Silence Beyond Mind - Maitreya Upanishad

It has been said:
There is something beyond our mind,
which abides in silence...

It is the supreme mystery beyond thought.
Let one's mind and subtle spirit rest upon that mystery
and nothing else...

...When the mind is silent,
beyond distraction,
then it can enter into a world
which is far beyond the mind...

Then one knows the joy of Eternity...
Words cannot describe the joy of the Soul
when one is one with Itself...

As water becomes one with water,
fire with fire,
and air with air,
so the mind becomes one with the Infinite Mind
and thus attains freedom.

Maitreya Upanishad

~

When I can intrain with a deeper Silence of simply Being,
the mind is not in chaos and I can experience the Sacred
in the chaos...  I have only known a few of such
fleeting moments... :)

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Facing the Wound - Jeff Foster

You have been afraid to break down...

You've been carrying so much...

Do not fear the grieving and terrible
ache of existence.  For sure, there will be
times when the pain is so intense you will find
it difficult to breathe and your mind may project
death and oblivion for you...

But, you will keep on breathing, and you will be
breathed through the abyss and carried lovingly
by nameless forces through the voided voids and
out again into the awe and vastness of living.  Your
breath will not fail you, but your mind may make
you doubt it.  There is a terrified child in you who
just wants to be reassured and held.  She lives inside

us all.

Be kind to your trauma, be gentle and soft, but don't
forget to be fiery and fierce when the moment calls
for it.  There is time for sweet talk and soothing
words and there is time for the sword too.  Let your
trauma know, it will not dictate the passage of your
life any longer.

[.....]

Weep and rage if you need to, let your trauma witness
the primordial power that boils in your heart...
Weep and rage if your need to, let your precious
raw heart be seen!

Your trauma will not take you down,
it will enrage and enliven you and push you
to the raw edge of sanity, yes, but it will 
 not take you down.

Remember the fire and forgiveness,
and the unbearable love that moves all things.

Breathe into the void now.
It's never as bad as it looks through the
filter of the mind.

Do not fear the oblivion,
it is the only place where you will find
your true freedom...

Jeff Foster

Excerpt from:
"Trauma: Do Not Fear The Oblivion"

You tube video: https://youtu.be/KMj9cP_gnf4?si=YEbBi76f3sIOk2NB

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Drop Into Freedom...

In my decline I have lost track
of how things are "supposed" to be...
of how things are "supposed" to "work" -
like life...

of finding my way to wherever it is that
I'm "supposed" to be going.

Somehow I've lost my "keys"...

I have grown weary 
of how things are...
of what I'm "supposed" to be doing...
of taking responsibility for things
I'm not responsible for...

of attachments to things that used to be important...

of the body and its ailments and loss of functioning...
of the *ideas* of "awakening" and "enlightenment"...
who "awakens"?
what "enlightens"?
Does it really matter?

Is this how impermanence works?

You lose your keys to things that don't really matter
so that at some point it all falls away
in its importance,
and you are liberated *from*
false ideas and premises,
from hopes and dreams
that keep you bound,
and you "drop"
into
Freedom

Mystic Meandering

April 2, 2024

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Sri Yantra

 

The Eternity Portal...

Awoke 9 months ago and

lost my freedom
to move through life
the way I need to:
my natural rhythms
with life:
playful and free
dancing to a celestial tune;
in sync with the Rhythm of the Soul...

Melancholy takes up residence
in my Heart now - grieving the loss.

The cry of the Soul
trapped inside my Heart,
screaming to be free again.

Physical functioning is
becoming harder...
I have become "old"
in just 9 months.
Hardly able to bear the burden
of living life as it is  - now.

I shuffle through life,
losing my balance.

I heard a distant owl the other night.
Maybe it was calling my name...

I could sense death this morning;
we're all just waiting for the inevitable,
but it's how we wait that matters.
Maybe it's coming for me.

To relieve me from the weight of my
responsibilities here...

Released to the final freedom;
disappearing into a portal of light;
taking flight through the Eternity Portal
to a Greater Freedom...

A Blessing...

Mystic Meandering
July 28, 2023

PS - I woke up this morning in a totally different place
I was at peace, feeling my true nature again, playful and free;
dancing with my Soul
Not ready for the Eternity Portal just yet.  :)

Feeling Blessed

Aug. 2, 2023

_/\_

~

Photo - Dorothea on Beach
a few weeks before her walk into the portal of light.

 

Break For Freedom - David Whyte

To remove ourselves entirely and absolutely, abruptly and
at times uncompromisingly is often the real and radically
courageous break for freedom.  Unsticking ourselves from
the mythical Tar Baby, seemingly set up, just for us, right
in the middle of our path, we start the process of losing
our sense of falsity, of ridding ourselves of illusions, of
letting go of our self-manufactured enemies, and even our
false friends, and most especially the false sense of self
we have manufactured to live with them.  We make
ourselves available for the simple seeing of ourselves
and our world more elementally and therefore more clearly
again.  We withdraw, not to disappear, but to find another
ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to
step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a
clear, rested, embodied voice we begin to remember as our own.

David Whyte
Excerpt from an essay - "Withdrawal"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Take Flight My Soul...

Take flight my Soul -
Be free...

Open to a larger freedom...

You are not bound by the constraints
of life circumstances;
imprisoned, or captive, nor
weighed down.

Choose a greater freedom
and take flight...

Set yourself free -
unfettered, unencumbered -

opening to ecstasy...

Mystic Meandering
April 23, 2023

~

Photo from the Internet

 

Break Into Freedom - David Whyte

To remove ourselves entirely and absolutely, abruptly and
at times uncompromisingly is often the real and radically
courageous break for freedom.

Unsticking ourselves from the mythical Tar Baby, seemingly
 set up, just for us, right in the middle of our path, we start
the process of losing our sense of falsity, of ridding ourselves
of illusions, of letting go of our self-manufactured enemies,
and even our false friends, and most especially the false 
sense of self we have manufactured to live with them.  We
make ourselves available for the simple seeing of ourselves
and our world more elementally and therefore more clearly
again.  We withdraw, not to disappear, but to find another
ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step,
and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear,
rested, embodied voice we begin to remember as our own.

David Whyte
Excerpt from an essay - "Withdrawal"

~

Inside this new love, die...
Your way begins on the other side.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone born into color.
Do it now...

Rumi

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Wrapped in Wonderment - Miriam Louisa Simons

no longer working to get free

(or fix or heal or please)

no longer needing to understand

how any of this is possible

not to mention

knowable

I rest

entirely wrapped

in wonderment

Miriam Louisa Simons

Echoes from Emptiness

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Reorientation - May Sarton

I am not ready to die.

But I am learning to trust death
As I have trusted life.
I am moving
Toward a new freedom
Born of detachment,
And a sweeter grace -
Learning to let go.

I am not ready to die.

But as I approach sixty (73 😊)
I turn my face toward the sea.
I shall go where tides replace time,
Where my world will open to a far horizon.

Over the floating, never-still flux and change.
I shall go with the changes,
I shall look far out over golden grasses
And blue waters...

There are no farewells.

[.....]

May Sarton

With thanks to Death Deconstructed

Photo from the Internet

 

Now We Are Free - Gladiator

 

Rest In Peace - Papaji

Rest in Peace...

You are Eternal Being, unbounded and undivided.
All is well...

You are Happiness, your are Peace, your are Freedom.
Do not entertain any notions that you are in trouble.

Be kind to yourself.  Open to your Heart and simply Be.
Those who know This know Everything.
If not, even the most learned know nothing at all.

Papaji

~

Photo Art - Mystic Meandering

 

Heart Sutra Discourse #2 by Osho

Photo by David Peters

At the very core of life, death exists.
Hidden in it is the greatest freedom.

Death is not an ax that cuts down the tree of life.
Death is making love to God, or God making love to you.
Death is cosmic.

You don't remain like you.
You don't remain as an entity.
You don't remain defined,
identified with anything.

You disappear into the Whole.

Learn to die consciously...

excerpt from The Heart Sutra, Discourse #2 by Osho

 

Resurrected...

 Breaking free of concepts, constructs, beliefs and stories
that have kept me entombed...

I rise...

Waking up to my "True Nature"

a living expression of "The Sacred" within me...

I rise...

Untangling the tattered threads of old roles, old crafted identities
worn to make me feel safe and important...

I rise...

Letting go of frayed "lifelines" that kept
me tethered to the shore of familiarity and conformity...

I rise...

Now not needing to be other than who I Am
my natural, playful, creative, expressive Aliveness...

I rise...

Mystic Meandering

April 3, 2021

~

Photo: Vortex Art 2010 - Mystic Meandering
done with fingers and Craypas oils

The Ghostly Winds...

My Dear,

Be free of concern...
Be free of your mind, and be still.
Let the winds of agitation and despair
pass through you...

Just rest and wait for
the winds to pass through -
as they will...

The stripping winds of decline,
the ghostly winds of the mind,
they all pass through...
Be patient and wait.

All is cared for...
All will be well...

Just rest your mind
and let it all pass...

My Dear,

Be at peace with yourself.
It all passes through.

Mystic Meandering
Jan. 11, 2021

Personal Note:  These were the words that
came through in meditation after a particularly
stressful and restless evening and night,
getting caught in the mind by the winds of
craziness and hatred occurring in this country.

Peace
_/\_

~

Photo - hubby :)

 

 

Here is There - Fred LaMotte

 Spend thousands for enlightenment at the Ashram of Tantric Wine
Tasting?  Advanced flow-yoga at a seaside resort in Bali?  Or that
Advaita in a Tuscan Villa.  At this Saturday's workshop, the spiritual
teacher will teach us that there is no teaching and no one here to teach.
The $1200 course fee includes a complimentary green smoothie.

No thanks.

I must be getting lazy.  I've lost my longing for exotic spiritual 
destinations.  I just want to wander in the woods now, beyond my
dilapidated fence, listening to raindrops on ferns, no dakinis sculpted
on the entrance of my mind cave, no Tibetan runes on the limestone
walls of my emptiness, no echoes of vanilla dharma talks.....

Guess I'm getting old.  I just want to sing about the vastness of what
I don't know.  I want to open my eye - not the eye in my forehead but
the eye in the callous of my sole, pressing dark loam with a barefoot
kiss.  From where I stand on the slow turning earth, I can see that this
wheel rolls nowhere.  "Here" is already "there"...

I want to walk more gently over the planet, sighing without words,
and call it prayer.  And I won't turn gratitude into a technique,
because gratitude is simply me, breathing.  Me, honoring the moss-
bearded cedars.  They are very great gurus who give their priceless
teaching for free; a mist-green stillness.

The roots of their lineage truffle dirtward down to the first moment
of creation, entangled in the fungi of the void, close to the fountain
of wonder that gushes up from the center of every Now.

At midnight, soundless owl wings slice through the glory of night,
bright knives of Unknowing. Starlight seeps out of the wound, and
I am awakened.  I am thrice-awakened - here, there, and in each
particle of dust.  Parasam Gateh, beyond the beyond, right where

I am.  Coyote howl will be my song.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Fred LaMotte

Forest on Mt. Rainier

Free to BE - Fred LaMotte

The first discipline of non-violence is to honor every human
being as a unique soul-body, refusing to identify them by
race, gender, religion, or political party.

Yet just as much as right-wing movements, today's "progressive"
movement often promotes conflict and division by labeling
individual Persons by their group identity.  Some of us who
talk about "diversity" actually stifle it, because real diversity
is not to promote tribalism [or nationalism], but to recognize
the incomparable [unique] Personhood of individuals.
[As it also says in the Declaration of Independence.]

It is much easier to hate a category than a Person, whether
your animosity is toward Muslims or Christians, "black people",
or "white people", liberals or conservatives.

The beginning of world peace is to free each human soul-body
from racial, political, or religious abstractions.  Our incidental
association with a group is not who we really are.

I do not identify my Self [Eternal Being] as a color, as rich
or poor, capitalist or socialist, Republican or Democrat,
Christian or Pagan [or American].  I am neither "good" nor
"evil."  Those are just conceptual chains with which your mind
attempts to enthrall me.  But I am not your concept of me:
you are.

If you want to superimpose a group identity on me, that is your
act of violence against the singularity of my Personhood.  You
are free to label me, but I am also free...  I refuse to identify with
your label...

I Am who I Am...

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance
(from a 2018 post)

[brackets mine]

Photo from Stillness Speaks

~

This is a newspaper clipping from 1968 that I still have.
The same year that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy
were assassinated...

~

We are truly Free when we recognize our Eternal Beingness
in each other, and, the diverseness of our individuality
that expresses that Beingness, and treat each other with
respect and compassion...

The Paradox of Freedom - Amoda Maa

The closer we come to truth (and the closer we come to
living the truth), everything becomes paradoxical.  Yes, everything.
It's this and that.  It's human and divine.  It's messy and it's perfect.
it's time-bound and it's timeless.   It's relative and it's absolute.
It's form and formless.  Everything becomes paradoxical.

We start to live as this paradox, because truth is not an end point.
Truth is not an answer.  Truth is not a belief system.  Truth is an
open ended-ness within us.  And this is where freedom begins.

It's not a freedom that negates our human experience, with all its
changes, with all its ups and downs, with all its losses and heart-
breaks.  It's a freedom that allows us to live at peace with all of
it, even when it's not peaceful.  It's a deep acceptance of what is.

It's a freedom that wipes away all the cover-ups, everything we tell
ourselves in order to protect ourselves,  to pretend that we're safe,
to imagine a perfect destination.  It's a freedom that wipes away the
layers of defended-ness, all the strategies that we create - mental
strategies, emotional strategies, energetic strategies - to get what we
think we want from life in order to feel comfortable, in order to
feel special, in order to feel loved.  But these cover-ups end up being
our prison.  And there is no fulfillment in this self-created prison.

Fulfillment only comes when there are no cover-ups. It's the fulfillment
of internal freedom, and has nothing to do with the external.  You
could be in a jail cell, and still this freedom is available.

Amoda Maa

~

What really matters is your
capacity to turn towards the
tenderness of your heart in
the midst of that which
offends you.

Amoda Maa

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Untethered...

Untethered I step off into "space" -
the spaciousness of Just Being.
Flying into the vast unknown;
Invisible inner Forces showing me the way -
if I allow them to...

Not trying to "direct" my own way
by what I had known before;
letting the conceptual veils drop away...
Remaining open to an Invisible Force
at the Core of my Being -
the Inner Essence of what
makes me - me;
not an abstract construct,
but Life living ItSelf as me...

Mystic Meandering
Nov. 29, 2019

~

Art - Untethered Heart
craypas oils
2009

digitally altered

True Emptiness - Dorothy Hunt

True Emptiness - which we could also call formless Spirit -
fills the universe and is filled by the universe.  It contains
everything, yet is not separate from a single moment's arising,
or dissolving.  What I am calling Emptiness is simply empty of
self, and empty of definition.  The word "Emptiness" is not
really it, neither are any of our ideas about it, including the
ones I use to try to point to the Mystery that is Unnamable
and indefinable.  To be emptied of our attachment to
definitions and concepts - especially our self-concepts - is
to be unburdened, whole, fluid and free to truly be.

To be empty means we are open; to be empty means we are
available for whatever or whoever is in front of us; to be
empty means we are not stuck anywhere, but can experience
the fullness and the flow of life unhindered.  Our seeing is
empty until it lands on an object, is it not? Our freedom,
inherent wisdom and selfless love arise right out of
Emptiness...

For a moment, just allow yourself to be the emptiness, open
and without definition, yet intimate with the moment as it is.
You might discover a vast and spacious Presence that feels
more real, more connected, more meaningful and lovingly
your truest Self than anything you could ever imagine.  And
even though the mind cannot say exactly what this is,
something knows; something in you remembers.
And what remembers tenderly holds anything that may arise
to be seen, experienced or liberated...

Dorothy Hunt
Buddhist Teacher

 

Ordinary Enlightenment - "G", Shinzen Young & Jeff Foster

There are many different definitions of mysticism, but a narrow
description of mysticism is known as the "perennial philosophy",
or "perennial wisdom."  [That Truth is Universal & Eternal].
In this sense, mysticism indicates the dying of the illusion
of selfhood into the greater reality of God, Nirvana, Dao, or a
number of other concepts representing the deathless and
indefinable part of us that is often called the Void. [or Emptiness].

It is the "death" [dissolution] of the individual ego into the
indescribable that characterizes the perennial wisdom. [Or rather]
it is the giving up of identifying with being the individual ego/self.

God, as the mystic understands the term, does not correspond at all
to the commonly held beliefs involving an anthropomorphic deity
gazing down on humanity from on high.  For the mystic, God is
much more subtle and immediate.  In mysticism, God is not a
separate being to us, rather the very "being-ness" that lies
 at the heart of everyone. 

The mystical process, whatever traditions or methods it uses, is
ultimately aimed at breaking through the prison of mortality into

freedom of what both the Buddha and Japanese Zen Master Bankei
called the Unborn.  Living as the Unborn we are no longer tied to
[attached to] a false sense of ego/self... but are liberated as the very
Awareness that is the heart of every being in the universe.

Excerpt from: "Buddha and Religion: Mysticism"
Buddha Space
Read the full article here

This blog also has other interesting topics!

~

Even for a deeply "enlightened" person, the experience of contact
with Flow and Emptiness does not necessarily go uninterrupted.  It
may happen frequently during the day, but not necessarily continuously.
Even a very liberated person still spends a lot of time experiencing
the world in the ordinary way.

What then is the difference between an ordinary person and a liberated
person?  The difference is a matter of freedom.  An "enlightened"
person has the ability to experience self and world as a Source wave.
And when they are not experiencing things that way, they understand
why that is the case. It is just because they are not paying close
attention...

Shinzen Young - The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works

via Markings

Pay attention! :)

~

There is no fixed path to enlightenment.  Enlightenment is not a
destination, a goal, a final resting place at the end of a long journey -

that's the mind's version of enlightenment.  Nobody is the authority
on your path - no teacher, no guru, no religious leader.  Nobody can
tell you the right 'way' for you...

Jeff Foster

via The Dawn Within

~

Photo from the Internet