The School of Death

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A hero’s journey isn’t necessarily a long ordeal.

At any given moment, we can leave the self-enclosed world of our thought and touch down in the present moment, which is always unknown territory. Yet it also feels like coming home.

It seems miraculous to move
from one state of being to another,
from thinking to opening to presence.
 
Meditation and spiritual practice
have been called death in life.

We die to the hope
that our life is taking us somewhere.

We let go
and allow ourselves to open to a new life,
a shared life.
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I would have died if I hadn’t died.
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Tracy Cochran
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One way of celebrating the Solstice
is to consider it a sacred time of reflection,
release, restoration,
and renewal.
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Sarah Ban Breathnach
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We’re going on a summer break.
And will maybe be reborn
on a new platform
with a new approach.

Sometimes things have to fall apart
to make way for better things.

Sometimes things have to die
in order to survive.

Happy Sommer Soltice!
School's out for summer!

The School of Death
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Life will break you.

Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.

You have to love.
You have to feel.
It is the reason you are here on earth.

You are here to risk your heart.
You are here to be swallowed up.

And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.

Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
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Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
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Art by Anastacia Sholik

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The wonder of life is in presence,
it’s not in the scenery that happens to be showing up.

That’s why you can be looking at
the Grand Canyon and feel miserable,
or you can be looking at trash
blowing down the street and feel ecstasy.

The wonder, the ecstasy, the joy,
the beauty is in the quality of the looking.

It’s in the presence.

If you’re looking at the Grand Canyon and thinking that you’ve wasted your whole life,
you’ll probably feel miserable.

If you’re looking at trash in the gutter and you’re totally present and open and not caught up in thinking,
you’ll feel wonderfully alive.
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Joan Tollifson
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joantollifson

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Dismiss this phantasma
of disease and health,
sorrow and joy.
Rise above it.
Become the Self.

Watch the show of the universe,
but do not become absorbed in it.

Many times I have seen my body
gone from this world.
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Death is not a punishment; it is an awakening; it is a release.

We cry for a loved one, saying,
"How terrible. He is gone."
Still, we are the ones to be pitied.

One great swami in India said:
„Insult not my death with your pity,
ye who are left on this desolate shore
still to mourn and deplore; it is I who pity you."
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Paramahansa Yogananda
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Wether we choose celibacy or committed partnership, wether we are female or male or something in between, the same work remains of polishing the mirror of the heart, of being in remembrance moment by moment, breath by breath.

Each moment, we reaffirm the inner marriage until there is no longer lover or Beloved but only Unity of Being.

Little by little, we die to that which we thought we were.

We are dissolved into Love, and we become love, God willing.
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Camille Adams Helminski, Introduction of ‚Women of Sufism - A Hidden Treasure‘
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mysticism
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It's a rare and precious thing
to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong.

If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it
or isolate ourselves.

If others are suffering,
we're taught to put them away somewhere
so we don't have to see it.

Someone who has experienced trauma
also has gifts to offer all of us - in their depth, their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience
of the power of compassion.
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Sharon Salzberg
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📷: Cynthia Erivo as Celie in John Doyle’s Broadway revival of “The Color Purple”. Shot by Norman Jean Roy

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Hence this life of yours which you are living
is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole;
only this whole is not so constituted that it
can be surveyed in one single glance.

This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear:
Tat tvam asi, this is you.

Or, again, in such words as 'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above,
I am this whole world'.

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth,
with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.

You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable.

As surely she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering.

And not merely 'some day':
now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over.

For eternally and always there is only now,
one and the same now;
the present is the only thing that has no end.
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The total number of minds in the universe
is one.

In fact, consciousness is a singularity
phasing within all beings.
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Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World
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Don’t ask what the world needs.

Ask what makes you come alive,
and go do it.

Because what the world needs
is people who have come alive.
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There is something in every one of you
that waits and listens
for the sound of the genuine in yourself.

It is the only true guide you will ever have.

And if you cannot hear it,
you will all of your life spend your days
on the ends of strings
that somebody else pulls.
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Howard Thurman
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Art by Unknown

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Most energy moves through space
in a spiral form—a ubiquitous motif in the macrocosmic and microscopic architecture of the universe.

Beginning with galactic nebulae—the cosmic birth-cradle of all matter—energy flows in coiled or circular or vortex-like patterns.

The theme is repeated in the orbital dance of electrons around their atomic nucleus, and (as cited in Hindu scriptures of ancient origin) of planets and suns and stellar systems spinning through space around a grand center of the universe.

Many galaxies are spiral-shaped; and countless other phenomena in nature—plants, animals, the winds and storms—similarly evidence the invisible whorls of energy underlying their shape and structure.
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Paramahansa Yogananda
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Opening and closing spirals
constitute the heartbeat of the universe.
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Walter Russell
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📷: 2: From the book: The Universal One by Walter Russell, Art by

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Meditation is misunderstood
as something you envision in your head,
when in fact it is something to be seen
with your own eyes.

What you begin to see is that the place
where you thought your life occurred - the cave of rumination and memory, the cauldron of anxiety and fear - isn't where your life takes place at all.

Those mental recesses are where pain occurs, but life occurs elsewhere,
in a place we are usually too preoccupied
to notice, too distracted to see:
right in front of our eyes.

The point of meditation is to stop making things up and see things as they are.

You have to step through the gate,
the false barrier of your critical mind,
to see all the ways we habitually reject
the very place our lives have landed us.

And then, we have to stop plotting an escape. That’s what practice is for: staying put.

Your life is your practice.
Your spiritual practice does not occur someplace other than in your life right now, and your life is nowhere other
than where you are.

You are looking for answers, insight,
and wisdom that you already possess.

Live the life in front of you, be the life you are, and see what you find out for yourself.

This is my practice.
It's not anything special you need to learn.

It is not some new information you neet to get. It is nothing you haven't heard before.

It is just a turn you might not yet have made, or made again, and again, and again.

A turn toward intimate engagement
with the life you already have.

Fulfillment derives not from lofty achievements, but from ordinary feats.

It arrives not once in a lifetime,
but every moment of the livelong day.
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Karen Maezen Miller, Zen Buddhist priest and teacher at the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles.
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