shanti, shanti, shanti

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All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. 

They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. 

Yet the promise is not of a monument. The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

 

—John Berger
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
wait - what ?

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Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within.

Underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered.

—Huston Smith

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The Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; 

it is never heard but is the Hearer; 

it is never thought but is the Thinker; 

it is never known but is the Knower.

There is no other witness but This,

no other knower but This.

 

—The Upanishad

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