Chapter 23 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)


XXIII

Whether or not to continue playing any game
Once the interest is gone, that is the question.

* * * *
Nothing scribbled on the tablet is ever the tablet.
You are that upon which all is said and written.

* * * *
Circumstances born of time often call each of us
To act in ways we might otherwise not choose.

* * * *
All psychological suffering is just the concoction of vanity.

* * * *
Before all you think real and important, you are.

* * * *
Change is.

* * * *
The personal mind is the outcome
Of the suffering of consciousness.

* * * *
How do you expect to change the world
If you cannot even change yourself?

* * * *
Are you the dreamer of the mountain
Or the mountain dreaming you?

* * * *
Do not hesitate to cross any boundary.
None exist in reality.

* * * *
Your only obligation in life,
If you choose to own any obligation,
Is to play your hand out to the best of your ability.

* * * *
Where are the boundaries without the senses?

* * * *
Every part of your vanity or derision
Is food to one life form or another.

* * * *
Real religion is opening to the no-mind
Which forms no resistance to the changing.

* * * *
Pursue the teachings, not the scribes.

* * * *
Stop torturing yourself to fit into a world
Which does not appreciate the reflection you offer.
Become that which is prior to all mirrors.

* * * *
It is not a matter of convincing yourself.
It is a matter of knowing your Self.

* * * *
Stop playing the game of ideals.
Just say what you mean
And mean what you say.

* * * *
Call it mountain, ocean, universe
Or whatever name you concoct,
It is ever the same oneness.

* * * *
The garden still exists.
It is right before your eyes
As it has ever been.

* * * *
There are more problem-makers
Than there are real problems.

* * * *
For so many, the more they have, the tighter the grip.

* * * *
To be born, to live, to die.
A great honor, or a great bother?
A bit of both, many times over.
In everything, paradox.

* * * *
Whatever you are, you are.
How amazing this mystery.

* * * *
All problems are
Only because you have a body.

* * * *
The joy thought is not joy.

* * * *
To put godness outside yourself
Implies a duality which does not, cannot be.

* * * *
Neither seek pleasure nor avoid pain.
Reside in the stillness before time.

* * * *
Instinct, habit, patterning, conditioning,
All jailers in the prison of manifestation.

* * * *
What makes you believe the clay
Is attached to any particular shape?

* * * *
When one does good works, the motive,
Whether born of heart or political expediency,
Become quickly apparent.

* * * *
Nuclear weaponry is the ultimate extension of the fist.
We toy with the power of god without the wisdom.

* * * *
If it is your destiny to awaken,
What can stop you?

* * * *
How blurry the lines of duality really are.

* * * *
No society or organization
Seeking its own perpetuation
Has any interest in your being free.

* * * *
All attempts to organize any belief system
Only breed greater division and rancor.
Isn't it enough to delve your own soul
Without creating dogma for another.

* * * *
What point is there to a life work
That creates imbalance and destitution of spirit?

* * * *
Each must find that courage, that essence of being
To face the suffering mortal life has in store.

* * * *
The play of mythos often lies hidden in texts taken as scripture.
Few teachers, if any, are completely free of their beginnings.
Discern for yourself without creating dogma for others.

* * * *
Becoming godness is not a thought.
It is the awareness prior to thought.
So simple.

* * * *
Did you choose to be born?
Did you pick your parents and family?
Your body? Your geography? Your circumstances?
Some would say that this is one of countless reincarnations,
But do you know it for a fact for yourself?
And does any of it even matter?

* * * *
The competitive savagery
That got our kind to this point
Is no longer functional for survival.
Over-population and our ceaseless inventions
Weave an ominous, cancerous plot against the entire planet

* * * *
You are the fruit born to harvest.

* * * *
At the depth of every soul
You will find your own.

* * * *
Alone again, naturally.

* * * *
Dogmatic morality is a vain vice.

* * * *
Love is more than a conceptual ideal.

* * * *
In their ecstatic quest for happiness,
Lemmings abandon themselves to the cliffs.

* * * *
Mortality is a difficult enticement to tack beyond,
A challenging game with stakes of no real value.

* * * *
It is so simple, so nondescript, so obvious
That you blindly walk through it every moment.

* * * *
Humanity's fate is the synergy
Of countless choices born of separation.

* * * *
Your true face is before all lightshows.

* * * *
Amazing how it all kind of fits together.

* * * *
One man’s terrorism is another’s war.

* * * *
The argument that we would be nothing without history
Is so very, very true.

* * * *
None of this can you keep.

* * * *
How is godness going to be omnipotent and omnipresent
Unless it resides in every fiber of everything, including you?

* * * *
One of the most simple ways to end or destroy something
Is to ignore it, to refuse to participate, or to give it no power.
Political institutions, corporate empires and organized religions
Are prime targets for the anarchy of the unattached mind.

* * * *
You are already everything you could hope to be.

* * * *
It is not a matter of convincing or persuading,
But of seeing.

* * * *
Some will use any means
To deny your origin.
Get them all behind you.

* * * *
These thoughts are randomly placed
Because life is a random process.
All organized attempts come from the mind's
Difficulty in dealing with the chaos of manifest existence.

* * * *
Our unwavering willingness to subjugate the world
Shows clearly the depth of alienation
From our source of being.

* * * *
Your denial of your so-called dark side
Is denial of half the coin.
Embrace it all.

* * * *
The continuity you fabricate
Is a dream you cannot grasp.

* * * *
Dwell where thought will, it is ever the same.

* * * *
It is you who takes you
Through the full range of emotions,
Not the other.

* * * *
Were we to seriously
Seek a resolution to any conflict,
We might well find ourselves on the same side.

* * * *
A some point it can only go downhill.
It is the statistical nature of all creation
That it must eventually be destroyed.

* * * *
An elite club into which all are welcome
Many are called but few choose.

* * * *
The only lock is the one in your mind.

* * * *
In great abundance
Is the seed of great hardship.
In great hardship, the seed of abundance.

* * * *
Fashion your detachment in whatever way you will.

* * * *
The corporate whip does not discriminate.

* * * *
Peace is not a concept.

* * * *
You will eventually be dispatched
With the same ruthlessness
You have dispatched
So many others.

* * * *
Sometimes you charge.
Sometimes you withdraw.
Sometimes you hold the line.
Be as fluid as nature allows.
Have intuitive confidence
That whenever now comes,
You will figure out what to do.

* * * *
Absoluteness is absoluteness,
No matter what route appearances have taken.

* * * *
To be overly concerned
With the triflings of this illusive world
Is but an enticing dead end.

* * * *
In absoluteness vanity disappears.
The senses are observed dispassionately.
There is only stillness in timeless unfolding.

* * * *
It is likely not personality that interests godness.
None of us are the gibberish residing in our heads.

* * * *
Attachment to any teacher or teaching,
To any philosophy or organization,
Creates a separation, a denial that truth
May manifest in a diverse infinity of appearances.
Only the silent ear and the inner eye witnesses their total reality.

* * * *
The imprint of order based on Maya
Is the rational mind's delusion born of time.

* * * *
Dogma is the ruling of outward authority,
The principled dictates of the limited minds of men.
When you own your own law, no others apply.

* * * *
This leaves no room for anything more
Than the pretense, the conscious play of identity
In the theater of time's passing dream.

* * * *
You are before all scriptures and religions
They point to you but can never touch you.

* * * *
The mind's quest to deny and destroy diversity
Misses entirely its innate unity.

* * * *
Psychological desire by its nature creates separation.
The "me and mine", the "I want", the "I own",
Are the duality, the division of diversity,
Existing in sensory illusion only.
Reality is ever oneness.

* * * *
If anyone ever told you, if you ever believed,
That you could never be free of conditioning,
Take a chance and guess again.

* * * *
You have created all this for your amusement.
A virtual reality game, extraordinary.

* * * *
To give importance to the scribe,
To the messenger of these words,
Plays into Maya's game.
It is all you.

* * * *
Every moment is a note in the cosmic symphony.

* * * *
Mortality has no morality.

* * * *
Life as we know it is a habit
And most of us are addicts.

* * * *
Explore, discuss, disagree, agree and more,
But avoid fabricating new dogma,
If that’s even possible,
Flawed species that we are.

* * * *
Death is death.
It’s how you die
That’s the bother.

* * * *
How vague the many memories
The many perceptions of one’s life become
As the life force begins to wane.

* * * *
Barkeep, another round.

* * * *
What was life like before you began to want and fear?

* * * *
You are an eye of godness.

* * * *
Any vision is only as accurate as the eyes are clear.

* * * *
The task of the ones who see is to pass it on.

* * * *
Different cultures allow and disallow as groupthink ordains.
But we are, after all, cousins of the same branch,
Gone awry across the dream of time.


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