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In the mirror this old man sees

Nothing.

Where once his face would be

Looking back at its own changes

Is now a blurred grey emptiness,

Framed by distorted familiarities:

Frosted hair; glimpses of a Monet world.

That which sees can now never see itself;

The eye of ‘I’ has closed its windows,

The blinds permanently drawn,

Perpetually blind.

Those screens upon which ten-thousand things

Were once reflected, before transmission

Along the optic cable into that coiled chamber

Where I translated a sense into forms, the forms wherein I dwelt –

Those screens now hide behind a tattered curtain,

Behind shattered slats.

Yet each sense must go before this vehicle is ready to be devoured, just as it has spent its brief decades devouring nature in numberless forms.

Yes, they must all go.

Only in the stillness

Can I know where I will be

When there is no thing, no one

To feel; only silence to hear;

No means or object of tasting;

But perhaps an unearthly fragrance, a perfume which pervades and envelopes, nurtures, and supports rather than being smelt?

Perhaps.

Perhaps – because Mysterium  Magnum has not eluded ten thousand tongues and scrolls

And years

For nothing any man or beast can label under the

Illusion that objects names explain.

Names are flash-cards glued to stuff for the child or adult learning the trick of language.

As the mind dodders towards decay,

More and more is labelled ‘the thing that…’

It always was.

The labels taught us little about what they named.

There is a Hadron Collider in Cerne which has recently confirmed the existence of Higgs’ Boson, an energy particle so irreducible that some are equating it with God.

I state this series of labels to demonstrate that not one reader will really know what these words mean.

The Vatican owns two major astronomical observatories.

Cardinals and popes are very much more interested in the universe than they are in the poor and wretched.

Why not?

The poor are always with us, yet the universe may not be.

What does the Vatican seek out there in that glittering eternal vastness?

God? Alien life forms ripe for conversion to their archaic version of totalitarian tyranny?

There are no gods,

Because all existence is Divine.

Galaxies we view as they were a trillion trillion years ago:

Divine, holy.

The cicada singing its whirring chant in the dust – and the dust itself:

Divine, sacred. All.

Creator and Creation are one and indivisible, as every saint and sage has been telling us for countless millennia.

Only our senses persuade us otherwise,

And Death, of course, will be the final proof.

Why die without knowing, though?

Stillness and silence alone offer the experience of this blissfully eternal Unity.

I know my name.

Yet who is this knowing ‘I’?

Thoughts and memories, hopes and fears?

Are the thoughts me?

Watch them, but do not follow.

I discover they have no connection to the ‘I’ which adopts them.

They are generated by the unstill mind, through association, memory, desire, yet I do not generate them.

In the quiet mind only consciousness exists.

We exist, and are conscious of this fact. It is indeed all we truly know.

Pass the terror of an utter loneliness, and what awaits is pure bliss, the raindrop realizing it is the infinite ocean into which it fell.

When ripples cease, the little pond becomes a mirror reflecting, and no different from, the starry night up at which it now gazes, or which gazes down.

Stillness, silence: these are the answers that so many seek, and why ‘the Kingdom of Heaven lies spread out upon the earth, yet men see it not’.

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