whoever you are

   

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You have long been bound thinking:
‘I am a person’.

Let the knowledge: ‘I am Awareness alone’
be the sword that frees you.

—Ashtavakra Gita

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Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything; 
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.

With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, 
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.

And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence. 
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go…


—Rainer Maria Rilke
The Book of Images

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