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#2902 - Thursday, August 16, 2007 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
One: Essential
Writings on Nonduality. Amazon site: http://nonduality.com/one.htm
Check availability at your local Borders Store: http://www.bordersstores.com/locator/locator.jsp?tt=gn
Several fine writings from recent contributors to Nonduality Salon, and a couple of announcements/links that I think you'll like.
Amusement Park
by Jodi
The Venus/Mars of my mind pulls/pushes me through the crowd
here at No-Flags Amusement Park.
Self-evident selves cross Paths, bumping into each other,
sometimes smiling, sometimes frowning,
sometimes shaking a fist. I'm right in the thick of it - I'm on
mission. Following my Heart, I'm
searching for a particular ride, The Carousel of Unknowing. It's
Now or never.
The un-Sattvic smell of Kshatriya-brand hotdogs wafts by. I
grab a spiritual map and see that the
indexer has listed The Carousel of Unknowing, along with all
other rides, as location "One". Event-
ually, I perceive the carousel on the Horizon. The map states
that I Am. It's a relief to Be There
already, because my feet hurt.
The carousel's music - currently "Ode to Sartre" -
is Booming from the Center, which is Illusion.
Or not. At any rate, here are Ruin's innumerable cousins,
including Wisdom, resplendent in a
Chakra- striped saddle and bridle, and Stupidity, fashionably
decked out in Gravitational Black. I
choose Stupidity (or is this predestined?) and climb on.
I see that many of the horses are supported by helpful posts.
Posts generally reach the heights.
Some also reach the depths. Some manage to do both at once.
"Gita-yup," I whisper in Stupidity's ear. She rolls her three eyes. The carousel doesn't start.
"Move toward Awareness," I suggest. Stupidity
glances meditatively at Awareness, who appears to
have a cushion for a saddle. There is no movement. There is only
stillness.
"Embody Truth?" I plead. Stupidity looks around for
Truth. His reins are tied to a podium, and he's
nuzzling a pre-written speech. I can't blame her for not going
there.
I'm stuck. And worse, although the horses are all branded with
the word Exit (and their saddles are
stamped with varying numbers of little Buddhas), I can't find an
exit. The situation is
intolerable.
It appears that all horses are forever beyond me. Still, I
lean forward to look around: maybe I am
. . . I lean forward some more: maybe I'm not . . . I lean
further: maybe I can never . . . I slump
forward, hanging from my horse's neck. Yes, Stupidity, thinking
is ridiculously meaningless.
Stupidity whispers in my ear, "Be Nothing." I
straighten up and look around. There doesn't seem to
be a Nothing. This is the last straw. I give up.
Astonishingly, Nothing happens.
A bell rings. Effortlessly, The Carousel of Unknowing
moves-and- stops. (This ride is not what I
expected.)
I give Stupidity a loving pat, dismount, and disappear into the everyday crowd.
The Real Secret
Nothing is mine
and no-one can take
that away from me.
I am free.
Peace,
Anna
It is as if...
It is as if I were living a third life these days. The first two
were
long ago and far away. At first there was a daughter who called
me
Mama and did pirouettes for me to see. Then she left and life
rolled
on into the sea of the everyday once again. The tsunami of my
husband's death revealed the second life I had to undergo. As
caregiver I lunged heavily into the sorrow and suffering. I
chronicled
it online. Now I am seemingly free.
What now? Is it enough to live peaceably within, letting the
outer
manifestation called Vicki find simple pleasures. I think so. I
think
this third life is given over to conscious self-care. I remember
reading about the Shivapuri Baba who lived so very simply. He
taught
his student, J. G. Bennett, how to procure flowers from the
market and
arrange them to perfection. It was in this way that he learned to
awaken. I can do that. I have had experience in taking care of
people...why not flowers?
Vicki Woodyard
http://www.bobwoodyard.com
Dear Jerry,
I am now making
available on our websites (radicalhappiness.com and
endless-satsang.com) a free 60-minute MP3 recording of a
channeled satsang. To hear this talk entitled “Moving from
the Ego to Essence,” click on the link below (which is the
homepage of my website) and then scroll down to the bottom of the
page, where you will find a link to the recording. Here is a
description of it:
Through
I realize that
the idea of channeled satsang might be a little radical for some,
but that is the best description I can find for what I do. If you
think your list would enjoy this recording, would you please send
it out to them? Thank you!
Click here
and then scroll to the bottom of the page to the link for “Moving
from the Ego to Essence”
Gina Lake
(928) 282-5770
ginalakenow@aol.com
www.radicalhappiness.com
Editor's note: I listened to this hour-long recording which
features a full focus upon essence, making ego look negligible. I
think many of you will enjoy listening. I would not have known
that the speaker was channeled entity had I not been told.
I've never heard Gina speak before, so I had nothing to
compare her speaking style to. -Jerry
New book by
Peter Fenner, Ph.D.
Radiant Mind: Awakening Unconditioned Awareness
Buy Now - http://store.soundstrue.com/bk01133d.html
Book
description
Whether it is called enlightenment, pure awareness, or
"unconditioned
awareness," there exists an awakened state of pure
liberation that is at the
heart of every contemplative tradition. According to Peter
Fenner, this
experience of boundless consciousness does not have to exist
separately
from our day-to-day, "conditioned" existence. Rather,
we can learn to live as
unique individuals at the same time as we rest in a unified
expanse of
oneness with all existence--a state he calls "Radiant Mind.”
Students in
the West often feel frustrated in trying to follow the Eastern
path
to awakening, confused by seemingly vague or counter-intuitive
teachings.
Peter Fenner created the Radiant Mind practice to help you break
through the
obstacles that are often challenging for practitioners in our
culture. Drawing
on his background in Eastern spirituality and Western psychology,
Fenner
brings you a precise, step-by-step approach to non-dual practice
that
includes:
"As
extraordinary as unconditioned mind may sound," teaches
Peter Fenner,
"it isn't distant from our everyday life; it's always
readily available to us."
With Radiant Mind this master-teacher crystallizes the
contemplative wisdom
of the East into an eminently accessible guide for living a life
suffused with
pure bliss.
About the Author
Peter Fenner, Ph.D. studied as a monk for nine years with many
notable
Buddhist lamas, including and Thubten Yeshe, Sogyal Rinpoche, and
Zopa
Rinpoche. He is founder of the Center for Timeless Wisdom, and
the author
of numerous books, including Reasoning into Reality (Wisdom
Publications,
1995) and The Edge of Certainty (Nicolas-Hays, 2002). He has
taught
workshops at Stanford Medical School, Columbia University, and
elsewhere.
Endorsements
Radiant Mind is an excellent guidebook for waking up from our
collective
trance and realizing the promise of enlightened life, both within
oneself and
in our benighted world. Peter Fenner has studied with wise
Tibetan elders
and brought their practical and also nondualistic teachings alive
in a modern
way which can benefit us all, skillfully pointing out how we can
discover and
actualize our innate unconditioned awareness while integrating it
into daily
life, where the rubber actually meets the road on the spiritual
path. This
book will help us to understand and practice the View, Meditation
and Action
of Dzogchen, the Natural Great Perfection.
Lama Surya Das,
author of Awakening to the Sacred: Building a Spiritual Life from
Scratch,
Awakening the Buddhist Heart: Integrating Love, Meaning and
Connection
into Every Part of Your Life, Letting go of the Person You Used
to Be:
Lessons on Change, Loss and Spiritual Transformation
[The Radiant Mind course] is a brilliant postmodern
implementation of
Buddhist nondual wisdom. Peter Fenner has taken the refined
deconstructive
practices that have liberated ten of thousands of Asian
contemplatives and
adapted them for effective Western use. I highly recommend it.
Robert Thurman,
Ph.D.,
Buddhist Scholar, Columbia University,
President of Tibet House in New York
Peter Fenner is a teacher-practitioner of the first order. I
know of no other
Western author who communicates the essential reality of
unconditioned
awareness with such power, simplicity, and authenticity. Read
this book.
Enjoy unconditioned awareness.
Allan Combs, Ph.D.,
author of: The Radiance of Being:
Understanding the Grand Integral Vision; Living the Integral
Life.
Buy Now http://store.soundstrue.com/bk01133d.html
If we really dropped illusions for what they can
give us or deprive
us of, we would be alert. The consequence of not doing this
is
terrifying and unescapable. We lose our capacity to
love. If you
wish to love, you must learn to see again. And if you wish
to see,
you must learn to give up your drug. It's as simple as
that. Give
up your dependency. Tear away the tentacles of society that
have
enveloped and suffocated your being. You must drop
them.
Externally, everything will go on as before, but though you will
continue to be in the world, you will no longer be of it.
In your
heart, you will now be free at last, if utterly alone. Your
dependence on your drug will die. You don't have to go to
the
desert; you're right in the middle of people; you're enjoying
them
immensely. But they no longer have the power to make you
happy or
miserable. That's what aloneness means. In this
solitude your
dependence dies. The capacity to love is born. One no
longer sees
others as means of satisfying one's addiction. Only someone
who has
attempted this knows the terrors of the process. It's like
inviting
yourself to die. It's like asking the poor drug addict to
give up
the only happiness he has ever known. How to replace it
with the
taste of bread and fruit and the clean taste of the morning air,
the
sweetness of the water of the mountain stream? While he is
struggling with his withdrawal symptoms and the emptiness he
experiences within himself now that his drug is gone, nothing can
fill the emptiness except his drug. Can you imagine a life
in which
you refuse to enjoy or take pleasure in a single word of
appreciation
or to rest your head on anyone's shoulder for support?
Think of a
life in which you depend on no one emotionally, so that no one
has
the power to make you happy or miserable anymore. You
refuse to need
any particular person or to be special to anyone or to call
anyone
your own. The birds of the air have their nests and the
foxes their
holes, but you will have nowhere to rest your head in your
journey
through life. If you ever get to this state, you will at
last know
what it means to see with a vision that is clear and unclouded by
fear or desire. Every word there is measured. To see
at last with a
vision that is clear and unclouded by fear or desire. You
will know
what it means to love. But to come to the land of love, you
must
pass through the pains of death, for to love persons means to die
to
the need for persons, and to be utterly alone.
How would you ever get there? By a ceaseless awareness, by
the
infinite patience and compassion you would have for a drug
addict.
By developing a taste for the good things in life to counter the
craving for your drug. What good things? The love of
work which you
enjoy doing for the love of itself; the love of laughter and
intimacy
with people to whom you do not cling and on whom you do not
depend
emotionally but whose company you enjoy. It will also help
if you
take on activities that you can do with your whole being,
activities
that you so love to do that while you're engaged in them success,
recognition, and approval simply do not mean a thing to
you. It will
help, too, if you return to nature. Send the crowds away,
go up to
the mountains, and silently commune with trees and flowers and
animals and birds, with sea and clouds and sky and stars.
I've told
you what a spiritual exercise it is to gaze at things, to be
aware of
things around you. Hopefully, the words will drop, the
concepts will
drop, and you will see, you will make contact with reality.
That is
the cure for loneliness. Generally, we seek to cure our
loneliness
through emotional dependence on people, through gregariousness
and
noise. That is no cure. Get back to things, get back
to nature, go
up in the mountains. Then you will know that your heart has
brought
you to the vast desert of solitude, there is no one there at your
side, absolutely no one.
At first this will seem unbearable. But it is only because
you are
unaccustomed to aloneness. If you manage to stay there for
a while,
the desert will suddenly blossom into love. Your heart will
burst
into song. And it will be springtime forever; the drug will
be out;
you're free. Then you will understand what freedom is, what
love is,
what happiness is, what reality is, what truth is, what God
is. You
will see, you will know beyond concepts and conditioning,
addictions
and attachments. Does that make sense?
Let me end this with a lovely story. There was a man who
invented
the art of making fire. He took his tools and went to a
tribe in the
north, where it was very cold, bitterly cold. He taught the
people
there to make fire. The people were very interested.
He showed them
the uses to which they could put fire -- they could cook, could
keep
themselves warm, etc. They were so grateful that they had
learned
the art of making fire. But before they could express their
gratitude to the man, he disappeared. He wasn't concerned
with
getting their recognition or gratitude; he was concerned about
their
well being. He went to another tribe, where he again began
to show
them the value of his invention. People were interested
there, too,
a bit too interested for the peace of mind of their priests, who
began to notice that this man was drawing crowds and they were
losing
their popularity. So they decided to do away with
him. They
poisoned him, crucified him, put it any way you like. But
they were
afraid now that the people might turn against them, so they were
very
wise, even wily. Do you know what they did? They had
a portrait of
the man made and mounted it on the main altar of the
temple. The
instruments for making fire were placed in front of the portrait,
and
the people were taught to revere the portrait and to pay
reverence to
the instruments of fire, which they dutifully did for
centuries. The
veneration and the worship went on, but there was no fire.
Where's the fire? Where's the love? Where's the drug
uprooted from
your system? Where's the freedom? This is what
spirituality is all
about. Tragically, we tend to lose sight of this, don't
we? This is
what Jesus Christ is all about. But we overemphasized the
'Lord,
Lord,' didn't we? Where's the fire? And if worship
isn't leading to
the fire, if adoration isn't leading to love, if the liturgy
isn't
leading to a clearer perception of reality, if God isn't leading
to
life, of what use is religion except to create more division,
more
fanaticism, more antagonism? It is not from lack of
religion in the
ordinary sense of the word that the world is suffering, it is
from
lack of love, lack of awareness. And love is generated
through
awareness and through no other way, no other way.
Understand the
obstructions you are putting in the way of love, freedom, and
happiness and they will drop. Turn on the light of
awareness and the
darkness will disappear. Happiness is not something you
acquire;
love is not something you produce; love is not something that you
have; love is something that has you. You do not have the
wind, the
stars, and the rain. You don't possess these things; you
surrender
to them. And surrender occurs when you are aware of your
illusions,
when you are aware of your addictions, when you are aware of your
desires and fears. As I told you earlier, first,
psychological
insight is a great help, not analysis, however; analysis is
paralysis. Insight is not necessarily analysis. One
of your great
American therapists put it very well: "It's the 'Aha'
experience that
counts." Merely analyzing gives no help; it just gives
information.
But if you could produce the "Aha" experience, that's
insight. That
is change. Second, the understanding of your addiction is
important. You need time. Alas, so much time that is
given to
worship and singing praise and singing songs could so fruitfully
be
employed in self understanding. Community is not produced
by joint
liturgical celebrations. You know deep down in your heart,
and so do
I, that such celebrations only serve to paper over
differences.
Community is created by understanding the blocks that we put in
the
way of community, by understanding the conflicts that arise from
our
fears and our desires. At that point community
arises. We must
always beware of making worship just another distraction from the
important business of living. And living doesn't mean
working in
government, or being a big businessman, or performing great acts
of
charity. That isn't living. Living is to have dropped
all the
impediments and to live in the present moment with
freshness. "The
birds of the air . . . they neither toil nor
spin" -- that is
living. I began by saying that people are asleep,
dead. Dead people
running governments, dead people running big business, dead
people
educating others; come alive! Worship must help this, or
else it's
useless. And increasingly -- you know this and so do I --
we're
losing the youth everywhere. They hate us; they're not
interested in
having more fears and more guilts laid on them. They're not
interested in more sermons and exhortations. But they are
interested
in learning about love. How can I be happy? How can I
live? How
can I taste these marvelous things that the mystics speak
of? So
that's the second thing -- understanding. Third, don't
identify.
Somebody asked me as I was coming here today, "Do you ever
feel
low?" Boy, do I feel low every now and then. I
get my attacks. But
they don't last, they really don't. What do I do?
First step: I
don't identify. Here comes a low feeling. Instead of
getting tense
about it, instead of getting irritated with myself about it, I
understand I'm feeling depressed, disappointed, or
whatever. Second
step: I admit the feeling is in me, not in the other person,
e.g., in
the person who didn't write me a letter, not in the exterior
world;
it's in me. Because as long as I think it's outside me, I
feel
justified in holding on to my feelings. I can't say
everybody would
feel this way; in fact, only idiotic people would feel this way,
only
sleeping people. Third step: I don't identify with the
feeling. "I"
is not that feeling. "I" am not lonely,
"I" am not depressed, "I" am
not disappointed. Disappointment is there, one watches
it. You'd be
amazed how quickly it glides away. Anything you're aware of
keeps
changing; clouds keep moving. As you do this, you also get
all kinds
of insights into why clouds were coming in the first place.
What kind of feeling comes upon you when you're in touch with
nature,
or when you're absorbed in work that you love? Or when
you're really
conversing with someone whose company you enjoy in openness and
intimacy without clinging? What kind of feelings do you
have?
Compare those feelings with the feelings you have when you win an
argument, or when you win a race, or when you become popular, or
when
everybody's applauding you. The latter feelings I call
worldly
feelings; the former feelings I call soul feelings. Lots of
people
gain the world and lose their soul. Lots of people live
empty,
soulless lives because they're feeding themselves on popularity,
appreciation, and praise, on `I'm O.K., you're O.K.,' look at me,
attend to me, support me, value me, on being the boss, on having
power, on winning the race. Do you feed yourself on
that? If you
do, you're dead. You've lost your soul. Feed yourself
on other,
more nourishing material. Then you'll see the
transformation. I've
given you a whole program for life, haven't I?
Anthony de Mello, SJ
contributed by Mark Otter