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.

One Song

 
All is change in the world of the senses,
But changeless is the supreme Lord of Love.
Meditate on him, be absorbed in him,
Wake up from this dream of separateness.
Know God and all fetters will fall away.
No longer identifying yourself
With the body, go beyond birth and death.
All your desires will be fulfilled in him
Who is One without a second.
—The Shvetashvatara Upanishad
 

Consciousness begat light and light begat matter.

Without consciousness, nothing could exist.

Light is energy and energy changes form.

The things of this world are only light slowed down,

and light is the stuff of God.

And God is consciousness, pure consciousness,

the ground of all being, the mind beyond minds,

the whole of which we are not quite a part,

no more a part than a wave is a part of the ocean.

We are God in motion, consciousness

that has taken form.

We need to stop believing in our dreams,

or else, we need to realize that

our waking state is just as changeable as our dreams,

and just as true.

Waking and dreaming are just shifts in consciousness.

How can we wake from our waking dream?

We start by being conscious of the light,

conscious of all things as light,

conscious of ourselves as light,

conscious of everything as extensions of ourselves.

And then we see what happens.

Don’t ask me what happens,

I only know where to start.

The sage says that we go beyond birth and death,

perhaps we become a room that has lost its walls,

so the space within becomes united with the surrounding space.

Beyond the body is light and God is beyond the light.

No, that’s not exactly it.

Beyond our consciousness of the body

is our consciousness of light

and beyond our consciousness of light

is our consciousness of the Lord of Love.

There is nothing beyond the Lord of Love,

because God is All-That-Is.

All-That-Is is pure love.

There are so many illusions within

the Lord of Love.

We believe in birth and death, good and evil,

time and space.

It’s true, as some say,

that nothing can separate us from the love of God.

All-That-Is is spacelessness and timelessness

joined in one infinite, eternal song.