Courage - Fra Giovanni

[.....] The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet
within our reach, is joy.  There is radiance in darkness, could
we but see.  And to see we have only to look...

Life is a generous giver.  But we, judging its gifts by their
covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard.  Remove
the covering, and you find beneath it a living splendor, woven
of love by wisdom...

Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel's hand that brings
it to you.  Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, the gift
is there and the wonder of an overwhelming presence.  Your
joys too, be not content with them as joys.  They, too, conceal
divine gifts.

Life is full of beauty beneath its covering, you will find earth
but cloaks your heaven.  Courage then to claim it.  But courage
you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together,
wending through unknown country home.

Fra Giovanni
1513

with thanks to Love Is A Place

~

"We're just walking each other home."

Ram Dass

~

Photo from the internet

 

Eternity - Joseph Campbell

Eternity isn't some later time.
Eternity isn't even a long time.
Eternity is that dimension of here
and now that all thinking in temporal
terms cuts off.  The experience of eternity
is right here, in all things...is the function of
life...

Joseph Campbell
from: The Power of Myth

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Golden Eternity - Jack Kerouac

I have lots of things to tell you now, in case we never
meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me
under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter
moonlit night.

It said - It's all a dream,  Everything is Ecstasy inside.  We
just don't know it because of our thinking-minds.  But
in our true blissful essence is known that everything is
alright forever and forever.

Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop,
stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the secret Silence
inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember
the bliss your forgot:
There is only the Golden Eternity
You are the Golden Eternity

It is all one awakened thing.  I call it the Golden Eternity.
It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal
self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an
idea, a mortal idea.  That which passes into everything is
one thing.  It's a dream already ended.  There's nothing to
be afraid of.  I know this from staring at mountains months
on end.  They never show any expression, they are like
empty space.  Do you think the emptiness of space will
ever crumble away?  Mountains will crumble away, but
the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence
of mind, the vastness, empty and awake, will
never crumble away...

Jack Kerouac
The Portable Jack Kerouac
and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Peaceful Presence - a meandering...

Suddenly peace overtook me and I was no longer
engaged in mental thrashings about life circumstances...
at least in that momentary, fleeting moment...

And I thought to myself:
Finally, Peace has come!

I actually fell into a twilight sleep -
aware that I was at last at peace/peaceful,
without trying to be peaceful, just basking
in the unbidden feeling of being at peace.
It was wonderful -
and somehow I knew that everything is deeply okay;
deeply peaceful at its core; at its essence...

Was this real, a dream, a mystical experience?

I understood that underneath the tempests of the mind
there is an abiding peace at the core of our being;
lost to us most of the time, to our awareness,
by the crashing waves of the mind's turmoil, but can be
felt in between the waves; like the pause between the
breaths.  There is a peaceful pause that sustains itself

 - even if not felt...

Everything is at peace at its core, but you can't try to get
there, you can only allow it to come through, to just
receive it when it emerges/arises on its own within,
and make yourself available to it when it does...

If only for one fleeting moment...

Mystic Meandering 
Jan. 7, 2023
around 3pm

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Openness - Frank Ostaseski

Openness.....is a willingness to look into what arises,
to work with it, and relate to it with curiosity.

Openness doesn't reject or get attached to a particular
experience or view.  It is about allowing experience to
unfold, having tolerance of the unknown, letting go of
expectations.

Welcoming what is, as it is, we move toward reality.
We may not like or agree with all that we encounter.
However, when we argue with reality we suffer.
We waste our energy and exhaust ourselves with the
insistence that life be otherwise.  We often have little
control over the external circumstances of our own lives.
However, we have a great deal of choice about how we
relate to and learn from the cards life deals us.  We build
resilience by allowing ourselves to experience what we
are feeling in any given situation, whether good or bad.
Until we come to accept life with all its madness and
inspiration, we feel cut off, separate and isolated.

Acceptance is not resignation.  It is an opening - to
a skillful response to life.

Opening allows experiences to enter and allow for our
responses to emerge and be expressed...

Frank Ostaseski

from The Five Invitations

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Life Suspended...

I don't remember winter
being so grey - even when
the sun is shining...

So frozen, so cold, hard crusted;
which may only be a reflection
of my own inner landscape.
I have been frozen lately -
iced in by life circumstances....

And then, out of the blue,
standing in the kitchen
under a moonlit sky light
in the dark of night,
everything softened -
as I thought about "the visitor"
sitting alone in her chair,
suffering and struggling,
mentally and physically,
day in and day out...

Sadness arose for her aloneness,
and hard life - self imposed 
by life choices made long ago -
for which she now pays the consequences -
or so I tell myself...

Then Compassion overtook me -
and my heart melted, released of its
hard line - and dare I say "love" arose
for "the visitor" who sits alone in her chair,
her body and mind breaking down;
memory and mental capacity quickly waning -
struggling day in and day out;
just sitting -
solitaire and TV
 her constant companions...

A life suspended...

Mystic Meandering
January 6, 2023

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Great Silence - Robert Sardello

We have a strong tendency to imagine Silence as the
absence of sound.  This imagination deprives Silence of
being anything in itself and makes it an emptiness, a void...

But Silence was here before anything else.  It is the most
primary phenomenon of existence, both palpably something
and seemingly nothing.

Silence is prior to sound, not the cessation of sound.  It is
already present.  If we drop into quietness for just a moment,
we feel the presence of Silence as in invitation.  We are being
invited into a new way of being.

Silence is not merely the void from which things spring up;
it is a living presence...  As we enter the mystery of Silence,
its presence resonates throughout the fibers of our flesh,
while extending beyond the flesh...  The inward silence of
solitude meets with the Great Silence of Cosmic Wisdom...

Silence bears the wholeness we keep looking for.  It is around
us and within us.  It goes to the deepest depths of the soul
and to the outermost reaches of the cosmos uniting in our heart.

The experience comes with astonishing intimacy and feels like
the finding of a long lost beloved..

We, along with everything else, are within Silence.  This realm
of Silence is pregnant with the ever-living Mystery.  It is the
deepest feeling of communing, touched by the ineffable, that
keeps us intimately bound with the truth of our core being,
the very essence of our being; an interiority that has been
waiting for us.

~

Silence has a rhythm all its own.  The currents of Silence
weave polarities and opposites and contradictions together.

Within Silence everything resonates in true intimacy and
mystery.

When we perceive through the depths of Silence we discover
the invisible body of the world in which everything is nurtured
into existence at every moment.  We discover ourselves as
participants in the Great Silence.  We are not detached observers
of an independent phenomenon, for we exist within the Silence
we are observing.  The world of subjective experience and outer
presence dissolve into one field.

When we incline toward Silence a resonance is set up within
our heart, prompting an inclination of our heart to enter
deeper into the realm of Silence...  In the interior space of the
etheric heart we feel the currents of Silence as an endless
intimate infinity that we are within.  We are held within a
tender, loving, invisible presence...
A vivid Presence of Silence...

Excerpts from: Silence, The Mystery of Wholeness

by Robert Sardello

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Silence of the Universe - Chet Raymo

It is a thin membrane that separates us from chaos...
The space between the stars is silence...

How are we to understand the silence of the universe?
Beyond earth's sun of our sky is silent.
Stars blow themselves to smithereens;
we hear nothing.

The fireball of creation exploded from a pinprick of
infinite energy.  There is no sound track.
The universe is silent; a primal silence.

The silence of the stars is the silence of creation
and recreation.  It is the silence of that which
cannot be named...

Chet Raymo
The Soul of the Night

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The "Cosmic Womb"...

Laying down the burdens and chaos of existence,
coming to rest in the 
"Mother Energies": the "originating
feminine energies" of the Cosmos...

Unfettered, Unbuffeted
by the strain of life circumstances of the day...

Embraced, and tangibly infused by
this Primordial Source Energy - Always...

This undefinable, formless "Cosmic Womb"
invites this meandering mystic in.
 I stumble across the threshold of a doorless door...

into an Ineffable space that holds me...

There is no chaos here,
no troublesome thoughts of the mind;
yet "thinking" still occurs
as mental images and constructs
of present life occurrences pass through,
which hold no reign in the mind -
 in this Great Womb of Silence...

The past - just fleeting memories passing through
with no mental or emotional attachment - surprisingly;
like wandering through an unfamiliar land...
The shift to a new orientation - re-framing perspectives,
untangling what I perceived to be real is still occurring...
A new spark is felt within...

Pathways of the Primal Mother Energies leave their
imprint in the brain and body - very subtly...

The body tries to self-correct after a life-time of walking
the energetic History Trail of Family Dysfunction in physicality -

core survival issues, that have left residual scars - beginning to release...

Realizing that All That Is is this exquisite Primal Energy
expressing Itself through every experience; experiencing Itself
in many forms; morphing Itself into different expressions,
softening the hard residues into compassion and kindness that heals...

Now beginning to experience the fluidity of the "Mother Energy"
that innately and intimately flows through me/us - like an
Aurora Borealis subtly streaming through this body,
leaving its own illumined energetic signature...
A new spark of Life is lit...

Mystic Meandering

~

Reality cannot be mapped.
It is not a single static truth,
but rather an endless,
unfolding mystery.
It is alive, dynamic,
and constantly being expressed
through form and formlessness.

Frank Ostaseski
From The Five Invitations

 

Free The Body - Gabrielle Roth

We are born into bodies that are fluid and free.
Yet for most of us, this state of grace is sadly short lived.
Judgement, emotional wounds, fear and loss become
stored deep inside our muscles and bones, leaving us
with shoulders that sag, hips that are locked, arms that
can't reach out, hearts that beat behind a stone wall.  When
we move our bodies we shake up firmly rooted systems of
thought, old patterns of behavior and emotional responses
that just don't work anymore.  Rhythm, breath, music and
movement become tools for seeing, then freeing, the habits
that hold us back.  When we free the body, the heart begins
to open.  When the body and the heart taste freedom, the
mind won't be far behind.  And when we put the psyche
into motion, it will start to heal itself.

Gabrielle Roth

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
rock balance

 

Resting in the Womb of Creation - Kathleen Knipp

...The body is one radiant mass of Aliveness,
the Aliveness that just Is...  Feel the pulse of the Universe throb
through, giving up any struggle, any need to do or know; to 
figure out...  Just resting, being breathed...

The natural flow of thoughts and emotions will continue...
Slip behind or below the thoughts and emotions like an
ocean with waves and froth on the top - surface turbulence.
Sink down beneath, deep down, below all the movement
of the mind, resting in absolute stillness; the vast silence
of the Ocean of Pure Awareness, Pure Beingness...

There may be a sense of being pulled, drawing you deeper
and deeper into the silence, into a stillness beyond
comprehension and words, receding into the womb of
creation before time, deeply resting, being held in a feeling
of ease and well-being that is familiar...

Kathleen Knipp
Excerpt from a Yoga Nidra Meditation
Resting in the Womb of Creation

~

Photo from the Internet

 

Holy Silence - Robert Sardello

There is a living Silence that hears the cry of the Soul...

...a sacred depth of being that asks us to enter an inner
clearing that makes room for new life, including living,
breathing Silence.  In this dimension where time has become
space, life is enlivened.

\

The Silence sends us on a different pilgrimage.  It guards
the heart's fire and teaches us to speak from within with a
language that is imbued with the Sacred.  Words thus
nurtured in this Holy Silence fly forth to lead us back to
the Silence from which we were born.

As we enter the mystery of Silence, its presence resonates
throughout the fibers of our flesh to the soul inwardly and
to the cosmos outwardly.  The inward silence of solitude
meets up with the Great Silence of Cosmic Wisdom.  When
we do not cultivate this, we lose access to the presence of the
Silence.  Without silence we are lost and cannot get still
enough to find our way back.

Silence [The Great Silence] is around us and within us.  It
goes to the deepest depths of the Soul and to the outermost
reaches of the cosmos and continuously unites the two at
the centering place of our Heart.  Here everything comes 
alive again as if for the first time.  We may be shocked to
notice we had not even realized we had lost ourselves. And
feel a new attunement to Spirit as a directly felt reality.
The Silence is a palpable, living Presence...
The deeper we enter into The Silence the more we become
aware that this living presence is primary.

Robert Sardello
From: Silence - The Mystery of Wholeness

from the introduction and Chapter 1

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Be the Energy - Danna Faulds

That's how you came here,
like a star without a name...

Rumi

Be The Energy

Trust the energy that courses
through you.  Trust - then take
surrender even deeper.
Be the energy.

Don't push anything away.
Follow each sensation back to
its source and focus your awareness
there.

Be the ecstasy...

Be unafraid of consummate wonder.
Energy so new, so vulnerable,
that you don't know
who you are.

Be the energy,
and paradoxically,
be at peace.

Dare to be your own illumination,
And blaze a trail across
the clear night sky...

Danna Faulds

From - Prayers to the Infinite

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

At Winter Solstice - Dolores Stewart

Art by Valerie Claff
www.valerieclaff.com

Winter Owl hoots three times in the far woods,
fair warning for all small creatures
scurrying to their burrows.

Are we not still and always
those crouching figures
who flee the heavenly alchemy?
Three times in the crackling air,
Owl hoots for us.

*

Wind plays the drums of snow...
staccato taps
crescendo off the roofs,
flourish of shuddering branches.
Ice snaps its castanets,
its daggers.

Atonal music of the darkest days
needs the most fearless,
subtle listeners.

*

Those strumming flamenco 
fingers of sunlight
are a long time away now.

Now we go comforted
in dreams and ceremonies
flaming our star-speck candles,

raising our voices against that other music,
drowning out the forever
at night's heart.

*

Look up!  The wheel is turning.
The spectacular crowd of stars,
the tangle of dimensions
jostle for our attention.
Salute the birth of everything holy.

Dolores Steward (Riccio)

with thanks to Beyond the Fields We Know

~

Photo - Art by Valerie Claff

 

Let the Mind be the Mind - Danna Faulds

Photo - Cate Kerr

Let the mind be the mind...

Behind its restless activity,
just one layer deeper is stillness,
and beneath even that,
is an ocean of mystery and truth.

Swim in this eternal sea
until you know yourself
to be infinity,
and bring that knowing
back into your day.

Let the mind be the mind,
but don't bind yourself
to its limited reality.

Trust your experience of vastness.
Trust the truth that never
loses potency
or disappears 
in fear.

Let the mind be the mind
and identify not with thought
but with with Silence...

Danna Faulds
Yoga Practitioner and Poet
From: Limitless

~

Photo - Cate Kerr
Beyond the Fields We Know

~*~

Still your mind in me,
still yourself in me,
and without a doubt
you shall be united in me,
Lord of Love,
dwelling in the Heart.

Bhagavad Gita

 

The Golden Silence...

The Deep Silence calls to her
in the waking moments;
the "remedy" for all that
disturbs, contracts and constricts,
that blinds her from the Way...

It whispers to her:

Loosen the robes of religion you have worn -
that bound you.
Untie the shoes of "spirituality" -
that don't fit now.
Lay down all the "apparel" - the outer garments -
that have burdened you.

Dare to be naked...

Laying in the early morning silence,
she brings her tattered self to the deeper
dimension of the Golden Silence within;
careful not to get lost in the shadowy caverns
of the unconscious mind along the way...

In the space of Deep Silence she hears:

Just be still and wait...
Trust the Flow of Life
Wait for the pieces to fall together.
Observe the metamorphosis
that is taking place inside you
through
your internal "wranglings"
and your unbearable struggles;
like a butterfly trying to break through
its hard chrysalis - wanting to be free...

Be patient - do not resist what is...

It will all be okay - is okay...

Cross the threshold of your troubled mind
and step into the still waters of the Golden Silence within,
your Primordial Home...

Rest here...

Unscathed...

Mystic Meandering
May 31, 2021

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

 

The Elusive Present Moment - St. Augustine & Ostaseski

"Now" is neither in time nor out of time.
The elusive present moment is measured by the tick-tock time
of a clock, which we humans have invented, nor is it separate
from past or future.  There is no time line, at least not as we
conventionally think about it.

St. Augustine (paraphrased)
from - The Five Invitations

~

Hope....is not a wish to be fulfilled, or a plan to be formulated
and executed, but in how we meet the ever-changing moment.

The present moment could best be described as the flow of life.
We are continually being shaped by it and we are shaping it
through the way we meet and respond to it...

Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Life as it is - a meandering

Religion is a heavy mantle some people wear -
robes of ritual, dogma and doctrine...

Advaita is a heady game some people like to play -
self/no-self?

Non-duality - a conundrum -
not two - but not one...

I'm tired of all these heavy "games" I've played
in the "Spiritual Game"...

It's time for me to just step out of the way -
to let myself unfold -
and not entangle myself in the many webs
that constrain and constrict that Flow.

Maybe some ancient saint or sage had it all figured out -
maybe not...

My inner sage tells me it's about acceptance,
about empathy, compassion; about living life as it is
the best I can without living up to some "spiritual"
ideal: Someone else's beliefs, someone else's "way",
someone else's "truth"; the "right" perspective, or
"right" thinking... 

Needing to listen to the
deeper Rhythm of my own Soul/Essence/Being...

But strong primal instincts arise,
unable to "spiritualize"
the rawness of emotions into - pretty language...

The practicality of Buddhist Wisdom draws me now -
not as a religion or belief system, but as day to day
wisdom for getting through...
The wisdom of accepting what is, of just being present,
of mindfulness, of caring and compassion, of stepping
out of the way of the experience and just seeing what unfolds,
letting go of expectations, the need for solutions,
 and the need to control - allowing life to happen
as it does...

No more lofty goals of "enlightenment" -
just fulfilling the requirements of ordinary daily living
in the midst of global and personal chaos
- in my new role as "caregiver" -
doing what needs to be done
as life keeps living itself
 as it is...

Mystic Meandering
Dec. 12, 2022

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Hubby and Emmy sleeping....

 

Change - Frank Ostaseski

We don't grow and transform in our comfort zones.  We grow
when we realize we are no longer able to control all the
conditions of our lives, and are therefore challenged to
change...  When we release our clinging to what used to be
and our craving for what we think should be, we are free to
embrace the truth of what is in this moment.

No matter what we do or don't do, things will always change.
Change is constant and inevitable.  We need to trust ourselves
and persevere without despair...

Frank Ostaseski

The Five Invitations

 

The Wheel of Time - Einstein & Ostaseski

We trust that time is linear.
That it proceeds eternally, uniformly,
Into Infinity.

But the distinction between
past, present and future is
nothing but an illusion.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow
are not consecutive, they are connected
in a never-ending circle.

Albert Einstein

~

Like a confluence of great rivers,
our lives are a series of different moments, joining
together to give the impression of one continuous flow.
We move from cause and effect, event to event, one point
to another - which gives an outward impression that our
lives are one continuous, unified movement.
In reality, they are not.

Each moment is born and dies.  And in a very real way we
are born and die with it.  Creation and destruction are two
sides of the same coin.

Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

~

Photo - Mom's Mandala
a mandala that she colored in
several months before she died in March 2019.

 

The Invisible One - Nag Hammadi Scrolls

I am thought that lives in the light.
I live in everyone, and I delve into them all...
I move in every creature...

I am the invisible one in all beings...
I am the voice speaking softly...

I am the real voice... the voice from the invisible thought...

It is a mystery...  I cry out for everyone...

I hid myself in everyone, and revealed myself
within them, and every mind seeking me longs
for me...

I am she who gradually brought forth
everything...

I am the image of the invisible spirit...
The mother, the light... the virgin... the
womb, and the voice...

I put breath in all beings.

Nag Hammadi Scrolls
from: Why Religion, Elaine Pagels

with thanks to Love Is A Place

~

Photo - Sri Yantra necklace

 

 

"The Game" - a meandering...

"You don't play the game,
the game plays you"

Yellowstone

~

I am being played by Life...

I am not responsible for how
"The Game" is played out or how it ends.

I'm just a "player" in "The Game."
I need to let it play out -
to step aside and let it play -
let it unfold.

Beliefs don't matter.
It's all like a play, a movie, a dance, a story, a "game."
Choose your word, the one that resonates with you.
Some call it a dream...

I have to ride it out, and
not take "The Game" seriously.

I'm not in control of "The Game."

You don't direct the dance,
the dance directs you,
and there's nothing but
the dance...

It's all part of a larger "Game" that we
cannot even comprehend.

There are many depths, many layers
to "The Game."
There are multiple levels all playing at
the same time.

Each day you have to "see" how "The Game"
will play out - how to play "The Game" that day -
how you're going to play.

It's kind of like Alice in Wonderland,
where the game changes depending on
which rabbit hole you go down, or which
door you go through - what fantasy you
choose to play.

Each day a new fantasy or a continuation of
an old one, an old theme that keeps getting 
replayed - but who chooses?  Are there doors
that you must go through as part of your life
experience?  Did Alice have a choice?  It seems
she just fell down the rabbit hole -
into another reality,
another game...

What hole will I fall down and what doors will I have
to go through in the life experience, Life Game -
and what hat am I going to wear? :)

Mystic Meandering

Nov. 17, 2022

~

Photo - Mad Hatter hat
from the internet

 

 

"it happens" - Kathleen Knipp

.....in our "practice" of life, we can just rest back and experience
how it's being done.  We don't have to do life, life happens in
whatever way it happens.  [But] we claim the activity that
happens as something volitional.

Observe the belief, explore the belief that I am in control, that
 I am the "doer" [of what happens].  Question the belief.
Life is happening, just as breathing is happening or thinking is
happening.

What would it feel like to slide out of the picture into an
observer position, being aware of thoughts that are generated
by the mind and emotional states that arise and pass - watching
it all happen.  It plays out like an old show on a big screen.
Step back and watch with a sense of curiosity.  See yourself as a
"character" that you observe - watching, observing, noticing all
the different sensations of the body - the different experiences.
Have compassion for your "character."  Life is changing out of
our control, our expectations, our wants.

Surrender to the Great Mystery, beyond comprehension, before
time, before conceptualization; inexplicable but palpable.
Source reveals itself in all of its different manifestations - as
profound tranquility and turbulence, as mind stuff, as breath
and body: the totality of all of its expressions.
Rest deeply in this knowing.

Kathleen Knipp

Excerpts from a Yoga Nidra Meditation
"it happens"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering