Chapter 32 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)


XXXII

Who is the who that asks who?
The what that asks what? The when that asks when?
The why that asks why? The where that asks where? The how that asks how?

* * * *
From large to small, from part to all,
Pathless witness serenely dawns and sets,
Spring awakening into the sleep of winter's end.

* * * *
We all wander from one distraction to the next.

* * * *
Journeying within, you explore a world
Many have traveled but none can truly chart.

* * * *
The perfect master is but another refection of yours.

* * * *
Become a free agent.

* * * *
All you can really cling to
Is the illusion that all this is real,
And perhaps for some reason, important.

* * * *
The claim that you are something because of history
Is aspiring mythology born of deluded imagination.

* * * *
Them that believes knows no shortage of pain.

* * * *
The answer to the riddle is that there is no riddle.

* * * *
See the relativity of all limitation.

* * * *
If you cannot meditate in the fury of hell,
You do not understand real meditation.

* * * *
Life can be a great opportunity
To let love fall into you.

* * * *
You are the point of time.

* * * *
Everyone will create their own way.
There are paths until it is discerned.

* * * *
The world is fortunate
Not to know your true rage
At the injustice, the unfairness,
The inequity in every realm.

* * * *
Moralists hold no real sway.

* * * *
If you are truly born again,
Then you are a light unto the world.

* * * *
As long as you pretend your identity,
You are subject to forgetting the realization,
To falling back into the suffering of consciousness.
Complete detachment is not easily discerned.

* * * *
Even if you had the most fantasized partner
This dreamy mayic world could manifest,
You would still be very much alone.

* * * *
Sometimes you will be embarrassed
To admit your god-nature.
It is a game of hide-and-seek.

* * * *
To comprehend the barrenness
Of even one mythological set
Is to comprehend them all.

* * * *
Everyone is searching everywhere
For happiness, fulfillment and contentment,
Yet finding only dead-end paths in the manifest maze.

* * * *
Shatter all sense of identity
But that essential beingness,
Of which totality ever is.

* * * *
How we play into each other's vanity.

* * * *
The answer to hell is silent stillness.

* * * *
The role you play in the world
Is dependent upon your attachment to it.

* * * *
What a role the instincts play in this drama.

* * * *
Maya, Lucifer, call it what you will,
Will tempt you until unity's dawning.

* * * *
Surrender to the ultimate longing.

* * * *
So many trying so hard to be
What they are not and never will be.

* * * *
You can tell the veterans.

* * * *
It is difficult to be courageous
As long as you seek any approval.

* * * *
The kingdom of heaven is at hand within.
It is the serene awareness of nowness,
The quality of infinite consciousness
Prior to time-bound consciousness.

* * * *
Heaven,
Make it happen now
If you yearn it so.

* * * *
Hell is the gap between what you are
And what you vainly believe you are.

* * * *
How enthralled we are with the masks and costumes.

* * * *
Now that you know hell more than well,
The challenge is to divine that which is heaven.

* * * *
Do not get too wrapped up in your own words.
They change as soon as they are thought or spoken.

* * * *
Godness is no lover of personalities.

* * * *
Imagine if you were a rabbit, rat or raccoon,
How you would be chasing the other sex for a little action.
The patterning of any given life form is really no different from your own.

* * * *
The meek will settle for hell.

* * * *
All the personal wants and fears
With which you continue to grapple
Prove the arduousness of pathlessness.

* * * *
At some point in this time-bound play,
The vehicle to which you are so attached,
Will be a dusty treat for one beast or another.
Even  tombs buckle to eternity's infinite patience.

* * * *
The limitations of any groupthink
Inevitably muddles the eternal quest.
Dogmatic thinking does not harvest truth.

* * * *
Even in a room full of noise
There is the silence within.

* * * *
The universe is chilled to perfection.

* * * *
You are the witness, the eternal clayness,
Impartial to every form creation imagines.

* * * *
Castes operate in every group because participants
Accept that superiority and inferiority really exist.

* * * *
On a diamond, all facets are equal.
You are the nexus through which
Your manifest facet is witnessed.

* * * *
Pierce all the veils concepts weave
Until you discover the oblivion
From whence all are born.

* * * *
Taken wrongly, thoughts such as these
Can lead down many vain, painful paths.

* * * *
To compete with god is a journey
Into which many angels have fallen .

* * * *
What is there for you as witness to do
When spontaneity does it all for you?

* * * *
Entertain no doubts that you are the one.

* * * *
In those quiet moments
When you are backstage alone,
Do you ever remove the mask within?

* * * *
These writings are a play of words
About a space words can never go.

* * * *
Every mythological explanation ever concocted,
Including any herein written, is but idle speculation.

* * * *
Your aloneness is a unavoidable manifest fact,
One discernible in the human psyche
Through every point in history.
Its reconciliation is your eternal salvation.

* * * *
You can capture perceptions in memory,
But you can never even for a flickering moment
Put a brake on time's ceaseless passing.
How vain to even make an attempt.

* * * *
If you discern time does not really exist,
What can be either new or old?

* * * *
Do you occasionally punch the pause button
On that video recording playing your mind?

* * * *
You are godness but every concept formulated about you
Has ever been meaningless and fated to create only confusion
In minds capable only of blindly stumbling through duality's weavings.

* * * *
The manifest world convinces you
That you cannot be complete without it,
Yet its very nature is what prohibits your reunion.

* * * *
All your life you have been experiencing the eternal
Disguised by the hypnotizing illusion of time and space.

* * * *
To what end, all your self-absorbed calculations?

* * * *
Awaken to the giant within.
Embark now for heaven's way,
No, not in some far off distant place,
But here and now, neither time and space.

* * * *
Mother Nature does not take kindly to her domestication.

* * * *
You are a spy in hell.

* * * *
If you are seeking comfort and safety,
Then truth is probably not the answer.

* * * *
Your identity is the fabric of your own imagination.

* * * *
The desire of your many expectations and hopes
Create only sorrow, anger, frustration, failure and guilt,
The passionate suffering of existence apparent to all who see.

* * * *
You will not see far if you cannot say no.

* * * *
Where exactly does your face end
And the universe begin?

* * * *
The delusional mind is so easily distracted by gossip,
So willingly eager to chatter about anything and everything
In its avoidance of the timelessly silent aloneness within.

* * * *
The drop strikes the pond, ripples, and disappears.

* * * *
Look at your hands.
Watch how they change through time,
But how the awareness of them ever seems the same.

* * * *
An individual life?
Is there really any such animal?

* * * *
Whether under tree or by river,
On mountaintop or desert wilderness,
Whether in ashram or coffee shop,
Or merely out for a long swim or walk,
It is the quality of your freely willed attention
Which merges into the true aloneness.

* * * *
The subtlety of reality's unknowable presence
Is before, between, beyond, within and without all wordplay.

* * * *
What good are idealistic words
If you will not live them?

* * * *
The meek discern only the myriad forms.
They are bound to the manifest realm by their senses
Until that unitary moment when inner vision opens to the eternal way.

* * * *
As noble as it is to wish and work
For a peaceful, co-existent, loving world,
It seems unlikely the world can ever really change
Unless everyone somehow tunes into the eternal picture.

* * * *
How ironic that the diversity which shaped the human psyche
Now pays such a harsh price for our insatiable consumption.

* * * *
We are all just faces in each other's dreams.

* * * *
Hell is without
Until heaven is discerned within.

* * * *
Godness is one big cannibal.

* * * *
Anything is possible, everything probable.

* * * *
If you think human beings
And the countless other life forms
On this garden planet already suffer dearly,
Put on your seatbelt, baby, we ain't seen nothing yet.

* * * *
A pile of dung is as much a mystery
As you will ever be.

* * * *
No storyline holds up forever.

* * * *
What delusion to believe any form superior to another.

* * * *
In finite form your true nature is sheathed,
Your godness dimmed by a manifest encasement.
It is difficult to discern you are already home.

* * * *
Attachment and pride formed over any spiritual path
Is a vain false trail sure only of a dead ending.

* * * *
Whether you live once or times beyond counting,
You must still traverse every now allotted in time.

* * * *
It is the attachment to the meaning of the words
That gives them power, not the sounds.

* * * *
Regarding the unfolding human drama,
After its end is the same as before its beginning.
So what entices you to continue witnessing the play?

* * * *
Those who avoid hell, seeking god and heaven
Are mesmerized by the eternal light show.

* * * *
If the all you seek is god,
That is all you will find.

* * * *
Is not the fact that you are here proof enough?

* * * *
To get home you must somehow cross
The river of mortality without drowning.

* * * *
Do you really think this has been your life?
Only in the highest sense.

* * * *
If Jesus really did say you must hate your parents,
He probably meant get away from their unweaning grip.

* * * *
What on earth is worth depriving yourself a full breath?

* * * *
And who is me, and who is not me,
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

* * * *
The only real difference between you and any given infant
Is that the infant’s mind is not yet clouded
By all the make-believe.


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