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Nondual Highlights Issue #2590, Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the
present experience.
It isn't more complicated that that.
It is opening to or recieving the present moment,
pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is,
without either clinging to it or rejecting it.
- Sylvia Boorstein, posted to DailyDharma
All spiritual teachings are only
meant to make us retrace
our steps to our
Original Source
We need not to acquire anything new, only give
up false ideas and useless accretions.
Instead of doing this, we try to grasp something
strange and mysterious because we believe happiness
lies elsewhere. This is a mistake
- Ramana Maharshi, from The Essential Teachings of Ramana
Maharshi, posted to AlongTheWay
There are two kinds of intelligence:
One acquired,
As a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
Collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence
in retaining information.
You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge,
getting always more marks
on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet,
one already completed and preserved
inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox.
A freshness in the center of the chest.
This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate.
It's fluid,
and it doesn't move from outside to inside
through conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing
is a fountain-head from within you
moving out ...
- Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks, postrd to Mystic_Spirit
SOMEONE DIGGING IN THE GROUND
An eye is meant to see things.
The soul is here for its own joy.
A head has one use: for loving a true love.
Legs: to run after.
Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,
for learning what men have done and tried to do.
Mysteries are not to be solved. The eye goes blind
when it only wants to see why.
A lover is always accused of something.
But when he finds his love, whatever was lost
in the looking comes back competely changed.
On the way to Mecca, many dangers: thieves,
the blowing sand, only camel's milk to drink.
Still, each pilgrim kisses the black stone there
with pure longing, feeling in the surface
the taste of the lips he wants.
This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up,
while the real work is done outside
by someone digging in the ground.
- Rumi, version by Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi,
posted to Sunlight