Epigrams and Subversions – John Veen
Reality is timeless so the question “When?” can never be answered.
If you can’t say when something arises you can’t claim to know that it arises. You might speculate that birth and death happen now, simultaneously—but timelessness erases even that.
Now thoughts, whether “of” time or timelessness or anything else, have no actual extension in space or time, and therefore no content. We might reflect or meta-reflect on thoughts as objects or containers of objects but that near-process is an extinct, dimensionless memory.
Memories, thoughts and other “karmic burdens” are like flames and water streams: formless forms apparent only to the timeless non-form in question.
Reality is… ?
The epigrams and subversions that follow are a squence of primitive objections to form, most of which also object to their own forms vainly, solipsistically.
They step foolishly into the dream. And while they are not light, they are bathed in it. They thank you for it.
Look straight at the seeking itself.
There’s your devil. Your teacher.
◊
It requires nothing
no belief
no conversion
no breakthrough
no need to bore down
no need to dig deep…
◊
See the resistance to what is—
to what is right in front of your face.
See the inversion, the contraction,
the avoidance,
the rejection of the real
in favor of some phantom ideal.
◊
You become aware of your own tendencies
and resistances.
Seeking (seeking answers, seeking comfort…)
is seen or felt as uncomfortable,
even painful, contraction.
Compulsive, instinctive, automatic desires
and fears are exposed.
And the peace of not clinging, not grasping,
not cowering is somehow exposed.
◊
Chronic self-knotting, caught in the act,
is itself the key.
(The key to what? Who the fuck knows?)
See the contraction in action
without trying to fix it…
Now it’s as if there’s a microscopic (infinite)
distance between ‘you’ and ‘suffering’.
That distance is healthy detachment.
Simple, accidental renunciation.
Breathable space.
(It’s all breathable space!)
◊
A ghost outside.
Tension inside.
When you look and see nothing’s there
tension subsides on its own.
◊
The ‘yes’ hidden in the ‘no’…
release masquerading as obstruction.
◊
Bodymind contracts, both predator and prey.
Salvation? Love?
The breath that comes and goes…
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*Intro from book foreword
**Download a .pdf sample
John Veen is a poet and working stiff from Central California by way of Michigan.
He facilitates an irregular non-duality dialog in Fresno, C.A., and edits the website: www. nopathnoself.net
A paradoxical, irreligious confrontation with the (almost) ‘unbearable lightness of being.’
Non-Duality America 