CCXCII
Babble.
Babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble-babble.
Babble-babble.
Babble.
* * * *
Freedom is more than a word, and is free to all
Who discern the essential nature,
And therein reside.
* * * *
Wandering on empty.
* * * *
Just pointing out the obvious.
* * * *
Freedom is a state, a quality of mind.
You can be in chains, tortured, locked forever away,
And be as free as the freest soul ever born.
* * * *
Nature is the only god there has ever been.
How humankind lost touch with that indelible truth
Is a story well beyond any and all bounds of rational thinking.
* * * *
Love is really only as meaningful as its manifestation in any given moment.
* * * *
What is there to complain about when you do not know any different?
* * * *
Truth is all-inclusive, no ifs, no ands, no buts about it.
* * * *
Who is the you that wonders about all this?
* * * *
Everyone works out a salvation
That suits the capacities and limitations
Of their fleeting mortal wander.
* * * *
Within the corridors of memory, you could travel forever.
* * * *
We are all bottomless abysses
That cannot be filled by anything,
No matter how grandiose the effort.
* * * *
It might have hurt if you had cared.
* * * *
Ignorance is a bliss of its own making.
* * * *
If you think God does not weep
For what we have made of this Eden,
Then you neither feel nor fathom the rain.
* * * *
Another flawed character
Expressing such an array of noble ideals,
That even they turn a blind eye to the unadorned day-to-day.
* * * *
It is all just recycled compost, the piss and shit of cockroaches and dinosaurs.
* * * *
You are hopefully too busy living, too busy exploring the allotted moment
To bother about whether some vain and jealous and otherwise malevolent deity
Is going to judge you, punish you, for playing out your given nature-nurture inclinations
In a relatively brief mortal existence in which you had absolutely no say.
* * * *
At some point in the discernment of Self, all doubt ceases.
* * * *
If you cannot build heaven in the right here, right now,
What makes you believe any divinity worth its salt
Is going to invite you to park yourself in his?
* * * *
And if nothing calls you, what then?
* * * *
A touchy-feely, 3D dream in which everything gets you nothing, and nothing, everything.
* * * *
Is it a method to his madness, or a madness to his method?
* * * *
We may all be tools in each other’s awakening,
But the universe looks likely to end
Before some figure it out.
So do not feel like
You have to stick around,
Unless some sort of absurdly futile,
Cross-bearing martyrdom is seducing your vanity
To a near-death experience on one lonely hilltop or another.
* * * *
Good, empathic, compassionate, kind, considerate, cheerful,
Composed, responsible, trustworthy, tranquil, graceful, content;
Likely attributes of a mind at rest, at peace, serenely fulfilled.
* * * *
It is all happening in a sort of topsy-turvy,
Inside-out, ass-backwards, convoluted,
Surround-sound, dipsy-doo-dah way.
* * * *
Whatever you do the first twenty or thirty years of life, you will pay for with the rest.
* * * *
It is far too large a mystery for the monkey-mind to decipher
With any organized techniques, with any dogmatic assertions.
There is really only merging into the grace of its indivisibility.
* * * *
What is a life unmeasured?
* * * *
Speculations abound, none really any more true than any other.
* * * *
Your existence is permeated with both an innate craving for,
And an innate aversion of, the pleasures of the seven deadly sins
– Pride and envy and gluttony and lust and wrath and greed and sloth –
And the chronic suffering they inevitably foster in mind and body.
* * * *
It is really consciousness that plays family,
Lover, friend, acquaintance, stranger, adversary.
Every kaleidoscoping mask is naught but a translation
Weaving its intention within the vastness of your imagination.
* * * *
Whatever analogies, metaphors, parables,
Or concepts of any sort you or any other might employ,
Mind-born imagery is all they are, have ever been, or will ever be.
None have any actual reality beyond aftershocks
Echoing down neuron pathways.
* * * *
Why would you ever need another to tell you that you are remarkable?
Why would you ever need another to tell you they valued you?
Why would you ever need another to tell you anything,
When what you really are requires no sanction.
* * * *
Education is about training the mind to move in many ways.
Meditation is about returning it to its innate serenity.
The quantum origin permeates all venues.
* * * *
The dream of time by any other name is the same.
* * * *
Awareness, call it what you will, is you.
* * * *
Despite your hedonistic, narcissistic,
Insatiable inclination for pleasure,
It is all rather painful, is it not?
* * * *
Whatever it may be called,
Five Elements or Periodic Table, Ether or Quantum,
It is all the same indivisible essence.
* * * *
A pathless mind leaves no footprint.
* * * *
Better some thoughts rattle about on paper.
* * * *
The cosmos is an adventure
No matter which way you might turn.
The maze of existence goes on and on and on,
For as long as there is the breath in which to wander time.
* * * *
Compassion arises from empathy with all things great to small.
* * * *
The mind is a flower of nature, in its own little mortal, temporal sort of way.
* * * *
What do you mean you cannot have your cake and eat it, too?
You had your cake, and then you ate it.
What’s the conundrum?
* * * *
Is there even such a thing as a waste of time?
How can something that does not exist
Ever be spent badly or well?
* * * *
When were you born, when were you not?
* * * *
Not all candles seek to be lit.
* * * *
Joyful bother.
* * * *
Thought is only necessary to abide in fields of dreams.
* * * *
Exploring nothing is always new ground.
* * * *
Language is language, concepts echoing across the abyss, ground to all.
* * * *
What is this ephemeral emotion we call love, if not the eternal void of pure awareness?
* * * *
There is only one mystery, one truth, and we are all equally of it.
* * * *
The grace and serenity of eternity trumps all the speculations born of time.
* * * *
The mind of humankind is an indelible tool-maker,
And those tools in turn shape future minds
In countless, unforeseeable ways.
* * * *
The ever-present tripwire is taking everything,
And thus your self-imagery,
All so seriously.
A glaringly subtle error, indeed.
* * * *
Die ten thousand deaths every moment.
* * * *
However it all began,
We all share the same origin.
All life is the posterity of the first seed.
* * * *
The oldest game in town.
* * * *
And there it is, once again, staring you right in the face, the blatantly notorious obvious.
* * * *
In every word, a degree of separation.
* * * *
There is a price to be paid for everything.
* * * *
It is incomplete, uncritical, undoubting thinking
That has so many of our kind believing, asserting,
That we must play out this theater any particular way.
* * * *
Even if it is witnessed, it nonetheless remains a dream.
* * * *
It is relatively easy to be happy when you have nothing in mind.
* * * *
The history within any given mind is no more than a vague, arbitrary, temporal notion.
* * * *
The ending of desire is the key to freedom from the known.
* * * *
We are all living on borrowed time from the get-go.
* * * *
Time travels oblivious to the eternal moment,
Which allows it temporal right of way,
Ever untouched all the while.
* * * *
Death is like a balloon fizzling out of air,
A scoop of salt dissolving in water,
A river washing into the sea.
A candle flickering out,
What has changed … really?
* * * *
Eternity is like Teflon, nothing sticks.
* * * *
Monkey dust.
* * * *
If there is a supreme being,
Maybe when you die, it will finally show its face,
And you will discern it your own.
* * * *
Just as monkey as everyone else.
* * * *
Expand, stretch into the great stillness within.
* * * *
All over the map because there is a map to explore.
* * * *
If there is still psychological pain, then you likely have deeper to delve.
* * * *
And how would you feel if another treated you the same way?
* * * *
Always amusing how intelligent, well-educated folk
Truly imagine they can persuade ignorance
To become as savage as they are.
* * * *
The mind is a-whir.
* * * *
It all starts off as nothing,
Then gradually becomes something,
And then, for those who awaken,
Reposes into nothing again.
* * * *
How can you forget what you never knew?
Why remember what you think you do?
* * * *
If a vision does not include everything,
Then it cannot really be anything
More than another lie.
* * * *
We all put ourselves under so much pressure for whatever.
* * * *
Is monkey love really any more than narcissistic self-absorption?
* * * *
It does not get any more graceful,
Any more effortless, any more flexible,
Than the nothingness of the eternal mind.
* * * *
As if all your caring really means anything.
* * * *
If you assume someone else knows more than you about this unknowable mystery,
Then you are likely destined to be tithing to one middleman or another,
Perhaps until your last wheezing, hacking, weary breath,
Less, of course, the nominal ten percent.
* * * *
What is this corporeal form but a satchel of memories
Destined either to be licked by flames into ash,
Or consumed by one creature or another
In the bowels of the dusty labyrinth.
* * * *
Try telling that to anyone who cannot listen.
* * * *
Some seem to feel compelled to proclaim themselves Buddha
Because the original moniker no longer bears the sovereignty.
* * * *
To die, or not to die, that is the question.
* * * *
How expansive, expansive can be.
* * * *
What was it you projected in that, anyway?
* * * *
What fear it takes to not even be able to look.
* * * *
There is no other, never has been, never will be.
* * * *
Never mind.
* * * *
You are absolutely nothing in the most profound sense.
* * * *
How has all this come about, a mystery that has no answer.
* * * *
Be as an infant in the womb – serene, aware, unattached – with malice toward none.
* * * *
What consciousness hath set apart, let consciousness render whole again.
* * * *
Why bother holding on to all the memories of what has only ever been a dream?
* * * *
Every life form is a shard of the Truth, the Life and the Way.
* * * *
Manifestation is the limitation of one form or another.
* * * *
Remember nothing. remember everything.
* * * *
Family are the people you love, friends the ones you like.
To have love and like one in the same can be rare, indeed.
* * * *
It starts as nothing, it journeys as nothing, it ends as nothing.
How can there ever be either beginning or end to the indivisibility?
* * * * * * * * * *
The Return to Wonder
Field Notes from the Unknown
© Michael J. Holshouser 2009
World Rights Reserved