J.K

 

Hafiz - In the Beloved's Street I lost my heart!

 

Ode 150

In the Beloved's Street I lost my heart!

HAFIZ had once a heart, Muslims, like you ;
A pitiful good heart, a comrade true,
A counsellor, and a most faithful friend.

In the Beloved's Street I lost my heart!

Skilful it was to aid and to advise,
Shelter and succour, and exceeding wise
The broken hearts of other folk to mend.

In the Beloved's Street I lost my heart!

So, when I fell into Love's whirling pool,
Through the ensorcelled folly of my eye,
Upon my faithful heart did I rely
To snatch me back to shore. Alas! poor fool,
My heart had lost himself as well as I.

In the Beloved's Street I lost my heart !

The Street of my Beloved — it was there
I lost my friend: O perilous thoroughfare!
Most dangerous is my Beloved's Street,
And most detaining to the robe of man.

In the Beloved's Street I lost my heart!

O maze of honeycomb ! O heavenly hive !
Wildered, I wander on with tangled feet,
Seeking my heart in the Beloved's Street;
But find again my friend I never can.

In the Beloved's Street I lost my heart !

Would I had pearls for every tear I shed!
Sometimes I wonder if he is alive,
And sometimes shudder lest he should be dead;
O never was a harder case than mine.

In the Beloved' s Street I lost my heart!

Have pity, people! Honoured once and wise,
Before he drank of passion's fatal wine,
Was he who comes now in this beggar's guise;
So sweet the songs of HAFIZ used to be,
Ere my Beloved took my heart from me,
That multitudes would hold their breath to hear,
As at the singing of some heavenly bird.

In the Beloved's Street I lost my heart !

Perchance of HAFIZ ye have sometimes heard
As of a man honoured in all the schools,
A man of sense, and of a judgment clear;
Believe it not — he is the king of fools.

In the Beloved' s Street I lost my heart !

download Odes from the Divan of Hafiz here:

https://archive.org/details/odesfromdivanofh00hafiuoft/mode/2up

Chuck Surface - These days

 

These days it doesn’t matter to me,

Who or what created this universe;

Such considerations are not pondered,

Left to friends who revel in theory.

These days I’ve left off wondering,

Whether any religion is true or false,

For all seem to me, articles of faith,

Left to friends who take shelter there.

These days the mind has given up,

Struggling to grasp the Ungraspable,

Having joined the Heart at the Tavern,

Drunk on the Wine of wordless cognition.

These days metaphysical ponderings,

Have lost their former glamour,

And I find that only one thing matters...

What it Feels like to be Alive.

Not the what, why, how, and wherefore,

Arising within the mind, after the fact,

But the Experience of Existence, Here,

In the Immediacy of Timeless Now,

Not what the body feels like, being alive,

Not thought, imagination, or emotion,

But deep within my deepest Interiority,

At the Heart of my Essential Aliveness…

What does it Feel like to be alive.

And in that Placeless Place, Before Time,

The answer is Fullness and Completion,

Untouched, Unmoving, impenetrable,

By the vicissitudes of manifest creation.

While pleasures and pains ebb and flow,

While storms of emotion roil and still,

Amidst manifestation’s Beauty and Horror,

Here, in the Heart of being, it Feels like…

Love

an affair of the heart 

Garden of the Beloved

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Aram Shaly - Always One.

 

To realize truth is to travel from yourself to yourself without ever going anywhere.
At first, it seems as if there is a seeker and something to be found. a path appears. a journey begins. questions arise.
Who am I? Where did I come from? What is reality?
Years may be spent searching through philosophy, religion, science, meditation, and experience.
Yet the final discovery is astonishing:
What was being sought was never absent.
The seeker was searching for its own source, just as a wave searches for the ocean while never having left it.
Truth is not an achievement. It is not something gained. It is not a destination reached at the end of a long road.
Rather, it is the recognition that there was never any distance between yourself and what you were seeking.
The journey ends where it began.
And in that moment it becomes clear:
No one arrived. Nothing was attained. Nothing was added.
Only the illusion of separation dissolved.
The traveler, the path, and the destination were always one.

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Hermann Hesse - One with all being

 

"We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome . . . We are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for in our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being." ~Hermann Hesse

(“It was morning; through the high window, I saw the pure, bright blue of the sky as it hovered cheerfully over the long roofs of the neighboring houses. It too seemed full of joy, as if it had put on its finest clothes for the occasion." ~Hermann Hesse) 

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Frederick Franck - In the silence of drawing

 

Sculpture by Frederick Franck: Unkillable Human

In the silence of drawing

hidden, yet visible, in each face

I see the Face of faces,

see:

that the plural of man

does not exist,

is our cruelest hallucination –

see that our Oneness is infinite differentiation,

see:

that the pattern of the universe

and mine

are not-two,

that what lives in me

is the Tao

in which all lives.

THIS IS NOT WHAT I BELIEVE

BUT WHAT MY EYES

SAW ON THE WAY.

Having become

all these faces, all these bodies,

a meadow, a flower,

a night moth and a cow,

A STRANGER NO LONGER

I AM AT HOME,

BELOVED EARTH!

– Frederick Franck, The Awakened Eye

via the awakened eye

http://www.frederickfranck.org/

 

Miriam Louisa Simons - Canto from the lockdown cave

 

Photo by ml: 

A recently completed small work, a candle, my mother’s ashes, a daffodil, an apple and a magic arrow  

2021 covid lockdown, Aotearoa New Zealand

no longer working to get free

(or fix or heal or please)

no longer needing to understand

how any of this is possible

not to mention

knowable

I rest

entirely wrapped

in wonderment

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https://wonderingmindstudio.com/ 

https://theawakenedeye.com/

https://echoesfromemptiness.com/

https://thisunlitlight.com/

Monica Dayakar - "The Enlightened One"

 

 "The Enlightened One"...

The number of times that I've been told... So if you've understood this...( whaaaaaaaat ) 😜... 

oh wait... even  funnier... if you're so realised... 

then all the more reason you should or shouldn't be such and such... or so and so like...
Heart-breaking... really...
Tears...
It would be funny really... if it weren't so sad...
It makes me weep...
When the applecart upturns... and the world begins to spin out of control... and the threat looms large of no grip on the handlebars...
The fear of losing it all can really feel like being self threatening...
Like your life depends on it...
That's cause it does...
That fear of free falling...
Their palpable fear of an out of control world... 

felt so acutely here as well... and its accompanying pain...
Knowing fully well that there's nothing I can do...
Hugging them tight with my arms around them...
Even if its in my heart...
Loving them...
'Cause most times they physically put up invisible iron barriers tha shut them in...
In an attempt to keep themselves safe...
They shut all love and light out...
So nothing goes out and nothing comes in...
Even as I watch all their attempts to numb the pain...
And yet I sing... sing... sing...
And songs flow through me...
Constantly...
Of this love divine...
And everyone's stories become your story... un-owned...
Its more like the last hope fading...
Most confuse saintly behaviour and are confounded 

with what they deem to be appropriate behaviour 

of who they look upon as a "supposed sage"...
The "sage-y" ness... itself a mentally fabricated myth...
When there's not even nothing there...
Yes I see a lot posting on fb that if all your "karma" acts weren't cleared up and the soul ( 😜 ) purified... ( whatever the heck that means...😂 ) and if the s*** didn't smell of lavender 

( sorry but there's no polite way of putting this 😜 ) ... you get the drift!!
All escape routes of being human... shut...
And endless efforts to transcend the dream...
Scratching at imaginary walls...
Till your nails bleed...
Ideas of enlightenment...
Forget enlightenment...
Ideas of how life should be...
More ideas of perfection...
No pain... no suffering... no sickness... no death...
Even when we see it staring us in the face...
Blissed out... 24×7...
Happy... happy... happy...
Chasing your own tail...
Endlessly...
Tears...
"It's all prison kid...."~~MM
Some behavioural patterns drop away of their own accord 

as beliefs crash and fall and are seen through...
And yet we remain...
Yes... the self remains...
Tears...
Oh how I tried to get rid of the mirage...
The mirage once seen as a mirage... needn't go away...
Such a misperception...
There was nothing there in the first place...
And here we are...
It took years to get used to...
A couple of decades... really... as the fullness seeped in...
At its own sweet pace... lol...
It's simply a conceptual idea people have in their heads....

that there's a "you"... or a "them"... that is this or that or the other...
Some even start to get angry about it...
As they can't understand it...
And can't stand that feeling...
And there is fear...
That accompanies the slipping handholds...
When the mind finds itself unable to grasp what is seen as its life line...
And the mind can't grasp this emptiness...
Or wrap its clinging tentacles around this no-thingness...
It is the grasping...
And without it...
It is not...
And fears its own demise...
And yet I feel their pain...
And hear the call for love...
In the unsaid words... of... 
If you were such and such...
Or not so and so...
Then I'd not feel what I feel...
And be other than who I'm being...
Tears...
And love simply flows...
Even as I know...
That there's nothing anyone can do to manipulate or improve the dream...
There's simply nothing and no one there to defend...
And cannot be grasped with the mind...
No person gets realised...
It truly is an empty bauble...
Under the mental fabrication there's not even nothing there...
And yet this is the only place a you or me exist...
And live and love and dance and sing...
And yes that is the realization...
Yes... we've heard it always said... "the enlightened one"...
Whether in reference to the Buddha... Krishna... or the Christ...
All the references made by those who believe themselves to be a person... 

and hence the other as well...
I did too at first... when I sat at the feet of the guru...
When the solidity of this falls through... the belief in a person... 

here or there falls away too...
There was simply no one there... or here...
And yet the self continues...
Looking back... I wouldn't have changed a thing...
Not that I could have... lol...
The beauty of even the quest... like a rose bud unfolding...
Simply...
This...
This...
This...
Tears...

~~Monica Dayakar
~~13/03/2017

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