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#1507 - Tuesday, July 29, 2003 - Editor: Jerry
Aerial: The view from above by Jason Hawkes. See the slide show: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/in_pictures/3059875.stm (from Mary Bianco, NDS News)
from
Dreaming the Dark
Starhawk
http://www.angelfire.com/ca/iloveDave/mys.html
...we have
our power to choose, our human will and imagination,
our courage, our passion, our willingness to act and to love. And
we are not, in truth, strangers to this world.
We are part of the circle.
When we plant, when we weave, when we write, when we give birth,
when we organize, when we heal, when we run through the park
while
the redwoods sweat mist, when we do what we're afraid to do, we
are not separate. We are of the world and of each other, and the
power
within us is a great, if not an invincible power. Though we can
be hurt, we
can heal; though each of us can be destroyed, within us is the
power of
renewal.
(seen on AllspiritInspiration)
Jorge
Daniel Morales
from
the Neville Goddard list
Meditations ~ "I AM"
The
problem started with our need to name things, and for practical
purposes
language is very necessary. It's a lot easier to tell another
person in a
conversation the word "tree", than having to walk up to
a tree to physically
point it out.
But when the need came to name this all powerful ever present
power, and
words were created to name it, it also came SEPARATION, the
belief that this
power was away from us -sometimes to be acquired by some
enchantment,
petition, or human/animal sacrifice-. Once the human sense felt
satisfied
that the Gods were "pleased", then they allowed
themselves to let the power
flow and solve their problems.
Back then, they didn't have a "unified theory" like
Einstein was proposing.
Every force of nature, and every human emotion was a God, and
they were
sensitive and expectant to every sign of nature as a sign of
counseling from
the Gods.
In an ancient Greek book "Xenophon", 430?? BC, a Greek
general and lover of horses, wrote that after being stranded with
his troops in Persia, where they went to aid a Persian King
deposed by his brother to regain his throne, but this ex-king
gets killed in battle, so they don't know how to find their way
back to Greece. They ask help from the Gods, and at that moment
someone sneezed, so immediately every one of the soldiers fell to
their knees; that sneeze was taken as a sign from the Gods. The
same in other occasions, when birds happen to fly at the time of
prayer.
Talk about being attune with all basic human life experiences;
now we are
drowned with so much clatter, noise, and sensorial stimulation
that we
couldn't perceive a sign from the Gods unless it felt on our
heads, or
something dramatic like an accident, going to jail, or life
threatening
situation.
What Jesus, Neville and other prophets tried to do, was to bring
that power
back to ourselves, something very difficult to do these days if
we are open
to external suggestions. We have been raised by our parents,
family and
exposed to the media that constantly conditions our powers to
something we
do, or buy, or some pill to take.
Before the world was, (the world of names and superstition) I AM
On my
train ride to New York, and my flight to Los Angeles, the feeling
that persisted was that my life was running out; it was running
out of me
like clutched sand. I didn't feel in any way liberated or changed
by saying
thank you and good-bye. Quite the contrary, I felt the burden of
that weird
affection more deeply than ever. I felt like weeping. What ran
through my
mind over and over were the titles that my friend Rodrigo
Cummings had
invented for books that were never to be written. He specialized
in writing
titles. His favorite was "We'll All Die in Hollywood";
another was "We'll
Never Change"; and my favorite, the one that I bought for
ten dollars, was
"From the Life and Sins of Rodrigo Cummings." All those
titles played in my
mind. I was Rodrigo Cummings, and I was stuck in time and space,
and I did
love two women more than my life, and that would never change.
And like the
rest of my friends, I would die in Hollywood.
I told don Juan all of this in my report of what I considered to
be my
pseudo-success. He discarded it shamelessly. He said that what I
felt was
merely the result of indulging and self-pity, and that in order
to say
good-bye and thank you, and really mean it and sustain it,
sorcerers had to
remake themselves.
"Vanquish your self-pity right now," he demanded.
"Vanquish the idea
that you are hurt and what do you have as the irreducible
residue?"
What I had as the irreducible residue was the feeling that I had
made my
ultimate gift to both of them. Not in the spirit of renewing
anything, or
harming anyone, including myself, but in the true spirit that don
Juan had
tried to point out to me in the spirit of a warrior-traveler
whose only
virtue, he had said, is to keep alive the memory of whatever has
affected
him, whose only way to say thank you and good-bye was by this act
of magic:
of storing in his silence whatever he has loved.
Carlos Castaneda
THE ACTIVE SIDE OF INFINITY
Saying Thank You (from The Other Syntax list)
The
Imperishable, The Joy-giving, The Pain-healing Feet of Siva
! Om Namah Shivaya
Om. Salutations to the Supreme Self.
Om Namah Shivaya
Ma gaccha tvam itas-tato girisa bho mayyeva vasam kuru
svaminn adi-kirata mamaka-manah-kantara simantare /
vartante bahuso mrga mada-juso matsarya-mohadayas
tan hatva mrgaya-vinoda-rucita-labham ca samprapsyasi /
43
O Lord ! Thou Resident of the Mountain !
Thou the Primeval Hunter !
Go not hither and thither, but reside with me alone.
For in the forest of my mind there are many beasts of prey,
like envy, infatuation, and the rest. Killing them,
Thou shalt satisfy Thy fondness for the hunt.
Chandah-sakhi-sikhanvitair dvijavaraih samsevite sasvate
saukhy'apadini kheda-bhedini sudha-saraih phalair dipite
cetah-paksi-sikhamane tyaja vrtha-sancaram anyair alam
nityam Sankara-pada-padma-yugalt-nide viharam kuru //
45
Thou kingly bird of my mind ! Give up thy vain
wanderings
and quest after other things, and sport for ever in the nest of
Siva's feet,
which are resorted to by the birds of holy men
fluttering amidst the branches of the tree of the Vedas,
and which are rendered charming by the fruits of liberation--
imperishable,
joy-giving,
pain-healing,
and nectarine.
(from the SriSankaracharya list)
Vicki
Woodyard
NDS
Nothing
Higher
Yesterday I took a tumble. I was getting dressed to go to
the grocery store
and remembered that I needed to turn the hems under on my new
jeans so that
they wouldn't look so long. I hoisted one leg up on the
clothes hamper so I
could turn the hem under. The hamper turned over and before
I knew it, I was
falling headlong into my vanity stool. (Talk about a
teaching.) My husband
heard me crashing into different objects in the bathroom and came
in to see
what had gone wrong. I tried to explain the sequence in
which the events had
happened, but it was no use. Besides, I was one big scrape.
Today I came across the wonderful story of grace in The
Million Paths posted
by Gloria on Harsha's site. It told of one Anna-Marie and
how grace had
transpired to bring her to Bombay to be with Nisargadatta.
I was moved by
this story as I know many people were. Guru's grace is
right in front of us
even while we are tripping over what is.
So grace is not always evident, so what? When it manifests,
it benefits all of
us.
Vicki Woodyard
http://www.bobwoodyard.com
The Guru is God
By Nanji
June, 2003
I first
tried to write this book 20 years ago, and made what I
feel was an important discovery. That was that my mind was not
clear, not resolved, and I doubted that even if I had poured
all of my energies into writing, I would not have been able to
come up with something that would truly reflect the turmoil
that I was going thru at that time. Doubt has become something
very valuable to me, not just in myself, but doubt of others.
Doubt
may seem like something you don’t want, but it is
actually the very thing that will help you to evolve and grow.
You need to learn to distrust thoughts because they may or may
not be true. And even if they are true, they are only
relatively true. In time you will get more information on that
particular thing, thus obsoleting your prior knowledge. Many
people get stuck at a particular point in their lives, and
seemingly stop learning about themselves, others and life. You
don’t want to wait for some trauma to jar you out of your
own
conditioning.
You are
at a phase, a stage of your development. We are in a
state of becoming and as we go along, our consciousness
actually can expand and we potentially could experience more,
so even that which you experience with your senses is not
absolutely true. This may not seem possible to many reading
this, but I am speaking literally, not just metaphorically.
But in order for you to awaken to this truth, you have to see
your own conditioning and make thinking a conscious process.
Some Buddhists call this mindfulness.
Who Am I?
Fortunately,
I had the unpleasant, yet awakening experience of
finding myself single 12 years ago and thinking that I’d try
the personal ads to find someone to hang out with. Seemingly a
straighforward enough proposition, but one that would be far
more of a revelation to me than I could imagine. In fact, at
the time, I just saw it as a means to an end, a way to use the
technology of the day in order to accomplish what would be
much more difficult using some other method, such as going to
bars or hoping to just bump into someone in the supermarket.
What I
discovered was I wound up asking myself “who am I?”
which was the method that the Indian Saint Ramana Maharshi
would have his students ask themselves. I needed to try and
define myself in a paragraph, maybe two, so that I could give
some woman reading it some idea of who I was. I didn’t
expect
that a simple thing like this would have such profound
implications, but then, all of life really does, if you look
for them.
So who
was I? I scanned other mens’ ads, finding them
dishonest, like fishermen baiting hooks. Superficial things:
age, weight, the fact that they exercised. Most of them said
attractive, but were they? This is before the internet and no
pictures were posted in the newspaper. Most people wrote
superficial facts. Was I this superficial? It appeared I was,
although I have had profound spiritual revelations which
apparently hadn’t transformed me in this aspect.
I wanted
a pretty, younger than me, trim woman to hang out
with. This was at the top of my priorities, or so I thought.
But who was I ? Someone who wanted those things! I can’t
write
that. ’I am someone who has superficial priorities’. It
would’ve been honest, but I decided to just be superficial
and
see how that went. I used to identify with the hippies, was I
still one? I was middle age now, 45, and had a professional
career of sorts. That was the truth. Let’s see ‘Middle
aged
professional man (of sorts) who used to identify as a hippie,
with superficial priorities going thru mid-life crises seeks
younger, pretty woman with perfect body, mental condition
unimportant’. Hmmm, who am I?
Ok, I
was lost on this part of the process. I’d come back to
it. The other part was who was I looking for? Had she asked
herself who she was? Did I care? Really, some part of me did,
but not the part that was at the surface. I had never
approached this girlfriend idea in any scientific way, I had
let my life pretty much just fall together haphazardly and had
the type of results that come from that. 3 failed marriages,
and no idea of who I was or who I wanted to be with. This was
going to be a problem. I did need to find a date, I had been
on my own now for a few months and hadn’t bumped into anyone
in the laundromat and was getting lonely.
Time to
get serious, back to who am I? I finally settled for
cute beatnick, 45. Trim, professional guy. Sounded lame but I
needed something. This gorgeous 35 year old answered my add.
That was easy! We met at the beach and sat down on a blanket
to talk things over. She was upset with me, she felt I had
deceived her, which of course I had. I wasn’t a cute
beatnick.
I was an average looking ex-hippie with a midlife crisis who
had no idea who he was. She was expecting some movie star with
a beret who could quote Allen Ginsberg, who she thought she
wanted. Did she really? It wasn’t the point, it’s who
she
thought she wanted and I wasn’t him. She made up some lame
excuse to end our date quickly, leaving me hurt, disappointed,
and with a real need to define myself accurately and define
the person I was looking for. I really liked the way she
looked, but who she was? It really didn’t matter, and it
should have.
The cute
beatnick idea had to go. I wasn’t a beatnik or
especially cute. I just was, haha. Ok, who am I? I am. Nah,
that won’t work. That works ok for God, but not for me. So,
eventually after many interesting and some very disappointing
results flailing around with identites, I did realize who I
was. I was an ex hippie who was God oriented, a professional
man, average looking and I was looking for a slightly younger
woman. And I wrote that ad and someone who I could hang out
with answered it and ten years later we’re still together.
It
took me two years to figure out who I was. This may not be the
ultimate answer to who I am, but it’s close enough to
reality
to be true. God oriented is a nice, safe, general kind of
description that could say who many of us are. Or maybe you
haven’t even thought about God yet?
The
intention of this book is to give the reader some
information that will hopingly be useful. I can’t say that
any
of it is necessarily new, although you may find some of the
ideas new. It’s old information really, distilled and
transposed from my unique point of view, as the reader’s
viewpoint is also unique. We all have our own histories and
experiences and ways we’ve adapted. My intention is to give
you enlightening information, in a form that will also
entertain you.
Enlightenment
should make life endlessly fascinating, but you
have to keep a light touch, and search for the beauty and
grace in every moment. Even more important, you have to
discover that you have to create the grace and beauty. You are
the one who is responsible for how you are and what you are
experiencing. Now if you think about it, doesn’t this make
perfect sense?
In a
way, this is a twofold chronology, of things that have
already occurred, and a viewpoint that is evolving as I write.
I’m expecting to see some style changes and even attitude
changes, as none of that is fixed, at least not in my case.
While at the same time, trying to stay focused on the
intention of giving the reader useful information without
glamorizing or indulging my own narcissistic tendencies, a
universal human tendency. Nor can I be concerned with any
judgments the reader may be making about anything I am saying.
I ask you to try and suspend those until you’ve read a bit
more. Judgment defines something which is ever-changing.
My
writing style is to continually be dissatisfied with what
I’m writing because my inner view of things seems to be
constantly changing. I write something one day based on how I
am that day but then I change and become a little different
the next day, and what I write doesn’t seem quite current.
So
if I don’t just write something and let it be, this book
will
never get published. I’ll write more books if the public
wants
me to, possibly. Already I’m editing the intro, but I’m
afraid
I’m just going to have to leave it alone, and go with what I
have. I’m already too far along on it. But then, I’ll
probably
edit it, haha. I’ll have to pick a title too which may be
difficult. Originally, it was going to be Hippies, gurus and
angels and may still be the title. I have chosen to remain
anonymous. I have, since beginning my spiritual journey,
shunned too much attention, I am uncomfortable in the
limelight. In fact, I’m a bit of a hermit. But I will answer
any and all serious emails. oak1day566@cs.com
Jan
Sultan
NDS
We are
Rudderless Captainless Ships
buffeted by the high seas of 'what is'
Did someone ask my opinion when they changed me from a dozing,
healthy person into someone who makes workaholics look like lazy
bums? And bringing with it ill health. Nope. Come to think about
it nobody has ever asked my opinion about anything concerning my
life! If you are honest with yourself you will realize that you
too have no say in what happens to you.
There never was 'my' will, it has always been God's will.
Be honest, look around. Is anybody really in control? This coming
from the ultimate self-improvement guru. Yep! I, day by day, got
better and better at everything. I was the captain of my ship,
the master of my destiny ... and all that crap.
I was not honest with myself. I have never been in control of
what happens to me. I have always pretended to be totally in
control.
Now I realize that even 'I' am just a bunch of thoughts/memories
in a brain! I don't even exist outside this brain. So how could
this 'I' have been in control of what happened to this body/mind
entity? No 'I', no captain in this ship, soon you will tell me
that there isn't a ship too!
It was better when I believed in Santa Claus! First I realized
that there was no Santa, then much latter I realized that there
was no me either! Just 'the mind' playing tricks, first being
'me' then being the 'Self', then mixing it all up until I do not
know if I am coming or going!
The only sanity in the silence prior to thoughts. In thoughts
only wisps of smoke ... changing shapes to entertain and confuse.
But then whose decision it is to remain in that silence or not to
remain there? Not mine! Whose decision will it be to surrender to
the will of God or accepting 'what is'? Not mine! What will be
will be.
[Don't tell anyone, but understanding this does bring peace of
mind. Though it will not be your decision to understand or not.]
Benny
NDS
for rudderless
