Our True Nature - A Buddhist Perspective

Remember the clear light, the pure white light from which
everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the
universe returns; the original nature of your own mind.
The natural state of the universe unmanifest.

Let go into the clear light,
trust it, merge with it.
It is your own true nature,
it is home.

[.....]

No matter where or how far you wander, the light is only
a split second, a half breath away.  It is never too late to
recognize the clear light.

From the Tibetan Book of the Dead

Adapted and translated by W.Y. Evans-Wentz,
edited by Jack Kornfield

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Cosmic Light...

Sadness gives way to spontaneity...

The inner child of the Cosmos
has come to play...

There's a hidden joy inside that shimmers up
- playful,
tickling the heart...

Subtle joy turns into Love for the whole experience of
LIFE

knowing it's all the "Play" of the Cosmos...

The Light of the Cosmos
hidden within myself
begins to glow -
an unlit light.

It's the rhythm of the Cosmos that moves me,
taking my breath away,
making my heart skip;
and the realization that

I am Cosmic Light -
lit from within!

I am the Cosmos!

I am the joy of the Universe...

It's all the Play of Cosmic Light!

Mystic Meandering
Sept. 21. 2020

Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

Here's a woo-woo story about how I found this poem again... :)

One night I was checking the stats on my blog, and saw my
URL with a number after it.  I had never seen this before.  So I
clicked on it, and it gave me two links.  I recognized the first
link, so I clicked on it.  And it took me to a fellow blogger's blog,
now deceased!  And right there on the page was the poem, 
"Cosmic Light" that she had posted in 2020.  She passed away
in January 2021.  How strange!  A "voice" from beyond?
However it came, it was as if someone was trying to remind me,
that even though I have been going through dark and challenging
 times the light is still there. And I still have to embrace it all everyday,
the dark and the light.  I even mentioned to a friend that
I thought my Light  was going out - he too reminded me that there
 is still a light within that never goes out.
 We ARE that Light!  And that life is a play of the 
Cosmos :)

I have since tried to enter that same combination of URL with 
the number again and it tells me "site not found"

:)

 

Remembering The "Inner Life" - a meandering...

What is the "inner Life"?  For me it is that Stillness of the
innermost Being, and attuning to the Rhythm of The Silence within -
just BEing in that internal space of Divine Silence - the "Gatekeeper
of the Inner Life" - experiencing "The Silence" that holds all -
until the entire Being feels "nourished" and restored - which 
does not mean I don't do anything.  There is always "doing" to be
done.  But there needs to be some life changes for me, so that I
may return to the Rhythm of the Inner Life.  I am fortunate as
a "caregiver" that I'm still able to get a lot of "downtime" - 
especially for my health..  But there needs to be some inner life
adjustments to help me access the "Inner Life" again...  Like:

The other morning as I lay in bed, waking.  Instead of getting up
right away, I started mindfully breathing in Light, bathing the cells
 of my body in Light, riding the Rhythm of the Breath; feeling the
Rhythm within again - laying there in silence breathing the Cosmic
Light, listening for the Inner Flow of Energy, and bringing my
awareness there...  Accessing the Space of Silence within settles me -
unwinds my mind, and fears, and stresses of the day.  It is the
medicine that brings me back into the current of the Inner Life
that abides in and animates this body...  Ultimately it's about 
remembering who/what I really am at a deeper level, beyond the
surface existence of being human...

Several years ago when I used to spend a lot of time sitting in
The Silence, just listening, and breathing, this came:

"You must come into the eternal Rhythm of "The Quiet..."
You must learn to live in and from"The Silence"
which does not mean 
live in silence,
but to live in/as
"The Silence" that is
from the eternal vastness
and depth of
True Silence...

~

Find your authentic self 
here...

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
Nov. 21, 2013

~ 
Photo - Northern Lights
from a calendar

 

Reveille - Ruth Bowen Hersey

When a new day wakes me, each
worry rises too, greets the morning,
rubbing the eyes and joining the others
that crowd around as we
all, the whole battalion of us, put
on our work boots and dress ourselves
and prepare to pretend we've got it all together.

Each morning we put ourselves together.

Ruth Bowen Hersey

 https://thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

posted with permission

~

Photo - taken by my brother
My Dad's Army boots

~

Personal Note:  I love this poem because sometimes now,
since I became a "caregiver", this is how I feel.  Every morning
boots on the ground, hit the ground running, feeling overwhelmed,
 like I'm always trying to "put myself together" meeting the challenges
of this "new" role... 

Things need to change...

I need to remember my Inner Being, my Inner Life...

Stay tuned...:)

 

The Song is Still Here - Fred LaMotte

Spend a little time today
getting lost.
Find your way
without rudder or sail
across the mud puddle
in your back yard.

Meet me on the shore.
We will find shelter
in each other's breath.
There is a mountain
of silence inside you,
and inside the mountain
a cave of silence
where you'll find the bones
you left here
before you were conceived.
We've had other bodies, friend,
but no other song.

Listen.
The song is still here

inside the bones
inside the cave
inside the mountain of silence
inside you.

Spend a little time today
getting lost.
Find your way
without rudder or sail
across the mud puddle
in your back yard.
Meet me on the shore.
We will find shelter
in each other's breath.
There is a mountain
of silence inside you,
and inside the mountain
a cave of silence
where you'll find the bones
you left here
before you were conceived.
We've had other bodies, friend,
but no other song.
Listen.
The song is still here
inside the bones
inside the cave
inside the mountain of silence
inside you.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Light of Breath - Hazrat Inayat Khan

We ordinarily think of the breath as that little air that we feel
coming and going through our nostrils; but we do not think of
it as that vast current that goes through everything, that current
which comes from Consciousness...

...it is written that first the Word [or Logos - the Word of The Divine]
was, and from the Word all things came [into being].  But before
the Word was the Breath, which made the Word. 

Behind the word is the much greater power: Breath.  If a person
wishes to study the self, to know the self, what is important is
not the study of the mind, of the thought, the imagination, nor of
the body, but the study of the breath.  The Breath has made the
mind and the body for its expression.  It has made all from the
vibration to the physical atom, from the finest to the grossest.

~

Breath is a light in itself, and it becomes projected like the beam
from a searchlight...   Breath is sometimes not different from the
light of the sun but even brighter than that. Breath being a light 
from another dimension, which is unknown to science today, it
cannot be visible to the ordinary physical eyes.

What people call the aura is the light of breath, but not everyone
sees it.  A radiant countenance is a proof of an aura which
illumi-nates it, and the lack of it is the lack of light in the breath.
 A seer sees the sign of a death more clearly and longer beforehand
than a physician can.  The reason is that the seer sees in the aura
of a person whereas the physician sees only the condition of the
body.  Many experience the phenomenon of the light of breath,
and yet doubt if it can be true, for they think it is perhaps an
imagination.  Others, who are capable of seeing that light,
confirm their doubt.  The Sufi, by the development of breath,
experiences this light, which becomes for him a proof of the
existence of that dimension which is unknown to the ordinary
world.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

From:  The Philosophy of Breath
and The Healing Papers

with thanks to Love Is A Place

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Rest in the Breath - David Whyte

Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and
how we love to be.  To rest is to give up on the already
exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its
endless outward need to reward itself through established goals.
To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that
there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to
put it right; to rest is to fall back literally and figuratively from
outer targets, and shift.....to an inner state of natural exchange.

The template of natural exchange is the breath, the autonomic
giving and receiving that forms the basis and the measure of
life itself.  We are rested when we are living [that] exchange...

In rest is the sense of stopping, of giving up on what we've been
doing or how we have been being.  It is the sense of slowly coming
home...

Deep in the primal exchange of the breath, is the give and take,
the blessing and the being blessed and the ability to delight
in both.  In rest there is a sense of presence, a delight in and
anticipation of the world and all of its forms [in which]
receiving and responding occur in one spontaneous movement.

A deep experience of rest is a perspective from which we are
able to perceive the outer specific forms of our work [and life]
and our relationships whilst being nourished by the shared
foundational gift of the breath itself.

Rested, we are ready for the world,
but not held hostage by it...

David Whyte

Excerpts from a writing called "Rest"
From the book: CONSOLATIONS

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Heart's Journey - Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Everything, every particle in creation is surrounded by and
infused with Divine Light,  We do not see it because we
are veiled by our own darkness and forgetfulness, but it is
the Light of creation remembering the Light of The Divine's
own self-expression - the brush stroke of the Great Artist,,,

~

It's our own unique journey, our heart that is being broken
by love, our own sorrow and bliss.  It is called the journey
from the alone to the Alone, because we are left alone with
the cry of our heart and the places it takes us - both terrible
and beautiful - places where there are no books, or stories,
no words to comfort us, except the story of our own heart,
our confusion, longing and love...

~

Love's journey brings many scars, often scars of the heart,
and they do not all fade away, even if their drama has
lessened.  They tell us something about what it means to
be human, to stand at the place where the two seas meet...

And yet, because in the moments of real experience there
is no time,just the instant that is.  These stories do not
belong to any past; they are simply a part of the deepest
knowing of our self.

.~

allow this unending love to live within me...

 Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Quotes from: Fragments of a Love Story

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Inner World - John O'Donohue

It is strange to be here.  The Mystery never leaves you alone.
Behind your image, below you words, above your thoughts, the
silence of another world waits.  A world lives within you.  No
one else can bring you news of this inner world.  Through our
voices, we bring out sound from the mountain beneath our
soul.  These sounds are words.  There are so many talking all
the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on TV, on radio,
in the paper, in books.  The noise of words keeps what we call
the world there for us.  We take each other's sounds and make
patterns and predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies.  Each
day, our tribe of language holds what we call the 'world' together.
Yet the uttering of the world reveals how each of us relentlessly
creates.  Everyone is an artist.  Each person brings out sound
out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.

Humans are new here.  Above us, the galaxies dance out toward
infinity. Under our feet is the ancient earth.  We are beautifully
molded from this clay.  Yet the smallest stone is millions of years
older than us. .....the silent universe seeks echo.

An unknown world aspires towards reflection.  Words are oblique
mirrors which hold your thought.  You gaze into these word mirrors
and catch glimpses of meaning, belonging shelter.  Behind their
bright surfaces is the dark and the silence.  Words are like the god
Janus, they face inwards and outwards at once.

If we become addicted to the external our interiority will haunt
us.  We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or
deed can still.  To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our
vulnerable complexity.  In order to keep our balance, we need
to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known 
and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together.
No one else can undertake this task for you.  You are the one
and only threshold of your inner world.  This wholesomeness
is holiness.  To be holy is natural; to befriend the worlds that
come to balance in you.

Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an
artist in this primal and inescapable sense.  Each one of us is
doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and
shapes a unique world.

Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a 
visible sign of invisible grace.

John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Vortex Art
Mystic Meandering

2011

 

Return to a Deeper Rhythm - LLewellyn Vaughan-Lee

As our world appears to spin more and more out of balance...
there is a pressing need to return to a deeper rhythm, to the 
cycles that belong to healing and transformation, and the
seasons of the soul.  Returning we may find balance resurfacing
from deep within, a balance that reconnects and restores us...

If we are to participate creatively in these toxic times, to bring
rain to a land where the inner and outer wells have run dry,
first we need to be present "in another country where things
are in order."  And this "other country" can be found in the
space between the in-breath and the out-breath, where the
soul is present.  But first we need to reconnect, return to this
place of balance.  And the simplest way is through 
stillness and silence...

Silence draws us inward, away from the clutter and the
distractions of our outer life, to the deeper roots of our Being.

Here our soul nourishes us, here we can be replenished, and
here we can help replenish the world.....  In the silence we can
drink deeply of the waters of life that are still pure, we can
commune with the primal forces of nature, we can return to
what is sacred and essential to our life, and to the life of the
Earth.

Here in this "other country" the air is not toxic, and the miasma
of today's world in this post-truth era is not blurring our vision.
The laughter of children still rings true.  Stillness is here, and
the seasons are in balance.  Every in-breath and out-breath is
sacred.  The breath, the soul, the Earth and its seasons, are
linked together, nourished by each other. 
It is time to heal....

Llewellyn Vaughan-lee
Sufi Mystic
2017

Excerpt from an article published by Garrison Institute

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Reflections in the Wilderness - Sigurd F. Olson

Life in the wilderness, especially when one is alone, is a continual
contemplation and communion with God and Spirit regarding
eternal values.  One does not have to assume any particular
stance, invoke incantations, repeat over and over again words
such as Om, chant, or sing.  To me these are merely hypnotic
devices used to bring the mind into focus and into the realm
of silence by those who do not have the privilege of living in
situations where peace is all around them.  There is no doubt
of the efficacy of such ways of preparation or they would not
be followed by hundreds of thousands, but when quiet is all
around, with no sounds but natural ones - bird songs, wind,
washing of waters against shores - the stage is always set for
meditation and reflection, whatever one may choose to call
it.  Man may not be conscious of contemplation or seeking
wisdom, for often no revelations come.  Normal and
unplanned contemplation comes as softly as the falling rain
or the first snows in late fall when the entire world is waiting.
While no great answers may come at these times, they do
infiltrate occasionally and unobtrusively into one's
consciousness, but usually there is simple a sense of peace,
removal, and a happiness beyond understanding.

Sigurd F. Olson
Reflections From The North Country

with thanks to Heron Dance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

Although I may not wander in the wilderness, 
this is why I like the Quiet late at night,
when the house is quiet and I can settle into
a deeper communion with the deep Quiet within -
not always, but often, occasionally hearing
the echo of an owl in the trees... and fall
into sleep...

MM

 

Confessions of a Wanderer - Fred LaMotte

The grail knights thought it a disgrace to quest in a group.
So each entered the forest where there was no path, and
where it was darkest.

La Queste del Saint Graal, 13th C.

Up until age seven, I wandered.  Then I began to buy the
propaganda of my school.  The teachers insisted that if
I wanted to grow up I had better get life all figured out, and
learn to be a success.  Of course, they were just passing along
to the next generation their own fear of failure.

Took me the next half century to realize that they were pretending.
Absolutely every adult I met was pretending to know.  Over the
years I too pretended, and played the role of knower.  So that I
could be a successful doer.

Now I know that I don't know.  And the more I don't know, I know
who I am.  And the more I do.  Because it is not the do-er who
does, but Being.

If you've found the true path, congratulations, please don't guide
me. If you've found the movement that will finally save
humanity, congratulations: please don't sign me up.  Because
what I have found is the courage to wander again.

I have abandoned the compass technique.  Now I enter the ancient
forest precisely where the trees are unfelled.  I have no desire to
super-impose my map of consolation over this unfathomably mystery.

.....The blossom of Correct Teaching withers away, we are the
fragrance that remains.  Just by admitting we know nothing, we
sigh together and breathe life.

Letting go of our search, we meet each other where we get lost, 
and arrive at our destination.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Full Moon July 2022

 

Be Curious Instead of Afraid - Pema Chodron

Regard everything as transparent...

See through everything...

See that everything is in transition...

Liberate concepts and beliefs...

Let go of the need for an "answer"/solution

Rest in the nature of Essence -
the Primordial State of everything...

Be a child of fantasy/imagination...

Be curious instead of afraid...

Pema Chodron
Buddhist Teacher

~

I've had this posted on my refrigerator
for years.  Maybe I should have read it
more often :)

~

Photo from the Internet

 

Ten Thousand Butterflies - Kavi

When you open your inner Pandora's box
Expecting a thousand ghosts and ghouls
And all manner of horrors to be released

You discover ten thousand butterflies
That have been trapped in a cage
And all you ever felt
Was the flapping of their fragile wings
As they begged for their release.

Kavi

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering