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Monday, September 25, 2023

Alain Joly - Isn’t Life a Simple Thing?


 

 

 We as an apparent body and mind are nothing but the conditions met for the apparition of a world and all the resulting experiences that take place within it. We are simply housing the thoughts, feelings, and sense perceptions necessary to enact experience, and give it a shine of reality. But the essential of what we are is neither in thoughts, nor in feelings, nor in sense perceptions. The essential of a mind is made of consciousness. Awareness is its structure and its backbone, without which there would be nothing left. If it wasn’t for its awaring quality, our mind would be no mind. Our thoughts would crumble and disappear to never reappear. Our feelings and sensations would suddenly blacken and decay in an instant, to be never formed again. And the world would be swallowed back into infinity, if it wasn’t for the consciousness that gave it its essence and knowability. Look as you may, you won’t find a mind of your own anywhere. At best, just a few scattered thoughts, and the momentary and illusory appearance of a self.

Observe carefully. A few thoughts can never make a mind; and neither could some random feelings. You couldn’t own the necessary self that you need to function in a world, without some inseparable and indispensable measure of knowing. So it is all about knowing. It is all about being conscious. Awareness holds it all together — your body; your thoughts and feelings; your world as sense perceptions. All of these come into existence at the only condition that an ‘awareness’ is present. If awareness goes, you go. If consciousness goes, everything with you go. The world goes. No bodies viable. No flower fields. No Milky Way. Everything falling apart. Universe shut black. Just a mess! That’s the power of consciousness! Far from being a mere function of the body, awareness is what holds the body and the world together. It is the essence of everything. It is the indispensable matrix. It is the ocean in which the waves and currents of thoughts, sensations, and world are dancing. And it has no home where to rest but itself. In fact, it is itself a resting place for all apparent minds, bodies, things, selves that make up a world. Consciousness gives existence with its being, allows relationship with its knowing faculty, and brings the consolidation of happiness with its loving nature. Then it returns into itself and stays there, in utter peace and completeness — replete with itself. And when you have seen it all as it is, and yourself as you are — indivisible being — then might come simply a swell of awe. God, isn’t life a simple thing?

 


 

https://thedawnwithin.com/ 

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Saturday, September 23, 2023

Rainer Maria Rilke - All life is being lived

 

art Willem Haenraets

 

 And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances,
or streets, as they wind through time?

Is it the animals, warmly moving,
or the birds, that suddenly rise up?

Who lives it then? God, are you the one
who is living life?



Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

 


 

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Rupert Spira - Waiting Without Waiting, an Essay on Jean Klein

 

 I have read many of Jean Klein’s books, but I cannot tell you anything about his teaching. Anything said about it would be the mind’s attempt to reduce the infinite to the finite. If we want to speak of it, we should remain silent.

Likewise, anything we say about Jean Klein as a person tells us nothing about him. To know his teaching, the mind must give up its knowledge; to know him as a person, one must cease being a person.

My mother once visited the Albanian painter, Chatin Sarachi, and asked him about God, ‘If God exists, how do you dare even mention his name?’ he replied. Jean Klein was a man after Sarachi’s heart. How could the mind, which is itself an apparent fragmentation of reality, ever know let alone speak of it? The mind should tremble in the face of reality and fall to its knees in silence.

Jean Klein lived on his knees in silence. This silence is not the absence of sound; it lies behind and within both sound and its absence. It is the silence that Alice Meynell refers to when she writes, ‘My silence, life returns to Thee in all the pauses of her breath. Hush back to rest the melody that out of thee awakeneth, and Thou, wake ever wake for me.’

As a concession to one who longed for the peace of their true nature, Jean Klein would sometimes say, ‘Listen!’, and then, ‘Be the listening!’

Or, ‘Wait without waiting’.

When our waiting is divested of its object, it stands revealed as peace; when our longing is divested of the beloved, it stands revealed as love. When the perceiver merges with the perceived, there is only perceiving; when perceiving subsides, beauty shines.

Jean Klein was an artist. He didn’t see the world as a distraction from God’s being; he saw it shining with God’s being, as God’s being. He felt that a true work of art comes from this intuition or understanding, and becomes, as such, a pathway through which the contemplator of it may be taken to their true nature. Like the painter, Paul Cezanne, Jean Klein felt that the purpose of a work of art was ‘to give people a taste of nature’s eternity’.

Klein particularly felt this power in music. The opening verses of Rumi’s epic poem, ‘The Masnavi’, could have been written by him: ‘Anyone who has been separated from someone they love will understand my music. Every separation is an echo in the heart of the great separation, every sorrow an invitation to return. For anyone who has been taken from their home longs to go back.’

Jean Klein’s other great contribution to the contemporary expression of the non-dual understanding was his approach to yoga, rescuing it from new-age interpretations and restoring to it its original sacred significance. He understood that the body is not experienced as a solid object but as the ‘experience of sensing’, floating weightlessly like a cloud in the open, empty, loving sky of awareness. As this ‘energy body’ is surrendered into this transparent, luminous, loving presence, it gradually expands into it and is, in turn, permeated by it, like a cloud expanding into the sky becomes permeated by its emptiness. Each mingling and exchanging their substances until only this transparency, luminosity and love remains. That is the true body.

This is the meaning of Shiva Asana – the ultimate posture. Not a fixed position that the body adopts whilst lying on the floor but, in Christian terms, the ‘transfiguration’ of the physical body into the body of pure knowing, the body of love.

On the path of yoga, we surrender the body; on the path of knowledge, we surrender the surrenderer; on the path of love, we surrender the surrendering. In Jean Klein’s teaching, all three approaches come together as one.



https://rupertspira.com/

 

 

Sunday, September 10, 2023

Jiddu Krishnamurti - The quality of silence

 



 “ The quality of silence is not felt by the brain; it is beyond the brain.
Stillness is beyond its range, beyond all imagination, beyond all desire.  
As I watched the sea, so very still, I really became part of everything.
I was everything.
I was the light, and the beauty of love.
To say “I was a part of everything” is wrong:
the word “I” is not adequate because I really wasn’t there.
I didn’t exist.
There was only that stillness, the beauty, the extraordinary sense of love.
That leaf and that eucalyptus and the blue shining water were not different from me.
The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone,
no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything.
Then it comes silently, and makes a golden path in the very stillness,
which was at the beginning, which is now, and which will always be there.”

 


 

 

 

Sunday, September 3, 2023

Dorothy Hunt - Tendrils of Mind

 


No matter how many words
arise in your mind,
or how many places
its musings travel;



No matter how many
thoughts or opinions
it clings to,
how many attachments
to how many stories;



No matter how many shoots
called projections or memories,
or how many judgments
it imagines are true;



There is one single tendril
wound round all the others,
that must be unwound
if you want to be free;



The last one to drop
is the one you most cherish,
the one that insists
its productions are real;



The tendril that causes
all of your suffering?
The one that holds tightly
to a thought called "me."

 


 

https://www.dorothyhunt.org/home 

 

 

Sunday, August 20, 2023

Fakhruddin Iraqi - What a shame!

 

 

 Many are the pains I've endured, what a shame!
My desires not fulfilled, not at all, what a shame!

In this world every door that I saw, I opened,
but no heart-holder’s face I ever saw, what a shame!

I became despondent, for before this hopeful eye
no fair-cheeked beauty ever came, what a shame!

Never did I see in this world a rose-garden
that didn't scrape my eye with a thorn, what a shame!

A beloved have I who does not recollect me:

Who else has such a beloved, [so aloof]? What a shame!

He observes my sickly heart, but never does he ask,
“What ever happened to that one who was infirm?” What a shame!

One-hundred times I've been to the threshold of his intimacy—
not once did he acquiesce to grant me audience, what a shame!

To this heart of mine from lamenting for his distance
arrives a [different] sorrow every moment, what a shame!

Without your face, my days have now expired;
not much more is remaining of this life—what a shame!

Of ‘Iraqi he doesn't inquire, until [‘Iragi] dies.
‘Thereupon says the World, “He's died. Yes, what a shame!”

 


 

 

download source text PDF:  HERE

Monica Dayakar - The Nothingness Of It All...

 


My heart was just breaking...

And yet strangely there was the utter peace of the quiescent centre that never left...

Even as my feet crossed the thresh hold...
There was not the slightest inclination to look back...

There was no back left...
Nor front...

The heart was just collapsing into itself...
And there was simultaneously...
An utter peace with it...
Even as the life I'd known...
The life that I'd called home...
Was evaporating right in front of my eyes...

Homeless I stood for a second...
One foot in...
And the other out...
The door...

My throat caught between a laugh and a cry...
I stood there stripped naked...
Of a lifetime...

And the feet began to move... of their own accord...

The caterpillar approach... suddenly gone...
The tendency to grasp the next leaf...
With the fore legs
Before the letting go of the hind...

Centerless the world spun...

Brilliantly hued...

I had lost my mind...

And love bubbled up...
And overflowed...
All over the land...
Colouring the world...

Hullo sunshine...

Life was heartbreakingly beautiful...

Even as it turned towards everyone and everything again...

Even on the me I had left behind...

It was like looking upon my self...

Everywhere and yet nowhere to be found...

Seeing as if for the first time...
Through baby eyes...

As love curled its fingers around itself...
And there was nothing there to grasp...
Not even love...

And I no more know what to call this...

It's not even as if you and I are each other...
As opposed to being separate selves...

Feels more like where you and I are not...

Yet there I cannot hold you close...
Nor kiss you...
Nor call you beautiful...
Or say I love you...

Only in this imaginary realm...

Can I call it love...

And say I love you...

Kissing you...
Kissing me...

It's impossible to make head or tail of it...

But how could I even begin to describe this...

The bliss of the hole in the heart...

An emptiness I'd been running away from...

The nothingness of it all...

And the everything-ness...

The emptiness... lush with the fullness...

The Nothingness Of It All...

Silent words arising...

The ocean sighing...

Collapsing back into itself...

Back...

Into...

The Nothingness Of It All

 


 

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Thursday, August 17, 2023

Rumi - Silence

 


"The story admits of being told up to this point,
But what follows is hidden, and inexpressible in words.
If you should speak and try a hundred ways to express it,
'Tis useless; the mystery becomes no clearer,
You can ride on saddle and horse to the sea-coast,
But then you must use a horse of wood (i.e. a boat).
A horse of wood is useless on dry land,
It is the special vehicle of voyagers by sea.
Silence is this horse of wood,
Silence is the guide and support of men at sea."

{The Masnavi of Jalaluddin Rumi. Abridged translation by
E. H. Whinfield, p.326.}