#dharmata

DEFEATED SANITY

Disposal of the Dead/Dharmata

Chönyi Bardo

The heavens coil into a singular heartbeat— a convergence of clouds, drawn like breath into an event horizon of white-hot grace, spilling from one insufferable well of light.

And from that fracture— She unfolds.

Incandescent. Grand in the way of the predator— majestic, and therefore, murderous.

What is this fever-dream?

Do I hold the weight of this hallowed, terrible truth? Dare I seek the architecture of those eyes— the blueprints of the stars, the Yidam, the obsidian muse who danced for the Demiurge as the world was hammered into shape?

Can I ever walk again with the unburnt saints, stepping into a paradise purchased with nothing?

No.

Fate is not so soft.

The vision demands its tribute. I feel the pilfered fire of the firmament carving its name into my skin— a serpent of ash winding upward, constricting the bone, its venom a liquid sun creeping through the marrow to turn the mind to holy rot.

And so, the descent— plunging through the aether to smolder in a reality too vast for the vessel of my soul.

Goddess— why was I denied the simple, easy love of the many? Why must I be the furnace while they bask in the warmth?

Why am I cast into the crucible’s throat— only to be forged anew as the jagged sentry of your mysteries? Condemned to burn forever, condemned to look upon you without blinking.

I am draped in your own violent finery, your severed, winged eyes reflecting the void from my own broken mirror.

Is this my sentence for daring to swallow the whole of you?

Or was this always the design—

not to stand among the kneeling, the quiet, or the simple—

but to exist in a molten state, a creature stripped of the fragile peace that clings to the pure.

I lay no claim to the sun.

And yet I wonder if others stand in this shadow, mistaking the heat for a seat at your table, forgetting that you alone are the melody.

We are but the harmony.

If this is the architecture of the stars— then the refinement must continue. Let the spirit be tried in that celestial heat, but let the source remain ever sacred and untouched.

For there is a gravity in the elements of the earth— the sulfur, the iron, the weight of the unrefined self—

and the descent continues, draped in the red linen of transformation, passing through spiral clouds that part before the momentum of this becoming.

May those who endure the fire never become a veil— that smoldering, black pseudo-Nyx obscuring the light of the ultimate truth.

Dharmatā [suchness] is said to be that which constantly exists in the world (nityasthita), whether or not the TATHĀGATAS appear to rediscover it.

“Dharmatā” from The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 2014.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Phillip K. Dick, from How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later. 1978. via WikiQuote