_ The past, a hellion; reeking havoc anew, casting doubt upon a once bright future. Where did we go wrong? 'Tis a child of the universe, born of parents long thought dead. From whence this whelp? How deep and dark the cave of memory... 'Two birds, fast-bound companions, clasp close the self-same tree; one bird eats the sweet fruit, the other watches.' Candlelight, the Sun... Who sees the shadows dance? Suffer the indulgence of imagination; suffer. Imagine within and without, loss and gain, birth and death, up and down. Imagine the reins of a horse, with a head in every direction, resting softly in your hands. God is everywhere. God is everywhere. Within and without - it is we who are ignorant. We may not see what we ignore but it holds fast. We are never out of the embrace.
_ '... Another unborn male leaves her with whom he has had his delight...'
_ We've drifted.
_ Or perhaps everything else has moved; broken free of its moorings.
_ No... Yes... yes, it is as you say. And now it's gone. Another another has replaced it. So strange... we have all been here before. I watched as my father lay dying. I wonder if he did the same, with either himself or his father. I will soon follow, putting to rest the rumor of death. Forever alive in the breath- defying silence.
_ Would you know silence?
_ I would, and I have. I have known silence in a manner that makes all else strange. But that only lasts for a minute - the strangeness only lasts for a minute, for it soon is consumed in the all-pervading silent echo. A masquerade is what we live...' We cling to a shrub, yet a grove lay before us.'
_ You, too, call on the Upanishads.
_ The Upanishads exist forever as a certificate of live birth. I have known silence in a way that makes you strange; that makes you dissolve. It's as though you were never, ever here; and I can't forget you. Precise imaginations, created into a functioning image, disappearing by and by, and turning into forget me not's.
_ Is that so?
_ Yes. You have never fully been here. The better half of you is everywhere else. Our comings and goings are evocative of another lie - the lie of life and death. I am going to taste of death in the same manner I have tasted of life; in the same manner in which the bow of a ghost ship tastes of the sea as it forever plies forth; never resting, never moving. And I will bring back gifts from unseen lands and place them in unseen hands; and all will be an offering to a most jealous god. Cast aside fear and be absorbed. I don't know what else to say to you; you're undependable.
_ I will remain undependable as long as you remain afraid.
_ Yes. I understand. Things are happening so rapidly. Only the authentic matters. The straight and narrow is neither straight nor narrow. The infinitesimal and the infinite: One the quotient of division, one the product of multiplication; one through subtraction, one via addition: All is the same. Stand your own personal catastrophe against dreams unrealized. What's the diff?
_ The diff is the same.
_ Beautiful. Chai?
_ Thank you.
_ You, my friend, are welcome.
********
... Faith is born of intuition, of hearing silence; it is not belief.
... To sit in meditation and watch as you emerge from the jaws of death over and over and over. It's not what you think, it's what you don't.
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IIIIIIIII KEEEEEEEEEEP WAKING UP! Small story I was 16 and my grandmother was lying on a gurney in the hallway of Kings Hospital, in a coma at the time I stepped up beside her. She was pasty white and I thought that she would surely be dead at any time. I left her with that image in my mind. But it didn''t happen according to that image. She woke up, and the energy she exuded as she went about comforting those less fortunate than her within the nursing home she lived in in Brooklyn. I visited her again alone in her room this time facing a women with a message. She sat me down, looked me in the eyes and said to me, "Ralph do not be afraid of death, it is nothing." We may have talked about other things but this was all I remembered, to this day. Her body left her a couple of weeks later. Guruma was the next person, I told this story to. Her words of explanation to me, words I hold to this day and use as a salutation many times. "You just wake up." I can't think of it as being any other way? There I am either dreaming or seeing again.
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