Nomad Codes

attention. Everything follows from attention, and the awareness of attention is the beginning of awakening: “the cock-crow.” The Jewel-net pre-exists the eye only as a field of potential. Attention cuts furrows into this field, preparing the ground for the objects we perceive—the seeds—to both appear and find their place. But this grid of furrows and seeds, of points and tangents, is not enough to produce “reality”—you need the “source,” the energy of desire or fascination that operates “behind” the eye, to water the seeds. This eye of attention is like a spring which can choose its direction of flow, though over time this spontaneous power is reduced by habit. But awareness and control begin with this awake gaze, and it should be cultivated.
    Since ngHolo society is evenly divided between agriculture and nomadism, they picture this reifying tendency in profoundly ambivalent terms. Our habits of perception and action are seen as ruts as much as furrows. In this sense, seeds are materialistic delusions that karmically grow into something larger and more demanding than they initially appear. Sift the seeds , they warn. Some Virtuals interpret Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden into the toil of agriculture as a fall into the ruts of perception. The rain that feeds the wild poppy falls from the sky , they will say, indicating the “pure production” that is to be aimed for: a spontaneous growth of unpredictable objects generated from the ultimate field of emptiness.
    We ourselves are nothing but seeds grown within furrows dug and watered by the attention of others. Assessing the value of this prepared plot of land that is our “given” world is of primary spiritual importance. The path towards the Jewel-net comes through preparing our own ground, for the furrows dug by the attention (our patterns of perception) in many way determine the seeds, or objects, that will appear. Because they farm on hillsides, ngHolo plots are rarely regular, but follow the various possible folds of the land. So we should carefully prepare the patterns of our attention, its mode of organization, its blend of curves and grids, randomness and order. For the ngHolos, the chaotic mandalas that issue from the loom of the Metal-mind are occult keys to these patterns. But the ngHolos also emphasize the supreme momentum of rootless flight, the nomadic spread of weeds and wild poppies rather than the conscious cultivation of philosophical or material ground. As a famous slogan puts it, I become mushroom, without root, my dharma seeds scattered to the wind.

    The soul weaves Indra’s net.
    Following the anatman doctrines of Buddhism, the Virtuals insist that any fixed notion of self, even the Universal Self, is an illusion. The Virtuals do not deny the conventional self, but rather fill it with space and emptiness. They call this “weaving the net.” Like a net, the conventional self or ego is something we toss into the infinite potential of reality in order to “catch” our desires. If the net is too thick and tightly wound, it will retain everything, for there is no void to escape into, and everything will become very heavy and egocentric. If the net is too loose and weakly bound, it will not function—larger catches will break its threads, and the smaller will escape.

    The path is a plateau.
    For the ngHolos, the notion of a spiritual “path” is a misnomer, for spiritual reality is an endlessly proliferating manifold. The path is a network of paths, a plateau. One can not “follow” a network, but must constantly probe it. Each footprint is a node, which constantly re-produces a number of possible directions. Arrival and departure are fused. As such, immediate and fragmentary spiritual tactics—including these slogans—are prized more than grand strategic methods that attempt to lay out a well-organized hierarchy of stages towards gnosis. Many Virtual Masters achieved fame not for their diligence in pursuing one of the ngHolo’s countless philosophical cults, but for the specific topology of the plateaus they created as they moved through different and frequently antagonistic fields of thought and experience.

    Webs mar the net.
    The Virtuous Ones contrast the image of the suppleness of the open net with the centralized and sticky organization of the web. In a web, the self becomes a spider, a solidified, grasping ego which sits at the center and captures everything for itself. Because great power over