Love and Surrender - Chuck Surface

These days, with more behind than ahead,
I do not yearn to solve the Mystery of Life,
Or come to "enlightenment" or "awakening."

Those words long ago lost all meaning,
And the Great Mystery has proven,
Beyond all doubt, Unknowable.

These days I Cherish two things:

The Sacred Presence in The Heart,
That Ineffable Sublimity,
which Illumines the Experience of Being:

Love.

And the Enlivened Serenity of the mind,
Though ever awash in Wonder,
Surrendered to Not Knowing.

Love... and Surrender.

Having these,
What care is there of attainment,
Or "levels" of enlightenment?

Having these,
What care is there for states of being,
Created and sustained conditionality?

Having these,
How can one bear arid discourses,
Seeking to prove this "Truth" or that?

Having these,
What "spiritual desire" can arise
Save...

Love's desire to Bless.

I've grown so weary of all else "spiritual."

These days, with more behind than ahead,
This Mystery within a Mystery is content
To breathe in Love, and breathe out Surrender.

Chuck Surface
In The Garden of the Beloved
Facebook

~

...in the course of my life, I found,
No finality in the milestones come to along The Way.
No flag planted, no summit attained.
And however Profound each milestone,
More should not be made of them,
than should be made,
Each being merely a juncture...
On a Journey of Endless Enlightening.

Chuck Surface

~

Photo - sent to us by a friend many years ago.
The Fawn's mother had been killed...

Rest - David Whyte

Rest is the conversation between what we love to do
and how we love to be.
To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will
as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless
outward need to reward itself through established goals.
To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense
that there is something wrong with the world
unless we are there to put it right;
to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets,
and shift.....to an inner state of natural exchange.

The template of natural exchange is the breath,
the autonomic giving and receiving
that forms the basis and the measure for life itself.

We are rested when we are living [that] exchange...

In rest is the sense of stopping, of giving up on
what we've been doing or how we have been being.
It is the sense of slowly coming home...

Deep in the primal exchange of the breath,
is the give and take, the blessing and the being blessed
and the ability to delight in both.
In rest there is a sense of presence, a delight in and
anticipation of the world and all of its forms [in which]
receiving and responding occur in one spontaneous movement.

A deep experience of rest is a perspective from which we are
able to perceive the outer specific forms of our work [and life]
and our relationships whilst being nourished by the shared
foundational gift of the breath itself.

Rested, we are ready for the world,
but not held hostage by it...

David Whyte

Excerpts from a writing called "Rest"
From the book: CONSOLATIONS

(David's words, my format)

Note: In Non-Duality religions they would call this Resting in Awareness...  One could also say it is resting in the Primal Rest of Pure Being, although am not sure that is David's meaning - but is how I interpret his words...   

Meditation and the self - Shinzen Young

...you can think of enlightenment as a kind of permanent shift
in perspective that comes about through direct realization
that there is no thing called "self" inside you.

Notice that I'm not saying that there is no self, but rather
no thing called a self.

Of course. there is certainly an activity inside you called
personality, and activity of the self.  But that is different
from a thing called the self.

Meditation changes your relationship to sensory experience,
including your thoughts and body sensations.  It allows you
to experience thoughts and body sensations in a clear
and unblocked way.  When the sensory experience of the
mind-body becomes sufficiently clear and uninhibited,
it ceases to be a rigid thing that imprisons your identity.

The sensory self becomes a comfortable home, not a jail cell.
That's why enlightenment is sometimes referred to as liberation.

You realize that the thingness of self is an artifact caused by
habitual nebulosity (cloudiness, haziness) and viscosity (density)
around your mind-body experience...

Shinzen Young
The Science of Enlightenment:
How Meditation Works

via: Markings

~

Photo - Amitabha
Buddha of Infinite Light,.
also called The Eternal Buddha

The Tao of Physics - Fritjof Capra

...the intuition behind the physicist's interpretation of the sub-atomic
world, in terms of the quantum fields, is closely paralleled by
 that of the Eastern Mystic who interprets his or her
 experience of the world in terms of an ultimate underlying reality.The Brahman of the Hindus, like the Dharmakaya of the
 Buddhists, and the Tao of the Taoists, can be seen,
 perhaps, as the ultimate unified field from which spring
 not only the phenomena studied in
 physics, but all other phenomena as well.
In the Eastern view, the reality underlying all phenomena is beyond
 all forms and defies all description and specification.  It is therefore
 said to be formless, empty, or void, but this emptiness is not to be
 taken for mere nothingness.  It is, on the contrary, the essence of
 all forms and the source of all life.  Thus the Upanishads say:

Brahman is life.  Brahman is Joy.  Brahman is the Void.
Joy, verily, that is the same as the Void.
The Void, verily, that is the same as Joy,

(Chandogya Upanishad 3.14.1)

The Eastern sages make it clear that they do no mean ordinary
 emptiness, when they talk about Brahman, Sunyata or Tao,
 but.....a Void which has infinite creative potential...
Like the quantum field, it gives birth to an infinite variety of
 forms, which it sustains and eventually reabsorbs.

Fritjof Capra
From: The Tao of Physics

via: No Mind's Land

~

"...in reality only the Ultimate is...
When you understand that what is real is
nameless and formless,
pure energy of life and light
of consciousness,
you will be at peace -
immersed in the deep silence
of reality."

Nisargadatta

Note: I know nothing of Quantum Physics or the "unified field theory" from a scientific perspective.  But this excerpt caught my attention.  The subject fascinates me as a mystic, and sometimes confirms
to me what I have experienced in "meditation."  _/\_

Photo: Mandala Art

Silence is Universal...

Midnight...
Sitting at the window again...
Sinking deeply into
the peace of Stillness,
leaning into the night
in awe... of its Silence...

The one constant is Utter Silence...
tangible; a felt sense
that undulates ItSelf through form
in Silent Rhythms...

The Universal Silence of all existence...
The Energy of Being that pulsates through all life...
manifesting many different faces of the Formless,
reflecting ItSelf in many expressions,
all "different", yet all the same Life Energy...

The mind focuses on differences,
instead of That which unifies;
the common thread of Living Silence...

Beyond seeming "difference"
is the same Infinite, Resonant Vibration of Being ~

Wondrous, Ubiquitous Silence in varying vibrations...

Every utterance from Infinite Silence
is an expression of the Eternal;
is a wave in the Ocean of Infinity...

Every life form is The Formless Silence...
It's Sound is an undulating OM ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And

This "me" experience, then, is the expression of
That ~ an emanation from Pure Silence...
in all Its disguises...

Mystic Meandering
Oct. 16, 2016

Rediscovering True Silence - Jean Klein

Silence is our real nature.
What we are fundamentally,
is only Silence...
Silence is free from beginning and end.
It was before the beginning of all things.
It is causeless.
Its greatness lies in the fact that it simply is.

Silence has no opposite in noise.
It is beyond positive and negative.
Silence dissolves all objects.
It is not related to any counterpart which belongs to the mind.
Silence has nothing to do with mind.
It cannot be defined but it can be felt directly because
it is our nearness.

Silence is freedom without restriction or center.
It is our wholeness,
neither inside or outside the body.
Silence is joyful, not pleasurable.
It is not psychological...

Silence is holy.
Silence needs no intermediary.
It is healing.
There is no fear in Silence.
Silence is autonomous like love and beauty.
It is untouched by time.
Silence is meditation, free from any intention...
Silence is the absence of one's self...

Sound, which comes from Silence, is music.
All activity is creative when it comes from Silence.
It is constantly a new beginning.
Silence precedes speech and poetry
and music and all art.
Silence is the home ground of all creative activity.
What is truly creative is the word, is Truth.
Silence is the word.
Silence is Truth.

Jean Klein

via: Being Silently Drawn

(Jean Klein's words, my format)

Utter Stillness...

Utter Stillness,
within and without,
comforts, nurtures,
claims me...

Sweet repose in this Stillness...
beyond noise,
beyond feeling,
beyond thought,
beyond story.

Utter Stillness does not anticipate,
does not seek.
It just IS...
awareing,
seeing,
knowing.

To *reside* in Utter Stillness
is pure Being,
pure Awareness,
pure Life...

From the Spaciousness of Utter Stillness
life is just experienced...

no conclusions,
no interpretations,
no judgments,
no reactions,
no labels...

Just Life being lived...

Utter Stillness...

Sweet Refuge...

Mystic Meandering
2010

Embrace Your Wholeness - Oriah

Embracing your wholeness is the greatest gift you can give...
Christine Wushke
Freely Human

~

All things are made of the same sacred presence - stillness...
All things emanate from and return to and are never
separated from a vast and sacred wholeness...

This spaciousness that we are is not
indifferent to the suffering that we feel
when we have forgotten what we are.
It reaches out to us, calls to us...

It is the Great Mystery.
It is what we are made of,
and what everything and everyone
is made of.
It is what we participate in
with every breath...

We will never be happy
or truly able to live and love fully
until we find our way of living
from an awareness of the deep stillness
at the center of what we are
- our essential nature -
which is wakefulness, awareness,
love, peace, truth and beauty...

Look at your own life from within,
that sense of quiet stillness
that you are.
You will see this inner essence,
this innocence,
like a bright thread
woven throughout the center
of your life.

Living it consciously is why you are here...

Oriah
From: The Call

(Oriah's words, my format)

Turn Your World Red - Danna Faulds

Cardinal calls me from the
railing of the deck.  "Turn
your world red," he says,
insistent, beckoning.  "Risk
life outside your hard-earned
walls and windows.  Cast
aside caution, propriety,
and your too small sense
of what you can and cannot do."

Fly!

I tell you that the
sky knows no constraints.
All your are or can be comes
clear in the near approach of clouds.

Fly!

That which you
fear the most holds your
deepest teaching.  Let your
spirit be the bridge between
safety and release.  Soar to
the far end of what is known
from dawn to twilight, then
throw yourself at the whim
of the wild night winds.
Turn your world red, and
live with no regrets.

Fly!

[.....]

Danna Faulds
From: Poems from the Heart of Yoga

~

Photo - Drip painting...
If you look real close you can
almost see a little red bird
sitting on the thick vertical line
in the middle near the top - very unintentional :)

Break for Freedom - David Whyte & Rumi

To remove ourselves entirely and absolutely,
abruptly and at times uncompromisingly is often
the real and radically courageous
break for freedom.
Unsticking ourselves from the mythical
Tar Baby, seemingly set up, just for us,
right in the middle of our path,
we start the process of losing our sense of falsity,
of ridding ourselves of illusions,
of letting go of our self-manufactured enemies,
and even our false friends,
and most especially the false sense of self
we have manufactured to live with them.

We make ourselves available for the simple seeing of ourselves
and our world more elementally and therefore more clearly again.
We withdraw, not to disappear, but to find another ground
from which to see; a solid ground from which to step,
 and from which to speak again, in a different way,
 a clear, rested, embodied voice we begin to remember
as our own...

David Whyte
Excerpt from an essay -"Withdrawal"

Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
Slide out the side.
Die, and be quiet.
Quietness is the surest sign that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running from Silence.

Rumi
"Become the Sky"

~

Top Photo - Ceiling Abstract
taken looking up where several ceiling levels
come together, also a ceiling beam, and a rod
with a hanger on it :)  Color inverted.

Bottom photo - Through the glass of a greenhouse ceiling. 

Want Only What Is True - Jennifer Welwood & Licata

There will always be voices that promise you greatness and glory;
They call out from the worldly marketplace;
They call out from the spiritual marketplace;
They call out from the bigger-better-more marketplace.

Do not buy their false promises, or purchase their ephemeral wares;
What fulfills for a moment is not worth the price of your soul.
There are heights that will lift you,
 but not when you try to ascend them;
There are powers that will fill you,
 but not when you make them your own.
There are treasures, and there are imitations of treasures.
If you have lost your true gold, at least turn away from the glitter.

Want only what is true.
This will lead you to the well of your deepest sorrows.
Follow that passageway, all the way down;
Become the dark emptiness of your core.
Be still.  Don't measure the waiting.
Be still.  Let the waiting become a fire.
Be still.  Let the fire show you its secret heart;
A strand of clear light running through you.
Gather yourself there, and the luminous universe opens.
In the vast expanse, fathomless, infinite ocean of light,
lose yourself, and find yourself, and become what you already are.

Jennifer Welwood
"Renunciation"

~

We can descend into the fire of direct experience of our feelings.
It is within the very core of this holy fire, in the alchemical crucible
of the body where the naked, groundless somatic territory of
illumination occurs, where healing emerges, and a new pathway
of love, care and compassion unfolds and illuminates within you.

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Woman Whirling in the Fire
(looking from overhead)
Vortex Art with Craypas oils