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#3856 - Monday, April 5, 2010 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights -
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights

    Just a little information for those who are UK based ... on an impending visit to the UK/London of Namkai Norbu ... world renowned Dzogchen master .... May 28 - June 2.

http://www.dzogchencommunity.org/

Thanks to Roy Whenary  


 

Proverbios y Cantares VII

 

I love Jesus, who said to us:
heaven and earth will pass away.
When heaven and earth have passed away,
my word will still remain.
What was your word, Jesus?
Love? Forgiveness? Affection?
All your words were
one word: Wakeup.
  ~ Antonio Machado ~      (Translated by Robert Bly, in The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy)  
  Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Proverbios_VII.html    


Guidelines to Life:

Show up;
Pay attention:
Tell the truth;
Don't judge;
Be compassionate;
Express silent gratitude to everyone for
showing up in your dream. (After all, they're
only here to support your own awakening.)

Above all, don't be attached to the results of
your efforts.

There are only two real choices:

1) Resist what shows up for you in life
and then, grudgingly, finally learn to accept it,

or

2)  Consciously choose what shows up for
you in life and then, lovingly, embrace it being
just as it is.

                               - Chuck Hillig
posted to Along The Way    


Understanding Is Like Water

Understanding is like water flowing in a stream. Wisdom and knowledge are solid and can block our understanding. In Buddhism, knowledge is regarded as an obstacle for understanding. If we take something to be the truth, we may cling to it so much that even if the truth comes and knocks at our door, we won't want to let it in. We have to be able to transcend our previous knowledge the way we climb up a ladder. If we are on the fifth rung and think that we are very high, there is no hope for us to step up to the sixth. We must learn to transcend our own views. Understanding, like water, can flow, can penetrate. Views, knowledge, and even wisdom are solid, and can block the way of understanding.

- Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Heart Sutra”  


 

What's forgotten is that state of simplicity.  That paradox of the immensity of existence, of life here and now.  The fullness of it and the absolute emptiness of it.   It's that quiet immensity.  I was reading an old journal of mine from the mid 1980's and in it was this wonderful quote from, actually quite a few wonderful quotes from Thomas Merton that I had written down.  I used to love reading Thomas Merton.  But he had this very  beautiful, this one line this one description and he called it the abyss of freedom.  And I loved that because he's linking that very paradoxical words that only someone who's experienced  that abyss of freedom will know what he is talking about.  That abyss of freedom.  Everybody wants freedom, not everybody wants the abyss. The emptiness of freedom.  The disappearance to just a simplicity, a quietness that takes paradoxically because I am speaking but takes the words away from us.  In other words takes away the inner dialog away from us and we actually begin to live in that abyss of freedom rather than to talk to ourselves about that. 

And so when you stop looking in the high places for truth but look in the low places, the places that are obscure, the places where nobody pays any attention.  That's where you'll find what you are.  That's where it will become obvious.  When you start to pay attention to what you don't usually pay attention to, what's quiet.   Not clamoring inside of you for attention. What's not insisting.  What's not trying to take some sort of spiritual stance.  That in you which does not have a theology whether it's dualistic or nondualistic. That simplicity.  That very simple shining emptiness.  Very easy to forget that that's what its about.  That's what brings self-liberation.  That's what takes us beyond our own self-obsession.  Wakes us up from the dream cause that's the awakening.  Suddenly you're awake from the dream of being obsessed with yourself.  Past, future.  You awaken even from the obsession with being a self.  Because that's all being a self is, it's an obsession.  One thought obsessing on another thought obsessing on another thought obsessing on another thought until it spins the illusion of a self into existence.     

Adyashanti, Mount Madonna retreat 2009

posted to Wisdom-l by Mark Scorelle


 

On Angels

By Czeslaw Milosz
(1911 - 2004)

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe in you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice -- no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draw near
another one
do what you can.

Poetry Chaikhana Home

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