Getting into a receptive state for a download isn't about doing anything. It's about being heart-centered and trusting the flow of Presence to be available on call being innocent of any intent but to listen deeply to the whispering of the voice of silence. Strictly speaking, I do not write poetry. Poetry pours through me.…
All Our Relations
It appears that all wisdom is enshrined in the storied lives and inspirational sayings and writings of all the saints, sages, philosophers, martyrs, divine incarnations, gurus, teachers, priests, monks and nuns, generals, politicians, and cultural agitators, and yet there is natural wisdom to be discovered in the numberless unknown, the featureless, anonymous and hidden lives…
Intensity and Serenity
Andre van Zijl © 03/12/17
It is easy to coast through each day, managing a mild form of acceptably “normal” anguish. The gift of our inner wounds, which are invisible to the world, impacts all our relationships; with ourselves and with those closest to us. They come most poignantly to light when mirrored in our most intimate relationships. So when personal accounting becomes necessary, what do we do about facing and curbing an habitual inner unruliness which has hidden its real face till now?
Something always happens. The dissonance of our private internal landscapes are at some time or other exposed in the broad light of day for all to see. For example, suddenly and thoughtlessly I blurt out a rude judgment of another person in a public setting where it inflicts real hurt and embarrassment. It doesn’t matter what the “something” is, something always happens to expose the face of…
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Facing The Beast
When all is said and done, it is in the way we do the little things each day which prepares us for any big things that can come our way. It is breathing into whatever arises with an unselfconscious equanimity, seeing all as a gift, no matter its nature. This equanimity is not a state…
A Skeptic Pursuing Wonder
Fear driven by circumstance, we seem to walk a thin line between the thin skinned narcosis of belief, and each moment, wings open, being sliced throat-to-belly opened to the cosmos. We seem to vacillate, lukewarm, between a false (an understandably human) hope (for some future relief from the raging present) and a fierce resistance to…
BECOMING ALL YOU CAN BE
This “walking ourselves home” is an ongoing business. There is no one stop shop, where we hit the “home” button & we’re done! No, it’s a continual re-birthing into the eternal present of our common birthright. The psychiatrist Gerald C. May put it beautifully when he said that “a contemplative psychology could embrace in-the-round, the…
“We Don’t Have to Save the World, We Just Have to Belong to it More Fully” (anonymous)
The world is not an object in front of us, it is the whole of us, we are it, and it is us, and no disentanglement is possible. The world is as much us as we are it. It cannot be changed from a burning hell to a cooling heaven without fully over hauling our…
Being Distracted to Death is a Way of Life
It seems that our attention is habitually fixed outwardly towards the things, people, events and relationships which seem to most immediately impact own own circle of influence. This means that we are, willy-nilly, bobbing corks floating on the roiling surface of a stormy ocean, at the whim of crashing tides and waves, their unpredictable troughs…
GOING FORWARD THROUGH TIME WHILE EMBRACING THE TIMELESS
Always and forever I know that I cannot go back to the old dichotomies of monastic versus married householder, of me versus you, of pleasure versus pain, of good versus bad. These are the false surface divisions inherent in dualistic thinking which is the non-thinking of the prevailing global culture, which pursues the borrowed elitism…
Dauntless Exuberance
The audacity of youth is in its unquestioned thinking that time does not concern it, that death is an imaginary, far off event that simply cannot intrude upon its life as now imagined! Even those times when death came close and brushed its barely felt crows wings across ones face, were simply seen as spice…
Emptied of Myself BLOG by Andre van Zijl - musings, poetry and art 