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https://mysticdancecaravan.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/DUP-Logo-Vector-180x180.png00adminhttps://mysticdancecaravan.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/DUP-Logo-Vector-180x180.pngadmin2022-09-01 09:30:102022-09-01 12:53:19Great new video from Eric Putkonen: The Witness
Burn through the dust, my friend. The reflection looking for itself. See with your own eyes And eat with your tongue.
Dash the stingy heart. Love is your gift. There IS no worship, and yet, Without it your life is devoid of flavor.
Sing a mighty song of thanks to the wind that gives your breath and the man who provides your anger.
Both are a gift.
Ending
You can meditate, clear your mind to run from your guilt. Make small offerings and excuses And fill your mind With drugs of oblivion.
Or you can do the thing.
Poem of NOTHING
Maria M. Decsy
In a stunning, power-packed instance I recognize Nothing, Utterly nothing / utterly everything. Intimate nothing / everything. Real nothing / everything. Silent, playful, nothing / everything and
I AM THAT.
My mind is stunned. It scrambles for meaning, It is confused, disoriented, perplexed, Never experienced such comical flailing, scrambling for words.
I spend hours and hours writing utter nonsense, in absolute useless effort to put into words the incomprehensible.
What just happened? How can Nothing be Real and Everything? I hear heartfelt laughter echoing through the cosmos:
Now you know why mystics stutter !
Nothing IS Real and Everything.
I AM THAT! (Namaste)
WHAT IS LIFE TRYING TO SHOW ME?
Maria M. Decsy
Who are you?
Are you still Nothing? whispers the voice. Once I saw and recognized, I can never NOT know!
I look through my eyes from Awareness that is Aware And recognize myself in the hummingbirds and bees.
I am the flow of rivers of human life, Fluttering monarchs competing for nectar. The hawk that soars through the yard and lands on the great pine, The symphony of song-bird’s distress call to all.
I am the breeze that lifts a feather high in the sky. Joy, laughter and an ocean of tears. Such beauty, such heart-rendering pain. Two sides of the coin One and the same.
Who am I?
Did I live a mistaken identity? Is life as I know it a story? An illusion? A mirage? A dream?
I retreat into Nothing, looking for the familiar me, The self I thought I knew for close to eighty years
Nothing, only Nothing Zero, no time or space
One breath, one heartbeat, One pulsating Life, Flowing Awareness, Nothing and All.
I Am the Cosmos,
I Am the Life,
I Am Nothing! NO-THING ! I Am Love on the Loose.
Hands
So, it’s like everyone has been convinced that they don’t have hands. And I’m saying… look… it’s right there. You are using them right now.
And everyone is like… I don’t see it. Do you have any exercises for finding hands?
And I’m… but you don’t have to find them. They are right there. You are using them right now.
No they aren’t . Yes they are. No they aren’t. Yes they are.
Okay. I don’t know what to say.
But here… (hands you something and you take it). Now what?
Visions
My mind slipped free of hooks and barbs And you replaced what I thought was me.
I toss all notions into the wind And dance on the tongue of the beloved
(Chew if you will)
Not Two
As long as you have an ideal against – You are trapped in conflict.
Just moving to the opposite of something Is not transcending it.
Love can move to hate and back again. Agitation can move to peace and then fall back, again, to agitation.
Nothing has changed.
Transcending is leaping entirely out of it. Where love and hate do not matter. And agitation and peace are the same.
Because, now YOU are.
Simplicity
Non-duality, by its very definition, has to be simple. It’s duality that’s complicated!!!
So many things out there, so many conflicts. In nothing there is nothing.
Everything becomes simple when not two.
Life is life. Love is love, Anger is anger. Thoughts are thoughts. Everything is real. Everything is.
No more searching or wondering. You’re harder to control, not so easily fooled.
Life is crazy enough without dealing with it directly.
What about the path of love? Because, I guess, that’s actually a path of doing. That’s a path of effort in one way, and then in another way it’s not.
I guess what I would say in terms of the path of love is it really builds right on to what I was just saying. It’s the path of surrender to the divine. Because, as I see it, the goal is for me to be in continuous worship of that which I love. Right? And the way that I’m in continual worship of that which I love is by being a vehicle for her.
So what the divine wants to pass through me, whether I understand it or not, whether it’s personally what I want or not, is not the point. The point is: I want to show my love for divinity. Express my gratitude for being by being available to her in whatever form she wants.
Ultimately, I was on a Jñāna path. It was a path of wisdom. It was a path of penetrating insight. It was a path of seeing through the facades of the separate self to one of wholeness. But more than that, I was on a Bhakti path. I got into this because I was in love with my teacher. I was in love with the path. I was in love with god. And it was the love that was the energy that kept me going through some very very difficult times. I just kept doing it because I was doing it for what I loved.
I don’t think you can progress very far on the path unless you’re driven by love.
It’s hard for me to imagine that intellectual curiosity would hold enough power to keep you persistently on the path. Ultimately, it’s the love.
Ramana Maharshi and the Advaita tradition always talked about how, in the end, the Jñāna path and the Bhakti path (which is the wisdom path and the love path) they need to become one. Because the Bhakti needs to realize that they are that which they’re in love with, and the Jñāna needs to fall in love with the true self. And so one path may be your doorway in, versus the other, but in the end there’s a merging and they need to become one.
So, thinking that they’re separate at all is just not useful
They’re separate at one level but to me the way to think about it is: having a preference between them is useless. In manifestation things manifest, this moment this way, that moment the other way. But We’re available.
I always say the ultimate stance is availability. I’m available. I’m available to make effort. I’m available to not make effort. I’m available for the path of wisdom. I’m available for the path of love.
Every moment will dictate how my availability manifests, but I’m available.
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One of our songs to explore Non-duality will be in Sanskrit, which is a beautiful language designed with spiritual words that cannot be easily translated into most cultures. Below is a video of a short clip of this tune, and here is one of my favorite explanations of the term… which translates as the master thief.
Hari Om Tat Sat: the divine sound – that is the truth… It is one of the mahavakyas, the great sayings which have been embedded in the hearts of the mystics since eternity. It is not something theoretical, not something philosophical, it is something existential.
Om
Those who have gone within themselves have always heard a strange sound, which can only be called the sound of existence itself. It is difficult to reduce that sound into language. Hence for centuries, as far back as we can go, Om, the sound, has been represented not by any alphabetical word but by a symbol.
That symbol is beyond any alphabet. It does not belong to any language. Hence the Tibetans can use it, the people who are writing in Sanskrit can use it; Mahavira can use it, who was using a language called Prakrit; Gautam Buddha can use it, who was speaking in a language called Pali.
There is no other symbol in the whole world which does not belong to any particular language, but is simply symbolic of a certain experience that can happen to anyone. And why have they not reduced it to some linguistic form? It is not without reason.
The Divine Sound
The sound of Om is heard only when your mind is completely silent, when you have gone beyond all language, all thinking, when there is pure silence, not even a ripple. Suddenly you hear a music.
There is no instrument playing it. It seems it is simply the very heartbeat of existence. That’s why it doesn’t matter whether someone is a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Jaina. It does not depend on your philosophy, on your religion. It depends on the depth of your reach towards your very inner center.
There, suddenly, you are overwhelmed.
It is not exactly Om, but Om comes the closest to expressing the sound. And the sound has been called the divine sound because it is not man-made. It is eternally herenow. Whoever wants to enter into the stream of eternal existence is bound to hear it. It says nothing, but it vibrates your being to such joy, to such celebration, to such dance that you have never dreamt of before.
Hari
The word ‘hari’ is used as one of the names of God.
The word ‘hari’ in itself has another meaning which is far more beautiful than the word God. Hari in Sanskrit means the thief. And the sound of Om, once you come close to it, certainly proves to be the master thief because it simply steals your very heart forever. Then you are part of the existence and you are no longer a separate personality.
You are not. Existence is.
Certainly this can be done only by a master thief: you are completely stolen, absorbed, not even a mark is left behind. Those who have used the words hari om would rather say that it is the divine sound. My own preference is to say that it is the master thief sound, which has stolen millions of hearts.
But whatever you say, one thing is certain: Tat Sat. Tat means that, and sat means truth.
Sign up here:
Wednesday, July 6, 2022, 7PM Mountain Daylight Time
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And finally… we met with Jeff to talk. Here’s the zoom video
Zoom meeting. Held: Thursday October 27th at 6:00pm US mountain time
The Series
Below is a refresher of his three attunements:
Edited transcript of Spiritual Dialogue
Jeff: Dialogue plays a very important role in spiritual inquiry. At one level it is an exchange of ideas. There are different levels of dialogue that that need to take place.
There’s the kind of dialogue that one has with someone who has more experience than they do. This has a learning value. You know, if you’ve encountered someone and you recognize that they have some inner spiritual attainment that you feel very drawn to. You can learn an enormous amount by speaking to that person and finding out how they’re relating to their experience that might be different than the way you tend to relate to yours.
And so that’s one level of dialogue that can be very valuable.
The other thing that happens in dialogue is also compelling. I believe in traditional spiritual circles it’s called transmission. The idea is that that someone who has more access to higher perspectives transmits that in a in a way that’s beyond the words spoken.
Sometimes, I think, the words are just the vehicle that holds our attention but the energetic transmission of that perspective is arguably the more important.
Now, more recently, neuroscience has come up with this idea of mirror neurons, which I think is an interesting way to think about spiritual transmission. What they say is if I’m seeing something that you’re not seeing, and I describe it to you, and while I’m describing it, I’m looking at the thing I’m describing, there are neurons in your system that will start to orient themselves in accordance to mine. And so you’ll start to see what I’m seeing through some kind of osmosis. I think that’s a very powerful way to think about what spiritual transmission might be.
Whatever it is, the effect that many people report is that when they speak with someone who has some degree of attainment that they start to see something that they weren’t seeing before. It doesn’t have to do with understanding the words. It doesn’t have to do with learning something.
It has to do with being brought into a view.
Ultimately, in terms of spiritual dialogue, the ultimate value is the capacity to be brought into a higher view.
You know, if you learn something, if you gain information, that’s wonderful, but it’s really not that valuable. What’s valuable is being brought into a higher view. And you want to be brought into a higher view over and over again until it becomes a natural home for you.
So one way you do that is by speaking with people who have more experience than you do. People you recognize as having more attainment.
In another way, when serious interested parties who may be more equivalent in their experience and attainment come together with a passionate desire to evolve we can ratchet each other up through the power of shared perspectives and dialogue and meld into a kind of unity of vision that takes us higher.
So by coming together, whether that’s two or three, or four or five or ten or twelve or more, but we come together. The intensity of our interaction and the dialogue that we have together will actually rise. It’s like we’re all floating in an ocean and by engaging. The level of the ocean is going up and we’re all going up with it.
To me those are the two most profound ways in which dialogue has spiritual value. I’m a big believer in spiritual dialogue.
Zareen: I know that one of the things I experienced at Andrew Cohen retreats was that he would bring people together to have dialogue. And my experience was that people simply needed to be given permission to talk about things more important than just the everyday mundane soon. As soon as the permission to engage was released, it was just amazing what we could do with each other.
Jeff: It’s completely amazing. And the other aspect of dialogue that’s very, very important is that we are social creatures. What that means is our ability to hold truths is partially collective, it’s partially shared.
So the the analogy I like to use is if you were outside and you saw an alien up in a tree, and you talked to the person next to you and said, “Oh my God, look at that!:
And they say, “I don’t see anything.”
But, you turn to the next person, “Look at that!”
And they say, “Oh, I don’t see anything.”
I always like to wonder how many people would have to say they didn’t see it before you would stop saying you saw it.
And then. How many more people would have to say they didn’t see it before you stopped seeing it yourself? Right? Before you are conditioned by the collective.
That’s why I think throughout history spiritual gatherings have been so important, because we need to create a field that is mutually reinforcing. Because otherwise it’s just us against the dominant paradigm.
Besides those rare few beings, Ramana Maharshi, and Eckhart Tolle’s, most people aren’t going to hold that higher view in the face of a whole culture telling you it is wrong.
So we need to come together to bolster up the strength of our conviction.
Jeff Carreira on Effort vs. No Effort.
There are many spiritual orientations which talk about no effort. They say that liberation is your nature. Your true self is what you always already are. The only thing that’s in the way is the effort you are making to get there. Because you keep convining yourself that you are not there by making an effort to get there.
The problem is that you can take that and turn it into a justification that just about anything can be the truth of who I am.
But there is an attainment that needs to be achieved before you are able to hold that. There is still effort to be made.
The way I think about effort vs. no effort is that we are both a universal source, always, and we are also already an individual.
A no effort school is speaking directly to the source. They are saying that you don’t need to do anything to be the source because you are the source. As long as the goal is to recognize who you are, that’s all you need.
But if your goals and needs are about how to live as an individual in the world, then the messy bag that is the individual might have work to do in order to be able to hold the higher truth.
So the schools that are talking about effort tend to be speaking to the individual. They are saying, “You need to make effort.” You need to be able to clean this up. You need to be able to focus your attention.
I think the paradox of effort and no-effort is a direct result of the fact that we are one, and only one. We are the one without a second, and no effort is required. And, also, we are an indivudual in this lifetime. If we care about how we manifest in this world then some effort may be required.
I think, in the end, what it means to be free has to do with no longer caring whether you need to make effort or not. So if there is an attachment to either not making effort, or an attachment to making effort there’s not freedom.
The Path of Love
What about the path of love? Because, I guess, that’s actually a path of doing. That’s a path of effort in one way, and then in another way it’s not.
I guess what I would say in terms of the path of love is it really builds right on to what I was just saying. It’s the path of surrender to the divine. Because, as I see it, the goal is for me to be in continuous worship of that which I love. Right? And the way that I’m in continual worship of that which I love is by being a vehicle for her.
So what the divine wants to pass through me, whether I understand it or not, whether it’s personally what I want or not, is not the point. The point is: I want to show my love for divinity. Express my gratitude for being by being available to her in whatever form she wants.
Ultimately, I was on a Jñāna path. It was a path of wisdom. It was a path of penetrating insight. It was a path of seeing through the facades of the separate self to one of wholeness. But more than that, I was on a Bhakti path. I got into this because I was in love with my teacher. I was in love with the path. I was in love with god. And it was the love that was the energy that kept me going through some very very difficult times. I just kept doing it because I was doing it for what I loved.
I don’t think you can progress very far on the path unless you’re driven by love.
It’s hard for me to imagine that intellectual curiosity would hold enough power to keep you persistently on the path. Ultimately, it’s the love.
Ramana Maharshi and the Advaita tradition always talked about how, in the end, the Jñāna path and the Bhakti path (which is the wisdom path and the love path) they need to become one. Because the Bhakti needs to realize that they are that which they’re in love with, and the Jñāna needs to fall in love with the true self. And so one path may be your doorway in, versus the other, but in the end there’s a merging and they need to become one.
So, thinking that they’re separate at all is just not useful
They’re separate at one level but to me the way to think about it is: having a preference between them is useless. In manifestation things manifest, this moment this way, that moment the other way. But We’re available.
I always say the ultimate stance is availability. I’m available. I’m available to make effort. I’m available to not make effort. I’m available for the path of wisdom. I’m available for the path of love.
Every moment will dictate how my availability manifests, but I’m available.
There are many spiritual orientations which talk about no effort. They say that liberation is your nature. Your true self is what you always already are. The only thing that’s in the way is the effort you are making to get there. Because you keep convining yourself that you are not there by making an effort to get there.
The problem is that you can take that and turn it into a justification that just about anything can be the truth of who I am.
But there is an attainment that needs to be achieved before you are able to hold that. There is still effort to be made.
The way I think about effort vs. no effort is that we are both a universal source, always, and we are also already an individual.
A no effort school is speaking directly to the source. They are saying that you don’t need to do anything to be the source because you are the source. As long as the goal is to recognize who you are, that’s all you need.
But if your goals and needs are about how to live as an individual in the world, then the messy bag that is the individual might have work to do in order to be able to hold the higher truth.
So the schools that are talking about effort tend to be speaking to the individual. They are saying, “You need to make effort.” You need to be able to clean this up. You need to be able to focus your attention.
I think the paradox of effort and no-effort is a direct result of the fact that we are one, and only one. We are the one without a second, and no effort is required. And, also, we are an indivudual in this lifetime. If we care about how we manifest in this world then some effort may be required.
I think, in the end, what it means to be free has to do with no longer caring whether you need to make effort or not. So if there is an attachment to either not making effort, or an attachment to making effort there’s not freedom.
Let’s sing and talk about that.
We are only having one more dance/talk in September because schedules are so busy, so I hope you can make it.
https://mysticdancecaravan.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/DUP-Logo-Vector-180x180.png00adminhttps://mysticdancecaravan.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/DUP-Logo-Vector-180x180.pngadmin2022-06-16 08:10:362022-09-06 09:50:31Jeff Carreira – Effort vs. No Effort