Finding Our Light -Spirituality

bluebells in the glade

It is a sure thing that darkness and the light are equally sacred but that does not mean we benefit by becoming complacent about the darkness we may meet in ourselves or others. Others’ darkness is a constant reminder to ourselves that we need to overcome our own.  Yet, often we are complacent about our darkness and oftentimes, we accept it as the way things are. Why hurry? we lament.  What’s the point of life is there’s only suffering! And what does it matter if there’s a little dust on the mirror? Still, in the end we will  need to cleanse our mirror. The all important  mirror of perception will not cleanse itself, only we can purify ourselves. We must bring light into the darkness and that is no easy task. There has always been the path of consciousness and the  flow of illumination or light. The coexistence of darkness and light indeed creates a crazy dance in which the clarity of light is invited to lead, but it does not create a higher order . ~Eve

 

“He who is in the sun, and in the fire and in the heart of man is ONE
He who knows this is one with the ONE.” – Maitri Upanishad

 

bluebells in Kent, UK ~ Winter 2016

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One of the most beautiful meditations from Sathya Sai Baba.

 

“Let it be in the hours before dawn. This is preferable because the body is refreshed after sleep, and the dealings of daytime will not yet have impinged on you. Have a lamp or a candle before you with an open, steady, and straight flame. Sit in front of the candle in the lotus posture or any other comfortable sitting position. Look on the flame steadily for some time, and closing your eyes try to feel the flame inside you between your eyebrows. Let it slide down into the lotus of your heart, illuminating the path. When it enters the heart, imagine that the petals of the lotus open out by one, bathing every thought, feeling, and emotion in the light and so removing darkness from them. There is no space for darkness to hide.

 

The light of the flame becomes wider and brighter. Let it pervade your limbs. Now those limbs can never indulge in dark, suspicious, and wicked activities; they have become instruments of light and love. As the light reaches up to the tongue, falsehood vanishes from it. Let it rise up to the eyes and the ears and destroy all the dark desires that infest them and which lead you to perverse sights and childish conversation. Let your head be surcharged with light and all wicked thoughts will flee there from. Imagine that the light is in you more and more intensely. Let it shine all around you and let it spread from you in ever widening circles, taking in your loved ones, your kith and kin, your friends and companions, your enemies and rivals, strangers, all living beings, the entire world.

 

“Since the light illumines all the senses every day so deeply and so systematically, a time will soon come when you can no more relish dark and evil sights, yearn for dark and sinister tales, crave for base, harmful, deadening toxic food and drink, handle dirty demeaning things, approach places of ill-fame and injury, or frame evil designs against anyone at any time. Stay on in that thrill of witnessing the light everywhere. If you are adoring God in any form now, try to visualize that form in the all-pervasive light. For Light is God; God is Light.”

Om Shanti

 

painterly style – bluebells

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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Take A Crocus – Rumi Inspirational Poems

 

The beauty of the heart
is the lasting beauty:
its lips give to drink
of the water of life.

Truly it is the water,
that which pours,
and the one who drinks.

All three become one when
your talisman is shattered.
That oneness you can’t know
by reasoning.

 

– Rumi, From: Mathnawi II, 716-718

 

Photos taken today with a lumix Camera on Macro setting – please click to enlarge for details. I am having a lot of difficulty with Word Press technology and especially with photos. I hope whatever you are using, ipad or iphone, lap-top or  desk-top, this is okay. 🙂

 

 

 

 

from the top of the fridge

Schelling’s CLARA – Inspirational Quotations

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Port de Carhaix – Fr.

 

 

 

I find myself every once in a while, searching through quotations for something to inspire and to light up my day. Here’s several such quotations from Schelling. I hope you enjoy them. Photos are from this Fall, and what an enchanting Fall it was too.

 

Schelling’s,   –  “CLARA”

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One of the characters in this book says:

Oh, the true ruins are not those of ancient human splendor which the curious seek out in Persian or Indian deserts; the whole Earth is One great ruin, where animals live as ghosts and humans as spirits and where many hidden powers and treasures are locked away, as if by an invisible strength or by a magician’s spell.

And this:

Even in your own opinion nature is suffering from a hidden poison that she would like to overcome or reject, but cannot. Doesn’t she mourn with us? We are able to complain, but she suffers in silence and can talk to us only through signs and miens. What a quiet wistfulness lies in so many flowers, the mourning dew and in the evening’s fading colors.

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All Fall down!

 

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Orchids

 

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“Certainly one who could write completely the history of their own life would also have, in a small epitome, concurrently grasped the history of the cosmos. Most people turn away from what is concealed within themselves just as they turn away from the depths of the great life and shy away from the glance into the abysses of that past which are still in one just as much as the present.”

“I now need friends who are not strangers to the real seriousness of pain and who feel that the single right and happy state of the soul is the divine mourning in which all earthly pain is immersed.”

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph

 

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Sweet Williams

 

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Cyclamen

 

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“A tree that draws strength, life, and substance into itself from the earth may hope to drive its topmost branches hanging with blossom right up to heaven. However, the thoughts of those who think from the beginning that they can separate themselves from nature, even when they are truly spiritually and mentally gifted, are only like those delicate threads that float in the air in late summer and that are as incapable of touching heaven as they are of being pulled to the ground by their own weight.”

-Schelling, “Clara”

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Can anyone tell me: Does Word Press have an automatic “like” button feature anywhere? I am beginning to feel there has to be one, judging by the fast speed of the first few likes on each and every post, sometimes before I have published!   ...

 

chrysanthemum

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Cyclamen

Sand Castles – Inspirational Quotes

from the garden in fall

It is hard to believe I have kept this little blog going now for five long years.Of course during that time, it has been changed and been rearranged so many times, I’ve lost count. It began as a blog for small stories and quotes from Sri Sathya Sai Baba, who died unfortunately, in 2011.

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After his demise, the blog lost purpose. At least for  me. The sadness of losing Sai Baba and the community that had been “home” to me for over two decades, left a big hole in my heart. Saddened, I renamed the blog “Children Of Light” then continued on with spiritual parables and quotes. Later still, I began adding more photos and you tubes. Just lately though, I have definitely developed writers block, although I’m not sure why. Perhaps I have reached the limits of my capabilities in the writing dept. Still, the photography is something I love to share with you all. So like the quote below, I have with some success built my sand-castle, decorated it with shells – now the tide has come in and washing all of it away, leaving me with the just the photos.

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 Just like children building a sand castle, we embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea. 🙂

~ Pema Chödrön

The Window Box flowers,
Quintin, Fr.

for I.

Words Of A Rose – Inspirational

tiny french roses

“If you would look at a flower, any thought about that flower prevents you from looking at it. The words the rose, the violet, it is this flower, that flower, it is that species keep you from observing. To look there must be no interference of the word, which is the objectifying of thought. There must be freedom from the word, and to look there must be silence; otherwise you can’t look. If you look at your wife or husband, all the memories that you have had, either of pleasure or pain, interfere with looking. It is only when you look without the image that there is a relationship. Your verbal image and the verbal image of the other have no relationship at all. They are nonexistent.”

—Jiddu Krishnamurti.

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abstract in flowers

Photos July 2015

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Meetings With Ramana Maharshi – Inspirational

 

 

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 “Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.”  ~Ramana Maharshi
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After spending about twelve years in personal attendance on Bhagavan, I began to feel an urge to devote myself entirely to sadhana . However, I could not easily reconcile myself to giving up my personal service to Bhagavan. I had been debating the matter for some days when the answer came in a strange way.

As I entered the hall one day I heard Bhagavan explaining to others who were there that real service to him did not mean attending to his physical needs but following the essence of his teaching: that is concentrating on realizing the Self. Needless to say, that automatically cleared my doubts.

I therefore gave up my Ashrama duties, but I then found it hard to decide how, in fact, I should spend the entire day in search of Realization. I referred the matter to Bhagavan and he advised me to make Self-enquiry my final aim but to practise Self-enquiry, meditation, japa and recitation of scripture turn by turn, changing over from one to another as and when I found the one I was doing irksome or difficult. In course of time, he said, the sadhana would become stabilized in Self-enquiry or pure Consciousness or Realization.

Before recommending any path to an aspirant Bhagavan would first find out from him what aspect or form or path he was naturally drawn to and then recommend the person to follow it. He would sometimes endorse the traditional stages of sadhana , advancing from worship ( puja ) to incantation ( japa), then to meditation
( dhyana ), and finally to Self-enquiry ( vichara ). However, he also use to say that continuous and rigorous practice of any one of these methods was adequate in itself to lead to Realization.

– Kunju Swami
“As I Saw Him”

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Through Beauty – Inspirational

Flower Mock Orange taken this Spring

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Here are seveal of my recent photos of the Mock Orange. I love taking photos of this flower because of its elegance and sublime beauty, and the way it lends itself to the camera. The pity is the Mock Orange does not last long, along with all other Spring flowers it fades before there’s time to really take enough photos to make a good collection. Here are two of my better photos of this imposing flower from a few weeks ago taken outside in the rain.

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Photo ~ Black Iris, Karen Platt’s Blog

“There are moments in our lives that stand still in time while all the frantic hours and years surrounding them have blurred into an obscurity of grayness. One such moment remains vivid in my mind after more than thirty years, a luminescent spot of time, as clear as if it had happened only yesterday. It was in one of those dark, cavern-like vaults of a lecture hall in college where Art History was offered as a slide show, and it was a perfectly ordinary lecture on American artists, clicking through shadowed images of Cubism and Futurism until a huge close-up of an iris glowed from the screen. “Black Iris.” Georgia O’Keeffe. A simple polarity of translucent light petals reaching upward and dark falls cascading downward made the flower look like a cathedral illumined from within. Breath stopped, mind stopped, and I felt myself dissolve into beauty, passing through painted veils of titanium white and dove gray mist, suspended over waves of amethyst, troughs of onyx. It was as if a thread of light flowing through the moment pierced me to the soul, connecting me to a higher realm.

There were no words in my nineteen-year-old mind to describe the epiphany I’d felt; there are no exact words this day. Words attempt to anchor experience, but that place was wordless and ineffable. In that light-filled moment I was changed forever, uplifted with new possibility. When I left class that afternoon, I had a mission in life: to attempt to stir in others that same sense of wonder: I began to study painting.”

–Rebecca Robison, an excerpt from “Through Beauty,” reaching for a harmonious whole, in PARABOLA, Volume 27, No. 3, Fall, 2002, “Grace.”