Breathe in the ever-present mystical wonder of life
Mystical wonder proliferates in our world of form! Spring is a fully sensate example. Spring is the time of renewal, birth, budding and flowering. It’s a great time to be alive. It’s exciting to go outside, and see all that beauty.
Although in the reality of our form-filled world, every day is NOT a spring day, in the potential of your mind’s eye, and in your heart of hearts, you could view every day with the sensate fullness of spring, and the mystical wonder in which the world around us thrives.
Now that we’ve taken a look at human potential and self-love it’s time to breathe, to breathe deep into the mystical wonder that is life. It’s time to take a load off, look around and remember that whatever day or season it is, we live in a wonderful world. (Sure there are problems; no one said it was a perfect world. It’s just a wonderful world, complete with mystical wonder.)
Here’s musical talent, Louis Armstrong to help us hold and envision this notion of new and mystical wonder, with his song “What a Wonderful World” as posted by mancaangelo on YouTube:
Pause long enough to get off automatic habits of attention
The transcendent premise at play here, is simple enough. After a bit of working on yourself, you need to stop and smell the roses, as it were. You need to get up and out of your head, out of your internality, and put yourself out into the external. Go out into the world.
The world that The Universe, God, Allah, The Ground of Being, or Mother Nature—whatever is your name for the “Great One that always is,”—that world, out there, is where you need to be sometimes.
Everything is about balance. You can’t always be inside the bargain store making self-love purchases. You also have to be out, engaged, showing up and interacting with the world. Zen teacher Daniel Sharpenburg, put it this way in his article “The Land of Mystics” on ElephantJournal.com:
“With one foot in the realm of emptiness and one in the realm of form, the Mystic dwells. The Mystic is a spiritual excavator, digging in, penetrating reality, cutting away the things that aren’t really present to find the Truth. The Mystic walks a path, not of belief or devotion, but of transformation, spiritual revolution, awakening, unleashing true potential. The Mystic dwells in a state of Dreamy Wonder, seeing the world as wonderful and wonder-filled.”
Being in the world of form, while also enjoying non-duality
Louis Armstrong set very similar thoughts to music. Armstrong’s song, “What a Wonderful World” besides just being lovely, also points to this mystical wonder on which Sharpenburg writes. Armstrong is singing that beauty is in the world and the mystical wonder is in the eye of the beholder, as well as in the people beheld. Armstrong sings:
‘The colors of the rainbow,
So pretty in the sky.
Are also on the faces,
Of people going by,”
“What a Wonderful World” is reminding us that love, sensate joy, and mystical wonder are all around. It may be a tired theme, but well worth repeating, because many people aren’t yet listening, not fully anyway. Armstrong sings:
”I see friends shaking hands.
Saying, “How do you do?”
They’re really saying,
“I love you.”
That’s quite true, really; when we shake hands, we are affirming, through touch, that someone is valuable to us, or at the very least that we recognize that other’s existence. Armstrong kicks it up a notch, and says it isn’t just a valuing, it’s a full-on loving. And we saw in “Grow the Garden of Your Mind” that you can grow ideas in your mind. Armstrong is planting the idea in his mind that the world he lives in is wonderful and full of mystical wonder. He sings, “Yes, I think to myself, What a wonderful world.“
Yes-AND! ease and resistance moment-to-moment
And when we stop to think about, it is a wonderful world, full of beauty, splendor, people, objects, things, hopes, potentials…wonderfully full of options is our world. Our ego is the only place where the world gets, or feels, limited. As you go through this week, grow the idea in your mind that the world is wonderful, full of mystical wonder. And then watch for the ease or the resistance that might show up. In the resistance is the fuel to grow; in the ease, is the joy of life. Yes-AND!, both the ease and the resistance are valuable information.
Tune in next week for another Grounded Grounded Relating Monday Music Challenge to help remind you to stay present to yourself.
The full lyrics for “What A Wonderful World,” written by George Douglas, Howard Dietz, Bob Thiele, Robert Thiele, Arthur Schwartz, Axel Christofer Hedfors, George David Weiss, BobThiele Jr., as posted on atozlyrics.com appear below:
I see trees of green,
red roses too.
I see them bloom,
for me and you.
And I think to myself,
what a wonderful world.
I see skies of blue,
And clouds of white.
The bright blessed day,
The dark sacred night.
And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.
The colors of the rainbow,
So pretty in the sky.
Are also on the faces,
Of people going by,
I see friends shaking hands.
Saying, “How do you do?”
They’re really saying,
“I love you”.
I hear babies cry,
I watch them grow,
They’ll learn much more,
Than I’ll ever know.
And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.
Yes, I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.
Oh yeah.
