Jennifer Welwood - Unconditional

Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening to my loss,
I gain the embrace of the universe;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me,
Each condition I welcome transforms me
And becomes itself transformed
Into its radiant jewel-like essence.
I bow to the one who has made it so,
Who has crafted this Master Game;
To play it is purest delight;
To honor its form — true devotion.

http://jenniferwelwood.com/

 

A.Einstein/R.Tagore - Same stream of life

A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free us from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Αlbert Einstein

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

from Gitanjali written by Rabindranath Tagore

 Read the Historic Einstein-Tagore Meeting: On the nature of reality

HERE 

 

Llewellyn Vaughan - A Time for Silence

Silence draws us inward, away from the clutter and distractions
of our outer life, to the deeper roots of our being.
Here our soul nourishes us, here we can be replenished,
and here we can help replenish our world.
The Earth is dying from the ravages of our culture, of our materialistic nightmare
which pollutes the air we breathe, the water we drink,
and starves our soul from its natural connection to the sacred.
In the silence we can drink deeply of the waters of life that are still pure,
we can commune with the primal forces of nature,
we can return to what is sacred and essential to our life and to the life of the Earth.

Read the full text HERE

https://goldensufi.org/

 

 

 

Henri Le Saux/Abhishiktananda - Dhyana

Return within,
to the place where there is nothing,
and take care that nothing comes in.
Penetrate to the depths of yourself,
to the place where thought no longer exists,
and take care that no thought arises there!
There where nothing exists,
Fullness!
There where nothing is seen,
the Vision of Being!
There where nothing appears any longer,
the sudden appearing of the Self!
Dhyana is this!

 

Fakhruddin 'Iraqi - The canvas of existence

 Each image painted
on the canvas of existence
is the form
of the artist himself.
Eternal Ocean
spews forth new waves,
"Waves" we call them;
but there is only the Sea.

Many disparate waves do not make the sea a multiplicity;
no more do the Names make the Named more than One.
When the sea breathes they call it mist;
when mist piles up they call it clouds.
It falls again,
they name it rain;
it gathers itself and rejoins the sea.
And it is now the same sea it ever was. 

via Being silently drawn 

 

Chuck Surface - If you come for tea

 If you come for tea and sweets, my Muslim friend,
Don't leave in a huff if you see upon my wall,The picture of a Hindu Goddess smiling.

If you come to sit in fellowship, my Christian friend,
Don't curl your lip at the Moorish lanterns,
The books of Hafez, Sanai, and Attar strewn about.

If you come for the porch's soft breeze, my Buddhist friend,
Don't dismiss me as a deluded diest when tears well up,As I gaze at the Christian monstrance.

My house, my Heart, my Life,
Is a Wine of many grapes, but One Love,
A Garden of many Roses, but One Love.

"I profess the religion of Love," said Ibn Arabi,

"Wherever its caravan turns along the way,
That is the belief, the faith I keep."

And so it will be with us,
My friends of many faiths,
If you come for tea.

www.GardenOfTheBeloved.com
www.facebook.com/InTheGardenOfTheBeloved

Marianne Broug - Embrace

I pull all the scattered and scared parts to me,
The small parts,
The pain-filled and tired parts,
The parts that have seen enough
Of the world’s angular pushing for now.

 I hold them all in softest embrace;
Soft as the caress of my lover’s cheek
Or the kindness of compassionate eyes.

 My hands, my breasts, my belly, my heart,
Loosen.
And take me in.
I curl myself into the warmth of my own soul.
Smoothing and soothing.

 I sink effortlessly in the depths of who I am,
Allowing all of life
Its place in this moment.

 Exquisite gentleness.

 And indescribable joy.

Marianne Broug

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Michael A. Rodriguez - The Whole Universe Is One Bright Pearl

One of my favorite Zen sayings was by Hsuan-sha: “The whole universe is one bright pearl.”  Another translation runs like this: “The entire world of the ten directions is a single shining [or ‘luminous’] jewel.”  There are other versions, but I like these two variations the best.

I often think the entire dharma – and perhaps drama – is contained in this expression.  It speaks to me.  That statement could only have arisen from the awakened state, and in fact, most people are asleep precisely to the reality to which this statement points.  If you could wake up to this one truth, you would wake up altogether.

Somehow, by the mysterious mechanism of memory, the unknowable self-luminous jewel of awareness seems to become shrouded by what we take to be the known.  We essentially come to live in a claustrophobic prison of the known and do not see the absurdly obvious fact that the reality of boundless experience could not possibly be shining more luminously.  As the writer Samuel Beckett once wrote, “habit is a great deadener.”  Because of habit, which functions by way of the veiling power of memory, we start to live within the narrow confines of our routines and fall asleep to the radiance of Mind.  Actually, Mind falls asleep and dreams within itself a limited world made of habit.  It’s not personal.  This falling asleep happens slowly over many years, and it begins to happen before we are conscious of the fact.  Because of conditioning and education from the moment we’re born (and even before that in terms of cell memory), it creeps up on us below the threshold of conscious awareness and solidifies as cognitive structures of experience in exactly the same way that hypnotic suggestion works.

The other main problem is that you, boundless awareness, have been conditioned to dwell with your attention in the human world of limited concepts.  To wake up to the fact that you are already limitlessly shining in all directions as one bright pearl, try taking your attention off the human realm and contemplate, instead, the fact that “the universe” literally has no beginning or end.  Ever since I was a child, this contemplation has always produced in me a rapturous wonder.  Just think about it.  Right now, human beings are running around as though they know what this whole thing is, as though we exist in a limited world that has boundaries and borders and edges.  But it doesn’t!  I’m not speaking mystically or poetically here.  It’s literal.  How could there possibly be more freedom?  The universe (from which your body-mind is not separate) does not begin or end somewhere.  It’s immeasurable in exactly the same way that a nighttime dream is immeasurable.  How much “space” does a nighttime dream take up?  I hope you got the point with my rhetorical question!

Now, whatever this is obviously has a self-aware quality that shines as the fact of conscious knowing.  I say “self-aware” because since it does not have any limits, there can’t be anything “outside” it to be aware of it.  The limitless totality, therefore, is simply self-aware and shining as the limitless totality of experience.  In other words, it’s a limitless subjective experience to awareness itself that does not contain a single object.  Not one.  Why?  Because “objects” have to have limits (otherwise they would not be knowable), but objects are inseparable from the limitless environment.  “Objects” are illusions of memory.

The fact is that you only ever experience yourself as one bright pearl.  You as boundless awareness are the most precious jewel that could ever be.  Try contemplating this fact over and over again until you wake up to your self-shining magnificence.  To say that “it’s not far from you” is a severe understatement; it is you.

https://boundlessawareness.tumblr.com/