SONG OF UNITY

I am full as a mountain lake after the summer rain

That’s fed the sacred stream and source of holy wisdom, love.

A fire sent by God to ignite His planet, from above.

The golden glow of heat on burnished plain

Gilding leaves on this march down pilgrim’s lane;

Warming the earth, her gritty ochre clay,

Water, sea of mercy, so green and grey.

Air, the sweet breath of life that’s free from pain,

Crystalline, beyond any loss or gain.

What does it mean to my Master, pure as a turtle dove?

This vast empty void, a deep abyss, the precious pearl

Of trial that poor pilgrim has to pay.



What of scripture, tracts, gospels and theological books?

The Lord’s lurid library of commands and revelation;

A crore of scribbling comments with endless emendation,

Weighty tomes which cram cathedrals nook and crook

To surfeit, cawing like a craw of rooks.

What is self-knowledge, esoteric?

Pathology of mind, narcissistic?

Even when freed from the senses it looks

A hotchpotch prepared by the devil’s cooks;

To titillate the senses to some novel sensation.

So what is freedom, vulgarised by folk-democratic?

But my Master who is One is truly aristocratic!



What is knowledge of truth, understanding, enlightenment

And ignorance, sleep, alienation, dark delusion

Or folly, dithering in a dream of world illusion?

Or freedom from bondage and attachment?

Are these questions the prime predicament?

What means ego? I thought, I conceit

Imprisoned by mind, one beds in self-deceit,

This is mine, a grasping temperament

For baubles, attractive but so vehement?

Or the form of self-consciousness to save from confusion,

To rescue soul from duality, its preordained defeat?

I pray for grace and mercy at my Master’s tender feet.



I am without a central ‘I-notion’ resident at home,

There’s no me to be elated or badly hurt by fear,

Pleased, perplexed, precious, pouting, proud, or simply here

To feel depressed, anxious. A soul free to roam

On inward seascape of bubbles, froth and foam.

So where is he who suffers, enjoys, acts,

Who has strong opinions and knows all facts?

The rising of thoughts under a cerebral dome,

What’s this world? The trinket of an impish gnome?

Here and now there’s no fictional person to jeer or leer,

For my Master, Dame Fortune’s cards are neatly dealt in stacks,

Abidance in the heart, Real Self, no need for lofty tracts.



Seated in the temple shrine of the spiritual heart

Nestling on the dexter side of my heaving breast

Not on the left where the fleshly pump pulses in the chest,

Dwells ‘I Am’ which wakens Self to start.

Pondering, I question, what is the part

I play on life’s stage and what is this world?

Who yearns for freedom from prison where hurled?

Oh what is oneness, truth and wisdom’s art?

Into which God shot love’s rose-flowered dart?

Who is bound or free as the honoured friend and conscious guest?

Behind the nervous body-mind and now at last unfurled,

Space for a universe to happen in, lustrous and impearled.



Deep in my spiritual Heart, I am the One, unborn,

Uncaused, deathless, I am, uniquely perfect, new, absolutely free!

I ask what is this tempestuous, stormy, troubled sea?

Where froth foams spuming from dusk to dawn,

On the ocean of Self lit by a fiery morn.

What is creation, world dissolution?

I ponder, and search for some solution.

Who and what is seeking? King, bishop or pawn

On this chequered emerald palace lawn?

What is the goal of seeking? Is it peace, freedom, liberty?

Who is the bold seeker who craves this final absolution?

Has he found any answer? An ultimate resolution!



I am pristine, pure as the driven Himalayan snow

As a pellucid stream pouring from a pinnacle’s height,

Chaste, flawless, stainless, without blame, blemish and wintry white.

I trickle down the mountain valley’s flow

Free! I’m curious, what is there to know?

By what dubious method is knowledge gained,

To what spurious end when it’s attained?

I have no problems here, now or there below,

I’ve surmounted grief, all sorrow born of woe,

Simply stated, I know what is meant by both wrong and right.

Our universe by creation, preservation, is maintained

By grace of God and his mighty will, all creatures are sustained.



Here, awakened now, I am steady and perfectly still

As an adamantine rock in the restless ocean stands,

Unmoved by cyclonic gale, tidal wave or shifting sands,

What of oppositions, healthy or ill,

Pleasure, pain, to heal quickly or to kill;

Distraction, perturbation, meditation,

Reflection, negation, confirmation?

Sage welcomes all as God’s almighty will

He accepts ‘what is’, as gracious grist to his mill.

Gently by grace of God, in mercy, he breaks all bondage bonds

In a great paean of praise and total affirmation

He rests with consciousness, his Self, the great consummation.



I have lost the monotonous merry-go-round of thought

The perpetual treadmill of self-opinion and words,

Mainly cynicism and lies, the parroting chirp of birds,

A poisonous brew so bitterly fraught

With the mistaken idea that I ought

To cherish the mind as chief.

Am I to be mugged by thought, the villainous thief?

So that is the lesson my dear Master brought,

Ignore the scorpion stings of concepts wrought

With this inner discussion and debate. It’s so absurd

There is consciousness here, a gift beyond any belief

And the ending of thought; peace, ultimate joy and relief.



I am clarity pure as diamond, crystal, lily-white

Growing in a moorland, a purple thistle-bracken field.

So what is illusion? To this question I meekly yield.

Finite mind can’t understand the infinite,

And magic of Maya is but a slick trick of light.

What is this life? A bad dream which appears?

A note to deceive the soundest of ears,

An emptiness as velvet void as night

For witnessing Self, nakedness of clear inward sight.

To know what is here now beyond pearl onion peeled.

So my Master gently wipes away all my sad grief and tears,

All is well, unfolding as it should to allay foolish fears.



With not the slightest hint of duality, One without two,

Unity, wholeness, existence, holistic, all seamless

Without separation, pure consciousness, love, awareness,

No division between me and you

Emanating from the Primal Source, who

Am I, but That? I am eternal, the same

Being as truth and God without a name.

At last I know the little ‘me’ who can never do,

All that happens is the will of God right through.

I rest in the spiritual heart, blissful, benign and blameless,

So what is my greater Self to the mighty God of flame?

My Master says “Unknown, unique, celebrate His game.



“For endless striving and effort, what’s the urgent need?

Struggling, wrestling against one’s natural way and feeling

Trained from the cradle to do well, and practice honest dealing,

Working hard if you wish to barely feed

A family own home, car and succeed,

Ingrained, conditioned, a machine well oiled,

Pilgrim’s become half-baked and par-boiled”.

So my Master to his students does plead,

Be still, motiveless when you perform any deed.

So forget all those books, aims, efforts, teaching and kneeling,

After all the hard years you’ve zealously worked and toiled

Open wide, relax, and never by the world be coiled!



I have no limits or borders, I am no longer bound.

No more hedges, fences, verges, remain for spacious me,

Nothing arises, I am empty capacity for all to see

That all is well, my True Self I have found!

I traced my ‘I thought’ like a hunting hound

And knew my primal source, the light of day,

And now as consciousness I’m free to play.

I rest in the heart on a sacred mound

Where my naked feet walk on holy ground.

I am freedom, enlightenment, joy, bliss and liberty!

Nothing ever was, I am God, what more is left to say?

This Ashtavakra taught me, his devoted pupil, the true Advaita way!



I am That, absolute, unique, ever primeval One

As consciousness, love, awareness, effortless bliss,

Embraced by the love of God, blest by His all-gracious kiss ;

In light of glory, radiant as the sun,

I am homogeneous, second to none.

What care I for freedom or liberation?

In life or death, gaining realisation?

Or for my destiny predisposed to run,

Reborn in another womb till kingdom come?

And after transmigration, at-one-ment I may miss.

My Master halts this baffling mental perturbation.

I let go, abiding in my heart of silent adoration.



Alan Jacobs