The Golden Thread...

I have conversed with the Universe,
commiserated and cogitated;
ascended, descended;
polarized, conceptualized and spiritualized;
dis-membered and re-membered ~
and still I find no "plan" ~

Only Vastness and immensity
beyond theory, framework and perception.
The Greatest, Grandest Mystery
in an ever unfolding nebula;
procreating itself in billowy clouds
and golden streams of stardust in a
beginningless infinity.

A golden thread weaving through space,
through the Silence beyond creation,
through Sound beyond sound,
and Light beyond light.

Matchlessly weaving its Eternal Vibration
through timelessness,
into time, and space beyond time,
with one theme braided into its
unending spiral
through
dimensions, distortions, dysfunctions -

~ Love ~

From this divine, mysterious weave of Love
we live our reality,
and dance the dance of duality:
our light and our dark.
One thread within the
Cosmic Fabric...

Held by Love...

Mystic Meandering
1999

~

Article about the above photo, The Golden Bridge
built in Vietnam

"The Hymn of Creation" - The Rig Veda

Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it?  Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?

There was neither death nor immortality,
nor was there then the torch of night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.

At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.
All this was only unillumined water.
That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
arose at last, born of the power of heat...

But after all, who knows, and who can say
whence it all came, and how creation happened?

The gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it has arisen?

Whence all creation had its origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
he, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows - or maybe he does not know.

~

The Rig Veda is one of the oldest texts [creation stories]
dating from somewhere between 4000 and 2000 BC

~

This version is from a wonderful book for the serious
explorer of the Truth of Existence called,
The Recognition of Our Own Heart:
Pratyabhijnahrdayam

by the late Joan Ruvinsky.

It is a modern day interpretive translation of
the Pratyabhijnahrdayam -
loosely meaning "Primordial Recognition" -
from the 11th century Kashmir Shaivism tradition.

The basic concept of Kashmir Shaivism is that an
individual's existence is the unlimited manifestation of
Universal Consciousness (the Luminous Unmanifest)
that embodies everything.
It is also available on Amazon here.

Bee-lief - J.Krishnamurti & Adyashanti

You believe in God, and another does not believe in God,
so your beliefs separate you from each other.

Belief throughout the world is organized as [Religion],
and so it divides man from man.  We are confused, and we
think that through belief we shall clear the confusion; that is,
belief is superimposed on the confusion, and we hope that
confusion will thereby be cleared away.

But belief is merely an escape from the fact of confusion;
it [belief] does not help us to face and to understand the fact
but to run away from the confusion in which we are.

To understand the confusion, belief is not necessary, and
belief only acts as a screen between ourselves and our
problems.  So, religion, which is organized belief, becomes
a means of escape from what is, from the fact of confusion.

J. Krishnamurti

~

All barriers are conceptual - made of ideas, beliefs and opinions.
Outside of concepts and beliefs there is no barrier. Belief is what
the mind does to fill up emptiness, to give it something to look at,
to play with, to hide behind...

So let us understand that Reality transcends all of our notions [beliefs]
about reality.  Reality is neither Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Advaita
Vedanta, nor Buddhist.  It is neither dualistic nor non-dualistic,
neither spiritual nor nonspiritual.  We should come to know that there
is more reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all of our
thoughts and ideas about reality.  When we perceive from an undivided
consciousness, we will find the sacred in every expression of life.
...we must let ourselves be led by the inner thread of Silence into
the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we
go innocently or not at all....

Adyashanti

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Among The Trees - Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple", they say,
"and you too have come into the world to do this,
to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine."

Mary Oliver

via - The Beauty We Love

~
Photo - Mystic Meandering

When I am not present to myself - Thomas Merton

When I am not present to myself,
then I am only aware of that half of me,
that mode of my being which turns outward
to created things.

And then it is possible for me to lose myself among them.
Then I no longer feel the deep secret pull
of the gravitation of love which draws my inward self
toward "God." [The Unmanifest]]

My will and my intelligence lose their command of the
other faculties.
My senses, my imagination, my emotions,
scatter to pursue their various quarries all over the face
of the earth.

Recollection brings them home.
It brings the outward self into line with the inward spirit,
and makes my whole being answer the deep pull of love
that reaches down into the Mystery...

Thomas Merton

from - No Man is an Island

via - The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - by Jacqueline Riman Photographer/Artist

via - No Mind's Land

Wild Portals of Unknowing - Fred LaMotte

"God leads every soul by a separate path." - John of the Cross

I cannot possibly know what is most important; that which will
transform me.  If I already know what it is I will never be free,
because I have packaged "liberation" as knowledge, in the tight
wrapper of a concept.  This means that spiritual transformation
can never become a program, a technique, or a course that I take.

The moments that liberate me are wild portals of unknowing,
when the blue sky of wonder outshines any cloud it contains;
vast emptiness shifts into the foreground; techniques, traditions,
concepts cultivated in the past, dissolve...

[.....]

The best meditation evaporates into amazement.  The best mantra
melts into silence.  The best guru dances in the mist at the edge of
a meadow, and disappears into your longing heart, where true path
has no beginning....

No, I cannot possibly tell what is most important - how a blue
moth disguises herself in a petal of lupine, why cascade lilies
frolic in a rainy mountain meadow, what the hermit thrush means
to silence.  I cannot know when the golden sun will burst my chest
wide open, turning the small dark chamber of self-doubt into a
boundless empyrean.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

Photo - Vortex Art
2011

Primordial Pool of Silence...

Days unfold like rushing waterfalls.
Nights I welcome the silence;
just sitting, just being,
allowing
the flow of the day to come to the edge
and gently fall away...

A smooth, sliding movement
finding its own rhythm empties out
the eddies of life...

Letting go of trying,
trying to make sense of life;
trying to make something happen.

Just deeply resting...

Just falling off the edge,
effortlessly,
into the still pool
of Primordial Silence...

Mentations slip away;
the mind finally resting...

Feeling the gentle, rhythmic
movement of Silence envelope my being,
I fall into its soft crevice,
into the folds of deep Stillness,
the softness of just Being...

The Natural State...

Mystic Meandering
2012

~

FunQi Art
2009

UnKnowing - Chuck Surface

"The great religions are ships,
Poets, life boats.
Every sane person I know,
Has jumped overboard."

Hafez

~

My mind has lost its will,
To seek knowledge and understanding.
It no longer dreams of resolution,
To a Mystery beyond comprehension.

For after impassioned consideration,
It has concluded, rationally, empirically,
That Unknowing IS the resolution,
Any sane person will come to.

And from this Pregnant Fact is birthed...

The mind's Surrender,
The Heart having long ago Drowned,
In Love.

Chuck Surface

Facebook

~

I'm not "meditating", but Remembering.
Not in thought or image of something known,
Outside myself, something "other" there.
But a Feeling of my Essence, my Soul, Here.

And in that instant of Remembrance,
Before words, thoughts, or images can arise,
The whole of my Being Sighs in Ecstasy...

Chuck Surface

excerpt from Yes, and Yes
Facebook

Conflict - David Skitt

A Commentary on Krishnamurti's POV on the world

Conflict and violence Krishnamurti sees as issues of basic concern...
But in his view history shows there has been a repeated failure
of education, science, politics and organized religion to end them.
What is needed in our time therefore is to own up to that failure,
to make a clean sweep of all these past, defective endeavors,
and to adopt an entirely new approach.  It is hard to imagine taking
a more radical position than this: Put aside everything you have
 learned from others, ever read, and start your own inquiry into
what life is about, what really matters.  Stand on your own two
feet.  Stop being a second-hand human being.

He proposes that this means looking at what is actually
happening in life and in our consciousness - 'what is, not what
should be' - without condemning or justifying, without resisting
or wanting to change it, holding it instead 'like a precious jewel.'
In doing so, he says, we are looking at human consciousness,
not just our own.

A constant source of human confusion, in Krishnamurti's view,
is our rooted tendency to make images of ourselves, others, and
of life and death that are put together by thought based on memory,
on past experiences or hearsay.  Instead of looking afresh at what is
new in the now, being open to the unknown, and unpredictable, we
'translate the present into the past.'  He sees such images are
inevitably conflictual because they are time-bound and therefore
partial and inadequate.  Yet we frequently act as though we are
programmed by them.

Krishnamurti maintains that we fail to make the most of our
mind and our life while subject to latent or manifest anger and fear.
Also, our sense of self is usually experienced as inherently [separate]
from another's, whereas all human beings share far more
psychologically than separates them.  Not to see that is a huge error
of perception, because our sense of shared humanity is lost. This
feeling of psychological [separateness] breeds a fear of isolation
that leads, among other things, to a spurious sense of safety in
numbers, which is then, unfortunately and divisively, carried to
excess in nationalism, political ideology, and religious [fanaticism].
These provide a false cohesion held together by fear that there
are those 'outside' who threaten us and are in some way not as fully
human as we are.

Seeing the problems in our personal life and in the world with a
mind free from the dictates of the past, from faith, belief,
stereotyping, and fantasy, is to see that what goes wrong in the
world outside reflects what goes wrong in one's own mind.  This
is the share of all men, of all humanity, unless we all change,
each one of us, change to something that is not projected by thought.
Where there is insight into that, Krishnamurti says, there is a wholly
different way of living, in which an awakened awareness of what
causes human suffering also brings with it greater sensitivity to the
beauty and immensity of life.

David Skitt

KFT.org

via - No Mind's Land

Precipice - Fred LaMotte

The bold become themselves.  There is a point in meditation,
if it is true meditation, when you fall off the precipice of practice
into groundlessness...  You can no longer resist the subtle sorrow
in your flesh, that which the Buddha called Dukkha...

You've been carrying it for years, for centuries, the stuff made of
stories about a suffering 'me.'  It is buried deep in the rind of your
body, but neatly packaged in the sterile cellophane called 'spirituality.'

Now the time has come to let the wrapping go.  Be vulnerable to
yourself.  Allow your every distant ache, the brittle anguish of a
 trillion nerves, the  secrets of grief, the worms of rage, the clogging
 undigested waste of blame, this whole discomfort you are, to erupt
 in one magnificent purple blossom of pain, fragrant with the gift
 of tears. Let it flower from the subtle into the gross, gushing
 without name, and without distinction between good and bad,
beautiful or ugly.

It is just Dark Energy, percolating wordlessly out of your molecules,
yet pulsing with photons of fire and swirling suns.  It is holy
destruction and healing, cosmic in scale yet intimate with every
cell of your body.  It is the chaos of possibility.  It is the cleansing
smile of...No Secret Me Any More...
It is pure love, the stuff of your bones.

Be bold.  Let your edges dissolve.  There is no one else in all
the universe for you to become.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

Remembering Silence...

Sitting in the Sanctuary
of Silence,
the deep space of
Formlessness
keeps pulling me in,
enticing me to
remember,

to
listen
D

E

E
P

L

Y
.

.

.

In this space of Pure Awareness,
beyond thought,
I can feel the intimacy of Silence
once again;
The organic Rhythm,
immersed in its Quiet Flow...
Out of which all movement arises
and takes form...

Formlessness-Form
Form-Formlessness,
Not two - yet not one;
not either/or
but
both/and

The Ineffable Mystery

I sometimes call it "The Beloved",
sometimes now "The Unmanifest."

It has many names -
this Aware Silence,
this Hush of the Mystery
that we are,
that we emerged from,
Life ItSelf;
and is no-name as well...

The Unknown...

In this Sea of Silence
I remember the feel of
Its Rhythm;
the transparency and
boundarylessness
of its endless S p a c i o u s n e s s

that Just IS...

The Mystery of Life living ItSelf
in/as
the vast
and
rhythmic
pulse of Living Silence...

recognizing ItSelf as "me",
and "me" recognizing It
as my
Self

I had forgotten
this Sacred Silence
that knows us intimately
as ItSelf...

Our pain, sorrow, grief;
our laughter and joy,
are inexplicably
ITs own

Inseparable

It knows our shadow
and embraces
all darkness
as ITs own -
because
IT is -
ITs own

Light...

that knows
no darkness

The grief, the loss,
the sadness, the suffering,
the woundings...

ALL ITs own;

feeling what we feel,
experiencing what we experience
as ItSelf...

Ever-present
Ever-aware
Ever-open
to all experience

Not a cold, conceptual
hollow vacuum of Nothingness...

But the V a s t n e s s of Life ItSelf,
intimately living ItSelf...

OM-ing pre-Existence into Existence...
Breathing ItSelf into Life -
into every wound of pain
and suffering
with ITs soft caress...

Aware Living Silence

knows our Hearts

as ITs own,
and dances with
Joy
in
the
delight
of
knowing
it

.

.

.

I had forgotten THIS...
The feel of this deep intimacy
in ITs complete and utter Embrace;
Its total enfoldment;
Its inclusiveness
of all that we are;
forgotten the once known
innocence of
being touched
by the
Vastness
and
Depth
of

Silence

Mystic Meandering
April 11, 2015

The Embrace...

Everything is held in the Embrace of the Luminous Unmanifest...

~

This Eternal Embrace is
a dynamic stillness of Being
that holds everything as it is;
a holding space for everything to just Be...

~

We are held in this space of Divine Embrace -
a Vastness that just is...

~

There is only ever Embrace -
a deep compassionate Embrace for all life,
for all that is - as it is...

The Divine embracing Itself in every expression of Itself...

~

Everything is suspended
in this ubiquitous Presence of Life Itself...

Rest in This...

And when we emerge from our rest,
we realize that we ARE the Embrace -
embracing Itself.

We ARE fluidly and interchangeably the Embrace -

Divine Intimacy...

Sweet Serenity...

~

Notes from my journal - 2009

~

Photo from Shutterstock
digitally altered

Self-Compassion - Matt Licata

It is important to realize that the path of opening the heart
is not the same as becoming a receptacle for the unloading
of others' unconscious. unresolved beliefs, unprocessed
feelings, and unintegrated behaviors.  While "appearing"
compassionate on the outside, being an emotional doormat
involves the re-enacting of early unconscious dynamics.
We learned that devaluing ourselves, often in very subtle
ways, was the best route to get out needs met, to fit in,
to receive attention and affection, and to maintain a
precarious tie to an unavailable attachment figure
[parent]...to work through overwhelming states of
survival-level anxiety.

But the pathways within are luminous - neither solid
nor fixed - and can be reorganized around empathy,
kindness, and presence...  ...this possibility occurs
only by way of self-compassion and the unconditional
commitment to no longer abandon yourself...which
will require immense courage, care, curiosity and
embodiment.

Look carefully and see the ways you habitually
place others' needs over your own...not out of
true compassion for them, but a re-enactment of
an early environment of shame and unworthiness...
...lay down a new pathway [through self-compassion].
The pathway is grounded in self-care, which wisely
expresses itself in the skillful care of others, and
opens the doorway into the unfolding dance of self
and other and the eternal mysteries...

Matt Licata