Any Other Heaven

You reach up to pluck ripe fruit from the cherry tree
but your arm slips instead through a fold in space-time.
Then whatever is left of you is pulled through too.

Has this happened to anyone before? If so, how
would we know, unless they returned to share
their tale, and then who would believe them?

You don’t believe it yourself, even though
you find yourself on the other side, which is
nowhere to speak of — at least till you arrived.

Now, it’s as if whatever existed before no longer
does — gone, poof, like last night’s fleeting dream.
In every direction: empty space, mysteriously aware.

That aware space, without addition or subtraction,
is you, though there’s no body there. When awareness
rests in itself, you obligingly disappear, Bodhi Swaha!

When it awakens, so do you — you’re reaching up
for a fat crimson cherry, bursting with sweetness,
so delicious: is there any other heaven than this?

Receive and Be Taken

“Your mind, which perceives yet is free of substance,
Cognizes without thought, is conscious yet indescribable.
Free from the movements of conceptual thinking.
Remain in that state, awake and wide-open.
To remain in this nature is itself
the awakened state!”

~Padmasambhava,
from “Songs to The Twenty-Five Disciples”

If we relax and open ourselves to this immediate presence
which is infinite Divinity beyond any concept or desire,
we can feel intimations of love so unceasingly ecstatic
there is not a speck of unlove in it, nor any limitation
or qualification, except that of our own capacity
to receive and be taken, receive and be taken,
to be refined in that crucible, till we reflect
as one clear prism the sublime pure light
of our own immaculate being.

Children of the Void

As silence expresses itself through music,
so are we children of the eternal void.

The deep oceans express themselves in silence,
with myriad light forms singing through the dark.

They are making the precise music of the void,
lullabyes from the sweet womb of infinite life.

Our own ancient emptiness mother pushed down
through the densities to labor and deliver us
into this virtual fluid materiality.

One thought followed the next, leading inexorably
to vast universes of forms, all appearing and vanishing
in the great music, which is silence itself, singing
out loud, populating the oceanic depths and trenches
with fluttering, glowing, neon creatures who will never
see the sky, moon, or stars, yet who render us speechless
in their sublime beauty, and who know what they are
without thought, spasm of speculation, or belief.

We all share the same identity, woven in musical strands
throughout space and time, space and time revealed at last
as a magical pyrotechnic display of creative imagination,
a festival of illusion whose sleek denizens glide silently
through the depths and trenches, mindless in their bliss,
food for each other in the cycle of their perfect lives,
at home in the void, the darkness, the sea.

To the Atoms

The lone survivor reclines in the searing heat of a nuclear twilight
listening to the music of planets, stars, whole clusters of galaxies

none transmit any meaning now, just beauty upon infinite beauty,
as if there was nothing else, as if beauty was all that mattered

and from the dead, enormous silence permeates to the atoms
which in the end conspired, without the least hesitation,
to spin around with Shiva and render men mute.

We ourselves have become this silence now,
its source and destination. Much later,
with a flick of a wrist in the form
of one thought, it begins again.

Om Shiva