NAKED IN UNFATHOMABLE GRACE... "...steeping in silence..." "TO HELL WITH THE DEVILS" Sunrise/Afternoon Feb. 7, 2018

"Sunrise" Sky from ocean-facing porch view..too rainy to go out this morning

The wise man, by studying nature, enters into unity through its variety,
and realizes the personality of God by sacrificing his own.
                        Bowl of Saki, February 7, by Hazrat Inayat Khan
http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/V/V_1.htm

1/1/15 SUNRISE

 AWARENESS OF NOTHING
IS ALL THAT IS
< 
A STILLPOINT SOURCING ALL
WITHOUT IDO’S ADO
< 
BEYOND WORDS & THOUGHTS
NAKED IN UNFATHOMABLE GRACE OF TAO CORE
ew
4:28 AM-2/7/18

1/1/15 SUNRISE

We can make our minds so like still water
that beings gather about us to see their own images
and so live for a moment with a clearer,
perhaps even a fiercer life
because of our silence.
William Butler Yeats
https://makebelieveboutique.com/2018/02/07/26893/

1/1/15 SUNRISE

7/17/16 SUNRISE

In awakened awareness we use language to communicate
while knowing that another, more powerful communication
is taking place in deeper awareness.
In awakened awareness we don't need to pretend
that we are only a conglomeration of stories,
an aggregate of accomplishments,
or a survivor of miseries.
We are willing to gaze into the eyes of another person
without fear or desire
—without stories about who I am or who she is--
and sense only the light of existence
shining in a particular pair of eyes.
~Catherine Ingram
https://makebelieveboutique.com/2018/02/07/26893/

6/22/15 BACKYARD "PET"

There's an awareness that exists
beyond words and allows
our direct experience to be completely fresh.
The more attuned we are to this awareness,
the more quickly language and thought are analyzed
for their usefulness and released.

5/9/15 Grandfather's Cove

This occurs via a process which I call "steeping in silence,"
whereby the attention rests in quiet awareness
and thus remains there more and more consistently,
as it becomes stronger in its habit. 
~Catherine Ingram
https://makebelieveboutique.com/2018/02/07/26893/

AFTERNOON...

...it is simply that freedom is to be found here and now,
not in some imagined future.
The future never comes.

Freedom is simply to know that what we are is pure awareness.
We are not merely this body
or the steady barrage of thoughts
that we tell ourselves.

We are the pure awareness
in which everything is arising and passing,
and all of it is arising as pure awareness itself.

So this is to know yourself as your own source even as you are living it;
to have the attention placed on the source or on the pure awareness instead
of on these fleeting occurrences of body and mind;
to know yourself as the ocean
and not merely the individual expression
or the wave.

We do not deny the individual expression- our “waveness”
but we know ourselves in essence as the ocean.
And in this knowing
there is actually a great celebration of and a tenderness for
the unique and fleeting manifestation of the wave.
Catherine Ingram
http://www.catherineingram.com/thunderstorm/

People who know how to enjoy life
are wiser than people who value their lives.
Excerpt from.
TAO TE CHING #75
Trans Ron Hogan
https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Year:1972,1988,1996,2004/section:75

TO  HELL WITH THE DEVILS
excerpt from
Gerald May's synopsis of vital changes in the life of
 Teresa of Avila

Being able to surrender her prayer to God alone,
being reassured that God would not abandon her,
and being understood by one prayerful human friend:
these were three powerful vehicles of grace
that enabled Teresa to tell her devils to go to hell.
As she began the great works of the last twenty years of her life,
she proclaimed of the devils,
"I pay no more attention to them than to flies
... A fig for all the devils, because they shall fear me ...
Without doubt,
I fear those who have such great fear of the devil
more than I do the devil himself ...
'The devil! The devil!' we say,
when we could be saying 'God! God!'
and make the devil tremble."


See Read More below
for entire Gerald May Article
"TO HELL WITH THE DEVILS"

TO HELL WITH THE DEVILS
Gerald May
In the twenty years before her death at age 67, Teresa of Avila spearheaded a controversial reform within the Carmelite order,
authored four classic contemplative texts,
gave spiritual direction to John of the Cross and countless others,
and commanded the respect and obedience of priests, bishops,
and civil authorities including the King of Spain.
I have often wondered how Teresa,
a vowed religious woman of poor health
and living in sixteenth-century Spain, could accomplish so much.
In those twenty years,
she was fearless of the turbulent and often vicious powers around her.
She was "amused" at being examined by the Inquisition,
and said to the devils,
"Come now, all of you ... I want to see what you can do to me!"

It was not always that way.
During the first two decades of her religious life,
Teresa was besieged by self-doubts and fear of the devils.
She strove to conform to the rigid expectations of outer authority,
but her prayer was irrepressible and spiritually incorrect
for a woman of her times.
She heard God speaking to her,
and she saw inner visions of Christ.
Her experiences seemed valid while she was in prayer,
but afterwards, reflecting on them with others,
she was terrified they might be the work of the devil.

Her early spiritual directors confirmed her fears.
They were certain the voices and visions came from the devil
and sent Teresa from one counselor to another.
She was told to abstain from quiet prayer and solitude.
Obediently, she tried never to be alone.
But then "the Lord made me recollected during conversation and,
without my being able to avoid it,
told me what He pleased."
One director even ordered her to make the "fig,"
a contemptuous hand gesture,
at any vision of Christ she might experience.
She obeyed, even though
"Making the fig at this vision of the Lord caused me the greatest pain."
The fearful concern of her friends and advisors left her feeling abandoned, dreading that "all would run from me."

What empowered Teresa to transcend two decades of struggle
with herself and her advisors?
Teresa describes what happened.
She finally surrendered,
not to her own judgments nor to those of anyone else,
but to God alone.
She quit trying to control her prayer and simply put it in God's hands.
Thereafter,
instead of blindly trusting the opinions of others,
she tested them against her own interior experience
of the Divine Presence.

Repeatedly she affirms it was God's sheer grace
that enabled her to surrender and, thereby, find her strength.
She also mentions three experiences which were vehicles of that grace.
Two were words she heard God speak in prayer;
the third was meeting a human being who finally understood her.

One powerful word from God came at a time when Teresa was feeling especially abandoned by her friends.
"They were all against me;" she wrote,
"some, it seemed, made fun of me
... others advised my confessor to be careful of me ..."
Praying in her loneliness, Teresa heard God say,
"Do not fear, daughter; for I am, and I will not abandon you."
"By these words alone," Teresa says,
"I was given calm together with fortitude, courage, security,
quietude, and light so that in one moment
I saw my soul become another.
It seems to me I would have disputed with the entire world
that these words came from God.
Oh, what a good God!"

Another time,
God's words dealt with the importance Teresa
had been giving to the opinions and perceptions of other people.
God said,
"No longer do I want you to converse with men but with angels."
Her interpretation was that she no longer
needed to give energy to relationships with people
who weren't genuinely dedicated to "loving and serving God."
"From that day on," she wrote,
"I was very courageous in abandoning all for God."
There is some indication that she also attempted
to apply this to some of her less-than-helpful spiritual directors,
but God seemed to insist that she continue to obey them.

Then,
just before Teresa began her monumental works,
she met Peter of Alcántara.
Peter had initiated a reform of his own Franciscan order
and encouraged Teresa in hers.
He was a man of deep prayer and devotion,
widely respected for his asceticism.
Teresa bared her soul to him, and
"Almost from the outset,
I saw that he understood me through experience,
which was all that I needed."

Peter so trusted Teresa's inner experience
that he shared "his own concerns and business matters"
with her and asked her to pray for him.
To make things even better,
Peter then went to Teresa's spiritual directors,
assured them, and, in Teresa's words,
"gave them motives and reasons for feeling safe
and not disturbing me any more."
Some of these directors became
Teresa's beloved friends and colleagues in later years,
and "the one who had troubled me most"
finally became her directee in a time of crisis
near the end of his life.

Being able to surrender her prayer to God alone,
being reassured that God would not abandon her,
and being understood by one prayerful human friend:
these were three powerful vehicles of grace
that enabled Teresa to tell her devils to go to hell.
As she began the great works of the last twenty years of her life,
she proclaimed of the devils,
"I pay no more attention to them than to flies
... A fig for all the devils, because they shall fear me ...
Without doubt,
I fear those who have such great fear of the devil
more than I do the devil himself ...
'The devil! The devil!' we say,
when we could be saying
'God! God!'
and make the devil tremble."

I have given only the barest sketch of Teresa's empowerment here,
but perhaps it will help illuminate these words
from one of her most well-known poems:
Nada te turbe, Nada te espante ... Sólo Dios basta.
Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing make you afraid ...
God alone is sufficient.

TO HELL WITH THE DEVILS
Gerald May
 
Quotations are from "The Book of Her Life," Ch. 24 ff, Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1987).


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