Mind Games...

Tired of noisy words,
the "spiritual abstractions"
cleverly strung together
by word-crafters espousing
their mind games - not
from the simplicity of their Heart,
but the complexities of their minds;
having been absorbed by too many
conceptual ideas: "there is only here
and Now"; "there is no other"; "there
is no me"; "'i' does not exist -
creating a phantom reality from those concepts
and ideas on which to hang your mind;
plying their paradoxes into 'non-dual' jargon.

Once a player in "The Mind Games",
I now seek refuge in the simplicity of the Heart,
and a more "direct experience" of what cannot be
defined by words and abstractions; not philosophical,
existential conundrums that boggle and confuse, but
a simple truth,
untethered and unencumbered...

I'd rather step into the unknown
and be free, than be tethered to the
certainties of noisy words and abstract
mind games that parade as truth.

Without those, I am free to BE - who I am,
as I am;
a unique expression of "The Ineffable Mystery" of Life
that animates my being -
living from the simplicity of the Heart...

_/\_

Namaste

Mystic Meandering
Dec. 14, 2019

~

Photo from the Internet
digitally altered

Untethered...

Untethered I step off into "space" -
the spaciousness of Just Being.
Flying into the vast unknown;
Invisible inner Forces showing me the way -
if I allow them to...

Not trying to "direct" my own way
by what I had known before;
letting the conceptual veils drop away...
Remaining open to an Invisible Force
at the Core of my Being -
the Inner Essence of what
makes me - me;
not an abstract construct,
but Life living ItSelf as me...

Mystic Meandering
Nov. 29, 2019

~

Art - Untethered Heart
craypas oils
2009

digitally altered

Bee-lief - J.Krishnamurti & Adyashanti

You believe in God, and another does not believe in God,
so your beliefs separate you from each other.

Belief throughout the world is organized as [Religion],
and so it divides man from man.  We are confused, and we
think that through belief we shall clear the confusion; that is,
belief is superimposed on the confusion, and we hope that
confusion will thereby be cleared away.

But belief is merely an escape from the fact of confusion;
it [belief] does not help us to face and to understand the fact
but to run away from the confusion in which we are.

To understand the confusion, belief is not necessary, and
belief only acts as a screen between ourselves and our
problems.  So, religion, which is organized belief, becomes
a means of escape from what is, from the fact of confusion.

J. Krishnamurti

~

All barriers are conceptual - made of ideas, beliefs and opinions.
Outside of concepts and beliefs there is no barrier. Belief is what
the mind does to fill up emptiness, to give it something to look at,
to play with, to hide behind...

So let us understand that Reality transcends all of our notions [beliefs]
about reality.  Reality is neither Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Advaita
Vedanta, nor Buddhist.  It is neither dualistic nor non-dualistic,
neither spiritual nor nonspiritual.  We should come to know that there
is more reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all of our
thoughts and ideas about reality.  When we perceive from an undivided
consciousness, we will find the sacred in every expression of life.
...we must let ourselves be led by the inner thread of Silence into
the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we
go innocently or not at all....

Adyashanti

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Wild Portals of Unknowing - Fred LaMotte

"God leads every soul by a separate path." - John of the Cross

I cannot possibly know what is most important; that which will
transform me.  If I already know what it is I will never be free,
because I have packaged "liberation" as knowledge, in the tight
wrapper of a concept.  This means that spiritual transformation
can never become a program, a technique, or a course that I take.

The moments that liberate me are wild portals of unknowing,
when the blue sky of wonder outshines any cloud it contains;
vast emptiness shifts into the foreground; techniques, traditions,
concepts cultivated in the past, dissolve...

[.....]

The best meditation evaporates into amazement.  The best mantra
melts into silence.  The best guru dances in the mist at the edge of
a meadow, and disappears into your longing heart, where true path
has no beginning....

No, I cannot possibly tell what is most important - how a blue
moth disguises herself in a petal of lupine, why cascade lilies
frolic in a rainy mountain meadow, what the hermit thrush means
to silence.  I cannot know when the golden sun will burst my chest
wide open, turning the small dark chamber of self-doubt into a
boundless empyrean.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

Photo - Vortex Art
2011

Neither "Separate" nor "One" - Matt Licata

We are neither "separate" nor "one", but the erupting holding
field in which the energies of "separate" and "one" interpenetrate
and dance the relative into being.  Neither of these concepts
are majestic enough to contain the mystery of the soul.  While
we may have a preference over unity and oneness, over
multiplicity and differentiation, it would appear that Love
does not share this bias and is ready at all times to equally
employ either of its manifestations to be its envoy here.

Those visitors of raw, achy, lonely, broken openness are not
neuroses to be cured or mistakes to be remedied. The shaky
vulnerability is not pathology, it is path.  As our perception
is cleansed, we see that they are not obstacles, but passionate,
yearning requests, tending to the lost grief, joy, rage
and peace of the unlived life.

The freedom we long for will never be found in the eradication
of the unwanted, but only in deeper layers of attunement to the
love and information it carries.  At times the burning can seem
unbearable.  Such is the nature of the human heart.  We may
burn until we are translucent, but it is by way of this burning
that wholeness is revealed.

Matt Licata

Our Concept of "Reality" - Bohm, LeShan & Brunton

Reality is what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is what we believe.
What we believe is based upon our perceptions.
What we perceive depends upon what we look for.
What we look for depends upon what we think.
What we think depends upon what we perceive.
What we perceive determines what we believe.
What we believe determines what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is our reality.

David Bohm
Quantum Physicist

~

The trouble is we have a basic commitment to the *idea*
that there is one true, valid concept of reality
(ours, of course) and that all others are primitive,
childlike, mythological or pathological.
[or false].

Lawrence LeShan
Psychologist
From: Landscapes of the Mind:
The Faces of Reality

~

There is no single path to enlightenment.
Life itself is the great enlightener.
Do not submit to the pressure of those who say
there is only a single way.....the way they follow
or teach.  Do not let the mind be trammelled or
narrowed.  The truth is that the ways are many,
are spread out in all directions, and are individual.

Paul Brunton
Mystical Philosopher

The Shape of "self" - MM

The Infinite Beingness that we are
takes the shape of
"self" - "you"...

- like contained water -

The Source of our Essential Beingness,
whether we call it God,
Buddha Nature, Consciousness,
Non-Dual Awareness,
Great Spirit, or
Infinite Being
is like fluid light;
refracting ItSelf
in order to make ItSelf
appear in form -
as "self"...

Our Being
takes the form of matter reality;
a modulation of Its Pure Beingness,
vibrating ItSelf uniquely into
the shape of "self."

Don't be deluded by prescriptive dogmas and
doctrines of hierarchies
selling you the steps to "enlightenment."
Instead, unshape your "self" from
the conceptual overlays
that man's finite mind devised
to try to explain what IS...

And fall into the Grace of Silence...

~

Don't entrap your "self" in intellectual argumentation,
and interpretations of
Self/No-self, Duality/Non-Duality, Just This/only Now;
frameworks of distortion; 

words that tickle the mind...

Instead, let the Shapelessness of your Eternal Being
take shape within you,
let It shape you -
and feel the authentic Being that you are.
Let It form and inform your
"self"...

The "self" cannot be discarded.
It is part of the whole
of who we are.
There can be no "separation"
or denial of who we are
as the wholeness of Being,
including the "self"...

Feel into the fluidity of
your Whole Being;
the essential feeling of Being.
Let your "self" be
the Luminous Infiniteness
with its myriad expressions,
its multiplicity and diversity...

~

If only for a moment...

Love your "self"...

Be yourself - as you are

Embrace all of "you"...

As the Infinite Whole...

Mystic Meandering
Feb/Mar/Apr 2018

This poem percolated over a period of 3 months

Namaste
_/\_

No tongue can tell your secret - Ivan Granger

The direct encounter with the Divine can't be put into words.
Words are a creation of the limited mind, powerful certainly,
but limited.  Words, even when masterfully wielded, can only
describe limited aspects of limited reality.  Words imply a
fracturing of reality into countless objects, an impassible
duality of observer and observed, describer and described.
How can words properly convey the undivided Wholeness?
(There is really no 'encounter' the way I just phrased it, because
that implies two separates meeting, when there is really only
the profound recognition of unity.  Words fail the Wholeness.)

Seeing this limitation, some teachers construct complex frame-
works of descriptions.  Some hint and suggest and riddle.  Some
fall silent.  What is said and what is left unsaid...a fascinating game.
But it is only the encounter (which is not really an encounter) that
conveys the truth of all this.

The "tongue cannot tell" these things properly.  "But the gift of the
ear / is that it hears" anyway.  That is, when we truly and openly
listen, an inner whisper begins to draw the awareness beyond the
descriptions, the suggestions, the silences.  And suddenly there we
stand, outside of all words, and concepts that obscure while they
define.  There we stand, witnessing, participating in the living
Wholeness that is the divine nature of undivided Reality.

Ivan Granger
Poetry Chaikhana

This is an excerpt from a commentary Ivan wrote on a poem
by Hakim Sanai -

No tongue can tell Your secret
for the measure of the word obscures Your nature.
But the gift of the ear
is that it hears
what the tongue cannot tell.

~

Photo - rainbow light on wall digitally altered

Seeing Red... It's not what you think!

Seeing color was an exercise from The Practice of Contemplative Photography by Andy Karr and Michael Wood.  See their website here.  The idea was to only see color, not to identify the object of the color – as in red *car*, yellow *sign*, blue *house* - but to just see the color – any color – all colors.

~~~

This photo was taken last Fall
outside a restaurant.

 ~~~

~~~

I was out in the car doing errands one day this last week and thought I’d try the exercise.  No camera to tempt me to snap every shot of color I saw…  I just had to be aware…   I began to see red – naturally drawn to it… Interesting…  I just became naturally *aware* of the color red as it passed by me or in front of me, and wondered if this is what the authors meant: The object itself  is not important – don’t need to identify it – only see color…

~~~

~~~

And then – a couple of days later I began to see red all around the house. (We have red trim, red car, red fence, red doors, red curtains – all shades and hues of red. J)  Only this time the camera was readily available and I began snapping like a snappin’ fool.  After all, it was an *assignment* and my mind evidently took it seriously. Intuitive seeing left the room and thinking took over.  I became obsessed with red, on an expedition to find red, planning, and arranging – oh-oh…  I broke one of the rules of contemplative photography – no contrivance – if I understand them right.  According to the authors – contrivance is “how we want things to appear and not how things actually are - directly *seeing* your immediate experience unfabricated and uncontrived.”  I started to specifically *look* for anything red, looking for “good” shots – not just spontaneous “flashes of perception/seeing” as they call it in the book – but purposely *looking.*  And I could tell the difference.  There wasn’t a *natural* relaxed, spontaneous *feeling* of perception that flowed from within.  I wasn’t just being *aware* - but conceptual thought took over the process.  I didn’t get absorbed in the moment of awareness, just noticing, instead, my mind became the controller of the moment. I felt stressed and anxious about “getting the shot.”  I think you can see the difference in the two photos at the end of this post with the previous photos.  

The authors say that “true seeing comes through seeing from your basic nature/Beingness which gets ‘reflected’– producing ‘equivalents’ of what you saw from your basic Being, drawing on a deeper level of intelligence than the usual way of seeing..... through being present to something in an open space (of awareness) that is created by letting go of the currents of mental activity that obscure our natural insight and awareness.”  One could call it the awakened eye, just *seeing* life as you find it, rather than manipulating it…   Am not saying I’m there yet… Just sayin’ what they said…

~~~

contrived

So – obviously - I am learning to *see* without the conceptual overlay, without manipulation, without interpretation, judgment, or contrivance – just seeing what is - from that sense of Aware Beingness – that which is seeing through the mask of me.  Not as easy as I *thought.* J

“In reality only the Ultimate is…
The rest is a matter of name and form.
When you understand that names and shapes
are hollow shells without content,
and what is real is nameless and formless,
just pure energy of the life and light
of Consciousness,
you will be at peace -
immersed in the deep Silence of reality…”

Nisargadatta