Chapter 20 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)


XX

Once you curmudgeonize,
There is little hope
Of mustering the energy
For a bright, cheery cheerleader role.

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Mad enough to believe anything possible.

* * * *
Suffering is a great eyewash.

* * * *
You cannot see what you cannot discern.

* * * *
The mountains of innocence are too quickly lost
That each must by much effort and sorrow
Try so hard to effortlessly regain.

* * * *
Suffering sculpts wisdom.

* * * *
Words tear us apart.
Perhaps better so much
Be left unsaid.

* * * *
You are players in my theater
And I in yours.
Welcome and fare-thee-well.

* * * *
There is great beauty and horror
In this bountiful theater manifest design.
None of it can touch you without your consent.

* * * *
Each moment is an intricate sand painting,
Which you are challenged to forever wipe away.

* * * *
In ancient times the thoughts born of insight were often sought
To clearly resolve issues for the communal good of all concerned.
To not esteem sages offering their experience, judgment and wisdom
Shows how far we have meandered from common sense in daily existence.

* * * *
Children, shrieking in playful joy,
Flee the onslaught of the ocean waves,
Never even conceiving that someday
They might return to embrace them.

* * * *
These words are not for window-shopping tourists,
But for sojourners questing their eternal birthright.

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In your brief dream of time, you, and you alone,
Must discern that filament of awareness
That is timeless, pure and free.

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The ocean is blind to your vanity and suffering.
You must reconcile with it, not it with you.

* * * *
The trail may be easier if you have a guide,
But would you have savored so much suffering
If you had not done it alone?

* * * *
New age implies old age
And how can either be
When it has ever been ageless?

* * * *
Your presence contributes
To the rewriting of the script
Humanity has up to now played.

* * * *
Dress wisdom in whatever
Costume, language or mythos you like,
It ever washes out the same.

* * * *
You must master the many temptations
This sojourn through time every moment offers,
Before you can truly grasp the eternal key
To the heaven that has always been.

* * * *
At some point the greater whole, the greater good of all,
Must be discerned by those who are capable
Of such a relatively simple task.

* * * *
An introspective, insightful eye is vital,
One which sees what is true and what is not,
And sheds the latter to whatever degree is possible.

* * * *
Watch your attempts to create, intentionally or not,
Envy in both friends and enemies alike.
The path to glory is desolate and meaningless.

* * * *
The rashness of youth is tempered with age.
The young should seek wise counsel
Of those who see a larger view,
If that view is not of a tyrannical mold.

* * * *
How much of your daily life
Is spent pursuing your many vanities
And succumbing to your ceaseless insecurities?

* * * *
Prophets wait patiently with stylus in hand
For insight to issue through the mind onto paper.
You must be very open and clear to find your true voice.

* * * *
Cynicism and pessimism are the anger
Common sense must endure when this world is witnessed.
Use them as levers to pry your consciousness into its unmanifest potential.

* * * *
Outward piety is a show which fools only the undiscerning.
Hypocrisy is like an empty shell, a wormy husk
In which there is no room for heaven.

* * * *
To own property, animals, plants or another,
What is the point? What is this urge to possess?

* * * *
Why be overly concerned for your survival
When your life was given in the first place?

* * * *
Whether to create your own prime directive
Or surrender it over to godness,
That is free will.

* * * *
No matter how many times doubt
Plays its countless inevitable riddles,
The door home will never be locked.

* * * *
Surely, even the hardest heart must see
The smallest flicker of the eternal,
The slightest bit of inner light
Which ever shadows the self-deceit
To which each must inevitably answer.

* * * *
Never let the priests, politicians and lawyers
Baffle you into believing they are necessary
For the reclamation of your eternal birthright.

* * * *
Is it necessary to tell someone you love them?
If your love is real it is in every expression and action.
It exudes from the core and fiber of your very being.

* * * *
The subtlety of consciousness in the manufacture of identity
Weaves the fabric so finely that it is incredibly arduous to clearly discern
Its ultimate source never was the you, you believed it to be.

* * * *
If you believe you are practicing real religion
By tithing to some edifice and its resident holy man,
You sell yourself on the seaward end of the rotting plank.
That many are satisfied with the trappings of religion
Are the surest proof that all organized attempts
Are as meaningless a meaningless can be.

* * * *
Integrity is integration with the largest picture.

* * * *
The best way to make your peace with god
Is to become godlike.

* * * *
The wealth of heaven has nothing to do
With any earth-bound visions.

* * * *
Your concern over past lives
Is just more of the same old vanity.

* * * *
Even with great practice it takes a lifetime
To surrender totally to totality.

* * * *
So much of what is called spirituality
Is immature pretense with little substance.

* * * *
Those who hold to outward laws and dogmatic principles
Live earthly lives, never having the courage
To tack their own course home.

* * * *
Just because sun, moon and earth cycle round and round,
Does not make time real.

* * * *
Discern the word and share it in whatever way you will.

* * * *
Discounting another human being or life form
Discounts you as well.

* * * *
Paying to hear the truth?
To pretend that which is ever denied?
Such scams we mortals do endlessly entertain.

* * * *
If you think heaven is a members only club,
Go to the end of the line.

* * * *
Organized religion is often systemized groupthink
Which ever blocks real spirituality's blossom
In its denial of godness dormant within.

* * * *
History's subjugation of now proves again and again
To be an unsought travesty upon innocent minds.

* * * *
The depths which you may go
Can be deep, dark and isolating,
Depending how resistant your ego,
How hard the shell you have built round yourself.
For some the return home may be the most natural thing.
For others the journey may well traverse the brink of physical death.

* * * *
Have you truly ever known an evil
That was not the concoction of some mortal mind?

* * * *
The blind remain blind
Until they have the discernment to see.

* * * *
What fools we mortals be
To tarry in this dream we cannot see.

* * * *
When once you own this mystery jaunt,
You, too, will share a hue or two.

* * * *
There are none above you, none below you.
All distinctions are born of personality, not reality.

* * * *
It is whatever you choose to see
For that is the dreamy nature
Of this mirage of playful light.

* * * *
Alas, attachment to non-attachment
Can spin a web equally binding.

* * * *
Humanity will pay a merry price
For the imbalance its separation has wrought.

* * * *
Vanity comes in every imaginable form.
Even denial of vanity can be a covert exercise.

* * * *
How is it that we have so much resistance to realizing
That deep down we are cousins even with the most simple life forms?

* * * *
To ceaselessly argue limiting self-absorbed viewpoints
Is what lemmings do as they rush toward the cliffs.

* * * *
Even the most ambitious wind
Must return to stillness to catch its breath.

* * * *
Discern the wisdom of the ages,
And the unmanifest comes to fruition
At whatever pace the dream allows.

* * * *
In this busy world focusing ever more intently on specialization,
We have placed the wisdom of generalists on the shelf.
The result is many trees and no forests.

* * * *
When seen through the personal eye,
The body is an identity with many attachments.
When seen through the impersonal eye,
It is just another clay container,
A vessel in which godness witnesses.

* * * *
Do you believe the dust which all of us are
Has any loyalty to the forms into which it is made?

* * * *
How easy to spot the other guy's vanity.

* * * *
The way our species has chosen to live,
The population, technology and conflicts,
Does not take into account the 40,000
Or more generations that could follow us.

* * * *
It has become so insane in certain arenas
That you no longer have time to turn the other cheek.

* * * *
Everything is arbitrary.
Everything is assumption.
Everything is whatever.

* * * *
Any given seed is but a pattern, a blueprint,
An offering of potential to the dreaming of time.

* * * *
The elixir of pure, unfiltered awareness,
Untainted by the gusting winds of consciousness
Is the only real salvation in this theater of manifestation.

* * * *
The state of the world is a natural consequence
Of the synergy of our all our imaginary interactions.
It has nothing to do with any plan, any conspiracy
Concocted by any god, any gods, any demons.
It is we alone who have created our destiny.

* * * *
If excellence is your inclination,
Being immersed in a culture of mediocrity
Is more than a little challenging.

* * * *
No one is going save you
Because there’s nothing to save.
The essence that is real and true, is immortal.
What you are, is what you have always been, and will ever be.
How can that which was never born ever die?

* * * *
The vast theater of time and space
Is the illusion of the given sensory vehicle.
Created to witness the infinite, mysterious unknown,
It is, without a question to answer.

* * * *
What a jewel this world must have been
Before our kind climbed to dominance.

* * * *
To challenge your fear, to understand your fear
You must not be afraid to fear.

* * * *
Heaven and hell are states of mind.
In heaven you can be in hell,
And in hell, in heaven.

* * * *
To be at peace,
You must be ready for peace.
You must be done with the war within your mind.
The duality must cease and desist.
Eternity must reign.

* * * *
What doesn’t kill you today
May well take another stab at it tomorrow.

* * * *
All the idealism is the world means squat
Unless everyone decides to make it happen.

* * * *
Hard to keep caring about something
That just ain’t never going to get fixed.

* * * *
A culture that doesn’t make
A sound investment in its young
Has no vision for its future.

* * * *
Any given fate is a sculpture
Carved in every moment
All fates are already written
In the vast eternal framelessness.

* * * *
Challenging to play out any given part
And inwardly be anonymous.

* * * *
The mind is an assumption.

* * * *
It’s only money, it’s only stuff, it’s only life.

* * * *
Observations, within and without.

* * * *
A breath is far more valuable
Than all the wealth in the world.

* * * *
Don’t start a fight you can’t finish,
And finish any fight you didn’t start.

* * * *
No religion
Anywhere in this world
Has any more spiritual authority
Than any other geographic assumption.


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