Beyond a Timeline...

I rest in the Silent spaces of the Soul -
in and out of time,
beyond a timeline,
where existence transcends
time, flowing in the stream
of the eternal Cosmos,
just outside the noise
of troubled waters...

Quietude that nourishes
body and Soul.

Mystic Meandering
Oct. 2, 2024

~*~

In this spiritual world there are no time divisions
such as past, present and future; for they have
contracted themselves into a single moment of
the present where life quivers in its true sense.

The past and the future are both rolled up in this
present moment of illumination, and this present
moment is not something standing still with all
its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.

D.T. Suzuki, 1870 - 1966
On Indian Mahayana Buddhism

with thanks to Love Is A Place

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Light shadows on a wall...

 

Non-continuity - J. Krishnamurti

Photo - vincent guth on unsplash

Questioner: The fact that death stares everybody in the face,
yet its mystery is never solved.  Must it always be so?

Krishnamurti:  Why is there fear of death?

There is fear of death as long as there is desire for continuity
[of the] character, the name, and so on.  Fear comes into being
when this continuity is threatened through death.  So, there is
fear of death as long as there is the desire for continuity.

Death, the state of non-continuity, the state of rebirth, is the
unknown.  Death is the unknown.  So death remains a mystery.

Immortality is not the continuation of "me." [the character]
The me is of time.  So there is no relationship between the me
and that which is immortal, timeless.  That which is immeasurable
and timeless cannot be caught in the net of time [and
therefore never dies - and we are that timeless energy]

J. Kirshnamurti
excerpt from a talk in Bombay March 1948

[Brackets mine]

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo -Vincent Guth
Unsplash

~

For all the innocents who have passed in humankind's never ending
propensity toward war...

_/\_

Namaste

 

A Time of Passage...

This is a time of passage,
the passing away of old patterns of life;
a passing of what we thought was true;
what we believed to be real;
the old facades of being,
the images we hold of ourselves.
Everything is passing away.

It's a passage out of time
where time has no meaning anymore;
passing into timelessness
and times beyond time.

Leave everything alone...  Let it all be...
Let things take their natural course...
Let life go its own way...

We cannot stop the currents from flowing
the way they flow -
even if it is painful...

Trust the unseen deeper current
that leads to peace...
that Is Peace...

Mystic Meandering
March 30, 2023

~

Photo - from the internet

 

Eternity - Joseph Campbell

Eternity isn't some later time.
Eternity isn't even a long time.
Eternity is that dimension of here
and now that all thinking in temporal
terms cuts off.  The experience of eternity
is right here, in all things...is the function of
life...

Joseph Campbell
from: The Power of Myth

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Cosmic Dance...

 I have conversed with the Universe,
contemplated and cogitated,
ascended and descended,
polarized, conceptualized and spiritualized;
dis-membered and re-membered -
and still, I find no -
"plan"...

Only vastness and immensity,
beyond theory, framework and perception.
The Greatest, Grandest Mystery
in an ever unfolding nebula,
procreating itself in billowy clouds
and golden streams of stardust
in and endless infinity...

A golden thread weaves through space
without beginning or end, through
the Silence beyond creation, through
Sound beyond sound, and
Light beyond light...

Matchlessly weaving its Eternal vibration
through timelessness,
into time and times beyond time,
with one theme braided into its
unending spiral
through dimensions,
distortions, and
dysfunctions...

~ Love ~

From this divine, mysterious weave
we dance the dance of duality,
complete in our light and our dark
within a vast Cosmic Love
of Divine Embrace...

Mystic Meandering

1999

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

20-Watts of Energy - Robert Lanza

 Many of us fear death.  We believe in death because we
have been told we will die.  We associate ourselves with
the body, and we know that bodies die.  But a new
scientific theory suggests that death is not the terminal
event we think.

One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain
observations cannot be predicted absolutely.  Instead, there
is a range of possible observations each with a different
probability.  One mainstream explanation, the "many
worlds" interpretation, states that each of these possible
observations corresponds to a different universe (the
'mutliverse').  A new scientific theory - called biocentrism -
refines these ideas.  There are infinite number of universes,
and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some
universe.  Death does not exist in any real sense in these
scenarios.

All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of
what happens in any of them.  Although individual bodies are
destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling- the "Who am I?' -
is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain.

But this energy doesn't go away at death.  One of the surest
axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be
created nor destroyed.....

The linkages between the various histories and universes
transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time.
Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting
either this or that result onto a screen. .....it's still the same
battery or agent [source] responsible for the projection.

According to Biocentrism, space and time are not the hard
objects we think.  Wave your hand through the air - if you
take everything away, what's left.  Nothing.  The same thing
applies for time.   Everything you see and experience
right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind.
Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything
together.

Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world.  In the
end, even Einstein admitted, "Now Besso (an old friend) has
departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.  That
means nothing.  People like this...know that the distinction
between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly
persistent illusion."  Immortality doesn't mean a perpetual
existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of
time altogether.

After the death of his son, Emerson wrote: "Our life is not
so much threatened as our perception."

Robert Lanza
Excerpt from The Huffington Post - Dec. 8, 2009

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Insistent Grace - Stephen Levine & Ivan Granger

 There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.

It is an insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.

We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.

But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.

And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.

Stephen Levine
Original title: "Millennium Blessing"

via Death Deconstructed

~

Commentary by Ivan Granger

Most of us spend our entire lives avoiding that inner opening.
Most of the time it is a quiet itch at the back of the awareness
we squirm and turn away from.  And when it really presses
on us, it can inspire terror, as if we were facing death.

It is the death of our old world view, the death of patterned
awareness, the death of our limited notion of who we are.  All
we thought ourselves to be stops - and so it is a sort of death.
To feel that grace approaching, to welcome it, requires a sort
of courage.

It requires courage, and surrender.  We have this idea that
spiritual opening is a terrible effort... No...  That unfolding
wants to occur within us.  The only effort is to let go of our
endless strategies to halt the process.  We all feel it, a gentle
prodding to let the heart open, to know ourselves truly, to be
present and radiate ourselves into the world.  It is insistent,
trying to happen within us.  Call it grace, if you like.  The
question presented to us: Do we courageously accept the
invitation or not?

For those of us who live in contemporary society, how hard
it is to stop the ticking of the clock?  From such an early age
we internalize the sense of time and progress and deadlines.
Yet, in doing so, we forget that these are all just concepts,
just one way to understand the unfolding of being and
experience.  That sense of time is a powerful tool for doing
and accomplishment, but it isn't inherently "real."  It doesn't
have much to do with who or what we are.  There is a flow of
days and months, but they are the surface current of a much
deeper timelessness.

It's fascinating how we use the hyperactivity of thought to
define the world, to frame our perception of the world, and
in some ways to limit our notion of the world.  The other
thing about thought:  It creates time.  When thought settles
down, we discover timelessness.  And as the poet says, the
mind comes to rest, not in the head, but in the heart.

And we remember.  It is not through intellection but through
stillness that we remember.  Look at the word "remember."
Re-member.  To remember is to finally see how apparently
separated reality actually fits together in a single body.
Discursive thought can only ever examine pieces of the whole.
To remember is to have the full vision of Wholeness, as
things actually are.  But this vision is found in timelessness
and stillness, through the quiet mind unfiltered.

Ivan Granger
Poetry Chaikhana

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Timeless Source - Nisargadatta

 Just live your life as it comes.
Keep quietly alert, inquiring into the real nature of yourself.

You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey
into the unknown.

Give up all names and forms, and the Real is with you.
Know yourself as you are.
Do not think of the Real in terms of consciousness and
unconsciousness.
It is utterly beyond both.

Go beyond the personal and see.
You are utterly beyond all existence and non-existence,
utterly beyond all that mind conceives.
Question yourself: Who am I?

What is behind and beyond all this?

You are infinite potentiality, the inexhaustible possibility.
You are timeless Source.

Nisargadatta

from: I am That

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Why We Fear Death - J. Krishnamurti

Questioner: The fact that death stares everybody in the face,
yet its mystery is never solved.  Must it always be so?

Krishnamurti:  Why is there fear of death?
When we cling to continuity, there is the fear of death.

There is fear of death as long there is the desire for
continuity [of the] character, in action, in capacity, in the
name, and so on.  As long as there is action seeking a result,
there must be the thinker who is seeking continuity.  Fear comes
into being when this continuity is threatened through death.

So, there is fear of death as long as there is the desire for
continuity.

Death, the state of non-continuity, the state of rebirth, is the
unknown.  Death is the unknown.  The mind, which is the
result of continuity, cannot know the unknown.  It can only know
the known.  It can only act and have its being in the known,
which is continuous.  So the known is in fear of the unknown. 
The known can never know the unknown, and so death
remains the mystery.

Immortality is not the continuation of "me."  The me is of time,
the result of action towards an end.  So there is no relationship
between the me and that which is immortal, timeless.  We would
like to think there is a relationship, but this is an illusion.  That
which is immeasurable cannot be caught in the net of time. 

J. Krishnamurti
excerpt from a talk in Bombay in March 1948

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

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

Cosmic Bardo - Matt Licata

All the techniques, the teachings, the things to manifest, the new
beliefs to take on, the worn-out ideas about the true source of
peace, aliveness and flowing abundance.  Perhaps there were
once answers to these questions, but now there is no answer to
be found.  Only a burning where the questions once existed.

This burning is the doorway, the portal...

A cosmic sort of exhaustion can come at times, where we find
ourselves in the bardo between one moment and the next.  We
can't quite go back to the way it was, but the rebirth has yet to
appear.  There is a creativity in the liminal but it can seem out
of reach.  We are asked to marinate in the womb..., to tend to
the groundlessness, and find refuge in the unknown: to be
midwife to the darkened illumination.  There are signs and
symbols and guidance all around and inside us, but their
appearance is governed by a timeline written somewhere else.

As we bear witness to a new day, in awe at the gift that has
been given... the breath is here.  The heart is quivering.  The
birds have come.  Sounds from the other world, another
opportunity to hear, to behold the miracle of the senses.  The
sun has come up again.  The moon is hiding nearby waiting
her turn.  For just one moment, the veil parts and the
perfection is there awaiting our participation.

Your life is not an unending self-improvement project and
your heart is not a venture to be undertaken, mastered and
completed.  Perhaps today was never going to be the day
when you figured it all out, got all your questions answered,
or resolved the contradictions....  but to let your heart open
to the vastness of the question.  To fall to the ground as a
humble lover of the mystery.  And listen once again.

Matt Licata

~

Photo by my husband...

You Think You Have Time - Gunaratana

We usually do not look into what is really there in front of us.
We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we
mistake those mental objects for reality.  We get so caught up in
this endless thought-stream that reality flows by unnoticed. We
spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in an eternal flight
from pain and unpleasantness.  We spend our energies trying to make
ourselves better, trying to bury our fears.  We are endlessly seeking
 security.   Meanwhile, the world of real experience flows by
untouched and unnoticed...

Henepola Gunaratana

Buddhist Monk

Into The Twilight - Winter Solstice

There is a seamless "edge" when twilight comes...
And a twinge of longing when the
light wanes into twilight,
the edge of the veil;
that threshold between
light and dark...

A knowing that this life
is waning into twilight too,
from one state into another,
forever re-forming Itself...

Tree branches wave in the wind
in homage to the light
dimming in the West...

Owls hoo - calling the night
into existence
from the East;
prophets of twilight
standing at the edge
where ending meets beginning
and beginning, ending...

Twilight
the in-between,
as Life cycles through time,
through light and dark,
through living
and dying.

This night we stand at the edge of time,
and timelessness beyond time...

peering through
for a glimpse
of the
Infinite Light
that knows no dimming
and no night;
only Its own Eternal Radiance
of
Being...

This Light we are...

Mystic Meandering
Winter Solstice
Dec. 21, 2012

It Will Be in the Silence - Jamie K. Reaser

Sometimes you come upon a place that
beckons you into silence: an old stone bench,
a lake shore, a certain time of your life.  Nothing
small can reside there.

.

I'm looking for that place now, the kind of place
that puts clocks to rest because something must
come forth to reset everything.  I don't want to
follow these rules and constructs anymore -

written, not written, felt.

.

Something is asking me not to, and it is wise.

.

Reason doesn't have roots that run deep enough
to tap the place that I am longing for, that place
where obvious things cannot be explained. That
place that is called sacred even by those who
never used the word before.

.

I want you to sit and wait with me, away from the
noise and the voices of those who speak only to rob
you of your name.  What most needs to be heard
hasn't yet been said.

Jamie K. Reaser

© 2016

From "Conversations with Mary"

Go Deeper Than Love - D.H. Lawrence

What we lack is a cosmic life...
The rhythm of the cosmos is something we cannot
get away from without impoverishing our lives.
We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation
to the cosmos and the universe.
For the truth is, we perish for lack of fulfillment of our greater
needs, we are cut off from the great source of our inward
nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally
in the universe...

~

Go deeper than love,
for the soul has greater depths...
Go down to your deep, old heart.
and lose sight of yourself.
Let us lose sight of ourselves,
and break the mirrors.
For the fierce curve of our lives is
moving again to the depths
out of sight
in the deep living Heart.

D.H. Lawrence

~

I am part of a vast network, an unbroken legacy of evolved,
thinking sentient beings that is older than myself, older
than my ancestors, older than my species, older than the
rocks and trees and even the planet we live upon.

...my origins go back even further, to the Big Bang and beyond...
eons ago, to a time before time.

Poffo Ortiz

Wholeness - Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

You search to find what the heart has always known, that there
are no boundaries to love.  Finding this leaves us on the edge
of our own expectations unaware of the simplicity of the
unknown.  For so long we have searched hoping, expecting
to find something - a realization that was longed for.  Always
you thought there was something to seek, a journey to make.
Now you stand on the precipice looking over the horizon of
your self.

Here there is no seeking, no looking, nothing to reach for, no
path to follow.  But within there is an answer, not in form, but
in substance.  There is a bigger wholeness hidden, waiting,
watching from behind our thoughts.

The wholeness has an unexpected purpose.....from across time
and beyond space.  There is another presence, another pattern,
not hidden, but unrevealed.  There is a tender sense of Silence.
In the moment of our own silence we are welcomed.  We need
to allow the Presence to become present, not in defined
moments, but in a flow.  The river is here.  The Silence,
unbidden, is always present; nothing is defined or captured.
This world is infused with this "other" - steeped in timelessness.

In that Isness, everything is included.  You, The Beloved,
the object of your prayer, and the will to unfold the Eternal
into the present, to cross the borders of time and space, and
saturate the now with Eternity.

Yet there is no "other."
You waited for someone to come, always you waited;
always waiting at the bus stop for the bus that never comes,
because there is nowhere to go.  You are fortunate to
disbelieve everything.

The world spins around a place of Silence.
You need to enter that Silence, and wait in the
Eternal Presence, for The Eternal that is already here,

amused with our seeking, with our thinking God is "other."

We only struggle with our self...

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Sufi Mystic

Take from: Fragments of a Love Story

~

Photo - glass ball with bubbles

Death is a Favor to us - Hafiz

Death is a favor to us,
but our scales have lost their balance.
The impermanence of the body
should give us great clarity,
deepening the wonder in our
senses and eyes
of this mysterious existence we share
and surely are just traveling through...

[.....]

...all I know of life and myself is that
we are just a mid-air flight of golden wine
between [God's] Pitcher and His Cup.

[.....]

...our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
of time and space cannot endure very long.

Death is a favor to us,
but our minds have lost their balance.
The miraculous existence and impermanence of form
always makes the illumined ones
laugh and sing.

Hafiz

~

In memory of my mother-in-law who passed from this life
Nov. 12, 2017 after lingering many years with Alzheimer's...
Death was indeed a favor to her, allowing her Essence to
"pass through" and "journey on" beyond the fields we know...

In Our Consciousness of Time - Wendell Berry

In our consciousness of time
we are doomed to the past.
The future we may dream of
but can know it only after
it has come and gone.
The present too we know
only as the past.  When
we say, "This now is
present, the heat, the breeze,
the rippling water," it is past.
Before we knew it, before
we said, "now," it was gone.

If the only time we live
is the present, and if the present
is immeasurably short (or
long), then by the measure
of measurers we don't
exist at all, which seems
improbable, or we are
immortals, living always
in eternity, as from time to time
we hear, but rarely know.

You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river
or the swallows flying, you see
a beloved face, mortal
and alive, causing the heart
to sway in the rifts between beats
where we live without counting,
where we have forgotten time
and have forgotten ourselves,
where eternity has seized us
as its own.  This breaks
open the little circles
of the humanly known and believed,
of the world no longer existing,
letting us live where we are,
as in the deepest sleep also
we are entirely present,
entirely trusting, eternal.

Is it concentration of the mind
our unresting counting
that leaves us standing
blind in our dust?
In time we are present only
by forgetting time.

Wendell Berry

From: Leavings
2007

via: Being Silently Drawn

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

The Stream of Light and Breath - Naomi Stone

I write as I live
in an energizing stream
of light and breath
for love has its own
momentum

*

we feel the rhythm
of the heart
for we are all
contained
in the music
of a larger heart
*
a stream of energy
simply flows where it goes
and the same light
dances on the prairie
as on the ripples
and waves of the sea
in which we are all embraced
*
the same source dances us
into the day
the same pulse of life
beats in all awakening hearts
and the same breath
breathes us into being
*
the music of the heart
rises from the sweep and touch
of divine fingers
and the light that circles there
is as rich and golden
as the pure light pouring
through the sun
*
when the heart begins to sing
the song emerges
springing from joy
whether in the darkness of night
or the glow of morning
*
for it opens
from within the greater heart
and music flows
from a glorious mystery
no one
can truly name
*

music is always new
like the breath
no matter how it sounds
to another

*

for love is encoded
with a beauty only the heart
can recognize
and only unseen eyes
can behold
*
words dance out of the darkness
like our lives dance
and swirl in the curls
of beauty
that have entrapped mystics
through the ages
and time stands still
and falls away as a measure
that has no meaning
to the heart
*

there is no such thing
as separation
to the pulsing heart
of one abiding in the mystery
that listens
to all longing hearts
of countless beings
who have sweetly surrendered
their boundaries
to love
*

everything falls from a source
beyond my ability
to describe or control
it tumbles like a waterfall
into the fall line
of a timeless stream
energizing
this life
moment by moment
*
all the histories of all
of the faces and names
ultimately melt
in the dancing flames
of the beloved
and only the one
who sustains
my heart remains
*
this sweet existence
is the perfect
transparency
for this invisible flame
as the shimmering wings
of poetic vision
are carried by the light
of life itself
*

Naomi Stone