Abhishiktananda, Swami (Henri Le Saux) - Return within

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!

English version by H. Sandeman (?)
Original Language French

poetry-chaikhana

 

 

 

Naomi Stone - An enchanted place

Chasing words like feathers
in the wind,
seedlings that float away
when I try
to hold them in my hand...
Ideas turn to fluff,
like fairy dust dancing just
beyond my reach

Stars twinkle away from me,
and the moon
slips behind a cloud.
Sunlight flickers and hides
in the shadows,
and the twinkle in love’s eyes
lights up my heart.

Love is laughing
at my serious quest
teasing me,
playing hide and seek,
peeking out,
blowing kisses that turn
into flowers
all around me.

Love wants to play
and walks all over my words,
leaving dusty footprints
on the page
for me to follow
wherever they go.

Sometimes, we follow
a butterfly,
or the light from a star,
and we find
a hidden door
into an enchanted place,
where love’s secret
joys are shared.

 

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Lal-Ded - Secret of the self

Thou wert absorbed in Thine Own Self,
hidden from me;
I passed whole days in seeking Thee out
But when I saw Thee in mine own Self

O joy! Then Thou and I
disported ourselves in ecstasy
I traversed the vastness of the void alone,
Leaving behind me reason and sense,
Then came upon the secret of the self;
And, all of a sudden, unexpectedly,
In mud the lotus bloomed for me.

Like a tenuous web Shiva spreads Himself,
Penetrating all frames of all things,
If while alive, you cannot see Him,
How can you see Him after death?

 

 

Michael Markham - Simply being

I know......It's been a hard journey.
There have been tears and blood on this trail to the edge.
But here you are.......standing at the delta.
In front of you is the vast undefined edgelessness.
Behind you is the dream of we are.
Standing in the outgoing tide you can feel everything
being pulled from under who you thought you were.
When you look down, you can see only the flowing.
When you look up you can see only clouds.....moving.
But if you look to the side.....you may see someone.....laughing.

........you've had the world pulled out from underneath who you thought you were and planted your butt on a park bench just to settle in and get used to the edgelessness.
And that's pretty normal.
But all that time you have been trying to get an idea of what the hell happened..... Life has been pulsating all around you.
Squirrels have started their families and the robins have returned.
Stand up......Look around....Touch the grass........Feel the wind.
It's time to return to the only reality you can ever know.

It's time to embrace the mystery of simply being.

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John Astin - What is

Perfect Clarity

Stop for a moment and just watch the flow of experience, the flow of whatever is appearing. Notice how it is constantly changing, how the flow of experience looks and feels different from moment to moment.

Now, as you notice this constantly changing flow of experience, appreciate something quite remarkable and that is that all that’s appearing is doing so in perfect clarity. By definition the fact that something has appeared is evidence of this pristine, perfect clarity.

No matter how this moment may be appearing, no matter how it might feel or how we might describe it, it is clearly whatever it is. A moment of happiness. Perfectly clear it is that. A moment of sorrow? Perfectly clear it is that. A moment of clarity? Perfectly clear it is that. A moment of confusion? Perfectly clear it is that!

Everything may be changing, never the same from moment to moment. But the clarity is constant, the perfect, ever-present clarity of what is.

Reality, Drinking Itself

All there is, is experience.

Feel the reality of this, the undeniable fact that you can never, ever find anything outside of experience. Let it sink in, the reality that experience is all there ever is.  Go “inside” of what you think of as yourself and what do you find there? Experience. Go “outside” of what you think of as yourself and you find exactly the same thing. Experience.

Now, within this field of experience, it may feel as if there are two separate things happening—that which is being experienced and the one experiencing it. But in reality, both the apparent subject (self) and object (other), are nothing other than an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic dance of experiencing.

And so when we say that “we” are having an experience of some “thing,” what we’re really saying is that experience is experiencing itself. In every instant, no matter how we might be describing it, all that’s ever happening is that experience is tasting itself, drinking itself, feasting on itself.  Feel this, the way in which experience is constantly exploring itself, ever curious about the countless forms it takes each instant.

Drink in the richness, the luscious sensuality of it all. Enjoy this exquisite dance of life savoring itself in all its many forms.

 John Astin

 

St John Of The Cross - In the joy of night

 Upon a darkened night
on fire with all love’s longing
– O joyful flight! –
I left, none noticing,
my house, in silence, resting.

Secure, devoid of light,
by secret stairway, stealing
– O joyful flight! –
in darkness self-concealing,
my house, in silence, resting.

In the joy of night,
in secret so none saw me,
no object in my sight
no other light to guide me,
but what burned here inside me.

Which solely was my guide,
more surely than noon-glow,
to where he does abide,
one whom I deeply know,
a place where none did show.

O night, my guide!
O night, far kinder than the dawn!
O night that tied
the lover to the loved,
the loved in the lover there transformed!

On my flowering breast,
that breast I kept for him alone,
there he took his rest
while I regaled my own,
in lulling breezes from the cedars blown.

The breeze, from off the tower,
as I sieved through its windings,
with calm hands, that hour,
my neck, in wounding,
left all my senses hanging.

Self abandoned, self forgot,
my face inclined to the beloved one:
all ceased, and I was not,
my cares now left behind, and gone:
there among the lilies all forgotten.

  San Juan de la Cruz - Seven Spiritual Poems 

 

Paul Hedderman - The Trip to What's Not Happening

Thoughts are like corn kernels, and you’re the popcorn maker. There is heat and they begin to pop, and you become aware of them.For a while the thoughts are just what’s happening, like trains going by. Then you inject all this buttery goo, making it about YOU. That’s when things get sticky.Feelings and thoughts do not bring you any meaning. You are injecting them with meaning. How do you do that? By making it MY thought and MY feeling.You open up the thought or the feeling as though it BROUGHT you the meaning, though the meaning is already in the files.Let’s say I have a belief that I’m lazy. The thought comes, “I haven’t done anything today.” It could just pass. But I think it’s about ME. Then all these meanings download from my files. I follow it on the screen and it takes me into a story into the mystical place in which Paul is really bad, where Paul hasn’t done anything in his whole life and has no value whatsoever. It’s a trip into WHAT’S NOT HAPPENING.People who go to Hawaii come back with a tan. But I go on this train trip to what’s not happening. Plenty of dilemmas out in the future and the past; so I return with anxiety, recrimination, and shame. The trip’s about ME and I have a great interest in it. Why? Because I’m identified with it all.The freedom comes when you lose interest in the dilemmas.How do you lose interest? By entertaining the simple message, “I’m not that.” You simply witness what is.Something shows up, and after that something else. A thought or feeling comes into awareness, does its little acrobatic act, then the circus packs up and leaves.Then you’re conscious of the next event, and the next. It’s a very smooth clean way of living, yes? Very fluid.In a while, if you don’t get engaged in the contents, you may become engaged in the CONTEXT — in the consciousness of what’s WITNESSING everything showing up — the station — instead of getting on the trains of thoughts and trains of feelings coming by, for them to carry you away.The activity of trains is not to stay at the station; they go. They pick up passengers and they take them somewhere. But you are the central station, the awareness, through which the trains constantly come in and go out.When you’re identified as a long-lasting independent separate entity it makes you a passenger at that station. Your drive is to get on a train in the hope that it’s going to take you somewhere. You have hopes and expectations and conditional desires that society has built into you, with the hope of arriving somewhere by doing or having. Having two kids and a picket fence and so on.These trains will come and we get on them and we call them the journey of life. Sometimes the trains are locals to a heaven, and the next stop is to a hell, and it goes on like that.Now in a sense all of these thoughts and all of these feelings and all the experiences you have everyday have been anchored into being by one act and one act only: Consciousness OF. You have been conscious of every experience that makes up your life. Without consciousness there could not have been any experience that might have been noted.So here we are at the station, which is consciousness — the sphere where experience is happening. Consciousness through this interface seemingly comes in contact with our world. By becoming conscious of thoughts there forms a sort of mental experience. It takes your attention and puts it into a realm of mind that no one else can go to; YOUR own realm of mind. Your own little What’s Not Happening.Rarely is your what’s not happening matching someone else’s what’s not happening. That’s why communication here is very, very difficult, since people are talking about what’s not happening. Their condition last week, or what they hope will happen. Their whole state of being isn’t being; it’s a state of was-ing and will-ing.The only true stated communication is being now.Every train is witnessed by consciousness. Each one came through the station. Trains to Philadelphia, trains to Boston, trains, trains, trains. It doesn’t matter their destinations, they’re all witnessed by the station. The station is the one stable thing for all the trains.So you’re like a station. You’re the interface for this world, for this experience.Every train with all its feelings and thoughts is noted — but only as it’s going through. Once it’s gone through its not the station’s business anymore, which is constantly awake to what’s happening. It’s also awake to the mental experience of what’s not happening. But it doesn’t get on any train that goes through the station. It cannot give up its station-hood to become a passenger on the train.It witnesses all the acts of you as a long-lasting independent separate entity which is just a mental process called selfing, getting on trains and getting off trains, having great expectations and great disappointments, and so on and so forth. All of the activity of selfing is being witnessed by the station. The station would no longer be the station if it got on the train. It would become a passenger.Our state as the station, of being a witness, has been forgotten. This consciousness has forgotten its own nature and has become identified with the projection of a mental process. The mental process that I like to call selfing because it’s a verb, not a noun. It’s not real. It only seems real by its sense of continuality.The sense of being a noun is that of being a passenger. The passenger is going to be totally affected by what train he gets on, or what train someone else gets on. I should not have gotten on that train, etc. on and on and on and on. Selfing, selfing, selfing.You will give the trains all the meaning they have. You do not know what comes with you when you get on that train. A lot of old ideas, a lot of beliefs; you are a catacomb of conditioning called the idea of being a self. And that gets downloaded on every little trip you take as a passenger.I can try to figure out which trains are the good ones, practice deciphering the hieroglyphics on the side of the trains so I can ascertain which ones might take me to heaven or to hell. That activity is hellish, so obsessed with trying to figure things out. There’s no lightness in that, it’s really heavy.Maybe I go looking for the Schedule of All Schedules! Maybe a really old one from a cave in the Himalayas that will tell me about all the trains, when they come in and where they go. Even so I’ll still be a passenger, without a sense of the true quality of my nature, which is consciousness, the station. Of witnessing.I’ll judge the train, that it’s to blame that I didn’t get where I wanted to go. Everyone said it would get me where I’m going! Something must be deeply wrong with the train — or else with me.If you feel the sense of separation and you have a belief that there is an eternal light, you’re going to write a story that you must have done something not to be in that eternal light. You’re going to feel deeply shameful and guilty about your condition here, and your life will be a giant dance, an attempt not to feel the unbearability of being the maker of all this. If it all pertains to you you’re going to feel responsibility for everything you see around you.Being at the station is like a long pause. The pause to me is like an eternal moment. There is no time in a pause.So entertain a pause. You can live in that pause. That’s the station. It is a recognition of what’s obvious, here in the moment. Your mind, when introduced to what’s obvious, has the ability to be convinced by its own recognition that this place is totally crazy and contrived, that it’s a dream. An active realization takes place. Because it’s so easy to see what’s not happening for what it is – what’s not happening!The simple recognition that your mental experience is truly not happening on the level you think it is, that’s your release. Your relief.

The Trip to What's Not HappeningText by Paul Hedderman / Edited by James Saint CloudWednesday, June 23, 2010

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thanks to Roxane Chapdelaine