that read "push" and at the same time, both grab the handle, pull, then burst into laughter.

here's the KICKER though. so, without knowing why i was laughing, my nephew goes "oh, God, well while we were walking toward the door, i was just feeling the vibe from the art exhibit, and when i looked at the door and saw the little circular sign that said push, i saw it as an enso, i looked at and just thought "enso", then because i was so engrossed in the enso, i pulled on the door instead of pushing. then it immediately hit me how funny that was, cuz..."

at that moment, i was like SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!!!!!!! AGHHHHH!!!!!!!!! totally wigged out. i mean COME ON! what are the fucking odds of that? a million gazillion gazillion babillion to ZERO. it was a fucking psychic moment. our consciousnesses (that's a weird word - consciousnesses? wha? i think the plural form of that word should be something like "consci" or "consciti" or something.)- anyway, our two awareness AND our bodies...i guess i'm saying BODYMINDS here- they fucking merged and synchronized. we had the same movement, same feeling, and same freaking thought forms, occuring simultaneously. and it wasn't a thought like "oh, i'm hungry" or "it's cold out". it was incredibly particular, and it was a Zen joke! how cool to have your psychic experience be a joke! that brings up something i've been meaning to mention: more Sufis and zen practioners should fuck and have babies. i think those two lineages are perfectly complimentary. Zen is Big Mind, Sufism is Big Heart. let's do it. i used to practice with a Sufi order, and they had dialed in the Causal heart like nobody's biz. being married to a Dakini, i see many similarities between Sufism and the Dakini vibe.

anyway. my nephew and i were psychicly aligned, and so, one day we will control the World. and then we will forfeit control, just like we did when we were God and the Kosmos was our purveyance, cuz who wants that kind of responsibility? answering the petitionary prayers of fundamentalists to take over democracy alone is enough to make a Deity go cross-eyed, much less attending to the infinite biological processes of, oh, say the insect kingdom. we'd rather start forest fires, right justin?