Parinama

  Umbilical: Being a necessary or nurturing link or connection   All your limbs, dear, can entwine with a pillar like me and rise and rise and rise until no one on earth can see you anymore, for there is no limit to our height. And any nutrients you needed I could let flow into your roots and stems, giving like some umbilical cord that is attached to my heart.   Hafiz, A Tree You Can Wind Around   What if we are connected to God umbilically and like the infant in the womb receiving our lives through the pulse of love from a source greater than ourselves?   At the surface level of consciousness, we tend to think of ourselves as separate beings. This is the egoic part of the self which has limited self-focused view of things. The deeper layers of consciousness cultivated through yoga, prayer, and contemplation we, in contrast, experience our connection to all others in a oneness that is woven through with the infinite source of our being....

    After you have awakened the consciousness, the Seer sees whether the consciousness has been awakened in each and every part of your body. Then the Seer engulfs the entire body. Then the body becomes an instrument for the Seer to penetrate further. That is what asana teaches. BKS Iyengar.   In the contemplative wisdom traditions, God is not object.   Any material object of the world that we might stamp an image of God upon would not be nearly large enough to contain the infinity which is God.   In these contemplative traditions – which have deep and ancient roots in the many and varied religions of the world – the word used to describe the Divine differs and some traditions forgo trying to name this “otherness” altogether.   In its essence, what these traditions refer to with the word God is the infinity of presence itself, the reality of life unfolding in each and every moment. The Trappist monastic monk Thomas Merton has sai...

  Consider that domination, greed, cruelty, violence, and all our other ills arise from a sense of insufficient and insecure being......If we could arrange energy from within, if we more often nurtured our companions and promoted their well-being, we would suffer much less. Rearranging energy from within is what mysticism does. Beatrice Bruteau, Preface to The Mystic Heart by Wayne Teasdale     The lovely John O’Donohue uses the word “evicted” to describe how the media hijacks our minds from ourselves, pulling us ever outward to more consumption, accolades, and attention.  Scratch the surface of the media onslaught and you what you find is a barren land of lack since what is sold to us can only ever give a brief high that sets us on the desperate search for the next hit.    The overload from the pernicious media/tech machines sullies the senses of perception which become dull, inarticulate, and unable to grasp the subtler aspects o...