Click here to go to the next issue

Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day

#2448 - Sunday, April 16, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee  

Don't ask so much what the world needs.
Go out and do what makes you come alive,
because what the world needs most
is people who have come alive.

     - Howard Thurman    

  But then it came to me as an insight that I should teach this truth, for it is also happiness. There are people whose sight is only a little clouded, and they are suffering through not hearing the reality. They would become the knowers of the truth. It was in this way I went forth to teach.

- Majjhima Nikaya [The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha]

From "The Pocket Buddha Reader," edited by Anne Bancroft, 2000

Here's your Daily Poem from the Poetry Chaikhana --

  Easter Exultet  

Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!  

~ James Broughton ~  

(Sermons of the Big Joy)

  Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Easter_Exultet.html

  I think a lot about the fact that the Buddha made a separate category for Right Speech. He could have been more efficient and included it in Right Action, since speaking is a form of action. For a while I thought it was separate because we speak so much. But then I changed my mind--some people don't speak a lot. Now, I think it's a separate category because speech is so potent. During the 1960s, when the social ethos was "letting it all hang out," I had recurrent fantasies about writing a book called Holding It All In. I think I was alarmed that people had overlooked how vulnerable each of us is. In recent years, I've revised my book title to Holding It All In Until We've Figured Out How to Say It in a Useful Way. I believe we are obliged to tell the truth. Telling the truth is a way we take care of people. The Buddha taught complete honesty, with the extra instruction that everything a person says should be truthful and helpful.

  - Sylvia Boorstein, It's Easier Than You Think

  Before we do anything, we should always ask ourselves whether we will be able to do it properly and complete it. If the answer is no, we should not start. Leaving tasks uncompleted creates a habit for the future. So once we have begun something, we should be sure not to go back on our decision. Self-confidence is not to be confused with pride. Pride is thinking highly of oneself without good reason. Self-confidence is knowing that one has the ability to do something properly and being determined not to give up. Ordinary beings are prepared to make a good deal of effort for relatively insignificant ends. We have promised to work for the immensely more important goal of liberating all beings, so we should cultivate great self-confidence, thinking, Even if I am the only one to do so, I will benefit all beings.

  - The Dalai Lama, A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night

  The Wisdom of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj  

"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."

  A Net of Jewels  

  What arises from what you write here, is that when we take issue
about something and identify with that issue, then we are bound for
conflict. On the other hand, if we see something clearly and offer
it as an insight or observation, without feeling inwardly attached
to it, then conflict does not arise.
There's a similar situation when one has written a book and someone
picks on a specific section of the book and questions it. Well, if
the book was written from the heart, the heart is not bothered that
the book has been questioned ... but, if the mind had become
attached to the book, then the mind might feel defensive about it,
and conflict is born.
It seems that there is in most of us a natural tendency to push our
point of view and to defend it ... whereas, it is also possible to
voice our point of view but not be bothered about defending it. One
implies a holding on, an attachment ... whilst the other implies a
letting go ... a freedom from concern.  

Roy Whenary posted to Awakened Awareness  

  'Loving Kindness' is not just an intellectual concept, it is a heartfelt feeling which comes from a transcendent vision of the way things are in the universe, in life. All the philosophical ideas and statements about non-duality are meaningless if they do not take one to the source, if they do not provide one with the vision, the greater view which takes one beyond the sense of separateness, beyond duality, Loving Kindness - not me towards you or you towards me - but Loving Kindness towards all creation, is a sign of the realization of the ultimate non-duality.
 
 
- Roy Whenary in The Texture of Being  

  A magical mystery tour  

http://members.shaw.ca/yofrizb/  

posted by Bob O'Hearn  

top of page