Pyre

When you opened your eyes on the world for the first time as a child
How brilliant the colors were, what a jewel the Sun was
What marvel the stars, how incredibly alive the trees were
And to love again and again, and have people to whom we are deeply attached
Go to sleep and never wake up

And the laughter echoes only in one's mind
But then the echo goes, the memory, the traces are all gone
All your efforts, all your achievements
All your attainments turning into dust, nothingness
What is the feeling? What happens to you?

The idea of God as the potter, the architect of the universe
It makes you feel that life is, after all, important
That there is someone who cares
It has meaning, it has sense
And you are valuable in the eyes of the father

But after a while it got embarrassing
(The superstition, the myth, the absolutely unfounded idea)
(Why does anybody believe that?)

So you become an atheist, and then you feel terrible after that
Because you got rid of God, but that means you got rid of yourself
You're just nothing but a machine
And your idea that you're a machine is just a machine too
(A machine in the system)

So if you think that that's the way things are, you feel hostile to the world
You feel that the world is a neurological trap
Into which you somehow got caught, trapped
You run from the maternity ward to the crematorium and that's it, that's it
So if you're a smart kid you commit suicide

(Now I want to propose another idea all together)

The real you, is not a puppet which life pushes around
The real you, the real deep down you, is the whole universe
You cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin
Your skin doesn't separate you from the world, it's a bridge
But just as a magnet polarizes its-self in north and south but its all one magnet
So experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it's all one

(Anyone? Believe!)
(But it's all one)
What you call the "external world" is as much you as your own body
(It's anyone? Believe!)
(But it's all one)
Most people think that when they open their eyes and look around
That what they are seeing is outside
(It's anyone?)
It seems, doesn't it, that you are behind your eyes
(It's all one)
(It's anyone?)
We haven't realized that life and death, black and white, good and evil
Being and non-being, come from the same center

When you look for your own particularized center of being
Which is separate from everything else, you won't be able to find it
The only way you'll know it isn't there is if you look hard enough
To find out that it isn't there
It isn't there at all, there isn't a separate you
There are, in physical reality, no such things as separate events

People can't be talked out of illusions
If a person believes that the earth is flat
You can't talk him out of that, he knows that it's flat
He'll go down to the window and see that it's obvious, it looks flat
So the only way to convince him that it isn't is to say
Well, let's go and find the edge