No matter how the world evolves,
Whether true to life
Or spiralling in madness,
The life principle
Remains pure and untouched.
–
Invest your life
In its sweetness
And disregard the rest,
However seductive and convincing,
For only in love
–
Is sweetness manifest.
And if the world descends
Wholly into madness,
Still, life’s truth
Holds fast.
–
And if all obey the call to anger,
But your mind left last
And abiding in love,
It will not matter
And will surely be enough.
The moment is fresh
As dew-lubricated leaves
New from the womb of the world.
Oh, this sweet, empty moment,
Virgin as the first born thing,
How can I describe your unresistance
With but the clumsy word?
For you are nothing:
An endless, friendly nothing
Holding me in your arms,
Tender as the loving heart
Welcoming all that is.
You, who is no you,
You, who is everything
Seen and unseen,
Everything unformed or dwelling unchanging
In that which is not yet made.
–
The moment is fresh
And alive with infinite spirit,
And while the dogged mists and moods
Of false thoughts,
So seemingly bonded and glued,
Drift upon me from time to time,
Obscuring your brilliance,
They too, are born in you,
They too, arise in the light
Of awareness’s presence,
Taking their life
From the very light that you are.
One man
Is an individual,
He walks in the world
As a separate entity – of course,
Carrying his loneliness
Like an ever heavy weight.
There are things in the world,
Things that might draw
Attention from that dark void
In which he must not look.
And so he desires those things
For the momentary peace
He receives in their procurement.
–
Another man
Is joined to the world,
All the things he sees
Arrive to him
And in him,
Endlessly passing
And dying away:
Yet he alone
Never dies away,
For his watching
Is container for the world
And all within.
And if there is loneliness
It is brief as the seasons,
And if there is a void
He does not fear it,
Accepting all within the bounds of himself.
We walked through the night,
The blazing sunshine
Of our hearts
Lighting the way.
–
Where is lack
In this?
Where are dark thoughts
And angst?
–
Exactly where they always were,
But untouched and allowed to be;
For the sunshine of open hearts
Allows, shines on everything equally.
Immersed in the landscape
Or fixated on an object,
This artist does not paint
What his eyes see,
Rather, he absorbs the sight,
Places it
In the cauldron of his being
Where life seeps
As the language of the soul.
It is this he paints,
This aliveness
Mirroring landscape or thing:
His spirit
And God’s spirit
Dancing as one
Infinite being,
And reaching out
To his poised fingers,
To transform the inanimate
And deliver magic on the canvas,
Every stroke of his brush imbued
With the inward spirit he feels.
When the noise stops,
When the machine of thinking thoughts
Slows to a lull
Or is brought silent
In a moment of
Concentration.
When the worker sets down his tools,
Rests a while,
Leaves his ideas alone,
Then,
In this pause,
This relaxation,
The love that was always there
Is seemingly exposed,
And Life,
Beautiful and whole
Is known in fullness.
Where sanctuary?
In thought’s fickle materialisation?
In the world of passing things,
Ever dematerialising,
Always dying and slinking away?
In emotion’s slavery
To the fickle thought?
–
Where else is there?
–
Where else
But the nothing,
The dimensionless no-thing,
The substance-less non-realm
Of the self.
Where else but the self’s
Void-less void,
Thing-less thing,
The self’s changeless being,
Un-conceived
And un-manifest.
–
Where sanctuary?
–
Only in nothing:
Foundation found
Only in the
Self’s foundationlessness.
From the ashes of my beliefs
Awakes the child of myself,
Born into the moment.
–
Can he remain true
To the idealess
Realm of his beginnings
–
Or must he age
In the world,
Heavier with each moment,
–
Each new belief?
Is the ageing process
And stiffening up
–
An illusion
In which we dwell
Stiffer and more unwell
–
In the hardening carapace
Of personality’s
Hard work and upkeep?
–
Or is the child unblemished,
Cocooned in the now,
Eternally fresh,
–
Ideas burned to ash
Under his gaze,
Illusions
–
Nothing but ciders
In the presence
Of his presence?
Perhaps you forgot
The searing light,
Buried it
In low-mood thoughts
And reason
As heavy as chains.
–
Oh, yes, you say,
Give me the nicotine of thought
And worldly misadventure.
Let me overlook my overlooking,
Let me ignore my ignorance
And dwell outside myself
In a swirl of worries,
While the light is left unacknowledged.
–
Instead,
Remember, not the cold intellectual light
And the optics of the brain,
But the warm body of love
Inside yourself.
–
Remember the needless state
Where the heart floats
On ethers,
And worries are nothings,
Neither fears, nor even yours.
–
Remember the you
Before the you
Who carried the weight of living,
The unfettered you
Buoyant and watching,
Alive in the now
From which all springs forth.
–
Remember the sun of love
Blazing in your heart,
Remember remembering,
And the knowing
That the heart has always, always burned,
Is never dulled
And will never ever grow dark.
Like the clock
Whose ticking
You no longer hear,
And like the picture
You pass every day
That’s almost disappeared,
And like the wedding band
On your finger,
Now part of you,
And like the beautiful view
These days seldom seen:
Like these
Being is present
As it’s always been,
There, at the centre of you,
The background of you,
The you of you:
Knowable only in its knowing,
Realised only in realisation,
Noticed only when you notice
You are.
distilledvoice 