Our Moving into Meditation class completed our study of Frank Ostaseski’s wonderful book the Five Invitations. In today’s class the 5th invitation to cultivate “don’t know mind” became an exploration of mystery and transformation.
In realizing our selves as mystery we open the door to awe and wonder. We truly live with uncertainty and touch the elemental feeling of fear. Voices of poets, naturalists and writers joined with Frank in encouraging us to be embrace and engage change and impermanence.
Guided Relaxation
Welcome. Welcome your whole self . . . enter the mystery of self . . . of breath . . . taking a deep breath in . . . and then letting it go . . . surrendering . . . so you can release efforting . . . let the struggle go . . . feel the edges of ego softening . . . becoming porous . . . easing into the mystery of being alive . . . aware . . . consciousness . . . present . . .
I breathe in All That Is-
Awareness expanding
to take everything in,
as if my heart beats
the world into being.
From the unnamed vastness beneath the
mind, I breathe my way to wholeness and healing.
Inhalation. Exhalation.
Each Breath a “yes,”
and a letting go, a journey, and a coming home.
Again and again we are invited to change . . . in that change we begin to swim in the transient nature of all experience. Floating on the surface . . . diving deep . . . touched by and moving through tranquil and stormy waters . . . In our willingness to venture through unknown waters we accept the invitation to live . . . to move and be moved by life . . . to experience transformation. Frank O. describes this process as “dying into life.”
Transformation is a deep internal shift through which our basic identities are reconstituted. It is a metamorphosis, as radical as the caterpillar’s . . . we see and experience everything in a new way. We realize that we are more than our stories. Limiting personal boundaries dissolve. A deep peacefulness and universal sense of belonging infuse our awareness. The expansive freedom of being is beyond our current understanding . . .
Frank writes that transformation of consciousness is made possible by our active engagement: .
. . . it requires an open ended willingness to be fully vulnerable to experience the unknown . . . mystery cannot be solved or fully known by the conceptual mind. It cannot be captured . . . as when we listen to an extraordinary piece of music we can give ourselves over to mystery completely.
We don’t just observe mystery; we realize that we are mystery. It lives through us.
Right now, we might recall those mysterious encounters . . . experiences of wonder . . . visions of beauty in which time stops . . . When did you last enter the eternal now? In the timelessness of meditation we can open to the mystery . . . curious about what might surface . . . expressed in feeling . . . memory . . . thought . . . vivid colors . . . subtle whispers . . . What were our life-transforming moments and how did they unfold?
Frank O. writes:
In life-transforming moments such as dying, birthing, meditating, making love, 
being immersed in the beauty of nature, connecting with great art . . . we have a sense of looking into the vast unnamable. . . . Everything we need is present. Each taste of this experience expands our love and draws us further toward the endless, inexhaustible mystery of being.
The contemplation of life, death and . . . mystery in each moment is too important to be left to our final hours. Coming to terms with our fears and discovering what dying has to teach us about life are essential to our transformation.
Buddhist nun, teacher and writer, Pema Chodron, encourages us to explore our elemental being, to feel our fears:
Fear is an universal experience. . . . We wade in tidal pools and put our finger near the soft, open bodies of sea anemones and they close up. Everything spontaneously does that. It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.
In becoming intimate with fear, we move closer to the truth of our being. Entering the unknown we can experience “a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking.” She describes this as the hard work of befriending ourselves and befriending life fully. We come to realize that life isn’t a problem to be solved. She says things come together and they fall apart, again and again. We experience a kind of healing when we can allow room for all of this to happen: room for fear, grief, joy and mystery.
Polish poet and Holocaust survivor Czeslaw Milosz wrote:
Pure beauty and benediction: You are all I gathered
from a life that was bitter and confused,
in which I learned about evil, my own and not my own.
Wonder kept seizing me, and I recall only wonder.
Here, in our lives today, can we allow ourselves to be seized by wonder?
Wondrous Haiku moments are offered in response to poet Chris Dombrowski’s Orion Magazine article, Kana:
JOSH
Reflections of light
Resonates in taste
Harvest of dew drops
MARISA
Perfection through light
Delighted faces turned east
Breathe deep the sweet scent
PAT
Four-toed print in mud.
Cougar, I want to see you
First.
BEN
Millions of fish, wheels
and drizzle, mountains I cannot
see. Time to go.
BRYAN
The wind, slight or strong,
Whispers or wails, yet never
Does it lose its breath.
DOUGLAS BRUNT
Jade-head mallards
the red canoe
whispers through silver reeds
ROZANNE
whatever language
one human experience
earthlings celebrate
MAIA
May you know beauty
like the moon in the antlers
of the Coast Live Oak
EARLE LAYSER
Subzero cold —
in dawn’s light,
ice crystals ignite.
RAMESH
Crow caws,
Child weeps,
Silence reigns.
CHRIS
Not hearing
the acorn falling
until the garage roof
RUTH MEYERS
Parsley, reappears
From its duvet of snow
I pick some for soup
D. T. BERKOWITZ
Fresh below the green
Life bursting above my head
And under my feet
RUTH MEYERS
A necklace of stones
Fording the quiet river
Invites me to leap!
In ending his beautiful book, Frank O. invites us to:
Pick a path and start walking, or wander off the marked trails. There is no one right way. Ultimately all paths lead to an open field. They ask us to release our holding on to habits of mind and preconceived notions, to meet life in a fresh and curious way. . . . Can you let go of your history and step into the mystery?