The Hush of "The Mystery"...

The Hush of "The Mystery"
silently moves through time and form...

Can you feel it? -
this silent hush
that lives in you,
that moves through you,
that communes with you
even when you don't know it?

It waits for you to stop and listen -
to sense Its Hush
infusing you -
beyond hearing,
beyond seeing,
beyond knowing...

It comes in sudden,
unexpected
breezes of awareness
wafting through your being -
in and out of your noticing,
but never really gone -

It invites you to enter
the cosmic seduction of
Its Presence,
to
follow Its Silence
more deeply,
into the cavern
of Its Heart
that awaits you
in the depths
if Its repose

Succumb
to what awaits you

in
the Heart of "The Mystery"

The Breath of the Eternal...

Love's Illumination...

~*~

Mystic Meandering
May 2015

~

I use the term "The Mystery" here, but one can call it:
The Infinite, the Ineffable, the Nameless, The Ultimate
Reality, The Beloved, and of course - God...

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

"The Mystery", like Life ItSelf, is ever unfolding,
ever revealing ItSelf.
We are always in a state of discovering "The Mystery"
and what IT is revealing to us - ongoingly.
What IT offers each of us is unique, yet universal:
Speaking directly to our Hearts...
When I speak of "The Mystery", as in this poem,
it is always from my own direct "experience" of it,
for I am acutely aware that I *know*, intellectually,
nothing *about* "The Mystery",
only how "The Mystery" reveals ItSelf to and in my
Heart...

Namaste

_/\_

 

Endless Mystery - Rod MacIver

The deep, important journeys of life involve endless mystery.
The source of the cohesive disequilibrium of the universe  -
the disharmonies that combine to create harmony, the depths
of our inner worlds and the hidden belief systems and
mythologies, unique to each of us, that guide our lives
without us knowing it, the beauty of the natural world and the
search, individual to each of us, for the courage to manifest
the beauty within, to evolve, to change.  And the somewhat
contradictory search for inner peace.  We search for harmony
with our inner world, and sometimes find it, then, once again,
lose it.  And then of course the ultimate mystery of death and
the implications of that mystery on the true nature of life.
On living that life...

Rod MacIver

Heron Dance

 

The innermost self - Hermann Hesse

I seek to reach the innermost part of myself...

One thing no longer existed for him, the wish to have teachers
and to listen to teachings.

He asked himself - "But what is this, what you have sought to
learn from teachings and from teachers, and what they, who 
have taught you much, were still unable to teach you?"  And
he found: "It was the self, the purpose and essence of which
I sought to learn.  It was the self I wanted to free myself from,
which I sought to overcome.  But I was not able to overcome
it, could only deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from
it.

No thing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this
my very own self, this mystery of one being one and being
separated...  And there is nothing I know less about... I know
nothing about myself!  I searched Atman, I searched Brahman,
I was willing to dissect myself and pull off all of its layers, to
find the core of all peels in its unknown interior, the Atman, life
the divine part, the ultimate part.  But I have lost myself in the
process.  I do not want to kill and dissect myself any longer, to
find a secret behind the ruins.

I want to get to know myself, the secret of Sidartha.

[The beauty of this world] was no longer the veil of Maya, was
no longer a pointless coincidental diversity of mere appearance,
despicable to the deeply thinking Brahman, who scorns diversity
who seeks unity, but the beauty was also in Sidartha, the singular
and the divine lived hidden - the purpose and the essential
properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in 
them, in everything...

From: Sidartha
Herman Hesse

~

I do not believe in "spiritual paths."
The purpose of spiritual paths is to
enmesh you in the world of knowledge,
while Reality resides prior to it.

All spiritual paths lead to unreality,
Discard all paths...

Nisargadatta Maharaj

with thanks to Love Is A Place

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

A Mysterious Engagement - Terence McKenna

Do not dwell in the mistakes of the past.  Do not lose yourself
in the castles of the future and do not give your authenticity
away to experts, gurus, government commissions, bosses,
wives, mates - take back your mind and body and begin to
engage with the fact that you are alive, you are going to die.
Nobody knows what being alive is and nobody knows what
dying is.  You're involved in a mysterious engagement where
every living moment presents you with mystery, opportunity,
and wonder.  There is no mundane dimension, really.  If you
have the eyes to see it, it's all transcendental. 

Terence McKenna

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo by Cate Kerr
Beyond the Fields We Know

 

The Embrace...

Everything is held in the Embrace of the Luminous Unmanifest...

~

This Eternal Embrace is
a dynamic stillness of Being
that holds everything as it is;
a holding space for everything to just Be...

~

We are held in this space of Divine Embrace -
a Vastness that just Is...

~

There is only ever the Embrace -
a deep compassionate Embrace for all life,
for all that is - as it is...

"The Mystery" embracing Itself in every expression of ItSelf...

~

Everything is suspended
in this ubiquitous space...

Rest in this space within...

And when we emerge from our rest,
we realize that we ARE the Embrace -
embracing Itself.

We ARE fluidly and interchangeably the Embrace -

Divine Intimacy...

Sweet Serenity...

Notes from my journal - 2009

~

Photo from the Internet

 

The Essence - a meandering

The Essence of our own Being is felt - not understood...
An animating life energy inherent in

the body system itself...

originating from within;
an innate aliveness
 that lives this body...

A mystery, The Mystery...

And also my felt experience...

And then of course the mind tries to put words
to it, to explain it, interpret it...  :)

Once I recognized it internally, it "awakened", or 
"came alive" in the body, although already there -
but made itself known , as my very own Being
 - embodied - in and through my
recognition of it.

Again, a mystery that I try with words to explain...

Although its movement is now deeply felt within,
nothing actually changes in my
human experience.

I did not become a different "person."
The "ego" didn't suddenly disappear.
Old habits of conditioning still remain -
and yet - there is this recognition of the Source
energy that mysteriously inhabits and animates this body.
Not conceptually known, but a felt movement of Being in 
the body - embodiment...

It's not even the feeling of "love" - as we know love...

It's a tangible felt sense of openness, of 
total acceptance of what is...
of whatever is unfolding in the life experience...

And what is "love" really but
the total acceptance of everything...

The Essence of Being...

_/\_

Namaste

Mystic Meandering
Jan 20, 2022

 

The Silent Stream...

Come to Rest in the Silent Stream...
In the Inner Stream of Silence, the place of Deep Rest...

The Silent Stream is your refuge...
Letting go of the surface chaos,
moving into deeper rhythms;
the Flow and Rhythm at the core of your Being...
Allow your body to rest and align with that Rhythm...

More than ever now, you need Deep Rest and Deep Silence...

Do not allow yourself to be disturbed or disrupted by anything,
including your own emotions..

Nothing else matters now, except taking refuge in
the Silence of Deep Rest...
There you are held... cradled beyond
comprehension - only felt, and experienced...

Rest in the deeper Mystery of Being...

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
Sept. 2021

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Great Transition - Matt Licata

 In the current global environment.....as we navigate this
period of great transition, while we don't know exactly where
we're headed, we can slow down and prepare for what is 
coming next by deepening our wisdom and compassion,
both for ourselves and others.

By turning toward the Soul, the Heart, the Self, and attuning
to its intelligence and guidance, we can recommit to our
unique path of transformation, and remember what is
most important.

Each of us is called in our own way towards a life of
wholeness, purpose, and meaning, and we each have our
own hurt, pain, grief and wounding to tend to.

We affect, and are affected by, those around us.  We are
affected by life everywhere.  We come to this life with
unique gifts, and ways of engaging The Mystery.

We have all been wounded and the path of seeing our
wounds as initiation is one that is as old as recorded
history.  It is not an easy path, but one that is imbued
with mercy, grace, and a certain poetic beauty.  It is a
path of courage and kindness...

It is essential that we honor our unique sensitivities and
eccentricities and open to the possibility that even our
deepest wounding may be filled with guidance,
medicine and meaning.  [It is essential] to recommit
to the path of [the Soul], to embodied transformation
and healing, to participate consciously and access the
alchemical gold  at the core of our wounds as a gateway
to a life of deeper meaning, connection and aliveness.

Matt Licata, PhD

~

Photo from the internet

"The Mystery" is more than real...

 What is this "Mystery" that
abides in the depths of me?

Who is "She" that lives me?

"She" rises up in me as Energy
from the very core of my Being,
letting Herself be known in Her whirling
through the spine - dancing me;
the heart quivering, the intensity breathtaking -
The Alive Presence of "The Mystery."

"She" is Here - in us - always,
making Herself known as the Infinite Source of all,
ever abiding within the 
subtle realms of Being.

Not just believed to be true,
but felt to be true...

For what we believe to be true
in our minds,
becomes our "truth" -
our view of "Reality"

until - our inner eyes open to see
"The Mystery" revealed,
as a subtler Reality beyond Form...

"The Mystery" - a subtle Reality
that can be felt
beyond matter reality -
beyond conceptual ideas of reality;
and experienced as
"more than real."

Mystic Meandering
Dec. 27, 2020

Shivoham
_/\_

~

Photo - Aurora Borealis from a calendar

~

May we all experience the healing subtler realms of Being
in the new year, giving birth to new perspectives - new ways
of seeing and being in the world...

Out of the Unseen - Matt Licata

In an environment of "embodied attunement", we are able to
rest in the mystery of Being.  We can explore unstructured
states of consciousness and enter courageously into the dark
and into the light.  In this sense, love is an alive field of
presence in which experience can unfold into greater levels
of integration and cohesion.

From this perspective, "I love you" = "I allow you."  I can
allow you to have your own experience, to organize and make
meaning of the world in the way that you do.  I can allow you
to be what you are.  While I will not allow you to abuse me or
to act violently or break the agreements and boundaries we
have established, I can allow your experience to be what it is,
and unfold the way it does.

By meeting people where they are we can be vehicles of love...

We can enter into friendship with another and their experience
as it is, but not so close that we lose perspective and become
emotionally fused...  In this sacred middle territory we offer
the gift of our "attuned presence" - the offering of pure space...
For space is our true nature.  By resting in the organic space of
Being.....we do not need people to be different, to change, to
become "awakened", to be in "high vibration", or to "heal" in
order for us to love them.  We also will not place the burden
upon them to take care of our unlived lives and unmet
emotions for us, and we will honor their unique process and
journey, by being there for them if we are needed.

We can provide the same space for ourselves.
In any here and now moment, we can discover that our
nature as Awareness Itself is in fact the ultimate holding
environment.  While as an infant we depended upon
another to provide this environment for us, in which we
could rest in Primordial Beingness, it is actually here at all
times.  It is here now, pouring out of the unseen and soaking
into ever cell and strand of DNA.

With eyes and heart wide open.....just look and you will feel it
surrounding you... right now.  While we may not always
understand our experience [or others] - and while it may never
conform to our ideas, hopes, and dreams about the life we were
"meant to live" - we can come to trust that it is unfolding
uniquely, emerging out of the unseen hand of Love.

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Mammatus Clouds.
See the two hands with forearms
reaching down, from right upper corner
to center of photo :)

Mystical Alchemy...

We are born from the fathomless Cosmic "darkness",
the Eternal Depths of the Primordial Womb
before Light began...
from which Light emerged;
a mystery...

Without knowing how or why...
We simply are...
Life ItSelf - simply being...

Born of the Ineffable Mystery,
the Cosmic Igniter of the Divine Flame
ignites the Ember of our Heart
through the remembrance of Love -
in "Mystical Alchemy."

Without the need for certainties of the mind,
or intellectual "understandings."

Only visceral awareness of the
Presence of Divine Love
illuminating the Heart
through Grace...

Pure Bliss...
Pure Blessing...

Ever in Gratitude

~

Mystic Meandering
Feb. 2017

of Being - Denise Levertov

I know this happiness
is provisional:

the looming presences -
the great suffering, great fear -

withdraw only
into peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of the sky:

this need to dance,
this need to kneel:

this mystery:

Denise Levertov

via - Being Silently Drawn

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Prison of Certainty - John O'Donohue

When we domesticate our minds and hearts, we reduce our lives.
We disinherit ourselves as children of the universe.  Almost
without knowing it, we slip inside ready-made roles and
routines which then set the frames of our possibilities.  We
acquire sets of convictions in relation to politics, religion and
work. We parrot these back and forth to each other, as if they
 were absolute insights.  Yet for the most part these frames of
belief function as self-constructed barriers, fragile cliches pulled
around our lives to keep out the mystery.  The game of society
helps us to forget the unknown...  The control and ordering of
society is amazing: we comply so totally with its unwritten
rules.  In a city at morning, you see the lines of traffic and the
rows of faces all on their way to work.  We show up.  We
behave ourselves.  We obey fashion and taste.

We have a deadening desire to reduce the mystery...
We bind our lives up in solid chains of forced connections
that block and fixate us.  This silences the voices within us
that are always urging us to change and become free.  Our
sense of uncertainty and our need for security nail our world
down.  We confine mystery within the prison of routine and
repetition.  Your response to the invitation at the edge of your
life becomes reduced to a series of automatic reflexes.  We
live so much of our one life with the same automatic blindness
of adaptation.  After a while, unknown to you, a wall has
grown between you and the native forces of your experiences.
You go through life only half aware...  This subtle conditioning
becomes so effortless that you are only half present in your life.

[But] Everywhere around us mystery never sleeps.  The same
deep nature is within us.  Each person is an incredibly
sophisticated, subtle, and open-ended work of art.  We live at
the heart of our own intimacy, yet we are strangers to its endless
nature.  Each of us needs to travel inwards from the surface
constraints and visit the wild places within us and answer the
question:  Who are you?  Who are you behind your role?  Who
are you behind your words?  Who are you when you are alone
with yourself?  Who are you before you slip back safely behind
the mask and the name by which you are known during the day?

If you can awaken the eternal beauty and light of your soul
you will break through the prison of certainty
and bring light wherever you go.

John O'Donohue
From: Eternal Echoes 

Honoring The Mystery - Mark Nepo

Somehow we have been dropped into the Mystery,
below our roles, and identities, fallen through our maps into
one stream of love.  Some moment or circumstance becomes
an unexpected doorway into the Mystery.  We never know how
it will appear, or how we will be drawn to it...

Honoring the Mystery is what opens us to the powers of wholeness -
this unknowable totality that we live in.  To honor the Mystery is
not just to glimpse the whole, or even acknowledge the whole, but
to live our days with [as] that wholeness...  Commit to leaning into
life until it drops you beneath your surface maps of reality...

Though we pray to the many faces of God, each is a changing
wave in the sea of Divine Being...  Any circumstance that
awakens us to that divine sea is a holy gift...

If courageous enough we might just slow down to the pace
of creation, where the pulse by which the mind thinks touches
the pulse by which the heart feels, and together they equal the
rhythm where Being plays in exact motion with all beings...

Nothing matters but emptying...

until the softness we call Spirit bubbles through the tongue
and words fail in utter adoration.
Nothing now but the need to be...

Mark Nepo
From: The Exquisite Risk

~

Photo - Water on Windshield through a car wash :)

Guru Cat...

Peering over the computer screen,
with piercing eyes, Guru Cat said to me:

Today
start to de-clutter your life
of that which does not serve the Heart,
or nourish the soul;
whether people, or
situations, or
beliefs, or
your immediate environment
would be good...
Look at this mess!

Create space for
LIFE
to enter, to flow
through you.

Yes, Guru Cat - I said.
I cannot contort myself to
the forms that others have created
any longer...

Guru Cat said:

Today
start to pick up the lost pieces
of your tattered psyche,
let go of the frayed and loose ends
in the fabric of your current reality,
and open to
"The Mystery" of being.

Be at peace with life;
not afraid of what life will bring.

Yes, Guru Cat - I said.

Guru Cat said:

So - Today,
reclaim your Self,
the Eternal Being
that inhabits your form,
that allows you to move on,
past the scatteredness, through
the overwhelm, and the inertia,
moving into pure Aliveness...

Let go... Relax...
Play more!

Do you see what I'm saying...

Yes, Guru Cat - I said.
Got it...

Today
I will start
writing a new life;
as soon as my computer comes back on line...

Seeing life in a new way...
Opening to curiosity...
Accepting the uncertainty of living...
Exploring my inner Resource...
Embracing change...
Experiencing life as it is...
Content to just be...

_/\_

purrrrrrr

Mystic Meandering
Dec. 17, 2017

Death is a Favor to us - Hafiz

Death is a favor to us,
but our scales have lost their balance.
The impermanence of the body
should give us great clarity,
deepening the wonder in our
senses and eyes
of this mysterious existence we share
and surely are just traveling through...

[.....]

...all I know of life and myself is that
we are just a mid-air flight of golden wine
between [God's] Pitcher and His Cup.

[.....]

...our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
of time and space cannot endure very long.

Death is a favor to us,
but our minds have lost their balance.
The miraculous existence and impermanence of form
always makes the illumined ones
laugh and sing.

Hafiz

~

In memory of my mother-in-law who passed from this life
Nov. 12, 2017 after lingering many years with Alzheimer's...
Death was indeed a favor to her, allowing her Essence to
"pass through" and "journey on" beyond the fields we know...

Seek The Mystery - Ken Kesey

The answer is never the answer.
What's really interesting is the mystery.
...seek the mystery instead of the answer...
I've never seen anybody really find the answer.

They think they have, so they stop [seeking].
But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery...
Plant a garden in which strange plants grow
and mysteries bloom.

The need for mystery is greater than the need
for an answer.

Ken Kesey 
author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Make a Covenant with the Mystery - Tom Spencer

...make a 'covenant' with mystery - by learning to stand in
relationship to what is known and unknowable at the very
same time.  I believe the essential trait that makes this
covenant possible is the capacity for wonder...

One need not peer off into the heavens to stand in
relationship with the mystery of our existence.  That
mystery is unfolding around us continually in a countless
variety of ways.  Our task is to pay attention - to stand
'with' means standing 'ready' by keeping our eyes, hearts
and minds open.  Even the most ordinary of experiences
has the capacity to change our lives...

Tom Spencer
from "Some thoughts about Wonder"

~

Photo from the Internet

Effortless Joy - Sandy Jones

Love leaves the confines of ideologies, doctrines, dogma and
the restricting limitations of regulations and rules.  Love is
freedom.  Love makes it easy to see in new ways.  It opens
the heart to expansive vistas, to freedom.  Love and freedom
go hand-in-hand.  Love and Reality reside right here as the
very identity I am.  Each of us can put our self here because
this unbound Self, this tranquility, this joy, this peace and
beauty is your identity as well.

A rush of passion celebrates the joy of this simple, everyday
existence of my being, of life, this marvelous magic that is
being me.  I am this living mystery of ever-flowering beauty.
The moonlight song ten thousand fathoms deep is a fact quite
plenty enough for me.

I'm filled with this awe and wonder that is living here in the
middle of an infinity of myself.  Life is an enigma, a mystery
so extraordinary, veiled in the soft pink light of the ordinary.

I am a million joys, living irresponsibly and aimless, carried
by this river of fearless love that upholds me...

It is not mine to tell others what to do.  Mine is this wind
blown freedom of an irresistible and effortless joy...

Sandy Jones

via: No Mind's Land

"The Pull"...

There is an intimacy of the Heart in turning inward,
following the pull of "The Mystery" into The Silence
that is hauntingly
sublime...

A magnetic pull of
Pure Being
calls
from within...
pulling ItSelf back to ItSelf...

In fluidity of being one feels suspended in a
deep internal womb-like Cosmos,
where there is endless depth and breadth,
fullness and emptiness,
all at the same time;
a subtle movement of awareness
aware-ing everything at once...

Collapsing into the Cosmic Waves of Being,
into Existence prior to manifestation,
everything within softens and opens,
like a delicate flower,
including the body,
touched by the subtle
rhythmic caress
of
the Unknown
 ~ breathing ~
~ embracing ~
surrounding ~ and filling;
unwinding the contractions
of body and mind.

There is a "sanity" in this Cosmic Silence
that bestows a soundness of Heart through Grace
that is beyond mere mental reason
and cognizance...

Finding this deeper Rhythm within
one loses a sense of "self"
and becomes...
"The Mystery"  ~

Breathing ItSelf...

The Breath of The Infinite

The Whisper of Love

Mystic Meandering
March 1, 2017

_/\_

A Humble Lover of "The Mystery"

~

Photo - Craypas oils, done with fingers