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August 2015
08/25/2015
A well of Wisdom
I keep this book beside my bed or at my reading post because it is for me like a deep well of wisdom into which I dip whenever I want or need to renew my commitment to my spiritual path, and every time I dip, I am inspired all over again.
This book is a splendid compilation of writings from Christian mystics from many Christian traditions - Fundamentalism, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Gnostic etc. - even some from Taoist and Hindu philosophies .
One of my favourites is by a Russian Orthodox monk, Hieromonk Damascene, whose essay is based on the teachings of Lao Tzu (not coincidentally one of my favourite philosophers).
“Emptiness penetrates the impenetrable”, he writes,
and “Controlling the breath to make it gentle, one can be as a little child . . . . . Descending with the mind into the secret place of the heart, and gently checking the breath, Followers of the Way now call upon the name of Him who had once been nameless. And the Way who took flesh...” (pp. 49-50).
The words of the Ancient Chinese Sage are the words of the Christ who called himself the Way, and who also taught that to enter heaven (the sacred within), we must become as a little child.
Some of the most enigmatic and challenging passages in this book are on the nature of emptiness, its deepest spiritual import. For some, including the Desert Fathers, emptiness requires the humility to recognise that our own impurity and ignorance and error prevent us from seeing the Divine that is all around and within us.
“The extent of the illumination is not dependent upon the ray of sunlight but upon the window”,
wrote St. John of the Cross, a sixteenth century Spanish mystic and close colleague of St. Teresa of Avila (pg. 239), so we must empty Self of self (small self or personality) to let God’s light can enter and shine forth.
According to ‘The Gospel of Thomas’ (written about 150 years after Christ), emptiness requires freeing the mind from the worldly illusion of opposites so that one can recognise the essential Oneness of being.
“When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside . . . . . and when you fashion an eye in place of an eye . . . . . and a likeness in place of a likeness, then will you enter the Kingdom” (pp. 159-160).
Then the mind-bending passages from C12th Meister Eckhart and C16th mystic shoemaker, Jacob Boehme, both of whom write from mystical experience of the true nature of things. Mystical experiences are experiences of the ineffable, and as such, a beyond description, so they are often described in highly metaphorical language. This makes Eckhart, Boehme and other mystics sometimes difficult to understand. But their message is clear.
Boehme writes that even the desire to hear God, to feel the Divine Presence can stand in the way. To be empty, you must:
“stand still from the thinking of self and the willing of self . . . . For it is nothing indeed but your own hearing and willing that hinder you, so that you cannot see or hear God” . . . . “. . . when you are quiet and silent, then you are as God was before nature and creature; you are what God was then” (pp. 5,6).
Centuries earlier by Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) descibed this primordial state of being “before nature and creature." In his essay, ‘To be quit of God’, Eckhart describes the poverty that Christ taught and illustrated in his own life as emptiness even from ideas about God, even from the will to know God.
“As long as a person keeps his own will, and thinks it his will to fulfill the all-loving will of God, he has not that poverty. . . . . . if one wants to be truly poor, he must be as free from his creaturely will as when he had not yet been born . . . . . a man ought to be empty of his own knowledge . . . . and be as untramelled by humanness as he was when he came from God” (pp. 250 - 251).
A tall order for a mere human, I think, but a strong reminder that the spiritual journey is, ultimately, not about gaining knowledge or good intentions, but the practice of letting go, giving up or sacrificing what we think we know, and who we think we are and listening for the small, still voice within that is the only true guide.
Cutsinger, James S. (Comp. & Ed.) 2003. Not of this world: a treasury of Christian mysticism. World Wisdom, Bloomington, Indiana.
Coming back to Mindfulness
Life has been a bit chaotic lately and I've been feeling pulled in too many directions trying to decide what I really want to do with the rest of my time in this body. Should I start painting again? Should I do more writing? Would I be of greater help working with children or with the aged? What kind of work would I be prepared to commit to? And what am I going to do with all of this study?
But I know from experience that the really useful answers never come this way, from a place of inner restlessness, discontent or uncertainty. The rational mind, I have learned, might be very good at gathering and making sense of information, but it is by no means a wise guide, and has led me astray too many times to be trusted with that responsibility.
Where my best answers about life purpose and being are those sensed deep within, coming to me through dreams, intuition or that strong gut feeling, and the best way that I have found to recognise the promptings of soul is through the practice of mindfulness.
Mindfulness brings me back to the Centre of my being, the Centre of my life, which is always at THIS MOMENT, the only point at which I have the power to reflect on past lessons, and determine how to move into my future. It is also, I know from experience, the only point at which I can enter that deep inner core of peace, and touch who I really am.
Mindfulness is, I believe, the key to psychological and spiritual maturity. If we are not mindful, we will not evolve any further than we are now, no matter what else changes. It is THAT important!
Meditation is one way of being mindful, a very good way
As you sit to meditate, allow yourself to simply be aware, noting your feelings, body sensations, thoughts etc. but not judging them as good or bad, positive or negative. They are what they are. Just recognise them, one by one, and allow yourself to enter into them.
At the end of your meditation is a good time to give yourself affirmations or suggestions that can help you make the changes you want: such as, 'I am confident and have no fear', or 'I am a beloved child of God' or 'I am becoming more patient and kind every day' or whatever (always in present tense: I am, or I am becoming; not I want or I will).
Living mindfully is even better. We can train ourselves to be mindful as we go about our day, as often as possible, especially when things don't seem to be going well.
Whenever you remember, Stop, count slowly to five or ten, take three deep breaths and relax yourself, and pay attention to what's going on inside you and out of you. You don't have to be aware of everything, just one thing at a time. You might choose to focus on different things (body sensations, feelings, thoughts, sounds outside, how the sun feels on your skin etc) at different times, if that suits you better. It doesn't really matter HOW you do it, just that you do it as often as you can.
Make it part of your daily practice until it becomes a habit. It's especially helpful to be mindful when you are about to face a problem, or interact with someone, to sense how you really feel and what thoughts are in your head.
Mindfulness creates Presence. When you are Mindful, you are more fully Present to yourself and others. You are a Presence in the world, firmly centred in your own Being and Experience. From that point of power, you are more naturally open to your own Higher Self and the Divine.
By grounding you in the Present Moment, Mindfulness increases your awareness of self and other, enabling you to see things more clearly as they really are, without all those distorting judgments, expectations and opinions. It also helps you develop a more accurate and honest understanding of yourself and how you act in the world.
Mindfulness reminds us that we are ONE. Mindfulness affects us energetically and on the soul level. When we pay more attention to what's happening within us, we also strengthen our energetic connections, both within us and with the divine energy of the cosmos. We are better able to sense our place in Nature, to feel her love for us, and pain at our insensitivity, and feel the energies of the stars gazing down on us at night.
Mindfulness makes us energetically strong. Our growing awareness of the energies all around us, and those moving with us has profound on our invisible energy body, and on the strength of our soul. The stronger our light body, the stronger our individual being, both during life and after death. If our energy or light body is weak, our being is weak, and easily pulled into others' energy patterns, so that instead of living the life we were meant to live, or have chosen to live, we are continually reacting to or against what others say, want or do. We are as out of control as moths drawn to light!
Eventually .... and this is important!....... if we continue to remain psychically weak and ineffective, to live in reaction rather than by intention, we become like those fairytale mermaids who on death became nothing but foam on the sea. Our souls do not have enough radiance to continue, and are dissolved back into the divine.
So for the sake of your personal and soul wellbeing, and your precious individuality, whenever you think of it, bring your attention back to This Moment, This Body, This Mind, and pay attention. Everything you ever need to know is within, but you will never find it if you are always outside. Nor will you ever truly know yourself.
If you want to know how to be mindful, watch an animal. In their natural state, animals are nature's experts in mindful living.
Sites worth a visit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwwKbM_vJc Jon Kabat-Zinn Mindfulness meditations with google
Self-Knowing: the Key
‘It is enlightenment to know one's self‘ (Lao Tzu)
"When one understands self, and self's relation to its Maker, the duty to its neighbor, its own duty to self, it cannot, it will not be false to man, or to its Maker." (Edgar Cayce Reading 3744-5)
Tomasz-Alen-Kopera, 'Whisper-to-the-Real- You'
Most people I talk to consider ourselves to be very self-aware, and don't give much importance to introspection (examining their thoughts) or self-observation. Nor do they place much store in what others think of them, or try to learn from them.
But really, how well do we know ourselves and why we act as we do? The truth is, not much. Research has repeatedly shown that most of us have only a vague idea, if any, at given time about how we feel, what we really think, and why we act as we do.
Unless we make a conscious effort to know ourselves and why we what we do, we will shuffle along thinking and behaving as we have been conditioned to do, stuck in old habits that we hardly even recognise, much less question. Even when things go wrong and we begin to see that our ‘usual way of being’ doesn’t really work, many just muddle through, doing and thinking the same old things.
One barrier to self-awareness is that most people think that they know themselves.
What we usually know (and even then, not much) is our ego-personality, that accumulation of traits and expectations built up in response to life's hurts or disappointments, or learned from parents, teachers and others. Most make little or no effort to look past the surface, to observe our thoughts and actions, or ask ourselves, and Socrates urged the youth of Athens to do, 'Why do I think and act as I do? What do I really believe and value? and why?' We are so asleep to our inner selves that our own reactions to outside events often surprise us. We find ourselves wondering, "Now where did that come from?" or "Why did I say that?"
Another impediment to self-knowing is that we are overwhelmingly out of touch with our feelings, and what the spirit teacher, Seth, calls our basic feeling-tone.
Yet that fundamental feeling-tone affects our feelings, which determine how we see and respond to our inner and outer experiences. We do not realise that what we perceive and experience, even our emotions, are distorted by thick layers of self-delusion, conditioning and unquestioned beliefs and attitudes. With all that interference, it’s no wonder that we cannot feel or hear the little voices of our True Self, which speak to us primarily through our emotions. It's like trying to hear whispers through several thick walls. When we hear them at all (and some part of our unconscious mind always does), the messages come through all muffled and distorted, .
For example, I might feel love, but through my learned filters of mistrust, resentment, unworthiness or fear, I consciously register suspicion and doubt about love, and that can seriously limit my ability to recognise love, or to give or receive it.
Or I might feel anger (a perfectly justified emotion in some instances), yet by the time it passes through my belief that anger is wrong, my belief in blame and judgement, my fear or sense of helplessness, I may consciously register only hurt and resentment. I avoid questioning my anger and blame, and project it onto others.
Most of our relationship difficulties, personal and social, are due to unconscious projection.
We have to dig deep to know what we're really feeling.
Let's say you're basically a positive person, but lately, feeling dissatisfied with your life. You might tell yourself that you have a good life, a happy life, a loving family and all that comes with it. 'I'm just going bored" you might tell yourself, or "My health hasn't been too good, so I'm that's why I feel this way." You may be right.
But when feeling of dissatisfaction persists and grows stronger, you may start looking deeper. "Why do I feel this way? What's wrong with me?"
In oblique ways that disguise your discontent, you might bring it up in conversations. You might ask for divine help: 'Lord, guardian angel, unconscious mind, help me to understand myself.' You might begin to pay attention to your life, your relationships, your daily routines...your thoughts .... and to the inner voices: dreams, flashes of memory, insights into your feelings and actions ...
If you have the courage not to shut down these these voices of your spirit, you will one day realise that you are NOT the person you thought you were, that your life feel too small for you, fake, inauthentic.
You might even start making changes - change your job, find new friends, take up that creative work you once enjoyed. Yet with your newly expanded awareness, you still know that something is lacking.
What is lacking, dear friend, is You. Self-knowing takes time, it takes effort, and it requires that very difficult letting go of all your self-illusions. That, my friend, is the necessary big step, and it is not easy.
But be assured, friend, that self-awareness is within your grasp. Every soul incarnated on this earth has within itself the means to achieve it. And reward for such effort is priceless: Consciousness that knows Itself.
The question is, How strong is your desire to know who you really are? How much do you want to be authentic?
The Heart's Wisdom
One of my favourite blogs is 'Macy Afterlife: the Beacon'. Mark Macy is a world expert in afterlife communications, and an assiduous commentator on the human condition, and posts loads of well-researched and insightful information about humanity and its current dilemmas. Inspired by teachers from both the spirit and earthly realms, and by his own experiences, Mark is deeply committed to the evolution of human consciousness, and frequently writes about the necessity of inner transformation.
In his post, 'Cleansing and Clearing the Cluttered Mind', (http://macyafterlife.com/2015/01/11/cleansing-and-clearing-the-cluttered-mind/) Mark explains why we get so caught up in those attitudes that keep us imprisoned in our fears, doubts and negativities, and cause so much suffering and conflict in the world, and how we might begin to release ourselves and see more clearly. Below is some of Mark's advice for getting back in touch with our true Centre, the sacred portal to the Divine - the heart.
Go to the Heart
When we move our awareness—our thinking process—from the head to the heart, we’ve moved to a place that is free from life’s dramas… a place where gratitude, empathy, forgiveness, love, and other noble values prevail.
The heart is the seat of the soul… and the soul is a small sub-ray of that brilliant source of living light… a piece of God. When we move the mind’s control center into the heart, we’re at a place where it becomes a more natural process to connect with God.
Granted, moving your awareness from the busy brain down to the peaceful heart might not come easily at first. After all, the mind has gotten accustomed to setting up shop in the brain, directly behind the body’s main sensory input stations (eyes, ears, nose, and mouth). The heart, by contrast, is more like an intimate park of flower gardens, rich lawns, and wooded areas. Coaxing the mind to leave the busy office for a while to set up shop in the park might be met with some resistance at first.
Tell the mind it can bring its laptop, if that helps. :-)
Or, better yet, try a simple technique. First, get comfortable somewhere, close your eyes, and locate your awareness… there, behind the eyes.
Then, once you get the sense of your thoughts happening in your head, here’s the tricky part: move them to the heart. It’s not something you can force. It might take some gentle coaxing. Try one of these techniques:
- Think of your mind as an elevator. Move your awareness to the back of the head, into the elevator, then proceed slowly down to the heart. It’s not as though you stay in the head and just think about the heart; it feels like your awareness—your thinking process—is moving down… down to the heart.
Or, another technique…
- Think of your mind floating gently on a lake of living, nourishing water. You can live and breathe in the water… so you drop anchor down to the heart, and you pull yourself… your mind… your thinking process… slowly, steadily down through the wonderful, nourishing water… into the heart.
When I first began my heart meditations, I found both of those techniques helpful. With practice it became easier and more natural to move to my heart without them. I’d just close my eyes and steer my thinking down to the chest.
Now I don’t even have to close my eyes. I can move to the heart while sitting at the computer or driving the car or standing in the checkout line.
Source: http://macyafterlife.com/2015/01/11/cleansing-and-clearing-the-cluttered-mind/
Two years ago, I might not have understood what an important post that is.
My own inward journey into the heart began well and truly last year, while I was drawing and writing about mandalas. Spiritual and sacred writings are full of references to Love and the Heart, but on the spiritual level, I had never really been able to get beyond them as principles and ideas.
Yes, I loved my fellow humans, philosophically, that is, and now and then I was stirred by deep, unexpected waves of love for strangers, but I found the talk about 'opening the heart', 'softening' the heart, heart-centred awareness and all that a bit cloying.
Why not simple compassion, an emotion based on intellectual awareness of our common humanity, and the realisation that 'there but for the grace of God go I'? Surely that was enough? ..... But no, Not for everything.
Then I began studying shamanism and drawing mandalas, and somehow, things began to shift. It soon became obvious that in every mandala, which I drew intuitively without any conscious intention on my part, the whole meaning and significance of the mandala was in the centre.
My mandalas became for me a journey into the centre of myself, my own heart, what I truly felt about the world, life and everything, and no matter how plain it appeared in a mandala, everything that I felt, and that sought expression in that mandala emerged from that centre. I don't mean visually. I mean in my direct experience of that mandala.
Even now, a year later, I look at those mandalas and am drawn back to the centre, for there is hidden the bottomless well of emotion that gives all ideas and beliefs their true significance and meaning. Though the centre may be nothing more than a big dot, a circle or a simple pattern, everything else in the mandala emerges in response to it.
Then in one particular shamanic encounter with a real life hawk, I clearly saw how heart and mind work together, not as different ways of perceiving but in synergy, as the two wings of understanding that give us the power to soar (July 2014 post, 'Everything teaches if we know how to see'.)
What I suddenly understood was why I was so easily distracted from my goals, and had such difficulties staying focused on anything ... because “my heart was not in it”.
Focusing with intellect alone is not sufficient. True focus and strong intention come from the heart, from a yearning towards, a passion for, a love of what is being sought, observed or studied.
Which brings me back to Mark, whose second step for creating inner peace is to "Forge a conscious connection to God" using this simple mantra:
"Dear God, our oneness is the cornerstone of my life."
Say it with feeling, for the journey into our own holiness (that is, whole-ness) begins, the mystics teach, with our earnest desire, our intense yearning for the Sacred.
08/04/2015
Learning from Nature
This morning at my favourite beach, I laid out on the shifting sands a simple mandala of found things, little bits of pumice and a few shells that I found along the shore.
What struck me as I gathered was how few shells there were, so much fewer than when I was a child. Whole tracts of beach are now quite empty of shells, and I thought that was quite sad.
It set me thinking about the depletion of sea life in our oceans, how human disregard for natural rhythms and Earth's wellbeing are rapidly altering the health of our oceans, and so that people who used to live off fish from the sea are now struggling. Australia has a terrible history of causing whole species to become extinct, and more recently, our governments have put our glorious oceans and our once thriving Great Barrier Reef under great threat from mining. We are fast selling our natural heritage down the river.
My little mandala might seem to be an homage to the sea, and it is, but it is also a wreath of mourning for what we have lost, and are fast losing. As much as I want to be positive, this expresses what was in my heart as I strolled the shore, and what has been troubling my mind - the stupidity and blindness of which we humans are capable, despite our limitless potential for greatness.
On the other hand (I cannot remain gloomy for long!), a breeze was skimming the shore, and I was intrigued by the delicate flowing movement of sand. It reminded me that we ourselves are in continuous motion, ever changing, yet because we focus on the familiar obvious patterns, we think that we are the same person as we were yesterday.
I am reminded of that on the mornings that I sit by the river. It is never the same, from moment to moment always changing, sometimes in response to seemingly tiny influences like a diving bird or a small manta ray hovering around the shoreline rocks looking for a meal.
A small rock protruding into the water causes it to ripple, each ripple sending out more and more ripples. Who know what far that effect continues into the river. A lone canoe gliding over seemingly still water cuts through it, leaving a strong wake that does not settle for ages, and if that wake meets wakes from other canoes or paddle boarders, the surface of the river as far as I can see moves in impossibly complex patterns.
We think of ourselves as this or that person, with this or that personality, but what we are is a river, a flowing process of change that is never ever the same. Who we are at any one moment is never quite who we were at another.
Why are we so determined to 'be' any one thing, any one person with any one way of thinking or being? Wouldn't it be infinitely more exciting, more realistic and also much more liberating to allow ourselves to fully and unashamedly experience who we are at any particular moment? If we did, we might begin to recognise the deep design of our individuality beneath all those changes, and be more truly ourselves.