Welcome...

Come meander with me on the pathless path of the Heart
in these anecdotal,
sometimes inspiring, sometimes personal meanderings of the Heart's opening in the every-day-ness of life...

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Rupture and Evolution - Arundhati Roy & Jeff Kober


What is this thing that has happened to us?
It's a virus, yes.  In and of itself it holds no moral brief.
But it is definitely more than a virus...
It has brought the world to a halt...  Our minds are still
racing..., longing to return to "normality", trying to stitch
our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture.
But the rupture exists.

Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the
past and imagine their world anew.  This one is no different.
It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
[one way of life to the next].  We can choose to walk through
it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our
avarice, our data banks and dead ideas... or we can walk
through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine
another world. [Another way of being in the world].


Arundhati Roy
Author - The God of Small Things
[brackets mine]

~

The Vedas tell us that change is constant, that the nature of
the relative world is continual change, always.  Like the weather...
But the Vedas also tell us that the changing nature of the
universe is always progressive.  Evolution is the only thing
that's ever happening here. Always.  Like rivers always flowing
downstream; regardless of how many curves and meanderings they
may take, they always reach the ocean.  Downstream flow is the
nature of water.  And evolution is the nature of consciousness.
Consciousness cannot help but evolve.  It cannot help but expand,
widen, deepen, grow.  This is its very nature.  Though we may
resist it or ignore it, pretend it isn't so, in fact it is so.  It always
has been, it always will be.


Jeff Kober
Meditator

~

Photo from the Internet



Sunday, April 26, 2020

Solitude - Zat Rana


"All of man's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly
in a room alone..."

Blaise Pascal


According to Pascal, we fear the silence of existence, we dread
the boredom and instead choose aimless distractions, and we can't
help but run from the problems of our emotions into the false
comforts of the mind.

We never learned the art of solitude.  And now we live in a world
where we're connected to everything except ourselves.  Everything
 that has done so much to connect us has simultaneously isolated us.
We are so busy being distracted that we are forgetting to tend to
ourselves, which is consequently making us feel more and more
alone...

Never being alone is not the same as never feeling alone.  The less
comfortable you are with solitude, the more likely it is that you
won't know yourself.  And then, you'll spend even more time
avoiding it to focus elsewhere.  In the process, you'll become
addicted to the same technologies that were meant to set you free.
Just because we can use the noise of the world to block out the
discomfort of dealing with ourselves doesn't mean that this
discomfort goes away.

Almost everybody thinks of themselves as self-aware.  They
think they know how they feel and what they want and what
their problems are.  But the truth is that very few people really
do.  And those that do will be the first to tell you how fickle
self-awareness is and how much alone time it takes to get
there.
  In today's world, people can go their whole lives
without truly digging beyond the surface level masks they
wear...[How interesting that we are required to wear masks
these days.] We are increasingly out of touch with who we are...
[Maybe this is why so many are having a hard time with
the "stay-at-home" orders - feeling confined, like their freedom
 has been taken away - acting out].

Almost anything that controls our life in an unhealthy way
finds its roots in our realization that we dread the nothingness
of nothing.  We can't imagine just being rather than doing.  We have an instinctive aversion to simply being.   And there-
fore, we look for entertainment, we seek company, and if
 those fail, we chase every higher highs.

We ignore the fact that never facing the nothingness is the same
as never facing ourselves.  And never facing ourselves is why
we feel lonely and anxious in spite of being intimately connected
to everything around us.

Fortunately, there is a solution.....  When you surround yourself
with moments of solitude and stillness, you become intimately
familiar with your environment in a way that forced stimulation
doesn't allow. [Forced socialization]  The world becomes richer,
the layers start to peel back, and you see things for what they
 really are, in all their wholeness, in all their contradictions,
 and in all their unfamiliarity.

You realize there are other things you are capable of paying
attention to than just what makes the most noise on the
surface.  [Solitude] allows you to discover the novelty in things
you didn't know were novel; it's like being an unconditioned
child seeing the world for the first time.  It also resolves the
majority of internal conflicts.

Without realizing the value of solitude, we are overlooking the
fact that, once the fear of boredom is faced, it can actually
provide its own stimulation.  And the only way to face it is to
make time to just sit... with our thoughts, with our feelings, with
a moment of stillness...


Zat Rana

Excerpt from: "The Most Important Skill Nobody Taught You"
an article in Medium.com


[brackets mine]

~

Your solitude will be a support and a home for you,
even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances,
and from it you will find all your paths...

Rainer Maria Rilke
Excerpt from: Letters to a Young Poet #1

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering


Friday, April 24, 2020

Turn Inward...



Turn...

inward,
toward "The Silence;"
The Light in your Heart;
the space of Pure Awareness...

Turn from the voices of an unconscious world;
the voices of confusion, hatred, and ignorance;
the ones who distract you from *knowing*
the Truth of who you are...

~ Turn ~

Turn and Listen
in the deep Silence,
in the chalice of the Heart,
until you hear what needs to be heard...

Turn inward from the stimulation of empty words
being "sold" to the masses with the false delusions
of the Real, selling you their "frameworks" of reality,
leaving you empty...

Come - Sit in The Silence...

Sit in solitude...
Silently listening within...

Thrive in The Silence
of your own Being,
that waits for you to
Turn...


Mystic Meandering
April 2020

~

"There is a huge silence inside each of us 
that beckons us into itself, and the recovery 
of our own silence can begin to teach us 
the language of heaven." 


 Meister Eckhart


~~

Photo - the 2011 Full Moon through a skylight...
What captured my attention was the reflection of
what appears to be an "inner window" or door.
You can see the square-like image to the right of
the ball of light (moon).  In a sense it is what this
poem is about - turning inward through the inner
window/door, and meeting the Spaciousness that
 is always there...


Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Changing Perceptions of Reality - Ivan Granger


One must remain in the Vastness,
alert and lucid,
Letting one's gaze encompass
the infinite sky,
As though seated on the summit
of a mountain,
open to all the horizons.

by Shabkar
from - Tibetan Poems of Shabkar,
Translated by Matthieu Ricard


I am acutely aware of the anxiety felt by everyone -
concerns about Covid-19, uncertainty about jobs and
the economy in general, the increasingly messy political
situation, all surrounded by pressures of isolation.  Whatever
worries you may be feeling are being shared by many.  Even
in uncertainty and isolation, there is connection and community
and, therefore, strength.

...everything is an opportunity for awareness.  Even in moments
of fear, we [can] always be asking ourselves, what can I learn
from this?  How can I use this moment as a way to step free from
limited ways of thinking...?

One observation that comes to mind is that when society is moving
along in expected ways we are much more likely to align with
the group mind.
  The group mind asserts that reality is a certain way
and the routine functioning of day-to-day life seems to confirm it, so
we enter into the shared psychic current - for good and for bad.  We
can list many of the ways that are good, but it also lulls us into a
rather narrow band of perception and self-awareness.  When those
outer certainties, which were never certainties in the first place,
change, when the rhythms of the human world shift and become
less predictable, the fear we feel is more fundamental than the
question of a paycheck or health concerns;  it is a fear that
reality is falling apart.
  It is worth reminding ourselves that
Reality [the Vastness] itself is never vulnerable and the only
thing that changes is our agreed upon description of it [our
tribal mentality].  We are being coaxed to see reality in a new
way,
 to see different aspects of reality, to see a wider view of
reality...

The challenge is to quickly adapt our awareness to the new
terrain, to recognize its regular features, to find what is familiar
and identify what is new, to be at home in a more opens space.

...the less rigidly we hold to some idea of how things used to
be or "should" be and, instead, allow our minds to acclimate to
what is happening, the more naturally and confidently we can
step forward.

As conscious beings we always want to perceive as clearly as
we can.  We want to perceive as much of reality as we can.  And
we must remind ourselves that what we call reality is just a
mental model of what actually is.  When that mental model is
shaken, we can try to prop it up exactly as it was before, but more
rickety and at a tenuous angle, or we adjust it.....to reflect a new
understanding.

 We have a chance to review our assumptions and assess which
 ones don't stand up to the scrutiny of stress.  We are invited
to embrace possibilities that had previously been rejected. 
We can use this time for redefinition and improved perception.

Moments of uncertainty are a genuine opportunity to update
our descriptions of reality,
both personally and collectively,
in order to more fully reflect the immensely mysterious space
of being we inhabit together.

The big challenge is not to shut our eyes as our vision expands.




[brackets mine]

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering


Monday, April 20, 2020

In Difficult Times - Matt Licata


Collect pieces of the broken world and create a container
of empathy and love for what has crumbled to be held
and tended to with pieces of light.  Honor the holy truth
that the forms that love takes will always fall apart -
for this is their nature -
in order that they may come back together in more
integrated and cohesive ways.


~

Photo - a square from a quilt that my
great-grandmother made in the early
1900's from pieces of old neckties...


Sunday, April 19, 2020

Feel Your Feelings - Fred LaMotte


[.....]

It is good, it is very good
to feel precisely
what I am feeling,
even grief, and despair.
For when I am completely
what I feel,
there is transformation
and healing.
No darkness left
to penetrate,
for I am all night.
This is how light is born.
This is how the bud
breaks open, spilling
beauty from a wound.
This is how the chrysalis
frees a golden moth
from its season
of uncertainty.
This is how your tear
becomes the sky.


Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering


Thursday, April 16, 2020

Uncertainty Is Hard on the Brain - Markham Heid



...what decades pf psychological research has borne out - is
that the human brain is uniquely vulnerable to uncertainty.
There's evidence that an inability to tolerate uncertainty is a
central feature of most anxiety disorders, and that uncertainty
stokes the sorts of "catastrophic interpretations" that fuel panic
attacks.  Some researchers have even argued that fear of the
unknown is the bedrock fear that human beings experience -
the one that gives rise to all other fears - and that a person's
ability to weather periods of uncertainty is a fundamental
characteristic of a healthy, resilient mind.

As the world grapples with.....the nightmare of Covid-19,
the rhythms and rituals [routines] of American life are
indefinitely disrupted...

...uncertainty disrupts many of the habitual and automatic
mental processes that govern routine action.  This disruption
creates a conflict in the brain, and this conflict can lead to a
state of both hyper-vigilance and outsized emotional reactivity
to negative experiences or information.  In other words,
uncertainty acts like rocket fuel for worry; it causes people to
see threats everywhere they look, and at the same time it makes
them more likely to react emotionally in response to those threats.

Uncertainty lays the groundwork for anxiety because anxiety is
always future-oriented...  The human brain has the capacity to
imagine all the worst things that could happen.  And the more
uncertainty there is - the more likely the brain is to conjure up
and fixate on the worst-case scenarios.

Even minor periods of unpredictability can cause significant
negative effects. ...the lack of control sends stress and anger
levels through the roof.  ...removing the element of uncertainty
makes one feel better.

The more people engage in worrying, the less they feel
confident in their ability to solve a problem and the worse
their solutions to that problem tend to be.  If you're going to
be spending six or seven hours a day worrying about the
coronavirus, you're going to be building up and strengthening
the neural connections that support this activity.  Worrying
breeds more worry.
So what can people do to combat the effects of uncertainty?
...focusing on the present can help dispel uncertainty and the
anxiety it foments.  Do things you enjoy.  Get out a book you've
been wanting to read, or watch a movie, or talk with a friend.
Occupy your brain with work, chores, entertainment, [creativity],
or other activities related to the source of uncertainty; something
that gets your brain into the present moment.

This may also be the perfect time to finally give mindfulness a try.
...embracing [what you are doing in] the moment can distract us
from worry and what may or may not happen. ..."letting go" of
things one has no control over may be the best way to shrink
worry down to a manageable size.


Markham Heid
From an article in Medium.com

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering


Monday, April 13, 2020

Cosmic Breathing...

Photo - Johannes Plenio at Unsplash

Sitting in the Silence of the Inner Landscape,
I suddenly realize the Cosmic Breath of Infinity
is slowly breathing this body -
breathing in... breathing out...

Held in the pause between breaths -
I recognize that "I" am being breathed
by an unheard Rhythm...

From the Inner Window,
at the edge of Infinity
I see beyond this world,
into the formless void,
beyond moon and stars,
into the Infinite Cosmic Ocean
that holds it all...

Aware of what is aware within:
Life - breathing ITSelf...

Every Breath is the Primordial Breath
rippling through space...

Hush
Be Silent
Listen

Entrain with the Cosmic Rhythm
that is breathing you...

Slow down and breathe
the Infinite Breath -
that whispers...
All will be infinitely well...


Mystic Meandering
April 12, 2020

~

Photo - Johannes Plenio at Unsplash



Friday, April 10, 2020

Lay Low - John O'Donohue


This is the time to be slow.
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.

Try as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.

If you remain [low to the wall]
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning...

John O'Donohue
From: To Bless the Space Between Us

~

"A Glimpse of the Larger Story"

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

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, or isolated sense of power over all events
and circumstances is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps
the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human
and especially of being a 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

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering




Saturday, April 4, 2020

Dance with the Darkness - Author Unknown



The realization of wholeness is simply recognizing that
wholeness is the essential state of reality,
regardless of whether it is being experienced that way.
From: The Natural Contemplative

~

Everything is embraced/held by Pure Consciousness
including what we experience as "darkness."

Nothing is excluded, even the "darkness",
however that manifests in our minds.


You have to be willing to dance with the "darkness,"
which only means that you are willing to meet it,
to be with it, and not try to push it away;
not resist it as something absent of Light, but seeing
that the "darkness" is not the opposite of Light.

Just dance with whatever shows up...

The "darkness" is also part of the dance.

Nothing is excluded.

Everything is embraced.

It is Love dancing with ItSelf...

Author Unknown

~

Photo - artistic depiction of the earth via Uradiance


Thursday, April 2, 2020

Hidden Fire - Alain Joly


One has to start anew, to re-create, get rid of the old and let a
new possibility of life emerge.  Real health is revival, it is the
life that creates itself every moment, without the grooves of the
past that limit and condition us.  We can never know when the
time is ripe for a new possibility.  It comes as a surprise,
uncontrolled, uninvited...  A new dawn emerges.  This is why
I chose to name my blog The Dawn Within.  The Dawn Within
refers to the Light, or at least its first and shy expressions when
the mind ceases to be interested in its own productions or in
the objects of the world out there and turns within.  The dawn
is shy - the light is coming but is not yet a full sunny day.  It
is hesitating.  The night is still lingering but the promise is here.

Alain Joly



I do not know where the fire comes from
It is hidden, ready to burst
A piece of ember under the ashes

When the flame has died out
The ashes are left,
Like a thick coat
Tenacious
Like a screed

It doesn't let anything pass
But the ember doesn't die
It remains there
Hot
Waiting

We sometimes need so little
A tiny stimulation
To remove one by one the grey leaves
Glued
Welded
Undo the uncanny order
Of all these withering years

It sometimes takes very little
To revive
Timid
Intact
This little piece of fire
That contains the ardour and madness of all flames
Of all rebirths
Of all cures



Excerpt and poem from an article in
The Culturium entitled:
Alain Joly: The Dawn Within