Featured Artist  John Barilla Writer John Barilla can be described as, among other things, an author, poet, and budding filmmaker, without admitting to being any "thing". John holds an MA in Psychology, and the degree of Juris Doctor. He says that those things make a sort of developmental, rather than practical, sense in his case.  When asked to describe or define "himself", he replied:  "John is a locus of events." John began having random "psychic" experiences at the age of eight years. - A certain woman, mysterious, a beneficent witch, or awakening angels perhaps, at a bus stop.  Upon seeing her from afar, he knew that she would come to him, knew exactly what she would say, and precisely how he would reply.  Even at that age, Barilla was thrilled and intrigued with such a different way, one of inner experience.  Along with many others like events over the years, it proved to be a never-forgotten, valuable life-lesson in real intuitive, knowing.  More importantly, it meant that there was something more, something beyond the ordinary. As a young man Barilla was drawn to Zen and the Martial Arts, choosing to study Judo.  His teacher was 5th dan, Black Belt, Takashi Tobaiyakowa, a master in his own right.  On one occasion, the teacher had 15 students line up and do a headlong, diving, front-roll over the back of a metal chair that was folded open, one by one, over and over again.  Slowly and deftly, the teacher removed students from the line until Barilla was the only one still diving - over and over again.  Running now to make up the space, then diving - running and diving, running and diving.  At a point, consciousness moved beyond the confines of the body.  There was no sense of time, no sense of effort, only a pure sense of being, while the body continuously, as if it were a perpetual motion device, kept on running and diving, running and diving, over and over again.  Suddenly there was a single clap of the teacher's hands in Barilla's face.  The exercise was over.  It was not repeated in the dojo again.  There, again, was something more - beyond the ordinary. Barilla has had many experiences of the extraordinary - the mystical.  He remembers the view, floating out-of-body at the ceiling of a hospital emergency room, as his motionless physical frame lie on a gurney.  It was amusing to see the hospital attendants rushing in action around and over the body.  They seemed to be going at super-speed, and talking that way too.  He recalls the sensation of being suddenly almost slammed back into the body; waking up within an unearthly coldness; slow, slurred speech coming from, him saying, "Slowww Dowwn"; the attending physician saying in relief,  "I was sure we had lost you.  You had no blood pressure!"   Experience again - there was something more - beyond the ordinary - and there were things not yet done.   Barilla began his formal study, training, and practice of many forms of meditation more than thirty years ago.  After the first fifteen of those years, he spent ten continuous years in contemplation in the Eastern Catskill Mountains, where he began personal writings on politics, on peace, on self-development, and on self-knowing discovery.   Continuing as the seeker, one who had gained great insight, Barilla realized that, for him, the road to perfection next led into the heart of the ordinary world.  He moved to the City of New York, continued his spiritual practice, and waited intuitively.  When a sudden, and unexpected, opportunity to join in a tour of some of Southern India's most ancient and significant temples appeared on a moment's notice.  Barilla went.  And after then, once home again, there came new studies, a more expert practice, deeper insight, all of which blossomed into the simple realized bliss of knowing true freedom - Experience. In September of 2004, John completed a manuscript of poems, stories, and essays, entitled:  This Is Not Freedom: A Slaves Companion.  While sharing many of the collections pieces with others, he has not yet sought publication for the manuscript.   Barilla;    "I've realized that everything I do serves a "dream" in some way or other.  This vision is the world of true freedom, and that is an extraordinary world.  It does not lie in death, nor somewhere out in space.  The planet, has, and will again, host the consciousness of the Buddha sitting 'neath the Bodhi tree, and will also host the murderer sitting up on one of its branches waiting to pounce.  The worlds however, are reflections of consciousness that stream across the planet.  This Is Not Freedom: A Slaves Companion speaks of transcendent, other worlds, because it recognizes that the ordinary world is a perfect world as it is and, thus, needs no saving or healing.  And that gives rise to "the dream", a common dream really, whose seeds of _expression are flowering in great variety at this perfect moment." Barilla offers these quotes as representative of the manuscript: "There is One Mind of All, within which is the world mind, the ordinary mind, the analytical mind, our mind; indeed then, our world itself.   True freedom cannot be "understood" in the ordinary mind's way of understanding.  If we "understand" freedom, it is a sign we do not have it.   The ordinary mind captures and confines all things to dead concept, here, in the ordinary world - our world.         Beyond everything you can think of, every limit you can imagine, every achievement your mind can conjure, there is more!  There, beyond, is true freedom. To come back to your own true freedom, to remember who you are, you need a few simple things.  Among those are time, and the command of your own attention." Barilla:  "It has come to me that getting to extraordinary "worlds" might require some facilitating focus on the subtle workings - the simple assumptive phases, the "traps" in other words - of the ordinary world.  So, before moving on publishing A Slave's Companion, my ordinary-world-play now can move into portraits of those things; and can do that in film, which is something I have always wanted to do, because while imagining and writing stories, I see them vividly." Current projects? Barilla:  "Yes, I've been writing two scripts for short films in hopes of getting acquainted with the process, and in furtherance of playing with portraying features of the ordinary world.  One of those is about a young woman, who is conditioned as a two year-old, to laugh at a common name.  Her response becomes subconsciously programmed.  Later she gets hooked-up with someone holding that very name and in the mix finds that things are as Georges Ohsawa noted in his traces of "The Order Of The Universe" - i.e. "Everything has a front and a Back."  The other project is about V, who is an educated young mother, alone in New York with two children, who learns, in the most poignant, difficult, and tragic ways, the costs of earning one's daily bread.  There's another project that I see as an animated film short, (I have a series of those in mind).  In this one, there is a four year-old child, a boy who is in a high-tech video chamber, with images running backwards past his view, showing all the great images, seen and yet seen, relevant to him - the "messiah", the "creator", the "preserver", the "Buddha", the "monk", Siva the "transformer" . . . and when he comes out of the chamber, it's that last one that remains with him - the "Transformer"!  So he gets himself to a place, a highly advanced technical center of change, where he asks a man, whose kindness is masked by a stern "teacher's" facade,  "Can I use the torch?" . . .   I also intend to develop one of the stories in A Slave's Companion into a Feature Film Script.  That story's title is Fools and Masters; and for me the game goes on. - At least in the beauty of the dream worlds. Previous Publications: Magical Blend, a nationally distributed magazine, published Barilla's article entitled, Seeing God In India. John Barilla's poetry was published in Fall 2003 issue of Nomad's Choir, a widely circulated poetry journal in the midst of New York City's large and vibrant poetry scene * John can be reached at jbarilla@earthlink.net  ** for samplers of John's work, you can check below

Poems by John Barilla  All rights reserved                                 Blueprint  (Yin)   It’s just a game! > Jump in? I’ve been Fade away? Oh – to never think again Always have been trying Frightened Can’t come out When did I discover death? When I confessed to no sufficient pretense Betrayed by my own shadow No hiding places left No armor No title No expertise No dream No sense! Climb inside my self Fade away Self lost Die in darkness One last tear Fear just hurts, but < Sadness is the name of death >______________________________>

From:  A Slave's Companion     Blueprint  (Yang)                             < It’s just a game. Jump in! Yes! May I fly? Always Is discovery endless? Can I accept it? I will soar through time - endlessly. Such ease. All light.   A moment now to breathe in all of life. to embrace to heal the budding lotus to truly know to birth a paradise to sail beyond reason unbounded beauty ever lasting ever harmless ever living all love all love                 In every pause I am triumphant> <______________________________<

INTRODUCTION:   Essay 1   An Invitation                                                                                                 You are cordially invited, to choose, at a time and place of your own discernment, to contemplate and share in the nature of true freedom.  May I beg to have a part.  I suppose I am implying a mission here.  Perhaps, rather, it is an apology for playing within the play of hide-and-seek.  Well, there it goes already.  I could say that this collection is a Koan.  I could say many things, and I have!  I could simply say that I love freedom - true freedom:  The experience of pure being, totally unconfined, unchained, not caged, unlimited!  And here I have, I have said so!  So that frames the invitation             There would not be much else to say, except that true freedom, like true love, cannot be understood in the sense we ordinarily “understand” - from the limits of reason and analysis - and yet true freedom, and true love, those may be experienced.  That is all I could write in some code of poetry.             Imagine describing true freedom as “the experience of pure being, totally unconfined, unchained, uncaged and unlimited!” and then surrounding it with the chains of logical, linear, “understandable” definition.  A definition of  “definition” is: to surround a segment of the whole so as to trap it within conceptual boundaries.  A definition is a confinement.  A confinement can hold neither God nor freedom.              There is a “higher” - a more expanding, more illumining, more all-inclusive, more liberating, - capacity we have, that describes processes rather than constructs cages.  I saw a perfect example of this recently in the dynamics of a television program.  In a discussion with author Gary Zukav, Oprah Winfrey asked for the definition of “authentic power”.  His response, as I recall, was that authentic power is “the alignment of your personality with your soul”.   Oprah’s response was, “I love that definition!”  Gary had described a process, one of “alignment,” outside of definition, beyond confinement.  Oprah had used the term “definition.”   The key though, was in her reaction - “higher” emotion.  It was the meeting of “higher” description and “higher” emotion that yielded a more expanding, more illumining, more all-inclusive, more liberating, and empowering outline for a procession of experience.  Together, during that airing, they and the studio participants dynamically demonstrated the progression from definition to description, uncovered the process, and traveled “higher.”             In this Grand Drama, the Grand Leela, there are many dynamics and, at once, there is One dynamic.  We are free because we have been born of freedom, play as though we may here to the contrary.  And play it is, that we are confined ultimately by our own concepts of “I” and “self.”   In the movie Little Buddha, actor Keanu Reeves as the Buddha sits underneath the Bodhi tree, as Christ sat in the desert, facing the temptations of body, emotion, and mind.  Then came the last one - a perfect mirror image of himself.  That was, and is, the last boundary, the final surrender that can never be “understood,” nor can ever be “defined” - and that is the invitation.             I have paced in inner celebration for some long time at each of beauty’s entries into this locus of events, this process, which is “I.”   Then there could never be mere “words,” and there was no process left after celebration, nothing to capture such beauty and exhilaration.  And now, when I talk to young poets, everyone seems to know:  Beauty is never captured, it just flows everywhere.  But then, that is the “world,” of many possible “worlds,” where I now choose to live - and that is the invitation.             I have sat inside of the material I am offering here, cried in sweet pure emotion, warmed in humor, electrified in power and passion, broke bonds of self-imprisonment and soared away, pure formless perception true freedom - and that is the invitation!             I will apologize now for drowning you in verbiage, or at times over-hiding some little secret “self”, and perhaps even some-One infinite.  But, whatever wants the spirit to sing out to itself in multitudes, just that sharing, that is here - and that is the invitation.             We have often recited that we are born free, and so we are.  We do not often cite that we are born love, and yet we are.  For me to say “I love you!” could cause a confusion.  Love describes the process that is responsible for all creation/animation.  It is God to God, and God to god, and god to god, unbridled by gender while giving it existence.  Such prime attraction exploding out of prime differentiation - God’s birth of Self, and on to “self”.  Love is radiant!  We cannot give love, nor take love, nor possess our own or another’s love.  We can express love, share love, “feel” love, radiate love, all in automaticity upon the great remembrance of who we truly are.  We unveil love.             I once attended a celebration of spiritual musician-poet and activist Bob Marley, somewhere on 145th Street in Harlem.  One of the co-authors of a book about Marley, Malika Lee Whitney, gave an engaging presentation and was signing copies.  Members of the group, Heritage, gave a beautiful performance, which made African drums sing with strength and brilliance.   And, there was something that I brought there with me.             I had then recently been to India.  There are many opportunities one faces in every moment.  In my moments in India I was given the opportunity to slip into the worlds of some of her children.  In precious brief encounters, in the streets and near the Temples, they engaged me and we played in the language of the heart - fully present in each precious moment - Now!  True love was there unveiled - dynamic vibrance, without judgment, attracted to and by everything and everyone, in awe of all that it beheld whether through tears or smiles.  That is what I had brought with me to the presentation on Bob Marley - that precious experience and that discovery.             Now there was a woman whom was greeting attendees at the door, selling tickets and such, who had the obviously unveiled the same gift within herself.  We spoke to each other of those tickets and such, but the real communication and communion was in our mutual beaming of the delight of just being - fully in that moment, radiant, no words necessary.  It was perhaps also her misfortune to be the recipient of the spontaneous bear-hug I gave her as I left.  I remember thinking that I just loved everything and everyone!  In the sense of radiance, I did!  I had not “self” in that moment, I simply radiated who I was beyond the limitation that is ”self” - no thought of self-consciousness, no doubt, unquestioning All-self acceptance. “Self-love” is not blowing kisses to the image in the mirror.  It is just that experience of being unveiled, fully whom we are!  By energetic All-love, we, and all things, are cradled and carried through existence.              Truly “loving” another is as intuiting an open, worthy space.  We can imagine saying, “Hold on just a moment!”  We throw off all fears, judgments and self-protections - all the armor of personality.  Then we focus into the mirror of an “other”, and just radiate.  To love another is to remember who you are, and to show it - radiance, radiance, radiance!  Inspired radiance can be found in every mirror.  There, if not on the surface, still there, just behind - there in the depths, waiting in that mirror.  Everyone is a mirror holding the same essential image - Real Love.  Trust means knowing that.  The Heavens are brilliantly rich and dark, and they lend brilliance to the stars by holding to an essence.  Yes, the stars obviously radiate, and also do the rich dark Heavens all!  We look “up”, and then sometimes through the Universe, to see the whole essential, inseparable, multi-dimensional fabric.  We not only live in that, we are of that!   We are that!  “You” are a star, lent love, of love, and radiant in the whole fabric of All.  Love describes no commodity.  Love is an ever dynamic, radiant realization!  Of love, be assured you have it, because, in fact, you are it! - and still you flow on, beyond.  You need no invitation.              I am grateful, for your play and your attention.  In love’s true freedom, and in true freedom’s love, I am sincerely yours,   John Barilla – January 2001 PS. - Gross physicality is only one of the many residences of “reality.”          Dream, and dare to step inside!

John Barilla                                                   A Slaves Companion  Essay 4   Transcendence:  Sin and the Redeemers   So knowing, so grand, so generous, so free, such radiant splendid beauty in beatitude were they, all the redeemers.  And to prove that no less are we, they risked the sin of revealing the widest truth – the fact of Oneness, the fact of bliss beyond.  They all remain with us, alive in memory. The redeemers have staked their very living-memory existence in the success of our transcendence - in their faith in us.  Their sin was to expose to the ordinary, separative, split mind, secrets of the way home.  This mind, our world’s strongest most apparent instrument, is a “survivalist”.  It must capture, convert, and confine the widest truth inside the limits of definition because limitation is its very nature.  In its doings, its capturing imprisonment to concept, it is machine-like.  It thrives in Ignorance.   So the redeemers came into the relative world where everything has a front and a back.  On the front they are heroic.  In their revelations, we are liberated from the ordinary – its confining consciousness.  On the back, their truth is twisted, converted to confining defining instruments of mind’s split world; and still, drowning in Ignorance – everywhere across time - we war.  What on the front would be salvation - escape from the ordinary - on the back becomes the sin of imprisonment to it.     So the risk for the redeemers was, and still is, that we won’t get it.  The possibility was that what they offered would be left to analytical blind-mind interpretation, systematized, dogmatized, and confined within religions  – i.e. sets of belief.  And so it has.  In belief, we reduce their offerings to prisons of conceptual, speculative,  “understanding”, dead to the extraordinary experience they tried to inspire.  In our ignorance of the extraordinary, we are left more in the ordinary, even less free, and the redeemers’ hopes in us are defeated.   So the risk was clear.  If the redeemers’ efforts succeed, we are liberated from the confines of the world of dead concept, and lifted into the transcendent world of true freedom’s living experience.  Should their heroic quests fail, we are left even deeper in the grips of the mind because mind co-opts and converts transcendent truth into an empty illusion of freedom.   Transcendence indicates an escape from confining limitation.   At the same time, it indicates an expansion into the consciousness that orders the worlds.  In transcendence, the whole has no “end”, and splitting-separation is merely a perceptual trick promoting play.  Play comes from the power of the Whole to focus through either an infinitely wide-angle or a definitely narrow lens.  We each have the power to perceive a finger separately, or as part of the whole hand, the whole hand separately, or as part of the arm, and that process goes near infinitely on beyond the limits of the ordinary mind.  In ordinary consciousness, my whole hand can strike at the body of “another” – i.e. it can use the narrow focus to dramatically play that the “other” is separate.  In ordinary consciousness, “whole “ is a concept.  In transcendent consciousness, Whole is not merely an idea, it is an actual experience.   As Oneness would always teach, it is important to not perceive the ordinary mind and its world as points of “opposition”, even though the mind would see itself in such terms.  We are grateful for the game, for the opportunity to play, and then to escape its confinements.  Escape is merely part of the play - an extension of the game.  Transcendence brings true freedom.  True freedom leaves one with the choice of how and when to play, or to not play – to simply cradle in the silence of pure bliss.  There is somewhere a way.    Yet, what is the cost to the redeemers themselves when their quests are twisted into an offering to the ordinary mind?  We might go back here to the wisdom that instructs us, and instructed the great master redeemers, to walk through the ordinary world and leave not a trace.  The redeemers, each in their own way, have left a part of their radiance here in the ordinary world – we remember them well.  They knowingly risked sacrificing that radiant part of self to the machine of the ordinary mind, despite their own liberation in true freedom from it.  And they knew, in their knowledge of wholeness, that if a part suffers, so suffers the whole – great risk!  We can understand Lao Tzu’s reluctance – and we remember him well.   Lao Tzu is sometimes used to illustrate the sagacious advice that one should walk through the world without leaving a trace - nothing left suffering, nothing to retrieve, nothing to return for.  Yet, for Lao Tzu, as he came through a mythical mountain pass near end of his life, what was it that allowed him to be prevailed upon – to reluctantly bring things to a writing, and a risk, in the Tao Te Ching?  For Lao Tzu, and for all of the redeemers, beyond risk, beyond self-concern, there is compassion.    The “Passion” of the Christ is compassion.  Georges Ohsawa, who had sagaciously culled the mysteries of the Far East in his teachings during the mid-twentieth century, once said that he did not expect to die well because he had talked too much in revealing the grand Order Of the Universe – revelation is the risk that becomes the sin.  The Buddha taught compassion.  His very life was compassion.  For some, the Buddha’s “middle way” means not too much sugar, not too much salt.  Yet, from the Buddha, “the Middle Way” indicates a passage out of our world of suffering.  There, he sat at the point of whole and perfect balance where there are no “opposites”, so no “oppositions” - beyond the ordinary world, beyond the Tao’s “two” and “three”, beyond all separation.  In rejoinder, in concinnity, in Nirvana, the Buddha found pure bliss.  And yet, he returned and stayed on to teach, which again is to risk the sin.  The Buddha knew better.  They all knew better.  Yet, the redeemers, those named and those nameless, all risked.  They all knew us.  And still, for us, they all surrendered themselves to the exacting beauty of compassion.       We have ever mistaken the game of redemption as a one-way process.  It is at the point of the hero-redeemers’ failed risk, the point of their sin against true freedom, that the game turns, and we then became their redeemers.  In his confidence in us, the Christ would reassert a necessary prophecy: that what he had done we would do, and more!  In our transcendence, in our remembrance of freedom, in our escape from the prisons of the ordinary, their faith in us is redeemed, their risk is resolved, their wholeness is respected, their deity acknowledged truthfully along with our own, their suffering ended, their vision of our whole-reunion realized, their bliss complete.   It is not yet.   “Can I come down now?” “Not yet!”   Yes, see him, and see them all now:  Left suffering on a cross for millennia; alone in Nirvana; words of wisdom separated and twisted into an excuse for terror, war and murder; Oneness separated-off in supposed “worship” and begging that comes from the depths of a world of “caste”’, “class”, “difference”, “opposition”, and separation.   In the ordinary world, we see some take up a place of suffering, so that others need not.  Wherever you see suffering, you are a witness to that.  Suffering is the compassionate choice that some have made before coming into the ordinary world - a split world that requires part happiness, part suffering.  At least one of the great redeemers boldly tried to take up the suffering and death of all persons for all time!  Still, the lives they all offered as templates of the way remain unredeemed.  Just so, all their invitations to blissful freedom have been crushed in the mechanics of the ordinary mind.    And yes, they came to play in respect of the game’s own beauty.  Can they come down off the cross now?  Can they see the end of suffering come in the achievement of bliss beyond the “law of opposites”?  Can they be acknowledged as bringers of Peace?  Can we remember who we really are?  In our transcendence, they are redeemed.   Mr. Ohsawa once noted that: “Humanity will always let you down.”  We can take that from the fact of change – “Everything changes!”  Our counting on “others” involves us in dependence upon the constancy of their being, and upon their constant being.  In the passing of every instant some piece of them, some cell, has died and another one been born, and in the passing, they have already gone.  We can also take Mr. Ohsawa’s notice from the long wait of the redeemers.  Yet remember their faith. We appropriately mimic their mastery when we hold through change for the emergence of truth.  We need know where to look.    Once, in a discussion about seeking, a man said that, although he saw some beauty in the way of the spirit, he wanted to try seeking the truth he might find in science - in “the empirical” as he termed it.  The reply to him was that in the analytical, theoretical, relative world of the empirical, “everything changes”.  So in the moment after a theoretical “truth” is found, it and its basis has already changed, leaving the seeker back at the zero-point of beginning again.  At the same time, Science is conducting its own march towards the widest truth, and what is “proved” is that spirit is the essential-everywhere, and all things are essentially “spiritual”.   Meanwhile, the ordinary world has its own version of salvation, its own cycles of “redemption”.  We are all born into the wound of the ordinary.  In this consciousness of separation, we are left “alone”.  Loneness brings fear.  There is a boundary, a limit to “you”.  Limitation means an eventual “end” -  “death”.  “Death” means vulnerability.  One piercing glare, one harsh word, one hurtful stab of rejection, one flash of fear, or the lack of other-love, plants a seed of death in a child.  It comes in the form of self-doubt and self-loathing.  Imagine what striking a child does!  We are the field covering many seeds.  Yet “here”, lone-one grows on, leaving separation’s fear unseen in the roots underneath.  In play among “others”, the world is found “tolerable”, even holding precious glimpses of transcendent escape in ecstatic orgasmic reunion.  It’s then on to the world of giving and taking – owning things, owning others, giving ”self”, riding on the roller coaster of thrills - beautiful world!  Lone-one is “redeemed”!  Since the roots always feed up, at some point comes rising the self-doubt, the self-loathing, now unrecognized in murky anxiety.  The marriage is a futile distance, the success is no longer relevant, the acquisitions unsatisfying, the life empty.  Lone-one is unredeemed.  So it’s on to the affair, the next marriage, the new car, the trip somewhere, perhaps a child!  It’s the climb up again - up to the top of the cycle, seeking re-redemption - only to come once again to the slide down.  The cycle itself may claim the whole of a life in the ordinary.   Another of the ordinary’s cycles of redemption is implicit in the first.  The children come with lessons never taught through pontification.  Only ever taught in lying down their bodies, and too often their very lives, in the unreasonable assertion of their god-selves into the ordinary.  In the doing, they act as mirrors for every fault their parents still hold – every fear hidden by anger and passive-aggressive cold resentment.  Parents learn hard, if at all.  Their sins against the children are of the obvious, angry, harmful, damaging, cold, neglectful, punitive, and ordinary kind.  If they are fortunate, later they will know remorse.  When they become grandparents they might know that grandchildren are their redeemers – the chance to make it up, to do it naturally right this time, to apply the lessons their own children, now parents, suffered to teach them.  Of course, those very children, now parents, have forgotten their own lessons.  The forgetfulness of the parents comes to the harm of their children, who are their teachers, and who are the redeemers of their grandparents, and who will later forget their own lessons to the harm of their children, who in turn will be both the teachers and redeemers in the next round of the cycle – harm and relative redemption here in the ordinary, on and on. . . .         Enter the master redeemers, as living transcendence, knowing that sin is itself an illusion, born and residing in the ordinary world.                     So knowing, so grand, so generous, so free, so courageous, such radiant splendid beauty in beatitude are they still, all the redeemers – still languishing in the depths of their sin.   In our transcendence we are all redeemers, and all are redeemed.   John Barilla – August 1, 2004

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