What's Your Bias? - Brian McLaren

People can't see what they can't see.
Their biases get in the way, surrounding them like a high wall,
trapping them in ignorance, deception, and illusion.
No amount of reasoning and argument will get through to them,
unless we first learn how to break down the walls of bias...

Confirmation Bias:  We judge new ideas based on the ease with which they fit in with and confirm the only standard we have: old ideas, old information, and trusted authorities.  As a result, our framing story, belief system, or paradigm excludes whatever doesn't fit.

Complexity Bias: Our brains prefer s simple falsehood to a complex truth.

Community Bias: It's almost impossible to see what our community doesn't, can't or won't see.

Complementary Bias: If you are hostile to my ideas, I'll be hostile to yours.  If you are curious and respectful toward my ideas, I'll respond in kind.

Competency Bias: We don't know how much (or little) we know because we don't know how much (or little) others know.  In other words, incompetent people assume that most other people are about as incompetent as they are.  As a result, they underestimate their [own] incompetence, and consider themselves at least of average competence.

Consciousness Bias: Some things simply can't be seen from where I am right now.  But if I keep growing, maturing, and developing, someday I will be able to see what is now inaccessible to me.

Comfort or Complacency Bias:  I prefer not to have my comfort disturbed.

Conservative/Liberal Bias: I lean toward nurturing fairness and kindness, or towards strictly enforcing purity, loyalty, liberty, and authority, as an expression of my political identity.

Confidence Bias: I am attracted to confidence, even if it is false.  I often prefer the bold lie to the hesitant truth.

Catastrophe or Normalcy Bias: I remember dramatic catastrophes but don't notice gradual decline (or improvement).

Contact Bias: When I don't have intense and sustained personal contact with "the other", my prejudices and false assumptions go unchallenged.

Cash Bias: It's hard to see something when my way of making a living require me not to see it.

Conspiracy Bias: Under stress or shame, our brains are attracted to stories that relieve us, exonerate us, or portray us as innocent victims of malicious conspirators.

Brian McLaren
from - Why Don't They Get It?  Overcoming Bias in Others.

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo from the Internet

 

The Swan and The Frog - Dennis Holtje

Photo by Robert Woeger on Unsplash

There once was a beautiful white swan that came from the great
ocean to the North.  After being in the South for the winter, it
was ready for the return journey home.  So it took off and with
its big wing span and shining white feathers, it soared effortlessly
through the blue sky.  After a long while, and far along the journey,
the swan began to tire and came down to land for a rest.  It landed
right on the edge of a water well and let out a deep sigh.

In the bottom of this well there lived a frog.  The frog said, "Well,
who are you and where do you come from?"

"I am a swan, and my home is on the water of the great northern
ocean," answered the swan.

"Ocean?  How big is this ocean? asked the frog.

"Very big," said Swan.

"Is it this big?" Frog asked, taking two hops backward.

"No, much bigger," said Swan.

So the frog took five huge hops backward, saying,
"Is the ocean this big?"

Swan said, "No, it's much bigger than that."

And so the frog went around the entire well - his whole
reality, as he knew it - and asked the swan, "Now, is the ocean
as big as this?"  And the swan said, "No, it's much bigger,
much bigger!"

Thereupon the frog said, "Well, you're a fool and a liar!"
because he knew there could be nothing bigger than
 his world and his well.

Dennis Holtje
From: Light to Sound

 

 

The Role I Play - Wislawa Szymborska

[.....]

I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it's mine.  I can't exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot
just what this play's all about.

Ill prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can't conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for hammy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can't take back,
stars you'll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run -
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But her comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage).

You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations.  Oh no.
I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I've done.

Wislawa Szymborska

with thanks to Being Silently Drawn

~

Photo via Death Deconstructed

 

Delightful Distractions - Fred LaMotte

Honor the slight distractions
that keep you sane.
These are not distractions.
These are the essentials.
A titmouse at the thistle feeder.
Wing-beat of geese
navigating by the moon.
A glistening spider's web
in the withering hyssop.
Exultation of a turquoise moth
who will only live until sunrise.
The motionless explosion of a rose.
Are you not redeemed by the sure
sweet vision of particulars?

What else is faith?
The baby's ancient gaze
from a supermarket shopping cart.
Elegant cracks in a hand-made tea bowl.
Two dragonflies dancing at the edge
of a spring-fed forest pond.
Fragrance of honeysuckle
on a broken fence.
Sound of a horse's tail
swatting flies on a summer morning.
These are not distractions.
These are every flame-tipped thing
conspiring in a ceaseless revelation
to whisper yes, you are here.
The splendor of Sri Yantra
seen in the camellia blossom
that fell in the night by your back door,
its empyrean petals, choir upon choir.
The crown of an infant against your cheek.
Bamboo wind chimes in an empty temple.
Whisper of waves dissolving on sand.
The silence between raindrops.
This breath.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

My personal delights:

Crickets chirping their chorus in the quiet of night.
The sound of rain hitting the elephant ear leaves of
 a zucchini plant in the garden.

Sitting in the open window late at night
breathing in the silence, as the cool night air
brushes my face.
The early morning echo of the birds wake-up call,
or their haunting goodnight song.
Sunlight through glassware... :)

What are some of your delights? 

 

Dancing with Life...

In moments of Solitude and Quiet
the life "characters" I've assumed -
fall away...

The defense mechanisms, beliefs, roles and identities
drop into the Quiet -
and the Eternal Perspective emerges...

unthinking happens...

Embracing the mystery and paradox of life,
I accept the totality of life experience;
not just the pathways of 
light and bliss and peace -
but the darker pathways,
with their shadows of the psyche,
without "spiritualizing" them...
Accepting the shadow side of life
as part of the Whole...

In the Quietude I listen to the "Oracle" of the Soul
that has imagery, poetry and music all its own.

With the innocence of a child -
open and spontaneous -
my Heart, hidden by the many masks I've worn,
melts through - hearing the music...

Unencumbered... Unconstrained... Undefined...
And dances with the innate Rhythm of Life again -
The Natural Rhythm,
as the world plays out its darker side.

Mystic Meandering

Aug. 29, 2021

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

 

Fragmented Culture - J. 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 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 a 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 patter 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

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

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

 

Grief is Sacred - Francis Weller

No one escapes suffering in this life.
None of us is exempt from loss, pain, illness and death.
How is it that we have so little understanding of these
essential experiences?  How is it that we have attempted to
keep grief separated from our lives and only begrudgingly
acknowledge its presence at the most obvious times, such
as a funeral?

'If sequestered pain made a sound,' Stephen Levine says,
'the atmosphere would be humming all the time.'

It is the accumulated losses of a lifetime that slowly weigh
us down - the times of rejection, the moments of isolation
when we felt cut off from the sustaining touch of comfort
and love.  It is an ache that resides in the heart, the faint echo
calling us back to the times of loss.  We are called back, not
so much to make things right, but to acknowledge what
happened to us.

Grief asks that we honor the loss and, in doing so, deepen
our capacity for compassion.  When grief remains unexpected,
however, it hardens, becomes as solid as stone.  We, in turn,
become rigid and stop moving in rhythm with the soul...

When our grief stagnates, we become fixed in place, unable
to move and dance with the flow of life.  Grief is part of
the dance.

As we begin to pay attention, we notice that grief is never 
far from our awareness.  We become aware of the many ways
it arrives in our daily lives.  It is the blue mood that greets us
upon waking.  It is the melancholy that shades the day in
muted tones.  It is the recognition of time's passing, the slow
emptying of our days.  It is the searing pain that erupts when
someone close to us dies....  It is the confounding grief when
our life circumstances are shattered by the unexpected.....

It is essential for us to welcome our grief, whatever form it
takes. When we do, we open ourselves to our shared
experiences in life. Opening to our sorrow connects us with
everyone, everywhere.  There is no gesture of kindness that is
wasted, no offering of compassion that is useless. 
We can be generous to every sorrow we see.
It is sacred work.

Francis Weller
from - The Wild Edge of Sorrow

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Turning Into The Not-Knowing - Matt Licata

There is a certain death that occurs as part of the healing
process, a part of us unable to survive illumination.  As we
turn the light around, according to one Daoist alchemical
text, a piece of soul will fall away.

While it is tempting to spin out of the uncertainty and
quickly into rebirth, there is wisdom and purity within
the reorganization which we cannot bring into embodied
knowing if we patch it all up prematurely.

The dissolution itself is initiation as it offers vision and
feeling not available in the put-back-together-state.  An
old part of ourselves that has accompanied us for so long,
a fellow traveler is no longer permitted to continue the
journey by our side.  This prior soul-companion can be
another person or it can be a member of the inner family.

Somehow, we're asked to bear witness to the crumbling of
an old dream - my life and the way I was so sure it was
going to turn out.  This is the holy alchemical operation of
putrefactio, a sacred process that is evidence of.....fierce grace.

In order to be initiated, we must slow down, and turn into
the not-knowing.  To take some time to mourn the
reassembling of our world,  to grieve all that we will
inevitably lose as we heal and awaken.

To tend to the pieces of the soul, the shards of the heart,
and the fragments of the psyche that are being rearranged,
to honor the role they have played, for standing by us for
so long, and providing refuge during difficult times.

To lament the loss of their companionship and allow them to
continue into whatever realm is next for them, [and give them]
permission to travel and experience new things.  Even if we
 are unable to "accept" this, we can touch the ground where
 they once were, and bow.

To stand in awe at this process, despite the profound pain and
grief, to care for all of it as we allow the Mystery to reveal
itself in deeper and deeper ways.  To know that healing and
awakening is messy, glorious, and full-spectrum... and is not
only an act of creation, but one of destruction as well.

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Epitome of Truth - Alan Watts

Death is the epitome of the truth that in each moment we are
thrust into the unknown.  Here all clinging to security is
compelled to cease, and whenever the past is dropped away
and safety abandoned, life is renewed.  Death is the unknown
in which all of us lived before birth.

Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret
of life.  It means that the past must be abandoned, that the 
unknown cannot be avoided, that "I" cannot continue, and
that nothing can be ultimately fixed.  When a man knows this,
he lives for the first time in his life.  By holding his breath, he
loses it.  By letting it go he finds it.

Alan Watts
From: The Wisdom of Insecurity:
A Message for an Age of Anxiety

With thanks to Whiskey River

Photo from Beyond the Fields We Know

 

Shift Happens...

Life is shifting again -
the "apocalypse" of mankind
seemingly upon us...

I feel it in my spirit -
an annoying disorientation.
I see it in my husband's face,
our aging bodies...
our minds fading...

the world in distress...

Endings & Beginnings...

COVID culling the human race...

Fire guts the land - its smoke
circling the globe;
man's arrogance and entitlement
up in flames...

Mother Nature devastates Haiti;
human suffering left in
Her wake -
the vulnerability of existence...

Afghanistan crumbles -
desperate ones run with the planes
trying to escape their fate,

unable to take flight...

Where once Stillness of Being was,
the Natural Inner State -
A collective unsettledness and restlessness
have taken up residency...

Kali, the fierce one, destroyer of unreality, reigns;
standing outside the constraints of culture,
transcending time and space -
forcing us to face our current reality;
removing our illusions,
loosening our attachments,
gleaning us for something new...

Nothing escapes her Holy Chaos...

We are crossing an evolutionary 
Bridge of the Unknown -
from one state of Being to the next;
an alchemical transmutation of our false assumptions
about what is "Real"; what is "True."
A collective spiritual initiation
with its necessary losses...

Stripped of the comforting conceptual certainties of
faith and belief -
we await a new illumination;
a new emergence from the Dark Womb of
the Great Mother...

...until then

Uncertainty abounds...

Nothing stays the same...

Shift Happens...

Mystic Meandering

Aug 17, 2021

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Loss Teaches You Everything - Issa

I lost many things in Costa Rica: physical stuff, psychological
baggage, spirituality (the idea that there is someone who should
get enlightened), weight, conditioning, civilization (the idea that
there is a certain way to be civilized, a norm to live by), 
domestication (the idea you should own a house/property and
own many physical things in order to be secure), sentimentality
of romance (it's apparently part of the play to have this experience
yet it has lost its sentiments).

It's when all is lost that all is found.  
When the illusion of the one who is doing her best to be in control,
to do the 'right thing', is gone.  When she is apparently gone life just
 flows magically, completely empty (nothing can be held onto,
prevented to change) yet fulfilling every need and desire as there
are no particular demands from anyone.  Life fulfills life as water
endlessly keeps flowing from a well to the sea.

Issa from Costa Rica

via - Uradiance

Photo - from Love is a Place

 

In the Heart of Every Creature - The Bhagavad Gita

Creatures rise and creatures vanish;
I alone am real, Arjuna,
looking out, amused, from deep
within the eyes of every creature.

I am the object of all knowledge,
Father of the world, its mother,
Source of all things, of impure and
Pure, of holiness and horror.

I am the goal, the root, the witness,
Home and refuge, dearest friend,
Creation and annihilation,
Everlasting seed and treasure.

I am the radiance of the sun, I
Open or withhold the rain clouds,
I am Immortality and
Death, am being and non-being.

I am the Self, Arjuna, seated
in the heart of every creature.
I am the origin, the middle,
And the end that all must come to.

The Bhagavad Gita
Lord Krishna to Arjuna
Stephen Mitchell version

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Guru Cat :)

 

Because We Are Human - Dr. Jacqui Lewis

I think grief puts us in touch with our vulnerabilities.
I think the feeling of grief lets us know the power of wounds
to shape our stories.  I think it lets us know how capable we
are of having our hearts broken and our feelings hurt.

I think it lets us know the link that we each have because we're
human.  Because we're human, we hurt.  Because we're human,
we have tears to cry.  Because we're human, our hearts are
broken.  Because we're human, we understand that loss is a
universal language.  Everybody grieves.

All humanity grieves,  All of us have setbacks, broken dreams.
All of us have broken relationships or unrealized possibilities.
All of us have bodies that just don't do what they used to do.
Though grief is personal, every person grieves.

Dr. Jacqui Lewis

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Rest in the Gap - Frank Ostaseski

All things change...
The way we end one experience shapes the way the next one
arises.  Clinging to the old makes it difficult for something 
new to emerge...

Breathing is a microcosm of life itself.  Every breath goes
through a process of birth, growth, and death.  At the very
end of the exhale, there is a gap, a pause.  Breath has left
the body, and we don't know for certain if it will return.
Do you trust that the next in-breath will emerge on its own?
Can you rest your mind in the gap? Can you let the breath
breathe you?

Breath is the most intimate connection we humans have to
the realm of "God."  The breath is the vehicle for reaching
the transcendent.  The breath takes us to that experience that
is deeper than words, deeper than thought, deeper than form...

The breath invites us into the body.  We can learn to align
with the breath and move with it, to allow the breath its own
natural depth and flow.  Every breath takes us to where we 
belong.  As we relinquish command of it, we gradually feel
the breath breathing us.

The breath becomes a resting place...

Frank Ostaseski
From - The Five Invitations

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The "Art" of Recognition - Walker Percy

My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal
truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether
it's poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or
listener or viewer something he already knows but which
he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of
communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that
he has been there before, a shock of recognition.  And so,
what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply validate the
human experience and to tell people the deep human truths
which they already unconsciously know.

Walker Percy

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
"Sacred Shadow"
Shadows on a wall colored purple

 

The Art of "selving" - Fred LaMotte

I offer a new verb: 'to selve.'

It means to finally be You.  To be what you love, and love
what needs doing, and dot it as no one else can.

No guru teaches you to selve, just as no parent taught you to
walk.  To selve, you must abandon the notion that the universe
expects you to act in accordance with somebody else's rules.
Selvers follow no role model or mythic archetype.  They 
abandon the words "as" and "like."

You cannot selve "as" anyone who came before you: neither
Sakyamuni, nor Mohammad, nor the Guru, or Jesus.  In fact,
the great way-showers all selved.  Then they taught, "If you
want to know God, you too must selve.  But you cannot selve
as me.  You must selve as you."

Only in the present moment can you selve, and only in a state
of wonder.  When you do something beautiful and say, "I have
no idea how this happened!  I didn't do it!" you have selved.

Selvers do not seek the "Self."  If the verb of selving ever came
to rest in the noun of Self, you would be dead.  Selving is energy.
Self is an abstraction.  You are not here to attain a state of being:
you are here to be.

Selve a chef, a carpenter, a yoga teacher, a janitor, a warrior,
a nurse, or an investment banker. In the art of selving, there is
no superior or inferior status, no better or worse.  There is but
authenticity.

No one selves cruelty.  No one selves dishonesty.  No one selves
selfishness.  Those are malfunctions...  When you truly selve,
you only love.

As for Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Guru: these are just names we
give to people who have selved with wild abandonment.  Every
moment they lived, they were bewildered by themselves.

Fred LaMotte
Urandiance

~

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

 

What's Real? - a meandering...

Tired of the weariness of existence 
and the "games" that people play...

Lost all longing for, or any sense of devotion to 
any "spiritual" entity. All "spiritualities" seem to be just
explanations and theories about existence; all the many
theologies, dogmas, doctrines, disciplines, traditions,
religions & practices; Karma, reincarnation, and
anything else humans have come up with to try to "explain"
how it all is - "The Truth of Existence..."

Are we just another species replicating itself...
Are we a dream...
Or - Are we Source morphing ItSelf into human form...

Is it really true that our True Nature is
 kindness & compassion & love...
There seems to be an inherent ignorance of that Nature...

What makes humans believe that a "God" - any one
"God" - is "right", or "in control..." It's all the same
 "God-energy" anyway - in essence - prior to manifestations

 of a personal "God" that we choose to name...

Is it true that there is only Pure Consciousness
manifesting ItSelf in all expressions so that "IT"
can experience humanity and all the experiences 
here in this realm -
over and over and over again...

My meanderings lead me to ask: Why - why after
billions of experiences in billions of manifestations
would "IT" (Consciousness) want more of the same
experience...Why does "IT want to keep manifesting
ItSelf just to experience limited human life in its
vulnerability...  Hasn't "IT" learned enough already...

It is a belief to help explain this existence, but you have
to believe it is true...

And am tired of all beliefs and theories and explanations
that leave me empty, disconnected - spiritually disoriented...

What is there that actually reveals the "Truth of Existence..."
"Direct Experience" you say...

But we all have different experiences of that too...

And who came up with all these concepts, theories and
conjectures, that we are supposed to just believe in...
Some ancient "sage" meditating in a cave?

I do miss not having an "explanation story" to believe in,
or a "God" to believe in, but - still want to know what
the Truth really is...

Is there something in us called Essence, Pure Being, Pure
Consciousness?  And if so, why don't we know this
Beingness, this Essence that we are...

Some say we have supposedly "forgotten" - concealing
the "Truth" of who we are from ourselves...
Why would we do that...

Why do we spend a lifetime seeking for what we already are...
Like looking for your cat, thinking it might me under the chair,
when all along it's been sitting in your chair watching you
search for "it"...

You have to be invested in what you believe in;
that it's true.  Even if it isn't...

And we all believe something different...

Having hope for a "better" reality, or a "better" you -
"enlightenment"- is the universal manipulation...

On the other hand, I don't believe that there is only
this reality - "just this..."
What of mystical experiences...

And believing in God/Guru only gives us a feeling of
worthiness, rightness - or unworthiness and "wrongness";
of being loved, special - or even condemned...

It's still all about "you" -
not what's Real...

So - what is "Real..."

The proverbial existential question...

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Meanderings
June 27, 2021

P.S. - All that is required to "know" the "Truth"
is to enter the deep "inner space" and discover
the Heart of our own Being for ourselves...

Or is that just a belief too :)

~

Photo from the Internet
"Time Tunnel"

 

Cosmic Dream - John O'Donohue

In the beginning was the dream...
In the eternal night where no dawn broke, the dream deepened. 
Before anything ever was, it had to be dreamed...  Every single
thing is somehow the expression and incarnation of thought.

If we take Nature as the great artist of longing, then all presences
in the world have emerged from Her mind and imagination.  We
are children of the Earth's dreams.  It's almost as if Nature is in
dream and we are her children who have broken through the dawn
into time and place.  Fashioned in the dreaming of the clay, we
are always somehow haunted by that, we are unable ever finally
to decide what is dream and what is reality.  Each day we live in
what we call reality, yet life seems to resemble a dream.  We rush
through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to
stay and the serious project of the world depended on us.  We
worry and grow anxious - we magnify trivia until they become
important enough to control our lives.  Yet all the time, we have
forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of
a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos.

There is no definitive dividing line between reality and dream.
What we consider real is often precariously dream-like.  And
even our grip on reality is tenuous...

John O'Donohue
From: Eternal Echoes

Photo from the Internet

 

Cosmic Meditation - Robert Rabbin & Adyashanti

Meditation doesn't promise anything
It isn't a strategy,
It simply is.

When we exist within meditation,
there is no room for strategies of
becoming, achieving, attaining, owning.

Within meditation,
Silence is the only strategy,
because everything [just] is...

Robert Rabbin

With thanks to No Mind's Land
for photo too :)

~

Real meditation is not about mastering a technique
True meditation is letting go of manipulating our experience.
Stop seeking something more or better or different, and turn
your attention inward to the awake Silence that you are...

Adyashanti

 

Quantum Strangeness - Fred LaMotte

Here's another secret of quantum strangeness from the annals
of the quark.  All events, as to their quiddity, are equally
significant.

The daring leap of a tree frog from the spigot of your garden
hose, to her sanctuary in a pot of begonias, is as important as
the birth of a new political party, or an earthquake in Brooklyn.

The universe is not just as you see it, but as the frog sees it.
Your attention magnifies a breath of August breeze into a
hurricane; but for the frog, all human catastrophes are as
weightless clouds in a distant sky.  They pass soundlessly
overhead.

Why do you assume that your chief concern should be mine?
The liberal wants to convince me, the conservative wants to
convert me.  Neither allows me to create myself.  But that is
one task I can do better than anyone else.  Let me follow the
wondrous river of my own interest over all its rocks, through
the rough waters of responsibility and consequence, and I will
learn my lesson much better than you can teach me.

A Greek philosopher said, 'Be kind: everyone you meet is
fighting a great battle.'  A Jewish carpenter said, 'Judge not,
lest ye be judged.'  Here's another piece of advice: if you want
to see radical transformation in humanity, stop trying to change
each other.

Have you ever walked the labyrinth?  One who seems closest
to the goal may suddenly find their way veering far off.  When
two pilgrims pass, they don't know who is nearing the center,
and who is drifting further from it.  Compassion is precisely
this not knowing.  All they can do is bow...

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering