In God Makes the Rivers to Flow; An Anthology of the World’s Sacred Poetry & Prose, Eknath Easwaran includes a selection from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad entitled “The River of God.”  I’ve written the following poem-like reflections inspired by this selection.

Form and the Formless

 
Time, nature, necessity, accident,
Elements, energy, intelligence—
None of these can be the first cause.
They are effects, whose only purpose is
To help the self to rise above pleasure and pain.
—The Shvetashvatara Upanishad

Time in all its majesty did not exist forever. It is blurry as the memory of our birth.

It seems we have always existed, for existence is all we ever have known.

But we don’t remember the Grand Canyon before it was a canyon.

We don’t remember the Milky Way before it was a galaxy.

We can’t comprehend the beginning that was no accident.

The matter, the energy, the intelligence which formed us

is only form.

What we are trying to comprehend is the formless that existed before form,

the formless that always only exists.

What it is we cannot know; it is beyond our limited minds.

There is something so basic, so mystical, so ineffable

that contains time, that contains space,

from which time and space emerge.

Is it formless form?

Is it energy that is not energy and is not not energy?

Is it an intelligence beyond intelligence?

Is it what we are when we go beyond ourselves?

We ride a pendulum that swings from pleasure to pain and back again.

This pendulum needs time and space to swing.

It needs matter and energy to give it form.

It needs us to feel its vacillations.

What we need is for time to stop, for all moments to become one moment.

What we need is for space to lose its shape, so that the pendulum has nowhere to go.

What we need is to take control and lose control,

to discipline our minds and surrender our senses.

Pleasure is an addiction.

Pain is an addiction.

We seek to escape pain by running to the pleasures that turn to pain.

All we think we want is the escape.

What we really want is to remember the formless, from which we were formed.

We need to remember what we truly are.

We need to know ourselves so deeply

that pain does not pain us

and pleasure does not claim us

that within the shifting play of forms

our foundation is the joy that is born in the formless.