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# 2094 - Saturday, March 26, 2005 - Editor: Gloria Lee    

We don't receive wisdom;
we must discover it for ourselves
after a journey that no one
can take for us or spare us.

     - Marcel Proust
   


         The intellectual quest,
       though fine as pearl or coral,
       is not the spiritual search.
       That spiritual search is on another level.
       Spiritual wine is a different substance.


                      ~ Rumi

 

posted to Along the Way

   


 

It Cuts the Plow Reins

What does Purity do?
It cuts the plow reins.

It frees you from working and dining
In the mud.

It frees you from living behind
A big ox
That is always breaking wind.

What can Purity do, my dear?

It can lift your heart
On a rising, bucking Sun
That makes the soul hunger
To reach the roof of Creation.

It offers what the whole world wants -
Real Knowledge and Power

It offers what the wise crave -
The priceless treasure of Freedom.

Pure Divine Love is no meek priest
Or tight banker.
It will smash all your windows
And only then throw in the holy gifts.

It will allow you to befriend
Life and light and sanity -

And not even mind waking
To another day.


'I Heard God Laughing - Renderings of Hafiz' by Daniel Ladinsky


posted by Gill Eardley ~ Allspirit
www.allspirit.co.uk

photo by Al Larus  http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/sheep.htm

 



 

Christ and Ramana

By Banning Richardson

from The Mountain Path, Jayanti Issue 2001

=============================================


It is a tenet of Hinduism that all spiritul paths lead to the
same goal. In a broad sense this is true, but also it hides the
truth. For if one has followed one religion or another, one
Yoga or another, one has still in the end to go through the
process of self-analysis, of inner search and surrender which is
best described in our time by Sri Maharshi.
In other words the 'goal' is not a goal but a path.
When one has learnt everything that one can from one's inherited
or acquired religion or spiritual discipline, one has to take
this prized possession and cast it to one side - the most
painful of acts - and, starting afresh, follow the simple,
scientific method that the Saint of Arunachala teaches us.

I have said that this saint is the greatest contemporary
exponent of this age old teaching. This is as true for the
scientific minded Westerner as it is for the Easterner.

Dr. Jung writes, "The identification of a Self with God will
strike the European as shocking. It is a speciphically oriental
Realization, as expressed in Sri Ramana's utterances.'

No doubt such identification is shocking to the Western Christian
or other orthodox religionist, but as I have implied, it is
consonant with Christ's teachings, if they are approached afresh
without prejudice.

If one examines the New Testament carefully one finds
that Christ is trying to convince a fanatically
monotheistic people that God could inhabit human form for a
special purpose, and that the nature of God was not something
different from man's but that one could see the image of
God in a perfect man.

And he proclaimed himself to be a perfect being who had presided
over human destiny since the world began. This in itself was an
overwhelming dose for the orthodox Jew to swallow.

One would not therefore expect that Christ would go farther
and show that this Perfect Being is latent in every man ,
because God is in every man. But in fact he does say this
by implification, and sometimes directly, throughout his
teaching.

Take for instance - "The kingdom of God cometh not with
observation; Neither shall they say, Lo here ! Or lo
there! For behold, the Kingdom of God is within you."

In other words his first lesson was, 'Heaven is within
you and it is a spiritual state, not a material place."

Having made this clear, he goes on to say, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.'   Thus he was saying in fact,  "God dwells within you; you can become  perfect like Him. '   This was a revolutionary teaching , and its full implications are understood only if one comes into touch with the teachings of Ramakrishna or a Sri Maharshi."    But Christ went even farther than this. In verses 33-36 of the  tenth chapter of St. John's Gospel we read - "Jesus answered them(the Jews): Is it not
written in your law,I said,Ye are gods?"

"If he called them gods, unto whom the
word of God came, and the scripture
cannot be broken; say ye of him,
whom the Father has sanctified, and sent
into the world, Thou blasphemest;
because I said, I am the son of God?"

So we might ask today, do you acuse Sri Maharshi of blasphemy for saying that
the True Man within us is God, when Christ was executed on the same charge 2,000
years ago? Just because the church has petrified his teaching, as Judaism before
has petrified the teaching of the Prophets, do you expect those who feel God stirring
within them to join the mob who cry 'Blasphemy ' ?
And to pursue this argument a little farther in order to reveal
the basic similarity of Jesus Christ's and Bhagavan Maharshi's
teachings, one remembers that Christ answered the rich, young
man who came to him and asked, "Good master, what shall I
do that I may inherit eternal life', by saying "Why callest thou
me good? There is none good but one, that is God'.

This, taken with the quotations already mentioned, clearly
shows that he believed that God was in all men and that all men
could attain the perfection that he, Christ, himself revealed,
through following his path - i.e., actively loving God and one's
fellowmen , and knowing that the Kingdom of Heaven is
within each one of us.

posted by Viorica Weissman ~ MillionPaths
   


   

Truth has to appear only once in a single mind,

for it to be impossible

ever to prevent it

from spreading universally

and setting everything ablaze.

~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Heart of Matter 

Posted by Jani Roxburgh ~The_Now 2

 


    Those who argue and discuss without understanding the truth are lost amid all the forms of relative knowledge, running about here and there and trying to justify their view of the substance of ego.

If you realize the self in your inmost consciousness, it will appear in its purity. This is the womb of wonder, which is not the realm of those who live only by reason.

Pure in its own nature and free from the categories of finite and infinite, Universal Mind is the undefiled wonder, which is wrongly apprehended by many.

~ Lankavatara Sutra
From "Buddha Speaks," edited by Anne Bancroft, 2000    


    ‘Lost in the woods I snapped off a dark branch’

VI From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

 

Lost in the woods, I snapped off a dark branch

and, lifted its murmur, in thirst, to my lips:

perhaps the weeping voice of the rain,

a shattered bell, or a broken heart.

 

It came to me, something out of far distance,

deeply concealed, and hidden by Earth,

a cry, defeated by immense autumns,

by half-opened moistness of shadowy leaves.

 

But waking out of the wood’s dream there,

that hazel branch sang under my tongue,

and its vagrant perfume rose to my mind

 

as if suddenly roots I had long abandoned

searched me, the lost domains of childhood,

and held me, wounded by wandering fragrance.


~ Pablo Neruda

 
posted by Zen Oleary ~ Allspirit

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