Soaring upwards
Can be like reaching down

Pushing forward

Can be like pushing back

Going right

Can be like Going left

Within is within

All things begin

And end at the cross roads

–GraalBaum 2013

This world-mountain was Nizir to the Chaldeans, Olympus to the Greeks, Hara Berezaiti to the Persians of the Avesta, the later Alborz and Elburz; a transfer, as says Mme. Ragozin, of ‘mythical heavenly geography to the earth.’ This mountain—the solar hill of the Egyptians—we shall again refer to in the next two or three chapters. At its apex springs, the heaven tree on which the solar bird is perched. From its roots spring the waters of life—the celestial sea, which, rushing adown the firmament, supplies the ocean which circumscribes the earth or falls directly in rain. At their fountain these springs are guarded by a goddess. In Egypt Nut, the goddess of the oversea, leans from the branches of the heavenly persea and pours forth the celestial water. In the Vedas, Yama, lord of the waters, sits in the highest heaven in the midst of the heavenly ocean under the tree of life, which drops the nectar Soma, and here, on the ‘navel of the waters,’ matter first took form. In the Norse, the central tree Yggdrasil has at its roots the spring of knowledge guarded by the Norns, the northern Fates; two swans the parents of all those of earth, float there. In Chaldea the mighty tree of Eridu, centre of the world, springs by the waters. The Avesta gives a very complete picture—Iran is at the centre of the seven countries of the world; it was the first created, and so beautiful, that were it not that God has implanted in all men a love for their own land, all nations would crowd into this the loveliest land. To the east somewhere, but still at the centre of the world, rises the ‘Lofty Mountain,’ from which all the mountains of the earth have grown, ‘High Haraiti;’ at its

summit is the gathering place of waters, out of which spring the two trees, the heavenly Haoma (Soma), and another tree which bears all the seeds that germinate on earth. This heavenly mountain is called ‘Navel of Waters,’ for the fountain of all waters springs there, guarded by a majestic and beneficent goddess. In Buddhist accounts, the waters issue in four streams like the

Eden from this reservoir, and flow to the cardinal points, each making one complete circuit in its descent. In the Persian Bundahish there are two of these heavenly rivers flowing east and west. To the Hindus the Ganges is such a heavenly stream. ‘The stream of heaven was called by the Greeks Achelous.’ The Nile in Egypt, the Hoang-Ho in China, and the Jordan to the Jews, seem to have been celestial rivers. This mountain of heaven is often figured in Christian art with the four rivers issuing from under the Throne of God.

Sir John Maundeville gives an account of the earthly Paradise quite perfect in its detailed scheme. It is the highest place on earth, nearly reaching to the circle of the moon (as in Dante), and the flood did not reach it. ‘And in the highest place, exactly in the middle, is a well that casts out the four streams’—Ganges, Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates. ‘And men there beyond say that all the sweet waters of the world above and beneath take their beginning from the well of Paradise, and out of that well all water come and go.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/amm/amm07.htm

http://chasinghermes.com/2009/04/24/08-axis-mundi.aspx

in using inadequate words

that drives the mind

beyond all words…

At the borders of speech

we open ourselves

to the positive value of silence….

Literary reading,

through its complexity, its music,

its suggestiveness, points to a fuller realm of being.

–Edward k Kaplan (citing Abraham Joshua Heschel)

Revelation is a cloudburst, a downpour,

yet most of us are like moles, burrowing,

and whatever stream we meet is underground

–Abraham Joshua Heschel

–Thomas Merton

………………………..

THE universe is God’s book,
And he to whom the vision of the Divine
Has been vouchsafed
Reads therein and understands.
Substance is its consonants and accidents its vowels,
And different creatures are its signs and pauses.
The first verse is “Universal Reason,”
The second “Universal Soul,” the “verse of light,”
And this is as a brightly shining lamp.
The third is the “Highest heavens,
The fourth “The Throne.”
After there are seven transcendent spheres,
The “chapter of the seven limbs,”
And forms of the four elements,
Then Nature’s three kingdoms
Whose verses none can count.
And last of all came down the soul of man

http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/srg/srg00.htm

………………………………………………….

“The world was created with ten utterances.

But could God not have created her with a single utterance?

Rather, it is to teach you how precious the earth is,

and how much reward for those who cherish her and how great the consequences for those who abuse her”

– Babylonian Talmud, Avot 5:1

………………………..

Sometimes you really feel the presence of God in the world, and in your life, And sometimes, you have trouble accessing that sense of Divine Presence. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi calls God “The Great Cosmic Flasher.” More ancient rabbis put it this way: “The Sacred Wellspring (God) is both revealed and concealed. “God is always present, and at times that presence is conspicuous, and at times mysterious. But never absent.

-Sefer Ha’Zohar, (Vol 1, f39b)

When you train yourself to hear the voice of God in everything, you attain the quintessence of the human spirit. Usually the mind conceals the divine thoroughly by imagining that there is a separate mental power that constructs the mental images. But by training yourself to hear the voice of God in everything, the voice reveals itself to your mind as well. Then the right in mind, you discover revelation.

–Daniel C Matt: The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism

To find the Tao, there is nowhere you need to search.

If it is nit inside you, it is not the Tao

–Confucius

–thomas merton

Before the mountains had been shaped,

before the hills, I was brought forth,

When he had not made the earth and fields,

or the world’s first bits of soil.

When he established the heavens, I was there;

when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,

when he made firm the skies above,

when he established the fountains of the deep,

when he assigned to the sea its limit,

so that the waters might not transgress his command,

when he marked out the foundations of the earth,

then I was beside him, like a master worker,

and I was daily his delight,

rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world

and delighting in the human race.

–prov 8:25-31

The verification which Zen seeks is not to be found in a dialectical transaction involving the reduction of fact to logical statements and their reflective verification by fact. It may be said that long before Bertrand Russell spoke of `atomic facts’ Zen had split the atom and made its own kind of statement in the explosion of logic into satori (enlightenment). The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.

But what reality? There is certainly a kind of living and non-verbal dialectic in Zen between the ordinary everyday experience of the senses (which is by no means arbitrarily repudiated) and the experience of enlightenment. Zen is not an idealistic rejection of sense and matter in order to ascend to a supposedly invisible reality which alone is real. The Zen experience is a direct grasp of the unity of the invisible and the visible, the noumenal and the phenomenonal or, if you prefer, an experiential realization that any division of them is pure imagination.

–Thomas Merton The Golden Age of Zen: Zen Masters of the T’ang Dynasty (Spiritual Masters)

–Martin Lings ( Sacred Art of Shakespeare: To Take Upon Us the Mystery of Things  )

………………………………………..

–D.T. Suzuki ( Zen and Japanese Culture (New in Paper) (Bollingen Series)

……………………………………………..

WHAT IS AN ARCHETYPE?

What more shall I say? In that earthly shell There is naught but foam of foam of foam of foam!

God is that foam; God is also that pure sea for His words are neither a temptation or a vain boast.
Plurality and Partial Evil, though seemingly opposed to Unity, subserve

Good. The story is now concluded, with its ups and downs, Like lovers’ musings, without beginning or ending.

It has no beginning , even as eternity,
Nor ending, for ’tis akin to world without end. Or like water, each drop whereof is at once Beginning and end, and also has no beginning or end.

–Rumi (Masnavi)