Rafael Stoneman - The Miracle of Color

Here I am Here again
Not again
But only Now
Though it seems that moments are repeating
It is really One continuous moment
What changes and what remains the same?
Somehow through the prism of the mind
many moods appear in consciousness
although there is only one Ultimate mood.
This is the miracle of color
The play of emotion
On the negative end of the scale
we condemn the negative
But we imagine that we are on the positive end
when we seek ways to remove the negative.
How positive would we feel if there was only the positive end of the scale?
If we are willing to sacrifice the pain
are we willing to sacrifice the pleasure?
Equanimity is a dear friend.
One that holds the same embrace for praise and for blame.
The same space for fortune and for misfortune.
The same face for respect and for betrayal.

 

Jean Klein - A state of not-knowing

We have come together to find out what we mean by truth, or our real nature, globality. This inquiry calls for a certain quality of attention, an attention free from any expectation. It is really a state of not-knowing, where we are simply open. It should also be clear that what we are looking for, we already are. It is completely objectless. Truth cannot be known by the mind and requires a different kind of perceiving than the mind uses. It is not a functional perceiving which is in duality—“I perceive this”—but a being the perceiving, where there is only perceiving without any perceiver or thing perceived. In other words, where we are the perceiving.

All that can be obtained, perceived, thought, is an object, but we are the subject of all objects. So if we remain in a state of trying to achieve understanding, we will only find an object and not the objectless truth. This object may be a subtle state, but what we are fundamentally is not a state. In trying to obtain ourselves, we go away from ourselves. When this is understood, our mind is automatically brought to a stop where all the energy used in projecting and attaining is no longer directed, and we find ourselves in non-directionless openness, waiting without waiting. This is really the most profoundly relaxed state of the body and the mind. We are simply open, open to the all-possible, open to the unknown. We can never go to it, because there is no one to go and nowhere to go. We can never take it. We can only be taken by it. So we must allow it.

We are accustomed to using the mind to understand, so we must go until the end of the mind, until it comes to the point of being completely exhausted. In other words, the mind must know its limits. This brings an absolutely relaxed state. The mind functions in space and time, but what we are, profoundly, is out of time. So time, the mind, can never understand what is beyond time. When the mind is exhausted, we are at the threshold of our real being. This threshold is a global feeling, free from any conceptualization. What is important is that when we say, “I have understood,” we feel how the understanding has acted on us. Intellectual understanding dissolves in silence, and this silence is our real being. We may have a clear geometrical understanding in our mind, but this understanding is still objective; the geometrical understanding must dissolve in being understanding, which is a global feeling. It is really this global feeling that is meant when we speak of being the understanding.

From Open to the Unknown, Chapter One

 

Brian Browne Walker - Wei wu Wei Ching

art  Parablev

No teacher

or master is in possession

of your enlightenment. Ultimately

only you can free yourself. Just shed your

delusions like a sweaty shirt and slip into the

stream of zen and tao, empty minded,

quiet hearted, at rest in the midst

of everything and at peace

with all that

occurs.



Polish

yourself  on your

own over and over until

you disappear, and you’ll wake up

right where you are. You’ll see straight

through the snares of the world and

pass freely into complete

realization.



Wei wu Wei Ching, Chapter 27

http://brianbrownewalker.com/

 

Steve Taylor - The Alchemy of Acceptance

Emptiness can be a bleak vacuum
cold and hostile, dark with danger;
Or emptiness can be a radiant spaciousness
warm and welcoming, soft with stillness –
and the only difference between them is acceptance.

Any task can seem tedious
a chore to rush through as quickly as you can;
Or any task may seem rewarding
a process to relish, with an attentive mind
that reveals more richness, the more present you become –
and the only difference between them is acceptance.

Pain may seem unbearable
searing through you from a sharp, concentrated point
so that you have no choice but to resist
to try to escape, or to push away the pain;
Or pain can be a sensation
which you can move towards and merge with
which no longer has a centre, and dissipates and spreads through your being
until it becomes soft and numb, no longer a pain at all –
and the only difference between them is acceptance.

Trauma and turmoil can break you down to nothing
destroy the identity you spent your whole life building up
like an earthquake that leaves you in ruins;
Or trauma and turmoil can transform you
break open new depths and heights of you
give rise to a greater structure, a miraculous new self –
and the only difference between them is acceptance.

Life can be frustrating, and full of obstacles
with desires for a different life constantly disturbing your mind;
or life can be fulfilling, full of opportunities
with a constant flow of gratitude for the gifts you have,
and the only difference between them is acceptance.

https://www.stevenmtaylor.com/ 

 

Fr. Richard Woods, O.P. - The same eye

When the great Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart was first hailed into court by the heresy-hunters of the Archbishop of Cologne in 1326, one of his sayings they objected to was this famous and mysterious remark:

"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing and one love." (From German Sermon No. 12.)

Eckhart replied by citing a famous passage from Saint Augustine about God's intimacy with us. Not that it did much good, although the objectionable passage did not make it into the final list denounced by the pope's bull of condemnation two years later and published a year after Eckhart's death. For in fact, what he was teaching was not heretical, but ancient Christian spirituality.

But the Cologne censors also objected to a similar statement in Sermon 10, which makes the point even clearer if less dramatically:

"The nearness of God and the soul makes no distinction in truth. The same knowing in which God knows Himself is the knowing of every detached spirit, and no other. The soul takes her being immediately from God . Therefore God is nearer to the soul than she is to herself,' and therefore God is in the ground of the soul with all His Godhead."

Here again, Eckhart was citing Saint Augustine on the divine intimacy. In another sermon (German Sermon 5b), he put it this way: "God's ground is my ground and my ground is God's ground."

What Eckhart is getting at in all these koan-like passages is that our union with God is so intimate that it is impossible to distinguish the Lover from the Beloved. (The implication must have upset the inquisitors deeply: then why bother to?) For Eckhart, such total union with God is both the original source of our existence and the final point of our destiny. Still, between our original unity in the eternal womb of the Godhead and our ultimate union with God , the goal of all our questing, the difference made by awareness is all-important.

In German Sermon 68, Eckhart said, beginning again with his favorite passage from Augustine,

" God is closer to me than I am to myself: my being depends on God's being near me and present to me. So God is also in a stone or a log of wood, only they do not know it. If the wood knew God and realized how close God is to it as the highest angel does, it would be as blissful as the highest angel. And so a human is more blessed than a stone or a piece of wood because she or he is aware of God and knows how close God is. And I am the more blessed, the more I realize this, and I am the less blessed, the less I know this. I am not blessed because God is in me and is near me and because I possess Him, but because I am aware of how close God is to me, and that I know God ."

Eventually, however, Eckhart insists that we must go beyond even this awareness. As long as we are aware of the difference between God and our own selves, between the "I" and the "Thou," we are not truly one. So Eckhart could say in all sincerity, as he did in Sermon 52, "I pray God to rid me of God."

Eckhart never confuses God and creatures. But he denies that union with God ultimately admits of any experienced duality of Lover and Beloved.

It is like the ecstasy of lovers gazing into each others' eyes, oblivious of anything except their love. True intercourse means forgetting any distinction between "your" joy and "my" joy, or love, or being, or presence, or anything else. Such awareness expands even beyond any awareness of "our" into an unimaginable and ineffable dimension of one-ness, what in Hindu teaching is called Sat-chit-ananda -- "being-awareness-bliss."

No wonder that Hindus think of Eckhart as a Hindu, Buddhists think of him as a Buddhist, and Sufis regard him as one of their own. He speaks the mystical language of the world's greatest lovers, those who really KNOW 

~~~~~~~~

 http://opcentral.org/blog/fr-richard-woods-o-p/

 

 

Jennifer Welwood - The Dakini Speaks

My friends, let’s grow up.
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven’t noticed, let’s wake up and notice.
Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It’s simple — how could we have missed it for so long?
Let’s grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings,
But please, let’s not be so shocked by them.
Let’s not act so betrayed,
As though life had broken her secret promise to us.
Impermanence is life’s only promise to us,
And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.
To a child she seems cruel, but she is only wild,
And her compassion exquisitely precise:
Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,
She strips away the unreal to show us the real.
This is the true ride — let’s give ourselves to it!
Let’s stop making deals for a safe passage:
There isn’t one anyway, and the cost is too high.
We are not children anymore.
The true human adult gives everything for what cannot be lost.
Let’s dance the wild dance of no hope!

 http://jenniferwelwood.com/