Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
#1596 - Friday, October 24, 2003 - Editor: Gloria
There are no passengers
on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
--Marshall
McLuhan
Daily Zen
Do not say, “I understand! I have attained mastery!” If you have attained mastery, then why are you going around asking other people questions? As soon as you say you understand Zen, people watch whatever you do and whatever you say, wondering why you said this or that. If you claim to understand Zen, moreover, this is actually a contention of ignorance. What about the saying that one should “silently shine, hiding one’s enlightenment?” What about “the path is not different from the human mind?”
- Foyan (1067–1120)
The clouds that wander through
the sky have no roots, no home,
Nor do the distinctive thoughts floating through the mind.
Once the Self-mind is seen,
Discrimination stops.
-Tilopa, "The Song of Mahamudra"
From "Teachings of the Buddha," edited by Jack Kornfield, 1993. www.shambhala.com.
Viorica Weissman ~ Million Paths
Ojai , California Tuesday , April 19 , 1983
...................................
That which is immeasurable cannot be measured by words. We are always trying to put the immeasurable into a frame of words, and the symbol is not the actual. But we worship the symbol, therefore we always live in a limited state. So with the clouds hanging on the tree tops and all the birds quiet, waiting for the thunderstorm, this is a good morning to be serious, to question the whole of existence, to question the very gods and all human activity. Our lives are so short and during that short period there is nothing to learn about the whole field of the psyche, which is the movement of memory; we can only observe it. Observe without any movement of thought, observe without time, without past knowledge, without the observer who is the essence of the past. Just watch. Watch those clouds shaping and reshaping, watch the trees, the little birds. It is all part of life. When you watch attentively, with diligence, there is nothing to learn; there is only that vast space, silence and emptiness, which is all-consuming energy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
J. Krishnamurti Krishnamurti to Himself His Last Journal
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gill Eardley ~ Allspirit Inspiration
Some people become deeply
peaceful and-almost luminous just
before they die, as if something is shining through the
dissolving
form.
Sometimes it happens that very ill or old people become almost
transparent, so to speak, in the last few weeks, months, or even
years of their lives. As they look at you, you may see a light
shining through their eyes. There is no psychological suffering
left. They have surrendered and so the person, the mind-made
egoic "me," has already dissolved. They have "died
before they
died" and found the deep inner peace that is the realization
of the deathless within themselves.
~Eckhart Tolle 'Stillness Speaks'
Freedom means letting
go. People just
do not care to let go
everything. They do
not know that the
finite is the price of the
infinite, as death is
the price of immortality.
Spiritual maturity
lies in the readiness to
let go of
everything. The giving up is the
final step. But
the real giving up is in
realizing that there
is nothing to give up,
for nothing is your
own. It is like deep
sleep - you do not
give up your bed when
you fall asleep - you
just forget it.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj
Ben Hassine ~ NDS Limitations
Jerry I read your comments. I
felt I had to write a word or two in response.
I agree with you this can be an important subject to reflect on,
so we all
can turn within and find out. Let me try. (O what torture, here I
go again).
I have the feeling the only guru worth the name is the Friend.
The Friend is
just another word for the simple and evident fact of I AM-ness.
All is
basically I AM-ness. I AM-ness doesn't demand anything. It is
open, simple
and inviting clarity.
So, why complicate things? The
direct path is to stand alone and not depend
on any outside circumstances or people in the role of teachers;
for what is
there to teach? There is nothing to teach. The only thing that
has to be
understood is that you rather have to unlearn, give up and let
go. This is a
very intense and often painfully confronting process, you will
have to go
all the way down to "ground zero". I came to the living
insight that deep
crises in human life are very direct invitations to burst out of
our
self-made prison of concepts and humbly admit we know nothing at
all. All
knowledge and opinions are shallow, temporary, ever-changing and
therefore
unreal, delusional. Even these words, I admit. Freedom lies in
the conscious
acknowledgement of these facts. This leads one to living insight
and the so
longed after SACRED PEACE BEYOND UNDERSTANDING.
Enlightenment is a return to our home: simple unborn openness.
Teachers can
be living pointers and encouragement to find out (for) yourself,
nothing
more, nothing less. These teachers are rare I guess.
The way home is not a
mechanical process of accumulation, there are no
key-figures that can hand over crucial pieces of information to
proceed on
our path to some kind of super-conscious everlasting
"high". In my view this
is a terrible misconception of the whole concept of liberation
-more
concepts, I admit again, yes indeed.
The way home is, rather, a
gentle, silent, "organic" and almost unconscious
non-process of undoing, not-knowing, going blank, an impersonal
emptying wit
hout volition of all the pain, confusion, clinging, sorrow,
suffering in
other words: dying of self. There is nothing mechanical about it.
There is
nothing really that can describe this non-process accurate. There
is this
Intelligent Love that swallows you up in a healing deed of
compassion.
Exactly this intelligent Compassion is the Teacher to be heard.
And that
Teacher is always available for free: you are that Teacher, it is
the
splendidly shining, boundless diamond within the heart, the
compassionate
Friend!
He/She/It is the most sacred of sacred. This Teacher is not
asking for
ANYTHING: it is only giving. Love for the sake of Love.
So I would question
anyone claiming to act out of this compassion and build
a profitable, hierarchical rubbish organisation out of it.
I never understood why there are so many teachers$ and book$ out
there, or
do I? What, for heavens sake, are we looking for? Are we looking
for
freedom?
I don't think we are truly looking for freedom. I think we are
looking for
the ultimate psychological security. Freedom in a way is the
opposite: total
insecurity!
We simply have to deal with our suffering and fear in a mature
and
intelligent way. That is sadhana. To go to the root of it, alone,
shy,
humble and eager to discover what is beyond the dark little
corner of me in
the hostile world. And the Beyond is waiting to Love for the sake
of Love.
The rest is really entertainment.
Well I don't know, I am not so original or intellectual but this
I will
repeat over and over for the rest of my little miserable life :-)
Love,
Ben.
~ ~ ~
Hi Ben,
What you say describes where this list is coming from, but has
never been
set forth in the list description, and should. This list isn't
about gurus,
nor is there an official resident guru, though understandably
some will view
certain members as such.
This list vision is closer to the original vision of the I Am
list, which
was started in May of '98. It was simply to speak from the I Am,
in the way
people know what that is. Some speak from beyond that. Some are
trying to
hold onto the I Am. This was Nisargadatta's instruction, to stay
with the I
Am. There's no reason to do a whole guru song and dance as people
are doing
and which I don't favor. My whole donut crusade was probably a
reaction to
that song and dance. Just go out for a donut. Just stay with the
I Am. Just
make it simple. That's what this list -- and what (spiritual)
life -- is about.
Jerry
Ben Hassine ~ NDS
Kierkegaard selections/It's cloudy outside and I am inside
I
When around me all has
become still, solemn as a starlit night, when the soul is all
alone in the world, there appears before it not a distinguished
person, but the eternal power itself. It is as though the heavens
parted , and the I chooses itself, or, more correctly, it
accepts itself. The soul has then seen the highest, which no
mortal eye can see and which never can be forgotten. The
personality receives the accolade of knighthood which ennobles it
for eternity. He does not become someone other than he was
before, he becomes himself; consciousness unites.
II
And when you have died or
died to yourself, to the world, then you also died to all
immediacy in yourself, also to your understanding. it is when all
confidence in yourself or in human support, and also in God in an
immediate way, is extinct, when every probability is extinct,
when it is dark as on a dark night, it is indeed death we are
describing, then comes the life-giving spirit and brings faith.
III
The truth is a trap: you cannot get it without it getting you;
you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing
you.
IV
My depression is the most
faithful mistress I have known - no wonder, then, that I return
the love.
V
To come to oneself in self- knowledge. In self-knowledge. In any
other knowledge you are away from yourself, you forget yourself,
are absent from yourself?There is only one kind of knowing that
brings a person completely to himself -- self-knowledge; this is
what it means to be sober, sheer transparency
VI
Which is more difficult, to
awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he
is awake?
VII
When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world ? no
matter how imperfect ? becomes rich and beautiful, it consists
solely of opportunities for love.
~ ~ ~
"You know quite well, deep
within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a
single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love
your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your
aversion that hurts, nothing else."
--Herman Hesse
When I hear
somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask,
'Compared to what?'
-- Sydney Harris
~ ~ ~
Many years ago, I read about a
study in which people from different walks of
life were asked: What is the most profound way you feel loved?
The number
one response was: "When someone's really listening."
-- Mary Manin Morrissey in "No Less Than Greatness"