I'm getting together a half
dozen or so verses -- I hesitate to call them poems -- that I've written
through the years with the intention to publish them as a Kindle booklet in the
near future. It's something that may or may not happen -- like all things in
the future. In any case, each little verse would be published with a
commentary, which I call a "Contemplation". One of these verses is
the one that appears under the title of this blog and which I first published
in a meditation manual entitled Breath-centered
Consciousness: The Way of Equanimity (Booksurge 2008). [2018 NOTE: It's also published to my Medium.com page under the title: The Way of Silence. Here it is properly
formatted and followed by the Contemplation related to it.
No longer seeking to know the truth
nor trying to understand with words,
I only sit
and listen to the sounds of wind in
the trees
and watch the shadows of the evening
lengthen into night.
CONTEMPLATION
The truth as something expressed in words is
a static unchanging thing. But the truth as a synonym of reality
is a dynamic process. And yet there is also in reality a sense of something
that does not change. It’s like a mirror. The reflections in the mirror
continually change. But the mirror itself does not. Now imagine the mirror is
not a physical artifact that exists in the same way as the things it reflects.
Imagine the mirror is instead an invisible, intangible capacity or power to
reflect things. Now ask yourself: does the mirror change or does it not? Apart
from the reflections, the mirror is for all practical purposes not there. But
to identify the unchanging capacity with the fleeting ever-changing reflections
would be wrong. The Diamond Sutra
says, “truth is uncontainable and inexpressible. It neither is nor is it not.”
(A. F. Price translation, ch. 7).
