Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
Nondual Highlights Issue #2233, Wednesday, August 17, 2005
This issue was created by Mark Otter,
while in the midst of moving and starting a new job.
Switching email accounts in yahoo is likely the least of his
many chores. Jerry and I greatly appreciate his dedication.
-Gloria
Practice
hearing the voices in your head without
becoming involved and without judgment.
And take it on faith that any Voice, internal or
external, that is telling you that
`SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH YOU,'
Is not the voice of your Heart, God, or True Nature.
- Cheri Huber, from the book, There is
Nothing Wrong With You, published by Keep It
Simple Books, posted to DailyDharma
The man of understanding who has lost
his identity as a separate individual remains
identified with pure, infinite Consciousness
while he continues to live out
his life as an ordinary person in the world,
knowing full well, however, that it is all
an illusion.
- Ramesh S. Balsekar, A Net of Jewels, Advaita Press, 1966,
posted to AlongThe Way
The world of Absolute Reality,
onto which your mind has
projected a world of relative unreality
is independent of yourself, for
the very simple reason that it is yourself.
Examine the motion of change
and you will see. What can change
while you do not change, can be
said to be independent of you.
But what is changeless must be one
with whatever else is changeless.
The main objective to grasp is
that you have projected onto
yourself a world of your own
imagination, based on memories,
on desires and fears, and that you
have imprisoned yourself in it.
Break the spell and be free.
You are universal. You need not and you
cannot become what you are already.
Only cease imagining yourself to be
the particular. What comes and goes
has no being. It owes its very
appearance to reality. You know that
there is a world, but does the world
know you? All knowledge flows from
you, as all being and all joy. Realize
that you are the eternal source and
accept all as your own.
Such acceptance is true love.
Having never left the house you are asking
for the way home. Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all.
Collecting right ideas also will take you nowhere.
Just cease imagining.
Don't you understand?! Enough if you do not
misunderstand. Don't rely on your mind for
liberation. It is the mind that brought you to
bondage. Go beyond it altogether.
What is beginningless cannot have a cause.
It is not that you knew what you are and
then you have forgotten. Once you know,
you cannot forget.
Don't ask the mind to confirm what is beyond the mind.
Direct experience is the only valid confirmation.
- Nisargadatta, posted to JustThis
The Open Window
God is the Lord,
who gave such beauty to Joseph
that his face like lakewater
with white clouds in it
bloomed with light.
Joseph and Moses received God's light,
Joseph the light of beauty,
Moses the light of knowing.
In the midnight of this world,
Moses could see everything.
His face shot forth such a powerful beam
that he asked God for a veil,
so that others would not be blinded,
as adders are said to be
by the glint of an emerald.
He asked God for a feedbag
to fit over his face!
"Make one out of your felt robe.
That fabric is used to being permeated
with our light. It can stand the intensity."
The bodies of holy men and women have the ability
to endure the unconditional light
that can tear mountain ranges to pieces.
In a lamp niche there is a glass lamp,
and in that there is a light,
which nothing can hold.
Muhammed related that God said, "I am not in
the atmosphere, or in the void of space,
or in the most brilliant intelligences.
I live more clearly and brightly
as a guest in a humble worker's heart.
There I am, without qualification, or
definition, or description. I am there,
in that person's loving, so that my qualities
and powers can flow out into everything else.
In such a mirror, time and matter
can bear my beauty. Such a person is
a vast mirror, within which, every "second",
fifty wedding banquets appear!
Don't ask me to describe it!"
The gist of this is that Moses could make a veil
because he knew God's penetrating power well.
His covering was a glory,
as a devoted person's face glows
with the guest, as a mystic
in ecstasy shines.
Fire can be stirred from embers,
because the embers already "know" the fire.
Safura, Moses' wife and the daughter of Shu'ayb,
loved God's light and the true guidance so much
that she sacrificed her eyesight.
She closed one eye and beheld the uncovered light
of Moses with the other. That eye was lost.
Then, she couldn't help herself!
She opened the other eye and spent it too.
Just as a spiritual warrior at first will give away
loaves of bread, and then his life.
Safura began to weep. "Are you grieving,"
asked a woman friend, "because you've lost
the beautiful jonquils of your eyes?"
"No, I'm crying that I don't have
a thousand more eyes to lavish on Moses.
My windows have been demolished by the moon,
but this ruin has no regrets, no memory even
of what the porch looked like, or the roof."
The light of Joseph's face, when he passed by a house,
would filter through the lattice and make a radiance
on the wall. People would notice and say,
"Joseph must be taking a walk."
It's fortunate to have a window that faces
that way! Open it up and stay in the opening,
so you can have more delight in Joseph.
The work of love is to open that window
in the chest and to look incessantly
on the Beloved. You can do this.
Listen. Make a way for yourself
inside your self. Stop looking
in the other way of looking.
You already have the precious mixture
that will make you well. Use it.
Old enemies will become friends.
Your beauty will be God's beauty.
Your friendlessness will change to moisture
and nourishment for your friends.
It's not a kingdom like any you know,
the kingdom of God that's within you,
but hundreds of thousands of kingdoms.
God gave Joseph the kingdom of beauty
and the kingdom of dream interpretation.
He didn't have to be taught that science.
The kingdom of physical beauty led him to jail:
the episode with Potiphar's wife.
But the kingdom of dream interpretation
gave him power greater than Pharoah's,
a stately mystery and depth like
Saturn with its rings.
- Rumi, Mathnawi, VI, 3055-3105, Feeling the
Shoulder of the Lion, Coleman Barks, posted
to MillionPaths
Quote from Huang Po:
The Enlightened man is capable of perceiving both unity and
multiplicity without the least contradiction between them!
- posted to The_Now2