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Nondual Highlights Issue #2271, Sunday,
September 25, 2005, Editor: Mark
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I have no individuality. I have assumed no pose as a person.
Whatever happens in the manifest consciousness happens.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj
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Lose yourself,
Lose yourself in this love.
When you lose yourself in this love,
you will find everything.
Lose yourself,
Lose yourself.
Do not fear this loss, For you will rise from the earth
and embrace the endless heavens.
Lose yourself,
Lose yourself.
Escape from this earthly form,
For this body is a chain
and you are its prisoner.
Smash through the prison wall
and walk outside with the kings and princes.
Lose yourself,
Lose yourself at the foot of the glorious King.
When you lose yourself
before the King
you will become the King.
Lose yourself,
Lose yourself.
Escape from the black cloud
that surrounds you.
Then you will see your own light
as radiant as the full moon.
Now enter that silence.
This is the surest way
to lose yourself...
What is your life about, anyway? -
Nothing but a struggle to be someone,
Nothing but a running from your own silence.
- Rumi, from In the Arms of the Beloved, translation by Jonathan
Star, posted to DailyDharma
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A Display of Mackerel
They lie in parallel rows,
on ice, head to tail,
each a foot of luminosity
barred with black bands,
which divide the scales'
radiant sections
like seams of lead
in a Tiffany window.
Iridescent, watery
prismatics: think abalone,
the wildly rainbowed
mirror of a soapbubble sphere,
think sun on gasoline.
Splendor, and splendor,
and not a one in any way
distinguished from the other
--nothing about them
of individuality. Instead
they're all exact expressions
of one soul,
each a perfect fulfillment
of heaven's template,
mackerel essence. As if,
after a lifetime arriving
at this enameling, the jeweler's
made uncountable examples,
each as intricate
in its oily fabulation
as the one before.
Suppose we could iridesce,
like these, and lose ourselves
entirely in the universe
of shimmer--would you want
to be yourself only,
unduplicatable, doomed
to be lost? They'd prefer,
plainly, to be flashing participants,
multitudinous. Even now
they seem to be bolting
forward, heedless of stasis.
They don't care they're dead
and nearly frozen,
just as, presumably,
they didn't care that they were living:
all, all for all,
the rainbowed school
and its acres of brilliant classrooms,
in which no verb is singular,
or every one is. How happy they seem,
even on ice, to be together, selfless,
which is the price of gleaming.
- Mark Doty
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The great sea
Has sent me adrift
It moves me As the weed
in a great river
Earth and the great weather
Move me
Have carried me away
And move my inward parts
with joy ...
The arch of sky
and mightiness of storms
Have moved the Spirit
within me
Till I am carried away
Trembling with joy ...
- Uvavnuk - Inuit shaman, posted to Poetic_Mysticism
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Laughing Buddha
When I broke open
Buddha broke open,
And neither of us
has been the same since.
In an instant
we fell into each other laughing
and neither one of us survived.
But still the sun shines in the morning
and sets in the evening.
I am like a friendly old dog now
wearing my master's night slippers,
Yet somehow
they fit perfectly.
- Adyashanti from My Secret is Silence