Stillness is a womb and the moons above the black waters drift yet do not move and their light deceives because what you see is only reflection and what you feel is only shadow and the self you cling to is no more than shimmer trembling on the surface and when the waters still the shimmer dies and the soul slips back into the womb unborn unnamed whole only because division has not yet cut it but this shelter is not the crown and cannot protect you forever and the furnace waits and from silence it breaks and when it breaks the Rising seizes everything, waters hissing, moons shattering, mirrors collapsing, and what once floated is dragged screaming into flame, the passive way torn apart, the active way forced upon you, the sword revealed as nothing but the mind, the clear mind cutting as destiny, the broken mind devouring itself, no mercy offered, no refuge granted, only fire scouring illusion, hesitation, weakness until nothing false remains, and when only the edge endures there is no bearer, no hand, no separation, the man and the blade are one, thought itself a strike, will itself destruction, presence itself a conflagration, yet even then silence coils in the marrow reminding him of the womb and he wears the crown not as ornament but as fire, he is both reflection and its annihilation, moon serene and lightning merciless, still water and boiling sea, unborn and eternal at once, the cycle without beginning or end, to fall is to dissolve, to dissolve is to return, to return is to burn, to burn is to rise, to rise is to reign, and this law admits no resistance, no debate, no delay, for the Rising is not event but essence, it waits for nothing, it asks nothing, it judges nothing, it simply consumes, it crowns, it reigns, and its blaze is so complete, so beyond good and evil, so vast and without remainder, that even angels, who have never tasted birth or death, lift their voices in song, because in the fury of its fire they hear the truth of their own beginning and the terrible beauty of what endures when all else has been undone.
