Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
Nondual Highlights Issue #2081 Sunday, March 13, 2005
There is no such thing as an entity.
Now you know that you are awake because,
you are here and you have that knowledge.
There is nothing else other than this
knowledge, no entity.
When you are dwelling in this consciousness
you see that you are not doing anything, it is
all happening spontaneously. There is no
question of your trying to do anything.
You cannot try to be your Self,
because you are your Self.
- from Talks of Nisargadatta Maharaj,
posted to JustThis
Q: Are the names and forms of the world real?
A: You won't find them separate from the substratum [adhishtana].
When you try to get at name and form, you will find reality only.
Therefore attain the knowledge of that which is real for all
time.
Q: Why does the waking state look so real?
A: We see so much on the cinema screen, but it is not real.
Nothing is real there except the screen. In the same way in the
waking state, there is nothing but adhishtana. Knowledge of the
world is knowledge of the knower of the world [jagrat-prama is
the prama of jagrat-pramata]. Both go away in sleep.
Q: Why do we see such permanency and constancy in the world?
A: It is seen on account of wrong ideas. When someone says that
he took a bath in the same river twice he is wrong, because when
he bathed for the second time the river is not the same as it was
when he bathed for the first time. On looking twice at the
brightness of a flame a man says that he sees the same flame, but
this flame is changing every moment. The waking state is like
this. The stationary appearance is an error of perception.
Q: Where is the error?
A: Pramata [the knower].
Q: How did the knower come?
A: On account of the error of perception. In fact the knower and
his misperceptions appear simultaneously, and when the knowledge
of the Self is obtained, they disappear simultaneously.
Q: From where did the knower and his misperceptions come?
A: Who is asking the question?
Q: I am.
A: Find out that `I' and all your doubts will be solved. Just as
in a dream a false knowledge, knower and known rise up, in the
waking state the same process operates. In both states on knowing
this `I' you know everything and nothing remains to be known. In
deep sleep, knower, knowledge and known are absent. In the same
way, at the time of experiencing the real `I' they will not
exist. Whatever you see happening in the waking state happens
only to the knower, and since the knower is unreal, nothing in
fact ever happens.
Q: Is the light which gives the `I'-sense identity and knowledge
of the world ignorance or chit, consciousness?
A: It is only the reflected light of chit that makes the `I'
believe itself different from others. This reflected tight of
chit also makes the `I' create objects, but for this reflection
there must be a surface on which the reflection takes place.
Q: What is that surface?
A: On realization of the Self you will find that the reflection
and the surface on which it takes place do not actually exist,
but that both of them are one and the same chit. There is the
world, which requires location for its existence and light to
make it perceptible. Both rise simultaneously. Therefore physical
existence and perception depend upon the light of the mind which
is reflected from the Self. Just as cinema pictures can be made
visible by a reflected light, and only in darkness, so also the
world pictures are perceptible only by the light of the Self
reflected in the darkness of avidya [ignorance]. The world can be
seen neither in the utter darkness of ignorance, as in deep
sleep, nor in the utter light of the Self, as in Self-realization
or samadhi.
- from Be As You Are, The Teachings of Sri
Ramana Maharshi, edited by David Godman,
posted to MillionPaths
Ram Tzu knows you
All of your
Dirty little secrets
Are tattooed on your forehead
For him to read.
You cling so tenaciously
To your history
Sensing correctly that to let go
Would set you adrift in a present
In which you cannot survive.
Here and now is the great evaporator
Poof - youšre gone.
Surprising isnšt it?
All that time you thought you were
You really werenšt.
Poof - back again so soon?
Guess the illusion wasnšt finished
With you after all.
If you learned anything
Youšll know it doesnšt
Make any difference.
Ram Tzu certainly doesnšt care.
- Ram Tzu, posted to AlongTheWay
CONCERNING THE SPONTANEITY OF ALL THINGS:
"Social conditioning fosters the identification of the mind
with a fixed idea of 'itself' as the means of self-control, and
as a result, man thinks himself "I"- the ego.
Thereupon the mental center of gravity shifts from the
spontaneous or original mind to the ego image. Once this has
happened, the very center of our psychic life is identified with
the self-controlling mechanism. It then becomes almost impossible
to show how "I" can let go of "Myself", for
"I" am precisely my habitual effort to hold on to
"myself".
I find myself totally incapable of any mental action which is not
intentional, affected, and insincere. Therefore, anything I do to
"give myself up", to let go, will be a disguised form
of the habitual effort to hold on.
I cannot be intentionally unintentional or purposely spontaneous.
As soon as it becomes important for me to be spontaneous, (to
overcome ego, to see beyond myself) the intention to do so is
strengthened; I cannot get rid of it, and yet, it is the one
thing that stands in the way of its own fulfillment.
It is as if someone had given me some medicine with the warning
that it will not work if I think of a monkey while taking it.
While I am remembering to forget the monkey, I am in a
"double-bind" situation where "to do" is
"not to do" and vice versa. "Yes" implies
"no", and "go" implies "stop".
At this point, Zen comes to me and asks: "If you cannot help
remembering the monkey, are you doing it on purpose?"
In other words, do I have an intention for being intentional, a
purpose for being purposive?
Suddenly I realize that my very intending is spontaneous, or that
my controlling self- the ego- arises from my uncontrolled or
natural self.
At this moment, all the machinations of the ego come to nought;
it is annihilated in its own trap.
I see that it is actually impossible not to be spontaneous. For
what I cannot help doing, I am doing spontaneously, but if I am
at the same time trying to control it, I interpret it as
"compulsion".
As a Zen master said, "Nothing is left to you at this moment
but to have a good laugh."
In this moment the whole quality of consciousness is changed, and
I feel myself in a new world in which, however, it is obvious
that I have always been living. As soon as I recognize that my
voluntary and purposeful action happens spontaneously "by
itself", just like breathing, hearing, and feeling, I am not
longer caught in the contradiction of trying to be spontaneous.
There is no real contradiction, since "trying" IS
spontaneity.
Seeing this, the compulsive, blocked, and "tied-up"
feeling vanishes. It is just as if I had been absorbed in a
tug-of-war between my two hands, and forgotten that they were
both mine.
No block to spontaneity remains when the trying is seen to be
needless. As we saw, the discovery that both the
"voluntary" and the "involuntary" apects of
the mind are alike spontaneous makes an immediate end to the
fixed dualism of the mind and the world, the knower and the
known.
The new world in which I find myself has an extraordinary
transparency or freedom from barriers, making it seem that I have
somehow become the empty space in which everything is happening.
Here, then, is the point of the oft-repeated assertion that
"all beings are enlightened from the very beginning,"
that "all dualism is falsely imagined," that "the
ordinary mind is the Tao", and that there is therefore no
meaning in trying to get in accord with it. In the words of the
Cheng-tao Ke:
"Like the empty sky it has no boundaries, Yet it is right in
this place, ever profound and clear. When you seek to know it,
you cannot see it. You cannot take hold of it, But you cannot
lose it. In not being able to get it, you get it. When you are
silent, it speaks: When you speak, it is silent. The great gate
is wide open to bestow alms, And no crowd is blocking the
way."
It was through seeing this that, in the moment of his Satori,
Hakuin cried out "How wondrous! How wondrous! There is no
birth-and-death from which one has to escape, nor is there any
supreme knowledge after which one has to strive!"
Or, in the words of Hsiang Yen:
"At one stroke I forgot all my knowledge! There's no use for
artificial discipline. For, move as I will, I manifest the
Ancient Way."
Paradoxically, nothing is more artificial than the notion of
artificiality. Try as one may, it is as impossible to go against
the spontaneous Way of All Things,as it is to live in some other
time than "now", or be in some other place than
"here".
-Alan Watts: The Way of Zen, posted to satsangdiarygroup
Kairos 25
We’re each one minute away
from annihilation,
a soap bubble wobbling
near a pine needle,
just a swift touch
and we’re gone, burst,
now a memory in the air,
a rattle
in the minds of friends,
a wound
in the soul of a lover.
In time we join the
anonymous dust of history,
become bone fragments
mixed with pottery shards
in an archeology dig or lie
long buried in the earth
vanished even from
the dim memories of
worms and beetles who
were our last lovers.
Yet this moment engulfs me,
sings in my ears and
floods my eyes with sunlight
spilling through the sky.
We touch and
become transparent,
energy fields tumbling in space
inside temporary bodies
licking the magic of each other.
Š Zen Oleary March 12, 2005, posted to SufiMystic