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#3181 - Thursday, May 29, 2008 - Editor: Jerry Katz
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights     

VICKI WOODYARD is a featured guest author in Soul's Code, a website for the spirituality mainstream.

Priceless

We have all watched the Mastercard ads where narrow slices of life are branded as “priceless.” What I’ve come to learn from those whom I’ve loved, and have died, is that what is truly Priceless is an essence that animates each of us — and which I still know in those whom I’ve “lost.”

When was the last time you looked at the truth of your being and rejoiced? Most of us look at ourselves with jaundiced, weary eyes — and look at bonded-teeth and hair-weaves with envy and a sense that we will never look “perfect.”

I remember when my young daughter was dying of cancer. She lost all of her hair to chemo at age four. Pale as a ghost and with a scar that ran down her right thigh, she did the hula for us on her unscathed leg. She had a malignant tumor in the muscle of her right one. So as she got her chemo at St. Jude’s and her father returned to work, we told her to surprise him with the hula.

That six-foot-four-inch tall man turned to mush. She knew she was dying; don’t ask me how she knew. We tried to keep it from her, but she looked at my brother one fine day and said, “You know, don’t you?”

Yes, we were all in on the conspiracy. The priceless one in her would never die, though. She would be in her thirties now, and she is one reason I still write. To celebrate the truth of our being.

~ ~ ~

Read the entire article at http://soulscode.com/

Listen to Vicki read Priceless at  http://www.bobwoodyard.com/Audio.html

Vicki is a spiritual teacher and writer who lives in Atlanta, GA

I Was A Wild Child Once


I was a wild child once,
born into a wild universe
by a wild man and a wild woman
who showed me how they
lost their wildness.

Everywhere I went I saw things
wild...

willow trees, cyan skies and
the night moon spoke
to me of their wildness,

and in my tamed wildness, I nearly
died...

I am silent now,

a river runs through me.


~Anna

The Mirage of Separation
Billy Doyle

120pp. Price: £7.95/ $13.95
ISBN:  978-0-9558290-0-0

Purchase: http://www.non-dualitybooks.com/Doyle_Mirage%20of%20Separation.htm

Website: http://www.billy-doyle-yoga.com

Billy Doyle is a well known and inspiring yoga teacher, but he is also a poet. The Mirage of Separation is a collection of poetry and verse reflecting different facets of the non-dual perspective.

About the author

 
Billy Doyle felt a strong spiritual orientation early in life, and when in his twenties he came to explore the non-dualistic teachings of Eastern thought, he immediately resonated with them. The teachings of Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, J. Krishnamurti and Atmananda Krishna Menon had a profound effect. On encountering Jean Klein, a master of Advaita and Yoga, in 1982, he immediately knew he had met his teacher and spent many years in contact. He lives in London and teaches yoga in the Kashmir Tradition, an approach brought to the West by Jean Klein.

Excerpts

Introduction

These writings come from a non-dualistic perspective. Our focus is on the nature of our real identity. Until we come to know it, we are lost in a world of ignorance.

Our basic mistake, and from which all other mistakes arise, is to identify ourselves with an object: the body-mind.

In doing so we lose sight of our true nature, consciousness, pure awareness, taking ourselves to be an expression of life, rather than life itself. Thereby we become engrossed in the world of a personalised I; it is this pseudo-I that usurps our real identity.

This I-image, the ego, is no more than a collection of shifting ideas and experiences, with no independent reality. In taking ourselves to be a separate entity we have come adrift from our homeground, and inevitably fear and desire arise. In compensation we pursue happiness and security and try to escape pain and sorrow.

It is only when we understand the illusionary nature of this projection that we become open to our real nature, that which is beyond the mind.

The Self is not something new to be attained, for it ever is; it has only to be recognized.

However we can never know the Self as we would an object, for it is the ultimate knower, neither perceivable, nor conceivable; we can only be it. Its nature is self-luminous.

is there a lack

~ ~ ~

The Mirage of Separation
Billy Doyle

Purchase: http://www.non-dualitybooks.com/Doyle_Mirage%20of%20Separation.htm

Website: http://www.billy-doyle-yoga.com

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