from Meher Baba – ‘Each soul is God passing through imagination to realize individually his own divinity’.

- and -

’When push comes to shove, When the intellectual lights go out, When the flashy experiences fade (and they will), When the highs and lows level out, When the senses can no longer generate or get puffed up by the “feel good stuff”, When the supposed “I” feels like a fragile, leaky amniotic sac due to the blows inflicted upon by clear seeing, When not even God can be perceived in the usual ways…what will you do? Will you be able to stay put, to endure the darkness, the unknowing, or will you find a new dream catcher to reflect back to you all that you are not willing to let go of yet? When there is nothing left but the crucible of innocent intent, what will you do? To stand still in this place is no easy task. All you can do is trust that which you set out to gain but which has somehow escaped you, because the way you knew That, has vanished. When you can sense no progress from all your efforts, and cannot see any way forward, what will you do? Stand still, in Innocence and trust. You have reached the end of your efforts. Something else must take over now. Wait~Wait~Wait This is how you serve God now. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” John Milton’

Quote for the Contest:
“For He has given His angels charge over Thee. They shall bear Thee up in Their arms lest Thy dash Thy foot against a stone.” Psalm 91.

Day Before Spring

“I like this winter sort of thing, for a while…
Because snow makes soft corners, soft lines and curves, soft sounds…

A quiet envelope to awaken in…
Dementions…? BOUNDLESS!

A cloak of silence, lightly covering all,
And smooth lines, to place silent footsteps into.”

I was attending my first ATR in South Fallsberg, in the Catskills. The silence was lovely and so rich. Snow a rare treat for me, being from the South. It flowed easily onto the paper.

Jan May

First Evening of Silence

“Winter night walking, silent snow falls…
Onto a blanket of itself.

We come to what sounds to be a cricket,
Small, gray-brown, chirping…
But we are in a snowy land, no home for such a creature!

The source? The occasional creak of a spinning motor, beneath a yellow- lighted window we are passing.

Yet in that instant, I found myself,
A barefoot dancer in deep, green grass,
Moving lightly through summer air,
First Star, crescent moon, cotton dress…

We are arm in arm as we steady our course through the white snow….
On this, the first night of the year.”

South Fallsberg, Governor training.
Maharishi was there for a few days and had just left. The whole atmosphere was rich, vibrant, delicate and sparkling with the beauty of his dharshan. It was January 1st and the beginning of SILENCE.

Jan May

“There is only one happiness in life.
To love, and be loved. “

Quote by George Sand, a woman writer.
Submitted by Jan May

It reminded me of hearing Suzanne speak of her communication with devas.
Saying that it was very vibrant with love.

“ Let noble thoughts come from every side”

Vedic scripture.
Submitted by Jan May

LOOKING AT A STAR

November I am twelve years old, reading on the window sill in the fruit
shed I am kneeling on a wicker hamper, and my knees are numb. The
daylight is cold and cramped. Rubbing my hands I sniff the air …

I have read myself out of existence. No such person inhabits the dark
day; but suddenly I come awake with a rush of feeling. My crowded head
feels suddenly clear, empty and airy as craning out of the window, I look
hungrily around. This is real, I think, the colours, the brick, the ivy. It
is as though something is going to be shown to me, once and forever.
Things seem so clear, they seem to declare themselves aloud. My eyes
have touch, my skin on which the air plays seems to be as glass through
which I can look from every pore. Awake, awake to all, I know it is a
rare moment, perhaps a beginning of a life separate from ordinary
existence.

And yet what is there? The elm tree dropping leaves yellow golden
all over, into the rainwater tank. They slide slowly downward on the
point and settle with the faintest breath of sound on the
olive surface…

I lean out, sighing with the strange feeling in me. I can
touch the cold
sides of the tank, I feel as though I can touch with my mind the tree trunk,
the hedge, the hurdle, even the farthest hill that I can see. What are all
these familiar things saying so clearly? Why have I never
seen them like
this before? A moment ago they existed but quietly and
without me.
Now the leaves keep falling so queerly — queerly as though I had some-
thing to do with their falling. Something is happening which
makes me
able to say and know that it is true: ’I shall remember this. I shall
remember each vein on each leaf. I shall be able to see this
whenever I want to,
wherever I am!…

Those are the eras, the visions,
where the inner and outer meaning of the earth and sky and all that is in
them, fit exactly the one over the other, when there is no slipping, no edge
of obscurity, no groping. Ah, how impossible it is to keep
those moments,
to hold down for more than a single instant that joy of being oneself
contained in all one sees! Feeling with the leaves, travelling with the
clouds, seeing back from the star, into one’s own breast that is the very
essence of perception. It is then that one can live for an
instant in the
million kinds of life which fumble for the sun, or in the stars which search
through space for the earth to shine on, and on the earth, a spirit to enter.

It is the strangest sensation for the mind to fix itself in the contemplation

of one single natural thing; and one of its most singular
phenomena is the
amazing quality of universal perception which takes place in the thinker
at the same time. Fixed on one, all things become supernaturally distinct
and detailed. With the mind utterly rapt the eye becomes
abnormally
sensitive, but unconsciously, so that in recollection memory brings back a
landscape where one seemed to see only a cloud’s broken suns. Yet not
always.
Sometimes I seem to know each separate thing while
lost in the
one, and then it is that I feel profoundly the almost
palpable linking up
of the universe. From life to life, from kind to kind,
through the mind to
the sky and out to each planet, the chain reaches. Ah, who
can doubt it?
Who that really feels what he sees can fail to be sure, if he thinks at all
of what his senses tell him. The air itself is felt to be
woven of threads of
life. Even in the darkness they are there. Looking up to the moon as it
seems to rush backwards across its own white hollow of light, looking
at the sun s direct rays on the earth, looking at the stars
whose presence
reaches us through enormous darkness, who can deny the
thought? Even in sleep it does not leave me—the least
thrill in the cord recalls me, and
in the morning it is there directly the day is felt on my eyelids. Yes, even
before 1 wake. I come to it. And there are million of spirits like mine.
To them I unite because we are still more closely connected I believe

in it. But I have failed to describe it, because language cannot form the
thought, because it is wordless and unimaginable and
pictureless, an
inhabitant unseen.

One July night I went out to look at the sky before sleeping. The night
compelled me, it was so strong! I walked along a path between two fields,
hearing the corn, which was high above the ground, whisper down the
length of its wall, hearing the invisible sheep tearing the grass over all the
still hills. Each sound was distinct between the silences of the starlight,
each syllable of movement, and (for it was not late) each voice. People

were talking, men and women and children, in the cottage bedrooms.
There was something quietened, yet immense, in their tones, as if they felt
the sky in their rooms, touching them — as if the roofs were gone from
over them, and the pale tingling blue of space came down to their being.
Down to the valley, surging, seeking, rolled the sheep, past me and then
there was left on the bare grass, on the horizon and the tree tops, the
power of the stars. Their breath was in the air, a thrill, not cold but cool,
like dew. I tasted the stars, I felt them in my lungs, in my throat, and on
my eyes. They shone from star to star across all the sky and down to earth.
I felt my way to them by listening and by touching what they touched
The long grasses on a wall were each distinct and clear, clashing their
feathered heads and the leaves on the bramble sprays were separate
shapes. It was like a perpetual dawn. On a level with my feet the grass
hill suddenly swerved to the valley. Before me shone a glow of purest
light, paler than any tone, fainter than the faint thrilling blue above.
It was the outermost ring of the sun, down below the earth, part of the
curve of the sun’s furthest circle. Above it, in the very forehead of the

east, showed a small star, as a separate speck, apart from all the rest. On
it all the mystery in my thought and sight became fixed.

At first it was as though it was beyond a moving transparency. I
seemed to look at it through a clear current of water. It seemed to swell
and shrink and to be misshapen by some intervening medium. And yet it
was always the same … not splendid flashing, or placid, but soft and
alone, and full of a gentle vibration. The depths about it were gray where
the blue waned above the sun’s influence, unlike the infinite blue and
violet around the great constellations in the zenith. It lay where the shadow

of space lightened towards earth, closing finally around" the curve of my hill…

I looked into it Behind me the south, shimmering with white
fire, the grassy path, were cut off at my last stride.
Though I could hear the breeze in the oats, and was conscious
through and through of the long hills, like wings bearing the earth’s body through the air, and though the awed voices still sounded through the windows, yet there was only the star and myself meeting. I saw it with my heart, as I sometimes see my hills, and I knew myself in it, and it from space, in me. Deeper and deeper it touched me, so tight drew the cord
between us it sang! The song gathered, the string, feeling
the music hummed, but as the breath came down upon the note I was obliterated.
from Autobiography by Margiad Evans, 1943

When the mind is at peace,
The world too is at peace.
Nothing real, nothing absent.
Not holding on to reality,
Not getting stuck in the void,
You are neither holy nor wise, just
An ordinary fellow who has completed his work.

Layman F’Ang (740-808)