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CHRISTIANA

Greetings, friends..

For those who might be interested in Ken Wilber and don't
already know this, there is a new CD interview with him. I've
just listened to it and it is delightful and clarifying to
listen to him describe (amongst many other topics and
pointers) his life, work, Relative vs Absolute Truth or the
dance of the manifest within the ever-present awareness of
the nondual. He speaks on many of the topics discussed here,
in an easy manner. Here's the link..with some audio clips.
http://www.enlightenment.com/shop/wilber_more.html

And.. while I'm recommending (and as a segue to the dialogues
on schizophrenia and the vagaries and power of mind), there
is much to ponder in the powerful film "A Beautiful Mind".

with warmth for each of you, Christiana

JOHN METZGER

Thanks for the link, Christiana. I've been looking and
listening for a couple hours. Your friend Metta mentions the
NDS website here. I hope we all follow Gene's suggestion to
get a webcam to enhance the communication/energy among us
crazies here at NDS. Love, John
http://www.enlightenment.com/media/atpcyberconf/digitaldarshanforum.html

___________________________________________________________________

JERRY KATZ

I think its it's sense of humor that keeps the universe
together. I remember once many years ago my cat came home
bathed in oil or grease from its hind quarters down. I was
driving it to the vet to get her bathed and on the way a
piece of paper flew onto my car and got stuck between the
rear view mirror and the car itself. The piece of paper was
smeared with black grease or oil. Never before or after has a
piece of paper got stuck on my car like that in 35 years of
driving. I thought I was definitely being given a message
from 'the universe'. Very shortly after that I got into legal
problems with a slimy, greasy guy (ethically and morally) and
had to go to court with him several times. I felt I was being
told to be on the watch for the something oily and greasy,
and knowing who I was dealing with helped me play my cards.
In the end, I won.

If a person watches, stuff like that can be seen happening
frequently. It actually happens in every portion of
'universe'. Hence the logic in reading tea leaves. Or reading
anything else! The i ching. The universe reveals itself,
past, present and future, at every level. When you think
about it, how could it be otherwise?

In a handful of dirt March the armies Of a thousand nations

------

Nondual activism is subtler than this, but this is
interesting to read:
http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Writings/dialogue.shtml

__________________________________________________________________

JAN SULTAN contributes:

Try to understand this point. Rational creatures such as men
and angels possess two principal faculties, a knowing power
and a loving power. No one can fully comprehend the uncreated
God with his knowledge; but each one, in a different way, can
grasp Him fully through love. Truly this is the unending
miracle of love: that one loving person, through his love,
can embrace God, whose being fills and transcends the entire
creation. And this marvelous work of love goes on forever,
for he whom we love is eternal. Whoever has the grace to
appreciate the truth of what I am saying, let him take my
words to heart, for to experience this love is the joy of
eternal life while to lose it is eternal torment.

from: The Cloud of Unknowing [author: unknown English mystic
of the fourteenth century]

--------

He whose sense of personal doership has dropped off through
intuitive in-seeing of his nature finds no reason to speak or
do anything. Though in the eyes of ordinary people he may
seem to lead a normal working life, for him nothing exists.

Ramesh S. Balsekar

--------

I am convinced that a more effective way for most of us to
transcend the mind is to beat it at its own game: vigorously
involve it at the beginning in gaining spiritual insights and
convictions that will, in good time, lure our hearts beyond
the limits the mind itself had set for us. When we have
sufficiently rethought, expanded, and replaced our mind's
presuppositions, our hearts will be moved to look to the
transcendent experience that the mind slowly begins to
suspect.

This does not mean that the mind will or can ever adequately
comprehend or portray Eternal Existence, the Source Being
that many call God. But the mind can be filled with new
knowledge in place of its assumption that all of reality is
visible to it. After its initial shock and complaints, the
mind will grow enthusiastic at its new vistas. It is, after
all, a part of us; it's on our side. If we have involved it
in our enterprise, it will in due time readily fall into
silence as it understands that such a course of action
(nonaction) is truly to our (and its) benefit. This will be
especially noticeable once our heart has begun to dance in
response to what the mind has started to parade before it.

from: LEARNING TO DANCE INSIDE by: George Fowler

--------

MEDITATION IS NOT CONCENTRATION, nor is contemplation a
magnificent montage of beautiful thoughts or new and better
convictions. But while contemplation does transcend thinking,
it remains an experience that initially and most readily
results from more accurate, adequate, and higher insight. A
blissful experience of Ultimate Reality will more readily
come to us as a result of spiritual insight and broadened
understandings than it ever will from the imposition of any
degree of bodily and mental discipline we might employ to try
to make our customary self grow quiet. The mind must, indeed,
eventually be quieted and transcended, but this is helped
along more surely by replacing the erroneous content about
which it is chattering than by making direct efforts to
silence or ignore it. You do not get rid of an obsessing
thought by concentrating on getting rid of it. You do so by
supplanting it with other thoughts. Nature abhors a vacuum
nowhere more than in the human mind. If we try simply to turn
the mind off, we have laid an enormous task before ourselves,
indeed. Taking the mind along on our journey to bliss is not
only easier, but also more often successful. And more quickly
so.

from: LEARNING TO DANCE INSIDE by: George Fowler

-------

So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of
the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the
thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you
listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence - your
deeper self - behind or underneath the thought, as it were.
The thought then loses its power over you and quickly
subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind
through identification with it. This is the beginning of the
end of involuntary and compulsive thinking. When a thought
subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream
- a gap of "no-mind." At first, the gaps will be short, a few
seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When
these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace
inside you. This is the beginning of your natural state of
felt oneness with Being, which is usually obscured by the
mind. With practice, the sense of stillness and peace will
deepen. In fact, there is no end to its depth. You will also
feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within: the
joy of Being. It is not a trancelike state. Not at all. There
is no loss of consciousness here. The opposite is the case.
If the price of peace were a lowering of your consciousness,
and the price of stillness a lack of vitality and alertness,
then they would not be worth having. In this state of inner
connectedness, you are much more alert, more awake than in
the mind-identified state. You are fully present. It also
raises the vibrational frequency of the energy field that
gives life to the physical body. As you go more deeply into
this realm of no-mind, as it is sometimes called in the East,
you realize the state of pure consciousness. In that state,
you feel your own presence with such intensity and such joy
that all thinking, all emotions, your physical body, as well
as the whole external world become relatively insignificant
in comparison to it. And yet this is not a selfish but a
selfless state. It takes you beyond what you previously
thought of as "your self." That presence is essentially you
and at the same time inconceivably greater than you. What I
am trying to convey here may sound paradoxical or even
contradictory, but there is no other way that I can express
it.

From: Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now"

--------

Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap
in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your
attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of
the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do.
In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity
and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and
aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation. In
your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any
routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and
giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end
in itself. For example, every time you walk up and down the
stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to
every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally
present. Or when you wash your hands, pay attention to all
the sense perceptions associated with the activity: the sound
and feel of the water, the movement of your hands, the scent
of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after
you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the
flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful
sense of presence. There is one certain criterion by which
you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of
peace that you feel within.

From: Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now"

__________________________________________________________________

RON WHITAKER

But when the mind is so filled with these spiritual insights
and the heart aches to be connected the pain can be so
intense. Then the mind is force to recognize it's own limits
and allow the silence to grow and allow the heart it's time
or connection. Much pain as presented lately by Eckart Tolle.

__________________________________________________________________

HELLMAYO

Hi JPS,

Only you can know for sure if you are awake. You must know
for yourself.

On the way to full awakening there may be many 'false
readings' i.e. events that seem like awakening.

There is a lot of confusion around awakening teaching -
Advaita especially.

The Advaita being promoted in the West is not that of Ramana
Maharshi or Papaji though it claims to be.

Ramana Maharshi and Papaji taught differently according to
David Godman has compiled and published extensively on Ramana
Maharshi and was invited by Papaji write a 3 volume biography
'Nothing Ever Happened'.

Ramesh Balsekar whose primary teacher was Nisargadatta
Maharaj has been described as an exponent of Ramana
Maharshi's advance teaching. People who read Ramesh 'think'
they understand Ramana but they don't.

Ramana Maharshi' explicitly taught a method called 'Self
Enquiry', but not all of the time, and it is seldom practised
now. Consequently few teachers understand real 'Self
Enquiry'.

Ramana's real teaching was silent transmission, words were
considered an inferior method. Yet, the majority of so-called
seekers are attracted to words because they can see and hear
them, and then swap them like bubblegum cards in teh
playground.

Ironically, the subject of 'transmission' is taboo in many
advaita circles, and yet it is transmission which awakens a
seeker.

It is via transmission that the teacher and the seeker can
discern each other.

If you experience peace, bliss and No-Mind then these are
good indicators that your teacher is an advanced soul. But
you haven't arrived yet. We can expect that many seekers will
run away at the is point - on the brink of infinity - because
that has been your pattern.

The Hindu solution to the 'fight or flight' instinct is to
create sannyasins (renounciate sadhus), who have give up all
their rights in this life, put them in a remote
mountain/jungle ashram and give them the basic necessities,
then they might just stick around long enough to get
'enlightened'.

The West has no such solution (though controversial 'Advaita
plus' teacher Andrew Cohen has created hierarchical
communities). Many visible teachers are on a perpetual
international circuit of whistle- stop satsangs. They
dispense temporary bliss, Papaji called them 'lollipops', to
the adoring fans just as wedding couples distribute sweets to
children.

To get enlightened through the vehicle of a teacher you must
be prepared to sit, sit & sit. Buddha sat. You must. It's
easier to sit with a teacher, and you get back up if you go
the wrong way.

False teachers typically do not allow time for a real
teaching relationship to develop because it exhausts their
limited verbal repertoire and exposes their lack of depth.

Have you ever tried to put a really important question to a
visiting teacher when there was 45 minutes left for questions
and 20 other people with their hands raised?

The full and deep teaching cannot reveal itself via the
spoken word in public introductory meetings, so you will
probably get a standard answer. Consquently, the seeking
circuit is rife with naive and simplistic ideas about
Awakening and Enlightenment.

A real teacher will have a serious study group - introductory
meetings do not go deep enough.

A false teacher will provide entertainment based around
ritual much like Morris Cerullo's Christian Healing Crusades.
Chuck Spezzano's Psychology of Vision events use emotional
songs and on-stage enactments of forgiveness with surrogate
parents. Rebirth is a common theme in Ancient Mystery Schools
including Freemasonry and Christianity.

Exciting parlour tricks seen on the advaita scene are the
classic 'advaita shuffle', 'Who's in?', 'The Three Card Find
the "I"' trick and 'Truth, dare or promise'. These devices
are fail-safes. If they don't work in producing awakening
(and they typically don't in the hands of an unawakened
teacher) they at least provide entertainment, bewilderment
and confusion. The Zen equivalent of these 'slick-tricks' (as
Andrew Cohen calls them but avows to never use) are koans,
tea ceremonies and kwat slaps.

Perhaps your question 'Is this not IT???' is rhetorical.
Ideally I would like to see what is going in your entire
make-up, and talk to you before making an assessment. Papaji
declared many people awake but they did not maintain it.
'Staying enlightened' is the title of an article I wrote, and
is a topic that is doing the rounds.
http://www.oshana.org/articles/staying_enlightened.html

best wishes

love dave

Greetings Dave, ... it seems to me that only the designated
few dispense enlightenment via transmission,... The bliss
thing comes and goes but not the recognition. Why do we need
an exclusive with Dave? No one can know the stuff you face on
the inside except the Real You just like the rest of us forms
of the Real I. Like Santa, Awareness knows when you are
sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been
bad or good so be good for goodness sake. So my question
is... when I have been in contact with you I feel a lovely
feeling that comes and goes.... but at all times whether
caught up in the illusion of the Matrix or absorbed in the
recognition that Spirit holds All including all human
reactions in Being.... how can there be any transmission from
Dave to Paulette that is Real? I Am always in I Am Presence
whether distracted or not... what is gained by these remarks
of enlightenment exclusively via contact with Dave, Papaji,
Siri Ramana... especially once I Am is recognized... even
these questions to you don't seem separate from I Am... just
a ditty dance in questioning the creation of another illusion
of dependence on Dave for "something" not already "Available
and Present" as I Am with regard to the appearance and
disappearance of Paulette and/or Dave???? Is this not IT???
How can I not Love You, you? J.P.S

___________________________________________________________

GENE POOLE

The question of 'how to deal with negative emotions' is a big
and important question.

It should be understood that 'no effort is wasted' by the
body-mind complex. If something is initiated by this
wonderful 'complex machine', it is for a purpose, even if
that purpose is not seen, and even if that purpose is
understood and denied. The body is not 'rational' and will
provide very mysterious and provocative material for us to
ponder.

Nonetheless, the body has (or more properly is) an
intelligence, one which precedes 'ego consciousness' in terms
of both personal age and also species evolution.

According to Hawaiian Huna, the body has a mind; and this
mind of the body is in charge of memory, and communicates
with 'ego consciousness' by means of specific images which
appear in the mind. Huna says that the body-mind sends these
pictures to the mind, and that it can send any imagery to the
mind. This is how memory actually works, it is the mind of
the body which delivers what we request.

Please consider that dreams are such images.

Now, it makes all the difference just what kind of
relationship ego-consciousness has with the mind of the body
(also called 'low self'). If ego consciousness (also called
'middle self') has been hogging the show, has been tyrannical
over the low self, has been self- obsessed, then the
relationship is strained, and the mind of the body (low self)
exists in a state of semi- paralysis, lives in fear and
especially lives in dejection, from neglect, and sadness,
from literally, lack of appreciation, not to mention lack of
recognition and respect.

So the whole person (consisting of three parts... beginning
to sound familiar?) is not integrated, and the powers of the
body are in abeyance, shriveled, and the mind of the body is
virtually far away, where it has been sent in exile, for the
vainglory of the mid-manager, who would take all the credit,
not- \withstanding that the mid-manager (middle self,
ego-consciousness) would literally not have a leg to stand
on, if it were not for the body.

Negative emotion _can be_ a dejection and literal mourning
being conducted by the body, in its lonely yet utterly
responsible vigil. It is expected to perform flawlessly, yet
is not remembered or even acknowledged.

The significance of the plaintive 'howl of the lone wolf', is
the terrible isolation and neglect of this fabulous mind, a
mind whose brilliance literally beats our hearts and breathes
our lungs and regulates the most minute details of
cell-membrane permeability, and not least by any means, whose
vitality is responsible for the integrity of our immune
system. All of these 'autonomic' tasks are actually
accomplished as the natural forte' of the brilliant mind of
the body.

The mind of the body, the 'low self', needs recognition and
love, at least as much as your dear pet dog or cat.

And if the busy and important mid-manager spends the time and
the effort to calm and still 'itself', to put aside the
managerial tasks for a while, and opens itself to the
feelings of the lower self, the feelings will flood in, and
overwhelmingly so, no reunion of long- lost siblings can
match this time of painful reconciliation and the getting
acquainted, like finding the brother you did not even know
you had, cringing beneath the basement stair in the dark,
quivering in shock and hunger and so deeply longing for love
and acceptance, that his teeth are chattering in his
intensity of confusion and despair.

It is up to you to embrace and give yourself to this Being,
to allow yourself to go to sleep in his hairy arms, wiry with
stringy muscle, and to resolve to yourself that you will take
him on his own terms, now and forever more, for he is you,
your completeness, and your anchor in this living universe.
He is your URL in the web of the worlds; he is the lens
through which your life-force is focused.

Consider and do this, and I can promise the the issue of
negative emotion will take on a much deeper significance, and
at the same time, will become your guide and reminder to
allow your exiled primitive self to come home, to be given
what it wants, the food, the warmth and most importantly, to
be appreciated for what it does. And if you do this, it will
do for you, something which you may not be able to even come
close to imagining, at this time.

How soon and how naturally we corrupt our children, how we
betray their birthright, to take from them their heritage and
their power, to remove from their natural sight the one who
is fully there, we create a 'mind' and a 'personality' and we
do this to them, to our children, and then we find fault with
our own creation, and we set our poor children on a lifelong
quest looking for what we took and this doing is a tradition,
an automatic gesture of obeisance to the dark overlords of
fear who are the creatures of our nightmares, and those
nightmare creatures are our parents, and most probably you,
if you are a parent.

And this is the lock and the seal placed upon the child and
it is the enjoining of awareness against the whole in favor
of the favored parts, and those parts are the ones allowed in
the places of commerce, to make us ripe for the easy
extraction of our resources. We are raised to become
merchants of our own integrity, which we sell to the bidder
who can most closely mimic the ideals by which we were
'raised', to key and cue our obedience to the father- image,
the dark god of approval and disapproval, and we simply have
no idea that this is the stream of our lives, covered and
tidied and perfumed as it is, and the whole thing buried, and
then those which buried it themselves buried, and the eternal
sphinx is the mute animal who still guards this ancient
secret, the mute animal of our forgotten and neglected animal
selves, the brilliant mind of the body, passed over in the
glory of ego-against-ego competition which is the hallmark of
'human civilization'.

If I have succeeded in my goal of transmitting evocative
imagery, if the fantastic unlikely and seemingly absurd
description has to a degree moved you, it is because I am
able to give this up from the one who would speak thus, if it
had the power of speech, or could at least a express a
measure of the passion which comes with the literal memory of
all of what is life 'eternal' from the beginning, the
successes and the brilliant learning and strange and
wonderful twists and turns, the literal memory of all of that
and this, and the pressure which acts and enacts 'if I had a
mouth I would scream', and that is the tragedy, and the hope,
of us all, overriding as we do the one who is the faithful
horse, helpless but to love and forgive the drunken rider,
who is starving and abusing and expecting, never letting
rest, our faithful vehicle, the mind of the body, the low
self. May we find it and find love and peace with it, for it
is ourselves. May we sleep in its arms, to awaken healed and
whole and in the best of love.

The first principle is 'pay attention to the communication'.

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