Cycle 48: Mind Matter

Automatic Thinking Machine

mind < men-



Six billion minds reflecting the shifting, shimmering facets of this impossible gem we call reality.

      What you think is what you get.

The less the mind reflects itself, the more it reflects the world.

      Between reminiscence and amnesia, the fugitive self flickers.

Making its own monsters, the mind (though it may not know it) can also unmake them.

      Reality reveals itself when the mind surrenders.

Who can say where the body ends and the mind begins?















The Eggcentric Egg

I < eg
mine < me-



O for some respite from my unblinking I, egging me on to I, I, I until I die.

Crack the ego’s shell open – you’ll find nothing there but the fear of there being nothing there.

An egg rolled into a bar.
What’ll you have? asked the barman.
All the King’s men.

It is the fate of the I - tragic or comic depending on how you look at it - never to see eye-to-eye with itself.

What am I? Nothing but an imaginary boundary dividing inside from outside.

The self is an egg that never wants to hatch.

The only thing the self really wants is – itself.

Which came first, the eye or the I?

An egg is an egg - until it cracks.

What will become of me when I crack open? (What will I become?)

It.















Schizo Disco

consciousness < skei- < sek-

Because the mind that nots is also the mind that knots, wisdom is possible.

The pleasure of thinking and the pleasure of shitting are the same – the gratification of separating one thing from another.

Consciousness makes schizos of us all.

A knife and a nail see different worlds.

Consciousness unravels what needs no unraveling, only disentangling what it has entangled first.

Because it can’t digest reality, the mind makes mincemeat of it all.

Consciousness, wounded by reality, swells in the imaginary cut between the body and the world.

Wanting only to combine, the body is baffled by the mind’s compulsion to separate this from that.

Consciousness loves nouns and adjectives; the unconscious, verbs and conjunctions.

Metempsychosis: A Belly Dance

psyche < bhes-



I breathe you in, I breathe me out - a different soul each time.

You can’t cling to your breath. To live, you have to let go.

Breathe before you think.

In the gap between in and out – a whiff of freedom. (Riding the breath, the mind rides to freedom.)

Some minds curl in, in, in. Others spiral out, out. But until it learns to dance in-and-out - letting itself go during the reversals - the mind isn't really thinking.

Who knows who I’ll become in the next breath? (Being is just becoming that has stopped breathing.)

With each breath I outgrow myself.















A Thinking Ship on a Signdark Sea

think < tong-



Mind cannot live on thought alone.

Thinking is becoming. Likewise not-thinking.

Thinking is nothing but the mind ceaselessly feeling itself.

You are never who you think you are. (Thank God!)

Thinking is always thinking about something, philosophers say. So why does my thinking often seem to be about nothing?

To not think? My imagination cannot fathom it. (O rivers of thought – what dark seas are you rushing to?)

Oh this sinking thinking!

Writer’s cogito: I think therefore I ink.

We all start out thinking with our whole bodies; few are fortunate enough to regain this innocence.

Where would I be without thinking? Each moment a new world.

Thinking trapped me in this maze – why do I think it will get me out?

To confuse things with thinking – the human stain.

A Sabbath from thinking, a holiday for the body.

To think is to compare; to stop thinking makes things incomparable, beyond the reach of words.

Neither friend nor foe, it thinks.

Do you know what you’re thinking?

Just thinking.

Etymologies from The American Heritage Dictionary

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