The Seer

Old habits of mind
Want to box and label
What is seen,
Safely containing
All things, all experience,
In the known world.

But a new wind
Blows through the mind
Not looking for refuge from life.
Seeing beyond itself
Into the alive world
Of happenings and presences,
Mysterious and unfathomable.
So far beyond thought
That mind lies down
In the deepest bow possible
Dumbfounded and reverent.

Then rising again,
From its bow
In hopeful adoration
Only wanting to serve
What it doesn’t understand.

~ by Alice Gardner

One of the special hightlights in recent years at Adyashanti’s retreats has been a female rap artist named: Premantor. To the enjoyment of all, and the perplexity of some, Premanator has been offering her awareness-inspired rap music for nearly a decade — sometimes performing with beatboxer, Edward “The Wild” West,

Apparently, non-dual wisdom rap is what the Premanator is all about. Expressing insightful and sometimes irreverent spiritual messages through the medium of rap music, the Premanator has one directive: to annihilate the listener’s mind — or at least loosen its grip on the not-so-real dream state we call “reality.”

Influenced by enlightened sages throughout time (such as Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj) and 80’s rappers (such as UTFO, Roxanne, and The Beastie Boys) the Premanator offers a unique and enlightening entertainment experience! You can see a YouTube Clip of her wowing her audience with: Who Are You?

There’s more information about this awakened rapper on Her Web Site.

You have to love
The antics of your mind,
Imagining life should only be sweet.
The bitter makes the sweet; and life is both.
It is whole, like you,

Before you think yourself to pieces.
Place this moment’s pain and confusion on the altar, too,
And give special thanks for such grace
That wakes you up from sleeping through your life.
Pain is greatly under-rated as a pointer to Unknowing,
yet greatly over-rated when taken as identity.

In this one moment,
Your eyes meet mine and there is
a single looking.
What is peering from behind our masks?
Can it touch itself across the room?
Place your palms together;
Touch your holy skin.
In another moment it will shed itself.
What will you be then?
What were you before you had two hands?
What are you now?
You cannot capture That
and place It on the altar of this moment.
It is the altar,
And this moment’s infinite expressions,
And the Seeing,
And its own devotion to itself.
You are That.

~ From the poem: “The Altar of This Moment” by Dorothy S. Hunt

I have this desire to drop everything
Things seem such a burden
Thoughts, concepts, beliefs, personality
So much effort involved in the maintenance of this.

When I allow, life flows
When I resist, life is a bottleneck.

This silent space seems custom made for me
After all these years with myself
I’ve never really known my Self.
Could I stand to die, not knowing?

Allow outward focus to gently change its course.
Come within, where everything and nothing merge.

Childhood patterns become adult patterns
Seemingly more sophisticated
But conditioned and genetic nonetheless.
Do patterns themselves have awareness?
What is aware of the conditioning?

I’m terrified of sleepwalking through this entire life
In an unconscious haze
Occassionally the alarm clock rings
But the snooze button is big, soft and easy.
My deathbed thought would be
‘Damn, I wasted this whole life’.

~ by Heather Saunders

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew –
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the (no-)face of God.

~ Pilot Officer, Gillespie Magee, RCAF

Down in the depth of my nature
Where the issues of life are born,
From that aware numinous realm,
Surviving through ages of storm,
A call is forever rising —
But its language I cannot speak.
It was born ere I had being,
’Tis the call of deep unto deep.

Down deep in the Heart that is God,
In mystical regions sublime,
In the void that’s potentially all things,
Long before our world or our time,
An answer was fully prepared
Every pain, every ache to meet,
In ‘I Am’ — God’s truly begotten,
Is answer to deep unto deep.

~ based on some verses by John Wright Follette
“Deep calleth unto deep at the noise (call) of thy water-spouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.” Psalm 42:7.

She peers through a pair of binoculars
into a treetop lit with day’s last blaze,
where some bird alights unseen by me.
Her gaze poised so tremulous and light,
as if resting upon a twig — looking, looking
at the bird that we don’t see. The bird in the tree,
and the seer of the bird sharing for the stainless present
the same slender branch. She stands stock-still.
Expecting nothing. Neither bird, nor bird watcher, nor air
are moving. Nor I, as I watch her, as she watches the bird –
all hung weightless and timeless and spaceless. Perched
upon this dimensionless brink. The twig could not bear
any more load than this bare awareness. If, therefore,
you would not spook the bird, nor snap the twig,
nor shatter this spun glass globe of air, then alight upon
the world like air, like breath. And do not linger any longer
than this bird watcher who now strolls off, the bird still hidden,
still lost in shadow. Forgetting the bird, forgetting herself.
Dissolving like an apparition into twilight’s final bay.
Only this poem still holding on. Foolish poem
grasping at the ungraspable world.

~ by Richard Schiffman.

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O Wondrous Self! O Sphere of Light,
O Sphere of Joy most fair;
O Act, O Power infinite;
O Subtle, and unbounded Air!
O Living Orb of Sight!
Thou which within me art, yet Me! Thou Ey,
And Temple of his Whole Infinitie!
O what a World art Thou! a World within!

All Things appear,
All Objects are
Alive in thee! Supersubstancial, Rare,
Abov them selvs, and nigh of Kin
To those pure Things we find In his Great Mind
Who made the World! tho now Ecclypsed by Sin.
There they are Useful and Divine,
Exalted there they ought to Shine.

~ From: My Spirit, by Thomas Traherne

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Space so empty undisturbed
Galaxies don’t touch it
are barely heard
It points to something
that can’t be seen
It is; we are
It isn’t; we aren’t.

~ by Augie Monge

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I was a neurotic for years.
Anxious, depressed, selfish
And everyone kept telling me to change.
And I resented them,
And agreed with them,
And wanted to change
But simply couldn’t, no matter how I tried.
What hurt the most was that, like the others,
my closest friend kept urging me to change,
So I felt powerless and trapped.

One day he said,
“Don’t change. I love you as you are.”
Those words were music to my ears.
“Don’t change. Don’t change. Don’t change.
I love you as you are.”
I relaxed. I came alive. And suddenly I changed!
Now I know that I could n’t really change until I found someone to love me whether I changed or not.

Is that how you love me God?

From: The Song of the Bird, by Fr. Anthony de Mello, SJ.