Sat Chit Ananda

 

Defining the Moola Mantra with stunning visuals and the mesmerizing voice of Deva Premal.

You have come from God, you are a spark of His Glory; you are a wave on the Ocean of Bliss; you will have peace only when you again merge in Him. ~Sathya Sai Baba

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I’ve been thinking about God recently.  I’ll  tell you what I think God is all about. The  Indian mystics all tell us, “A God defined is a God confined.” “What can’t be said, can’t be said and it can’t be sung about either.”  They also say, “God is impersonal.”  “I am without form, without limit, beyond time, beyond space. I am in everything. Everything is in me. I am the bliss of the universe. Everywhere I am. I am sat, chit, ananda, absolute existence, absolute knowledge, absolute wisdom.” ~  No messing about with their sacred ideas of God and what He is all about. They are straight as an arrow about it.

Jesus Christ says “He that is born of the flesh is flesh and he that is born of the spirit is spirit.”  Then he says, “Least ye be born again you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” also Jesus says, “I and my father are one.”  then Jesus says this,  “He that loveth mother and father, child, more than me cannot follow me.” What exactly is He telling us?

He is simply telling us just how things are. He’s talking about higher consciousness; He’s telling us who we really are. He is telling us what it means when we start on the journey  to be born again, when we suddenly start to have faith in another possibility than the one we have now. Now what is that called, what is the other possibility? It’s just a vibrational rate. It’s like you’re born with a pre-fixed setting on your television set to channel eighteen and you never even knew there was a channel eighteen, channel four, three, two. So when someone comes along and says, “Were you tuned into channel seven last night?” You look at them with a wee smile, “Don’t they know there’s only  channel eighteen? Then something suddenly happens, something touches a place in your heart that’s been there all the time. It’s just like you have suddenly awakened for a moment from a long sleep and say, “Oh! Wow! So that’s how it is! I was asleep for a long time. But now you are awake and tuning in to channel eighteen and you like what you are seeing.

Just saying

Lets Fall In Love With Our Maker

image: Krishna with Radha

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“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me;

my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

Meister Eckhart, Sermons of Meister Eckhart

Radha Krishna

We need to fully understand love if we wish to fall in love with the supreme love, known as  “Divine Love.” Nevertheless, such an understanding  is not something  that happens outside this world or beyond our space-time continuum. This is because each object in this world manifests the divine and thus, we as individuals  can encounter the divine in anything, anywhere and at any time.

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But once this understanding  happens, and it is crucial that it does happen at some point, we come to realise that the divine permeates everything. Thus, one way of defining divine love would be by falling in love with everything, as distinguished from the love of one particular object. But this definition does not sufficiently distinguish divine love from human love and the question still remains: is the nature of divine love (i.e., the love of everything) the same as human love?

Once we acquire the realisation that the divine permeates everything, then the nature or mode of our love of the divine changes dramatically. As the object of our love becomes “everything,” the manner of our loving evolves from human to Divine. This is known as enlightenment.

Divine love may begin with our loving another person, but gradually our love grows to embrace everything in the world, and as our love encompasses everything, we transcend the norms associated with human love and the manner of loving changes.

Doors Wide Open – Inspirational

Doo

Exploring Locronan, Brittany, France

The ego has to sacrifice itself so that man’s divine nature can manifest itself. “Mine” is death;’not mine’ is immortality. Renunciation results in peace. The golden key of non – attachment opens the lock which keeps the door to heaven shut. Wise words from Sathya Sai Baba. ~ The symbol of a door is huge in every language and every culture. Nothing is more adventurous as a new door opening in our lives. And remember it takes only a very little key to open a very heavy door. Remember too for cowards, all doors are locked but for the curious among us all doors are open! So be an opener of doors!

 

hidden door

 

“I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear. The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the in-compatibility between man’s egotism and the divine purity, between man’s self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God. Following Boehme and William Law, we may say that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can be apprehended only as a burning, purgatorial fire. An almost identical doctrine is to be found in Perception.”      Door of Perception  ~ Aldous Huxley

 

 

 

 

“I climb the door instead of a tree
Just to crawl with myself walking free
What if I’m a lizard beneath my skin
Changing my colours of the human I’ve been”  ~ munia Khan

Indescribable Presence – Flowers For The Soul

Hibiscus

 

 

“God is without form, without quality as well as with form and quality.
Watch and see with what endless variety of beautiful forms
He plays the play of his maya with Himself alone.
The lila of the all pervading One goes on and on in this way in infinite diversity.
He is without beginning and without end.
He is the whole and also the part.
The whole and part together make up real Perfection.”

Sri Anandamayi Ma

 

All photos taken with a Lumix XL7 camera on macro setting. Click on each image to enlarge for details. thanks.

 

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Divine Mother,  “When flowers are brought to you, how do you give them a significance?
By entering into contact with the nature of the flower, its inner truth. Then one knows what it represents. ( The Divine Mother, from her timeless words on nature and flowers. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, India.)

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Gentle and lovely, flowers share their beauty with us and bring us a touch of eternal things. According to the Mother, each variety of flower has its own special quality and meaning. By establishing an inner contact with the flower, this meaning can be known. “Flowers speak to us when we know how to listen to them,” The Mother said. “It is a subtle and fragrant language.” As if to provide a key to this language. She identified the significances of almost nine hundred flowers.

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“It is intended by the word Presence to indicate the sense and perception of the Divine as a Being, felt as present in one’s existence and consciousness or in relation with it, without the necessity of any further qualification or description. Thus, of the “ineffable Presence” it can only be said that it is there and nothing more can or need be said about it, although at the same time one knows that all is there, personality and impersonality, Power and Light and Ananda and everything else, and that all these flow from that indescribable Presence. That is always the fundamental significance, — the essential perception of the essential Presence supporting everything else.” ~ SRI AUROBINDO

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Floral Park, Haute Bretagne – Travel Logue and Photos

House Ivy -photo from a week ago.

“The earth laughs in flowers.”  – Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yes indeed! and the trees whisper in our ears. I love to take photos of both. Nature to me has more gems than the Crown Jewels and yet they do not cost a thing. Today, and in my future posts, I plan to write about my visits here and there and to post photos. There’s little else I can offer in the way of spiritual stories. I’ve done with that for now. I offer instead, a short peek into our visit to Haute Bretagne Floral gardens, Fr.   

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Floral garden – The Lake

I don’t think we left soon enough for the trip to Normandy, Fr. It took over three hours from where we live and by the time we arrived it was late afternoon. The weather was fine when we left home, but dark clouds loomed by the time we reached Caen, then they lifted and then the sky turned dark again. After we left Nantes behind, a drizzling rain threatened to spoil the visit. Oppsie! Bloggers are not suppose to mention weather in the first paragraph. Sorry, I’ve broken the golden rule!

Finding the small turning  off the highway, for the town of  Fougères on the way to Normandy was more than difficult. There were a few signs as we left the highway for the back lanes but no real clear directions. Loads of pastures and fields of wheat and corn, clearly we were off the beaten track. Never mind, the villages were quaint and worth a visit. I love this part of Brittany, it is prettier than where we live and offers a lot to visitors. There are many visitors too, for the U.S. Cemeteries are located in Fougères and all along the coast, all the way to Le Harve.

Finally after a few wrong turnings we found a small town, not sure of its name. A town though filled of flowers. Another excuse to stop for another camera opportunity. Luckily we found a sign for the Park Floral. We eventually found it tucked away behind a field of cows.

The park sparkled in the late afternoon sunshine.The clouds had drifted and parted and a brilliant blue sky shone through for the rest of the afternoon. The other good thing – the park appeared to be uninhabited. There was absolutely no one there, other than the park’s gardeners, hidden away behind the shrubs. The down-side of that scenario – the small cafe was “ferme.” Nothing new there, I can tell you. “Ferme” is part of life in France. We can never leave home without water bottles and sandwiches. A cup of tea or coffee is out of the question, unless lucky enough to find a roadside stop-off. They are rare in this part of France. It would be another six hours before I had a cup of cafe.’  We just happened to return through Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, where an excellent roadside Cafe is located. It was  “ouvert.”

The Floral park was more than amazing. It’s silence made me stand still for a moment to surrender to its peace. The birds chirped but there was nothing else. France does have an absence of wildlife in this area.(I put that down to overuse of chemicals on the crops.) I did not see a butterfly or bee the whole time there. Maybe it was too late in the year, or they just were not around.

Amazing that a park full of the most beautiful plants on earth can be so sterile. I was not able to capture the beauty of the park on camera. Not sure why not. I have managed the odd whimsical shot – but mostly, I feel, the park was too formal, so didn’t photograph too well.

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Small stone watch tower,overlooking the Japanese gardens.

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Magical lookout over the pond and gardens. A breath-taking view!

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The Japanese garden, one of 15 gardens, is huge! I cannot express my feelings about this colourful vista. Just walking through the tiny pathways that meander through the garden is an adventure in Paradise. This garden definitely is not of the Earthy type. I felt I’d died and gone to heaven. The colours so vibrant with vines and huge trees all intertwined, provides the visitor with a feeling of Eden.  I wandered through all the paths and with every twist and turn, something more sublime met my eyes. The small rope bridge with its wobbly wood surface, appeared unsafe but I was not to be fooled. I crossed without incident.

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Rope Bridge across the stream

stone steps, small pathways, and small rocky waterfalls.

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My last photograph posted below is of a very unusual Hydrangea. It’s growing with other foliage up against the  stone wall that forms the garden entrance. I had to smile when taking the photo, because like all the other plants and shrubs in this exquisite floral garden, it grew in a stylish French way. Look at the way the small flowers tumble!  Rather like Paris fashion models wearing their finest and latest “Mode.”  Je dois vous revoir! Viva la belle France!

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Lacy Hydrangea growing against the old stone wall. floral Park

Sacred Feminine, the Matrix Of Creation

Youtube, I created this for today’s post.  (Eric Clapton’s rather sweet song  ~ In the sun, the rain, the snow, Love is lovely, let it grow.) enjoy! 🙂

 

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I believe I can never reach spiritual bliss – “anand”- without a deep understanding of the ‘Divine feminine’. The Divine Feminine has been put on the back burner for eons now. We’ve swept her away, like dust under the carpet. Yet, the Sacred Feminine requires all of us to come into acceptance of ourselves as we exist and breathe in Our Mother. In as much as we are able to realize that we are her daughters and sons, we realize we are becoming her. She has been and is known by many names and by no name at all. In many cultures and within our own intuitive heart centers, she abides. For most of us, our love of her knows no bounds and is teeming with gratefulness for her many gifts, she has given us and continues to impart to us on a daily basis. Both sacred and mundane, she reminds us that nothing is separate or apart from her, because absolutely everything is in her. This divine feminine is compassionate, courageous, and humble. She  is not reigned over by the five vices – lust, anger, greed, emotional attachment, and ego – but is in control of them. She already exists in men and women, but now we need to tap into her universal femininity.

I often use flowers as a way of connecting with the Inner Feminine, for her spirit is very much in nature. The flower garden is a constant reminder of how bountiful and Sacred She is.

http://whenthesoulawakens.org/the-divine-feminine_275.html

 

Image from Face Book

 THE MATRIX OF CREATION

By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

 The feminine is the matrix of creation.  This truth is something profound and elemental, and every woman knows it in the cells of her body, in her instinctual depths.  Out of the substance of her very being life comes forth.  She can conceive and give birth, participate in the greatest mystery of bringing a soul into life.  And yet we have forgotten, or been denied, the depths of this mystery, of how the divine light of the soul creates a body in the womb of a woman, and how the mother shares in this wonder, giving her own blood, her own body, to what will be born.  Our culture’s focus on a disembodied, transcendent God has left women bereft, denying them the sacredness of this simple mystery of divine love.

What we do not realize is that this patriarchal denial affects not only every woman, but also life itself.  When we deny the divine mystery of the feminine we also deny something fundamental to life.  We separate life from its sacred core, from the matrix that nourishes all of creation.  We cut our world off from the source that alone can heal, nourish and transform it.  The same sacred source that gave birth to each of us is needed to give meaning to our life, to nourish it with what is real, and to reveal to us the mystery, the divine purpose to being alive.

Because humanity has a central function in the whole of creation, what we deny to ourself we deny to all of life.  In denying the feminine her sacred power and purpose we have impoverished life in ways we do not understand.  We have denied life its sacred source of meaning and divine purpose, which was understood by the ancient priestesses.  We may think that their fertility rites and other ceremonies belonged only to the need for procreation or a successful harvest.  In our contemporary culture we cannot understand how a deeper mystery was enacted, one that consciously connected life to its source in the inner worlds, a source that held the wholeness of life as an embodiment of the divine, allowing the wonder of the divine to be present in every moment.

The days of the priestesses, their temples and ceremonies are over, and because the wisdom of the feminine was not written down but transmitted orally (logos is a masculine principle), this sacred knowledge is lost.  We cannot reclaim the past, but we can witness a world without her presence, a world which we exploit for greed and power, which we rape and pollute without real concern.  And then we can begin the work of welcoming her back, of reconnecting with the divine that is at the core of creation, and learning once again how to work with the sacred principles of life.  Without the intercession of the divine feminine we will remain in this physical and spiritual wasteland we have created, passing on to our children a diseased and desecrated world.

The choice is simple.  Can we remember the wholeness that is within us, the wholeness that unites spirit and matter?  Or will we continue walking down this road that has abandoned the divine feminine, that has cut women off from their sacred power and knowledge?  If we choose the former we can begin to reclaim the world, not with masculine plans, but with the wisdom of the feminine, the wisdom that belongs to life itself.  If we choose the latter we may attempt some surface solutions with new technology.  We may combat global warming and pollution with scientific plans.  But there will be no real change.  A world that is not connected to its soul cannot heal.  Without the participation of the divine feminine nothing new can be born.

 

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The Dream Of The Planet, Don Miguel Ruiz – Video

 

A brief post from the Masterful Don Miguel Ruiz, called the “Dream Of The Planet” –  a follow-on from my last post  “Every Human Is An Artist,” (Prayers – A Communion With Our Creator) blogged  from a month ago, and  posted on June 22, 2014 . I hope some of you will remember it...

I thought I’d offer another excerpt from “Prayers – A Communion With Our Creator“, as this little book is just crammed full of gems of wisdom and other truths. All prayer is a communion of the human with the divine. Whether prayers are offered in love or gratitude and inspiration, or from fear, despair, or desperation, we talk heart-to-heart with divine spirit. When we don’t pray, and I must say, I don’t pray as often as I used to, we feel more alone, cut off from our own hearts, and our own power. When I don’t pray, I write posts like this, because positive writing is a prayer, it is an agreement between the heart and the divine, an investment in faith, and helps foster the intent.

 

~ Thank you, eve

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“Together with my new post is kwisital,s eye-catching you tube, “AWAKENING INTO INFINITE LOVE AND LIGHT.”  Kwisital is a French guy with a deft hand with both music and film, he creates pretty amazing you tubes often using English quotations. I love his imagery and his creativity, use of color and sound. I hope you will take two or three minutes to watch his you tube.

 

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The dream of the planet is the dream of all humans together. We can call it society, we can call it a nation, but the result of the creation of the mind, individual and collective, is a dream. The dream can be a pleasant dream that we call heaven or it can be a nightmare, that we call hell. But heaven and hell only exist at the level of the mind.

The human society, the dream of the planet is ruled by lies, and fear is the result. It is a dream where humans judge one another, find one another guilty, and punish one another. Humans use the power of the word to gossip and to hurt one another. Misuse of the word creates emotional poison, and all the emotional poison is in the dream. It goes around the world, and that is what most humans eat:  “emotional poison.”  The dream of the planet prepares newborn humans to believe what it wants them to believe. In that dream, there is no justice; there is only injustice. Nothing is perfect; there is only imperfection. That is why humans eternally search for justice, for happiness, and for love.

For thousands of years people have believe there is a conflict between good and evil in the universe. But this is not true. The real conflicts is between truth and what is not truth. The conflict exists in the human mind, not in the rest of nature. Good and evil are the result of that conflict. Believing in truth results in goodness; believing in and defending what is not truth results in evil. Evil is just the result of believing in lies.

The Divine Light Body – Inspirational Quotatations And Poems

 

Gregory, The Teacher

His unquenched thirst for God’s sweetness experienced in prayer moved the righteous Gregory to live as a hermit in a cell outside the monastery. In the year 1326, the threat of Turkish invasions forced him, along with his Athonite brothers, to retreat to Thessalonika. There he was ordained to the holy priesthood.

As a priest, Gregory did not abandon his spiritual labor and hesychasm. He spent most of the week alone in prayer. On the weekends, he celebrated divine services and preached sermons. He cared for the youth, calling them to discuss religious issues with him. Father Gregory was not concerned about abstract problems of philosophy, but about Christian faith experienced in prayer. He wanted to preach solely about problems of Christian existence, which are more attractive and meaningful to the young.

Soon, many of his spiritual sons expressed their desire to live in a monastic setting. So in the serene area of Vereia, near Thessalonika, he established a small community of monks, which he guided for five years. In 1331 the saint withdrew to Mt. Athos and lived in solitude at the Skete of St. Sabbas. In 1333 he was appointed abbot of the Esphigmenou Monastery in the northern part of the Holy Mountain. In 1336 he returned to the Skete of St. Sabbas, where he devoted himself to theological writing, continuing with this work until the end of his life.

But amidst all this, in the 1330s events took place in the life of the Eastern Church that placed St. Gregory among the most prominent teachers of Orthodox spirituality.

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This is Palamas’s talking about his biggest theme: the need for the incarnate body both of men and women and Christ for the work of ‘Theosis’ (Divinization) to happen. Unlike the Roman and Protestant Churches, the Greek Church doesn’t have such an anti-body view. Palamas was defending the mystical practise of the Hesychast monks who claimed to be able to sense the Divine Light of God. They were attacked by a Catholic Monk called Barlaam for saying so. Palamas came to their defence. The result was the Triads, which was the ultimate summarisation of Hesychast and thus Greek Orthodox spirituality.

The idea is that by becoming united with Christ through the Incarnation we take on the Christ-nature; we are transfigured, like him. It’s an idea which exists in some Catholic doctrine and a few Protestant mystics… Here is the quotation..

 

Here is the quotation

 

“In his incomparable love for men, the Son of God did not merely unite his divine Hypostasis to our nature, clothing himself with a living body and an intelligent soul ‘to appear on earth and live with men’, but – O incomparable and magnificent miracle! – he unites himself to human hypostases, joining himself to each of the faithful by communion in his holy Body. For he becomes one body with us making us a temple of the whole Godhead – for in the very Body of Christ ‘the whole fulness of the Godhead dwells corporeally’.

How then would he not illuminate those who share worthily in the divine radiance of his Body within us, shining upon their soul as he once shone on the bodies of the apostles on Tabor? For as this Body, the source of the light of grace, was at that time not yet united to our body, it shone exteriorly on those who came near it worthily, transmitting light to the soul through the eyes of sense. But today, since it is united to us and dwells within us, it illumines the soul interiorly.”

– St Gregory of Palamas, ‘The Triads’

 

In the Orthodox Church he is a giant; in the Western Churches he is virtually unknown. This is probably because he gave the Roman Church a bloody nose after the Hesychast dispute. Plus the Western Churches don’t have any equivalent to Hesychasm.

Hesychasm means ‘Stillness’ by the way.  ~ Just saying.

 

quotation thanks to Jake Murray.

This first paragraph of this article originally appeared in AGAIN Vol. 27 No. 1.