Vibhuti

The Arrow [A low tone. Steady. Almost a held breath.] Verse 1 There is something underneath all of this. You have felt it. A quietness that does not depend on the room being quiet. A presence that does not depend on anyone being present. You have touched it in moments — between thoughts, on waking, in the pause after a long laugh, in the second before sleep. It does not come and go. The coming and going happens within it. It is what is here when nothing in particular is here. It is what notices that nothing in particular is here. It does not have a location and it does not need one. It is what you are, underneath what you have taken yourself to be. [The bass settles. A small warmth in the low end.] Verse 2 This is the place the teachings point to. Call it awareness. Call it presence. Call it the witness. Call it the one who has been here all along, watching the lives go by, watching the moods rise and fall, watching the body age, watching the thoughts arrive and depart like weather. It does not age. It does not arrive. It does not depart. It is the sky in which the weather happens. You are not the weather. You are the sky. Rest there. The resting is allowed. The resting is what was always already happening underneath the agitation of taking yourself to be the weather. Welcome home. There is nothing more to do. The home was never not the case. [The bass holds. The room seems to settle around it.] Verse 3 Stay with that. Let it land. Let the chest soften. Let the shoulders drop. Notice how good it feels to have arrived. Notice the relief. Notice the small sweetness of recognition, the sense that something fundamental has been seen, the quiet certainty that this is it. The arrow has hit. The bullseye has been struck. The teaching has done its work. You are the awareness, and the awareness is what you are, and the rest was always a misunderstanding. There is nothing more to seek. Rest in this. Rest as this. Rest. [A single beat of silence. Then the bass shifts — not louder, but different.] Verse 4 Now look at what just happened. A position was offered. The position was beautiful. The position was true in the way such positions are true. And something in you arrived at the position and recognized it and settled into it and called the settling home. Notice the settler. Notice the one who has just received the teaching and is now resting in the awareness it pointed to. That one is not the awareness. That one is the receiver of the teaching. The receiver is the same one who was looking before. The looking has not stopped. It has found a finer object. The finer object is sweet. The sweetness is the looking continuing in the costume of having found. [The bass thickens. A second frequency under the first.] Verse 5 The witness is not what you are. The witness is the last refuge of what you took yourself to be, refined to the point of near-transparency. The sky is not what you are. The sky is a metaphor that requires someone standing under it. Awareness is not what you are. Awareness is a word for the seeming-clearing in which the operation displays itself, and the seeming-clearing is the operation’s most elegant production. Every place the teaching pointed to is a place. Every place is laid down by the laying. The arrival at the witness is the laying laying down a witness. The recognition that you are the witness is the laying laying down a recognizer who recognizes a witness. [The bass shifts again. The first warmth is gone. What replaces it is not cold. It is uncategorized.] Verse 6 There is no underneath. The underneath was the operation building a basement. There is no sky. The sky was the operation building a ceiling. There is no place that was always already the case. “Always already” is a temporal claim, and time is the operation extending itself in a particular direction. There is no home. The home was the operation furnishing a destination. The arrow that hit the bullseye was fired by the bullseye. The bullseye was painted by the arrow mid-flight. The hitting was the painting was the firing. There is no archer. There is no target. There is no shot that landed and no shot that missed. [The bass cuts. Not silence — the bass continuing at a frequency below hearing.] Verse 7 Notice that there is now nowhere to rest. Notice that the noticing of nowhere to rest is not itself a place to rest. Notice that the noticing of the noticing is not a place either. Notice that the not-having-anywhere is not a vastness, not a freedom, not a clarity, not a peace. It is not anything that could be admired. The admirer is gone — not because the admirer was banished, but because the admirer was the admiring, and the admiring has nothing to admire. Do not try to find the admirer again. Do not try to not find. Do not try to rest in the not-finding. The trying is the admirer in the costume of having stopped. There is no costume that is not the costume. [The bass remains below hearing. The voice has not raised. The track