In Irish mythology there is the figure of Balor. Balor is the King of the Fomorians- the forces of darkness that refuse to be brought into the light of consciousness as represented by the sun god Lugh.

Balor has a single eye that destroys all it looks upon. It is so toxic that it is closed most of the time by a heavy eyelid.  This eyelid needs several people to lift it so that its power can be used in battle.

Balor represents the force of separateness. It is the eye that sees everything apart from itself. It is the eye focused on self-interest alone. This degree of self-interest is toxic to the degree that it is prepared to destroy other life forms to get what it wants.

This is not an eye that is light. It is an eye that mistrusts and lives in fear of its overthrow by another force that it feels it must resist at all costs.  This is the ego that must resist at all costs the radiant call of the heart to realise its connection to the source.

Irish mythology has lots of wonder tales. These wonder tales are not just old Irish stories. They are real Irish Blessings. They tell the story of the journey of consciousness.  They tell the story of the journey from darkness to light. These stories are about dark forces as represented by the Fomorians and the magic of sacred unity as represented by the Tuatha de Danaan.

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You are one of the beautiful people.  Only you have forgotten how this feels. This sense of the beautiful has been driven underground. In Irish mythology this underground world is the world of the sídh. This is the underground kingdom where the Tuatha de Danaan lives.

This is not just some quaint Irish story about days of old. This is your story.  It is the story of your journey into the timeless beauty that is at the very heart of who you are.  Your real work here on this planet is to awaken this beauty within you and radiate it for the highest good of all.  You are intended by Love for this purpose. 

When awakened to this radiance within you, you begin to feel empowered. This is your true power but it is a power you are given for the food of all. It is a power with rather than a power over. Your enjoyment will be in using this power to share with others your newfound sense of unlimited creativity.  This is true abundance.

Beauty is driven underground in each moment that you refuse to listen to the voice of the heart.  The refusal to listen to the heart leads to the rise and rise that we see of depression within our culture. All around us we see blandness and the absence of beauty.

The Tuatha de Danaan are a magical people. They represent your natural creative way of being in the world. In Irish mythology they are called the Shining Ones. They may have been driven underground but they never go away. The radiance that you have come to shine can wait on the Timeless. It has infinite patience.

Why not open up the sensitive heart and invite courage to allow you to express the beauty within you?  Why not realise the Tuatha de Danaan within you?

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Return to Tir na nÓg – Living the Time of Your Life

 

Tir na nÓg translates from the Irish as “the Land of the Forever Young.”  To modern intellects this story is a fairy story, meaning it is a fantasy. The intellect does not believe in a place where one lives forever and does not age.

 

The intellect is a wonderful tool but it keeps you bound to the prison of time and this is not the place where you can really enjoy the time of your life.  To really enjoy your life you know who you are beyond time and form and space. Without this knowing (which is not an intellectual knowledge) you are living in a prison called time.

 

The Land of the Forever Young is not some mythical place but a state of being. It is the state of felt oneness with the source of Creation.  Creation is created from that which itself was never born and never dies.  In that sense it is outside what we call time.  Forever does not mean an inexhaustible length of time. It is means no time at all.

 

An Anam cara invites you into the direct experience of living within time as a flow of the timeless. This is the direct experience of knowing yourself as the flow in form of that which is formless. This experience allows you to know the birthless, deathless state within.  It allows you to know you truly are forever young.

 

© Tony Cuckson 2008

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 When beauty touches our lives, the moment becomes luminous. These grace moments are gifts that surprise us.

John O’Donohue, Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

We have to be allowing of beauty. As advised by John O’Donohue  we have to trade our knowledge for bewilderment.  We have to allow the wildness of the feminine to express through us.

 

Most of us are gifted beyond our wildest imagination. To be the expression of Love in form would surprise us beyond our limited sense of who we are.  We have learned and often been encouraged to lose touch. We have armoured our bodies and surrounded ourselves with briars of judgement and doubt about our own creative flow that is the movement of beauty into form.

 

We have imprisoned beauty high in the tower of intellectual knowledge where all is consigned to the known. In the tower of this type of knowledge there are limited surprises but not the miracle of that which is luminous with beauty.

 

Grace moments, as the grace writer and poet John O’Donohue reminds us, come along and surprise us. In music there are what are called grace notes. These tend to be the notes that are surprises and arise out of improvisation. The musician has been graced a response to the moment. These notes tend to be delicate and fleeting but add much to the music being played.

 

What do you do with such grace moments? Do you honour them? Do you say ‘thank you’ for them flowing through you? Or do you claim that they are your own and bank them in your knowledge bank of things that you know about?

 

Alternatively, do you allow them to become an invitation to the return to beauty? You make Her invitation your invitation. You do what it takes to become one of the beautiful people we in Ireland call the Tuatha de Danaan – the Shining Ones. You make it your aligned purpose to become a vehicle for grace.

 

How do you do this? Through a practice of discipline that is the more active part and the paradox of surrender that reflects the feminine aspect.  This is the marriage of the masculine and feminine within you. It is the unification of your energy system. It is health giving but its intention is sacred, meaning to make whole.

 

This has to be of value to you. It has to have some sense of passion. You cannot really be grace-filled without your willingness to give your heart away to the Beloved. You cannot really be surprised if you aren’t willing to let go into what is unknown. You cannot become a beautiful birthing of grace without entering the wild divine within you.

 

The journey into love is not lukewarm. It involves passion that grows into compassion. It burns away all that is resistance to the entry of beauty into the grace of the moment. This is not hellfire but the fire of Love. It is often very wild and bewildering. While your ego will resist, your soul will persist in its invitation to Love. Your choice is to follow knowledge or wildness.

 

These grace moments are true gifts.  They are gifts that leave you feeling expansive. You are for a moment filled by that Divine invisible embrace, warm and timeless. It grows you spiritually, which is a paradox. You grow by letting go into the luminous.  You can then do nothing more than give this flow of grace away. This is what such grace moments are. They are the flow of the boundless into a boundary that then expands and flows into other boundaries.

 

An Anamcara invites you to learn practices and ways of becoming attuned to the beauty that is ready to radiate from within you and grace this world of form.  Are you willing to trade your knowledge about beauty for being wild that is at the heart of who you already are?

 

This trade means giving away your rags of limitation for the riches of creation that you were designed to give away.  Then you live in a real sense of abundance that no one except yourself can take away from you.

Are you ready to radiate the beauty within you?

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There is a divine restlessness in the human heart today, an eternal echo of longing that lives deep within us and never lets us settle for what we have or where we are.

 John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes

There has always been a divine restlessness. It is the tension of the creative that longs to create as love in form. This writer, for one, prays that this tension remains as the creative force it is. It is presently accelerating and this we see with the events manifesting in the world.

In the wonderful invitation that is A Course in Miracles you are invited to feel that which is deep inside you that longs to radiate through you and express for the highest good of all.  This is the radiance of soul. It is the invitation to knowing the timeless beauty of Love.

The Divine does not rest although this is not to say the Divine is restless. The Divine is Love and Love Creates. It is restless in the sense that it Loves that which it creates. The difference between what we think of as love and Divine Love is that the Divine never sees you as separate while you see the Divine as separate. The soul is the tension that longs for you to see that this sense of separateness is what keeps you restless. It is not satisfied by more but by less. This is the meaning of the Beatitude

 Blessed are those who are poor in spirit because theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

-          Matthew, 5:3

 

 

 

 

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And in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart

 William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey

This writer has taken the above quotation from Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O’Donohue, the late Irish poet and writer.

 

A sound practice for the spiritual journey is to make it your intention each day to invite communion with the heart. This is the invitation for soul friendship. It is true communication and on of its indications is how it lifts the heart. It becomes your heart’s song.

 

How many people do you meet that you can say “and in thy voice I catch the language of my former heart”? I suspect that they are all too few. On your journey into the heart, which is at the core of the spiritual journey, you will find you have fewer and fewer heart friends. 

 

Those that remain to companion you are your soul friends.  They are, as John O’Donohue says, “an invisible embrace to mind your days.” They speak the language of your former heart that was once in love with the dance of creation that is still you.

 

The sound practices of a soul friend engage with are daily connection with heart language.  This can be through poetry, music, song, or story.  Story includes reading and spiritual cinema.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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When beauty touches our lives, the moment becomes luminous. These grace moments are gifts that surprise us.

 

John O’Donohue, Divine Beauty :The Invisible Embrace

 

We have to be allowing of beauty. As advised by John O’Donohue , we have to trade our knowledge for bewilderment.  We have to allow the wildness of the feminine to express through us.

 

Most of us are gifted beyond our wildest imagination. To be the expression of Love in form would surprise us beyond our limited sense of who we are.  We have learned and often been encouraged to lose touch. We have armoured our bodies and surrounded ourselves with briars of judgement and doubt about our own creative flow that is the movement of beauty into form.

 

We have imprisoned beauty high in the tower of intellectual knowledge where all is consigned to the known. In the tower of this type of knowledge there are limited surprises but not the miracle of that which is luminous with beauty.

 

Grace moments, as the grace writer and poet John O’Donohue reminds us, come along and surprise us. In music there are what are called grace notes. These tend to be the notes that are surprises and arise out of improvisation. The musician has been graced a response to the moment. These notes tend to be delicate and fleeting but add much to the music being played.

 

What do you do with such grace moments? Do you honour them? Do you say ‘thank you’ for them flowing through you? Or do you claim that they are your own and bank them in your knowledge bank of things that you know about?

 

Alternatively, do you allow them to become an invitation to the return to beauty? You make Her invitation your invitation. You do what it takes to become one of the beautiful people we in Ireland call the Tuatha de Danaan – the Shining Ones. You make it your aligned purpose to become a vehicle for grace.

 

How do you do this? Through a practice of discipline that is the more active part and the paradox of surrender that reflects the feminine aspect.  This is the marriage of the masculine and feminine within you. It is the unification of your energy system. It is health giving but its intention is sacred, meaning to make whole.

 

This has to be of value to you. It has to have some sense of passion. You cannot really be grace-filled without your willingness to give your heart away to the Beloved. You cannot really be surprised if you aren’t willing to let go into what is unknown. You cannot become a beautiful birthing of grace without entering the wild divine within you.

 

The journey into love is not lukewarm. It involves passion that grows into compassion. It burns away all that is resistance to the entry of beauty into the grace of the moment. This is not hellfire but the fire of Love. It is often very wild and bewildering. While your ego will resist, your soul will persist in its invitation to Love. Your choice is to follow knowledge or wildness.

 

These grace moments are true gifts.  They are gifts that leave you feeling expansive. You are for a moment filled by that Divine invisible embrace, warm and timeless. It grows you spiritually, which is a paradox. You grow by letting go into the luminous.  You can then do nothing more than give this flow of grace away. This is what such grace moments are. They are the flow of the boundless into a boundary that then expands and flows into other boundaries.

 

An Anamcara invites you to learn practices and ways of becoming attuned to the beauty that is ready to radiate from within you and grace this world of form.  Are you willing to trade your knowledge about beauty for being wild that is at the heart of who you already are?

 

This trade means giving away your rags of limitation for the riches of creation that you were designed to give away.  Then you live in a real sense of abundance that no one except yourself can take away from you.

 

Are you ready to radiate the beauty within you?

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Any morning

Just lying on the couch being happy

Only humming a little

The quiet sound in the head

Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment

It has so much to do in the world

People who might judge are mostly asleep

They can’t monitor you all the time

And sometimes they forget

When dawn flows over the hedge

You can get up and act busy

Little corners like this

Pieces of heaven left lying around

Can be picked up and saved

People won’t even see that you have them

They are so light and easy to hide

Later in the day you can act like others

You can sake your head

And you can frown.

 

William Stafford

This poem is a blessing.  It contains some very wonderful lines.  One of my favourites is “when dawn flows over the hedge.”  It reminds me of how dawn flows over Cuilcuih Mountain here in Dowra.  It reminds me how light flows out of darkness.

 

Remember any morning lying on the couch you can be happy. Take time to come to slowly and deliberately. Make it a practice to enter the day slowly and surely.   Happy is something to be and not something to do. You are born in the image of the Divine.  You are Divine.  You are not to be added to or taken away from.  It’s all right now.  

 

We find this idea hard to accept.  

 

This is because we think about our life most of the time.  We avoid feeling it as a moment-to-moment experience.  This feeling of deep connectedness with our lives is here any morning and any time.  Do you think that the Divine takes a lunch break or gets tired of pouring love into our being?  Does the dawn stop flowing over the hedge?  

 

Those little pieces of heaven are lying around waiting to be noticed.  You have to know how to look.  When you can see them you can pick them up if you wish.  You do not have to even do that.  There is no requirement that you save or own them.  The real delight is in sharing these pieces of heaven.  

 

To be able to see the beauty of heaven you need to be present.  It is not waiting in the future.  It cannot be accessed via the past.  It is in front of your eyes and flows through an allowing heart.  You have to be present at this banquet of “love is flowing eternally.”  You have to nourish your soul by allowing wonder and awe to touch you.

 

Do not save these pieces of heaven.  Let them go.  Clear yourself out forever-new delight.   Give them away to others.  Help them lie on the couch and be happy.  Become a happy couch potato.  Remind them too that the dawn always flows over the hedge.  Remind them that to be happy is to be present.  Let them learn to be present to this banquet of life.

 

Let trouble be busy elsewhere for a while.  

 

We give our attention to gladly to the trouble of others.  We close our hearts to their sorrow and seek further security in legislation and insurance.  We build higher and higher walls in order to keep the world out.  I doing this we lock ourselves into a tight little fearful experience that we then call life.

 

Hum a little.  

 

Sing your own song.  Songs are always coming into my head.  Mostly they are songs from the sixties.  They include “Its all to beautiful.”  They include “Maybe I’m Amazed”.  The poet suggests that you do only a little.  He knows how difficult it is to stay awake to your wonder.

 

You do not want to incur the wrath of your Trickster.  This is the guardian of your mind that watches what you think.  It  insures that your thinking is contained within the boundaries of the norm.  It insures that you do not step to far out of line.  Otherwise you might go off your head.

 

Learn to know “the quiet sound in the head.”  This is your head.  This is my head.  It runs off at tangents every which way.  We then wonder why we never get to experience peace of mind.  We rarely, if ever, take time to listen to this internal chatter we call thinking.  It runs away with us.  

 

We are off thinking about last nights pub quiz.  We are thinking about next years holiday or tonight’s dinner.  This is needed but to often we are not present to tonights dinner when the time comes to prepare and eat it.  We are running three steps in front and we never catch up with the fact that we are alive now.

 

You can always return to frowning later in the day.  

 

This is our usual way of relating to the world.  Why not step out of it in the early morning light of a new day. Know that the perfection of the day is an internal experience that you can choose to have.  This is to choose to allow it to be without resistance.  

 

Stop judging it better or worse or not acceptable.  Allow it to be before crushing it with negativity.  It is newly born for our appreciation.  We have been gifted this day without any requirement other than we enjoy it.  Even this is not required of us.

 

As Kabir said in another wonderful poem:

 

“If it rains

Let it rain.”

 

Here in Corrogue this is the best approach to adopt otherwise on many days I might “return to frowning”.

 

Know that you are always enough.  This will give you a perfect day.

 

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I have discovered a new poem via the Internet.

 

It is by a poet whose name I am unfamiliar with.  It has a wonderful title.  This is “Any Morning.”  It suggests that any morning is the time to be happy.  It is the time to know that you are forever enough.

 

Sure there are times when we forget this but forgetting is our normal state of mind.  We have forgotten the simplest of blessings.  We have forgotten the simplicity of thankfulness.  Every morning becomes a prison of things to do, places to go, people to see and things to achieve.  We measure your worth by what is done rather than by the beauty of who you are.

 

This poem serves to remind me of this precious ever-present moment.  This is the moment of non-doing.  It does not mean you do nothing.  It means that your actions are moved from love and not simply from a place of activity.  

 

Our activity has become a mask for the fact that many of us are “hollow men.”  We work and “do activity” so that we do not have to go home.  This for some is their physical home and for others it is their spiritual home.  

Let me share with you this delightful poem.

 

Any morning

Just lying on the couch being happy

Only humming a little

The quiet sound in the head

Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment

It has so much to do in the world

People who might judge are mostly asleep

They can’t monitor you all the time

And sometimes they forget

When dawn flows over the hedge

You can get up and act busy

Little corners like this

Pieces of heaven left lying around

Can be picked up and saved

People won’t even see that you have them

They are so light and easy to hide

Later in the day you can act like others

You can sake your head

And you can frown.

 

William Stafford

 

This poem is a blessing.  It contains some very wonderful lines.  One of my favourites is “when dawn flows over the hedge.”  It reminds me of how dawn flows over Cuilcuigh Mountain here in Dowra.  It reminds me how light flows out of darkness.

 

Remember any morning lying on the couch you can be happy. Take time to come to slowly and deliberately. Make it a practice to enter the day slowly and surely.   Happy is something to be and not something to do. You are born in the image of the Divine.  You are Divine.  You are not to be added to or taken away from.  It’s all right now.  

 

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The glory of God

Is the human person

Fully alive.

 

Irenaeus, Philosopher and Theologian

 

In Corrogue there are times when I miss the target.

 

This target is a target of invisibility.  It is the ability to walk in this world with a light footprint.  Not wanting too much other than to know what is beauty.

 

In this modern age what many of us desire is an idea of success or fame.  We do not focus on being fully alive.  As John O`Donoghue writes in his wonderful book Anamcara, “This is the greatest sin of all.”

 

In some ways this writer is a reactionary.  There are words that make me react like Pavlov’s dog to the ringing of a bell.  One such word that causes this belling ringing for me is the word “sin.”  It is a word that has wounded many hearts and caused deep separation from the beauty of life.  It is a word that has burdened the vulnerable with a deep sense of guilt.  It has been perverted in ways never intended by the Christ.

 

Having been raised in Northern Ireland this word has been one that I have heard shouted from pulpits, from school platforms, whispered threateningly by those I loved and perverted by those in charge of children.

 

Sin and sex went together.  The beauty of the body was denied by those who advocated that one was and a miserable sinner.  There was delight in the depth of misery that the ego could wallow in.  There was no delight in allowing this animal body to do what it loves.

 

We do not love the body.  Mostly we love the body image.  From an early age we are locked out of the beauty of the body.  As children we become separate from the flow of our divine energy.  Our work in this world is to return to this flow. This is the source of our joy.  To imagine that we are sinners, and that we are wrong in our being, is a prison house from which no one is saved.

 

Do you think you are required to plead for your life with the Beloved?  This is a foolish distortion of the word ’sin.’ This word simply means ‘to miss the target;’ in one sense we all miss the target.  Only you are not required to feel like a worm.  You are only required to wake up and see how beautiful you are.  You are only required to take another shot at being the beauty you are.  This is the target practice of awareness without attachment to results.

 

The great Jelaluddin Rumi invites us to come into the circle of love.  Do not beat yourself up with false illusion.  To think that you are wrong keeps you in the prison of the ego.  To think that you can do anything to enter heaven is a false hope.  You cannot enter heaven until you disappear.  Make your target practice a practice of disappearance into love.

 

Make this target practice a celebration.  Find your way to the centre.  Know that if you are made to feel wrong, then the teaching is wrong.  If you feel wrong then you are attached to the words and have not bathed in the perfume of self-knowledge that is beyond words.

 

At the heart of all religion is a paradox.  This is the paradox of forgiveness.  All religions teach forgiveness but the paradox is that there is no one to forgive.  When you know who you are then there is only what is in all its’ beauty and glory.

 

Religion that teaches guilt is not religious in the true sense.  If anyone suggests that you are a sinner with an implication that you should somehow feel wrong then kindly remove yourself to a place that teaches you love.  You are not born in sin.  You are born in the light of the Divine.  Your work is to come back to the centre.  Your work is to return to the source of your being.  Your work is to know that no only are you loved forever but you are love forever.

 

This does not mean one cannot feel wrong for an action one has done.  However, one cannot be wrong no matter what one has done.  The focus on sin is a magnification of the ego that thinks it can manipulate the Beloved by convincing It that such a wretched sinner deserves mercy.  

 

If you feel guilty about your life then you cannot live a full life.  Your life cannot manifest the glory of the Divine presence. Your focus on sin is an error.  It is negative.  It is illusory.  To get back on target, simply begin to see the beauty at the very centre of your being.  This will make you laught at the very idea that creation that created you in Love would ever judge such creation wrong.

 

 

 

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