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

 

Merge Into Truth - Brian Brown Walker

 

[.....]

If you wish to embody the Tao,
stop chattering...

Relax your body and quiet your senses

Return your mind to its original clarity.

Forget about being separated from others
and from the Divine Source.

As you return to Oneness,
do not think of it,
or be in awe of it.

This is just another way of separating from it.

Simply merge into truth,
and allow it to surround you.

Brian Brown Walker

from - Hus Hu Ching:
The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Radical Honesty - Jeff Foster

You don't have to be okay with anything.  It's not about the
me-person being okay.  It's that everything is already embraced
by Life ItSelf.  It is a cosmic okayness that goes beyond "I'm okay"
and "I'm not okay."  We are totally free to respond to life experiences
in authentic, honest, human ways.  We are free not to like our
experiences, and on a deeper level to experience a total, all-
encompassing okayness with the entire situation.  Underneath
everything is a cosmic okayness.  It's not about telling yourself
that you're okay when you are not.  It's not about pretending to be
okay, trying to be spiritual, trying to be peaceful.
You don't have to be anything other than you are in the moment.
It's about radical honesty. It's about seeing reality as it is,
acknowledging it, and discovering that the situation is fully
admitted into life - already.  There is simply life, in all its
mystery, wonder, and timeless simplicity.  And in this
recognition the illusion of separation between us and life
falls away, and we are no longer at odds with life
as it is...

Jeff Foster

From - The Deepest Acceptance

~

This moment in time and space is an eggshell,
personal identity is a sheath.
The breath of God is breathing through it...

Remember the deep root of your being.
Give yourself to the one who already owns
your breath and your moments.

Rumi

~

Photo from the Internet

What Draws You? - Rumi

Artist: Puisi - ambua.id

There are two types on the path, those who come against
their will, the blindly religious, and those who obey
out of love...

The former have ulterior motives.
They want a midwife near because she gives them milk.
The other love the beauty of the Nurse.

The former memorize the proof-texts of conformity
and repeat them.  The latter disappear into
whatever draws them to God.

Both are drawn from the Source.
Any motion is from the Mover.
Any love from the Beloved.

Rumi
From: The Book of Love
translations by Coleman Barks

~

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull
of what you love...

Rumi

~

A baby pigeon on the edge of the nest hears the call
and begins her flight...
How can the soul not fly
when a message arrives saying,
"...come, come back to me!"

What is the secret that opens the door?

The key is the flutter of the heart's wings
and its endless longing.

When the door opens,
walk on the path...
where everything old becomes new,
and never look back...

Rumi

~

On Dec. 17, 1273 the great Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi,
died in Konya Turkey.  He was universally loved by
Muslims, Jews, and Christians.  It was called his
"wedding night" because death to him (and the Sufis)
was the ultimate union with God.

May it be so for all of us, when the time comes,
no matter "who" we know God to be...

Taking Responsibility - Pema Chodron

All activities should be done with the intention of speaking
so that another person can hear you, rather than using words
that cause the barriers to go up and the ears to close.  Everything
you say can further  polarize the situation and convince you
[and others] of how separate you are.  On the other hand,
everything you say and do and think can support your desire
to communicate from the Heart, to move closer and
step out of this myth of isolation and separateness that
 we're all caught in.

...you don't have to get frozen in [language] of
loser or winner,
good guy or bad guy...

We have two alternatives.  Either we hold onto our fixed versions
of reality, or we begin to challenge them, and start dissolving
the barriers that we erect between ourselves and the world.

Pema Chodron
Buddhist Teacher
From: Comfortable with Uncertainty

photo - two pieces of bread that look like faces
facing each other...

~

How We Get There - Fred LaMotte

We wonder why everyone is so stressed.  But many of us would
not know who we are without conflict...

Democrat against Republican, socialist against capitalist,
woman vs man, black vs white, vegan vs omnivore,
the enlightened vs the ignorant...

Maybe the answer is never one side vs the other.  Maybe we could
rest the [conflicted] mind in the Heart. Maybe we could all go meet
in Rumi's field, under the stars, beyond the ideas of right and wrong.
How can we get there?
Listen to the Silence.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

With great grief for the hatred and violence
in this country...

To feel one's grief is being authentic, allowing
yourself to feel another's grief, the collective grief
of people heartbroken from the trauma of violence. It
softens you, opens the heart and gives you a different lens
with which to see others with a sense of connectedness
and compassion; dissolving the barriers that separate,
allowing a different vision than your own dearly held beliefs
and opinions, whether spiritual or political.  And in that
is a deepening sense of inner peace and equilibrium...

~

2nd photo - the Om (Aum) symbol is a sacred symbol of the
universal name of God (or Ultimate Reality),
Om (Aum) is the ever present "sound"/vibration of
 an already unified Universe, which expresses itself dualistically
in our experience here.
When you are in meditative Silence, listening, you are aware
of it, the Universal Om - the Hum of the Universe.
  It pervades even the chaos,
and every "sound" becomes the sound of OM/Aum singing
the song of the Universe...  Just listen...
One experiences the wholeness of Life,
despite what is happening...
At least that it my experience.

The World of a Mystic - Naomi Stone

A mystic cannot help vanishing
into the living mystery of God...
It calls the soul beyond everything I have ever known
and then surprises by manifesting creatively...

infinitely... and intimately...

in the feathering of divine essence
as such variation and beauty...

I experience melting of all identity
into the softness of love
and the magnificence of light
in the gift of caressing waves of peace...

God is [the] artist of stroking color and vision...
[the] sculptor of glorious expression...
the sound and symphony
of the evolution of the spinning stars...
a glowing luminous and embracing moonlight...
mountainous stairways to the sky...
whispering tenderness...
an interior river of flowing peace...

an eternal companion...
magnifying and enlarging and deepening
the expanse and reach of divine love...

the sacred path
of the sweet revelation
of relationship
where everything is transformed into life itself...

I surrender into the sacred surroundings
of an absolutely enchanting Beloved...
this is the exquisite and elegant dwelling
within the One
from whom we came...

Naomi Stone

Personal Note - This is similar to what I experience when I "enter" (become aware of) the Sacred Silence within.  It is the space of  Presence, the Divine, The Beloved, or "God", however one calls this for themselves...

Photo ~ Rainbow light on wall

Ordinary Enlightenment - "G", Shinzen Young & Jeff Foster

There are many different definitions of mysticism, but a narrow
description of mysticism is known as the "perennial philosophy",
or "perennial wisdom."  [That Truth is Universal & Eternal].
In this sense, mysticism indicates the dying of the illusion
of selfhood into the greater reality of God, Nirvana, Dao, or a
number of other concepts representing the deathless and
indefinable part of us that is often called the Void. [or Emptiness].

It is the "death" [dissolution] of the individual ego into the
indescribable that characterizes the perennial wisdom. [Or rather]
it is the giving up of identifying with being the individual ego/self.

God, as the mystic understands the term, does not correspond at all
to the commonly held beliefs involving an anthropomorphic deity
gazing down on humanity from on high.  For the mystic, God is
much more subtle and immediate.  In mysticism, God is not a
separate being to us, rather the very "being-ness" that lies
 at the heart of everyone. 

The mystical process, whatever traditions or methods it uses, is
ultimately aimed at breaking through the prison of mortality into

freedom of what both the Buddha and Japanese Zen Master Bankei
called the Unborn.  Living as the Unborn we are no longer tied to
[attached to] a false sense of ego/self... but are liberated as the very
Awareness that is the heart of every being in the universe.

Excerpt from: "Buddha and Religion: Mysticism"
Buddha Space
Read the full article here

This blog also has other interesting topics!

~

Even for a deeply "enlightened" person, the experience of contact
with Flow and Emptiness does not necessarily go uninterrupted.  It
may happen frequently during the day, but not necessarily continuously.
Even a very liberated person still spends a lot of time experiencing
the world in the ordinary way.

What then is the difference between an ordinary person and a liberated
person?  The difference is a matter of freedom.  An "enlightened"
person has the ability to experience self and world as a Source wave.
And when they are not experiencing things that way, they understand
why that is the case. It is just because they are not paying close
attention...

Shinzen Young - The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works

via Markings

Pay attention! :)

~

There is no fixed path to enlightenment.  Enlightenment is not a
destination, a goal, a final resting place at the end of a long journey -

that's the mind's version of enlightenment.  Nobody is the authority
on your path - no teacher, no guru, no religious leader.  Nobody can
tell you the right 'way' for you...

Jeff Foster

via The Dawn Within

~

Photo from the Internet

Choice/No Choice - Jeff Foster

It's not that you have no choice.
Rather, the 'chooser' is the fiction.

It's not 'you' who chooses or doesn't choose.
It's life itself.  You are inseparable from life itself.
Undivided from the totality.

A star explodes.  The grass grows.  A mother gives birth.
A war begins, ends, begins.  A relationship breaks down.
People come together, fall apart.  An old wound heals.
Hearts open, close, open.
Like breathing.  Like the ocean tides.

We believe that we have a choice,
or we believe that we don't.

The planets spin.  The rain falls and stops falling.
Did we choose, or were we chosen?

Could it have been any different?
Can the rain fall backwards?
Can we un-say what we have said?
Can we un-read this poem?

Choice, no choice.  Those thoughts fall away too.
Into silence.  Into stillness.
Into the vastness of Being.
Into...

Beyond choice or lack of it, you are.

And you take the next step, or you do not.

Or you take the next step
of not knowing which next step
you will take.

And out of the not knowing,
the path becomes clear
if only
for a moment.

And then the Universe
begins again.

Jeff Foster

~

photo via No Mind's Land

Ineffable Experience - Bob Berman

An experience began that no words could convey.
It was ineffable and life-altering.  The best I can say is that "I" was
suddenly gone, replaced by the certainty of being the entire cosmos.
There was absolute peace.  I knew with total confidence, not
logically - because, "I" was no longer present - that birth and death
do not exist.  That all is perfect eternally, that time is unreal, and that
all is one.  The joy was beyond anything I could have imagined.
The to-the-marrow certainty could perhaps be better described as
a recognition, and an ancient familiarity of being Home.

There was no sense of a separate "me", an observer looking out
upon the world.  I was whatever my eyes gazed upon.  It was as if
my consciousness had previously been long confined, like a canary
in a little cage, and that a false sense of being a separate, isolated,
thinking individual had now vanished.  Objects were no longer
separate items existing in space; instead, everything was the
 same continuum.  When a person came into view, I was this person.
The universe was one entity for all time.  There were not billions of
humans and animals.  There was one living, deathless entity.

Bob Berman
from: Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space,
Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death

by Bob Berman and Robert Lanza

Via - Markings

~

Underlying the complex diversity of creation is a single Unity.
And within that Unity, the individual is not separate or
different from the vast Divine.  There is no separation between
individual self and the center of all selves... just Pure Being...

Ivan Granger - Poetry Chaikhana

Ending Suffering - Joan Tollifson

If we truly want to end suffering, we must move from our self-centered drama and story line, to the open surrender of "Thy will be done."  It involves a shift in attention - a shift out of the entanglement in and identification with the thought-stream - and open into awareness of Presence - a shift from thinking to sensing and awaring.  It involves a surrender, or opening, into the whole body-mind, a dissolving of the felt sense of separation, and duality, a melting into the spacious undivided, luminous and inseparable; noticing what is ever-present regardless of the experience that is arising.  

Surrendering is an opening of the whole body-mind, a dissolving of the solidity of the body-mind, a letting go into boundlessness, [realizing] that it is all appearing in a larger context - the open space of awareness.  The true "I" to which we all refer is ultimately this unbound awareness that is being and beholding everything.  We are not limited to the body-mind, and the body-mind is not really a separate, solid, autonomous "thing."  In fact there is no real boundary between "awareness" and "the body."  The words seem to divide what is actually seamless and whole.  So we don't need to deny the body or the person or relative reality, because all of that is appearing in a much larger context, and all of that is really very ephemeral and fluid and ungraspable...

There are many words for surrender: dissolving, opening, relaxing, softening, melting, letting go, resting, allowing, welcoming.  What matters is not the word or some idea of this, but discovering this for oneself experientially.  Surrender is a discovery that we each have to make for ourself.

In surrendering there is a letting go, an opening - allowing everything to be as it is, not resisting anything, and not trying to get anything.  Simply stay with the living reality itself, just as it is.  Awareness always allows everything to be as it is.  It never rejects or hates anything.  It is never really harmed or destroyed by anything that appears to happen in waking life.  All the apparent darkness and getting lost is always happening in this bigger, vaster context.  To realize this is to be free from suffering...

Joan Tollifson