Matt Licata - Burning Heart

art Gregory Colbert

 What if love never feels safe? What if it was never meant to provide you with consistent feelings of comfort, certainty, and security? What if it comes spinning out of the stars offering something much more radical, creative, and transformative than safety could ever deliver?

Perhaps it wasn't safety you were seeking after all, but wholeness and an untamed, erupting sort of aliveness?

No matter how many profound insights you have, how many amazingly powerful awakening experiences you collect, or how convinced you become that you have it all together, you will always be at risk for the beloved to step in and pull the rug out from underneath you. He or she will do whatever it takes to reveal your true nature as open, naked, unprecedented, and outside the realm of the conceptual altogether.

No, it will likely never turn out quite like you thought it would. You can be grateful for that. Perhaps the creative and destructive activity of love will never ask that you transcend your vulnerability, cover over your sensitivity, "heal" your tenderness, or end up in some pre-conditioned, second-hand state that has been described by another. For your journey is yours alone.

Perhaps love will always seed your world with the emissaries of full-spectrum reorganization, come to scatter its sacred nectar and fragrances throughout the four directions. Before you turn from this activity and abandon it as an "obstacle" to your path, renew your vow to stay close and to no longer abandon the wildness within you. For this reorganization is holy, unbearably creative, and is forming the substance of the path in every moment.

When you are totally unclothed – of all of your spiritual concepts and certain, safe knowing – love will show you what you are. When the known crumbles away, all that remains is your burning heart. There is nothing more alive than that. There is nothing more sacred than that.

http://www.mattlicataphd.com/ 

 

Leonard Cohen - Blessed is the one...

"I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name. The raw heart beat against the world, and the tears were for my lost victory. But you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting, and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place. Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller’s heart for his turning."

—Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934 – November 10, 2016)

Mauro Bergonzi - Mystery...

The mystery is at the heart of our being. 

We can't solve the mystery, we can only experience it!

Science and Nonduality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTYm9FpSH_s 

Henry Miller - The art of living

"The art of living is based on rhythm - on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, ‘the dance of life,’ metamorphosis. One can dance to sorrow or to joy; one can even dance abstractly. But the point is that, by the mere act of dancing, the elements which compose it are transformed; the dance is an end in itself, just like life. The acceptance of the situation, any situation, brings about a flow, a rhythmic impulse towards self-expression. To relax is, of course, the first thing a dancer has to learn. It is also the first thing a patient has to learn when he confronts the analyst. It is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live. It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender."
.
~ Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart

 http://www.henrymiller.info/

 

Michael A. Rodriguez - The Living Flame of Love

The following passage comes from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, and it lights up my heart every time I read it. There’s something about light, both in its literal and its metaphorical sense, that I find exquisitely beautiful. Its use in this passage has the power to set you on fire for Truth:

    “Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, 'If you will, you can become all flame.’”

The power of this saying, for me, resides in the awesome, almost numinous image of Abba Joseph – his hands stretched towards heaven, his fingers like lamps of fire, his words ablaze with wisdom. I imagine his eyes burning intensely with the full force of Conscious Light, the kind of intensity that you see in the eyes of Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta, and Anandamayi Ma.

Or in YOUR eyes. That Light shines in you whether “you” are awake to that fact or not. In other words, you are already aflame. However, when you are awake to Awakeness or to the fact that you are already Pure Consciousness shining as the Knowing of your experience, another magnitude of Light shines from your eyes.

The Christian mystic John of the Cross referred to this Light as the “living flame of Love.” The sense of the “separate self” is drawn to that flame like a moth. The moth cannot survive; the flame cannot die.

Deep in your heart, you wish to “become all flame.” Do nothing to prevent or delay this self-immolation. It is calling you home.

 Read/watch HERE

~~~~

http://www.boundlessawareness.org/ 

John Astin - Long before

To meditate is

to realize what has

always been meditating,

the vast and empty sky

in which the 

clouds of meditating

and not meditating

appear and

then disappear.

To meditate is to

realize this sky

that kissed the

clouds long before

we ever tried

to love what is.

 

 

 

About John Astin

John Astin, PhD: Along with his work as an internationally known researcher in the field of mind-body medicine, John  is a songwriter and recording artist and the author of Too Intimate for Words and This Is Always Enough, poetic and prose reflections on the nature of non-dual awareness.