Nonduality Salon Highlights, #2535

Ode I. 11

      Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,
      Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers
      In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.
      This could be our last winter, it could be many
      More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:
      Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
      And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
      As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.

~ Horace ~ [65-8 BC]
                       (The Essential Horace, edited and translated by Burton Raffel)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Ode_I_11.html

The Tao has just three lessons
restraint, compassion, and love
These are the three treasures

With love you can be courageous
With compassion you can accept all things
With restraint you can lead
...... Be an advocate with love, and you will wield a great sword
Defend the earth and all its creatures with love
and you will be a mighty shield. .....

Can you accept that even for the most vital matters 
the way of the Tao is to let events run their course?

People who have well-being of mind, 
even if the Buddha is not present, 
will receive Dharma from the midst of the sky, walls and trees. 

For those Bodhisattvas whose minds are pure, 
teachings and instructions will appear 
just by the wishes in their minds.


~The Buddha ~

Sky Dancer to Dzogchen Practice

Without a direct action expression of it, nonviolence, to my mind, is meaningless.
- Mahatma Gandhi

History of the Night

Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
thev sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhuastible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

Jorge Luis Borges

"When the wisdom of Rigpa shines,
a growing sense of tremendous and
unshakable certainty and conviction
that "this is it" rises up:

There is nothing further to seek,
nothing more that could possibly be hoped for.

This certainty of the View is what has to be deepened
through glimpse after glimpse of the nature of mind,
and stabilized through the continuous
discipline of meditation."

~Sogyal Rinpoche ~

Sky Dancer to Dzogchen Practice