Free from Self

Where do you end
and begin?

Do you know
your perimeter?

10 billion atoms
just left you!

While inhaling,
the ecosystem enters.

Exhaling, pieces of you
and your water evacuate.

Every breath,
each action, combines
us and environment.

What is being freed?

Is it the world,
plagued by selves?

Is it the self… itself?

Perhaps freedom through dissolution
is a more natural state.

Existing without definition
suggests a released prisoner.

From oblivion,
a word-thought emerges.

Intruding, it destroys
our peaceful nothingness.

We pay growing attention,
powerless over the capture.

Its volume increases,
drowning the mind.

A second later, mercifully,
it begins to quiet.

Diminishing, it retreats
to its home abyss,
from void to void.

“Everything” and “nothing”,
merely words.

They both contain a thing.

Our scratchings signify
infinity and zero.

How strange!
We spin our animal sounds
into profound representations.

“Oblivion” and “All”
encapsulated by silence,
not as howls of contention.

Layers of higher realms,
many beings at the helms.
Lowly we seem to be.

Humility, the most logical.
Cosmic aristocracy,
neither you nor me.

Appearing empty,
yet densely energetic,
matters burst forth.

Obscure waves,
mysterious parts of particles,
frothy building blocks,

changing, evolving,
linking, disintegrating.

Geometric chemicals,
hunting and dividing cells,
arrays of complex beings

A frantic play
of formless form.

“I” am Tao.
Tao is “me”.

Dividing cells,
destroying them.

Bits unfold, growing.
Sections collapse, dying.

“My” morphing pieces
adhere to it.

From oblivion they arise,
quickly retreating to the void.

Thoughts can never
be possessed.

In trying to capture,
they branch,
growing an infected web.

Watch with disinterest
as they dissipate.

Or, grasp tightly
to suffer.

Empty implies a shell,
outer separate from inner.

Inflow and outflow
forever dammed.

Release “your” trapped individual.
Be a non-boundary.

Without edges,
realize a fuzzy perimeter.

A silent mind
requires no destination,

there and then
having dissipated.

Now-aware dissolves time.

The past continually
freed in every moment.

Open and blank,
unswerving in its perception.