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Happy Mother's Day, fellow travelers.

May You Walk in Peace

May you walk in peace
Through storm and fire.

You seek me out,
Through pain and fear.
You ask me why I do these things
Of horror and despair
That hides the beauty of your heart
And makes you cry out in anguish.

Should I set you down in roses,
Feeding you of milk and honey
Would you then seek me out?
You may think the roses yours,
That honey and milk flow by your effort,
Then praise me as mighty.

Foolish child with willful ways,
You seek to define me.
With your hopes and fears
Your prayers and beliefs,
Telling all what I am and am not.
Smug in your crib you know nothing,
Only I know the truth.

>From the womb to the grave
Beyond the grave and back again
I endlessly grant you life
I endlessly grant you death
Beyond death I grant you the greatest wonders
Then I bring you back again, anew.

Now open your eyes and see me,
Through fire and storm.
Walk in peace for I am You.

From the Awakening Heart - Mu

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Dear everybody,

I want to share with you an excerpt from a talk of
J.Krishnamurti in New York, 1935.

You know, in India we have certain people called sannyasis,
who leave the world in search of truth. They have generally
two loin cloths, the one they put on, and one for the next
day. A sannyasi in search of truth, sought various
teachers. In his wanderings he was told that a certain king
was enlightened, that he was teaching wisdom. So this
sannyasi went to the king. You can see the contrast between
the king and the sannyasi: the king who had everything,
palaces, jewels, courtiers, power; and the sannyasi who had
only two loin cloths. The king instructed him concerning
truth. One day, while the king was teaching him, the palace
caught fire . Serenely the king continued with his
teaching, while the sannyasi, that holy man, was greatly
disturbed because his other loin cloth was burning.

You know, you are all in that position. You may not be
possessive with regard to clothes, houses, friends, but
there is some hidden pursuit of gain to which you are
attached, to which you cling, which is eating your hearts
and minds away . At long as these unexplored, hidden
poisons exist, there must be continual conflict, suffering.

Peace,

KKT
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TIM GERCHMEZ

Nisargadatta did describe "The Supreme" as "unbelievably
hard and solid."

He also discriminated between the terms "consciousness" and
"awareness," stating that awareness is primordial and
present during dreamless sleep (all the states, actually),
while consciousness is always OF something, and is
intermittent.

For awhile, I pondered his descriptions.

Then I realized I could only find out for myself, so I
dropped the distinctions between consciousness and
awareness, put the description of Reality being
"unbelievably hard and solid" out of my mind, and was done
with Nisargadatta.

Of what purpose are these distinctions and descriptions?
Every teacher uses the terms "consciousness" and
"awareness" differently, every teacher describes
"Realization" as being or feeling like something different.
There are some similarities, even more differences.

Pondering these things only takes one further from
discovery. It is useless. Experience life second-hand
through Nisargadatta, or experience it first-hand.

The real danger is to *expect* the experience of "The
Supreme" to be "unbelievably hard and solid." Apologies to
the Gods... Nisargadatta was a fool to voice such
descriptions.

There are no words used here to describe, only the
recommendation "find out for yourself, don't preoccupy the
mind with the thoughts and perceptions of 'others'."

Reading Nisargadatta's "I Am That" is fine, fantastic --
good book (seems like every Hindu teacher has written a
book called "I Am That). Pondering and pondering what the
"Realized" state might be like is moving further and
further away.

*Be* that Reality. Why think about it? Is it not a tactic
of the ego, so that it may further armor itself?

MATTHEW FILES

will wonders never cease! I actually agree with Tim on
this. It is truly a great disservice that is done when
descriptions of how "IT" is are handed out.At one extreme
Ego will take that information and set up the expectation
for that particular experience so that we can feel horrible
because we havent had an experience just like that, or at
the other end ego will create an experience that fits that
description, so it can keep on "winning". .Another mistake
along these lines that is quite often made is when one
"wakes up"and believes they woke up because of some
practice or discipline, or just because they did something
a certain way.Then they begin to teach others this same
technique or go about detailing the circumstances of their
awkening so that others can do it the same way.Practice and
discipline are crucial but Awakening never happens because
of them.

ANDREW MACNAB

People make mistakes, and one of them is
thinking that since what we are is what cannot be perceived
or thought it is somehow amorphous, misty, evanescent,
airy, indefinite. When he says that it is hard and solid,
he's countering that idea. Saying it is hard and solid
isn't literally true either of course, because all
descriptions are false, but thinking of reality as
indefinite is worse. The statement that it is hard and
solid stops people from heading in the wrong direction. As
I read Nisargadatta, he very much chose his words to be
useful to the particular people he was speaking to at the
time.

It's tricky you see, you can't counter the feeling that
reality is vague or indefinite by simply denying it, that
only makes it seem even more vague, so he counters it by
pointing out that it's infinitely more solid, harder, than
the world we see and feel around us, it's absolutely hard
and solid, while the world around us is only relatively so.

MIGUEL-ANGEL

Yes, Nisargadatta speaks of the hardness, solidity,
rock-like quality of Reality, Awareness, in sharp contrast
to the soft, unsteady, dream-like quality of the world.

Some excerpts (page from I Am That):

[The supreme state] is what is - the timeless reality,
unbelievably hard and solid. (36)

Overlook the movable and you will find yourself to be the
ever-present, changeless reality, inexpressible, but solid
like a rock. (162)

When all distinctions and reactions are no more, what
remains is reality, simple and solid. (410)

It is solid, steady, changeless, beginningless and endless,
ever new, ever fresh. (63)

This reality is so concrete, so actual, so much more
tangible than mind and matter, that compared to it even
diamond is soft like butter. This overwhelming actuality
makes the world dreamlike, misty, irrelevant. (484)

There is something changeless, motionless, immovable,
rock-like, unassailable; a solid mass of pure
being-consciousness-bliss. I am never our of it. Nothing
can take me out of it, no torture, no calamity. (191)

My world is free from opposites, of mutually destructive
discrepancies; harmony pervades; its peace is rocklike.
(485)

[My condition is] absolutely steady. Whatever I may do, it
stays like a rock - motionless. (192)

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ANDREW

Vernon Kitabu Turner has a website;

http://home.att.net/~turnerz/kitabu.html

I like the Still Waters poem.

XAN

excerpts from interview with Vernon Kitabu Turner:

When I open my arms for someone, I don't open my arms so
that they can be grabbed by Kitabu; I open my arms so that
God can hold them with my body so that they can feel Him,
not me.

````````` You're what the Buddha called "middle ground,"
precisely that point between earth and heaven where you are
both and neither. And that's how you can help people: you
can identify with their pain and suffering because you have
pain and suffering, and yet . . . you really don't at
all.

```````````` We don't really know the true state of our
being because we've been reflecting upon reflections that
are reflections of other reflections. When we can remove
all those, there'll be nothing but what is real.

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MELODY ANDERSON

I was listening to an interview done with Kitty Carlyle
this morning, along with some family members.

Kitty was saying that she was 90 years old, still does
morning exercises that a woman half her age would find
difficult to do, does her hair and makeup first thing every
morning, goes out to lunch... and again out in the evening
to some function... every night of the week. She really did
look 20 years younger.

The comments in the room were "what a remarkable woman she
is". She was referred to as a "great dame" and was said to
have lived a very successful life.

I enjoyed listening to her, and very much had the sense as
I was listening that her life is/has been very much in
keeping with Its design.

I couldn't help but smile with a very sweet sense of
gladness that indeed All is well....All is as it should be,
in the landscapes of our lives.

Perfect lives.....hers, mine, yours.

But for a moment I almost missed it...almost missed seeing
the perfection.

For a moment I began to compare her life's unfolding to my
life's design.....and for that moment, her life looked
stupid, wasted, wrong headed.

And the very moment I got myself out of the way.....the
moment I lifted *my* blueprints up off of *her* landscape,
the 'beauty' which is her life, became apparent once again.
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MARCIA PAUL

I thought this was very good from another list even without
the statement this person was replying to...

You still are unable to grasp that the "mind" (head- brain)
is the weakest/slowest of the centers - "stilling" -
"controlling" the "mind" is a fool's errand. You could have
the "stillest" most "controlled" "mind" in the universe and
be at the mercy of you body and emotions.

The Fourth Way is not about "stilling" anything, it's about
developing ATTENTION:

"'You have too much mind on it -- >must< have attention<.
Attention is the working together of the association of
thought with association of feeling. Memory working
together with sense makes attention.'" Pg. 90 - Ladies of
the Rope - Patterson

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JOE

Hi Tim - I guess I could say I was once a "Fourth Way"
person. Before my early encounters with Advaita, I put
heart and soul into it for roughly six years... While I can
understand your confusion about, and "condemnation" of G. -
surely you're a bit premature with your critique, given you
admit you actually know very little about him. My favorite
introduction to his thinking is in a book by P.D.
Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous. Other old friends
of mine prefer Ouspensky's The Fourth Way. Both are well
written, thoroughly thought out, and quite intellectually
challenging. My opion is that Ouspensky was awake, and that
he wrote from that perspective. Though, of course, who
knows? Two other books, besides G.'s Beelzebub's Tales to
His Grandson (which is about as transparent as, say,
Joyce's Ulysses - though certainly more rewarding), which
very much impressed me, are Rodney Collin's Theory of
Eternal Life, and Theory of Conscious Harmony. You might
wish to peruse one or more of these books prior to further
critiques. They are all very, very interesting, and useful
even for the most ardent Advaitan. Gurdjieff was no one to
take lightly - from any perspective at all.

About Ken Wilbur: I concur with some of the previous
remarks about your post. Mr. Wilbur is incredibly bright
and articulate, and his books are often a good read. Also,
almost without question, he is an intellectual writing
about a subject which is generally opaque to reason alone.

Please take care, Sir. I enjoy your posts and the work
you've done on your web site. -j.

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