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Nondual Highlights Issue # 1400 Saturday, April 12, 2003 Editor: Christiana
AnneChris HarshaSatsangh@yahoogroups.com
I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet. --Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
Jeannie HarshaSatsangh@yahoogroups.com
there is no right
there is no wrong
no height to climb
no depth to fall
live from the heart
and love from your soul
Art: Francene Hart: Forest Cathedral http://www.francenehart.com/
TAT Foundation
Emerging Spiritual Voices
II: Taking a Step Within.
A Conference to be held April 25th - 27th, 2003, in Wheeling, WV.
http://www.tatfoundation.org/april/2003.htm
Bob Fergeson
This month's commentary is about what I call the "Listening Attention," a meditation technique, if you will, which I've found to be a gateway to our Inner Self. The poet John Davis once said he felt the highest meditation was "listening with the eyes." This is a good starting definition. Another would be to look with attention, but without interpretation: to listen, the attention turned both inward and outward at the same time, with no thought or expectation. No expectation, judging or defining; no thought, no mind. This combined attention uses both the inner ear and eye, and is turned towards the inner heart and the outer world simultaneously. It is passive in that it does not project an image, or thought; it is active for the same reason, in that it is a pure attention, an active not-doing. There is no sense of an 'I' involved, for that would mean the springing forth of an image, which the attention would become identified with. It does not entail a motionless, inert body, for it can be found while engaging in activity.
Jim Burns At Home with the Inner Self
When you begin to have experiences of the information from within, you learn how perfectly attuned the inner mind is to your immediate and momentary circumstances. The fountainhead lies totally within
Gene Poole
- snips from a longer post
Message # 71542 on NondualitySalon@yahoogroups.com
The real battle is for memory-space. The individual who is 'cultivated', becomes aware of persistent figures inhabiting memory, and learns to flush the memory-caches voluntarily, at will.
The cultivated individual is thus in a minority, statistically. Such individuals shun mass movements and mass religions, but unless there is constant vigilance, the _tendency_ to populate memory with persistent images (which cast solid shadows) will still dominate.
Thus, we have 'alternative' religions or quasi- religions, which utilize persistent objects of memory, in the exact mode as do populist and proprietary movements. It seems that Advaita is becoming one of those.
The most difficult life to live, is one in which objects are not allowed to accumulate and remain in memory. This lifestyle is called nonattachment', and is as rare as a commune of hermits.
We have the lineage of methodologists whose goals are nothing less than the complete emptying of memory-space. Chief among these methodologists is the disciple of Buddha named Nagarjuna.
Nagarjuna perfected a method of emptiness which has never been, to my knowledge, surpassed. Nagarjuna knew with certainty, that if a teaching is considered to be 'contents' of mind, that the result would not persist, due to the vying for memory-space between various teachers, and religious power-blocks. The mind that is fully inhabited by persistent and successful projectors of solid shadows, is not a free mind.
Nagarjuna, as a disciple of Buddha, designed a method of teaching which is embedded in the dialectic of the teachings themselves. The ideas and words of the teachings, are designed to gradually abolish the contents of the mind, leaving the mind free for the use of the owner of the mind. Thus the dialectic of emptiness, considered one of the most challenging of teachings, but one which abolishes the idea of "attainment by sustaining of solid illusions".
After reading all of this, if you have followed my attempt to convey a certain understanding, you will see the usefulness of an empty bucket.
The empty bucket is ready for use.
The goal is not to have an empty mind, but instead, a mind that can emptied.
A mind that is clogged by 'tradition' is less useful than one which is empty and ready for use by the owner. Such a mind is called 'free', as in, unencumbered.
==Gene Poole==
If less is more, nothing is everything.
Ken Wilber's
new project The Multiplex 
Paul Tillich once commented, “What we call the ‘Renaissance’ was participated in by about one thousand people.” That is a jolting thought, but revolutionary endeavors often start in exactly that fashion, with a small number of evolved souls exploring new territories of culture and consciousness. The Multiplex, a multidimensional matrix of integral learning, is such an endeavor, grounded in knowledge and compassion, theory and practice, care and justice, consciousness and culture. Want to participate in history? At this time, the Multiplex itself—the world’s first Integral Learning Community—is under construction, due to launch in summer/fall 2003. In essence, the Multiplex is an online geodesic Dome with some 30 individual websites linked through the Integral Commons, allowing thousands of individuals from around the world to participate in a Rising Culture of Consciousness.
Read Pete Seesaw,
Skogen and others share bilingually
advaitayzen@yahoogroups.com
El detective del Zen investiga el ser
En rodillas de viento galgo
y huella fuí tras de ti, en mi
presencia transportado por ágil luz de estrella de sentido en
sentido hasta la ausencia. Atravesaste, amor, los egoísmos que
un
sílice de lágrimas desveló, yuxtaponiendo abismos sobre
abismos en
mi insoluble soledad de hielo. La gran araña de la lluvia teje
con
agua y viento telarañas móviles. Que mañana serán cuando
despeje.
Superficie de vidrio sin quebranto, como serán mis ojos cuando
inmóviles hayan llorado ya todo su llanto.
Miguel Angel Asturias
Pursuing your footprints I
went
Riding a greyhound wind.
I traveled by starlight from sense
To sense until I found your absence.
Love, you traversed the distance
From selfishness to selfishness with
Crystallized insomniac tears. Piling on
Abysm upon abysm in the insoluble
Icy loneliness. The
spider rain weaves movable
Webs with wind and water.
What morning will it be that all is clear?
Oh, glassy surfaces without sorrows, how would
My eyes look without my tears?
Jerry Katz to NDSN@yahoogroups.com
Personal Sabbath - Special to the Bonita Banner
Charles Lewis:
Relax and find spirituality 
The Sabbath is intended to be a day of rest, a time when we can drop our pressured agendas and bask in the goodness with which God has surrounded us.
Traditionally, it's a time to honor God by purposely changing our pace. Hence, when I talk about a Personal Sabbath, I'm referring to a time of international introspection free of expectations. Henri Nouwen calls this "The three phases of spirituality." First, is the movement from loneliness to solitude. Here the issue is a matter of learning how to make our loneliness productive. That's quite a challenge for most of us. Victims of competitive individualism, most of us find it nearly impossible to just settle down and enjoy purposeful inactivity. We have to be doing something, getting something done, turning some kind of profit. Well, if we ever learn to appreciate solitude, we'll discover that God works wonders when we feel as though we are standing still. In fact, only when we successfully discard our agendas are we capable of fully appreciating the gift of the moment.
Second, consider the
movement from hostility to hospitality. One of the most important
aspects of our spirituality is the manner in which we consider
other people. Are they a nuisance or a resource? Does a stranger
spark feelings of danger or opportunity? How important is the way
a person looks? And finally, is it possible for anyone to really
"know us?" The challenge is to master the art of
finding God in other
people. When we manage that, our spiritual horizons
explode.
Third, think of the pathway
from illusion to prayer. It is unfortunate that
most of us have been taught to view prayer as something we
control,
something we practice, something we do. To the contrary, deep
life-changing spiritual prayer is something God controls, God
practices
and God does in us. Our task is to identify and remove our
illusions
about prayer thereby giving God a fertile field in which to
work.
I know a lot of this just
doesn't fit with our time-honored ideas of
spirituality. Maybe that's why there is a good chance that a few
people
who never consider themselves spiritual are something to the
contrary.
Relax! God loves you! Look up! He cares!
Art: Francene Hart: Himalayan Passage
Jody Radzik in the new issue of
The Inner Traveler by Meditation Society of America
Identity, The Self, and the Snare of Significance
Why don't we know who we
really are? Why are so many of us limited
to the idea of being a person instead of understanding ourselves
as
limitlessness itself? Such questions are especially perplexing
given the
fact that we've never been anything else! What exactly is Maya's
veil,
this trickery that has us seeing snakes instead of ropes?
The process of identity
forms the crux of the problem. We identify as
the individual person we know ourselves to be. We have always
known
ourselves as this individual, and as much as we've changed over
the
course of our lives, we've always been just us. It's all we've
ever known,
and that's a clue to who we really are.... read the rest of the article at http://www.meditationsociety.com/itV216168/index.html
Benny NondualitySalon@yahoogroups.com
The cross of space and time
The cross of four directions
You are not stained by events
small wrinkles in earthly fabric
Ascension to, reversal, and becoming
The being, unmovable in this world
where man has ascribed his symbols
projected his tiny thoughts and
self enwrapped feelings
You spread out to eternity
Then curve back around toward
the little house on the prarie
Then you tie this knot and taste
of four foldness and vanilla
Bobby Graham HarshaSatsangh@yahoogroups.com
Fear of Pain
Today I went to my dentist. She is doing a lot of work for me in trade for artwork. And there is a problem. She lost a daughter two years ago, a child, and she is not recovering from it. There is a brittle barrier between her and any event that may be a bridge to her memories of her lost child. I, of course, must honor her reticence. The work I was to have traded her was to be a portrait of the little girl and also a portrait of her living daughter.
<snip>
Beauty is a category of experience. Everything is beautiful but sometimes we block that beauty. The more we want to hurt ourselves the more we block the beauty.
Beauty is real but
dependent on people and art must deal with beauty
and its blockage.
If the mind's fear of pain
blocks the perception of the pain then the
heart never has the chance to absorb it, and the mechanisms of
life in
the metaphysical sense, are eventually damaged.
The heart is as big as the ocean. The fear of pain is in the head.
I left Dr. Ann with two
paintings until she overcomes her fear that she
will be consumed by pain and I can paint her lost
treasure.
People are so lovely.
~ Painting of Athena by Bob Graham