Let Life Open You - Mark Nepo & MM

As you enter the day,
try not to reach for life...
Try to let life enter you.
Allow what touches you to
change your path...

Drop all reachings and simply open...
We have to settle into the wait
until we discover that there's
nowhere to go...

If we can survive the pain of being emptied,
a deeper place is cleared
in which the mystery can sing through us...
Each soul is a living flute
being carved by life to
a deeper and deeper song...

Uncover the mystery of strength by bringing
into focus a deeper sense of truth,
and your ability to step quite naturally,
with your heart...

Excerpts from Mark Nepo's book:
The Book of Awakening
(Mark's words, my format)

~

Trusting in the simplicity of Life,
let Life come to you...
Resting in simplicity,
Life will find you...

The more you trust Love
the more Life will
open up to you...

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
2004

~

Top Photo - digitally altered

Follow Your Own Footsteps - Nepo & Machado

Every time we talk to someone,
there comes back to us a map of expectation
as to how we should respond.

We share a confusion;
we are often given direction.

We share a pain;
we are often given an instruction.

We share a desire:
we are often given a plan.

The power of these unspoken maps
should not be underestimated.
For the endless gravities of expectation
we move in and out of govern most of our
thinking and summon most of our energy
in denying them or complying with them.

In actuality, underneath all the plans,
pressures, and expectations,
underneath all the subtle guidance and nudging,
the next step is truly unknown... [and our own].

Thus, our spiritual charge is
to maintain the wonder of the singular explorer
that each of us is...

The freshest step has always come when
we are brave enough to land at the end
of what little we know,
breathing in new air,
in reaction to no one,
in wonder at
  what is...

Mark Nepo
From: The Book of Awakening

(Mark's words, my format)

~*~

Wanderer, your footsteps are the road,
and nothing more...

Wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking...

Antonio Machado

~

Photo - taken by my father
c. 1952/53
his own footsteps

For A New Beginning - John O'Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
where your thoughts never think to wander,
this beginning has been quietly forming,
waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
feeling the emptiness inside you,
noticing how you willed yourself on,
still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
and the gray promise that sameness whispered,
heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
and out you stepped onto new ground,
your eyes young again with energy and dream,
a path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear,
you can trust the promise of this opening;
unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
that is at one with your life's desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
for your soul senses the world that awaits you.

John O'Donohue
"For A New Beginning"

~

Photo - Portal Cloud

The Flow of Life - Matt Licata

We are always in the flow of life.

It is the idea that there is some "us" on one side
and something called "flow" in some other place,
that is a great trance that seems to be unique
to the human experience...

Usually when we talk of being
"in the flow,"
we mean that we like the feelings,
sensations, and experiences
which are arising in our experience.
If there are more
vulnerable, intense, groundless, unresolvible,
or unideal feelings,
then we this as clear evidence that we are
"out of the flow."

And so the war begins.
The dream of abandoning the non-flow
to return to the flow as quickly as possible.

Perhaps it is only in the willingness to fully participate
in our immediate experience, exactly as it is,
that the nature of the flow will be revealed.

It is not something you will get to one day,
as some sort of acquisition,"
when you line up all of the right experiences,
when you successfully abandon and replace
what is here for something else.

The flow is right here,
utterly inseparable from what you are,
and is revealed in your unconditional commitment
to the truth of your immediate experience.

When you are willing to bring your embodied curiosity,
openness, acceptance and presence
to whatever is arising in the immediacy of now,
the question of how to feel more flow ceases to arise.

In this embodied openness the path is everywhere,
even in those places we least expect.
What you are left with is what you are,
which is love itself.

Allow love to astonish you...
Allow it to craft you
as a vessel of aliveness,
in which it can pour out
into this world.
There is no flow separate from that.

Matt Licata

(Matt's words, my format)

Rest Your Heart In Love - Fred LaMotte

The purest meditation is just to rest in Love...

Our love is often toward what we know to be God.
The "toward" of love is like an in-coming or out-going breath.
Its flow may proceed from my heart toward the Divine,
or from the Divine toward my heart,
until the two tides equalize in one serenity;
the silence between breaths... inhalation kisses exhalation.

Words cease.
  Prayer becomes deep meditation,
 and there is no more "toward"...
It is effortless repose through love, as love...
Just be with the formless feeling.
The little thread of formless love expands to fill the cosmos,
because it has no boundary, no image.
In a moment, you have captured the ocean of love
in the cup of your heart.

The tiniest thread, the faintest impulse of love,
is a breath of the Cosmic Mother,
felt as a sense of the heart.
Surrender to that subtle intuitive sensation,
without attaching any picture or face.
This ripple of affection will lead you to the sea.
Depth calleth unto depth.
In the formless abyss of love, one depth touches another.
The depth of God merges with the depth of You.

If images of an Avatar or a Master appear, let them.
They are delightful bubbles playing on the surface of
love's formless ocean.
They are all facets of one diamond,
 the brilliance of your divine heart.
Your heart is a little hologram that contains the cosmos,
the forms of every Avatar, every God or Goddess.

Whatever sadhana we practice, just rest in the heart,
filling the empty silence where thought used to be.
This silent glory [of Love] is the substance of creation itself,
suffusing every cell of the body.
Then it pours out through our eyes, our words, and our hands
in blessing...


Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

Excerpts from a blog post.
Fred's words, my format.

What Remains After Death...

I seem to be drawn to the topic of "death" lately - especially after watching this creative you tube video called "The Life of Death", which really impacted me.  Not in a morbid way, but in opening the door to bring awareness to the reality of "my" mortality - the certainty of exiting life as "i" know it... It left me feeling that death is really always with us.  It's right here - part of life. We know this, but we often avoid the idea.  But what really happens when we die...  Does this thing we call "consciousness" really "go on"?  What's left, if anything...  Is there truly a Greater Cosmic Beingness in which we are absorbed after physicality is gone?

My personal belief has been that our personal identity as a human being does not "go on" - that is, the "ego"/personality does not...  My belief has been that this "i"-wave called "christine" does not go on as christine, but dissolves into the Greater Ocean of Beingness - that famous analogy of the wave receding back into the Ocean...  But do I believe that because I like that scenario over others?  And will "i" know this is happening?  Will there be awareness?  I don't know...  Who really knows...  Just meandering here...

My father died in the early morning hours before dawn - we think - sitting in his chair in the living room.  He evidently couldn't sleep and had gotten up sometime in the middle of the night to sit in his chair.  My mother was still asleep in bed, and told the story later that Dad had come to her in what she thought was a dream and said: "Skip, I just died."  When she awoke at 5 am, he was not in bed.  She got up and found him dead in his chair.  Now some may call this woo-woo stuff, but...  who knows! Was my father aware of his death?  How exciting!  Did his consciousness go on, able to communicate somehow with my mother? And if so, how long did his consciousness linger...  Is this "dissolving" a gradual thing...  The Buddhists believe that one goes through what they call a Bardo period of "traveling" after death for something like 30 days or more.  But how do they know this? My father had had a near death experience several years before his actual death, in which his heart stopped after open heart surgery and he was "clinically" dead for a few minutes...  But was *he* "gone"?  Evidently not, as "he" was revived, and reported to us that he was now not afraid of death because his experience of dying, which he believed to be real, was peaceful.  There was something there that experienced "peace."  Fascinating...

My grandmother died in the hospital, having fallen and hitting her head, creating a blood clot under her skull requiring surgery.  After several days the decision was made to remove all life support because she was not improving...  I was not present when she died, but upon entering the room a half hour later, or so, I was gifted with an intensely tangible presence of Love that I have never experienced before, nor since.  It was like a warm presence that absolutely engulfed the room...  What was this!?  It was not the love I had for my grandmother, nor her's for me, but a greater Love.  

I realize now that it is this Greater Love that absorbs us, is what remains and "goes on."  Whether "we" retain anything of consciousness or the personal self remains a mystery.

In death and beyond there is only Infinite Love...

~*~

Photo -Imprint of a bird and wings in the snow

A View of Death - Joan Ruvinsky

Below is a transcript of a conversation that Joan Ruvinsky had with one of her Friends that was sent out in a recent newsletter from Joan's organization: Pathless Yoga.  Joan knew she was facing death, as she had end stage lung cancer.

When this body goes, does THIS [our Beingness] go?

The body is here and THIS is here - both/and...  There is one alive-space of us, and the room, and the wall, and everything else...  If global sensing is primary, the experience of me will become non-localized.  In other words, who I am is being interpreted right now as if I am a body-mind.  But the experience after I die is that there isn't a localization, that essence (called me) is just another flavouring of pure, dimensionless being.

When this body goes, does THIS go?  I'm going to say it the way Jean [Klein] said it because perhaps his wording is better than anybody's: the body is an expression of THIS.  The ocean comes up and makes this Joan wave and then this Joan wave recedes back into the ocean.  If you are looking just from the surface, yes a body has died and that person no longer exists.  If you are looking from beneath the surface, you see that yes, there is no body, but THIS still exists.  Whether I am here or not, IT is still here. This expression of IT, this tip of the wave, has come back into the ocean...  Right now you relate to the tip of the wave as well as the ocean.  The big question now is: "What is going to happen?" In your outer experience there will not be a body, but is your outer experience the truth?  What will happen in your inner experience?

There may be grief because the expression of THIS is going to be gone.  THIS is not going to go away.  And when it happens that the expression goes away, let's see, let's see what's left.  It is an experiment!  We don't know...  This everythingness... this presence... what will happen to it?  When you just stop and just close your eyes and listen within, when the background becomes the foreground, what will happen then?

Joan Ruvinsky was "reabsorbed", you might say, into the Great Ocean of the Ineffable Mystery of Being March 21, 2016.  She was evidently conscious during much of the dying process, and could describe her experience, until she could no longer talk.  Amazing...

~*~

Photo - Craypas Oils Art
Radially Blurred

"No Separate Thread" - Danna Faulds

The ordinary and the unified field
don't just co-exist, they coincide in
the same place, at the same time.
Divine and human can't be teased
apart - there is no separate thread
to pull heart from mind or soul.

There is only the unbroken chain of
wholeness forged link by link in a
continuum.  What is sacred and awake
is inextricably braided into the everyday,
but we forget that we can't dissect the
mundane from the radiant.

We lose ourselves in the rush to get
things done. Our memory grows dim
and there is such longing.  We desperately
seek something, anything, to plug us back
into what we've always been, forgetting
that the disconnect is only an illusion,
easily erased in the choice to see the truth.


Danna Faulds
"No Separate Thread"
From: Prayers to the Infinite

The Universe is a Story - Swimme, Essman, MM, & Vaughan-Lee

...the universe is not simply a place but a story,
a story in which we are immersed, to which we belong,
and out of which we arose.

This story has the power to awaken us more deeply to who we are.
For just as the Milky Way is the universe in the form of a galaxy,
and an orchid is the universe in the form of a flower,
we are the universe in the form of a human.

And every time we are drawn to look up into the night sky
and reflect on the awesome beauty of the universe,
we are actually the universe reflecting on itself.

Journey of the Universe

Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker

~*~

The Absolute is both unmanifest and a dynamic creative force.
From the creative force everything arises;
both the world as well as personal consciousness.
Everything is a blissful play [story] of consciousness,
not an unreal illusion.

Excerpt from an article by

Jan Essman

~*~

Everything is ultimately a story.
My life is a story,
your life is a story,
all occurring within the vast cosmic
Ocean of Consciousness.
The story of The Eternal is being lived
here...

The Ineffable Mystery of the Universe
takes a journey through
the story of life - as us...
The "Divine Drama" is our story -
and our "story" is the "Divine Drama"...

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
2013

~*~

The real mystery is how It
unveils ItSelf within us;
how the Beloved makes ItSelf known
to ItSelf in the fragile container of the
human being.

In the midst of the Divine Drama
there is a human story to be told.
But it's all "God's" story
being lived in human form...

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Sufi Mystic

*

Photo - A mystery :)

Shimmer of Light...

We are the grace of Love fulfilled,
the shimmer of Sacred Light,
lustrous uniqueness in a field of
multitudinal  Divine Shimmers
- autonomous, yet in glittering Oneness.

We are the twinkle of liberated luminosity
radiating from the Heart of Love,
in the Sound Stream of Life,
continuously unfolding.

We are created, and create, from the glowing embers
of the mystical furnace of Love's Fire...

Receive the molten flow of golden translucence
that forms you in the fire of Divine Love.
Love infuses you in every micron of consciousness
- Golden Light turned fluid,
flowing incessantly from the Primordial Heart..

Light of Love.
Love of Love.

Love experiencing ItSelf as Love
in every breath,
in every beat of your heart...

Mystic Meandering
Dec. 2001

~*~

Photo - reflection of light on wall
from a doorknob!

The Universe is Vibrating Strings - Kaku

...the subatomic particles we see in nature,
the quartz, the electrons,
are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string.

What is physics?

Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write
on vibrating strings...

What is chemistry?
Chemistry is nothing but melodies you can play on interacting
vibrating strings...

What is the universe?

The universe is a symphony of
vibrating strings...

What is the mind of God?
It's the cosmic music resonating
through hyperspace...


Michio Kaku

Physicist

Photo - Indra's Net of Jewels Mandala Art
digitally altered

Star Symphony...

The Cosmos plays a continuous Symphony of Silence
that only Inner Stillness can hear...
We have forgotten the music of the
Celestial Songs
that sound the stellar light language of
Love

Our remembrance lies hidden deep in
the cave of the Heart - untouched...

The unspoken language of the Heart
longs to be opened - awakened...
The dormant vibration calls to us,
to resonate with the tones of Creation
in the Space of Silence ~

in unified expression with
All That Is...

Listen deeply and hear the
Celestial Symphony
within the Stillness
of the Heart...

Follow the pulsing sound
into the Vastness
of Silence...

Find your resonance
with the Rhythm
in your Heart

~ and know ~

We are all a tone of Love

playing our uniqueness in the
Chord of Life,
reverberating with
the Sound of Source...

Mystic Meandering
Aug. 1, 2001

Photo - Mandala Art
digitally enhanced

The Universe is Sound - Fred LaMotte

The Universe is sound.
The subtle essence of light shines as sound.
Each star has a sound.
Every galaxy is a resolving chord,
the harmony of a trillion worlds.
We are each a unique resonance of
grace notes.

The atom of your body chimes.
Our subatomic counterpoint trembles
and dances over the scale of humanity,
and humanity's music co-mingles in the
cosmic chorus.

My heart is a receiver of your elegy,
and a transmitter of my own love song.
Inside the ribs of every man and woman,
the hollows of a well-carved instrument resonate,
softly playing notes
deeply personal,
yet pervading the universe.

With the vibrant sounds of our minds,
we contribute to the harmony of All,
or we grind out dissonance.

The day will come,
the day is here,
when you merely call
the Beloved's most secret name,
and the Beloved is with you,
nearer than this breath!

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

(Fred's words, my format)

~*~

Om is the primordial word [sound].
All that is, was, or will be is Om.

Mandukya Upanishad

Allow Everything Meditation - Adyashanti

In this form of meditation you are not leading the way,
you're not controlling.
It's almost like being a passenger in a car.

Instead of controlling your experience,
you're a passenger to your experience.

You're watching it and letting it be however it's going to be.
When you're more a passenger to your experience,
you can watch what naturally happens,
when you have no idea of what should happen
or where you're going.

You'll naturally come into more of a state of listening.
Listen, watch, see what happens.
Just allow awareness to flow wherever it wants to;
to be aware of whatever it wants to be aware of.

As you allow awareness to go where it wants,
rather than where you want it to go
it unwinds your thoughts, it unwinds your mind,
and your body.

So instead of seeing where you can direct awareness,
you're actually seeing where awareness will take you
when you let it go wherever it wants.

Nothing is held onto. Nothing pushed away.
Allow everything to take its natural course.

Make no effort to enhance or sustain anything.

Just have the notion that you will continue to allow
everything to be, as it is, as it wants to be,
and that you will continue to allow awareness
to go where it wants to go...

Adyashanti
An excerpt from his guided meditation.
from the CD set: "Spontaneous Awakening"
2005

Ebb and Flow - Ivan Granger

When the face of Ever-Presence is known,
all concreteness spontaneously fades away...
Kelsang Gyatso

The vivid appearance of the external world can become a trap
for the distracted mind.  We can get caught in constant reaction,
running after pleasure, running from pain.

In the truly natural state, awareness is at rest, perceiving without
tension, encountering reality without an overlay of stories,
without attraction or repulsion.
In that Pure Awareness, life becomes a flow of events and
interactions, not pushed by the self-will of likes and dislikes.

We are simply as we are...
Events simply unfold...

...life experience; its waning and waxing is simply its natural flow.

Ivan Granger
Poetry Chaikhana

~*~

Our lives are like rivers.
Eventually they go where they must,
not where we want
them to...

From the movie - "Empire Falls"

The Unutterable Space...

There is a clear
Space
within our
Heart of Hearts

Softly Fluid
Purely Still
Undisturbedly Content
Innocently Wondrous
The Illumined Space of
Pure Being...

"Ordinary temporal life" is allowed to be -
to happen -
within the context of
this Space,
allowing everything to pass through it.

Trust this that
sits in the Heart.
Touch into it,
and see where
it takes you.
Feel how it buoys you up
and floats you through time.

Turn awareness
inward - Listening...
Sense Its Presence,
as if there was an inner window
to this voiceless, timeless
Space of the Ineffable

For even when the mind is preoccupied with words,
this Ineffable Space
is still silently present;
in the wordless language
of the Heart.

Feel the nearly imperceptible movement
as it subtly reveals Itself as
Love...
The reverberation of our Eternal Being,
echoing ItSelf as Love
through the chambers
of the Spiritual Heart

Everything comes back to this Unutterable Space

the Space of
~ Love ~

Mystic Meandering
July 20, 2016

"Here" Is Your Heart - Papaji

"Enlightenment" is not about words
and thoughts and concepts
which can be doubted.
"Enlightenment" is always Here...

By "Here" I don't mean this present space.
Here is somewhere within where the mind cannot reach.
This here is not opposite of "there."
This here is nowhere, it is your Heart.
.....all comes back to the Heart.
All the cosmos is but a speck in your Heart.

Turn your mind over into this "Here"...
You have to take the last half-step
from Peace-Awareness-Bliss
and go deeper,
into the Mystery beyond...
Then - only Love remains...

Papaji
From: The Truth Is

Love In Its Own Way...

You pine for Love all your life,
seeking the Essence,
the purity of Love.
Your heart cries out for this Love so many times,
it seems endless - and unheard...

And then - when you least expect it -

Love reveals itself...
Not in big ways -
but in the little things.
Not in romantic ways -
but in the kindness of others.

The clerk at the grocery store and
the smile of a stranger
whose eyes tell you
they know -
they feel it too...

The voice of an estranged friend,
or loved one connecting once again.
Your heart sighs...

The sight of a bright yellow butterfly
playfully bouncing through your
backyard in pure delight of being alive.
The big, loving, black pool eyes of a puppy
eliciting your hidden love in return.
The trill of a Robin
singing for hours out your window
showing you the way out of
your self-imposed struggle.
Your heart lightens,
and sings its own song again.
Free...

You read a poem or story that inspires you to look deeper,
feel deeper, and open the heart - more...
You follow the heart's opening...

And one morning you unexpectedly wake up "happy."
Your heart dances for no reason -
except you know that somehow Love has visited you
when you weren't looking for it...

You find the spot of grace
that lets you know that
everything is deeply okay -
despite life's heartbreaks and tragedies,
yours and others...

You suddenly realize that your fear
has dissolved...
Your heart giggles like a child,
never really knowing why
or where it went -
or why it comes and goes...
You only know that, for today, there is
a new openness,
and softness of Love...

You bask in the bliss...

How this all happens, I don't know.
Life and Love ebb and flow
in their own natural way...
Darkness and Light dance
in and out of time as one movement,
touching us in ways we cannot understand,
revealing Love - in its own way...

The Mystery of Existence:
Pure Love
Inexplicable Love
Unexpected Love
that has its own way of
Loving ~

Mystic Meandering
July 15, 2016

~

Love to all!

  

Silence is Prayer - Zensho Wolfgang Kopp

Awareness of the Divine Essence as our innermost true Self
requires silence.
It is turning toward what lies hidden within -
to the internal - the all-embracing totality of Divine Being.
It is the way of meditation,
the way of inner silence before Spirit.

Remaining quiet before Spirit is a prayer of silence,
through which we listen to what secretly speaks to us
in the inner room of the heart.

What is hidden deep in our inner most being
 lies in silence and stillness,
and in the silence of the deep
springs the eternal, inexauastable, original
source of being.

Where words fall silent, the everlasting begins...

Wolfgang Kopp

From: Free Yourself of Everything

A Dream of Wholeness - Matt Licata

As you fall asleep at night,
and look up into the moon -
It's just there waiting for you -
that vague sense that something is missing;
of disappointment in the way things are unfolding...

Perhaps at a much earlier time, with a star or a tree or water
as your witness, you made a prayer of wholeness.
The response to that prayer has come,
but not in the way you expected.
It has arrived by way of the shattering of an old dream,
the dream of how you thought it would all turn out.
While this dream is painful, it is alive, sacred and holy.

Heartbreak and disappointment are not easy.
They will pull the rug out from under you and remind you
of how [raw] it really is here, of how anything could happen,
and of how unresolvable life truly is.

These ancient feelings and emotions are not your enemies
working against you.  They are not evidence of your failure,
or that you have fallen off the path.
They are the path.
But they are not the path you thought.
They are of the unknown and seeded with creativity.

They are relentless in a way, these forms of love,
but will never give up,
they will never stop looking for you
and calling you home.

Matt Licata

Dissolving Conflict - Mark Nepo & Fred La Motte

When you dare to hear my fear in the recesses of your heart,

you recognize it as your secret that you thought no one else knew.

And that unexpected wholeness - that moment of unity
is.....the mysterious oneness of spirit.

Everything - you and I and the people we mistrust
and even the things we fear -
everything at heart follows the same beat of life
pulsing beneath all the distractions and preferences
we can create.

We must put down the burdens that we carry...
What we hold onto keeps us from being
fully aware of our Sacred Beingness...

Enter through the door of your worries, anxieties, and fears...

We each have an unencumbered spot free of fear,
an umbilical spot of grace.
To know this spot of Inwardness
is to know who you are - not by
surface markers of identity -
but by feeling the Infinite...

This is the only thing worth teaching:
how to uncover that original spot
and how to live there...

Allowing the current of another's Inwardness to connect
with your own is the beginning
of intimacy...

...we become each other,
...we all feel the same agony,
...we all see the same wonder,
though we all speak in
a different voice

Mark Nepo
Excerpts from: The Book of Awakening

I merely put them together into this format

~*~

You are space itself,
the ever-expanding infinity of
pure awareness,
where all points of view dance and dissolve
into silence...
When we realize we are that space
a deep Listening will pervade every atom,
and conflict will evaporate into compassion...

Fred La Motte
Uradiance

~*~

Your most secret wound is the doorway...

Ivan Granger
Poetry Chaikhana

Culture of Fear - Krishnamurti

We have broken up the earth as yours and mine -
your nation, your flag and his flag,
this particular religion and
the religion of the distant man.
And for it we fight and wrangle,
and the politicians exult in their power
to maintain this division,
never looking at the world as a whole.
They haven't gotten the global mind.
They never feel nor perceive the immense
possibility of having no nationality,
no division...
They maintain the tribal attitude
towards life.
They do not have a mind that
steps beyond the division of race,
culture, and the religions
that man has invented.

We carry on like machines with our
tiresome daily routine.
How eagerly the mind accepts a
pattern of existence,
and how tenaciously it clings to it!
As by a driven nail, the mind is
held together by idea,
and around that idea it lives
and has its being.
The mind is never free,
for it is always anchored
within the radius
of its own center.
It is lost in fear...

Fear is not of the unknown,
but of the loss of the known.

One wonders how long it will take
for man to learn to live on this earth
without wrangles, rows, wars and conflict.
Man has created the conflict by his division
of the earth, linguistically, culturally, superficially.
One wonders how long man,
who has evolved through so many centuries of
pain and grief, anxiety and pleasure,
fear and conflict,
will take to live a different way of life.

J. Krishnamurti

(his words, my format)

This is a newspaper clipping from the Boston Globe from the late 1960's
It reads:

There is no mind more open or
heart more willing to love than
that of a young child.
But teach a child hatred and
prejudice and the mind begins to
close, the heart to harden. Until
finally, a bigot is born.
Sometimes what we don't teach
our children is more important
that what we do.

Learning to Live Together.
The Unfinished Task.

Upon Waking...

I woke this morning - Untroubled...
I awoke this morning with a heart of Gratitude...

It was just there -
undisturbed by the mind...

I was just Peace.
I was just Awareness,
Empty Pristine Awareness...

There was only Openness -
with/about life...
I didn't want to start thinking - I thought,
for fear I would contract;
and laughed at the thought...
It dissipated...

I became aware again
of
Open Awareness...


I woke this morning feeling FREE;
not Freedom FROM anything -
just Freeness - unencumbered...
I was Freeness Itself...

I woke this morning feeling LOVE;
as if I could reach out to everyone and Love them!

This could be dangerous - I thought...
Had I ever felt this way before!?

I didn't contract in the thought.
Instead -
there was a natural urge for love and kindness
that kept bubbling up
from somewhere inside...

I awoke this morning feeling  - JOY!

Quiet Joy...

Internal Joy...

I did not conjure any of these up!
I did not meditate on them,
or practice them...
They were already there...
They just happened!
I was graced - unexpectedly
when I wasn't looking...

I didn't want to lose this -
this gratitude, this joy for life;
this unfettered Freeness.
Yet I didn't want to grasp at it either;
this new way of experiencing life.
I let it sit inside,
aware that it was not happening TO me,
but was taking place inside...
It had nothing to do with me at all!
Something was coming alive within...

Was this "The Kiss of The Mystery"?
Most assuredly...
unbidden...

And the realization arose from the Silence:
One cannot "Awaken" one's self.
One's self does not "awaken" - but
Something inside us
 Opens
for no apparent reason,
spontaneously...
and creates in us a new way of seeing and being
in the world...

Good Morning!

Mystic Meandering
July 5, 2016

~

Photo taken by my brother