i sleep on my face

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It's a wonder I haven't smothered yet.

I slept long and hard last night, and I know I was dreaming big, but woke up doing my nested thinkers thing, calling my teacher's name while randomly generating words in the background. My face was ground into my pillow and that name was blasting like a shell horn with the surf blotting out any person attached to the invocation of this precious designation.

I first noticed this maybe infinite regress of voices while reading the Avatamsaka out loud.

I need to stop here and mention that while I mostly insist on the English terms for Buddhist things, "Flower Ornament Scripture" is not as generally used, "Avatamsaka" sounding so much hipper. Plus, keeping the word "scripture" out of it, I feel, is very much less misleading, much less tending toward convincing people it's religion when, truly now, it's no such a thing. So anyway, the Avatamsaka is a very good way to stifle yer inner blather and teach yourself some indispensable things.

The deal is: You read it aloud, and you DON'T slow up to try to understand what you're reading. Just like other meditations, whenever you catch yourself thinking while your mouth is carrying on thus, you just return your attention to the reading, still leaving understanding the hell out of it.

You have to turn off yer damn reading-what-you-already-think-into-everything-you-read thing. You can't learn anything beside what you already think, just with new bells and whistles, that way. We're stripping off the bells and whistles. We're filling the storehouse consciousness with stuff that doesn't impede understanding. We're ridding you of your psychosis.

So you just read aloud. The Avatamsaka is fifteen hundred pages and you just read it aloud over and over and over... daunting as the prospect seems going in. Somewhere around the third or fourth reading... or the tenth... you start actually understanding a lot of what's there, even though you never made an effort to understand it. You aren't a raving maniac anymore. You have noticed that you can make your thought read along with you, and think behind that, and turn off the thinking and make that thinker read along with you... without any effort applied ever to understand. You learn how silly what you only think truly is. You learn varying amounts of what the buddhas of the ten directions have to tell you about reality. Worried about all the charlatans out there stomping the shit out of your deepest urge to wake up? Take my advice.

It is worth the money....