Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3065, Sunday, February 3, 2007, Editor: Mark
Turn your attention away from the dream right now. Just for right
now, you don't need it. Let the thoughts and worries of the dream
character continue as they will, but just step back for a moment
and watch it happen, watch the dream character involved in its
dream.
And while the dream character is going about its business, turn
your attention to the one thing right now that is shining and
clear, peaceful and unassuming, steady and solid: the
consciousness with which the dream character is being observed.
Just rest here, in the unchanging consciousness which reflects
but is not changed by what it reflects. This is reality. Nothing
else is.
Rest your attention here. Get to know it. Let the reality of
consciousness be known to you, as you. Nothing needs to be done
here. No thought affects it, and so thought is not needed. No
action affects it, and so action is not needed.
It's not possible to do anything with this consciousness because
this consciousness is everything already. Pay attention to it for
a moment right now and it is easily noticed that consciousness is
complete. And since consciousness is complete, you are complete.
The only thing that ever makes you feel like you are not
complete, not whole, and that you need to "return"
somewhere to find wholeness, is that you have put your attention
into the dream life, and forgotten that wholeness is all that you
really are.
So observe the dream character as it desires enlightenment, and
as it desires love, reassurance, respect. Watch the dream
character as its life plays out. It is not who you are. You are
this consciousness, which has no mortality, no vulnerability, and
no limits. Beyond all imagination, the nothingness within which
resides the seed of all existence, the shining creation of
infinite universes - this is you.
Put your attention here, and allow your sense of this to grow. If
you are looking for Wholeness, here it is. If you are looking for
True Love, here it is, in the One Unlimited Self that is Reality.
No other love is possible. And this Love is already here, as You.
It's only a matter of attention.
- Annette Nibley
Separate yourself from your Body/Mind and rest as Pure Awareness.
Don't try to stop your mind. Don't try and do anything. It is all
the trying and searching and sweating yourself into a frenzy that
makes you unhappy. Let go of all of it. Rest in Pure Awareness,
right now, in this moment, and confusion is gone, sorrow is gone,
bondage is gone, fear is gone, limitation is gone. Yes, the mind
may say something. Thoughts may arise. But you are not the
thoughts. You are not the feelings. You are Pure Awareness. You
are free from all concepts.
Are you looking for spiritual experiences? You are not the
experiences. Experiences are phenomena. Phenomena come and go,
but you are always the witness to all experiences and all
phenomena. Do you want to see God. The experience of seeing God
may come and go but you are always the witness to all experiences
and phenomena. That Witness state, that Absolute Pure
Consciousness is itself non-different from whatever you might
conceive of as God. Do not underestimate this. Do not evaluate it
at all. Give up all evaluation, all judgement, all
intellectualizing and reside in the peace of who you are.
Are you seeking Awakening? As long as you are seeking you will
never find. You cannot be a seeker and a finder at the same time.
You must give up your seeking. You must give up your striving.
You must give up all that which is the very nature of your mind
and intellect. What is prior to that. It is only Pure
Consciousness without an object. It cannot be known or grasped
for it is the Knower, the Knowing. Let go of all concepts and
simply rest in that.
Who you think you are is concepts. It is your personal mythology
in which you are the Hero/ine. But that is a story based on a
supposed individual that doesn't exist, like a reflection in the
mirror. It is an appearance only. A case of mistaken identity.
Don't be fooled any longer. It is like watching a movie and
thinking that you are the main star. But it is just light on a
screen that gives an appearance of people and personalities.
Recognize the projector, which is the pure light of consciousness
itself. Only then can you be content and free from all of your
desires and anxieties (which are also only an illusion).
- Aja Acharya
We are made of these beautiful holy impulses and then the mind
jumps in with its commentary. Do we have to believe it? What it
says... Do we have to believe it?
When you are willing to speak what's there, to show what's there,
you bless it, and you allow us to bless it. And blessing what is
allows what wants to come through us to come through. Because
what we've been taught through conditioning is to put a lid on
everything, to curse things, to keep them under wraps. What if we
let what is knocking come in?
- Jeannie Zandi
Take a look at the room that you sit in. Just notice how there is
an automatic registering of all that you see in the instant that
you see it. The instant registering happens even before you gave
names to what you saw. It is effortless to see the objects in the
room- the walls, floor and ceiling. It is automatic, immediate
and natural to actually see. No one needed to teach us how to
see. No one can take away the actuality and effortlessness of
this seeing. The living activity of seeing does not need to be
maintained, mastered, developed or figured out. It simply is. It
lives us without 'us' being there. We don't need to plan how to
see the wall in front of us, nor do we need to understand what we
see for the activity of seeing to take place. Our seeing is a
given. It is constant and untouched by thoughts or ideas about
it.
Similarly to the effortlessness of seeing, is the recognition
that we Are. This recognition is as ordinary, common and
inescapable as seeing the wall, is. Who we are is so obvious that
we overlook it, or take it for granted. Registering the objects
in the room is such an unavoidable and constant reality that we
miss the essence behind it. We mistakenly think that the labels
and definitions of the objects that we see are what they are
(including our own image in the mirror).
In our ignorance, instead of recognising the immediate invisible
pure-intelligence that enables us to register images, we focus on
what the images (objects) mean to us and on the self-image
(subject) of the one we believe sees them. When we identify with
self-image we say, "It can't be that the truth of what I am
is so simple and self-evident." Thinking that it is too
simple we look outward and reach for a high that seems to come
with extra-ordinary phenomena.
Instead of attending to the fact of our being we hold on to the
act of seeking and hoping that it will reward us with the
promised happy future. We think we can have mind-flavored based
experiences to know a no-thing. Yet, a thing (which is what the
mind is) as Sailor Bob says, cannot know a no-thing. So, given
what we discovered here, lets take another look around the room
that we sit in and watch how the seeing is all that is happening.
There are no separate things that are seen, and no separate
person that sees them. There is simply the actual, effortless
seeing that lives all by itself, free of duality, free of
conditions. We are that one immediate seeing. We are the things
that we see, and we are the Oneness that is living as the seen
and the unseen.
- Brian Lake & Naama Livni
A man who moves with the earth will necessarily experience days
and nights. He who stays with the sun will know no darkness. My
world is not yours. As I see it, you all are on a stage
performing. There is no reality about your comings and goings.
And your problems are so unreal.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj