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#3081 - Tuesday, February 19, 2008 - Editor: Jerry Katz
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups. yahoo.com/ group/NDhighlights
Editor Mark should be back this week. We miss him. Happy Birthday wishes to Sam Pasiencier, his 77th. Sam is a long time beloved member of Nonduality Salon.
Clifford Shack submits the following quotation by Robert Adams:
Never forget the purpose of why you're
here. It is true in the
Absolute Reality there is no purpose. The universe has no purpose
for
existing. You have no purpose for existing, in the Absolute
Reality.
But as long as you believe you have a body or a mind, then your
purpose is to become no purpose. You spend your energy becoming
nothing. But do not believe your nothing when you haven't become
nothing yet.
Be honest with yourself. See where your coming from by the way
you
react to life situations every day. This will tell you where you
are
at, by the way you see yourself reacting to life's predicaments.
Life
will present to you many predicaments, and it's up to you to see
these things in the right perspective: never to be frightened,
never
to believe anything is wrong, always to know, even though you
believe
you are a body, you are not alone. There is the Pure Awareness
that
is with you all the time, just awaiting your recognition,
awaiting
your understanding that you are not the body, that you are a
spirit,
called the Atman, Brahman, Absolute Reality. This is who you
really
are. This is your real nature.
– From Robert Adams' Silence of the
Heart
Martha Ramsey informs us of teacher Jan Frazier whose website is http://whenfearfallsaway.com/index.html
Watch the mind – but don't judge what you see it doing. Neither berate yourself nor congratulate yourself. Don't beat yourself up for what you "catch yourself" doing, even if it's for the umpteenth time. It isn't a tender-hearted, self-forgiving stance that leads me to urge this nonjudgmental approach. I'm not saying "love and accept yourself for all your warts." The point is, it's neither here nor there, how your mind judges what you do. It's the judging that's the problem: because it indicates you're taking too seriously the life of the mind. If you are hard on yourself (or praise yourself) for the activity in your head, you are giving your mind power over you. The point is to not invest any of it with substantiality. Any kind of judgment only feeds the ego with the illusion that this stuff is valuable. Starve the ego to death: its ongoing vitality is like a wall that keeps you from seeing clearly who you really are.
Learning to laugh at the antics of the blustering, self-important ego will probably get you farther than all the heartfelt, earnest, self-flagellating striving in the world. Never forget that you have built that wall, just by participating in the human condition (which includes the mind, with its enormous power to delude, and all the conditioning that tells us untruths about who we are). You can destroy the wall – not brick by brick but all at once. This very moment.
--Jan Frazier
JB passes the word about a new J. Krishnamurti website: http://www.beyondthemind.net/krishnamurti-index.html
From the introduction to the website:
This new website is a different approach to
the scientist of the mind, J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986). The
approach is from a holistic and integrated standpoint, as far as
that is possible. It is not just taking a fragment here and
there, a well-worn catchphrase or two. It is an exploration into
the totality of the work - the books, dialogues and the public
talks covering in all around 38 years, from 1948-1986
(hereinafter referred to simply as ‘the talks’).
~ ~ ~
From the website, a selection from J. Krishnamurti:
We complicate things. Unnecessarily. This is because we
have been conditioned from the earliest to believe in a superior
authority, in the rigid social hierarchy of a society which
consistently devalues the individual and considers only the mass,
the so-called ‘greater good’. We look to political
leaders, to experts, to books, to ideological systems and
philosophies to solve all our problems, never realizing that we
can solve all our problems. We think that in this complex world,
with all its political, economic, social and environmental
problems, what we need is a super-expert, a grand guru, or savior
- one who comes in and has the ultimate answer to everything. Or
we cling to the persistent notion that, one day, some clever
technological advance will occur that will do it. In both cases,
the solution is bound to be complex, in order to match the
complexity of the myriad problems.
So the solutions to the problems themselves become complex, only really understood by others who have done all the appropriate academic study. Forgetting that all the experts, lawyers, economists and academics in history have never solved a single thing; they have improved things materially to be sure, the standard of living has demonstrably risen and medical advancement and overall material progress has undeniably occurred, yet all our human problems remain.
Hence the authoritarian approach may in fact be all wrong. And authority includes all our own recorded experiences stored as memory. So the only approach to the talks is to put aside all authority, including all one's experiences and conclusions. When you do that, you can then actually listen. It’s entirely possible the central point behind the talks is so simple we have entirely missed it. This really is an extraordinary proposition. At the very heart of the talks, is what they are saying so simple we have entirely missed it? Is this possible? Is this the real secret to why ‘no-one has got it’?
Has anyone actually listened, not to the
noise of one’s own conclusions and judgments, but carefully,
simply and openly, without
choice or selectivity, to what has been said across all the
talks?