The Crown Carousel

To Lahiri Mahasaya

The conversation continues, but what’s there to say? A subtle yet entrancing music emanates in profound splendor as we cruise the Crown Carousel of the three times, its sublime sensory perfume permeating everywhere, its grace a balm of forgetfulness while we glide on — how can any words compare?

It’s only when we step off that wheel that the timeless silence around things, their natural radiance, begins to reveal itself. Clarity, as our true voice emerges again from the stifled densities of advance and retreat, hope and fear. We begin to sing with the silent choir, with or without using words. A new song begins with one note, the same one playing now. It becomes whatever is. That’s just the way it wants to play, making it up as it goes.

If we listen quietly we may hear it broadcasting now from the Crown Carousel, a majestically revolving luminosity spinning in the chasm of an immense darkness. So divinely seductive, we’re drawn closer and closer still. Emptiness and form exchange glances in the mirror, wink, and get down with their euphoric dance.

We are the mirror, the dancer, the dance, and we are also none of it. Our words are praise and gratitude, or better to not speak at all, except perhaps to remember this deeper knowing we all share — the enormity of that silence where we appear and disappear, like a spark in the dark of an infinite expanse, like nothing any words could ever say.

Simultaneously

Since we are multidimensional beings, we live multiple lives, simultaneously. Since there is no time like the present, we are also living every past and future life, simultaneously. We need not wonder, “Which is the true me?” We are all and none, simultaneously. What do freedom or bondage mean to us? Attachment or surrender? Out there or in here? Birth and death? Frequency or vibration? Form and emptiness? Those carnival booths are numberless — vow to liberate each one, simultaneously. Vow to be yourself, for you can be none other. Even in the midst of any appearance, you and I and everything are streaming out of nothing and returning there, moment to moment, simultaneously. What is happening? A thought. A non-appearance. A Love Supreme? All and nothing, simultaneously. If we follow the track of these words, we come to a great silence. Now we are here and there, simultaneously.