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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #4031, Saturday, October 2, 2010
You've traveled up ten thousand steps in search of the Dharma.
So many long days in the archives, copying, copying.
The gravity of the Tang and the profundity of the Sung
make heavy baggage.
Here! I've picked you a bunch of wildflowers.
Their meaning is the same
but they're much easier to carry.
- Xu Yun, posted to DailyDharma
Once I said to God, "How do you teach us?"
And he replied
"If
you were
playing chess with someone who
had infinite power and infinite knowledge
and wanted to make you a
master of the game,
where would all the chess
pieces be at
every moment?
Indeed, not only where he wanted them,
but where all were best for your
development;
and that is every situation
of one's
life.
- St. John of the Cross, posted to The_Now2
All the powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who
have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark. Know
that there is no darkness around us. Take the hands away and
there is the light, which was from the beginning. Darkness never
existed, weakness never existed. We who are fools cry that we are
weak; we who are fools cry that we are impure. Thus Vedanta not
only insists that the ideal is practical, but that it has been so
all the time, and this ideal, this Reality is our own nature.
- Swami Vivekananda, posted to AlongTheWay
Indeed only that cid-akasha (the infinite consciousness), which
alone exists even after the cosmic dissolution, exists even now,
utterly devoid of objectivity. The concepts and notions that are
illumined by the consciousness within itself shine as this
creation, on account of the movement of energy within
consciousness, precisely as dreams arise during sleep. Otherwise,
it is totally impossible for an object of perception to exist
outside of the omnipresent infinite consciousness.
Even as the duality experienced in dream is illusory, the duality
implied in the creation of the world is illusory. Even as the
objects seem to exist and function in the inner world of
consciousness in a dream, objects seem to exist and function in
the outer world of consciousness during the wakeful state.
Nothing really happens in both these states. Even as
consciousness alone is the reality in the dream state,
consciousness alone is the substance in the wakeful state too.
That is the Lord, that is the supreme truth, that you are, that I
am and that is all.
- from Selected Verses From Valmiki's Yoga Vasishtha, from
a translation by Swami Venkateshananda, edited by Dennis B. Hill
Learn to live without self-concern. For this you must know your
own true being (swarupa) as indomitable, fearless, ever
victorious. Once you know with absolute certainty that nothing
can trouble you but your own imagination, you come to disregard
your desires and fears, concepts and ideas and live by truth
alone.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
Sakka asked: "What is the cause of self-interest?"
The Buddha answered: "It is perception of the world as one's
object."
"How does one overcome this perception of the world as apart
from oneself?"
"By acting for the increase of goodness and happiness. It is
in this
way that the world ceases to be one's object."
- from the Digha Nikaya, (Collection of Long Discourses),
posted to Distillation