Infinite Spirit/Divine Flow - Trine

There is an Infinite Spirit of Life behind all [life] -
a divine flow from the Infinite Source through the individual.
If this is true then the life that comes by this inflow to man
is necessarily the same in essence.  It is a difference in degree.

Our life as individual spirits is continually coming from this
Infinite Source by means of this divine inflow.  If our lives are
directly from this Infinite Spirit that is manifested in the life
of each [then it]is identical in quality with that Source, just as a
 drop of water from the ocean is, in nature, in characteristics,
identical with the ocean, its source.  How could it be otherwise?

Doesn't it not then follow that the only limitations are the
limitations he [man] sets to himself, by virtue of no knowing
himself?  Recognizing our true identity brings our life into
harmony with the same force.

The great central fact in human life, is the coming into a
conscious vital realization or our oneness with the Infinite Life,
and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine flow.

Ralph Waldo Trine

From: In Tune with The Infinite

published in 1897

~

Photo Aurora Borealis from a calendar

 

The Great Suffering - A Simple Man

The Great Suffering is one of many perceptions and sensations
felt in the body, and happens simultaneously with the 
awareness of the Beauty around us - in the formless Field of
Awareness.

Everything is overlaid with acquired knowledge, and the
psychological and somatic conditioning.  The immediacy of
our experience becomes veiled, overlaid by unconscious,
reflexive conditioning.  The overlay applies to the totality of
experience and what it feels like to be alive.

The Great Suffering comes about as we learn of the darker
aspects of Nature and humankind.  The aspects of the Great
Suffering are not innate elements.  Nothing originally overlays
our Naked Essence. Can we come to an Experience of Being
that we have known before the constituents of The Great
Suffering clouded our Essence?

Our Essence is the Essential me unshrouded by all that has been
acquired over the course of a life; all that is not native to us.
It is the feeling of Aliveness.  You can feel yourself.  You can
feel the Field of Awareness Itself - which is the Feeling of
yourself...  You have to keep bringing your Attention back to
feeling yourself as the Source, which is prior to the arising of
thought...

Who then am I?

The Formless Aliveness, the Essential self , recognized and
remembered.  

Excerpts from: An Affair of the Heart
by - A Simple Man

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Story of Akhilandeshwari - Laura Amazzone

Art: Peter Weltevrede

Akhilandeshwari is a South Asian Goddess figure in the Shakta
Tantric Tradition. According to that tradition She is a vast field of
 Consciousness - a force of Ultimate Reality - the Great Mother
Herself. 
 Her name means "Never not broken."

It is hard not to feel the brokenness of the world with all the
man-made crises, conflict, disasters and devastation happening in
the world; not to mention the personal dramas that play out in
 our lives.  We are all impacted by the global crises of these times.

What is needed to help find our way through?  How can our
breakdowns lead to breakthroughs? How do we approach the
challenges, pain and difficulty that overwhelm some of us? 
How do we transform our  own fears and personal  sense of
 impotence into something meaningful,
empowering and liberating?

[It is believed that] Akhilandeshwari can help us move through
the very challenges and difficulties in life.  She helps us to find
that  light of our Essence  through the cracks of the chaos.  She is
the power of the Sri Yantra, an ancient Hindu symbol of Union
 [with] Divine  Consciousness.

Brokenness seems to suggest separation, but if we look closely
 we can see  the felt sense of what is ever-present beneath the
cracks that  can lead to our own sense of internal balance and
union within.

One of Her many gifts is to remind us of the power to be
found in our brokenness.  From the Shakta Tantric perspective
 Akhilandeshwari brings and removes the pain and suffering that
 break  us down. She guards over all those experiences in life that
can knock  the wind out of us and send us reeling, crashing down,
 wondering how we will ever get up.  She brings and removes the
 deep sense  of brokenness, the crushing pressure on one's heart,
the endless mental anguish, to  remember what's Real.  Our
"Never not broken" experience  can be a fierce and painful
 process.  However, She gives us courage to face the many little
 deaths that happen repeatedly in  our life.  If we surrender and allow
 ourselves to go to the heart of our pain, we can find refuge in our
 vulnerability  and in our imperfections.

Spiritual growth and freedom can be gained through difficult
experiences and in the invaluable lessons they provide there is
always a gift in the pain we experience.

Akhilandeshwari is depicted as riding a crocodile, which represents
 our primal instincts, especially fear, and our false pretenses and roles
 we play to appear "perfect" and "whole."  She destroys all illusions
 and delusions, so we can come back to our Essence. The intensity
of our experience is to disorient our egos so that we drop our
attachments  and come into our authentic nature.

When we remember the unlimited Space behind our brokenness we
form new patterns and ways of being.  The journey that unfolds is
deep, mysterious, soul affirming and often intensely creative.

Akhilandeshwari breaks us down and from the depths of despair,
we come back to fullness and wholeness - our Essence.

Laura Amazzone

Excerpt from an article
Published Dec 2015 in the Sutra Journal

 

"Spiritual Practice" - Frank Ostaseski

Authentic "spiritual practice" is not about maintaining high
altered states, transcending the body, bypassing difficult emotions,
or healing all that remains unresolved within us.  "Spiritual
practice" helps us settle into the utter simplicity of being ourselves...
The healing happens when we bring awareness to the places
that have been hardened in us through the conditioned habits
of grasping, resistance and avoidance.

Mindfulness [awareness] is the deconditioning [of those habits].
Then things are free to be as they are.  We allow the difficult,
dark and dense.  We become more intimate with our full humanity
and discover an ever-deeper, vast sense of wholeness.

Being who you are can only arise from
accepting where you are.

Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

~

Photo from the internet

 

Trust...

Religion is a vehicle;
Spirituality is a vehicle;
Metaphysics is a vehicle;
A Guru/Teacher is a vehicle;
Quantum Physics is a vehicle;
Creativity and Art is a vehicle;
Yoga and Meditation is a vehicle;
and maybe Psychology is a vehicle;
tending to our traumas and wounds;
Maybe telling our stories of challenge
and difficulty is also a vehicle for us to
discover what is true for ourselves...

We don't have to follow a prescribed path,
or one teacher, or one way, or one story, but
use all "ways" to access the truth of existence;
the truth of your Being...

Life itself is the vehicle...

Trust your own way...
Trust your own experience...

Sometimes that means we have to go to the
darker places within for the truth to be revealed...

Mystic Meandering
Jan. 21, 2023

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Hope - Frank Ostaseski

Hope is a subtle, sometimes unconscious attitude of the heart
and mind that is essential in this human life.  Experts differ
on whether hope is an emotion, a belief, a conscious choice,
or all three.  I think of hope as an innate quality of being, as
open, active trust in life that refuses to quit.

When hope is misunderstood, it can plunge us into delusion
and become a hindrance to facing the facts of life.  To discern
the real value of hope, we must draw a line between hope and
expectation.  Hope is an optimizing force and moves us and all
of life toward harmony.  It is an abiding state of being, a hidden
wellspring within us.  This version of hope is a basic human
need.

Yet our usual kind of hope is little more than wishful thinking.
It's frequently tied to an an almost childlike belief, sometimes
even blind faith, that an external agency or authority will bring
about what we desire.  Driven by our preference for a different
 set of conditions, this conventional view of hope is a rejection
of what is present for us in the here and now.

Ordinary hope disguised as expectation is fixated on specific
outcomes.  This hope gets conflated with the desire for a
certain future result.  Attaching our happiness to a specific
future result causes us all sorts of suffering..... attachment to
outcome posing as hope interferes with our ability to be present
to our experience of life as it is unfolding.

Mature hope takes us inside ourselves and toward finding the 
good in the experience.  Mature hope requires both a clear
intention and a simultaneous letting go.  This hope is not
dependent on outcome.  The hope is in the potential for our
awakened [or skillful] response, not in things turning out
a particular way - and we are no longer trapped by our
conventional view of hope.  We leave room for surprise.
The energizing quality of mature hope helps us to remain
open to the possibility that while life may not turn out the 
way we first thought, opportunities we never imagined may
also arise.

Frank Ostaseski
Buddhist Teacher

from: The Five Invitations

 

Courage - Fra Giovanni

[.....] The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet
within our reach, is joy.  There is radiance in darkness, could
we but see.  And to see we have only to look...

Life is a generous giver.  But we, judging its gifts by their
covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard.  Remove
the covering, and you find beneath it a living splendor, woven
of love by wisdom...

Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel's hand that brings
it to you.  Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, the gift
is there and the wonder of an overwhelming presence.  Your
joys too, be not content with them as joys.  They, too, conceal
divine gifts.

Life is full of beauty beneath its covering, you will find earth
but cloaks your heaven.  Courage then to claim it.  But courage
you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together,
wending through unknown country home.

Fra Giovanni
1513

with thanks to Love Is A Place

~

"We're just walking each other home."

Ram Dass

~

Photo from the internet

 

Eternity - Joseph Campbell

Eternity isn't some later time.
Eternity isn't even a long time.
Eternity is that dimension of here
and now that all thinking in temporal
terms cuts off.  The experience of eternity
is right here, in all things...is the function of
life...

Joseph Campbell
from: The Power of Myth

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Golden Eternity - Jack Kerouac

I have lots of things to tell you now, in case we never
meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me
under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter
moonlit night.

It said - It's all a dream,  Everything is Ecstasy inside.  We
just don't know it because of our thinking-minds.  But
in our true blissful essence is known that everything is
alright forever and forever.

Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop,
stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the secret Silence
inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember
the bliss your forgot:
There is only the Golden Eternity
You are the Golden Eternity

It is all one awakened thing.  I call it the Golden Eternity.
It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal
self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an
idea, a mortal idea.  That which passes into everything is
one thing.  It's a dream already ended.  There's nothing to
be afraid of.  I know this from staring at mountains months
on end.  They never show any expression, they are like
empty space.  Do you think the emptiness of space will
ever crumble away?  Mountains will crumble away, but
the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence
of mind, the vastness, empty and awake, will
never crumble away...

Jack Kerouac
The Portable Jack Kerouac
and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Peaceful Presence - a meandering...

Suddenly peace overtook me and I was no longer
engaged in mental thrashings about life circumstances...
at least in that momentary, fleeting moment...

And I thought to myself:
Finally, Peace has come!

I actually fell into a twilight sleep -
aware that I was at last at peace/peaceful,
without trying to be peaceful, just basking
in the unbidden feeling of being at peace.
It was wonderful -
and somehow I knew that everything is deeply okay;
deeply peaceful at its core; at its essence...

Was this real, a dream, a mystical experience?

I understood that underneath the tempests of the mind
there is an abiding peace at the core of our being;
lost to us most of the time, to our awareness,
by the crashing waves of the mind's turmoil, but can be
felt in between the waves; like the pause between the
breaths.  There is a peaceful pause that sustains itself

 - even if not felt...

Everything is at peace at its core, but you can't try to get
there, you can only allow it to come through, to just
receive it when it emerges/arises on its own within,
and make yourself available to it when it does...

If only for one fleeting moment...

Mystic Meandering 
Jan. 7, 2023
around 3pm

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Openness - Frank Ostaseski

Openness.....is a willingness to look into what arises,
to work with it, and relate to it with curiosity.

Openness doesn't reject or get attached to a particular
experience or view.  It is about allowing experience to
unfold, having tolerance of the unknown, letting go of
expectations.

Welcoming what is, as it is, we move toward reality.
We may not like or agree with all that we encounter.
However, when we argue with reality we suffer.
We waste our energy and exhaust ourselves with the
insistence that life be otherwise.  We often have little
control over the external circumstances of our own lives.
However, we have a great deal of choice about how we
relate to and learn from the cards life deals us.  We build
resilience by allowing ourselves to experience what we
are feeling in any given situation, whether good or bad.
Until we come to accept life with all its madness and
inspiration, we feel cut off, separate and isolated.

Acceptance is not resignation.  It is an opening - to
a skillful response to life.

Opening allows experiences to enter and allow for our
responses to emerge and be expressed...

Frank Ostaseski

from The Five Invitations

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Life Suspended...

I don't remember winter
being so grey - even when
the sun is shining...

So frozen, so cold, hard crusted;
which may only be a reflection
of my own inner landscape.
I have been frozen lately -
iced in by life circumstances....

And then, out of the blue,
standing in the kitchen
under a moonlit sky light
in the dark of night,
everything softened -
as I thought about "the visitor"
sitting alone in her chair,
suffering and struggling,
mentally and physically,
day in and day out...

Sadness arose for her aloneness,
and hard life - self imposed 
by life choices made long ago -
for which she now pays the consequences -
or so I tell myself...

Then Compassion overtook me -
and my heart melted, released of its
hard line - and dare I say "love" arose
for "the visitor" who sits alone in her chair,
her body and mind breaking down;
memory and mental capacity quickly waning -
struggling day in and day out;
just sitting -
solitaire and TV
 her constant companions...

A life suspended...

Mystic Meandering
January 6, 2023

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Great Silence - Robert Sardello

We have a strong tendency to imagine Silence as the
absence of sound.  This imagination deprives Silence of
being anything in itself and makes it an emptiness, a void...

But Silence was here before anything else.  It is the most
primary phenomenon of existence, both palpably something
and seemingly nothing.

Silence is prior to sound, not the cessation of sound.  It is
already present.  If we drop into quietness for just a moment,
we feel the presence of Silence as in invitation.  We are being
invited into a new way of being.

Silence is not merely the void from which things spring up;
it is a living presence...  As we enter the mystery of Silence,
its presence resonates throughout the fibers of our flesh,
while extending beyond the flesh...  The inward silence of
solitude meets with the Great Silence of Cosmic Wisdom...

Silence bears the wholeness we keep looking for.  It is around
us and within us.  It goes to the deepest depths of the soul
and to the outermost reaches of the cosmos uniting in our heart.

The experience comes with astonishing intimacy and feels like
the finding of a long lost beloved..

We, along with everything else, are within Silence.  This realm
of Silence is pregnant with the ever-living Mystery.  It is the
deepest feeling of communing, touched by the ineffable, that
keeps us intimately bound with the truth of our core being,
the very essence of our being; an interiority that has been
waiting for us.

~

Silence has a rhythm all its own.  The currents of Silence
weave polarities and opposites and contradictions together.

Within Silence everything resonates in true intimacy and
mystery.

When we perceive through the depths of Silence we discover
the invisible body of the world in which everything is nurtured
into existence at every moment.  We discover ourselves as
participants in the Great Silence.  We are not detached observers
of an independent phenomenon, for we exist within the Silence
we are observing.  The world of subjective experience and outer
presence dissolve into one field.

When we incline toward Silence a resonance is set up within
our heart, prompting an inclination of our heart to enter
deeper into the realm of Silence...  In the interior space of the
etheric heart we feel the currents of Silence as an endless
intimate infinity that we are within.  We are held within a
tender, loving, invisible presence...
A vivid Presence of Silence...

Excerpts from: Silence, The Mystery of Wholeness

by Robert Sardello

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Silence of the Universe - Chet Raymo

It is a thin membrane that separates us from chaos...
The space between the stars is silence...

How are we to understand the silence of the universe?
Beyond earth's sun of our sky is silent.
Stars blow themselves to smithereens;
we hear nothing.

The fireball of creation exploded from a pinprick of
infinite energy.  There is no sound track.
The universe is silent; a primal silence.

The silence of the stars is the silence of creation
and recreation.  It is the silence of that which
cannot be named...

Chet Raymo
The Soul of the Night

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The "Cosmic Womb"...

Laying down the burdens and chaos of existence,
coming to rest in the 
"Mother Energies": the "originating
feminine energies" of the Cosmos...

Unfettered, Unbuffeted
by the strain of life circumstances of the day...

Embraced, and tangibly infused by
this Primordial Source Energy - Always...

This undefinable, formless "Cosmic Womb"
invites this meandering mystic in.
 I stumble across the threshold of a doorless door...

into an Ineffable space that holds me...

There is no chaos here,
no troublesome thoughts of the mind;
yet "thinking" still occurs
as mental images and constructs
of present life occurrences pass through,
which hold no reign in the mind -
 in this Great Womb of Silence...

The past - just fleeting memories passing through
with no mental or emotional attachment - surprisingly;
like wandering through an unfamiliar land...
The shift to a new orientation - re-framing perspectives,
untangling what I perceived to be real is still occurring...
A new spark is felt within...

Pathways of the Primal Mother Energies leave their
imprint in the brain and body - very subtly...

The body tries to self-correct after a life-time of walking
the energetic History Trail of Family Dysfunction in physicality -

core survival issues, that have left residual scars - beginning to release...

Realizing that All That Is is this exquisite Primal Energy
expressing Itself through every experience; experiencing Itself
in many forms; morphing Itself into different expressions,
softening the hard residues into compassion and kindness that heals...

Now beginning to experience the fluidity of the "Mother Energy"
that innately and intimately flows through me/us - like an
Aurora Borealis subtly streaming through this body,
leaving its own illumined energetic signature...
A new spark of Life is lit...

Mystic Meandering

~

Reality cannot be mapped.
It is not a single static truth,
but rather an endless,
unfolding mystery.
It is alive, dynamic,
and constantly being expressed
through form and formlessness.

Frank Ostaseski
From The Five Invitations