Meditation Pieces
from Deane Juhan1
Its deliverance through flesh.
Nerves are always there—to be
warmed into comfort, tickled into pleasure,
ignited into explosive joy.
The force that sustains all
is everywhere around us.
Only take a moment of surrender,
allow it to enter your felt sense.
Your whole being craves it, the one desire
that always feeds in its fulfillment.
First ask. Then allow.
Within gravity there is buoyancy.
Within fear there is survival.
Within anger there is change.
Within love there is possibility.
Within flesh there is the wisdom
to make these things joyful.
Our body is our temple,
awareness of it our worship.
How will you know when you have felt the Divine?
When you feel it you will know
that you have never felt anything else.
Be careful an objective view is not a shield
to protect us from overwhelming ecstasy.
4
See up there, a star
a raging fire of immense intensity
with a heat we cannot feel,
a light we only slenderly see.
So far away, it engulfs us—
we are in its belly.
Any star we see is a thin sliver of radiation
a shaft no wider than the eye’s iris’ center
a needle piercing the pupil
who dutifully tries to learn what it can let in.
A sliver shot from a molten core
expanding in all directions—
sphere of photons occupying more space
every moment of its movement through time.
Spheres that hold us in midsts
circumference of each overlapping all others
none defining a distinct domain.
Bellies within bellies
skeins of waves criss-crossing a loom
steadily weaving the shape of space.
When and where do we see these stars?
Only in darkness and
never at the time of their actuality.
They come at great speed
but never arrive when they are.
We can only know of them what was
and no two of them at the same time.
Are any still there at all?
From fire to ashes, from ashes to dust
cast sparsely across nothingness.
Within so many bellies there is no where.
In the passing of so many nows we have no when.
Is there ever anywhere an anchor?
The materialessness of the mind.
From the alpha of it to the omega
genesis begins and ends here and now
eons ago.
2
What truth could possibly be tidier?
Room for doubt vanishes,
True simply because it is true.
That is eternally reassuring beauty of it.
There through all time and space.
True always and everywhere,
It unfailingly holds fast.
An abstraction of the imagination.
It does not exist in the world of things.
Do two snowflakes plus two snowflakes
Equal four snowflakes?
No two snowflakes are alike,
ergo no equivalency.
Exposed to the intricacies and distinctions
inherent in all manifestations
the proposition crumbles.
Two men plus two women equals four humans
is inevitably preposterous.
What sort of men, what sort of women?
What is each’s unique history?
What is to expected from their interactions?
In the specifics of reality
abstraction offers no foundation.
The average age of a thousand can be calculated,
but that is not the age of any one of them.
The tidiness is only in the mind;
It provides a bulwark against the constant shattering of reality.
The precision of analysis repeats.
Nothing in nature does so.
The world has everywhere a center and nowhere a circumference.
The only explanation of reality is the feeling of it.
How can numbers account for the ultimate perception?
All is one.
5
Holy holy is unholy—
say it and it is not.
Even a hushed syllable
slipping by in a whispered breath
has too much thingness
too much weight and measure
too much freight in its breeze
for the fragile smoke of a covenant
to cohere within the mind,
to be held in the gossamer of experience
that melts away at the slightest
intimation of definiteness.
I am the vibrant tension of a cobweb
spreading across dimension
anchored at the edges of nothing.
If the smallest fly were to be ensnared
its struggles would destroy
the poised equilibrium of my existence.
Jaweh the ancients’ cloistered jewel
never to be written never to be uttered.
Ja the nameless inhale
Weh the meaningless exhale
the repetitive metronome of life
entering and leaving, filling and emptying
and in its wake is the restless dance of energy
Whose spinning is the life.
Chord not heard, melody never played—
the silent sources of all orchestration.
Strive to be content with this nothing
in the vessel that holds all,
for any icon of the holy
annihilates the spirit.
3
Center above it a sand cradle
Releasing a grain at a time.
Set this accumulator into action.
Wait for the emergence of pattern.
First random scatterings,
no grain is alike and no bounce the same.
Then an increasing density emerges
around a vague center.
A gestalt arises.
With more grains falling
density thickens into a mound;
a third dimension appears.
Growth develops both in height and girth.
The center clarifies
from flat to mound to cone.
As cone sharpens, a new emergence:
now periods of quiet accumulation
punctuated by sudden slippages.
New heights become absorbed by
a widening circumference.
Let this continue until cone’s base
meets the table’s edge.
A critical mass is obtained.
Circumference can no longer expand.
As grains continue to pile up
a prediction becomes certain:
Avalanches will happen and sand will fall.
But four things elude prediction:
where the next avalanche will occur,
when will it happen,
and how large it will be.
Avalanches continue in random jerks,
and sand will fall off the table.
But in two identical time periods
the amount of falling sand will never be the same.
The longer the times frames
the closer to equal the amounts will be;
but precision can never be achieved.
These discrepancies will not resolve
with more acute analysis.
The more acute the analysis
the more stubborn they prove to be.
Regularity wobbles, and the random persists.
These are not things we have not yet
figured out how to know.
Perhaps they are unknowable, and humility must prevail.
The stream’s music cannot be captured by notation
and without the exuberance of the random
we would be trapped in diabolical stasis.
In random is fecundity.
6
The question that matters most
Is not what you do or don’t know
But what you dare not know.
The value of knowledge shrivels
before the beneficent ignorance
that sustains our beliefs and spares us
disruption and dislocation of structures
that preserve certainties and peace of mind.
We prefer our fragile contract
with apathy that relieves us
from the labor of regeneration
and any obligation to act on our own behalf.
Specters of memory, unlike Lazarus
too leperous to resurrect
bodings too anguishing to allow
lie too close to triggers of rage
and rage too obviously self-protective
to keep terror repressed.
Masks and veils obscure authenticity
only by negating it
leaving us naked amid consternations.
Avoidance consequently is of supreme value.
It is an infant’s game of peek-a-boo
we play with what we must not see.
If we truly did not know what it is
and precisely where it is concealed
we would stumble upon it at every turn
to face prickly discomfiture at its presence.
So the mind becomes a labyrinth
of dark passages and bolted apartments
kept far away from here and now
yet remaining as shadowy subterfuges
of clarity honesty and accountability.
Thus we make ourselves strangers
to ourselves and to the world
unable to shutter our secrets
without compromising all perception.