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#3014 - Wednesday, December 12, 2007 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
This issue includes another reader's submission, this time by Ben Wolfe, who kindly wrote us, "in appreciation, a year and a half later. This is a post I just sent to the sufimystic list." But first, a couple of quotes chosen in appreciation of what Ben has to say.
If there were any object, any
doctrine, that could be given to you to hold
on to or understand, it would reduce you to bewilderment and
externalism. It's just a spiritual openness, with nothing that
can be
grasped; it is pure everywhere, its light clearly penetrating,
outwardly
and inwardly luminous through and through.
-Te-shan From Teachings of Zen, edited by Thomas Cleary
posted to Wisdom-l by Mark Scorelle
It speaks to me in the silence of this one
By Fakhruddin Iraqi
(? - 1289)
English version by William Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson
It speaks to me in the silence of this one
then through the words of that one speaking;
it whispers to me through an eyebrow raised
and the message of an eye winking.
And do you know what words it breathes into my ear? It says,
"I am Love: in heaven and
earth I have no place;
I am the Wondrous Phoenix
whose spoor cannot be traced.
With eyebrow-bow and
arrow-winks I hunt
both worlds -- and yet my
weapons cannot be found.
Like the sun I brighten each
atom's cheek;
I cannot be pinpointed: I am
too manifest.
I speak with every tongue,
listen with all ears,
but marvel at this: My ears
and tongue are erased.
Since in all the world only I
exist
above and below, no likeness
of me can be found."
from Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (Classics of Western Spirituality) , by William Chittick / Nasr Seyyed Hossein
Chaos and Transcendence posted to
SufiMystic by Ben Wolfe
Some Sufis teach that it is the interplay and convergence between the
individuated consciousness and the universal/transcendent consciousness that
is the highest development of both the human being and of God.
Hafizullah
I'd love to hear more about this Hafizullah. It's certainly where
the greatest sense of mystery, of discovery, of delight and of
play are in my life.
Whatever has been pulling me, towards whatever it is I'm
learning, is located at this boundary.
One of my two favourite books, prior to becoming conscious
of whatever-it-is-we're-doing-in-this-group was "Chaos:
Making a New Science", by James Gleick. Chaos (apologies for
the lesson to the many who probably share the interest) is the
ordered, self-regenerating, dynamic and yet utterly unpredictable
patterning found at the heart of many natural processes, and
especially under 'boundary conditions.'
It's a creative force. It produces astounding beauty. It's
impossible to see the world in the same way after taking this
way-of-looking in: it breaks down perceptual walls and habits in
much the same way as Zen. It's been called one of the three
things twentieth century science will be remembered for, along
with quantum physics and relativity.
the interplay and convergence between the
individuated consciousness and the universal/transcendent consciousness
From a chaos point of view, it is no surprise that this
interplay, which mixes levels, which should not be describable,
which should not (to the linear and rational mind) exist -- not
only does exist, but is at the centre of existence.
It's where reality "folds back on itself" in infinite
regress. The "still point" is here, the "pregnant
void," the "nothing that is everything." It's a
place of pure connection, the lovely, exhilarating, endlessly
surprising paradox of "knowing" that nothing can be
known, and that the you who is doing the knowing does not exist.
I was a whitewater canoeist (I could say "am", but I
don't get out nearly enough). A river sweeps round a bend or
obstacle, and water turns back upstream to fill the space.
There's a boundary line between the downstream and upstream flow.
If the force of the flow around or over an obstacle is powerful,
there can be a ferocious wave, standing in place on this line.
One of the games canoeists play is to surf this wave. It's one of
the fiercest points in the river, where its forces meet, and you
can edge in from the downstream side and sit perfectly still in
the midst of the chaos, and hold your paddle in the air and do
absolutely nothing.
This is just a single "folding back," of forces playing
on themselves, and it's a high that has people donning wetsuits
and helmets and risking their safety when the ice is barely off
the river. This high is just a pointer to the experience of
surfing the boundary between levels of consciousness. That, in
turn, is just a single step toward falling into the infinite
regress.
I love the Nisargadatta quotation: "Love says 'I am
everything.' Wisdom says 'I am nothing.' Between the two, my life
flows."
It captures this for me.
In the same paragraph, Nisargadatta says:
"I call this capacity of entering other focal points of
consciousness, love; you may give it any name you like. [...]
Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject
and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am
both, and neither, and beyond both."
I think this place is the source, the nature, not only of
nirvana, moksha, fanaa, but also of creativity, of limitless
psychological healing. Art, spirituality and psychology meet
here. (So, I suspect, does physics.)
The self dissolves, and becomes pure interconnection, pure
openness.
Another of my favourite quotations is from Byron Katie, I
transcribed it from a sample recorded session of her process 'The
Work':
"Who would I be without my story? In that moment is where I
create, it's where God and I [or, "god and i"] are
without separation."
This is one of my own favourite poems, one of the first I showed
anyone else. Gloria Lee published it in Nonduality Highlights,
about a year and a half ago, under a pseudonym I gave her for the
part of me that was having these experiences, in words that
couldn't be stopped. The process was too precious, too fragile
and too clearly and overwhelmingly "not in any meaningful
way mine" to dare attach my name to. .
it has to do with calculus with breaking free of the need to see
that one last step the one that is infinitely small as needing to
be measured and divided in its turn it is zeno's paradox we have
puzzled it for 2500 years circling the point at times infinitely
close reaching for reunion with the whole while always steps
beyond counting away as far as when we began kept at bay by this
mind-made trick that makes us stop to carve one last small
digital divide between us and the welcome waiting on the other
side
.
(There are tiny changes in this version.)
As with other things I've posted to this group, I have no idea
whether the images, the metaphors, the connections, the
experiences, (I'm still very new to trying to describe or,
better, "speak from") are common to any or many others.
Ben
(By the way, my other 'favourite book' alongside
"Chaos" was (and is) a children's story, full of
paradox, puns, impossible quests, challenges to identity,
awakening wonder, the attempt to see infinity and zero ... and
then a 'hero's journey' to rescue the twin princesses of sweet
Rhyme and pure Reason from their joint prison, in The Castle in
the Air. Buy it for every child you love who's over about 8,
maybe even younger, and then don't explain anything. It's a cheap
paperback, called "The Phantom Tollbooth," by Norton
Juster, and illustrated, as a bonus, by Jules Feiffer.)