The Portable Jack Kerouac

 I have lots of things to teach you now, 

in case we ever meet, concerning the message 

that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina 

on a cold winter moonlit night. 

It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. 

It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. 

We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. 

But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that 

everything is alright forever and forever and forever. 

Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, 

stop breathing for 3 seconds, 

listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, 

and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught 

in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. 

It is all one vast awakened thing. 

I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. 

We were never really born, we will never really die. 

It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, 

other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. 

That which passes into everything is one thing. 

It's a dream already ended. 

There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. 

I know this from staring at mountains months on end. 

They never show any expression, they are like empty space. 

Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? 

Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, 

which is the one universal essence of mind, 

the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, 

will never crumble away because it was never born.

 
― Jack Kerouac, The Portable Jack Kerouac

 

tags: awake, born, die, empty, letter, mountain, soul, space