salvation

who are you when you aren’t there?

Drawing by Michael Leunig

who are you

when you’re not constantly

re-minding yourself

on social media?

 

when you’re not sharing

your selfies, your mundane and mediocre

daily details?

 

when you’re not broadcasting

your insights, your threadbare, faded

knowledge?

 

what do you see

when you’re not there

telling yourself the old stories

(identify – label – judge)?

 

when there’s no observer

standing separate from

texture, color, energy?

 

when time and space

disappear, taking out your memorybank (poof!)

leaving . . . . . . . . . what?

 

who are you in that apocalyptic instant

when you realise that

every hard-earned conviction you hold

concerning

awakening

enlightenment

salvation

freedom

is merely an empty concept?

 

who are you when you aren’t there?

 

 

[conceptual answers not permitted; keep emptying!]

 

Drawing by Michael Leunig – it also accompanies this post from the early days of ‘the echoes’:

sitting in this leaky boat called ‘me’

 

your mission: find that independent, sinful, suffering entity

321

awakening is easy;
wideawakeness is the natural state of any sentient being
so no one has ever been anything but fully awake

so, why does it appear to be difficult to r-e-a-l-i-z-e?

simply because we fail to examine two notions that are automatically acquired,
assumed to be true, and that become set in concrete in our thinking:

 
1      there’s a separate entity here (somewhere) that thinks thoughts, performs actions, is independent and bears ‘my’ name
 
2      said entity and its life are imperfect, unsatisfactory, bound, limited and therefore in need of improvement, salvation and awakening
 

Echoes from Emptiness: Your mission? Find that entity

 

yet no one, among all the billions of human beings
who have incarnated throughout time,
has ever been able
to find that entity

Can you?

Image – artist unknown.

my feet are clumsy

192

The absence of striving brings the arrival of quietude.

It’s nothing ecstatic or amazing; just the palpable absence of dis-ease.

No goodness, no evil, no victim and no saint.
No protection, no danger, no salvation.
Nothing to be done and no one to do it.
No past, no future, no one going anywhere.

Sounds like the end of ‘your’ world?

It is.

But Life dances on.

My feet are clumsy; I’m still getting used to ITs wild rhythm.

~

on bondage, from owl and friends

75

bondage is merely a belief

who’s the believer that buys this belief?
who’s the prisoner that’s bound
– or not, for that matter?
who’s the victim needing salvation
or enlightenment?
where oh where can this ‘who’ be found?

who hoo t’whoo? asks owl
closing his bigBuddha eyes for the day
bally hoo bally hoo! says dove
getting on with getting on
wank wank wank! scolds willywagtail
enjoying his morning splash-about bath
(and ensuring it’s empty for the late-comers)

~

a huge human hoodwink

03

fictional self hangs on its tailor-made cross

first, self swallowed its own story,
and then it dreamed up the ‘cross’ concept
to hang its guilty suffering self upon
then, of course  it needed to invent
ways out

best way out?

invent a hereafter, with exclusive admission rights
this keeps self in business – selling sure salvation

but this is what I have seen with savage clarity:
the whole ‘solid-state self’ story is a fake,
a huge human hoodwink

no self : no doership
no doership : no suffering
no suffering : no salvation