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

 

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

 

The Ocean and The Wave - Fred LaMotte

...a wave does not need to go anywhere to merge with the sea.
No distance ever exists between the wave and the water.  At
it's peak, the wave may appear to be an individual, but at its
base, every wave is already the whole ocean.  Therefore, no
energy is required for a wave to return to its resting state. As 

the wave returns, in fact energy increases.  The practice of
meditation is not an effort to rise upward: it is settling down
to rest in the simplest state.

Meditation is not concentration, but de-concentration.
When the wave settles into the sea, it does not become
more concentrated, but gracefully expands into boundlessness.

Returning to the sea, a wave makes a gentle sound, sizzling
cool, fresh over sand.  As mind settles back into Source, there
is a faint whisper: the sound of the finite dissolving into the
Infinite...

Real meditation is not an attempt to rise above the physical
body.  Meditation is listening to what the body actually is:
infinite spiritual energy.  For every photon and atom of the 
body is permeated with the same creative sound - waves merging
with the sea...

The sea whispers in the wave:
so the Almighty whispers in every particle of the body.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance
excerpt from his post:
"What the Ocean Whispered to the Wave"

~

Photo from the Internet

~

Day 4 of "The Pause"

 

Love Yourself - Fred LaMotte

Who led us to believe we must dissolve our "separateness".
destroy our little "i", and merge with a flatline of "non-duality?"
That's a lot of work!  It's the work of the mind, chewing on
itself, creating concepts.  "Separateness" is a concept.
"Non-duality" is a concept.

The Divine Mother's ocean of love is not like the intellect
of man.  We can drop this mind into the starry night of the
heart.  When the little droplet of "i" falls into the ocean of
Her love, it won't dissolve into impersonal nothingness.
Rather, the ocean will become the drop.

As the drop merges with the ocean, the ocean merges with
the drop....

Surrendered to the love that enwombs the stars, You are no
longer just a little "i." You irradiate the cosmos.  You don't
need to rise above your Being, but sink into it.  Love yourself.

Countless galaxies whirl out of your unbreathed unborn stillness.
And every star in the cosmos is imbued with the sweetness
of your own peculiar light...

With this very breath, love yourself!

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Civil-ization? - LaMotte & Gély

The world is a field of conflicting opposites.  You
will never wake up one morning to discover that the
politicians made peace on earth, because peace is not
the nature of this world, or politicians,
[or its inhabitants.]
We come to stay for only a while...
We are strangers and pilgrims on the earth...

Fred LaMotte
excerpt from a post on Uradiance

[brackets mine]

~

"For as long as I can remember, I have believed in God, but
not the institutional God...  God is incomprehensible.  We
can't put Spirituality in a little capsule for consumption.
The way the world works doesn't change.  The big guy
crushes the little guy.  For two thousand years [or longer]
it hasn't changed.  There is no humanity in so-called
civilization."

Gabriel Gély

Gabriel was an artist who lived with the Inuit peoples of Canada
for 38 years.  He lived with them when they were living 
 a "traditional" lifestyle [their tradition].  And lived with
them during their transition to settlement lifestyles.
He died at age 96 in 2020 in Nova Scotia

Excerpt from an Interview with Rod MacIver
of Heron Dance

[brackets mine]

~

Personal Note:

It seems that history keeps repeating itself.
Our own "American" indigenous peoples were put on
reservations (settlements) after many of them were 
massacred by the white anglos, including women and children.
The white man believed they had a "manifest destiny" from God;
that they were entitled to the land, and so took it.

The same thing happened at The Alamo in Texas.
The Americans decided they wanted the land that belonged
to the Mexicans, and they took it.
The same in Ukraine, Putin wants an empire, 
and he's trying to take it...

White Supremacists want to kill Blacks and Jews -
in the name of God...

It seems that every civilization has its history of 
violence and injustices.
We are not immune...

"the enemy is us"
even with our
lofty "non-dual"
spiritual
words.

_/\_

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The saying on one of my T's
(the picture on the T is much better!)

 

Silence is Not a Practice - Fred LaMotte

Trying to practice silence, imposing stillness on the mind,
is not meditation, but a subtle form of violence.

  To control thoughts, force them out of the mind, or concentrate
 on one thought to the exclusion of others, is not meditation but 
oppression.  And to repeat an affirmation over and over again is
not truth: it is control and denial.  The affirmation tries to will
away a feared condition by drilling down into a description of its
opposite.  But behind the affirmation is the fear that the opposite
is true, and this fear tacitly empowers what it fears.

We pride ourselves in our techniques of "self-discipline."  But
 self-discipline is the inward idol of the authoritarian mind.  Who
 is the self that disciplines the mind?  Who disciplines that self
An infinite regression of selves to be disciplined, until one finally
surrenders...

True meditation is the weary traveler who lets go of the quest, 
takes off her clothes, leaves the path, and slips naked into a forest
pool.  She washes the journey from her glistening brown body.

Just so, the mind slips off one veil of thought after another,
 sinking deeper into more luminous layers of silence, until the
 dark effervescent stillness beyond thought immerses her.  It is a
 stillness that can only be discovered, never imposed.  No thought
can produce the vast tranquility that lies between thoughts, just 
as no star, however bright, can contain the vast night around it.
In this divine darkness, she joyfully drowns...

True meditation doesn't require hours of sitting.  For just a few
minutes, one dives into the secret pool of eternity, then emerges
totally refreshed, re-created, reborn from the womb of amazement.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

The Silence of emptiness pervades all forms.  It is the primordial
Silence of God, gushing tears from the spring of bliss in the
womb of creation.  True Silence is the mother of poetry, the
mother of art, the mother of music.

Fred LaMotte
Excerpt From - "True Silence"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Voice of Silence Within - Fred LaMotte

Upon emerging from meditation.  I was moved to share this:

The world is not in chaos.  Minds are in chaos.
There is a place we need to return to: the wellspring of our own
intuition, the starry depth in our core.  This is the real Guru, the
true Friend, the true Master.  Throw the penny in this little mind
into that well, which has been silently bubbling up for countless
lifetimes, in a hidden glade, the wildest glen of your ancient brain.
Fall into this yearning hollow, all the way down your spine,
through your rib cage into the solar plexus.  You are just a ripple
of silence trembling into the galaxy.  Who will guide you to this
well?  The true Friend.  She leads you not to herself, but points 
beyond words to your own heart.  Listen to the voice of the Silence
inside silence.  A real Guru reveals this murmuring spring in the
valley of your chest,through a whisper, a touch, or their mere
presence.  They then walk away, freeing you to name the Mystery
for yourself, as you gaze into the unfathomable waters of Shakti,
the healing current of your own awakened grace.  Whenever you
want to come to this forest pool and sit with your Guru, or the
Christ, with Buddha, or with any of the Rishis, you find them
waiting here, nearer than your pulse.  Not in any temple or
ashram, but in the golden dark inside the inward spring of
Divine Love, overflowing with the nectar of emptiness,
gushing stars, pouring out the fierce wild atoms of your body,
for no reason but to dance.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo from the Internet 

 

A Thousand Ways to Pray - Fred LaMotte

Smiling we know
is a form of meditation.
Weeping is also a prayer.
Worry is beseeching
the Whirler of All
for the things you don't want.
When you are angry or bitter,
the purest devotion is your belly
without naming it.
Let the fire of outrage
burn a hold through your forehead.
This is profound samadhi.
Be the thole.
Yes, there are ten thousand
ways to pray.
Today is sacred
because the planets are ajar.

Your horoscope looks like
the web of a spider
who fell into a plastic
Starbuck's cup
and imbibed caffeine.
The little dipper spills
mad lukewarm light,
making your plans collapse.
Your mind says, "everything 
is going wrong,"
but your gut just savors
the bitter, the salt, the sweet,
the flavor of a rainy sidewalk.

Be patient with indigestion, friend.
It is the sum of all prime numbers
dissolving in the taste 
of silence.

Angels of dust sprinkle themselves
over your cauldron of moon-blood.
Your mind gives up its pasquinade,
the falsetto soliloquy of reason
which is only the echo
of a voice that stopped speaking
before you were born.
Finally you can fall
into this breath,
the breath of grieving,
sighing, murmuring "yes"

to the dark.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

If you pray because
you believe it will
change the earth,
don't waste this
precious breath.
If you pray because
your mind is at war
with the way things are,
then solve your mind,
not the world.

Fred LaMotte

 

An Intuitive Whisper - Fred LaMotte

Through my dawning breath, from somewhere beyond
thought, came a soft voice of intuition, whispering:

The more the mind tries to please people,
the more you annoy them.
But if you are simply you,
your very presence will refresh them.

Just radiate Being.
Be what you love, 100%
Then whatever
you find yourself doing
is natural and spontaneous service.
Because the greatest service
is to Be.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

There are many ways to "serve" humanity.
We each need to find our own way.

 

The Voice of Silence Within - Fred LaMotte

Upon emerging from meditation, I was moved to share this:
The world is not in chaos.  The mind is in chaos.  
There is a place we need to return to: the wellspring of our
own intuition, the starry depth in our core.  This is the
real Guru, the true Friend, the true Master.  Throw the
penny of this little mind into that well, which has been
silently bubbling up for countless lifetimes, in a hidden
glade, the wildest glen of your ancient brain.  Fall into
this yearning hollow, all the way down your spine,
through your rib cage into the solar plexus.  Now you
are just a ripple of silence trembling into the galaxy.
Who will guide you to this well?  The true Friend.
She leads you not to herself, but points beyond words
to your own heart.  Why should you give away your
power to any other who claims to teach you what can
only be learned at the soundless fountain inside you?
Listen to the voice of the Silence inside silence.  A real
Guru reveals this murmuring spring in the valley of your
chest, through a whisper, a touch, or their mere presence.
They then walk away, freeing you to name the Mystery
for yourself, as you gaze into the unfathomable waters
of Shakti, the healing current of your own awakened grace.
Whenever you want to come to this forest pool and sit with
your Guru, or with the Christ, with Buddha, or with any
of the Rishis, you find them waiting here, nearer than 
your pulse.  Not in any temple or ashram, but in the golden
dark inside the inward spring of Divine Love, overflowing
with the nectar of emptiness, gushing stars, pouring out
the fierce wild atoms of your body, for no reason but to
dance.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Dare To Be Imperfect - Fred LaMotte

A life-coach told me,
"you're perfect right now."
So I went home and tried it,
but found it boring.

Who would be Me
if I didn't keep

[messing] things up
in my own peculiar way?
Blemishes delight me,
define me, jagged edges,
the letters of my true name.
Call me Broken Buddha,
the Half-Awake.
This universe just wouldn't
be the same without
my sins.
I am more priceless uncut,
like a ruby in the mud
that looks like a fallen berry.
What is the sign of progress?
I'm even less
perfect than I was
yesterday.
I dedicate this poem
to you, dear, who discovered
the hot mess of your body
on the kitchen floor
slobbering tears
into the linoleum
with Good Morning
America bleeding out
in the living room.
I honor the unconditional
catastrophe of your hair,
your crow's feet, the
droop of udder destruction,
the spreading warmth
of your wounded
mysterious smile
in the compost of uprooted
plans and scattered
possibilities,
when you finally realize
that no matter
how deeply you fall,
you are caught,
you have plunged
into the hug
that was always
there.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

Photo from the Internet

 

Guru - Fred LaMotte

A teacher fills you.
A guru empties you.
A teacher gives knowledge.
A guru awakens
the knower.

One transmits information.
The other transmits wonder
without words.
Your mind thirsts
for certainty.
Your heart years for
breaking open.

If the yearning is intense enough,
the guru could be a cricket.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

[Or - an Iris with a hidden face :)]

Photo from Uradiance

 

Terrible/Beautiful - Fred LaMotte

Everyone carries a dark secret.
We do not know its name.
But it's the same secret in all of us.
Terrible. Beautiful.

Sometimes we smile to hide it
because we are each afraid
that this is our secret alone.

But I know that your smile
covers the darkness
because it is mine.

[.....]

It is better that you look into my tears.
It is better that I look into yours.
The night embraced
blossoms into dawn.
A strange grace, is it not?

[.....]

How the soft wound
of courage glows
through this not trying
to hide it.

And a deeper secret:
I gaze from your heart,
you gaze from mine.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Feel What You Feel - Fred LaMotte

I don't need you to change me.

Just help me Be
who I am.

It is good
and very good for me
to feel precisely what I feel,
this cloud of grief,
this downpour of despair,
without any names or notes
to self.

Only let me dissolve
in a healing rain
that penetrates all my shadows.
A liquid sliver of sun may arise
on the jagged edge of mourning.

Or not...

Now I can feel everything
because I have tasted
the night.

How a bud bursts, spilling
beauty from its wound.

How the chrysalis shatters,
frees the golden
moth from her season
of uncertainty.
How a single tear
becomes the sky.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

These are difficult times for the Earth and a lot of people 
on the Earth now are suffering. There's a density intensity
on the planet now.  I feel it.  It is difficult to be
"lighthearted" and celebratory when so many people are
suffering.  The Earth itself and the people on it are unsettled,
and many are in darkness within, affecting the whole Cosmos -
the whole order of life.

What brings you to your knees?
What causes you to suffer inside?

What happened to empathy for those who are suffering in our midst?

My neighbor hung himself in his garage over a month ago.  No one
knew he was suffering.  Now his wife suffers.

Those who suffer do not need "fixing."
They need our heart...

_/\_
Namaste

MM

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Multiplicity and Unicity - Licata and Ruvinsky

The experience of multiplicity is just as holy, as valid, and
as "spiritual" [as unity]...  God itself has no bias toward
unity or multiplicity, oneness or differentiation, but rather
expresses itself through each of these perspectives to
disclose one of its qualities or fragrances.  We need not
take sides but only enter into communion with each of
these energies...

Matt Licata
From: A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

~

"The question doesn't even arise in Silence..."

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

She ["God"] births herself as the many who interchangeably
play the roles of objects and subjects, reciprocally adapting,
each of the many, even in their individual forms,
embodying the One...

Joan Ruvinsky
From: The Recognition of Our Own Heart

~

Photo from the Internet

 

The Times of Shaking - Fred LaMotte

Now we enter the times of shaking.
What can be shaken will be removed
so that what cannot be shaken may remain.
We begin to see that our personality can be shaken,
our emotions, our minds, our bodies can be shaken.
Thrown back into that which is never shaken,
we taste the eternal radiance of the Self [or Essence].

Find that in you which cannot be shaken.
This is the crisis, and the opportunity, of our time.
The crisis is not race, or gender, or disease, or economic woe.
The crisis is an invitation.
An invitation to distinguish the changing from the unchanging.
In the silent core of your heart, discover the unshakable.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Spiritual Egos - Fred LaMotte

Spiritual egos make a distinction between "beginners techniques"
and "advanced techniques."  Their intellect wants something
difficult to do, a sense of accomplishment.  That is why so
many new age teachers speak of their spiritual "work."  Do
they ever speak of their spiritual "play"?

Ease is the cure for dis-ease.  The deepest, most healing
spiritual practice, we ease into.  In fact, we do not practice.
We let go of practice.

The goal is never an achievement done by "advanced" practice,
but the dissolution of the do-er.  It is known by un-knowing and
done by un-doing.  This can only happen to the effortless.  The
most powerful meditation is the simplest, the most natural.

When you really look at people who carry a bag of "advanced"
techniques, you often see a weariness behind the stiff mask of
their perpetual smile. Of they look tentative, because they are
always taking the next step, and never completely here.  Only
the beginner dwells in eternal freshness...  The beginner is never
 advanced because she is present.

In the deepest and most natural meditation, you never have to
leave your body.  Every atom of your body is already woven out
of swirling stars....  No wind can uproot the beginner.  No
wound can puncture the intergalactic stillness of the Beginner's
core.

Transcending your body is not an advanced practice. It is a practice
of disconnection. That is why, in the Anapanasati Sutra, the Buddha
said, "Awareness of body in the body."  He did not say,
"Transcend the body."  He said to grok the body from within the body,
for consciousness and matter are one energy,
every cell and photon trembling with the sap of awareness.

...be a beginner.  Always feel the freshness of the first day of creation.
Now is the beginning.  Now is the end of time.  How could "now" be
advanced?

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - MM 
the two faces of Pumpkin Head :)

 

Nature's Way - Fred LaMotte

The stillness
of the English primrose
in Winter,
furiously blooming
all by itself.
No gardener.
The rain turns to snow,
then back to rain,
without your decision,

or indecision.
No creator.
Morning does this.
Evening does that.
Yet somehow the moon
commingles with the sun
in a kind of diffuse
blue whiteness.
No painter.
And without your
assistance,
countless sentient beings
become themselves.
They choose, they act,
suffer consequences
and rewards,
and they are deeply grateful
to you
for this breath,
for this silence,
for not interfering.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Ripples of Reality - Wilson & LaMotte

When we meet somebody whose separate tunnel-reality
is obviously far different from ours, we are a bit frightened
 and disoriented.  We tend to think they are mad..  Yet it is
neurologically obvious that no two brains have the same
 genetically-programmed hard wiring, the same imprints,
the same conditioning, the same learning experiences.  We
are all living separate realities. That is why communication
fails so often, and misunderstandings and resentments are
so common.

Robert Anton Wilson
From - Prometheus Rising

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Your point of view and my point of view are equally "right"
and equally insignificant facets in the dazzling holographic
diamond of opposites.  Whatever is, the opposite also is, 
simultaneously arising.  Yet neither of these little flickers of
local light is Truth.  Truth is what illuminates the entire jewel.

If we spent less energy constricting ourselves to a point, and
instead, let ourselves expand into the Whole, each One of us
would illuminate the world with a silent glance of beauty, a
gentle touch of joy.

This is the effortless breath of grace: inhaling into wholeness,
exhaling into uniqueness, the All embodied in the particular.

It is a happening, not an intention.  It does not need to be
planned or affirmed.  Plans and affirmations get in the way.

Just give up trying to be any-thing else.  Let Be who you
actually Are, the entire quantum crystal of eternity in this
moment.

Your point of view, my point of view: infinitesimal ripples in
one ocean of cosmic Light.  We are not just waves, you are the
sea.  As knowings, we are very very small.  As Beings, we are
vast beyond imagining.  We include each other.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Funky Art - Mystic Meandering

 

Meditation- LaMotte & Chopra

Real meditation does not 'by-pass' pain. Meditation
penetrates into the nectar of pain.  Meditators do not
rise above pain, they surrender to its core.  At the center
of pain is the flowering of boundless energy.  Ananda isn't
a passing mood or a temporary emotional state.
Ananda is the juice of pure Existence.
It glows in the dark, the beyond within.  Transcendence is
not above.  It is the hollow in the seed.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Meditation isn't something otherworldly.  It is quite natural
and effortless.  Meditation mode exists in everyone.

Meditation is a journey, not just a calm break from one's
daily routine.  It's an inner journey of "waking up" (becoming
more conscious, more aware).  It affects every aspect of your
well-being.

There is a difference between shallow silence and deep silence.
Deep silence takes you deep into silent Awareness - reconnecting
to the totality of Consciousness.

As meditation unfolds you see that Existence can take care of you.
"Life"/Consciousness always knows what to do.

Deepak Chopra

Excerpts from: Total Meditation

~

Anxiety, fear, trauma, stress cause us to be out of focus with
the Sacred within, and we become distressed.  We have to keep
refocusing on the Sacred within - often through meditation -
allowing the Sacred Energies to embody us...

Be at peace...

Everything is taken care of...
No need to worry or stress about anything.
Everything is "covered" (taken care of)
forever and ever...

Focus only on the Sacred Energies
at the Core of your Being...
There is nothing you can do...

Trust the Energies...

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
Sept. 17, 2021

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering