Shadowy Beliefs - Alan Watts

Real courage is possible only through seeing.
It's not possible through belief in the divine self, 
which we all share in common, as if that were
something you could believe in.  This is only to
be discovered through not hanging on to anything,
not having any armor, not having any beliefs, not
having any kind of gimmick with which to try to
hold the weaving of smoke in position. You don't
need it.  If you really are the basis of the world,
you don't need a belief that that is so.

Alan Watts

with thanks to Love Is A Place

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Morning Grace - W.S. Merwin

 It is at last any morning
not answering to a name
I wake before there is light
hearing once more that same
music without repetition
or beginning playing
away into itself
in silence like a wave
a union in its own
key that I seem
to have heard before I
was listening but by the time
I hear it now it is gone
as when on a morning
alive with sunlight
almost at the year's end
a feathered breath a bird
flies in at the open window
then vanishes leaving me
believing what I do not see

W.S. Merwin
From Shadow of Sirius
original title of poem - "Grace Note"

~

Photo taken by my brother in MA

The sack of insignificant things...

I was carrying items of no significance in a sack,
roaming through a house with many different rooms,
looking for something I couldn't identify...

I was having trouble seeing, kept squinting, kept
trying to open my eyes more and more to the "Truth",
but everything remained a blur...

Unable to see clearly, unable to focus,
I just looked down into my sack of insignificant things,
 and saw there ideas and beliefs I didn't need,
but had held onto - on many levels.

Bewildered, I wondered why I continued to carry
the sack of insignificant things... and kept wandering
through the house.

Room to room, belief to belief,
looking for the "answers"
that I thought I lacked...

Mystic Meandering
Nov. 15, 2019

~

This came from a dream I had recently...

~

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 

Good Medicine - Andrew Colliver

Unbelief is good medicine, undoing belief
better:

all beings free to leave their being
and enter silence.

The nameless tree with its forest
of green,
the endless expanse called
sky, beaks and

feathered wings with their urgent
conversations;
all around, the light that sets the vital body
to humming,

and the dark of re-creation:

the world held for us in promise
until it is loosed from
our thinking.

Andrew Colliver

Poetry Chaikhana

Commentary by Ivan M. Granger

The rebel in me likes this poem, especially its opening line...
"Unbelief is good medicine, undoing belief
better:"

I don't take this as a commentary on belief vs. atheism or agnosticism
or any of those artificial dichotomies of thought.  This is a commentary
on thought itself, our perception of reality, our relationship to reality.

All belief, whether good or bad, orthodox or unorthodox, is a window
we set in the mind.  Its frame defines the boundaries of what we
 perceive and what we are blind to; its tinted glass colors what we see
 and how we understand it.  That window of belief often serves the
 important purpose of helping us to focus, training us to see what is not
 commonly recognized. But, at a certain point in our awakening
 process, the very notion of belief becomes a problem.  All belief,
no matter how elevated or pure or accurate, is only a thought
 about reality.  What the soul ultimately craves is direct perception
 of reality - which requires dropping all perceptual filters,
including belief itself.

To enter that state of direct perception ("all beings free to leave their
 being/ and enter silence") requires deep silence.  The distorting
 vibrations of mind must quiet.  Get quiet enough and even the sense of
 ego fades, along with all its demands that it be seen as the center
of existence.  The various tugging and tremors of awareness melt away
 and finally, finally we see things as they are, without labels, without
 artificial separations: "The nameless tree with its forest of green..."

Seeing clearly, we see that everything flows into one another, and it is
 all filled with a living, glistening light -- even within ourselves.  Seeing
 this light, feeling it flow, feeling the heart overflow, we are filled with a
   quiet glee.  The very sense of who and what we really are is
 transformed. We feel alive for the first time... "all around, the light
 that sets the vital  body to humming"

That is when new possibilities emerge, the promises within ourselves,
within our interrelationship with reality are freed to find fulfillment.
For that to happen, we must first move beyond belief and free
 ourselves from the filter of the chattering mind.... "the world
held for us in promise/ until it is loosened from/our thinking."