fragmentation

perhaps it is time?

 
Photo art by Christoffer Relander
 

would you believe me
if I assured you that
you can never be too old
(or too young)
to meet the unborn
deathless Bright
that is your actual identity?

would you believe me
if I whispered that you
and the world appearing
within that radiant
Knowingness
are inseparable
except in thought?

would you believe me
if I said, No, it is not
too late
to turn in, to dive down
into your immensity
and feel loved again by
your own shy Life?

if your days feel deadened
by weariness and futility,
if your world seems fragmented
and full of pain,
I implore you: please
don’t believe or not believe,
but glance, with thoughts
on hold,
at the ever-present invitation
to check this out for yourself
 
perhaps it is time?

 

Multiple exposure portrait by Christoffer Relander

a willingness to disappear

363

analyze and adapt
diagnose and dialogue
formulate and fix
trance, track, tap:
so many ways to place
kiss-it-better
patches on the pain
of fragmentation

we call it healing
and invent new modalities by the minute
to ease the symptoms, which also
multiply by the minute, fattening the catalogue
of official psychological disorders

but until the trickster called time
is exposed and deposed
our little healings are just brief remissions
from the ache of incompleteness

to heal is to make whole

that’s why the true sages carry no band-aids
but go straight to the root of fragmentation
– time –
conjurer of the ‘me’-mirage
with its default sense of separation
and its insatiable appetite for union

they know that the ending of time
restores immeasurable wholeness
– no faith, no belief, no training required

only a willingness to disappear
into now and this and here

~

‘I-I’ replaces ‘I-am’

158

The grammatical first-person I that, as subject, takes a verb, is the I in I-llusion.  As subject, it’s also necessarily an object – conceivable – and therefore just another tool of thought and nothing more.

To say, “I am” and to assume that this little phrase holds some kind of spiritual power exposes yet another version of ego’s search for an identity.  Although it’s held in almost magical regard by many spiritual teachers, I’ve always been edgy around this phrase.  It asserts separation, individuality.  Unless understood at a profoundly deep level “I am” has precisely the kind of power it takes to deepen the illusion and foster fragmentation.

Sooner or later one comes to the understanding that ‘I’ has nothing whatsoever to do with doing (or feeling) and has no need of a verb because IT is a verb.

Ramana Maharshi liked to use the term ‘I-I’.  That’s good enough for me.

~