Chapter 74 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)


LXXIV

The eternal optimist is the one inured to death’s way.

* * * *
All suffering is identification with the unreal,
The ghostlike, time-bound illusion of all forms,
With the many inventions of all consciousness.

* * * *
We’ve got a pile of work ahead
To straighten out this fine mess.

* * * *
Do you really expect you can prevent people
From using drugs to drown their sorrow
When they have been systemized
Upon a doctrine of win-lose?

* * * *
Have you got it, yet?

* * * *
The universe,
The song of god
The realization of Self,
The source of eternal oneness.
You are That I Am.

* * * *
The instant, free of time, expects nothing.
Nothing, offering nothing, is nothing
But what imagination imagines.

* * * *
What need for the forever of time
Once the forever of now is discerned.

* * * *
There is no way you can really be lost.

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Sometimes you get so much time, you haven’t any.

* * * *
There is no path but that which is aimlessly wandered.

* * * *
Courage requires a certain detachment.

* * * *
Every tool has its time.

* * * *
If you understood what there is to be understood,
You would not be concerned about other lives.

* * * *
Hold your mind still and you will find the peace you seek.

* * * *
That some awaken, others must sleep.

* * * *
Some are allowed to live
Because is will take every lifetime
They can muster to get their act together.

* * * *
Go with god and get the hell out.

* * * *
Time seeks that which time can never know.
How typical to want most what you cannot have.

* * * *
How often do you take on
The conduct and characteristics
Of those you most resent and detest?
That’s karma, pure and simple.

* * * *
Amazing how mutative randomness
Carries one through the learning curve of life.
What coincidences are there, really?

* * * *
You are all that is remembered, all that is forgotten,
All that is known, and all which can never be.

* * * *
No matter the manifestation,
Godness cannot realize its Self
But through the reflections
Of imperfect refractions.

* * * *
All this watching is just another pattern, another habit.

* * * *
Loneliness is the denial of aloneness.

* * * *
You may not agree with everything written here,
But at least it will make you think about these things.
And you may well never see your world the same again.

* * * *
A current issue of the same vein
So many have wandered before.

* * * *
Can it ever cease to astonish anyone
How much diversity abides in this creation?
The incalculable innovations of light and sound
To which imagination seemingly sets no constraints.

* * * *
You are far from the first to bemoan the idiocy of our species.

* * * *
You wail about your fate,
Yet pity offers no reprieve
From a fate etched in dust.

* * * *
To have heard another’s story,
To have imagined a different role,
Is in a sense to have lived that part.

* * * *
Most personality roles are most likely too unappetizing
For anyone else to even remotely desire playing.
Who else would you really aspire to play?
And would your context allow it?

* * * *
What pain we create for each other.

* * * *
If you take it all personal,
You will endure great pain.

* * * *
What bluffs we play upon our world.

* * * *
How much can you get for the least investment
A common refrain.

* * * *
What adventure does the mystery beckon you next?

* * * *
A certain amount of self-restraint is good discipline
For a steady, balanced, moderate tack in any life.

* * * *
Let them think what they will.

* * * *
Let your loneliness go so deep
The you hit rock bottom
And discover its vast reality.

* * * *
A true king should occasionally
Wear rags and wander anonymously
Among the masses to understand
How he may better lead them.

* * * *
Is this all happening in the instant of  blink,
Or a blink of an instant?
Too incredible for words to do more than tell.

* * * *
They sit in their paltry, isolated, stuccoed boxes
With the ringers on, hoping against hope
That even a sales call will interrupt
The tedium of their loneliness.

* * * *
The urgency of survival sometimes dictates
How quickly hesitation must be set aside.

* * * *
The scribe has been fortunate
To have never  been in a real battle
In his life up to this point in time.
But the day is still young.

* * * *
You can never anticipate
When or where a krishna will show up.

* * * *
If you want to pay for something that’s free,
Go right ahead.

* * * *
All must someday pay the price,
Individually and collectively
For our stubborn pride.

* * * *
A biological, chemical, electrical, nuclear paradigm.

* * * *
One’s one no matter how you pick it apart.

* * * *
Death stalks all.
Immortality cannot die.

* * * *
Prey or predator,
One the other when circles close.

* * * *
Banish that attachment
With a blast of inhalation,
A wave of ocean to simplify
The ceaseless complications
Of conscious, time-bound design.

* * * *
It comes, it goes.
Why oh why, only fools know.

* * * *
Let’s put it this way.
We won’t be missed.

* * * *
You have always been in love,
In essence, in substance, in reality,
Whatever you condescend to baptize it..

* * * *
Some things just don’t add up.

* * * *
Do you really believe there is somewhere else you can be?
It’s all a big light and sound show no matter how you see it.

* * * *
You’re wired to be you.

* * * *
In certain things courageous,
In others nearly petrified with fear.
Craving, craving, craving all the while.

* * * *
You destroy without hesitation that which you consider ugly,
Yet lament the ruin of some romantic, illusory notion.

* * * *
Everything is used to projected ends.

* * * *
Am I supposed to applaud?

* * * *
For what it’s worth to the theater,
This is the scribe’s contribution.

* * * *
Are you supposed to applaud?

* * * *
All conceptual overlays reside on quicksand.

* * * *
The rich, famous and powerful
Didn’t get it by giving it away.

* * * *
There are some lives better never born.

* * * *
Why is it so many human beings
Only seem to value human life?

* * * *
Do you really have any use
For a god who would create all this?

* * * *
To see a larger picture
You must sometimes become blind to
Or tear apart the smaller ones.

* * * *
What others think of you
Often has much to do with
How you will survive.

* * * *
Do you really love another?

* * * *
Mother nature fabricates every possibility
At every level of her earthly crap table.
The human reverie is but one permutation.
Nothing is sacred for any duration but the source.

* * * *
What a subtle corruption of the soul
Our dependency on any other
For one value or another.

* * * *
Do what you do for love of godness,
Not for apprehension of retribution.

* * * *
Enlightenment is not a marketable commodity.
It is the one inalienable birthright all have in common.
It is the journey of all life no matter the shroud of ignorance.

* * * *
The scribe is here to remind you
Of your place on earth and in heaven,
Of that which you already know.

* * * *
The you in limited form cannot know it all.

* * * *
You can neither go back nor forward in time.
You are stuck in the now, ever absolute and eternal.
Only in the imagination of consciousness can you travel time.

* * * *
More megalomaniac rantings from a vitriolic curmudgeon.

* * * *
Everyone viewing any portion  of the whole sees it
Through the screen of their nature-nurture circuitry.

* * * *
Language is the fragmentation,
And its potential for reunification.

* * * *
You are That I Am.
All else is conjecture, speculation, idealism,
Consciousness endlessly deluding itself in every sort of imaginative flair.

* * * *
So many projecting some other side.
But what of the other side’s other sides,
And all dwelling beyond the next beyond?
Ah, duality creates so many diverse horizons
To cast its measuring visions so limited in scope.

* * * *
Is a cloud any more ephemeral than you?

* * * *
Osmosis is the power of real revolution.

* * * *
Why concern yourself endlessly
With the blather of consciousness?

* * * *
Not knowing has the tingle of absoluteness.

* * * *
The you is me,
The me, myself and I
That I Am.

* * * *
I am your witness and you are mine.

* * * *
Negotiating the maze of time and space
Can be incredibly arduous.

* * * *
Casting out demons is another form of psychotherapy.

* * * *
B. F. D.

* * * *
Peter Pan will live forever, Wendy.

* * * *
This is the gospel according to Michael.
Silly as it is.

* * * *
May the curse of your parents, your ancestors, fail in every way.
May your fate, your lot, your destiny, your kismet,
Be better than it now appears.

* * * *
How easily leaders around the world
Use your desire for martyrdom
To their own futile ends.

* * * *
Why not be courageous?

* * * *
Best intentions are often overridden by harsher realities.

* * * *
So arduous to recall the inward reality in the day to day of living.

* * * *
Are you bounty or cull in the harvest of imagination?
Will you be in or out in the great tabulation of speculation?
Will your fate be a greater heaven or a more irate hell?
Ah, the never-ending quest for a better ending.

* * * *
May as well forgive them if you can,
Because the patterning of time and space
Blind them, bind them, to the dream they play out.
We are all walking the same stage in different universes.

* * * *
Are vested interests, established patterns
Ever changed or eliminated voluntarily?

* * * *
These reflections are the outcome of participating
In as many ways as one frail body would allow.
Is anyone else really doing it any differently?

* * * *
In the face of over population’s horror,
They breed even more adamantly.


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