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Christiana, Nonduality Salon

Recently I (and others here) have enjoyed live or archived  stream online audio interviews with authors/teachers who  point to facets of nonduality (ok, I realize that that statement  is an oxymoron). If others know of such archives, upcoming  interviews or interesting audio clips, please post them here  or send them to me directly. Here is a link to three interviews  with David Hawkins, and one for an upcoming interview with  Gangaji.  

Christiana  

http://www.eaglecondor.net/drhawkins.shtml  

Gangaji radio interview on April 23, 2002
http://www.gangaji.org/index.asp

Gangaji will be a guest on the radio program, Vibrational Voyage, on
Tuesday, April 23, 2002 from 3:00-4:00 p.m (PST). The program airs on KKUP,
Cupertino 91.5 FM. The signal is heard in many areas from Monterey to
Oakland. If you have a 56k modem or faster, you can listen to the program on
the internet as KKUP does live streaming. Instructions can be located on the
KKUP web site at http://www.kkup.com  

Viorica Weismann
Nonduality Salon  

Fame or integrity: which is more important?
Money or happiness: which is more valuable?
Success or failure: which is more destructive?

If you look to others for fulfillment,
you will never truely be fulfilled.
If your happiness depends on money ,
you will never be happy with yourself.

Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.
----------------------

Tao Te Ching
Lao-Tzu  

A Buddha-bellyful of koans, silliness, and modern technology prove spiritual trips can be as outlandish as drug-induced ones. 2.7 MB, Flash

http://hotwired.lycos.com/animation/collection/peter_richardson/shinji/

The God Who Loves You
Carl Dennis, 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Practical Gods  

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.

As I was reading the 'prattlings' online there was a knock at the door. A mentally challenged neighbor wanted to talk about coming to the rehab place where I work. Before the conversation was over, we had visited the heaven of his dream, where Moses carried a big stick with a statue of Jesus on it that came to life. He explained his dreams had something to do with witnessing his mother's death, by his father, with a baseball bat, when he was a child. Marijuana helped a little, he said, but his wife, deaf and mute, didn't like the smell, so he quit smoking. He wanted to ride with me to work as his car was out-of-order and he was broke, eating macaroni and cheese a lot.  John   

G. K. Chesterton
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour. Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terror of nature; he is strange as the stars, reckless and indifferent as the rain…That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one's duty towards humanity, but one's duty towards one's neighbour. The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or pleasurable…But we have to love our neighbour because he is there - a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation.  

Okay, maybe we take this spirituality business a little too seriously.

After all, it should be joyful and fun and free and easy if it's going to be
anywhere nearly as good as regular old wonderful experiences. It should add
to and increase them, make life even more beautiful and precious.

Don't stop me from having fun and tell me it's spiritual.

If being in love with the divine were not a lot more wonderful than not
being, I wouldn't be. I am not in this to be a holy man. I love to love
divinely, laugh, enjoy, be purposeful, feel happy.

There are wonderful people who do not claim spirituality who are nevertheless
delightful to be around, loving, kind, and in every way but officially,
divinely inspired.

You've just got to love ordinary goodness.

It is the divine plan.

There really isn't anything more.

Highly advanced spiritual goals and esoteric awareness are meaningless and
even negated if there is not that ordinary quality of kindness, loving,
humor, tolerance, living story.

Going into the silence is housecleaning.

Then you can invite people in.

Eman8tions
Copyright © 2002  by John MacEnulty
4/16/2002, St. Louis, MO   Web sites:
http://hometown.aol.com/eman8tions/myhomepage/business.html
http://www.geocities.com/eman8tions

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  http://lightgate.net/illusion/enlightenment.mv  
Q.: You seem to be a teacher in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi. Do you see yourself that way?

A.: Ramana Maharshi had no lineage. He had ample time to create one and did not. He did not even want an ashram. He barely agreed to speak or teach. How then can anyone claim to be in his lineage, and further, what is the motivation to claim this? I have the highest regard for Ramana, and I honor him each day by having nothing to do with him.

---Steven Harrison, The Question To Life's Answers  

truevision http://groups.yahoo.com/group/truevision/

Dear friends:
I am thrilled with the following Kabir website and wanted to share
it with all.

http://www.boloji.com/kabir/index.htm

Enjoy!
Doug

Da Free John

That which is called “realization”, “liberation”. “God-union”, or
whatever, gets represented to people in various symbolic forms, as
something with lots of planes and worlds, colors, lights and visions,
figures and forms, methods, universes, “inside” and “outside”, going
here, going there, distance, direction, shape. These are all conceptual
communications, symbols, pictures for the mind. Fundamentally, they
exploit your suffering, by motivating you to acquire whatever it is they
represent or hide. True spiritual life is not a motivation to these
symbols, a belief in them, nor even the acquisition of wht they
represent. True spiritual life is the process in consciousness in which
there is understanding, or re-cognition, of suffering, the present
experience.

Where there is no suffering, that which stands out or becomes the
obvious is called “heaven”, “nirvana”, “liberation”, the “Self”,
“Brahman”, “God”, “God-union”, “Truth”, “Reality”. When there is no
dilemma, when Consciousness Itself ceases to take on form or becomes
identical to form, that is what is called “liberation”. The process
that is involved is not one of search based on suffering.. Ordinarily,
if you suffer, you immediately seek to get free, and you attach yourself
to all kinds of hopeful signs. But true life, or spiritual life, is the
reverse of that. Ordinarily, you are seeking, pursuing forgetfulness
from your suffering, your dilemma, your contraction, this separation,
this unconsciousness. You pursue the absense of that in delight,
enjoyment, distraction, search for perfection, search for all kinds of
acquisitions, food, sex, money, good weather, lunch, until this whole
process begins to become uninteresting., You try every resort, either
by contemplation or by actual adventure. You look at every “movie” on
the subject. You seek, until that whole movement in yourself, that
whole reaction to your suffering, which is this search for the absense
of suffering, begins to wind down. Now you begin to realize its
hopelessness. The search begins to lose its ability to occupy you. It
becomes less exotic, less fascinating, less hopeful. Some quality in
consciousness begins to turn away from this whole process of seeking,
this whole reaction to your suffering, and rests in the suffering
itself. Even a vague disinterest in life’s pleasures may come over
you. You beging to realize that you are actually suffering, whereas
before you were completely occupied with your seeking, and suffering
wasn’t really the object of your contemplation. It was just some vague
“whatever”. The search was what involved you. But now you begin to
fall out of your search. You begin to live this suffering. Suffering
becomes your experience, your obsession. It completely absorbs you.
It becomes the object of your meditation. Your actual state becomes
absorbing—this rather than all the things to which you attached yourself
to forget this, to get rid of this. Then you beging to see your
suffering, to re-cognize your suffering. You begin to see, in fact,
what your suffering is. That subtle sensation that is motivating your
whole search becomes the thing that occupies you. You can no longer do
anything about it. You see what suffering itself is, at this moment.
You begin to see it precisely. It is a present activity. You begin to
re-cognize it, to know it again in consciousness. You see this
contraction of your own state, moment to moment, this separation, this
avoidance of relationship. You begin to see this more and more exactly,
specificially. It becomes an overwhelming re-cognition, until that
portion of yourself, that quality of yourself that enjoys the
recognition, that is the intelligence of this re-cognition of suffering,
becomes your intellignece, becomes the very quality of consciousness
that you live, with which you approach all experience moment to moment.
Then, instead of simply suffering, you may enquire of the nature of this
experience, moment to moment. You see beyond this contraction that is
your suffering. And you begin to enjoy that which your chronic activity
and state always prevent.

Your suffering is your own activity. It is something that you are doing
moment to moment. It is a completely voluntary activity.

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