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#2847 - Monday, June 18, 2007 - Editor: Gloria Lee  

Nondual Highlights    

All things

By Hadewijch
(13th Century)

English version by Jane Hirshfield

All things
are too small
to hold me,
I am so vast

In the Infinite
I reach
for the Uncreated

I have
touched it,
it undoes me
wider than wide

Everything else
is too narrow

You know this well,
you who are also there

 

-- from Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, Edited by Jane Hirshfield

 

Poetry Chaikhana Home


The experience of the practice itself teaches us
that any conception or ideal of awakened being can
only be a hindrance- neither practice nor awakening
is about our ideas or images.   A

nd yet, however limited the finger-pointing at the
moon, still we point, we turn to one another for
direction. So I have come to think that if the
bodhisattva's task is to continue to practice until
every pebble, every blade of grass, awakens,
surely the passions, difficult or blissful, can also be
included in that vow.  

And if awakening is also already present,
inescapably and everywhere present from the
beginning, how can the emotions not be part of that
singing life of grasses and fish and oil tankers and
subways and cats in heat who wake us, furious and
smiling, in the middle of the brief summer
night?
--Jane Hirshfield  


  A gold Buddha can't get through a furnace, a wood
Buddha can't get through a fire, and a clay Buddha
can't get through water. The real Buddha sits
within: enlightenment, nirvana, suchness, and
Buddha-nature are all clothes sticking to the body.  

-Chao-chou From "The Pocket Zen Reader," edited
by Thomas Cleary, 1999.  


    Do not undervalue attention.  It means interest
and also love.  To know, to do, to discover, or
to create you must give your heart to it - which
means attention.  All the blessings flow from it.

                            - Nisargadatta Maharaj

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `  


"I Am That"
Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
posted to AlongTheWay    


   

Swan by Alan Larus http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/shores/swan.htm more photos:

http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/shores/seaside.htm

http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/shores/spider.htm

 


    "All disciplines are fixations: discipline excludes everything, except the one thing that one wishes to concentrate upon. Thus one establishes a dictatorship over oneself and all understanding is jeopardized. What is absolutely necessary is attention without strain. When I observe myself, I am really forced to admit that every day I am the prisoner of a thousand unsatisfied desires, or desires whose satisfaction brings me no permanent bliss. So it seems to me that instead of endless running from one desire to another, it would be better to stop and examine the true nature of desire. If this investigation is successful you will penetrate the nature of the true aim of all desire. What any desire really aims at, is a state of non desire. This non desire is a state in which we demand absolutely nothing. Thus it is a state of extreme abundance, of fullness. This fullness is revealed as being bliss and peace. You now know that you are really seeking nothing else but fullness and absolute peace. Now that you have understood the inner nature of your ultimate goal, you perceive that the ultimate goal is, in fact, not a goal, that is to say an end towards which you strive, but that the ultimate state can only be the consequence of relaxing and letting go. Liberation is not to be obtained by collecting and accumulating, but by being rooted in a state of being which is truly ours and in which we live constantly without knowing it. Even if we wished to, we could not live for a single moment outside of this state."

--JEAN KLEIN posted to TheNow_2  


    When something arises, one can have the experience that "this is me" or that "I'm back here -- that is not me." Both of these are movements of mind, of afterthought, which is better known as ego. But when the undivided state occurs, two things may happen.      

The first can be an awakening to our true nature, which is this undivided state, this undivided being. The second thing that can happen is that the conditioning, the confusion that was innocently passed on through ignorance, can reunify itself.      

When conditioning arises within a person who is in an undivided state, where he or she neither takes ownership nor denies it, then there can be a sacred alchemical process through which the conditioning reunifies itself all by itself. Like mud in water, the conditioning naturally just sinks. It's like a natural miracle.      

This can be very delicate because, if there is the slightest ownership or the slightest denial of ownership, that process is in some way corrupted. It asks of us an inward softness and openness because this undivided sense is very soft, and we can't search for it like a sledgehammer looking for a nail.      

That's the reason spiritual teachings stress humility, which helps us to enter the truth of our being in a gentle and humble way. We cannot storm the gates of heaven. Instead we must allow ourselves to become more and more disarmed. Then the pure consciousness of being becomes brighter and brighter, and we realize who we are. This brightness is what we are.      

From: Emptiness Dancing, by Adyashanti. www.adyashanti.org

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