Mind and Form: A Poem on Esoteric Thought
By Don Iannone

It burrows its way through life like a mole.
Seeking and creating as it seeks,
and whatever it creates, it seeks again,
because it now knows its target.
Yes, the mind forever leaves its traces--thoughts,
some idle and lame, some subtle and deep,
some indiscernible from feelings and bodily movements.
Not just some organ in your head,
like your boozed out liver,
or your burned out lungs.
It's more like the air you breathe--
it's everywhere inside and outside you.
Mostly you think it's inside you,
but it's also outside the embodied you.
It's a creature and creator of habit.
It adores form, and
simultaneously abhors and delights
at the formless and unmet in life.
It loves form because each form
is a familiar and known furrow
created by an earlier burrow.
It loves the formless and unmet too,
because each is a conquest
to sculpt a form from the formless.
Over time, the mind learns to love itself,
and so it clings to itself and its creations, because
these are its children--
its offspring offered to all it has created, and
the make-believe separate external world,
which it has also created as a plaything, and
as a form against which to forge other forms.
It can only think of itself as a form
because it has low self-insight,
and only sees that which it has formed.
Its true nature, I believe, is formless, and yet
the mind can only grasp the formless as a form.
How sad, you say, that your mind
cannot grasp its true nature.
Don't sadden yourself with such machinations.
Even your sadness is a form, created by your mind,
as a futile attempt to give form to itself.
The answer? Don't go there either...
for answers are also illusory forms
seeking formless questions...
that are nothing more than your mind's gropings
to transcend form and reach formless permanence.
Next time you decide to visit reality, whatever that is,
don't think about it.

PS: Don't take any of this seriously. It could lead to
life-threatening illusions.