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 to have people to whom we are deeply attached Go to sleep and never wake up (never wake up, never wake up) And the laughter echoes only in one's mind But then the echo goes The memory, the traces are all gone Of all your efforts and 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 Many wold, the underworld believe What you call the "external world" is as much you as your own body Most people think that when they open they're eyes and look around That what they are seeing is outside It seems, doesn't it, that you are behind your eyes 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"