CCLV
Human beings across the world
Have unceasingly contrived gods and idols
That they might endlessly praise their insipid narcissism.
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Regarding power, the question is:
Can you be inwardly empowered without disempowering another?
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Real respect is not a product of fear.
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Children play with toys and make up games.
Adults put away childish things.
Will we ever grow up?
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Hearsay and superstition and idealism should never be confused with truth.
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Eternal salvation is just shutting up, and paying attention to the moment.
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Real faith is so much more than dogma.
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No matter the label, it is ever, has ever, will ever remain,
The same eternal, sovereign, inexplicable, indelible mystery.
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Yet another bogus charade.
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Asserting dogma does not make it so.
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How can you save something that can neither be lost nor destroyed?
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So many lies to which so many cling; Self-deception is the root of all evil.
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There is no order but the mind's innate ability to ceaselessly organize,
To ceaselessly orchestrate, its far more than a few vague perceptions.
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The inherent flaw of science, despite its perpetual pursuit of objectivity,
Is that it is, as are all things mind-made in this manifest theater,
Founded on the subjective limits of sensory perception.
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You see what you project.
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History has a way of forgetting itself.
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The only now there is, was, will ever be.
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As interesting as it can be, history inevitably weighs down the present.
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Who can you save from what?
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Do jellyfish cling to their drifting memories the way humans do?
What heavens and hells must they endure to win their god's favor?
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The Reaper makes meager picking of all things.
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The worry! The worry!
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Absurdity is surely only a human manifestation.
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Any given is history is but a temporary game;
Meaningful only as long as the collusion endures.
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Truth is a drift of fine sand taking whatever shape the wind contrives.
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Dullingly predictable.
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All things happen in time's shadow.
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Blessings and curses are merely imagination's inflated parley with its own fabrications.
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As if the eternal is really concerned with all your silliness.
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You are in reality that which you are not.
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All suffer in innumerable ways,
But few discern the common thread
Weaving its painful tapestry in every mind.
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Hands wander round and round on analog clocks and watches,
And numbers flash on and off on digital versions,
But has any time truly passed?
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Colors and shapes are creations of the sensory mind,
The deception of light and sound that you even exist at all.
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You are but a temporal synapse of totality,
An intuitive, mystical comprehension
Discerned by few far between.
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Your real tribe has no distinguishing traits except an enduring inquiry into true nature.
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What sound is any sound?
Sight, any sight?
Taste, any taste?
Smell, any smell?
Touch, any touch?
But what any given mind has chosen it to be?
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What difference is there really between being awake and asleep,
But consciousness pretending its illusory quantum creation real.
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The difference between birth and death is but a relatively few moments of perception.
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How can you be free, and not allow others the same privilege?
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So be it.
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Who kills any other but themselves in yet another form?
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All wander aimlessly though relatively few ever begin to realize it.
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So many believe it is really they who do any of it.
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Do what you need to do; leave it behind when you are done.
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What a shock it must have been be to be born,
To depart from the relative tranquility of the womb
Into this sensory garden born of consciousness.
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The wheel of illusion has innumerable spokes girding its suffering nature.
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In even the greatest beauty there are flaws, and in the most decrepit, gold.
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Where do you begin? Where does your universe end?
Where do you end? Where does your universe begin?
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What trip has not been played out in this earthbound play of time?
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Gold is dust, and dust is gold.
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Time as our species has concocted it
Is little more than an arbitrary confabulation
Based on the predictability of a spinning dust ball
A relatively judicious distance from a daunting fireball,
About which it goes round and round in a quantifiable way.
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Awakening to your birthright is an inward process
That no other can ever navigate for anyone else.
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Being true to your Self is perhaps the highest law in this lawless theater.
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The passions that others evoke in you are merely innumerable variations of desire
Playing out a seemingly endless array of attachments to a sensory-born illusion.
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The truth is that truth can never be spoken, only intuited in the beingness of awareness.
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Take pause as often as it is necessary to calibrate the clarity.
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Zen do we go?
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Those who follow, who imitate others, are like parrots
Constantly repeating remnants of vague memories.
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Life can certainly be entertaining, and perhaps only rarely boring,
If you are narcissistic enough to surround yourself
With enough hedonistic distractions.
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What is there to justify, what is there to explain?
It is the illusion, it is the delusion of the other,
To whom you surrender your sovereignty.
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Seers are like springs freely flowing.
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You are the dancing cosmic dust of totality temporarily cast in the refraction of light.
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Keeping desire at a simple level helps make life far less vexing.
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What purgatories the expectations of others can create.
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Why live in fear of what some imaginary deity expects of you?
Far more rational to clearly discern what you want for your Self.
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Humankind seems to be a far cry from discerning what a civilized world truly entails.
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After the coming fall, human vanity will likely continue, albeit on a revised scale
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Ride every moment as a surfer does a wave.
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In every indivisibly seamless holographic moment,
You are the infinitesimally infinite eternal mystery.
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Within the insecurity of aloneness, there is an indefinable security.
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Any given seed can never know into what illusion it will be cast.
All life adapts to time and circumstance as time and circumstance allow.
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The beast is potential within all,
Yet so is the authentic human being
Who journeys beyond its animal nature.
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When you are completely alone, what else could possibly matter?
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That which you truly are is no lover of personalities.
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Investigation any black box long enough,
And its unknowns will likely fall into
One coherent order or another.
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The highest does not exclude the lowest.
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The speculations mankind fabricates to illuminate this inexplicable mystery
Are practically meaningless, like dry, brittle leaves blowing this way and that.
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Adorn the table however you will,
The finest china can do little more than camouflage
What ever remains the savage, murderous enterprise of any predator.
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Humanity's ability to manipulate nearly everything it touches
Has bent back the limitations of natural law,
But only temporarily.
Like a rubber band, Mother Nature
Will eventually snap her world back into alignment.
And it will likely not be a pretty sight.
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No part is ever not the whole in reality.
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All personality is merely subjective adaptation to a given context.
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A complete life is too full to remember.
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The mind-body will be where it needs to be if you surrender it to your Self.
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With the aid of those who have discerned it before you,
You have the rare opportunity to become your own guide.
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Funny how some people will not let you past all those chips on their shoulder.
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The body is a container, a vehicle;
Useful to experience the manifest theater,
But only for a relatively brief time.
No use getting too attached.
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The pleasures and pains inspired by the nervous system
Fool you again and again into believing all this is truly real.
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Those who truly see may well be inspired
To snigger at the body's innumerable frailties
When they are not writhing and screaming in pain.
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Wars seem glorious from the parade ground.
Perspective changes when it is your boots
Tromping through the muddy trenches.
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The common sense that has never really been common
Will very likely not be center stage for any time ever to come.
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Discern all the differences you can imagine for what they are.
How straightforward, how effortless, it is to heal the fragmented mind
Once you perceive that the wholeness of awareness is its essential nature.
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What a timeless enterprise life ever is.
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The unrepentant film of dust
That daily returns to the tabletop
Is a constant reminder of your origin.
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Well, well, well.
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Déjà vu all over again.
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What the fuck were you thinking?
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We all have our timeline.
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What cannot be know cannot be usurped.
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Deign it merit?
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The madness that is sane is the mind that sets an aimless course.
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The inner eye, both empty and full, sees all, knows all, is all.
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Life, it'll kill ya.
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An imaginary creation, a tale of universal proportion.
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Vanity-vanity-all-is-vanity, except for pure awareness of the eternal kind.
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What is any history but the fog of perception.
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Scream or moan or laugh, the roller coaster rolls on and on.
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Feng that shui.
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Every moment a new discovery in the mind undivided by time.
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If your practice is idolatry, then you have missed the point.
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The point being?
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Detachment is key.
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Are you this? Are you that? No and no.
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How quickly the sparkle of obsession can morph into dark shadows.
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How quickly the sparkle of obsession can morph into dark shadows.
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Contentment is when just being is enough.
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This world is not for you, shake it off.
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What you do not give your mind to does not matter.
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Travel light, travel sure, travel free.
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It's your world now, kids, rotsa ruck.
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What the tongue craves is not necessarily what the tummy needs.
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Give it no name.
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There is no before, there is no after, there is only now.
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The corporeal body is but a means to a dream,
A temporal reverie of the three-dimensional kind.
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It is really only what you imagine of your Self that counts.
All the assertions, all the opinions, all the babble of the many others,
Is naught but temporal distraction from the indivisible, ever-present awareness.
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The Return to Wonder
Field Notes from the Unknown
© Michael J. Holshouser 2009
World Rights Reserved