Reflections from Nancy Neithercut

 

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San Deep - The Beloved’s breath in disguise

 

There was none to chant;
the name tore through an instrument of expression
like fire through silk.

No breath remained,
only ash that whispered
Hu... Hu... Hu...

The arms rose not from will,
but from the wind
that dances in absence.

Light did not descend......it erupted,
a thousand suns behind the ribs.

One is the smoke
of every veil burned,
the echo of every silence
that once wore a name.

Here.....there is only the turning,
the burning,
the Beloved’s breath
in disguise. 

 

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Tracy Pierce - Beyond sects and creeds

 

The true mystic progresses rapidly through the illusion of sects and creeds, and arrives at the realization that there is no place for religious prejudice in the enlightened spiritual life. Gradually, therefore, he accepts the contributions of all religions, recognizing the universality of Truth.”
- Manly Palmer Hall

BEYOND SECTS AND CREEDS

The mystic path is not a movement towards better beliefs, but towards freedom from identification with belief itself. Sects and creeds arise as structures of understanding, belonging and certainty. They may serve a purpose, offering language, guidance and orientation towards Truth. Yet when they become the foundation of personal identity, they cease to be doorways and become barriers. What once pointed towards Reality begins to obscure it.
Religious prejudice does not arise from genuine devotion, but from identification. Within the subconscious dimension of Awareness, vāsanās sustain the assumed separate self, conditioning attention to seek security in beliefs, traditions and collective identities. The conscious mind then defends these positions as though its own existence depended upon them. What appears to be devotion to Truth may instead be the protection of an identity constructed around it.
The enlightened spiritual life is not the triumph of one religion over another, but the recognition that Truth cannot be possessed or confined by any conceptual form. The obstacle is not belief, scripture or theology, but the misidentification through which these become substitutes for direct Knowing.
The true mystic neither rejects religion nor indiscriminately collects its teachings. One recognises that genuine spiritual insight may be expressed through different cultures, languages, symbols and traditions. What varies is the form of expression, not the indivisible Reality towards which authentic insight points. To recognise this universality is not to erase differences, but to understand their proper place within the differentiated expression of the One.
Universality is not an agreement reached by the intellect. It arises through direct recognition of the Self. As Self-knowledge illuminates the subconscious heart, the vāsanās sustaining separation gradually dissolve. The need to defend a religious or personal identity diminishes, not through moral effort or the suppression of thought, but through the dissolution of the ignorance from which that need arose.
The Self remains indivisible, while its Awareness expresses through the countless forms of the universal Temple. Person, animal and the seemingly inanimate are not separate realities standing outside the One, but differentiated expressions within its manifested Being. Their differences remain, yet none possesses an existence independent of the Whole.
This recognition does not produce confusion or relativism. On the contrary, it deepens discernment. The mystic can honour genuine insight wherever it appears without assuming that every teaching is equally clear or coherent. Contradictions need not be overlooked in the name of unity, nor must differences be defended as evidence of separation. Reason continues to serve Knowing, distinguishing the truth expressed through a teaching from the limitations of its conceptual form.
Thus, philosophy becomes a pointer rather than a prison, scripture a means of illumination rather than possession, and religious practice an expression of devotion rather than an assertion of superiority. Authority is no longer granted to a belief merely because it belongs to a particular tradition. Understanding is guided by the direct Knowing of the Self.
The recognition of universality is not an achievement of the individual mind. It is the natural expression of Self-knowledge as identification dissolves. The many traditions need not become one religion, just as the countless vessels of the universal Temple need not become identical.
Truth is One, though its expressions are many.
Where the One is recognised, difference remains, but division loses its foundation.

Love Tracy      🙏❤🙏❤
~via Metaphysical Insight and Intuition 

 

 

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Jean Klein - The presence of wholeness and love

 

Q. So the individual does not exist as an isolated entity. But does not the personality exist as a unique part of the whole?

A. The person is really only persona, mask, but it has come to be synonymous with the idea of an individual, separate and continuous entity. The personality is not the constant we imagine it to be. 
In reality, it is only a temporary re-orchestration of all our senses, imagination, and intelligence, according to each situation. There is no repetition in life, and each re-orchestration is unique and original like the design in a kaleidoscope. 
The mistake is to identify with the personality, to conceptualize it in memory and then take ourselves for this collection of crystallized images rather than letting all emotions, perceptions, and thoughts arise and die in us. We are in the theatre watching our own play on stage. The actor is always 'behind' his persona. He seems to be completely lost in suffering, in being a hero, a lover, a rascal, but all these appearances take place in global presence. 
This presence is not a detached attitude, a witnessing position. It is not a feeling of separateness, of being 'outside'. It is the presence of wholeness and love, out of which all comes. When no situation calls for an activity, we remain in emptiness of activity, in this Presence.

- Jean Klein, Who Am I?

 

 

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Chuck Surface - The rose unseen

 THE ROSE UNSEEN

I find it difficult to discard,

Plants which are near to death,

Fading, whatever the cause may be,

For I, too, was once near death,

Saved only by the Beloved Gardener.

The legalists, the jurists of religion,

Would have tossed my Soul aside,

Onto the heap of the irredeemable,

Deeming further care a waste of Water,

My Being far too ravaged by Drought.

But a Loving Eye fell upon me,

And a Heart of Grace was moved,

To Embrace, with Merciful Hands,

The starving root and withered branch,

Of my near breathless Soul.

Twas the Beautiful One who moved me,

From the broken pot of my self,

And placed me into the Ground of Being,

In the Secret Garden of Her Heart,

Tending me there, with Living Waters.

These days, though that which is visible,

Appears to wilt and wither with age,

Within, beyond the touch of time,

A Rose, unseen, is ever in Bloom,

Surrounding me with Her Perfume.

I find it difficult to discard,

Those encountered along The Way,

In whom root and branch are suffering,

And hold them in Prayerful Affection,

For I, too, would be discarded…

Were it not for the Beloved Gardener.

https://www.gardenofthebeloved.com/index.html 

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Michael Markham - The "I am"

 

 The "I am" is the gravitational center around which all objectified thought turns. It is not a thought among thoughts but the still point that lets thoughts appear to move, the fixed star every mental orbit is measured against.
Nothing enters awareness unfiltered. Every perception, every idea, every fact bends toward this center, is caught in its field, and comes out reframed as mine, as known-by-me. The self is not a passive witness to information; it is a gravity well that curves all incoming light into its own shape.
And this center does not hold still. It feeds on what falls into it. Each experience it bends becomes part of its mass, thickening the field, deepening the orbit, so that the "I" of tomorrow is denser, more elaborate, more convinced of itself than the "I" of today, an ever-expanding self-referential program, endlessly compiling itself out of its own outputs.
So what you call the universe and what I call the universe are not the same universe at all. Each of us stands at the center of a private gravitational field, and everything we perceive is already bent by the time it reaches us. There is no neutral cosmos we both simply observe, only a youniverse, curved uniquely around each "I am," each of us mistaking our own gravity for the shape of reality itself

 

 

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David Carse - The little key

 

Because this teaching that appears to be relatively insignificant can be, small as it is, the little key which if allowed into the lock and allowed to turn, will swing open the vast gates. 'I am not the doer of any action:' the significance of this is not that it is any great or total realization in itself.

The significance lies in where it will lead. If you really get this, really get that there is no one to get it, it will be like a line of computer code, which when introduced into the computer will re-write the whole operating system. Will cause a cascade failure of all the systems that you think of as 'yourself.' Will set in motion the surrender and apprehension which otherwise can in no way be achieved by a 'you,' and which is the Complete Understanding of awakening: the knowing that there is no one here to understand or awaken or know. There is only the Peace that passes understanding, the breath of Presence blowing through this hollow stick.

And the music thus made, which appears as the everyday thoughts and words and actions of 'you' and 'others, is nothing other than Presence playing through these instruments, and truly is the ultimate gift, beyond beauty.

 

Chapter 18

Morning Talks

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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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Jean Klein - What is this self Who am I?

 

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐚𝐦 𝐈?

Your real nature is stillness, light, expansion without center or periphery. It is unconditioned being, love. But you do not see it for you are a prisoner of your imagination and of second-hand information. You have enclosed yourself in a universe of concepts and beliefs. The ego is only a function, and to identify with it is a lack of true vision. Thoughts, feelings and actions appear in succession before the witness, leaving their imprint in your brain. Recalling them makes you believe in a continuity which is actually non-existent. But memory is a present thought, thoughts of the past occur in the present. In reality there is only presence, non-dual consciousness. We mistakenly take ourselves to be this or that, but there is only the true "I am" beyond time and space.

What is the real nature of the mistake I have made?

Desiring something which is nothing but an illusion, which has no foundation whatsoever; being afraid of truth, which is pure awareness free of thought.

Why would I be afraid of truth?

Because truth is life and you are afraid of living. You take yourself for an object which is born and dies, and you fear dying because you do not know life. It is only an object which is afraid and this object tries by all means to free itself. See that the effort to become free belongs to the belief in an object. The moment you see it turn your head and look behind.

RUMI - Moses And The Shepherd

 

A tribute to Coleman Barks

April 23, 1937 – February 23, 2026

Moses heard a shepherd on the road praying, God,

Where are You? I want to help You, to fix Your shoes

and comb Your hair. I want to wash Your clothes

and pick the lice off. I want to bring You milk,

to kiss Your little hands and feet when it’s time

for You to go to bed. I want to sweep Your room

and keep it neat. God, my sheep and goats

are Yours. All I can say, remembering You,

is ayyyy and ahhhhhhhhh.

Moses could stand it no longer.

Who are you talking to?

The One who made us,

and made the earth and made the sky.

Don’t talk about shoes

and socks with God! And what’s this with Your little hands

and feet? Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like

you’re chatting with your uncles.

Only something that grows

needs milk. Only someone with feet needs shoes. Not God!

Even if you meant God’s human representatives

as when God said, I was sick, and you did not visit me,

even then this tone would be foolish and irreverent.

Use appropriate terms. Fatima is a fine name

for a woman, but if you call a man Fatima,

it’s an insult. Body-and-birth language

are right for us on this side of the river,

but not for addressing the Origin,

not for Allah.

The shepherd repented and tore his clothes and sighed

and wandered out into the desert.

A sudden revelation

came then to Moses. God’s voice:

You have separated Me

from one of my own. Did you come as a Prophet to unite,

or to sever?

I have given each being a separate and unique way

of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.

What seems wrong to you is right for him.

What is poison to one is honey to someone else.

Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,

these mean nothing to Me.

I am apart from all that.

Ways of worshiping are not to be ranked as better

or worse than one another.

It’s all praise, and it’s all

right.

It’s not Me that’s glorified in acts of worship.

It’s the worshipers! I don’t hear the words

they say. I look at the humility.

That broken-open lowliness is the Reality,

not the language! Forget phraseology.

I want burning,

burning.

Be friends

with your burning. Burn up your thinking

and your forms of expression!

Moses,

those who pay attention to ways of behaving

and speaking are one sort.

Lovers who burn

are another.

Don’t impose a property tax

on a burned out village. Don’t scold the Lover.

The wrong way he talks is better than a hundred

right ways of others.

Inside the Kaaba

it doesn’t matter which direction you point

your prayer rug!

The ocean diver doesn’t need snowshoes!

The Love-Religion has no code or doctrine.

Only God.

So the ruby has nothing engraved on it!

It doesn’t need markings.

God began speaking deeper mysteries to Moses. Vision and words,

which cannot be recorded here, poured into

and through him. He left himself and came back.

He went to Eternity and came back here.

Many times this happened.

It’s foolish of me

to try and say this. If I did say it,

it would uproot our human intelligences.

It would shatter all writing pens.

Moses ran after the shepherd.

He followed the bewildered footprints,

in one place moving straight like a castle

across a chessboard. In another, sideways,

like a bishop.

Now surging like a wave cresting,

now sliding down like a fish,

with always his feet

making geomancy symbols in the sand,

recording

his wandering state.

Moses finally caught up

with him.

I was wrong. God has revealed to me

that there are no rules for worship.

Say whatever

and however your loving tells you to. Your sweet blasphemy

is the truest devotion. Through you a whole world

is freed.

Loosen your tongue and don’t worry what comes out.

It all the Light of the Spirit.

The shepherd replied,

Moses, Moses,

I’ve gone beyond even that.

You applied the whip and my horse shied and jumped

out of itself. The Divine Nature and my human nature

came together.

Bless your scolding hand and your arm.

I can’t say what has happened.

What I’m saying now

is not my real condition. It can’t be said.

The shepherd grew quiet.

When you look in a mirror,

you see yourself, not the state of the mirror.

The fluteplayer puts breath into a flute,

and who makes the music? Not the flute.

The Fluteplayer!

Whenever you speak praise

or thanksgiving to God, it’s always like this

dear shepherd’s simplicity.

When you eventually see

through the veils of how things really are,

you will keep saying again

and again,

This is certainly not like we thought it was!

Mathnawi II 1720-96, from This Longing: Poetry, Teaching Stories, and Selected Letters, translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne (Putney, Vt.: Threshold Books, 1988), pp. 19-22

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Aram Shaly - God exists, God does not exist

 

The ignorant one says:

“God is over there.”

And places the sacred at a distance.

The half-awake one says:

“I am God.”

And senses that nothing is truly separate.

The awakened one says nothing.

Not because words are lacking,

but because they are no longer needed.

Who would speak,

and to whom?

The last one neither knows nor does not know.

Not from ignorance,

but because knowing has fallen silent.

He holds no belief.

He holds no doubt.

He seeks no answers.

He is not someone

who has arrived.

He is simply here.

Like breath happening by itself.

Like the stillness between two thoughts.

There, both God and human

cease to be two.

And what remains

needs no name.

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