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Nondual Highlights: Issue #2941, Saturday, September 29, 2007, Editor: Mark
You don't have to live in a mountain
cave and meditate for thirty years.
You can wake up spiritually right now
in the middle of the busiest marketplace.
Beneath all of the chaos that's around
you, lies the Silence that's within you
. But you don't have to avoid the "rush"
of life.
If you can't get out of it, then get
further into it.
Use the rush - - to get into the hush!
- Chuck Hillig, from Seeds for the Soul, posted to
AlongTheWay
If all we want is to see Who we really, really are,
nothing can stop us from doing so this very moment.
But if our plan is to use that blessed vision
to buy baskets full of nice feelings or any other goodies,
we might as well abandon the very idea of Self-inquiry.
So long as any part of me remains unsurrendered,
I shall never be Myself.
Until the will is surrendered, there is no peace.
- Douglas Harding, from Open to the Source, posted to
The_Now2
The basis of spirituality is not guilt or burden.
The basis of spirituality is relaxed freedom.
This is not generally understood,
so it is thought that spirituality is something
that one must seek with tremendous effort and concentration.
It isn't. I assure you it isn't. Don't make it, as you say, a
federal case.
Let the seeking take its own course!
- Ramesh S. Balsekar, posted to The_Now2
Listen to the story told by the reed,
of being separated.
"Since I was cut from the reedbed,
I have made this crying sound.
Anyone apart from someone he loves
understands what I say.
Anyone pulled from a source
longs to go back.
At any gathering I am there,
mingling in the laughing and grieving,
a friend to each, but few
will hear the secrets hidden
within the notes. No ears for that.
Body flowing out of spirit,
spirit up from body: no concealing
that mixing. But it's not given us
to see the soul. The reed flute
is fire, not wind. Be that empty."
Hear the love fire tangled
in the reed notes, as bewilderment
melts into wine. The reed is a friend
to all who want the fabric torn
and drawn away. The reed is hurt
and salve combining. Intimacy
and longing for intimacy, one
song. A disastrous surrender
and a fine love, together. The one
who secretly hears this is senseless.
A tongue has one customer, the ear.
A sugarcane flute has such effect
because it was able to make sugar
in the reedbed. The sound it makes
is for everyone. Days full of wanting,
let them go by without worrying
that they do. Stay where you are
inside such a pure, hollow note.
Every thirst gets satisfied except
that of these fish, the mystics,
who swim a vast ocean of grace
still somehow longing for it!
No one lives in that without
being nourished every day.
But if someone doesn't want to hear
the song of the reed flute,
it's best to cut conversation
short, say good-bye, and leave.
- Rumi, version by Coleman Barks from The Essential Rumi
Monet Refuses the Operation
Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
- Lisel Mueller, posted to truevision