IX
The eternal salvation so many claim
Remains up to you to discover and recover.
Following some guide up an arduous mountain pass
Still requires that you undertake the journey very much alone.
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How many seek out others who will support their delusion.
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Believe nothing, abide in ignorance, the profound reality.
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How unique relationship founded upon respect.
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You are a witness, not an identity.
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Be simple.
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Only wax wings melt.
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All patterning is limitation.
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Develop the humility of a lump of clay.
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Maya will steal your things,
Diminish and annihilate your body,
And play every sort of havoc with your mind,
But do not let it tame your soul.
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That moment you just zippity-whizzed through,
What was it but a tentative perception?
How can you ever prove it ever really happened
But through subjective, arbitrary, unverifiable assertion?
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Birth and death are concepts formed by cultures that often comprehend neither.
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Love, as much of humankind manifests it, can be a fairly hateful act.
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Imagine all those walking by as skeletons waiting to happen.
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Go to where even the greatest deity must return.
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Breathe in isness … Breathe out isness …
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So subtle this timeless passing.
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All your ambition to become,
All the conflicts you partake,
All the suffering you register,
Mean nothing, nada, zero-sum.
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So predictable as to be absolute perfection.
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Languages and mythoi are ever-changing in time,
But the wisdom expressed by each is timeless in all.
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Every moment is birth and death, creation and destruction,
Appearing very different, yet ultimately very much the same.
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Words! Words! Words! Such wretched, distorting, incomplete distractions.
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Who cares if there is some sort of corporate pecking order to some sort of god?
Be content to be plebeian, gatekeeper, gardener, ferryman, charioteer.
Or whatever unpretentious role suites your beginner nature.
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Wherever you sojourn, far and wide as it may appear, you are always here now.
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Mind is both the source of separation and the potential for reunification.
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Such a mysterious dream, and you, the mystery dreaming.
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You are the sojourner witnessing your own creation.
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Once you begin this solitary pilgrimage,
There will be endless distractions,
But there is no turning back.
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Discern that to which no label clings.
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Clinging to your life does not make it so.
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The soul-mating you seek is really to your Self.
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Rapture over the spectacles of the human paradigm
Is akin to a domesticated animal raving about its cage.
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Vanity binds you again and again in the figment of your mind.
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Everything you see, hear, touch, taste, smell,
Every thought, every belief, everything known and intuited,
Is personal mythos, entirely of your own creation, your own imagination.
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Humanity has concocted every sort of mythology
To explain that which can never be known,
Yet suffering and angst continues unabated in every venue.
Organized religions, priests, sages, shamans, channelers, shysters, and charlatans,
Have failed to bring about any fundamental, simple, true clarity.
Why do you continue to be so gullible?
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The temporal world urges you to gather all you can whenever you can,
But to discern the indivisible, inscrutable, timeless source,
You must, within and without, let everything go.
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All explanations of the inexplicable mystery in any mythos
Are limited by the conceptual constraints of the given language,
And the expansive or contracted vision to which its aspires.
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Teaching is an excellent way to discover how little you know.
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Within all manifestation, the unmanifest witness is.
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Once you as identity are shattered,
The trick is not putting the shards together again.
Let Humpty-Dumpty rest in pieces.
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You are on your own.
The eternal is yours to tap.
The keys are your heart and mind,
And your unwillingness to settle for lies.
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Anger is the compressed resistance to reality.
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Do not give even one coin for all the lies your senses weave.
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So many just throw their minds, their lives away
On the kaleidoscoping illusion of appearances and attributes,
Never grasping that it is the portal to the mystery neither within or without.
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From your earliest moments, naming and defining began,
Desire was encouraged, innocence corrupted, and suffering derived.
Only the most unassuming, the most transparent, realize the timeless birthright.
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Transcending the doubt, merging into that which is intangible, indivisible,
Is an arduous journey, a profoundly mysterious inner quest,
The ending to which is timelessly the same.
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To discern heaven, you may well long and far traverse purgatory,
That which this temporal enterprise oftentimes appears to be,
Until, within and without, you awaken to its eternal reality.
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An enlightened parent's purpose in life is to empower a child
Not to depend psychologically on them or anyone else.
Do not use the innocent to redeem your deficiency.
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Most are satisfied with one mythos or another.
Few discriminate the indivisible foundation directly.
The maya of consciousness is a great distractor.
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Merge into the unicity of unmanifest beingness.
It is the origin, the source, of all manifestation.
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End the darkness, discern your own light.
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You can never really hope to know
Who, what, when, why, where or how.
It being an intangible, ungraspable mystery,
All you can do is intuit that you are it and it is you.
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These thoughts have no existence of their own.
Their meaning – like all paradoxes, ironies, and riddles –
Only those who perceive their own drum can hear.
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What have you discovered for yourself?
Is there some substance behind what you believe,
Or are you just regurgitating something you read or heard?
Unless you own your own mind, you will never perceive what is true.
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Identifying with any manifestation, any part, only perpetuates the web of delusion.
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Every flower has its time, and every one the compost for the next bloom.
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Who-what-when-where-why-how is any dreamtime life form
But same the faceless witness beneath the mask you wear.
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You have done and said and thought many things,
But all are merely a passing dream.
You are none of them.
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Though Maya pulls every magician's trick
To convince you there are many,
In reality there is only one.
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What is the point of living a life
Merely to gratify the senses and pander the mind?
Surely there is more to it than that.
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Prior to consciousness, prior to the sensory theater,
The stillness before time is what you every moment are.
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Pleasure and pain attract and repel like fighters in the ring,
Yet few discern the causeless cause and effortless solution.
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We are all faking it, pretenders making it up as we go,
And all the while trying so hard to justify ourselves bona fide.
Stop, take a deep breath, take the play and yourself less seriously.
Be here now, be the timeless awareness you truly are.
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Always examine, always question, anything and everything closely for your Self.
To blindly accept another’s outlook as truth without a critical eye,
Is a dark and wayward road down which the mob
Has traveled times beyond counting.
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Wherever you go, whatever you do, you are always here, you are always now.
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Because there is no other, there is no need to prove anything
To all the others you spend your consciousness creating.
It is all you.
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Whatever bearing you take on this inexplicable mystery,
Whether the all-knowing many-faced version,
Or that all knowledge is fabricated,
Where are you left with the vision offered?
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Prior to consciousness, you are that.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Simplicity its Self.
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Nothing will ever be the same.
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The dream is a field of gold.
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The truth spoken is not truth.
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All divisions are markers of ignorance.
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Do not encumber what is written here
With the labels and assumptions of the intellect.
No concept treads in the arena of indivisible absoluteness.
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The clayness abides any and every shape:
Animal, plant, insect, fish, earth, water, air and fire.
But can never peer beyond the enticing veil of manifest form
For more than momentary intuitive glimpses of its unnamable upwelling.
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What is the quality of mind when knowledge and experience add no further weight?
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Harmony is living effortlessly without the concerns and strains of identity.
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Ask not what isness can do for you, but what you can do in it.
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Your believing it real is a prison of your own design.
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Play the spiritual hierarchy game if it amuses you,
But ultimately totality, not the player,
Is your original nature.
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It is all just an endless load of crap.
Get over it and move on,
Alone and still.
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It is for you to say, for you to do.
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Your discontent is born of separation.
Surrender to the sovereignty of serenity.
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Awakening is for every one, yet not for everyone.
The many are called, few are chosen conundrum.
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Your persona is doomed to complete and utter extinction,
And there is no other to save that which needs no saving.
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You are but another life form, another creature, another universe,
Ultimately as anonymous as any other Mother Gaia has ever created.
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Whatever the witnessing, whether animate or inanimate, all is ever oneness.
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The arrogant suffer quite a shock then their ignorance becomes apparent.
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Play out the dream as you choose; all dancers and dances are equal.
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The essence of what you are is unknowable and ever out of reach.
Embracing an agnostic state of mind makes existence very simple.
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Anything can take you there if you have the insight to see.
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Doubt includes the dread that you may be wrong.
You are not.
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It is less about what any other thinks about you,
Than it is what you think they think about you.
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It is your sandbox; do with it what you will.
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Nothing is a-happening all the timeless.
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Psychological dependency aborts sovereignty.
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Respect all manifestation as you would your Self.
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Identity is so painfully confining, so dreadfully mundane.
Why you continue to seek continuity is, indeed, a mystery.
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What to do when the world and all its vanities no longer moves you,
When thought subsides and the mind is content to reside in awareness.
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Manifest life might get closer to being fair if everyone played by the same rules.
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Fear and desire have conditioned your mind into imagining time real.
Freedom in consciousness is abiding in the momentary awareness.
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How vain to think your life and times are so vital to the universe.
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If you are here-now-ing in awareness, you are That I Am.
No brag, just fact.
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The only difference between any given you and me
Is our perceptions, our vanities, born of imagination.
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If you seek to attain the eternal quantum mind,
You must abandon your sense of dualistic notion.
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Those discerning reality can only feel compassion
For the multitudes who tarry in ignorance and confusion.
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All the imagination in the universe
Cannot project itself into either past or future.
The eternal here now is the only time there has ever been.
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To settle for anything less
Than the absolute sovereignty of awareness
Is the constant confusion and folly ever manifested by ignorance.
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Are psychological theories and therapies anything more than tools
To engineer your continued conformity to the given cultural mindset?
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Do you seriously believe any supreme being
Would not be bored to tears with human absurdity by now?
Likely less the absentee landlord than the gone-fishing project manager.
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How much time have you dwelled on all the inanities of the human drama?
What do you need to prove, what can you prove, to any other anymore, really?
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The Return to Wonder
Field Notes from the Unknown
© Michael J. Holshouser 2009
World Rights Reserved