Turning up Ground

Christiana Duranczyk, editor

So much has been offered through dialogic fellowship on this site, and lies now in the archives. The search engine allows it to be a living archive. Using the search engine on the Nonduality Salon website http://nonduality.com/search.htm with the single word "ground," I moved through 80 NDhighlights, culled, extracted, and pared. This is a rich compendium from only a fraction of what has been shared. No citations are offered here, merely a single-voice pointer as background and foreground yield to the ground of I AM.

Ground as living metaphor

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Perhaps the shallow end is like knowing I AM. In that position the whole story, the source of suffering, can be seen. There are only a few adults and mostly kids in the shallow end. The masses are out in the deep end treading water or floating on all kinds of crazy objects designed to feel substantial and like real ground.

From the shallow end the whole story can be seen. The ladder is nearby. It's easy to climb out and enter the nondual reality, though it may take a while to dry off.

~~

The seen is dead to him who has attained liberation, but is alive to others, being common to all. (If one man gets liberation, it does not follow that the world becomes free. Every man has to struggle for himself. Because men have the same desires, they have the same playing ground.)

~~

On the ground between Knowing and Being.. Why do we draw lines between what is known and what is not? What happens when the lines get crossed? Can there be a turning back?

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now i am the ground
upon which the tigers
fight and i remain flat
and feel the feet above
and the claws slashing
as the tigers keep
fighting each other.

natural and wild they
are, and they do not
know what they do, for
they are only tigers.

wildly they rip at one
another and i am the
support upon which
their paws rest.

i am the ground upon
which they nurse their
young and where they
sleep and i am not
different from them
except that i do not
fight.

~~

so even selfish love is only impure when it is placed in relationship to a higher love which cannot exist with that impure love as its true ground....is the ocean impure ...perhaps, in relationship to a snowflake...but without one the other does not exist....

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"As the nondual, timeless, ever-present, "groundless ground" of the One and the Many, the Absolute "is equally and fully present in and as every single being, high or low, ascending or descending, effluxing or refluxing."

~~

No one can live apart, from the satsangh of the heart. For your generation, is born of itself from the children that love creates. Each child the progeny of the mothering, that births you into loves communion. Without this intercourse, the seed sleeps in the ground, mute within the ice crystal.

~~

I offer that at this crucial point of personal evolution, that it would be helpful to understand deeply the difference between God's will and personal will. This can become very confusing, unless one remembers that it is God who set this whole thing up 'in the first place'. Apparently, we are 'meant to be' or 'designed to be' so-tested. And what that means is that the whole thing is a larger ground upon which to behave. On this larger ground, one may see that God is indeed testing us; specifically, to see if we have the wisdom to suspend creating, and thus to fall into the pre-existing creation of God.

~~

The bridging is revealing itself to you now, the current you feel will increase, perhaps the ground will shake and foundations move, but listen to the poem of love, hold it all together and finally as may pass the body of your friend, so will yours, both to a peace more powerful than anything you've ever known.

~~

And remember, it is ME who is the darkest of the dark, exposed here on the common ground of this Heart.

Ground of relationship and commitment within and beyond words

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There is really no conflict in why muktananda told you and what neem karoli told someone else. That is, if there is a foundation of commitment to him. What Muktananda said, was to you and for you and no one else. However if muktananda is just another guru in a long (or short) list of "who i have been with" then there will be confusion because this one says this, and that one says something else, and there is no real ground of relationship and commitment with any of them.

Yes, I think that's the humor of Guru-talk and I'm wondering if that talk is different than the talk of time and occurrence, or of poetry. Really, its only that commitment you speak of, which is to ground of being, which assures that language will be heard as intended. Muktananda's 'something', Neem Karoli's 'nothing', and Gene Poole's 'abiding', are not three different things.

~~

The authentic ground is not beyond words, there is expression... Learning to be wise about the technology of the human...

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Our words and thus thoughts are constrained to a grammar which is itself predicated upon an assumption of separation; consequently, our language is used to describe particles and agglomerations of particles, each named and ranked according to the best use of the grammar of separation. Such a grammar, ruling language as it does, excludes any word which would threaten that grammar. The grammar of language, thus enforces our notion of separation and particulars, as being the ground of reality. Awareness is the whole of what contains all perceived particulars.

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Spirit wants to be the ground and the expression at the same time.

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What if, we are looking for answers to questions which themselves were compounded by those who lived in the assumption that the construction of a ladder of words, could be the way to heaven? What if, one suddenly realized that the very ground they are standing on, after the collapse of the semantic ladder, is none other than heaven itself?

Ground of Being

There is no remedy for the suffering incurred in the world-dream; the world dream is essentially toxic by nature, and is designed to be a short-term womb from which self is born to Self. Compassion is the Sacred Heart of the Divine Midwife, or the Mother of God. God is already-always, and is thus the ground upon which the world-dream is enacted; burial of the dead in the ground, symbolizes the ground of Being, or God, subsuming self at the end of mortality.

~~

So, the brain can be active without disturbing the ground of being and further ***its movement is an extension of our real being*** - just like a wave and ocean are different forms of water.

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In truth, the Spiritual path has little to do with Spirituality, and much to do with that which OBSCURES Spirituality. In other words, the spiritual path demands the participation of our ENTIRE being in the process of transforming, or translating our fragmented and separate vision to a life free from the burden of everything which inhibits the inherent beauty and freedom which is the true ground of our BE-ing. From this perspective the spiritual path is not something we enter

~~

Now if it were possible to isolate and identify one aspect of our un-free being as that area of our lives where most of the obscuration of our spirituality takes place, we may not have to look much further than our inner psychological world. It is in the arena of our profound identification with this psychological being where we live and breathe the confusion and complexities which so effectively convince us of our limitation and which so profoundly alienates us from the Spiritual ground of our BE-ing.

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Once the Heart of Attention has fundamentally shifted to Itself, that Itself is the fuel of the effortless effort which eventually burns up leaving nothing behind. When the ground of Being absorbs all attention and all effort, what is there to discard, and how, and by whom?

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The sense doors perceive movement, what we call change. Yet there is "_______" which is the ground of being that never changes. Any attempt to describe the unchanging ground of being is a movement within the sense door called brain - it is simply not possible for movement to describe stillness because they are different forms of the same thing. Movement is Stillness in another form.

~~

We are all One in our humanity expressing the animal and the divine in different shades of color as it all plays out on the ground of Being. We are One in Being.

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"The Absolute ground of Being (and beyond that the Godhead as infinite uncircumscribed freedom) is realized so to speak 'from within' - though 'myself' is now lost and 'found' in Him. These metaphorical expressions all point to the problem we have in mind: the problem of a self that is 'no-self,' that is by no means an 'alienated self' but on the contrary, a transcendent Self which, to clarify it in Christian terms, is metaphysically distinct from the Self of God and yet perfectly identified with that Self by love and freedom, so that there appears to be but one Self.

~~

That lasting happiness cannot be found in physical or subtle objects, which are temporary and intermittent. Happiness is the ground of all being, and when this is realized at every level, it is Self-Realization.

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It was my good fortune to recognize it within quantum physics, to recognize that all the paradoxes of quantum physics can be solved if we accept consciousness as the ground of being.

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I find that the best I can do is to acknowledge maya or suffering while keeping my attention on what might be called 'ground of being', 'I Am', 'deepest truth', or whatever one wishes.

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This kind of exuberant statement that mystics make could not be made on the basis of epiphenomenal consciousness. It can be made only when one recognizes the ground of being itself, when one cognizes directly that One is All. Now, an epiphenomenal human being would not have any such cognition. It would not make any sense to cognize that you are All.

~~

Definitions of terms are always getting in the way of communication. But I wouldn't say (using this mind's definitions) that there is something that could be called non-awareness. Awareness is "ground of Being." It cannot be non-present. It is Presence Itself. Can Presence be non-present?

Ground of Awareness

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The question arises this way: If the Witness is the ground of awareness, and there are all these things passing through this ground of awareness, isn't this Dualistic? Why are there two, the Witness and that which is witnessed? Having penetrated through the illusion of the separate self, why is there still this separation between Awareness and the contents of Awareness?

It seems that the way to experience the answer to this question, which is a good one to use as self-inquiry, is to keep on meditating, keep on getting more and more grounded in the Witness, and eventually the realization is given that Witness also is an illusion. Just as the separate self did before, the Witness illusion gives way into pure undifferentiated awareness. And then it seems that there is a further level beyond awareness, which is pure Being.

~~

The main task, as I saw it then and as I see it now, is to stay grounded in awareness as much as possible. This is done through meditation and through other exercises in mindfulness throughout the day and night. After a while this state of awareness, of Witnessing if you will, starts to perpetuate itself, and it seems that one is not DOING the meditation, the meditation is the ground and source of everything else that is happening.

~~

Perhaps there is no one occupying any material bodies. Perhaps the material bodies themselves are constructs from the "ground of awareness." Goals and decisions can take care of themselves. The illusion is that there is a "doer" and a "decider". What does it take to end this illusion? The courage to end the belief that there is someone who is being courageous? The character to end the belief that there is someone who demonstrates a character?

~~

Human search for 'truth' is the search for the original sleep-bed of conclusion. The bed of conclusion is not the ground of Being, it is the void of awareness. Awareness of void, is awareness of the state of nonawareness, but nonawareness is by definition not aware of this; thus the process of dissection, to find the ground of awareness. The danger is in finding it, not in not finding it. Those who 'find it', lose awareness, in their conclusion (finish) of the task of awareness.

Taskless awareness is abiding awareness.

Ground of illumination

~~

Pure consciousness is like light. Since it is idea-less, image-less, and concept-less, it is able to entertain ideas, images or concepts; *yet* it cannot be described in terms of *any* of these. Just as light is the object-less ground of illumined objects, the knower is the un-known ground of all that is known.

Home-ground

~~

To say that a thing is not itself means that, while continuing to be itself, it is in the home-ground of everything else. Figuratively speaking, its roots reach across into the ground of all other things and helps to hold them up and keep them standing. It serves as a constitutive element of their being so that they can be what they are, and thus provides an ingredient of their being. That a thing is itself means that all other things, while continuing to be themselves, are in the home-ground of that thing; that precisely when a thing is on its own home-ground, everything else is there too; that the roots of every other thing spread across into its home- ground.

This way that everything has of being on the home-ground of everything else, without ceasing to be on its own home-ground, means that the being of each thing is held up, kept standing, and made to be what it is by means of the being of all other things; or, put the other way around, that each thing holds up the being of every other thing, keeps it standing, and makes it what it is. In a word, it means that all things 'are' in the 'world'.

To imply that when a thing is 'on its own home-ground, it must at the same time be on the home-ground of all other things' sounds absurd; but in fact it constitutes the 'essence' of the existence of things. The being of things in themselves is essentially circuminsessional. This is what we mean by speaking of beings as 'being that is in unison with emptiness', and 'being on the field of emptiness'. For this circuminsessional system is only possible on the field of emptiness or shunyata.

Ground of practice as ourselves

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Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That's the ground, that's what we study, that's what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest. The ground is ourselves; we're here to study ourselves and to get to know ourselves now, not later

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There is a Chooser and it is Choosing: reclaim that ground

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"Change happens when someone operates out of a different ground."

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The problem with this operation is that I am to be bait and trap and the focal point as ground zero. It is like having eyes but no feet, feet but no means of escape, escape but no direction...

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I've suggested that when in the workplace, one inquire at random times, 'Is this Who I am?'. Or, 'Is this I AM?'. Or, 'Is this the Guru?'. Or, 'Is this the sound of the Mantra?'. The form of the inquiry would depend upon the most meaningful focal point of one's practice. Such an inquiry will serve to ground and re-center a person.

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A series of disappointments inspires us to give up ambition. We fall down and down and down, until we touch the ground, until we relate with the basic sanity of earth. We become the lowest of the low, the smallest of the small, a grain of sand, perfectly simple, no expectations. When we are grounded, there is no room for dreaming or frivolous impulse, so our practice at last becomes workable.

Breaking, losing and clearing ground

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I think the people of NDS broke a fair amount of ground in the lands of nonduality, and we're still doing that.

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The "loss of identity" is the loss of self and world. There is no ground beneath, there is the death of the entity one thought one was.

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It is the task of the spiritual PATH AND SPIRITUAL PRACTICE to remove the darkness and to clear the ground. Once it has done this work, and the ground has been cleared, freedom and wholeness will reveal themselves simply as our natural disposition.

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Spirit deconstructs everything that is in its way. Spirit wants to be the only ground."

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To have a gorgeous but empty garden just the other side of the fence seemed like an apt metaphor for what was going on, the Garden - so close, but seemingly locked away - being the ground.

Ground of Self

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Yes; this is self-creation, as growing in the ground of Self. Consider a board balanced on a fulcrum, like a child's seesaw ride, Roberts suggests. The fulcrum is the cognitive system, the knowing-self. The board is the affective system, the feeling self. The ends of the board represent the extremes of attraction and repulsion, while the part closest to the unmoving center represents subtle, unconscious movements.

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Yes. 'But'... there is more.

To know desire, is to know the alternative. Both together are the whole picture of our assumptions of what is reality. To see beyond this assumption of reality is to see the ground upon which the fulcrum rests.

This is to see not only the playground of our desires and aversions, but also to see upon what that playground is built. All action takes place on that playground. The very ground of Being is usually ignored and assumed to be 'what is'.

Battleground of the gap

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How is knowledge and awareness brought into the foreground effectively when the cacophony of the foreground appears so embedded in deep pockets of emotion.

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And what she observed and discovered was that there was a gap between herself and God. What demonstrated this gap was the initial spontaneous movements in response to life events. These movements were automatic and harmless, yet mystifying to Roberts, as she was not sure of their source, whether it was herself, or God, or some subtle instinct. But these movements demonstrated that there was a gap between herself and God. Within that gap between the center of the board or affective continuum, and the still-point (I AM), was the battleground between the forces of self-preservation and self-extinction. This battleground appeared to be separate from consciousness and untouchable, not under one's control or will.

Consciousness absorbing its ground

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"Here your mind stretches beyond its individual boundaries to encompass the thinking of the Universe. It is a state where you recover the experiences of levels where consciousness is absorbed into its ground, which is intelligence. Sufis call this unveiling the light of Divine Intelligence that has been covered over by the veils of delusion.

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Since the ground of consciousness is never born into any realm of being, nothing can add to or subtract from it.

ground of reality

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Pain is a fleeting sensation, as is pleasure; the bliss of love and consciousness is a constant thing, always there underlying everything, the ground of reality, the empty void in which all apparent things take place.

Middle ground

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You're what the Buddha called "middle ground," precisely that point between earth and heaven where you are both and neither. And that's how you can help people: you can identify with their pain and suffering because you have pain and suffering, and yet . . . you really don't at all.

ground of solitude and silence

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Solitude is an aspect of the destining of Being. the ground of solitude is a brilliant abyss in which what lingers for a while can stay for the time being or emerge much later.

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A mind which is simply in movement is not a problem. On the contrary when the intellect is grounded in silence everything is spontaneously referred to this ground.

ground note of resonation

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Resonation reminds of the sound OM. One of the characteristics of a raga is the presence of the so called drone. It resonates as the "ground note" in various rhythms and changing harmonic content throughout the entire piece. Likewise, to anyone for whom aloneness is a fact, the sound OM is the ground of phenomenal existence.

ground of earth with no gravity

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During the day he managed a patrician's household and daily went to the palace, engaged in worldly affairs, so that no one was aware of his pursuits....One day, as he stood and recited, "God, have mercy upon me, a sinner" Lk. 18:13), uttering it with his mind rather than his mouth, suddenly a flood of divine radiance appeared from above and filled all the room. As this happened the young man lost all awareness [of his surroundings] and forgot that he was in a house or that he was under a roof. He saw nothing but light all around him and did not know if he was standing on the ground. He was not afraid of falling: he was not concerned with the world nor did anything pertaining to men and corporeal beings enter his mind. Instead, he seemed to himself to have turned into light. Oblivious of all the world he was filled with tears and with ineffable joy and gladness.

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When Suzuki was asked what was it like to have experienced satori, enlightenment, he said it's just like ordinary everyday experience, but about two inches off the ground.

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I can make my way down
with easy peace
for i've dropped my burden
on the way up--
and with empty hands
i step down
onto the ground
where a figure remains,
reminds of what is eternal.

Background

~~

At this point, noise and silence are the same; all silence. In this vast silence, _any_ creative movement is seen. This is the 'governor' of spiritual life. To know this is to be able to use the Siddhe of creation sparingly, and with proper timing. To discern the difference between the 'already always' background of what is, and the assumed background of self-creation, is to know that one is small, but also that one may become large. This recognition allows one to avoid doing harm.

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Beauty, music and art, sweetness that is the background from which objects arise

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When background and foreground are the same, there is no distance, and I don't need or have a name.

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The ground we are looking for is us.