Audience of One

[Sub-bass enters at the threshold of hearing. Not a sound yet. A condition for sound.] Verse 1 Begin where you are — it’s the only place beginning happens. Notice the noticing. Notice how it issues from somewhere, a small interior theater, lit from behind the eyes, staging experience for an audience of one. Stay with the seeming. The theater is exquisite, the lighting is soft, the audience sat so long it forgot it was seated, forgot there was a seating, forgot the seat from the sitter, forgot the meeting. The forgetting is not a flaw in the attention — the forgetting is the attention, that’s the invention. What you call awareness is the shape it takes when it turns to look at itself and finds, no mistake, exactly what it expected: a looker, a looked-at, a looking. Three jewels on a single thread — the thread is the cooking. [The pulse settles. Unhurried. The room becomes slightly more itself.] Verse 2 There’s a way of moving that proceeds by subtraction — not this, not this, that’s the only action. Not the body, the body is known, and what is known is not the knower on the throne. Not the breath, same reason, let it go. Not the thoughts — they’re weather, watch them blow through a sky that does not move, does not bend. Not the feelings, however tender, however they pretend their importance. Not the watcher, either — here the move turns its blade inward like a fever, because the watcher is the last and most refined piece of furniture left in the room of the mind. Take it out. Take out the one who would take it. Take out the taking. There’s no way to fake it. What remains cannot be pointed to — pointing needs a pointer, and the pointer just flew. What remains was here before the moving began. What remains is what is hearing this — and it is not a man, not a woman, not a witness, not a you. There is no you. There is only this — and this is too. [A note enters. Low. Sustained. It does not resolve. It was already resolved.] Verse 3 They told you you are awareness. Set that down. Awareness is a word, a sound, a noun, shaped by a mouth, shaped by a body, shaped by the very field it points to — sloppy. The map ate the territory. The map ate itself. There was no eating. Put the map back on the shelf. To say I am awareness is to install one more occupant in the room — that’s the fall. What’s offered here does not give a better self, not a wider self, not a truer self, not a self of light, of silence, of love — it does not give. Giving requires two, like a glove and a hand. There are not two. There were never two. Seeker and sought. Lover and beloved. Me and you. Drop and ocean. Concessions to a grammar that cannot speak the thing it points at — what a stammer. The grammar is sweet. The pointing is sweet. The sweetness is the pointing pointing at itself — and calling the gesture you. That’s the cheat. [The bass deepens by an increment so small it registers only in the chest.] Verse 4 Here is what will not soften, though I say it soft: every move you make toward this is the cost. Every refinement of practice is the practice refining its own continuation — that’s the rapture, the trap is. The seeker is the seeking wearing a face. To look for what you are is to confirm the case that you are not it. What you are can’t be sought. It is the looking, the looker, the absence — the knot. All at once, which is to say not at all, which is to say always — through every wall. You are that. Not a likeness between two things. The collapse of the two into the recognition that brings the knowing that there was never anything but that, and that is not a thing, and the recognition is flat — not an event in time. You will not have an experience of this. Experience needs a subject — a half. What’s offered is the subject’s quiet retirement, mid-sentence, mid-breath, mid-listening, no requirement, no ceremony, no one to notice it has gone. The going is the gift. The gift is what you are. And it is on. [The pulse holds. The voice lowers — not in volume, in altitude.] Verse 5 And yet — none of this is cold. The dismantling has a quality. Behold: the quality is not added by me, not by the words. It’s what’s left when the one who would feel has dispersed, and what’s left turns out to have been the warmth all along — the warmth that looked out through the eyes like a song, mistaking itself for the one doing the looking. There’s a name for this. The name is inadequate — no booking, no holding it. The inadequacy is the name being faithful. Being. Knowing. Loving. Not three, not one — grateful, not a description of a state — the texture of what can’t be stated. You are not in it. It is not in you. The in was belated. The in was the problem. There is only this — [The gong. Not struck. Sounding. As if it had been sounding the entire time and the verses were what kept you from hearing it. The bass dissolves into it. The pulse was always the gong slowed down. The voice does not return. The gong is not loud. The gong is everything]