Re-Visioning - D.H. Lawrence & Alan Watts

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, which flow eternally in the
universe...

D.H. Lawrence

~

We have been brought up to identify ourselves with just the ego,
and so we ignore and are unaware of the vast, vast extent of our
Being.  People who by various methods become fully aware of
their cosmic Consciousness.....discover that the real deep, deep
Self - that which you really are [our Essence], fundamentally and
forever - is the whole of your Being.

You have to get away from all the madness for a while because
we become insane, we get confused with our roles.  Man is not
his role.  Man is deeper than that.  So, go into the forest or
someplace alone in nature, all by yourself, and find out who
you really are!  And then you no longer confuse yourself with
your particular temporary body, [or role] but identify with the
entire process of nature and the whole cosmos...

Alan Watts

~

Photo - Mandala Art - Mystic Meandering
"Windows into Infinity"

2013

 

In Rhythm With Your Soul - John O'Donohue

Where you belong should always be worthy of your dignity.

You should belong first in your own interiority.  If you belong,
and if you are in rhythm with yourself and connected to that
deep, unique source within, then you will never be vulnerable
when your outside belonging is qualified, relativised, or taken
away.  You will still be able to stand.....on the ground of your
soul where you are not a tenant, where you are at home.

John O'Donohue
From: Anam Cara

I think that we are infinitely greater than our minds and we are

infinitely more than our images of ourselves.  One of the sad
things today is that so many people are frightened by the
wonder of their own presence.  They are dying to tie themselves
into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined
identity that other people have actually settled on for them.
This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies
that are rising inside their souls.  Many of us get very afraid
and we eventually compromise.  We settle for something that
is safe, rather than engaging the danger and wildness that is
in our own hearts

John O'Donohue
From: Walking in Wonder

With thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Surrender - Frank Ostaseski

Surrender is not the same as letting go.
Surrender is more about expansion - we expand into a
spaciousness, a boundless quality of being that can include
but not be contained by the previously limiting beliefs that
once defined us...  In surrender we are no longer enslaved by
our pasts.  No longer imprisoned by our former identities...

Surrender happens when we stop fighting.  We stop fighting
against ourselves.  We stop fighting against life.  We stop
fighting against death.  Resistance ceases to occur.  We no
longer put up any defense.

Surrender is deeper than letting go.  Letting go is still a
strategy of the mind occupied with the past.  It is an
activity of the personality, and the personality is primarily
concerned with perpetuating itself.  Letting go is still me

making a choice.  Ego cannot surrender.

Surrender is effortless, easeful non-doing of our essential
nature without interference. We are simply aware - and
often happens when we are exhausted...
[from all the distractions and fighting and resistance.]

Frank Ostaseski
From - The Five Invitations

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

It All Dissolves - Frank Ostaseski

 Earth dissolves into water.  Water dissolves into fire.
Fire dissolves into air.  Air dissolves into space.

Dying [Dissolving], in many cases, does not happen all of
a sudden.  It is a gradual process of withdrawing from life
in form.

When I speak of the four elements dissolving, I am not
speaking exactly of physical form.  Rather, I am pointing to
the ineffable but observable animating qualities...
The animating qualities also dissolve - apparently missing
when we are left only with the heaviness of the corpse
after death.

There is something beyond the four elements - the spirit,
soul, or animating presence.  The inner dissolution happens
simultaneously.  Our medical instruments and devices can
certainly measure the physical disintegration, but the inner
dissolution that happens simultaneously is subtle and still...

They are all dissolving - the elements and their associated
states and as a result, the self is dissolving as well.  This is
happening all the time, we just see it at the surface at the
time of dying.

Now who are you?

Fragility and impermanence are in the nature of life.  It's
all always coming together and falling apart - not just the
physical properties of life - and not just at the time of death.

Our sense of self is impermanent.  While illness can contract
us into an even smaller sense of self, many people who are
sick and dying speak of no longer being limited by the 
previous boundaries of their old, familiar identities.

We come to embody much wider identities.  The interior
life and the external world permeate each other,
they commingle.

Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

~

With thanks Death Deconstructed for the photo...

What is your Script? - Adyashanti

 You [have to be willing] to ask "Who am I" or "What am I"

without any script or role, without the story, about who or what
you are, releasing the script of what you think your life is about.
Every sense of identity has its script.

...what am I, and who am I without my story, without my
demands upon the moment, without any hope of this
moment, without my script?

The mind would answer, "I don't know", because the mind
does not know when it is disarmed, it doesn't know who or what
it is without its role or its character to play.

The actor who is acting this all out is named "me."
The actor keeps maintaining itself. It will do whatever it takes
to keep the ball called "me" rolling.

When this disarming happens you are allowing the wordless
experience to present itself.  This is the wordless experience of
being.  You realize it's not a script or role, it carries no agenda,
and has no demand upon the moment.  It's also not  the actor.
What you are is prior to your idea of you.

What you are without your role [identity] is often assumed to
be hidden somewhere.  And so when you let go of your role
[identity], when you look past the character called "me" for the
truth of your being, you may look for the Self, the Truth, the
"enlightened me."  Looking for the "enlightened self" is just
another role, another script.  It's part of the spiritual seekers
script.  If you drop the script - now what are you?

Of course the reason I ask you to inquire into what you are is
because, at this moment, you are living the answer.  Nothing I
would tell you is a substitute for that Aliveness, for that living 
of the answer.  That is why it has been said many times that
only the people who don't know who they are, are "awake."
Everyone else knows who they are - because they are their
script, whatever their script is, [which includes their  "spiritual"
script], or "I'm not awake" script.  Awakeness is to have no
script, to know that ultimately a script is just a script, and a
story just a story.

There is a state of mind in which the mind says, "I have no
idea who I am," because it can't find the right script. 
Awakening is the realization that happens after the mind says,

"I give up.  I just have no idea who I am."  When you start to
understand this, you realize that if you put down your script of
being someone listening, and if you put down your script of
someone saying something, [or being a "spiritual" someone]
and you just drop these roles for a moment, you realize you are
not who you have taken yourself to be; this idea of a "me" that
thinks it's going to get its happiness through changing the script,
its role, its identity - even if its identity is to have no identity
[no-self]....

Adyashanti
From: Emptiness Dancing

~

Play life intuitively
not pre-scripted

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

A Time of "Dying"...

 Photo - David Peters

A time of "dying",

dying to the entanglements of this world;
to the demands of this world;
dis-mantling the attachments;
untangling the knots...

A time of "dying".
to self-image;
the loss of the structure of identity;
of expectations of how I hoped life would be,
how I would be -
Yet grateful for the way it is...

A metaphorical "death",
an internal "death";
the death of perceptions,
perspectives, beliefs and preoccupations -
only shadowy characters in the play.

Feeling the loss of my own "death" already,
my self-made identity - loosening its grip;
the decline in faculties of mind and body -
losing their functions...

Something in us knows
when we hear the haunting echo of birds
singing at dawn - "waking" you up -
that something inside is "dying"...

Yet, I welcome this "death",
this "release";
the release of physical tension,
the mind's mentations,
and the ache of the heart.

And possibly an opening
into a Great Transition;
a Rebirth into
the Rhythm of
the Grand Mystery
of the Universe...

Mystic Meandering
April 23, 2021

Resurrected...

 Breaking free of concepts, constructs, beliefs and stories
that have kept me entombed...

I rise...

Waking up to my "True Nature"

a living expression of "The Sacred" within me...

I rise...

Untangling the tattered threads of old roles, old crafted identities
worn to make me feel safe and important...

I rise...

Letting go of frayed "lifelines" that kept
me tethered to the shore of familiarity and conformity...

I rise...

Now not needing to be other than who I Am
my natural, playful, creative, expressive Aliveness...

I rise...

Mystic Meandering

April 3, 2021

~

Photo: Vortex Art 2010 - Mystic Meandering
done with fingers and Craypas oils

A Journey of Liberation...

 This meandering is really a journey of liberation...

Recognizing one's "Indigenous" Nature.
Not Native American Spirituality, but the felt sense of
your Fundamental Nature...

liberating...

Recognizing "The Mystery" in disguise - playing you!
Revealing Itself through the "play" of you - the Joy of you!
liberating...

Moving beyond the "mechanics of living" to Indigenous-wisdom,
Natural Wisdom; living more spontaneously and intuitively; 
using direct, felt experience as guide...

liberating...

Recognizing more and more that we are "The Mystery" in form,
which expresses Itself through our self - as our self...
liberating...

Recognizing that "The Mystery" is our Fundamental Nature,
covered over by years of religious/psychological/emotional
conditioning and traumas - giving us an identity - which we
believe to be who we are - but aren't...
liberating...

Realizing it is the beliefs about the "self" that must dissolve,
not the self/ego/personality.  The personality then shines
with the Light of the Fundamental Nature.
This recognition is what liberates...

Not the pursuit of "enlightenment", of becoming
"enlightened", but recognizing the Inherent, liberated Being
that we are...

liberating...

Liberation is not the "me/self" that is liberated.  It's "The Mystery"
within that is liberated - in our recognition of it.
It's the Infinite within us, that which animates us, that is liberated.
It all gets liberated in the recognition of Itself in us, as us.

the mystery is - that we are "The Mystery."

Liberated!

Mystic Meandering
Oct. 31, 2020

_/\_

"The Mystery" in me bows to "The Mystery" in you!

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Light through an old cutting board :)

Allow yourself to be used - Thomas Merton

You are fed up with words, I don't blame you.
I am nauseated by them sometimes.  I am also,
to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes.
This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand
what I mean.  It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas
and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding
the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it.  And
then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to
make the meaning be there again by magic.  Going through
this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this.
Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing,
and it is right.

...The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they
suddenly happen, and we can share in them, but there is
no point in building our lives on personal satisfaction,
which may be denied us and which after all is not that
important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your
even thinking about what you are doing is crucially
important.  You are probably striving to build yourself
an identity in your work, out of your work...  You are
using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against
nothingness, annihilation.  That is not the right use of
your work.  All the good that you will do will come,
not from you but from the fact that you have allowed
yourself to be used by Love [Grace].  Think of this
more and more and gradually you will be free from
the need to prove yourself, and you can be more
open to the power that will work through you
without your knowing it.

Thomas Merton

~

"We are an instrument of Grace...
We are being played...
Keep the instrument tuned so
that Grace can play the music."

Mitch Rosacker
Self Discovery Studio

~

Photo - "The Mystery" playing :)

Inner Life - John O'Donohue

The visible world is only the shoreline of the magnificent
ocean of the invisible.  The invisible is not empty, but is
textured and tense with presences [energies].  These
presences cannot be named; they can only be sensed,
not seen.

When you name a dimension of your experience, one of
your qualities or difficulties... you give it an identity.  It
then responds to you according to the tone of its name...

The wildness of the invisible world is nameless.  It has no
name.  A first step towards reawakening respect for your
inner life may be to become aware of the private collage
of dead names you have for your inner life.  Often the
experiences of wilderness can return us to the nameless
wildness within.  Sometimes, go away to a wild place
on your own.  Leave your name and the grid of intentions
and projects and images which mark you out as citizen Z.
Leave it all and let yourself just slip back into the rhythms
of your intimate wildness.  You will be surprised at the
lost terrains, wells, and mountains that you will rediscover,
territories which have been buried under will-meant
but dead names.  To go beyond confinement is to
rediscover yourself.

John O'Donohue
from: Eternal Echoes

~

Photo - taken in Gloucester MA
 by my brother

If You Seek Reality - Nisargadatta & Adyashanti

If you seek Reality you must set yourself free of all
backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking
and feeling.

Even the idea of being a man or a woman, or even human,
should be discarded.  The Ocean of Life contains all,
not only humans.

So first abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of
yourself as such-and-such, so-and-so, this or that.  Abandon
all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or
spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of
achievement of every kind.

You are complete, as you are...

Nisargadatta

~

You have to be willing to ask, "Who am I?" or "What am I?"
without any script or role, without the story about who you
are and what you are, releasing the script of what you think
your life is about.  Every sense of identity has its script - like,
"I'm a spiritual seeker."  We each have a specific role and our
stories about that role.  But our roles and stories are not
what we are...

When you start to realize what the truth is, you wake up from
the story of you.  You recognize that truth is not an abstraction,
it is not something to learn.  You discover that truth is who you
are without a script or role...

There is a state in which mind says, "I have no idea who I am",
because it can't find the right script.  Awakening is the
realization that happens after the mind says,"I give up.  I just
have no idea who I am."  When you start to understand this,
you realize that if you put down your script and just drop the
roles for a moment, you are not what you have taken yourself
to be.

What you are without your role is often assumed to be hidden.
So when you look past your character called "me" for the truth
of your being, you may think there's someone to find who is
somewhere hidden.  Looking for the "enlightened Self" is just
another role, another script.  If you drop the script, what are you?
Enlightenment is to have no script...

Give up the script, the role, the identity -
even if it is to have no identity..

Adyashanti
from - Emptiness Dancing

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

There Are No Frames for the Soul - O'Donohue & Rumi

We are no sooner out of the womb than we must begin the
precarious unfolding and shaping of who we are.  If we
have bad or destructive times in childhood, we begin to fix
on a survival identity to cover over and to compensate for
what happens to us.  If we are never encouraged to be
ourselves we begin to construct an identity that will gain us
either attention or approval.  When we set out to construct
our lives according to a fixed image, we damage ourselves.
The image becomes the desperate focus of all our longing.
There are no frames for the soul.
In truth we are called, in so far as we can, to live without
an image of ourselves, or at least to keep images we have
free and open.  When you sense the immensity of the
Unknown within you, any image you have built of yourself
gradually loses its promise.  Your name, your face, your
address only suggest the threshold of your identity.
Somehow you are always secretly aware of this.
Sometimes you find yourself listening to someone
telling you what you should do or describing what is
going on inside you, and you whisper to yourself that
they have not the foggiest idea who you actually are.

John O'Donohue
From Eternal Echoes

via - The Beauty We Love

~

I am not from the East or West
not up from the ground
or out of the ocean.
My place is placeless
a trace of the Traceless.
I am from the Soul of souls.

Rumi

"Leaving" - Wehrman

Could he, he asked again,
walk out into the desert
of himself, let his self go.
the one built by the labor
of lifetimes - this one -
drop away into the ageless
void; and as he asked, he
knew; this is what it comes
to anyway, tonight as he
slept, or tomorrow, as the
result of old age, a natural
death, that waited closer
each day, a wordless chant,
it will all go, all of it,
castles and skyscrapers of
who you are, who you built
yourself to be; it ends at
the end - that's the idea - you
step from here, your
construction, into there,
the body abandoned - and
you saw it was not a despair,
but a ship to be boarded,
unmoored.....
free.....

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

The Secrecy of My Own Being - Thomas Merton

The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me
by my own estimate of what I am.  My idea of what I am is
falsified by my admiration of what I do.  And my illusions
about myself are bred by another's imagined greatness.

If I do not know who I am, it's because I think I am the sort
of person everyone around me wants to be.  Perhaps I have
never asked myself whether I really wanted to become what
everybody else seems to want to become.  Perhaps if I only
realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire,
I would really begin to live after all.  I would be liberated from
the painful duty of saying what I really do not think.  [or feel :)]

Thomas Merton

~

Photo - a recent Spring snowfall
1:30am

Limitless Awareness - The Tibetan Book of the Dead

You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless
range of awareness for which we now have no words; that
awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self,
your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned,
beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences
which usually separate people from each other and from the
world around them.

Walter Evans-Wentz
The Tibetan Book of the Dead

~

It's not so much that we don't have a self, rather it's that
the self we do have is not a thing.  It is an impermanent,
fluctuating activity, a process not a particle, a verb not a noun.

Shinzen Young

The Science of Enlightenment:
How Meditation Works


via - Love Is A Place

Deconstruction - Danna Faulds

I am deconstructing.

My identity, built
assumption by assumption,
is crumbling at my feet.
It's clear to me the way
of truth leads into the
unknown...

[.....]

Balanced on the rubble,
I grope for
handholds even as I try
to let go.  I am bared to the
bone by pain and the thwarted
desire to maintain control.  I
long to paint the scene the
way I want, while ignoring
how it is.  My practice now
isn't about rebuilding what
I knew.  It's not about
clearing the littered ground
of old illusions only to
construct new ones.
Emptiness has a stark
beauty, noticed only
when I stop looking
for security.  I sit on the
tumble of mortar and brick
and pray for patience,
pray for strength,
pray for the humility
to just keep breathing.

Danna Faulds
Excerpt from: "Deconstruction"
From: One Soul
2003

~

Art - Dissolving the Masks

2017

Who then is breathing? - Ilchi Lee

Observe your own body.  It breathes.
You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer
conscious of your own ideas of self-identity.
Who then is breathing?

The collection of information that you mistakenly think is you
is not the protagonist in this drama called the breath.  In fact,
you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening.

You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot
purposely keep your own life going.  The expression, 'my life'
is actually an oxymoron, a result of mistaken assumption...

You don't possess life; life expresses itself through you.
Your body is a flower that life let bloom,
a phenomenon created by Life.

Ilchi Lee