Inner World - John O'Donohue

It is strange to be here.  The Mystery never leaves you alone.
Behind your image, below you words, above your thoughts, the
silence of another world waits.  A world lives within you.  No
one else can bring you news of this inner world.  Through our
voices, we bring out sound from the mountain beneath our
soul.  These sounds are words.  There are so many talking all
the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on TV, on radio,
in the paper, in books.  The noise of words keeps what we call
the world there for us.  We take each other's sounds and make
patterns and predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies.  Each
day, our tribe of language holds what we call the 'world' together.
Yet the uttering of the world reveals how each of us relentlessly
creates.  Everyone is an artist.  Each person brings out sound
out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.

Humans are new here.  Above us, the galaxies dance out toward
infinity. Under our feet is the ancient earth.  We are beautifully
molded from this clay.  Yet the smallest stone is millions of years
older than us. .....the silent universe seeks echo.

An unknown world aspires towards reflection.  Words are oblique
mirrors which hold your thought.  You gaze into these word mirrors
and catch glimpses of meaning, belonging shelter.  Behind their
bright surfaces is the dark and the silence.  Words are like the god
Janus, they face inwards and outwards at once.

If we become addicted to the external our interiority will haunt
us.  We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or
deed can still.  To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our
vulnerable complexity.  In order to keep our balance, we need
to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known 
and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together.
No one else can undertake this task for you.  You are the one
and only threshold of your inner world.  This wholesomeness
is holiness.  To be holy is natural; to befriend the worlds that
come to balance in you.

Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an
artist in this primal and inescapable sense.  Each one of us is
doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and
shapes a unique world.

Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a 
visible sign of invisible grace.

John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Vortex Art
Mystic Meandering

2011

 

The Ocean and The Wave - Fred LaMotte

...a wave does not need to go anywhere to merge with the sea.
No distance ever exists between the wave and the water.  At
it's peak, the wave may appear to be an individual, but at its
base, every wave is already the whole ocean.  Therefore, no
energy is required for a wave to return to its resting state. As 

the wave returns, in fact energy increases.  The practice of
meditation is not an effort to rise upward: it is settling down
to rest in the simplest state.

Meditation is not concentration, but de-concentration.
When the wave settles into the sea, it does not become
more concentrated, but gracefully expands into boundlessness.

Returning to the sea, a wave makes a gentle sound, sizzling
cool, fresh over sand.  As mind settles back into Source, there
is a faint whisper: the sound of the finite dissolving into the
Infinite...

Real meditation is not an attempt to rise above the physical
body.  Meditation is listening to what the body actually is:
infinite spiritual energy.  For every photon and atom of the 
body is permeated with the same creative sound - waves merging
with the sea...

The sea whispers in the wave:
so the Almighty whispers in every particle of the body.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance
excerpt from his post:
"What the Ocean Whispered to the Wave"

~

Photo from the Internet

~

Day 4 of "The Pause"

 

At The Well of "The Sacred"...

At the Well of "The Sacred"
The OM of Existence is heard;
the deep OM -
the Primordial Song and Rhythm
of the Universe...

At the Core of everything is
the sound of OM -
vibrating...

The Primordial Sound of Life
that reverberates through the Cosmos...

Looking into the Sacred Well within
I can hear OM playing - humming -
vibrating...

I come to the Well of "The Sacred" to listen;
to replenish Mind, Body and Soul;
To be Filled;
To feel the Presence of "The Sacred;"

To reclaim my Wholeness again...

Mystic Meandering
April 6, 2023

~

Photo from the Internet

 

The Unknown Wanderer - Ed Crowley

I'm the Unknown Wanderer.
Understand that I speak not 
the language of your mind.

My speech is completely Silent.
It's compassionate and kind

I speak the silent alphabet,
that only talks Heart to Heart.
It immediately quells all fears

If you cannot hear it,
then go ahead and
shut the gates of both
your eyes and ears.

Go within, beyond mind,
far deeper, to the stillness
of the Silence within.

Listen closely and you
will hear the melodies
of Heart to Heart music
within the tranquil stillness,
where truth has always been.

There's only one sound
drowning out all others.
It's the transcendent,
primordial sound of OM.

It's echoing within the
innermost chambers
of your Soul.  I'll be ringing
the sacred inner temple bell,
I'll be calling you back Home.

It's the ecstatic bliss
of the Beloved One,
singing It's loving presence,
Intimately to your Essence.

Now open all your eyes,
the inner and outer ones,
You'll finally see the Reality
of the splendor of Existence.

With an empty mind and
a pure Heart, all of the 
world's miracles abound.

Feel the reverberating,
crescendo culminating.

You'll [be] Consciously
Awake, to Realize, that
It is Love that is indeed
Creation's primordial sound.

Ed Crowley

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Song of the Stars - Radiance Sutra

Bathe deeply in that ocean of sound
which is even now vibrating within you,
resonating softly,

permeating the space of the heart.
The ear that is tuned by rapt listening
learns to hear the song of creation.
First like a hand bell,
then subtler still as a stringed instrument,
eventually the buzz of a bee.
Entering this current of sound, the Listening One
forgets the external world, and becomes
absorbed into internal sound,
and then absorbed into vastness
like the song of the stars as they shine.

The Radiance Sutra part XV

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

That's how you came here,
like a star without a name...

Rumi

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

El Shaddai - Fred LaMotte

Art by Joe Maccer on Deviant Art

Myriad names of God swirl from the womb of holy silence.
Just so, stars spiral from a black hole at the center of the galaxy.
Yet all the black holes in the cosmos are one and the same fertile
void.  This star-birthing singularity, the infinite hush of the maternal
dark, is not far away.  It is the core of your being, the bindhu at the
center of your heart.

In Jewish Kabbala, the Great Seal of Protection is a mandala
containing 72 divine names.  We can find similar mantra-mandalas
made of Tibetan and Sanskrit letters.  In the untranslated letters of
St. Pachomias, "father of Christian monasticism", I have seen such
mandalas of syllables written in Old Latin.  They were possibly
derived from the Demotic, the language of Egypt, home to the
wisdom schools of Christian Gnosticism.  In all these mystical
traditions - Indian, Tibetan, Hebrew, Christian - the names are
bija mantras, healing sound-vibrations used in meditation.

In the Old Testament , the Lord tells Abraham that, "my name is 
El Shaddai," usually translated God Almighty.  But the etymology
is uncertain.  As with many sacred Hebrew words, there are alternate
roots, each with its own significance, resulting in parallel
commentaries. These multiple roots are complimentary,
not contradictory.

One root of Shaddai means "fertile field, uncultivated wilderness."
This would suggest the other divine names, which are the very
energies of creation, spring from a wild impregnable field to which
the intellect of man may lay no claim - or what Christian mystic
Ruysbroeck called, "the wayless wilderness of the Godhead."

...in the most popular etymology of the Hebrew word, Shaddai means
"mother's breasts."  El Shaddai is the "God who is like a mother's
breasts," the feminine power.  So countless worlds, innumerable
energies, and all the names of God are born of one Mother,
who is the divine Silence.  This Silence we may experience,
 but never "know."  For this is the

Silence of The Beloved...

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

 

The Sound of The Genuine - Howard Thurman

There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for
the sound of the genuine in yourself.  And if you cannot hear it,
you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching,
and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that
you had never been born...

You are the only you that has ever lived;
your idiom [your unique signature]  is the only idiom of its
kind in all of existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the
genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the
ends of strings that somebody else pulls...

There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of
the genuine in yourself, and sometimes there is so much traffic going
on in your minds, so many different kinds of signals, so many vast
impulses floating through your organism that go back thousands of
generations, long before you were even a thought in the mind of
creation, and you are buffeted by these, and in the midst of all of this
you have got to find out.....Who you are...  How the sound of
the genuine come through to you...

The sound of the genuine is flowing through you.  Don't be deceived
and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams,
your ambitions, so that you don't hear the sound of the genuine in you,
because that is the only true guide that you will ever have, and if you
don't have that you don't have a thing.

You may be famous.  You may be whatever the other ideals are which
are part of this generation, but you know you don't have the foggiest
notion of who you are, where you are going, what you want.
Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in
yourself.

Now there is something in everybody that waits and listens for the
sound of the genuine in other people.  And it is so easy to say that
anybody who looks like him or her, anybody who acts as this person
acts, can't hear any sound of the genuine.  I must wait and listen for
the sound of the genuine in you.  I must wait.  For if I cannot hear it,
then in my scheme of things, you are not even present.  And everybody
wants to feel that everybody else knows that she is there.

There is something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine
in your mother, in your father, in the people you can't stand, and if
you had the power you would wipe them out.  But instinctively you
know that if you wipe them out, you go with them.  So you fight for
your own life by finding some way to get along with them without
killing them.

There is something in you that waits and listens for the sound of the
genuine in other people.  And if you can't hear it, then you are
reduced by that much.  If I were to ask you what is the thing that you
desire most in life, you would say a lot of things off the top of your
 head, most of which you wouldn't believe but you would think that
you were saying the things that I thought you ought to think
 that you should say.

But I think that if you were stripped of whatever there is in you that is
literal and irreducible, and you tried to answer that question, the
answer may be something like this: I want to feel completely
vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely
 secure... [i.e. to be my Authentic Self].

This is what you look for in your children [if] you have them, this is
what you look for in your husband if you get one.  That I can run the
risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my
vulnerability will not step on me.  That I can feel secure in my
 awareness of the active presence of my own [uniqueness].

So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill.  It doesn't
matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife.  I'm secure
because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself and having learned
to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough, to hear the
sound of the genuine in you.

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if I hear the sound
of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come
up in you.  So that when I look at myself through your eyes having
made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall
that separates and divides will disappear and we will become as one,
because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.

Howard Thurman

from a 1980 commencement speech at Spelman College

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

"Don't ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come
alive, and go do it.  Because what the world needs is people
who have come alive..."

Howard Thurman

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
The inside of a large earthenware pot
digitally colored...

"The Mystery" never leaves you - John O'Donohue

"The Mystery" never leaves you alone.  Behind your image,
below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another
world waits.  A world lives within you.  No one else can bring
you news of this inner world.  Through our voices, we bring

out sound from the mountain beneath our soul.  These sounds
 are words.  There are so many talking all the time, loudly,
quietly, in rooms, on streets, on TV, on radio in the paper,
 in books [on Facebook :)]. The noise of words keeps what we
call 'the world' there for us. We take each others' sounds and
make patterns and predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies.
Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call 'the world'
together.  Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes
the invisible to become visible.

Above us, galaxies dance out toward infinity.  Under our feet
is the ancient earth.  We are beautifully molded from this clay. 
Yet the smallest stone is millions of years older than us.  In our
thoughts,  the silent universe seeks echo.

An unknown world aspires towards reflection. Words are the
oblique mirrors which hold your thought.  You gaze into these
word mirrors and catch glimpses of meaning...
Behind their bright surface is the dark and the silence.  Words
are like the god Janus, they face inwards and outwards at once.

If we become addicted to the external our interiority will haunt
us.  We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or
deed can still.  To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our
vulnerable complexity.  In order to keep our balance, we need to
hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and
unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together.  No
one else can undertake this task for you.  You are the one and
only threshold of your inner world.  This wholesomeness is
holiness.  To be holy is natural; to befriend the worlds that
come to balance in you.

Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is
an artist in this primal and inescapable sense.  Each one of
us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries
and shapes a unique world.

Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a
visible sign of invisible grace.

John O'Donohue
from Anam Cara

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo from Unsplash

Shimmers of Light...

We are the grace of Love fulfilled,
the shimmer of Sacred Light,
lustrous uniqueness in a field of
multitudinal Divine Shimmers
- autonomous, yet in glittering Oneness.

We are the twinkle of liberated luminosity
radiating from the Heart Pulse of Love,
in the Sound Stream of Life,
continuously unfolding...

We are created, and create, from the glowing embers
of the mystical furnace of Love's Fire...

We are the molten flow of golden translucence
that forms us in the fire of Divine Love.
Love infuses us in every micron of consciousness
- Golden Light turned fluid,
flowing incessantly from the Primordial Heart...

Light of Love.
Love of Love.

Love experiencing Itself as Love
in every breath,
in every beat of our heart...

Mystic Meandering
Dec. 2001

~
Ultimately there is light and love and intelligence
in this Universe.
And we are it.
We carry that within us.
It's not just something 'out there.'
It is within us
and this is what
we are trying to
re-connect with -
our original light,
love and intelligence,
which is who we are.

...remember...

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
(A Tibetan Buddhist Nun)

Photo - Mystic Meandering
reflection of light on wall
from a doorknob!

Uni-Verse: One Sound - Fred LaMotte

"Om is the primordial word.  All that is, was, or will be is Om."

Mandukya Upanishad

"Adau Bhagavan shabda rasahi: In the beginning, the Lord
created the cosmos through a subtle stream of sound."

Rig Veda

Creation is sound.  The universe is sound.  The subtle essence
of light shines in darkness as sound.  Each star has a sound.
Every galaxy is a revolving chord, the harmony of a trillion
worlds.

The atoms of your body are chimes.  Each cell of your body is
a carillon.  Your music vibrates into my sound-body, mine into
yours.  Both are intermingled with that galactic harmony, the
gong of planets.  Our subatomic counterpoint trembles and
dances over the scale of humanity, and humanity's music co-
mingles in the cosmic chorus of angels.

You are a ringing bell.  Who struck you?  Even from a thousand
miles away, I am touched by the song of your body.  Each cell
of my flesh feels and recognizes your key, your rhythmic signature.
The memory of you brings a blue note, a minor seventh, a raga
into my inward ear.

My heart is a receiver of your elegy, and a transmitter of my own
love song.  Inside the ribs of every man and woman, the hollows
of a well-carved instrument resonate, softly playing notes
deeply personal, yet pervading the universe.

With the vibrant sound of our minds, we contribute to the
harmony of All, or we grind out dissonance.  The most
important question we can ask at any moment is, "Do my
thoughts right now create harmony on earth, or disharmony?"
Harmonious thoughts expand creation, bringing light out of
darkness.  Cynical or hateful thoughts unravel creation and
contract our energy, preventing waves of music from
manifesting as light.

We are each a unique resonance of grace notes.  Are you a
morning or an evening raga?  Are you the music of the wind
or rain?  A brook of Spring rain murmuring in the desert?  The
song of melting snow high above tree line, chanting under
stones?  Are you the sound of moonbeams falling softly on the
petals of an amaranth hibiscus, changing their color to burgundy?

The day will come, and now is here, when you will wake in the
morning stunned by a symphony of blossoms, polyphony of sun
and dew.  The day will come, and is now here, when medicine
will be music, and songs will heal us.  The day will come, and
now is here, when listening to vibrations of mantras, O most
silent melody in the ancient brain, will dissolve the mind of
war into pure love.

The day will come, the day is here, when you long for the
Beloved, O nakedness more intimate than form; you merely
call the Beloved's most secret name, and the Beloved is
with you, nearer than this breath!

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - via Uradiance

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

Star 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 ~

in unified expression with
All That Is...

Listen deeply and hear the
Celestial Symphony
within the Stillness
of the Heart...

Follow the pulsing sound
into the Vastness
of Silence...

Find your 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
Aug. 1, 2001

Photo - Mandala Art
digitally enhanced

The Universe is Sound - Fred LaMotte

The Universe is sound.
The subtle essence of light shines as sound.
Each star has a sound.
Every galaxy is a resolving chord,
the harmony of a trillion worlds.
We are each a unique resonance of
grace notes.

The atom of your body chimes.
Our subatomic counterpoint trembles
and dances over the scale of humanity,
and humanity's music co-mingles in the
cosmic chorus.

My heart is a receiver of your elegy,
and a transmitter of my own love song.
Inside the ribs of every man and woman,
the hollows of a well-carved instrument resonate,
softly playing notes
deeply personal,
yet pervading the universe.

With the vibrant sounds of our minds,
we contribute to the harmony of All,
or we grind out dissonance.

The day will come,
the day is here,
when you merely call
the Beloved's most secret name,
and the Beloved is with you,
nearer than this breath!

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

(Fred's words, my format)

~*~

Om is the primordial word [sound].
All that is, was, or will be is Om.

Mandukya Upanishad