Chapter 25 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)


XXV

The mind is much more than a problem-solver, or maker.
Free yourself from the burdens you have accumulated in this world.
They are not worth their weight in gold, or any other form of cash or wampum.

* * * *
Excess ever weaves a price.

* * * *
Who has ever really discerned these things
Atop the shoulders of another?
All must seek truth alone.

* * * *
How many governments or corporations
Are truly concerned about individual welfare?

* * * *
Do you seriously believe
Great prophets of this world
Would bother entering the shrines
You have built upon their teachings?

* * * *
It is more than the eyes can see
And less than the mind can know.

* * * *
Organized religion is a crutch vainly used by many
To avoid unleashing the potential within.

* * * *
There is nothing which you can truly own in this world
Except this surety of your ultimate nature.

* * * *
What price, your soul?

* * * *
What nations or religions are really necessary
Once you understand the unity prior to consciousness?

* * * *
It is the mirrors of ignorance
The weariness of which ripens you into awakening.

* * * *
All must learn and earn the sovereign courage
To match and overcome the despair
Which living so often brings.

* * * *
That soul bivouacked on the park bench,
Is you in yet another version.

* * * *
What irony that we captivate and destroy,
That we put our forests into houses that are overly large,
That we kill off ourselves and other life forms in every way imaginable,
And then name landmarks and consumables after them.

* * * *
All that diversity, so much of which you dread, is your own creation.
How you destroy it so voraciously, so mindlessly,
Is insane beyond reckoning.

* * * *
The politicians and priests play upon your vanity
And you encourage them by paying for their wars and temples.
You are ensnared and choreographed by your own fear
When all you have to do is just say no.

* * * *
From whence these words do come?
Why, from you, of course, for as has oft been said,
You are your own version of the same play.

* * * *
Arguing your limitations only brings them about.

* * * *
When you are a child you speak as a child.
When you grow up you put away childish things.
When you find you, you recreate the best of all worlds.

* * * *
Even for the most honorable demon,
There is never a point of no return.

* * * *
The source is like the hub of a wheel,
The gap in a spark plug, the space in a ball.
Ever useful because of nothing.

* * * *
The corruptness and ignorance of the world
Wears on you because you fathom, however remotely,
The untainted purity of you inner vision.

* * * *
The piety and false humility of self-righteous hypocrisy
Is such an absurdly dense, even pathetic, mortal game.

* * * *
To think you knew someone then, that you know them now.
Hah!  All you ever knew was your own projected reflection.

* * * *
Argue the rational, logical, linear cause and effect world
And your wealth is ashes and death.

* * * *
Your desire for freedom must be matched
With the courage to face its fruition.

* * * *
This quest is not some once-in-the-blue-moon experience.
It is your life, your dream in every moment.

* * * *
Does the collective inertia of any given mythos
Have any interest in anything but its own perpetuation?
The result is disparity, isolation, anger and magnified suffering.

* * * *
Words used for wrong purpose
Diminish the power of your life force.
Used rightly, they fan the fires of your being
Until that moment when you need them no longer.

* * * *
Many who believe themselves born again of god’s grace
Are only playing out the vanity of one collective collusion or another.
They are camels who will wail when they someday discern
How small the eye of the needle truly is.

* * * *
Sometimes the self-righteous are best served
With a well-aimed shock to their rational, linear, earthbound equilibrium.
Irrational, irreverent minds discern many avenues
To dish out such teachings.

* * * *
When you grow weary of the worldly appetizers, the real feast begins.
Your identity is the main course.

* * * *
Any so-called prophet worth his salt has shared a vision of isness.
Your worshipping them, your idolizing them, was not part of the bargain,
And is but meaningless distraction to your own eternal rekindling.

* * * *
It is the ceaseless quest for purity of heart
Which wins you heaven within.

* * * *
All monoliths are made of sand.

* * * *
Toil the ground throughout your dream
For that day when the harvest comes.

* * * *
Sodom is a quality of mind, not an ancient city.

* * * *
What once seemed so sane
Becomes more and more desolate
As the irrational momentum gains insight.

* * * *
Science has loosed humanity
From the binds of false superstitions,
But its tether binds the mind in a noose of its own.

* * * *
Watch the faces, the eyes, the gestures and the bodies
Of the many souls you meet throughout your life.
They reflect the inner nature more than words can tell.

* * * *
The sexual drive creates a frenzy
Most challenging to curtail.
A combination of physical craving
Complicated by society's mixed messages.
Discern its effect on your life and deal with it as you will.

* * * *
The self-righteous are like geese squawking
Whenever their false piety is challenged
By that beyond any convention.

* * * *
Groveling before the powerful, rich or famous
Colludes with everyone's vanity and your own,
A sticky worldly paper which snares many flies.

* * * *
What possible good is memorizing scriptures
Without discerning their infinitely subtle meaning?
They are dead seeds unless their spirit is reborn within.

* * * *
To allow politician and pharisees to educate your children
Is like allowing hungry wolves to host a slumber party.

* * * *
Do not presume to judge another.
It is well enough to look to your own accounting.
We all live in glass houses and thrown stones are easily returned.

* * * *
Affection born of passion has a desperation about it.
Love tarnishes when coupled with wrong understanding.

* * * *
What mythos has ever encouraged truly free and independent thinking?
None would stand longer than a house of cards in a wind.

* * * *
Some may call this quest for godness an escape from reality,
Never to comprehend its subtlety is far more real
Than any light show they will ever see.

* * * *
You valiantly try to match your acts with your ideals,
But must ever fall upon the reef of suffering
When their reality is a product
Of a patterned mind.

* * * *
The greatest cities and monuments ever built
Are as sand blown by a gust of wind.

* * * *
Domination, subjugation and humiliation,
Are so much of what the human condition entails.
What an angry, desolate, isolating paradigm
We so unnecessarily suffer.

* * * *
Locked in the societal mindset,
You spend much of the day pleasing others
Because it is too frightening to face standing alone.
And all the other sheep doing the same.

* * * *
Family life should exhibit love and wisdom.
All should be empowered with a strong, supportive
Intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual underpinning.
Independence, respect, strength of spirit, should ever be encouraged.
To bring children into this world is the greatest responsibility.
Be committed to your mate and all your offspring
Before entering into such a union.

* * * *
Real religion is of the heart and is not susceptible
To the crystallization and stagnation of time.

* * * *
How unfortunate the price others have had to pay
For the wisdom you have from your angst gleaned.

* * * *
What rationales each of us blindly concocts
To endlessly justify our lives, actions and thoughts;
Vain attempts to maintain identities unreal from any beginning.

* * * *
You cling to idea and form because the mind is ever seeking security.
What in this world is there that must continue as it presently is?
Any attachment is denial of the reality of change.

* * * *
You cannot own this stillness
Until your craving for sensory experience
Dissipates and only unity remains.

* * * *
When a priori ends there is only awareness.

* * * *
Ego is the contraction of the mind's potential.
As desire, fear and anger dissipate into dreamy detachment,
Integrated expansiveness resumes its rightful state.

* * * *
The affairs of the manifested world decrease in importance
Until one day it all dissolves into a mysterious tragic comedy.

* * * *
Mythos, the outcome of our genetic nature
Sustains in each of us many fears and attachments
Which only common sense and wisdom can free you from.

* * * *
Our specialized lives have taken away the general living
That ancients knew and lived before the seeds of civilization.
The trade-off is luxury, decadence and philosophy.
Are we richer for it?  Perhaps, perhaps not.

* * * *
Be wary what sacrifices you make to work, play and life.
There are many costs and for excess to be paid
At the time's tollbooth down the road.

* * * *
There are many concepts created by humanity
Which we mistakenly, historically, take as being from god.
Each must, with great discernment, dig into it without assumptions.

* * * *
The range of thoughts others will think about you
Will scatter across the pleasure-pain spectrum of your self-imagery.
Detachment from any of it takes a good deal of practice.

* * * *
Do not pretend to know that which you cannot know.
Be open, patient, compassionate and seek the faith, the trust,
That all will be known when it needs to be known.

* * * *
Each of us does many things, both disastrous and fortunate
Which ripple long into the horizons of other people's lives.

* * * *
Those blissful times when you wake up
And do not remember where you are, you just are,
That is the purest state of consciousness you can know.

* * * *
You do not necessarily do this
To benefit anyone or anything else,
Even though it inevitably, invariably does.

* * * *
Martyrdom is a quick, albeit often painful way,
To get a message imprinted in the dreamtime.

* * * *
The fact that you remain in this plain of existence
May well be because of Maya's hypnotizing grip on you.

* * * *
Manifested consciousness is relative to its subjective nature.

* * * *
The petty squabbles and vain self-aggrandizement
Of those who would seek to organize spirituality
Is avoided by anyone with a real sense of things.

* * * *
The degree of resistance and surrender you manifest
Is exhibited in the physical fabric in which you wander.

* * * *
Freedom should not necessarily
Be equated to feeling comfortable.

* * * *
Any conclusion tainted by the shadow of vested interests
Should be approached cautiously, with great skepticism.

* * * *
No matter how great a story it may be,
It’s still just a story.

* * * *
One man’s truth can be another man’s lie.

* * * *
Taste the world, the universe
Your time and space in mind offers.
The observer is the observed.

* * * *
Who knows how any beginning begins
And any ending ends?

* * * *
Breed another day.

* * * *
An egalitarian view for those who see the truth of it.

* * * *
Count on nothing to take you where you will.

* * * *
We must play it separate, we must play it together.
How else could Self be seen?

* * * *
Any given mind is only as pliable as its version of imagination allows.

* * * *
How can what never began ever end?

* * * *
All frames of reference are bound
By the limitations of imagination.

* * * *
The consequences of any given decision
Are often difficult to reverse.

* * * *
Self taught.

* * * *
Seems like there’s always
Something or someone
Ready to fill a vacuum.

* * * *
The witness in one is the witness in all.

* * * *
To wrestle with the chaotic interplay of time
Is, indeed, a consuming, unquenchable fire.
And what of the coals and ash that remain?

* * * *
It boggles you every time you awaken to it.

* * * *
You are this moment … forever.

* * * *
This work, and those of many others,
Will find those whose time it is to see.

* * * *
You are arrived, the day is begun.

* * * *
Dissolve into true Self, surrender to your fate.
It will all be over soon enough.


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