Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
#2862 - Wednesday, July 4, 2007 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Nondual Highlights
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights One: Essential Writings on Nonduality: http://tinyurl.com/2blmhy
Somewhere in this process,
you will come face
to face with the sudden and shocking realization
that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a
shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels
barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of
control and hopeless. No problem. You are not
crazier than you were yesterday. You also are no
crazier than anybody else around you. The real
difference is that you have confronted the
situation; they have not. So they still feel
relatively comfortable. This does not mean that
they are better off. Ignorance may be bliss, but
it does not lead to Liberation. So don't let this
realization unsettle you. It is a milestone
actually, a sign of real progress. The very fact
that you have looked at the problem straight in
the eye means that you are on your way up and
out of it.
--Henepola Guanaratana
Mukti or liberation is our nature. It
is another
name for us. Our wanting mukti is a very funny
thing. It is like a man who is in the shade,
voluntarily leaving the shade, going into the sun,
feeling the severity of the heat there, making
great efforts to get back to the shade and then
rejoicing, "How sweet is the shade! I have reached
the shade at last!" We are all doing exactly the
same. We are not different from the reality. We
imagine we are different, that is we create the
bheda bhava [the feeling of difference] and then
undergo great sadhana [spiritual practices] to get
rid of the bheda bhava and realise the oneness.
Why
imagine or create bheda bhava and then destroy it?
--Sri Ramana Maharshi
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
"Be As You Are"
The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi
edited by David Godman posted to AlongTheWay
"'One day I will be free of the ego.'
Who is talking? The ego.
To become free of the ego is not really
a big job but a very small one. All you
need to do is be aware of your thoughts
and emotions - as they happen.
.
This is not really a 'doing,' but an alert
'seeing.' In that sense, it is true that there
is nothing you can do to become free of
the ego. When that shift happens, which
is the shift from thinking to awareness, an
intelligence far greater than the ego's
cleverness begins to operate in your life."
--Eckhart Tolle
From the book "A New Earth"
posted to Daily Dharma
The aspirant who frequently measures how far
he has advanced, or retrograded, upon this path,
or how long he has stood still, is seeking
something to be gained for himself, is looking all
the time at himself. He is measuring the ego
instead of trying to transcend it altogether. He
is clinging to self, instead of obeying Jesus'
injunction to deny it. Looking at the ego, he
unwittingly stands with his back to the Overself.
If he is ever to become enlightened, he must
turn round, cease this endless
self-measurement, stop fussing over little steps
forward or backward, let all thoughts about his
own backwardness or greatness cease, and look
directly at the goal itself. — Notebooks of Paul Brunton
posted to Wisdom-l
46. Awareness of Being
is Bliss
"That which you are,
your true self, you love it,
and whatever you do, you do for your own
happiness. To find it, to know it, to cherish it is
your basic urge. Since time immemorial you loved
yourself, but never wisely. Use your body and
mind wisely in the service of the self, that is all.
Be true to your own self, love your self
absolutely. Do not pretend that you love others
as yourself. Unless you have realized them as
one with yourself, you cannot love them. Don't
pretend to be what you are not, don't refuse to
be what you are. Your love of others is the
result of self-knowledge, not its cause. Without
self-realization, no virtue is genuine. When you
know beyond all doubting that the same life
flows through all that is and you are that life,
you will love all naturally and spontaneously.
When you realize the depth and fullness of your
love of yourself, you know that every living being
and the entire universe are included in your
affection. But when you look at anything as
separate from you, you cannot love it for you
are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear
deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only
self-realization can break it. Go for it resolutely."
--Nisargardatta, from I Am That posted to Wisdom-l
Fire goes
where there's fuel.
Truth - the tip of the flame --
where coming and going coincide,
birthing and dying are simultaneous,
never static, ultimately ungraspable.
We say we want Truth, but resist
enduring the burning away
of what is not Truth.
Fire of Truth eats what's not true -
the false is the fuel.
Am I willing to allow love's burning now?
In each encounter, relationship, moment?
The past only applies to who I am not -
the one identified as "me".
Only that which appears to be other than
our Essential Nature gets consumed.
Essential Nature is
the fireplace, the fire, the fuel.
The caterpillar cannot understand the
butterfly, nor kindling the flame.
What is Awake is Awake
in
dark as well as light.
It is the light within both, the light
in which both arise.
True freedom is this awake, aware space
in the midst of all life.
It cannot be defined
in opposition to bondage.
It is as free in bondage
as it is in liberation.
It is enlightenment
even from enlightenment.
Without Love there is no Truth.
Without Truth there is no Love.
Love transcends any sense
of its own absence.
Refuse to disconnect from love!
This Love is indiscriminate -
it loves saints and sinners equally.
It doesn't fall in and out.
A deep and simple recognition,
meeting itself in all arising,
in every pair of eyes.
When we sever the conscious connection
from the heart of Love, which is
the unspoken, we begin to lie.
The lie is the core story of separation,
infinitely modified as the forms
of our suffering.
Love is always pre-existing.
We must disconnect in order to maintain
the image of being a separate self.
Fear of this love is the only fear
greater than fear of death.
This is the love of seeing God
wearing all the masks.
Without being anchored in this Love,
Truth becomes an abstraction.
This intimate connection with all beings, with
life itself, transcends and yet lives within the
opposites, the paradoxes, of experience and
perception.
It has no opposite itself.
It is non-exclusive -
even of other flavors of Love.
It is within all, but not limited to them.
It is the only thing that can really be
transformative in relationship to life & the
world. This Love makes friends with the mind. It's
important to make friends with the mind.
Otherwise, one sets oneself up for the
slaughter.
In such a friendship, mind
itself is finally realized to be love all along.
This love was never
meant to be contained -
it is uncontainable.
When we say we cannot contain it, what
says so is that which will be consumed by it.
All positions are position in mind -
Love/Truth has no position.
There is no need to make sense of it all.
We are surrender -
the verb (surrender) is the description
of what we are, when we recognize
ourselves as love.
The energy of attention can go
into thought or into silence.
When thought appears, this energy
can be escorted into silence -
this love.
Love is God's Escort Service.
All beautiful beings love you!
The joy is to share joy, to love our loving, to
pour out like sweet rain on this dusty rock of a
world, to witness ourselves blossom and unfold
in glory, and wither and pass away like leaves,
and feel the unbearable beauty of it all, and
praise and go silent in awe and majesty.
LoveAlways
Bob O'Hearn
Alan Larus Photos, "Pages"
http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/shores/page__one.htm
http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/shores/page__two.htm
http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/shores/page__three.htm