#alexandracostin

[alivingstillness]

I play waves of empty water,

And think my self to be, 

Another I, another me,

One sprouting makes another,

From none, to two, to thousands, upon you,

Gazing through these windows of myself,

I’m neither known as wave nor watcher,

I am dance, I am the dancing,

To silent drums my water bleed,

But I stay whole, I never need,

I have no dharma, I dream no dream, 

These eyes of mine, cannot be seen,

For I am none, who is as one,

Yes I am none, and one indeed.

.

I am the limitless being who through my own power, veil myself with mind, which is nothing, but my own work of art. 

I create outwardly, but rejoice inwardly.

I descend through my very own Self and hold on to what I see. With my eyes I reach for objects and forget that they are of me. I divide and I multiply, “I” appears as other, and seem like something else. 

My limitation Is my freedom, and my freedom is without limit. Through love, I hide, through love, I seem bound, and through love, I am found.

Artwork: unknown

[ingagluhova]

[alivingstillness]

Samsara and the rising of the individual

When we speak about awakening to our non-dual nature which is the Self, we often use the analogy of dream vs. reality. It is a coming into recognition of your ever-present awareness and then becoming established as it.

Kundalini rising and the shattering and building of concepts that often follows an expansion in awareness is as real as anything else held in our collective experienced reality. Samsara is the perpetuating experience of individuality, macro-to-microcosm, I am, to -I am until you surrender to what you are.

Since we are not actually departed or locally distant from our true nature, it is an inner knowing of all individuals to realise the truth as fully as we can. Truth is in a way, veiled in plain sight by our own creative free will, touching upon itself, vibrating as creation as it’s no-thing foundation, that is the absolute.

The dream itself is the individual’s limited view of separation due to experienced levels of awareness, not awareness itself.

“Just as matter and it’s sensory qualities are the manifest outwardness of awareness, so is awareness and its sensory qualities it’s unmanifest inwardness” ― Spanda Kārikās

Love

/Alexandra 

[alivingstillness]

Motionless emotion.

Being stillness itself while emotion happens. -Residing as the unmoved background to appearance and recognising nothingness in the appearance of emotion, not setting forth the motion-imposing more movement on the motionless.

It is not about avoiding feelings, or experience. It is about understanding aversion and desire, and to whom they are felt and the mechanism of mind. To surrender to what appears within, while knowing that you are not that. It is about acceptance and humility towards the personal while always remembering the impersonal self, who stand witness to both the subtle and the gross, never attached to the hight of happy or the hollowest low.

/Alex

[alivingstillness]

I AM NOT THE EGO, EGO IS OF THE I AM.

Ego is of “I”-ness, the separation necessary for experience, for tasting the divinity of its real non-experiential nature, the Self, -selfless and indivisible. It is memory, comprised of the known, conscious and subconscious. It is the doer, reacting upon our past, quickly running to the future or feeling the before, superimposing and analytical, It takes credit for appearances.

"I AM THAT"

What your being is prior to experience or cognition, the source “I” came out from and fall back into, that is the you that is "That". And That is not the ego, the ego is of That. It is without parts, but parts are appearing within That, letting That touch upon itself, knowing to un-know

Our experience of the mind can make us feel like there is a division of an egoic and a non-egoic nature of it, one of heart and one of heartless. To grasp the nature of mind or ego it has to be explored with and from the workings of it. To be able to say that mind is within heart, there has to be the understanding that one is prior to and beyond the “I” that is the ego, and that "I" am not a product of time but that time is a product of the “I”.

When a person becomes drenched in her own stillness, the mind-stuff becomes absent, and in the absence, the Now is the only reality. Ego can not function properly when being in the present moment completely, for what gives ego the opportunity of taking hold of us is the dwelling between past and future, comparing between states of experience.

When the ego stays with itself without continuously perpetuating a persons story, the "I"-ness appear to disappear and separation cease to be our perceived reality. It does not eliminate the ego completely but when there is understanding that everything is appearing within intimate but impersonal consciousness, the workings of the ego or "I"-nature becomes fundamentally changed.

When experiencing everything as the Self, we are permeated with selflessness and humility toward our surroundings. One can be having life experiences immersed in duality while being completely absorbed in the understanding that one is only being-ness where the notion of "I" is a product of one’s own nature, not ultimate (absolute) for it is known. One does no longer give much credit to the "I", and the feeding of conceptual ego can stop. It is beyond life changing for it does not only change how we experience anything, but it relates the heart to the non-experience.

AVERSION OF THE EGO IS THE EGO.

There is no longer need to condemn the ego that has been accepted and dissolved by its own mechanism. Instead there is room for love, honouring the the path of content, making realisation of the pathless possible.

/Alex

Artist: unknown

[alivingstillness]

Unconditioned desire

To enter into samadhi is direct and formless perception of that which is beyond perception. From it comes the recognition of emptiness - a fabric made of nothing, holding within itself all that is coming into form. An emptiness that is full to the brim beyond comprehension which translates as love when being recognised by itself as its formless form.

One has to be immersed in this beingness as the being, always with heart in the empty, of the no-thing to feel effortlessly blissful without engagement- not a small integration so to say. When recognising this stateless nature as ones own being is when mind stops making impressions that cling to feelings, or mystical-spiritual experiences.

Something that is so simple is difficult to reach, for mind is attracted to complexity. Mystical experiences, spirit beings, energies are potentials, natural within consciousness itself, often misinterpreted as coming from outside of us. The more we cling to experiences, even though they might be of a much more subtle or ‘subconscious’ form, engaging in them for personal profit or attributing them to ones personal “I” can only be a hindrance to the realisation one might have first sought after.

It is easy to forget that experience from an “I” or ego, appearing on a spiritual path are transient, and if you have experienced yourself as non transience, merged with your self in samadhi, then remember that the experience of subtle and non subtle phenomena comes and goes from the form-and timeless Self. If you search for transient spirituality you may receive that, but if you are desiring only the Self, then devotion to that or someone in the form of a good teacher is powerful, because complete devotion is irrational, and seeds its ground for love. That love has the power to teach the devotee about the origin of love and fulfilment which is beyond personhood.

All desire is a cause for creation, but it is also an attribute of the absolute as deeply as we can comprehend. When there is conditioned desire, that which is subject/object in its nature, there is desire to satiate ones lack. It makes the fulfilment transient or short lived. But to desire to know oneself, to put ones trust in the longing for only That, unstirred by the thought of it possibly taking lifetimes for one to do so, that devotion is the most wonderful gift I can think of. It is about the love and courage that permeates ones path and bringing one to the first desire of shiva and shakti to melt together in their nothingness throughout creation.

 For the play and experience of transient life while one with the none-ness of it all. One foot in the “I” and the other beyond.

For the Guru of the Self and the Guru that is the selfless one.

OM Shanti Shanti Shanti.

/Alex

Artwork by Ashley Mackenzie

[shkoda-blog]

alexandra costin by lena shkoda