the Tree of Life

Deeply absorbed in meditation while on retreat in the vast uncharted forests of the Northwest, Bastante came to this realization:

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is the Tree of Thought.  Thinking itself is the knowledge of good and evil, for thinking itself is categorical and thus judgmental.  Thus it is anathema to whole, natural man.

Thinking is suffering.

The Tree of Life is the Tree of Breath.  By abandoning the machinations of thought in favor of the movement of the present moment, the in-and-out eternal movement of the breath, we are anchored to the now and freed from the suffering torment of thought.

The Fall of Man took place when man chose to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, learning to think and preferring to place his awareness on thinking rather than breathing.  This is putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.

In choosing to think and shunning the breath man has lost track of his eternal presence, his eternal now-ness, and has trapped himself in the prison of a paranoid ego existentially terrified of its own inherent emptiness. This paranoia has led to a control fetish, which in turn has led to planetary enslavement and near-destruction.

Just as thoughts arise and pass away, so too does sense of self arise only to pass away, eternally, instantly, perpetually.  "I"-ness, or  "I-Am"-ness, cannot be clung to, cannot be named and leaned upon, for it arises only to pass away.  It is there and instantly is gone again, only to return.

In each breath, we are born and die again a million times.

Beingness arises and passes away, a billion times a moment.

Thinking presumes the existence of a valid thinker, the 'subject' of all 'objectivity'.  Meditation negates the existence of said 'thinker'.  Thought itself has no foundation in reality, and must be abandoned in the pursuit of truth.  We must renounce the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and eat of the fruit of the Tree Of Life.  Sensation and respiration are a priori, while cognition is a posteriori.

Descartes got it completely backwards.  I think because I Am, not the other way around.

Bastante grasped this in a flash of insight, and then let it go, knowing it to be only another thought.  He returned to his meditation, and allowed every exhalation to be the emptying of the vessel that was his mind...