Cosmic Dream - John O'Donohue

In the beginning was the dream...
In the eternal night where no dawn broke, the dream deepened. 
Before anything ever was, it had to be dreamed...  Every single
thing is somehow the expression and incarnation of thought.

If we take Nature as the great artist of longing, then all presences
in the world have emerged from Her mind and imagination.  We
are children of the Earth's dreams.  It's almost as if Nature is in
dream and we are her children who have broken through the dawn
into time and place.  Fashioned in the dreaming of the clay, we
are always somehow haunted by that, we are unable ever finally
to decide what is dream and what is reality.  Each day we live in
what we call reality, yet life seems to resemble a dream.  We rush
through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to
stay and the serious project of the world depended on us.  We
worry and grow anxious - we magnify trivia until they become
important enough to control our lives.  Yet all the time, we have
forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of
a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos.

There is no definitive dividing line between reality and dream.
What we consider real is often precariously dream-like.  And
even our grip on reality is tenuous...

John O'Donohue
From: Eternal Echoes

Photo from the Internet

 

Cosmic Meditation - Robert Rabbin & Adyashanti

Meditation doesn't promise anything
It isn't a strategy,
It simply is.

When we exist within meditation,
there is no room for strategies of
becoming, achieving, attaining, owning.

Within meditation,
Silence is the only strategy,
because everything [just] is...

Robert Rabbin

With thanks to No Mind's Land
for photo too :)

~

Real meditation is not about mastering a technique
True meditation is letting go of manipulating our experience.
Stop seeking something more or better or different, and turn
your attention inward to the awake Silence that you are...

Adyashanti

 

Quantum Strangeness - Fred LaMotte

Here's another secret of quantum strangeness from the annals
of the quark.  All events, as to their quiddity, are equally
significant.

The daring leap of a tree frog from the spigot of your garden
hose, to her sanctuary in a pot of begonias, is as important as
the birth of a new political party, or an earthquake in Brooklyn.

The universe is not just as you see it, but as the frog sees it.
Your attention magnifies a breath of August breeze into a
hurricane; but for the frog, all human catastrophes are as
weightless clouds in a distant sky.  They pass soundlessly
overhead.

Why do you assume that your chief concern should be mine?
The liberal wants to convince me, the conservative wants to
convert me.  Neither allows me to create myself.  But that is
one task I can do better than anyone else.  Let me follow the
wondrous river of my own interest over all its rocks, through
the rough waters of responsibility and consequence, and I will
learn my lesson much better than you can teach me.

A Greek philosopher said, 'Be kind: everyone you meet is
fighting a great battle.'  A Jewish carpenter said, 'Judge not,
lest ye be judged.'  Here's another piece of advice: if you want
to see radical transformation in humanity, stop trying to change
each other.

Have you ever walked the labyrinth?  One who seems closest
to the goal may suddenly find their way veering far off.  When
two pilgrims pass, they don't know who is nearing the center,
and who is drifting further from it.  Compassion is precisely
this not knowing.  All they can do is bow...

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Universe is the Great Self - Thomas Berry

The universe must be experienced as the Great Self.

Each is fulfilled in the other.
The Great Self is fulfilled in the individual self,
the individual self is fulfilled in the Great Self.

Alienation is overcome as soon as we experience this
surge of energy from the Source that has brought the
universe through the centuries...

New fields of energy become available to support
the human venture.

It is all an exuberant expression of Existence ItSelf.

Thomas Berry

with thanks to The Beauty We Love
and the photo too :)

~

All is the Sacred Mother of all existence...
Rest in that...

MM

 

I am not dead - Robinson Jeffers

I am not dead, I have only become inhuman:
That is to say,
Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities,
But not as a man
Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete
Stripping for the race.

The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer
Of certain fictions
Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain
And expand with pleasure;
Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope:
That's gone, it is true;
(I never miss it; if the universe does,
How easily replaced!)

But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free.
I admired the beauty
While I was human, now I am part of the beauty.
I wander in the air,

Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean;
Touch you and Asia
At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises
And the glow of this grass.
I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth
For a love-token.

Robinson Jeffers

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Doorways to the Sacred - Frank Ostaseski

To know the sacred is not to see new things, but rather to see
things in a new way.  The sacred is hidden in all things...

The sacred is the nature of reality - yet most of the time we
walk around in a sacred world with ordinary vision.  We see
in a conditioned way, staying on the surface of life.  When we
pay attention, however, we realize that the sacred reveals itself
continuously.  Ordinary people, like you and me, can and do
regularly experience the sacred in myriad ways and forms.
Recognition that the sacred is present may also arise suddenly
and spontaneously, as the sacred makes surprise appearances.
We may sense an inner stillness, as if the momentum we have
counted on to keep us moving through life is no longer needed.
Deep silence is not merely a pause between sounds.  It is an
inner felt quietness.  This silence strips us both of belief and
disbelief.  It takes us beyond the known, beyond language and
into the sacred.  Silence is the natural response to the presence
of the sacred, no matter where it appears.  Stillness and quiet
are the doorways to the sacred.

Frank Ostaseski

From - the Five Invitations

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Inter-Spiritual Heart - Mirabai Starr

For decades I was conditioned to believe that to engage a mature
spiritual life I needed to "pick one tradition and go deep," which
implied that my attraction to the teachings and practices at the
heart of all religions was superficial and indolent.  Also, that the
path of non-dualism - with its affirmation of undifferentiated
consciousness - was superior to my devotional disposition.  Also,
that my experience of longing for God was an illusion - some
kind of unconscious blend of unresolved childhood abandonment
and magical thinking.  In other words, the energy that fueled my
journey was predicated on a perfect storm of delusional inclinations.

It was only when the fire of loss swept into my life and burned the
scaffolding to the ground that all conceptual constructs came
tumbling down and these insidious messages revealed themselves
as 1) unkind, and 2) untrue.  From the ashes of grief a transfigured,
more authentic self began to arise, and she felt no obligation to
choose sides.  She was a Jew and a Sufi, a believer and an agnostic.
She practiced Vipassana and Centering Prayer, observed Shabbat
and received communion.  She rested in blessed moments of
unitive consciousness and sang the praises of Lord Krishna.

I am not alone.  A 'tribe" of people is coalescing around the world
to celebrate a reorientation from religious separation to inter-
spiritual connection.  While many of us have been pilgrims on this
path for decades - sometimes feeling alone in the wilderness,
sometimes gathering with others who are similarly drawn to the
sacred in every single holy house we encounter - now, at last, our
numbers seem to be reaching a tipping point and what was a
fringe phenomenon is become a global movement.

The inter-spiritual path is characterized as much by what it is not
as what it is.  It is not a new religion; in fact many of its most
enthusiastic adherents consider themselves "spiritual but not
religious."  It has no creed or dogma, no tenets or prohibitions. No
special attire sets it apart and so single symbol represents its core
philosophy.  It's "membership" is as diverse as the full spectrum
of humanity.  It is not about belief...

Mystical poetry transcends theological distinctions and neutralizes
ideological ultimatums.  Love poems to God do not describe 
Ultimate Reality: they evoke it.  The poems of the mystics slip
past the thought-guardians and batter down the gates of the heart.
In crying out to the Holy One, the ecstatic poets offer us a direct
connection with the object of our Soul's deepest desire, and ours.

Mystical poetry generates a sacred field, and invites us to step in.

It is here, in the center of the perennial paradox, that it becomes
obvious all spiritual paths emanate from and return to the same
Universal Heart.

Mirabai Starr

read full article here

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

"Spiritual Boutiques" - Fred LaMotte

 Why plant plastic flowers?
The fragrance of one silent rose
roars louder than a thousand suns.
At night, candles appear to shine,
but where is their glory
when dawn breaks open the sky?
You waste your money
in the market place of spiritual teachers.
Each of them has a little boutique.
But which one has a root or thread,
a lineage leading to the ancient weavers?
Can any of them spin this world
into the weft of stars?
Isn't it time to close up
these shops in your mind?
Wander out beyond the maintained trail.
The wilderness is nearer than you think,
closer than breathing.
Go there, meet your oldest Friend,
the one who whispers your true name
after all those centuries of being
faithful to forgetfulness.
Every time you said, "I believe,"
you fell a little deeper asleep.
Now is your chance to get lost and wake up.
Find true darkness.
The Beloved will use your bones for kindling,
your blood for a spark to light the wildering
blaze of his [Her] Face in your chest.

...that Face becomes your face...
The roar you hear is not a plastic flower.
It is the fragrance of one silent rose.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Sweet Scent of The Sacred...

Overcome with fatigue - exhausted,
I enter the Liminal Space of "The Sacred."
I listen for Her "voice" - Her Sound - Her vibration
in the space of Deep Rest...

...and find Her waiting...

Her sweet cedar fragrance briefly wafts through
the room and soothes my senses,
calming the "noise" in the body and mind...

In the Quiet, she whispers from within:

Let the mind rest in The Sacred,
take comfort in The Sacred.

There is nothing to do but let things unfold...

Nature is taking its course...
All will be made known in time,
and an "answer" revealed...

Stop everything:
all seeking for solutions
 to unsolvable dilemmas,
or attempts to shift consciousness.

Just allow the natural unfolding of all
circumstances in their own time...

Lay down all "spiritual trinkets"
that you "buy" into - to feel safe and
validated in your beliefs; to feel happy;
to feel "enlightened"; to feel "special."

Just cling to Me...

Communing with Me
in the Liminal Spaces
 all will be made clear.

Mystic Meandering

July 13, 2021

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The World Shines Forth - Joan Ruvinsky

The world shines forth as the embodiement
of the Divine Mother;
the eternal Feminine -

the Ultimate Reality
never separate from
its Source.

~

She births Herself as the many...

even in their individual forms,
embodying the One,
the One who condenses into the mind...

She confines Herself by the limits
of space and time...

Contracting Her powers, She
explores limitations -
becoming ordinary, isolated
individuals...

She knows fully Her own play of
contractions and realizes Herself
as these.  Even by her descent into
contraction She recognizes
the Universe as Her own very Self.
Blossoming forth from her own Heart,
the play of the One and the many...

~

Everything becomes potentially
a doorway to the Infinite
since it is simply a coagulation
[contraction] of this Infinity.

Joan Ruvinsky

Center section is excerpts from the
Pratyabhijnahrdayam - an ancient Hindu
text from the Kashmir Shaivism tradition
meaning - The Recognition of our own Heart
(aka - The Recognition of the Self)

From the Joan Ruvinsky interpretive version,
in her book: The Recognition of Our Own Heart

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Grief as it is - Joan Didion

 Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die,
but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that
immediately follow such an imagined death.  We misconstrue
the nature of even those few days or weeks.

We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock.  We do
not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both
body and mind.  We might expect that we will be prostrate,
inconsolable, crazy with loss.  We do not expect to be
literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband
 is about to return and need his shoes.

In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." 
A certain forward movement will prevail.  The worst days will
be the earliest days.  We imagine that the moment to most
severely test us will be the funeral, after which the hypothetical
healing will take place.  When we anticipate the funeral we
wonder about failing to "get through it," rise to the occasion,
exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the
correct response to death.

We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I

be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I
be able even to get dressed that day?  We have no way of
knowing that this will not be the issue.  We have no way of 
knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of
narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of
others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion.

Nor can we know ahead of of the fact (and here lies the
heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it
and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the
void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession
of moments during which we will confront the experience
of meaninglessness itself.

Joan Didion
From: The Year of Magical Thinking
with thanks to Death Deconstructed

Joan suddenly lost her husband from a heart attack as they
 sat down to dinner after being at the hospital with their
deathly ill daughter.

~

Personal Note: My mother suddenly lost my father to a fatal
heart attack back in 1985, just 7 yrs after quintuple by-pass surgery.
 He was sitting in his chair in the living room in the middle of the
 night, unable to sleep, after returning from a road trip to the
 east coast to see family - which evidently proved to be too
stressful for his heart. My mother had gone to bed and dreamed
 that she had lost her right arm.  She woke up at around 3am to
find him dead in his chair...  Attempts to resuscitate him failed.
She basically sleep-walked through the next year, often
standing in the kitchen watching for his car to come down
the dirt road...  I can't imagine what that must have been like,
although I have known grief from many other kinds of losses...
And the world now continues in a collective grief from
the millions of deaths due to COVID... So many lives
impacted...  No matter what our "spiritual" beliefs are
about death, or whether there is life after death or not...
 we are still all impacted by death or loss both
personally and collectively...

~

Photo from the Internet

The Ancient Path of Dying - Sam Keen

 The basic motivation for human behavior is the need
to control our basic anxiety, to deny death in a world
where we are fated to die.  This is the terror: to have
emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness
of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning
for life and self-expression - and with all this yet die.

Since the terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire
to keep it unconscious.  The "vital lie character"
[personality] is the first line of defense that protects
us from the painful awareness of our helplessness...

Every child creates a personality...
So long as we stay obediently within the defense
mechanisms of our personality, the "character armor"
we feel safe and are able to pretend to avoid death.
And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended
fortress of "character" [personality].

But there's an ancient path of wisdom: practice dying.

Cultivating an awareness of death leads to disillusionment,
loss of the "character armor", and a conscious choice to
abide in the face of terror [death].  Instead of hiding
within the illusion of "character" we see our impotence
and vulnerability.  Living with the voluntary consciousness
of death, we can choose despair or trust the "vitality of the
cosmos", in the unknown god of life whose mysterious
"purpose" is expressed in the overwhelming drama of
cosmic evolution.

Sam Keen

From the Forward to
The Denial Of Death
by Earnest Becker
1973

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Rest the Nervous System - Matt Licata

 We've been through so much over the last year [or more]...
not only personally, but culturally and collectively as well...

It's been a slow continuous drip of cortisol/adrenaline into
the collective, a deep unsettling restlessness, on the one
hand, and on the other a collapse; an alternation between
hyper-vigilance and shutting down.

Many of us are experiencing a [deep] tiredness, not only
physically, but a soul-level sort of exhaustion, where what
we thought we knew about ourselves, who we are and what
 matters most to us, what we're doing here, and where we're
 headed...  so much of this has really been called into
question, been dismantled, and in may ways fallen apart...

There is a deep longing to rest and to feel safe again in
our bodies...

It is important to slow down - to mourn not only the losses
of health and life, but also the dream of the way we thought
it was all going to turn out.

The rebirth part of the death-rebirth cycle is embodied
through our willingness and capacity to grieve.  The
portal to new life opens through conscious, embodied
lamentation, as we gather the shards of the heart and
collect them in a holy vase...  as we prepare for what
will emerge out of the ashes of dissolution...

Matt Licata

From: An Invitation to Rest Your Nervous System

Resting Your Nervous System Webinar info

~

Photo from the Internet digitally altered

The Place of Rest - Frank Ostaseski

We often think of rest as something that will come to us
when everything else in our lives is complete: at the end of
the day, when we go on holiday, or get through our to-do
lists.  We imagine that we can only find rest by changing our
circumstances.  [But] we can find a place of rest within us,
without having to alter the conditions of our lives.

This place of rest is always available to us.  We need only 
turn toward it.  It is experienced when we bring full attention,
without distraction, to this moment, to this activity.  After
some time of doing this, we can come to know this
spaciousness as a regular part of our lives.  It manifests
as an aspect of us that is never sick, is not born, and does
not die...

When we are caught in a time driven mentality or tumbling
unconsciously from one moment to the next, we become a
prisoner of our thoughts.  We get trapped in a jail of our own
construction. We want to spin plates, juggle balls, and live
two dreams at once.  We end up being addicted to busy.  We
confuse rest with non-productivity, and laziness.  We race 
from one activity to the next.  Yet we do it all in a continuous
 state of partial attention, imagining we are accomplishing
more, when in reality we are living less.

Rest is found when we are present instead of letting our
minds wander through the hallways of fear, worry and
anxiousness.  Rest comes when we become more by doing
less, when we don't allow the urgent crowd out the important.
It is the result of a decluttering of the mind and decoupling
from fixed views.

If we drop beneath the surface of our minds, we encounter
a vast, serene calmness.  We don't need to be swept away
by the surface currents.  We can find a natural place of rest...

Surface mind reacts.  When you travel into the calm depths,
the place of rest, you can act from a place of wisdom and
compassion, allowing whatever needs to happen, happen...
We surrender our strategies and resistance and open to
what is unfolding...

We come to rest in the depth of our Essential Nature.

Frank Ostaseski
From: The Five Invitations

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Problems - Rigel Dawson

 Sometimes a problem is only a problem because you keep
trying to solve it.  Once you accept what can't be fixed,
it ceases to be a problem and simply becomes a reality
that exists...

Rigel Dawson
from pinterest

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Beginning Again - Fred LaMotte

Sometimes you need it all
to start over again...

So you take, no, receive
one breath.
The you remember,
this is the stream
of gratitude
that bathed us all
in the beginning.

~

The scentless nectar
that sweetens the rose
and desert sage alike,
invisible sap
that ripens all faces
to ochre, mahogany,
ginger and fire.

~

No vow, no sacrifice required.
Just keep pouring the ghee
of attention
into the flame of your body.
What thrills a distant star?
The jolt of coming Om
to rest in your heart.
Which is surely what you relished
when you were very young,
your sadhana was being
just as you are...

Sometimes you need it all
to begin again.
So listen and breathe,
take, no, receive

~

There now, it's done,
and the world is new.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

Photo - Laurent Berthier