Merge Into Truth - Brian Brown Walker

 

[.....]

If you wish to embody the Tao,
stop chattering...

Relax your body and quiet your senses

Return your mind to its original clarity.

Forget about being separated from others
and from the Divine Source.

As you return to Oneness,
do not think of it,
or be in awe of it.

This is just another way of separating from it.

Simply merge into truth,
and allow it to surround you.

Brian Brown Walker

from - Hus Hu Ching:
The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Inner Passageways - Matt Licata

 The path of opening the heart is not the same as becoming
 an unboundaried, leaky vessel for the unloading of another's
unlived life.  It is to the degree that we are attuned to our
own grief, sadness, shame, and rage that we will most
skillfully navigate within the we-space...

Most of us were not trained in the art of embodied

attunement as we live in an increasingly disembodied
world, where the capacity to hold unfolding emotional
experience was not encoded into a tender developing
nervous system.

The inner passageways, however, are luminous and ache
 for reorganization by way of the slower circuitries of
empathy, curiosity, wonder and awe. 

Inside something is stirring, a longing being awakened to
return home, for new circuitry to encode, for a new pathway

to light up and come alive.

Slowly, one moment at a time.
Safe. Connected. Open.

Embodied.

There is no urgency on the path of love.

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Find a way back...

 May we find our way back to
peace, civility, integrity and health,
and open our hearts to a new reality of living.

_/\_

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Experience is a River - Mark Nepo

 Experience is a river that never stops coming.
Often we need to empty ourselves of conclusions, judgments
and preconceptions in order to meet whatever comes our way...

[We] must carry less - must put down the wounds that clog
and weigh the heart.  We must risk being touched [by life].

...letting go is not just about putting things down.
On a deeper plane, letting go is about letting your heart crumble,
about letting yourself be rearranged by the journey of being alive.

 It simply allows us to change.
It is a call to enter the unknown.

When we can admit who we are, and give voice to what lives
inside of us, [all that we feel and experience], that very act
opens us like an inlet and lets the depths of being rush in.
For in admitting who we are lets the mysteries of life enter us.
We are talking about the authenticity of being...

Mark Nepo
excerpts from - The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live
an Authentic Life

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

World Insanity - Chelan Harkin

 Oh world,
I've been trying to convince you
of my sanity for far too long!
Trying to hold it together,
play the part.
I'm ready for the sacred undoing!
I'm ready to give up the game.
I'm delighted to say I've lost!

Here is my raw, naked heart,
my soul is ready to strip down
and streak through social conventions!
I am tired of pretending with you
that I'm ok with anything short of the sweetest,
most tender intimacy.
I'm un-signing my name
from the social contracts
enabling extreme blandness and terrible distance
from our hearts!
Come close and I will kiss your face,
come closer and I will offer you
every jewel in my soul
come closer still and I'll delightedly
give you my very life
and then go into my closets to see
what else I have in there for you!
Friend, it doesn't take much
to destroy social norms,
all it takes is to crack open
the sacred, wild barrel
of love in your chest
and offer it to whoever
might pass by.

Chelan Harkin
Original title: Oh World!

~

And, for Love's sake, wear a mask!!! :) MM

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

No Secret of Life - Kiserian

 There is no secret of life for you to find.  It makes me smile
when you talk of finding your true nature or losing your ego
or seeing that you are not separate.  That you have no self or
know you never had a self.  I always want to ask who is it
that knows what they are not?  All your focus is on what does
not exist.  And then you say this is it, or talk of what is, or
your talk of consciousness or awareness.  Does it not seem
funny that you tell me you no longer believe in concepts and
then use a flood of concepts to tell me that?  You are like a
river saying it is finished with water.

You trade one set of concepts for another.  All because you get
a little peek into what we always saw, felt and lived. 
Not knowledge.  Not ideas.  Simply life.
It needs no name.  There is no concept that your little mind
can invent to express everything that goes far beyond our
human experience.  You are like people who love playing
word games.  You can always beat me at a word game.  You
are the masters of using words to get what you want. Even
when you say that what you want is beyond words.  If it was
really beyond words, how could you speak of it?

I am not here to say you are wrong. 
I am not playing the game with you.  

I watch you play a tug of war with words over who is saying
it the best, badmouthing others and then you say you do not judge!
I am only pointing out that when you have the need to assert
what you believe, even if you never call it a belief, you are still
not seeing what I am talking about.  For it is not seen, not even
felt in the way we think of feelings.

You are trying to use words to say what you perceive.  But the
words you use take anyone listening away from life.  You can
never get outside of life to look at life.  To say nothing is real
creates an imaginary line between real and false.  And denying
what is felt and experienced is what Western philosophers have
always done.  Do you not see yourself falling into the very same
trap?

When you say it is all love, that may be as close as you can get.
I only wonder why that is never enough for you...

Kiserian - from Kenya
speaking of the concept of Non-duality

with thanks to No Mind's Land

see videos of her speaking here

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Your Own Peculiar Light - Fred LaMotte

 Perhaps you didn't notice how, when you awoke
this morning, you took your first breath
from the other world, the world inside this one,
where atoms are not shadows but fragrances of color,

and flesh is the music that vibrates the Law
that can never be written in books.

It doesn't matter anymore if you are on the Left or Right,
Christian or Muslim, a do-er or non-doer.
You need not wear a veil here in this softer daylight.
The glow of your essential oil anoints the meadow,
greening branches, thickening fur.  The hungry ones

who need your touch are no longer driven away
by the deafening thrum of your thoughts, but gather
toward your musky pollen like bees.  It matters not
what master you follow, what party you join,
but how deeply you rest in your body,
aligning your heart with a certain star,
dissolving that distance with each exhalation.

The formless flower of the void opening her golden cup,
pouring nectar down your darkest furrows, bittersweet,
the taste of death and joy.  Arise, come, begin your task.

Earth is thirsting for the flavor of your own peculiar light.
It rainbows through your face as through the prism
of no other tears.  Hear a new song, don't ask whether
the voice arises within you, or in the dust-atoms
on your path, transforming wounds into destinations:

Shivoham, Shivoham, Chit Ananda Rupam:

Pure truth I am, pure truth I am,
the very form of awakened beauty...

Neither ask what you must do.  From now on
your work is to keep listening, keep listening
for this music in the heart of every stranger.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

A Liturgy of Light - & Suffering - John O'Donohue

 When suffering comes, we feel panic and fear.
Frightened, we want to hide. You want to climb up some high
ledge to escape dismemberment of this acidic tide.

Yet the strange thing is: the more you resist, the longer it stays.
The more intensely you endeavor to depart the ground of pain,
the more firmly you remain fixed there.

It is difficult to be gentle with yourself when you are suffering.
Gentleness helps you to stop resisting the pain that is visiting you.

When you stop resisting suffering, something else begins to happen.
You begin slowly to allow your suffering to follow its own logic.
The assumption here is that suffering does not visit you gratuitously.
There is in suffering some hidden shadowed light.

Destiny has a perspective on us and our pathway that we can never
fully glimpse; it alone knows why suffering comes.  Suffering has
its own reasoning.

It wants to teach us something.  When you stop resisting its dark
work, you are open to learning what it wants to show you. 

Often, we learn most deeply and receive profoundly from the black,
lonely tide of pain.  We often see in Nature how pruning strengthens.
Fruit trees look so wounded after being pruned, yet the limitation
of this cutting forces the tree to fill and flourish.  Similarly with
drills of potatoes when they are raised, earth is banked up around
them and seems to smother them. Yet as the days go by the stalks
grow stronger.

Suffering can often become a time of pruning. Though it is sore
and cuts into us, later we may become aware that this dark 
suffering was secretly a liturgy of light...

John O'Donohue
from: Eternal Echoes

With thanks to - The Beauty We Love

P.S.  I also substitute the world struggle for suffering -
same thing, only on a different level

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - Matt Licata

 

Many of us are experiencing a deep restlessness and uncertainty,
not knowing what's coming next or how best to navigate this
transitional period.  But it is precisely in times such as these that
unique doorways to deep healing and transformation open,
often in unexpected ways.

It's so important right now to rest our nervous systems, to spend
time each day in activities that ground, center, and guide us
gently back into the experience of safety and connection.

In moments of fierce grace, when the rug is pulled out from
underneath us, our lenses of perception become ripe for
revisioning.

The alchemists, yogis, and mystics knew the importance of
dissolution and experienced it as initiatory.  It is the crumbling
of an old dream - my life and the way I was so sure it was going to
turn out - that can provide the rich soil for creative, embodied
transformation.

In order to be initiated in this way, we must slow down - and with
a passionate, alive and earthy compassion - attune to what is unfolding
and being illuminated right now.  To take some time to mourn
the reassembling of our world and to grieve all that we will
inevitably lose as we heal and awaken.

It is an act of kindness to remember that the transformational
process by its very nature is messy, glorious, and full spectrum...
not only an act of creation, but one of destruction as well.
It is an invitation into the temple of your own body, as a pathway
back into the depths of your own soul...

Matt Licata PhD

~

Matt Licata has written a new book called A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times, using the images and
metaphors from rich and diverse traditions such as neuroscience,
alchemy, contemplative practice, and the poetic imagination.

It is written to be a loving companion to walk with you into the
mysteries of your own heart.  In the end, perhaps it is really only
love that matters now.  But just what that is must be discovered in
the fire of your own immediate experience, where there is unseen
wisdom and guidance for the way ahead.

Matt Licata, PhD
From his blogpost

I have not read it yet but will be ordering it on kindle :)

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Guest - Rumi

 This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes as an
unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Rumi

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

A Journey of Liberation...

 This meandering is really a journey of liberation...

Recognizing one's "Indigenous" Nature.
Not Native American Spirituality, but the felt sense of
your Fundamental Nature...

liberating...

Recognizing "The Mystery" in disguise - playing you!
Revealing Itself through the "play" of you - the Joy of you!
liberating...

Moving beyond the "mechanics of living" to Indigenous-wisdom,
Natural Wisdom; living more spontaneously and intuitively; 
using direct, felt experience as guide...

liberating...

Recognizing more and more that we are "The Mystery" in form,
which expresses Itself through our self - as our self...
liberating...

Recognizing that "The Mystery" is our Fundamental Nature,
covered over by years of religious/psychological/emotional
conditioning and traumas - giving us an identity - which we
believe to be who we are - but aren't...
liberating...

Realizing it is the beliefs about the "self" that must dissolve,
not the self/ego/personality.  The personality then shines
with the Light of the Fundamental Nature.
This recognition is what liberates...

Not the pursuit of "enlightenment", of becoming
"enlightened", but recognizing the Inherent, liberated Being
that we are...

liberating...

Liberation is not the "me/self" that is liberated.  It's "The Mystery"
within that is liberated - in our recognition of it.
It's the Infinite within us, that which animates us, that is liberated.
It all gets liberated in the recognition of Itself in us, as us.

the mystery is - that we are "The Mystery."

Liberated!

Mystic Meandering
Oct. 31, 2020

_/\_

"The Mystery" in me bows to "The Mystery" in you!

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Light through an old cutting board :)

Soul Breath...

 Late at night,
my mind sits at the edge of these chaotic times...

And, despite the turmoil of "life as it is" ~

I become aware of the deep Silence of the Soul ~

and fall into the Rhythm of Its Breath;
sinking ever more deeply
into timelessness beyond time;
letting go of the distressing thoughts,
just following the Rhythm of Stillness...

the Breath of the Soul...

I hear the sound of the ceiling fan
breathing its own whirling rhythm...
feeling the breeze of its breath
gently move the strands of my hair...

Just breathing...

And "I" am suddenly "gone"...
unaware of myself ~

slipping off the edge
into slumber;
lost in Soul Breath
until just before the rising
of the next day...

~

Upon awakening

I breathe a sigh of relief,
sensing a shift,
and welcome
the turning of the page...

Letting go of the suffocating contractions
of the collective dis-ease;
I breathe...
hoping that stability and kindness
will make its way across the land again...

Keep breathing through...

Mystic Meandering
Nov 6&7, 2020

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

What Can I Say - Mary Oliver

 What can I say that I have not said before?
So I'll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinished story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until it ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.

Mary Oliver
from her anthology - Swan

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Aspen leaf floating in a creek

Morning Grace - W.S. Merwin

 It is at last any morning
not answering to a name
I wake before there is light
hearing once more that same
music without repetition
or beginning playing
away into itself
in silence like a wave
a union in its own
key that I seem
to have heard before I
was listening but by the time
I hear it now it is gone
as when on a morning
alive with sunlight
almost at the year's end
a feathered breath a bird
flies in at the open window
then vanishes leaving me
believing what I do not see

W.S. Merwin
From Shadow of Sirius
original title of poem - "Grace Note"

~

Photo taken by my brother in MA

Liminal Thinking - Wurman and Gray

 Liminal means a doorway, or portal, or threshold,
not this or that, not the old way or new way,
but neither and both.  It's a state of ambiguity or
disorientation that precedes a breakthrough, a
new kind of thinking...

Liminal thinking is a kind of agility that enables you
to successfully navigate times of transition.  It
involves the ability to read your own beliefs and needs -
and the ability to continually change beliefs in order
to better meet those needs, and the needs of others...

Richard Saul Wurman
From the Forward to Liminal Thinking
by Dave Gray

~

Your beliefs inform your actions and your actions are
interpreted by others, and those interpretations become
the basis for their beliefs, which inform their actions...

"Story webs" create a shared world.  They are co-created
by the people who participate in them.  A "story web" gets
created through our own beliefs about an experience and
other people - and we create a shared world based on our
story webs.

Over time, these beliefs become deeply embedded habits
that become invisible; a complex, dense, interconnected
system of beliefs and behavior that become "social
agreements" that go unspoken and are not easy to
untangle.  The more we reinforce the habits [beliefs]
the more invisible they become, until one day they are
just "the way it is."  But - "the way it is" is
something we have created together...

Changing stories can change reality.
So what story are you choosing to believe?

Changing a shared world requires
changing its underlying beliefs...

Dave Gray
Excerpts from - Liminal Thinking

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Imagine a New Experience - Mark Vernon

 Imagination.....reveals the truth of existence and life.  It converts
everyday incidents into rich perceptions that might amount to
a revolution in experience - seeing not with the physical eyes

but through them; seeing beyond the physical realm into the
Infinite realms, if only with our inner seeing, trusting imagination
as the living power of creativity with which we can cooperate...

~

As things run out of control, life is felt to be complexifying at
exponential rates and panic sets in.  It's not really.  It always was
complex.  Rather, people have lost their bearings for lack of
imagination.  The crisis becomes an opportunity to see more.

People cite rules instead of offering forgiveness, resort to courts
rather than reconciliation and, when culture wars break out, ethics
is weaponized in shaming and scapegoating - dividing and 
ostracizing people.

Tweets of hope are drowned out by threads of hate.
It's a dangerous time.

~

[However] It is no longer about the identification and defense
of principles, but the effort to mutually transcend old patterns of
behavior [old patterns of thinking] - laying open the hidden heart;
to understand, not condemn; to liberate, not subjugate.  It welcomes
mistakes as opportunities for the kind of learning that transforms
the soul as well as the mind.
Life has interiority and soul.

It isn't about dissolving the ego but routing out the desire to
possess life and control others.

~

There is a changed meaning to freedom...

There is a shift in consciousness...

In perceiving Eternity one actually 
gives up any struggle...
[We become} transparent to reality...
Time becomes fluid...

We realize we never possessed life to start with.
[We] live because life pours itself into us...
The everyday deaths through which we pass,
as well as the seemingly final death of passing over,
reveal there's a source of life.  It is timeless love,
which include and transcends death.

We are creatures of Infinity...

Excerpts from an essay on William Blake called
The Four-fold Imagination
by Mark Vernon

see the full, in depth essay here

With thanks to Virginia Lonsdale
at Footnote from a  moment

~

"If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is,
Infinite..."

William Blake

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Reflection of sky, clouds and trees in a puddle :)