The Paradox of the Journey - Andrew Harvey

All major mystical traditions have recognized that there is a
paradox at the heart of the journey of return to Origin.

Put simply, this is that we are already what we seek, and that
what we are looking for on the Path with such intensity of
striving and passion and discipline is already within and
around us at all moments.  The journey and all its different
ordeals are all emanations of the One Spirit that is
manifesting everything in all dimensions; every rung of the
ladder we climb toward final awareness is made of the
divine stuff of Awareness itself...

Divine Consciousness is at once creating and manifesting
all things and acting in and as all things in various states of
self-disguise throughout all the different levels and
dimensions of the universe.

Andrew Harvey
teacher of mystical traditions

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

There slumbers in every human being faculties by means
of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher
worlds.  Mystics, Gnostics, Theosophists - all speak of a
world of soul and spirit which for them is just as real as
the world we see with our physical eyes and touch with our
physical hands.

[...] Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of
perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man
develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception

through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him.

Rudolf Steiner

with thanks to Love Is A Place

~

Art - Mystic Meandering

 

 

The "Spiritual Journey" Is Unique - Matt Licata

The "spiritual journey" is by its very nature unique...
It must be explored by way of primary, first-person experience.

Contemporary spirituality is filled with all sorts of ideas and
concepts about what it means to be "spiritual" and we must
find the courage to question even the most sacred of these ideas,
trusting the path of direct revelation as we come to have more
and more confidence in our own unique experience.  There
are infinite number of ways to open to, touch and enter the
mystery, and the right way for us might look quite different
from others, even our "spiritual teachers."

At some point on our journey, we might hear a call to set aside
the beliefs, teachings and practices we've gathered throughout
our lives and rest.  This "rest" is not passive, cold or resigned
but lit up from within...  we open to a more paradoxical 
invitation that comes roaring out of thundering silence.  Just
what this is must be discovered by each of us in the fire of
our own direct experience.  We cannot take anyone's word
for it.

In this "rest" we are taken inside a dimension of experience
where we honor the entirety of what we are - [we are] drawn
to bring more awareness to this dimension of experience.
Something mysterious, magical, alive and sacred is wired into
this moment by its very nature and carries the fragrance of the
holy.

...something is granted permission and space to emerge - exactly
as it is.  We are invited into a deeper, richer exploration of the
dimension of the soul; re-entering the state of pure wonderment.

Matt Licata

From: A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves In Difficult Times

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Dancing with Life...

In moments of Solitude and Quiet
the life "characters" I've assumed -
fall away...

The defense mechanisms, beliefs, roles and identities
drop into the Quiet -
and the Eternal Perspective emerges...

unthinking happens...

Embracing the mystery and paradox of life,
I accept the totality of life experience;
not just the pathways of 
light and bliss and peace -
but the darker pathways,
with their shadows of the psyche,
without "spiritualizing" them...
Accepting the shadow side of life
as part of the Whole...

In the Quietude I listen to the "Oracle" of the Soul
that has imagery, poetry and music all its own.

With the innocence of a child -
open and spontaneous -
my Heart, hidden by the many masks I've worn,
melts through - hearing the music...

Unencumbered... Unconstrained... Undefined...
And dances with the innate Rhythm of Life again -
The Natural Rhythm,
as the world plays out its darker side.

Mystic Meandering

Aug. 29, 2021

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

 

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

A brave and startling truth - Maya Angelou

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons
and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is nor perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon or Mother Mississippi who,
without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouth abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in it labor
And the body is quieted in awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing,
irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it,
We, this people, on this wayward floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible,
we are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

Maya Angelou

via No Mind's Land

~

Photo from the Internet

Through Time...

My life is but a passage through time;
a zephyr ~~~~

smoke and mirrors that seem real;
a role to play, a story to unwind...

Sometimes burdened by the density of matter reality,
with its never ending mentations, and entanglements
of the personality;

baggage carried from the past;
paradoxes of the present;
perceptions of "Reality" that don't quite fit
the keyhole - waiting to be unlocked.

At times the mysteries of the Cosmos call me to
ethereal flights, and I play in the
 cosmic dance of timelessness...
Free of the passage of time.
Free of the persona, the story line,
that carries me through time...

Mystic Meandering
August 23, 2019
3am

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Om is the Sound Inside Silence - Fred LaMotte

Om is not just a chant. Om is the vibration of absolute Silence.
It is the paradox of trembling stillness, Silence rising and falling
in waves of itself.  Creation is born from the womb of a paradox -
Om.

Om is the unstruck sound whose resonant womb bears heaven
and earth, the galaxies, and all the space beyond the rim of time.

Physicists tell us that emptiness shimmers with "fluctuations of
the vacuum" - the virtual photons and electrons of light and energy
that burst forth as the physical universe, created from nothing.

Om is the sound of this fullness in the harmony of emptiness, the
mysterious Word that speaks the worlds out of Silence.  Om is
not human speech, but divine wonder.

...you can hear it.  Just be quiet and listen.  Om is the sound inside
the Silence.

When you truly listen, your mind does not make the noise of
thinking. Then you hear the thunder of quarks and neutrinos.
You hear the chorus of a trillion suns in a single proton.

...Drown in the oceanic waves of quietness.  There is no more
listener, only boundless Listening...

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Vortex Art
done with craypas oils
and fingers...

2012

Life is a Dynamic Expression - Darryl Bailey

Life is a moving, shifting, dancing event...
and we are part of that movement.
Life will play out the way it plays out,
it's all just happening.
Life is a dynamic function, doing what it does.
Just acknowledge the movement, the event;
the Flow of Life ItSelf...

Everything in existence is a legitimate expression of Existence.

We are the legitimate expression of Life, of Existence,
of this great mysterious happening.
just as we are...
Each different and unique in our expression.

When we see that, we can rest...

Acknowledge the wild, exotic expression that you are,
in your uniqueness.

Darryl Bailey

Excerpt from video talk:
Challenging the Fantasies

photo image via Stillness Speaks

~~

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when
one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life,
when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within
oneself?  If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes
truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding
and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such
paradox.  One must live in the middle of contradiction, because
if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing
questions.  You continue to live them out, making your life a
worthy expression of leaning into the light...

Barry Lopez
From: Arctic Dreams

via: Beyond the Fields We Know

The Middle Way - Jack Kornfield

The Buddhist tradition is neither a path of denial or affirmation.
It shows us the paradox of the universe, within and beyond
the opposites.  It teaches us to be in the world, but not of the
world.  This realization is called the middle way.

The middle way describes the middle ground between
attachment and aversion, between being and non-being, between
form and emptiness, between free will and determinism.  The
more we delve into the middle way the more deeply we come to
rest between the play of opposites. 

Learning to rest in the middle way requires trust in life itself.

Trusting in the middle way, there is an ease and grace, a
cellular knowing that we, too, can float in the ever-changing
ocean of life which has always held us.

We come to rest in the reality of the present, where all the
opposites exist. T.S. Eliot calls this the "still point of the 

turning world, neither from nor towards, neither arrest or
movement, neither flesh or fleshless."

The middle path describes the presence of eternity.  In this
reality, life is clear, vivid, awake, empty and filled with
 possibility.  When we  discover the middle path.....we can
 be with all our experience in its complexity, with our own
 thoughts and feeling and drama as it is.  We learn to embrace
 tension, paradox, change. Instead of seeking resolution, waiting
 for the chord at the end of the song, we let ourselves open and
 relax in the middle. In the middle we discover that
 the world is workable...

Jack Kornfield
From: The Wise Heart

Paradox - Danna Faulds

Neti-Neti, translates as 'not this, not this.' The basis of classical
yoga, neti-neti is the way of negation.  It is a path that reveals
who I really am by cutting away all the things I am not.  I am not
this body or this migraine pain.  I am not my thoughts, even when
the inner voices grow so loud they drown out everything else.
I am not my personal stories or opinions.  I am not the fear that
threatens to swallow me, not my wisest and most insightful
writing, or even the most profound 'aha' to come out of my
spiritual practice.

The only problem is that after walking the path of neti-neti
for a time, I chafe against saying 'no' to everything.  At my
core there is a 'yes' that must be embodied and expressed...

Asmi-Asmi is the flip side of neti-neti.  Translated as 'this too,
this too', asmi-asmi is a practice that comes from tantra - the
path of immanence.  Identifying with the whole, I find spirit,
truth, and oneness everywhere...  I am this aging body on
its slow march toward death.  I am everything my senses can
experience and more. I am this mind and its dramatic machinations.
I am the yearnings of the heart, and the full spectrum of feelings,
and the peace that passes understanding.  I am the worst of my
poems, and the best.  I am the infinite reach of nature, sky and
stars.  The only word that matters on this path is 'Yes.'  I include,
include, include until the individual 'me' blips out, leaving
only unity.

My personal preference has always been for sensory experience,
embodiment, and inclusion.  For that reason, I resisted the practice
of neti-neti because it felt dry and life-denying.  I wasn't interested
in transcendence if it came at the expense of being fully alive in
my body and actively engaged in life.  Fortunately, I overcame
my resistance and discovered that when I really focused on bare
awareness, on what was not thought, not sensation, not my
personal accumulation of conditioning and beliefs, I landed in
a very spacious place of pure potential.

Exploring that potential, it occurred to me that practicing at
either end of the spectrum - neti-neti or asmi-asmi  - might
result in the same experience.  Inquiring deeper, I asked myself
if ultimate negation and absolute inclusion could exist
simultaneously.  'That's impossible', my rational mind answered.
'It's happening', my experience whispered softly in my ear.
In that moment, I fell into a profound inner silence - the silence
that flashes into existence when opposites unite.  Outside of time,
I disappeared into the limitless.

Perhaps I can best describe my current practice as 'both/and.'
Instead of focusing only on neti-neti, or giving myself entirely
over to the practice of asmi-asmi, I am plumbing the depths
of paradox where 'no' and 'yes' coexist.

In the light and laughing space
where Not-This and All-This
are both true, the whirl of
thought dissolves. The mind
drowns in paradox.  Awareness
neither reaches out, nor reaches in,
and times hangs suspended.

Danna Faulds
Excerpt from the introduction to her book
Limitless - 2009

World As Paradox - Fred LaMotte

I don't agree with the world,
and I don't disagree with the world.
The world is an ever-turning Kaleidoscope of paradox,
and paradox is neither agreeable or disagreeable.
Paradox is not there to protest, to reform, or to mold into
something that corresponds to our opinion.
Paradox is there for our liberation,
as we gradually learn to stop clinging to preferences,
and to embrace the ineluctably mystery of wholeness.
Then we see the awful beatific truth,
to which almost every religious and political endeavor
is a form of resistance;
things are simply as they are.
Finally, in embracing what IS,
we can love...

Fred LaMotte
writer, philosophy teacher,
interfaith chaplain
Uradiance

(Fred's words, my format)

~

Love is the only reality.
It is not a mere sentiment.
It is the ultimate truth
that lies at the heart
of creation...

Rabindranath Tagore
East Indian Poet