I hope you are well and enjoying the summer. I’ve been writing a lot of poems recently and wanted to send you a few of my new ones.
There are five here: Be Gentle with your Mind; Rising Above; All of this will fade away; The Great Experiment: The House of your Being.
I’m starting to put together a new book of poetic reflections, which will hopefully be published as an Eckhart Tolle Edition (like The Calm Center), so I may
include some of these. Let me know if you like them!
All best, Steve
Be Gentle with your Mind
Be gentle with your mind.
Don't overload it with demands
or fill it with too much information
or pressurise it with too many deadlines
until it frazzles with strain
and refuses to work for you anymore.
Your mind isn’t a machine; it’s a
sensitive artist.
It gets agitated easily, if conditions aren't right.
And then it can't think clearly, or give birth to new ideas and insights.
The energies of your mind are pure and powerful, like a clear fresh stream,
but they get polluted easily, if you don’t protect its environment.
And then you feel uneasy, as if
you’re life is out of harmony,
and the world is conspiring against you.
So be gentle with your mind.
Give it time to rest and regenerate.
Allow it to be filled with space, not clogged up with information.
Allow it to be soothed with quietness, not bombarded with stimuli.
Let it be open and clear, so that you
can feel its ease and stillness.
Let it be a pure channel, so that the universe can flow through it,
directly into you.
Rising Above
There’s so much messiness to rise above
-
the discord of relationships,
the pettiness of resentment and jealousy
and the frustrations of illness and tiredness.
There’s so much triviality to rise above -
the drudgery of chores and draining demands,
the endless juggling of arrangements and deadlines,
and the constant nagging needs of the body and
mind.
There’s so much meanness to rise above -
the lack inside human beings that makes them hunger
for power and possessions
and the separateness that shuts them down
to the sufferings of others.
That’s why you have to find a purpose
that lifts you above the messiness.
That's why you have to find a meaning
that immunises you to the pettiness.
That’s why you have to find
the place where truth and beauty live,
the realm of the pure and timeless values
where you can unearth your own
insights,
and create your own truths, and preserve them
and transmit them timelessly to future generations.
Every act of selflessness, and every act of creation
is a triumph of truth above triviality.
And then, once you’ve risen above
you have to come back down again
to share your truths and insights.
You have to illuminate the world below
with the light that you have gathered from above.
And then you might find that the ordinary world is transfigured,
that the mundane is
touched with the sacred (with the miraculous)
and that the messiness has its own kind of perfection.
All of this will fade away
One day all of this will fade away
-
your thoughts will stop buzzing
your resentments will stop biting
your desires will stop scratching
and the anxiety of your anticipations will float away.
One day all of this will fade away -
the storm of stress and struggle that fills your life will pass by.
The pressure that drives you to keep striving
and searching
will exhaust itself.
And the attachments that weigh you down and tangle you up inside
will wither and fall away, like leaves from a tree.
One day all of this will fade away -
and then what will remain?
Then you’ll find the still, subtle essence of you
that consists of peace and exists in peace,
like a deep silence that breathes
beneath and between all sounds
and may be covered up and obscured
but can never fade away.
The great experiment
Are you ready for the great experiment?
It’s time to stop wasting your life
trying to accumulate what you don’t need
to satisfy desires that you’ve outgrown
and to distract yourself from your dissatisfaction.
It’s time to make your life meaningful,
and begin the great experiment.
The experiment is to awaken -
to cast off the husk of your tired old self
with all of its rigid structures and restricting
filters
and allow a strange new self to emerge,
like a butterfly from a chrysalis.
The experiment is to begin again -
to forget every story you’ve been told,
and erase every label you’ve attached to your experience,
and reconstruct reality from the blank slate of your true self.
The experiment is a
transmutation -
a darkness that will open up to clearer light;
a confusion that will give way to greater order,
as the base metal of your ego is purified
into the pure gold of spirit.
Every experiment has risks;
transformation can be stormy and scary;
birth and death can both be painful.
But you have no
choice,
as a flower has no choice but to blossom.
Are you ready for the great experiment?
The House of your Being
How can you live inside yourself
when the house of your being is full of discord,
as if your brothers can’t stop fighting
and your parents can’t stop arguing
and the neighbours make too much noise
and the rooms are so dirty and cluttered?
It’s worse when the house is empty,
when the air is charged with anxiety
and the quietness seems alive with danger
so you can’t relax for a moment.
And at night, the darkness seems so deep and cold
that you can’t close you eyes
and only ever skirt the edges of sleep.
It’s no wonder you feel the urge to escape,
and spend so much of your time outdoors,
wandering the streets, trying to pass the time,
and only come home when you have to.
But you can’t escape from yourself forever.
You’ll always be brought back home, no matter how far you run.
You can’t live your life
elsewhere
when you're always rooted in the present.
So come back home to yourself -
resist the pull that draws you outside.
Remember that you're the master of the house
and that any moment you're free
to clear away the clutter and refresh the air,
to flush out the negative energy,
and start to cultivate inner
peace.
And once the discord has begun to fade,
you’ll sense a soft glow of harmony radiating
from the deepest ground of your being -
an ancient peace that was always there,
but obscured by mind-made noise.
When the house is empty, you won’t feel threatened anymore -
you’ll sense the harmony more strongly, and rest more deeply.
And at night, the darkness will feel soft and rich, like velvet,
and embrace you as you sleep.
And so soon you’ll be able to live inside yourself.
Soon
you’ll rest contently within the house of your own being,
at ease with the present, at peace with the world,
at home inside yourself.
