Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
#3214 - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - Editor: Jerry Katz
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.
The first and last articles are basically on "doing nothing" and in between is a piece by Vicki Woodyard which might be about 'nothing doing.'
DOING NOTHING: Coming to the End of
the Spiritual Search
by Steven Harrison
Reviewed by Rodney Stevens
In his lively introduction, Harrison (who resides in Boulder,
Colorado) tells us how he "left the security of an Ivy
League university...and sought out every mystic, seer, and
magician I could find." He spent "long periods in
India and the Himalayas searching, contemplating, being,"
and finally finding--after years of frustration--that "it
was all useless."
Then, in a calm moment of self-enquiry, he discovered that it was
him as a seeker that was causing his discord. He saw that
the "very grasping for an answer" was taking him away
from any marginal peace that he may have been occasionally
experiencing. Shortly thereafter, Harrison's apparent
"me" passed into "the vastness, the magic"
that was his own, ever-present awareness.
In this handsome and penetrating collection of 20-plus essays,
Harrison speaks passionately about various aspects of that
vastness. The chapters include "The Collapse of Self,"
"Language and Reality," "The Crisis of
Change," "Teachers: Authority, Fascism, and Love,"
"The Nature of Thought," and "Health, Disease, and
Aging."
The chapter entitled "The Myth of Enlightenment"
deserves an extended quote. The slashes are meant to indicate a
new paragraph in the original text: "We will spend a great
deal of time looking for this enlightenment. But looking is
useless, because it is not there./We can sit on cushions facing
walls, dance in ecstasy, pray, chant. We can travel the world
looking for this enlightenment. We can find the greatest of gurus
and the most secret doctrines. It is useless.../Enlightenment is
a myth because the self is a myth."
The author has also penned the very fine What's Next After
Now?: Post-Spirituality and the Creative LIfe (Sentient
Publications, 2005). For Harrison, the expression
"post-spirituality" points (and justly so) to presence
itself. And once that presence is recognized, you see how clear
and creative you life can truly be.
DOING NOTHING can be ordered directly from the publisher
(http://www.sentientpublications.com/catalog/doing_nothing_book.php ) or at the following Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Nothing-Steven-Harrison/dp/0874779413
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rodney Stevens--who lives in Columbia, South Carolina and who
awakened through the books of John Wheeler--can be contacted for
talks and workshops at: writerguy@fastmail.fm
Wave If You Love Water
Spirituality
is like endless billboards
in the desert
announcing a desert
up ahead
without billboards
-Jerry Katz
Jerry’s little gem led me to wonder why the sea doesn’t
label its waves.
Or why it doesn’t get a computer and take a screen shot of
itself. Okay,
so we humans are stuck with tasks like that. Doesn’t make us
entirely
creative, does it. Makes us repetitive and as clingy as Saran.
If the sea doesn’t bother to label its waves, why are we so
concerned
with the family tree. It should be a banana tree, by the way,
because we
are all bananas. And not top ones.
Why doesn’t the wind name its own hurricanes? Is the wind so
lazy it
can’t make time for that....does it have to leave it to
NOAA. Who knew
the wind was so indifferent. We humans are precise, yet we are as
unpredictable as the wind’s storms. We have our own; they
are called moods.
I have gotten far from the diatribe at hand. Why doesn’t the
sea label
its waves. It must know something humans never learned. That
things
happen....that water makes waves that don’t always wave
hello.
If we are akin to waves on the ocean, can we just experience life
as
water and not bother to create meaningful lives as waves. The
great ones
tell us we can. They tell us we can lean back and let life catch
us....or not.
Schools of fish are just as smart as Harvard grads, just in a
different
way. They don’t wear scales with designer labels or have
drunken
reunions to celebrate where they cerebrated. When they flip
people off,
they don’t even think about it. It comes naturally.
If I were a wave on the ocean, I would just drink it all in. An
ocean is
its own wet bar, after all. I wouldn’t bother to pin a
nametag on
myself. Hi, I’m Wave One Billion and Six. But then again,
what do I
know. I’m only human.
Vicki Woodyard Waving Hello
http://www.bobwoodyard.com
http://conscious.tv/consciousness.html is a new and very good website featuring videos on consciousness subjects. The founder, Iain McNay, manages a record company that was well known in the UK in the '80's. I'm watching an interview with U.G. Krishnamurti. There's a little bit of self-satisfaction and vulnerability combined with warmth and quiet humor that U.G. wears well and gives some humanity to his stark words.