Self-described "tonal curiosity" Stuart Davis holds a festival for his "punk monk" fans every year, and we at TM were lucky enough to attend some of the proceedings. But we though it'd be sweeter to get an outside perspective, hence the following. Special thanks to the author for working so hard on this....


I knew I was in Boulder when I caught the cashier at Wild Oats talking up his intergalactic spirit guides with a hemp-wearing customer, and when I heard Love and Star being reprimanded by their mother for attempting to recycle paper napkins in the compostable-plastic receptacle, and when the tribally-tattooed woman in the ladies restroom warned me of the perils of bleach-treated tampons.

But I hadn't come to Boulder to have my chakras balanced with magic rocks or to seek my power animal prowling Pearl Street or to invoke the power of Thoth while browsing tarot cards at the 9th annual INATS.

Oh no, I didn't drive 900 miles for pie-in-the-sky, new age la-la, Rapture-take-me-away shit; I hadn't dragged my withered body out of bed at the ungodly hour of 5:00 am to come to Boulder for the masturbatory machinations of my ardent little ego or for narcissistic nooky. I was transrationally motivated, baby, I was here for loftier reasons:

I was here to get my integral freak on at Dharmapalooza with the Buddhist Sangha Sex Magic of Dharma Pop's Stu and Crew.

It was rich, friends, and I'm not talking about the sweet-potato soiree at the Royal Peacock or the sea of cherry-red zafus or even the florid display of flesh that Ken flashed. I was wholly unprepared for the subtle smack-down that the Mystery dished that Saturday and Sunday at Naropa's Nalanda Campus. I don't know what I expected, but whatever it was, it fell short of the Love-fest Lusciousness formerly known as Dharmapalooza.

"Love has no opposite," or thus spoke Stu, leaving me to contemplate the wonder of a kosmos that manifests a maverick-monk-meets-rock-star-meets-sex-god-meets-integral-artrenpreneur. Looking at the Kid Mystic perched on a chair gesticulating with those mile long arms and elegantly elongated head which housed eyes the size of eight-balls I couldn't help but wonder if perhaps he'd taken on the attributes of the alien-being that phoned home and kicked his ass to the cushion eight years ago.

The man behind Dharma Pop could tell a story. Never had I heard such a rogue account of egoic vaporization and the panic attack worthy of a Kubrick film that followed, or the desperate attempt to concretize with junk food and cigarettes a body gone to Is, or the continued practice that eventually realized itself in Bliss. Listening to Stu was like having your heart detonated, like being Bodhisattva-blitzkrieged into surrender, and god, that was when he was merely SPEAKING. Realizing this, I anticipated some serious causal casualties at Trilogy where he was slated to play later that evening.

Whom we presume to be the author of this
piece sits on a zafu at Naropa's Nalanda
campus to hear the Stu-D speak

I was still recovering from Stu's love bombing when the dharma talk began, given by a 28 year old former thug and Zen priest, Vidyuddeva. In the space between the time Stu stopped talking and abdicated the throne to Vidyuddeva I had gotten hooked into a particularly juicy melodrama regarding my wardrobe for the concert later that night: what would it be, platforms or flats? if I paired the platforms with a skirt THAT short would it be too hootch?  would I be forced to wear flats to accord with my pathologically ingrained, Mormon-standard sense of propriety thus compromising an otherwise fabulous outfit?

Vidyuddeva took the platform and sat in silence. His physical appearance was so preternatural that I entertained the idea that if I too realized enlightenment as an enduring trait rather than temporary state that I would prefer to return to save all sentient beings in the body of Jessica Simpson.

He began speaking and I was slammed with a Presence so powerful that the cyclonic activity of my monkey-mind ceased and my melodrama desisted with his first word and the World blew Open in a nuclear blast of Perfection. Being within a hundred yards of Vidyuddeva you heard the ocean lapping and laughing at it's own wetness as Sat-Chit-Ananda, and the spontaneous uncoiling catalyzed by his presence saw you always already Home. It's safe to say I've never encountered a more beautiful Human-Being-Buddha, which is simply to say that in Vidyudevva's presence you couldn't’t help but recognize your Original Face.

By this time all the Beauty, Goodness, and Truth was making the I, We, and It pretty damn hungry so we broke for lunch. It was here that everybody got their interpersonal groove on, and we starting constellating like crazy and the really big bonding began. I must confess to a hit of euphoria when it sunk in that the people I was talking to didn't mistake “levels and lines” for my idiosyncratic reference to a parking garage. Conversing with folks who realized “flatland” was a state of confusion and not the state of Kansas and correctly interpreted “pre/trans” as a developmental reference and not as an anatomically altering procedure greatly attenuated my sense that one should not use the term AQAL in polite company. As if all of this wasn’t swell enough, James Wagner came to play, and between the transformative gaming he led and our own overflowing philos we were pretty much primed for the universe communion which was Stu’s show.

At Trilogy, James Wagner reappeared and opened for Stu with a dharma inspired comedic tale of chasing tail worthy of canonization in the Kama Sutra, and a poetry performance which I wager will significantly increase his chances of getting laid by an integrally-informed, uber flexible yoga chic. (David Deida eat your heart out.)

As for Stu’s performance: Stu storms the castle of your heart and takes no prisoners, and after he’s dealt the merciful death blow, you thank him for sacrificing you. The energy at the show was astounding, I can’t recall ever feeling such a concentration of Love in a similar setting—if there was any lingering sense of separation it dissolved when Stu opened with "IS," and where a moment before I might have seen strangers I found myself flanked only by friends. From my strategically gained position in the front row I felt Stu let the Mystery rip him open and unleash a Love-tsunami, drowning the audience awake, continually returning the crowd's energy a hundred fold. Make no mistake, the man serves the Mystery, the Mystery makes demands, and Stu delivers. The man will fuck your subtle shit up as it's never been fucked before.

Of course, to fully authenticate the integral orgy that is Dharmapalooza it’s helpful if the Great and Mighty Bald One makes a personal appearance. Ken Wilber showed up looking every bit the metrosexual mystic (was that Prada on his feet?), inspiring both homoerotic fantasies and heterosexual longing. I sat there on my zafu and relished the intellectual torque while I basked in Ken’s immense generosity and presence and wondered how much time he committed to maintaining the body of a twenty year old. He must have developed some of those bona fide paranormal powers he was talking about because at that moment he seemed to demonstrate a telepathic connection by launching into testimony that resistance training takes at least ten years off your life and does amazing things for your body, to which I was compelled to interject, “Yes, we can see that !,” eliciting a response of...absolute silence. (Except for a sale at the Versace boutique or legislation abolishing mullets, I can think of nothing so superficially satisfying as witnessing the Philosopher-Jock stopped dead in his tracks.) Apparently he took the comment to heart and decided some inspiration was in order because a few minutes later the cardigan came off and the flesh flashed on. I don’t have to tell you that more than a few cameras clicked.

I left Boulder simultaneously ecstatic and somewhat incapacitated, wondering how much “voltage” I could take before short-circuiting, realizing it would be a long time before I fully metabolized the weekend’s graces and gifts, let alone found a way to temporally enact them on behalf of sentient beings in the samsaric realm.

That first morning when Stu spoke he talked about the honeymoon being over in terms of post-illumination and the difficulty of translating in time that which is timeless, of forging in form that which is formless. Driving I-80 West across Wyoming on the way home all I could think was that kensho, moksha, satori, samadhi, or enlightenment by any other name is a radical Grace, but "after the ecstasy, the laundry," and unless I could offer something, no matter how feeble, which transcended my own experience, my time in Boulder was just another exercise in celebratory self-interest. The deep delight of the weekend washed over me, but I was disturbed and daunted over what to DO, of how to best serve the Mystery in the manifest world.

I dragged my withered body out of bed again today for a 5:00 am shift trade and drove to work with Bright Apocalypse on the stereo, still holding the seemingly inexorable question, how to best serve the Mystery in the manifest? How to best serve the Mystery in the manifest? The Mystery. In The Manifest. The question yielded. Here I am.

Brandy George is a Zen-happy trans-Mormon, integrally-informed postal employee, and AQALicious shoe whore residing in Provo Utah who would enthusiastically volunteer to bear Stuart Davis’ babies were the position not already filled and she not happily coupled. She would like to thank Venus Boy and the Atlanta Mafia for their pivotal role in making this piece possible.