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#2783 - Monday, April 9,
2007 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Nondual Highlights
Mysteries are not to
be solved.
The eye goes blind when it only
wants to see why.
— Jalaluddin
Rumi
The Essential Rumi by Coleman Barks
Lean back with your eyes
closed, your arms
opened wide. Be there with all of life's mysteries.
Welcome them into your life.
— Terry Bookman in The Busy Soul
In other words,
mystery, from the Greek word
mysterion, is not about what we can solve but
about what astonishes us in splendor and horror:
that part of creation that can be experienced but
never completely explained. This spiritual
understanding of mystery is quite different from
our common, everyday understanding of the term.
Mysterion is about experiencing mystery as awe,
not just as something secret and hidden.
— Stephen Kendrick in Holy Clues
Awareness is the
ocean of existence.
Let it loose and your words will rage
and cause wounds like fishing spears.
But if you tend it like a fire
to discover the truth,
you'll find how much of that
there is in what you say. None.
- Lalla
14th Century North Indian mystic
From "Naked Song"
Versions by Coleman Barks posted to Along The Way
The Real Work
It may be
that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that
when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
- Wendell
Berry (Collected
Poems)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/The_Real_Work.html
Web archive of Panhala postings: www.panhala.net/Archive/Index.html
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Slipping into Sanity
I have given
all that I am
as have you.
Whether wearied or exalted
let's all fall on the floor laughing.
What a colossal blunder
we have all fallen prey to,
slipping into sanity like this.
Our minds are surely gone
when we see everything as God.
Prepare yourself Mother Earth
the inmates are loose
the fools have
broken free of their chains.
- Adyashanti
posted to Wisdom-l
Jean Klein
Sometimes, in meetings like this, questions come up in me which remain incomplete and cannot be expressed. Could you say something about this?
When your question does not come to formulation, just be still. It is only in your stillness that the question can become clear.
Is it important, then, that the question becomes clearly formulated?
Yes. But do not anticipate an answer. Keep to the question, then you will be open to the answer. The verbal answer can only be a suggestion. The formulated answer is never a total answer The answer as we understand it on the intellectual. level must abide in silence. It must abide in awareness. Then it is completely understood. What appears is the question, but what does not appear will be the answer. Live completely this absence of formulation. On the level of the mind we use symbols, but we must come to what the symbols symbolize. When we have a question, we must live in the questioning feeling and not force it to a conclusion.
If we try to understand it through memory, the past, it will never give us the total answer. When you live with the question in lovingness, not touching it, not forcing it, it is like a child, who one day maybe will tell you its secret.
What is it that can help us to discern between the answer at the level of the mind and the answer that comes from silence?
The understanding that comes from the mind is still in conflict. Understanding that comes from silence returns to knowing yourself in silence.
There must not be any
wishful thinking in your listening. You must accept the facts.
The solution is in the facts, and the answer is also in the
facts. Accepting facts means seeing things as they are. In this
unqualified acceptance of the facts, the truth unfolds. It
unfolds in your accepting, which is a global feeling. The mind
can only be clear when it is grounded in your wholeness, your
globality. Otherwise, the mind functions in fractions. You can
only really know the facts from your totality, where there is not
a knower, not a fraction, there is only knowing. Sometimes the
ego comes up and questions the wholeness and throws you again
into doubt. You should not fall into the trap.
taken from: Open to the
Unknown: dialogues in Delphi, Jean Klein, Third Millenium
Publications, 1992, ISBN 1-877769-18-5
Complete chapter is Here
Ben Hassine posted to
Awakening Awareness
Don’t Trust Anyone over Three
(re: the relentless inquiry of asking why)
We often mistake this behavior of the three-year-old for that of someone looking for answers. We have usually forgotten what this state of profound curiosity is really about. As adults, we inhabit a concrete world of relative certainty, and we assume that this is what the child is looking for.
This is why you shouldn’t trust anyone over three.
Young children are simply curious. Learning something doesn’t fulfill their interest. This thirst cannot be quenched by answers. They want to know more, regardless of what they have found out so far. Their question in life is their life.
We can’t answer their question.
We can, however, join them in their question. That would require us to abandon all our answers. We might lose track of time. We might not get anything done today. There may be no point to the question at all. The whole thing may be totally pointless, like a game without a score, without a conclusion, without a ... winner. - Steven Harrison, from education chapters, p.136
ONE: Essential Writings on Nonduality
Edited by Jerry Katz