"Spiritual Practice" - Frank Ostaseski

Authentic "spiritual practice" is not about maintaining high
altered states, transcending the body, bypassing difficult emotions,
or healing all that remains unresolved within us.  "Spiritual
practice" helps us settle into the utter simplicity of being ourselves...
The healing happens when we bring awareness to the places
that have been hardened in us through the conditioned habits
of grasping, resistance and avoidance.

Mindfulness [awareness] is the deconditioning [of those habits].
Then things are free to be as they are.  We allow the difficult,
dark and dense.  We become more intimate with our full humanity
and discover an ever-deeper, vast sense of wholeness.

Being who you are can only arise from
accepting where you are.

Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

~

Photo from the internet

 

Spiritual Egos - Fred LaMotte

Spiritual egos make a distinction between "beginners techniques"
and "advanced techniques."  Their intellect wants something
difficult to do, a sense of accomplishment.  That is why so
many new age teachers speak of their spiritual "work."  Do
they ever speak of their spiritual "play"?

Ease is the cure for dis-ease.  The deepest, most healing
spiritual practice, we ease into.  In fact, we do not practice.
We let go of practice.

The goal is never an achievement done by "advanced" practice,
but the dissolution of the do-er.  It is known by un-knowing and
done by un-doing.  This can only happen to the effortless.  The
most powerful meditation is the simplest, the most natural.

When you really look at people who carry a bag of "advanced"
techniques, you often see a weariness behind the stiff mask of
their perpetual smile. Of they look tentative, because they are
always taking the next step, and never completely here.  Only
the beginner dwells in eternal freshness...  The beginner is never
 advanced because she is present.

In the deepest and most natural meditation, you never have to
leave your body.  Every atom of your body is already woven out
of swirling stars....  No wind can uproot the beginner.  No
wound can puncture the intergalactic stillness of the Beginner's
core.

Transcending your body is not an advanced practice. It is a practice
of disconnection. That is why, in the Anapanasati Sutra, the Buddha
said, "Awareness of body in the body."  He did not say,
"Transcend the body."  He said to grok the body from within the body,
for consciousness and matter are one energy,
every cell and photon trembling with the sap of awareness.

...be a beginner.  Always feel the freshness of the first day of creation.
Now is the beginning.  Now is the end of time.  How could "now" be
advanced?

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - MM 
the two faces of Pumpkin Head :)

 

The Scandal - Eric Baret

The scandal is to make people believe that through some
exercises they will be better and their deep questioning will
be satisfied.  It is to make people believe that by following
this therapy, by adopting that concept, by wearing a particular
color of clothes, by hanging on their wall or to their neck a
picture of a popular guru, it will bring about a profound
questioning.  That is charlatanry.

Real life is facing the moment.  The different possibilities
of conflict express themselves in the world: you face them,
you look at what is touched in you, you look at what is
death, destruction.  In this way, you realize what you are.
When your house is destroyed, when your body is broken,
when your family is wiped out, you realize to what extent
you are free or not from yourself.  But to sit in a room to
do yoga, to chew hundred times a mouthful of brown rice...
of course, you feel good, but there is no questioning. 

...it is the cataclysms that deeply question the human being,
they make him ask the real questions.  Everything else
makes him sleep.  So, it should be very clear that the state
of the world is its chance.  Unfortunately, there are times
when a cataclysm is the only way to bring about a
questioning.  All this romanticism of yoga, of the East,
of spirituality, all these spiritual techniques of progression,
of purification, they really are a waste of money and energy.
One day they will completely disappear, and maybe that day
we won't need cataclysms to wake up.

Eric Baret

Excerpt from an article in science and nonduality

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Follow the Warmth - Fred LaMotte

When you were a
very young child
you used no esoteric practice,
no spiritual technique.
You just honored people
who made your chest expand
with silent warmth.

You stayed away from those
who chilled and shrank
your heart.
How does the orchid open
in the wilderness?
It bends toward light,
away from cold.
Follow the sacred scripture
of your body.
Walk through the forest
at midnight holding
the candle of your breath.
You don't need to see far.
Just step into the next
lit pool of silence.
Ways will open,
ways will open surely.
Now is the time to depart
from the kingdom of fear
and travel towards the golden
palace of your [True] Self.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Art - Mystic Meandering
Vortex Art with Craypas oils
c. 2011