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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3338, Saturday, November 1, 2008, Editor: Mark
Forget the known, but remember that you are the knower. Don't be
all the time immersed in your experiences. Remember that you are
beyond the experiencer, ever unborn and deathless. In remembering
it, the quality of pure knowledge will emerge, the light of
unconditional awareness.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, from I Am That, posted to The_Now2
Inexplicably it comes. When you least expect it. For a reason you
can never know. One moment you are striving, figuring, imagining,
and then, in the blink of an eye, it all disappears. The struggle
disappears. The striving disappears. The person disappears. The
world disappears. Everything disappears, and the person is like a
pinpoint of light, just receding until it disappears. And there's
nobody there to witness it. The person is gone. Only, only
awareness remains. Nothing else. No one to be aware. Nothing to
be aware of. Only that remains itself. Then it's understood,
finally and simply.
Then everything - all the struggle, all the striving, all the
thinking, all the figuring, all the surrendering, all the letting
go, all the grabbing hold of, all the praying, all the begging,
all the cursing, too - was just a distraction. And only then is
it seen that the person was, is, and ever will be no more than a
thought. With a single thought, the person seems to reemerge.
With more thoughts, the world eems to reemerge right out of
nothing. But now you know.
The incarnation is nothing more than a thought. A thousand
incarnations are but a thousand thoughts. And this amazing
miracle of a mirage we call the world reappears as it was before,
but now you know. That's why you usually have a good laugh,
because you realize that all your struggles were made up. You
conjured them up out of nothing - with a thought that was linked
to another thought, that was then believed, that linked to
another thought that was then believed. But never could it have
been true, not for a second could it have actually existed. Not
ever could you have actually suffered for a reason that was true
- only through an imagination, good, bad, indifferent. The
intricacies of spiritual philosophy and theologies are just a
thought within Emptiness.
And so at times we talk, and I pretend to take your struggles
seriously, just as I pretended to take my own seriously. You may
pretend to take your own struggles seriously from timeto time,
and although we pretend, we really shouldn't forget that we are
pretending, that we are making up the content of our experience;
we are making up the little dramas of our lives. We are making up
whether we need to hold on or surrender or figure it out or pray
to God or be purified or have karma cleansed - it's all a
thought. We just collude in this ridiculous charade of an
illusion pretending that it's real, only to reveal that it's not.
There is no karma. There is nothing really to purify. There's no
problem. There is only what you create and believe to be so. And
if you like it that way, have at it!
But we cannot continue this absolute farce indefinitely. We
cannot continue to pretend this game we play, indefinitely. It's
impossible. Everything comes back to nothing.
And then it's a bit harder to hold a straight face consistently
for the rest of your life.
- Adyashanti, transcribed from a talk in Pacific Grove, CA, June
9, 2006.
I can't really make out if we're at war or at peace.
I imagine the deceased assembled at some solemn occasion,
merely sharing hand-picked novelties of grace and experience
with the sundown; yet as I sidle up really close to a sunbeam
I notice they are auctioning off the dusk.
It would be hard to say if it was autumn or winter, in a black
hole in the sky I suddenly see the tussle of the seasons,
so soft and yet so inconsequential - not as when the seasons
are engaged in an allegorical interplay and finally
one overcomes the other in accordance with the will of a biased
producer in an amphitheatre. No, they only want to reduce
perishable mankind into stillness. That is why they allow
some indeterminacy to remain in the cosmos - and that too has
beauty.
However, if I'm unable to contain the limits of life
clearly within one definition, then it's a catastrophe!
at such a thought I split heaven and earth
on either side of me and watch as the cloudBR>approaches
cautiously, wanting to stroke the haycock;
the hay too wants to say something, but since each word
would be an assault, it draws itself tighter together ?
can peace be maintained under such conditions?
Either the war never really ended, or else peace is over.
- Alokeranjan Dasgupta, translated from Bengali by the Poet
"It is finished," he said. You could hear him say it,
the words almost a whisper, then not even that,
but an echo so faint it seemed no longer to come
from him, but from elsewhere. This was the moment,
his final moment. "It is finished," he said into a
vastness
that led to an even greater vastness, and yet all of it
within him. He contained it all. That was the miracle,
to be both large and small in the same instant, to be
like us, but more so, then finally to give up the ghost,
which is what happened. And from the storm that swirled
in his wake a formal nakedness took shape, the truth
of disguise and the mask of belief were joined forever.
- Mark Strand, number six from "Poem After the Seven Last
Words,"