view from a shit-stained boulder

Lost, the Seeker wandered through the endless desert maddened by thirst. Tongue grotesquely swollen he climbed the highest mountain. Eyes horribly bulging, he swam the deepest sea. Aeons spent he searching this and other worlds, seeking the transcendent …seeking completion …seeking that which cannot be named, cannot be expressed. Lost, the Seeker sought.

At the top of the highest mountain, at the bottom of the deepest sea, out of time in no time found he, observed he, spake he with a gnarled and elderly guru---perched cross-legged upon a shit-stained boulder, the smell of an oily rag emanating from his loins---saying:

“Oh wise one, wizened with wizdom thou art, may ye bless all selfhood and hearken to this humble Seeker begging to know how one unworthy though ze may be, how such an impurity might sully the righteousness of thine presence, and re-emerge, answered and yet invalidated, in the hithertude of transgression?”

Thus enquireth the Seeker of this creased and marbled master, this garrulous guru, this sun-baked samurai of truth, of whom I told you previously.

“Oh get a life!” responded the Guru querulously, “How can I answer you when your very words throttle the very meaning of life itself? See what you made me do! All I can say is that consciousness is the most secure prison cell, the Self it is from whence no escape is possible, nor yet permissible, let alone conceivable.

“As this body slowly crumbles and decays. Particle by particle, the magic winks out one moment glittering and alive, the next dull and devoid of spark. Unquickened.

“My hands ache. My arm hurts. My eyes are tired. They present me with increasingly blurred and indistinct data. My butt is bruised. My mind is wreathed in miasma.

“Try breathing with exhausted lungs, clothed in a mantle of dead cilia, brown and lifeless phlegm-coated despair pretending to be a microscopic forest stretching for as far as the inner eye can see,” quoth the Guru.

“Sorry for asking,” quoth the Seeker, then turning on his heel ran down the highest mountain screaming. Then he dived into the deepest sea sobbing. The nut-brown guru watched his departure with a twinkling eye. “You’ll be back,” he said to no-one in particular and then died.

Copyright © S R Schwarz 2007. All rights reserved.

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