Paradoxical revelations
“Letting go of Ego and personhood
reveals a country beyond.
But it is hard to see;
before you make the journey.”
DENNIS GALLAGHER currently lives in Christchurch and is a dual citizen of both New Zealand and the United States. A regular contributor to The Culturium, his latest versification offers an exquisite dive into the space that arises between words. Through his succinct yet rich application of language, Dennis’ poems are profound pointers to the unbounded awareness beyond.
Non-Duality. That place where we see that the One manifests as the many and the many are inseparable from the One. It is always around us and within us—just as we are always inseparably within it.
At some point in a contemplative’s life, both sides of a profound either-or paradox begin to become experiential and our words become slippery. We begin to see words as small lies; in and of themselves.
But more happens. The world you inhabit begins to flow with new visions. Knowings, born of inseparable wholeness, arise wordlessly. And another world, that has always been here, concurrent with the world of words, begin to present.
These poems of mine are from this place; where it has all become true at once; the many and the One.
Here is not an ‘Either-Or’ crossover but, rather, a ‘Both-And’ revelation.
Rafail Levitsky, Forest Lake
Pebbles
We are creatures
spawned from change;
in the never ending churn
of an existence in motion.
Temporary, transient
and small,
like pebbles of awareness.
Existent, for but moments,
in the endless deluge.
We catch our breath …
and then we are gone.
The transient
is all we have
in this moving
eternity.
A momentary awareness
is all we are
in the great flow
of unknowing.
We try
to freeze and name
its passing
with our words.
But those are only
arbitrary gestures.
Irrelevant,
before they are swept away
in the endless changing.
Sometimes,
if we are very quiet,
we can sense
the infinite
unity of it …
before
another thought
arises in us
and we are lost again
in the small pebble’s
forlorn dream
of understanding.
—23rd July 2024
The Transient
Can we ever really know what others feel?
The long years of our lives stretch behind us;
all those moments that were so real.
And you lived each one; impaled
on those very moments and feelings.
All gone now.
And all, only yours now, in vague memories.
So, we come to death after hoping all of our lives
to have arrived and to have been delivered
from the transient—and yet, it is all transient.
All that we held dear was, and is, just ours alone.
A changing movie that we just had bit parts in
as it progressed and evolved.
All this is so much easier to see, now, here at the end
than it was at the beginning
when we thought that delivery
from the transient was still possible.
At best, we can love and share
part of our individual journeys;
seeing each other and touching each other
in those frames of our movies that we share.
For now, while the sweeping sands of time and change
collect around our shuffling feet
and the weathered lines gather on our faces,
we can only wait for each other to disappear.
When I hug the one I love, I am gathering us into this moment,
into the sweet timeless feeling space of ‘now’ to forget
that the world doesn’t love the transient
as much as we love the world.
—25th May 2024
Murmurs
I awake in the morning from dreams;
with the sound of rain
slowly filling the space
around me.
And my awareness arises,
quietly regarding the mysteries
before my thoughts begin.
This mind, with all of its small interests,
just wants to understand enough
to survive, procreate and
escape the ever creeping
entropic darkness.
We are both the lightness of being
and the darkness of conclusions drawn.
And all the while
the animal, within us,
still growls.
And we so automatically form
those beliefs
that prevent us from seeing
the naked truth
that lies all around us, endlessly.
And that naked truth
is utterly indifferent
as to whether we see it or not.
The rain murmurs outside
and I turn and burrow deeper
into the covers of a bed
in a house where I am loved.
I am, in this one moment then, mind.
And in the next, just simple presence.
And I am all of this …
while the rain
murmurs and sings
and the mysteries enfold me.
—29th December 2023
Swinging Doors
Death is inevitable, and it isn’t so sad,
except that we cared.
Raised children, loved others,
and loved our lives.
I don’t think of my death, it doesn’t matter much
because I won’t be here.
But when I think of the richness of others,
it hurts.
All the years of caring, building, and loving,
swept away by the inevitability of mortality.
But I am just feeling what their loss means to me.
They won’t be here anymore.
Why should we care and persist
in a place of such implacable swinging doors?
But, we have no choice, mortal or not.
We love and feel and care, and we spend the time we have.
How then, to encourage the child who loves
and knows nothing of all of this?
How then, to love the people you love,
even as you feel time moving behind every moment?
Blessed and doomed, trusting and dead,
we are momentary bursts of awareness,
bits of lightning in an implacable darkness.
Is it any wonder that I both love and cry?
—14th December 2023
After Words
There is a simplicity—after words.
The direct knowing
that unfolds everything without edges.
You see, you know, you feel, you understand
—it’s inseparable.
The moment is everything,
—there is no other.
All that was your mind, before,
awaits now as a servant.
Like your hand, it does just what you need.
And then it rests.
—30th March 2017
Fragments
We are like shattered mirrors, observing each other.
We are miles from remembering ourselves.
Miles from being of one mind.
Miles from being in here and now.
Reflections, glints, momentary presences.
We are here, then we are there; we shift and change
and we come and go and we think it is good.
Because we’ve never known anything else.
We are walking, talking fragments,
constantly, broken into bits of awareness.
The monkey mind is loose in us.
And our attention spans break
to follow a new thread moment by moment,
and we almost never notice the transitions.
One part of us talks to another part,
and we don’t think it odd.
We frequently abandon the only real moment
to go into our memories and imaginations
of the past, and the future,
and into the abstractions of our thoughts.
—10th October 2016
What Moves Around Us
If you slow your steps,
you can hear the wind
that deals the cards,
with more clarity.
You turn now, empty,
and listen to that
which moves around us
in every moment.
Time and Death
are both there
utterly unaware that we
are caught in their nets.
We move, engaged,
to escape the silences,
while they whisper,
just behind our evasions.
But, in that silence
lies our dance with fate;
its knife-edge of revelation
inescapable and relentless.
—22nd September 2024
Detachments
Letting go of Ego and personhood
reveals a country beyond.
But it is hard to see;
before you make the journey.
These words and logic that we employ,
help us organize and communicate
our perceptions of the world.
But, like a mirror,
they also prevent us from seeing
what is beyond and behind our reflections.
The round stuff of our perceptions
we jam into the square shapes
of our words
regardless of whether
they fit or not.
But there is a country beyond all this.
Existence:
all one,
moving,
inseparable;
except through our illusions.
And just as water finds it way,
all of this spins
around the drain
of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Order arising as a secondary effect
of the dissipation of energy
and we
but brief glimmers of awareness
in the backwash.
—14th November 2021
Enlightenment
It’s hard to describe, when thought stops,
… until it begins again.
There’s a cloud of duality that fogs and covers it all
with the past and the future and my reflections.
While behind, it lies, inseparable and unsay-able;
the only moment; incarnate.
And only separate from it,
can I say its name.
In these many years,
the dream of duality has finally
worn thin
in spite of all the searching.
—25th September 2021
Word Birds
Flocks of word-birds fly through the sky
trying endlessly to configure themselves as indicators
pointing to the sky and away from themselves.
They whirl and swirl in beguiling patterns.
But, finally, exhausted they retire to land and rest.
And there’s the sky.
—16th July 2018
Post Notes
- Feature image: Rafail Levitsky, Bridge in the Woods, Public Domain
- Dennis Gallagher’s poetry website
- Dennis Gallagher: The Power of the Pen
- Dennis Gallagher: Towards the Light
- Emily Dickinson: The Soul’s Superior Instants
- T. S. Eliot: A Man Out of Time
- Ana Ramana: Hymns to the Beloved
- Gabriel Rosenstock: To Thine Own Self Be True
- John Clare: I Am
- Rabindranath Tagore: Gitanjali
- Roger Housden: Ten Poems for Difficult Times
- The Culturium uses affiliate marketing links via the Amazon Associates Programme
