Mad Love for Jack and the Buddha
- The I that created the sky
seems unaware of itself. - The word that is God
defies definition. - What seems real
never really seems
an illusion. - Awakening like the lotus
out of degradation again,
still we don't understand
degradation. - My body is spirit moving
deaf, dumb and blind. - My non-existence
is a rumor to me. - Bliss, like the world,
carves itself to the actual. - The singularity of me
doesn't equal
the wholeness of you. - Imagination is the only access
to a reality that
only lets nothing enter. - We always must choose
the movie or the world,
the dream or waking state --
how can we learn they're the same? - The dust on us
by which we know our purity
means we are no longer pure. - The silence at the center of things
must be learned, but because
it is silence, it cannot be. - Knowledge can see everything
fold into one.
Wisdom will keep things distinct. - In the beginningless
was the wordless,
just beyond the Gods
to be forgotten. - We know how our forms
eventually reveal their illusions
but we don't know what truth
brings to birth them. - Time is the alcohol
in the tincture
that makes it impossible
to take. - Because of this,
enlightenment
always comes too late. - Believing the eternal,
for example, is only a matter
of how long. - Life forms come to go and go to come.
Forgetting their bliss
somehow becomes their bliss. - We've never left
the universal mind
yet we can swear
on a stack of bibles
otherwise. - When change is the only permanence
nothing is left for the changeless. - In the darkness you can confront
the invisible
but it's only the absence of light. - Even flies nursing delicate viands
grow tired of chasing nothing. - The cause of woe is not knowing,
the cure is not to care. - Emptiness fills up everything
to make us forget
we are always hungry. - What you've lost
is on the other side
of the multiverse,
equally lost. - Like everything that kills,
you disappear
to quiet the mind. - You can race across the rapids
without a kayak
but mental pictures
never. - To be virtuous is a sin,
and sinfulness a virtue.
It turns around and around
like that because the whole
can't break itself to parts. - The listener is as sincere
as you imagine her to be. - The womb where
everything holy grows
is dark and empty,
no wonder what's
perishable in the light. - The mind exists not to think,
the heart exists not to feel;
but we're helpless at birth
and like cripples make our way. - The golden eternity pretends
to be you, plays your part
while you are in another room.
You come back to
everyone stunned. - The Carmelites answered everything
with silence.
We still can hear the screaming. - We know, somehow, that all
we call real is false, down here,
where we pull the wailing bell
to drown the constant silence
of our laughter from on high. - There are tears of joy
as you sense the other shorepeople
wash through everything near
and with an impeccable beat
they turn back to tears of grief. - Jesus and Buddha saw, as they died,
everyone as the same love,
thus depriving the others of
meaning, of being understood.
There is only the gold of
their profile that remains. - Earth was spun into existence
the way that Heaven was --
a process we can't possibly comprehend,
which makes it easy for us to pretend
they are the same. - The Guru, the Iman, the Rabbi,
the Most Right Righteous Reverend Don
has no more humility
than anyone in the flock
but has what the laypeople don't,
spiritual authority,
so they can breathe easy, say nothing,
and know the mysteries of life
make the most compelling stories. - The trees at night
are not trees at night,
which is sometimes comforting,
sometimes not. - An altar of oranges, frankincense and tea,
devoted to giving, to the heavenly,
merely replays the tragedy
of the bars in between,
the renunciation, the only
image we have of heaven. - It has to happen
for it not to have happened.
We have to speak the truth
to be told that we are wrong --
that's the peculiar sense of education. - The finality of death
would teach us to be free
if not for the finality of birth. - In paradise we stand in line
to be paralyzed numberless times
in hell -- yet the only rewards
we pay attention to here
are fungible? - If you could see how comically wrong
the scripture is in heaven,
you might pay more attention down here. - TIME can tightened or loosened like a bolt,
SPACE can be escaped like rain from eaves,
the senses can be turned inward to the universal mind,
but still our hands, for fun, consistently fail
to locate the dream alarm in the morning. - Every bee, each cup of tea and blade of grass
is sacred, even though they don't exist
and neither do we. - The Earth doesn't need your love,
the Universe doesn't need to be understood,
even you do perfectly fine ignoring who you are --
still all the wise ones want to do
is foolishly try. - Choices: The mountain is a vision
of purple heaven, or a thought
of melting moguls in spring
or something inaccessible,
with no feeling or meaning,
no discernible being. - How perfect to live in an illusion
and have words to help us believe
that it is real. - There are moments when I sense the golden
eternity. It's like every block is made,
and there's nothing but green to the end zone.
But the feeling soon fades, and all I want to do
is field another life-threatening punt. - Kindness begats the eternal milky love of oneness,
or is it that kindness makes us separate and strange,
feeling another's uncanny pulse? - It analyzes to vibration, our lives and world,
and that's okay, for we sense the frequencies anyway,
of course as something different. - One would think, with the universe in every cell,
there would be peace -- such perfection in structure!
How kind of us to conjure such chaos out of
the scraps we find around, as if we were the Gods
and the universe was somehow created. - If we can keep our eyes open
the visible world will disappear
as if it was the most natural thing to do,
but focus them we must, as there's someone
saying now the moon's a space ship,
completely empty. - "It's a computer simulation, a holographic
video game," spits out the latest
cosmological reports, as usual much easier
to grasp than the smiling void. - There are times, I suppose,
when the butterfly doesn't think of being eaten
and times when humans look at things
without turning into them, to step away
from nature momentarily, like a holiday. - Just because your fingerprint resembles
a certain nebula
doesn't mean you're not unique. - Cats make us jealous
when they gaze into those other worlds. - In heaven you'll regret the believing sweetness
of heart that kept the pitied
from being conscious of themselves.
Ah, the golden door, so ever-possible,
maybe the next time I'll find another
level of sincerity. - The perfect loving no-world trance
requires a mind to imagine it and go there,
not unlike a cardboard scripture
putting dusty thoughts into your head. - No evidence of existence, as if that
ever stopped us, our consciousness
causing the world and all,
and to both we are oblivious,
the eternal hush of silence so close
we think our words express it,
as we think we don't have dreams
because we don't seem to remember them. - Coyote the trickster points out the obvious again,
that transformation is the order of the day,
but not disclosing the equally pertinent,
that we have no ability to recognize our former selves. - They say if we see the colors the way they really are
we'll bounce away from our golden thread
instantly, so it's a way of keeping us here,
to experience only in sleep or deep delta
or some left-brain trauma
a vision of what some call "mystical":
the forms dissolving, people merging,
the line between the center and heart electrified,
we call it everything, we call it nothing,
we call it home, we call it heaven,
this stretch of feeling that makes us,
for no reason, believe our life has meaning,
even as the density returns and boundaries re-emerge.
That's what we do, create from nothing,
believe from nothing, know that it was all
a mistake, this terminal view,
and the lies that visited upon our eyes
unforgivable. And still we don't know,
as if knowing mattered, as if it didn't get
in the way. - Please compare with The Scripture of the Golden Eternity.
- There is no Scripture of the Golden Eternity.
