Raven's Eye

 

Raven's eyes looked straight into mine, and they were mine. Gazing out of darkness into light, they were the light they beheld. If you can't comprehend this look straight at the sun until it becomes a black hole burnt into your own retina.

Raven asked: "How much courage does it take to Be?” I was too afraid to answer. "You have been searching for priestly instruction, for sacred information to enlighten you. But the more the wisdom is hidden, the more useless it becomes, like a diadem meant to sparkle stuffed in a secret drawer under the folded wedding veil of a widow.”

 “All right then, Raven, if it’s not a secret, give it here for free!”

In a single squawk, Raven gave me the first and last instruction to free my heart forever. That squawk, I tell you, contained all the esoteric Tantras, the entire Qu’ran, the lost Gospel of the Gnostics, and every delicious heresy ever roasted to cold ash by the fires of the Inquisition. If I had to put that terrible ecstatic bird-cry into words, it might be these:

“There is no spiritual inform-ation because awareness has no form. No external authority can add anything to your natural state of sky-blue emptiness. You are already liberated before you shape the first thought. But as soon as you start conceiving any belief in anything whatsoever, you have separated yourself by ten million worlds of pain from the center of your galaxy.

 “So just listen to a raven squawk, a tree frog croak, a weary old cedar scratching its elbow in the gentle afternoon breeze. Stop clutching your heart with your mind. Let go of your chest like a moth rising up from a blue forget-me-not without moving her wings at all.

 “Fly at midnight into a star and pluck it from the sky. Then drop it like a tiny white seed into the loam furrow made by an eyeless earthworm. Just for this one eternal instant, fall into groundlessness.

 “Don't confuse enlightenment with the chatter of words and pictures. Assume that any knowledge you can’t see hear taste or smell is artificial intelligence floating like a plastic buoy on the ocean of pure Existence, which is already full of bliss whether a drop leaps out or falls in through one of your five senses.

 “You are innately luminous, like the night. How much courage does it take to Be? The courage of the self-effulgent sun, shining in brilliant nothingness from the core of not seeking.”