Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.
And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.
Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.
Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.
Quoted by Maria Popova in https://www.brainpickings.org/newsletter/
Below is the opening section of a Direct Path meditation offered by Rupert Spira. I do not add any comments of my own, but I include a link to Rupert Spira’s website for anyone interested in looking further.
“Allow the silence to come to your attention. Although the silence is empty, see that it is appearing in Awareness, appearing in pure knowing. It is saturated with knowing.
“Feel that the silence is pervaded by and saturated with pure knowing, and that pure knowing is pervaded with silence. The silence is only the knowing of it. There is no silence apart from knowing. This knowing is silent, empty, transparent.
“Everything that appears is like a ripple in this knowing silence, or silent knowing.
“Allow the breath to come to your attention. Feel that the breath is like an undulation of this silence. Lengthen and deepen the breath as if you were an infant breathing in deep sleep. Feel that the breath is like an undulation of this ocean of silence.
“Abandon the belief and feeling that the breath takes place inside a solid, dense, located body. There is no such experience of a body. There is a vast, borderless ocean of silence pervaded by knowing, and the breath completely fills this empty, silent, knowing space.
“The sensation that thought used to label ‘my body’ is a ripple quivering in the midst of this ocean of breath. The breath is expanded into this empty, silent, knowing, completely pervaded by it. The sensation called ‘my body’ is a quivering ripple vibrating at the centre of this borderless, empty space.
“Feel that the breath is not taking place inside a container. The breath is like a mist, completely filling the space in which it appears. It doesn’t appear in a physical space; it appears in an empty, knowing silence.
“Visualize a landscape in which the space, the air and the mist are one. Now go back to your experience and feel that the silence, the knowing and the breath are one. In this metaphor, the space is pure knowing, the air is silence and the mist is the breath.
“Pure knowing is unknowable as an object, completely transparent. Silence, the absence of sound, is the subtlest of all objects. And the breath is a very fine vibration, the first form of silence, like the mist, barely an object, but just discernable. Feel that these three – pure knowing, the silence, and the breath – are dissolved into one another.”
Rupert Spira Transparent Body, Luminous World: The Tantric Yoga of Sensation and Perception Oxford: Sahaja Publications, 2016
See also: www.rupertspira.com/
At dusk I came down from the mountain,
The mountain moon as my companion,
And looked behind at tracks I’d taken
That were blue, blue beyond the skyline;
You took my arm, lead me to your hut
Where small children drew hawthorn curtains
To green bamboos and a hidden path
With vines to brush the travellers’ clothes;
And I rejoiced at a place to rest
And good wine, too, to pour out with you:
Ballads we sang, the wind in the pines,
Till our songs done, Milky Way had paled;
And I was drunk and you were merry,
We had gaily forgotten the world!
Li Po and Tu Fu Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973 (Poems selected and translated with an introduction and notes by Arthur Cooper)
The poem above was written by Li Po (701-762) and its full title is ‘Coming down from Chung-Nan Mountain by Hu-Szu’s Hermitage, he gave me rest for the night and set out the wine’. The editor says: “this is typical of Li Po’s occasional poems, a ‘bread-and-butter letter’ to a friend who had entertained him. The ‘hermitage’ is not to be taken too seriously and need mean no more than a country cottage. In a world of intriguing courtiers, everyone was pleased to be called a retired hermit; though the word used for ‘hermit’ here is in fact also a high Taoist Degree of Initiation. (‘The world’ at the end of the poem, though a fair translation of the word used, translates something that can itself mean ‘intrigue’.)
Five months ago, I wrote a post summing up my recent inquiry work (1). I was moving into an engagement with ‘Direct Path’ approaches and during this period I have been in transition and flux. This has been liberating, but at times hard to articulate publicly. Partly, this is a penalty of lacking clear identification with a specific spiritual brand.
Now, I feel a new sense of synthesis. It is built on a fresh understanding of a tradition discussed in my November 2017 post. This is the Way of Sophia, which I conflated in the post with Sophian Gnosticism. I said:
“To the extent that it is connected to a method, the Sophian (or Magdalenian) journey is a Christian Kabbalist one, a Jacob’s ladder from the apparent world to a Void beyond describable divinity and back again to a new experience of the world as kingdom, transfigured by a super-celestial vision. To the extent that I find a problem with this method, it is a tendency for the reality of my true nature to seem remote and hidden, obscured by a too-vivid myth making. The spirit gets drowned in the cocktail.”
I also said: “When working with the image of Sophia, I found a more playful and free-spirited energy, not fitting easily in formal Gnostic Christian tradition. So, the system, as a system, doesn’t quite work for me.” I notice now that I had already separated my sense of Sophia from my sense of “the system”. I only half-noticed at the time because of my pull towards the Direct Path. I’m glad of this, because my extended check-in with the Direct Path has enabled me to build a new house on better foundations, though still using materials from the old one.
Direct Path teachers have enabled a more rigorous investigation of non-duality than I have experienced before, one that points to a simplified spiritual life now the investigation is complete. Christian Gnosticism and Mahayana Buddhism (including, in practice, Zen) are gradual path non-dualisms. The Headless Way is a variant form of direct path. I believe that the animist and pantheist (or panexperientialist) currents in Druidry and Paganism point in a non-dualist direction. Sophia, for me, is the patron goddess of non-duality.
Tantric tradition shows how we can have a goddess of non-duality without compromising a non-dualist view. Here, Shiva is the empty awareness at the heart of reality and Shakti is its energy and form. She is both the Cosmic Mother and everything that is. Neither can exist without the other. Shiva and Shakti are not in reality separate from each other and we are not separate from them. We are them.
The non-dualist teacher Francis Lucille said: “When we see that the mind, in spite of all its abilities, is absolutely unable to comprehend the truth for which we are striving, all effort to reach enlightenment ceases naturally. This effortlessness is the threshold of real understanding beyond all limitations.” (2) At this point I find that an element of mythology helps. I need stories and for me, a Tantric iteration of Sophia is closer than the more familiar Gnostic one. She is part of my-here-and now reality, rather than the illuminator of a distant goal.
As well as being a Cosmic Mother, Sophia becomes, in active imagination, a guide and focus for devotion – less abstract, more relational than the empty abstract Shiva. Even in recent months, I have continued the occasional practice of using ‘Ama-Aima’ as a mantra within a breath meditation that borders on prayer. Now, I reclaim the ‘Way of Sophia’ as the best way of describing my spiritual identity and path. Everything I’ve learned can be integrated under this single title.
(1) https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com/2017/11/21/intensive-inquiry/
(2) Francis Lucille Eternity Now Temecula, CA: Truespeech Productions, 2006 (Edited by Alan Epstein)
See also: https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com/2015/11/26/the-way-of-sophia/
“A man called Hua-tzu suddenly lost his memory in middle age. If you gave him something in the morning, he would forget about it by evening. If you asked him about something in the evening, he would forget it the next day. In the street he would forget to walk. At home he would forget to sit. Today he would forget what happened yesterday, and tomorrow he would not remember what happened the day before.
“Concerned about his loss of memory, his family first invited a fortune-teller and then a sorcerer to see if they could help Hua-tzu restore his memory. When neither could help, a doctor was called, but the healer shook his head and said there was nothing he could do either.
“Finally, Hua-tzu thought about a philosopher who could probably help him. So desperate was Hua-tzu’s wife in finding him a cure that she sold half their possessions and took her husband to the philosopher to ask for help.
“The family traveled to the philosopher’s home and he begged the wise man to cure Hua-tzu. The philosopher told the family, ‘this kind of illness cannot be cured by omens, magic or herbs. I’ll have to use special methods that are designed to work on his mind’.
“…..
“For seven days the philosopher was secluded with Hua-tzu. No one knew what he did or how he did it, but when Hua-tzu’s family arrived to take him home, they found him completely cured.
“After Hua-tzu recovered his memory, he became irritable and angry. He chased out his wife, beat up his sons and threatened the philosopher with a spear. When the police arrested him for disrupting the peace and questioned his motives, Hua-tzu said, ‘when I lost my memory, I was carefree and happy. I slept peacefully and had no worries when I woke up. I didn’t have anything on my mind, and I was a free man. Now that I’ve got my memory back I am miserable. I look back on the fortunes and misfortunes, the gains and losses, the joys and sorrows in my life, and I am overwhelmed. I woke up from a good dream into a nightmare. I will never be able to go back to the happy times when my memory was lost’.”
Eva Wong Lieh-tzu: a Taoist Guide to Practical Living Boston & London: Shambhala, 2001
Eva Wong grew up bilingual in Hong Kong, is a practitioner of the Taoist arts and a well-known translator of Taoist and other Chinese texts. She writes, “before I had even heard of Taoism, the stories of the Lieh-tzu were familiar to me from my childhood readers … although my family was bilingual, I grew up in Chinese culture, and the Lieh-tzu gave me and my schoolmates kernels of wisdom packed in fables and proverbs. Even at age six and seven, we knew about the Old Fool who tried to move the mountains, the man who worried that the sky would fall, and the man who tried to chase down the sun”.
I’ve been working with The Gospel of Thomas (1), for two reasons. First, it is a non-dual text. Second, it comes from my native tradition, by which I here mean the one I was personally born into. The Gospel is a collection of stories and aphorisms attributed to the teacher Yeshua (Jesus), without any accompanying life-story.
Some of these are very unlike the stories and aphorisms we find in the canonical gospels, unlike enough to get the text banned in the later fourth century C.E., a time of hardening Christian Orthodoxy. But others appear within them. I remember hearing these as a small child who knew himself to have been baptised and given a Christian name. They captured my imagination, and I remember liking and indeed loving them.
Thanks to this background, Christianity – even in the form of an early ‘heresy’ – affects me differently from other paths. I need to be on guard against emotionally driven reverence and dismissal alike. Fortunately this is not too difficult with St. Thomas. There’s a way in which this text heals my relationship with the tradition of my birth, though without any call to renew my allegiance to it.
Douglas Harding was a non-dualist teacher who faced the same issue, only more so, having been brought up in the Plymouth Brethren and subsequently become estranged from his family through religious differences. He wrote an essay about the Gospel of Thomas, giving it a warm welcome (2):
“In this early apocryphal Christian text, the living voice of Jesus comes down to us directly, bypassing all that men have been saying about him and doing in his name. It comes across distinctly, high above the confused roar of two millennia of Christianity, so-called. It’s as if he himself had planted this beneficent time-bomb in the cave at Nag Hammadi, carefully setting the fuse to delay its explosion till the world would be ready for the impact. It’s as if, so tragically far ahead of his own time, he knew when significant numbers of quite ordinary men and women (as distinct from highly specialised and disciplined saints and sages and seers) would at last be capable of catching up with his vision of the Light, his experience of what he calls the Kingdom.”
Harding also says that we owe it to such a teacher “not to believe in this teaching of his in Thomas, but to test it, sincerely verifying (and falsifying) the scriptures by our experience instead of our experience by the scriptures”. In the essay, he goes on to accomplish this by identifying parallels between the Gospel of Thomas and his own Headless Way (3).
I will deepen my work with the Gospel of Thomas. I already know the text quite well, but I think that my understanding of it has changed since my last close reading of it several years ago. I hope also to clear up any residual unfinished business with my Christian roots, and allow the text itself a stronger role in my ongoing life and practice.
(1) Jean-Yves Leloup The Gospel of Thomas: The Gnostic Wisdom of Jesus Rochester, VA: Inner Traditions, 2005 (English translation and notes by Joseph Rowe. Foreword by Jacob Needleman)
(2) Douglas Harding A Jesus for Our Time. Chapter 14 in Look for Yourself: the Science and Art of Self-Realisation London: The Shollond Trust 2015 (first published the The Head Exchange in 1996)
If I ask myself, ‘where is my spiritual centre?’ I do not find an answer within any named tribe. Spiritual friendships, communities of practice and generic webs of connection can all help, and I hope that I give something back. But my path is fundamentally solitary. Perhaps even the notion of having a centre is limiting.
I’ve learned a lot from Druidry. Partly thanks to Druid practice, I experience myself as more fully alive on a living Earth. I honour the wheel of the year as it turns in my locality. In Druidry, I’ve been enabled to explore a contemplative dimension within Earth spirituality. I have also connected with ancestral threads I might otherwise have neglected. But I’m not a polytheist Pagan and I have never felt attracted to Shamanism. I’ve learned from Buddhist tradition too. I’m a meditator. I have a deepened sense of interconnectedness and the call to kindness that goes with it. But I have not adopted the four noble truths as the basis of my path, and I do not seek refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. I am grateful for my connections to Druidry and Buddhism and will continue to take an interest in their literature. I also sense that, with certain understandings and practices now ingrained, their active roles in my life are over.
My creative edge has for some time been elsewhere. I have been working with the insight that perceptions, apparently of the world, do not establish the existence of a world, but only of perceiving (or awareness, or being). Sensations, apparently of a body, do not establish the existence of embodiment, but only of sensing (or awareness, or being). Thoughts, apparently of a mind, do not establish the existence of a mind, but only of thinking (or awareness, or being). This can seem destructively sceptical, even solipsistic. Yet for many people it signals the possibility of a ‘more than’ (or awareness, or being), rather than a dissociated ‘less than’. Mind, body and world can return enhanced rather than diminished by this kind of exercise, with a sense of a ‘not I not other than I’ connection with primordial awareness or being.
This is the basic stance of nondualist traditions, ancient and modern. In Indian culture, the stripping down and reduction to nothingness is sometimes identified as Vedantic, and the subsequent return and flowering in everything as Tantric. In the Gospel of St. Thomas, a Christian Gnostic text, Yeshua (Jesus) says: “I come from the One who is Openness” and the aspiration of disciples is to make themselves “the abode of Openness, a house that welcomes the breeze, a body that has become transparent, like a crystal flooded with light”. Here, a metaphor concerned with transparency emphasizes power and energy rather than vulnerability and exposure.
I am not a member of a nondualist group, or a Christian Gnostic. But I am moved by these spiritual currents. I am in dialogue with them. I think that ‘being in dialogue’ is a good place to be. For me, certainly now, it has more integrity than formal membership or adherence to a system.
(1) Jean-Yves Leloup The Gospel of Thomas: The Gnostic Wisdom of Jesus Rochester, VA: Inner Traditions, 2005 (English translation and notes by Joseph Rowe. Foreword by Jacob Needleman)
You do not need to leave your room …
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait,
be quite still and solitary. The world will freely
offer itself to you to be unmasked. it has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Franz Kafka. Quoted in: John Daido Loori The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life NY: Ballantine Books, 2005
Selkie Writing…
Images and words set against a backdrop of outsider art.
Strategist & educator on social change, focused on Deep Adaptation to societal breakdown
The pagan path. The Old Ways In New Times
Spiritual journeys in tending the living earth, permaculture, and nature-inspired arts
a magickal dialogue between nature and culture
The gentle art of living with less
Thoughts about living, loving and worshiping as an autistic Hearth Druid and Heathen. One woman's journey.
Druidry as the crow flies...
An place to read and share stories about the celtic seasonal festivals
Just another WordPress.com site
Exploring our connection to the wider world
Become more grounded and spacious with yourself and others, through your own body’s wisdom
Good lives on our one planet
News for the residents of Hopeless, Maine.
not a safe space - especially for the guilty
A Journey Through Nature, its Magic and Mystery
Nimue Brown, David Bridger - Druidry, Paganism, Creativity, Hope
The Musings of a Contemplative Monastic Druid
contemplativeinquiry 