Tag Archives: knowingness

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

 

the one outshining light

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Sufi dancer; Light Outshining

 

‘I’ and ‘you’ are but the lattices,
in the niches of a lamp,
through which the One Light shines.

‘I’ and ‘you’ are the veil
between heaven and earth;
lift this veil and you will see
no longer the bonds of sects and creeds.

When ‘I’ and ‘you’ do not exist,
what is mosque, what is synagogue?
What is the Temple of Fire?

– Mahmud Shabistari

 

Mahmud Shabistari was one of Sufi’s greatest poets of the 14th Century. Stressing the One Light that exists at the heart of all religious traditions, his work is one of the clearest and most concise guides to the inner meaning of Sufism, and offers a stunningly direct exposition of Sufi mystical thought in poetic form.
–  Poet Seers

In this new video Rupert Spira explains with precision and clarity how this unlit light is not external to ourselves, but the self-luminous Knowingness of everything we perceive. Never lit because never not-lit; never to be found because never-lost; never to be escaped because it is the very essence of our Being.

The video is from Rupert Spira’s Facebook page; you can also find it at his website.
The poem by Mahmud Shabistari, and the stunning image, are from Dean Keller at one of my favourite blogs:
The Beauty we Love

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

whatever the experience, you are always free

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A Solstice/Christ-mass/Seasonal gift for sentient sacred souls: an excerpt from a piece called Essentializing written by one of the clearest and dearest of contemporary teachers:

… you are always this unchanging Beingness that is the Knowingness present in all and as all experience.

It doesn’t favor love over hate.
It has no bias towards peace or war.
It does not value life over death.
It has no preference for health and well-being over sickness.
It has no bias towards happiness or suffering.
It has no bias towards enlightenment or ignorance.
It does not try to lead beings toward enlightenment.
It does not recognize “beings” as existing or as not existing.
It has no preference whether the universe appears or disappears.
It has no preference for the mind to be either joyful or sad.
It knows neither hope nor fear.

No teachers can bring you closer to it.
No practices lead to it.

It has never become identified with mind or a self.
It has never become attached to ideas or forms.
It has never “let go” because it has never grasped.
It can’t be found because it has never been lost.
It is what you are, not what thoughts say you are.

The pure and perfect unchanging awareness quality within each thought, image, feeling, sense of ego-self, emotion and all sensory perceptions is all you ever will be.
Whatever the experience, you are always free …

~ Jackson Peterson

You can read the complete article at The Way of Light

this is awesome, this is wondrous

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A week ago I said goodbye to those tropical skies that smile and shower upon the red earth and the tall gums of Capricornia Australia.  I bade farewell to the cackling Kookaburras, the inquisitive geckos, the huge Huntsman spiders…

I said goodbye and they said – Why do you farewell us, You who create us with a simple glance?  A touch?  A sniff or a taste?  A thought?  Are you leaving your mind behind?

A week ago I said hello to the steely temperate skies that hover low, gusty and wet, over this soft green land, Aotearoa New Zealand.  I said hello to the flowering Kowhai and the Tuis probing deep for nectar.  I said hello to the spindly flax, the Toi Tois and the tall cabbage trees tossing in the wind.

And they said – Welcome to yet another empty canvas within Your ever-creative mind.  Welcome, and thank You for giving us existence, for causing us to appear!  Without Your incandescent mind we remain mere patterns of potential in the womb of Emptiness!

This is awesome, this is wondrous:  the knowingness that wherever One goes, there is always only OneSelf unfolding its display in OneMind.

And there’s more – this knowingness, dear One, wears your name-tag.  But don’t be mistaken – it isn’t yours, or mine.  It’s its own OneSelf.

OneSelf, OneMind:  One – and only One.

~ miriam louisa

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archaeology of an ‘I’

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Level 1         I am my body

Task:  locate body

Outcome:  cannot specifically locate body

Conclusion:  body appears to be a sequence of sensations

 

Level 2        I am my sensations, feelings

Task:  locate whereabouts of senses

Outcome:  unable to locate senses, only find sensorial data

Conclusion:  senses appear to be a mental functioning – a knowingness

 

Level 3        I am my knowledge

Task:  locate knowledge database

Outcome:  unable to objectively locate either knowledge or knowingness

Conclusion:  knower, knowingness and knowledge appear to be inseparable from Consciousness

 

Level 4        I am Consciousness

Task:  locate Consciousness

Outcome:  unable to find Consciousness as an object separate from the seeker thereof – I

Conclusion:  Consciousness appears to be what I is

 

Level 5         I am…  I am…  I am… I am…

!!!!!!! does not compute !!!!!! system is shutting down !!!!!!!
 
 
 

ah h h h h h h h h h . . .

perfect peace