Chapter 235 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)

CCXXXV

It’s a god eat god world.

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A mystery too vast for any explanation.

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A mystery solved in a moment of unconditioned insight.

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Another turn of a page in the same book.

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So much ado about nothing.

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When you were very young,
Every moment was timelessly effortless.
To be born again is to embrace the essential nature,
To be the eternity of awareness without harbor for want or concern,
To resume being the utter simplicity of absoluteness
Which we all equally once upon a time
So very innocently were.

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A culture with no vision is a culture in decline.

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It does not matter who wrote this.
What matters is that it was written.

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Our self-absorbed hedonistic greed
Will be the poverty of those to come.

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But through your own choosing,
You are not bound today
To repeat what was done yesterday.
Nor tomorrow, repeat whatever will be done today.

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You have never really done anything wrong.
The threats of heaven and hell are groupthink mantras,
Concepts to bend fearful minds to one limited mythos or another.

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Questions of a thousand dreams,
What to do with what you see.

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The transcendent mind trumps all.

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Suffering is the taproot of hell.

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A mystery theater brought to you by the unknown.

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All your wanting this or that is imagined,
And all it brings is temporary respite
From the suffering and confusion.

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Why feel sorrow that this world no longer appeals to you?
Why anguish that what it offers only parches the soul?
Enjoy the joyful wander of your eternal solitude.

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How do we play it?
One for all and all for one?
Or none for all and all for none?

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What obligation can a madman have?

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Guides can only point the way.
The journey is for each to make alone
With all the joy and suffering the trail entails.

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The beginner sees nothing and thinks it something.
The master sees something and thinks it nothing.

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Pain is the teaching that leads the student home.

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Awareness of one’s foolishness
Can bring it to a very abrupt halt.

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What is lust but a projection of one’s own vanity?

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All divisions are concocted by the mind,
The grand weaver of the matrix of time.

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You are all the experiences
Your seed line in time offers.

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All are one.

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Only the great keeper of time knows
Where such thoughts as these eventually lead.
Yet, whatever function it may someday play, it will only be
But another dreamy page in the epoch of man.

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Consciousness,
Great or humble, strong or weak,
Is, despite all assertions,
Only consciousness.

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Cotton candy,
Despite all the fluff,
Is ever the same sugar.

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His story, her story,
Whoever’s narrative it may be,
All accounts are merely projected perceptions.
Subjective in every imaginable way.
We are all flawed witnesses.

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A different body, a different character, a different fate,
Would only inspire a different illusion, a different delusion.

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This work is an invasion upon time’s mischievous shore.

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What need for an imaginary friend
If you are your own best companion?

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What do you find irresistible in another
But the reflection you most favor?

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Same clay,
Just a different day.

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You are but a sensory play of godness
Waxing and waning in eternity’s dreaming.

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When it comes to religion,
Why feel at all obliged to choose
Between imperfect options?

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What we call growing up
Is really the sculpting of infinite potential
Into one inflexible rut or another.

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Satan is an imaginary enemy.
God is an imaginary friend.
Narcissistic tomfoolery.

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Saving souls from imaginary futures
Is surely an incomprehensible mystery.

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Such a twisted species we are, we are.

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So many reading the scriptures
End up have no insight whatsoever
Into what the scribes of old truly meant.
What an ironic mystery that so many seek
What so few are prepared to find.

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You have been taught to read,
But you must also learn how.

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What is a so-called cynic but an idealist
Whose capacity for observation
Is not yet well-honed.

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Any system is only as efficient as those who use it.

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A man without enemies may well be a fool.

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When any given physical entity ceases to exist,
That version of the universes evaporates forever.

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What an amazing thing, imagination.

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Apologies for not being able to offer more than words.
We all must each alone pan for our own gold.

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Everything has its pluses and minuses
In the relativity of time-bound manifestation.

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Sometimes self-absorbed.
Sometimes Self-absorbed.
Hard to be one all the time.

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The eyes have many faces.

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The wind is indifferent to nook or cranny.

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It is not always easy to accept
That everything breaks, disappears or dies,
And, at some point, so will you.

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Be alert to the probability that you
Have likely only fabricated another prison.

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You don’t have to own something
To perceive its essential nature.

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Within every seed
There is an architectural plan.
A birth, a role, a play, a destiny, a death.
Every seed spawns a witnessing.
Without it, you are nothing.

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Vanity and pride,
The avarice of the mind,
Knows no limits.

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If you’re still following,
You’ve missed the point.

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The suspension of reason
Is the ground for all confusion and delusion.
The surest course to coherent thinking
Requires unrelenting doubt.

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We are all just recordings,
Echoes etched in mind.

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The unending timeless moments
Of which all in stillness are capable.

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The things about which
You are only partially concerned
Inevitably descend into great disrepair.

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Every garden must be pruned and weeded now and again.
Some will call it Armageddon or some such thing,
But that is only delusion and ignorance.
The rules of the game are clear
To all who see clearly.

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Few crave freedom to its ultimate end.

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A healthy body is one that is not yet distracting you
With the countless forms of pain of which it is capable.

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Dogma is created by those who lack the vision
To clearly comprehend that they are really
The original architect of their own law,
Even if they adopt another’s.

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Science deals only with what can be measured in space and time.
It cannot fully acknowledge intuition because its foundation
Disintegrates when the unknown is acknowledged.

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All traditions are born of geographic assumption.
Like the seven blind men believing the elephant
Is one part or another, all conclusions are limited.

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No experience bears the winds of time.
Only in the timeless awareness
Is experiencing real.

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Anyone thinking they can possess truth
Is waving around a bag of empty concepts.

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That which is prior to knowing
Is the eternal life you seek.

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The web of wanting
Crisscrossing the limited mind
Offers no serenity.

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Unattached breathing
Is the manifest ebb and flow
Of the ocean within.

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Depending on its level of entropy,
Every successful adaptation
Must eventually face its demise.

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The buddhas, christs and other mystics
Feel so acutely the suffering of existence
That they travel within the ends of the world
To discern the eternal causeless nature,
Which is the origin of all dreaming.

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How we would laugh at other creatures
If they named themselves and their worlds,
Yet we delude our fabrications so real, so true.

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Irony, irony, all is irony.

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What are these thoughts
But another useless distraction
Brought to you by a mind of our kind.

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Discerning the eternal
Is not about becoming something.
It is about complete surrender to the beingness,
Of all manifestation, the matrix of totality.

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The keepers of any given religion have no interest
In your really discerning the source within.
It would compel them to get a job,
And maybe, just maybe,
Even come up with a real life.

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The boulder is but a speck of dust in your eye.

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Your true aura is so huge
That it cannot be conceived,
Much less perceived.

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How many forms godness attires itself in
In its timeless, illusionary sojourn
Are beyond counting.

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It is consciousness,
With all its attachments
To mind and body,
That suffers so,
Not the you
You really are.

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The foolish jester wanders where he pleases
In whatever manner intuitive spontaneity allows.
As dazzling as the sun, as anonymous as the breeze,
As still as a mountain, as unknown as the ocean’s depths.
As articulate as any creation, as dumb as any rock.
Blind to space and time, yet caught in its web,
Waiting for the spider’s hungry will
To feast upon the lifeblood
Of vain existence.

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After all is said and done,
What difference to an atom,
The building block of all illusion.

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Why does life strive so to survive in so many ways?
Because that is the way it is.

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In one form or another,
What have you not experienced
In this dreamy exposition of consciousness?

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If you haven’t already realized it,
This is one of those serendipitous works
In which you often seem to come upon a reflection
That you in time are most primed to mull.

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Some might deposit this scribe in a shallow grave
If they were to realize these writings are analogous to the story
Of the lone stonecutter bit by bit chipping away
In the bowels of the mountain.

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A stream of consciousness,
And though many may often seem alike,
You will likely never discover
Any given aphorism
Written exactly the same.

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Do with this exertion what you will, but be advised,
Do not WWMD: “What Would Michael Do?”
Never imitate nor attempt to play out
Any space-time but your own.

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All questions, all concerns,
Find serene closure in the singularity
Beneath the expansive brow.


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