Selections from the notebook of Sri Vyaktananda

by Terrence Oldham Barnes

edited by Robert P. Meizer

Poems & Aphorisms

FIND

you find the way to god

in each and all tradition

you find the way to peace

in every path you trod

you find the way to emptiness

you find the way to void

you find the way to overcome

your mind, and look at god

you find the way, and not a way

you find yourself is lost

and all you find is destiny

and all that is is fraud

you find the way, yet not the way

you face no future, know no past

you find the way, and know its cost:

your mind to look at god

ADVICE TO WOULD-BE MESSIAHS

Give all

Expect nothing

MY FAITH

There is no place in the desert

to hide from the sun.

There is no way to shelter

in the shade of your own shadow.

If all that is is form, if empty

representations are all that exist

then I can never know my own

non-existence, nor is anything

communicated by the word of

"void".

A poem begins in silence,

in silence it ends,

how very like my universe.

INVITATION TO SADHANA

Have at that silent hill,

that 'not' which cradles the numberless words.

Meditation, populous as slumbers and fluttering with form,

give me a mirror and show me how to watch.

I LIKE RAIN

The search for realisation is empty

Let the final suffering be

The givens are all one

where you see a coffin

dead men see nothing

when an eagle nears the sun

all we see is its shadow

Dualism's dumb.

Monism's moronic.

Nihilism's nuts.

What's a philosopher to do?

on Bali

shadows are used to enlighten

A watched pot may never boil, but an unwatched pot is liable to boil over.

Growth is the process of recovering from what everyone else thinks you are.

Elitists always think themselves the cream floating atop the fresh milk of equity when they are usually just the scum that forms upon the stagnant water of privilege.

I've never understood those people who are surprised to find that irrationality doesn't make sense.

KOAN FOR JUGGLERS

How do you let go of everything without letting go of anything?

PIECED TOGETHER OUT OF OLD DISCONTINUOUS MOMENTS LIKE NOW

Buddha said find

out for yourself

so people came and

asked him how to do it

history repeats itself (but not as

often as you hear that repeated)

the smell of a rose does

not replace its roots

The unmanifest contains the manifest, but the manifest does not contain the unmanifest.

The struggle to be something is unnecessary.

The struggle to not be something is a positive evil.

Freedom lies not in the ability to do whatever you want, but rather in the capacity to want whatever you do.

Looked at one way, the cause of this 'illusion' of individuality is ignorance; looked at another way, it's love.

That indifference does nothing is no surprise.

That love does nothing but balance out the indifference is not expected.

HOW TO LIVE AS A SINGLE NATURAL BEING
(For Charles Olson)

Breathe in and out but live in the space between breaths.

Let your thoughts be breaths and find the space between.

Eat breakfast with friends, and love your enemies because they offer you the opportunity to triumph over them.

Thereafter, benign indifference is the best revenge.

Take a long walk every day even if only in your mind.

Study yourself constantly, but believe yourself never.

Forget whatever you can.

Everything that happens, happens; everything that doesn't happen, doesn't happen.

THE ONLY POEM

How can you ever hope to explain the unexplainable?

You may as well try to give voice to the ineffable.

Far better to speak about the sourgrass in bloom.

Its iridescent yellow flowers bright as day.

There is no revenge against those who laugh at death.

~finis~