The thing that looks out through my eyes will carry on forever -
My body’s just its visual depiction.
Neither different, nor the same - in this there is no contradiction -
And yet there is one’s death, which seems to sever

The connection one observes between the “body and the soul”,
Which seems like an intuitive conclusion,
But eventually reveals itself as only an illusion, 
Which one is hardly able to control,

Since the inner and the outer seem as if they’re really two,
A notion we’ve all had since we were born -
Babies are all dualists, who believe the body’s worn
Like clothing, which surrounds the real you.

But what if brains and bodies are just simple illustrations, 
Just images, which fin’lly are unreal?
Pictures which convey the things which spirits think and feel,
That in the end are just hallucinations

Of what’s more fundamental - the awareness that’s behind
This ghostly dance of fleeting apparitions -
Which seem as if they’re “physical”, but are just suppositions,
Resulting from their being so well-aligned - 

Like reflections seen in mirrors which will suddenly disperse,
And seem to disappear into the air -
Like the way in which the moon when not observed’s not really there -
Like the fate of all my insubstantial verse.

If the body’s just a picture, well then, what becomes of me?
Where will I be when I up and die?
Exactly where my atoms are, in sea and earth and sky! 
Where finally of my ego I’ll be free.

And when that time arrives, this troubled, sad, and lonely wave
Will once again return into the ocean -
That vastness all-encompassing, of which we’ve little notion,
Which says to me that everything that they’ve


Been telling us since infancy were bromides falsely spoken -
That all the things that felt like me will find
They’d been a petty nightmare in a universal mind,
From which I will have finally awoken.

And when that strange, unearthly calm descends...

Anonymous 67