A Sacred Process - Matt Licata

In each moment the sacred process of death and rebirth is
playing out within us.  With each breath something in us is
dying: some aspect of who we think we are or what we're
doing here, and idea about how life was going to turn out.
[the loss of your faculties :)]

In the face of this dissolution, the question isn't so much how
can we be reborn, but will we participate in death,  fully, and
with an open heart, paving the way for new forms to emerge,
trusting that rebirth will take place according to a timeline
originating far away in the stars.

In times of transition, our tendency is to rush to rebirth,
 quickly back into the known, in an urgent attempt to cure,
maintain, or heal that which is dying (in us), that which longs
to transform.  It is so natural to resist falling apart in our need
to put it all back together.[the way it was].

But it is only from the core of the womb of death - a death 
tended to consciously - that re-birth can come into being.

The invitation, then, which we can at times hear clearly,
during the dark of night.....is to not abandon "death" in our
rush to be re-born [into the light].

To not short circuit the intelligence and creativity that death is,
and to remember that rebirth is not possible without the
creativity of dissolution, without the alchemical disintegration.

Allow the death some time to unfold, to share its poetry and
its fragrances, which are not partial, but of a light that is whole.
In those times in our lives when things are being rearranged
and reorganized inside and around us we can attune to what
is truly being asked, whether is is to cure death and reassemble
the known, or to allow the forms of love safe passage to 
continue their journey...

To give them permission to dance and play and participate
fully in the sacred return...

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Moon thru skylight

 

Hold Onto The Thread - William Stafford

 

There's a thread you follow.  It goes among

things that change.  But it doesn't change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see..

While you hold it you can't get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can do stop time's unfolding.

You don't ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford
From: The Way It Is 1998

William Stafford's journey with words
began most mornings before sunrise.
This simple poem was written 26 days
before he passed.

~

Photo from the Internet

This is an actual bridge (thread) in
Vietnam - held by huge hands...

Real Acceptance - Henry Rollins

If the world gives you the blues, if you wake up in the
middle of the night with waves of fear and senseless
panic washing over you, I am your friend.  If you're
overcome by a desperation that makes your mouth
open for a scream that never comes out but just freezes
your face in mute despair, then you and I have something
in common.  If you can't understand them for the life of
you, even though you've tried so hard, when that
dislocation makes you feel like you're the only one of
your species on the planet, I know I can confide in you.
If this endless ghetto of lies and heart break, this life-
long run of fences and flickering neon signs and night
sweats makes you feel like stopping, just stopping,
wait.  Wait...

You don't have to tell me your name.
You don't have to prove yourself to me.
I accept you...

Henry Rollins

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Love and Blessings to all who are struggling
in body, mind and spirit...

_/\_

MM

~

Polar Bears Hugging Photo from the Internet

 

Hold to "The Silence..."

Late at night,
holding my hands over my Heart,
I hold close to The Silence
when all is quiet;
my comfort, companion & Friend.

It's been a couple of years since we've
held each other intimately;
the intimacy of the deep
Silence of Being within...

The abstractions of "non-duality"
do not help me now,
they leave me - untouched, cold.

I'm on a different path now,
that is not yet clear to me...

I want to be deeply touched - by
the Ineffable Mystery - The Silence - at
the core of my Being; to be moved again
by the intimacy of Sacred Silence -
that I once closely knew...

It takes an environment of quietness to quiet the mind -
from the "noise", distractions, and stress of daily living;
accessing a sanctuary of Divine Silence within
so that I may be gently touched by The Mystery
and directly experience Its Fullness....

Not a conceptual Silence - but tangible;
Not an abstraction, but a Living Presence,
that can be touched - that wants to be found...

It waits for you...

Mystic Meandering
Dec. 11, 2024

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Pulse of Life...

\

Perfect Pulsing Silence...
Utter Stillness...
Breath-giving Life...

This is what I come to sit for;
to sit in utter and complete Silence of Being -
the pulse of Life;
to feel and sense "The Silence",
to feel its Aliveness,
to hear its Song...

Sitting in the silence of not-knowing
puts one in a place of really listening,
with no agenda or expectation,
leaving the space open for "The Silence" to speak,
to calm the mind and soul
and sing Its Song to the Heart...

I listen deeply for the Song of Silence...

A breeze touches my arm gently from the window
inviting me to stop and listen more deeply...

I gaze inward
to "The Song of Silence" within,
that is mirrored
in the sounds of silence in the night,
just outside my window...

It's all the same Silence, infusing everything...

I feel "The Rhythm" of Silence begin -

I bask in my chair
listening to the pulsing Silence
within and without,
feeling Its familiar Rhythm
through my body,
feeling the dance of intimacy begin again...

Nothing disturbs The Silence...
Nothing disturbs the depth of It...
Nothing prevents Its Song
from being sung ~

In this intimate Silence I am reminded that
everything occurs within this Divine Silence.
All life, all breath, all death...
 All movement occurs within this vast space of Silence
that WE  ARE...

In "The Sacred Silence"
I know everything is living according to Its
natural order - is following Its natural order,
including this life I call mine...

All life is being lived
by the hush of this Ineffable Mystery...
that birthed the Cosmos...

All is the pulse of the Great Silence ~

the Pulse of Life ~

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
May 2011
updated Dec 12, 2024

~

I know I've posted this one many times,
under a different title,
but *I* needed to hear it again :)
to type it out...

And actually made some changes...
May it soothe your Soul...

_/\_

 

 

The Decline of My So-called life - a meandering...

The other day I got up as usual and did the usual morning routine
with my sister - I'm her caregiver...

I went upstairs to post a blog post - and needed to prepare
several photos for posting.

I sat in front of the computer, just staring at the screen,
not knowing what to do...

I had totally forgotten how to prepare a photo -
what the steps were.

I sat several minutes, blank, until I started to *try* to
 figure it out again...

I couldn't make my mind work!

I tried different things on the computer
until I began to recognize the steps...

It was a shock to me that my mind could do this! -
could go totally blank on something I've done
for 15 years!

I'll be honest, no amount of "spiritual practice" can

prepare you for the sudden, startling awareness of
your mind's (and body's ) decline -
"spirituality" will not save you
from the natural order of life and death...

It starts off slowly - forgetting this or that,
a memory here, a word or name there;
where you put this or that thing, finding it
eventually, but not in its usual place...

Nothing can prepare you for the frustration of
your decline...

When your legs don't want to work-
and you stumble and bumble across the floor;
Thoughts of wheelchair enter your mind -
or having to move to a one level home -
even worse - assisted living...

My once "got it all together", 
"I'm on top of things" life
is falling apart,
a little at a time -
has been for several years.

Then suddenly there's a cliff - and
Humpty Dumpty starts falling off the wall.
What's worse is I'm aware of it - and know

that: all the king's horses and all the king's men
will not be able to put "me" together again...

And so I breathe,
and try to remember 
that there is a Deeper Reality
beyond my experience,
and try to rest there...

But I wonder if I will forget that too...

Mystic Meandering
Dec. 8, 2024

At least I can still write -
writing is my "therapy"
when falling apart :)
although the poetry
doesn't emerge 
like it used to...

 

Aging's Different Light - Lisel Mueller

 

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften the blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist, and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin and clothes 
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller
1924-2020

Original title - "Monet Refuses Operation"

~

This poem was written about the painter Claude Monet
who had cataracts.  When his doctor wanted to perform
cataract surgery, Monet refused.  He wanted to paint light.
He saw the blurred edges of everything as interconnection.

from Awakin.org

Photo - Mystic Meandering
street light through ice on window...

What are we? - Misc

 

A fleeting, intricate presence riding a tiny speck of water and
rock, out here in the dark, sailing the ship of wonder ever
more deeply into the void from which we came, that is our
true home and mysterious destination.

Whitley Strieber  & Jeffrey J. Kripal
The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

Photo - Johannes Plenio 

with thanks to Love Is  A Place

A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing
river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing
constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.

Carl Rogers
Becoming a Person

With thanks to Love Is A Place

Photo - Mystic Meandering

We are slowed down sound and light waves; a walking bundle of
frequencies tuned into the cosmos.

We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and
our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play
their music.

Albert Einstein

with thanks to Love Is A Place

Photo Mystic Meandering

A person is neither a thing nor a process, but an opening
through which the Absolute can manifest.

Martin Heidegger
Love Expands

With thanks to Love Is A Place

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Matter and Spirit - Misc...

Of what is the body made?  It is made of emptiness and rhythm.
At the ultimate heart of the body, at the heart of the world, there
is no solidity.  Once again, there is only the dance.

At the unimaginable heart of the atom, the compact nucleus,
we have found no solid object, rather a dynamic pattern of
tightly confined energy vibrating perhaps 1022 times a second:
a dance...

George Leonard
excerpt from Wake up and Laugh

with thanks to Love is a Place

Photo - Mystic Meandering

In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a 
world where all things are at rest in the same way.  Then a tree
becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of
whose riches we can only catch glimpses...

Dag Hammarskjold
Swedish Diplomat

with thanks to Love is A Place

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto

a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single
creature comes into being, shines through it as through a 
window.  According to the kind and size of the window,
less or more light enters the world..

Aziz Nasafi
Persian mystical thinker

with thanks to Love is a Place

Photo - Mystic Meandering

All that lives is spirit and all that dies is matter;
and all that dies in spirit is matter and all that lives
in matter is spirit...

Hazrat Inayat Khan
Sufi Mystic

from - The Mysticism of Sound and Music

With thanks to Rays

Photo - unknown

 

What Calls to You? - Dorothy Hunt

How does the Sacred call to you?  Through deep longing?
Through loving? Through the birth of an infant or the death of
a beloved friend? Through the silence of a forest or the
magnificence waves crashing at sea? Through a teacher or
teaching?  A guru or a God?  A scripture or a spiritual traditions?
Through art, poetry, music? Playing with your dog, sitting with
your cat?  Through a meditation practice or practice of service? Or
does the Sacred calling come when you are most desperate, most
vulnerable, unable to know what to do, where to go, how to address
the pain you are suffering or the suffering you see all around you?
Does it call you to your knees when you don't know where else
to turn?

What if the Sacred is actually calling us every moment: Come; see!
See what you are, what this moment is.  Come back Home.
Return - again and again and again!

Many of us think that a sacred calling is a calling to "do." but my
sense is that the Sacred calls us to "be,"and in the "being" the doing
 happens spontaneously. 

.

Being a human expression of life does not mean we have no
perception of choice, or of  moving toward or away from our
experience of the Sacred, toward or away from what is most true
within.  Rather than a calling to be something, perhaps the Sacred
is calling us to be, to see, to respond from what is most sacred 
within us.  Perhaps the Sacred calling calls us to come out  of
hiding - hiding our true self, hiding our true radiance, hiding the
Light that is here shining...

How does the Sacred call to you?  What does it beckon you to
discover, to sense, to be?  Perhaps the Sacred calling is not your
life's work. but discovering who/what is actually living life - your
life, to be precise!  

Dorothy Hunt
Buddhist Teacher

with thanks to No Mind's Land

Photo - taken by my brother off Salisbury Beach, Mass

 

Gobble Trouble - A Turkey Story

Only wanting to save myself time,
and not have to cook a turkey for hours,
I went on-line...

I thought I had planned well ahead...

ordering a"pre-cooked" turkey instead...
from a local grocery -
to be picked up
Thanksgiving mid-day
ready to serve...

But I guess I Googled the wrong key word
assuming "pre-cooked" meant the bird
was cooked in the store and placed under
a warming hood...

But no!

The story did not go the way I saw it in *my* mind...

Sent my husband to pick up the "cooked" turkey
at the appointed time...
Arriving home -- I saw the look in his eye -
that said something had gone awry...

The "cooked" turkey was frozen - he said...
We were both dismayed at how this had played...

I called the store, there must have been a mistake!
But it had closed, so their employees
could enjoy a Thanksgiving dinner plate...

I sputtered and agitated
wondering what I should do...

Instructions said thaw in refrigerator
2-4 days!  But that wouldn't do...

You'd a thought when I talked to
customer service pre-ordering the thing
she would have warned me it would be fro-zen
 but I didn't understand her Mandarin...

So it sat in the sink - only an 8 pounder,
but hard as a rock -
while I dealt with the shock...

I turned on the faucet following the sink thawing
instructions, which would take 4 hours! - or longer...
Still doable - I thought - but the pressure turned up
my self-imposed holiday expectations,
for a Thanksgiving feast
that was turning into a fait accompli...

Two hours into thawing I began to stress
about the mess I had gotten into,
making assumptions,
trying to live up to "tradition" - in my own
Thanksgiving rendition -
sitting in the sink hard as a rock,
the Turkey that is :)

A command decision had to be made.
Thanksgiving dinner would be delayed.
All 3 of us agreed without much sorrow,
after all it's just another day, my sister
reminded, and there's always tomorrow.

So now what to do bout - dinner...

Home made bunless hamburgers and 
roasted red potatoes
would have to make do...

While the Turkey gobble sat in the sink
waiting to thaw through...

I finally remembered, as I lay down my head,
that it's not about the meal
on "Turkey day" - 
but real gratitude instead...

Mystic Meandering
Nov. 28, 2024

Photo - the Turkey

 

A Heart Warmer...

These photos are so heart warming.  We received them from an
online friend back in 2011, and I can't even remember who.  But

I think they are from England, and I was so moved by them
that I wanted to share them again, after 13 years...

This is the short story that came with these pictures:  Lily is a 
Great Dane that has been blind since a bizarre medical condition
required that she have both eyes removed.  For the last 5 years,
Maddison, another Great Dane, has been her sight.  The two are,
of course inseparable...

This was the caption at the bottom of the photos:

"People will forget what you said; People will forget what you
did.  But people will never forget how you made them feel."

~~

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives
means the most to us, we often find that it is those who,
instead of giving much advice, solutions or cures,
have chosen rather to share our pain
and touch our wounds
with a gentle hand.

The friend who can be silent with us
in a moment of despair or confusion,
who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement,
who can tolerate not knowing,
not curing,
not healing,

and face with us the reality of our powerlessness,
that is a friend who cares."

Henri Nouwen

~

Wishing you many blessings of love,
especially in these challenging and
 less than loving times...

MM

 

Love Cries...

Love Cries...

For loss of the innocence of children
traumatized by
the world as it is...

For the compassion of strangers
lifting you up and walking you to
the "finish line" when you fall...

For the little things that touch your Heart
and open it - again;
a kind word, a gentle touch...

When the heart softens,
as the world hardens...

For fellow humans caught in unbearable
suffering - by those wielding delusional power...

For unexpected blessings
when all seems dark...

When you wake to a sense of inexplicable peace
in the midst of personal dis-ease and chaos...

When you hear the caring voice of a friend
you thought was lost to you,
suddenly call on the phone...

Love hears the Cries of our Hearts...

Love feels...

Love knows Itself...

Mystic Meandering
Nov. 20, 2024

~

My next post will have a story about
the dogs in the photo above with more
photos.  One is blind!  It is definitely
is a heart opener...

 

The Cosmic 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 Light
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 Being ~

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
Aug 1, 2001

~

Photo from the James Web Telescope

 

Religion and Spirituality - Wayne Teasdale

There is a difference between
religion and spirituality.
Spirituality refers to an individual's
solitary search for and discovery of
the Absolute or the Divine...

[however one knows that to be]
It involves direct mystical experience of "God"
[however one knows that to be],
or realization of the vast Awareness.
Spirituality carries with it a conviction
that the transcendent is real...

Religion is more a social organism of
worship and ritual...

We need direct contact with The Divine or Ultimate
Mystery.  The focus of Religion is on worship at a
corporate level - carriers of tradition rather than
the mystical life...

Spirituality can be profoundly transformative when it
inspires in us an attitude of surrender to The Mystery.
Spirituality draws us into the depths of our Being,
where we come face to face with ourselves, our
weaknesses and the Ultimate Mystery.

Religions depend on institutions to make decisions for
us through conformity to external religiosity and the
safe routines of liturgy and ritual.

The necessary shifts in consciousness requires a new
approach to spirituality that transcends past religious
cultures of fragmentation and isolation.
We don't need to go into monasteries to become mystics.
We need only to realize and activate that Essential part
of our Being...

How we make the journey is what spirituality is all
about, using all the resources from all the religious 
traditions available to us...

Finding our own path.

Finding a way to relate to the Divine [however one knows
that to be].  The evolution of an individual's spirituality
is a mysterious and intimate matter.  It originates in the heart,
in deep stirrings that represent an insatiable longing of the 
heart [for Source]...

We are created for the spiritual journey...

Wayne Teasdale
from: Mystic Heart

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Child of the Milky Way - Chet Raymo

I am a child of the Milky Way.  I am made of the dust of stars.
Every atom in my body was forged in a star.  When the
Universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for
the wood and the fish for the pond.  When the first galaxies
fell into luminous clumps. already matter was struggling
toward consciousness.

The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush.  If there is
a voice in Sagittarius, I'd be a fool not to listen.  If "God's"
voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I'll pick up my ears.
If night's faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I'll sit
back on a dark hillside and wait and watch.  A hint here and
a trait there.  Listening and watching.  Waiting, always waiting
for the tingle in the spine.

Chet Raymo
from The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

with thanks to Cate Kerr
Beyond the Fields We Know

Photo - Cate Kerr

~

How can you explain the mystery of the Inexplicable?
You can only surrender to it...

My "medicine" - my wild comfort -
is the wonderment and splendor
of the Infinite Cosmos...
It soothes my Soul

MM

_/\_

 

Unknown Wanderer - Ed Crowley

People often
ask me where
I live and what's
the name of my 
hometown road
I smile
as I tell them
it's nowhere

Yet
it's everywhere
and it's simply

my humble abode
I'm the
Unknown Wanderer
and hence
I simply wander
then I pivot
Awareness around
Into the stillness
of the Silence
as I lay my soul
down in Rumi's field
Where the
Beloved Ones
teachings are revealed
If you want to know
where I call home at
the end of the day
look up at the stars
It's beyond your vision
but if you look
long enough you'll
sense me there
spinning like a Sufi
in the boundless
galaxy
of the Milky Way

[.....]

Ed Crowley

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~*~

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.  I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other'
doesn't make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the door sill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep."

Rumi

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

At the Edge - Czeslaw Milosz

A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map led him here.
Or perhaps memory.  Once, long ago, in the sun,
When the first snow fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,

Joy of the eyes.  Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight.
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast of motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

Czeslaw Milosz

translated by Robert Hass

with thanks to Whisky River

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

A Far Bigger Reality? - a meandering...

 

When "window sitting" in 2010 with only the bright moon lighting
the night, the non-dual concept of "me-no-me" (or self-no-self) arose...
I scratched some notes out on the windowsill in the moonlight:

"Window sitting", like meditation, takes the focus off the "me"
and puts the focus on what is Aware within me - The Silence -
at the Core of my Being - or some call it Consciousness...
This Silence (for me) unwinds the "me" - slows it down -
gives it space...

*

Pondering the non-dual concept of whether there's a "me" or no-me
is tedious, divisive, and not very helpful - a conundrum that keeps me
 focused on the "me" as if the "me" is arguing its own existence. 
The thought arose that the tree does not argue whether it is a tree
 or not...  It just bes the tree. (Yes, that is what I wrote.) :)

The so-called "me" is like a lens through which the Essence or Core
of my Beingness sees the world, sees life, how it engages with life...

*

Recently (2024), while sitting in The Silence, these words floated
through: "there is a far bigger Reality than 'spirituality', or 'religion',
or 'non-duality.  It is a Reality inclusive of our entire personal
human existence, and human experience - as "me."

*

The sense (back in 2010 window sitting) was that we have to open
the "aperture" of the "me" - to take in the larger view, to not fixate
on *things*, like thoughts, ideas, beliefs, feelings, circumstances,
people, etc.  We have to soften our gaze to see the bigger Reality....

I/me became aware in this moment, sitting at the window, that there
 is just a fluid sense of Beingness at my Core, (the only way I know
 to describe it) - that which is Aware within me, as me, call it the
Divine Consciousness - or Essential Nature - was I now "no-me?"
And other questions arose:  Is it true that there is no "me"?
"How can that be true" (as non-dualists would argue that there is
no me - and no tree...) (I no longer ask questions regarding such
unanswerable abstractions - or maybe I just don't understand the
concept).

The sense arose in me (back then) that there is a "me" function of
"Consciousness;" a practical function.  Like a thought function, or
body function, there is a "me" function... a "me" mechanism...
(Some call this the ego)

The "me" is a function of our Divine Nature/Consciousness - not
its enemy that needs to dissolve, as some teach.  It's a conditioned
function - by life's experiences - habituated to perform in certain
ways, but that also allows the Essential/Divine Nature to express
Itself through this "me" - this human - as me...

Mystic Meandering
Nov. 2024

~

Photo taken by my brother
on the coast of Gloucester, Mass

~

You don't possess Life, Life expresses itself through *you*.
Your body is a flower that Life let bloom; a phenomenon
created by Life.

Ilchi Lee

~

The "religion" of the future will be a cosmic religion.  It should
transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology.

Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based
on a sense arising from the experience of all things, natural/human
and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.

Albert Einstein