Tag Archives: unknowable knowingness

this lucid light of livingness

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Photo: Andrew Cottam

 

sitting.
my cells singing their delight
in the pre-dawn hush.

awareing my breath’s ebb and flow
on shores that cool by the day
with winter’s arrival.

still velvety dark.
Venus is huge
and wearing a faint pearly corona.

I marvel that the light
which makes her visible to these eyes
began its journey so inconceivably long ago.*

yet I marvel even more
at this bright unknowable knowing we call awareness
which allows her luminous appearance
to be perceivable, along with all her cosmic neighbours
– this lucid light of livingness
which, unlike the intrepid photon,
has never endured a journey through matter, time and space
to arrive here

contentedly

gazing

at itself

 

– miriam louisa

* Although rays from our sun’s surface take around eight minutes to reach Earth’s surface, the actual photons can take a million years to make it out of the Sun owing to the density of the material and hence being scattered internally so many times. See The Naked Scientists

Photo by Andrew Cottam

unimaginable: unfurling unlit light

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In the deep darkness of night – no slumber in sight – bum sits on cushion, eyelids draw down of their own accord, breath flows in breath flows out.  Beat of heart, song of great silence.

Out of infinite velvet blackness points of energy emerge.

They spiral into appearance, and as they do so they take on mandala-like forms.  Some are glorious flowers.  Others are crystalline and geometric.  Others are snowflake-like, a blend of organic curvaceous-ness and geometric patterning.  Still others are spirals, simple vortexes, or radiating arms like the spira mirabilis.  There is no color, only milk-white light playing in the black vastness.

The energy forms appear to move towards the witnessing Awareness, spiraling and expanding, and then they move right through and into IT –

an endlessly unfurling pulsation
emerging, spiraling, flowering, and flowing,
penetrating and dissolving into
the unknowable Knowingness
that is ceaselessly watching.

~ echoes from emptiness

awareness is an unassailable fortress

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For those whose investment in their version of the ‘bondage’ dream is high, there’s bound to be a reaction when they meet any soul who dares to declare the immediacy of unconditional freedom.

It tends to go like this:

– if you are audacious enough to suggest that no kind of meditation practice or spiritual work will ever result in wideawake freedom (aka awakening or enlightenment), they’ll say you are truly deluded

– if you aren’t deeply engaged in analyzing your personal psychological pathology, they’ll say you’re in denial

– if you aren’t rushing around saving the lost souls, the children, the whales, the environment, they’ll say you’re irresponsible

– if you aren’t full of fear for the future with its threats of terrorism, mass destruction, financial collapse and mayhem, they’ll say you’re avoiding reality

– if you are happily and contentedly doing what you love, they’ll say you’re selfish

The good news is that none of this matters one nanojot to Awareness.  IT couldn’t give a toss.  (Just check in and see for yourself!)  Freedom is never anywhere but at the beginingless beginning.  Freedom is fundamental.  All the delusion, denial, irresponsibility, avoidance and selfishness in the universe can’t affect the freedom that simply is THIS.  Neither can accusations and insults.

Please don’t think I am trivializing or dismissing any of the practices or activities mentioned above.  There is room for every-imaginable-thing to manifest in the vastness of Life.  Everything has its place and purpose.  But once one has tired of all efforts to improve oneself and the world, and the quest has begun to move inwards rather than outwards, these things fall away of their own accord.  Perhaps they will re-emerge eventually, flowering as the focus of one’s wholly impersonal wideawake wisdom.  Perhaps not.  It ceases to matter, for one knows that whatever the dance of appearances, the Great Unlit Light of pure Awareing remains unmoved and unchanged.  It is the only unassailable fortress – yet It is without form or shape or location!

I remember my Granny teaching me the anti-bully rhyme when I was a tiny tot – “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me!”  Wise old wideawake woman.  She knew that Unknowable Knowingness was her true identity.

~ miriam louisa

thank you for the hairy ones

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This little blog was launched two years ago, on Mothers’ Day 2009, and dedicated to my sweet mother, Miriam. I’m a little late this year – it’s already Monday in this part of the world – but a post is pressing this morning, a prayer of gratitude for all mothers, including the miraculous and long-suffering Earth that is truly our lifelong womb.

Beloved Life

Thank you for Mothers

Thank you for all your awesome
ways
of replicating yourself
from simple cell-division
and eggs a zillion ways
to womb-birthed, pouch-held
babes

Thank you for the hairy
ones
the crusty, the creepy,
the slithery, the feathered ones,
the ones we love and
those that scare us silly

Thank you for the ones we call
human
our own, who built our scaffolding
from their own cells so that
the Light of your Awareness
would have a home

Thank you for their
generosity
regardless of our opinions,
our grievances, our stories, for
they made it possible for you
to create yourself
and to Know yourself

and to Know yourself
from birthing unto birthing as
Beloved

 

– miriam louisa

Photo: Slavka Gough, Bali, 2011

once you know

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Once you know

and you know that you know

that you are unknowable

Knowingness

and you fall headlong

into that wideawake wonderment

taking ITs name

as your own

at last,

at last,

IT takes over.

IT creates a new order

in the apparition

called body

and the energy mandala

called mind.

IT choreographs the dance:

the giving,

the emptying,

the cleansing

of the field

and

the opening and ordering

of a new life

mandala

ceaselessly forming and

re-forming and

alive

with energy,

shimmering

with Light,

and you find your place

as ITs centre

knowing

you are home at last.

 

– miriam louisa

my niche is the unknowable

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Mary Sedivy - Pink clouds turn into roses

 

About thirty years ago I confessed to a kindly iridologist that I felt I had failed to find my ‘niche’ in life.  He peered into my bright blue eye-maps and remarked that it was strange, because everything he could read there indicated that I was a highly capable person who could find a niche in many avenues of expertise.

It worried me, that feeling of being niche-less.  I was in awe of those who seemed, from a young age, to know exactly what they wished to do in the world and set about achieving it.  And it wasn’t helped by those who knew the potential here and kept asking when I was going to fully explore (exploit?) it.  I was in my late 40s and still wondering what I would be when I grew up.

I had all the right tools: a reasonably sane brain, a good education, some skills as an educator as well as in the area of art and design, but my life-path seemed like a meandering groping from one neti-neti to the next.

I tried being a teacher, a broadcaster, a fashion designer, a wife, a lover, a wandering yogini, a ‘professional’ artist.  All these niches ultimately failed to fit. The only role that held some promise was that of the artist, but the funny thing was that whenever the flow of genuine creating was going on in the studio, I wasn’t there.  I mean, ‘artist-me’ was AWOL.  In its place there was a vast, spacious, ‘I’-ness playing outside of all my small ideas of what should be happening.  And the moment the ‘artist-me’ tried to examine this mysterious movement, it would vaporize.  It was ungraspable and unknowable.

Later I found a philosophy that made sense of this mystery – it is spoken about by sages and artists alike as the movement of pure nondual Awareness. But back then it was a great mystery to me; it put the fire under a lifetime’s exploration of creativity.  And it eventually delivered me to the niche I had given up any hope of finding.

My niche turned out to be that ineffable nondual Awareness itself.  And the amazing thing is that it always had been!  It had been my preoccupation for decades, yet I had failed to recognize that it was a valid contender for the niche stakes.  The realization actually only hit once I was past the age and stage where niche-finding matters.  Truly, I can be quite slow …

When the penny dropped, a lifetime of seemingly incoherent bits of ridiculousness fell into place.  I fell about laughing like a lunatic.  The absurdity and awesomeness of it!  The beauty and simplicity and grace of it!  Like … landing on a cloud of rose petals … sinking into their silken perfume … resting, at last … knowing that you never have to leave … even if it were possible!

~ miriam louisa

Photograph by Mary Sedivy