Which Door? - Aurelius Symmachus

 We all look up to the same stars;
The same heaven is above us all;
The same universe surrounds us all.
What does it matter by what
system of knowledge
we seek to know
the truth?

Not by one path alone
may we attain to
so great a secret.

Quintus Aurelius Symmachus

A Roman Statesman

~

Photo from the Internet

Wounds are the Windows - Fred LaMotte

 A broken heart lets light in.  If it breaks wide open, the
beam has no end: it flows through to other hearts.

Wounds are our windows into each other.
Don't be hasty to heal and close.  Don't be a knower.
Be an opening.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Open to a deeper part/layer of yourself, as if
your Soul is about to speak to you.

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

This beautiful creature was on our patio Thursday night.
One of its wings was "wounded" and it couldn't fly.
If anyone knows what it is please let me know...

The Amusement Park - Jed McKenna

Awakening to your True Nature is like dying; it's a certainty,
inevitable.  You're going to get there no matter what you do,
so why rush?  Enjoy your life, it's free.  Cosmic Consciousness
and Altered States and Universal Mind are the names of the
rides in this vast and fascinating dualistic amusement park.
So are Poverty and Disease and Despair.  Enlightenment,
though, is not another ride.  Enlightenment means leaving the
park altogether, but why leave the park?  In the park you can
be a saint or a yogi or a billionaire or a world leader or a
warlord.  Happiness, misery, bliss, agony, victory, defeat, it's
all here.  When the time comes to leave the park, you'll know
and you'll go...

Jed McKenna

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

"Doo, doo, doo, lookin' out my back door" ;)

(a line from Credence Clearwater Revival's song
"Lookin' Out My Back Door" - 1970)

https://youtu.be/Aae_RHRptRg

Take a ride :)

Hiding The Shadows - Toko-pa Turner

 What if [negative emotions] have something essential
to communicate to us and each other, and the real problem
is the misguided attitude that negative feelings make us less
evolved and need fixing?

In the same way that we hold others at arm's length when they
are too different from us, we avoid the inner encounter with
otherness, excluding anything that doesn't fit the image we've
been building of ourselves.

'Negative emotions' don't cease to exist because we ignore
them.  They just find other ways to express themselves.
Sometimes inappropriately, having confusing crying fits, or
feeling protractedly numb.  Most commonly we slip into 
depression and anxiety...

If not addressed in a person's life, these issues can harden into
ideologies which are then passed through the generations.
When you add to this equation a loud or charismatic leader,
movements like Nazism will be born from the corroborative
fear of otherness.

Most of us have been raised to be moral, good, and agreeable,
putting all of our 'unacceptable' qualities in what Robert Bly
calls "The Long Black Bag" we drag behind us, or what Jung
termed the personal "Shadow."  The Shadow is the place
where everything we have forgotten, denied, rejected, or not
yet discovered goes to live.

When we try to live up to the impossible image of a spiritually
enlightened, knowledgeable, selfless, forgiving, easy-going,
supportive, generous superhuman, the dark side of our nature
just gains in power...

You always have a choice to turn away or to look for redemption
in the shadows.  Sometimes turning away is exactly what you
need in the moment, especially if you're tired from toiling there.
Trust that whatever you decide is the right decision.  Also
know that if the issue being presented has roots, it will still
be there when you're ready to look at it...

We cannot simply remove the Shadow all at once.  It takes
wisdom, courage and forbearance for our shadows to reveal
themselves to us so they can be faced and dealt with gently,
compassionately, and firmly.

Toko-pa Turner
from: Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

This shadowy, sunglass-wearing figure revealed itself in
the grains of the cutting board I recently acquired - wearing
his silly little hat - as if hiding in the shadows behind a
curtain... :)

Innately...

 Everything lives according to
its Innate Rhythm:
The flowers know when to bloom -
innately...

The leaves leaf out of the trees -
innately...

die and go dormant
innately...

So too our own body lives and dies
in sacred cycles of opening, unfolding, and
falling apart - innately; a lifespan...
Reorganizing its energy in different ways -
innately...

And "we", we continue our innate pull to Wholeness.

Dying is in the life of everything...

The Grand Mystery of Life living ItSelf...

...innately.

Mystic Meandering

Summer Solstice 2021

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Trust - Truthless Truth

Underneath the surface,
deep inside the dugout,
a place of low light,
but sheltered from pain,
lies the hell of commonplaceness,
the wasteland of self-deception and struggle.

Above the surface,
out in the open,
a place of wonder and awe,
where the sun equally shines on joy and pain,
lies the promised land of unknowing,
the kingdom of self-acceptance and peace.

Allow vulnerability,
surrender your armor,
drop your mask,
come out into the world,
naked,
as you were born,
and every butterfly,
will awaken your inner child.

Trust...

at Truthless Truth

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Real In You - Joan Ruvinsky

 ...Absolute Reality overflows spontaneously into denser and
denser myriads of interacting forms, [including human form]
 playfully forgetting the knowledge of their identity with Source. 
Then there is an inward-turning that reveals the primordial
 hum that surges at the heart of all things.  Pure Being reiterates
 ItSelf in the continuous interplay of creation and reabsorption,
simultaneously.

...[With this recognition] we stop pretending that we don't
know Who we are.  We are no longer fooled by our play
of ignorance.  The incandescence and the ordinary are
simultaneously present [in us].  We experience ourselves
to be in continuous dynamism with the Heart of Being,
surrounded and penetrated by Presence.

[We see that]...separateness is just another experience in the
field of unity.  These, too, are our co-creations with the Source.
It could be said that we are walking in God's shoes, [or Buddha's
shoes, or Shiva's shoes - however one knows that Presence].
We settle back into a seamless, timeless continuity [with Source]...

The game of hide-and-seek has found its own conclusion...

We are home...

Joan Ruvinsky
from her book: The Recognition of Our Own Heart

[brackets mine]

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Spiritual Junkie - Echo of the Absolute & Rumi

 How many retreats do we need to attend, and
How many healing ceremonies does it take, and
How many awakenings do we have to go through,
To understand their message?

So long as trust in the Universe is lacking,
we keep dialing God's number like fools.
And as the medicine becomes our diet,
We won't dare to hang up the phone.

But has our head ever disappeared,
As we lost sight of it?
Do we need to keep repeating our names,
To know what we are called?

A spiritual junkie lives from rush to rush,
And neglects many everyday concerns,
Not knowing that that way,
He hurries right past most gems of life.

He wants the highs without the lows,
But nothing exists independent of its opposite.
By continuously seeking spiritual bliss,
He walks the path of the eternal sucker.

The Truth is never hidden from anybody.
The sacred time and space is right here now.
Seek no further, get on with life.
In the love, in the light, in the glory and in the darkness.

Spiritual Junkie
at - Truthless Truth

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

~

Fool's gold exists because there is real Gold.  If it were
not for fool's gold, you would not know the real gold
when you encounter it...

Rumi

~

The Real Gold is within...

MM

It All Dissolves - Frank Ostaseski

 Earth dissolves into water.  Water dissolves into fire.
Fire dissolves into air.  Air dissolves into space.

Dying [Dissolving], in many cases, does not happen all of
a sudden.  It is a gradual process of withdrawing from life
in form.

When I speak of the four elements dissolving, I am not
speaking exactly of physical form.  Rather, I am pointing to
the ineffable but observable animating qualities...
The animating qualities also dissolve - apparently missing
when we are left only with the heaviness of the corpse
after death.

There is something beyond the four elements - the spirit,
soul, or animating presence.  The inner dissolution happens
simultaneously.  Our medical instruments and devices can
certainly measure the physical disintegration, but the inner
dissolution that happens simultaneously is subtle and still...

They are all dissolving - the elements and their associated
states and as a result, the self is dissolving as well.  This is
happening all the time, we just see it at the surface at the
time of dying.

Now who are you?

Fragility and impermanence are in the nature of life.  It's
all always coming together and falling apart - not just the
physical properties of life - and not just at the time of death.

Our sense of self is impermanent.  While illness can contract
us into an even smaller sense of self, many people who are
sick and dying speak of no longer being limited by the 
previous boundaries of their old, familiar identities.

We come to embody much wider identities.  The interior
life and the external world permeate each other,
they commingle.

Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

~

With thanks Death Deconstructed for the photo...

Superficial Existence - J. Krishnamurti

 Everywhere society is conditioning the individual, and this 
conditioning takes the form of self-improvement, which is
really the perpetuation of the 'me', the ego, in different forms.

Self-improvement may be gross, or it may be very, very
refined when it becomes the practice of virtue, goodness,
the so-called love of one's neighbor, but essentially it is the
continuance of the 'me', which is a product of the conditioning
influences of society.

All your endeavor has gone into becoming something [better],
either here, if you can make it, or if not, in another world; but
it is the same urge, the same drive to maintain and continue
 the self.

Being free of society implies not being ambitious, not being
covetous, not being competitive; it implies being nothing in
relation to that society which is striving to be something.

.....

As long as one wants to be part of this society, one must breed
insanity, wars, destruction, and misery; but to free oneself from
this society - the society of violence, of wealth, of position, of
success - requires patience, inquiry, and discovery...

.....

If one is capable of studying, watching oneself, one begins to
discover how cumulative memory is acting on everything
one sees; one is forever evaluating, discarding or accepting, 
condemning or justifying, so one's experience is always
within the field of the known, of the conditioned.

But without cumulative memory as a directive, most of us 
feel lost, we feel frightened, and so we are incapable of
observing ourselves as we are.

When there is the accumulative process, which is the cultivation

of memory, our observation of ourselves becomes very
superficial.  Memory is helpful in directing, improving oneself,
but in self-improvement there can never be a revolution, a 
radical transformation.  It is only when the sense of self -
improvement completely ceases, but not by volition, that there
is a possibility of something transcendental, something totally
new coming into being.

J. Krishnamurti

from talks given:
Aug. 7th - 28th, 1955

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Pathless - Fred LaMotte

 I breathe in darkness, breathe out light, but pranayama is
not my way.  I bend and bow and honor the tides in my
spine, but asanas are not my way.

I savor the name of God, but the Word is not my way. I
honor the Guru, but my path has no master.

Though I listen to the songs and suras of the wise, I follow
not the Vedas, the Torah, the Qur'an.

I give to those in need, but the path of seva is not for me.  I
surrender, Lord, but even You, even You, are not my way.
Parasam Gateh, "beyond the beyond," is where I am right now.

With no chant, no altar, no eucharist or puja, I wander in the
forest, offering the silence of cedar, trillium, fern.

At midnight, soundless owl wings, bright knives of un-knowing,
slice through the glory of darkness.  Coyote howl is my song.

And because the light of primeval stars is only now arriving
in my body, I am awake.

Each electron bathes in the glory of its origin.  Every photon
collides with the darkest particle of its other self.  I follow the
wordless path of this breath Om.

But my way is not a journey, it passes neither in nor out, but
shatters every window between seer and seen, sinking every
vessel in the ocean of transparency.

I have trillions of eyes, gazing into the well of eternal aloneness,
where past and future kiss, annihilating time.  This very
moment is the diamond of my awakening.

I achieve the beatific vision of celestial mansions, simply by
gazing at the motionless explosion of a rose.

Every religion a blood-colored petal of this, but I would offer
the whole flower, the wounded bud which opens in all directions
at once.

Where I Am there are no steps, no degrees of initiation, no levels
one to seven: only fragrances, only dissolving.

Each lineage of masters is a pollen mote, but I have sticky feet. 
I visit the center, where the nectar is made in secret darkness.

Down where the pistil and stamen touch in a throb of stillness.
Come, drink.....

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Acceptance - Jeff Foster

 Freedom is found not through escaping the present experience,
but by diving fearlessly into its hidden depths.  You must be
open to exploring suffering - how and why it manifests in you,
where it originates.  You must be willing to look at your pain,
fears, sadness, longings.  They are part of the wholeness of
life.  You must be willing to face them head on and find deep
acceptance for the seemingly unacceptable aspects of yourself...
Beyond the personal story of my own suffering, I discover the
pains is not really my pain.  It's the world's pain.  It's humanity's
pain...

It's one thing to know who you really are [your Beingness]
when life is easy and things are going well for you.  It's
another thing to remember this in the heat of the moment, 
when things fall apart, when life gets messy.  We find another
way of looking at suffering, a radical new way of relating to
it.  We can see the messiness and the beauty of day-to-day
human existence as something to be avoided, or transcended,
or we can see it for what it really is: a secret and constant
invitation to wake up... It's about finding out who you
really are, beyond who you think you are, beyond who you've
been taught you are, beyond the story about who you are,
beyond all your concepts and images of who you are.

...we must face reality with open eyes.  We must move away
from denial, wishful thinking, and hoping and tell the truth
about life as it is.  Great freedom lies in admitting the truth
of this moment, however much it clashes with our dreams and
plans - and self image...  Acceptance is about seeing reality,

seeing things as they actually are, not as we wish them to be.
And from that place of alignment with what is, all creative,
loving and intelligent actions flow naturally.

Freedom is about embracing all that appears in the Ocean
of our present experience.  Maybe the true calling in life is to
accept present experience deeply - to let go of how this
moment should be - letting go of our false self-image.

Great freedom lies in fearlessly facing the darkness and finally
coming to see that the darkness is inseparable from light...
Life cannot be good or bad.  Life is simply life.  It's about
seeing the Mystery of Life that is already here.

Jeff Foster
Excerpts from - The Deepest Acceptance
published in 2012
Facebook

As many of you know Jeff has been dealing with a
severe debilitating illness for the past few years, 
having to come face to face with Acceptance...
He writes about his experience on his Facebook page...

~

Photo - taken by my brother
at Plum Cove, Gloucester, MA

Invite the Guests In - Rumi & Ostaseski

 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're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep through 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 whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Rumi
original title: "The Guest House"
translation by Coleman Barks

~

Suffering is about perception and interpretation.
Our stories about what is happening or did happen
shape our interpretation of it. Invite in what hurts;
sit down with it and get to know it really well.
The only way through suffering is to allow what is
happening.  Turn toward the difficulty to see what
it has to teach you.  You can't make a change until
you first accept the truth of what is.

Frank Ostaseski
from: The Five Invitations

~

Photo: Mystic Meandering

My "Guest" :)

It's All Right - Robert Bly & Werner Erhard

 There are more like us.  All over the world
There are confused people who can't remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and people
Who love God but can't remember where
He was when they went to sleep.  

It's all right.

A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house.  And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he's lonely, and they talk, and thief
Goes back to college.  Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor.  And you find your soul...

Robert Bly
original title: "People Like Us"

with thanks to Death Deconstructed
for post and photo :)

~

The thought that there is something wrong is an illusion;
there is nothing wrong, there is only what's so.  Notice when
you're comparing what's so to some fantasy of how it 
should be.  Bring yourself back to what's so and it will be
O.K.  Ask yourself what's so, and align with that.  Align with
what's so and it will not matter.  That is the foundation of
transformation....  Not aligning with what's so is the only
thing that will ever bring you hardship or suffering.  Life
in what's so will bring you harmony and grace and balance.
Ask yourself - what's so about your situation?

Werner Erhard

The Golden Silence...

 The Deep Silence calls to her
in the waking moments;
the "remedy" for all that
disturbs, contracts and constricts,
that blinds her from the Way...

It whispers to her:

Loosen the robes of religion you have worn -
that bound you.

Untie the shoes of "spirituality" -
that don't fit now.
Lay down all the "apparel" - the outer garments -
that have burdened you.

Dare to be naked...

Laying in the early morning silence,
she brings her tattered self to the deeper

dimension of Golden Silence within;
careful not to get lost in the shadowy caverns
 of the unconscious along the way...

In the space of Deep Silence she hears:

Just be still and wait...

Observe the metamorphosis
that is taking place inside you
through
your internal "wranglings"
and your unbearable struggle to be free;
like a butterfly trying to break through
its hard chrysalis - wanting to fly...

Be patient - no resistance to what is...

It will all be okay - is okay...

Cross the threshold of your troubled mind
and step into the still waters of the Golden Silence within,
your Primordial Home...

Rest there...

Unscathed...

Mystic Meandering

May 31, 2021

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The End Game...

Accumulated shadows
from a life lived
emerge into the present -
like forgotten orphans...

The melancholy mind
grieving its losses:
names, places and events
become vague histories;
even the present moment
is a blur - already passed.

She recognizes what's coming,
as the shadowy figures move over
her chess board of life,
playing the end games
until checkmate...

grieving her once lived life
in the game...

Mystic Meandering
May 21, 2021

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering