The mystics come back to us from an encounter with life’s most august secret, as Mary came running from the tomb; filled with amazing tidings which they can hardly tell. We, longing for some assurance, and seeing their radiant faces, urge them to pass on their revelation if they can…

                                          --Evelyn Underhill

All mystics speak the same language, for they come from the same place.

                                          --Louis-Claude de Saint Martin

I exist as I am, that is enough.

If no other in the world be aware, I sit content.

And if each and all be aware, I sit content.

One world is aware, and by far the largest to me,

And that is myself.

And whether I come into my own today,

or in ten thousand or ten million years,

I can cheerfully take it now,

or with equal cheerfulness,

I can wait.

Ordinary men hate solitude,

But the master makes use of it,

embracing his aloneness,

realizing he is one with the whole universe.

When the eyes of the heart are opened, the creation is revealed as it really is, the body of the divine light. Everything in it is shown irradiated naturally by light and known as utterly sacred. Being initiated into this glory is essential for all of us now for it is only by knowing what nature really is and in what a splendid divine theatre we are that we will find in ourselves the hope and energy and passion necessary to do everything in our power to protect the planet and all the miraculous life it enfolds.

We can discover how to attune ourselves to the music of this one life. We can nurture in ourselves the vision of the child, the poet, the artist, the one who lives at one with nature. We can learn how to heal the heart. Healing the heart is about cherishing in every sense: cherishing the soul which has been neglected for so many centuries. Cherishing the body which has been despised, rejected, and neglected; cherishing the lives which have been entrusted to us; cherishing the earth, which is the great field of all our endeavors.

Glorious is the moment we sit in the palace, you and I

Two forms, two faces, but a single soul, you and I

The flowers will blaze and bird cries shower us with immortality

The moment we enter the garden, you and I

What a miracle, you and I, one love, one lover, one fire

In this world and the next, in an ecstasy without end

You are a valuable and necessary piece of the whole, why do you feel alone? Merely open your heart to feel my embrace, and the embrace of all that is, we are waiting for you.

Ascend with great intelligence from earth to heaven, and again descend to earth, and unite together the powers of higher things with lower things. Thus you will receive the glory of the whole world, and darkness will fly from you.

The ancient Masters

didn't try to educate the people,

but kindly taught them to not-know.

When they think that they know the answers,

people are difficult to guide.

When they know that they don't know,

people can find their own way.

If a country is governed with tolerance,

the people are comfortable and honest.

If a country is governed with repression,

the people are depressed and crafty.

When the will to power is in charge,

the higher the ideals, the lower the results.

Try to make people happy,

and you lay the groundwork for misery.

Try to make people moral,

and you lay the groundwork for vice.

Thus the Master is content

to serve as an example

and not to impose her will.

She is pointed, but doesn't pierce.

Straightforward, but supple.

Radiant, but easy on the eyes.

We always make offerings to the sun,

and to the mountains,

and to the stars.

That is why we live here...

we are the elder brothers.

We have not forgotten the old ways.

How could I say that I do not know how to dance?

We still know how to dance.

We have forgotten nothing.

We know how to call the rain.

If it rains too hard we know how to stop it.

We call the summer.

We know how to bless the world and make it flourish

                                                  ~The Kogis

Fill your bowl to the brim

and it will spill.

Keep sharpening your knife

and it will blunt.

Chase after money and security

and your heart will never unclench.

Care about people's approval

and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.

The only path to serenity.

Do we seek those things that are elusive, or do those things elude us which we seek?

With the sacred marriage of all things, in reconciliation of self, we return to where we started and know the place for the first time; know that everything we are, and think and do springs always from the divine ground and falls back into the divine essence. Life is then lived naturally as a completely sacred experience where all the old barriers between body and spirit, heaven and earth, life and death, are dissolved into an inexpressable experience of union, peace, and joy.

Solitude is resonant with a music as remote and vivid as the tremor of the stars. Out of all dream Athene arises grave, clear-eyed, forever youthful. About her a void tuned beyond all music, crossed by speedless intimations, threads of sound, of force, of light, more pure than frost. She tells me that silence, like sunlight, will illuminate me in the gods, and will deliver me from the phantom of ignorance. Silence will unite me with the gods themselves.

By a green jade lake-what a wonderful sight: an old hermit fathoming Tao. Aren't they the lucky ones-humble and still, quietly humming the melodies of heaven?

                                     ~Loy Ching-Yuen

In order to hear the voice within, you must first shut your own mouth.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would apppear to man as it is - infinite.

                                                ~William Blake

If the psychic entity had been unveiled from the beginning and known to its ministers, and not just to a secluded master in a screened chamber, the human evolution would have been a rapid soul-outflowering, not the difficult, checkered and disfigured development it now is; but the veil is is thick and we know not the secret light within us; the light in the hidden crypt of the heart's innermost sanctuary.

                                                    ~Sri Aurobindo

One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air...And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is realted to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it mad a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, ans an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things--plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and spinning planets and the expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time.

                                        ~John Steinbeck/Edward Ricketts

Do you feel connected?

Wholeness experienced first hand cannot be tryannical, for it is infinite in its diversity and finds itself mirrored and embedded in each particular, like the Hindu goddess Indra's net, a symbol of the universe, which has jewels at all the vertices, each one capturing the reflections of the entire net and so containing the whole. Some would have us worship, uniformly, at the altar of oneness, using the idea of unity rather than an ongoing encounter with it to steamroller-like, flatten out all differences. But it is the unique qualities of this and that, their particular individuality and properties - in their eachness and their suchness, if you will - that all poetry and art, science and life, wonder, grace, and richness reside.

All faces resemble each other, yet how easily we see in each uniquness, individuality, an identity. How deeply we value these differences. The ocean is a whole, but has countless waves, every one different from all the others; it has currents, each unique, ever changing; the bottom is a landscape all its own, different everywhere; similarly the shoreline. The atmosphere is whole, but its currents have unique signatures, even though they are just wind. Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession..........Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

IF ONLY

It doesn't matter whether you are using drugs or meditation, alcohol or club med. divorce or quitting your job. There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation has been faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation to sand down your own rough edges. You must be willing to let life itself be your teacher. This is the path of working where you find yourself, with what is here and now. This is it - this place, this dilemma, this job. The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in, no matter how unpleasant, discouraging, limited, unending, or stuck they may appear to be. So, if you think your spiritual state is no good, or the conditions aren't right, maybe if you had more money, or a car, or waited a few months, or were in a cave in the Himalayas, or an Asian monastery, or on a beach in the tropics, that it would make your spirituality stronger - think again. When you got to your cave or your beach, there you would be, with the same mind, the same body, the same breath that you already have here. After 15 minutes or so in the cave, you might get lonely, or decide you want more light, or heat. On the beach it might be raining or cold. There is always something to dislike. So why not admit that you need to become stronger right where you are? Right in this moment, touch the core of your being and invite the goddess to enter and heal you. If you can do this, then the cave or beach or monastery can offer up their full richness to you, but so will all other moments and places.

My foot slips on a narrow ledge: in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, by finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us, what one lama refers to as "the precision and openness and intelligence of the present." The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment, it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this minfulness of now into each event of the ordinary life.

                               ~Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

She comes to the thoughts of those who know her beyond thought, not to those who imagine she can be attained by thought. She is unknown to the learned and known to the simple. She is seen in nature in the wonder of a flash of lightning. She comes to the soul in the wonder of a flash of vision.

                                                     ~Kena Upanishad

No words can describe it, nor example point to it

Samsura makes it no worse, nor Nirvana make it better

It has never been born, and has never ceased

It has never been liberated, nor been deluded

It has never existed, nor been non-existent

It has no limits at all. It does not fall into any kind of category

Profound and tranquil

Free from complexity

Uncompounded by luminous clarity

Beyond the mind of conceptual ideas

This is the depth of the all

In this there is not a thing to be removed

Nor anything that needs to be added

It is merely the immaculate looking naturally at itself.

When the Master governs, the people

are hardly aware that he exists.

Next best is a leader who is loved.

Next, one who is feared.

The worst is one who is despised.

If you don't trust the people,

you make them untrustworthy.

The Master doesn't talk, he acts.

When his work is done,

the people say, "Amazing:

we did it, all by ourselves!"

                                                 ~Tao Te Ching

I am blind and do not see the things of this world; but when the light comes from above, it enlightens my heart and I can see, for the eye of my heart sees everything; and through this vision I can help my people. The heart is a sanctuary at the center of which there is a little space, wherein the Great Spirit dwells, and this is the eye. This is the eye of Wakantanka by which he sees all things, and through which we see him.

                                                         ~Black Elk

The eye with which I see Goddess is the same as that with which she sees me. My eye and the eye of Goddess are one eye, one vision, one knowledge, and one love.

The Master observes the world / but trusts his inner vision. / He allows things to come and go / His heart is open as the sky.

An eye is meant to see things. The soul is here for its own joy.

                                                     ~Rumi

Your whole body must be united in laughter...you should shake with merriment from head to foot...I want you to laugh with your whole heart and soul, with all the breath of life...you will see how the laughter that comes from such a heart defeats the world.

                                           ~Sri Ananda Mayi Ma

The truly wise person kneels at the feet of all creatures and is not afraid to endure the mockery of others.

We of the here and now are not for a moment hedged in by the time-world, nor confined within it...we are incessantly flowing over and over to those who preceded us...We are the bees of the invisible. We deliriously gather the honey of the visible, to accumulate it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

I have found her whom my soul loveth; I will hold her, and not let go...I am my beloved's, and she is mine.

The beginning of the universe

Is the mother of all things.

Knowing the mother, one also knows the sons.

Knowing the sons, yet remaining in touch with the mother,

Brings freedom from the fear of death.

Keep your mouths shut,

Guard the senses,

And life is full.

Open your mouth,

Always be busy,

And life is beyond hope.

Seeing the smallest insight;

Yeilding to force is strength.

Using the outer light, return to insight,

And in this way be saved from harm.

This is learning constancy.

What is firmly established cannot be uprooted.

What is firmly grasped cannot slip away.

It will be honored from generation to generation.

Cultivate Virtue in your self,

And Virtue will be real.

Cultivate it in the family,

And Virtue will abound.

Cultivate it in the village,

And Virtue will grow.

Cultivate it in the nation,

And Virtue will be abundant.

Cultivate it in the universe,

And Virtue will be everywhere.

Therefore look at the body as body;

Look at the family as family;

Look at the village as village;

Look at the nation as nation;

Look at the universe as universe.

How do I know the universe is like this?

By looking!

Under the sword lifted high there is Hell, making you tremble. But go ahead, and you have the land of bliss.

                                                     ~Musashi

The Divine and the Demonic are very close together, sharing two halves of the same soul; only a thin line separates them/us. We, who are capable of divinity, are equally capable of the demonic, and the deepest of all demonic activity is the use of our divine ingenuity to invent destruction. Divinity is a choice available to all.

No words can describe it, nor example point to it

Samsura makes it no worse, nor Nirvana make it better

It has never been born, and has never ceased

It has never been liberated, nor been deluded

It has never existed, nor been non-existent

It has no limits at all

It does not fall into any kind of category

Profound and tranquil

Free from complexity

Uncompounded by luminous clarity

Beyond the mind of conceptual ideas

This is the depth of the all

In this there is not a thing to be removed

Nor anything that needs to be added

It is merely the immaculate looking naturally at itself.

Fix thy mind on Me, give thy heart's love to Me, consecrate all thy actions to My service, hold thine own self as nothing before Me. To Me then shalt thou come. Truly I promise, for thou art dear to Me, thou art Me.

                                               ~Bhagavad Gita

We ARE that which we seek

Spiritual enlightenment is similar to the merchant man seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world; and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I'm a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.

The eye is not strong enough to look at the brilliant sun, but you can watch its light reflected in water. Pure being is too bright to behold, yet it can be seen reflected in the mirror of this world. For non being is set opposite to being, and catches its image in every moment.

Like a child separated at birth from its mother, we are separated from the Ground of Being. This separation is experienced by us as an exile, a state of disharmony and disunion. Form it has come our present dualistic, fragmented consciousness, and the fears and anxieties which torment us. But the memory of fusion or union with the Ground of Life lives on in us as a longing for reunion, for the ecstasy of belonging once again to that greater other. The mystics and sages of all times and cultures have tried to reveal to us what they have discovered: that we are in the Ground like a fish in the sea, like a bird in the air, and have tried to help us dissolve the illusion of our separate existence so that we would experience ourselves here and now, in this dimension, as what we truly are -- Divine Being.

There was something formless yet complete that existed before heaven and earth; without sound, without substance, dependant on nothing, unchanging, all pervading, unfailing. One may think of it as the Mother of all things under heaven. Its true name we do not know.

                                                  ~Lao Tzu

If you want to practice in this Way, you must do it in the creative evolution of yin and yang, of heaven and earth; realize its experience in the midst of all things and all events, and practice it and hold it in the presence of all people.

This is work that is alive, effervescent, free, liberated, gloriously enlightened, true, and great. Do you think it can be attained by people who shut the door and sit quietly with blank minds?

                                                  ~Liu I-Ming

Nothing in the world

is as soft and yielding as water.

Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,

nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard;

the gentle overcomes the rigid.

Everyone knows this is true,

but few can put it into practice.

Therefore the Master remains

serene in the midst of sorrow.

Evil cannot enter his heart.

Because he has given up helping,

he is people's greatest help.

True words seem paradoxical.

                                                      ~Lao Tzu

...And the spirit of wisdom came to me...I loved her above health and beauty, and chose to have her instead of light, for the light that comes from her never goes out. And all such things as are either secret or manifest, them I know. For wisdom, which is the worker of all things, taught me...For she is the breath and power of the ALL, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the universe; a drop of dew that at the morning comes down upon the earth...for she is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order of the stars: being compared with light, she is found before it.

Every particle of the world is a mirror, in each atom lies the blazing light of a thousand suns.

Cleave the heart of a raindrop, a hundred pure oceans will flow forth.

Look closely at a grain of sand, the seed of a thousand beings can be seen....

Within the pulp of a millet seed an entire universe can be found.

In the wing of a fly, an ocean of wonder.

In the pupil of an eye, an endless heaven.

Though the inner chamber of the heart is small, the Lord of both worlds gladly makes his home there.

The ancient Masters were profound and subtle.

Their wisdom was unfathomable.

There is no way to describe it;

all we can describe is their appearance.

They were careful

as someone crossing an iced-over stream.

Alert as a warrior in enemy territory.

Courteous as a guest.

Fluid as melting ice.

Shapeable as a block of wood.

Receptive as a valley.

Clear as a glass of water.

Do you have the patience to wait

till your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving

till the right action arises by itself?

The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.

Not seeking, not expecting,

she is present, and can welcome all things.

TO CHOOSE IS TO BE EMPOWERED

Our unwillingness to face the extremity of the situation that confronts the entire human race is part of the problem. We are certainly at the end of a civilization, the end of a whole cycle of history. The facts of our global crisis - a crisis that is at once political and economic, psychological and environmental - show us clearly that the human race has no hope for survival unless it chooses to undergo a total change of heart, a massive, quite unprecedented spiritual transformation. Only the leap into a new consciousness can engender the vision, moral passion, joy and energy to effect change on the scale and with the self-sacrifice necessary to save the planet in the time we have. The message we are being sent by history can be summed up in four words: TRANSFORM OR DIE OUT. Many experts agree that we have, at the most, fifteen or twenty years left before the crisis becomes undeterrable and unalterable. Human survival depends on whether we are brave enough to face the full desolation of what we have done to our psyches and the planet, and wise and humble enough to turn to the God and Goddess to learn what we will need to go forward. I hope we can abandon our pride before it is too late.

Cloud pregnant with a million bolts of lightning, Love gives birth to the philosopher's stone. My soul is flooded by you, Sea of Splendor, Being and cosmos drown there silently.

                                             ~Rumi

The labrynth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.

                                              ~Joseph Campbell

There are many ways to search, but the object of the search is always the same. Don't you see that the roads to Mecca are all different? The roads are different, the goal is one.....when people come there, all quarrels or differences, or disputes that happened along the road are resolved. Those who shouted at each other along the road "you are wrong" or "you are an infidel" forget their differences when they come there, because there, all hearts are in unison.

                                                             ~Rumi

By a green jade lake-what a wonderful sight: an old hermit fathoming Tao. Aren't they the lucky ones-humble and still, quietly humming the melodies of heaven?

                                                ~Loy Ching-Yuen

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, and compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and in thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.

                                                          ~Lao Tzu

The Tao is priceless, a pearl containing creation. In storage, it is utterly dark, without a trace. Brought out, its light shines through day and night. Becoming wise depends entirely on this-you need nothing else to be enlightened.

                                        ~Liu I Ming