Zero - Jeannie Zandi

There is something that does not move no matter what comes,
no matter what will be lost.

I like to call it zero.  It's sitting in zero [the still point as TS Eliot
calls it].  It's sitting in Being.  It's so slow that it has stopped. And
it has a fierce fidelity to what is authentically unfolding in the
moment out of Being.  Here we stand with what's being born in
its tiny infancy, authentic and shyly showing itself, birthed from
Being.  No care for what it can be used for, where it's going, what
it means about you, me or someone else.  It simply stands without
a name, without a use, standing with that moment because it's
precious, because it's the Holy unfolding itself.

  We blow past the subtle petals of our unfolding, and
this holy birthing that's happening all the time through us.
But What emerges authentically is Holy.

In Being, we're not manipulating anything.  We're not trying
to go anywhere.  We're not trying to heal anything.  We follow
the thread of what's alive and we behold it in reverent silence,
even if every egoic hand wants to grasp it and turn it into
something.  The Holy is shining and peeking its head out...

We are not shown how to stay with the natural expression of
unfolding through us, though we were born knowing it.  As
we grew up, no one saw it, no one reflected it, stood with it,
protected it, had faith in it.....simply because it was.  We were
left in concept-land, zooming over our actual life; our own
organic unfolding.  Now we're stuck in our everyday minds
with our will trying to build something out of concept that
will never be as solid as what the Holy organically reveals.

We can stand in what emerges naturally from Being.  We
can slow down to the speed of Being, which is zero.  It has
nothing to show for itself.  It's simply a miracle as it is.
Everything that is zero is true.

It is Beingness flowing into Beingness. 
When we sit in zero [Being] there is only zero [Being],
and even what moves is still.  At some point you start to feel
 it as yourself.   It starts to wake in you...

  Stay true to the speed of Being.  Don't move unless Being
 moves [you], because you cannot leave that place and offer
anything real, and you're sick to death of ["spiritual"] manipulation
 and skipping over what's actually, purely and humbly here.

It's our zero, like a big dark hole
in the center of us that we thought was our problem. 
It's actually a portal to the Holy.  And through that empty
space of Being the Holy paints the world.

  But... we have forgotten -
how to rest as zero and stand in what's simple and authentic.
And out of fidelity to that Being [that we are], out of this
magnificent black hole, an inordinate amount of glory spills,
and each movement is the poetry of being in motion, while
utterly empty.

Jeannie Zandi

[brackets mine]

~

Photo - a mandala that my mother colored in 2016 at age 88
 digitally zoom blurred and color inverted - magic :).

Dark Night of the Soul - Mirabai Starr & Jeannie Zandi

The Dark Night of the Soul, as St. John of the Cross conceived it,
is actually an inner state of "spiritual crisis."  It is an experience
of being stripped of all spiritual feelings, all our false constructs,
and a dismantling of edifices of religious concepts with which we
are accustomed to propping up our inner lives.  In the Dark Night
we cannot feel the presence of the Sacred anymore, and the word
"God" becomes devoid of meaning.  It is a plunge into the abyss
of radical unknowingness.  It is only when we get out of our own
way that the Divine can take over and fill us with love.  But it's a
grueling process to come to this level of surrender.

But the Dark Night of the Soul is not only about being brought to our
knees.  It is about unconditional love, the kind of love that wakes
us up and affirms our deepest humanity.  The act of consciously
yielding to the shattering of the heart [in grief] is not high on the
 list of cultural values, but it is part of being awake [to life]...

The Dark Night of global crisis will reveal itself as a state of pure
luminescence, where nothing is as we thought it was...

Mirabai Starr
Excerpt from Dark Night of the Soul

~

Even the most sophisticated.....seekers are flummoxed by a dark
night experience, and this ability to flummox is at the heart of its
effectiveness and purpose.  The coping strategies of conditioning
must be entirely frustrated, the arrogance of the "me" must be
thoroughly met with a humbling, so that the being is left with
absolutely nowhere to turn to "solve the problem."  Thus the
brilliant survival strategy that has the illusion of separation at its
base is brought to its knees, so that a new reliance on the organic
flow of the Divine may rise.

The dream of "getting there" that the being invested all her life
energy, hours and efforts into is suddenly seen as a mirage.  And
trying to get to Nirvana with strategies [is seen as] hopeless,
because it IS hopeless.  The coping strategies generally have to
fail utterly for a new reliance on living radically open and
unprepared in the moment to be fully embraced.

What the soul is after is not a temporary influx of light, but a
thorough deconstruction of the false that results in the embodiment
of a light that shines through the darkness.

The Dark Night of the Soul is an initiation, a sacred passage, a
dying of the old and birthing of light enfleshed.  This process of
initiation or passage is not a problem to be solved.  Huge amounts
of shadow material will rise, identities will fall, coping mechanisms
will fail, and tremendous amounts of energy, mostly as emotion, will
emerge to be released.  The "me" coping structure undergoes a
massive deconstruction, and the fresh innocent, wide-eyed and present
Essential Being emerges from the rubble.

Jeannie Zandi

Excerpt from: Dark Night: The Breakdown of the Mythology of Me