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 #3288, Saturday, September 13, 2008, Editor: Mark
Happiness is our real nature and we shall never rest until we
find it. But rarely do we know where to seek it. Once you have
understood that the world is but a mistaken view of reality, and
it is not what it appears to be, you are free of its obsessions.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
When it comes to hurricanes and storms of the mind, all we can do
is hang on to something that won't move. We get to high ground or
take refuge in a hotel during a hurricane, but where do we go in
the mind? Fear, doubt, confusion, anger, these are the winds of
the mind and they can attack with hurricane force. Too bad we
can't measure their velocity like we record wind. We can say they
are pretty strong when we require medication or end up in the
headlines for some bizarre behavior. Is there such a place as a
refuge from a mind storm? We need to turn within to find out, you
would think.
You can try this yourself right now. As you read this there is a
knower that is like a background awareness that is witnessing
your reading and thinking about this piece. You can't turn and
see this knower like you would if you suddenly sensed someone
looking over your shoulder. When you are very still you can sense
there is two of you, a thinker with its story and a knower who
knows you are thinking.
Whn a mind storm hits the coast of your self and sweeps you up in
the winds of anxiety, the knower is the background or space that
is prior to the storm, remains still during the storm, and is
there undistsurbed after the storm leaves. Hurricanes have an eye
and so does our mind. Without the eye the hurricane and the mind
cannot exist. And yet the mind does not disturb the eye because
the eye has no form. The eye is empty. So what is mind? Mind is
form, thought form. Who is the knower of the mind? Pure
consciousness, space, is the witness of the content of the mind.
Without content there is no mind, but there is still the knower
that says I AM.
Forms are impermanent, but the I AM is changeless. Thought is in
time, but the I AM is timeless because it is prior to thought.
Our I exists before thought and after thought is gone. When we
die, thought goes, but not the I AM. Meditation is learning how
to strengthen the I AM and weaken the storm. We should take
refuge in that.
- Ed Conley, posted to TheNow2
When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of
truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and
murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the
end they always fall. Think of it - always.
- Mahatma Gandhi, posted to AlongTheWay
Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only
chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of
your life and close relationships in particular. Never before
have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as
they are now. As you may have noticed, they are not here to make
you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of
salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again
and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to
make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will
offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the
higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For
those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing
pain, violence, confusion, and madness.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, posted to The_Now2
Through this, the Buddha's wish-granting prayer,
When aggressive hatred erupts
Neither inhibiting nor indulging it
But relaxing and releasing the stress,
May Awareness resume its natural primacy.
May all the six types of beings
Attain the Awareness of Radiant Clarity.
- Shakbar, from The Flight of the Garuda, translated by
Keith Dowman
Hey! It is OK to feel anger! There is no difference between anger
and love - they are emotions, waves on the ocean of Being; it is
only when we grab onto them and strut around like they are real
or something, that the suffering begins. If we just sit back,
relax, release them into the depths from which they arose, watch
out! Radiant Clarity knocks you outta your socks!
- dg, posted to DailyDharma
Have you ever fought with reality? Consider a day where things
didn't go your way. You're running late, you open the fridge to
grab something and that something spills all over your shirt. You
get into the car and there's only traffic and red lights. Each
apparent obstacle piling up in a heap of "this shouldn't be
the way it is!" I shouldn't be late, I shouldn't be wearing
a shirt with stains, there shouldn't be traffic. This is the
innocent yet delusional habit of the mind to carry an idea about
how things should be and then go to war with things as they are.
It's as if we say to the Holy, "Your world is screwed up,
it's not going my way. What's wrong with you? What's wrong with
this world? It's not conforming to my idea of ease and
rightness." We sit in a puffed up prideful place of "I
actually know better than all that is how things should be
going." What usually follows is "And I'm going to
attempt to bend things to this tiny will." And as nothing
bends to suit you, it's painful.
There's move in there that's kind of like breaking one's own
back, or like laying down, that says: "Alright. I have salad
dressing on my blouse. Alright, I'm 10 minutes late and getting
later. Alright traffic. Alright." What has to die then? The
one who is neat, the one who is on time, the one who is
respectable, right, in control. To return to things as they are
is a great reckoning as we break down all those "It should
be different" places and we fall to the ground in humility,
fall to the ground of things as they are. Reality as it is, is
constantly inviting us out of identification through the reminder
of pain.
And we don't have control over letting go either; we cannot will
surrender. It's an invitation for humility that even inside our
own bodies, we can't make it go the way we want it to go. This is
not a mistake; it's supposed to hurt to fight reality. Delusion
hurts. And the delusion that we're actually in charge hurts. To
fight the nature of things sends us right into noticing how
helpless we are And helpless is exactly the relationship between
something that's convinced it's separate and the Whole. The small
self IS helpless.
This great reckoning is like a great undoing, an undoing of
delusion and illusion - and we fight it! It is a sanding down to
the ground, a cleaning out, a purification. When it has really
begun to take us over, we can spend time in a stunned place, all
of our coping strategies taken from us if we're lucky. We enter a
clueless place, maybe a dark place, and we're being remade. We
don't yet know how to hold that beautiful instrument of our heart
and actually play it, we've been focused on coping so long. And
now it's handed to us in the dark.
To be prepared to sing the holy song we've come here to sing, we
have to be entirely emptied out so that our flute is so clear, so
empty, so offered, so filled with nothing, that the beautiful
breath of God can blow through it and there's not a single
distortion. Just a wide open portal that's done fighting for its
own way, one fighting for how it thinks it should be, or how it
learned it should be, how it read things should be or how its
friends say it should be.
So maybe we can enter into the mystery of what's here. Maybe we
can stop calling what-is names because it doesn't fit into the
stale brainwashed menu in our heads. Things as they are, are just
as they are meant to be. Every moment and every flavor of every
moment, a gift straight from the Holy, the Holy's touch on your
face. We can be so nothing that no matter what shows up we can
say, "Thank you, sweetheart, Holiness, for another moment.
Another chance to serve you, to serve the glory of this love that
you are and that I am."
A lovely woman came to an event in Taos a couple weeks ago and
she said she used to go to an ashram in India and it would be
time to find out what her seva would be, so she would go and look
at all the available tasks and pick the one she wanted to do.
After a good grinding down by life, this last time she went to
the ashram's sea office and simply said, "Give me any
task." This is what happens in this great grinding down
where we move from, what is my fulfillment, to, what else can I
give to glorify You? Put another homeless man in my path so that
I can give away my last $20 bill, because all I want to do with
my life is say, "You are so beautiful."
- Jeannie Zandi