The Totality of Experience - Shinshu Roberts

 ...As soon as we return to the totality of this moment's complete
expression, responding to the whole of our situation, we are
not caught by anything.  Even though we are still subject to
the repercussions of our past actions, we are free to
respond skillfully in the present moment/situation.

If we have been rude to someone in the past and that person
is wary of us [or if they have been rude to us], our total
participation in this moment of meeting that person will not
necessarily take away the effects of our past meeting.  What
it will do is free us to respond skillfully in this situation.
Since we are not caught by "piled up" or overlapping
experiences, we are freed to enact the new paradigm of 
[seeing the whole of the situation] and being present for
the next opportunity...

Holding on to a past mistake will often hinder your ability
to respond skillfully in the present, although you still file
away your mistake and make adjustments.

Our understanding of self can become a fixed idea of
accumulated ["piled up"] traits and experiences.  The self
 is both independent and the totality of all being-time.  We are
no-self and a particular self at the same time, caught by
neither and more than both.  [This] realization is not
predicated upon a particular set of circumstances.
Realization is present in each moment.
Realization is each moment.

Shinshu Roberts
from an article on Dogen in Insight Journal
from Barre Center for Buddhist Studies

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

You ARE Life! - Don Miguel Ruiz

 Your are Life,
passing through your body,
passing through your mind,
passing through your soul.

Once you find that out, not with logic, not with the intellect,
but because you can feel that Life, you find out that you are
the force that makes the flowers open and close, that makes
the hummingbird fly from flower to flower.

You find out that you are in every tree, and you are in every
animal, vegetable and rock.  You are that force that moves
the wind and the wind breathes through your body.

The whole universe is a living being that is moved by that
force, and that is what you are.

You cannot lose life.
You are Life.

Don Miguel Ruiz

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Living the Fantasy of Becoming - Jim Harrison

 Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.

This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the winds, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter.  But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

We whirl with the earth, catching our breath
as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained
except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.

Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.

Jim Harrison

from: Saving Daylight

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

"Only the rocks live forever."

James Michner
from - Centennial

 

Mystical Fog...

 

Unable to sleep, I pattered down to the living room
at 3:45 am and was surprised to find fog out the
window.  I haven't seen fog in a very long time...
I grew up in New England, but have lived in semi-
arid Colorado for more than 40 years.  There's not
often fog here...  So what a delight to find my
child-like wonder again! - on a sleepless mystical foggy
night; falling in love with the simple beauty and
magic of nature in the wee hours...

Here's a different view out the back window.
The chimney on the house behind us looks like
a lighthouse. :) A matter of perspective I know... 

And here I inverted the color for even more magic... :)

~

Regard everything as fantasy...

Regard everything as transparent...
See through everything...

See that everything is in transition...

Liberate concepts and beliefs...

Let go of the need for an "answer"/solution...

Rest in the nature of Essence ~ the Primordial
State of everything...

Be a child of fantasy...
Be curious instead of afraid...

Pema Chodron
Buddhist teacher

The Great Transition - Matt Licata

 In the current global environment.....as we navigate this
period of great transition, while we don't know exactly where
we're headed, we can slow down and prepare for what is 
coming next by deepening our wisdom and compassion,
both for ourselves and others.

By turning toward the Soul, the Heart, the Self, and attuning
to its intelligence and guidance, we can recommit to our
unique path of transformation, and remember what is
most important.

Each of us is called in our own way towards a life of
wholeness, purpose, and meaning, and we each have our
own hurt, pain, grief and wounding to tend to.

We affect, and are affected by, those around us.  We are
affected by life everywhere.  We come to this life with
unique gifts, and ways of engaging The Mystery.

We have all been wounded and the path of seeing our
wounds as initiation is one that is as old as recorded
history.  It is not an easy path, but one that is imbued
with mercy, grace, and a certain poetic beauty.  It is a
path of courage and kindness...

It is essential that we honor our unique sensitivities and
eccentricities and open to the possibility that even our
deepest wounding may be filled with guidance,
medicine and meaning.  [It is essential] to recommit
to the path of [the Soul], to embodied transformation
and healing, to participate consciously and access the
alchemical gold  at the core of our wounds as a gateway
to a life of deeper meaning, connection and aliveness.

Matt Licata, PhD

~

Photo from the internet

Emergence - Paul Levy, Betty Kovacs, & Andrew Harvey

 Humanity has become affiliated with a mysterious
psycho-spiritual disease of the Soul - the virus of the mind.
The very source of madness is to be found within the
unconscious psyche of humanity.  There is a fissure, a
primordial dissociation, a split deep within - a state of
fragmentation deep within the collective unconscious.

We are truly living in dark times where the darkness is
emerging from hiding in the shadows and is becoming
visible...  Confronting the darkness and viewing the
collective nightmare [requires looking] through the 
mystical lens of our intimate connection with the Divine.

We are currently living contrary to our innate creative
impulses, out of integrity with our Soul, [which has]
created a collective insanity/madness that we are
playing out.

What the world needs is for each of us to have the
courage to follow our calling, step into our true vocation
and share our creative gifts with the world such that we
co-inspire each other.

When intense darkness manifests within an individual's
process it can potentially lead to an emergence of an
unknown light within that person of which they are
previously unaware...

Paul Levy
from the Forward in Radical Regeneration by
Andrew Harvey

~

The first darkness we have to face, is the story we've
been telling ourselves about ourselves.  We have become
addicted to a story that now has the power to negate the
entire world.

Betty Kovacs
Merchants of Light

~

Because we may well be standing on the threshold of a new
story that is destined to emerge, we must open to the crisis
that makes its emergence possible.  Staying open and vulnerable
to exploding suffering and danger on every level demands
everything from us.  The industrial civilization has become
intoxicated with itself.

Andrew Harvey
from - Radical Regeneration

~

"Thinking" is the story we tell ourselves
about our world, about our experience,
about our existence, running scenarios in
the mind of the way it "should" be or
shouldn't be - how it will play out -
in our heads...

"If you touch one syllable of that story
you will suffer."

I touched the syllable
It's torture
I suffered

Mystic Meandering
April 18, 2021

With thanks to Mitch Rosacker
of Self Discovery Studio
for the quote: "If you touch one syllable
of that story you will suffer."

~

Art - Mystic Meandering
from a larger piece
2012

Accepting the Seasons of the Heart - Kahlil Gibran

 Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart
may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily
miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less
wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of the heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass
over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters
of your grief...

Kahlil Gibran

With thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Path of the Wounded - Matt Licata

 Many of us on the ["spiritual path"] have been wounded -
physically, emotionally, or at a soul level.  Whether this 
wounding takes form by way of relational trauma, or
through personal betrayal, it has a way of coloring our
perception and affecting our capacity to feel safe.

Our increasingly speedy and fragmented culture has 
pathologized valid human experience, such as grief,
melancholy, anger, and uncertainty, giving rise to a
psychiatric and self-help community determined to
"cure" or "transcend" dimensions of the psyche that
contain important (and even holy) data for our unique
 paths of creativity and meaning.

For some, this occurs only by way of transition, dissolution,
and loss, through an embodied confrontation with the
unconscious and the unlived life.  These experiences are
not signs of error or mistake, but calls to depth and
evidence of how our wounding can serve a function.

At times, deeper "healing" will require that the wound
disclose itself in more subtle ways within the psyche and
the body, where it can seem like things are getting worse.
Tending to this organic unfolding of the healing process
requires newfound levels of courage, patience and trust.

It is not an easy life/path - one that we do not choose
consciously....  It requires that we walk in this world
against the grain and remain open to further wounding
 and revelation of shadow, and dare to consider the
radical possibility that the ally will appear in infinite
ways.  Not to harm, but to reveal.

Even though it may seem as if we are alone - and in
part we must walk this path by ourselves - we are never
truly alone, as unseen helpers, friends, and companions
are always nearby...

Matt Licata, Ph.D.

From the Path of the Wounded Healer

~

The wound is the place where the light gets in.

Rumi

~

Photo taken by my brother

Still Mind - Hazrat Inayat Khan

 Where is the voice of "God" [The Sacred] heard?  In silence.
The seers, the saints, the sages, the prophets, the masters,
they have heard that voice which comes from within by
making themselves silent.  I do not mean by this that because
one has silence one will be spoken to; I mean that once one is
silent one will hear the word, which is constantly coming from
within.  When the mind has been made still, a person also
communicates with everyone he meets.  He does not need many
words: when the glance meets he understands.  Two persons
may talk and discuss all their lives and yet never understand
one another.  Two others with still minds look at one another
and in one moment a communication is established between them.

Where do the differences between people come from?  From within.
From their activity.  And how does agreement come?  By the
stillness of the mind.  It is noise which hinders a voice that we hear
from a distance, and it is the troubled waters of a pool which hinder
us seeing our own image reflected in the water.  When the water
is still it takes a clear reflection; and when our atmosphere is still
then we hear that voice which is constantly coming to the heart
of every person.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Sufi Teacher, Poet and Musician

with thanks to No Mind's Land
Photo also via No Mind's Land

The "Work" of Happiness - May Sarton

 I thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work.
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.

So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours
And strikes its roots deep in the house alone;
The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
White curtains softly and continually blown
AS the free air moves quietly about the room;
A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed walls --
These are the dear familiar gods of home,
And here the work.....can be done,

For what is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life's span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless...

May Sarton
from: Collected Poems: 1930-1993

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Be Undone - Clare Blanchflower

photo by Martin Stranka

 In the willingness
to be so fully undone
For all strategies to end
Surrender is here...

To see and be seen
in the light
of what is

To rest
as undefended
presence
at the feet of Life

Being humbled
again and again
As threads
of defense
dissolve
and the true power
of Being
is embodied
Life living ItSelf

A pure power
that wants nothing
A power
that says
I don't know...

And the eternal heart
beats in
silent reverence

Clare Blanchflower
Original title - "Devotion Is"

Grace Comes...

 Grace comes unbidden...
Her soft Presence comforts in the
coldest dawn and darkest night,
and sits with us when we are broken,
beaten down by the "life game"...

She is the antidote for an aching heart
and struggling body...

She hears your silent tears...
and walks with you...

Grace brings you love and kindness
to endure the crosswinds that bite...

It's all Grace -
come to bind the wounds from those
who tried to suffocate your voice,
who tried to kill your spirit...

She softens the heart
and clears the pain from your vision...

She is always with us,
even in the death of the body.
She is "the beautiful woman sitting on
the fence," come to take you "home,"
or to your next "journey" -
wherever that may be...

Grace has come, Grace has come!

She is singing her love song!

There is nothing to do but surrender
and let Grace sing her song of Love
to the weary heart...

Listen...

Mystic Meandering
April 8, 2021

The reference to "the beautiful woman on the fence"
is something my mother experienced during her
dying process 2 years ago...

Hospice said she was hallucinating, but we knew she was *seeing.*
She saw a beautiful woman sitting on the fence out her window,
at the top of a small incline, on many occasions.
She said: "the beautiful woman on the fence
has come to take me on my next journey."

Grace Comes...

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Insistent Grace - Stephen Levine & Ivan Granger

 There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.

It is an insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.

We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.

But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.

And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.

Stephen Levine
Original title: "Millennium Blessing"

via Death Deconstructed

~

Commentary by Ivan Granger

Most of us spend our entire lives avoiding that inner opening.
Most of the time it is a quiet itch at the back of the awareness
we squirm and turn away from.  And when it really presses
on us, it can inspire terror, as if we were facing death.

It is the death of our old world view, the death of patterned
awareness, the death of our limited notion of who we are.  All
we thought ourselves to be stops - and so it is a sort of death.
To feel that grace approaching, to welcome it, requires a sort
of courage.

It requires courage, and surrender.  We have this idea that
spiritual opening is a terrible effort... No...  That unfolding
wants to occur within us.  The only effort is to let go of our
endless strategies to halt the process.  We all feel it, a gentle
prodding to let the heart open, to know ourselves truly, to be
present and radiate ourselves into the world.  It is insistent,
trying to happen within us.  Call it grace, if you like.  The
question presented to us: Do we courageously accept the
invitation or not?

For those of us who live in contemporary society, how hard
it is to stop the ticking of the clock?  From such an early age
we internalize the sense of time and progress and deadlines.
Yet, in doing so, we forget that these are all just concepts,
just one way to understand the unfolding of being and
experience.  That sense of time is a powerful tool for doing
and accomplishment, but it isn't inherently "real."  It doesn't
have much to do with who or what we are.  There is a flow of
days and months, but they are the surface current of a much
deeper timelessness.

It's fascinating how we use the hyperactivity of thought to
define the world, to frame our perception of the world, and
in some ways to limit our notion of the world.  The other
thing about thought:  It creates time.  When thought settles
down, we discover timelessness.  And as the poet says, the
mind comes to rest, not in the head, but in the heart.

And we remember.  It is not through intellection but through
stillness that we remember.  Look at the word "remember."
Re-member.  To remember is to finally see how apparently
separated reality actually fits together in a single body.
Discursive thought can only ever examine pieces of the whole.
To remember is to have the full vision of Wholeness, as
things actually are.  But this vision is found in timelessness
and stillness, through the quiet mind unfiltered.

Ivan Granger
Poetry Chaikhana

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Step Into What You Are - Matt Licata

 At times, the most wise and soulful action is to establish a
boundary with another.  To stand up and assert what it is
that we need.  To move in an empowered and swift way to
maintain our integrity.  To privilege our autonomy.  To
meet narcissism, abuse, misattunement, and neglect with a
fierce embodied response.

This is not only the case with "external" others, but also
with the multitude of "internal" others as they emerge as
voices, figures, and images in the interior landscape.

As we wake in the morning, wander through the day, in
liminal states and at the entryway to sleep and dream...
we may notice their presence, arriving quietly in one
moment and as firestorm in the next - telling us:

"There is something wrong with you.  You have failed
again. You have done life wrong. You are unworthy of
mercy, of grace.  You are beyond redemption.  You are
unlovable and unwanted.  You do not belong here."

The images and voices of the past, shadow emanations
of authorities, cultures, and lineages of intergenerational
trauma and trance.  The voices of a realm that has forgotten
the holy, the sensitive, the eccentric, and raging uniqueness
of the heart.

But in a moment when perception is clear and a glimpse
is given from behind the veil, it is seen that the visitors
come not to harm, but to reveal.  But they, too, must be
met with boundaries of clear seeing.  To not accept what
they say at face value, but to enter into dialogue and to
find the way into what is most true.  To not merely accept
their conclusions, proposed tunnels of reality, and the
psychic lenses through which they have come to see...

But step into what you are.  To live in and from that as
your poetic offering to a weary world.  To take the risk
of telling a new story, dreaming a new dream, and
weaving new cloth.  And to allow yourself to be toned
and tuned by the great Weaver herself...
breathing and sensing and listening as a new vision is
unearthed.

Matt Licata, Ph.D.

~

Photo: Art - Mystic Meandering

Resurrected...

 Breaking free of concepts, constructs, beliefs and stories
that have kept me entombed...

I rise...

Waking up to my "True Nature"

a living expression of "The Sacred" within me...

I rise...

Untangling the tattered threads of old roles, old crafted identities
worn to make me feel safe and important...

I rise...

Letting go of frayed "lifelines" that kept
me tethered to the shore of familiarity and conformity...

I rise...

Now not needing to be other than who I Am
my natural, playful, creative, expressive Aliveness...

I rise...

Mystic Meandering

April 3, 2021

~

Photo: Vortex Art 2010 - Mystic Meandering
done with fingers and Craypas oils

Realer than real - Nancy Neithercut

There is a common misconception that enlightenment happens
*to* the person.  And somehow this imaginary character becomes
a no-self.  And obviously anyone who thinks that they are
enlightened also believes that there was a path or method that
they used to get there or to attain that, where there's nothing
to attain and no "person" to get it.

People long to escape their humanness.  As you grow up you
learn morals, you learn what to be like, how to act in society.
These morals generally come from some religion originating
from some God or giant authority keeping society together.
And one of the first ones they try to teach you is how to try to
be selfless.  So they tell you to give some of your candy to
Marianne.  And Marianne is happy to get it and your parents
or caregivers are happy that you've done it and so you feel
good about yourself.  So this seemingly selfless act was very
selfish wasn't it.  Lol

So the goal of many of these religions and societies is to become
a selfless person.  That sounds good to so many because they
can't stand the pain that they feel, the loneliness they feel
inside.  They have been taught that anger and jealousy are bad,
so they are trying to have only nice happy thoughts and nice
happy emotions and act selflessly, but this simply cannot be done.
And it is quite understandable that some people would be 
trying to erase or change themselves, their thought and emotion
in order to feel better.  However, I do think that unless they had
heard of it [as some teach it] they would not be trying to get
rid of the self.

So there are people who claim they have reached this rarefied
atmosphere.  And often they are revered and people imitate their
actions and language they use.  And they give instructions on how
to reach this unreachable place.  And seekers love this stuff because
 it gives them a path and it solidifies the Belief in [a separate] self.

And these "teachers" are revered and given a lot of flattery.  And
the authority hierarchy power driven cult is born.  I knew one
woman who said that there's nothing that you can do or not do 
[to attain enlightenment].  A few years later she was giving
instructions.  Other prominent "teachers" and "teachings" tell
 people to "drop the story" [of me], obviously not realizing that
there is no one who can drop,or not drop anything as we only
exist as a story...

It's all simultaneously dream-like and realer than real...

Nancy Neithercut
Facebook

 With thanks to No Mind's Land

~  

There is no "better" version of the self;
no "enlightened" version of the self.
You don't become your big "S" Self...
We are all "The Mystery" in funky clothes :)

MM

_/\_

~

Photo - Nancy Neithercut
via No Mind's Land

Love those funky clothes!  :)

Purpose

 What is my purpose in life? I asked "the Void"

Your problem is that you equate 
your purpose with goal-based
achievement.

The Universe isn't interested in your achievements...

Just your heart...

When you choose to act out of kindness, compassion
and love, you already are aligned with
your true purpose...

author unknown

~

On any given day it's not about the goal.
it's about the experience of living...

of simply being...

author unknown

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering