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#3229 - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - Editor: Jerry Katz
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Three articles:
The first is an introduction to Jeff Foster's new book, The Revelation of Oneness. I haven't read it yet, but I think you'll like the excerpt.
The second article is another where "nonduality" has been discovered in mainstream or non-typical contexts.
The third article is a confession composed by Nora and Valerie, originally posted to Nonduality Salon.
The
Revelation of Oneness
Dialogues on Nonduality and Spiritual
Awakening
Jeff Foster
296 pp. Price
£12.45/$21.45
ISBN: 978-0-9558290-4-8
5" X 8" paperback
Nearly 300 pages of dialogues selected and edited by Jeff which explore and clarify themes from his previous two books.
Order from the following places:
The publisher: http://www.non-dualitybooks.com/revelation_jeff_foster.htm
Excerpts
Jesus said to them:
“When you make the two one,
And when you make the inside like the outside
And the outside like the inside,
Then will you enter the Kingdom.”
- Gospel of Thomas
A quiet revolution in spirituality is taking place. There is a growing sense that freedom cannot be found in philosophies, religions, ideologies; that it cannot be located in books, or reached through lifetimes of intense spiritual practice; that it cannot be passed on by enlightened or awakened spiritual masters; that it cannot be owned, cannot be taught, cannot be captured.
There is a growing sense that freedom is all there is, that it goes right to the heart of what you are, that it is constantly available and costs nothing. And that’s what this message, which I call Life Without A Centre, points to - the absolute freedom right at the heart of life. It’s a radical message, to be sure. And yet it’s as soft and gentle as a kiss from a loved one.
This book is about the possibility that the spiritual search, and indeed all the seeking of the mind, can come to an end once and for all. And in the absence of that search, there can be a clear seeing that all there is, is Oneness. And in the clarity of Oneness, life loses its heaviness, and what is is always enough. Some people have called this “spiritual awakening”; however, it’s not something complicated, and it’s not reserved for the lucky few. It’s an awakening as simple and obvious as the sound of the rain splish-splashing up on the roof. It’s a bit like having a dream, and getting lost in it, and then waking up, and opening your eyes, and looking around and realising that yes, of course, it was just a dream…
There is no condemnation of seeking here, or of any religion or belief system. Seeking is nothing more or less than a longing for Home, a desperation to remember who you really are beyond name and form, beyond thoughts, beyond concepts, beyond all beyonds. And the search plays itself out, as it must. This is not to condemn the seeking, but to point to the possibility that it can fall away, to reveal something far more explosive than the spiritual teachings of this world ever promised.
This is not a new set of beliefs, or a fresh collection of ideas for the mind to chew on. No, this communication uses words to go beyond words, to point to something that cannot really be spoken of. It is not a teaching, not a communication from individual to individual, but a sharing from Oneness to Oneness. A sharing that ends in a revelation which completely transcends the dream of “me-and-you”.
And on some level, no more words are really necessary: it is already complete. Oneness is already perfectly whole, arising presently as the chair, the floor, the table, the body, the eyes, the nose, the arms, the legs, the heart beating, the breathing. All of this is Oneness, and nothing is out of place. And yet, for the individual, perhaps this cannot yet be seen. For the individual, there may be more reading, more effort, more going to spiritual meetings, more meditating, and more trying to understand all of this. And that’s exactly as it must be. The teachings of nonduality will appear to be relevant as long as there is an individual there trying to grasp them. That is the only purpose of these words: to be there, in friendship and love, for that individual. To meet them exactly where they are.
But when that individual dissolves into clarity, when the search unravels, these pointers to the ineffable will fall away too, and there will only be the immediacy of what is, with nobody there to know it. There will be a robin singing in the tree, a car whooshing past on the road, a cup of tea in your hand, and it will all be the divine Mystery; you will never look for anything else ever again, and there will be a complete release from the burden of individuality. A perfectly ordinary life will be lived, but nobody will be living it. And, in joy and clarity, it will be seen that there has only ever been this freedom, and that all the seeking and suffering of a lifetime played out in absolute innocence.
* * *
It may help to speak briefly about my past - bearing in mind, of course, that what we call “the past” is just a memory, just a thought arising presently, and that my past is really no more special than your past, or anyone else’s for that matter.
In my mid-twenties, after a lifetime of shyness, anxiety and an intense dislike of the entity I called “myself”, I entered a period of deep depression and illness. Fuelled by the desire to escape the suffering of a lifetime, I then embarked on an intense spiritual search which lasted for several years, taking me on a journey through all the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. For all of my life I had been a committed atheist, but the suffering had finally become so intense that an escape into spirituality seemed to be the only option.
I became addicted to the idea of “spiritual awakening”, and shut myself off from the outside world, meditating and self-enquiring and constantly changing and questioning my belief systems, reading literally hundreds of spiritual books and sitting for hours at a time in my garden trying to be “present”, waiting for the moment when the separate self would disappear and suffering would be no more.
However, I never found what I was looking for, and my despair and frustration reached a critical point. And then, in the midst of that despair, something opened up. The mind, exhausted from a lifetime of trying to reach unreachable goals, collapsed, and a deep relaxation took place. And the secret was revealed right in the midst of what I’d taken to be “my life”. The spiritual search ended with the realisation that there was only Oneness, and life was already complete, and wasn’t separate from what I took myself to be. In that clear seeing, all seeking fell away, leaving only the clarity and simplicity of what is. It was a shocking to realise that the secret of spiritual awakening had been with me right from the beginning, but I just hadn’t been able to see it, because I’d been too busy looking for it, and in that, separating myself from it. But the separation had been an illusion, and in the falling away of that illusion the truth was revealed, as clearly as a punch to the stomach. And the truth was revealed in a chair, a flower, a tree, my hands, my feet, everything. The revelation of Oneness had been happening all around me, in each and every moment, but in my search for an identity I’d missed it completely.
But in hindsight, how perfectly it had all unfolded. A lifetime of seeking and suffering had been necessary in order to wake me up from the dream of seeking and suffering! And in fact, the seeking and suffering had always been pointing to another possibility: they had always been pointing back Home.
* * *
At first, I just met with people in pubs and on park benches and chatted about my experiences. Then a website appeared, and books got written, and meetings started to happen, first in London, and then in other parts of the UK and abroad. I never expected any of it. The whole thing seems to have a life of its own now, and who knows how it will evolve?
It’s clear that Oneness delights in expressing this message. And what a gift it is to be able to meet so many people from all over the world, and yet to see that there are no “separate people” at all, and that it’s all One. Really, I’m only ever meeting myself and every question that I’m asked is the same question: it’s the mind longing to come Home. What a perfect play it all is.
Well, now it’s time to come Home. Read the dialogues with an open mind, and an open heart, and it may dawn on you: it was never about the words. Beyond the words, something else is happening, and it’s too extraordinary to talk about. These meetings aren’t really meetings at all. They are bonfires, in which all the questions of the mind unravel and burn up, leaving only the wonder of what is. Really, nothing can be said about this burning, because even the attempt to talk about the burning burns up in this. And yet, words continue to come, and life continues to unfold, and it’s quite clear that we are not in control of this astonishing dream world, and that we are constantly being embraced by Oneness, in each and every moment, from cradle to grave, and beyond.
In these pages, may you meet your own absence, and explode into wonder.
Jeff Foster
June 2008
Brighton, UK
Order The Revelation of Oneness from the following places:
The publisher: http://www.non-dualitybooks.com/revelation_jeff_foster.htm
Citrix announces hypervisor-neutral Project Kensho
16 July, 2008 By Paul Weinberg
Citrix is relying on Zen Buddhist metaphors
in the pre-introduction of its yet-to-be- branded
product, which will standardize software applications for all
virtualized environments irrespective
of the underlying hypervisor platform. Code name Kensho,
which literally means "seeing' one's
nature" and referring to the "nonduality of
subject and object," consists of open virtual
machine
format (OVF) tools based on industry wide Distributed Management
Task Force standards.
OVF will allow application workloads to be
imported and applied across Citrix XenServer, Microsoft
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual environments.
It is designed to root out various
interoperability challenges among virtualization platforms and
facilitate automated provisioning and management of applications,
rather than just virtual
machines.
Read the full article: http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=23494
Nora
Compassion is like faith, you either choose
to have it or you do not because you either choose to
feed it or you do not. Wind that does not blow is not wind, but
that has nothing to do with blame.
Humans that have no compassion are no longer human; they are
dead; but they just don't know it yet.
I still believe in free will. We are given
everything we have, but we can choose not to take it. We
are given compassion and a lifetime of food with which to feed
it, but we can choose to let it
starve. Do I have compassion for a woman whose child has died?
Why should I? I don't know the
child. I don't need to know; the child has nothing to do with the
compassion. The compassion
existed before I heard of the child because I never let it starve
to death. I have kept it fed for
just such an occasion, when perhaps some measure of my compassion
would help feed the compassion of
another, so their own would not starve when they were too broken
to feed it themselves.
Some kinds of energy cannot be stored. The
only way to keep it alive is to pass it from one being
to another, from the one to the one, if you prefer. What we feed,
what we pass along, is the glue
that holds us all together as one being, like two beings whose
arms are so short that they can only
eat when the other feeds them. You find me a person with a living
soul, but no compassion, and I'll
eat my keyboard beginning with the letter of your choice. That
person has disappeared and all you
see is an image still burned in a wall after the bomb has
incinerated them. They are no more, just
like the wind that never blows.
The mothers whose arms are now empty do not
need my words; they speak eloquently enough for
themselves. I hope it helps them to know that somewhere else a
heart missed a beat for a brief,
shared moment, then went on beating somehow changed just a bit
and a delicate entity named
compassion was fed another morsel.
Valerie
I had this moment once in my room in
Hawai'i, whereupon I had just spent half a year in America,
single-handedly attending to the death of my mother, and ongoing
disrespect and abuse from long
lost sisters, the child, the child's genetic donor, the lawyers,
the realtors, the meth freaks
behind my mom's house, the evil step-father, etc., in my
hometown. The whole plethora of a lifetime
of offenders had actually descended upon my psyche almost to the
point of being overwhelmed with
grief by that process, and I had practically fled there.
I lit my candle as I was watching the
magical light of the sunset over the ocean, and a dawning
realization that - every person was doing the very best they knew
how, and only their need for
control and need to be "right" kept them from the
undying compassion which makes us all human. I
saw it for what it was and was able to forgive them (all) en
masse. It was a "Jesus moment" where I
could see how and why someone could forgive their tormentors,
even as they are literally being
murdered by them, because they just know not what they do. And
needed no one to tell me I was in
control, or I was "right" - or even validation other
than the fire in my heart at that moment. I
think - just maybe - that was compassion.