Chapter 22 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)


XXII

No book ever written
Has any authority over you
Without your consent as its author.

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Practice until there is no time you are not.

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Whatever this mystery is,
You are as well.

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It is for as long as you breathe.

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What in this world is worth suffering for?

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All manifestation is not
Without you to witness it.

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It takes brave heart and sure mind
To discern that which has no measure.

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Discerning this is totally up to you,
Your willingness to surrender
To that which you really are.

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Manipulation is the lever of an impoverished soul.

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There is only one rhymeless reason.

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You keep seeking purpose, rhyme and reason.
There may be none but what you choose to imagine.
Isn't the sweetness of breath gift enough?

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So much of our manifest existence is a collusion of vanity,
Each of us wandering restlessly through life
Masturbating each other's egos,
All just imagination.

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All thought is assumption.
Even saying there is a god is an assumption,
An inference created by thought's desire for continuity in time.

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Will we ever tire of abusing our sandbox?

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There are them that talks about it
And them that does it.

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When exactly does eternity begin
If not your death to time now?

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Are you asleep?
Are you awake?
Are you neither?

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Everything you are this moment
Is all you have ever been.

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Harmony begins within.

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It is ignorance and confusion which breeds evil.

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One can certainly argue that the world was created to be spent.

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What any others think of you is your own creation,
An endless projection of your restless mind
Caught by the shadows of time.

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You are the blank tablet
Through which all is said and done.
Allow emptiness to envelop you into its silence.
Totally negate your identification with any movement of mind,
The ethereal awareness that is left is the real you.

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Quickly, slowly, what is the difference?
It all happens as it will.
Are you mindful of the process?

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To know you are godness, that all is godness,
Is an understanding, not another ego trap.

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Leave behind all attempts to organize reality.

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Those who seek the devil often create one within.

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It really has nothing to do with heart or mind.
Those are just manifest analogies.

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Each must discern his own covenant with godness.

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The reality of unity is the most simple thing there is,
Yet most get caught in time and space,
Build it into something vain,
Toss it out the window,
Walk right on by,
Refuse to even look,
Cannot even begin to see it,
Get distracted by all the diversity,
Or get muddled by the apparent complexity.

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Karma is just another entangling concept.
Responsibility for this life is its own reward.

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When a child is born, it is the potential of pure awareness.
Its senses function, but no conscious knowing is attached.
No identity or personality has yet been by collusion formed.
Quest and rediscover that eternal state of innocent emptiness.

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Mystic tools of promise and solace
Manifest from Maya's endless bag of tricks.
They play upon your fearful gullibility and superstition,
Your desire for happiness and continuity, and the dread of mortality.

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All outward desire for this form or that
Is simply misdirected inner longing.

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The awareness you are is immortal.
It has created all you see and do.
To deal with mortality, with change,
With sickness, injury, aging and death,
Requires a surrender few willingly fathom.

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The wisdom you glean,
The tokens you gather,
Are your tickets to heaven.

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Those who willingly injure others,
Who gain pleasure watching another's pain,
Suffer a tormenting isolation, a wretched separation,
Which even the greatest compassion will likely never penetrate.

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Your life is a series of experiences,
Much like a moving reel of film images.
Memory ties them together into a continuity
You steadfastly claim is your life.
What is the quality of mind
When the film of memory is shelved?

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This ceaseless preoccupation with religious forms
Only delays your surrender to untainted spirituality.

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You know thousands of words and concepts,
But how far can knowledge really take you?

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Are you really fooling anyone but yourself?

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What we each choose to see and know,
The drama we are driven to play
Is the mystery of diversity.

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Moon and sun crawl across the sky,
A duet of form making potential
The mystic seer’s dream.

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The calculations of design are without end.

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How many ists and isms
Will we propagate until we see
There are none but for those who count.

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That rational science does not fully accept and embrace
The mystery as its origin proves its incomplete nature.
These thoughts are riddles, paradoxes, reflections,
Designed to chip at your rational mind till it cracks.

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Real religion is when you are one with reality.
And then the religion disappears.

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There are no easy answers for a complex mind.

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Self-righteousness is a hell of its own design.

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Anger isolates the mind and hardens the heart.

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What does your face look like from behind that mask?

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Why accept anything less than a direct connection?

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As interesting as it may be,
History tends to twist and turn,
Even suffocate any given present.

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Saints live out their idealism.
Mystics are realists lost to time.

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Your heart needs no object to give its all.

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When you are it, what need for belief?

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Be as a child in this mortal play of divine light.

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Who, what, where, when, why or how?
Questions which have no answer
Except knowing you are the answer.

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Can you experience without the experiencer?
Perceive without the perceiver?

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If you accept time and space are not ultimately real,
Then history, whether personal or cultural,
Becomes less and less significant.
A sense of nowness, of timeless process,
Becomes much more weighted in your awareness.

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Who is it you feel you must become?
You already are everything you could hope to be.
What greater blessing could there possibly be in any lifetime
Than complete reunification with the unmanifest source of your being?

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Everything you fear are ghosts of your own design.
What exactly is it that you are protecting?
Or that you can protect?

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One day you wake up
And all that desire for continuity will have vanished.
But not you.

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Take personal responsibility in an impersonal way.

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You just have to realize how little effort
Is required to own this reunion.

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What devastation will it take
For the inertia of our collective synergy
To slow down and return to a livable balance?

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Of all the creatures great and small
To whose extinction humanity has contributed,
Do you seriously believe your line immune to such a fate?

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If you give to get, you have not given at all.
The unconditional asks nothing in return.

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Everything you have is a temporary loan.
The payback is your death.

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So much of what you have been told to value
Has no validity or meaning whatsoever.

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When you begin realizing how little you really know,
You are very close to discovering the reality you really are.

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Open your heart to even the most notorious.
They, too, suffer in this mortal theater.

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Those who oppress others are locked in a hell of their own.

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Everything you are or are not has nothing to do
With what you think you are.

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Your body will be destroyed,
But what you really are never dies.

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Is it really any different now
Than when you think it never was?

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Accepting any label creates a tendency
To live up to the definition you give it.

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Destiny is the play of free will born of illusion.

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All cause and effect is founded
On time-bound attachment to body-mind identity.

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Until you unify within, nothing will change without.

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Your resistance to this patterning
Is your soul's yearning for union beyond form.

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Pain and pleasure are both the promptings of nerve endings.

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When you take everything all personally,
There is no end to the contortions
Suffering can manifest.

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Who can know but you?

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The mind's capacity for the order of illusion
Must in the end submit to the chaotic order of reality.

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The vain drive for power, fame and fortune are misdirected quests
For what must ultimately be discerned within.

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To what end do you lean?
Creation, destruction or somewhere in between?

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Be sure the teachers you choose to follow are real teachers.
Too many use others for their own ends.

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The dexterity of these words
Is enhanced by your insight into their true meaning.

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The challenge is residing in the moment
Without identifying with it.

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What you really need is provided without your asking.

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Shine your light to the boundaries you create.
Then expand those limits until there are none.

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Why tolerate being fed ignorance?
Why put up with the confusion delusion manifests?

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Attachment to any religious, political, economic or social mindset,
Is the play of limitation, separation and, ultimately, destruction.

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The total functioning would not be without you,
Nor would you be without it.

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Everything is Nature,
But Nature shaped by the mind
Misplaces the spontaneous, rhythmic order
In which Nature alone abides.

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There it is.

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The sweet and sour of existence
Doeth make for interesting viewing.

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Whether to abide until the bitter end,
Or depart with time on the table,
That is, indeed, the question.

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Just another story, man.

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Everything is arbitrary,
But some things do, indeed, seem
More arbitrary than others.

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Death is merely going to sleep
And not waking up again.

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The innumerable masks
Can never hide from the eyes
That see Self ever pretending to be.

* * * *
Singularity playing a vast game of multiplicity.


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