Summer Solstice 2024 Retreat Journal: On June 19th, I started a solo retreat in the mountains of Nevada in Oregon. I'd been planning this for years - my mentor told me to do it years ago, as a kind of final task. It was time for me to Walk Alone. This is my journal.

My intent was awakening, which I define as an experience of non-dual consciousness. I structured my retreat this way: - 12 hours of meditation per day - silent except for when resupplying in town - no screens, music, reading or other distractions - no intoxicants whatsoever

Day 1: I arrive at my campsite, on the slope of Big Mountain, east of the Black Rock Desert. This is perhaps the most remote place in the continental US. I can see 50 miles in every direction. I don't think I've ever felt this safe in my life.

I make camp and settle in. Immediately, the wind begins to commune with me. It delivers stories, fears & knots, sometimes gently, sometimes in gusts. Psychosexual tangles, memories of my overwhelmed adolescence, the clear outline of the persecution complex I inherited from my dad

The allure of a persecution complex is that you soak yourself in pious self-regard no matter the circumstance. You dominate everything around you from a position of submission. It's a nearly impregnable fortress in which all battles, win or lose, reinforce your righteousness.

I don't care if I'm right anymore. I don't want to be a warrior. I want to live in alignment with the Dao, not my own code of laws. I want to put down my weapons and live a life of Peace. I want to be big and quiet and accepting of everything. I want to be a mountain.

Day 2: The beginning of mindfulness is learning to see through the thick tapestry of interpretations you overlay on the world and perceive the sensations of Being directly. But to try to remain in the interpretation-less present is a mistake. Thoughts are incomplete, not evil.

Once you have discovered the abiding awareness beyond the movie projector of narrative, mindfulness becomes a fractally deepening absorption in the inherent sacredness of your natural circumstances. The crickets are getting used to me now. They jump into my lap & sit with me.

Afternoon. I am already beginning to hallucinate. Every hour or so, I think I see the shadow of a high-flying bird darken the sagebrush, but when I scan the sky, there's nothing to be found. Little dust devils pick up in my periphery but vanish when I look at them directly.

Day 3: I am the wind in the canyon. I am the throaty croak of a raven. I am the stupid, reckless grace of a hurtling grasshopper. I am rivulets of piss streaming down a dusty, unkempt road. I am the mountain with no name.

No-self makes intuitive sense to me in terms of flow and "the zone." Impermanence took me more time & grief to understand. What has always bedeviled me is the abiding suffering in the fabric of my perception. A broken-hearted feeling in my chest, like a tree with a broken branch.

I have had beautiful meditations where it was clear that the world was simply experiencing its own arising and passing away, but never without suffering. When I try to relax into the non-dual, this lifelong thrum of grief spreads out and suffuses the whole of Being.

Day 4: I am starting to lose it a little. Everything has become funny. The whole-body careening flicks of insect leaps are hilarious. I can no longer tell whether or not any bird is real. The tweets I compulsively compose in my head make me laugh until tears roll down my face.

Mind becomes thick and palpable, viscous, almost like a liquid. A sea of consciousness, with currents and ebbs, where every drop of water that makes it up is a dimension of sensation, either conscious or unconscious. Bird song - if it exists - is no longer just sound.

I can feel the trills, warbles and chirps as a kind of disturbance in the field of consciousness. There's no particular valence to it. It's like throwing a stone into water. A bird sings, consciousness excites into a bevy of vibrations, then settles again into unbroken surface.

The experience of thought becomes concentrated at the sensory level. I feel my internal monologue in my ears as physical sound. Visualization overlays cleanly on my visual field. There are slight corresponding muscle tensions to each - swirls & eddies dancing across my forehead.

I begin to feel the outline of an extremely strange, fibrous bundle of tensions at the center of my experience of consciousness. It's almost like a stalactite or a thick tentacle. Time is losing meaning. I let myself get too low on water. It's time to go resupply.

I set my demons - my persecution complex, my self-destructiveness, my psychosexual hang-ups - loose on a gust of wind. Thank you, fuck you, I love you, goodbye. One poison splinter remains: a painful need to be loved as much, as deeply as I love.

I drive back to Winnemucca in melty, abiding, persistent flow. But always, always this tiny pain at the base of my heart. A sliver of a wound, something mutilated long ago, sometime before my memory began. I am trying to suture the world back together, breath by focused breath.

Day 5: Effortless presence. I resupply at a Walmart and discover a finger length rock has punctured one of my van's rear tires. I meditate in the waiting room while a mechanic patches it. Civilization changes my thoughts from transparent rivulets to hard, glinting objects.

If that rock had not stayed in the tire and plugged the leak, I would have been stranded in the desert. I may have died. My old campsite is too risky to try to return to it. I decide to head north to Oregon, and settle in a remote valley near the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

I am the drunk tumble of a butterfly. I am the communal shiver of a startled family of white-tailed deer. I am the pungent crust of a sun-baked cow pie. I am a battalion of midges sucking the blood of a foolish ape who forgot bug spray. Pack it back up. I'm off to Mt. Hood.

(intermission, I will post the rest later today)

I build a fire and settle in for a long day of meditation. A nearby alder is shedding, so it's snowing tree fuzz, making the clearing appear beautiful and cinematic. The giant firs sway in the wind. Consciousness becomes a softly roiling field of vibrations.

While taking a video of the late morning sunlight, a bird flies over and lands on my finger. It's hard to tell in the video, but you can see it swoop in toward the end. It startled me and I pulled my finger back, so it flew away again quickly.

I can sense the blooming pinpricks of sensation that make up experience, like being itself is carbonated. I become childlike in thought: The raven is my brother, the daytime moon is my sister lazing about in her bed. A chipmunk nestles into my robes near my feet, keeping warm.

Day 7: What is this suffering that remains in the field of consciousness? At the bottom of the breath, the breath that now pervades all of being in its rise and settles all of being in its fall - what aches, so dully, so deeply, so powerfully?

A dream of a love that lasts. A dream of a love that saves. A dream of a love that doesn't harm. I have never found it. I thought I stopped believing in it. I wish I could stop dreaming of it. I wish I could stop hating the people I love for failing to live up to it.

How do I let go of this dream? How do I purify it from my body? How do I stop loving women? A part of me wishes so badly that I could. But I can't. How could I? We're connected, more thoroughly and intimately than my mind could ever represent.

Day 8: I awake feeling grimy. I try to find a suitable place to bathe in the nearby White River but the bank is covered in brambles and swarming with mosquitoes. I turn back. My mind has now become so still and subtle and sensitive that slow walking feels blundering and heavy.

A brown garter snake slithers across my path, patrolling the edge of the forest for a snail to eat as a bedtime snack. The soil here is soft and black and crumbly, rich with the littered corpses of bugs and birds, with animal shit and piss and slime, with a thick quilt of rot

I can't prove this to you, I can only tell you I feel this as though all of my cells sing it in unison: there is no such thing as death. Life and death are not separate. The whole of being is change. There's nothing there long enough to be called a thing. It's already in motion.

It changes too quickly to live in a label. The label we call death is an exceedingly short period of dramatic transformation in which the material that comprises our current integrity comes apart and is recycled into another integrity. We vastly overload it with significance.

I am stone cold sober, tripping balls. Everything is my mind. I am the cosmos itself. The Earth is my body. The sky is the great dome of my head. I'm the entire thing. It's all made of mind. The True Face is a dimensionless aperture with no discernible boundaries, soaked in love.

My beautiful human body is caked with soil and sweat & covered in nicks & scratches. I am motivated by love for it to drive into town and rent a motel room so that I can shower. Euphoric, I pack up my camp. The Motel 6 is awash in Glory. I wonder if I'm having a manic episode.

Day 9: I returned to my campsite with a fresh scent and a washed and combed beard. Thoughts are no longer tense or sticky. I am no longer looking for myself in them. They are me. I am surrounded by myself. Everything is me and always has been. I settle into the breath.

The Lord of Death sits on his throne at the foundation of the heart: the bottom of the breath, the very center of the self. To meditate on it - to pause after exhale - is to see its inseparability from the whole breath. That is the void. The death that is present in all life.

This is embodied stillness in motion, this is the motion of life couched in the stillness of death. This is why human beings always kill what we love. This is why a person of love is always a destroyer. Life and death are the same Thing, passing so quickly they are nothing at all

The oneness is void. The void is the proof of the presence of God. Beyond the relative oneness of life and the relative void of death, there is a context in which everything relentlessly churns, transforms, singing the music of existence.

The unfolding of the Dao is the song of the heavenly hosts. Meditation is deity yoga with the void. Creation is a wound. The breath is samsara. To cling to life is to push away death. To embrace death is to embrace life. The love that I yearn for is lost. It's time to let it die

Day 10: The little bird came back this morning. He perched for a moment on top of my cowboy hat as I Sat by the fire, bringed his feathers a bit, and then flew off. I did not see him again. The field shimmers with love. Subjectivity, the true face, has no beginning or end.

The strange, hard seed of grief that sits at the center of self, suffusing it with suffering, gently obverts. There is nothing - no solidity, no suffering, no center. Only eternity in bloom.

Intermission 2

I feel relief like never before, like I've been reunited with something that was lost for so long, I don't remember losing it at all. I weep with joy. And then, shortly: my van is dirty. My laundry basket is full. The bundle tightens. It's time to go home.

Epilogue: I spent the next few days meditating in the city, reaching out to Dharma friends, spending time with my son. In those days I could relax the subtle center whenever I wanted. But soon, the tension wouldn't let go. It was soft but persistent. The door is closed now.

On this side of the door is still an ocean of love at hand, a loving context underlying my experience. Just a few days later I would come face to face with a deep, old abandonment trauma that still lives in my nervous system. It confused and terrorized me.

Even in the maelstrom, there were loving arms, gently wrapped around me. The world is not mutilated and evil, but it is often stupid and fickle. In one of my journals I described the Dao as "Old Papa Goof." This is His world. Of course it's like this.

I spoke with my mentor for the first time in 3 years and we agree that it was a non-abiding experience of true seeing. A brief glimpse of things as they really are. But this doesn't make me enlightened. All it has done is proved to me that non-dual consciousness is Real.

I don't believe a permanent enlightenment is possible in a conditioned world. I do believe there's a functional ceiling on our wisdom and self-mastery that for all intents and purposes is a measurable enlightenment. A measurable transcendence of the self. We have proof of this.

We would need to be absolute to be perfectly enlightened and we are conditioned beings in a conditioned realm. There is no abiding self to be enlightened. We are amalgamations of our habits, characters, tensions and present conditions.

What I feel that my glimpse of non-dual consciousness gave me is a felt sense of the Peace, an abiding, embodied sense that everything is unfolding exactly according to the Way of an incomprehensible unity that I am never separate from. And that feels pretty wonderful.

As my mentor reminded me, everything is circular, so I will come back around to non-dual consciousness when I'm ready. In the meantime, it has opened up new dimensions for investigation and spiritual adventure. The practice is never ending.

When in the mountains, I am a mountain with no name. When in the valley, in the realm of the Lord of Death, the war of all against all, the task is to try to be a peaceful warrior. The burden is lighter now that I've seen for myself that they're the same Thing