Primordial Silence - a meandering...

"The key", for me anyway, one of the many "keys"
actually, is constantly "returning" my awareness or attention
to the awareness of Primordial Silence within.  I am constantly
challenged to "wake up" and remember this deep Silence at core of
 my Being...

This came out of a conversation with my husband in the face
of life's challenges that are currently occurring here personally
on an ongoing basis - for years actually - but especially 
these last 2+ years - that I feel pulling me away from the deeper
sense of intimacy with "The Silence" within - which is why I
have been posting about Silence recently - as a way to remind myself.
The Primordial Silence calls to me, like an old Friend, 
inviting me, waiting for me to respond, to come and be still -
thus the late night "window sitting" that I practiced years ago,
 where I can rendezvous with the Great Silence by being
 in the stillness and quiet of the night...

Intimacy with the Primordial Silence is what nourishes me, my
Soul - when I can be in that space.  It is the elixir of Life -
dissolving all resistance, and anxiety about what is, the way life
 is right now, what it should be, and allows the veils that keep
 me from this Divine Communion of Silence to drop away... 
But, I'm not there... 
I am riding the "Mind Bus" with its stories and fears.

It is a conscious endeavor to remember that no matter what is
going on, there is always this intimacy with Primordial Silence
within, even if not felt.  I just need to constantly return to the felt
sense of It:
The awareness of Primordial Silence within myself...

Mystic Meandering

_/\_

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Intimacy with Deep Silence...

There is an intimacy with the deep Silence
that is indefinable,
luxuriatingly peaceful...

A fluidity of

~ s p a c i o u s n e s s ~

of Silent Awareness

aware-ing,

listening...

Nothing irritates or disturbs.

Everything is open

BE~ing~ness

There is depth,

and breadth,

and substance,

and fullness

to this

rhythmic

space

of 

Silence

that

embraces,

surrounds,

and

fills

every crack and crevice

of the
body and mind,

soothing the 'energies'

softening their flow ~ ~ ~

There is sanity in this Silence

that

is
beyond
breathtaking.

It is:

The Breath of the Infinite

The Whisper of Love

The Taste of Forever

The Feeling of Peace

The Awareness of Presence

~

Intimacy with this deep
Silence 
is *knowing*
I am
Home...

...resting in
The Primordial Womb
of Life!'

~

Mystic Meandering
Oct. 27, 2011

~

Photo ~  Aurora Borealis
sent to us by someone
who worked in Antarctica
several years ago.

It looks like a face kissing the earth :)

~

You may also like:
Perfect Pulsing Silence

 

This "Silence" - Amoda Maa

A non-dual perspective on our Essential Nature

"Silence" is not a mental state or a spiritual state, it is already
here prior to thinking, labeling or naming, or feeling;
prior to any experience in perception.

It is not about achieving a state of silence - by rising above.
It is an invitation to go inward to the Deep, the Quiet within.

It is what you already are.  It's your Essential Nature.

"Silence" is known before you take hold of your experience
and categorize it putting it into a mental category of
understanding or knowing.

It's your primary nature - everything else is secondary.

Amoda Maa
on you tube

~

This "Silence" is not about closing the doors, turning off the
phone and lighting candles.  Nor is it to do with trying to get
rid of your thoughts or imagining the perfect sanctuary of
peace.

This "Silence" happens when you stop giving attention to the
narratives that wrap themselves around your experience of
reality.  This "Silence" happens when you turn towards tenderness
every time an unwanted feeling enters your inner landscape.
This "Silence" happens when you have surrendered all resistance
to what is.  This "Silence" happens when you [realize] that
the whole universe is you.  

....Whether you sit in deep stillness or whether you are doing
something [the requirements of daily living] this "Silence" is
always here...  It is in you as Being-ness [your Essential Being].

It's about whether you can fall into the "Silence" that is
always here...

Perhaps it is wise to ask: how can I meet the world
as "Silence"?

Amoda Maa

With thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Undulating Silence

 

Holy Hush - Yahia Lababidi

Silence is the inescapable force in our lives - a constant presence.
Contemplatives, poets, and thinkers alike, have long hinted at
a wisdom beyond words, straining the limits of language
and sense, to describe the ineffable.

Silence is not the absence of failure of words, but instead
somehow exists before and beyond representation, a primordial
essence that lurks beneath our constructed world.  In the immortal
formulation of Tao Te Ching: 'Returning to the root is silence/
Silence is returning to being.'

It is in silence, that things patiently unfurl, open up and trust us
with their secrets or reveal their hidden natures...

Silence can be difficult to define.  For it is not merely the
absence of sound, but may be perceived as an actual physical
presence - a holy hush,  the elemental silence found in the
natural world, where Time appears to collapse and one is 
afforded glimpses into Eternity. Silence is the solemn 
companion of nature and can presence like the very
pulse of Being.

Krishnamurti describes this mystical state: 'And it is only
where there is space and silence that something new can be
that is untouched by time/thought.  That may be the most holy,
the most sacred - may be...  You cannot give it a name.  It is
perhaps the unnamable.'

One is said to 'enter' and 'emerge' from this state, as though it
were an actual physical territory.  We cannot forcibly break-in
and enter, or rush through this portal to arrive at a meditative-
reflective state; but instead must patiently wait to be granted
access...

The Christian philosopher, Max Picard said:
"Silence is listening.  And as attentive practitioners of this
metaphysical art may sense, it can sometimes be unclear who
is doing the actual listening...  us, or Silence itself...

Otherwise, dissimilar spiritual traditions - Hindu, Buddhist,
Taoist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Native American - all
agree on the importance of observing silence as a tool for 
inner transformation...

Yahia Lababidi
Egyptian-Lebanese poet and "thinker"

Excerpts from an article entitled:
"Notes On Silence" 

With thanks to No Mind's Land for the link :)

 

Feeling Old - a meandering...

I feel old...

But I now enjoy sitting in "aloneness" in the
inner wilderness of silence - just being -
in an empty house without distraction;
with no need for "doing"...

I listen more deeply, and notice more;
like the ceiling fan, that's always been there,
creating a small breeze that caresses my skin.
(After all that's what it's for :))

I hear the sounds of nature merging with the
highway hum into one sound through the window
where I sit; and don't get irritated by 
a world of busyness breaking through the quietude,
sitting in the "aloneness" in the
inner wilderness of silence.

I breathe deeply into a deeper transcendent Silence within -
my comfort and solace.

I feel old...

When I catch my mirrored reflection
looking back at me...
I see an old woman in T-shirt and sweats.
(Well, fairly old :))
At least I still recognize her/me;
a shadow image of what I used to be...
With her old eyes, worn out body and bedraggled look...

I feel old...

When I have to pull out my deceased mother's old walker
from the closet to get to the bathroom at night,
easily losing my balance...

I somehow know I have begun
my end...

Unattached to physicality or self-image - yet still,
the reality of "endings" sets in...

I feel old...

Because the "spiritual questing" of my younger years
for "the truth", for the next "spiritual trinket", is gone.
(You notice I didn't say I'm "done." :))

Wanting only to rest in the Sacred Silence within;
that soothes this body and mind.

I feel old...

But I'm not ready for the rocking chair on the back porch,
although a hammock under the trees in the backyard 
would be nice - rocking to a melody by the Moody Blues
 while I watch the clouds and maybe even the stars -
knowing that even when
the owl calls my name
and this body is gone,
"I"
(well not "me" exactly, but you know what I mean)

"I" am still somewhere
in the Great Cosmos
that fills the space I leave...

Mystic Meandering
Aug 24, 2022

"In my end is my beginning" - T.S. Eliot

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Ruptured Reality - Pema Khandro Rinpoche

We are always experiencing births and deaths [and other significant losses].  There is something radical about these changes in our reality.  There is a total rupture in our 'who-am-I-ness', and we are forced to undergo a great and difficult transformation.

In bereavement, we come to appreciate at the deepest, most felt level exactly what it means to die while we are still alive.  These are the moments when gaps [or in-between states] appear, interrupting the continuity that we otherwise project onto our lives.  These interruptions in our normal sense of certainty are that state in which we have lost our old reality and it is no longer available to us.

Anyone who has experienced this kind of loss knows what it means to be disrupted, to be entombed between death and rebirth.  We often label that a state of shock [or fracture].  In those moments, we lose our grip on the old reality and yet have no sense of what a new one might be like.  There is no ground, no certainty, and no reference point - there is, in a sense, no rest.  In that radical state of unreality we need - not just logic, but something beyond logic, something that speaks to us in a timeless, non-conceptual way.

The more we learn to recognize this sense of disruption, the more willing and able we will be to let go of this notion of an inherent reality and allow that precious pot to slip out of our hands.  Rupture is taking place all the time, day to day and moment to moment; in fact, as soon as we see our life in terms of successive changes, we dissolve the idea of a solid self grasping onto an inherently real life.  We start to see how conditional 'who-I-am-ness' really is, how even that does not provide reliable ground upon which to stand.

At times like this, if we can gain freedom from the eternal grasping onto who I am and how things are - our default mode - then we can get to the business of Being.  Until now, we have been holding on to the idea of an inherent continuity in our lives, creating a false sense of comfort for ourselves...  By doing so, we have been missing the very flavor of what we are.

The cause of suffering can be boiled down to grasping onto [or believing in] a fictional, contrived existence.  But what does that mean?  If we really come to understand, then there is no longer even a container to hold together our normal concepts, to make them coherent.

Reality as we thought we knew it is disrupted; the game of contriving an ideal self is suddenly irrelevant.  We experience a disrupted reality, a direct experience of disruption felt at the core of our being.

When we suffer disruption, we find we just can't play that game anymore.  It's really about recognizing the value of giving up the game, which we play without even giving it a second thought.  But when we are severely ill, and we have to cede control over our own body to strangers, holding it all together is not an option.

There are times like these in our lives - such as facing death [or other losses] - when we are no longer able to manage an outer image, no longer able to suspend ourselves in pursuit of the ideal self.  It's just how it is.  In these times of crisis we just don't have the energy to hold it all together.  When things fall apart, we can only be who we are.  Pretense and striving fall away, and life becomes starkly simple.

The value of such moments is this:  we are shown that the game can be given up and that when it is, the emptiness that we feared, emptiness of the void, is not what is there.  What is there is the bare fact of being.  Simple presence remains - breathing in and out, waking up and going to sleep.  The inevitability of the circumstances at hand is compelling enough that for the moment, our complexity ceases.  Our compulsive manufacturing of contrived existence stops.  We're forced into non-grasping of inherent reality.  The contrived self has been emptied out along with contrived existence and the tiring treadmill of image maintenance that goes along with it.  What remains is a new moment spontaneously meeting us again and again.  There is an incredible reality that opens up to us in those gaps if we just do not reject rupture.

But what's underneath our experience of rupture?  If here is no inherent existence to hold on to, then what is the ultimate reality?  This unanswered question drives a lot of us.  If we don't know the answer, then life becomes a primordial anxiety...  The extent to which we know [experience] what's underlying everything - is the extent to which life becomes bearable.

In the raw, broken-open state, this place where we let go of all the games, there is actually a great sense of relief, a knowledge that we don't have to do that anymore, to be that.  There can be a feeling of getting to the heart of things, a juxtaposition [a reorientation] of real and unreal.  That's the beauty of not grasping onto inherent reality.  If we can find ways to disrupt our own habit of clinging to our continuity story, to just strip it all down, then what we find in any bare moment is creative, instantaneous playfulness.

Emerging from the [in-between state], we re-enter the flow of life...  A new kind of openness becomes available to us.  We have lost our delusions of our contrived self image and a secure and solid state of reality and value the pause of the [in-between] as it makes apparent the Silence that underlies everything - that makes all sounds more vivid, and clarifies the end that we will now be beginning...

Pema Khandro Rinpoche
Excerpt from - "Breaking Open in the Bardo"
article in Lion's Roar

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
(color digitally inverted)

 

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 Creation
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
August 1, 2001

~

Photo from the James Webb Telescope

 

Before the Universe - Lao Tzu

Something mysteriously formed,
formless and perfect
in the silence and the void,
before the universe was born.
It is serene. Empty.

Solitary. Unchanging.
Infinite.  Eternally present.
It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name, 
I call it the Tao.

It flows through all things,
inside and outside, and returns
to the origin of all things.

Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

Definition of the Tao:  "The Tao is the absolute principle underlying the universe, signifying the way that is in harmony with the natural order of the Universe - living in harmony with the Universe and the energy in it, or Chi, that is guiding everything in the Universe."

 

Silence is "The Mother" of the Cosmos - Fred LaMotte

Silence is not a concept.
You cannot think it.
Silence is Being.

Silence is.....at the root of the Cosmos.
In meditation Silence is the Mother.
The real "Virgin Mother" is the mystical
eternal Silence.  Silence is the language of God.

The material world is made out of vibrating energy.
But what is the energy that vibrates?

The perfect Silence...

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Silence is the "Mother Energy", the "originating energy"
of the Cosmos, of Life, of Being.

MM

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Mammatus or "Mamma Clouds" 
Happy Mother's Day :)

 

Into the Great Beyond

 Nothing Remains To Think Or Know

Nothing left but Whispers and

eventually they Disappear

leaving only

Pure Original Silence

the Pure Silent Consciousness

of Origin

Dorothea Mills

10/18/2020

I just found out that my blog friend, Dorothea, of only a few months,
passed to the Great Beyond on January 17, 2021.
The above writing was one of her last posts...

Shine On Dear One!

Photo- Dorothea on the beach on Harbor Island, The Bahamas