The Myth Of Enlightenment: Musings On The Horrors Of Wholeness

Go, Self Portrait, In Dreams Series, 2012
©Kalliope Amorphous

The Myth Of Enlightenment: Musings On The Horrors Of Wholeness

I have studied with saints who were archetypes of the devil. I have prostrated before devils painted with the archetypes of saints. I have worshiped illusion and the absence of illusion with equal vehemency and conviction. I have been forced to kill that which I have given birth to on a triptych of the crucifixion. I have willfully and gleefully murdered the Kings and Queens from which I have built my houses and castles of cards. Before the massacre was finished, I drew aces like scars over the faces of those laminated gods.

I have torn up the steps of temples with my teeth until my tongue became sliced and silenced by the horror of the nothingness which it tasted beneath.

In the glimmer of distance itself, I saw my pale nonexistence and painted it the warm, skin tone of closeness in order to deceive myself and strip myself of gold paint; subterfuge drip of thief and saint.

When the white began to peel from my eyes, I helped it with my fingers until I again became distance. And then I stepped behind the holes of sight, for it is known that every crumbling thing is canonized at the entrance of the light.

From every broken beam of night -a halo grows ensconced in shadows and sighs with a shining, burning mouth, “You are already dead. Now, what is left to fear?”

I am pathless; I hold all paths and Gods inside of me. I am call and response. There is no one left to save.

I have learned where the mirror fractures to save the veins and how reflection becomes a martyr for blood. Each conscious breath bequeaths a sheath upon the leafless wreath of death. The divide is the door. The demarcation line is the slant of light under it. Nothing exists which does not flow into itself. The witness is the mirror on the hull; a chimera attached to the back of the skull.

The foolish aspirant seeks to rid himself of fractions. He dreams of a numb and numberless Samsara, far removed from factions and fictions -a frictionless man. He courts the course of corpses. He refuses to carve from himself a basin big enough to hold the refuse of life and death. Mere physics tells us that ascension can never descend upon the head -nor can boundlessness be born from breath. The coward looks toward the sky when the terror of the mirror and the nothing threatens madness.

Nothing is coming to you from the outside. There are no gifts drifting toward your self-inflicted rift. Blessings are mere moments of prose culled from your poses. Hold them and they wither cold and run slipping like sand through your fist. Plant them and they will grow roses as beautiful and temporary as mist.

Without embracing the spectrum, every holy and unholy cloth is food for mouths of moths who die by their abasement of the shadows. Truth is a rotting corpse with luminous angel wings; it exists in the tiny space between the illusion of opposites.

There is nothing holy about this. There is nothing sacred in the experience. It is a creative act, if it is anything at all -mostly, it is more of nothing. This endless stream of language; every sentence is a death sentence. Each thought comes to a full stop and dies to be crowned with a dot ten times smaller than it’s expanse. Like this.

Be here for a moment: The path that wears itself away with the slightest threat of footsteps. Contradiction is the line between opposites; the line in the sand drawn at the precise area where the tide will hit the hardest. But, who would dare take up permanent residence on such a line? Who is strong enough to face an empty mirror and build their house on the absence of illusion? I suspect our asylums -moreso than our ashrams and churches- are peopled with beings who perhaps stepped too far into the truth.

Opposites exist in the temporal realm to the degree in which we refuse to fully contain them. This refusal is the touchstone for the eternal struggle of mankind. If you can hold both darkness and light then you are at all points the opposite of each. One step cancels the other; the next -an embrace. It is in this space where opposites are annihilated. God and the Devil -those constructs which the human mind have projected into entities – are retroactively abolished to the womb. All gods are simultaneously dead and incarnating.

There are no credentials to be earned or gained. There will be no arrival or departure point. There are no Easter egg hunts for the soul. There is no glory, you will leave no legacy, you will garner no followers; neither your agony nor your ecstasy will be a credential and in the event that it is, rest assured you have regressed away from both nothingness and wholeness and into the hang-space. Beware anyone who has a teacher or a practice, for they are doubly lost.

Wholeness is not something that can be learned through the intellect or gleaned through meditation. It is an interior animal. It cannot be bought, taught or learned through a face. It is only brought and burned by experience,which for the sake of poetry, we may choose to call grace. Teachings, methods, practices and meditations exist outside of the sphere of experience because one cannot practice experience. Experience cannot be practiced.

Wholeness is not light, rainbows and a bolt of sparkling lightening beamed into your third eye. Wholeness is horror. One does not swallow the ocean and sit in yogic posture. Wholeness will leave you fetal-positioned on the floor, attempting to induce vomiting in order to make an empty space. Wholeness will make you want to rip your skeleton out of your body because you will feel both overstuffed and offended by it’s residence in your skin. When you have accepted the entire universe into your body, you will not assume the posture of apathy. On the contrary, every pain will be held and welded tenfold to the heart until it explodes into laughter, having nowhere else to go but to the feet of afflicted bliss.

Grace is not soft wings brushed up against the cheek and choirs of angels lifting you up to a safe space against their chests. Grace will maul you and unravel you. It will unravel you in the span of one moment, from your first breath to your last.  It is one thousand broken mirrors reflecting the sun and blinding the eyes. Grace will leave you sobbing on the floor, feverishly applying tourniquets to the map of your exploded veins. Grace will have you hanging black cloths on every reflective surface until you acquiesce to her acquaintance.

You will call out for God and hear only the sound of your own voice. And in that voice, you will hear the voice of everyone who moaned and cried before you. You will hear every soothing and damning response from every illusory and manifest God. You will hear, for the first time, the sound of undiluted and unencumbered silence.

Your tears will shift and you will begin to cry on behalf of the first tear ever wept by a sentient being. You will feel, with the weight of one hundred horses on your chest, the first lament that ever occurred -and you will at once understand what it means to love. You will become the great beauty and wholeness inherent in your own insignificance.

Wholeness is beautiful horror; a never-ending nesting doll of contradiction. She is a split-second in a moment of eternity who contains the whole world, yet means nothing. Her mantra:

I am pathless; I hold all paths and Gods inside of me. I am call and response. There is no one left to save.

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