Chapter 230 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)

CCXXX

Speculation about truth is meaningless.
Despite countless assertions to the contrary,
No one will never really know anything.

* * * *
The only thing
You can ever really know
Is that you really know
Absolutely nothing.

* * * *
So, relax, do with your time
Whatever the moment reckons.
Sit quietly, walk calmly, sprint boldly.
Dance with irreverent abandon.
Speak clearly, confidently.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Be That which you truly are,
Have always been, and will ever be.

* * * *
No matter how good or bad it seems,
It will never be more than a brief dream.

* * * *
The powerful forces of nature:
Earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, lightning,
Do not need to vainly boast, nor maintain idolizing histories
Of their influence upon the course of this planet.

* * * *
How much psychological pain
Is merely oxygen deprivation
Due to inattentive breathing?

* * * *
Humanity is far too deluded
To ever fathom its potential.

* * * *
Timeless moments are seldom recalled.

* * * *
Those unable to discriminate acutely
Often expect messengers of any given vision,
To maintain some sort of moral bearing for the milling crowd.
Few, if any, however, will linger on a pedestal for long.
And why should they even make the attempt?
What ideal has really ever been more
Than wishful, inflated notion?

* * * *
Martyrdom is very convenient.
Far worse for a message
To die on the vine.

* * * *
Memo to Self.
Re: The Return of Jesus.
Two thousand years plus . . . and counting.

* * * *
What a wearing, meaningless hoax
The gullible incessantly play
Upon themselves
And the many others
To whom they vainly cater.

* * * *
The veil of ignorance
May be heavier and thicker
For some than it is for others,
But it is a veil, nonetheless.

* * * *
Any given seed materializes
From the oneness into a harsh garden
That molds it into a destiny it might well not ask for
If it had been given a choice to begin with.

* * * *
Only when you are exhausted by the suffering
Will you detach from the passion that creates it.

* * * *
There is no original sin.
There is only the separation of birth,
A relatively brief, narcissistic play of consciousness,
And finally, in one ending or another,
The reunion of death.

* * * *
Do not be bound by your mind.

* * * *
In the totality of absoluteness,
Every thing is relative.

* * * *
More paradox to bemuse the already confused.

* * * *
The You to which this is written
In this wandering menagerie
Is not the you that you idly dream,
But the You that You really eternally are.

* * * *
People generally project their world upon the world.
Where lovers and friends see only affection and good will,
A cheater assumes all, given the opportunity, would hoodwink him.
Likewise for liars, thieves, murderers and other scoundrels.
And the sage, what does the mystical eye see?
What else, but himself in all?

* * * *
Consciousness is not inviolate.
It is the basis of a dreamy relativity of continuity,
But has the tenacity of crashing waves.
The maps of history are redrawn
As suits those who survive,
And those who rule.

* * * *
The charades of those who play
The many games of power, fame and fortune
Leave the realists unmoved.

* * * *
At what point as a child did you start pretending
Along with everyone else that you were a name.

* * * *
Any given circus will draw its crowd.
How simple it is to mislead the multitudes
With a loaf of bread laced with a few drops blood.

* * * *
The road to heaven is littered
With every shade of despair.

* * * *
Does the heritage of your ancestors
Free you in the highest sense,
Or merely burden you
With a vanity
No different than any other?

* * * *
Why settle for the will of any herd?
What is the point of a mindless existence?

* * * *
You never asked to be born, yet here you are
Again and again encased in every pattern imaginable,
Ever witnessing the myriad dramas of ignorance and delusion,
Ever compelling those whose time it is to awaken
To surrender to divine awareness.
Your eternally mysterious, illusory unfolding
Is, indeed, inevitably, absolutely, unfathomably immaculate.

* * * *
Can humanity afford
To contrive so irresponsibly.
Is avarice so insatiably, foolishly blind.

* * * *
As was quipped by a revolutionary
Only a few cycles of sun ago:
“We must hang together,
Or we shall surely hang separately.”
No doubt as true on a macro scale
As it was for the micro version.

* * * *
To witness without wanting, to be without fear,
That is the challenge of one’s daily existence.

* * * *
Imagination seduces in so many ways.

* * * *
Chart the course that will take you home.

* * * *
Before the duality initiated by sensory separation,
What else could you have possibly been
But the source of all things,

* * * *
How much day-to-day thought is bent
Upon the other in one form or another.

* * * *
It is the mother of all things,
Oneness, pure and simple.

* * * *
No matter how aware anyone may be of the universal nature,
Each must still deal with the day-to-day of the personal mind.

* * * *
All consciousness is just the ego play of godness.

* * * *
Not quite nihilism
In the most extreme sense
But definitely skimming the periphery.

* * * *
It is rigidity that sabotages
Even the best of intentions.

* * * *
No living thing can long survive
If it disregards the balance
Within its given niche.

* * * *
The temptress of your desire
Will assume whatever seduction
Will entice you away from your Self.

* * * *
Be a student of consciousness
And you will discern all is one.

* * * *
How often we allow leaders to choose themselves.

* * * *
That consciousness
Presumes itself important,
Or even vital, to the grand scheme
Is the crashing roar of narcissistic waves,
A collusion of the most ludicrous magnitude,
A hoax born of its own delusional inertia,
The joke of everything it has imagined,
The irony of ironies rippling nowhere.

* * * *
Consciousness is witness to the lightshow,
And the lightshow is the creator of consciousness.
The symbiotic link between the mystery and its creation
Is the same as between any initiator and the resulting handiwork.
The challenge is to realize there is no duality in the process.
That creator and created, observer and observed,
Despite all assertions to the contrary
Are ever one in the same.

* * * *
Despite the innumerable speculations,
There is only one truth, one way.
Bestow upon it whatever sound you will,
That which is -- has ever, is ever, and will ever be
The same source, the same mystery, the same divine oneness.
There is no getting around the bare simplicity of reality but through obfuscation.

* * * *
How many permutations there are in any given beginning,
Yet always the course narrows to an obvious conclusion.

* * * *
It is the sensory body
That creates time and space.
Duality would not even be possible
Without the field it each moment fabricates.

* * * *
That someone enjoys another’s pain
Illustrates how much they have suffered
To have lost all compassion and empathy,
Assuming, of course, that they ever even had it.
After all, not all hairless two-leggeds
Are true human beings.

* * * *
Your imagination projects
Every possible future
For this illusionary garden world.
Which will come to pass,
Only history knows.

* * * *
You drift off into pure, undifferentiated awareness,
Disappearing until you again fabricate your vanity.
It is the daydream of Self unconsciously manifest.

* * * *
Religious Paradox: Trust in an idolatrous god
That you will someday die in one fashion or another,
And are likely to be tortured countless times along the way.
What is there to venerate but your ultimate nature,
The beingness that is your only true friend
From the beginning to the end.

* * * *
Be less concerned about the story
Than the main points it is making.

* * * *
Image has become all-important
In this two-legged, hairless monkey theater.
So many living their world for what others think of them.
Where are the sovereign few?

* * * *
Competition is the nature
Of all creatures great and small.
What ridiculous vanity to even ponder
That this theater could ever be any different:
Any less confused, any less painful, any less anything.
As long as the oceans ebb and flow, why would crashing waves
Ever stop pounding every shore resisting their might.

* * * *
Human beings could probably co-exist peacefully
If we behaved moderately, lived simply, and shared.
Alas, true communism is the reality of some other world.

* * * *
It is the nature of imagination to imagine itself real.

* * * *
Efficiency can be quite a burden.

* * * *
Awareness is as good as any drug.

* * * *
No need to confess everything.

* * * *
There are really no opposites.

* * * *
Morph into that which is godness,
Real and unreal, true and untrue.

* * * *
Another testament.
Paradox revealed.

* * * *
Pity the wretched souls whose lives
Are ever subject to the public domain;
Their sovereignty dissipated by the many
Fashioning their misaligned personas
Into the putty of political character.

* * * *
As false as anything else.
Absurd through and through.

* * * *
Do not allow the words to fool you.
Tread lightly amidst their many imaginings.

* * * *
In the midst of reverence,
Leave some room for irreverence.
It is that as well.

* * * *
Once upon a time, you were born,
Or so you have many times been told,
A well-constructed lie if ever there was one.

* * * *
The fantasy that humanity
Is manifestly important to the universe
Is a day one delusion.

* * * *
The niche in which life abides is relatively slim.
How foolish humanity is to gratuitously toy with it.
Cease and desist, or suffer dire consequences.

* * * *
Never assume that someone
With an assortment of letters and titles
Is truly intelligent, much less wise.

* * * *
In the magic of the manifest inner vision,
You are the infinity of all that is,
And all that is not.

* * * *
Why follow anyone who believes
Their delusion more real your own.

* * * *
All manifest forms
Must eventually dissolve
Into the dusty source of all origins.

* * * *
Entropy, the anarchy of manifestation,
Will always reign in statistical excess.

* * * *
Practice detachment and moderation,
Lest the absurdity drive you mad.

* * * *
Because consciousness values itself so highly
Does not necessarily make it truly valuable.

* * * *
Who recognizes you
But through your recognition
Of the mirror image you have created.

* * * *
This planet is rather like
A very small pebble
In a very large, very still lake.

* * * *
If you cannot leave it an improved dream,
At least do not interfere too harshly
With that, perhaps, futile aim.

* * * *
Time, as reflected in mind, is the creator and destroyer.
You are the eternal nowness, the stillness timelessly witnessing,
The sensory nexus through which all appearances dance.

* * * *
Delusion comes in every shape and size.

* * * *
May you discern and dwell
Within the abiding grace of the infinity
Of the divine presence within.


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The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)
© Michael J. Holshouser 2009
World Rights Reserved