"What dignifies the Yogic practices is that the belief system itself is not truly religious. There is no Buddhist god per se. It is the self, the individual mind, that contains immortality and ultimate truth. At least I know where the self is. It’s in our own minds. It’s a form of human energy. Our atoms are six billion years old. We’ve got six billion years of memory in our minds. Memory is energy! It doesn’t disappear – it’s still in there. There’s a physiological pathway to our earlier consciousnesses. There has to be. And I’m telling you, it’s in the ******* limbic system…. I’m a man in search of his true self. How archetypically American can you get? Everybody’s looking for their true selves. We’re all trying to fulfill ourselves, understand ourselves, get in touch with ourselves, face the reality of ourselves, explore ourselves, expand ourselves. Ever since we dispensed with God, we’ve got nothing but ourselves to explain this meaningless horror of life….Well, I think that that true self, that original self, that first self is a real, mesurate, quantifiable thing, tangible and incarnate. And I’m going to find the ******."
-Dr. Eddie Jessup

Laying back in the tall grass
in the place I was born.
The shape my body makes
is a heavy sadness.
I sigh as if it made
the weight leave my body.

The sky is always bluer in the mountains,
that’s something to be learned with age.
To be ten years old and to hear that
childhood is archetypically
the best years of your life.
To be ten years old and to not realize
the freedom there is in that.

As if clouds could hear thoughts,
they cover the sky from time to time
just so I forget about my narcissistic thinking.

I close my eyes.
The grass feels like a sea of threads.
I’m in a constant state of waiting
for the needles to ***** me.
I am certain they will arrive,
but I do not move.
Laying on the ground
will never keep me grounded.

Laying back in the tall grass
I feel smaller.
I have failed, I have thrived.
The answers to my questions hover over this field
but the wind is too quick to pull them away
and I know where they are.
But the hard ground
is starting to feel comfortable now.

Somewhere
Along the way
Became the man
From once the boy
Not in an instant
But a litmus
Test
His limits
Could destroy
And what he saw
Not what he conquered
What he squandered
All the time
For he observed it
Then reverberated
Learning
To define
What constitutes
His attributes
As archetypically
Adult
And what refutes
His stance
And stature
As the leader
Of some cult