VI
Believe no one, accept nothing.
This must be entirely your discovery, your breakthrough.
You must let go everything and everyone if you are to discern that which you truly are.
* * * *
The divisiveness of consciousness, inspired by sensory otherness, is the suffering.
* * * *
Seeing the unseen, the unknown, there is really nothing more to see.
* * * *
These many thoughts are ultimately about simplicity itself.
You will not hear them, understand them, clearly
Until you are inwardly simple enough
To comprehend the mystery they are in you.
* * * *
As you awaken, it becomes increasingly apparent
That your existence is not really yours to own.
Fabrications begin to gradually fall away.
That once self-absorbed persona dissipates,
Giving way as impenetrable mist does to the sun.
Eventually it becomes apparent that nothing can persevere
Except this ungraspable sense of abiding awareness,
Which pervades every portion of your being
As globules of water do the ocean.
* * * *
Behind all masks resides the same puppeteer.
* * * *
To maintain any one path most true,
To insist on duality in any way, any shape, any form,
Is to completely misapprehend the relativity of this dreamtime reality.
* * * *
The first and last error is believing this mysterious awareness
Somehow belongs to you as an individual, somehow belongs to you as a distinct soul.
That all the thoughts you have about your identity and your world,
Are somehow real, are somehow true.
* * * *
When identity fades in importance, what remains is the awareness of awareness.
Reality resides in this moment-to-moment functioning.
Nothing more is necessary.
* * * *
Love, joy, bliss, and compassion are pleasant ideals,
Words which sound conceptually true and ultimately real,
But what is their reality in your beingness right now?
* * * *
If you desire a solution to this frail mortal drama,
Then you must wake up to your mind,
And that which is prior.
* * * *
Most seek comfort more than truth.
Not requiring freedom at the bottom line,
They continue sentencing themselves in time
To the unending bondage of identification.
* * * *
From attachment, detach.
From detachment, detach.
Nothing is as anyone thinks.
* * * *
Intuit the mystery.
It is you.
* * * *
All dreams are equal.
* * * *
Venerate your Self to own this.
* * * *
What blade can pierce that which was never born?
* * * *
Do not subscribe to any ists, any isms.
Use all teachings only as tools to discern for yourself
The unconditional freedom their founders brought to consciousness.
* * * *
Try not to make the spiritual quest for union more complex than it is.
It is so very logically, rationally, obviously, happily simple.
It is something to be discovered, not believed.
* * * *
Avoid being enticed by meaningless speculation.
Attempting to know the unknowable is vexing and futile.
All you can ever know is what your mind projects.
* * * *
There is no form, no world, no universe, no god,
Only fabrications of manifest consciousness.
* * * *
Good turns into evil and evil into good.
Just where is the imagined division
But the limitation in your vision?
* * * *
Integrity is not a moral concept.
* * * *
In the mind, from the heart, want not.
* * * *
There is nothing you need do.
There is nothing you must change.
All is as it has ever been, will ever be.
The challenge is to happily dissolve within.
* * * *
So subtle this illusive play,
Only the most simple,
The most humble, can even begin
To perceive, discern, distill and joyfully wonder
How unfathomable it truly is.
* * * *
Abide where desire and fear have no hold,
The natural state prior to all the temporal manifestation,
The unnameable, unknowable source from which all creation is spawned.
* * * *
Do you have the courage and simplicity to be, without question?
* * * *
Real relationship is freeing, allowing, without ulterior motive.
* * * *
Whether there is just one life or a trillion,
You have never possessed or been anything more
Than the awareness you are right now.
* * * *
Any personal god is your self-created illusion.
You are the only thing personal about godness.
* * * *
The garden exists when you as knower do not.
* * * *
Why burden yourself with any belief?
* * * *
Meditation is liberation from identity.
* * * *
Living in the freedom of original state
Requires no symbolic forms whatsoever.
Only the complacent tarry in tangibles.
* * * *
Your eyes, when seen impersonally,
Are just one set of those beyond number
In eternity's well-trod, ever-present witnessing.
* * * *
The ceaseless arrays of suffering
Personalities locked into consciousness
Have no real meaning to the ultimate nature.
There is nothing which will save you as an identity,
Nothing from which you or anything else need be saved.
* * * *
Every groupthink plants its seeds of illusion,
But as you awaken and stretch into your original nature,
Less and less will the prattle of inanity have any overriding meaning.
* * * *
If you are only awareness, if there is in reality no entity, what is it that reincarnates?
* * * *
The personality is merely a complex interaction of patterns.
Thoughts and emotions playing out the mind-body theater.
* * * *
Insight into this offers no wages, no security whatsoever,
Yet is the greatest taskmaster you will ever experience.
* * * *
Suffering can only end when you choose to be free.
* * * *
Consciousness through the senses creates duality.
Duality fabricates the illusory concept.
Concept believes itself real.
* * * *
No one observing you will ever see much.
You function and interact habitually,
Completing all required tasks
In much the same mode as before.
It is only within, out of exterior viewing,
That the absoluteness disclosures its handiwork,
The ineffable nature of its eternally timeless moment.
* * * *
The worship of tangibles will not get you home.
* * * *
Discover the timeless awareness of the here-nowness,
Wherein the passions of consciousness have no domain.
* * * *
To discern reality clearly, to surrender to it absolutely, agnostically,
Is to have no more questions, and a dwindling number of concerns.
* * * *
How odd that so many insist on duality, when reality knows neither division nor bounds.
* * * *
What are you, what is any god, but the same youness, the same absoluteness.
* * * *
When it is all the same clay, how can any thing be considered different?
* * * *
You as identity may die, but the essential you is eternal.
* * * *
If there is any struggle to meditate, to contemplate,
Then it is not the authentic freedom of true surrender.
All effort is of the ego ever imagining itself genuine.
* * * *
Putting anyone, putting anything, on a pedestal
Only puts off discerning your own emancipation.
* * * *
What is awareness, what is this original state,
But a tranquility that words ever fail to describe.
* * * *
The manifest theater is like a sandbox
In which the mischievous isness plays out
A timeless, challenging game of hide-and-seek.
* * * *
Transcendence, enlightenment, illumination,
Are simply catchwords for living naturally, logically,
In the unfiltered awareness prior to concept or concern.
* * * *
What is there to believe? What is there to know?
How can you be in anything but contemplative wonder,
And the still awareness from whence it every moment sparks.
* * * *
Reality will ever be,
But the dreamtime of humankind
Is on a collision course with an unforgiving force,
And those who survive the great fall, if any, will face a new world,
Bounded by the remnants, the scar tissue, of the one we altered beyond all pales.
* * * *
What you are cannot be discerned until the craving for experience in time ends.
* * * *
In existing for pleasure, you must abide the inevitable pain.
To give weight to neither is a discernment challenging to master.
* * * *
Any given personal mythos ever remains a dreamy fabrication.
* * * *
Surrender to the natural state must be unconditional.
* * * *
Nothing taints the knower of isness.
* * * *
You only see what you are primed to see.
* * * *
In rigidity there is weakness, in flexibility, strength.
* * * *
Ignorance of the first and last state,
Denial of the unconditional nature of aloneness,
Only regenerate the suffering of time-bound consciousness.
* * * *
Anyone claiming to be the key, the middleman to the answer.
Is setting you up for one of the best scams history ever devised.
* * * *
The ultimate delusion is that anyone can ever really know anything.
Pretending to “know” is nothing more than its own play of arrogance;
The vanity, the pride, of ego given over to the fabrications of imagination.
* * * *
All manifestation is subject to the patterning,
While the source to which all patterns essentially subscribe,
Remains timelessly inexplicable, timelessly inscrutable, forever unknowable.
* * * *
The awareness that you truly are, call it whatever you will,
Is prior to all the suffering, prior to all the torments of consciousness:
Unconditional, indifferent, desireless, birthless, deathless, indivisibly timeless.
* * * *
You are the totality, witness to the mystery, absoluteness observing its creation unfold.
* * * *
Discern the aware, non-knowing state that the senses can never sense.
* * * *
The mind marinated in the theater of time can never be secure.
Only in complete capitulation to the vulnerability of the natural state
Can there be any real clarity, any real calmness, any real peace.
* * * *
Do those who are religious think themselves religious?
Yet another all-but-inevitable snare of consciousness.
* * * *
Maya manifests an infinity of veiled facets.
Once the original nature is discerned and understood,
How can you not own each and every one.
* * * *
This insight into the enigma cannot be explained
Or agreed upon or persuaded or held onto,
In any way, any shape, any form.
* * * *
Turn the light to the heart
And the mind will melt into right relationship,
A union without compare.
* * * *
Give no thought to where thought cannot tread.
* * * *
When exactly will you be ready to die, of not now?
* * * *
Do not be blinded by the ever-playful lila of the senses.
They read only the temporal theater of light and shadow.
* * * *
Once you clearly discern the weaving of desire and fear,
How they patterned your personality becomes apparent.
* * * *
The mind-body is but a limited, partial receiver,
Discerning but a mere sliver of the all but infinite potential
Of the electromagnetic spectrum in this inscrutable hologram matrix.
* * * *
Explore love as much as you might with all your beingness,
It is the awareness within all that is its unfathomable cradle.
* * * *
No need to be timid or bashful about it anymore.
No need to hesitate when asked who you are anymore.
No need to deny the ultimate truth of it anymore.
Unfurl into what you have the vision to see.
* * * *
Through the endless suffering caused by extremes,
The moderation of the middle path is discerned.
* * * *
Light is only discerned through awareness,
And awareness only possible through manifestation
In one form, one dimension, or another.
The possibilities are infinite,
But there is but one source to all.
* * * *
In all things, discern your Self.
* * * *
Disaster is written all over it.
* * * *
In the ultimate state, no thing exists.
* * * *
It is a dream, this Maya, this Lila, so take it as one.
* * * *
You are the awareness of beingness, prior to all mythos.
* * * *
It is all one rut, one groove, or another, some more fortunate than others.
* * * *
Death is but a drop that never was, evaporating into the quantum dust yet again.
* * * *
You are the journey from beginning to end, and prior and after, as well.
* * * *
Do good and evil exist anywhere but consciousness?
* * * *
It is generally an error to blame others for your shit.
* * * *
What attachment can awareness have to anything?
Only the winds of consciousness fabricates attributes
Of every form, of every hue, of every shade of gray.
* * * *
Trapped again in a guise of your own fabrication.
* * * *
When there is no longer any craving for separation,
You will merge into the infinite ocean of oblivion,
Never to return to the pretensions of form.
* * * *
Stop pretending to know.
You do not, never did, never will,
And no one else does, did, nor will, either.
Agnostic is the only frank assertion under any sun.
* * * *
Contemplation and meditation, what a one-two tag team.
* * * *
Surrender completely and journey alone into the indivisibility of Self.
* * * *
Is there anything not made stronger
When fashioned by a certain amount of challenge,
A certain amount of adversity, a certain amount of pain and suffering.
Of the qualities needed for survival in this manifest world,
Amorphous is likely only rarely included.
* * * * * * * * * *
The Return to Wonder
Field Notes from the Unknown
© Michael J. Holshouser 2009
World Rights Reserved