Rainy day

Rainy day                                                                                        

To never die, our selves desire.

Yet, mortality is illusion, per the Masters,

as are all such objects –

inherently erroneous.

Our one true deficiency

being the blot and blur

of our desiring self.

Its erasure is all we lack

in the trek from nowhere to nowhere.

Our timeless, motionless passage

an entertainment, a false relief

from God’s idle, eternal limbo –

a brief distraction

during a rainy day, shut-in afternoon.

O child of God, whimsicality and pretense

run the gamut of all existence.

Something better besides

Something better besides                                                                       

To seek the truth

is to covet what God knows.

To seek nothing

is to honor His secret.

To seek nothing is the ultimate faith.

A dearth of trust is truth-seeking,

the self-seeking of reward.

To seek nothing is to abandon

the paradigm of loss and gain,

truth being only what is now.

Nothing else to be known; unstorable,

untranslatable into knowledge.

Grasp at truth?  Or hold out simply

your God-issued begging bowl?

O child of God, truth is greater than illusion

but there’s still something better besides.

Asheville Music Sahavas - Brian Darnell sings his song Save me

God's fabled Illusion

God’s fabled Illusion                                                                              

Believing all this – that this is all there is –

invites indulgence, mischief

pushing up from a sweet but false core.

Having no outer authority nor awaiting reward,

no purpose other than to plow and plod

this earth of delight and sorrows ever

outside the fettered gate, gathering what fruit

we may and wild flowers to adorn our graves.

Believing not in this fabled Illusion

as being God’s game, is to invest in human illusion

with all its impotence and futility.

To believe in God’s Illusion

is to have faith in the preeminence

of Something more than all there is.

O child of God, the veils of this realm

flutter loosely among the twisted limbs of faith.

What daredevils learn

What daredevils learn                                                                             

No sense in fearing

what can’t be controlled.

Each purposeful, fearful moment

arising from our pseudo-autonomy,

our obsessive self-protection.

Fear is the essence of self.

Its absence is love.

Everything but the self is love!

Lose your fearful self and become fear’s absence.

Become love; become that Everything.

O child of God, shed the false; become the true.

Shed the self; become Love Itself.

Brian Darnell at the Asheville Music Sahavas - 8-14-15

It takes a death

It takes a death                                                                                        

It takes a death, often

to bring us down to earth,

to the dove’s heart a blow,

an arrow bestirring the dust,

a crucifixion of some sort,

whether on rough timbers

or the rotting beams of old bones;

grave dust laden and silhouetting

our common little crucifixes built humbly

upon the rickety bridges of nothingness.

But also revealing the genuinely endearing

human qualities of valor and gallantry –

for how else may God be brave but through us? 

Clearing the air long enough to glimpse: 

Everyone is continuously reaching for God,

for love, for the above ground truth of who we are.

O child of God, there’s nothing to seek;

nothing to find but the hidden One.

You gave me it

You gave me it

I owe You my life.
Not because You saved it -

You gave me it.  You gave me it,
without reason, that whimsical

original moment You got rolling
the whole ball of wax.

You gave me it the time
of my labored entrance,

emergence of my personal Illusion -
the world, self and space.

You gave me it, at last,
a purposeless task,

my empty hands time-heavy, to sculpt
Your likeness in the rough, raw clay.

O child of God, you were given this life
you hold now so perversely for ransom.

Walking shoes

Walking shoes                                                                                          

One day I’ll put on my walking shoes.

Maybe the house will burn down

or I’ll be tossed out into the street;

maybe it’ll be wanderlust, cabin fever.

I’ll become a pilgrim then – a lengthy,

arduous journey becoming my life

and what will be left of me?  Nothing more

towards the end than my walking shoes,

one foot wearily in front of the other,

bearing my soul towards the threshold

where sanctity dictates, of course,

the removal of these smelly, heavy, broken,

worn and dusty, sweat-stained,

mud-caked appurtenances,

my spirit laved and unshod to freely enter

the holy immaculate house of God.

O child of God, Moses was plainly told –

no man sees My face and lives.

To question a faith

To question a faith                                                                                   

To learn of truth, peruse the discourses of Meher,

scriptures of Jesus, the other Avatars,

enlightened Ones but not aloud.  Not aloud. 

Words are holy only chalked up in the human heart;

tainted upon the lips of anyone short of sainthood;

recited from ignorance and to advantage,

persuasion, impression, impassioning desires

and devotion; to prove someone in error or unworthy,

to question a faith, a path chosen or otherwise,

to belittle the infidels and besot the faithful;

in short, a perilous, unwieldy instrument

those noble, rousing phrases, in the wrong mouths

and ears, having little to do with truth,

much less compassion, divine love and God Himself.

O child of God, He remained silent, a simple clue

yielding much insight and inspiration.

In the air

In the air                                                                                                    

Some never doubt – their faith inhabiting

their loneliness, the trick being not to move

a muscle, wrapped upon the kernel of themselves.

Some always doubt – never alight; never ensnared,

they ask their lonely selves the questions – rarely God.

Only when their throats are broken; too exhausted to jump

to another conclusion do they settle near the brink,

only to soon flap away again at a handclap starting,

flushed in the air, in the air, in the air

where hovers the illusion of autonomy.

O child of God, there’s no rest

except in death and surrender.

The promise of me

The promise of me                                                                                   

I keep going back

to the elephant in the dark,

seeing deeply the universal tent

bedimmed and the elephant ubiquitous;

not as a revelation

but the truth of ignorance,

getting a whiff of it, seeing

my fingers blindly grope

while the promise of me

standing eagle-eyed in some golden dawn

is just as false.  This dark narrowness

cannot be relieved, escaped or removed

without destroying the tent,

the elephant and just who I am.

O child of God, darkness is not answered

by seeing through your fingers.