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Nondual Highlights Issue #1871 Tuesday, July 27, 2004 Editor: Mark
The Sign of Being Dried-Up
The sign of being a dried-up branch,
unconnected to root-water in the deep ground,
is that you have no inclination to sway.
Moist, fresh limbs are easily pulled
any direction, even rounded into
a hoop for a basket handle.
This is symbolic talk, but the symbol itself
is a fire to consume your fantasies
about how you are in union.
Be empty as you go into
qualities and essence.
Some letters disappear when they elide.
That way the true meaning emerges.
No words can express how inspired
words spring out of silence.
- Rumi, from Mathnawi VI,
Version by Coleman Barks Say I Am You,
Maypop, 1994, posted on SunLight
Tiredness
What is this tiredness we feel
when we begin to soften?
When do our bodies start
to dry slowly like leaves?
Shrivel is what flowers do
while still on tree branches.
This is what we do in increments
& slow motion & no choice.
This thinning of the physical allows
our light to become more luminous.
- Zen Oleary on SufiMystic © July 27, 2004
I think it is essential sometimes to go to retreat, to stop
everything that you have been doing, to stop your beliefs and
experiences completely, and look at them anew, not keep on
repeating it like machines whether you believe or do not believe.
You would then let in fresh air into your minds. Wouldn't you?
That means you must be insecure, must you not? If you can do so,
you would be open to the mysteries of nature and to things that
are whispering about us, which you would not otherwise reach; you
would reach the God that is waiting to come, the truth that
cannot be invited but comes itself. But we are not open to love,
and other finer processes that are taking place within us,
because we are all too enclosed by our own desires. Surely, it is
good to retreat from all that, is it not? Stop being a member of
some society. Stop being a Brahmin, a Hindu, a Christian, a
Muslim. Stop your worship, rituals, take a complete retreat from
all those and see what happens. In a retreat, do not plunge into
something else, do not take some book and be absorbed in new
knowledge and new acquisitions. Have a complete break with the
past and see what happens. Sirs, do it, and you will see delight.
You will see vast expanses of love, understanding and freedom.
When your heart is open, then reality can come. Then the
whisperings of your own prejudices, your own noises, are not
heard. That is why it is good to take a retreat, to go away and
to stop the routine—not only the routine of outward
existence but the routine which the mind establishes for its own
safety and convenience."
Try it, sirs, those who have the opportunity. Then perhaps you
will know what is beyond recognition, what truth is which is not
measured. Then you will find that God is not a thing to be
experienced, to be recognized; but that God is something which
comes to you without your invitation..."
- J. Krishnamurti, posted to MillionPaths by Viorica Weissman
The Basis of Awareness
by Zen Master Foyan (1067-1120)
Expand enlightenment, and the mind is always calm; go along with
things, and consciousness runs at a gallop. I only wish to be
rich in enlightenment though personally poor, generous with
virtue though emotionally aloof.
Here, I am thus every day, thus all the time. But tell me, what
is "thus"? Try to express it outside of discriminatory
consciousness, intellectual assessments, and verbal formulations.
This reality is not susceptible to your intellectual
understanding. Now those who think, attend, and reflect all have
some intellectual understanding; but then when they turn back to
examine their own eyes and think of the mind that thinks, at this
point why do people unknowingly say, "It has never been
blue, yellow, red, or white; it has no appearance, no form"?
I tell you, this is what I call talk; it is not your original
mind.
How can you think of your original mind? How can you see your own
eye? When you are looking inward, furthermore, there is no seeing
subject. Some people swallow this in one gulp, so their eye of
insight opens wide and they immediately arrive at their homeland.
How can people nowadays reach the point where there is no seeing
and no hearing? Everything is always there; you see people,
houses, and all sorts of forms, like boiling water bubbling.
When you were infants, you also heard sounds and saw forms, but
you didn't know how to discriminate. Once you came to the age of
reason, then you listened to discriminatory thinking, and from
that time on have suffered a split between the primal and the
temporal. At this point, it is inevitably hard for people to
restore natural order even if they want to. Those who attain
enlightenment do not see walking when they walk, and do not see
sitting when they sit. That is why the Buddha said, "The
eyes seeing forms is equivalent to blindness; the ears hearing
sounds is equivalent to deafness."
How can we say we are as if blind and deaf? When we hear sound,
there is no sound to be heard; when we see form, there is no form
to be seen. What we see and hear is all equivalent to an echo. It
is like seeing all sorts of things in a dream -- is there all
that when you wake up? If you say yes, yet there's only the
blanket and pillow on the bed; if you say no, yet all those
things are clearly registered in your mind, and you can tell what
they were. The same is true of what you see and hear now in broad
daylight.
So it is said, what can be seen by the eye or heard by the ear
can be studied in the scriptures and treatises; but what about
the basis of awareness itself -- how do you study that?
Foyan's teaching, excerpted from Instant Zen:
Waking Up in the Present, translated by
Thomas Cleary - from the TATforum, July, 2004
#418. The only true and full awareness is awareness of awareness.
Till awareness is awareness of itself, it knows no peace at all.
#432. Is it not because you are yourself awareness that you now
perceive this universe?
If you observe awareness steadily, this awareness itself as Guru
(Teacher) will reveal the Truth.
- Sri Sadhu Om from The Path of Sri Ramana
Part One.
More here: http://uarelove1.tripod.com/FIVE_SAGES.htm
The
Readjustment
Awakening is a readjustment. The state is always present, is our
normal, permanent, real nature - as the Masters of all the
doctrines never tire of telling us - but the conscious experience
of it is denied us by a deviation of subjectivity on to a concept
that, as such, is unreal, an object in consciousness appearing as
its own subject. Until this phantom is exorcised by being
exposed, subjectivity appears to be bound, and we cannot
experience it as it is in reality.
When this anomalous situation is understood, we need to start
putting this understanding into practice, that is not just
thinking about it, but experiencing it. There have been people,
apparently born 'ready', for whom the fact of understanding has
been sufficient in itself to produce the experience, but for the
rest of us habit and practice are a necessary prelude to
conscious experience of our reality.
However it is important to understand that there is nothing to
acquire, but only an error to be exposed, because acquiring
necessarily involves using, and so strengthening that spurious
'I' whose dissolution we require.
For this merely a readjustment is needed, such readjustment being
the abandonment of identification with an inexistent individual
self, an abandonment which leaves us unblindfold and awake in our
eternal nature.
To seek to persuade ourselves that we do not exist as individual
entities is, however, to ask an eye to believe that what it is
looking at is not there. But it is not we alone who have no
existence as entities: there are not any anywhere in the reality
of the cosmos, never have been, and never could be. Only
whole-mind can reveal this knowledge as direct cognition which,
once realised, is obvious. That is the total readjustment. And
only 'I' remains.
- Wei Wu Wei from Ask the Awakened: The
Negative Way