Being beyond dogma: tracking Truth
Fantasy on marbled paper 16th century Turkish - Fogg Art Museum Harvard University (1) May the rivers keep on running to the ocean. Rivers, rising in the mountains, running to the oceans, and back again. In Australia they don’t always do that. There was a myth that they run to a great lake somewhere in … Continue reading These Fish the Mystics
There is an assumption in many people’s minds, perhaps, that they know what “Kindness” is, and any questioning – other than of ourselves and our own motives behind “doing for others” (or not-as the case may be) – is considered a mark of ignorance (of the same) by those that pose such questions. However the … Continue reading What is “Kindness” (2)
What is “kindness”? A simple enough question one would think, but one that opens us up to the deepest mysteries of God, if pursued. * “Kindness” according to the “Names” is that divine quality which the authors of the wonderful book, ‘The Physicians of the Heart’ tell us is the essence of Allah/God/The One. In … Continue reading What is Kindness?
On Re-Reading Ibn al-‘Arabi, ‘The Names of God’, Wahdat al-Wujud or “Oneness of Being” and “The Dream that changed my Life” According to William C. Chittick, in his introduction to the chapter on ‘The Most Beautiful Names [of God]’ in ‘The Meccan Revelations,’ Vol.1 (Chapter 558 of The Futuhat)1 Chittick summarises Ibn al-‘Arabi’s own opening … Continue reading “What’s in a Word: The Name of God”
Kuitpo Forest is part Eucalypt or native forest, and part Conifer or plantation trees. It sits above the Mt. Bold reservoir that supplies fresh water to the southern part of the surrounding Adelaide Hills region of South Australia. It is also where I lived for a while in an old Kombi Van I had converted … Continue reading Spiritual Autobiography 12: Marriage, Remote Teaching & Aboriginal Dreaming
Recently whilst on a visit to Adelaide with my wife we visited the Japanese Garden, in the Adelaide Parklands, after being told how beautiful they were by a friend. On this day, all around, noise, a cacophony of sound; workers were putting in new footpaths close by. Machinery, trucks, mowers, traffic, all combining as if … Continue reading “The Place of Symbolism”
Where then? Our last episode ended at a point which was not somewhere ‘else’ or dependent on someone else… but ourselves, for where else could one look to create a spiritual journey, cut one’s own way through the jungle of both possible and impossible options that open before one, seemingly, at each turn? I digress. … Continue reading Spiritual Autobiography 11: “Opening the Word from Within”
The Invocation of Inayat Khan: “Towards the One…” There is only ‘One.’ In Islam, the surah al-Ikhlas (112) says, “God is One without a second…” “…The Perfection of Love, Harmony, and Beauty…” Nothing on this earth or in this whole universe lasts for more than a moment, but in that moment, and the next, … Continue reading “One Without a Second”
"Dropping Out and Tuning In" By 1981, at the ripe old age of thirty-four I knew something had to change. I had been working since leaving school at fifteen years of age in a variety of jobs, mostly unsatisfactory (at least from my damaged perspective), nearly ten years of military service, and five years in … Continue reading Spiritual Autobiography 7 (A Brief but necessary DIGRESSION)
Three years ago now, almost to the day, I began to Blog “Tracks in a Pathless Land”, a personal encounter with Truth based on my own experience of it through tracing the hidden pathways, places, and byways of the mystics journey through ‘time’ and ‘space’. My Blog page opens with this quote (for those who … Continue reading “Where Are They, These Hidden Paths?”
Tracks in a Pathless Land 