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Nondual Highlights: Issue #2989, Saturday, November 17, 2007, Editor: Mark



You are the unchangeable Awareness in which all activity takes place.
Always rest in peace.
You are eternal Being, unbounded and undivided.
Just keep Quiet.
All is well.
Keep Quiet Here and Now.
You are Happiness, you are Peace, you are Freedom.
Do not entertain any notions that you are in trouble.
Be kind to yourself.
Open to your Heart and simply Be.

- Papaji, quoted on Allspirit




It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognising what you are......all illness is mental illness.... all disease comes from a state of unforgiveness.

- from A Course in Miracles




What exactly is "Skill In Means" or "Skillful Means" about? I think it's important to know that the ideal of Skill In Means (in the context of how it originally arose in Mahayana Buddhism) is not essentially about learning techniques or methods to help others, but is rather something very different. It is about the innate capacity of someone with an Awakening Consciousness (Bodhichitta) to GENERATE whatever very specific and different ways of expression and teaching are needed for every specific student. That is something very different than learning techniques and methods that can be applied to all students. It is actually the opposite of having methods transform students; it is having students transform methods.

Skill in Means is not any of the techniques themselves, nor is it all of the techniques taken together. It is acting from The Heart Of Compassion where the teaching is a response to a student's needs, rather than acting from a pre-existing therapeutic, psychological or spiritual structure that is being used to diagnose and treat them.

It is an organic aspect of Bodhichitta (Awakening Consciousness) that is the integrating factor among all the grab bag of techniques and ways of teaching, rather than simply a name for the grab bag itself. Skill in Means is not a product of the thinking, planning, preparing, discursive and constructing mind, rather it is teaching as a response to the other, dependent on the other, not on techniques of a psychological or spiritual school of thought.

I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with learning and including techniques and methods from various sources.

Nor am I advocating that we exile all systems of therapeutic (or spiritual) diagnosis. But I am suggesting that we recognize that while they may be helpful in specific cases, they are not the thing in itself and they come with their own conceptual baggage.

- Krishna Gauci




What great doctors do is awaken the doctor within.

- Albert Schweitzer




Try to be, only to be. The all-important word is 'try'. Allot enough time daily for sitting quietly and trying, just trying, to go beyond the personality, with its addictions and obsessions. Don't ask how, it cannot be explained. You just keep on trying until you succeed. If you persevere, there can be no failure. What matters supremely is sincerity, earnestness; you must really have had surfeit of being the person you are, now see the urgent need of being free of this unnecessary self-identification with a bundle of memories and habits. This steady resistance against the unnecessary is the secret of success.

- Nisargadatta Maharaj, from I Am That




Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

- St. Francis of Assisi

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