Recitation II: Random verses

Recitation II: Random verses
by Azly Rahman

Time, with thee I conspire with Fate and Free Will
unto thee I offer my salutation
from Dawn to Dusk to Darkness daily I see
thee tells the story of who I might have been
and yet  Evolution I must become
the story of Creation I have been told.
O Time, I wish all of creation know Thee

Read ... Read thyself
for thee is a book of signs, symbols, signifiers,
of the semiotics of spiritual symbiosis of the self
                   and the larger self; of truth within a truth,
                   of chakras configured from chaos connected to the cosmology of cosmic consciousness;
                   of a lamp within a mirror; of a speck of dust evolving and wishing to know;
                   of a text inscribed by the textuality of truth temporal

we come from love and unto love we shall return
in between these lies the deep understanding
                   of what love and the absence of it means
                   of suffering and liberation
                   of appearance and reality
                   of the evolution of consciousness and the destruction of it
                   of the entering of paradise and the expulsion from it
                   of the realization of beauty and ugliness
                   of the grayness of good and evil

O' capitalist societies, capitalist selves
be subjected to the ramadhanization of existence
for fasting is the act of slowing down your sense of urgency
         to accumulate and to acquire capital taken from Nature, from the Natural self
         to slow down the desire to
                             rob the poor
                             rape Nature
                                 and revolt against Love
Verily,
a life of detachment
of dharma,
and the realization of moksha
                         is a life free from dhukka

O' self, between darkness and light we met
and we mediate upon the covenant we are to made,
as we contemplate putting thee in the abode of Love,
where Paradise is never lost,
where Nature is the Ultimate Self
and as dawn breaks we set forth
to encapsulate thee into a soul, spirit, and body
as we greet the light of darkness and set thee free to roam the Earth
and to seek for thine self within a guide in thee

O' self, thou have shed tears of fear and loss
of meaningfulness at the dawn of creation
at the onset of thine journey through this matrix of complexities
and the Mandelbrott of spirituality
Did not thou agree to carry the gift of love and knowledge and remembrance of things past?
Go forth and seek for the guide within, so that thou will see Maya clearly

O' self
ask not what the nature of truth nor the form the guide taketh
these will come to thee in thine waking hours of labour
and thine conversations with Nature,
in thine deepest reverie when night falls
and when solitude is thine companion
for the righteous path will be many and will be one,
as the mind becomes science and the soul become a lotus that blooms
                                      a thousand times, piercing the eyes of reality

O' self
with sincerity, explore all possible roads that may lead to self knowledge
one may arrive first in a prison-house of language
in a tower of babel and end up feeling the pleasure of experiencing
                the universal in the particular,
                the profane in the sacred,
                the falsehood in truth,
                        and the grandiose-ness of the minutest of things

O' self
read ... read thyself ...
read ... even if it takes a lifetime to do so
for thou are a book of signs that began as a tabula rasa
constructed out of scripts whose ink drawn from the fountain of Love and Plenty
so that thine existence will become a scripture of scripts and subscripts
of narratives and meta-narratives of the Grand and the Subaltern

O' self
tame the Fire within for thou is a kingdom in itself
a master of thine's destiny with Fate decree and conspiring
command the armies
                the counsels
                the playwrights
                the scribes
                the artisans
                the musician
                the designer of battlefields within
for thine is a powerhouse of creations of many a worlds
                    to be created in thine's journey towards everlasting bliss

O' self
O' people
O' tribes
O' nations
see what destruction humanity has done when the stone is carved?
The stone was forced to become -- carved, constructed, characterized, and made to colonize
from the stone carved
        the powerful amongst you will invent, install, and institutionalize ideologies
        that seal the fate of humanity into becoming cogs in the wheels of absurdity
from stones we evolve.

O'self,
O' society
inside of thou resides beelzebub, iblis, satan, the demon mara
the darkest of the darkest human instinct, or whatever name you may call it
one that reincarnates into human systems, statesmen, tyrants, semiotics of power, casino capitalism, demonic-hegemonic cycles of civilizational force ---
know it, tame it, subdue it, bring it to de-evolution do that you may arrive at nibanna

O' deepest self
in earth, wind, fire water lies the metaphysical semiotics of thine's creation
and in the universe outside lies thine's universe inside;
rejoice
for thou is one with Nature
as that cybernetic energy imbued with an existentialist design of flesh and blood
rejoice and revolve, like Newton's universe
                             in harmony with thine's chakras within

O' self
childhood, youth, and old age are merely in thine imagination
for the mind, the spirit, and the soul
are old as the universe if thou knew that ecclesiastical history of the self
and the cosmology of creation
for thou is merely a symbolism of Time and Space constructed as an experiment
in the workability of creation;
                               do we exist hence?

O' people
guide thine youth to spend their early years in the pursuit of knowledge
and the passion of its application and the beauty of its bhakti to humankind;
teach them well in the way so of the "jen" or the gentlemen, as Kungfu Tze would say,
and turn them into deep thinkers who cares for the fate of society and
at the same immersed in the joys of growing up and finding meaning in being wise adults

O self
suffering lies in one's inability to detach oneself from materials, people, places,
and the urge to accumulate more than one could possibly share.
Liberation thus is to live a life focused on higher goals, ideals, principles and living a life
honoring what one needs and not feeding one's greed.
Live a life of mindful living, aware of the semiotics of Desire colonizing

O self
journey into the past, to battlefields of yesteryear
like those of Kurusektra, Peloponesia, Trafalgar
and slay thine dragons and demons thou have nurtured out of passion, desire and arrogance thou hath tamed not confront these as well as the skeletons in thine closet and come home to the present victorious
like Arjuna,Alexander, and Ashoka ...
                            so that peace of a thousand years shall reign thine heart

Life is not a losing battle; it is a glorious gift to the self

Become an ethnographer to thine's own life
an archaeologist of consciousness,
a philosopher of living
catalog the data of experiences
analyzing what thou have gone through
          so that thou may have conversations with thine's own inner culture
and reconstruct those patterns not longer in sync with thine's concluding chapter
                                of the Book of Thine Own Signs

O' self,
O' people
recite merely not thine holy scriptures
journey hermeneutically into it
         - recite, read, read, re-read, construct, deconstruct,
          dive into its dialectics, so that thou will find the meaning of each passage closer to thine's own desire,
          stripping off disabling cultural contexts of the world of yesteryears
          and ultimately it is you who will become the text in your own existentialist context

O' people,
Religion is merely
a logical structure of human experience
vis-a-viz the Divine
so that the mind can explore the meaning of religious rituals;
          symbolism, nature of existence, meaning of God, evolution of the self
                  as it journeys, through Love and Compassion,
                  toward the larger Self;.
Religion provides the idea of how human beings must treat each other
in this sea of Humanity and
in this Ocean of mercy

O'  self:
be in this world as a stranger;
thou do not exist except as a self conditioned by systems created by others,
controls imposed on the mind,
narratives inscribed by thine elders;
exist thou shall not in this state no longer
if thou knows that this journey of life is one of becoming a postmodern flaneur
and a destroyer of perceptions,
          creator of illusions, and
          preserver of thine's complex inner government

O' self
jihad till thou see the crystal clearness of thine soul, blissful thou shall be

O' people
activism and revolution alone cannot bring instant peace to any nation
it is the deep understanding, deep structuring, and the mass disseminating
                               of love for all things great and small
that will give everlasting meaning to desired change.
it is the absence of love that creates spaces for greed, hatred, and violence
                           subtly factored into systems of control
                           and organized chaos

to understand Death, one must first contemplate what Living means

O' self,
daily thou undergoes karma

O' Fate
O' Free Will
Let me conspire with thee

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