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Nondual Highlights Issue #1746 Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Editor's note:
Caveat Emptor. I'm grappling with the problem of "the
doer" in my own life, and so the question of "nondual
activity", or to push the envelope a bit further than my own
life-situation, "nondual activism" has arisen here.
This edition of the highlights is in some way part of my struggle
to understand, or perhaps to let go of understanding and allow
activity to happen; I'm not sure. Anyway, please don't think that
every quote is to be taken literally, I'm just trying to get my
head and heart around the issue. Be well, Mark.
PS I'm sitting in today for Joyce, who's back is bothering her. I
wish her a speedy recovery!
There is no neutral ground -- no neutral ground -- in the fight
between civilization and terror, because there is no neutral
ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery, and life and
death.
All of us are called to share the blessings of liberty, and to be
strong and steady in freedom's defense. It will surely be said of
our times that we lived with great challenges. Let it also be
said of our times that we understood our great duties, and met
them in full.
- Two short excerpts from remarks by U.S. President George W.
Bush on Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom,
from the East Room of the White House, on March 19, 2004
The full speech may be found here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040319-3.html
The profoundest wisdom coincides with the profoundest compassion.
At times, wisdom/compassion indicate intervention, at others
times they indicate non-intervention. Each of us must act and
let-be in light of the greatest wisdom and compassion available
to us. In so doing, we will make contributions as well as
mistakes. For this, perhaps we should each apologize in advance,
but in making such an apology, we must also offer forgiveness to
all the rest, each of whom is acting according to his or her own
best wisdom and compassion, though--of course--in some cases not
much wisdom or compassion is available! In such cases, the
outcome is not very pretty. Nonduality does not mean simply
sitting around doing nothing, but neither does it mean incessant
action, as if the mirror opposite of an alleged passivity. I
think that David Loy's account of the Taoist notion of WU WEI in
his book, NONDUALITY, goes a long way toward making sense of the
idea that nonduality means going BEYOND activity and passivity. I
hope that all of us can see BOTH that "all is well" and
that "there is plenty of good work to be done"!
Happy Holidays!
Cheers, Michael
- Excerpt from an internet post by Michael E. Zimmerman,
Department of Philosophy, Tulane University
More here: http://csf.colorado.edu/seminars/nondual-ecology/proceedings/0330.html
To live your life
intensely and on the edge-of-the-wedge, act "as
if" you're experiencing everything that
shows up for you for the very last time.
Obviously, sooner or later, this will certainly be true.
Then every conversation, every cup of tea, every bird in flight,
etc, becomes a cause and an opportunity for celebration and
gratitude.
Create deep passion in your life for something heartfelt ... and
then stay fully committed to it.
Taking a stand in life is even more important than the nature of
the particular stand that you're taking.
Amazingly, the universe doesn't really care what
you want to get committed to.
It just doesn't like you to be "wishy-washy."
Chuck Hillig, from his book Seeds for the
Soul, published by Black Dot Publications
I am of old and
young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff
that is fine,
One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the
largest the same,
A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and
hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the
limberest
joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,
A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin
leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,
A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger,
Buckeye;
At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with
fishermen
off Newfoundland,
At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and
tacking,
At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the
Texan ranch,
Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners,
(loving
their big proportions,)
Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands
and welcome to drink and meat,
A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,
A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,
Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,
A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,
Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.
I resist any thing better than my own diversity,
Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place.
(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their
place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)
- excerpt from Walt Whitman's poem Song of
Myself, as contributed by John Metzger to
Nonduality Salon - A
The rest of the poem is here: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html
The front page of the Nonduality Salon - A may be found here: http://www.nonduality.com/activism.htm
The interesting thing is, this is reality. This is just simple
reality. It is not some exalted state of enlightenment. It is
just recognizing what is obviously, irrefutably true. There is
just Awareness experiencing form. If you really check and see, it
is just Awareness meeting Awareness. There is only really one of
us here in the whole game. The interesting thing is, you see,
since this is reality, since this is just what is real, how might
life be if it was lived like this? If there was not the
referencing of something that anyway does not exist, how could
life be? How would world economics be if there was no sense of
"you" and "me"? Competition would disappear.
Starvation would disappear. Environmental degradation would
disappear. You know, I came from quite an educated family and I
had a good education, so everybody was interested in solutions,
political solutions, environmental solutions, but it became
really obvious to me from quite early on, when I was about
fourteen, that the only solution is to awaken from this dream. As
long as action is taken based in separation, you can
"Greenpeace" as much as you like and Greenpeace is a
great organization, but it is still coming from separation, you
see. It is still "us" against "them" - bad
guys and good guys. You can come up with all kinds of new
political systems. You know, Marx was really idealistic. I mean,
if you read "Das Kapital," he had fantastic ideas, but
you can't implement a different system without first changing
Consciousness. It has been the same with everybody who has tried
to shift the external.
Nothing is really going to fundamentally shift because the
underlying blueprint has been left untouched. It seems like it is
only through this shift from separation to wakefulness that life
on this planet can be lived as it is intuitively meant to be
lived. You know what I mean? You look around and you see so much
funny stuff going on. There's the weirdest stuff goes on on this
planet, you know. I mean, stuff that when you look at it, it
looks just crazy.
I used to live in Bali in Indonesia and they are cutting down the
rainforest very fast there. I found out that there are teak trees
there which are really beautiful and very valuable hardwood which
they cut down, put them on boats and take them 200 miles offshore
and dump them into the ocean. This is because Japanese
businessmen are amassing hardwood in warehouses in Japan and they
want to keep its value high. So other companies cut trees but
these Japanese companies pay for them and just dump them in the
water; abandon them just to keep investment high. Now, somebody
doing that has to have billions of dollars already. What kind of
thought process is at work with billions of dollars that is
willing to risk the environment just to keep value? It has to be
a thought process that is thinking in terms of limitation, that
is thinking in terms of "me" and "you." So,
what kind of world could it be, what kind of manifestation could
it be where this imaginary separation is just no longer
referenced?
- Part of the Preface to an essay entitled "Epicenters of
Justice," by Drew Hempel, the rest of which may be found
here:
http://www.lightmind.com/library/hempel/preface.html
Her search for
something to take its place led her from San Francisco to India
and to Poonjaji, "a remarkable teacher."
"In meeting him all I really saw was that there was nothing
to do, nothing to seek for. That only imagination impedes
happiness. We imagine that we're separate. We imagine that we
have these problems."
Imagination gives rise to what Ingram calls the
"story." Each of us spins his or her own story,
allowing it to dominate our thoughts and actions as each day,
each chapter unfolds. The story is about each of us, what we have
done, what others have done to us, what we have lost and what we
have acquired. We get caught up in our own stories, their
emotional ups and downs, their tensions and triumphs. We fiddle
with them, rewinding and replaying the past and fast forwarding
to the future.
This story-driven way of life is unnatural, Ingram says, and
takes a toll on all who live it. Ultimately, such stories create
suffering, she says. What is natural is an immaculate, shining
presence that exists in each of us, before the story starts,
underneath it. In her classes and retreats, Ingram tries to help
her students recognize this presence, to swap the suffering of
story for genuine happiness, the freedom of just being.
"It's an immediate recognition of what is already the case,
right now, a present awareness," she says. "You don't
attain it, you just relax into it, a stream of now."
Poonjaji led Ingram to this awareness, one that she says has
brought her the joy and love that had been missing in her life.
With it came an overwhelming compassion and a call to activism.
Her book, In the Footsteps of Gandhi, is a collection of
interviews with a dozen contemporary social activists including
the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Cesar Chavez.
"This love I am speaking about more and more wants to give
itself away, to be of sevice to others," says Ingram, who
co-founded the Unrepresented Nations and People Organization In
The Hague, Netherlands.
By her own estimate, Ingram has given more than a thousand
"Dharma Dialogues." In the two-hour sessions she calls
"interactive meditations" she welcomes questions and
comments as she describes her experience, encouraging what she
calls "a switch in perception."
"Assume the mind is mad," she says. "Freedom is in
the impersonal welcoming of whatever madness arises and in the
calm knowing that it all inevitably passes."
It is a matter of releasing beliefs, pictures or stories that
obscure the shining presence and resisting the temptation to
replace them with new beliefs, pictures or stories.
"It's more about subtraction than addition," she says.
- excerpt from "Delving into 'Dharma Dialogues'", an
article about Catherine Ingram, written by Nancy Haught for the Oregonian,
January 30, 1999
The full article is here: http://www.geocities.com/~cathing/oregonian.html
II
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor
fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor
towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still
point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
- T. S. Eliot from his poem Four Quartets 1:
Burnt Norton.
The full poem is here: http://plagiarist.com/poetry/?wid=7104
KAIA: John, it sounds to me like you have moved to a place of
acceptance of whatever will be, including the possibility that
higher mammals may not roam the earth fifty years from now. I
don't hear outrage at other humans: you have just said that
blaming ourselves is part of the illness of alienation. And yet,
you have not given up. On the contrary, you seem to have given
yourself quite fully to the possibility that humans will awaken
to this crisis. You craft your life around that likelihood,
moving from land to land, singing, reporting on the destruction,
giving workshops. Your face lines tell that you grin a lot, your
body says it's relaxed. Where are you, John?
JOHN: I'm here with you, a being who feels her connection to the
planet. I'm sitting close to another amazing being with strong
rough bark for skin and tendrils so delicate they suck nutrients
from the soil and I hear another winged being trilling between
our words. So, in every moment, I am surrrounded by wonder and
beauty in myriad forms. I am also in the eye of the hurricane.
Yes, I look as clearly as I can at the reports of destruction. I
release all my hopes and pleas that such things are not so. With
that release, tremendous energy is freed up for me to calmly
accept the state of things as they are and to create passionately
and lovingly all that I can to change the flow. I stay in touch
with my wild love for beings of all kinds as much as possible so
as to nourish myself and so as to model for others that it is
safe here. You can open your eyes to what is happening and not go
crazy or you can lose yourself in endless depression. It is good
here. I am present to as much of earth as I can be. I am awake to
my life.
- Excerpt from 'In the Eye of the Hurricane: An Interview with
John Seed, from the book The Soul Unearthed,
edited by Cass Adams, and published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, New
York.