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#2840 - Monday, June 11, 2007 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Nondual Highlights
To listen is to
continually give up all expectation
and to give our attention, completely and freshly,
to what is before us, not really knowing what we
will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of
our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a
willingness to be changed by what we hear.
--Mark Nepo
posted by Steve Toth
Metta by Ajahn Sumedho
Metta is very much how we should relate to
ourselves, too. It's how to relate to ourselves,
with kindness and acceptance rather than with
aversion and judgement. Metta implies that we
accept something that may not be very nice - like if
you have physical pain or things that aren't very
nice about your body, or your character. Maybe
you have a lot of fears or bad temper, or
something like that. If you have metta it means you
can accept these for what they are. You're not
judging it, condemning it from an ignorant,
self-conscious position. You're aware of it as
painful, unpleasant, or ugly - but metta practice is
the ability to accept patiently the flaws, the pain,
the irritations, and frustrations within our minds
and bodies and the unpleasant and annoying things
that impinge on them from outside.
This is because with metta
such things are seen as
no longer personal, there's not me and you, no
'you've done this to me...' or 'I've done this to
you.' Metta is having perspective and not creating a
problem even about the unfairnesses, injustices,
inadequacies and so forth, of ourselves or others
or of society. It doesn't mean that we don't
notice, or we can't see; but it means we don't
make problems about it, we don't carry it around in
our minds with bitterness, resentment, anger and
destructive tendencies. With metta there's always
the ability to forgive and start anew and to
recognise the way things are and not expect
everything to fit the ideals we have regarding how
things should be. It doesn't mean that we
fatalistically resign ourselves to mediocrity and
tyranny and stupidity, but it means that we aren't
caught in the pattern of ignorance's conditioning
mind formations. So we can bear with the
vicissitudes of life with a kindness and acceptance.
http://www.amaravati.org/abm/english/documents/the_way_it_is/24std.html
---
Gill Eardley on Allspirit
"To pray is to
pay attention to something or
someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so
concentrates his attention -- on a landscape, a
poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True
God -- that he completely forgets his own ego and
desires, he is praying. The primary task of the
schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular
context, the technique of prayer."
--W. H. Auden
Everything comes in pairs as death
with life and
darkness with light. Whatever seems to be
necessary to existence is so only because its
opposite is equally necessary. Duality is a governing
factor of the world and everything within it
including ourselves. That alone is outside the world,
is nondual, which is the untouchable Reality. This is
the Chinese idea of yin and yang, and the Bhagavad
Gita's expression "the pairs of opposites" conveys
the same idea. Duality is a fact. It is here. But it is
also an illusion and the opposite truth which
completes it is the nondual. We may deplore the
illusory nature of our existence, but we need not
get lost in it for it is fulfilled, completed, and
finalized in its complement the Real.
--Paul Brunton, Notebooks
Mark Scorelle to Wisdom-l
To attach oneself
to a guru, an avatar, one religion,
one creed, is to see the stars only. To put one's
faith in the Infinite Being and in its presence within
the heart, is to see the vast empty sky itself. The
stars will come and go, will disintegrate and vanish,
but the sky remains.
--Paul Brunton, Notebooks Mark Scorelle to Wisdom-l
Alan Larus photos: http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/shores/seaside.htm