Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
#2850 - Thursday, June 21, 2007 -
Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
One: Essential Writings on Nonduality: http://tinyurl.com/2blmhy
Happy Summer!
We search the globe for great and diverse writings in the spirit of nonduality, but it doesn't get better than the writers in our own backyard, the Nonduality Salon email forum. Here are some recent contributions.
Re: [Nonduality Salon]
Question from New Member
John wrote:
>Hello. I've been working with eastern traditions for many
years now, but
>only recently came across the nondual tradition. I've found
it very
>profound & more or less blows apart other systems that
I've worked with,
>although I don't think I would have understood it until now!
I'd like to
>ask if anyone knows of a teacher around the Bay Area of CA.
Nothing beats
>a living teacher, so I'd like to find one somewhere near me.
Someone suggested Adyashanti, would have been my first choice as
well. And
John Wheeler in Santa Cruz has a good rep. If you have an
affinity for
traditional Indian Advaita Vedanta you might try the orgs of
Swami
Chinamyananda or Dayananda, who have teachers in many centers.
They are at
http://www.chinmaya.org/ and
http://www.arshavidya.org/teachers_SWAMIJI.html respectively.
Their more traditional approach involves a more scholarly
approach than
that of the so-called neo-advaita but paradoxically also less
dry, as other
aspects of traditional Indian spirituality are incorporated.
For (much) more on the gap between trad and neo, there is a fine
collection
of essays at
http://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/trad_neo/trad_neo.htm
Sarlo
Out of My Mind
by Vicki Woodyard
I took my mind out of my head and unrolled it on the kitchen
table. It
just fit. I had been having lots of buzzing, droning thoughts and
wanted
to take a good look at them. First I stood up and looked and then
I sat
down. I could see nothing going on in there. All I saw was a pure
little
mind, as innocent as the driven snow. (I love a good cliche, don’t
you?)
So, confident that I was imagining these pesky little thoughts, I
carefully rolled the mind back up and skillfully put it back into
my
right ear. (I take it out on the left side and replace it on the
right.
(I tend to be compulsive.)
I put the teakettle on and got a cup down from the rack. Should I
have
tea or coffee (The mind wanted to know what the body was going to
have.
By this question, I knew that the buzzing was starting up again.)
I told
it I would have coffee and a couple of cookies. (I also knew, by
answering myself, that the mind had reinstated its bifurcation as
if by
magic.)
The two-way dialogue was off to the races. I knew that soon I
would
disappear into the buzz and the emotional brouhahas that would
soon
begin. I would drink my coffee without tasting it and eat cookies
in the
same way. So discouraging. (The inner critic had arrived. It
looked a
little like Roger Ebert. Was it hungry? Maybe that’s how I
was gaining
all of this weight...by feeding the multitudes, and not in a good
way.)
With a total sigh, I resolved to take the mind out and examine it
again.
This time there were crumbs on the table and the mind recoiled as
it
touched bits of cookie. It was such a purist.
Nope, there was nothing on the surface of the mind. It was a
clear pond
reflecting my body as clearly as a mirror. I smiled at its
ability to do
that. What a mind I had....so trusting that it mirrored anything
it saw.
I bowed to the purity of it and my reflection in it. As I rolled
it back
up and put it back through the right ear, I hoped things would go
differently now.
They didn’t. I could go on, good reporter that I am, to
describe how
often I do this. Once I went to a shrink and told him how many
times a
day I was taking my mind out to examine it. He said he knew I was
out of
my head. He tried to give me medication but I refused. When the
bill
came, it was exorbitant and at the bottom he had written a
personal
note: Patient is just like every other nutcase I have ever
treated. And
what I told her seemed to go in one ear and out the other.
Exactly!
Vicki Woodyard
http://www.bobwoodyard.com
Compassion
by Bill Rishel
I work at a kind of residential
"half-way house" for young
adults that have recently been released from hospitalization
for a mental health crisis. I love working with these people.
The other night while assisting a
particular male client with
his medication he expressed considerable anger about another
staff member. He said she had confronted him about his
personal hygiene, saying he had dandruff, which he
acknowledged he did, but had been working on remediating.
Apparently he was mightily offended by her manner of
confrontation with him.
I knew that this particular client was
strongly committed to
his practice of Buddhism, and said, "So this calls for the
practice of.... (letting him fill in the blank)." He said
something I don't recall, and I responded with,
"Compassion."
With tremendous intensity, and some defensiveness, he said,
"I
am compassionate...," and commenced to list a number of
things
that he had been doing with respect to the staff member. I
responded, "Compassion has nothing to do with doing. If
there
is bitterness in the heart, compassion is the removal of
that." He turned on his heel and walked out saying,
"I'll work
on that!"
The next night when I came in for work my
co-workers told me
about how in the morning the client had gone to the staff
member in question and had talked the matter over with her,
clearing the air and essentially making peace with her.
What I said to him in that brief moment was
something that had
never occurred to me before. It was not my mind that said it.
It just came forth into speech as if from deep place of
communion and connection with the client. It was as if I were
"channeling" his own wisdom to him in words.
To me this is how Truth speaks in our
lives. It is not about
"true sentences," but about relationship and deep
connection
which can express in many ways, sometimes as words, sometimes
in other ways.
And so compassion can also be said to be
such a deep
connecting between hearts, a true openness, a true sensing, a
true responding, be it words or otherwise.
It is such a wonder when two hearts connect
in such a way.
While every moment is a wonder, such moments somehow stand
outside of life in a way that is astonishing.
Bill Ahh...Bill....this
is the experience of the universe as
teaching itself.
It's all about lovingkindess and creating peace.
I've been directly involved like this since
I had my cosmic
explosion: all 'anna' cells merged in what is.
Sometimes I just forget. But I get to
reexperience it. It's
all good.
Love, Anna
Memorial Day -- A
small thought from across the pond by Ashoka I had a high school friend who went to Vietnam. He
came back very very
messed up, obsessed only with "the hunt." Whenever he
opened his
mouth, everyone that had not gone to Vietnam came down on him for
having been a soldier. That's what eventually killed him - not
the
crosshairs of an enemy, but the crosshairs at home. At his
funeral,
people talked of this and that, but no one understood what it was
that
had killed him. There has to be a way to better care for our
servicemen and women regardless of the changing political climate
that
sends these boys and girls to fight the battles of huge egos, and
then
the other egos who later withdraws them.
I am sharing this thought not to provoke any sense duality or
division.
Abdul's Rare
Awakening by
Geza This story is so
"top secret" that all copies have been
destroyed for the national security of not only every nation on
Earth
but indeed every religion, indeed the very security and sanctity
of all
the propaganda of "healthcare" and the arms-race of
civilization itself.
Not too long ago there lived a faithful Muslim called Abdul.
Abdul never heard God laugh and so he had to follow the
scripture's
Peehaytchdee pundits ... who convinced Abdul that Allah was
furious at
the kill ratio between Arabs and Jews... and so to please Allah
every
devout Muslim had to do what he could to make this kill ratio
that
pleases Jehovah of about 1:100 (1 dead Jew for every 100 dead
Arabs)
more to the liking if Allah of about 10:1 (ten dead Arabs for
every dead
Jew).
So to please Allah this faithful Abdul loads himself up with
dynamite
and sets off to find the biggest crowd of faithful Jews he can
find so
that he can blow himself up and in the process kill as many Jews
as
possible just to please Allah and get the Jehovah pleasing
kill-ratio
of 1:100 closer to the Allah pleasing kill-ratio of at least
10:1.
But no matter how hard Abdul tries to trigger the bomb to go off
in
this big crowd of faithful Jews it will not go off. And so he is
thrown
into a dungeon. He is condemned to death by firing-squad.
Standing in front of the firing-squad Abdul gets a thought that
makes
him laugh. Instead of the Israelis making him a saint for
performing
the miracle the bomb needed not to go off -- and thus
miraculously
save dozens of faithful Jews from certain death -- the Israelis
were
going to execute him just because his suicide-bomb did not go
off.
And the more this thought made him laugh the more it made the
firing-squad laugh which made him laugh all the more which made
the
firing-squad laugh ... until they had to be replaced by a
more-serious
firing-squad... which only made Abdul laugh even better.
This was because when this more-serious firing-squad shows up the
laughter of the leaving firing-squad makes the new firing-squad
start
to laugh which makes Abdul really really laugh hysterically until
the
unimaginable happens.
The unimaginable happens when Abdul becomes one of the rare
individuals
who actually LAUGHS at the Ultimate Joke before it happens --
mostly
with bullets and bombs, but in Abdul's RARE case with Laughter:
SELF-realization, GOD-Realization, Enlightenment,
THE Awakening of "there-is-no-other": Death.
It is the Realization of being brain-dead (the inability to
think, and
thus, for example, two gods Jehovah and Allah need a good
kill-ratio
to be one-god) that allows the rare individual, like Abdul, to
Laugh
at this Ultimate Joke before it happens ... SELF-realization,
GOD-Realization, Enlightenment,
The Awakening of "there-is-no-other": Death.
-- Braindead
THE HAND OF LOVE
The hand of love lies open outstretched in the gesture, the mudra of acceptance and of offering and of letting go...again...and again...and again of a patience beyond waiting as it holds our sustenance until in our curiosity and in our need we approach and partake and being fed we go while the hand of love lies open
-A.
David Lynch's last film:
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Empire_(film) >
Excerpt:
When presenting
screenings of the digital work,
Lynch sometimes offers a clue
in the form of a quote
from a translation of the
Aitareya Upanishad: "We
are like the spider.
We weave our life and then
move along in it.
We are like the dreamer who dreams
and then lives in the dream.
This is true for the entire universe."
Ciao,
Alessandro
Nice to hear from you
after a long time, Alessandro.
I heard Inland Empire
is more disturbing than Eraserhead,
but maybe it's great, too.
-Jerry
It is.
I mean great, not disturbing.
And offers a copiously real perspective
about nonduality. It's about an
actress
loosing, or maybe gaining,
perceptions of her role as an actress
and her role as a woman.
Regarding your request for more spider stories, here's one.
These are excerpts from a sequence of posts on the Two Mystics blog, www.twomystics.blogspot.com, beginning February 16, 2007.
Co-Author: Your link [about tiny animals] reminded me of a tiny spider I met one day on my desk. It was very small, about 3/16" in diameter, and we were friends for about a month or so. I used my pencil point to communicate (long story). It would come out to greet me in the morning, we'd play for awhile, and if anybody came in, it would go back to its home somewhere in the corner of the desk top, amongst the stacks of paper.
Me: How nice, someone else who doesn't just automatically kill spiders. Thanks for the fun story!
Co-Author: My encounter with the little spider affected my feelings towards all spiders. When the big ones show up in the bathtub, I always put them outside.
All things speak, but I cannot hear with all the chatter. If I attend to one, it speaks for all.
Me: Writing about a different subject, a very good friend recently reminded me, "One way to say this: `The way to the universal is through the particular.'"
We ourselves are tiny animals. As far as I can tell, we are only capable of looking at the particular. Whatever universal concept or conclusion we come to or even whatever experience we have, it's still particular, I think, whether we like it or not.
Jodi
And so I dreamed,
that the world dissapeared,
I entered blackness,
and forgot about reality completely,
my mind was wiped out,
in this darkness I found peace and silence.
But just when I thought that this is it,
this is the end of all of it,
something inside the darkness surrounding me began to shimmer and
shine,
in no time, a bright glowing, endless white light appeared in my
mind,
replacing the dark,
not so bad I thought to myself,
silence was still all surrounding me,
but the darkness turned into light, I became light.
Being light surrounded by light, I dwelled there for a seemingly
never
ending time, I felt nothing but pure bliss, like a never ending
orgasm.
This is good I thought to myself, let's leave it at that.
But my pleasure came to early, in the midst of my exstasy,
the white light turned into all colors of the rainbow,
and the colors of the rainbow turned into letters, black and
white.
Suddenly I saw out of million people's minds,
whiteness was gone, blackness was gone,
everything was gone,
the world remained.
It reappeared, in front of my eyes, million eyes.
And it looked not different than before,
everything remained the same.
I am back. In million bodies,
in million minds,
and I remember nothing.
Nothing.
Sweet nothing.
--lulu
Is Zen silence?
Are words failure?
Silence won't say.
Silence, unmoved
by questions, remains
mute like a leaning toomstone
in the rain that saying nothing,
to the soul speaks.
Pete