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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3388, Sunday, December 21, 2008, Editor: Mark
Papaji,how does an awakened being like yourself see the world?
As my own Self. When you see your hands, feet, body, mind,
senses, intellect, you know they are part of you. You say, 'My
"I" includes all these'. In the same way you must see
the world as yourself, not as different from who you are. Right
now you regard your hands, your feet, your nails and your hair as
not being any different from you. See the world in the same way.
- Excerpt from interview with Papaji, by Jeff Greewald
The disciples of Ananda Moyi Ma were often amazed that she would
accept, without any protest, that a huge number of people would
gather around her, and that as many people came to tell her their
worries, questions and family problems. To this she answered:
"If you beleive that this is unpleasant to me, it is only
because you make a distinction between their body and yours. You
do not feel that carrying your head, your hands, your feet, your
fingers or any of your members for that matter is a heavy burden
because you consider them as intrisic parts of your own body. In
the same manner, I feel all these persons as organic members of
this body (pointing to herself). They do not way heavily on me,
neither does their worries. Their joys, their sufferings, their
problems and their solutions are a vital part of my being ; I
have no sense of ego, neither of separation. In myself, each of
you holds in an equal measure, the height and depth of
eternity."
- Ananda Moyi Ma
What does it feel like to be Douglas Harding, given all that
you've written and spoken about in a very direct way? If the
ordinary `Joe on the street' says, `well, okay, I've turned
around 180ş and I see who I really am - so what?'
Douglas Harding: What does it feel like to be Douglas Harding?
Well, I suppose really that this Douglas Hardingness is
inescapably colouring the whole of my life. I mean one isn't, at
least I'm not, avoiding that identification, connection,
expression at all. On the contrary, particularly lately, I've
been saying how absolutely essential, precious, extraordinary is
that identification. The one in the mirror, I find, is not for
putting down, not for dismissing, not for undervaluing. On the
contrary, I think what I would say about Douglas Harding -
particularly I suppose as revealed through his face, voice and
behaviour, face particularly - I would say that it is enormously
precious for these reasons.
First of all, it is unique and no other face has been like that
ever, no other face would behave exactly like that. Some would
come fairly close, certainly never the same. And in all the
millions of humans who will live in the future, none would have
that face. And the number, think of the number, how many thousand
millions of people on the earth - this is unique and this is very
important - it signifies to me that one has something unique to
contribute, one is a special incarnation of Reality, one is a
special expression of Reality that's needed to complete the total
picture, and so that is enormously important.
But if it's only that, if that's the whole story, then that,
however valuable, however inspiring, is eventually the road to
hell. Why is it the road to hell? Because it's what distinguishes
me from all others. Now that which distinguishes me from all
others, the little guy in the mirror, in combination with this
which joins me to all others whom I identify with in my reality
totally - who I really, really, really am - is exactly who you
really, really, really are, and all sentient beings really,
really, really are. So it seems that this combination is
marvellous. Separate the two and I'm in deep trouble.
To go for the phenomenal Douglas in all his Douglasness alone,
which is what we normally do after all - this ego trip which
lasts a lifetime - to go for that alone is half the battle, is
half the job and is the half which leads to hell. In combination
with who I really, really am here, is exactly what the doctor
ordered, and so it is that combination, that union of the two -
that is not separating them functionally; but certainly, I mean
they come totally together, their function is totally different
and they're different aspects of who I really, really, really am
- each of which is complimentary to the other.
- Excerpt from interview with Douglas Harding, by Kriben Pillay
The core of ego is a feeling of deficiency, of poverty, of
emptiness, of saying: "I am no good, I am worthless, I am
empty. Give me, give me, more, more, more, more." In this
state of deficiency I don't love myself, I don't accept myself. I
reject myself. I want to run away, distract myself; maybe go to a
movie, see a friend, have sex, eat, fill myself with knowledge,
or pretend I am O.K. I am always wanting to fill this emptiness,
always rejecting it, always afraid of it. In fact, we are all
terrified by it. Most of the time people don't know that this
emptiness, this deficiency is what is driving most of their
actions. It's such a desperation, such a race to fill this
bottomless pit. But how sweet it is to say "yes" to
this emptiness. How courageous it is to say: "I feel empty,
I feel deficient, and I won't attempt to fill it. I want to see
the truth. I want to experience the reality of me. I refuse to
manipulate. I want to wake up regardless of how painful it
is." Only the hero will take this attitude, for it is a
heroic act to see your deficiency, your neediness, your
emptiness, and yet not try to manipulate your life to fill it. We
are so compulsive, so driven to manipulate, to avoid feeling this
basic deficiency of our personal ego. But believe me, my friend,
there's no other way towards fullness. God will not pour His
grace if you don't accept your deficiency and stop manipulating.
Manipulation, striving to fill this emptiness, is only the devil
doing its efficient work. It is constantly working to hide its
weakness.
- A.H. Almaas
We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be
released.
- Jean Houston
HOUSTON: I once ran into this Frenchman on the street and I
knocked the wind out of him, and he said to me, when I was about
fourteen, "Are you planning to run like that for the rest of
your life?" I said, "Yes sir, it looks that way."
He said, "Well bon voyage, bon voyage." And I ran to
school, and the following week I met him, and we began to take
these walks in the park, and they were numinous. He would say,
"[French accent] Oh, Jeanne, Jeanne, look, look, a
caterpillar! Hm! Jeanne, what is a caterpillar, huh? Moving,
changing, transforming, metamorphosing. Jeanne, feel yourself to
be a caterpillar." "Oh, very easily, Mr. --" I
called him Mr. Teilhard -- "Mr. Teilhard." "And
feel your transformation. Oh, Jean, sniff the wind. [Sniffing]
Same wind once knew Pıre Jesus-Christ. [Sniffing] Ah, Marie
Antoinette. [Sniffing] Ah, Jeanne d'Arc! Be filled with Joan of
Arc." It was extraordinary. Everything was sentient;
everything was full of life. He looked at you, he looked at you
as kind of a cluttered house that hid the Holy One, and you felt
yourself looked at as if you were God in hiding, and you felt
yourself so charged and greened with evolutionary possibilities.
And I used to go home and tell my mother, "Mother, I met my
own man, and when I am with him I leave my littleness
behind." And of course I found out years later, after he had
died, it was Teilhard de Chardin I was meeting.
MISHLOVE: It's an interesting phrase -- "I leave my
littleness behind."
HOUSTON: Leave my littleness behind, yes.
MISHLOVE: It seems that for many of us -- I know in my own life
-- at times we get so caught up in our littleness we forget
there's anything else.
HOUSTON: Well, we don't have time to do that anymore, do we? I
mean, we are living in the most complex times in human history. I
realize other times in history thought they were it. They were
wrong; this is it. I mean, what we do -- in my travels around the
world, which now are almost a quarter of a million miles, working
in many cultures, in many, many domains of human experience -- I
really discover that maybe we have ten or fifteen years of an
open corridor to make a difference. Many people, all over the
world, are really haunted by this. They wake up with a sense that
they just cannot live out their lives as encapsulated bags of
skin dragging around dreary little egos, and that all the walls
are crashing down. I mean, we have extraordinary -- the membranes
have cracked through as cultures begin to flow into each other.
We are on the verge of a true planetary culture, with high
individuation of individual cultures. Cultures are becoming more
so, not less. The potentials of different cultures -- the
potentials, for example, of an African culture that I have
studied, which has no history of war, no neurosis as we
understand it, incredible problem solving. And when I studied
this culture in West Africa, and I saw how they solved problems
-- they didn't say, "Uh, yes, what is it, A, yes, Subsection
1, 2, 3 --" No. First they danced the problem. [Singing] And
then they sang it, and they danced it, and then they envisioned
it, and then they drew it, and they talked about it, and they
danced it, then they breathed it, and they all had the solution.
Because they were operating on many, many frames of mind. In the
harvest of world culture that is happening in our time, what we
are gaining is not only different frames of mind -- thinking in
images, thinking in words, thinking with our whole bodies -- but
we are gaining access to the ecology of the genius of the human
race. We are all becoming Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, but
accessing this incredible domain of the human genius, so that we
discover, for example, that we are in a state of chronic
education. I have never met a stupid child. I have met incredibly
stupid systems of education that diminish our ideas of ourselves,
that give us a very limited, local notion, and we can't get away
with it anymore. And we have incredible access to who and what we
are. It's not for nothing that the whole earth as an image is in
our mind at the same time as the whole brain, the whole, whole
mind, and all these cultures converging, and -- what should we
say? We gestate in each
- Excerpt from interview with Jean Huston - "Thinking
Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and
Discovery," with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.
A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of
consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current
global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western
mechanistic paradigm.
Stanislav Grof
More Enough features 4 guests from Suchita's radio program Full
Circle (FullCircleRadio), Joanna Macy, Jean Houston, Tav Sparks
and Richard Moss talking about the collective belief that what
will fulfill and satisfy lies on the outside of us, and what this
means for ourselves and the planet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-25ilNvj0k