Chapter 116 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)


CXVI

You have many more words to describe life now,
But you are probably very much the same
As you were in your younger years.
Personality tends to possess
A strange consistency.

* * * *
You are, therefore you must be that.

* * * *
Will humanity ever understand the outcome
Of its vain arrogance, or will delusion
Carry on until the bitter end?

* * * *
Does anyone really control their fate,
Or is free will merely the play of ignorance
Parading in the choicelessness of dreamtime?

* * * *
The pain brought on by choice-filled resistance
Creates hardship and escalates delusion.

* * * *
You are a warm-blooded bug.

* * * *
The effort required to perpetuate your delusion
Can probably be correlated to how much
You and those around you suffer.

* * * *
It is you who must somehow become
Student enough to teach your Self
The freedom only seers know.

* * * *
What will be left as the desire
To suffer passion becomes
Less and less and less?

* * * *
Holding onto anything only perpetuates false pride.

* * * *
You realize, of course, all this
Was necessary for you to awaken.

* * * *
You believe all your measurement,
Calculations and labels add up to something?
Hah!  You only fool yourself in ways beyond counting.

* * * *
In your giving, do you truly give freely,
Or do you only give to get or take?

* * * *
The body is subject to mortal rules,
But what law can contain the immortal nature
But what you your Self engineer?

* * * *
For humanity to suddenly change its behavior
Is something no statistician would be likely to predict.
Only a diehard idealist could possibly believe it even possible.

* * * *
Me?  I’m a realist.
I don’t need any hope.
I just call it the way I see it.

* * * *
Melanin counts do not for supremacy make.

* * * *
Circle lazily content above the fray.
The passions of human consciousness
Do not climb more than a few miles
Into the deep reaches of space.

* * * *
Prove it?
How can you prove anything
When you are the only proof?

* * * *
Of course the drop cannot be the ocean,
Yet without it the ocean would not be whole.

* * * *
Explain why you will never see your own face.

* * * *
Each drop will evaporate as its turn arises.

* * * *
Expect nothing.
Tap into infinity’s timeless patience.

* * * *
Why take responsibility for what
Ignorance and delusion have created.
All any can do is be responsible for themselves.
Right living, the peaceful co-existence
With the moment’s unfolding
Is eternal salvation.

* * * *
When you die the world will no longer exist.
Without you as witness, time and space are not.

* * * *
Time is a fickle mirage.

* * * *
Do not covet thy neighbor’s life.

* * * *
The original sin is merely the birth
Into ignorance to which the rarest
Atone by discerning the eternal way.
It has nothing to do with right or wrong.
it is the fact for all born into manifest being.

* * * *
Stop trying to always remember time’s dream.

* * * *
If you think you will gain eternal life later on,
You have truly missed the whole point
That it’s happening right now.

* * * *
Forms keep pulling you into the reverie
Your sundry inclinations daily crave.

* * * *
Even wanting only happiness brings on suffering.
Craving anything insures the pain of existence.

* * * *
Refusing to examine closely
Your own complicity in this delusion
Is a denial of your ultimate reality.

* * * *
Savor the eternal through the flow
Of a breath filled with awareness.

* * * *
Imagine whatever you will,
You need not do it
To know its illusory reality.

* * * *
It means whatever you want it to mean.

* * * *
What is it to want nothing from what space-time offers?

* * * *
Better be content now
Because the clock’s battery
Is slowly running down.

* * * *
The dreamers dream they are awake
While the awakened know they are dreaming.

* * * *
The dead bury the dead in every way imaginable
Weeping before tombs bound to time born of mind.

* * * *
Is what we call caring any more than attachment
To selected forms which make us feel secure?
Reflections which give a token of comfort?
Divisive pleasures which merely distract
You from that deep aloneness which few
Have insight to see and embrace within all.

* * * *
The oneness is, prior to all forms.
Do not allow the astonishing diversity
To blind you to their eternal union.

* * * *
Learning to go with the flow of the dream
Can be very arduous to even the most adaptable.

* * * *
Who is anyone but the one in all?

* * * *
In their pride they created a god
To which they dedicated all their folly,
Forgetting all the while to include
Themselves in their creation.

* * * *
Why worry?
The angel of death already has your number.

* * * *
You only remember now.

* * * *
The universe is your mind.

* * * *
What group does not laud itself as being superior?
What individual does not pretend to be greater within?
What is the state of mind that requires no vain perspective,
That is done with the pretenses of human egocentricity?

* * * *
In the beginning there is every ending,
And in the end there is every beginning.

* * * *
The masses teem in so many ways,
Seeking identity, playing out mortal fare,
Adding to the chaos of their soul.

* * * *
Practice contentment.

* * * *
The perfect moment comes when inner vision
Aligns with whatever action has created.
The trick then is not giving into pride
Believing it was you who did it.

* * * *
To remain unfazed and aloof
Even under the greatest pressure
Is challenging for any one.

* * * *
God give you the strength to overlook the idiocy.

* * * *
The need to be known is shallow and intemperate.
Who can know you as well as you do yourself.

* * * *
Human beings are group animals,
But we are really small group animals.

* * * *
God can obviously do what it wants to any soul,
But can it really touch the essential nature?

* * * *
Having read many works of literature
Does not mean you believed any of them.
Some of us are just students of life,
Nothing more, nothing less.

* * * *
This is the part you are both privileged and condemned to play.

* * * *
Does life choose us, or we life?

* * * *
Was he talking to himself?
Was he talking to you?
Is there really a difference?

* * * *
Divine madness allows any question
As well as any solution>

* * * *
Does anything really astonish you anymore?

* * * *
He supposedly walked on water, you pick your nose.
He supposedly healed the sick, you scrape wax out of your ears.
He supposedly raised the dead, you scratch your ass.
Isn’t it all rather mysterious and profound?

* * * *
You know you’re close to death
When you dreamily wonder
If you’re going to survive this one.

* * * *
As if god could ever be locked in any building.

* * * *
You hunger for this or that
And then, as soon as you find it,
You are searching for something else.
More, more is there truly any?

* * * *
Contentment is an attitude.
A few simple breaths of it can
Make everything worthwhile.

* * * *
Dream on through oblivion.

* * * *
You are god’s will.

* * * *
It is the desire for life which tends
To creates the correlating fear of it.

* * * *
Death is a great night’s sleep.

* * * *
All mystics meet at the same pointlessness,
Despite all words and deeds to the contrary.

* * * *
Freedom is no longer needing to prove
Or disprove anything to anyone, anywhere,
Including your own manufactured self-imagry,
It is a state of mind where belief is unnecessary,
And truth is the youness of every passing moment.

* * * *
Words hurt when they do not match your own,
When you allow your fabricated image
To be their compliant target.

* * * *
Taking life personally
Only magnifies the pain.

* * * *
It is a divine madness untouched by insanity.

* * * *
Any grouping is held together or broken apart
By the concepts upon which it is founded.

* * * *
It is the wind vane of attitude and attachment
Which creates the joy and suffering
Of personal existence.

* * * *
You are space temporarily formed.

* * * *
At what point will you satiate your
Hunger for more and more and more?
Can there be an end to it without
The disciplined abstinence
Of a detaching soul?

* * * *
The rigors of excess play every sort of havoc upon us all.
No dream is immune to the reality of the ever-changing nature.

* * * *
Throw yourself into your fate.
There is no other.

* * * *
You are going to make mistakes, it is inevitable.
The trick is to carry them lightly,
Or not at all.

* * * *
You are not bound to play it out any certain way
But through the choices of your habitual nature.

* * * *
When you wipe away identification with the mind-body,
What is there to save, maintain and protect?
What is there to give purpose?

* * * *
As new or old as it gets,
It’s really all the same age.

* * * *
You will get through it the same way
You have every other moment
Since this eternal play
Was first cast.

* * * *
The premise that time exists is founded
Upon ignorance and its continuing delusion.

* * * *
Why allow the world to entrap you?

* * * *
What makes you think you deserve heaven
If you cannot create it here in the now?

* * * *
It is what your passion deems it.

* * * *
Carry on with the detachment of the sun
And the infinite universe beyond it.

* * * *
History has few students able to comprehend
The infinite nature of its illusory context.

* * * *
His story, her story, their story, our story,
Call them tale, epic, legend, opus, saga, myth,
Chronicle, adventure, escapade, fantasy, legend,
Fable, allegory, parable, narration or yarn,
Every story has ever been just a story.

* * * *
Do not rely on your mind-body,
Your health or your looks.
They are all fleeting.
Only you, the witness, are real,
And even then only as long
As consciousness exists.

* * * *
How many times has the church we call science
Proven itself to be just as dogmatic and narrow-minded
As what Galileo faced in the church of his day?
Why is it so difficult for so many scientists
To understand their theories are merely
Works in progress, not security blankets;
That we are never really going to be sure
Of anything in this incredible mystery theater;
And that science is only tinkering with limited data.


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