Chapter 31 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)


XXXI

Through the senses you experience a manifest dream,
Which you may, at any point in time, choose to wake up to.

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If you were really free, why would you be reading this?

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How seriously you take the lies the senses weave.

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So indescribable what you really are.

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Learn what it is to unlearn.

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Will is merely the shallow surface
Camouflaging the unfathomable depths
Of the totality you have ever been,
The totality you will ever be.

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Violence is a tsunami, peace its counterpoint.
Both playing out their time in the same pond.

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Aggrandizement of individual identity
Has created an ego-ridden calamity.

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What is sexual gratification but mutual masturbation
Surrounded with a thick coating of romantic reverie?

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The ultimate fate of this garden world,
Of this entire universe, and of any creation,
Is complete, absolute, unmitigated annihilation.
So why be burdened by a temporary, surreal dream
You can never more than superficially change?

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What burdens each of us harness upon ourselves.

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We have been domesticated by our civilized cravings.

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As to space-time, when was it, and when was it not?

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If you had all the power of totality,
What would you possibly need to do?

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Merely gratifying the body
Does nothing for the soul.

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Be without attributes.

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Acknowledge all potentials.

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Life may not be fair and just,
But death is the irreverent equalizer.

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Go where no word has ever, will ever, can ever go.

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The sugar-coated storytelling
Of one religious mythos or another
Is no longer required by those who see.

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Love is an easy thing to conjure on the mountain,
But its reality in daily living is a little more arduous.

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How much of this world is immobilized
By the countless harsh injustices
We burden one another with.

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Love is not a glandular action.

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Though these many words
May seem abstract and intellectual,
What they point to is not at all.

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What is there to become
When you already are?

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It is the beingness of the highest order.

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Imagine a newborn of any seed
Absolute innocence groping
In undiscerning awareness.

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Worshiping the remnants of the dead.
How infantile.
Death is.
Get over it.

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Do not equate love
With emotion or passion.
What it really is would toast you
Like lightning would a marshmallow

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Real relationship allows sovereignty.
It is open to process, non-interference.

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Before the imprinting took root,
What bliss there must have been.

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What makes you think anyone's path
Is really that much different than your own?

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Trying to "fix" everyone is futile.

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What there is to see cannot be seen.
By those whose only view
Is through the senses.

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To be unburdened
Discern and accept your death.

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Your concepts about it
Are all vain and useless.

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Those senses lighting your mind
Have convinced you, have tricked you
That this virtual reality is real.
How easy it was.

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There is nothing to grasp,
Nothing that cannot be grasped.

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Give in till you puke,
Or abstain until you blow a fuse.
It makes no difference.

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When that valuable vase
Leaves the mantle for the floor,
The most arduous trick is to have let it go
Long before it journeyed into your possession.

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Trying to capture this
Is like clutching the wind
On a deathly still day.

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It is much more, yet so much less
Than you can ever imagine.

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Ego dissolves but the sugar remains.

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You are that which has created all this.

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Seers of the universal mind come and go,
Attempting to explain in every manner imaginable
A vision of the unseen that can never really be explained.

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Can you feel in your body
All the angst your mind has fabricated?

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The differences between all duality are merely concepts.

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Look beyond god into your own eye.

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Give no thought where there can be none.

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Your idols are concepts,
Images holding you back
From that for which you long.

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Until you truly see that it was you who thought it,
How can you be held in any way responsible
For what anyone else does, thinks, or says?

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You may believe that you are not where you ought to be,
But in reality you are playing your role in absolute perfection.

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If your life was to end in a few minutes,
Would you greet it with panic or equanimity?
With fear or courage?  With resistance or surrender?
With regret or contentment?

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First your environment programs you,
Then, like any software program.
You just keep on doing
Whatever you do.
Free will?
Hah!

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Can you stop looking at god as an imagined concept,
And instead discern its immaculate presence
Within every particle of your being?

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Dust your mind.

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Personality cults get entangled
In their idolatry of vain mortal attributes.

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How often desire is cloaked by the word love,
For ends which have little to do with its real nature.

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You will have the power you need
To do whatever it is you are doing here.

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Neither up nor down,
Right nor left,
In nor out,
Over nor under,
Behind nor in front,
Forward nor backward,
Around nor through,
With nor without,
You are.

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It is real and unreal,
Neither real nor unreal,
Born of the same nowness.

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Get past your doubting fears.
It is the temporal game of identity
Locked in mayic proportion.

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Practice detachment until you see
Dispassion your most real nature.

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The nobility of eternal nature abides within even
The greatest torment, confusion, and squalor.

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What some call original sin
Might be better termed
Original separation.

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What does faith have to do with it?

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The god you pray to is the one you create,
A concoction of your own vain limitations.

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All pain is the result of clinging to false identity,
A persona, a limiting finite set of thought patterns.

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Despite the undeniable, irrefutable reality
That they are born of the same indivisible nature,
No two individuals will ever witness the same universe.

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Eternal salvation require eternal volition.

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You are a fallen angel
With a return ticket to godness
Anytime you choose.

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You will do what you need to do
Until you need to no longer.

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The dissolution of ego
Leaves only what it has ever been.

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Clinging to any dualistic notions
Is a hellish fate of your own choosing.

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What so many call love
Is really only the draining suffocation
Of personal need.

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Any body, any form is like the protective chaff of grain
Which eventually falls away to reveal the hardy kernel.

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This quest is not a game of chance, it is not a gamble.
Approaching it as one, hedging your bets, you lose.

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The journey you are on
Ends only when you see it never began,
And never ends.

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There is nothing you can do or need do
To prove that you are the proof.

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Are god and devil truly eternal chess players vying for human souls?
Or merely the vain concoctions of those unable, unwilling
To come to grips with the truth of all origins?

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The tyranny of thought in any guise
Must be discerned for what it is
If you are ever to be free.

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How arduous it is to see
That no form is real but for time.

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How surreal the passing of time.

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Passion is the road to hell,
Dispassion the key to heaven.

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Why die a prisoner of a limited mind?

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A relationship without mutual sovereignty
Is a hellish exercise in conscious suffering.

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Your fear of physical death is correlated
To your clinging to the lies senses weave.

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All your groveling to god will mean nothing
Until you realize its eternal nature is within.

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Will manifest existence ever reconcile with itself?
Not without you.

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Ignorance is given, wisdom earned.

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Your eternal nature will faithfully match
All the longing you will ever muster.

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Nothing temporal can ever leave you complete.

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Your resistance to totality is futile.
It is impossible to be alienated
From your real nature forever.

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You can never go back,
And forward traverses
The chasm of nowness.

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Judgment is denial
Of that portion of the illusion.

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All outcomes are written in time.

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No one has ever started a new religion,
Just new collusions, new dogmas.

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Even the blackest sheep can find the way home.

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Between the personal and the impersonal,
There is the finest, sharpest, most indefinable edge,
A narrow, cutting tightrope which takes great balance to tread.

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Every manifest form, whether alive or inert,
Operates on its own relative baseline of consciousness,
Yet all have the same essential origin,
And thus the same end.

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Until you can see the interconnected nature of all that is,
You will abide in suffering, pain, doubt and anger.

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All psychological dependency,
No matter the pretense asserted,
Is ever an agent of suffering.

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The same essence playing out in every form,
Some awakening, quickly or slowly, to the grand view,
But most dozing through their existence,
Oblivious to the infinite array.


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