Bliss means absolute silence, but a silence that sings.

 

"Bliss means absolute silence, but a silence that sings, a silence that is capable of celebration. Bliss means peace but not a dead peace, not the peace that exists in the cemetery, but the peace that surrounds the peaks of high mountains — alive, thriving, pulsating, no noise but a tremendous melody."

Osho

Photo: Ice patterns on the Loch, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, March 10, 2012

We are Called to Be an Ocean of Silence Out of Which All Things Arise

I make the effort to maintain a ground of oceanic silence

out of which arises the multitude of phenomena of daily life.

I make the effort to see the Beloved in everyone and

to serve the Beloved through everyone (including the earth).

I often fail in these aspirations because I lose the balance

between separateness and unity,

get lost in my separateness

and feel afraid.

But I make the effort

(Ram Dass)

Photo: Sunset at Gold Bluffs Beach, Redwood National Park, CA, August 2, 2011

Half-Hidden Truth is Most Attractive

"By far the best part of every person's mind is not that which he knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing, unpossessed before him.  His firm recorded knowledge soon loses all interest for him.  But this dancing chorus of thoughts and hopes is the quarry of his future."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why did that moon-face [Radha]
cross my path?
Just for one moment her eyes met mine
Whose sidelong glance is all too keen . . .
Giving just a glimpse of your breast,
You stole his heart.
Vidyapati inquires: O Beauty,
how shall Krishna live? . . .
Your sidelong glances have stolen his
wits away . . .
When there you stood with hanging hair,
Across your breast but half its veil,
Then Krishna, seeing all, was sorely troubled.

Vidyapati, 15th century Indian Poet

(The flirtations between Krishna and Radha symbolize the loveplay occurring between God and the feminine divinity of the human soul, which has a habit of hiding itself)

Photo: One of the La Sal Mountains peeks through a gap in the sandstone, Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 27, 2011

Desire is an Endless "Tremoring Vibration" That is a Fulfilling End in Itself

 

"For tantrikas [practitioners of tantra], desire is the mark of the endless creativity of consciousness.  It is the very movement, the very nature, of the universe itself.  In discovering the universality of desire, we enter its radiant space . . . When we ask ourselves the question: 'What do we really desire?' we generally believe that we desire to possess people or objects.  Hence, we go through the world as predators, seeking to appropriate for ourselves everything our desire can touch.  But after a short time, we realize that we are dissatisfied, and this mechanism of truncated desire pushes us unceasingly to desire more objects, in an endless cycle that eventually gives way to frustration.

" 'What if desire were to desire something other than objects?' the Tantric masters then wondered.  If desire were simply the incandescence that gives us the feeling of being alive, were intensity, were the tremoring vibration that carries us, then it would be absurd to allow it to be consumed by objects and to lose it once we possess the object or realize we cannot attain it.  This profound movement of desire is life itself, and this tremoring is the one that all yoginis and yogis experience, precisely because they remain in the incandescence of desire without rendering it dependent upon the object . . . Here, we allow our desire to blossom out over all objects.  When our desire occupies all of space, the absence of one object goes totally unnoticed, because the flow of our awareness remains free to come into contact with thousands of others.  In the tantric sadhana there is a particular practice wherein the yogi sees the world as desire.  Everything - a leaf falling from a tree, the sky, the snow, the water he drinks, his food - desires him.  Each contact with reality becomes a celebration of the universality of desire.  Fixation on a single object thus ceases to exist."

Daniel Odier

Photo: Midway Geyser Basin at dusk, Yellowstone National Park, WY, September 3, 2011

Flirtatious Mount Rainier

 

                                               “Nature is wont to hide herself"  (Heraclitus)

            

                                               "Today the mountain,

playful and not omniscient, thinks itself

concealed among attendant clouds . . .

But you are no more hidden

by complacent cumulus

than Venus by a mask

of black Venetian velvet”

(Denise Levertov, "Masquerade," on Mt. Rainier)

                                                

                                               

                                                Seeking to cover my breasts with my hands,

            I could not, - Just as the snow may not

            conceal the southern hills.

            (Vidyapati, on the Goddess Radha, 

            15th century India)

Photo: Mount Rainier flirting with the camera, Mt. Rainier National Park, WA, August 4, 2011