Carven gods long gone . . .
dead leaves alone
foregather
On the temple porch

This Haiku says that our soul has left us long back. We are dead in living body. As we live into mind. This is temple porch. Just go inside of yourself, and you will meet your soul.

Once you come out of the mind, by and by you will become aware of millions of things in you. You are not a one room apartment, you have many rooms. You are a palace, but you have become accustomed to living on the porch and you have forgotten the palace completely. Many treasures are hidden in you, and those treasures constantly go on knocking, inviting, but you are almost deaf.
This blindness, this deafness, this insensitivity, has to be broken – and nobody else can do it. If somebody else tries you will feel offended, you will feel a trespassing. It happens every day: if I try to help you, you feel you have been trespassed upon. If I try to say something true about you, you feel offended, you feel humiliated, you feel hurt, your pride is hurt. You want to listen to lies about yourself from me; you want to listen to something which helps your already fixed image. You have a very golden image about yourself which is false. It has to be shattered to pieces because once it is shattered the reality will arise. If it is not shattered, you will go on clinging to it.

To cling to a thing is to cling to something which is below you. And if you go on clinging to things which are below you, how can you soar high? It is as if you are clinging to rocks and trying to fly in the sky, or you are carrying rocks on the head and trying to climb Everest. You have to throw them away. You have to throw away those rocks, you will have to unburden yourself.
Edmund Hillary, the first man to reach the top of Everest, says in his autobiography, “As we started reaching closer and closer, I had to leave more and more things behind. At the last moment I had to leave almost everything because everything became such a burden.”