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Nondual Highlights
Issue #2022 Wednesday, January 5,
2005 Editor: Mark
Our
lives are lived in apparent opposition.
The opposition between how we are and how we should be.
But do we a actually know how we we are without a comparison with
the
'should be'.
Subtly, identity is maintained by such comparison.
If I don't know how I should be I don't know how I am.
Shock! Horror! That will never do!
So right now, without any comparison, how are we?
Are we at all?
- posted to NonDualNetwork by Gary Merrill
When you have understood that all existence,
in separation and limitation, is painful, and
when you are willing and able to live integrally,
in oneness with all life, as pure being, you have
gone beyond all need of help. You can help another
by precept and example and, above all, by your
being. You cannot give what you do not have and
you don't have what you are not. You can only give
what you are - and of that you can give limitlessly.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj from I Am That - Talks
with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, The Acorn
Press, 1973, posted to MillionPaths by Gloria Lee
Dear friends,
Shabistari's Secret Rose Garden is considered to be
one of the great works of Persian Sufism. In
this work, Shabistari expresses a viewpoint of Sufi
realization similar to the perspective of the
great Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi, and Rumi, but
expressed through the rich Persian poetic
tradition.
Again and again the great mystics and saints remind us
to "cast away your existence entirely."
This is expressed in many ways in the various world
traditions: to die in order to live, to lose
yourself in order to be found.
Why all this insistence in every tradition on
self-negation? It is important to understand which
"self" is being negated. The self that must be
"cast
away," "discarded" is the false self, the
little self, the ego, the false sense of "me'.
Until the ego self is truly dropped, it rules your
perception of reality like a miser. That ego
has a secret it desperately must hide from your
everyday awareness: it doesn't really exist. At
best you could say the ego is like a tension in the
psyche, but it isn't a real thing in and of
itself.
So long as a person believes in the reality of that
phantom ego, so long as he or she identifies
with that nagging cramp of the "me"-sense, then
stepping outside of it is inconceivable,
terrifying. The loss of ego is mistakenly assumed to
be the death of self. Recoiling from that
fear, the psyche reflexively limits your perception of
everything around you, crippling the
consciousness, all in order to protect you against
"death." The result, however, is that the
simple truth remains hidden: The ego does not exist,
and you are not the ego; you will survive the
loss of ego.
The way out of this trap is to -- with deep love,
infinite patience, elegant balance, and
unshakeable determination -- loosen the ego's bindings
until it falls away naturally.
When you accomplish that, you'll stand in mute
amazement. For, when the ego "you" has left, "when
you go forth," the Divine One "will come in," and
"unveil His beauty" to you. And, although that
radiant beauty reveals itself to be everywhere, it is
also recognized as contentedly abiding in
the "heart's chamber."
from Ivan Grainger's, Chaikhana site, posted to Satsangdiary by
Alan Jacobs
This body is
Just borrowed water of the ocean
Encased in a bag of skin
Strengthened by a structure of calcium
Visiting
This desolate
Solid
Earth,
And
When the time comes
It will return
Back to the ocean
Whence it came
Yosy Flug, posted to SufiMystic
"The Verge of Tears"
You make our souls tasty like rose
marmalade. You cause us to fall flat
on the ground like the shadow of
a cypress still growing at its tip.
Rainwater through a mountain forest,
we run after you in different ways.
We live like the verge of tears inside
your eyes. Don't cry! You trick some
people with gold ropes, tie them up and
leave them. Others you pull near at dawn.
You're the one within every attraction.
All silence. You are not alone, never
that, but you must be distracted, because
look, you've taken the food you were
going to give Jesus out to the stable
and put it down in front of the donkey.
- Rumi, Ghazal (Ode) 2950, Version by Coleman Barks, with Nevit
Ergin, The Glance,
Viking-Penguin, 1999, posted to Sunlight
What the Heart Wants
See then
what the heart wants,
that pliable iron
sprung to the poppy's redness,
the honey's gold, winged
as the heron-lit water is:
by reflecting.
As an aged elephant answers
the slightest, first gesture of hand,
it puts itself at the mercy --
utterly docile, the forces
that brought it there vanished,
fold into fold.
And the old-ice ivory, the unstartlable
black of the eye that has traveled so far
with the fringed, peripheral howdah
swaying behind, look mildly back
as it swings the whole bulk of the body
close to the ground. Over and over
it does this, bends to what asks.
Whatever asks, heart kneels and offers to bear.
- Jane Hirschfield, The October Palace,
posted to truevision by Eric Ashford