II
You have been filled to the brim with countless vain distractions
That are ultimately nothing more than deceptions formed of sensory illusion.
Attributes spun of random, arbitrary, evolutionary happenstance,
Nothing more than nothingness playing its Self real.
* * * *
All manifestation in consciousness is devised by you and you alone.
Explore anything and everything; discover the absoluteness in all.
* * * *
There are many ways to rediscover your original state.
The basic ingredients are doubt and discrimination.
* * * *
In the process of discovering the source,
You learn to yield to the path of least resistance.
It is really nothing more than child's play.
* * * *
Values, ethics, morality, good and evil,
Are all fabrications born of limited thinking,
Bondage without anchor in the unseen reality.
* * * *
The eternal quest for understanding,
For emancipation from that which is known,
Is a convoluted, subtle, puzzling, chess-like maze,
A timeless game of strategic and tactical finesse,
Which only the most earnest discern and mate.
* * * *
You need not each and every moment
Hold on to all the psychological and physical pains
Manifested in your brief mortal fling in this garden of good and evil.
Discern the key to immortality – Physician, heal thy Self.
* * * *
In all destinies there is an executioner, an assassin, a slayer,
Ever formed of the earth-air-water-fire of all things here-now ether.
There is no escape for the awareness you are, only an abiding endurance.
Spurn the Fates, they cannot touch you once the shadow of karma loses its hold.
* * * *
Every moment springing simultaneously anew within the indivisible quantum matrix.
All its concoctions, all its innumerable forms, ever the same source,
Ever the same awareness, ever the same you-ness,
Ever the same boggling mystery.
How astounding this indelible Song of Godness,
This eternal eye gazing out the masks and veils of manifestation.
* * * *
You cannot find true contentment in the transience of materialism,
Only the intertwining, sticky web of pleasure and pain,
The bondage of suffering in consciousness.
* * * *
When thought stills, when time ends, when awareness is,
When the waves of desire, fear, and anger subside,
The space is filled with a quiet, simple serenity.
* * * *
Who owns it? Only those who surrender to it.
* * * *
Master your passionate mind.
Know that you need not be slave
To its mundane, whimsical disposition.
* * * *
You may practice in the world
Or pretend to remove yourself from it,
But until each and every inseparable moment
Is seen purely through the eyes of timeless awareness,
You will perform the penance of continuity.
* * * *
You reclaim your freedom, your birthright, your entitlement,
Only when the discontent with the insufferable bondage of suffering
Takes you to, through, and beyond death's indivisible door.
* * * *
If all sentient beings were to awaken at once,
Consciousness would not, could not, be the adventure it is.
So the relentless, gnashing, grinding, kaleidoscope of bondage and suffering
Spins on in its mysterious, unfolding dreamtime destiny.
* * * *
Once fully unleashed, there is nothing that can long appease or impede
This quest for emancipation, this hunger to discover what one truly is,
But complete abandonment to the timeless source of all beingness.
* * * *
Experience in time is painful and binding
Because of separation from one's ultimate, unborn nature.
Only timeless experiencing without attachment
Is pathless, serene, joyful.
* * * *
You have only temporarily lost sight
Of the intangible nature that you really are.
Do not wait for your dying breath
To realize your birthright.
* * * *
When one sees the source of all things,
The true nature of all manifestation,
There is malleable compassion
For those many suffering
The bondage of ignorance.
* * * *
The senses tease and taunt you.
They are lies of the delusional mind.
You must ascertain the witness within,
Discriminate the freedom that they cannot,
And discern with every particle of your beingness,
That only in the immutability of awareness
Are you as real as real allows.
* * * *
It is a nice ideal, but to love all manifestation in agape fashion,
To crave nothing in the daily passing, is a great challenge for anyone.
Likely even the heralded Buddha still tingled occasionally at a passing sari.
* * * *
That little gratification, that little pleasure,
That little satisfaction, that little amusement, that little enjoyment,
That little hedonistic longing, that little decadent inclination, that little narcissistic notion,
How much do you really need it? How important is it, really?
* * * *
When you realize your faceless state, the manifest world becomes but a sensory dream.
* * * *
The challenge is to pay very close attention to everything both without and within.
* * * *
The dreamtime of organized religion is losing its sway over many.
Each must discern alone what is real, what is true.
The quest harbors no intermediary.
* * * *
The identity, the persona, the ego, the self, however it is called,
Is but a temporal, mortal, fabrication of mind and senses,
And their weaving with the culture, the mythology,
Of the space and time in which it sets sail.
* * * *
Operating in persona is confining, temporary, and painful.
Once discerned, how can anyone long for anything
But the return to unadulterated awareness?
* * * *
But for the cycles of sun, moon, and seasons,
Would the perception, the conception, the whimsy, of time
Have ever been imagined, ever been invented?
* * * *
To know life is to know death; one is not without the other.
* * * *
Attachment to mind and body is the fountainhead of suffering.
* * * *
To see the many others, yet see no other, that is the razor's edge,
Upon which you timelessly traverse this reverie both real and unreal.
* * * *
To discover your essential birthright you must disregard the senses
And all resulting experiences, knowledge, identifications and conclusions.
You are far less, far more than consciousness bound in time can ever perceive.
* * * *
To see, to know, to own, that you are the absolute, manifest, is beyond all imagining.
* * * *
Peace is a quality of consciousness, not some unattainable, divisible ideal.
* * * *
Returning to oneness, desirelessness, the breath is naturally fearless.
* * * *
There is nothing that is not community at one level or another.
* * * *
How attached are you to the movement of thought?
The door to freedom opens as the waves are discerned
As the cosmic ocean from whence they rise and fall.
* * * *
Even those who, given a choice, would rather not,
Must play out their part in this eternal tapestry.
All are witnesses, some realized, many not.
Those who see the play weaving within,
It is they who return to absoluteness.
* * * *
All you know is what dreamtime shows you.
All knowledge is of the kaleidoscope.
The source can never be known.
* * * *
The universe within is the universe without.
* * * *
Wisdom is not something one attains or owns.
It just sort of happens as you unfold into clarity.
* * * *
The releasing discernment of the absoluteness within,
Is the fulfillment of every so-called scripture ever written.
* * * *
Real loving is without preference, without attachment.
Anything less than everything, anything less than agape, is not love.
It is without any imaginary notion, it is without any fictional conception, whatsoever.
* * * *
The sojourn ends, or perhaps really begins, when you freely blossom into serenity.
* * * *
Why should it matter what another thinks of you when there is no other?
* * * *
Without the word, what could there be? Even with it, what is there?
* * * *
The quest for eternal freedom requires great courage.
The oblivion of identity, simple as it is,
Is not easily realized.
* * * *
Pleasure alone can never bring lasting peace.
* * * *
Insight is effortless direct perception.
* * * *
Identity is the attachment.
* * * *
Otherness is the illusion.
* * * *
Your true residence is the eternal.
* * * *
The wisest, happiest fools are students of death.
* * * *
Hell and heaven are born of the same timeless moment.
* * * *
See the infinity within your Self, and know that it resides in all things.
* * * *
Nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten.
Each alone must search for it, each alone must discern it.
Each alone must let go of all that is known, release all that is held near and dear,
To realize the eternal truth fated to forever remain unknown.
* * * *
Peace, contentment, serenity, joy, bliss, can only be when desire for continuity is not.
* * * *
Travel beyond knowledge into the realm of wisdom, and beyond that, stillness.
* * * *
Liberation can unfold only when everything mind concocts is disengaged.
* * * *
Yield, surrender, resign, let the spring of sweetness bubble within.
* * * *
You are already perfection; all you need do is discern it.
* * * *
Whatever you think you are, you are not all the while.
* * * *
When one surrenders to insight, eternity emerges:
Infinite, timeless, pathless, unencumbered, serene.
* * * *
Illumination is living each moment in total freedom.
* * * *
No matter how many drops rain down from the clouds,
There is, has ever been, and will ever be but one ocean.
* * * *
Absoluteness does not require the carnival sideshows
Of saviors, priests, gurus, magicians, and other charlatans.
* * * *
In the beginning there was the word, but before that, who can say?
* * * *
All are of the original nature, but each must quest alone that essential state.
It is a journey relatively few feel strongly enough begin, much less complete.
* * * *
In your quest for liberation, you must even journey past the desire to know some deity.
* * * *
You can only know the binding play of illusion, which means you really very little.
* * * *
You must cultivate the discerning, disciplined scrutiny of the scientific mind
To discover the original nature that abides within all dreams great to small.
* * * *
The sojourn through the maze of delusion may be prolonged or swift.
You will reach the crossroad of surrender at your own reckoning.
* * * *
There are many teachers and many teachings.
Search for those who encourage discovery of the unconditioned,
Those who teach you to fish for your own soul.
* * * *
Release every thought,
Every concept manufactured by the limitations of mind.
They are not the real you.
* * * *
To discern all manifestation with the one eye,
To covet no thing, to covet no other,
Is the road to emancipation.
* * * *
When all cravings fall away,
When only serenity flowers within,
Then you become that beingness which is,
Completely full, eternal, supreme, total, absolute.
* * * *
Let your identity go.
Put aside the bondage of thought.
You know nothing other than what you have imagined.
* * * *
You are it, it is you, there is no other.
There is no second, there is no third, no fourth,
Nor even tens of thousands, nor countless gazillions more.
* * * *
The mind must surrender to insecurity to discover the harmony of totality.
* * * *
Only when you are done with all light shows will you return to your natural state.
* * * *
Who can say whether it is all or nothing, for they are one in the same.
* * * *
To one unfettered in consciousness, all experiencing is equal.
Both seeking and avoiding are but sure routes to suffering.
* * * *
Through your eyes, through your mind, all creation passes.
* * * *
One day you will perhaps wonder that you ever doubted.
* * * *
Such a brief dream any mortal existence.
And the skull that has contained these so many thoughts
Is already turning into another layer of sediment,
Another handful of mulch, of compost,
For dreams yet to come.
* * * *
To discover your Self, you must explore your self.
* * * *
What do you want so badly that is worth the fear?
* * * *
One day you will perhaps wonder that you ever doubted.
* * * *
You are the knowing; it is not loitering out there somewhere.
* * * *
Double-speakers calling the circle, square, and the square, circle.
And weary octagons forever on their own, ever out on limbs too far.
* * * *
Sweep away all identification; there is nothing oneness needs cling to.
* * * *
Indeed, there is so much to both like and dislike here; hard to stay, hard to leave.
* * * *
No matter how much you think you know, it is ever a mystery behind the veil.
* * * *
Do not surrender to anything but what you truly are, and then give it all.
* * * *
At some point the fevered monopoly game runs out of new ground,
And the worn and torn infrastructure turns to gravity for resolution.
* * * *
Identity is the mistaken belief that the awareness you really are
Is at all attached to the sundry attributes of the food-body,
Or the world of appearances through which it renders.
* * * *
Consciousness is by its nature twisted, convoluted.
Some swirls upon the dusty stage are called good, others evil.
Since you are the ultimate source of your creation,
In reality, you are the only one judging.
* * * *
Call it what you will – soul, self, cosmos, god, whatever –
You are the awareness, not a dream of consciousness.
* * * *
The pitter-patter of meandering thoughts
Dancing across the mindscape offer so much distraction
That one is hard-pressed not attend them.
* * * *
The make of a man is his word, nothing more, nothing less.
* * * *
What is thought, what is said, what is written,
Are but different means through which consciousness
Plays out a relatively brief opportunity to discover its potential.
* * * *
Awareness is the “awakeness” of all living creations,
Of the indivisible quantum matrix, the stardust, come to “life.”
It is the eternal eye of the unknown prior to all manifestation ever-changing,
And whatever dreams they in spontaneous combustion may inspire.
* * * * * * * * * *
The Return to Wonder
Field Notes from the Unknown
© Michael J. Holshouser 2009
World Rights Reserved