The wide river was still as a millpond. There wasn't a ripple and the morning breeze hadn't awakened yet for it was early. The stars were in the water, clear and sparkling and the morning star was the brightest. The trees across the river were dark and the village amongst them still slept. There was not a leaf stirring and those small screech owls were rattling away on the old tamarind tree; it was their home and when the sun was on those branches they would be warming themselves. The noisy green parrots were quiet too. All things, even the insects and the cicadas, were waiting, breathless for the sun, in adoration. The river was motionless and the usual small boats with their dark lamps were absent. Gradually over the dark mysterious trees there began the early light of dawn. Every living thing was still in the mystery of that moment of meditation. Your own mind was timeless, without measure; there was no yardstick to measure how long that moment lasted. Only there was a stirring and an awakening, the parrots and the owls, the crows and the mynah, the dogs and a voice across the river. And suddenly the sun was just over the trees, golden and hidden by the leaves. Now the great river was awake, moving; time, length, width and volume were flowing and all life began which never ended.
     How lovely it was that morning, the purity of light and the golden path the sun made on those living waters. You were the world, the cosmos, the deathless beauty and the joy of compassion. Only you weren't there; if you were all this would not be. You bring in the beginning and the ending, to begin again in an endless chain.
     In becoming there is uncertainty and instability. In nothingness there is absolute stability and so clarity. That which is wholly stable never dies; corruption is in becoming. The world is bent on becoming, achieving, gaining and so there is fear of losing and dying. The mind must go through that small hole which it has put together, the self, to come upon this vast nothingness whose stability thought cannot measure. Thought desires to capture it, use it, cultivate it and put it on the market. It must be made acceptable and so respectable, to be worshipped. Thought cannot put it into any category and so it must be a delusion and a snare; or it must be for the few, for the select. And so thought goes about its own mischievous ways, frightened, cruel, vain and never stable, though its conceit asserts there is stability in its actions, in its exploration, in knowledge it has accumulated. The dream becomes a reality which it has nurtured. What thought has made real is not truth. Nothingness is not a reality but it is the truth. The small hole, the self, is the reality of thought, that skeleton on which it has built all its existence the reality of its fragmentation, the pain, the sorrow and its love. The reality of its gods or its one god is the careful structure of thought, its prayer, its rituals, its romantic worship. In reality there is no stability or pure clarity.
     The knowledge of the self is time, length, width and volume; it can be accumulated, used as a ladder to become, to improve, to achieve. This knowledge will in no way free the mind of the burden of its own reality. You are the burden; the truth of it lies in the seeing of it and that freedom is not the reality of thought. The seeing is the doing. The doing comes from the stability, the clarity, of nothingness.