Heaven, Darkness and Between

A poem to find our place in life

Bhikkhu Dhammānanda
2 min readJun 13, 2024
Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

Heaven is vast,
Narrow the earth
Darkness and voidness of joy
And those who goodness seek destroy
Dwell below earth’s upper soil
In the gloom darkness

Above the devas reign in glory,
Below the demons play their pranks
It is in the middle were most of us find their ranks

However nobody’s rank is fixed
If fate with an effective will be mixed
Then a desired destiny may be won
And a bad fate may be gone

All nature indeed is within us
Each’s gain akin to what he does
Upwards we may seek to climb
Downwards may us drag the grime
Or in the grey middle we else may pass the time

Waging the inner war
We came to earth truly for
Becoming nobler than a boor

Walking through a loftier door
This is the call we should listen to
This is the path that is only true
All else precisely what we seek eschew
Never the lower we be found to do
Even if this means companions having few
Even if each day we start from scrap anew

This is the price
For indeed all true good only comes from sacrifice

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Bhikkhu Dhammānanda
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I am a Buddhist monk, who enjoys writing about the deeper aspects of Buddhist philosophy, often in rather untraditional ways. Website https://highermindart.info