Chapter 70 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)


LXX

Respecting your opponent confounds them.

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Ah, garden paradise, you never were.

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Time keeps on slipping, slipping, into the future.

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You are bound by no parameter
But those you devise.

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To be free of time you must be eternal.

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Do you listen to your own advice?

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What difference, really, between the violence
Of an alleyway or that of a battlefield?
Behind each is the stain of desire
And a willingness to take,
Whatever the cost.

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The holographic universe is the truest flag.

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Truth is a dusty concept.

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Love is what you choose it to be.

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Peace is prior to the passionate vagaries of consciousness.

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Death is merely another version of where you’ve been all along.
Change the mask and dimension however you will,
It is ever very much the same.

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Those who might be much more adept at wise leadership
Seldom lead because they draw so little attention,
And have so little inclination to be followed.

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Some people just don’t realize
Their shit smells just like everyone else’s.

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Thought is the surfer of time,
But only through volitional release
To the awareness from which it is birthed,
Can the oneness of all creation be perceived.

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There’s no place else to be.
It’s okay to be right here, right now.
You’ll probably be there, then, soon enough.

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Who is innocent?  Who is not?

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You’re just the same as they are.

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What’s to grok?

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When have you ever really change anybody?
Why get frustrated about it?

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What the world needs now
Is a good forty-day, forty-night cry.

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The so-called master, the adept, is merely one
Who has traversed through enough life
To understand how things work.

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What will humanity do when it has decimated the diversity
So thoroughly that its own survival hangs in the balance?

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In the harshness of a Darwinian world,
What life form can survive for long
If inadequacy is its mainstay?

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So many craving the continuity of their seed
At the expense of so many others equally divine.

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And the answer to your solution is …

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Ease into each breath.
Emancipate the many burdens
To which you confine your imagination.

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Eternal life is not bound
By the play of mortality.

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Tomorrow will be now, too.

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How well do you know the devil in yourself?

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How simple life is one you cease judging any other
As anything but another reflection of your Self.

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Once you see the mystery of your own breath,
You become much less concerned
How the world spends it.

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So many so entrapped by their spiritual mumbo-jumbo
That they cannot or will not, even for a moment,
Fathom how irrational they appear.

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What metering can there be without a meter to measure?

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Don’t know when it will collapse,
But it cannot continue like this forever.

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We know each other through our respective movement.

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In any process, one must learn
To recognize a point of conclusion.

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Pain and pleasure are both the same mirror.

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What are you missing out on now?

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Seems you have to become famous or die
Before some people finally listen to you.

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There is the way this world is
And the way the world could be.
Don’t torture yourself in the big gap.

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Each of us have no choice
But to fabricate the role
We habituate in time.

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The delusion that our capability
To form great cosmopolitan groupings
Has somehow made us civilized
Is both farcical and pathetic.

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Revenge allows no conclusion.

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If it weren’t for sexuality, for that genetic mutation,
Would men and women have much in common?

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Do you really think godness
Isolated any form from its genesis?
The receiver is equally within all creation.
Turn it on, call home, be home.

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An equation grasping at infinity
Would be so hugely simple
As to be unnecessary.

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How incredibly picky some people are.

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Some people can be so intelligent, so aware,
Yet so naive all the while.

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The equation is always equal.

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So much to remember to forget
To remember to forget.

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Creating a god sure gives comfortable rationalizations
For all our superfluous, inane reasonings and actions.

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Set aside your pride, your self-absorption
Long enough to listen completely.

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Such a wide range of thoughts.
To what end only time will unveil.

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Rarely does anything need to be a case of all or none.

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You imagined that you had something to teach,
That you could, perhaps, impart something credible.
Obviously one of your more inane delusions.

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That you expect life should or could
Offer you any more is a great apparition.
Mortal fare will ever be mortal fare.

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What another thinks of you,
Or whether they think of you at all,
Is their own affair.

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So many lives just in this one.
What need would you have for more?

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Religion is organized by ignorance
Seeking something to know.

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Through years of inconsideration,
Some learn not to be.

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So many lessons of history
Fall upon deaf ears.

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Karma is the inevitable outcome of choices.
It is a dualistic notion binding only those
Who endlessly concern themselves
With so many illusory realities.

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To what degree you wake up
Is your own affair.

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Is any version of history
More than rumor or conjecture?

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Even a large potato seems small when you’re hungry.

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A cynical view:  Weddings and funerals are about the same.
In one you’re dead, and in the other one foot is stepping into the grave.

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Language fabricates the duality,
The departure from Eden in its midst.

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Why capitalize god?

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What other creature on this planet
Needs to create purpose and meaning?

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The point is,
What point need there be?

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Gaze into the drop, you see the ocean.
Gaze at the ocean, you the drop.
One, one, one, all one.

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All conflict the curse of pride
Born of conscious separation.

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What a difference between instinct and so-called free will.

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There is nothing which must be,
Nor anything which should not be.
All is as it is.  Ever the same
In so very many ways.

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Avalanches begin even with a whisper.

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Attachment is so pervasive.

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We will never agree on everything.
Even among seers, there will be conflicts of opinion.
How they are resolved is another matter.

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When you no longer identify with any concept born of time,
You become aware that the “what is” already fills the cavern.

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So many babbling so many romantic views.

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Death always get the last laugh.

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One is born every minute, and god, the devil,
Pulls the wool over each and every one.

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You cannot pretend to exist a vacuum, so poof!
Creation, evolution, consciousness, history.
And here you are to explore the mystery of it all.

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As enticing as pleasure may be,
Its good practice in the disciplinary menu
To be able to say and mean no at times.

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Carrying a lot of religious gibberish in your head
Does not make you any more spiritual,
Just vain in another way.

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Strategic and tactical thinking
Depends greatly on the technology available.

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The worship of money, of false value,
Will play itself out in every conceivable fashion,
A blind monster to which we all contribute.

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Through the years, how many meanings, how many purposes
How many Quixotic adventures has your consciousness forged?

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Examine every reflection in as many ways as possible.
That way you may figure out what’s really being said.

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Would you concern yourself with what any other creature
Besides a human being thinks of you?
Why is that?

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And it ain’t done yet.

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Freedom is an attentive mind clear of time.

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Life is full of opportunities for excess and discipline.
Each has a calling and must reckon a journey
Which has only one real accounting.

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Time is the hell of it.

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Must we, like locusts, destroy every bit of diversity
In our greedy, passionate frenzy to survive?

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So many mourn their losses
Rather than care for what is left.

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Before you have children, ask yourself
If you would want to return another time.

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Such vast, intangible wealth in this very brief sojourn.

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Eternity won’t let you keep or take credit for anything.

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No fraction stands separate.

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The universe courses through your veins.

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All destinations are imagined.

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A capsule summary of the human condition
Might be:  We have out-manipulated ourselves.

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To not believe anything,
What is That about?

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Concepts create the dream.

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Any given garden
Is governed by many forces,
But no tree prunes itself.

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Sometimes great,
Sometimes small.
Foolish and wise,
Violence at peace,
Cruel yet often kind,
Attached to detachment.
The river is every field.

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Fascinating how many seem to consider
Having children a competition between beliefs.

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These reflections are for the remote possibility
That a larger view will someday be more important
Than this incessant quest for comfort and entertainment.


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