Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
#2938 - Wednesday,
September 26, 2007 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Nondual Highlights
"Realize that truth
disturbs in order to cure."
- Vernon Howard
The great Indian teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj once said, "Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between the two my life flows." "I am nothing" does not mean that there is a bleak wasteland within. It does mean that with awareness we open to a clear, unimpeded space, without center or periphery--nothing separate. If we are nothing, there is nothing at all to serve as a barrier to our boundless expression of love. Being nothing in this way, we are also, inevitably, everything. "Everything" does not mean self-aggrandizement, but a decisive recognition of interconnection; we are not separate. Both the clear, open space of "nothing" and the interconnectedness of "everything" awaken us to our true nature. This is the truth we contact when we meditate, a sense of unity beyond suffering. It is always present; we merely need to be able to access it.
- Sharon Salzberg
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XXIX
Quiet
friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what
batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this
uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there. A
nd if the
world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
~ Rainer
Maria Rilke ~
(In
Praise of Mortality, translated and edited by Anita Barrows
and Joanna Macy)
Web archive
of Panhala postings: www.panhala.net/Archive/Index.html To subscribe to Panhala, send a
blank email to Panhala-subscribe@yahoogroups.com music link (left button
to play, right button to save)
That we are at all is the great mystery.
The unknown force animating us,
present in all that is blooming and fading,
is our deepest felt sense,
and strangely,
the feeling we most often overlook.
Like breathing, this aliveness
- this passionate presence -
is taken for granted,
and we pay attention instead to an endless stream of thoughts.
Yet, as our attention comes to rest more in pure presence,
a natural intelligence emerges.
This intelligence bypasses our genetic gifts,
IQ, age, cultural conditioning, and education.
We might call it an intelligence of the heart.
- Catherine Ingram
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971), founder of Zen Center San Francisco and author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, was known to discourage questions about enlightenment. Once, when pressed on the subject, he replied: "What do you want to know for? You may not like it." - Suzuki Roshi, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Spring 1997
Alan Larus - photos with poems
http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/Ink.htm