Balance: Noticing the Opposites - iRest

Artist- Puisi

Our experience always changes.  We have idealized
expectations of what we think life is supposed to be.
Life will do what life does, despite trying to
control our experience.

Balance is born out of transformative embrace of the
fullness of life in its ups and downs, not dependent
upon on external life circumstances.

Flow with the waves of life, noticing the *sensations*
in the body, exploring the opposites in the body,
the heaviness and lightness; feeling both sensations
in the body at the same time; as well as opposite
emotions and beliefs.

Every experience has an opposite.
Once explored and underlying sense of well-being
and ease can shine through, a true balance emerges.

Trying to control our experience [causes stress],
instead set life free to be what it is through allowing
life to be as it is, in balance and harmony with the
opposites, through the simplicity of noticing.

From an iRest meditation
from a free meditation series
through the iRest Institute

~

Photo - Art by Puisi

 

Opposites - Chuang Tzu

When we look at things in the light of Tao,
Nothing is best, nothing is worst.
Each thing, seen in it own light,
Stands out in its own way.
It can seem to be "better"
Than what is compared with it
On its own terms
But seen in terms of the whole,
No one thing stands out as "better."

[.....]

He who wants to have right without wrong,
Order without disorder,
Does not understand the principles
Of heaven and earth.
He does not know how
Things hang together.
Can a man cling only to heaven
And know nothing of earth?
They are correlative: to know one
is to know the other.
To refuse one
Is to refuse both.
Can a man cling to the positive
Without any negative
In contrast to which it is seen
To be positive?
If he claims to do so
He is a rogue or a madman...

[.....]

Chuang Tzu
translation by Thomas Merton

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Playground of Life...

We are "The Mystery" come into being...
Consciousness awakened...
Self replicating ItSelf;
or whatever word you give
"The Mystery"...

"The Mystery" dressed up as "me."
Formless as form,
Form as formlessness.
"Divine" and human intertwined...

Opening to "The Mystery"
we are free to be our unique selves,
however defined...

When we know this
"something" wakes up inside
and comes Alive -
it hums...

Everything is
~ humming ~

playing in the play of Life;
a multitude of expressions
all playing together
in this virtual reality...

"The Mystery" playing you, playing me,
each a reflection of the other...
both "The Mystery" playing ItSelf...

When we let go of conceptual words
and frameworks of belief and interpretations
we are just FREE...

Letting go of the non-dual concepts of
i/I, me and "no me", Self/no-self,
we are just Life living ItSelf here...
We are being LIVED

as we are.

There is something authentic
in allowing myself to be
just as i am...

Life is met from a different space -
the space of vast openness
to "The Mystery" of Life ItSelf,
where everything is embraced
as it is...

The deep grief and sadness of loss,
the laughter and joy of new birth,
the physical pain and psychological drama
of being human...

All dancing together in the playground of Life...

Mystic Meandering
2019/2024

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Civil-ization? - LaMotte & Gély

The world is a field of conflicting opposites.  You
will never wake up one morning to discover that the
politicians made peace on earth, because peace is not
the nature of this world, or politicians,
[or its inhabitants.]
We come to stay for only a while...
We are strangers and pilgrims on the earth...

Fred LaMotte
excerpt from a post on Uradiance

[brackets mine]

~

"For as long as I can remember, I have believed in God, but
not the institutional God...  God is incomprehensible.  We
can't put Spirituality in a little capsule for consumption.
The way the world works doesn't change.  The big guy
crushes the little guy.  For two thousand years [or longer]
it hasn't changed.  There is no humanity in so-called
civilization."

Gabriel Gély

Gabriel was an artist who lived with the Inuit peoples of Canada
for 38 years.  He lived with them when they were living 
 a "traditional" lifestyle [their tradition].  And lived with
them during their transition to settlement lifestyles.
He died at age 96 in 2020 in Nova Scotia

Excerpt from an Interview with Rod MacIver
of Heron Dance

[brackets mine]

~

Personal Note:

It seems that history keeps repeating itself.
Our own "American" indigenous peoples were put on
reservations (settlements) after many of them were 
massacred by the white anglos, including women and children.
The white man believed they had a "manifest destiny" from God;
that they were entitled to the land, and so took it.

The same thing happened at The Alamo in Texas.
The Americans decided they wanted the land that belonged
to the Mexicans, and they took it.
The same in Ukraine, Putin wants an empire, 
and he's trying to take it...

White Supremacists want to kill Blacks and Jews -
in the name of God...

It seems that every civilization has its history of 
violence and injustices.
We are not immune...

"the enemy is us"
even with our
lofty "non-dual"
spiritual
words.

_/\_

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The saying on one of my T's
(the picture on the T is much better!)

 

Ripples of Reality - Wilson & LaMotte

When we meet somebody whose separate tunnel-reality
is obviously far different from ours, we are a bit frightened
 and disoriented.  We tend to think they are mad..  Yet it is
neurologically obvious that no two brains have the same
 genetically-programmed hard wiring, the same imprints,
the same conditioning, the same learning experiences.  We
are all living separate realities. That is why communication
fails so often, and misunderstandings and resentments are
so common.

Robert Anton Wilson
From - Prometheus Rising

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Your point of view and my point of view are equally "right"
and equally insignificant facets in the dazzling holographic
diamond of opposites.  Whatever is, the opposite also is, 
simultaneously arising.  Yet neither of these little flickers of
local light is Truth.  Truth is what illuminates the entire jewel.

If we spent less energy constricting ourselves to a point, and
instead, let ourselves expand into the Whole, each One of us
would illuminate the world with a silent glance of beauty, a
gentle touch of joy.

This is the effortless breath of grace: inhaling into wholeness,
exhaling into uniqueness, the All embodied in the particular.

It is a happening, not an intention.  It does not need to be
planned or affirmed.  Plans and affirmations get in the way.

Just give up trying to be any-thing else.  Let Be who you
actually Are, the entire quantum crystal of eternity in this
moment.

Your point of view, my point of view: infinitesimal ripples in
one ocean of cosmic Light.  We are not just waves, you are the
sea.  As knowings, we are very very small.  As Beings, we are
vast beyond imagining.  We include each other.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Funky Art - Mystic Meandering

 

"Play" of Perspectives - Joan Ruvinsky

 Every philosophy [spiritual teaching] seeks to describe,
even explain, How It All Is.

...the various systems are simply roles that
Consciousness takes on, the way a person changes outfits
from day to day - same person, different look.

All different and divergent philosophical [spiritual] positions
are the outpourings of Consciousness at play.  
Any philosophical [spiritual] position, no matter what, is only
a partial viewpoint, in which only a fragment of the unitary
whole is described.

We can never approximate the capital-t Truth in words...

Joan Ruvinsky

From: The Recognition of Our Own Heart

[brackets mine]

~

Life is simply a Divine "play" of perspectives
that allows every expression/position to be played...

MM

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Life size chess board in atrium of a nearby office building
(notice 2 pieces are missing)
Photo color digitally inverted to show perspective:
Black became White
White became Black
and shades in between

Surrender to Wholeness - Fred LaMotte

Surrender to wholeness.
There is no escape.
Refuse to be divided.
Rebel against any force
that would diminish or
entice you to choose
one view against its opposite.

For it is never that one side
is enlightened and the other ignorant.
Ignorance is the antipathy itself,
the separation of wholeness into
polarized opponents.

There are choices, but they are
momentary and intuitive,

never frozen into ideology.
Therefore, revolt against
every ideologue, every divider,
who would lure you into the
toxic but delicious energy of
blame and judgment.
Blame and judgment are not
actions, but re-actions.
And re-action means
endless entrapment...

Act from  the silence of
the unified field,
dynamically at ease
in the Heart...

Rebel ruthlessly yet gently...

Surrender and rebellion are
one and the same...

Fred LaMotte

excerpt from the blog post:
Surrender to Wholeness
(his words, my format)

~

Photo - through the bottom of a glass

The Middle Way - Jack Kornfield

The Buddhist tradition is neither a path of denial or affirmation.
It shows us the paradox of the universe, within and beyond
the opposites.  It teaches us to be in the world, but not of the
world.  This realization is called the middle way.

The middle way describes the middle ground between
attachment and aversion, between being and non-being, between
form and emptiness, between free will and determinism.  The
more we delve into the middle way the more deeply we come to
rest between the play of opposites. 

Learning to rest in the middle way requires trust in life itself.

Trusting in the middle way, there is an ease and grace, a
cellular knowing that we, too, can float in the ever-changing
ocean of life which has always held us.

We come to rest in the reality of the present, where all the
opposites exist. T.S. Eliot calls this the "still point of the 

turning world, neither from nor towards, neither arrest or
movement, neither flesh or fleshless."

The middle path describes the presence of eternity.  In this
reality, life is clear, vivid, awake, empty and filled with
 possibility.  When we  discover the middle path.....we can
 be with all our experience in its complexity, with our own
 thoughts and feeling and drama as it is.  We learn to embrace
 tension, paradox, change. Instead of seeking resolution, waiting
 for the chord at the end of the song, we let ourselves open and
 relax in the middle. In the middle we discover that
 the world is workable...

Jack Kornfield
From: The Wise Heart

Untitled - Danna Faulds

Put up no resistance to the day as it unfolds.
Watch the play of opposites, your likes
and dislikes, thoughts you would draw
close and those from which you would
recoil.  What if, for this moment, you let
it all be as it is?  What if you interfere
with nothing?

Become the subject - vast, bare, always
aware. Of course there are objects.  Do
not try to shut them out or change what
is.  Sense impressions, circumstances,
the day's events move forward on the
wheel of time while you are timeless, the
silent subject of the whole, pure
potential, simply there.

When the entire universe blazes into
being, take it all inside yourself, without
exception.  When the only word is "Yes,"
when your point of view dissolves into
every viewpoint and no viewpoint at all,
when the Big Bang is happening in
every instant, you are fully and finally
alive.

Danna Faulds
from the introduction to Limitless
2009

The Play of Emotion - Rafael Stoneman

Here I am Here again
Not again
But only Now
Though it seems that moments are repeating
It is really One continuous moment.

What changes and what remains the same?
Somehow through the prism of the mind
many moods appear in consciousness
although there is only one Ultimate mood.
This is the miracle of color
The play of emotion.
On the negative end of the scale
we condemn the negative.
But we imagine that we are on the positive end
when we seek ways to remove the negative.
How positive would we feel if there was only
the positive end of the scale?
If we are willing to sacrifice the pain
are we willing to sacrifice the pleasure?
Equanimity is a dear friend.
One that holds the same embrace
for praise and for blame.
The same space for fortune and

for misfortune.
The same face for respect
and betrayal.

Rafael Stoneman

via my friend Michel
at No Mind's Land
where I get a lot of
wonderful posts to reblog :)
Thanks Michel!

~

Photo - original pic was a fire in the fireplace,
digitally zoom blurred and color altered - magic :)

By Way of Broken Places - Matt Licata

No matter how many profound insights we have,
how many amazingly powerful awakening experiences
we collect, or how convinced we become that we have it all
together, we will always be at risk of further heartbreak,
deflation, and crushing [self]revelation.

In the bedroom of The Beloved, there is always more humbling
to come, as we are all beginners there.  No experts, no masters,
and no final resolved landing place where we are guaranteed a
life without vulnerability and deepening exposure...
for The Beloved has no interest in all of that.

It is by way of the broken places that he or she is able to reach
you, to fill you from within.  In that crucible where the opposites
are at play, the rug is being pulled out from underneath us in an
ongoing way, with our personas falling away one by one as they
burn up in the fire of pure seeing.

Out of this highly-charged and creative field, it is revealed once
and for all that your shaky raw vulnerable heart is not weakness,
and your tender sensitive body is not something to be transcended
or "healed", but are portals through which the sacred can come
 into form.

Though at times it may seem as if the world has gone mad - as the
dreams of separation play out within the collective, things are not
always as they seem.  You are the vessel through which Love
can come alive here...

Matt Licata