(For J. Krishnamurti)
You know what's round the bend
when you've seen all around it
and come to a place to notice-
clear of mind and awake with
no choice and no judgment
of what you see. This seeing
needs no optic nerve but some
nerve.
The nerve of observation's key
to attend to what's there and what
not. Apart from point of view
and beyond remembrance of things
past or pained or pondered
you attend with no effort and
thus attending you conclude
nothing.
You must issue no verdict of
self or self-interest and rest
present with presentments not
chosen. One other thing,
there must be no envy
ambition or greed for action
to spring well from its rightful
place.
Often breakthroughs come
as the outcome of breaking
down the brain's mindless
maneuvering for its own
preservation. The relaxed
bearing of the watcher, by its
very observation, meets this end.
The high anxiety wedded to
paranoia of the sane sort that
arises as the seedbed of all
other little episodes of mind
racing, can be let to run its course,
dissipated like the incense of
perfume, the perfume of incense.
If paranoia runs wild as
the background radiation
of high anxiety: free-floating
energy out of bounds, no
control by the onlooker,
then watching: observing
patterns of energy reservedly,
effortlessly, with no need for
preserved boundaries and no
desire to dismount them,
can arise as the alternative
to acting out, over-identifying,
that tells the story of distressed
people of all the earth during
the current age of anxiety.
You can call this glad
dissimilitude
freedom
from
choice
as it readies you
to take life seriously
still not personally.
The pain so real persists even now as you sit
to write its obituary. Delighted by some piece
of life's beauty you laugh aloud and reach for
the sweeper to sweep up and letting your eye
fall away just a flicker for the delight you jam
your thumb between the refrigerator and the wall
where the sweeper still sits and sits so still now
because beyond your reach, as the very object of
your eye's craving too has escaped your memory.
Life hurts and, what's more, delights.
