Even at your best and noblest
You want to get to something
To health, to revelation, to divinity
And this getting to gets you nowhere
As you try, you prevent

But to freely explore possibilities
Is to not try to direct their flow but
To anticipate their pleasant surprises

For every thought, sensation,
And perception waits to be
Acknowledged by you and
Returned to its source

And if you listen carefully
All these things
Aggressively, gently,
Impatiently, or sweetly
Importune you to do
What you must do

Form is empty. Emptiness is form
And all things are the same
Neither this nor that
Neither good or bad
Neither ugly or beautiful

For the illusion of separateness
Usefully breaks the unbroken
Continuity of consciousness

To give names and labels is to
Dissect and discriminate the whole
To choose one over the other when
These labels you give to yourself
Are only flexible summaries
Of inflexible characterisations

Resist aporia and follow through
Instead of Looking back
For signs of lostness
Wondering if it is possible
To get through to revelation
When the only way to reveal it is
To go all the way through

To accept the opinions of others
In full knowledge that they repeat
The verities or falsities of yesterday
Warmed-up and re-served for today

In full knowledge that nothing
Can be truthfully trusted at all
But your own unmade path
As you make your way through it

Things out of reach are
Things always present
For their constant presence
Creates the illusion of absence
And though seeming close at hand
Flee faster than can be pursued
And now seeming to reach them
Only transmute themselves in
The distance ahead, which
Ceaselessly grows and extends
Until you turn around and see
Anew the country you have crossed
For where you are is always
At the centre of your thoughts
The edges of which
Circumscribe your reality

And when you fail to notice
What you have failed to notice
Because you are busy trying
Not to notice what you don't
Want to notice, your prāṇa (प्राण)
Your vital energy, the vivifier of
Action and perception, is exhausted
To the point where you fail to notice
Your child’s distress,
Your mother’s sorrow,
The speeding car
As you walk your fateful steps

To collect experiences and
Cultivate memories is the only way
To recognise experiences
For you cannot cut being off
From the separateness of being
Unless you choose to
Undivide the indivisible
Of divisive ideas and beliefs
To see as new and whole
The extraordinary, unfolding now

If you can bear to stop
In your pursuit
If you can turn around
And face your longing
To ask what it means
And if it is meaningful
If you can bear to hear
Its devastating reply
To see the illusion of
Fulfilment and accomplishment
All the things you did
And needed to do turned
On their heads, undone
And start anew
From day one

There is an eagerness, a zest
An excitement, that makes these
Ordinary moments of moment
And importance in the only sense
That importance ever anywhere
Can be
A joie de vivre privately felt in the
Extraordinary experience of being
But more so, when abandoned
To the nature of things
Discover the public pleasure
Of sympathetically joyful muditā
Is beyond all measure

Tendencies (tendens) is a
Stretching to, towards, but
Back to well-known things
And like a spoilt child
Knows only when it is
Satisfied or crossed

Much experienced habit
Habituates the mind and
Catalyses the actions that follow
Like wine that permeates
The wood of its cask
Habit treacles through
The deep structures of
Unchangeable personality
And personal identity

Beyond which logic cannot go
Things half-seen and half-heard so
In expression, complexion, inflection
Tone, colour, shape, and other
Feeling textures that arrive whole
Unlike the myriad little steps of
Well-ordered reasoning
Like a seed that germinates
When conditions are ripe
To recognise the pattern in the
Noble proportions given to sense

Me, a thing-with-features
In the world of things-with-features
Learn to see myself
As others see me
To mould myself to the aspirations
Of family, church, and community

Now condemned to preserve
This precis of myself with its
Roster of injunctions to obey
To constantly prove to myself
And anyone who will listen
That I am what I intend to be

Now mortified that a vital fragment
Of myself has been stripped away in
A little death, a moment of unreality
That this amazing technicolour
Dreamcoat worn with pride
Was cut for Someone of a
Different size, shape, and stride