Saying Hello to Life - Padraig O Tuama

Neither I nor the poets I love found the keys to the kingdom...
and we cannot force God to stumble over us where we sit.
But I know that it's a good idea to sit anyway.  So every morning I sit.
I kneel, waiting, making friends with the habit of listening, hoping
that I'm being listened to.  There, I greet God in my own disorder.
  I say hello to distraction and privilege, I greet the day and I greet
 my Beloved...I recognize and greet my burdens, my luck, my
 controlled and uncontrolled story.  I greet my untold stories,
 my unfolding story, my unloved body, my own love, my own body.
  I greet the things I think will happen and say hello to everything
 I do not know about the day.  I greet my own small world and
 I hope that I can meet the bigger world that day.  I greet my
 story and hope I can forget my story during the day,
 and hope I can hear some stories, and greet some
 surprising stories during the long day ahead.
I greet God, and I greet the God who is more God than
the God I greet. [The Mystery?]
Hello to you all, I say, as the sun rises above the chimneys
of North Belfast.

Hello...

Padraig O Tuama

is a poet and theologian
living in Northern Ireland

from an interview with
On Being

via: No Mind's Land

Listening Within the Heart - Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

...listening within the Heart attunes us to The Beloved.
By listening within the Heart we develop the ear of the Heart,
the inner listening of the soul that can perceive at this higher
frequency.  Still, such listening requires both attentiveness and
discrimination, as it is not always easy to discriminate between
the voice of the ego and the voice of The Beloved.  But there is
a distinct difference.  The words of the ego and mind belong to
duality; the words of the Heart carry the imprint of oneness
 [wholeness]. In the Heart there is no argument, no you and me,
 just an unfolding [attitude of] oneness [unity].  The Heart
embraces a difficulty, the ego takes sides...

Listening, waiting for Love's words, turns us away from our
own needs to being attentive to the higher need. [the need of the soul]
In our need we call to The Beloved, and then wait at the doorway
of the Heart, listening for an answer.  But gradually, imperceptibly,
this inner listening becomes more important than our own need.
Our questions become fewer, our inner attention grows.
The Beloved begins to nourish us [the soul's need] with the response...

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Sufi Mystic

from: Prayer of the Heart

[brackets mine]

Via: No Mind's Land

~

Photo - light through Venetian Blinds
taken by my husband...

Scattered Heart - Omid Safi

The Prophet Mohammad was once asked what was the one essential
quality for prayers...  Many in the community thought they knew the
right answer.  Some thought the Prophet would say the proper
recitation of Arabic.  Others thought the answer would be lovely
memorization of Qur'anic chapters.  Yet others expected the answer
would be perfect ritual observations of prayer.

Muhammad's answer was: Presence in the Heart...

What is Presence?

It is not so much presence of God.
God is always present.
It is we humans who are absent from our own Heart.
[the spiritual Heart].  So much of our lives are spent in a
fractured state of Heart.  We are, too often, scattered.  We speak of
being scatterbrained.  The truth of the matter is that the scatteredness
is much more systemic.  We are scattered at every level: body, soul,
 mind, and spirit.  We do this to ourselves.  We throw ourselves
 to the past, often clinging to a past pain or trauma.  Or, we hurl
 ourselves towards the future, attaching ourselves to a hope for the
 future, or fear of losing something.
We are in the past, or in the future, everywhere but Here.
To pray with the Heart, to have presence in the Heart, is a remedy.
It is a healing, an unscattering.
This starts with mindfulness, with an awareness of the breath.
When we monitor our breath, simply observe the breath enter into
the heart, and emerge from the heart, our breathing slows down.
The heart rates slows.  Here is where we become whole:
our body, our breath, our spirit become One.
In that moment, in this breath, we are healed and whole.
And what a prayer there is in this breath.
What Presence...
God has always been present, waiting for us.
We ourselves become present, meeting God.
This is the Prayer of the Heart.

To pray the Prayer of the Heart we cannot be anxious about
 the past, or hopeful/fearful about the future.
  We have to be Present to our own Heart's state.

The Prayer of the Heart starts with us where we are: broken,
 fractured, and dis-united.  It takes us by the breath, and moves us
 along to unity, wholeness, and healing.

This is when we realize that tawhid (Unity) is not just about God,
but about our own Hearts becoming unified.
We have to become united [within].
Our inner division, being disconnected from our own bodies,
our own breath, our own Heart is only one part of our lack of unity.
That inner division is reflected in how we as a human community
are divided.  When we are not one with our own Heart, we cannot
see the full humanity of others.

The inner and outer are reflected in each other.  When we are
 internally divided, we will be externally divided.
  If we wish to be united as a human community, we have to
 strive for unity and healing at the
Heart level...

We need the Prayer of the Heart.
By whatever form we pray,
we need to become whole.
May it begin one breath at a time.
May it begin with me...

Omid Safi
excerpted from an article
entitled: The Prayer of the Heart
at: On Being

via;  No Mind's Land

The "Good Dark" - Ivan Granger

What is the "Good Dark"?
The Light is so often considered one of the attributes of the Divine,
but we forget that dark too is also a metaphor...  The Eternal is
sometimes called dark because IT is beyond the ability of the limited
intellect to see.  It is the realm where there is no longer separation;
nothing is seen as separate from That [the Eternal].  It can feel like
a shining darkness.  So the Sacred Dark, the Good Dark, is God,
the Eternal, that exists in its mysterious, invisible, indefinable form.
Vast beyond comprehension.  [It is the Eternal] that gathers
everything, even light, into ItSelf.  This is the darkness where
there is great joy,  This is the immense Mystery...

If we understand the Divine to be that living, mysterious darkness,
then we finally recognize ourselves as the same as that darkness.
[The light and dark being the same - think Yin-Yang, where the
light is contained within the dark and the dark within the light.]
In the 'half-light' [partial understanding] we are still distracted by
our own faces, we are confused, more aware of ourselves than the
holy mystery we touch.  We become like a young lover, too
self-conscious to simply lose oneself in the embrace of the Beloved.

...[when] we have no face of our own *separate* from That [our face
before we were born], then we can melt silently into the Good Dark,
into the mystery of the Divine.  Your face gets erased [the persona, or
mask] - the false self, the little me, the ego.  This is the place where
concepts fail, where reality is no longer parceled out into dichotomies
of good and bad, right and wrong, (no division of opposites)...  There
is nothing (except the Divine Wholeness that is all things). The ego-
mind is no longer able to segment reality.  Underlying the complex
 diversity of creation is a single Unity.  And within that Unity, the
 individual is not separate or different from the vast Divine.
  There is no separation between individual self and the center of all
selves...  Just Pure Being...

If you can settle deeply into this awareness [that there is nothing
except Divine Wholeness, beyond the mask], then you will find
yourself drinking the ecstasy of true love-wisdom!

Ivan Granger, Poetry Chaikhana
[brackets mine] (parentheses his)

~

We are from the fathomless depths,
the "darkness" of "The Deep"
*before* Light began...
*from* which Light emerged...
We *are* the Deep Ananda of
The Divine...

without knowing how or why...
without the need for certainties,
for *answers*; only the
ever-available Presence of
Divine Love...Pure Bliss
Pure Blessing

Mystic Meandering
January 30, 2017

Whispers of the Heart - Stoneman, Rumi, Barrett

There is a whisper,
but it's louder than the wind.
It calls to us, "Come Home.
The story is over,
the pages are worn thin.
Come Home."

It's like a chant,
a sacred OM
underlying all else.

It requires not doing anything,
or going anywhere,
or becoming anything.

If only we see that we are this
whispering sound,
all else will dissolve
into peace.

Rafael Stoneman

~

Make everything in you an ear,
each atom of being,
and you will hear
at every moment
what the Source
is whispering
to you...

You are the beloved
of The Beloved...

and in every moment,
in every event of your life,
The Beloved
is whispering to you
exactly what you need
to hear and know...

Rumi

~

Put your ear to the wall of your heart...
Listen to the whisper of knowing there.
Love will touch you if you are
very still...

Tom Barrett

Space Is Not Empty - Author Unknown and Hafiz

Empty space is not empty.  Space vibrates with energy,
and even the most barren of vacuums is seething with activity.
Space is warped, compressed and stretched.  Matter creates
"dimples" in space, much as a bowling ball placed on a
trampoline will create a deformation in its fabric, so too does
matter create distortions in the fabric of space.
A rotating body - like a planet, or star - will not only "dent"
the space around it, but space itself will be dragged along
in its wake, in much the same way that a rotating spoon
will cause a vortex om a cup of tea...
As an object moves through space, space itself becomes
compressed in the direction of the object's travel.
Stars and atoms and the vacuum are all of a single, seamless
whole...

We are trapped in the assumptions that the way we experience
things is how things are...

Author Unknown...

Note: I wrote these words down from a blog on a piece of paper,
 but failed to write down the author, or the blog - my bad.
If someone knows whose words these are
please let me know...  Thanks :)

~*~

Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.

When your truth forsakes its shyness,
when your fears surrender to your strengths,
you will begin to experience
that all existence
is a teeming sea of infinite life.

In a handful of ocean water
you could not count all the finely tuned
musicians who are acting stoned
for very intelligent and sane reasons
and of course are becoming extremely sweet

and wild!

In a handful of the sky and earth,
in a handful of God,
we cannot count
all the ecstatic lovers who are dancing there
behind the mysterious veil...

True art reveals there is no void
or darkness.
There is no loneliness to the clear-eyed mystic
in this luminous, brimming, playful world.

Hafiz

Ineffable Experience - Bob Berman

An experience began that no words could convey.
It was ineffable and life-altering.  The best I can say is that "I" was
suddenly gone, replaced by the certainty of being the entire cosmos.
There was absolute peace.  I knew with total confidence, not
logically - because, "I" was no longer present - that birth and death
do not exist.  That all is perfect eternally, that time is unreal, and that
all is one.  The joy was beyond anything I could have imagined.
The to-the-marrow certainty could perhaps be better described as
a recognition, and an ancient familiarity of being Home.

There was no sense of a separate "me", an observer looking out
upon the world.  I was whatever my eyes gazed upon.  It was as if
my consciousness had previously been long confined, like a canary
in a little cage, and that a false sense of being a separate, isolated,
thinking individual had now vanished.  Objects were no longer
separate items existing in space; instead, everything was the
 same continuum.  When a person came into view, I was this person.
The universe was one entity for all time.  There were not billions of
humans and animals.  There was one living, deathless entity.

Bob Berman
from: Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space,
Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death

by Bob Berman and Robert Lanza

Via - Markings

~

Underlying the complex diversity of creation is a single Unity.
And within that Unity, the individual is not separate or
different from the vast Divine.  There is no separation between
individual self and the center of all selves... just Pure Being...

Ivan Granger - Poetry Chaikhana

What is Seeking? - Eric Baret

Seeking is an expression of truth, it's not a Way.
All the yoga practices are an expression of truth.
Yoga does not bring [us] to truth but truth expresses itself
through yoga.  Sadhana [spiritual practice] is an expression.
It is because you fore-feel Silence that your life becomes sadhana.
But to do sadhana, to reach Silence is the wrong way of thinking.
The very fact that you look for something is a proof you already feel it.
The very fact that you asked the question proves you know the answer
The answer is before the question.  You only ask a question because
you fore-feel the answer, or else you cannot ask the question.
So when you look for God, this looking comes from God directly.
It's [seeking] just an expression.  But the looking does not bring you to
 what you look for.  What you look for is behind you...
...you are not the finder of anything - the truth is in back of us,
not in front of us.  That's why it can never be reached, it can never
be understood...

Only listen towards Life itself...  Open yourself to what is really here...
Life is experienced in the body, viscerally, palpably, as vibration,
as energy...  The mind only functions with words...  But the thoughts
that come from the deep Silence, with words that come out from the
Depths, are also expressions of Life...
They come from the Silence to bring you back to Silence...

Open to experiencing without words...

Listen with your whole being...


Excerpted from a published interview with Eric Baret 2014
Eric Baret is a teacher of the Tantric Tradition

via: No Mind's Land

~

And so I dove Within,
Back... behind... before, ever deeper,
seeking the experience of Pure Being,
Before I knew anything of "myself."

Chuck Surface

Excerpt from: "Impossibly"

In The Garden of The Beloved

Facebook

The Longing of the Heart...

It is your destiny to be Love...
The only "purpose" is to BE - Love.

Rest in Sacred Silence
where the ripples of luminescent Love
form and expand...

It is already there in your Heart ~
in the core of your Being.

Love is your sanctuary.

The Longing of the Heart
is there
to
draw
you
in
.
.
,

It's the Longing of the Heart for Divine Love,
for that which is True, Pure, Innocent,
 Whole and Alive
within
you

It's the Longing for the Embrace of
"The Beloved."

And...

It's the call of "The Beloved",
the pull of the Heart.

Follow the call -
the pull

The Longing is your Innocence;
the innocent Longing
for the affection
of Divine Embrace.

Let that innocent Longing carry you
Home...

Where you are held -
deep within
the Divine Heart...

Thrive in that Embrace.

That is Home...

That is Love...

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
circa 2004 - 2006

~

Photo - Mandala Art digitally altered

"The Pull"...

There is an intimacy of the Heart in turning inward,
following the pull of "The Mystery" into The Silence
that is hauntingly
sublime...

A magnetic pull of
Pure Being
calls
from within...
pulling ItSelf back to ItSelf...

In fluidity of being one feels suspended in a
deep internal womb-like Cosmos,
where there is endless depth and breadth,
fullness and emptiness,
all at the same time;
a subtle movement of awareness
aware-ing everything at once...

Collapsing into the Cosmic Waves of Being,
into Existence prior to manifestation,
everything within softens and opens,
like a delicate flower,
including the body,
touched by the subtle
rhythmic caress
of
the Unknown
 ~ breathing ~
~ embracing ~
surrounding ~ and filling;
unwinding the contractions
of body and mind.

There is a "sanity" in this Cosmic Silence
that bestows a soundness of Heart through Grace
that is beyond mere mental reason
and cognizance...

Finding this deeper Rhythm within
one loses a sense of "self"
and becomes...
"The Mystery"  ~

Breathing ItSelf...

The Breath of The Infinite

The Whisper of Love

Mystic Meandering
March 1, 2017

_/\_

A Humble Lover of "The Mystery"

~

Photo - Craypas oils, done with fingers