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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3887, Sunday, May 9, 2010, Editor: Mark
Awakening: The Modern Heresy
There are many factors contributing to our inability to recognize
our Original Nature and our own inherent state of Natural
Awareness. Perhaps the greatest of these is our addiction to the
process of searching for meaning and truth. In our modern Western
culture, we have often cleverly cloaked and disguised this
addiction with a rationalization that it is the journey, not the
destination, that is important.
While it is vitally important to recognize that:
Reality is continuously manifesting through a dynamic
and on-going process of unfolding, and
in an Infinite universe, we may never actually
arrive at a final destination or end point,
...we often lose sight of the inherent completeness and
perfection of Reality, as it is, within the present moment,
and we use the popular metaphor of a spiritual journey as
a way of justifying our restless wandering and searching
for an elusive and mysterious Essence that seems to be
missing from our lives.
By convincing ourselves that there is something noble and humble
in never arriving at our spiritual destination, we rob ourselves
of the opportunity to recognize our own essential and fundamental
nature, and doom ourselves to living within a perpetual state of
psychological and spiritual homelessness.
In fact, I believe an assertion that one has experienced an
Awakening or Realization has become the ultimate modern heresy,
for this declaration challenges and sabotages the accepted,
intellectual assumption that we must be forever journeying toward
a distant and unreachable destination.
In many Eastern religious traditions, however, there is a much
greater willingness to accept the possibility that experiences of
Awakening may actually be a legitimate insight into, or
recognition of, the fundamental and essential nature of Reality.
I have begun to suspect that, in most cases, this openness and
willingness -- at least to consider the radical possibility we
might one day awaken into a liberating recognition of our innate
and Original Nature -- may be an essential precursor to the
actual experience of Realization, itself.
Without this willingness to accept the possibility that we might
one day actually experience a stunning Realization of who and
what we really are, we will be forever destined to wander in
search of a Reality that, ironically, is inherent within the
immediacy of the present moment.
- Metta Zetty
Part 3 of a 5-part poem called "drops of rain"...
It was the buoyancy of Water
that finally
broke
my heart;
how
it held me
when
I let go,
unafraid.
- Anna Ruiz, posted to NondualitySalon
Words of wisdom
Spoken at the right time
In the right company
Are chipping off
Petrified concepts and ideas
Breaking off
Fossilized thoughts and beliefs
Revealing
The underlying ever-present
Boundless
Everlasting life,
Just
As it always
Is.
- Yosy Flug, posted to allspirit
Listen for the stream
that tells you one thing.
Die on this bank. Begin in me;
the way of rivers with the sea.
- Rumi, version by Coleman Barks, posted to AlongTheWay
One night I asked Love: "Tell me truly, who are you?"
It said: "I am life eternal, I multiply the lovely
life."
I said: "O you who are beyond each place, where is
your home?"
It said: "I am together with the heart's fire and beside
the wet eye,
I am a dyer; due to me every cheek turns saffron-colored.
I am a swift-footed messenger, and the lover my lean
steed.
I am the crimson of the tulip, the merchandise's worth,
I am the sweetness of lament, the unveiler of all that is
veiled . . ."
- Rumi, Ghazal (Ode) 1402, translation by Annemarie
Schimmel, posted to Sunlight