Chapter 37 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)


XXXVII

How challenging it is to surrender
The noise of consciousness
To its silent origin.

* * * *
The personality is like a filter
Shading the camera’s view,
But only until its removal.

* * * *
Karma is simply ripples coming back at you.

* * * *
What do angels have over you?
Nothing.

* * * *
The ending of desire washes away all fear.

* * * *
How senseless it all truly is.

* * * *
You see a face in the mirror,
But are those eyes staring back really you?

* * * *
The devil pays many dues
For all his false gold.

* * * *
Most people in this conflict-ridden world
Would be content to have a quiet, simple life.
A relatively small handful make that very difficult.

* * * *
It is very challenging for humanity
To extend its cooperative efforts
Beyond the simplicity of concepts,
Symbols, rituals and sundry traditions.

* * * *
We are all wandering the same mountain.

* * * *
Always question why and where
Someone wants to lead you.

* * * *
Loyalty to the human predicament,
To consciousness, whatever the form,
Erodes as you see it sliding through hell,
Pretty much at an accelerating rate.

* * * *
I came, I saw, I shrugged my shoulders,
And I drifted away.

* * * *
What are you in the world
But a temporal frame of reference,
A brief reckoning upon which your version
Of the universe rises and sets in eternity’s light show.

* * * *
What a lot of senseless chatter
We all have in our heads.

* * * *
In reality you are the forever beyond time.

* * * *
The discontented unhappy races have despoiled
Those whose contentment nettled their fear.

* * * *
All creatures great and small
Participate in this dreamy play of consciousness
In whatever fashion spontaneous evolution is taking them.
Our current narrowing approach to all other life
Is wreaking havoc on manifest diversity.
We shape out own fate in the way
We choose to shape others.

* * * *
Your individual personality
Is a one-shot affair in consciousness.
Look around to see a handful of your other lifetimes.

* * * *
The time we measure in so many ways
Is founded upon the cycles of manifestation,
Not upon the eternal nowness of its source.

* * * *
You deal with any future in the nowness.
Passion is a product of time.

* * * *
So little needs be said.
It is your fear of aloneness,
Your fear of not being,
Which births so much chatter.

* * * *
The game you are really playing
Is with your Self.

* * * *
Before you seek solutions,
Find out who creates the problems.

* * * *
Neither better nor worse,
All diversity is truly the same.

* * * *
All gain, all loss, is imagined.

* * * *
Whoever you are,
Whatever you are,
Wherever you are,
However you are,
Whenever you are,
In whatever way you are,
You will always be the only you,
You truly are.

* * * *
All the opinions in the world add up to diddly-squat, zilch.
These ones included.

* * * *
You have filled you head with a great deal of useless data
Which keeps your mind too noisy to discern how still it really is.

* * * *
As long as the myriad voices rule you thoughts,
Your continued suffering is assured.

* * * *
Freedom is the unattached unbound stillness
Of the undifferentiated unknowing awareness.

* * * *
Be gentle with the body.
It so easily suffers in so many ways
For its many mortal flaws.

* * * *
The forests fill our bookstores and libraries
As we vainly fill our ceaselessly ravenous minds
With the knowledge founded upon manifest existence.
But to what end, always an open-wound question.

* * * *
Love is a world with so many vain contexts.
Probably best not to use it overly much.

* * * *
You will never attain godness
If you do not see the many myriad forms,
No matter the innumerable reflections,
Are also of the same ultimate nature
As you.

* * * *
Witnessing is not an evangelical matter.
That is the twisting of those caught
In persuasion-bound idolatry.

* * * *
Freedom is not something bought or sold.

* * * *
Do not believe even for a moment
That your true nature is subject to your vain opinions.

* * * *
Your consciousness will be drawn
To the fate your desires wills into manifestation.
To what end, you as witness will have neither say nor concern.

* * * *
It looks real, sounds real, smells real,
But is it, has it every been, will it ever be?

* * * *
Where will you be
When you stop reincarnating?

* * * *
Your ideas about it
Have nothing to do
With the reality of it.

* * * *
Most cling to life.
The seer releases death.

* * * *
Pretending you know anything
Is perhaps the most enticing delusion
This time bound theater offers.

* * * *
By what right does anyone have anything to judge
Regarding how another views the world?

* * * *
You are the flowering of manifest consciousness
Born into a world traversing intense joy and suffering.

* * * *
If you believe you are not susceptible to the will of the herd,
You are either free or not watching your mind very closely.

* * * *
Though you attempt over and over again to grasp it,
It only laughs like the wind at your vanity.

* * * *
There is no one to follow, no way you can follow.
Most attempts evolve into one form of idolatry or another.

* * * *
Despite its myriad diverse forms,
It is the same for as far as you can see.

* * * *
Bet on the cockroaches.
You will not collect,
But at least you will win.

* * * *
Integrity is hard-won.

* * * *
We are monkeys born in hell.

* * * *
Manifestation will rise and fall
As long as the ocean is.
Life is a curious witnessing,
A generational rolling and crashing
Few minds only briefly comprehend.

* * * *
Why should we expect to continue
If this is the best we can do?
Godness favors balance
And that requires a certain humility
By the form concerned.

* * * *
Any illusory personal immortality is manifest
Solely through the continuity of your seed,
An ephemeral fact at best, as all genetic lines
Must eventually extinguish into eternity’s oblivion.

* * * *
You cannot retain your form
Any more than any other seed can.
Only your true nature, the oneness of the isness
Born of nowness is eternally immortal.

* * * *
There is the personal nature
And the impersonal nature.
The former is the one you think you are.

* * * *
Our misuse of the mind
Denies us the quiet serenity
Of spontaneous natural living.

* * * *
Mastery is realizing fully
How little you really know.

* * * *
There is a tendency to think of eternity
As something involving time as we know it,
But its foreverness is only the trick of the mind
Caught in its own web of imagined continuity.

* * * *
What is there to continue but the play of the senses.

* * * *
Nothing is offered freely here.

* * * *
You would probably laugh
If a strain of  bacteria in a petri dish
Thought their jelly world was the core of all.
Is your sensory frame of reference
Really that different?

* * * *
Those who survive the exponential advent of technology
May well look back to this time and find it difficult
Not to shake their heads often at our
Utter disregard for their time.

* * * *
Most cling to the ignorance and superstition of the ancients
Because they lack the desire, insight and courage
To discern the greatest inner vision.

* * * *
Find the balance or you will be an insect
For the rest of Eden’s manifest play.

* * * *
To plot revenge upon the grandson
Of a man your grandfather hated,
To cling to the ceaseless petty grudges,
Blood feuds and vicious wars of our ancestors
Is such limited fair of this potential feast.
Will you ever see your true nature
And participate in this garden
As godness manifest?

* * * *
Those who seek me shall find me
In many forms, in many places.
And the most sincere will become vessels
In which I, too, shall flower into heaven on earth.

* * * *
Right action is unprincipled integrity
Which each must discern alone.

* * * *
When decisions are made
Solely on the basis on imagery,
The foundation and function disintegrates.

* * * *
Release the memories,
Release the projections.
Your destiny is now.

* * * *
The immortality of any seed
Resides in its essential nature,
Not its blueprint patterning.

* * * *
Taking life seriously generally means
Taking yourself and your interests too seriously.
And so many others doing the same.

* * * *
You will be washed back into oblivion
As a spent wave is drawn back to the sea.
But the patterning ceaselessly sends
New waves upon the infinite shore
That illusion play out its eternal dance
Of manifest hide-and-seek in time and space.

* * * *
Put aside everything you have been told or imagined.
That clarity is you.

* * * *
What would your universe have been like
If no other had convinced you that there
Was something else for you to become.

* * * *
Are serenity and joy beyond imagination,
Or what?

* * * *
If you truly want to create heaven on earth,
You must destroy yourself without harming the vehicle.

* * * *
It really is not you in a personal sense
Who is making any of this happen.

* * * *
Every form is a receiver,
But few are truly clear about
Just what it is they are receiving.

* * * *
Between the personal and impersonal
There is an imperceptible veil.

* * * *
We are diversity playing roles defined
By that which we have no answer to.

* * * *
There is an all but infinite lightshow play,
But no where else, really, to go.

* * * *
You are eternally alone.
How aware you are of your aloneness
Depends on how still and observant you can be
At that point where the tire meets the road.

* * * *
Regarding death,
How can something leave
When what they are has always been?
Your are the indivisible Soul, not an individual soul.

* * * *
Why fear any deity when you are that
Which you have in imagination created?

* * * *
All your life, your mind-body cravings
Have been manipulated by your culture,
Often with complete and utter lack of respect
For your sovereign right to flower as only you can.

* * * *
Discern the silence of sound,
The blandness of taste,
The blindness of sight,
The numbness of touch,
The odorlessness of smell.

* * * *
At some point of realization in your awakening,
No one has any sway over your mind
But those you allow entry.
The Soul cannot die,
But the mind can be pierced
Again and again in ten thousand ways.


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