#2630 - Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights
photo: screenshot from Second Life
The movie The Matrix (http://nonduality.com/matrix.htm) showed how reality is the programming of the mind and how enlightenment or waking up is deprogramming or the understanding of programming.
In the spirit of Halloween it could be said that our programmed "false self" is like the perpetual costume we wear.
Well now we have another entertaining way of learning about how reality is programmed and how false selfs are developed.
Second Life (SL) isn’t really a game. It’s a virtual world created by Linden Labs where you “walk” or even “fly” around a 3D graphical environment, interacting with avatars — computer representations of actual people who are also in the world. It doesn’t cost anything to join the action, but if you want land or posessions, you need to pay real money for them. And if you build up property or can create a cool line of clothes, you can make a business out of it that pays you real money converted from the game’s “Linden dollars.”
I’m standing in an airy train station surrounded by rolling, wooded hills. Distant sounds of birds and trickling water reach my ears over a low buzz of chitchat from the people around me. They have come from all over North America to meet here, and now they’re lounging on couches and standing in sociable little clots. Ballerinas are talking to men in body armor, while guys in suits show off their dance moves to aliens and ladies with wings. I try not to stare.
Or rather, a digital version of me called an avatar tries not to stare. I’m sitting at my computer, and my point of view hovers about three feet behind as I use the arrow buttons on my keyboard to amble toward the street outside. Next to me, a blue elf and a towering woman in a black cape tap on invisible keyboards that hover in the air. I can hear the click of the keys, and cartoon speech bubbles near their heads reveal that they’re discussing computer programming.
---------------
"I’m sitting at my computer, and my point of view hovers about three feet behind as I use the arrow buttons on my keyboard to amble toward the street outside." Hey, that sounds a lot like Suzanne Segal's description of her condition of awareness following her instant collision with emptiness. Listen:
I lifted my right foot to step up into the bus and collided head-on with an invisible force that entered my awareness like a silently exploding stick of dynamite, blowing the door of my usual consciousness open and off its hinges, splitting me in two. In the gaping space that appeared, what I had previously called "me" was forcefully pushed out of its usual location inside me into a new location that was approximately a foot behind and to the left of my head. "I" was now behind my body looking out at the world without using the body's eyes. From a non-localized position somewhere behind and to the left, I could see my body in front and very far away.
Second Life allows us to get a new perspective on the world in which the "real you" could be called awareness itself and what you see is not out of the eyes of your character but it is seeing itself, headlessness, or the seeing of everything at once.
The Second Life website is here: http://secondlife.com/. Second Life is an opportunity for having fun, interacting with other people, and creating real businesses. It also shows how we program lives and may nudge us to question why we program in certain ways and what programming is.
At some point we may look at our "real" life and come to see it as no more real than Second Life. Then we are seeing with a quality similar to what Suzanne Segal saw, as awareness itself. This is also known as headlessness. Suzanne passed away at a young age and was a babe. You might want to read her book: Collision with the Infinite: http://snipurl.com/10xvt
photo: Suzanne Segal
And as far as using movies or computer worlds to understand our nature and reality, and as far as calling nondual chicks babes, this is all life. We are many things. I have always worked to bring nonduality to the people. There has been some success in that regard. Jay Michaelson has made the term nonduality a household word for readers of his publication, Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture: http://www.zeek.net/. In his most recent article, Kashrut and Nonduality, Jay writes:
nondual spiritual practice must be all-pervasive. If you suppose that God is only present in the pleasant stuff - on a summer's day but not in a cancer ward, when you're feeling relaxed but not when you're tense - then you've still making the same dualist error: God is here, but not there. In fact, the best spiritual practice might be one that neither provides the allure of the present nor the expiation of the difficult - but one which is utterly transparent, colorless, and thus always available.
Nothing is outside the world of nonduality. It is up to us to see the world. Initially we see that we are a body with awareness. Very few people probably actually recognize that. Then like Suzanne Segal or the players of Second Life, perspective reverses and we are awareness seeing the body and the world. Then there is awareness alone.
The last step is the one that can't be talked about. The gateless gate leads there. Gateless because ... well ... cuz it's hard to imagine a construction worker getting up in the morning and saying to his wife, "Gotta go to work on that damn gate between the world and pure reality. Are my damn eggs ready?"
#2632 - Wednesday, November, 1, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
NONDUAL HIGHLIGHTS
Before the USA votes next week, our friend across the pond,
Roy Whenary, recommends a visit to Swami Beyondananda.
"For a little trip through non-duality and humour, and politics, etc ... the Swami is always a good option."
But first, a moment of Zen...
A man should learn to sail in all winds.
--Italian Proverb
~ ~ ~
"I have never been lost,
but I will admit to being confused for several weeks."
--Daniel Boone
When perception is stronger than mindfulness, we recognize various appearances and create concepts such as "body," "cat", "house," or "person". . . On some clear night, go outside, look up at the sky, and see if you can find the Big Dipper. For most people that is a familiar constellation, easy to pick out from all the other stars. But is there really a Big Dipper up there in the sky? There is no Big Dipper up there. "Big Dipper" is a concept. Humans looked, saw a certain pattern, and then created a concept in our collective mind to describe it. That concept is useful because it helps us recognize the constellation. But it also has another, less useful effect. By creating the concept "Big Dipper" we separate out those stars from all the rest, and then, if we become attached to the idea of that separation, we lose the sense of the night sky's wholeness, its oneness. Does the separation actually exist in the sky? No. We created it through the use of a concept. Does anything change in the sky when we understand that there is no Big Dipper? No.
--Joseph Goldstein, Insight Meditation
The Wisdom of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
"Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to happen to, a conscious separate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it."
A Net of Jewels
Those who wish to embody the Tao should embrace all things. To embrace all things means first that one holds no anger or resistance toward any idea or thing, living or dead, formed or formless. Acceptance is the very essence of the Tao. To embrace all things means also that one rids oneself of any concept of separation; male and female, self and other, life and death. Division is contrary to the nature of the Tao. Foregoing antagonism and separation, one enters in the harmonious oneness of all things.
Hua Hu Ching
Allspirit
To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weakness - that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.
--Pablo Neruda, The Book of Virtues
Allspirit
We live in illusion And the appearance of things.
There is a reality. We are that reality.
When you understand this, You see that you are nothing.
#2632 - Thursday, November, 2, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
NONDUAL HIGHLIGHTS
Jess writes:
Hello Jerry,
I would like to let you know I’m most grateful for having came across your awesome website. I’ve been visiting it for what must be close to seven years now.
Not long ago I found an essay by Mark Twain which surprisingly I’ve never heard any reference given to with in the world of nonduality (other then naturalistic nondual philosophy.) I wondered if you had not encountered it, at any rate it might make a worthy subject to put on ND Highlights.
Back in Highlights #1147, Heidi sent an excerpt from the essay Jess refers to, What Is Man? It's a very long essay (didn't Twain get paid by the word?) and only the conclusion is reprinted below.
OM: To me, Man is a machine, made up of many mechanisms, the moral and mental ones acting automatically in accordance with the impulses of an interior Master who is built out of born-temperament and an accumulation of multitudinous outside influences and trainings; a machine whose ONE function is to secure the spiritual contentment of the Master, be his desires good or be they evil; a machine whose Will is absolute and must be obeyed, and always IS obeyed.
YM: Man has been taught that he is the supreme marvel of the Creation; he believes it; in all the ages he has never doubted it, whether he was a naked savage, or clothed in purple and fine linen, and civilized. This has made his heart buoyant, his life cheery. His pride in himself, his sincere admiration of himself, his joy in what he supposed were his own and unassisted achievements, and his exultation over the praise and applause which they evoked--these have exalted him, enthused him, ambitioned him to higher and higher flights; in a word, made his life worth the living. But by your scheme, all this is abolished; he is degraded to a machine, he is a nobody, his noble prides wither to mere vanities; let him strive as he may, he can never be any better than his humblest and stupidest neighbor; he would never be cheerful again, his life would not be worth the living.
Excerpt from What Is Man?
O.M. You have been taking a holiday?
Y.M. Yes; a mountain tramp covering a week. Are you ready to talk?
O.M. Quite ready. What shall we begin with?
Y.M. Well, lying abed resting up, two days and nights, I have thought over all these talks, and passed them carefully in review. With this result: that... that... are you intending to publish your notions about Man some day?
O.M. Now and then, in these past twenty years, the Master inside of me has half-intended to order me to set them to paper and publish them. Do I have to tell you why the order has remained unissued, or can you explain so simply a thing without my help?
Y.M. By your doctrine, it is simplicity itself: outside influences moved your interior Master to give the order; stronger outside influences deterred him. Without the outside influences, neither of these impulses could ever have been born, since a person's brain is incapable or originating an idea within itself.
O.M. Correct. Go on.
Y.M. The matter of publishing or withholding is still in your Master's hands. If some day an outside influence shall determine him to publish, he will give the order, and it will be obeyed.
O.M. That is correct. Well?
Y.M. Upon reflection I have arrived at the conviction that the publication of your doctrines would be harmful. Do you pardon me?
O.M. Pardon YOU? You have done nothing. You are an instrument--a speaking-trumpet. Speaking-trumpets are not responsible for what is said through them. Outside influences-- in the form of lifelong teachings, trainings, notions, prejudices, and other second-hand importations--have persuaded the Master within you that the publication of these doctrines would be harmful. Very well, this is quite natural, and was to be expected; in fact, was inevitable. Go on; for the sake of ease and convenience, stick to habit: speak in the first person, and tell me what your Master thinks about it.
Y.M. Well, to begin: it is a desolating doctrine; it is not inspiring, enthusing, uplifting. It takes the glory out of man, it takes the pride out of him, it takes the heroism out of him, it denies him all personal credit, all applause; it not only degrades him to a machine, but allows him no control over the machine; makes a mere coffee-mill of him, and neither permits him to supply the coffee nor turn the crank, his sole and piteously humble function being to grind coarse or fine, according to his make, outside impulses doing the rest.
O.M. It is correctly stated. Tell me--what do men admire most in each other?
Y.M. Intellect, courage, majesty of build, beauty of countenance, charity, benevolence, magnanimity, kindliness, heroism, and--and--
O.M. I would not go any further. These are ELEMENTALS. Virtue, fortitude, holiness, truthfulness, loyalty, high ideals-- these, and all the related qualities that are named in the dictionary, are MADE OF THE ELEMENTALS, by blendings, combinations, and shadings of the elementals, just as one makes green by blending blue and yellow, and makes several shades and tints of red by modifying the elemental red. There are several elemental colors; they are all in the rainbow; out of them we manufacture and name fifty shades of them. You have named the elementals of the human rainbow, and also one BLEND--heroism, which is made out of courage and magnanimity. Very well, then; which of these elements does the possessor of it manufacture for himself? Is it intellect?
Y.M. No.
O.M. Why?
Y.M. He is born with it.
O.M. Is it courage?
Y.M. No. He is born with it.
O.M. Is it majesty of build, beauty of countenance?
Y.M. No. They are birthrights.
O.M. Take those others--the elemental moral qualities-- charity, benevolence, magnanimity, kindliness; fruitful seeds, out of which spring, through cultivation by outside influences, all the manifold blends and combinations of virtues named in the dictionaries: does man manufacture any of those seeds, or are they all born in him?
Y.M. Born in him.
O.M. Who manufactures them, then?
Y.M. God.
O.M. Where does the credit of it belong?
Y.M. To God.
O.M. And the glory of which you spoke, and the applause?
Y.M. To God.
O.M. Then it is YOU who degrade man. You make him claim glory, praise, flattery, for every valuable thing he possesses-- BORROWED finery, the whole of it; no rag of it earned by himself, not a detail of it produced by his own labor. YOU make man a humbug; have I done worse by him?
Y.M. You have made a machine of him.
O.M. Who devised that cunning and beautiful mechanism, a man's hand?
Y.M. God.
O.M. Who devised the law by which it automatically hammers out of a piano an elaborate piece of music, without error, while the man is thinking about something else, or talking to a friend?
Y.M. God.
O.M. Who devised the blood? Who devised the wonderful machinery which automatically drives its renewing and refreshing streams through the body, day and night, without assistance or advice from the man? Who devised the man's mind, whose machinery works automatically, interests itself in what it pleases, regardless of its will or desire, labors all night when it likes, deaf to his appeals for mercy? God devised all these things. _I_ have not made man a machine, God made him a machine. I am merely calling attention to the fact, nothing more. Is it wrong to call attention to the fact? Is it a crime?
Y.M. I think it is wrong to EXPOSE a fact when harm can come of it.
O.M. Go on.
Y.M. Look at the matter as it stands now. Man has been taught that he is the supreme marvel of the Creation; he believes it; in all the ages he has never doubted it, whether he was a naked savage, or clothed in purple and fine linen, and civilized. This has made his heart buoyant, his life cheery. His pride in himself, his sincere admiration of himself, his joy in what he supposed were his own and unassisted achievements, and his exultation over the praise and applause which they evoked--these have exalted him, enthused him, ambitioned him to higher and higher flights; in a word, made his life worth the living. But by your scheme, all this is abolished; he is degraded to a machine, he is a nobody, his noble prides wither to mere vanities; let him strive as he may, he can never be any better than his humblest and stupidest neighbor; he would never be cheerful again, his life would not be worth the living.
O.M. You really think that?
Y.M. I certainly do.
O.M. Have you ever seen me uncheerful, unhappy.
Y.M. No.
O.M. Well, _I_ believe these things. Why have they not made me unhappy?
Y.M. Oh, well--temperament, of course! You never let THAT escape from your scheme.
O.M. That is correct. If a man is born with an unhappy temperament, nothing can make him happy; if he is born with a happy temperament, nothing can make him unhappy.
Y.M. What--not even a degrading and heart-chilling system of beliefs?
O.M. Beliefs? Mere beliefs? Mere convictions? They are powerless. They strive in vain against inborn temperament.
Y.M. I can't believe that, and I don't.
O.M. Now you are speaking hastily. It shows that you have not studiously examined the facts. Of all your intimates, which one is the happiest? Isn't it Burgess?
Y.M. Easily.
O.M. And which one is the unhappiest? Henry Adams?
Y.M. Without a question!
O.M. I know them well. They are extremes, abnormals; their temperaments are as opposite as the poles. Their life-histories are about alike--but look at the results! Their ages are about the same--about around fifty. Burgess had always been buoyant, hopeful, happy; Adams has always been cheerless, hopeless, despondent. As young fellows both tried country journalism--and failed. Burgess didn't seem to mind it; Adams couldn't smile, he could only mourn and groan over what had happened and torture himself with vain regrets for not having done so and so instead of so and so--THEN he would have succeeded. They tried the law-- and failed. Burgess remained happy--because he couldn't help it. Adams was wretched--because he couldn't help it. From that day to this, those two men have gone on trying things and failing: Burgess has come out happy and cheerful every time; Adams the reverse. And we do absolutely know that these men's inborn temperaments have remained unchanged through all the vicissitudes of their material affairs. Let us see how it is with their immaterials. Both have been zealous Democrats; both have been zealous Republicans; both have been zealous Mugwumps. Burgess has always found happiness and Adams unhappiness in these several political beliefs and in their migrations out of them. Both of these men have been Presbyterians, Universalists, Methodists, Catholics--then Presbyterians again, then Methodists again. Burgess has always found rest in these excursions, and Adams unrest. They are trying Christian Science, now, with the customary result, the inevitable result. No political or religious belief can make Burgess unhappy or the other man happy. I assure you it is purely a matter of temperament. Beliefs are ACQUIREMENTS, temperaments are BORN; beliefs are subject to change, nothing whatever can change temperament.
Y.M. You have instanced extreme temperaments.
O.M. Yes, the half-dozen others are modifications of the extremes. But the law is the same. Where the temperament is two-thirds happy, or two-thirds unhappy, no political or religious beliefs can change the proportions. The vast majority of temperaments are pretty equally balanced; the intensities are absent, and this enables a nation to learn to accommodate itself to its political and religious circumstances and like them, be satisfied with them, at last prefer them. Nations do not THINK, they only FEEL. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought-- by force of circumstances, not argument--to reconcile itself to ANY KIND OF GOVERNMENT OR RELIGION THAT CAN BE DEVISED; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later, it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them. As instances, you have all history: the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Russians, the Germans, the French, the English, the Spaniards, the Americans, the South Americans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Hindus, the Turks--a thousand wild and tame religions, every kind of government that can be thought of, from tiger to house-cat, each nation KNOWING it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it, each proud of its fancied supremacy, each perfectly sure it is the pet of God, each without undoubting confidence summoning Him to take command in time of war, each surprised when He goes over to the enemy, but by habit able to excuse it and resume compliments--in a word, the whole human race content, always content, persistently content, indestructibly content, happy, thankful, proud, NO MATTER WHAT ITS RELIGION IS, NOR WHETHER ITS MASTER BE TIGER OR HOUSE-CAT. Am I stating facts? You know I am. Is the human race cheerful? You know it is. Considering what it can stand, and be happy, you do me too much honor when you think that _I_ can place before it a system of plain cold facts that can take the cheerfulness out of it. Nothing can do that. Everything has been tried. Without success. I beg you not to be troubled.
#2633 - Friday, November, 3, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
NONDUAL HIGHLIGHTS
I like what Rob Rabbin says in this article. The crux of it is this thing between Eli Jaxon Bear and Gangaji. Like he was cheating on her secretly for three years or something and of course all his followers were naive enough to belief he was this wonderful perfect guy or something. Same old same old. Well, big deal. They're a married couple. End of story. They're not more special than the married couple in the trailer park or living in their VW bug under a stack of old newspapers. Why is everyone so shocked? They're people. They're not floating above the floor of their living room singing in angelic choirs. They're sitting on the couch watching Jeopardy. They are gifted teachers perhaps, but everyone has a gift and one isn't better than another. Here's Rob...
It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got that Swing
by Robert Rabbin
"What we have received is the ordinary mail of the otherworld, wholly common, not postmarked divine" -- Les Murray, Australian poet
A friend sent me a letter written by Barbara Denempont, executive director and board member of the Gangaji and Leela Foundations, the organizational supports of well-known US spiritual teachers Gangaji and Eli Jaxon-Bear, in which she writes:
"It is possible that you have already heard about a heartbreaking disclosure within our community. On Sunday, October 1, 2006, Eli Jaxon-Bear, founder of the Leela Foundation and Leela School as well as Gangaji's husband and partner, revealed to the entire Board of Directors that he breached the sanctity of the teacher/student relationship by initiating an intimate relationship with one of his students, who is also a teacher in the Leela School. This relationship lasted for three years. Eli told Gangaji about the relationship in October 2005. At the student's request, neither Gangaji nor Eli disclosed the relationship." Later in the same letter, Barbara writes, "Eli takes full responsibility for his actions and the harm he has caused. In response, he is willingly stepping down from teaching immediately."
In an article written for the Ashland Daily Tidings, 14 October 2006, Robert Plain quotes Eli as saying, "A lot of people are upset with me. I'm human. I make mistakes. This has been hugely humiliating, but I am willing to stand and face that. I feel like this itself is a teaching for people. It's a great test for everyone to see what is true within their own hearts. My prayer is that people don't discard the teaching because of the flaws of the teacher."
The "sanctity of the teacher/student relationship" is tricky business, and I don't want to take up the complexity of that notion here. It does seem odd, however, that, as stated by Barbara, "What was initially seen as a matter between adults is now recognized to be a betrayal of the teacher/student relationship and an abuse of power." I wonder what happened in people's minds between "initially" and "now." I wonder if Barbara and the other board members who approved her letter have really taken full responsibility for their perceptions, projections, fears, doubts, choices, and actions. I also wonder about the characterization "heartbreaking disclosure." For whom is it heartbreaking, and is this true? Barbara does not appear to apply the famous satsang ju-jitsu move, "Who is it that is heartbroken?" I wonder if the people have failed the teachings, or if the teachings have failed the people.
I don't think Eli is flawed, and I don't think he should stop teaching. In fact, I believe only now is he qualified to teach, now that Toto has shown us the man behind the curtain. If there is a flaw, it is in the teaching.
What is the teaching? Perhaps the teaching is pointed to in this statement made by Eli in response to the question, Who are we?: "Silent, empty, conscious, intelligent love." (John Darling, Mail Tribune, 31 December 2004)
The flaw in the teaching is that "silent, empty, conscious, intelligent love" is not the whole story of who we are. The whole story is quite huge, and we would do well to remember Rumi's comment, "However you think it is, it's different than that."
Any teaching that is based on a transcendent ideal at the expense of our human beingness is flawed. We turn towards meditation, self-inquiry, and inner exploration to find our innate connection with the universe, with the all that is. We enter silence in order to reawaken our conscious feeling for the enormous endlessness of who we are, to set free our exhilaration for life, to initiate ourselves into the mystery and magic of creation. But the enormous endlessness of who we are is anchored in our humanity and in our life on this Earth, in full relationship to every detail and aspect of daily life.
The transcendent ideal of spiritual attainment is flawed. It is an incomplete, distorted picture of who we are. Ramana Maharshi, from whom Eli and Gangaji claim spiritual descent via their guru Papaji, did not go far enough on his journey of self-discovery. He only went away; he didn't come back. And we, in our hunger for truth, peace, and meaning, have come to mistake going away as the ideal. Ramana Maharshi needed to come back into a full, robust, sensual, sexual, passionate embodiment of that silence. We should not make his mistake. Silence does not neutralize our life and living, it animates them. We should stop impersonating an ideal that is flawed. The archetype of sage as aloof witness to the world is an old, tired one, as cumbersome and ineffective as the typewriter compared to a new Apple Powerbook. I would be more interested in what the Buddha might have said had he returned to the palace and become king. He, too, went away; and he, too, didn't come back.
I don't know why we have traded away our human beingness for transcendent ideals. Perhaps its because, like any form of fundamentalism, it creates a false sense of security and certainty. We love the idea that we are emptiness, or silence, or pure consciousness. We are these things, but not exclusively. We are also a teaspoonful of DNA, but not exclusively. We are this body/mind, but not exclusively. We are all of it, aren't we? That's the hard part: to integrate enormous endlessness with our daily life. If the teaching is to be full, the teaching must exist within the context of our lives, as we live them. If we are going to ascend, then let us remember to descend. If we are going to travel to otherworldly realms, let's not forget to come back to the kitchen where we eat.
Barbara continues, "The Board intends to create a Foundation code of ethics, or similar document, to address the teacher and student relationship, as well as other pertinent issues." Why is this necessary? It seems to be another way in which people can avoid life, trading personal responsibility and the thrill of spontaneity for rigidity and fear of self. If we live out in the open, moment by moment, and if we are unafraid to ask direct, personal questions about how our teachers live, why is a "code of ethics, or similar document" necessary? Why do we need to regulate behavior, banishing our impulses to our individual and collective shadow-bags? Once the document dealing with pertinent issues is created, can we then peacefully, blissfully, and blindly go back to asking Who am I?
Who am I? is only half the question; the other half is How shall I live?
Who am I? and How shall I live? is the full, challenging, and redeeming spiritual question which we would do well to take up with our whole heart, without looking away, without trying to escape or oversimplify the often untidy totality of our life.
How shall I live? can not be swept under the carpet with spiritual ideals of transcendence. We can not live as pure consciousness except in this body, in this world, with each other. We need to look honestly and openly at how we actually live, taking the whole thing into our enormous endlessness: body, mind, emotions, relationships, money, sex, power, desires, health, work, fantasies, imagination, intellect. And there's more that we need to include in our living: conscious lifestyle choices and participation in the social, political, and environmental issues of our times.
I do not think Eli is flawed, and I do not think he should stop teaching. I only wonder why he did not live openly from the beginning? Three years is a long time to be secretive about how one is actually living. If we want our spiritual teachers to be sexless, that is our problem. If we want our spiritual teachers to be above it all, that is our problem, too. If we want our spiritual teachers to look and sound remote and different from us, that is our problem. What exactly are we trying to be above? What are we trying to escape? Why are we so afraid of our lives as we live them? Eli's humanity is not the flaw; the flaw is a teaching that forces us to live in shadows and carry secrets.
Really, it's time to grow up and stop playing dress-up-like-some-old-Indian-guy. Let's stop hanging giant pictures over our giant chairs, pretending to meditate on the Self when we are just medicating the self. Let's stop giving our power to the Wizard of Oz, creating the very source of our disempowerment, disappointment, and disillusionment with our own projected power. Let's have the courage and originality to invent our own lives, according to our own natures (both with a small and capital "s") and deep desires, our passions and artistic tsunamis, our concern and caring for the things of this world where we live.
Everyone alive has to deal with emotions, money, relationships, desire, doubt, fear, insecurity, paradox, heartbreak -- the whole lot of it. If they say they don't, they are lying, or they are living a tiny life surrounded by Tin Men and Cowardly Lions.
The great jazz pianist/composer Duke Ellington, wrote: It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing There's something else that makes this song complete
The song that makes our life as enormous endlessness complete is our human beingness, our embodiment, our actual living and loving. I suggest we get real, not ideal, in our satsangs. I suggest we stop impersonating "realized" beings who themselves only went away. That is not a big deal. The bigger deal is coming back.
Robert Rabbin is a pioneer in executive/life coaching, a keynote speaker, leadership/communication consultant, teacher, and author of five books and more than 250 articles. He is the originator of "Presencing," a holistic style of public speaking and communicating based on the integrity, transparency, and clarity of the speaker. For contact and further information, please visit www.radicalsages.com and www.presencing.com.au. __________________________________
#2634 - Sunday, November 5, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nondual Highlights
This entire issue is a reader's contribution. As I read it, I saw many similarities with the Buddhist practice of tonglen, and many other practices from different cultural backgrounds.
"We begin the practice by taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and who we wish to help. For instance, if you know of a child who is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of that child. Then, as you breathe out, you send the child happiness, joy or whatever would relieve their pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in other's pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open, and breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever you feel would bring them relief and happiness. However, we often cannot do this practice because we come face to face with our own fear, our own resistance, anger, or whatever our personal pain, our personal stuckness happens to be at that moment." --Pema Chodron
If this sounds to you like some hocus-pocus or magical thinking, I invite you to read with an open mind and heart. Exactly how working on on our own heart benefits others may not be obvious, it may be difficult to pin down. It also may be way better than trying to fix "them". I have seen amazing transformations in a relationship when only one person manages to forgive the other. And people heal emotionally in the presence of a person who first and foremost accepts them as they are. The following is Miriam's letter.
Have you come upon the (it seems to me) very non-dual ho'oponopono process/philosophy?
Two years ago, I heard about a therapist in Hawaii who cured a complete ward of criminally insane patients -- without ever seeing any of them. The psychologist would study an inmate's chart and then look within himself to see how he created that person's illness. As he improved himself, the patient improved.
When I first heard this story, I thought it was an urban legend. How could anyone heal anyone else by healing himself? How could even the best self-improvement master cure the criminally insane?
It didn't make any sense. It wasn't logical, so I dismissed the story.
However, I heard it again a year later. I heard that the therapist had used a Hawaiian healing process called ho 'oponopono. I had never heard of it, yet I couldn't let it leave my mind. If the story was at all true, I had to know more.
I had always understood "total responsibility" to mean that I am responsible for what I think and do. Beyond that, it's out of my hands. I think that most people think of total responsibility that way. We're responsible for what we do, not what anyone else does. The Hawaiian therapist who healed those mentally ill people would teach me an advanced new perspective about total responsibility.
His name is Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len. We probably spent an hour talking on our first phone call. I asked him to tell me the complete story of his work as a therapist. He explained that he worked at Hawaii State Hospital for four years. That ward where they kept the criminally insane was dangerous. Psychologists quit on a monthly basis. The staff called in sick a lot or simply quit. People would walk through that ward with their backs against the wall, afraid of being attacked by patients. It was not a pleasant place to live, work, or visit.
Dr. Len told me that he never saw patients. He agreed to have an office and to review their files. While he looked at those files, he would work on himself. As he worked on himself, patients began to heal.
"After a few months, patients that had to be shackled were being allowed to walk freely," he told me. "Others who had to be heavily medicated were getting off their medications. And those who had no chance of ever being released were being freed."
I was in awe.
"Not only that," he went on, "but the staff began to enjoy coming to work. Absenteeism and turnover disappeared. We ended up with more staff than we needed because patients were being released, and all the staff was showing up to work. Today, that ward is closed."
This is where I had to ask the million dollar question: "What were you doing within yourself that caused those people to change?"
"I was simply healing the part of me that created them," he said.
I didn't understand.
Dr. Len explained that total responsibility for your life means that everything in your life - simply because it is in your life--is your responsibility. In a literal sense the entire world is your creation.
Whew. This is tough to swallow. Being responsible for what I say or do is one thing. Being responsible for what everyone in my life says or does is quite another. Yet, the truth is this: if you take complete responsibility for your life, then everything you see, hear, taste, touch, or in any way experience is your responsibility because it is in your life.
This means that terrorist activity, the president, the economy--anything you experience and don't like--is up for you to heal. They don't exist, in a manner of speaking, except as projections from inside you. The problem isn't with them, it's with you, and to change them, you have to change you.
I know this is tough to grasp, let alone accept or actually live. Blame is far easier than total responsibility, but as I spoke with Dr. Len, I began to realize that healing for him and in ho 'oponopono means loving yourself. If you want to improve your life, you have to heal your life. If you want to cure anyone--even a mentally ill criminal--you do it by healing you.
I asked Dr. Len how he went about healing himself. What was he doing, exactly, when he looked at those patients' files?
"I just kept saying, 'I'm sorry' and 'I love you' over and over again," he explained.
That's it?
That's it.
Turns out that loving yourself is the greatest way to improve yourself, and as you improve yourself, your improve your world. Let me give you a quick example of how this works: one day, someone sent me an email that upset me. In the past I would have handled it by working on my emotional hot buttons or by trying to reason with the person who sent the nasty message. This time, I decided to try Dr. Len's method. I kept silently saying, "I'm sorry" and "I love you," I didn't say it to anyone in particular. I was simply evoking the spirit of love to heal within me what was creating the outer circumstance.
Within an hour I got an e-mail from the same person. He apologized for his previous message. Keep in mind that I didn't take any outward action to get that apology. I didn't even write him back. Yet, by saying "I love you," I somehow healed within me what was creating him.
I later attended a ho'oponopono workshop run by Dr. Len. He's now 70 years old, considered a grandfatherly shaman, and is somewhat reclusive. He praised my book, The Attractor Factor. He told me that as I improve myself, my book's vibration will raise, and everyone will feel it when they read it. In short, as I improve, my readers will improve.
"What about the books that are already sold and out there?" I asked.
"They aren't out there," he explained, once again blowing my mind with his mystic wisdom. "They are still in you."
In short, there is no out there.
It would take a whole book to explain this advanced technique with the depth it deserves. Suffice it to say that whenever you want to improve anything in your life, there's only one place to look: inside you."
"I" come forth from the void into light, Pua mai au mai ka po iloko o ka malamalama,
"I" am the breath that nurtures life, Owau no ka ha, ka mauli ola,
"I" am that emptiness, that hollowness beyond all consciousness, Owau no ka poho, ke ka'ele mawaho a'e o no ike apau.
The "I", the Id, the All. Ka I, Ke Kino Iho, na Mea Apau.
"I" draw my bow of rainbows across the waters, Ka a'e au i ku'u pi'o o na anuenue mawaho a'e o na kai a pau,
The continuum of minds with matters. Ka ho'omaumau o na mana'o ame na mea a pau.
"I" am the incoming and outgoing of breath, Owau no ka "Ho", a me ka "Ha"
The invisible, untouchable breeze, He huna ka makani nahenahe,
The undefinable atom of creation. Ka "Hua" huna o Kumulipo.
"I" am the "I". Owau no ka "I".
Years ago in New Zealand I had an amazing healing from an ancient Maori elder who had spent years of his youth training with the Kahuna. He was in a kind of trance when he spoke to me in the Kahuna language. I'll never forget the way I knew what he was saying - even though I have no conscious knowledge of that language. In my years of 'long teeth' it all begins to make sense ...
gratitude
contrition
love
are the outpourings of this little faltering heart miriam
(YOU ARE THE WORLD! remember how Krishnamurti kept saying it ... ?)
#2635 - Monday, November 6, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights
One of the earliest participants in nonduality forums, Sandeep Chatterjee sent the following to a few email lists and is duplicated here:
One of the common and wide-spread issues debated and discussed in the spiritual circles
whether it is in physical satsanghs or in cyber based forums........
....... is the issue of whether practice is absolutely a must for spiritual enlightenment .....
.......OR.......
.....there being nothing else but the Self (or Bozo)..........who is to do what and for what purpose, to what end.
The debate goes on and on with disciples of either schools absolutely convinced about their own position and the absurdity/foolishness of the other's position.
Arguments go to and fro and supporting quotes from scriptures are hurled by both sides in order to clinch the debate.
The school of practice have even coined phrases like "neo-Advaita" and the "Advaita-shuffle" to disparage the "All-is-Self-anyway" proponents.
The debate is very interesting and reveals nuances in both the positions.
First of all the very debate is ambrosia for the "me-entity".
For the "me"........the very debate is it's existence and the continuance of the debate............the perpetuation of it's identity.
The debate lends the spiritual halo, the religious glow to the "me".
For the school of practice (whether the specific practice is of Self-Enquiry, aka Ramana or Nisargadatta, or meditation aka the various schools of Zen, prayer aka Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, or charity work to earn merits useful for salvation, it makes no difference).....
....fundamentally the issue is the belief that an effect, any effect needs a cause, separate from the effect.
The "me" having seen evidence where apparently without effort there is no success in the material world,..... ...... this belief gets reinforced by Teachers, Gurus hollering from the rooftops that the path of salvation, is only through the practice of X, Y.Z, which of course only the specific hollering teacher can show, teach, transmit, deeksha-it.
The "me" which is essentially the sense of insecurity.... .....having sought security in the temporal icons like relationship, career, money, social position, acquisitions knowledge power etc... ....realizes the hollowness, the transitory nature of these temporal icons and now seeks security in the eternal.
The same equation is brought in with only a conceptualization of a new icon to be sought.
The equation being there is a problem, for which there exists a solution, if only the seeking for the solution can diverted to the right direction and the necessary cost be paid.
And there are enough characters who are skillful in utilizing the innate sense of insecurity to create "to-be-chased-solutions", in the process augmenting Bank balances and disciple numbers with some good old sexual romps thrown in.
Why does the "me" not see through this charade?
It does but does not acknowledge............because now the claim of ownership of the meditation, of the Pranayam, of the Self-Enquiry, of the number of charities supported, worked for....
.......is it's identity.
It is I who is meditating, doing Pranayam/Self enquiry 16 hours a day,...... ......the sense of the "I" as the sense of the "me" is intact.
I have saved so many heathens by getting them to accept the Bible.... ....surely I am ensured my rightful place in Dad's pad in the hereafter.
No matter what practice is happening in the moment............the claim of ownership of that practice.... ......lo behold the lurking sense of entitification.
The specific technique, the specific activity.............is not all an issue.
The same is the case for the Guru/Teacher.
Without the practice and the disciples swearing by that practice....
....how can I the Guru remain a Guru?
How can I be a saint, unless there are sinners around to be saved?
If Pranayam is happening......if zazen is happening.......if massive charity work is getting effected through oneself....
...if there descends moments of quietude where the heart is filled with am immensity of gratitude..
....then that can only be a nuance of the movement of the moment.
Moment to moment to moment.
Apperceiving this............
.......anything and everything becomes a practice.
In the gestalt of such an existing.......cleaning the accumulated dried shreds of shit on the sides of a toilet......
.......is practice....
...... no less....... no more....
... than that of feeding the poor.
Thus real meditation is not the technique per se......not the practice per se.......but that....
..... in which there is the end of the meditator.
And thus the end of meditation.
Meditation as conceived to be a means to an end. As believed to be a cause for a desired effect.
Rather than time specific, condition specific meditation sessions.............there is a meditative existing...... .....in which may happen........a specific series of acts labeled as zazen .......or KapalBhati... ....followed by maybe some lusty love making next to the altar...... .....followed by maybe some expressing of a haiku in the midst of a noisy brothel.
In that meditative existing........ can happen the honed activities as required in running a global corporation..... ......existing side by side with agenda free compassion.
There is no sense of an agenda, there is no sense of an intention and there is no sense of an expectation.
It is no longer a cause-effect plea bargaining.
There is a flowing..........a synchronousness........there is just the enacting of living.
Which is all powerful, all creative......and .....indivisive .
In the school of All-is-Self-hence-nothing-must-be-done.... ......is also the prevailing sense of the "me".
If All is the Self................if All-that-is-is that-which-IS..................if this is apperceived.... .....then it is apperceived that the very biological sentient object engaged in praying to a self-conceived symbol, whether that is a deity, a principle or a Guru-known as zazen ....
....such a conditioned object.....
...... AND...
....the activity happening through such a conditioned object can only be an expression of that-which-is.
How can it be otherwise?
And thus what is it in phenomenality, ...........which is wrong and has to be condemned or is to be negated?
What appears to be happening............could not have been otherwise.... ..... in that very moment of happening..... ...for all the stars in the Andromeda galaxy.
There is nothing which needs to be done.... .... AND....... whatever is to be done....... .....gets done.
The very opposition to practice, the very need to deny....... ........is the sense of the "me" at play.
For in the opposition, in the denial.......... is the identity and perpetuation of the identity.
Ramana was once asked........."Since you are enlightened...why don't you just wave your hand and enlighten everybody else?
The dude in the diaper replied "When you wake up from a dream, where are the dream-people who have to be woken up?"
And yet the dude while adjusting his diaper, used to be moved to copious tears on hearing the narrations of the grief-stricken seekers, visiting him.
He even suggested the practice of Self-enquiry to those who had no existential reality.
At other times, the communion was in silence.
At all times..........it remained the Duet of One.
The arising of practice..........it's run and finally it's end or cessation, whether temporarily or permanently...... .....are all nuances of the movement, known as the moment.
These set of squiggly signs getting transmitted through routers and servers and modems and satellite systems over cyber-space and finally appearing as pixels on a PC screen... .....are not the doings by somebody, for somebody else to read and apperceive.
#2636 - Tuesday, November 7, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights
In this issue is announced a retreat with Cee. I've known for about 7 years and have met her several times. Geez, all she talks about is Truth. Cee is one of these people who takes great care with whatever she does and makes everyone around her feel God's looking after them, that reality is all there is, and that it's useless to struggle. You may view one of Cee's videos here: http://www.pne.cc/media/videos.htm?submit=Already+Donated
photo: Hana
The Way of Knowledge Meditation Retreat
Feb. 16, 17, 18, 19, 2007
Hana, Maui
with Cee
This year a special retreat focusing on Self Knowledge taught be Cee, will be held in the verdant and serene setting of Hana, Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands. Each day will be comprised of meditation, focused study of the Way of Knowledge, and specific instruction on Self-Inquiry as revealed by Sri Ramana Maharshi. You will receive a book on the Way of Knowledge by Cee and be able to ask questions to gain clarity and focus in your spiritual practice. We will also work with sleep and dream states. You are warmly invited to attend this silent meditation retreat. The focus is on discovering the truth within yourself.
Cee encourages everyone around the world who is earnest about spiritual understanding and the truth of existence to make the effort to come to Hawaii for this retreat. The ancient wisdom of Advaita Vedanta is called the final highest truth because you not only discover and know the truth in the deepest way -- but YOU ARE THAT reality. Beginners will have the practice clearly explained and will learn how to quiet the mind while long time practitioners will find immense value from focused attention toward complete awakening.
Retreat Times:
The retreat begins Friday February 16th at 7:00 p.m. and ends on Monday, February 19th at 1:00 p.m.
Retreat Place:
The retreat will be held at Ala Kukui Retreat Center in Hana. It is an expanse of 12 acres with an ocean view. Our group will be renting the whole facility where simple healthy (organic when possible) vegetarian breakfast, lunch, and dinner will be served. www.alakukui.com/index.html. Up to ten people can stay at the Center, others will need to find lodging in the vicinity. www.hanamaui.com/lodging.html. We will be happy to provide recommendations.
Cost of the Retreat:
For those staying in shared (same sex) rooms at Ala Kukui, $400. This includes all meals and three nights lodging.
For those spending the night elsewhere, $250. This includes all meals for the retreat.
~ ~ ~ Please join us to celebrate the immense joy and deep peace of the Self ~ ~ ~
(What follows below are answers given by Ramana at various times to devotee's questions, strung together and brought into flowing English for ease of comprehension.)
There is no greater mystery than this, that being the reality yourself, you seek to gain reality.
You think there is something binding your reality and that something must be destroyed before the reality is freed. This is ridiculous.
A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your efforts. What is there to realize? The real is always as it is.
You have realized the unreal, in other words, you regard the unreal as that which is real. Give up this attitude and you will attain wisdom.
There is nothing new nor anything you do not already have which needs to be gained. The feeling that you have not yet realized is the sole obstruction to realization.
In fact, you are already free. If it were not so, the realization would be new. If it has not existed so far, it must take place hereafter. What comes will also go, what can be gained can also be lost.
If realization is not eternal it is not worth having. Therefore what you seek is not that which must happen afresh. It is only that which is eternal, but not now known due to obstruction.
Remove the obstruction. That which is eternal is not known to be so because of ignorance. Ignorance is the obstruction. Get over the ignorance and all will be well.
The ignorance is identical with the 'I-thought'. Find its source and it will vanish. Then the Self alone will shine as it always has, in the stillness of being.
#2637 - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nondual Highlights
"We are part of the earth and the earth is part of us. The air is precious. It shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave me my first breath also received my last sigh. This we know: the earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth. The earth is our mother. What befalls the earth befalls all the sons and daughters of the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us. We did not weave the web of life. We are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves" --Chief Seattle.
Dear Friends,
This past weekend, we attended the American Conservation Film Festival. There were many films, and I would like to tell you about some. But first, I would like in some small way to convey the impression they all made together.
Few of you might ever find any opportunity to see these films, as so few venues are out there for independent films. Because the level of passion and commitment portrayed in these films is so seldom seen anywhere, it remains largely unknown. They truly have the power to awaken anyone to the issues facing our planet: the survival of the natural world; habitat loss leading to species extinction; the future we leave to our children; the health of the very land, air, and water that is the basis of all life. This is the real war, one that is going on everywhere, and it has many fronts. We are running out of time, and this is not just about global warming, as big an issue as that is. Do we really need to destroy millions of acres of public land in the western states? Would you sacrifice a pristine wilderness area forever just to have a two day supply of natural gas?
WATCH THE TRAILER for A Land Out of Time.
We may not all be capable of an extraordinary dedication, but it is important to realize how small efforts can add up. Conservation is our biggest, untapped source of "free energy". Our homes and buildings contribute far more to global warming than all our cars. And we already have the technology to cut electricity use, with simple and easy steps. Investment in clean, renewable sources pays for itself in very reasonable times frames. In "Kilowatt Ours", an entire county converted all its schools to geothermal heating and cooling, using the earth's constant 59 (&1/2) degrees the same way a heat pump exchanges air above ground. This saved $100,000's per year in what was going to electricity, now available for salaries and books. If we all switched to those compact flourescent bulbs, we could "not need" many new power plants to be built. And who would mind saving money? If we could care enough to do just what we can, these little things really do add up.
Why are we not hearing about energy conservation? Why are renewable energy sources not a priority. I think we already know. Now, there may be a chance to make changes.
Watching a trailer is hardly the same as seeing the whole film, but still, it gives the flavor and shows more than words can convey. So please do watch them. Some films are being shown around the country, check the schedules. DVD's are for sale. This really is a spiritual and moral issue. Support some of the many fine conservation groups already at work. - Gloria
WATCH THE TRAILER : A Land Out of Time
Time is running out for vast swaths of the Rocky Mountain West as the Bush/Cheney Administration turns over millions of acres of public land for oil & gas drilling. Westerners on the land for generations expose the dramatic changes to the landscape and their heritage and spark a backlash. Just who is in charge of our public lands, the oil & gas industry or the American people?
The oil and gas industry has already leased more than 35 million acres of federal land--an area greater than 15 Yellowstones--and industry is moving aggressively to lease millions more before the end of Bush's term. Over a hundred thousand oil and gas wells have already been drilled from Montana to New Mexico, and plans are under way to drill another hundred thousand.
Kekexili, the largest animal reserve in China, is home to many rare species, including the Tibetan antelope. Prized for its skin that is used in making luxurious, albeit illegal, shahtoosh scarves, the antelope’s numbers have been dwindling drastically in the past 20 years as poachers slaughter the animals, often hundreds at a time. In the 1990s local Tibetans formed a volunteer patrol to try to stop the illegal poaching—sometimes at the cost of their own lives. MOUNTAIN PATROL: KEKEXILI chronicles the life-and-death struggle between these volunteers and the poachers, and takes place in the 5,000-meter (3.1-mile) high Kekexili on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.
Mountain top removal mining, air pollution, haze in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, methylmercury contamination of newborns, childhood asthma and global warming ALL stem from the same root cause.
The most significant cause of each of these problems is our dependence on coal-generated electricity in America. In other words, the solution begins at our light switches and power strips.
Today, more than 50% of our nation's electricity is generated from coal. In the southeast U.S., where household electricity use is highest, this amounts to more than 12,000 pounds of coal burned per home per year.
Buildings in America consume nearly 2/3 of all the energy we use. The typical American home emits twice the annual global warming emissions compared to the typical car.
So, if we can make our buildings Net Zero buildings, the benefits to the environment and our quality of life will be profound.
#2638 - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights
"Learn the difference between thinking and awareness. Thinking connects with the past, with memory, and works by opposites, such as good and bad, you and I. It is rightly used in everyday matters, such as cooking. It is wrongly used when one tries to gain a self-identity, like labeling oneself a success or a failure.
Awareness is an impartial observation of the whole of life. It does not proceed from a sense of individuality; it is the whole tree, not just branches which are opposed to roots. Awareness is sanity, peace.
Would you like something to challenge and strengthen your mental forces? At the next disappointing event, reflect, 'This is also just as much a part of life as what I label a favorable event. As a whole person, I see both sides equally; I do not split events into good and bad. Being whole, I see the whole.' Do this, even if you don't understand it, for it contains a tremendous secret."
One millionth of one percent false is completely false. Everything in duality is false -- false as in not true, not true as in bullshit. There are not exceptions. Black and white, no shades of gray. Truth is one, is non-dual, is infinite, is one-without-other. Truth is dissolution, no-self, unity. There's nothing to say about it, nothing to feel about it, nothing to know about it. You are true or you're a lie, as in ego-bound, as in dual, as in asleep.
--Jed McKenna in Spiritual Enlightenment, The Damnedest Thing
Love is natural. Console your mind and make it listen. Love all or it is not love. Make your mind love this way and you will see the magic of this everyday.
"The Truth Is" Sri H.W.L. Poonja Yudhishtara, 1995
from Along the Way
I lit up a cigarette, buttoned my coat up, and began walking down the long straight highway. After twenty minutes I remembered the pack of cigarettes. I lit another. It was that easy.
#2639 - Friday, November 10, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights
This is an excerpt from Spiritual Enlightenment, The Damnedest Thing, by Jed McKenna: http://wisefoolpress.com. This book is about an enlightened guy named Jed McKenna who had run an ashram. It consists of teaching dialogues with students at various stages of understanding, descriptions of his life, and confessions of his enlightenment and knowings.
"Which two or three dozen?" Mary asks, and it takes me a moment to realize that she's jumping back to my statement about which books would remain if I were more discriminating about the library.
"Oh, I'd want to be a little careful answering that," I say. "The reason for the books I'd choose wouldn't be that they are particularly enlightened or enlightening books, or even specifically on the subject of enlightenment. My choices would be based on what I feel is useful knowledge on the path to enlightenment, which is very different from enlightenment itself. In this light, I'd have a bunch of books and maybe some movies, too, because they're often a common experience we share and can provide interesting framework for highlighting certain issues..."
"Like what?" she asks.
I think about some of the movies I've seen in the last few years that most everybody would be familiar with.
"Well, The Matrix would be a good example of a movie I could get a lot of use out of. Total Recall, The 13th Floor, Blade Runner -- those are all good looks at the flimsy and even arbitrary nature of what we call reality. Joe vs. the Volcano is another one I'd use because of the parable-like view it takes of the death-rebirth process. There are probably a few dozen more if I thought about it. The Peter Brook version of The Mahabharata certainly. All the Mornings of the World would be a nice look at the teacher-student relationship. What Dreams May Come to demonstrate the relationship between thoughts and reality. Plenty of others, for different reasons. Harvey, just because."
I pause to consider and decide I'd better stick with general recommendations not too open to misrepresentation. I don't want to mention any books that would require me to include a lengthy disqualifier.
"As for books, besides the ones that you would all guess -- various versions and translations of the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching -- there'd be a version of the Mahabharata accessible to Westerners. The Three Pillars of Zen by Roshi Phillip Kapleau, Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein, The Razor's Edge by Maugham, Walden, Leaves of Grass, Emerson's essays, anything by Stan Grof, Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, and so forth -- all good for different reasons. There would also be a small collection of channeled material, some spiritual novels with a theme of rebirth..."
Almost everyone reacts at the same time to the mention of channeled material. The general response seems to be a mixture of suprise and disbelief.
"I find channeled material very useful and interesting, not just for teaching, but for my own understanding of the phenomenal world in which, as you can see, I exist just like anyone else. If you want me to be specific, I'd say I like Michael for understanding ego and personality structure. When it comes to personal reality, I like Seth. If I have questions about flow and manifestation and desire, then I read Abraham. I might be forgetting something, but those are the main ones I like. A Course In Miracles certainly has its moments."
"So those channeled entities were instrumental in your own...?"
"Oh, no, no, not really," I wave a hand dismissively. "It's more like, combined, they make up my user's manual for being a human on earth -- Being Human 101. This is why I want to be careful about this discussion. I like the books I mentioned, but I don't really look at them that often. Usually just when I have a specific question."
"So what do you read for amusement?" asks Mary.
"Besides Harlequin romances? I like Osho -- the enlightened guy formerly known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh." Some surprise registers through the group about this, which is quite understandable. If one equates enlighenment with sainthood, then Osho might come off as more of an anti-saint, especially if one has only heard the stories of murder plots and free love and power grabs and tax evasion and the ninety Rolls Royces. I like his teaching style. I like his take on Zen. I am in awe of his mind.
"And novels. I read a lot of fiction." I can see from their reaction that I need to say more. "All right, you got me. I spend a lot of time just killing time. I play video games, read books, watch movies. I'd say I probably blow several hours a day that way, but I don't see it as a waste because I don't have anything better to spend my time on. I couldn't put it to better use because I'm not trying to become something or accomplish anything. I have no dissatisfaction to drive me, no ambition to draw me. I've done what I came to do. I'm just killing time 'til time kills me."
This seems to have a quieting effect on the group. I suppose they hadn't considered the possibility that enlightenment was the end of a lot of things we don't normally think of as having ends. Finally, Mary breaks the spell by returning us to the discussion of books.
"What if you were stranded on a desert island," she asks, "and could only have one book?"
"Easy," I reply, "Calvin and Hobbes."
Everyone laughs. I close my eyes and lean my head back and everyone takes that as a signal to give me some peace. They talk among themselves but I am not listening to them. I'm listening to everything and nothing and feeling the light rain on my face and breathing the fresh night air, bringing it all the way down so it cleanses me and carries away the heaviness that builds up after long periods in character. I'm not tired or ending the evening, I just want to not hear my own voice for awhile. I want to pay attention to the rain and the breeze. I want to let one topic fade out so that a new and fresher one might come along.
Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
--Wendell Berry
We can demonstrate that the experience of steady practice influences the quality of our lives, but the nature of the essential urge toward enlightenment is enlightenment itself. The very fact that we are intrigued with the spiritual quest stems from the source of the Light, so to speak. Consequently, enlightenment is not an end; it is truer to say that it is the beginning.
--David A. Cooper, Silence, Simplicity, and Solitude
A wonderful painting is the result of feeling in your fingers. If you have the feeling of the thickness of the ink in your brush, the painting is already there before you paint. When you dip your brush into the ink you already know the result of your drawing, or else you cannot paint. So before you do something, being is there, the result is there. Even though you look as if you were sitting quietly, all your activity, past and present, is included; and the result of your sitting is also already there. You are not resting at all. All the activity is included within you. That is your being. So all results of your practice are included in your sitting. This is our practice, our zazen.
--Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Have no fear in not knowing what to do about a problem. Fear activates its negative relatives of impulsiveness, ego-protection, and an anxious craving for security.
Instead, let the mind be still. Never think of fighting, for an answer won by fighting will soon require another answer and another fight. The problem exists because of an agitated mind, so when the mind rests from its own agitation, there is no problem at all."
--Vernon Howard, from the book "Esoteric Mind Power",
Daily Dharma
The Ponds
Every year the lilies are so perfect I can hardly believe
their lapped light crowding the black, mid-summer ponds. Nobody could count all of them --
the muskrats swimming among the pads and the grasses can reach out their muscular arms and touch
only so many, they are that rife and wild. But what in this world is perfect?
I bend closer and see how this one is clearly lopsided -- and that one wears an orange blight -- and this one is a glossy cheek
half nibbled away -- and that one is a slumped purse full of its own unstoppable decay.
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled -- to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing -- that the light is everything -- that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.
Here's an excerpt from the chapter 'Give it up and Go Wash the Dishes':
"There is nothing to get. ‘I am’ is a pointer that points away from the imaginary person and his story of suffering. There is no enlightenment to attain, and there is no one to attain it. There is no entity who is suffering, only the body can suffer, and the body takes care of itself. There is no separate awareness, no separate consciousness, no suffering person: all of that is purely imagination. All psychological suffering, all ideas of enlightenment, all ideas of a separate me, and a separate awareness are pure imagination.
You don’t need anything at all. There are no real problems—it’s all imagination. There is nothing to attain, nothing to avoid. All there is, is this. This is it. This nothing that is everything.Thoughts and stories are spinning around in circles and the thoughts and stories are believed to be real. See that it’s all imagination, and your imaginary search for imaginary enlightenment comes to an end. And here you are as you’ve always been—just this."
-------------------
Here's a link to the page on my website that has details about the book:
Since first introducing the Transcendental Meditation program in 1958, His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1986c) has always emphasized that individual peace is the basic unit of world peace. He uses the analogy that just as there cannot be a green forest without green trees, there cannot be a peaceful world without peaceful individuals. Even though there are many sincere individuals dedicated to the cause of peace, establishing peace requires more than simply adopting a psychological belief in peace. It can only be achieved through a transformation at the very deepest level of the human mind and through a corresponding change in the physiology. Maharishi explains that when the mind and body are deeply at peace, then thought, speech, and action will spontaneously radiate an influence of harmony into the environment.
Quotations from 3 books, posted to the Spiritual Humanism list:
"The Tao Te Ching" Lao Tzu
"Plan for what is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small. The most difficult things in the world must be done while they are still easy, the greatest things in the world must be done while they are still small. For this reason sages never do what is great, and this is why they can achieve this greatness."
"The Book of Balance & Harmony"
"To sense and comprehend after action is not worthy of being called comprehension. To accomplish after striving is not worthy of being called accomplishment. To know after seeing is not worthy of being called knowing. These three are far from the way of sensing and response.
Indeed, to be able to do something before it exists, sense something before it becomes active, see something before it sprouts, are three abilities that develop interdependantly. Then nothing is sensed but is comprehended, nothing is undertaken without response, nowhere does one go without benifit."
"Spirituality Without God" Moller De La Rouviere Chapter 8,page 100
"Conditioned reality is reality, until it is inspected, understood, felt through and ultimately transcended. A path of self-enquiry that does not take this into full consideration will remain absorbed in the web of its own projected reality,merly looking at itself, however much it may believe it is making progress towards freedom from self- limitation."
bindu: ...while the realized ones sleep they are aware of the body .. and while dreaming they are aware of the body and not unaware of The Self .... and KNOW they are dreaming whether awake or asleep but are still not UNAWARE of The Self in all states; there is the total knowledge of the fact that all things states and beings along with their states are also apppearing in The Self who has realized Himself in them. There is the sure knowledge of the universe, the cosmos and lokas and all of Time appearing in The Self whom has realized hHimself in them. Thus it is much much bigger than the jiva simply awakening to the fact of his OWN non-existence.
A whole life without speaking, "a thunderous silence" that was Wei-ma's Way. And here is a place where no monk can preach. I understand now what T'ao Ch'ien, enlightened, said, he couldn't say. It's so clear, here, this water my teacher.
The sun wasn't up yet; you could see the morning star through the trees. There was a silence that was really extraordinary. Not the silence between two noises or between two notes, but the silence that has no reason whatsoever the silence that must have been at the beginning of the world. It filled the whole valley and the hills.
The two big owls, calling to each other, never disturbed that silence, and a distant dog barking at the late moon was part of this immensity. The dew was especially heavy, and as the sun came up over the hill it was sparkling with many colours and with the glow that comes with the sun's first rays.
"The delicate leaves of the jacaranda were heavy with dew, and birds came to have their morning baths, fluttering their wings so the dew on those delicate leaves filled their feathers. The crows were particularly persistent; they would hop from one branch to another, pushing their heads through the leaves, fluttering their wings, and preening themselves. There were about half-a-dozen of them on that one heavy branch, and there were many other birds, scattered all over the tree, taking their morning bath.
"And this silence spread, and seemed to go beyond the hills. There were the usual noises of children shouting, and laughter; and the farm began to wake up.
"It was going to be a cool day, and now the hills were taking on the light of the sun. They were very old hills probably the oldest in the world with oddly shaped rocks that seemed to be carved out with great care, balanced one on top of the other; but no wind or touch could loosen them from this balance.
"It was a valley far removed from towns, and the road through it led to another village. The road was rough and there were no cars or buses to disturb the ancient quietness of this valley. There were bullock carts, but their movement was a part of the hills. There was a dry river bed that only flowed with water after heavy rains, and the colour was a mixture of red, yellow and brown; and it, too, seemed to move with the hills. And the villagers who walked silently by were like the rocks.
"The day wore on and towards the end of the evening, as the sun was setting over the western hills, the silence came in from afar, over the hills, through the trees, covering the little bushes and the ancient banyan. And as the stars became brilliant, so the silence grew into great intensity; you could hardly bear it.
"The little lamps of the village were put out, and with sleep the intensity of that silence grew deeper, wider and incredibly over-powering. Even the hills became more quiet, for they, too, had stopped their whisperings, their movement, and seemed to lose their immense weight...
"Silence has many qualities. There is the silence between two noises, the silence between two notes and the widening silence in the interval between two thoughts. There is that peculiar, quiet, pervading silence that comes of an evening in the country; there is the silence through which you hear the bark of a dog in the distance or the whistle of a train as it comes up a steep grade; the silence in a house when everybody has gone to sleep, and its peculiar emphasis when you wake up in the middle of the night and listen to an own hooting in the valley; and there is that silence before the owl's mate answers. There is the silence of an old deserted house, and the silence of a mountain; the silence between two human beings when they have seen the same thing, felt the same thing, and acted.
"That night, particularly in that distant valley with the most ancient hills with their peculiar shaped boulders, the silence was as real as the wall you touched. And you looked out of the window at the brilliant stars. It was not a self-generated silence; it was not that the earth was quiet and the villagers asleep but it came from everywhere - from the distant stars, from those dark hills and from your own mind and heart. This silence seemed to cover everything from the tiniest grain of sand in the river-bed - which only knew running water when it rained - to the tall, spreading banyan tree and a slight breeze that was now beginning. There is the silence of the mind which is never touched by any noise, by any thought or by the passing wind of experience. It is this silence that is innocent, and so endless. When there is this silence of the mind action springs from it, and this action does not cause confusion or misery.
"The meditation of a mind that is utterly silent is the benediction that man is ever seeking. In this silence every quality of silence is."
"Silence is our real nature. What we are fundamentally is only silence. Silence is free from beginning and end. It was before the beginning of all things. It is causeless. Its greatness lies in the fact that it simple is. In silence all objects have their home ground. It is the light that gives objects their shape and form. All movement, all activity is harmonized by silence.Silence has no opposite in noise. It is beyond positive and negative. Silence dissolves all objects. It is not related to any counterpart which belongs to the mind. Silence has nothing to do with mind. It cannot be defined but it can be felt directly because it is our nearness. Silence is freedom without restriction or centre. It is our wholeness, neither inside nor outside the body. Silence is joyful, not pleasurable. It is not psychological. It is feeling without a feeler. Silence needs no intermediary. Silence is holy. It is healing. There is no fear in silence. Silence is autonomous like love and beauty. It is untouched by time. Silence is meditation, free from any intention, free from anyone who meditates. Silence is the absence of oneself. Or rather, silence is the absence of absence. Sound which comes from silence is music. All activity is creative when it comes from silence. It is constantly a new beginning. Silence precedes speech and poetry and music and all art. Silence is the home ground of all creative activity. What is truly creative is the word, is Truth. Silence is the word. Silence is Truth.The one established in silence lives in constant offering, in prayer without asking, in thankfulness, in continual love. "
The Other Side of Belief: Interpreting U.G. Krishnamurti by Mukunda Rao. Penguin Books India, Rs 350.00. ISBN: 0144000350
Contents: Foreword.
I. The way it is: Prelude.
1. No boundaries. 2. Can you take it. 3. Doubt is the other side of belief. 4. A con game. 5. Cancer treats saints and sinners in the same way. 6. Have you ever had sex Krishnaji. 7. The end of Samsara. 8. The dark night of the body. 9. The mystique of Nirvana.
II. Interpreting U.G. Krishnamurti 1. God(s) fear and ultimate pleasure. 2. Mysticism demystified. 3. Gurus and holy business. 4. Avatars as ultimate models. 5. Religion in a secular mode. 6. Theory and practice. 7. Superman debunked. 8. The two Krishnamurtis. 9. Body mind and soul do they exist. 10. The enigma of the natural state. 11. The eternal recurrence.
III. Anti teaching 1. Telling it like it is: the voice of UG.
*
Trapped between a dead past and an unborn future, the human animal has, since the dawn of time, asked these two questions— ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Why am I here?’ These are the questions which propelled the author to the doors of the most subversive man in human history—U.G. Krishnamurti. And the outcome of that encounter is this exceptional book. —From the Foreword by Mahesh Bhatt.
*
Described as the thinker who shuns thought, U.G. Krishnamurti is the most enigmatic and iconoclastic ‘anti-guru’ of our times. His conviction that doubt is the other side of belief emerged from an uncompromising negation of everything that can be expressed, not from a desire for some ‘comfy dialectical thesis’.
The Other Side of Belief: Interpreting U.G. Krishnamurti is a candid and refreshing chronicle of UG’s life and the evolution of his radical outlook and ideas. Tracing the development of UG’s notion of enlightenment as a series of biological mutations devoid of mystical or religious connotations, Mukunda Rao weaves a complex portrait—of a man who doesn’t hesitate to challenge and demolish society’s most cherished and comforting values and ideals, but nonetheless commands a most fervent respect and veneration from multitudes of admirers.
UG has always been adamant that life must be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms so that it is de-psychologized and demystified. He underwent, in his own words, a ‘calamity’: a series of bodily metamorphoses that catapulted him into the unique state of the ‘declutched’ mind. This book gives the reader a vivid description of UG’s ‘cellular revolution’ and an intensely personal insight into UG’s unflinching and relentless insistence on freedom from the ‘stranglehold of thought’.
With a foreword by Mahesh Bhatt, film-maker and lifelong admirer of UG, The Other Side of Belief offers a searching exploration of the incredible charisma of a man who has transformed the lives of people all over the world.
U G Krishnamurti on Enlightenment
There is no such thing as enlightenment. You may say that every teacher and all the saints and saviours of mankind have been asserting for centuries upon centuries that there is enlightenment and that they are enlightened. Throw them all in one bunch into the river! I don’t care. To realize that there is no enlightenment at all is enlightenment.
But actually an enlightened man or a free man, if there is one, is not interested in freeing or enlightening anybody. This is because he has no way of knowing that he is a free man, that he is an enlightened man. It is not something that can be shared with somebody, because it is not in the area of experience at all.
Does such a thing as enlightenment exist? To me what does exist is a purely physical process. There is nothing mystical or spiritual about it. If I close the eyes some light penetrates through the eyelids. If I cover the eyelids there is still light inside. There seems to be some kind of a hole in the forehead which doesn’t show but through which something penetrates. In India that light is golden, in Europe it is blue. There is also some kind of light penetration through the back of the head. It’s as if there is a hole running through between those spots in front and back of the skull. There is nothing inside but this light. If you cover those points there is complete, total darkness. This light doesn’t do anything or help the body to function in any way, it’s just there.
This state is a state of not knowing. You really don’t know what you are looking at. All there is inside is wonderment. It is a state of wonder because I just do not know what I am looking at. The knowledge about it, all that I have learned, is held in the background unless there is a demand. When required it comes quickly like an arrow, then I am back in the state of not knowing, of wonder.
I don’t know if I have made myself clear. The reason why I am emphasizing the physical aspect is not with the idea of selling something but to emphasize and express what you call enlightenment, liberation, transformation, in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. There is absolutely no religious content to it, and no mystical overtones or undertones to the functioning of the body. Unfortunately, for centuries the whole thing has been interpreted in religious terms and that has caused misery for us all. I am not interested in propagating this. This is not something which you can make happen, nor is it possible for me to create that hunger which is essential to understand anything. I am repeating this over and over again but repetition has its own charm. You are assuming that you are hungering for spiritual attainments and you are reaching out for your goals. Naturally, there are so many people in the market place, all these saints, selling all kinds of shoddy goods. They say it is for the welfare of mankind and that they do it out of compassion and all that kind of thing. What I am trying to say is that you are satisfied with the crumbs they throw at you. They promise that one day they are going to deliver to you a full loaf of bread. That is just a promise. They cannot deliver the goods at all. There is no use waiting for something to happen to satisfy your hunger. The hunger has to burn itself up. Literally, it has to burn itself out.
*
The whole mystique of enlightenment is based upon the idea of transforming yourself. I cannot convey or transmit my certainty that you, and all the authorities down through the centuries, are false. They, and the spiritual goods they peddle, are utterly false.
Just let me warn you that if what you are aiming at, enlightenment, really happens you will die. There will be a physical death because there has to be a physical death to be in that state.
It happens when you touch life at a point where nobody has touched it before. Nobody can teach you that.
*
When enlightenment comes it wipes out everything. That is something which cannot be made to happen through your effort or through the grace of anybody, through the help of even a god walking on the face of this earth claiming that he has specially descended from wherever for your sake and for the sake of mankind. That is just absolute gibberish.
*
People call me an ‘enlightened man’ -- I detest that term -- they can’t find any other word to describe the way I am functioning. At the same time, I point out that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all. I say that because all my life I’ve searched and wanted to be an enlightened man, and I discovered that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all, and so the question whether a particular person is enlightened or not doesn’t arise. I don’t give a hoot for a sixth-century-BC Buddha, let alone all the other claimants we have in our midst. They are a bunch of exploiters, thriving on the gullibility of the people. There is no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear and not God.
We are no more purposeful or meaningful than any other thing on this planet… We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood.
*
The plain fact is that if you don’t have a problem, you create one. If you don’t have a problem you don’t feel that you are living.
*
When you are no longer caught up in the dichotomy of right and wrong or good and bad,
you can never do anything wrong. As long as you are caught up in this duality, the danger is that you will always do wrong.
*
In nature there is no death or destruction at all. What occurs is the reshuffling of atoms. If there is a need or necessity to maintain the balance of ‘energy’ in this universe, death occurs.
*
An artist is a craftsman like any other craftsmen. He uses that tool to express himself. All art is a pleasure movement.
*
There is more life in the chorus of the barking dogs than in the music or singing of your famous musicians and singers.
*
A messiah is the one who leaves a mess behind him in this world.
*
Religions have promised roses but you end up with only thorns.
*
It is terror, not love, not brotherhood that will help us to live together.
*
Meditation itself is evil. That is why you get evil thoughts when you start meditating.
*
Anything you want to be free from for whatever reason is the very thing that can free you.
*
Atmospheric pollution is most harmless when compared to the spiritual and religious pollution that have plagued the world.
*
Going to the pub or the temple is exactly the same; it is quick fix.
*
The body has no independent existence. You are a squatter there.
*
God and sex go together. If God goes sex goes, too.
*
When you know nothing, you say a lot. When you know something, there is nothing to say.
*
You have to touch life at a point where nobody has touched it before. Nobody can teach you that.
*
All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain
unhappy.
*
Understanding yourself is one of the greatest jokes perpetrated not only by the purveyors of ancient wisdom– the holy men– but also the modern scientists. The psychologists love to talk about self-knowledge, self-actualization, living from moment to moment, and such rot.
*
The more you know about yourself the more impossible it becomes to be humble and sensitive. How can there be humility as long as you know something?
*
It is mortality that creates immortality. It is the known that creates the unknown. It is the time that has created the timeless. It is thought that has created the thoughtless.
*
You actually have no way of looking at the sunset because you are not separated from the
sunset. The moment you separate your self from the sunset, the poet in you comes out. Out of that separation poets and painters have tried to express themselves, to share their experiences with others. All that is culture.
*
All experiences however extraordinary they may be are in the area of sensuality.
*
Humility is an art that one practices. There is no such thing as humility. As long as you know, there is no humility. The known and humility cannot coexist
*
Man cannot be anything other than what he is. Whatever he is, he will create a society that mirrors him.
*
Inspiration is a meaningless thing. Lost, desperate people create a market for inspiration. All inspired action will eventually destroy you and your kind.
*
Love and hate are not opposite ends of the same spectrum; they are one and the same thing. They are much closer than kissing cousins.
*
It is a terrible thing to use– somebody to get pleasure. Whatever you use, an idea, a concept, a drug, or a person, or anything else, you cannot have pleasure without using something.
*
Hinduism is not a religion in the usual sense. It is a combination and confusion of many things. It is like a street with hundreds of shops.
*
Gurus play a social role, so do prostitutes.
*
Society, which has created all these sociopaths, has invented morality to protect itself from them. Society has created the ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’. I don’t accept them as such.
*
By using the models of Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing up unique individuals.
*
As long as you are doing something to be selfless, you will be a self-centred individual.
*
The subject does not exist there. It is the object that creates the subject. This runs counter to the whole philosophical thinking of India.
*
When thought is not there all the time, what is there is living from moment to moment. It’s all in frames, millions and millions and millions of frames, to put it in the language of film.
*
The man who spoke of ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ is responsible for this horror in the world today. Don’t exonerate those teachers.
*
Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It must be
demystified and depsychologized.
*
Society is built on a foundation of conflict, and you are society. Therefore you must always be in conflict with society.
*
You know the story of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. The red queen has to run faster and faster to keep still where she is. That is exactly what you are all doing. Running faster and faster. But you are not moving anywhere.
*
The appreciation of music, poetry and language is all culturally determined and is the product of thought. It is acquired taste that tells you that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is more beautiful than a chorus of cats screaming; both produce equally valid sensations.
*
The peak of sex experience is the one thing in life you have that comes close to being a first-hand experience; all the rest of your experiences are second-hand, somebody else’s.
*
The problem with language is, no matter how we try to express ourselves, we are caught up in the structure of words. There is no point in creating new language, a new lingo, to express anything. There is nothing there to be expressed except to free yourself from the stranglehold of thought.
*
What you call ‘yourself’ is fear. The ‘you’ is born out of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.
*
It would be more interesting to learn from children, than try to teach them how to behave, how to live and how to function.
Nondual Highlights Issue #2645, Saturday, November 18, 2006
Two posts from OH today.
Love, Mark
Happy in the morning I open my cottage door; A clear breeze blowing Comes straight in. The first sun Lights the leafy trees; The shadows it casts Are crystal clear. Serene, In accord with my heart, Everything merges In one harmony. Gain and loss Are not my concern; This way is enough To the end of my days.
- Wen-siang
Gain and loss are not my concern. ahhh. the last sun, the naked trees, the chilling wind, whatever is here, now, is not my concern either but it brings me joy! to the end of my days. ~dg
Poem from book, "Sleepless Nights: Verses For The Wakeful," translated by Thomas Cleary,
Hello dear ones: Hope everyone is feeling well and happy. Below is an old post from Old Hag (OH) that begins with a startling, gorgeous poem by Nancy Ore that never fails to bring a tear to ole eye here. And oh sends along a reminder to stop all the trying and just lay back and bask in the cool breeze (well, it is almost winter here.) Hope you enjoy and benefit. Be sure to take good care of your precious selves today. love, dharma grandmother
____________________ From OH:
Hello, dears:
This is for anyone who may feel that they are not enough just as they are right now.
"You are Enough!" A Woman Seminarian's Story
It is not enough said her father that you get all A's each quarter play Mozart for your kinfolk win starred-first in contest you must come home on your wedding night.
It is not enough said her mother that you smile at Auntie Lockwood take cookies to the neighbors keep quiet while I'm napping you must cure my asthma.
It is not enough said her husband that you write letters to my parents fix pumpkin pie and pastry forget your name was Bauer you must always you must never.
It is not enough said her children that you make us female brownies tend our friends and puppies buy us Nike tennies you must let us kill you.
It is not enough said her pastor that you teach the second graders change the cloths and candles kneel prostrate at the altar as long as there are starving children in the world you must not eat without guilt.
It is not enough said her counselor that you struggle with the demons integrate your childhood leave when time is over you must stop crying clarify your poetic symbols and not feel that you are not enough.
I give up she said I am not enough and laid down into the deep blue pocket of night to wait for death.
She waited...
and finally her heart exploded her breathing stopped
They came with stretcher took her clothes off covered her with linen then went away' and left her locked in deep blue pocket tomb
The voice said YOU ARE ENOUGH
naked crying bleeding nameless starving sinful YOU ARE ENOUGH
And the third day she sat up asked for milk and crackers took ritual bath with angels dressed herself with wings and flew away.
- Nancy Ore
~You are Enough. Just as you are. Perhaps if we just threw all the ego's-antics analyzin', all the how-to-wake-up discussin', all the self-improvement manuals in the commode, down the drain, flushed 'em all, and just accepted all as it is - even the unacceptable, oh yes, "Accept the Unacceptable," we would learn to fly! No, can't even use the word "learn" - cause there is no learnin' - everything we have put into that wondrous brain of ours drains out through the "You are Enough" hole.
"God shatters all that is not Him!" the Sufis say.
Buddha had the idea: what do you think he was "doing" under that tree? Jes sittin' - that's all. And ole Mara came along and threw all that stuff at him about what he could "do"....jes like Jesus heard, "have power," "seek sex" "brag" "invest in tech stocks" "lose weight" "fight for that promotion" "use strips for your blackheads"...well, somethin' like that, and Sidd ignored him, and just sat. And his big awakening was to simply see things as they really are, right there, in front of his nose. And IT was enough. HE was Enough. And so are WE. Enough.
That's what it seems to this ole woman, all those dudes who Made IT learned: they were enough. And when they stopped seekin' to be more - or less - when they stopped. Period. They began to live for the first time, And every dern one of them had their wings pop out and were flyin' all over the place.
"Not for this were my wings fitted." Plato.
It jes feels so damned good sometimes to remember how simple it all is.
love to all, lalala...i love you jes the way you are...lalala oh
#2646 - Sunday, November 19, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nondual Highlights
Ta-sui was asked, "Buddha's truth is everywhere; so where do you teach your students to plant their feet?"
He replied, "The vast ocean lets fish leap freely; the endless sky lets birds fly freely."
From "The Pocket Zen Reader," edited by Thomas Cleary, 1999.
Let's try an experiment. Pick up a coin. Imagine that it represents the object at which you are grasping. Hold it tightly clutched in your fist and extend your arm, with the palm of your hand facing the ground. Now if you let go or relax your grip, you will lose what you are clinging onto. That's why you hold on. But there's another possibility: You can let go and yet keep hold of it. With your arm still outstretched, turn your hand so that it faces the sky. Release your hand and the coin still rests on your open palm. You let go. And the coin is still yours, even with all this space around it. So there is a way in which we can accept impermanence and still relish life, at one and the same time, without grasping.
--Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
The world no longer holds him. He has gone beyond The bounds of human nature.
Without compassion Or the wish to harm, Without pride or humility.
Nothing disturbs him. Nothing surprises him.
Because he is free, He neither craves nor disdains The things of the world.
He takes them as they come.
His mind is always detached.
--Ashtavakra Gita 17:16-17
From "The Heart of Awareness:
A Translation of the Ashtavakra Gita,"
by Thomas Byrom, 1990.
The view of interdependence makes for a great openness of mind. In general, instead of realizing that what we experience arises from a complicated network of causes, we tend to attribute happiness or sadness, for example, to single, individual sources. But if this were so, as soon as we came into contact with what we consider to be good, we would automatically be happy, and conversely, in the case of bad things, invariably sad. The causes of joy and sorrow would be easy to identify and target. It would all be very simple, and there would be good reason for our anger and attachment. When, on the other hand, we consider that everything we experience results from a complex interplay of causes and conditions, we find that there is no single thing to desire or resent, and it is more difficult for the afflictions of attachment or anger to arise. In this way, the view of interdependence makes our mind more relaxed and open.
--The Dalai Lama, A Flash of Lightening in the Dark of Night
JESUS
I am a secret follower of yours. Not the kind that are known by a name you never pronounced. Not the kind that raise icons of your torture and call that worship their love.
I did not kill you nor does my soul depend upon your forgiveness.
I am a follower in the sense that the earth is a follower of the sun. I follow your laughter and the gift of your manhood. Your gentle strength and the way you loved women. The way you healed by seeing no illness.
I follow your silent reply when they questioned you: That silence still rings loudest.
I and you are a secret, I know you as I know myself; my living breath is your temple.
I follow you Jesus like the lofty hawk follows the gospel of the wind.
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary. - David Bailey
In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.
- Aaron Rose
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. - Diane Arbus
I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term -- meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching -- there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster. - Ansel Adams
Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gismos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn't make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel. - Peter Adams, Sydney 1978
The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking. - Brooks Atkinson
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without
You know you are seeing such a photograph if you say to yourself,
"I could have taken that picture. I've seen such a scene before, but never like that." It is the kind of photography that relies for its strengths not on special equipment or effects but on the intensity of the photographer's seeing. It is the kind of photography in which the raw materials--light, space, and shape--are arranged in a meaningful and even universal way that gives grace to ordinary objects.
I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff – being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens. - Henri Cartier-Bresson
When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without. - Ansel Adams
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. - Ansel Adams
The Roe Deer
Driving home at midnight, a buck and two doe's at the roadside
To my surprise they did not run away ( they always do ), so I stopped
A doe walked slowly in front of the car and looked at me for an eternity
The Other Side of Belief: Interpreting U.G. Krishnamurti by Mukunda Rao. Penguin Books India, Rs 350.00. ISBN: 0144000350
Food, clothing and shelter- these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.
*
You must accept yourself and others as you and they are because they cannot and will not change, nor can you.
*
There is no difference between any aspects of human experience, they are all the same.
*
We are no more purposeful or meaningful than any other thing on this planet.
*
The plain fact is that if you don’t have a problem, you create one. If you don’t have a problem you don’t feel that you are living.
*
You are what you do, not what you say you want to do. You think when you don’t want to do anything. Thinking is a poor alternative to acting. Your thinking is consuming all your energy. Act, don’t think.
*
The appreciation of music, poetry and language is all culturally determined and is the product of thought. It is acquired taste that tells you that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is more beautiful than a chorus of cats screaming; both produce equally valid sensations.
*
Nature is interested in only two things--to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man.
*
The body here is so peaceful. It is only interested in pumping blood, secreting pancreatic juices, moving its bowels. It is so blissful in and of itself that it is not at all interested in your so-called `spiritual bliss’, your yoga, your divine peace, your moksha, etc."
*
Boredom is a bottomless pit. As long as you think that there is something more interesting, more purposeful, more meaningful to do than what you are actually doing, you have no way of freeing yourself from boredom.
*
Man eats for pleasure. Your food orgies are not different from your sex orgies. Everything that man does is for pleasure.
*
It is fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new sciences, new talks, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks.
*
A ‘moral man’ is a frightened man- chicken hearted man; that is why he practices morality and sits in judgement over others.
*
The so called self-realization is the discovery for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to discover. That will be a very shocking thing because it’s going to blast every nerve, every cell, even the cells in the marrow of your bones.
*
Thought is something dead and can never touch anything living. It cannot capture life, contain it, and give expression to it. The moment it tries to touch life it is destroyed by the quality of life.
*
Cabbages are more alive than human beings.
*
Anything you experience based on knowledge is an illusion.
*
The body has no independent existence. You are a squatter there.
*
The day man experienced the consciousness that made him feel separate and superior to the other forms of life, at that moment he began sowing the seeds of his own destruction.
*
All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy.
*
These memories have a great deal of emotional content for you, but not for me. I am only interested in what is actually happening now, not tomorrow or yesterday.
*
When the movement in the direction of becoming something other than what you are isn’t there any more, you are not in conflict with yourself.
*
While you are living, the knowledge that is there does not belong to you. So, why are you concerned as to what will happen after what you call "you" is gone?
*
Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow. It is like lightning and thunder. They occur simultaneously, but sound, travelling slower than light, reaches you later, creating the illusion of two separate events.
*
The questioner is nothing but the answers. That is really the problem. We are not ready to accept this answer because it will put an end to the answers which we have accepted for ages as the real answers.
*
You eat not food but ideas. What you wear are not clothes, but labels and names.
*
If you do not know what happiness is, you never be unhappy.
#2649 - Wednesday, November 22, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nondual Highlights
Truth is no theory, no speculative system of philosophy, no intellectual insight. Truth is exact correspondence with reality.
--Paramhansa Yogananda
No one is more qualified than you to discover the true
treasures of your inner kingdom.
--Vernon Howard
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
Suffering lament, sorrow and wild joy commingle in
the lyric—a collective sigh of relief comes cascading out of the blue—
a yearning to submerge in life like the swimmer in the pool forgetful
immersed and quenched— water trailing scattered diamonds in a rustling
voice of resigned subsidence as though in the same stroke everyone alive were speaking through you—
--Tom Clark
from Light & Shade: New and Selected Poems
Go deep into the sense of 'I am' and you will find. How do you find a thing you have mislaid or forgotten? You keep it in your mind until you recall it.
The sense of being, of 'I am' is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes, or just watch it quietly.
When the mind stays in the 'I am', without moving, you enter a state that cannot be verbalized but can be experienced. All you need to do is to try and try again.
We discover it by being earnest, by searching, inquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery.
It has nothing to do with effort. Just turn away, look between the thoughts, rather than at the thoughts. When you happen to walk in a crowd, you do not fight every man you meet, you just find your way between.
When you fight, you invite a fight. But when you do not resist, you meet no resistance. When you refuse to play the game, you are out of it.
#2650 - Thursday, November 23, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights
In this issue, 2 works. One is a letter from Jenny Munday in response to our series of selections from the writings of U.G. Krishnamurti.
The second work consists of selections from Empty Thoughts, a new book by Robin Dale.
Hope American residents are having a great Thanksgiving weekend!
Jenny Munday
Refreshing approach to the work of U.G. Krishnamurti. I particularly agree with his remark about it being a "physiological" journey rather than a psychological one. My mind wants to turn it all into thought but the body has played the lead role for a lifetime - being always possessed of more energy than was comfortably manageable.
At age 50 a tingle up the spine lead to a the experience of a physical polarity switch and I learned the meaning of awakening of the Leydig center - or Kundalini, as it's called in the East. From then on it was - as UG says, a series of body mutations - muscle spasms, energy swings, different states of consciousness, etc. which I always tried to make sense of through my chosen profession of Psychotherapy.
It's like trying to fit a foot into a too tight boot. You can get it in there but you walk with discomfort - not bliss nor "enlightenment". To me enlightenment has meant releasing my belief system from the rigid structures imposed by materialistic conditioning and fairy tale promises of those who market the "more-is-better" mindset.
I have realized the world I live in as the hologram of my belief system and endorse David Bohm's quantum mechanics theory of wave movement. I have seen that "you" and "I" and "me" are the same ONE. But this has happened through the incredible unfolding of the physical mechanisms of the organ called "body".
My best guess is agreement with Sri Aurobindo's premise that the real stuff going on constantly is the evolutionary movement to create a new bodymass that can contain the electric voltage known as Fohat - or the highest watt which allows the knowledge/wisdom factor to over-ride the lower mindset.
Empty Thoughts
by Robin Dale
On the back cover of the book it says, "This is a book of meditations pointing to the Emptiness which is Fullness, and which is the essential nature of all things, including thoughts. This Emptiness is prior to the mind; from it alone, words of truth flow." A few numbered selections follow, along with ordering information:
6
We deceive ourselves
that there is knowledge:
we are living
in the Unknown.
38
Acquiring things
is a defense
against
things' emptiness.
43
Even the initial
intent alone,
to see what
things truly are
works miracles.
55
There is
no such thing
as an idea
which frees.
76
Beliefs
are stepping-stones
to their absence
79
I'm safest
when I don't know
what's going on
102
Existence
and the Purpose
of Existence
are the same thing.
125
God gives you
the compost
known as "The World"
in return for your flower,
which is this spirit.
This is a natural process.
142
In all the universes
there is only One sense
of separation.
145
The moment before
your reaction occurs,
there is an empty, radiant silence,
in which absolutely everything,
including your reaction,
occurs.
146
Nothing
makes
everything.
147
Everything
means
nothing.
148
Everything
teaches
nothing.
149
Nothing is impossible,
even that there be
the impossible.
150
The Universe
is the cause
of the Universe;
everything exists
because of itself.
~ ~ ~
Empty Thoughts, by Robin Dale consists 321 short poems like the ones above. The size of the book is 4" tall by 6" wide. It would make a very nice gift. The price of the book for overseas purchasers is $29.20 Australian, which is approximately $21.00 USD.
PayPal: Email the author at rdale02@... to arrange PayPal payment. Or phone him at +61 3 9754 8641 (Australia)
Wyrd Publications 52 Monbulk Rd. Belgrave 3160 Vic. Australia
#2651 - Friday, November 24, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights
Elysha, who we've known for a number of years in the online nonduality community, has an awesome website: http://www.elysha.org/contents.html. Here's something from it:
The Only Think You Know
There is nothing you can do
Absolutely nothing
There is not a single thing more for you to do to try and get yourself to be enlightened
You cannot lift another finger that will make any difference whatsoever to be any closer to what it is that you are looking for
You do not have to hold your mouth in a particular way to allow the energies to move 'just so' to suddenly give you the keys to your enlightenment
You do not even have to open up any more chakras to get it right
If your kundalini was not already moving up your spine you would find yourself arising in this very moment without a physical body
Just as you are, right now, is good enough for you to be the enlightened one that you already are
Absolutely nothing more for you to do to get it "right"
And yet
And yet...
Here you are fully aware that no matter what you tell yourself you are still not in touch with, nor living the obviousness of what you intuit to be "out there/in there" awaiting your realization
Enlightenment is, afterall, this utterly simple matter of suddenly remembering or realising who IT is that you truly are already
Yes, already
Yes, that does mean now
All that is going wrong in anyone's life is this forgetting of who it is that one already is
In this very arising moment right now
But.. but.. but.. but...
If it is already the case right now why am I not at rest in the clarity of that with everything that I am expecting to receive while in this state of enlightenment?
Or, for those of you who think you are already standing in this clarity, why am I not living the obvious freedom of who it is that I truly am - so steeped in it that it does not have me being caught up in the energy patterns of agenda, of looking for things to be different to the way that they are simply arising, moment by moment, fully loved and loving?
Still attempting to get what you already are
Simply at rest as the one that I truly am
What could you possibly think that you might be doing wrong in terms of simply being who you already are
What could be so elusive, right now, that would have you believing to be something that you are not
That would be preventing you from simply being what and who you truly are right now in this very moment
What would you think that it might be
Have you ever investigated who it is that you are?
Or have you taken it to be fact what your parents, neighbours, teachers, society have taught you?
That you are the personage that was born on such and such a date, etc.. etc...
That you are the summation of all of the memories that you have of who you think you are? Which of course includes all these other apparent separated individuals, family, friends, events, places etc..
When you go to sleep each night you totally let go of everything that you hold in place (in your imagination) of your perceived world. Even your partner who is lying next to you in the same bed, you forget. When you awaken from a night of deep sleep you 'know' you have had a deep sleep. Who is this one that knows? And who is the one that upon awakening each morning brings back into the equation all of its memories of its belief patterns and sets up its own imagined world once again? Including your partner, family and friends, enemies, etc..
Here you are - the Immensity of life itself - pretending to forget itself within its own manifestation (which arises, of course, within itself or within the unmanifest) which is totally free - freedom itself
So here you are - freedom itself - pretending that you are only a minute aspect of your self having forgotten who you truly are
This is what you suffer
A bad dose of amnesia
You have forgotten who you are
And "enlightenment" is just a fancy title for... "...Holy Moses, I have just remembered who it is I truly am..."
The one behind the many
So, what is it that you know of yourself
Without going into your head, what is the one thing that you actually know of yourself
You know that you are
Your "amness"
No matter what you get up to, how much you have forgotten, you cannot escape your amness
The fact that you are
And you are - now (this of course is obvious that your areness is arising now)
You cannot hide from this fact
In fact - *chuckling* - it is the only fact that you have of yourself
#2652 - Saturday, November 25, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights
Something we make available through The Highlights are different views of reality. There's the "everything's bs" view, which is fine and dandy. It's the most difficult view to talk about because the talker is that bs. It's the radical nondual approach.
Then there's the view that something is worthwhile and that it could be attended to, whether we call it Christ, Buddha, consciousness, I Am, or something else.
Both views are nothing more than views, but the former requires an extra step that can't be taken, so it gets weird.
The current issue is more about the latter view, which is attainable, functional, worthwhile, and understandable. There's a wholeness to be felt in the latter view. In the former view there's nothingness.
Of course neither view actually exists except that we make it exist by agreeing on things about them. Which is probably insane, but what the heck.
“According to the normal way of thinking about the Christian religion, we cannot identify with Jesus, we have to imitate Jesus. To say “I and the Father are one,” as Jesus said, is blasphemy for us.
However, in the Thomas gospel that was dug up in Egypt some forty years ago, Jesus says “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I shall be he.”
Now, that is exactly Buddhism. We are all manifestations of Buddha consciousness, or Christ consciousness, only we don't know it.
The word “Buddha” means “the one who woke up.” We are all to do that — to wake up to the Christ or Buddha consciousness within us.
This is blasphemy in the normal way of Christian thinking, but it is the very essence of Christian Gnosticism and the Thomas gospel.
Civilizations are grounded on myth. The civilization of the Middle Ages was grounded on the myth of the Fall in the Garden, the redemption on the cross, and the carrying of the grace of redemption to man through the sacraments.
The Christ story involves a sublimation of what originally was a very solid vegetal image. Jesus is … the tree, and he is himself the fruit of the tree. Jesus is the fruit of eternal life, which was on the second forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden.
When man ate the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the Garden. The Garden is the place of unity - of non-duality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. You eat the duality, and you are on the way out.
The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life, where you know that I and the Father are one.”
#2653 - Sunday, November 26, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nondual Highlights
When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the morning light, for your life and strength. Give thanks for your food, and the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies with yourself.
--Tecumseh, Shawnee Chief
If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people. To be born means that something which did not exist comes into existence. But the day we are born is not our beginning. It is a day of continuation. But that should not make us less happy when we celebrate our Happy Continuation Day.
Since we are never born, how can we cease to be? This is what the Heart Sutra reveals to us. When we have tangible experience of non-birth and non-death, we know ourselves beyond duality. The meditation on no separate self is one way to pass through the gate of birth and death.
Your hand proves that you have never been born and you will never die. The thread of life has never been interrupted from time without beginning until now. Previous generations, all the way back to single cell beings, are present in your hand at this moment. You can observe and experience this. Your hand is always available as a subject for meditation.
--Thich Nhat Hanh, Present Moment, Wonderful Moment
hunches
we don't think in straight lines like rulers on a grid
we think in the roundness of sounds the panoply of words
exhales of the unknown along the bare skin of the mind
"Great poetry can alter the way we see ourselves. It can change the way we see the world. You may never have read a poem in your life, and yet you can pick up a volume, open it to any page, and suddenly you see your own original face there; suddenly find yourself blown into a world full of awe, dread, wonder, marvel, deep sorrow, and joy. Poetry at its best calls forth our deep Being, bids us live by its promptings; it dares us to break free from the safe strategies of the cautious mind; it calls to us, like wild geese, from an open sky."
--Roger Housden 'Ten Poems to Change Your Life'
Gill Eardley on Allspirit
Flight of the Garuda, Song 6: by Shabkar Tsokdrug Rangdrol
E-ma-ho!
Listen again, fortunate heart-children! That which is widely renowned as mind, does anyone have it?
No one has it!
What is it the source of? It is the source of samsara and nirvana and their myriad joys and sorrows.
What is it believed to be? There are many beliefs according to the various vehicles.
What is it called? It is named in countless different ways.
All ordinary people call it "I." Some non-Buddhists call it "self." Shravakas call it "individual egolessness." The Mind Only School label it "mind." Some call it "Prajnaparamita," "transcendent knowledge."
Some label it "sugatagarbha," "Buddha-nature." Some name it "Mahamudra." Some give it the name "Madhyamika." Some say "the single sphere." Some name it "dharmadhatu," "realm of phenomena." Some call it the name "alaya," "ground of all." Some call it "ordinary mind."
Despite the innumerable names that are tagged onto it, Know that the real meaning is as follows: Let your mind spontaneously relax and rest. When left to itself, ordinary mind is fresh and naked. If observed, it is a vivid clarity without anything to see, A direct awareness, sharp and awake. Possessing no existence, it is empty and pure, A clear openness of non-dual luminosity and emptiness.
It is not permanent, since it does not exist at all. It is nothingness, since it is vividly clear and awake. It is not oneness, since many things are cognised and known. It is not plurality, since the many things known are inseparable in one taste.
It is not somewhere else; it is your own awareness itself. The face of this Primordial Protector, dwelling in your heart, Can be directly perceived in this very instant. Never be separated from it, children of my heart!
If you want to find something greater than this in another place, It's like going off searching for footprints although the elephant is right there. You may scan the entire three-thousand-fold universe, But it is impossible that you will find more than the mere name of Buddha.
This is the song which indicates the natural state of the main practice.
[A new documentary directed by Michael Goldberg explores the life of Japanese Buddhist author and scholar Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki.]
Delivering the opening assessment of Suzuki's work in the documentary is Pulitzer prize-winning poet and one-time Zen initiate Gary Snyder. "He's probably the most culturally significant Japanese person, in international terms, in all of history," says Snyder, who spent many years in Japan, starting in the 1950s, as a Zen adept. To that, eminent U.S. religious scholar and student of Zen Huston Smith adds, "(Suzuki) . . . made Buddhism burst like a bomb on America."
What is Zen? During Zen sitting meditation, called zazen, practitioners sit in lotus position, half-lotus or the Japanese kneeling position called seiza. Some schools of Zen emphasize "just-sitting" meditation without any particular goal, while others focus on the breath and the contemplation of paradoxical riddles called koan.
The late American pioneer of Zen, Philip Kapleau, who had studied under Suzuki at Columbia University in New York before being ordained as a teacher of the spiritual practice himself, wrote in his widely read book "The Three Pillars of Zen" that, "At its profoundest level, Zen, like every other great religion, transcends its own teachings and practices, yet at the same time there is no Zen apart from these practices."
But let us listen to Suzuki himself, who comments on the question in the documentary.
"Zen denies everything we do, everything we say, everything we write. But at the same time, Zen writes, Zen speaks. Zen acts -- does all kinds of things," he tells a listener. In another clip: "What distinguishes Zen from all the rest of religious teachings, or from the rest of Buddhist teachings, perhaps, is this: psychologically speaking, to become conscious of the unconscious; morally, to be attached and not attached."
"The dharma of thus-ness is intimately transmitted By Buddhas and ancestors. Now you have it, preserve it well.
A silver bowl filled with snow, a heron hidden in the moon. Taken as similar, they are not the same; Not distinguished, their places are known. The meaning does not reside in the words, But a pivotal moment brings it forth.
Move and you are trapped; miss and you fall into doubt and vacillation. Turning away and touching are both wrong, for it is like massive fire. Just to portray it in literary form is to stain it with defilement. In darkest night it is perfectly clear; in the light of dawn it is hidden.
It is a standard for all things; its use removes all suffering. Although it is not constructed, it is not beyond words. Facing a precious mirror; form and reflection behold each other. You are not it, but in truth it is you.
Like a newborn child, it is fully endowed with five aspects. No going, no coming, no arising, no abiding; a baby babbles - is anything said or not? In the end it says nothing, for the words are not yet right.
In the illumination hexagram, apparent and real interact; stacked together they become three, the permutations make five, like the taste of the five flavored herb, like the five pronged vajra.
Wondrously embraced within the real, drumming and singing begin together. Penetrate the source and travel the pathways; embrace the territory and treasure the roads. You would do well to respect this; do not neglect it.
Natural and wondrous, it is not a matter of delusion or enlightenment. Within causes and conditions, time and season, it is serene and illuminating. So minute it enters where there is no gap, so vast it transcends all dimension. Just a hair's breadth's deviation, and you are out of tune."
#2655 - Tuesday, November 28, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights
Thanks to Dustin LindenSmith for contributing the article from which excerpts have been taken. Dustin runs the Awaken to Nonduality blog at http://community.livejournal.com/nonduality/. Also he has been a close partner in nondual crime for the last ten years.
This is a long article. I've only extracted a few paragraphs that bear on nondual reality. The rest of the article is psychological, scientific, and human interest.
If anyone has thoughts on the implications of this article for enlightenment, or can provide relevant quotations, write us and we'll publish your letters. Thanks.
--Jerry
"Perhaps the fluid reality we perceive is just a flimsy construct of individual puzzle pieces..."
They can see your eyes, your nose, your mouth – and still not recognize your face. Now scientists say people with prosopagnosia may help unlock some of the deepest mysteries of the brain.
By Joshua Davis
BILL CHOISSER WAS 48 when he first recognized himself. He was standing in his bathroom, looking in the mirror when it happened. A strand of hair fell down – he had been growing it out for the first time. The strand draped toward a nose. He understood that it was a nose, but then it hit him forcefully that it was his nose. He looked a little higher, stared into his own eyes, and saw … himself.
For most of his childhood, Choisser thought he was normal. He just assumed that nobody saw faces. But slowly, it dawned on him that he was different. Other people recognized their mothers on the street. He did not. During the 1970s, as a small-town lawyer in the Illinois Ozarks, he struggled to convince clients that he was competent even though he couldn't find them in court. He never greeted the judges when he passed them on the street – everyone looked similarly blank to him – and he developed a reputation for arrogance. His father, also a lawyer, told him to pay more attention. His mother grew distant from him. He felt like he lived in a ghost world. Not being able to see his own face left him feeling hollow.
...
He was sent to a psychiatric hospital near Stuttgart, where a doctor named Joachim Bodamer examined him. There had been reports of face blindness as far back as antiquity, but no one had studied it systematically, so the physician decided to make a detailed analysis.
To assess the extent of the man's impairment, Bodamer dressed the officer's wife of seven years as a nurse and lined her up with four real nurses. Bodamer asked if he noticed anything different about any of the nurses. The man said no. Next, he was told to look in a mirror and report what he saw. "It's strange," he said. "I've looked at myself often, but that's not me anymore, although I know that it's me. But I have a feeling of unfamiliarity."
Bodamer wrote a 47-page report on the case and coined a name for the condition: prosopagnosia (in Greek, prosopo is face and agnosia means without knowledge). He defined it as "the selective disruption of the perception of faces, one's own face as well as those of others, which are seen but not recognized as faces belonging to a particular owner."
...
... fundamental questions about human consciousness weighed on (Bodamer). What might his patient's condition imply about how healthy people experience the world? Maybe there are mental mechanisms for perceiving each aspect of reality – parts of the human mind that render faces, houses, and bombs meaningful. While everything was falling apart, Bodamer had stumbled onto a clue about how things come together in our heads. Perhaps the fluid reality we perceive is just a flimsy construct of individual puzzle pieces, any one of which could suddenly disappear. In nothing else, Bodamer wrote, "does medical fact touch so closely on … the basis of all knowledge."
...
MORDECHAI HOUSMAN, A GENIAL, portly Hasidic Jew, is playing Minesweeper on his computer at home in Brooklyn. One of his three young sons sits next to him – though Housman isn't sure which.
"Who are you?" Housman finally asks with a smile.
"I'm Abraham, Dad," Abraham says. The 6-year-old has heard this question before and thinks his father is just kidding. It's like a family joke. He doesn't understand that his dad really can't tell him apart from other kids on the street.
The Hasidic men in the neighborhood – clad uniformly in black pants, white shirt, black jacket, and black hat – are even harder to distinguish. But this doesn't bother Housman. He considers it a blessing of sorts. "In my culture," he says, "we de-emphasize material things and appearances. Our focus should be on God. For me, I've been given a head start."
...
Developmental prosopagnosia came to light in large part because of Internet groups. Before that, most people born with the condition assumed they were just bad with faces. It's not the type of thing most would go to a doctor about, and even if they did, their physician probably couldn't help, because many doctors are unaware of it. In many ways, this is a neurological condition discovered by Yahoo.
Which makes Duchaine wonder if other groups of people with perception problems will start to coalesce online. It would certainly help him if new groups formed with names like Trouble Recognizing Gender or Trouble Recognizing Myself. Among the millions of Internet users, there are sure to be some who consider themselves normal save for one troubling quirk. They may hold the key to a deeper understanding of the way we assemble reality.
'There is only one way to be totally at ease in every condition of life. I will repeat that in different words. There is a certain state of mind which gives you complete command of everything that happens to you.'
'You make us eager to know what it is.'
'It is a state of mind in which you never need to prove you are right.'"
--Vernon Howard
The near enemies are qualities that arise in the mind and masquerade as genuine spiritual realization, when in fact they are only an imitation, serving to separate us from true feeling rather than connecting us to it.
The near enemy of loving-kindness is attachment. At first, attachment may feel like love, but as it grows it becomes more clearly the opposite, characterized by clinging, controlling and fear.
The near enemy of compassion is pity, and this also separates us. Pity feels sorry for that poor person over here, as if he were somehow different from us.
The near enemy of sympathetic joy (the joy in the happiness of others) is comparison, which looks to see if we have more of, the same as, or less than another.
The near enemy of equanimity is indifference. True equanimity is balance in the midst of experience, whereas indifference is withdrawal and not caring, based on fear.
If we do not recognize and understand the near enemies, they will deaden our spiritual practice. The compartments they make cannot shield us for long from the pain and unpredictability of life, but they will surely stifle the joy and open connectedness of true relationships.
--Jack Kornfield, in A Path with Heart
Good Evening, Friends!
This afternoon at the nutrition shop where I work, a middle-aged woman approached me, nominally in search of some supplement to help assuage traumatic stress. She said she was drawn to working with natural remedies. I inquired first into the source of the discomfort.
She informed me that it was her daughter who had been abducted and found later, raped and murdered. It apparently had been a big local story just before I moved to this area a year ago. As she spoke, we both tried to hold back tears, but unsuccessfully. She had just been notified that her son was now terminal with leukemia, and she was on her way to Colorado to be with him. During the time his sister had been missing, he developed the disease, and then let it take him down when her body was found. He is angry at the world, and wants out. Meanwhile, her husband is collapsing, can't deal with it anymore.
I asked what kind of support she was receiving, and she said that everyone has been so kind, and they were working with the police chaplain. She expressed faith in re-uniting with her family in heaven. She shared that what has emerged from all this is the realization of how fragile life is, and how the love we share with each other is all that really matters. We considered these notions, and finally agreed that trying to figure things out just adds more stress, but were able to settle on an herbal formula that could help sooth her husband in his sleepless despair.
I praised her for her efforts in remaining sane in the midst of this, and as we looked each other in the eye for one long moment, I could have pointed and said, "Here, here it is right here", but there was really no need to say it, it was already plain and clear.
LoveAlways
Bob O'Hearn on Garden Mystics
Last year, I admired wines. This, I'm wandering inside the red world.
Last year, I gazed at the fire. This year I'm burnt kabob.
Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moon's reflection.
Now I am a lion staring up totally lost in love with the thing itself.
Don't ask questions about longing. Look in my face.
Soul drunk, body ruined, these two sit helpless in a wrecked wagon. Neither knows how to fix it.
And my heart, I'd say it was more like a donkey sunk in a mudhole, struggling and miring deeper.
But listen to me: for one moment, quit being sad. Hear blessings dropping their blossoms around you.
Thanks to the AdvaitaToZen group for receiving occasional issues of the Highlights. Excellent writings on the list. Check it out at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AdvaitaToZen
If you own an email list or forum and would like to The Highlights sent to it, let us know by replying to this email. Nice thing about the Highlights is that you never know what's going to be in any issue and we don't represent any single teacher or institution.
"It is U.G. Krishnamurti who is not an authentic or sincere man -- but you can fall into the trap because he is repeating beautiful phrases." --Osho
U.G. Krishnamurti is controversial in his extremism. Osho is controversial in his extremism! In this issue we feature Osho's view of U.G. Thanks to Kamal for sending us the link.
I have noted that all these spiritual giants go away during certain times of the day and then return at other times. They are dream characters no different than a lady waiting for a bus. And their teachings are invented: pastries, cakes, and cookies taking infinite shapes. I hope everyone tries everything on the table. Enjoy it all and remember that none of it is good for you.
One of my sannyasins went to see U.G. Krishnamurti, and because he argued with him, U.G. Krishnamurti immediately became angry. And these people like U.G. Krishnamurti are telling people to drop anger, to drop greed, to drop the ego. But if you provoke them... Their whole religion is just skindeep. Inside is hiding a very pious ego, and when ego becomes pious it becomes poisonous. It is more dangerous because you become absolutely unaware of it, it goes so deep down in the unconscious. U.G. Krishnamurti lived with J. Krishnamurti for twelve years, and he never mentions his name. If somebody brings up J. Krishnamurti's name, he immediately condemns J. Krishnamurti -- and whatever he is saying is just an imitation of J. Krishnamurti, paraphrasing. The reason he cannot accept the fact that he has been with J. Krishnamurti for twelve years is very simple. The moment he accepts it, then you can compare his statements with J. Krishnamurti's, and you will find they are simply paraphrasing. He is repeating, imitating, he knows nothing.
Osho
Before my sannyasin started arguing with U.G. Krishnamurti, he was just a great saint, so silent, so peaceful. As the argument began, he was afraid to be caught, he could not answer the questions, and anger suddenly arose. He may not have been aware of that anger, but my sannyasin helped him! He wanted to get rid of the sannyasin. It is U.G. Krishnamurti who is not an authentic or sincere man -- but you can fall into the trap because he is repeating beautiful phrases. His memory is good, and his intellect is good, but this is the shadow.
Osho
... only one thing has to be remembered: when you are fragile in your growth, people like U.G. Krishnamurti can destroy you. These people have missed their life, and now they are living in frustration. And in frustration people start behaving like women. They start breaking things, throwing things. That's what U.G. Krishnamurti is doing.
Osho:
Just the other day I was reading a lecture of U. G. Krishnamurti. He says he went to see Ramana Maharshi. He was not attracted - because he was chopping vegetables. Yes, Ramana Maharshi was that kind of man, very ordinary. Chopping vegetables! U. G. Krishnamurti must have gone to see somebody extraordinary sitting on a golden throne or something. Ramana Maharshi just sitting on the floor and chopping vegetables? preparing vegetables for the kitchen! He was very much frustrated. Then another day he went and saw him reading jokes. Finished for ever! This man knows nothing. This man is very ordinary. He left the ashram; it was not worth it. But I would like to say to you: this man, Ramana Maharshi, is one of the greatest Buddhas ever born to the world. That was his Buddhahood in action! U. G. Krishnamurti must have been in search of a pretender. He could not see the ordinariness and the beauty of it and the grace of it. And this same man, U. G. Krishnamurti, lived with Swami Sivanand of Rishikesh for seven years - and that chap was just stupid - and practised yoga with him. And after seven years he recognized that he has nothing; but after seven years, he took seven years. That simply shows that he also has a mighty dull mind. Seven years to see that Sivanand has nothing. Seven seconds are more than enough! And with Ramana Maharshi, seven seconds were enough - because he saw him chopping vegetables or reading jokes, looking at cartoons. That's how the ordinary mind, the egoistic mind functions. The ego is always searching for something bigger, some bigger ego. And the true sage has no ego; he is an ordinary man. He is utterly ordinary - that is his extraordinariness! I would like to say to U. G. Krishnamurti: he should have looked in the eyes of Ramana Maharshi. He looked only at the hands which were chopping vegetables. He should have looked into his eyes - with what love he was chopping the vegetables. He should have looked into his eyes to see what love he was. He was the Real Man. There is only one indication and that is love. But to understand love you have to be a little silent, a little loving, a little open. If you are full of prejudices about how the enlightened man should be, then you will go on missing. You should not have any prejudices. Just look into the eyes of a real man, and suddenly something will start stirring in your heart too. Tears will come to your eyes, your energy will have a great delight, your heart will throb with new vigour. Your soul will spread its wings.
Osho: Take It Easy Vol.1 # 5
Just the other day I mentioned U.G. Krishnamurti. When he saw Ramana Maharshi reading joke books and looking at cartoons, he was very much frustrated. Not only that: a man asked a question about God and U.G. Krishnamurti was present there - very seriously, bowing at his feet, a man asked about God. And what did Sri Ramana do? do you know? He gave him a joke book and said, "Read it!" Naturally, U. G. Krishnamurti was very much offended. Is this a way? This seems to be disrespectful to the man who has asked such a serious question - to give him a joke book. This is again a kick in the pants, in its own way. What he is saying is, "What nonsense are you talking about! God? It is not a thing to be talked about - better read a joke book and have a good laugh. "If you can laugh, maybe you can know God - not by what I will say. But if you can laugh a hearty laugh, a belly-laugh, in that moment thinking stops." In the moment of laughter, suddenly you are one with the harmony of existence. Weep... you have fallen apart, you are no more part of it. In sadness, in seriousness, in despair, you are not in rhythm with existence. In laughing, in dancing, in singing, in loving, you are in rhythm with existence.
Osho: Take It Easy Vol.1 # 6
Now, this U. G. Krishnamurti missed Sri Ramana - and something great was happening. Almost like Buddha giving his flower to Mahakashyap, Sri Ramana giving a joke book to a man who is asking about God, or Ma Tzu giving a terrific kick in the pants. U. G. Krishnamurti missed Ramana. Then he missed J. Krishnamurti too. He lived for years with J. Krishnamurti. Now, J. Krishnamurti is totally different in his expression, very logical, very rational. The beginning of his work is always with the mind; then slowly slowly he leads you beyond the mind, But there U. G. Krishnamurti thought it was all abstraction, philosophy. He stopped going there because "It is all abstraction." He left Sri Ramana because there was no philosophy. He left Krishnamurti because there was too much philosophy. In both the cases he missed. And he lived with Sri Sivananda of Rishikesh for seven years doing yoga postures. There for seven years he thought, "Something is here." And there was nothing! Sivananda is a very ordinary teacher. You can find dozens of them all around this country teaching people how to stand on their heads, teaching people stupid things. There he remained for seven years, became a disciple.
I have received from Mukunda Rao -- author of The Other Side of Belief: Interpreting U.G. Krishnamurti -- a lengthy response to our previous issue issue in which Osho attacks U.G. Krishnamurti's authenticity and sincerity. I'll publish Rao's response in two or three parts next week.
~ ~ ~
In today's issue we take a break from hard nonduality -- well, not really, actually -- and look at popularized enlightenment, or consumerized spirituality as given to us by Oprah Winfrey. While reading this we could examine whether the hardest category of nonduality, such as that set forth by a U.G. Krishnamurti, can become enshrouded and attenuated by popularization. A question to ask while reading today's issue is, "Can U.G. become an Oprah for nondualists?" What would that look like? Something to think about in these days where nonduality is creeping, like the Blob, into mainstream spirituality.
"The religion of Oprah is the incorporated faith of late-capitalist America."
Oprah has probably turned multitudes of people -- mostly women, I guess -- inward to feel their spiritual nature. Okay, maybe only a little, I don't really know. However, Oprah has helped many improve their quality of life.
Today's issue informs and reminds us of what is going on in the dreamworld continent of Oprah and moves us to consider whether the most radical teaching of nonduality can be hauled to that place. But, hey, on the other hand we all want to look good, smooth out the glitches in our personalities, and be successful in the dreamspace -- or maybe we don't; once again, I really don't know -- and Oprah's got the catalogues to help us! I know what I need: Alberto jeans for winter, Tommy Bahama cologne, and a strong couch in case Tom Cruise comes over and wants to jump up and down on it.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The question from one of her students is familiar -- "Is Oprah a religion?" -- and the professor is ready with a reply: "Oprah does things in a religious manner, but she is not a religion."
In discussing how Oprah Winfrey has influenced so many people, Kathryn Lofton, an assistant professor in the Indiana University Department of Religious Studies, considers that an important distinction.
"I approach Oprah as a potentially religious subject, as someone committed primarily to spiritual change through material means," Lofton said. Winfrey's topics and language place her activities well within the scope of religious and cultural studies, Lofton added, but no study of her movement has been published.
Winfrey herself rejects the idea that what she advocates is a religion. "She eschews the label constantly, saying that she believes in a 'spiritual' path, not religious doctrine. But talk of spirituality is often a means to whitewash dogma," Lofton said.
Spirituality can indeed be contrasted with religion. Religion usually involves institutions that organize individuals into communities ordered by a code of behavior, a creedal relationship to a divine authority, and a set of ritual practices. On the other hand, spirituality refers to devotion to metaphysical matters rather than worldly things.
For Lofton, however, Winfrey's disavowal of religion and religious doctrine is a sleight of hand.
"She endorses some modes of theological existence, but dislikes many more. For her, religion implies control and oppression and the inability to catalog shop. The only way religion or religious belief works for Oprah is if it is carefully coordinated with capitalist pleasure. Thus, the turn to 'spirituality' -- the non-dogmatic dogma that encourages an ambiguous theism alongside an exuberant consumerism," Lofton said.
In Winfrey's view, Buddhism isn't about meditation and renunciation, it's about beaded bracelets and fragrant incense. "Christianity isn't about Christ's apocalyptic visions or the memorization of creeds, it's about a friendly guy named Jesus and his egalitarian message. As long as you can spend, feel good about yourself and look good, your religious belief will be tolerated on Planet O. The religion of Oprah is the incorporated faith of late-capitalist America," Lofton said.
Winfrey's viewers and readers are told to "Change Your Life." "I argue that lives are changed through Oprah's multimedia advocacy of specified, routine practices, such as buying, reading and writing," Lofton said.
Winfrey's system is carefully organized around prescribed individual behavior. "Behave your way to success" is one of her maxims, and a study of her television show, her Web site and her magazine reveals that prescriptive behavior dominates her message, Lofton said.
"Here's what to do, here's some sage testimony as to the utility of your newly chosen habit, here's where to go to get it done, and here are some smart products to assist and decorate your process of self-realization. And in case you don't remember all she has told you to do, she provides three modes of reminder. The point of this media assault is clear: don't just watch, do," Lofton said.
It's hard to watch "The Oprah Winfrey Show" or leaf through her magazine or scan her Web site (http://www.oprah.com) without feeling a need to do something to improve yourself. But Winfrey's program tends to involve a fairly high standard of consumption. Self-indulgence, self-discovery and shopping are her keys to self-improvement.
The right goods to buy, according to Winfrey, encourage self-indulgence and relaxed reflection among individuals who spend too much time on others and not enough on themselves. "Maybe you're like so many women I've talked to over the years who have suspended their deepest desires in order to accommodate everything and everyone else," Winfrey wrote in her magazine. "You ignore the nudge to finally get on with what you know you should be doing."
In Winfrey's system, this precisely prescribed practice of buying will produce internal and external change for such women, surrounding them with a material beauty that should be reflected in their spiritual interior.
Nondual Highlights Issue #2659, Saturday, December 2, 2006
Where does the whole of samsara, all animals and plants, all concepts, trees, and birds come from? There is only one Source: return to it, merge in it. Know what it is and everything is It itself. There is no difference between you and what you call other! Know this and you will speak to all beings; every rock, tree, and animal at the same time because time does not exist here.
- Papaji, The Truth Is, posted to AlongTheWay
The universe and I exist together And all things and I are one
The sage has the sun and moon by his side And the universe under his arm
He blends everything into a harmonious whole.
He blends the disparities of ten thousand years Into one complete purity
All things are blended like this And mutually involve each other
He who regards all things as 'One' Is a companion of Nature
Heaven, Earth and I were created together And all things and I are One.
- Chuang Tzu, posted to Mystic Spirit
The hearty unripe grapes, capable of ripening, at last become one in heart by the breath of the masters of heart. They grow rapidly to grapehood, shedding duality and hatred and strife. Then in maturity, they rend their skins, till they become one: unity is the proper attribute for one who is one with others.
- Rumi, Mathnawi II: 3723-3725, version by Camille and Kabir Helminski, Rumi: Daylight, posted to Sunlight
If you never searched for truth come with us and you will become a seeker. If you were never a musician come with us and you will find your voice. You may posses immense wealth come with us and you will become love's beggar. You may think yourself a master come with us and love will turn you into a slave. If you've lost your spirit, come with us take off your silk coverings, put on our rough cloak and we will bring you back to life.
- Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, Ghazal (Ode) 74, Rumi: Hidden Music, translated by Azima Melita Kolin and Maryam Mafi, posted to SufiMystic
I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men’s hands even at the height of their arc of anger
because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound and it is His - the Christ’s, our Beloved’s.
I have come into this world to see this: all creatures hold hands as we pass through this miraculous existence we share on the way to even a greater being of soul, a being of just ecstatic light, forever entwined and at play with Him.
I have come into this world to hear this: every song the earth has sung since it was conceived in the Divine’s womb and began spinning from His wish,
every song by wing and fin and hoof, every song by hill and field and tree and woman and child, every song of stream and rock, every song of tool and lyre and flute, every song of gold and emerald and fire, every song the heart should cry with magnificent dignity to know itself as God:
for all other knowledge will leave us again in want and aching - only imbibing the glorious Sun will complete us.
I have come into this world to experience this: men so true to love they would rather die before speaking an unkind word,
men so true their lives are His covenant - the promise of hope. I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men’s hands even at the height of their arc of rage
because we have finally realized there is just one flesh we can wound.
I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men’s hands even at the height of their arc of anger
because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound and it is His - the Christ’s, our Beloved’s.
I have come into this world to see this: all creatures hold hands as we pass through this miraculous existence we share on the way to even a greater being of soul, a being of just ecstatic light, forever entwined and at play with Him.
I have come into this world to hear this: every song the earth has sung since it was conceived in the Divine’s womb and began spinning from His wish,
every song by wing and fin and hoof, every song by hill and field and tree and woman and child, every song of stream and rock, every song of tool and lyre and flute, every song of gold and emerald and fire, every song the heart should cry with magnificent dignity to know itself as God:
for all other knowledge will leave us again in want and aching - only imbibing the glorious Sun will complete us.
I have come into this world to experience this: men so true to love they would rather die before speaking an unkind word,
men so true their lives are His covenant - the promise of hope. I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men’s hands even at the height of their arc of rage
because we have finally realized there is just one flesh we can wound.
Send Email
Print-Quality Photo 
