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#3008 - Thursday, December 6, 2007 - Editor: Jerry Katz
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Submissions: http://nonduality.com/submissions.htm
Read the book inspired by the Highlights, ONE: Essential Writings on Nonduality: http://nonduality.com/one.htm
Dustin LindenSmith brings us Nonduality Highlights Podcast #3: http://lindensmith.com/nonduality/ndh_podcast_003.mp3
Topics include the Eightfold Path, Various Quotations, and Poems of David Davis. Davis's poems, featured in earlier Highlights, sound even better in Dustin's audio version.
Here is an excerpt from The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad, by Ken Wilber. This book introduces Ken's Integral Theory, but the great nondual section is the few pages of the last chapter. You may want to get the book for that reason alone. Here's the first few paragraphs from that 18 page chapter.
The Great Search
The realization of the Nondual traditions is uncompromising: there is only Spirit, there is only God, there is only Emptiness in all its radiant wonder. All the good and all the evil, the very best and the very worst, the upright and the degenerate -- each and all are radically perfect manifestations of Spirit precisely as they are. There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other.
This realization undoes the Great Search that is the heart of the separate-self sense. The separate-self is, at bottom, simply a sensation of seeking. When you feel yourself right now, you will basically feel a tiny interior tension or contraction -- a sensation of grasping, desiring, wishing, wanting, avoiding, resisting -- it is a sensation of effort, a sensation of seeking.
In its highest form, this sensation of seeking takes on the form of the Great Search for Spirit. We wish to get from our unenlightened state (of sin or delusion or duality) to an enlightened or more spiritual state. We wish to get from where Spirit is not, to where Spirit is.
But there is no place where Spirit is not. Every single location in the entire Kosmos is equally and fully Spirit. Seeking of any sort, movement of any sort, attainment of any sort: all profoundly useless. The Great Search simply reinforces the mistaken assumption that there is some place that Spirit is not, and that I need to get from a space that is lacking to a space that is full. But there is no space lacking, and there is no space more full. There is only Spirit.
The Great Search for Spirit is simply that impulse, the final impulse, which prevents the present realization of Spirit, and it does so for a simple reason: the Great Search presumes the loss of God. The Great Search reinforces the mistaken belief that God is not present, and thus totally obscures the reality of God's ever-present Presence. The Great Search, which pretends to love God, is in fact the very mechanism of pushing God away; the mechanism of promising to find tomorrow that which exists only in the timeless now; the mechanism of watching the future so fervently that the present always passes it by -- very quickly -- and God's smiling face with it.
Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad, by Ken Wilber.
Amazon.com link: http://www.amazon.com/Eye-Spirit-Integral-Vision-Slightly/dp/1570628718/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196949236&sr=1-1