Be A Wanderer - Fred LaMotte

"Not everyone who wanders is lost" ~ Tolkien

I am most aware and most present when I am wandering,
when I am a pilgrim.  I find myself most vulnerable, alive,
and open then.  Not when I claim the kingdom of "Non-
Duality," but when I wander in the wonder of duality, the
both-ness of being on the Way and arriving at the same
time.

There is something authoritarian to me about "Non-Duality,"
and those who claim to be instantly enlightened just by 
saying that all is One.  Oneness can be very oppressive
when it is a "spiritual teaching," when it is not lived as a
journey of constant opening and discovery.  Yet for a
journey, there must be the dynamics of twoness.  There must
be eternity, and not-yet...

Those who claim to be "non-dualists" never deign to call
themselves seekers, disciples, or devotees.  They are only
content to call themselves "spiritual teachers."  Their message
is, "I have arrived."  But doesn't being-there get rather smug,
rather boring, when there is no more to [discover] and no more
wandering to unfollow?

.....a pathless Way is different than being "lost."  Those who
feel lost assume there is a destination.  They are dissatisfied
 with where they are, because there must be somewhere better. 
 But wanderers discover beauty in each step.  They never and
always arrive.  This is the lively paradox, the blessed not-yet,
of enlightened Duality...

The Gnostic Jesus doesn't say "Follow me." pointing up
to a final resting place.  He shows me the never-ending 
labyrinthine spiritual power of waylessness.  If I follow,
I follow the one who leaves no footprints on the water.
Each breath is the end and the beginning of my pilgrimage.

I learned this not from Jesus, but from his favorite and most
beloved companion, Mary Magdalene.  She became my 
anam cara, my Friend, when I was wandering down the
Medieval pilgrimage routes through southern France, 
knowing not at all what I was looking for.  And I had no
idea about herstory, for it has been submerged in history.

After the first Easter, she became a wanderer.  She was lost
at sea in a rudderless boat, tossed up on the shore in southern
France, at what is now Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.  A pilgrim,
a stranger, she found herself with no map, and no rudder for
her boat.  That is how we all find ourselves.  She finally
arrived at the beginning of her journey, awakening Christ-
Consciousness in the Western world, before theologians
and evangelists were ever invented.  And even now, she is
the Friend who blesses me when I am most fallen and far
from any path.

I must say, in  my old age, as I no longer try to go anywhere,
it is delightful to realize that such great soul-beings as Jesus,
Mary, Krishna, Radha, Qwan Yin, Lakshmi,Gurudev,
are not mere archetypes or abstract symbols in some pablum
of "non-duality."  They are living Persons I can know in
the wonder of friendship.  I bump into them somewhere out
in Rumi's meadow, when I abandon the destination,
and become a wanderer.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Multiplicity and Unicity - Licata and Ruvinsky

The experience of multiplicity is just as holy, as valid, and
as "spiritual" [as unity]...  God itself has no bias toward
unity or multiplicity, oneness or differentiation, but rather
expresses itself through each of these perspectives to
disclose one of its qualities or fragrances.  We need not
take sides but only enter into communion with each of
these energies...

Matt Licata
From: A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

~

"The question doesn't even arise in Silence..."

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

She ["God"] births herself as the many who interchangeably
play the roles of objects and subjects, reciprocally adapting,
each of the many, even in their individual forms,
embodying the One...

Joan Ruvinsky
From: The Recognition of Our Own Heart

~

Photo from the Internet

 

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

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

Etty Hillesum - Mystic of the Holocaust

True peace will come when every individual finds peace
within himself; when we have all vanquished
and transformed our hatred for our fellow human
being of whatever race - even into love one day.

~

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty:

to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves,
more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others.
And the more peace there is in us,
the more peace there will also be
in our troubled world.

Etty Hillesum
from: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries

~

Etty Hillesum, known as the Mystic of the Holocaust, was a young
Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation
and who died as one of the millions of victims of the Holocaust.

Russian authors and Christian mystics likely contributed to Hillesum's
understanding of spirituality.  She did not strive for ecstasy, but longed
to meet the depth of her own interior and life itself.  She had little
interest in organized religion of any kind.  In a time when the "whole
world [was] becoming a giant concentration camp," she felt one must
hold fast to what endures - the encounter with God at the depths of
one'sown soul.  Her spirituality was not confined to her intellectual
understanding of a greater power.  In the concentration camp of
Westerbork, she had unusual experiences of spiritual awakenings
 and insight.

"I now listen all day long to what is within me, and am able to draw
strength from the most deeply hidden sources in myself.  I keep
following my own inner voice even in the madhouse..."

Hillesum suffered inner turmoil during her young childhood, but
increasingly transformed into a woman of maturity and wisdom.
She writes:

"Everywhere things are both very good and very bad at the
same time.  The two are in balance, everywhere and always.
I never have the feeling that I have got to make the best of
things; everything is fine just as it is.  Every situation,
however miserable, is complete in itself and contains
the good as well as the bad."

In touch with the equilibrium of a bigger picture, she continuously
 drawsfrom this interior place to find meaning in her current reality.

Her transformation unfolds, and she records a slow emergence of
astounding inner freedom.  She could no longer
"live with the kind of hatred so many people nowadays force upon
themselves against themselves..."

Her diaries record the increasing anti-Jewish measures imposed by
the occupying German army, and the growing uncertainty about the
fate of fellow Jews who had been deported by them.

On Sept. 7, 1943 she and her family were deported to Auschwitz.
Her parents were killed in the gas chambers.
Etty died there November 30, 1943 at the age of 29.

Etty invites us to be the "thinking heart" of our country.
as it hangs on the brink of perpetual chaos and conflict...

From - Western Mystics
and Wikipedia

Taking Responsibility - Pema Chodron

All activities should be done with the intention of speaking
so that another person can hear you, rather than using words
that cause the barriers to go up and the ears to close.  Everything
you say can further  polarize the situation and convince you
[and others] of how separate you are.  On the other hand,
everything you say and do and think can support your desire
to communicate from the Heart, to move closer and
step out of this myth of isolation and separateness that
 we're all caught in.

...you don't have to get frozen in [language] of
loser or winner,
good guy or bad guy...

We have two alternatives.  Either we hold onto our fixed versions
of reality, or we begin to challenge them, and start dissolving
the barriers that we erect between ourselves and the world.

Pema Chodron
Buddhist Teacher
From: Comfortable with Uncertainty

photo - two pieces of bread that look like faces
facing each other...

~

How We Get There - Fred LaMotte

We wonder why everyone is so stressed.  But many of us would
not know who we are without conflict...

Democrat against Republican, socialist against capitalist,
woman vs man, black vs white, vegan vs omnivore,
the enlightened vs the ignorant...

Maybe the answer is never one side vs the other.  Maybe we could
rest the [conflicted] mind in the Heart. Maybe we could all go meet
in Rumi's field, under the stars, beyond the ideas of right and wrong.
How can we get there?
Listen to the Silence.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

With great grief for the hatred and violence
in this country...

To feel one's grief is being authentic, allowing
yourself to feel another's grief, the collective grief
of people heartbroken from the trauma of violence. It
softens you, opens the heart and gives you a different lens
with which to see others with a sense of connectedness
and compassion; dissolving the barriers that separate,
allowing a different vision than your own dearly held beliefs
and opinions, whether spiritual or political.  And in that
is a deepening sense of inner peace and equilibrium...

~

2nd photo - the Om (Aum) symbol is a sacred symbol of the
universal name of God (or Ultimate Reality),
Om (Aum) is the ever present "sound"/vibration of
 an already unified Universe, which expresses itself dualistically
in our experience here.
When you are in meditative Silence, listening, you are aware
of it, the Universal Om - the Hum of the Universe.
  It pervades even the chaos,
and every "sound" becomes the sound of OM/Aum singing
the song of the Universe...  Just listen...
One experiences the wholeness of Life,
despite what is happening...
At least that it my experience.

"Equinox" - Rumi

Artist: Puisi - ambua.id

Look at love
how it tangles
with the one fallen in love.

Look at spirit
how it fuses with earth
giving it new life.

Why are you so busy
with this or that or good or bad.
Pay attention to how things blend.

Why think separately

of this life and the next
when one is born from the last?

Look at your heart and tongue,
one feels but deaf and dumb,
the other speaks in words and signs.

Look at water and fire,
earth and wind,
enemies and friends all at once.

The wolf and the lamb,
the lion and the deer
far away and yet together.

Look at the unity of this
spring and winter
[or summer and fall]
manifested in the equinox.

You too must mingle my friends...

Be like sugarcane,
sweet and silent.
Don't be mixed up with bitter words.
My Beloved grows right out of my [your] own heart.
How much more union can there be...

Rumi

Translation by Mader Khalili
From: This Dance of Bliss

Poetry Chaikhana

Original title: "Look at Love"

~

The "Equinox" is a "pivotal cosmic hinge"
signifying equilibrium, or equality;
a fluid threshold, poised between 2 seasons.
Or in the case of the whirling dervish,
the union/merging of heaven and earth;

between Divine and human.
The Dervish whirls with one palm open up
to the cosmos and the other palm downward,
open to the earth...
symbolizing the union of our Divine nature
and our human nature...
the fusion of spirit and matter;
being reborn to the Truth of our Being...

As Rumi says -
"how much more union can there be? :)

Dissolving - Dorothy Hunt

Coming/Going...

Creation/Destruction...

Emptiness/Fullness...

Freedom/Bondage...

Come to where these words dissolve.


Her you will find neither

Duality/nor Nonduality...

Ignorance/nor Enlightenment...

Purity/nor Impurity...

Time/nor the Absence of Time...

Here nothing is

Attached/or Detached...

Known/or Unknown...

Asleep/or Awake...

Divided/or Undivided...

Here, the mind cannot speak.

No you/No me...

No union/No separation...

No form/No formlessness...

No death/No deathlessness...


Silence alone reveals what thought cannot think,
what knowing cannot know,
what listening cannot hear,
what seeing cannot see.

Dorothy Hunt

~

Photo - Mandala Art
digitally altered

A Unitive Place...

In these sometimes harsh, divisive times
one must dive deep and refocus
on the depths of the Stillness of Being within oneself,
moving inward beyond the polarities of existence
where nothing is disturbed, nothing harmed...

There we will find a deeper unitive place of Restful Presence,
knowing that externally it's just the duality of existence
playing itself out in the construct of time...

In the Primordial Womb of Stillness,
in which matter reality exists,
everything is allowed...

The world will go the way it goes -
life will continue to unfold as it unfolds -
the light and the dark will continue to dance together -
in time bound reality.

If we focus only on the divisive chaos we will
react out of the mind-created contractions of fear and ignorance...

If we are able to experience the depths of this True Silence,
the Silence of the Everlasting Depths of Existence,
we can experience what's beyond the outward mentations
of chaos and fear:
- the Silence that holds the Cosmos together -
- that is the Cosmos -

the enduring Silence of the Universe within all form;
the pure Stillness of Being...

The Unitive Place...

In this deep Silence that sustains Existence
we Rest...in the True Heart of That which animates Life...

The True Timeless Heartbeat of Reality...

_/\_

Namaste

Mystic Meandering
Jan. 5, 2018

~

Photo - Vortex Art
2011
Craypas Oils
done with fingers

Living the Balance - Sandy Jones

There is a perfect Balance between duality and non-duality.
There is a way of balance between the changing, ongoing
images of this time-space tangible world and the Living Light
of the unseen, changeless, Divine Principle, that stands behind
all things.

Living this Balance, is an inner knowing that keeps us steady,
true, strong and agile.  It is an ease and a dominion within us.
It is the perfect center within ourself.  We know it when we
find it.  It is real...  The Balance is a sweet place within, where
the heart and the soul come together.  Here, between the known
and the unknown, Something real, pure, unconditioned is found.
It is the original self...

How do we come to know this marvelous sense of Balance,
and know we know it?  How else, but by living the imbalance -
for a time.

...this Balance between the tangible world of multiplicity,
matter, time and change - and the intangible knowing, the innate
realization and understanding of the oneness of all things
[doesn't]  leave out any part of this Life.  It includes all
possibilities [all experiences].

This knowing is fearless, now enjoying the shadows,
the flickering light of this world, as part of the unfolding
beauty of it all.  The sweet balance leads us to a new way of
being and seeing, right here in the world - where Life Flows...

Sandy Jones

Excerpt from a post on her blog

~

Photo via No Mind's Land

Fully "ME" - Anna Wood & MM

One of the most valuable insights I've gained through yoga
and meditation is that I've lived most of my life estranged
from myself as a whole, compartmentalizing aspects of my
existence into heart/mind/instinct/left foot/daydreams/ love
handles.  Thus segmented "I" was (am) never fully "me,"
and I never had (have) to come to terms with the actual
density and simultaneous emptiness of being alive as a
human being on planet earth.
...it seems to me like we've collectively designed a global
system that prevents most of us from accomplishing it
even we had the will to.

Silence, by clarifying our senses, invites us to witness
ourselves as we are.

Anna Wood
From: A More Intricate Cup of Tea

~*~

What I seem to understand - what I have always known, but
have felt constrained by mental/conceptual frameworks - is
that Life/Existence/Awareness *delights* in expressing
 ItSelf, and *how* It expresses ItSelf really doesn't matter
 to It. Awareness has no concept of non-dual awareness,
 of non-dual language. It *sees* everything as ItSelf, and
 therefore as not  separate from ItSelf.  The idea that it is
 "non-dual" does not even occur to It.  It does not concern
 ItSelf  with "non-duality," or duality for that matter.
It doesn't *see* duality, the self, the me, as a problem to
 overcome, or be seen through, or merged with, as other than
 non-dual. The whole me/no-me, self/no-self concept
doesn't matter anymore.  I somehow had constrained my
 Self by subtly making those very linear delineations,
splitting Existence in two - creating duality; becoming more
 *self* conscious -  trying to fit this expression of Being into
 a "non-dual" conceptual framework instead of just Being what
 I already knew myself to be.  My SELF!
 Beingness being ItSelf - as me...

What a relief!  Such freedom!  I can just be ME! - living from
the Heart of Being, and not the framework, the scaffolding.  In
 a sense I muted this innate Aliveness that wants to express here
*through* constraining myself to the frameworks and scaffoldings
of *conceptual* "non-dual" ideas, interpretations, language and
beliefs - trying to fit myself into a nice neat "spiritual" box.
When all along it was about coming Alive again, rekindling the
Life that already lives here - "outside the box."

Infinite Beingness expresses Aliveness.
Its only purpose, evidently, is to express Life, in all its forms.
Aliveness expressing ItSelf as Life - all life, not just
"non-dual" life -
whatever that might mean...

Mystic Meandering

Meditative Writings
2011

"First" (excerpt) - Chuck Surface

[.....]

First...

Turn your wandering Attention within,
and find the Self within your self...

Find it not by "thinking about" it,
But by Feeling with the Whole of your Being.
What you are, Where you are,
Before the feeling of you, the person, ever arose...

[.....]

You are the formless, unmanifest Mystery,
And... you are all that appears.
From, within, and as that Mystery,
As it moves into Creation.

Once you have poked a hole in Heaven,
It will shine into your manifest Experience,
Of space, time, and objects.
Here... in this Dream of duality.

And in time, that Wellspring in your Heart
Will Dissolve the residues
of the salt doll "self",
In those living Waters.

Knowledge... is... insufficient.
Many "know" intellectually,
That they are formless Pure Being,
But continue to "feel" themselves bound...

For such "knowledge" is nothing more than "belief."

To cut the Knot...
"Find the 'I' Feeling and rest there",

As Ramana [Maharshi] said.
Not by looking at a conceptual "picture"...

But by diving deep, in Feeling, in Experience.

Throughout the day, as you can Remember,
Turn Attention within, turn Feeling within,
And forgetting all concept, theory, and conjecture,
Investigate the nature of Where and What you are...

And Resting there...
Moved by that Ancient Longing...
Dissolve in and as The Unknowable Mystery...
That you are.

[.....]

Chuck Surface

Facebook

To read the entire poem click
here then scroll down in the left margin
to Aged Poems - which are listed alphabetically.

~

Photo - pic of clouds turned on end. 

The "Good Dark" - Ivan Granger

What is the "Good Dark"?
The Light is so often considered one of the attributes of the Divine,
but we forget that dark too is also a metaphor...  The Eternal is
sometimes called dark because IT is beyond the ability of the limited
intellect to see.  It is the realm where there is no longer separation;
nothing is seen as separate from That [the Eternal].  It can feel like
a shining darkness.  So the Sacred Dark, the Good Dark, is God,
the Eternal, that exists in its mysterious, invisible, indefinable form.
Vast beyond comprehension.  [It is the Eternal] that gathers
everything, even light, into ItSelf.  This is the darkness where
there is great joy,  This is the immense Mystery...

If we understand the Divine to be that living, mysterious darkness,
then we finally recognize ourselves as the same as that darkness.
[The light and dark being the same - think Yin-Yang, where the
light is contained within the dark and the dark within the light.]
In the 'half-light' [partial understanding] we are still distracted by
our own faces, we are confused, more aware of ourselves than the
holy mystery we touch.  We become like a young lover, too
self-conscious to simply lose oneself in the embrace of the Beloved.

...[when] we have no face of our own *separate* from That [our face
before we were born], then we can melt silently into the Good Dark,
into the mystery of the Divine.  Your face gets erased [the persona, or
mask] - the false self, the little me, the ego.  This is the place where
concepts fail, where reality is no longer parceled out into dichotomies
of good and bad, right and wrong, (no division of opposites)...  There
is nothing (except the Divine Wholeness that is all things). The ego-
mind is no longer able to segment reality.  Underlying the complex
 diversity of creation is a single Unity.  And within that Unity, the
 individual is not separate or different from the vast Divine.
  There is no separation between individual self and the center of all
selves...  Just Pure Being...

If you can settle deeply into this awareness [that there is nothing
except Divine Wholeness, beyond the mask], then you will find
yourself drinking the ecstasy of true love-wisdom!

Ivan Granger, Poetry Chaikhana
[brackets mine] (parentheses his)

~

We are from the fathomless depths,
the "darkness" of "The Deep"
*before* Light began...
*from* which Light emerged...
We *are* the Deep Ananda of
The Divine...

without knowing how or why...
without the need for certainties,
for *answers*; only the
ever-available Presence of
Divine Love...Pure Bliss
Pure Blessing

Mystic Meandering
January 30, 2017

Mystical Presence - Vaughan-Lee & Campbell

To know that beneath all the divisions of the outer world

 there is a single stream of mystical [Presence]
is in itself a refuge and deep reassurance.
It is so easy to get caught up in the forms and images
of the outer world, and yet, as Rumi writes,"God does not
look at your outer forms, but at the love within your love."
And as I have discovered from my own journey into the heart,
there is a love that embraces each of us with a tenderness
and passion known only to lovers.
We are taken by love to love.

We begin this mystical journey with the simple act of listening
within the heart.  We bring the mind down into the heart,
into the feeling center of our self.  And here we wait and listen,
not to the sounds of the outer world, but to the silence
that is within our self.  This silence is nourishing, and draws
us deeper and deeper within.  It is the silence from which
love is born.  It nourishes us from the depths of our own soul,
[and] our outer, everyday life becomes more and more
grounded in the core of our Being.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Sufi Mystic
From: The Prayer of the Heart

~

The divine manifestation is ubiquitous, only our eyes are not
open to it.  Awe is what moves us forward.
Live from your own center. The divine lives within you.
The separation apparent in the world is secondary.
Beyond the world of opposites is an unseen, but experienced,
unity and identity in us all.

See the radiance everywhere...

Sanctify the place you are in...

Joseph Campbell
Mythologist

The Art of Living - Henry Miller

The art of living is based on rhythm -
on give and take,
ebb and flow,
light and dark,
life and death.

By acceptance of all aspects of life,
good and bad,
right and wrong,
yours and mine,
the static, defensive life
which is what most people
are cursed with,
is converted into a dance,
'the dance of life,'
metamorphosis.

One can dance to sorrow or joy;
one can even dance abstractly.
But the point is that
by the mere act of dancing,
the elements which compose it are
transformed;
the dance is an end in itself,
just like life.

The acceptance of the situation,
any situation,

brings about flow,
a rhythmic impulse towards
self-expression.
To relax is the first thing
a dancer has to learn...
It is the first thing any one has to learn
in order to live.

It is extremely difficult,
because it means surrender,
full surrender.

Henry Miller
The Wisdom of the Heart
(Mr. Miller's words, my format)

via: No Mind's Land

The Infinite is Everywhere - Danna Faulds

I am everywhere present
said the [Infinite.]

Seek me in the stately trees,
or the melodies of sparrows
and you will surely find me.

Look for me in the Buddha's smile,
the countenance of Christ,
the words of the Koran and Sanskrit prayers.
I am always there.

Turn your attention to the sky
where the movements of the moon and stars
trace my beauty...

Experience true emptiness
and my presence permeates the void.
Now bring your focus closer
to your heart.

Grow still and find me within you.

Separation dissolves like salt water
when you experience your true identity as me.

Practice devotion and let go into the ocean
of my love,
or be the open space from which all things arise.

One and two,
duality and union,
are both true.

So I say be jubilant
and be at peace,
for inside you is the seed and the fruit,
the tree and the root.

Choose to be in communion with me
and see the whole of this
creation infused with one energy...

Danna Faulds
Yoga Practitioner and Poet

Excerpt From:One and Two are Both True
From: Prayers to the Infinite

Out Beyond - Rumi

Out beyond the ideas of right-doing and wrongdoing
there is a field…
I will meet you there…

Rumi

~

Beyond all polarities, mental concepts,
and the shadowy forms of beliefs about

 “God” or “no-God”,
duality or non-duality,
or the language we use for what we call “God”,
or “Oneness”,
there is an Ineffable, untouched
Mystery of Being
  within us…
A stillness...
where we can lay our “self” down in the Sacred Silence
and rest -

Meet me there,
no matter what your beliefs…

MM

The Ineffable Breath...

Beyond the concepts of duality and n0n-duality
there is only The Breath of Sacred Silence...
Here is neither oneness or two-ness,
only The Rhythm of the
Ineffable Breath
of Silence
IN
which
Existence exists

In this space
everything falls away -
even our own breath –

 all  breathing falls into the
the Rhythm of the
Ineffable – breathing
the essential Life that

underlies everything.

The Ineffable Breath is always
 here - and "we" -
 are always being breathed
by the Ineffable Breath...

A mystery...

The inhale and exhale
of the Cosmos,
one Rhythm.
No longer aware of
a separate "me,"
only the Ineffable Silence
breathing…

The mind tries to keep the personal
sense of "me" alive through
thought patterns,
thought processes,
an automated mechanism
that just runs,
creating scenarios of I/me
BUT
There is only The Breath
of The Ineffable,

Breathing -
breathing Existence.

There is no sense of
union,
or dissolution,
or surrender
of a thing
called
"me"

One is simply - absorbed -
 subtly by/into The Ineffable.

A natural, organic absorption of the whole being

 taking place IN the Ineffable Breath -
 the ongoing stream of
 Pure Beingness –

Ecstasy…

The mystery of Existence
 all takes place
IN

The Ineffable Breath of Silence

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
January 18, 2016

~*~

This poem triggered a mass exodus from my blog.
Maybe it is too "esoteric", too confusing, as a "Friend" suggested.
And yet, this was/is my experience of the Ineffable, the Mystery of
Existence, during times of meditative Silence -
 lost in the Ineffable Breath.
But how does one express the inexpressible in
 "understandable" ways?

One doesn't  - that is why it is "ineffable" - i.e. beyond expression,
unspeakable.  And yet I felt compelled to write,
 to share the experience
through the only vehicle I know - words -
in hopes that it would inspire...

Namaste

Life Sings...

Life Sings:

I am the rustling of leaves,
the feel of the cooling breeze,
the call of the Magpie – displeased…

I am joy, sorrow, grief;
comedy and tragedy…
 

Even the sound of traffic,
honking horns, and
sirens screaming…

It’s all Life singing.

Just sit with Life,
listening…

Life Sings:

I am THIS
and this,
and this…

Life Sings:

I am everything…
being everything…
living everything…

Life is Awake,
Aware, Alive
and
Singing…

Life Sings:

Hear ME

Aware ME
Experience ME
Remember ME

the song of Life…
the singing of Aliveness…
the singing of the Heart for ItSelf…

Life is everything
and everything is singing Life…

Nothing is separate from this Life
that sings…

Nothing is discounted…

Nothing is dismissed
as illusion or dream…
Every thing is always
Life – singing…

Life does not see ItSelf as “duality”
or “non-duality”
as light or dark;
not opposing forces…

Life just sees ItSelf ~
Vibrant and Alive and Singing!

Playing, Loving, Living…
Whole in its expressions…

Everything is always Life living ItSelf,
expressing ItSelf…

Delighting in living ItSelf,
Life Sings!

Mystic Meandering
originally written June 2011
updated January 2016

Timelessness...

I have conversed with the Universe,

commiserated and cogitated,

ascended, descended,

polarized, conceptualized and spiritualized,

dis-membered and re-membered ~

and still I find no “plan” ~

Only vastness and immensity

beyond theory, framework, and concept.

The Greatest, Grandest Mystery

procreating itself

in endless infinity;

without beginning or end,

Sound beyond sound,

Light beyond light ~
Mystery of mysteries…

Expressing ItSelf in timelessness,

through time, and space beyond time,

with one vibration:

~ Love ~

From this mysterious pulse of Love

we are coalesced into Form,

and dance the dance of duality ~

our light and our dark
seamlessly woven

as one thread within the
 cosmic fabric of Timelessness
 dancing in Time…

~*~

Mystic Meandering

Originally written on Winter Solstice

1999
revised December 2015