Deconstruction - Danna Faulds

 I am deconstructing.
My identity, built
assumption by assumption,
is crumbling at my feet.
It's clear to me the way
of truth leads into the 
unknown...

[.....]

Balanced on the rubble,
I grope for
handholds even as I try
to let go.  I am bared to the
bone by pain and the thwarted
desire to maintain control.  I

long to paint the scene the
way I want, while ignoring
how it is.  My practice now
isn't about rebuilding what
I knew.  It's not about
clearing the littered ground
of old illusions only to
construct new ones.
Emptiness has a stark
beauty, noticed only
when I stop looking
for security.  I sit on the
tumble of mortar and brick
and pray for patience,
pray for strength,
pray for the humility
to just keep breathing.

Danna Faulds
Excerpt from: "Deconstruction"
From: One Soul
2003

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

What is your Script? - Adyashanti

 You [have to be willing] to ask "Who am I" or "What am I"

without any script or role, without the story, about who or what
you are, releasing the script of what you think your life is about.
Every sense of identity has its script.

...what am I, and who am I without my story, without my
demands upon the moment, without any hope of this
moment, without my script?

The mind would answer, "I don't know", because the mind
does not know when it is disarmed, it doesn't know who or what
it is without its role or its character to play.

The actor who is acting this all out is named "me."
The actor keeps maintaining itself. It will do whatever it takes
to keep the ball called "me" rolling.

When this disarming happens you are allowing the wordless
experience to present itself.  This is the wordless experience of
being.  You realize it's not a script or role, it carries no agenda,
and has no demand upon the moment.  It's also not  the actor.
What you are is prior to your idea of you.

What you are without your role [identity] is often assumed to
be hidden somewhere.  And so when you let go of your role
[identity], when you look past the character called "me" for the
truth of your being, you may look for the Self, the Truth, the
"enlightened me."  Looking for the "enlightened self" is just
another role, another script.  It's part of the spiritual seekers
script.  If you drop the script - now what are you?

Of course the reason I ask you to inquire into what you are is
because, at this moment, you are living the answer.  Nothing I
would tell you is a substitute for that Aliveness, for that living 
of the answer.  That is why it has been said many times that
only the people who don't know who they are, are "awake."
Everyone else knows who they are - because they are their
script, whatever their script is, [which includes their  "spiritual"
script], or "I'm not awake" script.  Awakeness is to have no
script, to know that ultimately a script is just a script, and a
story just a story.

There is a state of mind in which the mind says, "I have no
idea who I am," because it can't find the right script. 
Awakening is the realization that happens after the mind says,

"I give up.  I just have no idea who I am."  When you start to
understand this, you realize that if you put down your script of
being someone listening, and if you put down your script of
someone saying something, [or being a "spiritual" someone]
and you just drop these roles for a moment, you realize you are
not who you have taken yourself to be; this idea of a "me" that
thinks it's going to get its happiness through changing the script,
its role, its identity - even if its identity is to have no identity
[no-self]....

Adyashanti
From: Emptiness Dancing

~

Play life intuitively
not pre-scripted

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Natural State - U G Krishnamurti

 The natural state is not the state of a self-realized God-realized 
man. It is not a thing to be achieved or attained, it is not a thing
to be willed into existence; it is there - it is the living state.
This state is just the functional activity of life.  By 'life' I do not
mean something abstract; it is the life of the senses, functioning
naturally without the interference of thought.

This state is a state of not knowing; you really don't know what
you are looking at.  I may look at the clock on the wall for half
an hour - still I do not read the time.  I don't know it is a clock.
All there is inside is wonderment.  The whole of my being is
like a single, big question mark.  It is a state of wonder, of
wondering, because I just do not know...  The knowledge of it -
all I have learned - is held in the background...

You can never understand the tremendous peace that is always
there within you, that is your natural state.  Your trying to
create a peaceful state of mind is in fact creating disturbance
within you.  You can only talk of peace, create a state of mind
and say to yourself that you are very peaceful - but that is not
peace.  So there is no use in practicing peace, there is no reason
to practice silence.  Real silence is not a dead state of mind that
spiritual seekers think. Silence is bubbling all the time - the 
energy, the life - that is its quality.  You may ask how I know.
I don't know.  Life is aware of itself, if we can put it that way -
it is conscious of itself...

UG Krishnamurti

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Our  Luminous Essence
is,just waiting to be discovered...

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Simply Living...

 I've been revisiting the view that life is a story being lived
by Life ItSelf; That "I" am being lived; that we are the living
story of Life.

Life lives the story of "me" that I've identified with all these
years, and believed, for a while at least, that "I" needed to be
"enlightened" - and have once again returned to the sense
that "I" am simply living.  Just Being.

In this there is an internal "letting go" - or "giving up" - or
some would say "surrender"...  And as a wise friend explained:
"In that, an ancient tension and stress is released.  And in the
deepest instance of 'giving up', even the somatic aspect of our
being feels a tremendous relief, and a Serene Emptiness where
a contraction had formerly been felt; as much in our physical
body as in our subtle energetic nature.  Struggle ceases, no longer
driven by the engine of dissatisfaction with 'what is', with 'how
we are.'  No longer driven by the engine of self-judgment and 
self-qualification, by the desire to be better or worthy, or
finally 'understanding', or the desire for
'enlightenment.'"

~

There is only the immediacy of the current experience -

just living that experience, whatever that experience is,
whether it is one of joy, or sorrow and grief, however it
unfolds, without the sense of a "self" striving for something
"better", or to do anything to improve it, or to create
strategies to become "enlightened;"  the struggle of the "self."

Everything is allowed...

"Enlightenment" is just untangling what you believe to be
true - your belief constructs.  Just live life intuitively,

with no strategies for "awakening."  Don't get trapped in
the mind, or try to figure out how to play the game.

"We", the "Beingness" that we are, just experiences 
whatever is occurring without a framework of time,
or reference point, or concept...

It's just Life being - life!

It is Existence experiencing ItSelf as "me", or "you" -
as an occurrence within ItSelf...

Simply Living...

We, as waves of the Ocean of Existence, are continually
occurring - unfolding fluidly, seamlessly, reverberating
through the concept of time, and is what the wrinkle of
time happens in - the Timeless Ocean of Existence.

And so the realization seems to be that we simply
recognize Life living ItSelf as us...

...Simply Living

As we are...

Our Natural selves...

Now if I could only remember this...  :)

_/\_

Mystic Meandering

~

photo taken by my brother
Sunset over the Parker River in
Newbury, MA

Unfolding Spirals of Grief - Matt Licata

 Art by Joe Maccer at Deviant Art

Tending to grief is the essence of....providing a sanctuary and
safe passage for its unfolding - in the body, the psyche, and the
nervous system - which requires that we fall to the ground,
at times, and weep.

Weep for our shattering [collective and personal], for the dying
of a dream, for the  entirety of the unlived life.  For it is these tears
 that form the substance of the portal of joy. [Rebirth].

Grief is not something we "get over", but a partner we spin
with, honor at times, argue with at others, and lament with as
the cycles of our lives unfold.

We live in a world that has lost contact with the holy waters of
reorganization.  But to marginalize the experience of grief is
to work against nature.  Out in the natural world, the earth grieves
by way of her seasons.  We can feel that grief in a rain drop, if
we allow ourselves to be taken apart and put back together.

There is no endpoint to this restructuring, no final state of
resolution where we land in some untouchable place, free from
our embodied vulnerability, our somatic aliveness, and from
more burning.

Rather, we find ourselves in what the alchemists call the rotatio,
the holy rotation of vast cycles of rupture and repair that touch
and open the human soul.

The soul is endless and the visitors of grief may companion us
for a lifetime.  But the grieving, orphaned ones of the psyche
and soma come not to harm, but to reveal.  And to open a
doorway into wholeness, mercy, and light.

Grief is not so much a process that we "make it through" and 
come out the other side fully intact, but a non-linear transforming
midwife of the unknown.  It moves not by way of straight line,
but by that of circle and spiral.

Matt Licata, PhD

A Time of "Dying"...

 Photo - David Peters

A time of "dying",

dying to the entanglements of this world;
to the demands of this world;
dis-mantling the attachments;
untangling the knots...

A time of "dying".
to self-image;
the loss of the structure of identity;
of expectations of how I hoped life would be,
how I would be -
Yet grateful for the way it is...

A metaphorical "death",
an internal "death";
the death of perceptions,
perspectives, beliefs and preoccupations -
only shadowy characters in the play.

Feeling the loss of my own "death" already,
my self-made identity - loosening its grip;
the decline in faculties of mind and body -
losing their functions...

Something in us knows
when we hear the haunting echo of birds
singing at dawn - "waking" you up -
that something inside is "dying"...

Yet, I welcome this "death",
this "release";
the release of physical tension,
the mind's mentations,
and the ache of the heart.

And possibly an opening
into a Great Transition;
a Rebirth into
the Rhythm of
the Grand Mystery
of the Universe...

Mystic Meandering
April 23, 2021

Simple Life - J.Krishnamurti

 Simple life does not consist in the mere possession of a few
things but in the freedom from possession and non-possession,
in the indifference to things that comes with deep understanding.
Merely to renounce things in order to reach greater happiness,
greater joy that is promised, is to seek reward which limits it
and prevents it from flowering...

To control thought-feeling for a greater reward, for a greater
result, is to make it petty, ignorant and sorrowful.  Simplicity
of life comes with inner richness, with inward freedom from
craving, with freedom from acquisitiveness, from addiction,
from distraction.  From this simple life there comes that
necessary one-pointedness which is not the outcome of
self-enclosing concentration, but of extensional awareness
and meditative understanding.

Simple life is not the result of outward circumstances;
contentment with little comes with the riches of inward
understanding.  If you depend on circumstances to make
you satisfied with life then you will create misery and
chaos [for yourself and for others], for then you are a
plaything of environment, and it is only when
circumstances  are transcended through understanding
 that there is order and clarity. To be constantly aware of
the process of acquisitiveness, of addiction,
of distraction, brings freedom from them

and so there is a true and simple life.

J. Krishnamurti
from The Collected Works Volume III Ojai
8th Public Talk 2nd July, 1944

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Essence of who you are simply exists - Rosacker

The body is a bio-organic sensing vehicle that *you*
are experiencing. It's designed to feel feelings and
have thoughts and experience emotions and have
experiences; all of which are temporary.

Everything in the physical dimension has a 
beginning, a duration, and a completion.

It is temporary...

The Essence of Being is not temporary...

There is This that you are,
that is non-physical, that remains as it is
unaltered and unharmed;
will always be eternal existing Presence.

The Essence of who you are simply exists...

You have always been This -
the continuum of existence is you,
not limited to a body.

Excerpts from "Living Practice"
a guided meditation
by Mitch Rosacker
of Self Discovery Studio

~

Photo Mystic Meandering

 

At the Core of Being...

At the very Core of Being
there is complete stillness,
a dynamic Stillness of Being

~

Just Being

There is utter awareness
of all life, all existence,
not as form,
but
the felt sense of the
ISness of Being ~

of Life

~

Living

~

In the Silence of
this dynamic Stillness
one is aware of
to cocooning hush
of The Mystery,
of Primordial Existence
that holds the unmanifest
in the comfort of
Its Womb

before its birth
into form

~

In this Stillness
the rhythmic Breath

of the Cosmos
pulses like
waves

~

The originating Cosmic energies
of an Alive Cosmos
generate themselves
into existence
spiraling outward
from the
Core ~

giving birth to itself
through spiraling open its petals,
blossoming into time and space

~

All Existence is at
the Core of our Being ~

In every atom, every cell...

We are the living Cosmos...

~

Existence lives ItSelf,
in a perpetual unfolding of Life ~

The Core of Being birthing ItSelf

in and as us ~

The unmanifest manifesting
the formless into form ~

~

At the Core of Being

there is only

Aliveness
Stillness
Silence
Peace
Love
Life

It is who we are...

~*~

Namaste
_/\_

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings

Feb. 12, 2015

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Dissolve - Fred LaMotte

Rosette Nebula - From: The Invisible Universe
by David Malin

 Stars dissolve into a rose. A rose dissolves into stars. Ask Dante.

The solution is dissolution.  What dissolves?  Separateness.

I am not my skin color.  I am not my tribe.  I am not even my
gender.  I wear these veils and garments, just as I have a red
shirt or a Yankees cap on: but they are not my Self.

Nor am I my political party, my nation, or my religion.  And I
am not my ancestors.  These are marvelous incidents, but not
my Essence.  The core of my existence is prior to labels,
identifications, masks.  Yes, I enjoy wearing them, dancing in
them, playing in their forms.  I need not renounce them,
because they were never really "mine" to begin with.  In deep
meditation, these forms dissolve like the dreams they are.
Then I Am.

In deep meditation, the core of existence reveals itself as the
One who cannot be divided into races, tribes, religions, parties,
yet who plays in them all as light playing in a kaleidoscope.
The revelation transcends thought and imagination.  It is the
Self-image of the Imageless.  Groundless, brilliant, empty, it
is nowhere and everywhere.  It is the Holy of Holies.

Emerging from meditation, I need no longer look for that place.
I look from that place.  Then it is impossible to identify any
color or creed, any political or spiritual movement, as "me."
I am simply who Am.

The verb "Am" is solid as a diamond, boundless as the sky.
Who needs to say, "I Am a man, I Am a liberal, I Am a Buddhist,
I Am a white or a black?  Not I.  Just Am.  Those labels of
identity make the mind small.  No noun, no-thing, ever really
follows the verb To Be.

Fred LaMottte
Uradiance

Heaven's Wrinkle - Susan Tweit

 Looking at the heavens places me in time and space - and beyond
them.  Gazing at the stars, I look through heaven's wrinkle; the
light I see now represents their past, having traveled many years
across space to reach my eyes here on earth; the light they are
emitting now will be visible only in some future, years away.

I and all the other lives on Earth are connected to the stars, held
together by gravity, the invisible glue that defines our universe,
and bound elementally by a common material: stardust.  This
atomic grit of interstellar space paints dark clouds on the Milky
Way, condenses itself into swirls of gravity-bound suns and 
planets, and provides the minerals bounded by the push and pull
of electrical charges into the molecules that form our cells.  Like
stardust and other materials of life itself, we are in constant
motion, changing shape as we pass through our lives, and after
the makings of our bodies break down and are recycled,
rearranged into other forms of life.  The stars remind me of
where I come from and who I am.

Susan J. Tweit
from -Walking Nature Home

with thanks to Beyond the Fields We Know
for post and incredible photo!

The River - Khalil Gibran

 It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing the forests and villages.

And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there  seems nothing more than to disappear, forever.

But there is no way back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that's where the river will know
it's not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

Khalil Gibran

with thanks to No Mind's Land
for post and photo

The Cosmic Dance...

 I have conversed with the Universe,
contemplated and cogitated,
ascended and 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 and endless infinity...

A golden thread weaves through space
without beginning or end, through
the Silence beyond creation, through
Sound beyond sound, and
Light beyond light...

Matchlessly weaving its Eternal vibration
through timelessness,
into time and times beyond time,
with one theme braided into its
unending spiral
through dimensions,
distortions, and
dysfunctions...

~ Love ~

From this divine, mysterious weave
we dance the dance of duality,
complete in our light and our dark
within a vast Cosmic Love
of Divine Embrace...

Mystic Meandering

1999

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

20-Watts of Energy - Robert Lanza

 Many of us fear death.  We believe in death because we
have been told we will die.  We associate ourselves with
the body, and we know that bodies die.  But a new
scientific theory suggests that death is not the terminal
event we think.

One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain
observations cannot be predicted absolutely.  Instead, there
is a range of possible observations each with a different
probability.  One mainstream explanation, the "many
worlds" interpretation, states that each of these possible
observations corresponds to a different universe (the
'mutliverse').  A new scientific theory - called biocentrism -
refines these ideas.  There are infinite number of universes,
and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some
universe.  Death does not exist in any real sense in these
scenarios.

All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of
what happens in any of them.  Although individual bodies are
destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling- the "Who am I?' -
is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain.

But this energy doesn't go away at death.  One of the surest
axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be
created nor destroyed.....

The linkages between the various histories and universes
transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time.
Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting
either this or that result onto a screen. .....it's still the same
battery or agent [source] responsible for the projection.

According to Biocentrism, space and time are not the hard
objects we think.  Wave your hand through the air - if you
take everything away, what's left.  Nothing.  The same thing
applies for time.   Everything you see and experience
right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind.
Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything
together.

Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world.  In the
end, even Einstein admitted, "Now Besso (an old friend) has
departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.  That
means nothing.  People like this...know that the distinction
between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly
persistent illusion."  Immortality doesn't mean a perpetual
existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of
time altogether.

After the death of his son, Emerson wrote: "Our life is not
so much threatened as our perception."

Robert Lanza
Excerpt from The Huffington Post - Dec. 8, 2009

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Create Silence - David Whyte

 The object in meditation and all of our contemplative
disciplines is silence.  But...  that silence is in order for
you to perceive something other than yourself -
what you've arranged as yourself to actually perceive
this frontier between what you call your self and what you
call other than your self,  whether that's a person or a landscape.

One of the greatest arts of poetry is actually to create silence
through attentive speech - speech that says something in
such a way that it appears as a third frontier between you and
the world, and invites you into a deeper and more generous
sense of your own identity and the identity of the world...

Poetry is the verbal art-form by which we can actually create
silence...

Silence is frightening, an intimation of the end, the graveyard
of fixed identities.  Real silence puts any present understanding
to shame; orphans us from certainty; leads us beyond the
well-known and accepted reality and confronts us with the
unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about
to break in upon our lives.

In silence, Essence speaks to us of Essence itself and asks
for a kind of unilateral disarmament, our own essential
nature slowly emerging as the defended periphery
atomizes and falls apart.

As the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation
through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability,
revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive
eye, an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion,
and belonging to a different person than the one who first
entered the quiet.

David Whyte
Poet
from - Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and
Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Photo by Aaron Burden

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

The Celestial Symphony...

 The Cosmos plays a continuous symphony of Silence
that only Inner Stillness can hear...
We have forgotten the music of the
Celestial Songs
that sound the stellar light language of 
Love ~

Our remembrance lies hidden deep in
the cave of the Heart - untouched...

The unspoken language of the Heart
longs to be opened - awakened...
The dormant vibration calls to us,
to resonate with the tones of Creation

in the Space of Silence ~

Listen deeply and hear the
Celestial Symphony
within the Stillness
of the Heart ~

Follow the cosmic waves,
the pulsing sound of Life,
into the Vastness
of Silence ~

Find your own resonance
with The Rhythm
in your Heart ~

~ and know ~

we are all a tone of Love
playing our uniqueness in the 
Chord of Life,
reverberating with the
Sound of Source ~

Mystic Meandering
August 1, 2001

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Mandala Art digitally altered

The Silent Self - Thomas Merton

 There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing
precisely because it is so silent: it can't be spoken.
It has to remain silent.  To articulate it, to verbalize it,
is to tamper with it, and in some way to destroy it.

Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which
is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this
inner, silent self.  We live in a state of constant semi attention
to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise
of what goes on around us all the time.
This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words,
a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted;
we are not quite "thinking", not entirely responding, but we
are more or less there.

We are not fully present and not entirely absent,
not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available.

It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything
and we may in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and
resentment.  Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague 
sense that we are "part of something"...

Although we are not quite able to define what that something
is...  and probably wouldn't want to define it even if we could.

We just float along in the general noise.
Resigned and indifferent,
we share semi-consciously in the mindless mind of Muzak
and radio commercials which pass for "reality."

Thomas Merton
from Love & Living

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~ 

Photo - Mystic Meandering

This little tulip (maybe 6"tall") is growing
in a planter tub amongst the weeds - 
the "silent self" amongst the "noise." :)

Have no idea how the bulb got there!