Tag Archives: changeless peace

give us light, o light of lights

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Arti - Light

 

Jyoti Jyoti Jyoti Swayam
Jyoti Jyoti Jyoti Param
Jyoti Jyoti Jyoti Arul
Jyoti Jyoti Jyoti Sivam
Vaama Jyoti Soma Jyoti
Vaana Jyoti Jnaana Jyoti
Maaha Jyoti Yoga Jyoti
Vaata Jyoti Naada Jyoti
Ema Jyoti Vyoma Jyoti
Eru Jyoti Veeru Jyoti
Eka Jyoti Eka Jyoti
Eka Jyoti Jyotiye

~

Light O Light of Self-Effulgence

Light O Light of Absoluteness

Light O Light of Gracefulness

Light O Light of Auspiciousness

Light of Siva, Light of Moon

Light Divine, Light of Wisdom

Light of Heaven, Light of Yoga

Light of Wind, Light of Sound

Light Delight, Light of Water

Rising Light, Vital Light

The Only Light, The Only Light

Give us Light, O Light of Lights

Arti Chant

The image and chant were posted by Tina Koskelo on her beautiful blog being silently drawn with the title Lighting of the Candle.  (Thank you Tina!)  It’s a perfect fit for this blog, which is an ongoing celebration of The Only Light, The Light of Lights.

The Light of Lights is ever-present and inescapable – it wears your name, sounds as your voice, feels your every feeling, thinks your every thought and performs your every deed. If you doubt this, just experiment with trying to separate any of these self-attributes (identity, speech, feelings, thoughts and deeds) from that which is aware of them. That Which Is Aware of them IS the Light of Lights.

Whatever forms your Yuletide observance take, may they be blessed with peace and harmony. May you turn towards the New Year with courage and unswerving awareness of your luminous immensity.

 

please take these offerings

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They often sneak up on me at this time of the year – a gaggle of words-wanting-shared. Yes, it’s birthday time – not a blog birthday, but another tick in the annual count for she-who-scribbles while her spacecraft steers itself around the sun…

Birthdays are a good time to reflect on one’s blessings, and to offer gratitude to our friends for their kindness and thoughtfulness. I always begin my birthday with a gesture of thanks to my mother, who not only gave me the miraculous opportunity for life, but also fostered, nourished and inspired the flourishing of that life in every way possible.

Now in my eighth decade, and delighting in life regardless of its curved balls, I feel to share some of the observations that have delivered me to this joy. It’s the best I can offer; may your mind and heart be able to receive.

Image source - https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/BoneStructure/

 

Life hurts.
But what you are never feels pain.

Everything changes.
But what you are remains unchanged, eternally.

You’re flat and exhausted and depressed.
But what you are is forever poised as equanimity.

You’re broke, stressed, squeezed dry, homeless and hungry.
But what you are is unaffected and impartial.

You’re smashed by disappointment, betrayal, abandonment.
But what you are is ever calm, accepting and unbroken.

You’re afflicted by physical and mental aberrations, abnormalities, imbalances.
But what you are never suffers for one second.

 

So what you are is clearly something with which you need to become very familiar. And it’s e-a-s-y to do so. You don’t need a formal introduction. You don’t need a manual or a map or a guide book. You don’t need to change your religion or your beliefs (although changes may well occur as a result). You don’t need a 12-step plan or a meditation practice.

What you are is more obvious and closer than the tip of your nose. It’s the one experience you can never escape, 24/7.

What would you call that? Your aliveness? Your awareness? Your presence? All these words come close, but none are ultimately true or exact. Why?

Because they aren’t yours. Or mine. Or anyone’s. Drop the personal pronoun, and there you are – radiant all-knowing alive presence. The Light of Knowingness, self-luminous, always-on, never-needing fuel or flint…

And that is what you are – free, fulfilled and flourishing as all you conceive, perceive and experience. All of it.

How wondrous that this is possible – that this primordial awareness is huge enough to hold the entirety of creation, excluding nothing – yet be unaffected and unmoved by any expression of its handmaiden, consciousness.

It is truly The Beloved, the Godhead of the saints and sages and poets.

And it is what you are.

 

Image source

 

this shines on regardless

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Bill Viola - Catherine's Room, Scene 1

 

This shines on

whether I’m in bitch mode or radiating benevolence

whether I’m depressed or enjoying equanimity

whether I’m achingly weary or frolicking tirelessly.

 

This shines on

whether my bookshelves are stacked with scriptures, chick-lit, crime or porn

whether my shoes are microfiber or leather, my coat cotton or mink

whether my fridge is piously vegan or robustly carnivore.

 

This shines on

whether my philosophical tendencies veer towards the scientific and secular

or the mystical and metaphysical

whether I’m a closet optimist disguised as a cynic

or a knee-jerk nay-sayer, jus sayin

 

Don’t be fooled. This shines on

– pristine, incorruptible –

regardless.

 

This shines on

whether you agree with me as you scan these words

or jump to defend your own view

whether you accept me as a flicker of the vast Light we are

or turn your back on our inextricable intimacy.

 

This shines on

and in, and from, and through, every perception,

every experience of every face and fact of World

known by human and non-human Knowingness

(and I exclude nothing, no thing in creation

from that capacity for Knowingness).

 

This shines on.

The sages call it Reality, but beware: it’s not a thing, an object

or even a state. To name it is to turn from it, but it could care less.

It shines on regardless.

 

– miriam louisa

To be continued: The implications…

Image: Bill Viola – Catherine’s Room, Scene 1

the realisation of radiance

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A luminous piece today written and illustrated by Chameli Ardagh

This Unlit Light: Painting by Chameli Ardagh - The Queen of Trust

You are the light of awareness
embodied in time and space.

Embodied awareness brings forth
embodied consciousness,
which is radiant light.

Bring your attention to the field of luminous awareness
that illuminates your experience right now.
Without this clear light of awareness
you would be without experience.

You cannot think or imagine your way
to this natural luminosity, although it
illuminates your thoughts and memories
and everything else in your experience,
as it is also illuminating itself.

Light illuminates light.

The primordial Shakti,
the Light of Manifestation,
is this self arising luminosity which permeates:

1~ the object of your awareness
2~ the one who is aware,
3~ and awareness itself.

Becoming aware of awareness
within yourself and others is
Sri Vidya, the realization of radiance.

In your embodiment practice you unclench
the fixation onto the appearances in the mind.

By recognizing and relaxing the automatic
mental and physical and emotional
reactivity towards your experiences,
the energetic knots in your body softens
and more Prana Shakti (breath and life force)
is allowed to flow through.
You open as a translucent and continuously unfolding
embodiment of luminous awareness

Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.

Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace.

– Upanishads

Practice – the Realization of Radiance

Rest in an open focus of the radiant field of awareness,
hold that which you are experiencing
within the awareness field of light.

Experience the object that the
light of your awareness is illuminating,
and the field of illumination both at the same time.

Thinking and feeling, sensation and memory,
fantasy and desire are all of luminous nature
as is your own awareness.

Art (The Queen of Trust) and words by Chameli Ardagh at Awakening Women

 Also from Chameli Ardagh:

who moves you?

it’s closer than a heart-beat

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the profound peace that flows
into the space left vacant by the dissolving of the ‘doer’
is the very peace so long sought by that doer

it’s a cool drink of pure water
on a stifling summer’s day
it’s a down doona on a chilly night

it’s the quiet rapture of immeasurable relaxation

it passes all understanding

and it’s closer than a heart-beat

.

~ miriam louisa
echoes from emptiness

.

not one iota of change, ever

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First we had Simone Weil advising us to beware of imagination’s superglue at work patching up the rips in the ‘me’-cocoon.  Then Teresa Dunyati-Long, warning us not to get stuck in the imagination because its pretty pics and stories are sourced, by default, from the past, from memory.  So?

The movement of thought which we label ‘imagination’, and which we tend to value very highly, turns out to be an unhelpful tool if we are serious about what it might mean to know unconditional freedom.  The problem is that it’s so easy to – yes – imagine what freedom will be like, what it will mean.  Or happiness, enlightenment – whatever.  But as everyone knows, painted cakes don’t satisfy hunger.  And our stories, richly illustrated and annotated, are just painted cakes.  Yummy, not.  Thing is, we love our stories.  So much so that we starve for the very thing we hunger.

When it comes to Truth-being, even for one minute, we know how impossible it seems, at first, to simply … be It.  Right now, just this, here.  The movement of thought is faster than our ability to see it coming, and before one knows it – literally – it’s off spinning pictures, labels, formulae, strategies about Truth-being.  It’s the magic carpet zooming in and whisking one off to … fantasy land.  Again.

Sooner or later it’s understood that the very thing we idolize as being our major tool for awakening – for freedom from the manic boredom of our lives – is its arch enemy.

Don’t get me wrong, imagination is a cool tool.  It serves our lives in untold exciting ways.  It just depends on what we want.  Do we want endless entertainment?  Fine, perfect tool.  But if we’re after the godly goodie spoken of by all the sages and saints who have walked before us – the changeless peace that “passeth all understanding,” it is useless, and worse.  It’s the super-spawner of countless red herrings.

Check it out for yourself:  Whatever can be imagined, however potent or paralyzing, sublime or depraved, makes no difference whatsoever to the Truth-being that is aware of it.  Did Einstein’s e=mc leave one tiny trace?

Not one iota of change.  Ever.  This unlit light remains unsullied, unaffected, undivided.  Just so.