art Hege Elisabeth Haugen

http://www.ellendavis.org/ 

 

Mystic Meandering - Devotion

art DaniaArts

 

An unexpected visceral longing arises -
again...
A primal Love and Longing for what cannot be named;
like a lover pining away for their "Beloved."
Its intensity nearly snuffs my heart out
and will only be revived by the Silence of "The Presence."

The Heart only wants to touch and be touched
by, "The Divine",
however defined, or undefined.
It only wants to dissolve into
the Sacred Silence of the Inner Room.
Nothing else matters...

Even when "spiritual seeking" ends,
this inexplicable Longing remains
deep within the Heart -
not heeding the dissuasive voices of
the minds of acquired knowledge,
or those who claim "enlightenment"
who would dismiss it,
discredit it,
and say there is no need for it;
as if I were a fool for longing.

It just is...

It is beyond words...

I allow the Longing to be...
following its irresistible pull -
drawing me more deeply inward
to Itself...

Letting go of external "spiritual" constructs
and the conceptual maps of what I assumed to be reality...

Instead

I listen - to The Heart of my heart that Longs for
the undeniable fragrance of "Her" Presence...
the warm touch of "Her" Invisible Hand
upon the Heart,
opening its "gates" to the rush of Love...

The Fire of Love's Longing will not be quelled until it is
quenched with the Golden Elixir of
The Ineffable Living Presence...

Even after seeking ends,
this Heart aches, at times,
to Remember;
to feel the felt sense of "Her";
to hear the whisper of "her" Voice;
to experience the indescribable perfusion
of this Immutable Reality
breathing in and out
through this body...

This Primal Love and Longing IS Devotion...

Unashamedly, I embrace it,
this Love, this Longing,
which at times immerses me in the
Illumined Glow of Love's Furnace...

It is an Invisible Path -
deepening into
the Mysteries of the Heart;
not an outward journey of seeking and arriving,
or finding,
but diving deep
into the
"Mystical Heart"
whose only language is
Love...

Mystic Meandering
Oct. 2016

Note: "The Divine", as I use it here, is not an entity as such with a name "God" or "Goddess."  It is neither male nor female.  It is an Ineffable Presence, an "energetic signature", if you will, of "The Mystery."  When I use the term "Her", it refers to this "energy" that has a felt sense of being "feminine" - which is of course completely subjective, but experienced by many.

 

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art
Burning Fire Vortex
Craypas Oils
2011

 

♥

 

A vibrant and powerful post by Mystic Meandering -

Gratitude 

https://mysticmeandering.blogspot.gr/

 

 

 

 

Gnostic - The first and the last

Because I am the first and the last
I am the venerated and the despised one
I am the prostitute and the saint.
I am the bride and the virgin.

I am the mother and the daughter,
I am my mother’s arms,
I am the sterile one, yet my children are numerous,
I am the married woman and the unmarried one,
I am She who gives birth and She who has never given birth,
I am the consolation for the pains of childbirth.

I am the bride and the groom,
And it was my man who nurtured my fertility.
I am my father’s Mother,
I am my husband’s sister.
And he is my rejected son.

Respect me always,
As I am the Scandalous and the Magnificent one.


–Gnostic texts
Found in 1947, Nag Hammadi, Egypt
Dated III-IV BC.

reblogged from Love Is A Place

 

Jiddu Krishnamurti - Be in revolt

We are always told what to think and what not to think. Books, teachers, parents, the society around us, all tell us what to think, but they never help us to find out how to think.

Ultimately, if you don’t revolt against this process, you become like an automatic machine, functioning without creativity, without much original thought...

Joan Tollifson - The key...

artist unknown

THE KEY TO ENDING SUFFERING AND BEING LIBERATED ON THE SPOT

If we truly want to end suffering and be liberated on the spot, at a certain point, like Jesus on the cross, we must move from our self-centered drama and the seductive storyline of “Why have you forsaken me?” to the open surrender of “Thy will be done.” That shift is the key to the resurrection and the light, metaphorically speaking. Holding on to anger, to resentment, to bitterness, to being right, to despair or self-pity, or to needing any particular outcome—that is suffering. (And if anyone had real justifications for holding onto stories of abandonment or mistreatment, Jesus certainly did!).

The key to being liberated on the spot is two-fold. First, it involves a shift of attention—a shift out of entanglement in and identification with the thought-stream—and into open awareness or presence—a shift from thinking to sensing and awaring. And secondly, it involves a surrender or opening of the whole bodymind, a dissolving of the felt-sense of separation, encapsulation and duality, a melting into the spacious immediacy of undivided, boundless awareness, a felt-realization that everything is seamless, undivided, luminous and inseparable. And let me stress, this is actually the natural state that is already present, although it may be clouded over and unnoticed, but I’m not pointing here to some exotic psychedelic experience that comes and goes. Rather, this is a noticing and a realization of what doesn't come and go, what is ever-present regardless of the experience that is arising.

When I speak of shifting from thinking to awaring, I’m not saying that all thinking must end. Functional and creative thinking will continue intermittently as needed, and even a certain degree of harmless mental gum chewing may happen at times without causing any real problem. What we’re waking up from or shifting out of is the ceaseless mental noise and the kind of useless, habitual, obsessive, compulsive, me-centered thinking that gives rise to and perpetuates suffering: I’ve ruined my life, you’ve ruined my life, I can’t do anything right, you can’t do anything right, the world is going to hell, I wish I could be happy, I need another drink, I should stop smoking, what if, yes but, if only, maybe someday, I had it, I lost it…and on and on. These thoughts are painful and destructive. They may also be pleasurable in the kinds of ways that any addiction is initially pleasurable, but ultimately, they are painful and destructive. They don’t serve us.

We can’t force ourselves not to think these thoughts. That’s just more thinking—thoughts battling with thoughts (as in, “I need a cigarette” battling with “I should stop smoking” – both are addictive thoughts that create and sustain the sense of “me” at the center of this drama – and that “me” is the fundamental addiction and the root illusion).

So instead of doing battle with thoughts and trying to suppress or control them, instead, we simply need to SEE these thought-patterns, to be aware of them as they show up. Awareness is the great solvent. The more clearly these thoughts are seen as thoughts, and the more clearly we realize that the true “I” is not the thought-stream or the mirage-like thinker (the separate little me who seems to be at the center of the story authoring the thoughts, but who is itself just another thought)—the more clearly that is realized, the less power these thoughts have to hypnotize us. They lose their believability.

So what I’m pointing to here is not thinking about thoughts or analyzing them, but simply awaring them—seeing them for what they are, being aware of the thought-stream and not entranced by the story thought is telling. Awareness doesn’t fight with thoughts or resist them, but it allows the attention to gently and naturally shift out of the abstract thought-realm and into the aliveness of sensory experiencing: hearing, seeing, smelling, touching, tasting. If we are awash in anxiety or depression, what happens if we stop and simply listen openly to the traffic sounds and the bird songs…if we notice all the colors and shapes and the beauty of the light… if we feel into the body as pure sensation and energy...if we feel this open, spacious, awaring presence that is being and beholding it all, this awaring presence that is unbound and unlimited, this presence that we are?

Surrendering is an opening of the whole bodymind, a dissolving of the solidity of the bodymind, a letting go into boundlessness. That doesn’t mean we lose all sense of individuality—we still have a functional identification as a particular bodymind in the play of life, we still have appropriate social and psychological boundaries and a unique personality, and so on. We don’t walk in front of buses or forget our name or become invisible. But all of that is appearing (intermittently, as needed) in a larger context—the open space of awareness. It is recognized that the true “I” to which we all refer is ultimately this unbound awareness that is being and beholding everything. In other words, we are not limited to the bodymind, and the bodymind 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, but 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 other words for surrender: dissolving, opening, relaxing, softening, melting, letting go, resting, allowing, welcoming, not-grasping, stopping. What matters is not the word or some idea of this, but discovering this for oneself experientially. No one can do this surrender for us, and no one can tell us exactly how to do it. It’s like riding a bicycle or swimming. It can’t really be explained. Someone can help us get to the threshold—and they can maybe offer a few helpful pointers—but ultimately, how to ride or swim or surrender is a discovery we each have to make for ourself.

Once we’ve discovered this shift, it’s just a matter of doing it again and again, or more accurately, doing it now. And of course, the word “doing” is misleading because it suggests something too forceful, whereas surrendering is almost more of a not-doing. It’s more like we stop doing something that we have been doing—a kind of tightening or grasping or seeking relaxes, and there is a letting go, an opening—allowing everything to be as it is, not resisting anything and not trying to get anything. It’s like falling asleep—you can’t make it happen, but there are things you can do or not do that will help to allow sleep to happen. And here, instead of falling asleep, we’re falling awake. But again, the words can only point to what must be felt into and discovered experientially firsthand by each of us.

Is surrender a choice? I can’t say yes and I can’t say no. If we think we can “do” surrender on command, as an act of personal will, we will be greatly frustrated and disappointed—and subject to guilt, shame and blame. If, on the other hand, we cling to the belief that we can’t do it, that there is no choice, that we can only wait to see what happens, then we will be foolishly disempowering and ignoring the power and the absolute response-ability that is right here—awake and aware—being and beholding everything—and we are not other than that. So is it possible—right now—not to get stuck on either side of a conceptual divide that isn’t really there in direct experiencing? In other words, what happens if we don’t cling to an ideology, a belief or a formulation (e.g., that there is freedom and choice, or that there is no freedom and no choice)? What happens if we let go of all these descriptions, ideas and beliefs? What if we let go of everything that can be doubted? What happens if we simply stay with the living reality itself, right here, right now, just as it is?

That’s the great discovery. We discover, or consciousness discovers, how to end the trance of suffering, how to be liberated on the spot—not forever after, but HERE / NOW.

It’s relatively easy to make this shift in a quiet, pleasant setting…on a meditation retreat or in nature. It’s more challenging when we’re in physical or emotional pain, when we feel anxious or depressed, when we’re arguing with a loved one, when we’re in a war zone (literally or metaphorically), when we’re sick or under stress, when our buttons are being pushed, when the world isn’t going the way we think it should. And sometimes this shift doesn’t seem to happen right away. Sometimes the power of old habits wins out for awhile. We get lost in anger, depression, resentment, self-pity, self-righteousness, worry or whatever it is, and we overeat or light up or watch too much TV or get into an argument or whatever we do. It happens. And yet at some point, we wake up. The habitual movement ends. And then the challenge is to focus on right now, not on the story of how “I just failed again.” Because these apparent failures are not personal—they are movements of the whole universe. So can we love ourselves and the whole world in all our beautiful imperfection?

That unconditional love (or awareness) is big enough to include everything. Awareness is actually always awake, always allowing everything to be as it is. It never rejects or hates anything. And it is never really harmed or destroyed by anything that appears to happen in the dream-like movie of waking life. All the apparent darkness and all the apparent getting lost is always happening (or appearing) in this bigger, vaster context. It is really nothing other than that. To realize this is to be free from suffering. But pain is an unavoidable part of life. As I’ve said before, being nailed to a cross is going to hurt no matter how awake you are.

Being awake isn’t about ignoring or dismissing relative reality, and it’s not a protective shield against feeling pain or heartbreak. But it’s also quite different from being swept up in reactive emotion-thought, hypnotized by beliefs and storylines, and stuck in endlessly self-perpetuating wars (on any level). Being awake is a vulnerable, sensitive, open-hearted aliveness. Life presents us with endless opportunities to wake up, to let go, to open, to dissolve—to be liberated on the spot. We may find that this opening is the greatest gift we can give to ourselves and to the whole world. It is the end of separation, the end of conflict. We may discover that love is infinitely more powerful than hate, that awareness is more healing than all our ideas, and that nothing is ever how we think it is.

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http://www.joantollifson.com/ 

 

Kabir - The flute of interior time

art Ram Onkar

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 The flute of interior time is played whether we hear
it or not.
What we mean by “love” is its sound coming in.
When love hits the farthest edge of excess, it reaches
a wisdom.
And the fragrance of that knowledge!
It penetrates our thick bodies,
it goes through walls-
Its network of notes has a structure as if a million
suns were
arranged inside.
This tune has truth in it.
Where else have you heard a sound like that?

 

Geoffrey D. Falk - Ocean of Cosmic Consciousness

We are individualized waves of consciousness on the Infinite Ocean of Spirit; so say the sages.
 
But, although the Ocean has become the wave, and the wave, when it dissolves the illusion of ego-separation and limitation, realizes that it has always been one with the Infinite Ocean, the form-bound wave itself is not the Ocean. Nor is the Ocean merely the sum of its waves—the Ocean can exist without the waves, but the waves cannot exist without the Ocean.
 
Everything you can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and much more, is part of this Ocean. For all matter, energy and consciousness is merely waves of certain rates of vibration on the surface of the Ocean of Consciousness; Spirit has become, and is present in and as, every created thing. That is, consciousness is the “water” of the Infinite Ocean of Spirit, and all phenomena arise as modifications of this one stuff, or ripples on/of this Ocean of cosmic consciousness.

Geoffrey D. Falk, The Science of the Soul: On Consciousness and the Structure of Reality 

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Rumi ♡ Where is that fountainhead?

rocking and rolling
what have you been drinking
please let me know

you must be drunk
going house to house
wandering from street to street

who have you been with
who have you kissed
who's face have you been fondling

you are my soul
you are my life
i swear my life and love is yours

so tell me the truth
where is that fountainhead
the one you've been drinking from

don't hide this secret
lead me to the source
fill my jug over and over again

last night i finally caught
your attention in the crowd
it was your image filling my dream

telling me to stop this wandering
stop this search for
good and evil

i said my dear prophet
give me some of
that you've drunk for ecstasy of life

if i let you drink you said
any of this burning flame
it will scorch your mouth and throat

your portion has been
given already by heaven
ask for more at your peril

i lamented and begged
i desire much more
please show me the source

i have no fear
to burn my mouth and throat
i'm ready to drink every flame and more