The World

 

1.

We’re living in a time when even the sky people open their windows and look down, amazed. This is the time when human beings find their dreams more realistic than their waking lives, which are also dreams. In their waking dreams, which are their lives, what they fear emerges from their own imagination.

It assumes a life of its own, like an old dream wearing new garments, mind-woven in fear factories, coalescing around a matrix which has no actual substance, as in dreams which dissolve when the dog barks and sleeping eyes flutter open, heart thumps, but there’s nobody there.

In whatever custom-fashioned and transient universe one momentarily appears to exist within, fantasies of interpretation on perception still colorfully parade down the neural boulevard in a caravan called “Endless”.

The number of views one might entertain about any or all of it are as numerous as grains of sand on an infinite shore, though employing the mind to comprehend the mind itself just adds delusion to delusion. That is, attempting to figure things out with the human intellect merely compounds one’s own delusion, in turn only spawning further delusion.

Nor does it cease at that. Accordingly, it is called “Samsara” by those who favor that particular verbal description for the peculiar octave we collectively resonate at here in this sizzling psycho-physical circus attraction called “the world.”

2.

There, by the crumbling banks of an ancient river, an early dusk sky was still ablaze with the glowing embers of the dying day. I saw you hunched over the burning funeral ghats, inhaling the smoky perfume of charred flesh and bone
like a macabre dope fiend, then go drunkenly staggering through the sewer-lined streets of the night-time town, brazenly juggling flaming batons of birth and death like some crazy carnival clown on a grisly spree.

Behold, in the temples and shrine rooms your devotees are offering gilded gifts at the makeshift altars of their salvific superstitions, but I can see you, Devi, and I know that you’re only doing your job, so no praise or blame will escape my lips, just get on with it now: this world is dry tinder, and you wield the match.

3.

In the aftermath of the inferno, boatloads of souls are disembarking, typically looking a bit singed and dazed. Some of them may try to pray, others might want to curse. They stare back and forth at each other — something’s familiar, but still hard to sort. Eventually Her deputies show up, silent and smiling, to wheel them away before the next group sails into port.

A few imagine they know what to expect: streets of gold for the righteous and lawful, while for the rest, seven descending levels of awful. They read their bible, were sure of the facts, but they were wrong, it is nothing like that.
Those ideas and beliefs, like hope and fear, are among the props that get left behind. Nobody expects what they actually find — to cut to the chase, we get our own mind. Welcome to yourself, your own just reward. If you think it’s unfair, take it up with your Lord!