Samizdat Graffiti Koans #1

Commit random acts of impossible beauty.

Be the problem you wish to solve in the world.

Fuck purity. Fertility is the true sacrament.

Love yourself like you’re your favorite rumor.

Become fluent in your own nonsense.

If at first you don’t succeed, take advantage of the plot twist.

Pray to chaos; tithe your orgasms.

Don’t just march to your own drum. Invent a new time signature.

Crucify boredom before it crucifies you.

Holiness without humor is just fascism in drag.

Be more myth than biography.

If your lust isn’t holy, your holiness is fake.

+

Samizdat Graffiti Koans #2

Be selfish enough to save the world.

The Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not be a buzzkill.

Be the glitch in the simulation.

Surrender so hard that victory surrenders to you.

Your perfect partner is probably a slightly more evolved version of your worst enemy.

Be so authentic you confuse yourself.

Hack your destiny; reboot your karma.

Make friends with your monsters; they know the best shortcuts.

Be the miracle that annoys your cynicism.

God doesn’t need worship. She needs accomplices.

If paradise isn’t feral, it’s prison.

Fuck like the future depends on it—because it does.


+


Art by @li.orange

+


Samizdat Graffiti Koans #3

Outwit your destiny with dumb luck and reckless grace.

Be the ghostwriter of your own folklore.

Pretend to be sane so you can get away with doing what's crazy.

Mistake yourself for a masterpiece and experiment as if you were a genius.

Make your imagination work twice as hard.

Don't help others glamorize their pain.

Sanity is just a polite form of hallucination.

Seduce despair into becoming your collaborator.

Pledge allegiance to whatever makes you blush.

Worship the loopholes; they’re divine portals.

The clitoris is a philosopher; the penis just heckles.

Don't worship truth; romance it instead.

Anarchy is just radical hospitality with teeth.

+

Samizdat Graffiti Koans #4

Fantasize so hard the world has no choice but to join in.

Be your own perfect mess.

Mock your own sacred beliefs, burn your own flags, and blaspheme your own gods.

Orgasm is the real national anthem.

Your shadow is your best stunt double.

Disappoint normal. Impress the impossible.

Get drunk on paradox; sober up on lust.

If you're not offending yourself, you're not growing.

Let your wounds become graffiti on eternity.

Don't just find yourself, invent yourself.

Commit random acts of clarity.

If you’re not scandalizing your inner critic, you’re slacking.

+

Samizdat Graffiti Koans #5

Let the universe plagiarize you.

If you can’t solve a problem, seduce it.

Be proud of your mistakes. They're custom-made.

Become the rumor that history refuses to fact-check.

If your saints don’t dance naked, they’re probably cops.

Complicate your simplicity until it sings.

Treat every taboo as a treasure map.

Love like you've never been ghosted.

Be confidently uncertain about everything.

Don’t settle for being human. Upgrade to trickster.

Revolution is just good manners toward the future.

Fuck the empire right out of your bloodstream.


+


art by Howard G. Charing

+


SACRED ADVERTISEMENT: Koan and Samizdat

This perfect moment is brought to you by the koan, also known as a paradoxical anecdote or riddle. It’s used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to generate unpredictable waves of awakening.

The koan doesn't care about our need for certainty. It laughs at our demand for answers that fit neatly into our understanding. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" isn't a question. It's a small explosion designed to detonate in the fortress of our overly-defended mind.

The koan is a prank gift from teachers who refuse to enable our addiction to false comfort. It says: Your confusion is more sacred than other people's clarity. Your not-knowing is more luminous than the brittle confidence of those who claim to have figured everything out.

When we wrestle with a koan, we're not trying to solve it. We're allowing it to disrupt the logical mind that thinks there's something to solve. We're becoming more intimate with the gorgeous absurdity at the heart of existence. Meaning and meaninglessness? They are close kin.

+

This perfect moment is also brought to you by samizdat, which are dissident makeshift publications that bypass official channels of conveying information and entertainment.

Samizdat is truth that won’t wait for permission. It's the word made flesh in defiance of gatekeepers who want to decide what deserves to be said and heard. In old Soviet Russia, writers typed their forbidden samizdat manuscripts on thin paper, making carbon copies by hand, passing them from reader to reader in a conspiracy of illumination.

But samizdat isn't just historical. It's every blog post that tells a truth the conventional wisdom won't touch. It's every song recorded in a bedroom and released to the world without a marketing budget or corporate approval. It's the graffiti of the soul, written on walls the authorities don't own.

Samizdat says: The means of production belong to anyone brave enough to pick up a pen, keyboard, or spray can. Our voices don't need to be sanctioned by the priests of oligarchy’s culture. Our vision doesn't require validation from the tastemakers who serve the empire.

The very act of creating samizdat is a ritual of resistance. It declares that no power structure has the right to determine what stories get told, what ideas circulate, or what beauty is allowed to exist.

+

The next perfect moment will be brought to you by samizdat koans and koan-infused samizdats: dissident paradoxical riddle language that subverts every known paradigm so as to activate and incite insurrectionary soul awakenings and unauthorized enlightenment.

Imagine if every piece of underground literature carried within it the explosive potential of Zen's confounding riddles. Imagine if every koan was also a manifesto, a revolutionary transmission.

"If a revolution happens and the mainstream media doesn't cover it, does it still transform reality?"

"What was your original face before you were colonized by the cult of productivity?"

"How do you practice radical tenderness while the world is on fire?"

These questions don’t need answers. They’re tactical strikes against calcified patterns of thought that keep us complicit in our own oppression. They’re designed to make our certainties short-circuit, to reveal the hidden trap doors in the prison of conventional wisdom.

A samizdat koan challenges political systems, but it also challenges the structure of how we think about political systems. It questions spiritual authorities, but it also dissolves the boundary between rebellion and enlightenment, between mystical awakening and social justice work.

When we sit or dance or run with a samizdat koan, we're not just meditating. We're conspiring with the deeper intelligence of the universe to birth new ways of being human that the dominant paradigm has declared impossible and maybe even illegal.

+

The next thousand perfect moments will be brought to you by the book Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthy Cells in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality.

It’s an insurrectionary summons disguised as a spiritual text.

It's for those who are weary of being told that their bodies are obstacles to overcome, that their desires are distractions, that their messy human stories are illusions to be transcended. It's for those who suspect that the path to liberation doesn't require leaving Earth behind but rather falling more deeply in love with it.

Enlightenment for Rebels argues that the ego isn't the enemy. The war against the ego is. Our ordinary self, with all its quirks and contradictions, is already worthy of reverence. Perfect moments don't vanish like smoke but persist in ways the doctrine of impermanence can't account for.

This book celebrates the soul's need for both transcendence and incarnation, both stillness and wild movement, both solitary meditation and ecstatic communion. It suggests that true awakening doesn't mean rising above our humanity but diving more fully into it—including all the parts that polite spirituality has taught you to be ashamed of.

It's a grimoire for those who want to get enlightened without becoming less interesting and less passionate. For those who refuse to choose between heaven and earth because they understand that the boundary between them is a lie told by people who’re afraid of their own vitality.

Enlightenment for Rebels is written for everyone who has ever walked out of a meditation retreat feeling vaguely violated by teachings that seemed to require them to become less of who they are. For those who sense that the future of spirituality belongs to tricksters, lovers, activists, and feral mystics who know that consciousness wants to be embodied, not escaped from.