Mining for Jewels - Chuck Surface

For jewels, we dig through the earth or hammer rock.
And upon finding, remove them from their encasement,
Leaving behind the rubbled detritus of earth and stone.

Just so, I approached the world of religion and philosophy,
Digging, sifting, washing away veiling encrustations,
Of hardened orthodoxies and binding dogmas.

The jewels found in that rubble. more or less precious,
Were expressions with which my Heart felt affinity,
And with which my discerning mind did not take issue.

The measure of these jewels, born of another's experience,
However cherished by multitudes over centuries,
Is their resonance with the Diamond of my own Essence.

Lacking this, no matter how treasured by countless others,
I left them in the rubble where I found them buried,
And wandered off, seeking deeper resonance and affinity.

Those jewels I found and kept, are treasured in gratitude,
For the Water of Beauty they offered my thirsting Heart,
And the Manna of Wisdom they fed my starving Mind.

Digging, sifting, washing away the obscuring encrustations,
Of so many binding orthodoxies and rigid dogmas,
I saw refracted, there, in those jewels of many colors...

The Diamond of my own Radiant Essence.

For some, it is best to set aside religion and philosophy,
And undo the conditionings that have accrued within us,
Over a lifetime lived under their tutelage and influence.

Not for everyone, but for some.

For some, our experience must be unwrapped, unveiled,
In interpretations by others, of their unique experience,
However revered or worshiped they may be...

So we can see with eyes afresh in Wonder.

For some, it is best to be liberated even from liberation,
Described and defined by others, long dead, or living,,
However revered or worshiped they may be...

So we can experience freedom anew, in its Purity.

Some of us must discard the burdensome clothing,
Of enlightenment and such, propounded by others,
However revered or worshiped they may be...

And face, naked and wide-eyed, our Radiant Essence.

Chuck Surface
Facebook
Original Title: The Diamond of Our Own Radiant Essence.

Photos Mystic Meandering

 

Within This Body - Tulsi Sahib and Ivan Granger

 

Within this body
breathes the secret essence.
Within this body
beats the heart of the Vedas.
Within this body
shines the Universe,
so saints say,
Hermits, ascetics, celibates --
all are lost
seeking Him
in endless guises.
Seers and sages perfectly parrot
the scriptures and holy books,
blinded by knowledge.
Their pilgrimage,
and fasting
and striving
but delude.
Despite their perfect practice,
they discover no destination.
Only the saints
who know the body's heart
have attained the Ultimate,OTulsi.

Realize this, and you've found your freedom
(while teachers trapped in tradition
know only the mirage
in the mirror.)

Tulsi Sahib

English version by Ivan Granger

of Poetry Chaikhana

~

Commentary by Ivan Granger

This poem really cuts right through the delusion of
fundamentalism on the one hand - and being overly
enamored with the spiritual practices and rituals, on
the other -

This is not to say that one should not study sacred texts or
that we should ignore the value of spiritual practices.  The
problem is that it's easy to forget what their true purpose is.
Sacred writing, sacred striving, they are signposts that remind
us to turn inward and discover the true heart that shines with
the light of the universe.

If we just memorize words or pray in the mountains, even if
we do it perfectly, we are idolizing the trappings of
spirituality, without understanding, without making the real

journey.  This is one of the reasons why there us so much
anger among fundamentalists in all traditions - they push
to fit into an externalized idea of what it means to be perfect,
yet they are not transformed, and they secretly know it.

Unable to face the pain of that failure, they externalize it, and
blame the imperfections of the world around them for holding
them back.  That pain becomes anger at the outer world, and
that anger is reflexively attributed to God.  Then that angry
God is imagined to punish by withholding heaven from the
individual until the whole world rigidly falls into order.
The more desperate these individuals become for release 
from spiritual pain, the more violently they try to enforce
their vision upon society in the hopes that they will finally
appease God and find freedom.

So sad, when all that is necessary is to slip through that pain,
let go of self-importance, and discover the immense joy
quietly glowing deep within.  No one and nothing else
holds us back.

More important is to yield and open and finally settle
into the secret shining heart [essence] that awaits discovery...

~

...Okay, Ivan will now step down from his soapbox. 
Have a wonderful weekend, and remember to take some
sweet quiet time to settle within.

Ivan Granger
Poetry  Chaikhana

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Remember Your Essence...

Our Essence is the same Silence that suspends the Cosmos,
and the same Energy of the Stars...
We are the Hush of "The Mystery"
and the breath of Life itself...

Our Essence is embodied in every cell of the body...

Our Being is the Dance of the Aurora Borealis
and the unlit Light of the Sun...

generated through the inner radiance
of Shakti - the primal energy -
coursing through our bodies...

Our Essence is "Godness" seeking expression...
in human form;
it is the Essence of all matter reality -
Life living us...

May we all remember our Inner Light,
our Essence...

_/\_

Blessings to all in this Sacred Season of Light...

Mystic Meandering
Oct. 16, 2023

~

Photo Mystic Meandering

 

The Longing - a meandering...

Since I was a young child I longed to know "God" -
the "God' of my childhood religion...

~

Recently longing has arisen again...

I long to know "God" still,
even though that longing has been covered over by layers of
different beliefs and stances - all veils...  And my idea of, and
names for "God" have changed; like "The Mystery", The Beloved,
The Great Silence...

It's time to part the veils so that I may truly know the "God" of my
longing; not the "God" of my childhood religion - not a man-made
"God" - but "The Source" Itself...  The Primordial, Nameless "God"...
Some have called it the Primal Energy, or even the Divine Breath...
But I long for something more personal...

I sense that all our longings and sorrows come from this longing for
"Source"; to know who/what that truly is - our origin, and if we are
that - as the many spiritual teachings say.

So I turn to look for the Source of my longing, that I wish to know 
intimately - again - as in the beginning - before birth.  All others
have been only names, personas, maybe even "lesser gods."

The longing is not for a distant "God - but the "God" who
resides within - the Source or Essence of myself.

Whoa - What?

As those words slipped out onto the page, they caught my attention:
"the 'God' who resides within -
the Source or Essence of myself."

The "Source" is within!
What I long for is in myself! 

This hit me as if this was a "new" revelation,
with a feeling of relaxed awe and wonder...

And yet, I know I know this! - intellectually, in my head.
"God - aka the Primal Source of all that is resides in everyone and
everything...  But I want to know it experientially...
to feel it intimately...

I am not ashamed to feel that longing again; that was hidden by
the veils of the intellect, the intellectualized, conceptualized, and
abstract stances, and belief systems...

It is the Heart longing that will bring me to "the Source" of my
longing; not stances and belief systems, but the innocent, child-like
longing from the Heart - the direct experience that the "God" I long
for resides within myself.

I am finally allowing myself to feel that fire of longing
again...

My child-heart has opened once more...

Mystic Meandering
Dec. 8, 2023

from my journal

After this "revelation" I felt a Presence behind my heart and with it
a deep Quiet came over me internally...

the "God" of my longing dwells within!

Amazing!

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Sunset Heart Leaves

 

Remember Your Essence...

Our Essence is the same Silence that suspends the Cosmos,
and the same Energy of the Stars...
We are the Hush of "The Mystery"
and the breath of Life itself...

Our Essence is embodied in every cell of the body...

Our Being is the Dance of the Aurora Borealis 

and the unlit Light of the Sun...

generated through the inner radiance
of Shakti - the primal energy -
coursing through our bodies...
Our Essence is "Godness" seeking expression
in human form;
it is the Essence of all matter reality...
Life living us...

Mystic Meandering
Oct. 16, 2023

~

Blessings to all in these uncertain times
May we all remember our Inner Light,
our Essence...

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Great Suffering - A Simple Man

The Great Suffering is one of many perceptions and sensations
felt in the body, and happens simultaneously with the 
awareness of the Beauty around us - in the formless Field of
Awareness.

Everything is overlaid with acquired knowledge, and the
psychological and somatic conditioning.  The immediacy of
our experience becomes veiled, overlaid by unconscious,
reflexive conditioning.  The overlay applies to the totality of
experience and what it feels like to be alive.

The Great Suffering comes about as we learn of the darker
aspects of Nature and humankind.  The aspects of the Great
Suffering are not innate elements.  Nothing originally overlays
our Naked Essence. Can we come to an Experience of Being
that we have known before the constituents of The Great
Suffering clouded our Essence?

Our Essence is the Essential me unshrouded by all that has been
acquired over the course of a life; all that is not native to us.
It is the feeling of Aliveness.  You can feel yourself.  You can
feel the Field of Awareness Itself - which is the Feeling of
yourself...  You have to keep bringing your Attention back to
feeling yourself as the Source, which is prior to the arising of
thought...

Who then am I?

The Formless Aliveness, the Essential self , recognized and
remembered.  

Excerpts from: An Affair of the Heart
by - A Simple Man

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Golden Eternity - Jack Kerouac

I have lots of things to tell you now, in case we never
meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me
under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter
moonlit night.

It said - It's all a dream,  Everything is Ecstasy inside.  We
just don't know it because of our thinking-minds.  But
in our true blissful essence is known that everything is
alright forever and forever.

Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop,
stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the secret Silence
inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember
the bliss your forgot:
There is only the Golden Eternity
You are the Golden Eternity

It is all one awakened thing.  I call it the Golden Eternity.
It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal
self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an
idea, a mortal idea.  That which passes into everything is
one thing.  It's a dream already ended.  There's nothing to
be afraid of.  I know this from staring at mountains months
on end.  They never show any expression, they are like
empty space.  Do you think the emptiness of space will
ever crumble away?  Mountains will crumble away, but
the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence
of mind, the vastness, empty and awake, will
never crumble away...

Jack Kerouac
The Portable Jack Kerouac
and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

In Difficult Times - Kathleen Knipp

Let go of the belief that 'I have to muscle this through' -
and let yourself be held...

This moment - if it could be different it would be different...

Everything changes...

Underneath the changing thoughts, emotions, beyond form
there is This - the unchanging, unspeakable Essence -
familiar as the breath - and a deep knowing that everything
is okay...  in the silence that is present, even as the soundscape
unfolds - a stillness that is present even as movement arises;
the silence and stillness that is Isness in all form...

Kathleen Knipp
gems from a Yoga Nidra Meditation
called: "A practice for difficult times"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

"Wisdom Mother"...

Art: Meganne Forbes

Don't fill your head with the "voices" of others -
the so-called "teachings" of others...

Don't seek what you need in the external world
of techniques, and foolish games of
clever worldly wisdoms.

Instead, seek the company of the Innermost Essence
of your own Being - in the Silence of Being;
The True Wisdom - The Innate Wisdom;
The Inner Voice of Inherent, Intuitive Wisdom...

Trust the "Wisdom Mother" within...

Mystic Meandering
June 11, 2022

 

The Indigenous Within - Malidoma Patrice Some

The indigenous world, in trying to emulate Nature, espouses
a walk with life, a low quiet day-to-day kind of existence.  The
modern world, on the other hand, steams through life like a 
locomotive, controlled by a certain sense of careless waste
and destruction. Such life eats at the psyche and moves its
faster and faster along, as they are progressively emptied out
of their spiritual and psychic fuel.  It is here, consequently,
where one's spirit is in crisis, that speed is the yardstick by
which the crisis itself is expressed.

Any person in modern culture who is aware of this destruction
from the machine world upon the spiritual world......realizes
that there is a starvation of the soul.  And realizing that, he or
she starts to wonder what to do about it.  In places that I have
been to speak to people about the beliefs and realities of the
indigenous world, there has been a consistent number of people
who have been so touched, even profoundly shaken by what I
was telling them that I have to believe that I was not so much
appealing to their minds as I was awakening something within
their souls - something that has always been there.  This tells
me that there must be an indigenous being within each of us.

[The Buddhists call it out True Nature, Advaitins call it the Self.
Hinduism call it the Atman, or the innermost Essence.]

Malidoma Patrice Some

[brackets mine]

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Beyond Buffoons and Bullies...

Give no regard to the voices of fear that
divide you and conflict you;
whether from within or without...

The "Inner Essence" that you are is
undivided by the earthly "tribes"
of politics and religion;
of false power and ancient aggressions...

Do not listen to the baffling words of others
trying to tell you what is true,
what to do,
and how to be.

Instead, turn to your Primordial Essence
inherently within you at all times...

Listen to the deep internal Silence
beyond the bluster of buffoons and bullies
with mouthfuls of meaningless words...

Be still...

Breathe...

Wait...

Then you will know what is true,
what to do
and
how to BE...

Mystic Meandering

Feb. 24, 2022

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering