Nonduality Salon Highlights, #1660

If we pick up the handle, we pick up the pot. Similarly, if we meditate on and develop compassion—the wish that all others be without suffering—we hold within us the essence of all other Dharma practices.

-Geshe Hgawang Dhargyey, "Advice From a Spiritual Friend"

Copyright Wisdom Publications 2001. Reprinted from "Daily Wisdom: 365 Buddhist Inspirations," edited by Josh Bartok, with permission of Wisdom Publications, 199 Elm St., Somerville MA 02144 U.S.A, www.wisdompubs.org.

If You Want To Live Your Soul

The soul within our individual souls
Loves the one who runs and falls down

more than the one who sits and watches.
The soul within soul lives in a lover.

Consider this metaphor: how you love is
open sky. These personal selves are

the separate roofs of a town. Your tongue,
the guttering where words flow. If the

roof's not clean, the water-words get thick
and murky. Some people have elaborate

systems that drain water from other roofs.
This is not wise. There's a false eloquence

to it. A lover is one who waters a garden
from the rain barrel that fills under his

own roof. Roses that grow from that have
tears in them. Sometimes the scale pans may

weigh correctly, but the balancer is off.
A sweet doctor may give bitter medicine.

A foot finds the right shoe in the dark.
Love moves on its way through the pleasures

it feels. Even though the time you live in
is violent and frightening, you're safe in

Noah's boat. If you want to know who someone
is, hang around with those close by. They

know. The rule that covers everything is:

How you are with others, expect that back.

If you want to know God, enjoy the company
of lovers. If you want to be thought a great

person, learn some subtle point and say it
with many variations as the answer to every

question. If you want to live your soul,
find a friend like Shams and stay near.

'The Soul of Rumi' Translations by Coleman Barks

Hello dears:

If you are celebrating, hope you are having a fine holiday, and if you
are not celebrating, hope you are having a fine time, too. ,^))

Many years ago, this old woman had a wonderful breakthrough in dharma
understanding when reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So, for this
morning's quote, i am going to share the passages with you that
triggered that precious time.

The book is read aloud to those who have recently died to guide them
through the "bardo," the intermediate state between death and re-birth.
Throughout the reading, the reader re-assures the person in the bardo
that there is nothing to be afraid of - that all wrathful and peaceful
deities that appear are just projections of his/her own mind.

This very fine advice applies to our current journeys through the bardo
of samsara also, eh? Everything we feel, whether "good" or "bad,"
everything we fear or trust, everything we think is "out there" doing
something to us is just a projection of our own minds! Emaho! Quite
remarkable!

Near the end of the reading, if the traveller has not "gotten it" yet,
the Lords of Death appear in all their horrible glory - very frightening
descriptions - and the reader re-assures with the following passages
(here again, we can apply this to our everyday to free us from taking
anything seriously - i mean how can we take something seriously when it
is not really happening!!:

"O son of noble family, if you do not recognize your own projections,
even though you have practiced dharma for an eon and are learned in all
the sutras and tantras, you will not become a buddha. But if you
recognize your projections, with one word you will become a buddha.

(Next is the description of the Lords of Death with frightening
appearances who threaten to strike and slay. Then the following
passage:)

"O daughter of noble family, when projections like this appear, do not
be afraid. You have a mental body of unconsciousness tendencies, so even
if you are cut into little pieces, you cannot die. You are really the
natural form of emptiness, so there is no need to fear. The Lords of
Death too arise out of your own mind; they have no solid substance.
Emptiness cannot be harmed by emptiness. Be assured that all these
peaceful and wrathful deities...only arise out of the spontaneous play
of your own mind. If you understand this, all fear is naturally
liberated, and merging inseparably, you become a buddha."

"Emptiness cannot be harmed by emptiness."
Those words are the ticket to freedom!

When i was a little girl, i was warned that if i told anyone "what had
happened," i would be "cut up into little pieces" with the knife i
thought they had put inside me. So, with much emotional pain, i kept
"the secret" for over forty years, was held so tightly in its fear grip,
i had come to think it was a permanent state of being. The reading of
this passage hit like a Divine Lightening Flash, releasing me from that
fear in an instant! i could never be cut into little pieces - for the
knife, the people who threatened me, the fear itself! were all just
projections of my own mind! A Grand Emaho!

My New Year wish to us all: May each precious dear recognize that
everything that appears to us is just a projection of our own minds and
in that recognition, be finally free!

love to all,
dg/oh

"As one becomes a lover, duties change to inspirations. Practices become dance, poetry, creek music moving along. Impossible natural images of transformation appear: candle becomes moth; a dry stick breaks into bud. A chickpea becomes its cook (not so impossible, the natural tasting!). Something enters that sponataneously enjoys itself. Finding a purpose for acting is no longer the problem. The soul is here for its own joy. Eyes are meant to see things. It's by some grand shift of energy that we know love.

We have this great love-ache for the ocean and the seabirds sewing the hem of her robe. That is the subject here. We long for beauty, even as we swim within it. Abdul Qadir Gilani describes this region of the heart as a baby. Bawa Muhaaiyaddeen also speaks of it this way. Someone asked Bawa once what it felt like to be him. He answered by closing his eyes and making little kissing noises like a baby nursing. In this new life a baby is born in the heart. Purity comes and a playfulness, an ease, a peace. Gilani says this new heart-baby sometimes talks to the soul in dreams. Bawa says that this baby knows the language of God. It understands every voice that floats on the wind because it is in unity and compassion. This baby has none of the exclusivity of loving, the limits we learn and later, hopefully, unlearn from our families (the blood ties), our culture, religion, tribe, and nation. Bawa says humanity is "God's funny family." That's how the baby sees.

I saw this baby come into my father's eyes in the last weeks of his life in 1971. Everyone felt it. My mother died (she was 64, lung-cancer) on May 8, 1971. My dad died of a stroke on July 2, 1971, at seventy-two. In the time between (fifty-five days), Dad lost all judgemental tendencies. He met everyone with unconditonal love. He would go out on any excuse to walk around and talk with strangers. He had unlimited time and attention and helpfulness for everyone. So beautiful. I see that opening in John Seawright's mother and father too. To hear Rev. Ryan Seawright pray outdoors in the wind at a June wedding, as I did recently, is about as much as a heart can stand. Bawa used to go out rounding, which meant riding in the passenger's seat of a car driving very slow and waving to people walking on the sidewalk. Sometimes I'd go along. When pedestrians would see his face, it was like they were struck full-power with one of those old searchlights from Second World War airfields. Then they'd recover and wave so tenderly, as to a baby.

The connecting extends to all living beings. My friend Stepan Schwartz tells of an old farmhand who could stand at the edge of a field and speak in a soft voice to a particular cow a couple of hundred yards away. "Number forty-seven." That cow, who needed attention froma vet, would detach from the herd and walk over. Pleasant, (the man's name) would talk to the cow, looking in her face, about what needed to be done, and he'd say, "That's good. Go on back now." then he'd call another one, "Number twenty-four." Stephan swears that he was present many times when this happened.

Bawa went into the jungles of Sri Lanka for fifty years to watch the animals and learn about God. When your heart dissolves in this love, books are beside the point. We learn from the taste of life events. Jelaluddin Chelebi once asked me what religion I was. I threw up my hands in the who knows gesture. "Good," he said. "Love is the religion, and the universe is the book."

[image:Bawa Muhaaiyaddeen ]

Some souls have gotten free of their bodies. Do you see them? Open your eyes for those who escape to meet with other escapees,

whose hearts associate in a way they have of leaving their false selves to live in a truer self.

Love comes sailing through and I scream.
Love sits beside me like a private supply of itself.
Love puts away the instruments
and takes off the silk robes. Our nakedness
together changes me completely.

Only when you realize the true peace, the peace you have never lost, that peace will remain with you, for it was never away. Instead of searching for what you do not have, find out what is it that you have never lost? That which is there before the beginning and after the ending of everything; that to which there is no birth, nor death. That immoveable state, which is not affected by birth and death of a body or a mind, that state you must perceive.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking and feeling. Even the idea of being man or woman, or even human should be discarded. The ocean of life contains all, not only humans. So, first of all abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such or so-and-so, this or that. Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing.

http://peacefulrivers.homestead.com/wow.html

"The essence of religion is the personal discovery of the meaning of life, the meaning
of truth. Religion is related to the unconditional, total freedom that truth confers on
us. It is a revolution of the whole way of living. Religion moves us from the superficial
layers of existence and encourages us to go deeper to the roots of life. It is an inward
journey to the depths of our being."

"Nothing in life is trivial. Life is whole wherever and whenever we touch it, and one moment or event isnot less sacred than another."

"Vimala Thakar has been a meditation teacher in India and Europe for many years. In many ways, she is a Dharma heir to (the Indian-American mystic) Krishnamurti. After she had been working in rural development for many years, Krishnamurti asked her to begin to teach, and she became a powerful and much-loved meditation teacher.

When California meditation teacher Jack Kornfield asked her why she returned to development work and to helping the hungry and homeless, she replied, "Sir, I am a lover of life, and as a lover of life, I cannot keep out of any activity of life. If people are hungry for food, my response is to help feed them. If people are hungry for truth, my response is to help them discover it. I make no distinction between serving people who are starving and have no dignity in their physical lives and serving people who are fearful and closed and have no dignity in their mental lives. I love all life."
More here: http://www.prahlad.org/gallery/vimala_thakar.htm

All day long rain:
typing on my roof,
its lonesome poem.

-Pete

Why don't you:
go out there
keep it company?

-Lady Joyce
Now you tell me!
Loved your reply.

Chicken Fish

As the downpour
hit the river,
Fish scathered.

-Pete

"What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone,
in the forest, at night, cherished by this
wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world,
the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges,
and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it.
It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.
As long as it talks I am going to listen."

-Joyce (know_mystery)

Cough

Drown by Silence
Mind has shut down.
All is silent and dark,
Thoughts swim unseen-

Dim fish gliding
In the blackest ocean.
The current moves my corpse,
Life keeps unfolding.

Awakening to the Dream

The Gift of Lucid Living.

"This book will be of great assistance to the seeming many." Sailor Bob Adamson
www.awakeningtothedream.com

The Texture of Being
by Roy Whenary"We do not need to search in order to find our true Being. We already are it, and the mind which searches for it is the very reason why we cannot find it."
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