Solitude - the furnace of transformation

Solitude is the furnace of transformation.
Without solitude
we remain victims of our society
and continue to be
entangled in the illusions
of the false self...

Henri Nouwen

~

The great omission in American life is solitude;
not loneliness,
for there is an alienation
that thrives most in the midst of crowds,
but [it is] that zone of time and space,
free from outside pressures,
which is the incubator
of the spirit.

Maya Mannes

~

Awareness of the Divine Essence as our
innermost [Being] requires silence...

It is turning toward what lies hidden within -
to the internal - the all-embracing totality
of Divine Being.

It is the way of meditation,
the way of inner silence before Spirit.

Remaining quiet before Spirit is a prayer of silence,
through which we listen to that which secretly speaks
to us in the inner room of the heart.

What is hidden deep in our innermost being
lies in silence and stillness,

and in the silence of the deep
springs the eternal, inexhaustible, original
source of all being.

Where words fall silent,
the everlasting begins...

Wolfgang Kopp
From: Free Yourself Of Everything

~

Spiritual joys come from solitude.
A little while in your room
will prove more valuable than anything else
that could ever be given...

To be one with the truth for just a moment
is worth more than the world and life itself...

Rumi

~

Personal Note:

I am not suggesting that we all live a cloistered life of 
solitude and silence!  We're not all meant for that.  I don't
think I could even do that as much as I need solitude and silence.
As I have discovered, solitude is not always the "answer."
But it is  about going deeper within,
listening and hearing the deeper Voice within,
and responding to the inner movement of That.
We can be in solitude while cleaning or creating, or in nature.
And sometimes that inner Voice speaks to us through the voice
of others, as these quotes here did for me.
I merely wish to point out that part of the angst and entropy
we are experiencing personally and in the world is due to
a lack of spending time in solitude and silence,
becoming aware of and getting to know our deeper,
mostly unknown, Core Being.

MM
_/\_

~

There is no effort that we can make to still ourselves.
True stillness comes naturally from moments of solitude
where we allow our minds to settle.  Just as water seeks
its own level, the mind will gravitate toward the holy.
Muddy water will become clear if allowed to stand
undisturbed, and so too will the mind become clear
if it is allowed to be still.

Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao, Daily Meditations

~

Photos - Mystic Meandering

The Interior Voyage - Charles Wright

Photo Art - Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

We've all led raucous [noisy, chaotic] lives,
some of them inside, some of them out.
But only the poem you leave behind is what's important.

Everyone knows this:
The voyage into the interior is all that matters.

Whatever your ride...

Charles Wright

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo Art - Johannes Plenio

Unsplash

 

A Non-Path Path :) - a meandering...

I am feeling the need to settle deeper into the interior, and 
rediscover a sense of the inner Truth of Myself; not by following
a particular external path - but by intuitively listening to the 
Inner Voice; by spending time in Quietude, and "The Silence"
(which I crave, but so easily avoid by getting distracted on
non-essential things.).

"The Quest" - for me then - is to discover the Deeper Reality of

Myself.  I have forgotten how to be ME!  In a sense, what I was
"designed" for; one could say my Soul's "calling"...   Some call it
the Self (or Higher Self), but I get hung up on those words, because
the big "S" Self is not another self hidden somewhere inside us with
a big S on it that we have to "become"/discover.  But it's the discovery
of, a remembering of, having a felt sense of, the authentic, natural
self, beyond mind, beyond religion, beyond "spirituality."  Who are
 we really?   What is the "Deeper Reality"? I thought maybe I knew, 
but I haven't really met Her - yet...  Hopefully I will find the Deep
Quiet of the Heart, and the Illuminating Light of the Soul.

The path of "Enlightenment"/"Awakening"/"Self-Realization",
particularly what is popularly known as "Non-Duality, wasn't
IT for me, with its attraction to the mind and its abstractions and
mind games. It is just another construct, a belief system.  I found
out that the "Emperor has no clothes!  And I'd rather not describe
Truth by a negative - with no-me, no-self, no other, no world - as
Truth  is all inclusive - including duality, me, self, other, humanity,
and the world.

Even if one follows a "spiritual path" (which can be any path), life
will not suddenly become easy or flowing with bliss, although there
may be little epiphanies and "awakenings" here and there. We won't
necessarily lose our personality with its quirks, and become an
emotionless automaton. We won't lose our conditioning, or our 
neuroses.  Our thoughts will not stop, neither will our surface
struggles, or our pain, or our stories.  Walking "a path" doesn't even
guarantee that we will actually *see* life differently, or suddenly
find our "purpose" - as if there is only one.  But no one tells you
this about "the path."  It has to be a self-discovery, even if we have
a "Teacher", a "Path", or use a "Teaching" to help point the way.

It is different for everyone, of course.  I'm only reflecting on my
own experience here...

Years of seeking, realization, recognition, and then forgetting, and
then seeking again, then remembering, and then forgetting again, etc.,
brought me to the realization that discovering (or rediscovering) the
Essence of who I am is, for me, through awareness of and deep
intimacy with "The Silence" within; through continually coming
back to "The Silence of Source" - the space of Stillness, and
innate Wisdom - which of course is wherever we are at the 
moment, not off in the distance somewhere.  It's not a place.
"The path" doesn't *go* anywhere.  There is no reward at the end.
It's an inner pathless path...  And that's my "path" - again :)
rediscovering the inner Silent Truth of Myself, directly;
experiencing the underlying Rhythm of Existence Itself, and
within that the Truth of Myself...

Mystic Meandering
April 2024

~

Wanderer, your footsteps are the road,
and nothing more;
Wanderer, there is no road.
The road is made by walking...

By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path that will
never be trod again...

Wanderer, there is no road -
only wakes upon the sea..."

Antonio Machado

~

Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind rest in peace.
The ten thousand things rise and fall
while the [inner] self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then
return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness,
which is the way of nature...

Returning is the motion of the Tao.

Lao Tzu

~~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
taken at the Denver Botanical Gardens

 

Sacred Experience - Ivan Granger

I know it is a challenging time in the world.  Things might feel
off kilter.  But this is also a holy time, a time to recall what
is sacred.  It is a time to reconnect with what illuminates our
minds and awakens our hearts.  We enter the cave of interior
awareness during this darkened period of the winter and
discover and rediscover the light within ourselves,
renewing ourselves...

Mystics write poetry, universally, Saints and sages, shamans
and seers, wise women and medicine men - they sing songs,
they riddle, they rhyme...  

Numinous experiences are not easily communicated through
words.  The sacred can be witnessed and participated in, but
not conveyed through limited concepts.  Any attempt to
communicate what is perceived in states of encompassing
unity and mental quiet is necessarily an act of translation.
Poetry is well suited to the sacred, enabling language to
relay experience...

Sacred experience is beyond word and form, yet the limited 
mind, in trying to understand what it has witnessed,
reflexively interprets its experience in terms of the world known
to the senses.  What emerges is a primal language of metaphor,
a rich and spontaneous pidgin that develops between the 
limited mind and unlimited awareness.

The fiery rising of the Kundalini inspires verses on the moth's
ecstatic annihilation in fire.

To the seer, enraptured by the holistic vision of reality as
fluid interconnectedness, one thing truly is another.
Metaphor ceases to be a literary device or a dramatic
mode of expression; it is observed reality.

It is from this visionary metaphor that sacred poetry is born.

Ivan Granger
excerpts from the Introduction to his book
The Longing in Between
Poetry Chaikhana

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Fire and Ice

 

Inner Rhythms - a meandering...

I've been trying to find my "Inner Rhythms" again; the Inner
Rhythm of Being, of the Soul, and how that wants to move
in and through me.  I receive postings from  Nature Artist
and Writer, Rod MacIver, from his website, Heron Dance.
He has spent a lot of time alone in nature, getting in touch
with his Inner Rhythm.  He reflects:

"A balanced life is based on its own rhythm.  If you don't set
your own rhythm, and have the discipline to follow it, your
life will move at the speed of the culture around [you], which
moves too fast.  The space we make for quiet time affects our
thought patterns and, in turn, the quality of our lives."  And, he
asks:  "To what extent is the rhythm of your life a result of....
adapting.....to the flow that surrounds [you]."  Or, I would
even say, to the people around you.  Have we entrained to the
people around us - living their rhythm?  I know I have...

I felt a resonance with his words, knowing that I needed to find
that sense of the deeper Inner Rhythm again, not just my own
personal daily rhythm with life, but the Flow with the Inner
Rhythm of my Being; the undercurrent flow of Life within -
from which all movement arises.

The only way I know to do this is to turn within to The Silence 
where The Rhythm of the Inner Being is felt - the Rhythm of
Silence ItSelf.  Being in The Sacred Silence is what brings me
joy, and a felt sense of Presence.  Finding that Inner Rhythm,
The Silence of Being, is "Divine Communion."  This, for me,
is the True Rhythm, the Rhythm of Pure Being ItSelf - the deep
undercurrent of Life that animates all life - which is The
Silence.  This is what calls to me - over and over again.

But the hypnosis of the world keeps me/us magnetized to the
ways of the world and pulls me/us out of this deeper way of
living and knowing.  We are conditioned to be drawn to the
external dramas of the world, to chew on them, teethe on them...
It's the pablum of the matrix we live in.  But no one trains us
to turn within to the Quiet Inner Presence of Silence.  And so
we follow the rhythm of the world (the "civilized", mechanized,
political, chaotic world), with its hypnosis of separation from
our Inner Rhythm, instead of turning inward to the awareness
of the Inner Rhythm; to that interior space of the "Great Mystery"
 that pulsates Its Rhythm within us...

I'm curious, before your innocent Heart was hypnotized by the
rhythms of the world, what did you want deep in your Heart,
not what you wanted to be when you grew up, but what did
you really long for?  What called to you?  Do you remember?
Do you know now?

Mystic Meandering
Sept. 6, 2015

~

Photo - Mandala Art
2013

 

The Great Silence - Robert Sardello

We have a strong tendency to imagine Silence as the
absence of sound.  This imagination deprives Silence of
being anything in itself and makes it an emptiness, a void...

But Silence was here before anything else.  It is the most
primary phenomenon of existence, both palpably something
and seemingly nothing.

Silence is prior to sound, not the cessation of sound.  It is
already present.  If we drop into quietness for just a moment,
we feel the presence of Silence as in invitation.  We are being
invited into a new way of being.

Silence is not merely the void from which things spring up;
it is a living presence...  As we enter the mystery of Silence,
its presence resonates throughout the fibers of our flesh,
while extending beyond the flesh...  The inward silence of
solitude meets with the Great Silence of Cosmic Wisdom...

Silence bears the wholeness we keep looking for.  It is around
us and within us.  It goes to the deepest depths of the soul
and to the outermost reaches of the cosmos uniting in our heart.

The experience comes with astonishing intimacy and feels like
the finding of a long lost beloved..

We, along with everything else, are within Silence.  This realm
of Silence is pregnant with the ever-living Mystery.  It is the
deepest feeling of communing, touched by the ineffable, that
keeps us intimately bound with the truth of our core being,
the very essence of our being; an interiority that has been
waiting for us.

~

Silence has a rhythm all its own.  The currents of Silence
weave polarities and opposites and contradictions together.

Within Silence everything resonates in true intimacy and
mystery.

When we perceive through the depths of Silence we discover
the invisible body of the world in which everything is nurtured
into existence at every moment.  We discover ourselves as
participants in the Great Silence.  We are not detached observers
of an independent phenomenon, for we exist within the Silence
we are observing.  The world of subjective experience and outer
presence dissolve into one field.

When we incline toward Silence a resonance is set up within
our heart, prompting an inclination of our heart to enter
deeper into the realm of Silence...  In the interior space of the
etheric heart we feel the currents of Silence as an endless
intimate infinity that we are within.  We are held within a
tender, loving, invisible presence...
A vivid Presence of Silence...

Excerpts from: Silence, The Mystery of Wholeness

by Robert Sardello

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Survivors of Solitude - John O'Donohue

They are to be admired those survivors
of solitude who have gone with no maps
into the room without features,
where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace,
no path of danger to a cold summit
to look back on and feel exuberant,
no clarity of territories yet untouched
that tremble near the human breath,
no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores
to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds,
no friendship of other explorers
drawn into the dream of the unknown.

No.  They do not belong to the outside worship
of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior
space where the senses have nothing to celebrate,
where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human
and a poultice of silence pulls every sound
out of circulation down into the ground,
where in the panic of being, each breath unravels
an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind,
shawls of thought fall off, empty and lost...
...and the end of all exploring is the relentless
arrival at an ever novel nowhere.

John O'Donohue
From: Echoes of Memory

Original title - "Nowhere"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

"HERE" and "THERE" - Chuck Surface

There is a... a Space, Within,
A Place at the Very Heart of my Being,
Where Nothing exists, but Existence.

Not a space, of course, or a place, really,
But although unseen, ungraspable, "There",
It is Palpable, Visceral, Experienced "Here".

The Kingdom of Heaven, our Inner Sanctum,
"There", yet closer than the jugular, "Here",
The Essence we Are, before "we" are...

The "Am" before "I Am".

I will not speak for you, or others,
And become, thus, yet another theologian,
Preaching the "Truth" of all things.

But perhaps you have tasted this Wine,
Even if only as the Softest Ambience,
That Imbues, Surrounds, Enfolds in Love?

I am not in accordance with those,
who pronounce this Essence transcendent,
Beyond all qualities and attributes.

For when "I" Died, yet Remained,
An Attribute like non other was Revealed,
"There", at the End of all things...

Where Beginning and End do not exist.

A Rapture, an Ecstasy, beyond expression,
Beyond all dualities, without opposite,
"There", in the Heaven of Nonexistent Existence...

Where Heaven and Hell do not exist.

And a touch of that Ecstasy followed me "Here",
When "I" and Creation returned from "There",
So that "I" was never quite  "myself" again...

Where self in form and formless Soul coexist.

Existing "Here" as myself, but... not,
Moving in space and time, but... not,
Being both "Here" and "There"...

Where Space, Time do not exist.

Wounded and broken in my Humanity
But accompanied, through that Imperfection
By that Rapturous Perfection, Shining...

Where Perfect and Imperfect do not exist.

Chuck Surface

~

Photo - Mandala Art

The Guest - Kabir

The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
the daily sense of failure [despair] goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no-one has shaken,

inside "love" there is more joy than we know of,
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through with in all parts by a
single sort of love.

How hard it is to feel that joy in all our bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word "reason" you already feel miles away.

How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own boat.
His poems amount to one soul meeting another.
These songs [poems] are about forgetting dying and loss.
They rise above both coming in and going out. [birth and death].

Kabir

from: Ecstatic Poems

Thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

The following is part of a commentary on the above poem
that I found this morning on line.  Author Unknown...

~

God is already in you; the True God, not the man made
image of God, not god of the temples, and the churches,
and the synagogues and the mosques and the gurudwaras...

The god that man has imagined in his own image, the god
that man made according to his own wishes, the god that is
nothing but the projection of man's mind and desires...
  That god never really existed.[because "God" is much
vaster than our personal limited images of who/what
 "God"is.]
The untrue [image] MUST cease for the truth to be.

Those who know the True God, know God as the fragrance
of life, the perfume of existence, the very ground of being.
For them God is not a concept, not a theory, not a hypothesis.
For them God is an existential experience.  For them God
is not separate from man, for them God is man's innermost
core...  God is nothing but your own depth [your Core Being]
trying to manifest itself.  God is not an ideal.
God exists as you - as life.

Life is eternal.
Life is immortal.
It changes forms, just like the waves in the ocean go on changing
but the ocean remains.  Bodies come and go, but your innermost
[Being] remains always there.  And that is God.

God is not to be worshiped, but realized.  There is no need to make
temples for God.  You have to learn to look within.
The temple is already there; It cannot be destroyed.

God is always your interiority...

The Guest is within you, but you have to turn in...
You have to become more conscious of your Consciousness.
You have to become more aware of your Awareness.
A point of stillness comes where you are simply aware of
your [inner] Awareness...

When Awareness [the Core Being] is the only content of your
awareness, that is the moment when The Guest is found...

author unknown

The End of All Exploring - John O'Donohue

They are to be admired, those survivors
of solitude, who have gone with no maps
into rooms without features,
where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace,
no path of danger to a cold summit
to look back on and feel exuberant,
no clarity of territories yet untouched
that tremble near the human breath,
no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores
to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds,
no friendship of other explorers
drawn into the dream of the unknown.

No.  They do not belong to the outside worship
of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior
space where the senses have nothing to celebrate,
where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human
and a poultice of silence pulls every sound
out of circulation down into the ground,
where, in the panic of being, each breath unravels
an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind;
shawls of thought fall off, empty and lost,
where only the red scream of the blood continues unheard
without anonymous skin, and the end of all exploring
is the relentless arrival at an ever novel nowhere...

John O'Donohue

From - Echoes of Memory
Original title of poem: Nowhere

~

Photo - looking into the inside of a basket,
as if into an empty room.