Death and Rebirth - Matt Licata

In each moment the sacred process of death and rebirth
is playing out within us.  With each breath something
in us is dying - some aspect of who we think we are -
or the spiritual path that once brought us meaning...

In the face of this dissolution, the question isn't so 
much how we can most quickly facilitate rebirth, but
to what degree we will participate [consciously] in the
death when it appears.  Psychological death, or
spiritual death, is not just a preliminary process in
which we engage so that we can put it behind us and
get on to birth.  It is a valid, holy unfolding with its
own intelligence...  [It is] a catalyst, and vessel of
insight, perspective, and revelation...

It is natural to resist this falling apart and do what we
can to put it all back together.  But it is only from the
womb of death - attuned consciously - that rebirth can
emerge.

Allow the death time to unfold, to share its poetry and
fragrance...   Death is not merely a phase to get through.
In those periods in our lives, when things are being
rearranged and reorganized inside and around us, we
can attune to what is truly being asked of us...  Listen
to the wisdom in death and what it has to teach us about
love...  We allow the dissolution so that new forms can
emerge and provide the transformation for which we
most deeply long.

Matt Licata
from - A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Spiritual Egos - Fred LaMotte

Spiritual egos make a distinction between "beginners techniques"
and "advanced techniques."  Their intellect wants something
difficult to do, a sense of accomplishment.  That is why so
many new age teachers speak of their spiritual "work."  Do
they ever speak of their spiritual "play"?

Ease is the cure for dis-ease.  The deepest, most healing
spiritual practice, we ease into.  In fact, we do not practice.
We let go of practice.

The goal is never an achievement done by "advanced" practice,
but the dissolution of the do-er.  It is known by un-knowing and
done by un-doing.  This can only happen to the effortless.  The
most powerful meditation is the simplest, the most natural.

When you really look at people who carry a bag of "advanced"
techniques, you often see a weariness behind the stiff mask of
their perpetual smile. Of they look tentative, because they are
always taking the next step, and never completely here.  Only
the beginner dwells in eternal freshness...  The beginner is never
 advanced because she is present.

In the deepest and most natural meditation, you never have to
leave your body.  Every atom of your body is already woven out
of swirling stars....  No wind can uproot the beginner.  No
wound can puncture the intergalactic stillness of the Beginner's
core.

Transcending your body is not an advanced practice. It is a practice
of disconnection. That is why, in the Anapanasati Sutra, the Buddha
said, "Awareness of body in the body."  He did not say,
"Transcend the body."  He said to grok the body from within the body,
for consciousness and matter are one energy,
every cell and photon trembling with the sap of awareness.

...be a beginner.  Always feel the freshness of the first day of creation.
Now is the beginning.  Now is the end of time.  How could "now" be
advanced?

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - MM 
the two faces of Pumpkin Head :)

 

Perishable - Niall Williams

It's because people are so perishable.  That's the thing.
Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will
be a last moment when you hand slips from theirs, and everything
ripples outwards from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours
that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look
down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like
before their hand slipped away.  And you cannot.  You cannot feel
them.  And then you cannot quite see them, there's blurry bits,
like you're looking through this watery haze, and you're fighting
to see, you're fighting to hold on, but they are perishing right 
before your eyes, and right before your eyes they are
becoming a bit more ghost.

Niall Williams
From: History of the Rain

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Nothing is more important than empathy for another human
beings' suffering.  Nothing.  Not career, not wealth, not intelligence,
certainly not status.  We have to feel for another if we are going to
survive with dignity.

Audry Hepburn

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Floating Fork :)

 

Rest the Nervous System - Matt Licata

 We've been through so much over the last year [or more]...
not only personally, but culturally and collectively as well...

It's been a slow continuous drip of cortisol/adrenaline into
the collective, a deep unsettling restlessness, on the one
hand, and on the other a collapse; an alternation between
hyper-vigilance and shutting down.

Many of us are experiencing a [deep] tiredness, not only
physically, but a soul-level sort of exhaustion, where what
we thought we knew about ourselves, who we are and what
 matters most to us, what we're doing here, and where we're
 headed...  so much of this has really been called into
question, been dismantled, and in may ways fallen apart...

There is a deep longing to rest and to feel safe again in
our bodies...

It is important to slow down - to mourn not only the losses
of health and life, but also the dream of the way we thought
it was all going to turn out.

The rebirth part of the death-rebirth cycle is embodied
through our willingness and capacity to grieve.  The
portal to new life opens through conscious, embodied
lamentation, as we gather the shards of the heart and
collect them in a holy vase...  as we prepare for what
will emerge out of the ashes of dissolution...

Matt Licata

From: An Invitation to Rest Your Nervous System

Resting Your Nervous System Webinar info

~

Photo from the Internet digitally altered

It All Dissolves - Frank Ostaseski

 Earth dissolves into water.  Water dissolves into fire.
Fire dissolves into air.  Air dissolves into space.

Dying [Dissolving], in many cases, does not happen all of
a sudden.  It is a gradual process of withdrawing from life
in form.

When I speak of the four elements dissolving, I am not
speaking exactly of physical form.  Rather, I am pointing to
the ineffable but observable animating qualities...
The animating qualities also dissolve - apparently missing
when we are left only with the heaviness of the corpse
after death.

There is something beyond the four elements - the spirit,
soul, or animating presence.  The inner dissolution happens
simultaneously.  Our medical instruments and devices can
certainly measure the physical disintegration, but the inner
dissolution that happens simultaneously is subtle and still...

They are all dissolving - the elements and their associated
states and as a result, the self is dissolving as well.  This is
happening all the time, we just see it at the surface at the
time of dying.

Now who are you?

Fragility and impermanence are in the nature of life.  It's
all always coming together and falling apart - not just the
physical properties of life - and not just at the time of death.

Our sense of self is impermanent.  While illness can contract
us into an even smaller sense of self, many people who are
sick and dying speak of no longer being limited by the 
previous boundaries of their old, familiar identities.

We come to embody much wider identities.  The interior
life and the external world permeate each other,
they commingle.

Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

~

With thanks Death Deconstructed for the photo...

Dissolve - Fred LaMotte

Rosette Nebula - From: The Invisible Universe
by David Malin

 Stars dissolve into a rose. A rose dissolves into stars. Ask Dante.

The solution is dissolution.  What dissolves?  Separateness.

I am not my skin color.  I am not my tribe.  I am not even my
gender.  I wear these veils and garments, just as I have a red
shirt or a Yankees cap on: but they are not my Self.

Nor am I my political party, my nation, or my religion.  And I
am not my ancestors.  These are marvelous incidents, but not
my Essence.  The core of my existence is prior to labels,
identifications, masks.  Yes, I enjoy wearing them, dancing in
them, playing in their forms.  I need not renounce them,
because they were never really "mine" to begin with.  In deep
meditation, these forms dissolve like the dreams they are.
Then I Am.

In deep meditation, the core of existence reveals itself as the
One who cannot be divided into races, tribes, religions, parties,
yet who plays in them all as light playing in a kaleidoscope.
The revelation transcends thought and imagination.  It is the
Self-image of the Imageless.  Groundless, brilliant, empty, it
is nowhere and everywhere.  It is the Holy of Holies.

Emerging from meditation, I need no longer look for that place.
I look from that place.  Then it is impossible to identify any
color or creed, any political or spiritual movement, as "me."
I am simply who Am.

The verb "Am" is solid as a diamond, boundless as the sky.
Who needs to say, "I Am a man, I Am a liberal, I Am a Buddhist,
I Am a white or a black?  Not I.  Just Am.  Those labels of
identity make the mind small.  No noun, no-thing, ever really
follows the verb To Be.

Fred LaMottte
Uradiance

Living the Fantasy of Becoming - Jim Harrison

 Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.

This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the winds, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter.  But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

We whirl with the earth, catching our breath
as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained
except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.

Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.

Jim Harrison

from: Saving Daylight

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

"Only the rocks live forever."

James Michner
from - Centennial

 

Pondering Impermanence...

With my mother's death last year and now with the COVID
Pandemic - feeling surrounded by death - I have become more
aware of my own mortality, especially at my age, with a body
malfunctioning, broken since birth.

So I have been pondering "death" - not morbidly, but with a
sense of the reality of the impermanence of this life of
physicality.  What can you do...  It's going to happen...
It's just the nature of time for things to fall away in the
cycle of life...

~

A few months ago, in my ponderings, I wrote this -

The "I" (the Eternal Being) that inhabits this body is not aging -
but "i" am surprised by the body's increasing decline - knowing
where it is headed - the inevitable...

death...

Saddened by the prospect -
although grateful that the end
to the body's struggles is closer -
how close "she" doesn't know -
but wonders what that will be like;
to witness the death of her body
and the possibility of a
"cosmic birthing" into a new "form"
of the Formless; or maybe dissolve
back into cosmic dust, or be absorbed
by the Vastness of the Eternal.
Sentience dissolving into the Eternal...

Who really knows...

All is transient here.
We're just passing through.

I shouldn't be surprised by this,
feeling the body's decline as I do -
but still -

gives me pause...

Mystic Meandering
Feb. 23, 2020

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Death and Rebirth - Matt Licata

In each moment the sacred process of death and rebirth is playing
out within us.  With each breath, something in us is dying: some
aspect of who we think we are, or what we're doing here, the death
of an old dream, or an idea about how it was all going to turn out.

In the face of this dissolution, the question isn't so much how can
we be reborn, but will we participate in death fully, and with an
open heart, paving the way for new forms to emerge, trusting that
rebirth will take place according to a timeline originating far away
in the stars.

In times of transition, our tendency is to rush to rebirth, back into
the known, in an urgent attempt to cure, maintain, or heal that
which is dying, that which longs for transformation [within us.]
It is so natural to resist falling apart in our need to put it all back
together.  But it is only from the core of the womb of death - a
death tended to consciously - that rebirth can come into being.

The invitation, which we can at times hear clearly, during the dark
of night, in the slowness and the depths, as we move in and out of
states of sleep and dream, is to not abandon death...  To not short
circuit the intelligence that death is, and to remember that rebirth
is not possible without dissolution.

Allow death some time to unfold, to share its poetry and its
fragrances, which are not partial, but of a light that is whole.
In those times in our lives, when things are being rearranged
and reorganized inside and around us, we can attune to what
is truly being asked, to allow the forms of love safe passage to
continue their journey.  And equally allow them to dissolve...
Give them permission to dance and play and participate fully
in the sacred return...

Matt Licata