De Profundis

by Robin Artisson

*



I

1. Some of the ancients, wise as they were,
Believed that Nature was a female being,
A Goddess, some said-
The sacred source of life and all things.
Some said that she held the tablets of Fate;

2. Others that she was three sisters, spinning Fate.
Some said that a great God was the source of all,
A craftsman that shaped everything,
A creator, a great parent, a depth,
A mystery.

3. Some of these ideas have great power;
They are great devices of poetry,
And they awaken something in us that sounds like truth.
Whatever we believe, some things are clear:
Life is here, and we live,
And life interacts with other life.

4. Life is everywhere a great system-
The tangled and overlapping hairs of the Fate Goddess?
The weave of the sisters?
The tapestry of a great spider among the stars?
The great vision of an artist?

5. I call what I see around me the Suprasystem of Life.
I know some things about it that I want to share,
A song of types,
A great feeling that I want to share, though I don't know why.
This poem will flow like the river of life
Of which it is a part. I don't know where it will go.

6. The Suprasystem of Life is sacred.
It is timeless, not born and not ceasing,
It comes from nowhere, and always exists.
It is existence.
Existence, the bare essence that we call "Reality",
is alive.
The ground of life is alive.
The ground of life and life- they are one and the same,
Though we make distinctions by virtue of our minds and senses.
More on this will be spoken in due time.

7. The system of life is all that is
And all that ever will be.
Life didn't suddenly "begin";
That makes no sense. "Beginnings" and "endings"
Are just words in our heads.

8. It violates what we normally think, but it is inescapable-
Life doesn't just start out of nowhere or nothing.
Nothing contains within it the seeds of nothing,
And nothing gives way to more nothing.
Life contains the seeds of life and gives way to more life.

9. Since the system of life is here now, I know it always was.
Not coming into existence, it will not go out of existence.
Life was always.
Life is always.
Life will be always.
Life is sacred.
Sacredness is perpetual.

10. It seems like a continuous rushing flow
But it isn't rushing anywhere;
It's just here; it's you, it's everything.
Better to say it emerges from the living depths
And expresses the living depths everywhere.
Dawning everywhere, without obscuration,
Without ceasing or obstruction.

11. Stop holding on as though you’ll be driven far away
Or dashed into pieces! Life’s vivid power seems to go ahead
And move
With great power and speed.
But look deeper, broader:
Life arises and appears at all points with a grandiose gentleness
And fullness.

12. The seeming forward motion is in reality
A great All-Around Arising;
It is already complete in its greatness;
Already complete in its coming-to-be.
The narrow view impressed upon most
Does not reveal the true story of this reality.
So let go and be at ease.

13. Be peaceful where you are.
You'll always be here. Life will always be here.
Forms of life can change, but this is your place.
Wherever you are, this is the place
Where your wisdom is worked out,
Where understanding is born.
The system of life itself conspired to place you here.
This is the temple of the heavens and the earth,
The university of explorations unimagined,
The great Halls of Life.

14. Be happy, because life loves to live.
If your happiness is hiding, afraid to come out,
You have to trust things more.
You have to get beyond the "beginning" and the "end"
And consider the possibility
That you're both more ancient and more new
Than you could ever believe.

15. You'll have to consider
That you're none of the things you really think you are,
And instead, you're a life process
Which is born from a billion causes,
All of them natural, timeless, and sacred.
A sacred event like a life process
Can indeed forget the nobility of its parentage.
It's possible.
But the pain of forgetting is as dim as candlelight
When compared to the sunlight of joyful remembering.

16. That life-process that we call a "person"
Is not the same as the Suprasystem of Life
It is a eddy in the stream of life,
Moving through one shape after another.
You can try to separate an eddy from a stream
But you won't be able to do it.
And yet, our words and perceptions lead us to see them as distinct.
Each person's life-process, their appearance,
Is like that, with respect to the Great system of life.
The same and not the same at the same time.

17. It is not so confusing when you realize
That life carries within itself the possibility
Of these sorts of perceptions.
Thus, the life-process that perceives- that is, each person-
Each living creature-
Is a device of the Suprasystem of Life,
An ornament of its greatness,
A sense-organ of its unfathomable ocean of awareness.
You might say it's Fate that the whole of life's system
Should swirl- however temporarily- into the form of man
Or of trees or of rivers or clouds.

18. A dance of such magnificence is certainly
Awesome
By any measure. A person not moved by it
Has a sickness of the spirit;
Perhaps the greatest sickness imaginable.
Better death as a young man or woman in a wasted body,
with the capacity for awe- even a single minute of awe-
Than health and long life with no sense for the sublime.

19. You might say that the awesome "swirling out" of life,
Into its multitude of forms and interactions,
Is magnificent enough, and you'd be correct.
But Nature- that ancient name given to the Suprasystem of Life-
Isn't satisfied with "magnificent enough";
She goes further, and when you think she's gone as far as she can,
She goes further still.
She never runs out of potential or possibility.

20. The cup of life gets full only to overflow
Into a larger cup that had not before been imagined.
Magnificent forms of life and their interactions
Are only the first cup; they overflow into another,
One far more mysterious than the last
And the emotional participation of each life-process
In the confines of this second cup
Gives life it's real power, endows it with a new meaning.

21. That second cup is the cup that celebrates connection
It is the cup of love
It is the loving container of our passion
And our common joy at recognizing others in this magnificence.
As infinite as the first cup seems to a living being,
This second cup reduces it to a grain of sand.

22. Love is not an illusion; it is not vain,
It is not a foolish passion;
It is the miracle among miracles,
The amazement that eclipses amazing things,
It is the greatest thing we men and women can experience,
Even though Great Nature is capable of so much more.

23. That idea is humbling; it should be.
Nature swirled all of these things out, without a reason.
Fate weaves because the weaving is what Fate does.
The bounty of things is not a gift; it's just an expression
Of the way things are.

24. Our natural joy at the way of things is our greatest treasure;
We must allow the rapture to flow through us.
It is better to say “how wonderful” than to say “thank you”-
Though if you must say “thank you”, then do so.
All of life continually gives its gifts,
Whether you thank it or not.
That’s real generosity;
Generosity without limits.

25. It is better to save your thanks for those men and women
And those other living creatures
Who follow the example of Great Nature
And give of themselves to you.
The joy of receiving becomes complete when you give back.





II

1. Is it so hard to accept that things simply are as great as I say,
As bountiful and as joyful,
Naturally, without any reason?
Is it such a violation of reason to suggest
That reality is perpetual, a wonder beyond wonders,
Itself alive, a sublime and infinite radiance?

2. Is it so much more logical to assume that goodness
Must be unnatural, or obscured, or hard to find,
Or that flaws must rule the day?
The simpler answer is more likely the correct answer-
So I say “all is well”
I say it always has been and always will be.

3. “But the miseries! The tragedies!”
Many will protest in this way;
And with good reason- all the joy and love in the world
Seems thwarted in a moment’s disaster.
Indeed, no words- not these or any others
Can comfort one deep in the chasm of bereavement.
To those suffering I say “the world suffers with you”-
Your life and the system of life are truly one,
And your triumphs and your melancholies are shared by it
Fully.
Nothing is forgotten, ignored, or excluded.

4. Those who love you will share your grief and rage;
It is what those who love others do.
They need not explain it, or give reasons,
Just share it.
Grief shared is grief made less; a burden
Carried on many shoulders is easier on all.
The world suffers with you. It conspires to support you,
Because in reality, it is supporting itself.

5. At every point in your perpetual existence,
You or any other living being, those we call “alive”
And those we call “dead”
Those we call “near” and those we call “far away”,
At every moment, the system of life says to us
From every one of its sacred parts and portions:
“I am with you”.
And
“You are with me”.
What burdens you bear, you bear on behalf of the world
And it bears your burdens, too.

6. Trite though it may seem to say,
The life-process of each thing is never thwarted
By any event that we can give a name to- “death” included.
Infinite possibilities and countless powers stand behind each life;
A love without measure stands behind each life;
What we call a “lifetime” is just the tip of a greatness
That I can’t come near to describing.
The small death that troubles mortals cannot destroy
The greater bulk of what makes us what we are.

7. If you can’t believe this, then even your joys
Are sorrows in disguise.

8. If you can’t see this, can’t allow the Great system of life
To be as vast and powerful as it is,
If you can’t look into the void of stars without end
And to the diversity of things
And realize the smallness of our ideas about a “lifetime”,
And in that realization,
Have a faith in the greater story of which we are a part,
Then your joys are weights
Hung around your neck.

9. A person with these weights
Must be fearful everyday of the fall into deep, choking water.
What a terror! What a sad way to waste
What could be moments of joy and peace.

10.The story is greater than we can imagine.
Let the story be greater than you can imagine.
The system of life is larger than us;
Don’t think that you can explain it,
Or that you need to explain it.
Just rest knowing that the involvement of all beings
Is perpetual and accompanied by love.

11. Let the love in the second cup inspire you
And teach you about hidden things.
Our parts in the great story are not optional;
We, too, are part of the necessity of things,
Each of us.
We will be together forever,
Even though we do not write the story of our lives
Or the lives of those we love,
We’ll always be on the same great stage
Where those stories are played out.





III

1. We living beings are rich; we are wealthy beyond description;
Our dignity is fathomless.
There is only room for one true tragedy
In Nature's explosion of greatness:
The possibility that such wealthy beings
Might forget their wealth and dress in rags;
Or perhaps
The possibility that such dignified beings
Might forget their dignity and crawl begging in the dust
Or hurt other living beings, as though they didn't matter.

2. Now you might ask me
"If what you say is true, how could I ever forget such things?"
And I might say in return
"Maybe you didn't forget; maybe you never knew."

3. Perhaps conditions have aligned themselves
For you
So that now, for the first time,
You can know the wealth and dignity that is yours.
And live in the perpetual joy that is your birthright.

4. Or maybe, you did know, and forgot-
There are many reasons for forgetfulness;
But the joy of life and the magnificence of things
Will undoubtedly bring about remembrance.
Trust in that and see!

5. Whatever the case may be, we didn't weave this web of life;
It wove us
So your first chance to know yourself, or your chance to remember,
Is uniquely yours, an event born from forces Greater than conception will allow.
And that won't ever change.
It is the greatest opportunity I can imagine.

6. I've never been able to feel the "God" I was told to look for;
I've always wandered in and out of the houses of holiness,
In and out of the mazes of philosophy,
In and out of the lesser joys and gaping depressions
That obsess everyone I know.

7. I've wondered if the problem was mine,
Or everyone else's, or the problem of a select few;
I've wondered if the problem was a madness in me, a gift,
Or a meaningless twist of the mind.
In the end, I don't think it was any of those things.

8. The problem- if you want to call it that-
Was just a life-process- my life process-
Suspended in its glorious and eternal home,
Quite afraid to let go and let joy be joy.
An amnesiac king begging in his own kingdom!

9. So, I never found God or Enlightenment,
But I have felt the magnificence of this living world.
This is what is real to me.
We have to live by what is real to us;
Nothing else will suffice.
And so this joy
Is my truth.
Those to whom love’s mystery has joined me
Are my true companions,
And our companionship will outlast the stars.

10. Lesser joys and other truths that I have enjoyed
All washed away in the rain of time.
This truth remains; it is from the depths;
It is what remains because it didn't come from anywhere.
It's as perpetual as I am, or as you are.
Before I saw this truth, my time was running out!
Now that I've seen it, I'm not going anywhere,
And neither are you.
If we are going somewhere, it's just from forgetfulness
To memory
And from confusion to joy undivided.

11. If you think this truth is separate
From the system of life that swirled it out,
If you think it the invention of a madman or a malcontent,
Then please keep looking till you find your own place.
When you get there, we'll see one another again.
You'll find that you never left.





Text Copyright © 2008 by Robin Artisson
All Rights Reserved