Mysticism demystified . . .
Sunday, February 16, 2025. It's Sol's day . . . TulseyTown got 2” of snow overnight. Sunshine and cold Northerlies are forecasted to be with us until Tuesday when more snow and bitter cold are indicated.
At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rainforest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover. – Deepak Chopra
Today is World Whale Day.
Whale Day
So is it too much to ask that one day a year
be set aside for keeping in mind
while we step onto a bus, consume a ham sandwich,
or stoop to pick up a coin from a sidewalk
the multitude of these mammoth creatures
coasting between the continents,
some for the fun of it, others purposeful in their journeys,
all concealed under the sea, unless somewhere
one breaks the surface
with an astonishing upheaval of water
and all the people in yellow slickers
rush to one side of the boat to pint and shout
and wonder how to tell their friends about the day they saw a whale?
— Billy Collins, “Whale Day,” from Whale Day. Random House, 2020.
SUNDAY SERMON
Demystifying mysticism
It’s easy to buy into the dualistic illusion that spiritual orientations are composed of fundamentally and mutually exclusive parts. But you can, of course, be both a prophet and a mystic. You can be, and probably are, a prophet-mystic. – Mirabai Starr in an essay posted in Meditations at The Center for Action and Contemplation.
Mysticism is not about concepts; it is about communion with ultimate reality. And ultimate reality is not some faraway prize we claim when we have proved ourselves worthy to perceive it. Ultimate reality blooms at the heart of regular life. – Mirabai Starr
Expanding on an earlier observation: You don't have to be a Buddhist to learn from the inherited teachings of the tradition and have your life improved, to make a gift of your life to the world. Similarly, you don't have to be a Christian to learn from the inherited teachings attributed to Jesus. Or Mohammed. Or Rumi. Or Rilke. Or Teresa. Or Mirabai...The inherited teachings from the multitude of prophet mystics drawing, speaking, writing across dualistic time distill into a nondual singularity: Now Is Love.
“Now” is a word. As a word it is a metaphor for the moment that just left your reading this sentence. As a reality, “now” like “love” has no name, no meaning, no status as a “thing.” The “present moment” is sometimes referred to as “now,” differentially bringing with it focal opportunities: holding or grasping onto something ephemeral as “the past,” or even more ephemeral an imaginative future, or even more abstractly attempting to unify past and future while closing our mind to the only nondual reality. Words are our brain playing tricks to keep itself entertained. And, like all such pleasures, can be addictive. – jab