The Roaring of Her Voice

As I sat there listening to the roaring of her voice, knowing that behind me there was a jungle of life, and in front of me an ocean of time,

I could see the immensity in front of me; and behind me, the void. Everything and nothing behind me––just empty space. All that there was, was the ocean before me. All I could hear were her stories, but the stories kept coming one after the other. The images of origins and endings, beginnings and nevermores were here inside me and outside of me, and as the ocean was inside my mind, bursting it open, I couldn’t tell the difference between the ocean in me and the ocean outside.

I had no idea where I was. I had no idea what I was hearing. Voices came and went until every word, and every concept, and every memory lost any proportion and meaning. It was just sounds until no longer could I remember who or what I was, what I was hearing, what was she saying––only that reverberation that was felt through skin and spine, only the wailing until nothing else could be had, until that point of reference which is I was barely there.

Yeah. There I was, just a point of view, barely there. I, perceiving the ocean, hearing the stories. The almost I. The barely I. The uncreated. The eternal. That nothing that was not absent. That point which was ceasing to be. Unmanifested. Uncreated.

Something sat, maybe. I cannot really tell you for I did not see it sitting. There was an immensity, I believe so now. I can’t really say. For compared to what could that be an immensity?

There was a vastness that came and went that would give me moments of reprieve, when I could collect myself and think maybe enough to know myself as the teller of stories, as the thinker of thoughts, as the one who yearns for the kiss of that vastness whence I came.

I could never have enough time to consolidate this long enough before she would take me again, before my point of view would change to being a vast something that had existed from the beginning of time and will continue to exist until the end of time when the last flame in the last star goes off.

This Impulse to Know

My mother ocean, maybe she’s hoping one day to have swelled so much that one tip of her womb would breach the infinite ocean above and become one.

One with what? It does not know. It only knows that one day long, long ago it must have come down from that big, big, big heaven. One day it, the ocean, was only a drop that came down from that roaring, infinite vastness of which the sun and the moon are just two tiny creatures that play with her, that penetrate and pull her, making her give birth over and over again.

One day––and this is for sure to happen one day––she will also die and become one once again with the oceans whence she came. Then she will forget herself as the waters above swallow her whole, and her consciousness and vision become stretched way beyond her capacity to know, to think, to remember, and to be.

And so, every star, and every galaxy, and every God one day too will dissolve into the vast, vast ocean-void whence they came.

That part I know. That part I remember.

What I don’t know and cannot know is why that vast ocean of mother Binah swells once again and sets me forth into this harsh and vast light. Why again am I down here where I forget, where all I know is to yearn, and to love, and to desire?

Not even having the memory of what it was, I only have the pain of the yearning; and out of my soul, the depth of my being that has no name, no memory, no ego, nothing… but out of the depth of this pain, the memory of my origin pulls me, and the presence of God penetrates me day and night. In thought and in silence it pulls me. And out of me comes, now as a thought, then as a whisper, this little impulse to go back.

Go back… Go back… This impulse… This thing in my heart of hearts that wants to swell up, flutter up, and become and know what is there outside myself.

¿A Dónde Se Va el Silencio?

¿A dónde va el esfuerzo del amor
si tan efímero es el recuerdo
y tan feroz e indestructible es el olvido?

¿A dónde van las palabras que jamás se oyeron?

¿En qué rincones se quedaron los juegos de niño?

¿En qué paredes se vieron plasmadas todas las vivencias?
¿Y a dónde va la luz solar cuando en color se convierte
y se absorbe en la pupila de tus ojos?

¿En qué oscuridades cabrán tantas y tantas vivencias?
¿En qué rincones oscuros de tu cerebro penetra la vibración de cada palabra?

¿Dónde se pierde la comprensión de lo que nunca fue?
¿A dónde se va el silencio después que absorbe todo sonido?

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Check out SoundScapes—Otherworldly Sound Trajectories by Vox Angelus and Koyote: https://youtu.be/fR_D-AZSxEE

Why Does the Ocean Swell?

Why does the ocean swell?
Is it the pull of the Goddess Moon
high above at the heart of that other ocean,
holding so many stars?
Is it the yearning and the loving of this earthly sea,
stuck here in planetary existence with us
trying to get back to the higher waters,
to that infinite ocean to which our own is but a drop?
Is it that love for the divine,
the love for the womb,
that makes our mother ocean swell and become wave?

Is that what makes you, God, swell with pride and become life?
I don’t know. It’s not mine to know.
For I only know when I am the wave,
and the wave is movement;
and I move and I move,
and I grow and I play,
and I explode and I rumble.
I tumble, then I die.

Maybe after kissing the ocean,
maybe after touching the light,
maybe after giving way to a behemoth well,
maybe after swallowing a ship or two,
I am wave.
As wave I am the ocean
and there is no difference between my water and her water.

And yet I am not her.
I have all her qualities and characteristics.
The composition of me is the composition of you,
and all together we don’t even touch the infinite vastness of her.

From the Telling: Born of Purusha, by Koyote the Blind

Island of Solace

This island of solace will one day vanish away. It will be washed away. For the more I feel the reality of the illusion, the more I touch the hard reality, the more the events of my life prove to me that whatever happens to me is important, that my children are special, that my life is unique.

The more I entrench myself in this illusion of life, the harder the weight of the illusion, and the harder, stronger, and heavier becomes the self. The less flexible I am, the more mechanical and robotic my move, my thought, my emotion.

The more mechanical and fiercely solid my movement of consciousness, the deeper the suffering is and the more entrenched, harsh, solid, heavy the illusion of I am becomes––forgetting the womb of that mother that lies in the emptiness of the eternal presence of the void.

In this Space I sit

In this space I sit, surrounded by a mystery that penetrates every particle and creek of my being.

This mystery moves. If I look inside I see nothing. If I sense the space before my eyes, I find darkness. If I place my attention behind, I see nothing, a dark shadow. I feel the cold presence of the empty void behind me, pushing me, supporting me.

I notice the emptiness moving through my fingers. I hear the emptiness surrounding my words––words that pretend to have meaning but are carried away from me by this emptiness, the echoes of something unknown.

Even the being who says “I am”, implied in every sentence, the being that observes, that hears, that sees shadow and light, the being that says “I am” sits in the shadows between the worlds.

If I look within the source of attention, trying to find the I am, it retreats even further. When I think I’ve grappled the self, surrounding it in a craftily and carefully constructed web of meaning and concerns, saying “here I am,” the I am becomes smaller, more remote, more in shadow. I look for the I am not realizing that the one who searches is also the I am, forever retreating yet always at the center of every experience.

The Light of far away Stars…

In the presence of this ocean, the inside and the outside have lost their boundary.

I see myself through ancient eyes: an immensity of sound and movement behind me. I see the odd alien old man sitting alone. His face, unmovable. His eyes, dead, reflecting the distant light of far away stars.

I move my hand towards the waters of the ocean, and for a moment I seem to almost touch the starry sky. The cold of the ocean of emptiness comes closer to my hand. I become afraid to go too far into the immense silence, afraid of being dissolved and devoured by the nothingness.

I withdraw, trying to remember who I used to be, where I used to go, the path I used to walk; trying to remember the name I used to have–the family, the friends, the name. The doing. The being. The day to day. The step by step I used to take. The orderly something that heeds this horribly beautiful ocean of blue. 

There is an Ocean…

There is an ocean I see with eyes of ancient memories, an ocean of a deep blue. The depth of the ocean feels exactly like the depth of my soul. The sound of the ocean comes hesitant at first, as if wanting to become present, real.

The gentle reverberations in the surface of the ocean are seen with the eyes and felt with the skin. It moves in soft rhythmic jumps. I sit at its shore feeling sand and pebbles under my feet, and every minuscule portion of sand appears to be complete unto itself; as if every particle of sand creates a unique sensation that travels through my body; as if I could get lost in every single sensation, and all of them are felt at once.

There is an ocean of deep blue. Its depth can be touched by the proximity of my hands. The closer I move my hands to my sightless eyes, the deeper I touch the profound stillness of this ocean. I sit as if waiting, but I don’t know what I wait for. I sit at the shores of this ocean. I hear the crashing of the waves, and each reverberation of the waves sounds as if it is my voice talking and moving and reverberating through the skin of my back.

I sit. For a moment, I do not know if I see the dark waters at the edge of time and creation or if, perhaps, I simply stand at the face of the abyss at the end of a life that I can no longer remember as being mine.

For a brief moment, the terrible thought begins to form that perhaps I do not know where I sit; that there is no ocean blue, no peaceful movement of waves; that perhaps all that is happening is the projection of my illusion of safety onto the immense, incomprehensible chaos––a non-existing nightmare that moves and reverberates, a darkness darker than black, a void, an emptiness that moves, an immensity such that the more I stare at it the more it looks towards me.

That look comes at me as a stream of sound, of words being thought by something flowing through me. I no longer know if these thoughts, these words, are flowing out of me or into me.

I Almost Remembered

I almost grasped one memory. I almost saw her tiny hand. It almost pulled me back to a place of belonging.

The closer the memory comes the farther away I seem to move. I try to relax. I lay down on my back. I open my eyes and I see the starry sky, beautiful in its immensity.

I look at the stars and the full moon pulling me; and the pulling of the full moon is gentle, and it pushes me at the same time. It grabs me with her arms of feminine beauty. It embraces me. It lifts me––or something that resembles that sensation of being me.

I look at this ocean of dark above with the tiny stars rippling like crests of waves in an impossibly big, impossibly old ocean of dark blue. The more I lay down the more I forget why I laid down in the first place. Why am I here? What is it that I’m trying to remember?

I do not know.

The Old Well Is Behind Me

There is a well behind me. Old. It’s been there before the creation of the world. It’s been there before there were bricks and stones to put around it. It was there before there were any trees out of which wood was extracted and molded to cover it, to protect it, to keep little children from falling off into that darkness; before there was any thirst in the people and before there was any water, dark and silent, that could satiate such thirst.

There is this well.

What did it look like before we had words such as well, water, thirst? Did it look like a swirling of meaning––like the conglomeration of words and thoughts? Or was it a swirling of darkness dancing with a swirling of light, mixing, separating, always together, never ever nullifying one another?

What happened before the division of creation; before the separation of left and right; before the separation of male and female, of joy, and suffering; before life and death were distinct; before the dreaming and the waking became separate worlds?

How did this river, then, move from left to right when there is no left and no right? How did the waters flow? Were they dancing around one another without movement from here to there? Were they just shadows? Was the river and the well then––before the formation of the foundations of the world––one and the same?

And how would one go about crossing this river, I wonder? Would it be enough to sit here, stare at the crossroads, and force my eyes to see beyond the veil of creation; to see everything before me as a thin screen where lights and shadows create the illusion of a world of infinite space and infinite unending manifestation?

Could I at that moment simply see the world for what it is?
A thin membrane of words and hopes…
Seeing all plastered in front of me,
and reaching out not with the vision of the eyes
but the vision of the sensing that exists behind my head.
Reaching beyond the veil.
Seeking for a pathway.
A middle ground.
Seeking the way that you seek your way
in a dark moonless night.