Dissolving - Dorothy Hunt

Coming/Going...

Creation/Destruction...

Emptiness/Fullness...

Freedom/Bondage...

Come to where these words dissolve.


Her you will find neither

Duality/nor Nonduality...

Ignorance/nor Enlightenment...

Purity/nor Impurity...

Time/nor the Absence of Time...

Here nothing is

Attached/or Detached...

Known/or Unknown...

Asleep/or Awake...

Divided/or Undivided...

Here, the mind cannot speak.

No you/No me...

No union/No separation...

No form/No formlessness...

No death/No deathlessness...


Silence alone reveals what thought cannot think,
what knowing cannot know,
what listening cannot hear,
what seeing cannot see.

Dorothy Hunt

~

Photo - Mandala Art
digitally altered

You have not danced so badly - Hafiz

art by Rassouli

You have not danced so badly my dear,
Trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One.

You have waltzed with great style,
My sweet...

[.....]

So what if the music has stopped for a while.

So what if the price of admission to the Divine

Is out of reach tonight.

So what, my dear
If you do not have the ante to gamble for Real Love.

The mind and body are famous
For holding the heart ransom,
But Hafiz knows the Beloved's eternal habits.

Have patience,
For He will not be able to resist your longing
For long.

You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to kiss the Beautiful One.

You have actually waltzed with tremendous style,
O my sweet...

Hafiz
Persian Poet
1320-1389

~

Art: "The Dance"

Rassouli

a wonderful artist!

Dark Night of the Soul - Mirabai Starr & Jeannie Zandi

The Dark Night of the Soul, as St. John of the Cross conceived it,
is actually an inner state of "spiritual crisis."  It is an experience
of being stripped of all spiritual feelings, all our false constructs,
and a dismantling of edifices of religious concepts with which we
are accustomed to propping up our inner lives.  In the Dark Night
we cannot feel the presence of the Sacred anymore, and the word
"God" becomes devoid of meaning.  It is a plunge into the abyss
of radical unknowingness.  It is only when we get out of our own
way that the Divine can take over and fill us with love.  But it's a
grueling process to come to this level of surrender.

But the Dark Night of the Soul is not only about being brought to our
knees.  It is about unconditional love, the kind of love that wakes
us up and affirms our deepest humanity.  The act of consciously
yielding to the shattering of the heart [in grief] is not high on the
 list of cultural values, but it is part of being awake [to life]...

The Dark Night of global crisis will reveal itself as a state of pure
luminescence, where nothing is as we thought it was...

Mirabai Starr
Excerpt from Dark Night of the Soul

~

Even the most sophisticated.....seekers are flummoxed by a dark
night experience, and this ability to flummox is at the heart of its
effectiveness and purpose.  The coping strategies of conditioning
must be entirely frustrated, the arrogance of the "me" must be
thoroughly met with a humbling, so that the being is left with
absolutely nowhere to turn to "solve the problem."  Thus the
brilliant survival strategy that has the illusion of separation at its
base is brought to its knees, so that a new reliance on the organic
flow of the Divine may rise.

The dream of "getting there" that the being invested all her life
energy, hours and efforts into is suddenly seen as a mirage.  And
trying to get to Nirvana with strategies [is seen as] hopeless,
because it IS hopeless.  The coping strategies generally have to
fail utterly for a new reliance on living radically open and
unprepared in the moment to be fully embraced.

What the soul is after is not a temporary influx of light, but a
thorough deconstruction of the false that results in the embodiment
of a light that shines through the darkness.

The Dark Night of the Soul is an initiation, a sacred passage, a
dying of the old and birthing of light enfleshed.  This process of
initiation or passage is not a problem to be solved.  Huge amounts
of shadow material will rise, identities will fall, coping mechanisms
will fail, and tremendous amounts of energy, mostly as emotion, will
emerge to be released.  The "me" coping structure undergoes a
massive deconstruction, and the fresh innocent, wide-eyed and present
Essential Being emerges from the rubble.

Jeannie Zandi

Excerpt from: Dark Night: The Breakdown of the Mythology of Me

Full Spectrum Experience - Jeff Foster

Don't judge your sorrow too quickly or too harshly, friend.  Honouring
the darkness within is not the same as 'wallowing'.  And cultivating
deep trust in all of life's movements does not equate to self-indulgence
or a 'pity-party'.  Please don't misunderstand this.  Find a space in your
heart for the unwanted, the unloved, the rejected aspects of experience.

If we refuse to plumb the depths we are left only half alive, however
'enlightened' we claim to be.  Artists, musicians, poets of all cultures
throughout the ages have understood this.  See your life as an art
gallery.  Embrace the full spectrum of experience, from the light to
the dark. Hold it all in your prayers, illuminate it all with the light
of loving awareness.  Be that awareness!

Perhaps your frustration just wants to frustrate itself fully and be
felt, fully.  Perhaps this moment contains no mistake!  Perhaps the
relief you will feel in time will be infinitely sweeter for having
suffered so deeply.  Perhaps your suffering is teaching you humility,
gratitude, quietude, and compassion - and trust - unbreakable trust
in life's strange processes.

Don't judge your sadness, your depression, your feelings [your illness].
And don't judge the process of another, for you really don't know
what's best for anyone, and you really don't know more than life itself.
  That which you reject (in another or yourself) may actually be
much-needed medicine, a misunderstood teacher, inviting you to an
 awakening deeper than you ever thought possible.  It may be a
threshold guardian, a gatekeeper of a forgotten kingdom. 
The glory of a life fully felt!

And to your demons say -

Namaste!

Jeff Foster

Seasons of the Soul - Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

For our ancestors the rhythms of the seasons were their calendar,
the rising and setting of the sun their only clock.  Today our clocks
 seem to spin much faster and it is easy to ignore, or even forget
these more primal seasons and their meaning.  And yet as our world
appears to spin more and more out of balance.....there is a pressing
need to return to a deeper rhythm, to the cycles that belong to
healing and transformation, and the seasons of the soul. 
Returning we may find a balance resurfacing from deep within,
a balance that reconnects and restores us...

If we are to participate creatively in these toxic times, to bring
rain to a land where the inner and outer wells have run dry,
first we need to be present "in another country where things are
in order."  And this "other country"can be found in the space
between the in-breath and the out-breath, where the soul is present. 
But first we need to reconnect, to return to this place of balance. 
And the simplest way is through stillness and silence.

Silence draws us inward, away from the clutter and the distractions
of our outer life, to the deeper roots of our being.  Here our soul
nourishes us, here we can be replenished, and here we can help
replenish our world.....  In the silence we can drink deeply of the
waters of life that are still pure, we can commune with the primal
forces of nature, we can return to what is sacred and essential to our
life and to the life of the Earth.

Here in this "other country" the air is not toxic, and the miasma of
today's world in this post-truth era is not blurring our vision.  The
laughter of children still rings true.  Stillness is here, and the seasons
are in balance.  Every in-breath and out-breath is sacred.  The breath,
the soul, the Earth and its seasons, are linked together, nourished by
each other.  It is time to heal.....

LLewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Sufi Mystic
2017

Excerpt from an article published by Garrison Institute

Happy Spring Everyone!
Or Fall, as the case may be :)

~

...your breath is a bridge between you.....and the universe.

The breath is also a bridge between you, and space and time.
Breath touches the body and the universe,
 it touches you and that which transcends the universe.

Osho
The Book of Secrets

The Descendant Current - Matt Licata

Let us not forget the descendant current, flowing into the unlit
places, the underworld, and the dark caverns of the psyche.  The
realm of dream, fantasy, imagination and creativity.  The
invitation here is one of embodiment - into the contradictions,
the chaos, and the deflation we must confront on any journey of
depth.

There is a cultural fantasy that we are supposed to know what to do
with our lives, that things, are supposed to be clear, that we are
supposed to feel solar and heroic and in control of the feelings that
wash through us.  But Love is full-spectrum and will equally
employ the energies of not-knowing, disappointment, and
reorganization as part of its revelation here.  The process of
dissolution is non-negotiable.  It is by way of this sacred washing
of the known that new forms can find their way here.

Inside the vessel of life, encrusted, worn out ideas and opposites
are washed away, such as silence over noise, oneness over multiplicity,
quiet over inner revolution, crystal clarity over shaky uncertainty, and
power over vulnerability.  While we may have our conditioned
preferences, Love does not share these biases and will use the entirety
of the emotional and phenomenal world to reach us.  Even in the
darkness, the numbness, the chaotic, and the mud, the wild,
untamed activity of the soul erupts.

It is natural and ordinary to disconnect from the downward movement
as we overly identify with the ascending, the upward, the light, and
the transcendent.  In the rush to exit immediate experience - for
something that is higher, purer, less messy, and less contradictory -
we turn from the waters of life and lose touch with Essence.

While it is natural to have a bias for one current over another, let us
not do so as the expense of fragmentation.  In ways the mind may
never fully understand, there is a luminous middle place where the
currents intertwine.  It is buried in a secret chamber inside your
own heart.  

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Vortex Art

Digitally altered
2011

Vulnerability - David Whyte

Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or
something we can arrange to do without.  Vulnerability is not a
choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding
undercurrent of our natural state.  To run from vulnerability is to
run from the essence of our nature.  The attempt to be invulnerable
is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most
especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others.
More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help
needed at every turn of our existence.

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events
and circumstances is a lovely illussionary privilege and perhaps
the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human
and especially of being youthful human, but it is a privilege that
must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with
loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers;
powers eventually and most emphatically given up, as we
approach our last breath.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our
vulnerability, how we become more courageous and more
compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance.
Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of
 loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers,
reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never
walking fully through the door...


David Whyte

Excerpt from
Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying
Meaning of Everyday Words

The Beautiful Wound - Rumi & Mirabai Starr

The wound is the place where the light enters you...
Rumi

Your most secret wound is the doorway...
Ivan Granger
Poetry Chaikhana

~

The Christian Mystic, Teresa of Avila, speaks of "the
beautiful wound" of longing for God, describing
the depth of suffering as a doorway to union with
The Beloved.  John of the Cross coined the term
"dark night of the soul" and developed a teaching
that shows how to surrender to radical unknowing
and allow ourselves to be stripped of all that stands
between our souls and The Divine.
These and other mystics see deep sorrow as a
great spiritual blessing, rather than a problem
requiring a solution...

Mirabai Starr

~

There is a cure,
an individual medicine
not a social remedy,
sit quietly
and listen
for a voice
within
that will say:

Be more silent.

As that happens
your soul
starts to revive.

Rumi
Be More Silent

~

Photo - taken by my brother
after the Nor'easter
in the Northeast yesterday...

The Whole of the Soul - Ralph Waldo Emerson

...We live in succession, in division, in parts and particles.
Meantime, within man is the soul of the whole; the wise
silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is
equally related; the eternal one.  And this deep power in which
we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only
animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts,
is the soul...

...All goes to show, that the soul of man is not an organ, but animates
and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of
memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and
feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the
master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in
self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and 
the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object
are one.  We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the
which they lie - an immensity not possessed and that cannot be
possessed.  From within or from behind, a light shines through us
upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing,
but the light is all...

A man is a facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and good abide.
What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting
man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents
himself.  Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is,
would he let it appear through his action, would make your knees bend.
When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes
through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection,
it is love...

...The soul circumscribes all things.  As I have said, it contradicts all
experience.  In like manner it abolishes time and space.  The influence
of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree,
that the walls of time and space have come to look real and
insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world,
a sign of insanity.  Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the
force of the soul...

Ralph Waldo Emerson
From: Essay IX The Over-Soul
1841

~

Photo - South Pole Aurora

The Space of "The Quiet"...

I awoke to "The Quiet" filling this space...

A palpable Nameless Presence...
As if "It" had taken up residence here,
in this space of my dwelling...

I breathed in "The Quiet"
as It breathed me,
and with curiosity
turned my inner awareness more keenly to
"The Quiet" that filled the space of me -
and was comforted
by this unbidden
Presence...

Through fluid inner eyes I understood that
only "The Quiet" truly occupies this space,
not the things in the rooms, or the rooms themselves.
but only the ubiquitous space of "The Quiet"

that matter reality dwells in
beyond sight, beyond form...

Every manifest being dwells within
"The Quiet"
and "The Quiet" dwells within them...

The pure unadulterated, untainted Silence of Being...

I surrendered in Love and Gratitude to "The Quiet"
subtly filling the space here - tangibly -
forever present in each breath
of this space that "I"
occupy as well...

Hush...

"The Quiet"
dwells among us
and in us...

Holy-Holy

Mystic Meandering
Dec. 5, 2016

~

Photo - have no idea what this is,
probably a "mistake", but can you see
the faint outline of a heart in the center
of that "cloud"?  :D

Quietude - Dada Gavand

So we have to work with ourselves and go directly to that core,
to that center, to that root wherein lies the whole secret and mystery
of life.  You need not depend upon anyone, or on any book, in fact not
on anything that is outside.  Just be quiet into yourself.  There will not
be any thought to imagine or demand a thing.  Simply be quiet
with the total fund of energy within, and in such quietude you are
going to discover something new.  You will then experience what
humility is, and what innocence is.  The mind which is quiet into itself
is innocent, humble, transparent and open to discover that which is real.

Then you will know what meditation is.  Meditation is not the chanting
or singing of devotional songs, nor the repetition of any word or
phrase. You will then be in a state of total surrender,
alone within yourself.

You have to be really alone and anonymous to be with the inner spirit.
When you are somebody, you are related to the world, you belong to
the world.  And as long as you are of the world, you cannot move
toward the inner spirit; you will have no relationship with it.  So to
have a contact with the spirit, you will have to be alone, on your own.
Then you will get a helping hand from within.  The whole secret is to
come back into yourself by gathering all your energy, and to be there
in quietude and silence.  To be in silence is to be near one's own inner
spirit.

To be in such silence within is the highest form of prayer.  Prayer is not
chanting or singing praises to someone, nor asking and begging for
rewards of the other world.  Desires and supplication of thought on any
level are not prayers.  The silence of one's own total energy in the inner
domain is the true state of prayer.  Such prayer finds its own reward in
a very mysterious way.  The innate energy, when it regains its balance
and stillness, finds its own fulfillment...

Dada Gavand
East Indian Mystic

From: Beyond the Mind

via: No Mind's Land

~

Photo - two shadows on a wall
digitally colored

Wholeness - Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

You search to find what the heart has always known, that there
are no boundaries to love.  Finding this leaves us on the edge
of our own expectations unaware of the simplicity of the
unknown.  For so long we have searched hoping, expecting
to find something - a realization that was longed for.  Always
you thought there was something to seek, a journey to make.
Now you stand on the precipice looking over the horizon of
your self.

Here there is no seeking, no looking, nothing to reach for, no
path to follow.  But within there is an answer, not in form, but
in substance.  There is a bigger wholeness hidden, waiting,
watching from behind our thoughts.

The wholeness has an unexpected purpose.....from across time
and beyond space.  There is another presence, another pattern,
not hidden, but unrevealed.  There is a tender sense of Silence.
In the moment of our own silence we are welcomed.  We need
to allow the Presence to become present, not in defined
moments, but in a flow.  The river is here.  The Silence,
unbidden, is always present; nothing is defined or captured.
This world is infused with this "other" - steeped in timelessness.

In that Isness, everything is included.  You, The Beloved,
the object of your prayer, and the will to unfold the Eternal
into the present, to cross the borders of time and space, and
saturate the now with Eternity.

Yet there is no "other."
You waited for someone to come, always you waited;
always waiting at the bus stop for the bus that never comes,
because there is nowhere to go.  You are fortunate to
disbelieve everything.

The world spins around a place of Silence.
You need to enter that Silence, and wait in the
Eternal Presence, for The Eternal that is already here,

amused with our seeking, with our thinking God is "other."

We only struggle with our self...

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Sufi Mystic

Take from: Fragments of a Love Story

~

Photo - glass ball with bubbles