Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
Nondual Highlights Issue #2025 Sunday, January 9, 2005 Editor: Mark
Q:
How to maintain the thought that all is Brahman
in the midst of worldly activity?
M: When the harmonium is being played there is a constant note
that is called the sruti.
Along with that, other notes also come out. If the ear is fixed
on this note that is constant, then while listening to the other
notes, that original note cannot be forgotten. Actually, that
first note gives strength to all the other notes. So, the
principle to understand is that the first note is the adhistana
(substratum) while the other notes represent worldly activities.
During worldly activities if (awareness of) the note of the adhistana
is continuous, whatever is spoken is then done with the authority
of this adhistana note.
But an ordinary man does not keep his attention on the first
note, the adhistana . He
merely listens to the subsequent notes. The jnani
keeps his attention on the first note. Sukdev (a sage of ancient
India) used to keep such attention and maintain his awareness of Brahman.
When the attention is fixed properly on the first note, the
effect of the other notes will not be felt.
- excerpt from The Power of the Presence,
Part One, edited by David Godman
Look here, my son! He who has forgotten his true nature is
alternately born and dies, turning round and round in the
unceasing wheel of time, like a feather caught up in a whirlwind,
until he realised the true nature of the Self. If he comes to see
the individual self and its substratum, the Overself, then he
becomes the substratum, i.e., Brahman, and escapes rebirth.
Should you know yourself no harm will befall you. As you asked I
have told you this.
- excerpt from Kaivalya Navaneeta
(The Cream of Emancipation) - posted to MillionPaths by Viorica
Weissman
Chapter Two:
Awareness Watching Awareness
Practice Instructions:
Description Z:
Shut your eyes.
The progression of the practice
over days, weeks, months, years:
Awareness Watching Awareness.
Awareness Observing Awareness.
Awareness Aware of Itself.
Awareness being aware only of Awareness.
Awareness being Awareness.
Awareness Alone.
Awareness-love-bliss.
Infinite-eternal-perfect-awareness-love-bliss
with no suffering or sorrow.
- posted to awarenesslovebliss
In response to the email Motivation to Practise a
student writes:
"This topic interests me, too. I agree - one spur is the
desire for truth, which becomes quite acute when one's world view
has been turned upside down as mine has.
There is an urgent need to re-stabilise 'the world' - all the
inconsistencies I am left with now just have to be resolved if I
am to be at all comfortable!
Reward is also a potent motivator. With the realization of no
self, no phenomenal world, comes immediately the much stronger
realization of the equality of everything (everyone) and a
lessening of anxiety about one's own being.
So there is the reward of a certain freedom from oneself and of
the precious quality of everyone and everything, which is love.
As I become more involved, these feelings become stronger, and as
they are pleasant, they are their own rewards."
Shenpen replies:
That is true.
Student:
"Finally, there is plain curiosity. What is Life and how
does it come and go - or does it? So far any continuity I intuit
is so far from any personal continuation as to be quite useless
as solace about my living forever.
This realization brings with it its own solace in a different way
from what I thought before (total extinction) because I do have a
funny feeling that something goes on.
This confusion is also a spur to find out, to work out a system
(which you have told me not to try!) or at least get the
satisfaction of understanding in some other inexpressible
way!"
Shenpen:
I think that you are touching on something very profound there.
I have just been reading two books by David Bohm, "Wholeness
and the Implicate Order" and "Unfolding Meaning".
He was a physicist and he proposed a view of the Universe very
much on the lines that I am teaching - so its a good place
to look for some conceptual underpinning of what we are talking
about.
He says: "By simply becoming aware of the question the
answer was already there. You see the new idea was already in the
question, right? So you can ask, where does the facility to be
aware of the questions come from, and perhaps that is the nature
of awareness".
He talks about meaning being capable of indefinite extensions
"you can have meanings of meanings" maybe meaning is
what life is. A change of meaning is a change of life -
consciousness is meaning'.
Student:
"The reminder about the power of adhistana (blessing) during
the retreat coupled with what I feel about not being entirely
separate from anything else begins to explain the power of crowds
and to confirm what I am doing by going to church here in the
village.
There I am in company with good-hearted people living in a way
and for values I greatly respect. I felt they needed support, and
I also feel I am supported by them, who welcome me knowing I am
Buddhist."
Shenpen:
That sounds really good.
Student:
"I went to the doctor who suggested counselling. At first I
had thought I should be able to deal with this through meditation
but realised that the fact is, I am not managing as happily as I
need - having someone else listen, hearing her suggestions and
practising them, has indeed helped!
She was very interested when I told her I was Buddhist and
meditated and (I feel) has amended her suggestions to suit
this."
Shenpen:
That all sounds very positive. I think counselling is often a
good way of working with someone to become more aware of what is
going on within oneself. There is a very good book,
"Focusing", by Eugene Gendlin that talks about what it
is exactly that brings about changes.
Its to do with the way we focus our awareness. If a person
is focusing in this way then the therapy can succeed and if they
are not, it wont. You can tell more or less right off
whether therapy will work by whether the person is focusing in
this way or not.
Its a very simple and unpretentious book but it is really
talking about the way one focuses in meditation. Its very
interesting.
- Shenpen Hookham, Buddhism Connect
More here: http://www.ahs.org.uk/default.asp?action=article&ID=1045
Love
Untitled 28
I climb over the distractions
of the day to get to you,
and they are many, these
rusting hulks of former years
that litter the roadways,
these landfills of memory
and intrusions of other people
who appear as ghosts,
transparent in sunlight,
who yet demand words and
attention and hold me in time.
I have endless night dreams where
I am here trying to get there,
only I cant describe either place and
am lost in city streets and crowds
who rush past as if I were invisible
till I become so even to myself and
I wake breathless and clutching air
and whispering your name.
Some days you appear as a mirage
at the end of a summer road,
this shimmer of love and delight
who recedes with each step I take,
who entrances me ever further into
this love, this madness that entangles,
this heaving ground under my feet.
I am eating grass like some lost dog
starving in abandoned lots
sniffing down new green shoots,
tearing into them, yet they are never enough
until somehow, transformed, they are.
© Zen Oleary, January 8, 2004, posted to truevision
Is the heart the place between this branch and the next, to use
the analogy of the monkey?
If you agree to let go of the branch you are clinging to without
catching hold of another, you fall into the heart. You have to
accept dying, letting everything you know slip away, everything
you have been taught, everything you possess, including your life
or at least everything that you think at this stage is your life.
This requires daring. It's a kind of suicide.
Is it really like that? For example, do you remember the moments
that preceded your recognition?
Yes.
Was it like that?
Yes.
Thank you. Before that did you have any idea what was going to
happen?
Yes and no. Yes, because I felt the invitation. No, because up
until that point, I had only known relative happiness, relative
truth, relative knowledge, and I could not have imagined the
absolute, the ineffable. The self is beyond all concept, all
projection. It is why we cannot steer ourselves to it under our
own steam and must wait for it to solicit us. But when it invites
us, we must say yes joyfully, without hesitation. The decision
belongs to us, the only decision in which we truly have a free
choice.
One of the reasons I postpone and do not make myself available to
the invitation is my fear that my life will be radically changed.
Oh, yes. It will be.
My family, as well?
Your family, too. Everything will be changed.
I am afraid that some people will leave me and be replaced by
others.
I can assure you that you will regret nothing.
Is it possible to have received the invitation and to have
refused it?
Yes, you are free.
Will I be invited again?
Yes. Be ready. Be available. You are available when you
understand that there is nothing that you can do on your own to
get to the King. When you acknowledge your total powerlessness,
you become an empty room. As soon as you become an empty room,
you are a sanctuary. So the King can enter, take the throne and
grace you with immortal presence.
- Francis Lucille on Advaita
More here: http://www.francislucille.com/excerpt.html