Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
#2906 - Monday,
August 20, 2007 - Editor: Gloria Lee Nondual Highlights
"When you express
gentleness and precision in your environment, then real
brilliance and power can descend onto that situation. If you try
to manufacture that presence out of your own ego, it will never
happen. You cannot own the power and the magic of this world. It
is always available, but it does not belong to anyone."
--Chogyam Trungpa From the book: "Shambhala - The Sacred
Path of the Warrior" posted to DailyDharma
The Buddha
recommended that every person should remember every single day
that we are not here for ever. It is a guest performance, which
can be finished any time. We don't know when; we have no idea. We
always think that we may have seventy-five or eighty years, but
who knows? If we remember our vulnerability every single day, our
lives will be imbued with the understanding that each moment
counts and we will not be so concerned with the future. Now is
the time to grow on the spiritual path. If we remember that, we
will also have a different relationship to the people around us.
They too can die at any moment, and we certainly wouldn't like
that to happen at a time when we are not loving towards them.
When we remember that, our practice connects to this moment and
meditation improves because there is urgency behind it. We need
to act now. We can only watch this one breath, not the next one.
--Ayya Khema
Alan Larus
http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/bees_1.htm
http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/bees_2.htm
Perhaps the deepest
reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who
we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate
identity--but if we dare to examine it, we find that this
identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to
prop it up: our name, our "biography," our partners,
family, home, job, friends, credit cards. . . It is on their
fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So
when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we
really are? Without our familiar props, we are faced with just
ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with
whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted
to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of
time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to
ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on
our own?
--Sogyal Rinpoche
When
Paramahansa Yogananda met Anandamayi Ma and asked her about her
life, she answered: "Father, there is little to tell."
She spread her graceful hands in a deprecatory gesture. "My
consciousness has never associated itself with this temporary
body. Before I came on this earth, Father, 'I was the same.' As a
little girl, 'I was the same.' I grew into womanhood, but still
'I was the same.' When the family in which I had been born made
arrangements to have this body married, 'I was the same.' ...
And, Father, in front of you now, 'I am the same.' Ever
afterward, though the dance of creation change[s] around me in
the hall of eternity, 'I shall be the same.'"
Tom, posted to GardenMystics
Sunset by Alan Larus http://www.ferryfee.com:80/bluesky/sunset_1.html
Life and death: they are one, at core entwined. Who understands himself from his own strain presses himself into a drop of wine and throws himself into the purest flames. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Rumi poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2nYZSoIMY8
Mazie Lane, posted to GardenMystics