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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3268, Sunday, August 24, 2008, Editor: Mark
When The Sun Appears in the East
When the sun appears in the East,
I make friends with my poetry.
I see a golden disc
Right above the blue sea.
A red hibiscus is smiling at me,
Is there anybody on earth, O Sun,
Who does not long for your smile?
No, nobody.
Everybody wants your smile.
I too want you smile
And something more:
I want to bow to you
With my heart's adoration.
- Sri Chinmoy
The Sun
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone -
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance -
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love -
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed -
or have you too
turned from this world -
or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?
Mary Oliver
A Star Without a Name
When a baby is taken from the wet nurse,
it easily forgets her
and starts eating solid food.
Seeds feed awhile on ground,
then lift up into the sun.
So you should taste the filtered light
and work your way toward wisdom
with no personal covering.
That's how you came here, like a star
without a name. Move across the night sky
with those anonymous lights.
- Rumi, Mathnawi III, 1284-1288, version by Coleman Barks
Samadhi
Vanished are the veils of light and shade,
Lifted the vapors of sorrow,
Sailed away the dawn of fleeting joy,
Gone the mirage of the senses.
Love, hate, health, disease, life and death:
Departed, these false shadows on the screen
of duality.
Waves of laughter, scyllas of sarcasm, whirlpools
of melancholy,
Melting in the vast sea of bliss.
Bestilled is the storm of maya
By the magic wand of intuition deep.
The universe, a forgotten dream, lurks
subconsciously,
Ready to invade my newly wakened memory divine
. I exist without the cosmic shadow,
But it could not live bereft of me;
As the sea exists without the waves,
But they breathe not without the sea.
Dreams, wakings, states of deep turiya sleep,
Present, past, future, no more for me,
But the ever-present, all-flowing, I, I everywhere.
Consciously enjoyable,
Beyond the imagination of all expectancy,
Is this, my samadhi state.
Planets, stars, stardust, earth,
Volanic bursts of doomsday cataclysms,
Creation's moulding furnace,
Glaciers of silent X-rays,
Burning floods of electrons,
Thoughts of all men, past, present, future,
Every blade of grass, myself and all,
Each particle of creation's dust,
Anger, greed, good, bad, salvation, lust,
I swallowed up - transmuted them
Into one vast ocean of blood of my own one Being!
Smoldering joy, oft-puffed by unceasing meditation,
Which blinded my tearful eyes,
Burst into eternal flames of bliss,
And consumed my tears, my peace, my frame,
my all.
Thou art I, I am Thou,
Knowing, Knower, Known, as One!
One tranquilled, unbroken thrill of eternal, living, ever-new
peace!
Not an unconscious state
Or mental chloroform without wilful return,
Samadhi but extends my realm of consciousness
Beyond the limits of my mortal frame
To the boundaries of eternity,
Where I, the Cosmic Sea,
Watch the little ego floating in Me.
Not a sparrow, nor a grain of sand, falls
All space floats like an iceberg in my mental sea.
I am the Colossal Container of all things made!
By deeper, longer, continuous, thirsty,
guru - given meditation,
This celestial samadhi is attained.
All the mobile murmurs of atoms are heard;
The dark earth, mountains, seas are molten liquid!
This flowing sea changes into vapors of nebulae!
Aum blows o'er the vapors; they open their veils,
Revealing a sea of shining electrons,
Till, at the last sound of the cosmic drum,
Grosser light vanishes into eternal rays
Of all-pervading Cosmic Joy.
From Joy we come,
For Joy we live,
In the sacred Joy we melt.
I, the ocean of mind, drink all creation's waves.
The four veils of solid, liquid, vapor, light,
Lift aright.
Myself, in everything,
Enters the Great Myself.
Gone forever,
The fitful, flickering shadows of a mortal memory.
Spotless is my mental sky,
Below, ahead, and high above.
Eternity and I, one united ray.
I,a tiny bubble of laughter,
Have become the Sea of Mirth Itself.
- Yogananda Paramahansa, from Songs for the Soul
There the sun shines not,
nor the moon and the stars,
nor the lightning,
let alone this earthly fire.
Only when illumining Light shines,
everything else shines;
the self-revealing Light illumines
the entire universe.
- excerpt from the Upanishads