V
The imaginary persona is not what you truly are.
Discern the indivisible you, surrender to the isness.
The solitary journey to manifest the unconditional reality
Is the raison d'être of this kaleidescoping quantum dreamtime.
All else is nothing more than absorbing distraction.
* * * *
The mind-body experience, all the ravenous weavings of sensory craving,
Combine in countless ways to impart the awareness of reality
To those rare few discriminating enough to see it.
* * * *
The mind can create every sort of heaven or hell.
Surrender or suffer, the choice born of free will.
* * * *
Every part and particle is an indivisible holograph of the essential oneness.
* * * *
Within all manifestation is the potency of absoluteness.
* * * *
To you who yearn for the ultimate freedom,
You are all christs, you are all buddhas.
You are every mystic seer and master
This illusory cosmos has ever known.
You are your own timeless companion.
Do not be fooled into believing otherwise.
* * * *
So-called ultimate questions can never be answered.
Only the reality of the questioner is subject to real inquiry.
* * * *
Every culture molds individual conformity
To whatever mythos it prescribes.
It takes discerning courage
To discover and be what you truly are.
There is no freedom in incarnating a prescribed life.
* * * *
When will dissolves into awareness, pure consciousness is all that remains.
* * * *
The indivisible absolute is no more responsible for this illusion
Than any ocean is for its surface, its bottom,
Or the play of its waves
Upon any number of shorelines.
* * * *
When all ambition and purpose is released,
You return to the naturally flowering awareness
Free of the burden of psychological identification.
To discern and own this peaceful, dreamlike freedom
Requires an inward simplicity, a detached humility,
A upheaval from the birthplace of all beingness.
* * * *
It is revolution in most earnest, purest form.
It is the journey to the end of personal consciousness.
It is the unqualified capitulation to harmony within and without.
* * * *
Words can only feebly point out the one and only way.
The discernment of their meaning is prior to all concept.
* * * *
The concept of karma plays out its illusory hand
Only when there is complete surrender
To the knowing prior to mythos.
* * * *
No pleasure or pain
Can touch what you really are.
Even in the face of torturous physical suffering,
Detached awareness is quiet witness.
* * * *
Which is more infinite, more infinitesimal, more magnificent,
The apparent universe, or the source of it all within and without?
* * * *
The inward exploration of the mystery is the ultimate frontier of this manifest dream.
* * * *
Every fiber of your being must be in total revolution to own your sovereignty.
* * * *
Be content to play your little part, to be a drop in the ocean of isness.
* * * *
You are like a caterpillar, at some point chrysalis,
Evolving into that moment when your insatiable desire to fly
Will take you into the consuming fires of totality.
And melt your wax wings forever.
* * * *
Any journey begins with each step, eternity with each moment.
* * * *
When you are sovereign,
Desire can be attended, brushed aside
Or passed only just noticed.
* * * *
What is the cosmos but a community born of oneness.
* * * *
Real maturity is discovering your natural state.
Few ever get past what they call being grown up.
* * * *
You as personality, as identity,
Must become very still inwardly
To discern what you truly are.
* * * *
No hope, no meaning, no solace, is offered here,
Only complete and absolute annihilation of identity,
The pure awareness of godness consciously manifest.
* * * *
When beingness is all there is, when you are content to merely be,
Then birth and death, the dreams of becoming or that, touch you not.
* * * *
The blessing of giving yourself back to the awareness of isness is beyond measure.
* * * *
Take what is beautiful and what is not beautiful as you would specks of dust.
* * * *
The personality worship of so-called spiritual teachers
Is a unmitigated misunderstanding of the ultimate state.
* * * *
To call the isness "love" is to give it a meaning
The emotionally attached will never understand.
* * * *
To realize with every thread of your cloth
That you are the aloneness of totality's quantum fabric
Offers mind an unimaginable equanimity.
* * * *
Unity is prior to all appearances.
* * * *
Nothing is yours to own.
* * * *
What a veneer all manifestation.
* * * *
These words are solely to dispel the delusion
That you truly exist as anything other than the entirety.
And how does one whole being treat any other?
Perhaps a little more compassionately
Than history has thus far noted.
* * * *
To criticize, to judge, any other is to throw stones
At all the iniquities you have likely committed
Times beyond counting in mind if not deed.
* * * *
When craving for the temporal world finally diminishes,
When the absoluteness of awareness is all that remains,
The unfathomable unicity of isness opens its eternal reality.
* * * *
Beneath the blissful half-smiles of the Buddhas of paper and stone,
Are sharp fangs that will rip and tear your delusional reality to shreds.
* * * *
If you expect someone who abides in a boundless state
To behave in some prescribed manner, some ordained fashion,
That is your own assumption, your own projection, your own delusion,
And you may well be disappointed, frustrated, annoyed, irate, even enraged,
Or worse yet, succumb to yet another mesmerizing groupthink,
Another pointless impasse born of imagination.
* * * *
The spiritual quest can easily be weighed down with hypocrisies.
Try to be discerning and candid with your Self about your own.
* * * *
If these thoughts are already in mind,
Pass cheerfully and peacefully on your journey.
If not, well, they are yours to own if they in any way suit you.
* * * *
Discerning this is very much a scientific exploration.
You will find the results duplicate the many experiments
Throughout humanity's evolution in consciousness.
* * * *
Notions of exclusive love are fanciful and romantic,
But are they real, are they authentic, are they enduring?
* * * *
The urge of the mind-body to believe itself significant,
To believe itself vital and real, is an enticing play of imagination,
But when it inevitably falls away, all that will remain
Will be the only you it has ever truly been.
* * * *
Where exactly are you in that mind-body?
Where is the elusive center you imagine you are?
Is it in the brain, is it in the heart, or some other body part?
An unyielding, unrelenting, unfaltering, discriminating, quest for it,
Discloses the absolute nature of any dream of existence.
* * * *
The quest for your natural state will leave you in a heap of ashes.
And from these ashes, what remains blossoms into unfettered clarity.
* * * *
Real revolution is not reaction to the cause and effect of outward stimulus.
It is tuning within and following the insights born of your own awareness.
* * * *
The you that your mythos attempts to mold for its own divisive ends
Is pleasure-seeking, busy, calculating, and ambitious;
None of which you really are naturally.
* * * *
What would you be if there were no culture
Impinging its mythology on your given natural state?
That is all enlightenment and liberation and transcendence are.
To abide in that ever-present entirely is illumination.
* * * *
No experience is more spiritual than another.
Every passing timeless moment is shrouded in mystery.
Picking your nose is in truth just as astounding
As raising someone from the grave.
* * * *
Quietly accept what is offered.
Do not seek anything requiring extremes.
Travel a path of moderation.
* * * *
All fear is the outcome of one desire or another.
* * * *
You can only know what you are conditioned to believe,
Or what you garner through your own experience.
Be free, be content, to know nothing, as well.
* * * *
When thought stills naturally,
Only the most basic bodily urges remain.
The sexual cravings are bound to vivid imagination.
The body itself is not attached to the mind's insatiable hungers.
* * * *
You generally find the experiences you pursue.
If you seek none in particular, you will find life a timeless stage,
Which you spontaneously wander with a minimum of effort, a minimum of attachment.
* * * *
The ethereal beings of all the religions and mythologies across time, across space,
Are only metaphors to be used as a means to discern the state before you were born.
* * * *
Could you really endure immutable freedom? It leaves you with nothing.
* * * *
You seek happiness through one experience or another,
But time after time you continue the dance with suffering.
Only when your search takes you beyond what is seen
Can you begin to comprehend your eternal birthright.
* * * *
Fooling your Self again?
* * * *
What an eternity a lifetime is.
How much more eternity really is,
Is serenely unfathomable.
* * * *
The patterns of personality and identity remain,
But they are as a coat worn without concern,
Gradually washing away as stagnancy does
From a pool no longer separate from the river.
* * * *
What is spiritual materialism but the vain ego-identity
Continuing its ongoing flight of fancy with illusion.
* * * *
Your natural state is unburdened, carefree, unchanging.
Many so-called civilized people will label it
Indolent, irresponsible, unproductive, even revolutionary.
It will be a long road in this purgatory before more than a few understand.
* * * *
The suffering of ego-identity,
With its isolating passions born of desire and fear,
Require the maintenance of interminable imaginary, often debilitating, effort.
Residing in the awareness of your real nature is effortless.
* * * *
The movements of earth, water, fire and air
Are powerful teachers of change in this manifest reality.
Discern that the stillness of their many forms is no different than your own.
* * * *
The absolute nature is the common denominator, the essential core of all manifestation.
Even if there someday proves to be a supreme being, it is created of the same source.
* * * *
The flowering freedom of the natural state blossoms alone in simple ground.
Many may come to witness and admire and even worship it,
But few ever discriminate their own potency.
* * * *
Neither your mind-body identity, nor your actions, are your perfection.
* * * *
Illumination is seeing, but not necessarily bothering to remember.
* * * *
Thoughts are like ocean waves
Lapping softly or crashing fiercely
On the many reaches of awareness.
* * * *
But for your desire for stimulation
And your fear of its coming to and end,
What would you really want to have continue?
* * * *
There is no detachment in either attraction or revulsion.
* * * *
Spiritual legalisms cannot touch your unfathomable lawlessness.
* * * *
To awaken to its inexplicable, timeless, indivisibly absolute awareness,
Is surely the ultimate point and purpose of this manifest quantum paradigm.
* * * *
As long as you believe it all real, as long as you fabricate cause and effect,
You will endure, you will suffer, the many heavens and hells born of continuity.
* * * *
Travel to the limits of the universe, or into the smallest atomic particle,
It is still but the imaginary temporal projection of manifest limitation.
* * * *
Who else could you possibly be but the every thing and the no thing.
* * * *
Doubt paves the road of those destined to discern the ultimate reality.
Its end is enlightenment, samadhi, nirvana, bliss, joy, liberation,
Or whatever arbitrary sound you might choose to name it.
* * * *
You are not required to go out
And play any of the games the world offers.
It is only through your own imagination, your own volition,
Your own inner blending of desire and fear that you choose to participate
In whatever way you are consciously or unconsciously drawn.
* * * *
Are you not more than a little weary of caring about
So many things that have never really mattered?
* * * *
Alone in the zone, no attachment known.
* * * *
Awareness is prior to all mythos.
* * * *
He may have died for you and me,
But it might have been better for history
If he had, instead, lived a little longer for himself.
What meaningless, hollow vanity, martyrdom.
* * * *
Could we have done it any differently? Probably not.
* * * *
Once you see past all the idolatry, what is there but you, the real you.
* * * *
Without everything preceding this moment, how would you be here right now?
* * * *
The one mind discerns the one in all, the one mind discerns there is no other.
What point anything but compassion, even for the most abominable.
We are all just visitors here, prisoners here, of our own device.
* * * *
The Seven Deadlies: Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Wrath, Greed, Sloth.
The cornerstone for any narcissistic, hedonistic, Sybarite.
The perdition of any of monk-ish design.
* * * *
The now streams indivisibly each and every moment into the next,
While the sensory mind consumes it, metabolizes it, weaves it,
Into a perception of time, which only imagination knows.
* * * *
You are the only one, you are not the only one.
* * * *
How is it that you ever imagined
That your origin was ever any different
Than anyone or anything else’s?
* * * *
Filling the day with another round of nothing?
Or filling another nothing with a round of day?
* * * *
It is what it is, and nothing anyone thinks or does
Has ever mattered even one iota of diddley-squat.
* * * *
Nobody really knows what is going on around any given corner;
How could they possibly know is happening across the universe?
Or who-what-why-where-when-how it all started in the first place?
* * * *
What is the universe?
And what makes you believe it has ever existed
In any which-way the senses have deceived your mind into daily believing?
* * * *
History is whatever each of us thinks it is, and much of it absurd hogwash.
Time always boils down to be here now, and enjoy or endure it as best ye may.
* * * * * * * * * *
The Return to Wonder
Field Notes from the Unknown
© Michael J. Holshouser 2009
World Rights Reserved