Douglas J. Penick - The cosmic mirror

THE COSMIC MIRROR

In TANTRIC POETRY by Douglas J. Penick

 Among Gesar’s daydreams, visions and songs on his journey home, this part begins The Mirror of Nowness: the legacy of the rulers of Shambhala.

Gesar, King of Ling, Destroyer of Demons, makes his way home at the head of his army. They wind their way along rocky riverbeds and rise onto steep mountain trails. When they reach the summit of the first mountain pass, they see before them rank upon rank of jagged snow mountains amid billowing white cloud banks ranged before them. They pause, awe-struck as if they are on the border of a different world. Gesar laughs and sings to them, beginning with some verses from the Avatamsaka Sutra:

The Flower Bank Ocean of worlds
Expands further than the universe.
Pure, it is pure in every sense;
At peace, peace, it fills all of space.

In this ocean of worlds
Are more world systems than any mind conceives.
Each is arrayed in different shapes, colors, senses.
Each is utterly independent.
They cannot be mistaken, one for the other.

Like networks of cities,
They circle each other like whirlpools,
Like vast blooming lotus flowers.

 

THE COSMIC MIRROR

In the all-pervasive pure immensity of primordial space,
The limitless, the timeless;
Space before stillness, time before occurrence,
The signless, the directionless, the gateless;
In this realm which neither appears nor disappears;
Space without other, ground without path, the primordial mandala
Is pure presence, is pure reality itself.

Now,
Without beginning,
Now,
Without end,
The cosmic mirror
Is the spontaneous expanse of infinite space.

The first moment without the second,
The cosmic mirror is primordial nowness.

Now,
Radiating within the space beyond space and the time beyond time,
Everywhere and simultaneously.

Now,
Light before illumination and shadow;
Luminosity inseparable from bliss,
The radiance of all, bliss of all,
The self-luminous blazes as gates of light.

Now,
Without logic or consequence,
Sight, sound, smell, taste and touch
Shine
Free from the limits of perceiver, perception or consciousness.

This is the all-encompassing radiance
Of the cosmic mirror.


Now,
As a bolt of lightning, as a sharp cry
All the wisdom of the cosmic mirror
Condenses.

A sudden dot,
Vibrant, alive, awake,
Pulses in the infinite expanse of luminous space.

Now is the all-pervasive life
Of vision, tenderness and courage.

The Kingdom of Shambhala
Rises beyond time
Complete, brilliant and all-pervasive
In every instant.

This was extracted from The Brilliance of Naked Mind: Secret Visions of Gesar, King of Ling with the kind permission of the author Douglas J. Penick.

SOURCE  Text

http://www.douglaspenick.com/

Lisa Starr - What It Takes

All it takes is one blue rowboat tied to a buoy,
and its reflection, and this moment
for me to go remembering everything.

Then a murmur, the sound of water lapping,
the breeze snapping, and the way the leaves
resist the letting go, or don’t…

the wheels of a bicycle soaring downhill
with some gravity-glad rider—
all of it, all of it complicit.

What I’m talking about is the sheer, shimmering
faith of the rope that connects the boat to the buoy
and the hands that tied the knot, and the fathers

who teach their sons and daughters
these simple things I see all day
and sometimes, not at all.

Moments like this become miracle, oracle,
and my heart knows again that the whole world—
this one—is just my own face in the mirror,

and I know that I am the boat and the buoy
and the rope—and like faith, that holy smoke—
I am brilliant, and bobbing, and blue.

http://drummakingjourneys.com/

 

Mooji - Silence

The natural state of mind is to be silent, empty, open… it exists without intention! …If you think you need to practice silence, find silence, keep silence, then you have misunderstood.
All this, the universe, is happening in silence!

It is not about running to find some silence…it is to recognise the Silence which cannot be disturbed wherever you find yourself, what ever the circumstances, however loud the noise… reactions of any nature do not exist… it is not a behaviour or an enforcement…you and the Silence are the same.

All this talking, this pointing, is only to reveal your own Silence…and it doesn’t take time! …when you stand in front of the mirror, it doesn’t say…’Look, I am busy right now, come back in half an hour! …So powerful is the mirror of enquiry, immediately you are seen! …and then you know the indescribable, the formless directly …Maybe you cannot speak about it, but your suffering is over …your fears are over…you conquer death itself!

So many of you, at the nearest opportunity of discovery, make excuses and run away, afraid to burn the last attachment to ‘I’ …the opportunity is to face it, to feel it and to see that you are the Untouchable.

https://mooji.org/

 

 

 

T. S. Eliot - I said to my soul

art Enzo Perrazziello

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away--
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing--
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. 

Wei Wu Wei - The Inconceivable

art Autumn Skye Morrison

THE  SPACE-TIME,  subject-object  phenomenal  universe 
is  a manifestation of mind, of which day and sleep dreaming
are examples in a second degree.
The result of this individualisation process, based on seriality,
which all degrees of dreamers know as “reality,”
has no objective  resemblance  to  that  which  causes  it  to  appear,
because that which causes it to appear has no objective quality at all.
Therefore that is totally inaccessible to any form of objective cognition,
let alone of description. The only words that can indicate it at all are
This, Here, Now, and Am, and in a context which is entirely abstract.
The negative method is provisional only; it turns from the
positive to its counterpart, and then negates both. That wipes out
everything objective and leaves an emptiness which represents  fullness, 
total  absence  which  represents  total  presence.
Here the thinking (and not-thinking) process ends,
and the absence itself of that IS the Inconceivable.
Inconceivable  for  whoever  attempts  to  conceive  it. 
But who suggested that we should do that? 

excerpt from

Read more HERE

 

 

 

 

Mirabai Starr - Longing for the Beloved

There is a longing that burns at the root of spiritual practice. This is the fire that fuels your journey. The romantic suffering you pretend to have grown out of, that remains coiled like a serpent beneath the veneer of maturity. You have studied the sacred texts. You know that separation from your divine source is an illusion. You subscribe to the philosophy that there is nowhere to go and nothing to attain, because you are already there and you already possess it.

But what about this yearning? What about the way a poem by Rilke or Rumi breaks open your heart and triggers a sorrow that could consume you if you gave in to it? You’re pretty sure this is not a matter of mere psychology. It has little to do with unresolved issues of childhood abandonment, or codependent tendencies to falsely place the source of your wholeness outside yourself. The longing is your recognition of the deepest truth that God is love and that this is all you want. Every lesser desire melts when it comes near that flame.

You realize that not everyone experiences this. For some people, the spiritual journey is not so dramatic. It’s less about the overwhelming desire for union with some invisible Beloved than it is about quietly waking up. It’s about developing compassion, rather than suffering passion. There are people who never doubt that God is with them, and so there is nothing to long for.

But there are those, like you, who have felt the Divine move like an ocean inside them, and, incapable of sustaining an unbroken relationship with that vastness, feel they have been banished to the desert when the wave recedes. There is a tribe of holy lovers, who have tasted the glorious sweetness that lies on the other side of yearning, when the boundaries of the separate self momentarily melt into the One, before the cold wind of ordinary consciousness blows through again, and restores your individuality. You would risk everything to rekindle that annihilating fire. You would leave your shoes at the door and run after the cosmic flute player, if only you could hear that music one more time.

You give up everything for one glimpse of the Beloved’s face. You sneak into his chamber in the middle of the night and say, “Here I am. Ravish me.” But when you awake the next morning, swooning and alone, you realize you missed the entire encounter. You throw your clay cup on the cobblestones and it shatters. You thought you would marry, bear babies, make a career in broadcasting. You wander city streets during siesta hour and wonder where he is sleeping. Your longing and your satisfaction are reciprocal. The moan of separation is the cry of union. . . .

Read more HERE

 

http://mirabaistarr.com/

Zenkei Shibayama - Blooming

Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,
The world of the flow, the whole of
the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower,
the truth of the blossom;
The glory of eternal life is fully shining
here.